skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personal unions were not considered to be the same entity unless one was eventually absorbed into the other (like with Castille and Aragon becoming Spain). They didn't even have the same governments, and laws and citizenship were distinct between partners in a union. The only thing they had in common was the head of state.

So yes, labelling them as a single country does seem wrong.
So this is where you spend the man hours, tweaking a generated or autonomously created world.
Imposter Syndrome

So, when I was growing up, where the family had to drive 50 miles to visit other Asians, I started to realize there was a pattern to how bumf#cks would come circling in for what was in their minds the justified pleasure of humiliating a non-white person. Most people were decent, but I and my family members stuck out.

I notice the same sort of circling at some programmer meet-ups here in the bay area, though I don't think it's my race that prompts it. Programmers make good money, are highly sought after, and in many companies are positively coddled. Just about every group that found itself in such a position has developed some small sub population of arrogant, entitled jerks. In retrospect, I may have been guilty of being a little bit of that myself.

One might like to think that good programmers are also good at thinking rationally in general. That's not how it works. Being good at programming just trains us to think rationally in a very specific context. The rest of the time, we're primates vying for a place in the social hierarchy. The best we can hope for are social structures and patterns that co-opt such tendencies for the uncovering of truth and the good of the group. Seeking social contexts that humanely succeed at this should underly one's seeking for a place of work.

It's hard to do this, and most of the time, people find a situation that achieves group cohesion and effectiveness through an "us vs them" dynamic.
Everybody's spending lots of energy decrying Newsweek for being wrong. Why isn't anyone calling them out for, you know, being nasty muckraking paparazzi who'd try to drag a private individual (who's done nothing wrong and values his privacy) involuntarily into the limelight to make a quick buck?

Or do we all have so much outrage fatigue at this point that this shit doesn't even register?
>This problem is iterated over and over. It's mentioned in every discussion about why python is bad.

What? It's quite a stretch to say "Python is bad" because objects have implicit truthiness and that in this one rare occasion it's implemented poorly in the standard library.
My money is on the comic book character.
Practising Catholicism in Saudi Arabia
You know, when someone says "hey, I may be wrong, please correct me if so" and you respond by going triple-time on the snark and smug condescension, that's kind of a dick move even if he is wrong.
It should be back! We have an odd cache bug on those pages depending on traffic patterns!
Why? It seems unnecessary, but not overly hard to read.

Some re-education should be enough.
Will they get the 20K emails?
The most interesting thing about this post is pointing out the existence of https://expatriates.stackexchange.com.
Lexaloffle has been working on something like this for a couple of years: http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php

Apparently it can actually run well on a volumetric display!
The intent of startups in the Hacker News context is not mere profitability. I can start selling fruit from a bike part time on the side and make a profit but I don't think many here will count that as a startup.

The intent of startups is to make it big. To make it big, 100% effort is a requirement. I am not discounting people who can do 200% (two jobs) but if you want to do a fulltime job plus a startup plus give time to your family, and do all three adequately, you'd have to be superman who needs no sleep. For the rest of us mortals with families that we want to live with and not merely exist with, two full time jobs, one of which is a startup is not possible. We might do it transitionally, but not more than a few months.
He said that PostgreSQL scaled pretty well, but he got rid of MongoDB in one week. Seems pretty damning to me.
high-performance ray tracing, graphics and compute in a power envelope suitable for mobile and embedded use cases.

If true, color me impressed!
Holy Grail Layout – Solved by Flexbox
I don't know the details but from the description he'll have done through the form of a leveraged buyout.

Icahn secures a loan from a bank (or group of banks/financiers - possibly even one of his other companies, I don't know what the law is like in this regard in America) to purchase enough shares to take the company private.

Here's the 'trick' though. That loan is not secured by Icahn, it is secured by the company he has just "bought out" - the repayments of the loan being secured against the companies current capital assets and future profits. In effect Icahn gets the company to take out a loan which he uses to take control of the company.

Obviously there needs to be enough shareholders willing to sell for this to work but if the leveraged buyout offers a great enough premium then they'll normally find enough willing sellers.
> not as safe as the Objective-C approach where one can just send messages to nil[0] which is really awesome imo.

It's definitely NOT awesome. This stupid behaviour causes bugs all the time as you think you're doing an action but it's actually a no-op because something else failed and you get a nil. An NPE is awesome - it crashes immediately and you know exactly what is wrong. A silent no-op is the worst thing to debug.
Change-based vs. File-based Code Reviews
It's a common practice to use two pointers when parsing some stream data buffer. If you will use a pointer to the start of the buffer and the size of an available data to parse, then you would need to change two variables instead of one on every parsing stage. So you have more opportunity to make a mistake.
I am waiting for the OpenJDK release on Debian. In the meanwhile, you can also use the WebUpd8 PPA:

http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/install-oracle-java-jdk-7-in-...
For other desktops, there is this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gnotifier/
I was a C++ programmer for a very long time (and a C programmer for a long time prior to that). The abuses of 'helpful' features like operator overloading that I saw in C++ code would be enough to make a grown man cry.
Many Typo3 Websites get Hack for Google Ranking
How does this apply to HN? HN now seems to be more politics than technology unfortunately.
Nobody with any sense uses XML in Java anymore. Everything uses annotations now.
Last version before they ruin their UI with Australis.

