skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt announced tomorrow that they would do everything in their power to prevent GOOG from EVER paying dividends, buying back stock, or selling to another company, then that would be catastrophic for the share price, correct? This is a step beyond simply being disinterested in dividends and buybacks in the near term, but you seem to be confusing the two.

Anyone who purchased shares at that point would be doing so because of one of the following
1) They believe that Page, Brin and Schmidt will change their minds
2) They believe that control will be wrested away from Page, Brin and Schmidt by more buyback/dividend friendly management
3) They believe that other people will still buy for reasons 1,2, or 3. This is classic Keynes Beauty Contest investing.

GOOG could still grow its revenues, but if it is guaranteed to never pay a dividend or buy back stock (Berkshire Hathaway doesn't pay dividends but Buffett has said he would definitely pursue share buybacks under certain conditions) or sell its assets, then there is no way to get cash out of GOOG except by trading with other beauty contest investors. The only thing left to anchor GOOG stock value to Google the company is the possibility of bankruptcy.

So yetanotherphd is 100% correct. It's not impossible for people to trade as if there's no connection between a company's future dividends/buybacks/asset sales and its stock price. But that's how you end up buying tulip bulbs for their weight in gold.
Thanks; my resolution for 2014 is get involved in the local tech community a bit more.
On Naming Methods With Blocks
-(void) loadCurrentUserWithCompletion:(BAAObjectResultBlock)completion;

-(void) loadCurrentUserWithCompletion:(BAAObjectResultBlock)completionBlock;

-(void) loadCurrentUserWithCompletion:(BAAObjectResultBlock)completionHandler;

What's your style?
Yup, unfortunately libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have jumped on it like it's the solution to all bad government and a way to avoid taxation and have become religious about it. They're wrong, and completely nuts, but this isn't Bitcoin's fault.
Considering the situation, doesn't it always seem more like trying to suck up than genuine?
That seems to be just a video chat service. Hangouts is much, much more than that.

While Google's initial push of Hangouts angered me as much as anyone, I have since accepted its ways:

- true multi-device chat, the whole chat conversation is visible between from various devices. XMPP never got that right

- easy multi-user chat, no need to create a special room, just invite the people

- in-line images and animated gifs

- see who's read what in the chat (an oft-missed feature: look for other user's thumbnail pics in the chat: it's below the latest message they've seen)

- easy multi-device voice and video chat, with volume management that just works (like or better than Skype IMHO) and proper conferencing features (ability to mute others)

Now, as an XMPP aficionado, I just wish they'd open their protocol...
9,125 days later
"The most obvious one is graphical objects, which are typically expensive to render."

For me, in my current project, it's message passing between the low-latency thread and other threads.
While light's behavior as both particle and wave can easily be observed, the particle carrier for gravity, the graviton, hasn't been observed in the wild.

As a result, gravity is currently only a wave, in relativistic spacetime.
Which library is that? Truly curious.
Ask HN: How to talk to my mailing list after a long hiatus?
Hey HN,

Since I last collected emails, my product has gone through tons of changes and delays. I felt it was fruitless to communicate with those who expressed interest early on because I didn't know where I'd end up and whether I could deliver but I'm realizing now it was a mistake.

It's been at least a year since I last spoke with them, and I'm actually ready to show them what I've built and have them sign up for early access. I'm looking for some advice or references on how to talk to them after such a long break and how to re-acquaint them with what I'm working on right now and what steps they can take to sign up. I only plan on launching in the next 60 days (lots of things to iron out) but I want to gauge their interest and prep them for another email in the next 60 days with an account or a link to activate their account.

I'd love to hear what you think

Thanks!
Stephenson specialises in seeing the possible and articulating it.

The world of Snow Crash and Diamond Age is a very palpable future.
Can you (or someone) explain what he says right before the lady hugs him and Prof Linde asks to repeat to him?

EDIT: Nevermind, it's in the article.
Nope. Had a white magsafe power adapter, never wound the cable tightly, cable basically fell apart. This same macbook also had the plastic case falling apart.

It was an acknowledged design flaw, and Apple fixed it with more strain relief on later models, and a changed angle for a real fix.