Best way to delay the pain (and that of their general too-frequent breakage) is to switch to the ESR version: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/ , which should give enough time for addon writers to undo the australis damage.
Thanks!

I have two left.
There's a Node.js implementation on top of Nashorn, the JS engine that comes with JDK 8 https://avatar-js.java.net/

Pretty cool stuff! I hope someone makes an easy way to render FB react modules on the server without relying on a separate Node.js process.
Running in a single process (not strictly true; addons are in another) has a lot of performance benefits though. I can get Firefox up to ~1.2GB with a few hundred tabs; Chrome uses that much memory for about 20.

Also, splitting process is bogosecurity like "I run SSH on a non-22 port". I thought the general consensus here is that security by obscurity is bad.
It's kind of implied by the parameters that they point to the same object; they're named "pos" and "end" after all. But I agree, a count variable is nicer.

The subtraction also has a (very theoretical) problem that its result must fit in ptrdiff_t (signed), and it would produce undefined behavior when you have a huge object whose size doesn't fit in ptrdiff_t (but does in size_t, by definition).
Well I guess the problem with "best" is that you have to ask: best for what? Looking pretty? Running fast? Being elegant? Being maintainable? Getting Shit Done(tm)?

Yeah, it's a kinda vacuous statement I guess :o)
yeah, that was one of the reasons as well. I posted the top level site for interest, but it didn't seem to get much attention. I feel like it'd be really handy for hackernews, given how many are transient workers (like myself). Guess we'll see how it goes.
My thoughts exactly. A portable system powered by a pocket-sized computing device, or a more powerful desktop, or the portable device dialling into the desktop. Perhaps rather than a camera a simple (Blade Runner-ish) SLR-type of screen flipper to show you RL in an instant, no extra battery power required.

I can also see a glove, similar to the early Nintendo efforts, with a keyboard that slides down over (or under) the hand, pivots 90 degrees and locks out between both hands. Speech recognition is of course great and all, but slightly humiliating to use (from experience), getting progressively moreso on a sliding scale of how many people can hear you talking to a computer. What we really need is either the sensor, as you mention, for 'air keyboard', or a brainwave reader that can intercept and interpret thought. Obviously one of those is more workable than the other, but no harm in planning ahead.
So, is it the case that increasing computational resources help us with getting things right? It's generally good to bet with Moore's Law.
Australis is a huge step backwards for firefox.

If you want chrome (or opera, which is little more than a chrome clone these days), you know where to find it. Firefox is supposed to be the customisable browser that gives the user the freedom to have what they want and not what Big Google decides they do.
Note the presence of a smiley. It indicates an attempt at humour.
New York seeks curbs on high-frequency trading
But don't those go away with enough compute resources?
Looks like the first player has a significant disadvantage.
"raise the age a man can marry without parent approval to 25"

Now they just won't register their relations.

Pushing on those ideas will make you reinvent GULAG.
I haven't reviewed the original Bitcoin 0.1 code, however...

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Based on the white paper Nakamoto released, "genius" levels of crypto were absolutely not required. An intelligent recent undergraduate or graduate who studied crypto could understand, suggest, and implement all of the crypto primitives and ideas discussed in the paper if they were given the scenario ("implement a distributed form of currency, with the ability to send payments and use computing power to mine transaction blocks"). No new cryptographic algorithms were invented by Nakamoto whatsoever, and his use of all the algorithms he chose have been in standard use for decades.

If you read the whole paper, you can see that any decently knowledgable CS student could grasp most, if not all of it, on the first read through. Hell, the most advanced math in the whole paper is just a handful of simple probability calculations.

Regarding C++: he's certainly a good C++ programmer, but if I recall many early contributors found his code to be messy and not that refined. It did the job and implemented the protocol, but I believe they ended up rewriting it almost from scratch later on.

The innovation in Bitcoin is the core idea and promoting the network; technically, it is not particularly innovative or unusual. Even the idea itself has been suggested by numerous cryptographers in the past decade, but only with toy implementations.

I personally posit that Nakamoto is not even a professional cryptographer, let alone a "world-class expert" or "genius". He probably has a bachelor's and possibly a master's in Computer Science. He probably worked as a C++ developer for many years and worked on some projects that involved crypto, and eventually came upon the idea of Bitcoin due to his libertarian ideals.

Going by his posting style and his actions in general, I think he was and likely still is a pretty ordinary, geeky programmer; not an academic. I think he's probably fairly young, too (under 40, maybe under 30). In fact, I think he falls right into HN's demographic.
Can VR displays replace monitors for programming? It would be great to have virtually unlimited screen size. Are there some problems I do not realize at the moment?
If not Mail.app, what about notmuch with one of the supported clients ;).
3D printing with my kids. We built a RepRap Prusi i3 and have had a lot of fun printing printer upgrades and other fun things. We've designed a few things ourselves but often someone else has already designed something that we can use on places like Thingiverse.
After N hijack, software engineer starts two-factor authentication directory
map / getOrElse is standard in all the Scala code I've seen. Abstracting over the monad is also a pretty big win that has made some big refactorings painless for me. Pattern matching is really only used by beginners IME.
After Dark Screensaver in CSS
An interesting move by Apple as iPhone5C sales were not picking. Apple reduced the price of iPhone 5C & iPhone 5S in US by $ 100 . http://www.dazeinfo.com/2014/03/19/apple-inc-aapl-cuts-iphon...
Well, the fact that HN changed might be true, but you might want to read the guidelines again:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Having this sort if insight about the legal implications of practicing some religion in Saudi Arabia might be relevant to some people here. Anyways, we will soon know if this is "HN worthy". Upvotes and downvotes are here for a reason.
Hacking LibreOffice.
Nik hanselmann – bodyfuck
MH370: a conflict of interest for the search operations
> 2001

It's silly to compare Java8 with Java1.4? 1.3? from 2001.
Every syscall fix in kernel breaks user space in some subtle way.
So what is the API and libraries like? Is there any sort of built-in OGL fallback or do devs need to write two completely different renderers? Is there standards relating to this; are any other vendors going to be implementing same API? Is this new hardware compatible with the older Caustic2 cards?
I found it interesting and it brought to my mind something I hadn't thought about before. Isn't that what HN is for? New, interesting stuff?
What about Steve Jobs?
"Who is Paul hanging around with that smart is paired with awkward more than outgoing?"

Programmers, obviously.
Aureal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor
Creative bancrupted them with legal cost while at the same time using their patented tech without paying.

I have Diamond Sonic Impact 90 (Vertex AU8820) next to me on the wall :/ That was and is my best sound card to date.
Most platforms, at least major ones, ARE relevant for many years. Of course we have yet to see if Angular will be one of them, but it's looking like it will.
> Also, unless you are from China/India/Philippines there is no difference in wait time between the two.

Not really, EB2 generally requires a labor certification which takes about an additional year to process. You're right this is better than the multi-year wait Indians and Chinese face though.
Copyright Alliance Attacks ChillingEffects.org As 'Repugnant,'
no it's the other way around. if people who own another brand of device would mention the name every other time, we'd have (or make sure to have) a good mental image for those as well.

Like a William Gibson novel.

I don't know what a "Dell Latitude 3300" looks like because its owners do not mention they own one when they talk about "their laptop". If they did, after a few mentions, I'd have gotten a clearer idea on the type of machine, or have looked it up.

there's nothing more meaningful about "MacBook Pro" than, say, "EeePC Seashell" (which is arguably an even more evocative name).

and especially among computer geeks who care for this kind of thing, adding a series number instead of some word, isn't a problem and actually helps.

Apple laptops have numbers too, right? It's easier for me, even because I don't keep track of all the different kinds of Macbooks out there, at least for iOS I can figure "higher number is newer". Just the term "Macbook Pro" merely tells me it's shiny, probably white or aluminium, expensive and owner is either from the US or in the graphic design/music industry.

Posted from my Asus EeePC 1215B "Seashell", with Linux Mint, hooked up to a Samsung SyncMaster SA350 24" monitor, typed on a Microsoft Comfort Curv--ahh, sod it.
Special reference Power Hacking and Security : Web Programming
I went to read thinking maybe there will be some great insight behind his reasoning.

But all it came down to was, bookstores will never sell amazon books, so no major authors will ever go there, so they are fucked.

It's almost annoyingly short-sighted.
everything is politics.
Playing the banjo
I think Keith is on the right track (excuse the pun).

1. The weather. Check on that. On a clear night it is possible to sneak up behind and tail an aircraft. Night Fighters did it all the time in WW2. And they had to get close enough and hang on and to check "friend or foe"!
2. Not sure where the FIR boundary was, but if it was close to their westward track (last radio call was a handover) more doubt on the ground.
3. They could have listened in to the radio calls of SIA68 with their radio. That would have given them height and position info too. So long as they did not transmit, nobody could have picked up anything from that.
4. If they had also switched off all the navigation lights nobody on the ground, or in SIA would be likely to have seen anything - rear view from a commercial aircraft is nil! Two aircraft at 35000 feet sound the same as one.
5. Timing on one other score was perfect. Night flight when radar operators are dozy, landing just before dawn - time to camouflage the plane from satellites, and a diversion of a China sea crash to confuse everyone.