The durability of the charger has little to do with the presence of a design flaw in the cable.
Apple's Healthbook App for iOS Shown in Renderings
What does it take to switch to a new ATC? AFAIK they were in the process of switching to the Vietnamese ATC and in fact the last message was a "good night" to the Malaysian ATC. Could the process of switching to the new ATC mean that they were left without communications in the deciding minutes?
As jeffbr states, look at the policies of the SNP before unfairly categorising them. Scotland just voted in equal marriage for same-sex couples with the First Minister of Scotland, and leader of the SNP, strongly in favour. It really isn't a prejudiced or authoritarian nationalist party and has a record to back that up.
Why do terrorists only get to be guys in caves? What was the difference between a pirate and a privateer in the 19th century? A government endorsement?
It is not a "conspiracy theory" to think that companies might be putting a positive spin on (i.e. lying about) changes made to increase their bottom line. That's what companies do.
;; is a special token used only in the REPL to force evaluation, it is not something you ever use in real code.
It's hard to find webdevs who believe in SRP; my theory is that the explosion of open source libraries and frameworks has de-emphasized all facets of programming experience and technique to the point that app dev is little more than duct-taping components together and debugging until it works. (Which is incredibly dreary, but that's another discussion.)

Also, a lot of script-y environments discourage you from thinking about it: Rails' autoload, DHH's rants, no compilation/linking step, etc.
If you're working with a traditional publishing house, you almost have no choice at this point. I was able to get my wife into a text-only markdown-based format because I am responsible for the layout.
When, on that sliding scale, does a hijacking become a theft?
Where the mem at?
Wikipedia puts the service ceiling at 43,100 ft (13,140 m).

I imagine it could surpass that though without depressurization.
Save and plan for financial independence, not retirement
Happiness Hack #6: Find Flow for higher levels of happiness.
Open Source invoicing application
My worry about the T series is that its a bit of a heavy machine to lug around.

How did you swap out the DVD for a battery? Did you buy it like that from Lenovo?
You're holding them wrong. Seriously, what do you mean by 'goes flat'? The bottom wears off? Or battery? Just get a charger, not a big deal. Also, I can't find a position where it nips my fingers. Bottom doesn't fall of if you close it properly. I haven't had any of such problems with Magic Mouse, although I miss the middle button. Scrolling in both directions is much better than any other mouse.
I'm looking at Russia, and thinking that it would be very convenient for them for Ukraine to drop off the news... which it largely did when this broke.

Now what could cause that - perhaps a good mystery. Everyone likes a good mystery.

Baikonur is a pretty f'ing good place to hide something like a 777, and is very proximal to the last possible position. Been there. Middle of nowhere. Airstrip is high security, remote, and has underground hangers. Local populace are very well versed in "I see nothing". It's also jurisdictionally weird, being a bit of Kaz rented to Russia as sovereign territory, meaning that any legal search would be very tricky to arrange to say the least.

Add that to the big old pile of theories.
They are wrong, the blockchain is public, it is very likely that a bitcoin like technology be used by state actors in future to create tightly controlled currencies!

Imagine a state being able to charge sales tax at the point of each transaction!
Or more disturbingly know exactly who buys what for how much and when if tied together with government issued ids and wallets.
Or instantly calculate taxes due on income.

Its actually quite scary :(

In fact bitcoin technology or derivative could be used unfortunately to take even more control from people and economies! Its probably a good thing that in most countries politicians would balk at this since they wont be able to get brown envelopes if everyone in the state uses coins
German people writing iOS software must be having a hard time then.

Seriously, even in the context of cultural sensitivity, this seems pretty silly to me. Really? National Socialism gets to own the letters NS for the rest of time? I mean, if it's an objective fact that Germans get upset by those letters, then I guess that just is. I still can't remember ever hearing of anyone being upset about letters that could stand for something else before. There aren't really that many letters, so I'm not sure how feasible it is to restrict two-letter combinations.
I wonder if this is some kind of DNS issue. My coworkers seem to be having no problem with it - but Chrome can't find it on Starbucks wifi.
The NYT is saying that some Malaysian government officials are confused about how ACARS works, leading to the confused reporting.