Good thinking, keep it up. Looking forward to more insights!
I go elsewhere for constant stories about the US government's overreach and other social commentary. This site used to have mainly deep technical stories, now it is mainly used to soundboard about how awful the NSA and government is and the like. The site has become really a lot less enjoyable since then IMO.
Ask HN: Best way to get out of work mode?
I started my first job as a developer a couple of months ago. I've been programming a while and even been paid to write code before, but this is my first time where it is my one and only focus. I'm enjoying it a lot but I am pretty much unable to snap out of it after work. I either have a list of things to go learn better at the end of the day which leads to lots of random what_does_this_do code/reading documentation at late hours or I am still working on a subset of what I was working on during the day.

I am really enjoying programming programming for a living but given the amount of articles suggesting to chill the hell out I figure better minds than me have discovered my current pattern to be unsustainable.

Any good advice/ideas/hobbies/things you have to get out of work mode after work?
Gmail used to be great back in the early 2000s, but its time has long passed. The metro-ified UI is ugly and clearly only designed for tablets, options are steadily being hidden or removed, and the privacy concerns have only got worse. Not to mention, if you want to use a better client such as Thunderbird, their IMAP is glacially slow and often breaks altogether. The only other alternative is to use POP3 to bulk download all mail and sort through it locally.

I switched from gmail to running my own mailserver a couple of years ago; best decision I ever made about email. It's faster, more private, I can issue my own DKIM keys (and I know my signatures haven't been messed with), and I get sane spam filtering with visible scores that doesn't source its data from other people's email and has a much lower false positive and false negative rate, which only improves via Bayesian learning.
It's bad because it beckons bad behavior. Instead of doing the simple thing and changing your if-statement which puts the idiosyncrasy in the relevant piece of code, you are tucking away the behavior out of sight when something like this almost definitely belongs directly in front of your eye-balls.

This is a bit of a strawman, but being able to do

class Foo(object):
def __bool__(self):
return random.random() > 0.5

shows how crazy you could be. If you really want something weird, put it in the if-statement
"Amazon is not interested in print, only digital. This publishing concept is a dead end."

So very funny. I like print personally, but the direction of the future is quite clear.

There are just so many authors these days who self publish on Amazon - digital only. And they do fine! The better the author the better they do, which is how it should be.

A common format is a series of short-ish books, the first is free the rest are $0.99. In print they would probably be combined as a single work.
Slow Down. Keep It Simple. Do It Right.
The autoupdaters are still throttled so not everyone is on Firefox 28 yet.
There is work going on to introduce value types which would allow for primitives to be got rid of in their current form and unification of the type system.
Cards, code and wearables
Please check this long-term study: http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/5/1310.short

It's as effective as the pill. But you're right that it doesn't provide birth control during the fertile days.

It depends on how you define birth control. Is it something that enables you to have sex during fertile days or is it something that enables you to know more about your fertility?

So, seen in the first way, the sympto-thermal method is just a method for observing natural processes. Nothing that prevents pregnancy during the fertile window.

If you want mechanical birth control, there are really only three reversible options: condoms, IUD, diaphragm. Everything else that's reliable is based on hormones. In that light, I think it's a good idea to use the sympto-thermal method to be at least 50% less dependant on other mechanical tools.
Not inherently wrong? Laws are there to protect established businesses? I thought they were there to protect consumers and indirectly, of course they protect properly run businesses. What's 'established' got to do with it?
I firmly think languages like Ruby and Clojure get it right, nil and false are falsy, everything else is true, end of story.

This is one of my biggest pet-peeves with some languages. PHP is horrifically bad, there is a huge chart to consult if things get even remotely weird.
http://www.hittail.com/ comes to mind. (It's self-funded, though - slightly different kind of startup.)

https://www.projectwonderful.com/ might also fit that description.
I either go to work by car or by a combination of public transportation and walk. I don't know exactly why but the second method clears my mind much more than driving. It creates a clear frontier between work and home, while driving force you to stay concentrated and it does not break the work mood so to speak. So minimal physical exercises every day should help.

Also try some meditation.
I've seen various statistics, but I think up to 20% of marriages are between people who met at work. That's why I also tend to remain skeptic about that approach to the issue (to simply forbid relationships between employees).
I like getting mental headspace with a clear separates-the-day activity, whether that is going to the gym, having dinner, or what have you. YMMV. Before $WHATEVER time is work, after $WHATEVER is, in principle, not work.
'Haunted Empire' sticks to its Apple-is-doomed narrative