The above comment is accurate: the last ACARS message was received at 107, and the next one was expected at 137. The voice communication was logged at 119.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlin...
Can't beat the local delicacy of salt'n'sauce on your chips here in Edinburgh!
If you steal a plane off the ground, it's a stolen plane. If you steal a plane out of the sky, it "obviously" crashed, just like we all thought for the first four or five days of this.
I didn't see a RSS icon on their page, and had to open the source of the page to get it. Here it is, for anybody else out there that still uses RSS: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/feed/
> That the rules and exceptions came about because the recurring issue with LINQ (particularly LINQ to Objects) being an enormous performance issue?

No, you're exaggerating your position to try and justify it. There is zero substance in what you're saying. All I see is someone who appears to have made an irrational decision about a technology because he personally doesn't like it. There's no fundamental reason why LINQ to Objects should be any slower than say a foreach over a set. You can get is a mess with either approach. If you're not prepared to mentor your team, or do code reviews to check for problematic usage then it's a fault of yours, not the technology.

> It doesn't matter to you, probably because you don't even know what the cost is [and that isn't meant to be at all a slam. For most software the cost simply doesn't matter].

Of course it's meant to be a slam, you have no knowledge of my experience of optimisation or my deeper understanding of how frameworks like LINQ works, so instead you assert that I "don't even know what the cost is". I have spent a large part of my career doing 'to the metal' optimisation, so I will ignore that comment.

> Though I have to chuckle at the notion that LINQ helps with testability, or robustness for that matter.

If you don't understand why imperative and functional code are different then you won't understand why LINQ is inherently more robust and testable.
SOPA: Dead in Congress, Alive in Trans-Pacific Partnership
Unskilled and Destitute Are Hiring Targets for Fukushima Cleanup
Sneakers is a one of my favorite old movies. Have to give props to the above mentioned Pirates of Silicon Valley also.
Xilisoft iPhone Magic Platinum.v5.5.9
>> quote could be interpreted as coming out in favor of the hedgehog:

Silver is adopting an analogy to describe modern journalism, and the analogy largely fits. Traditional political pundits spent a lot of time in 2012 crafting narratives that fit with what they felt was blowing in the wind. In this case of using the analogy the hedgehog sucks.

However, Archilochus was definitely praising the idea of the hedgehog in his poem. A good analogous English saying would be, "Better a live chicken than a dead duck".
8x iPad Retina Screens used as PC Monitor for EVE
There are legitimate reasons to have a manual on/off switch:

1. In case of electrical failure to extend battery charges for 2-way communication.

2. If the device goes nuts and is better off.

3. To be turned off so that it doesn't interfere with a backup transponder.
I write all my javascript in haskell, and haven't had any problems. What do you need/want "DOM bindings" for?
After 2 Months, FOBO (YC S11) Has Hit a Million-Dollar Run Rate
> They ignored alarms warning of an overflow because so many tanks are near capacity, alarms ring all the time.

Now that's just bad design, an accident waiting to happen. :(
"My Programming Language Is Better Than Yours And I'll Prove Why"
You sir, won the internet for me today :)
Because this is simply not a puzzle or a brainteaser you can solve from your armchair. You can't just Google a few things, read a few pages on Wikipedia, watch a documentary on Discovery Channel about aviation disasters and maybe read the comments on Hacker News as well and then use logical deduction and Hegelian dialectic to formulate to a conclusion. Dont't you see that?
Since the two non-C implementations use a JIT, it would be interesting to see results of an FDO build of the C program.
>Nowadays, yeah, just using a garbage collected language would solve the vast majority of their problems with negligible effects on performance

The person you responded to didn't suggest this.
No kidding, I think people gravitate to generators in the same way in many environments... even in ASP.Net MVC I tend to clean out the project bits as a first step, then start wiring myself. Though, I do think express/connect, koa and others do a good job of giving you relatively SRP lego pieces.
> Even if TCAS on MH370 wasn’t working for some reason, an in-expensive portable ADS-B receiver paired with an iPad and Foreflight app would allow a pilot to receive the ADS-B output being transmitted by SQ68 at that time."

http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR

That ADS-B receiver runs about $20-30.
Gentlemen's Club: Top Gun Academy
Or, light is neither a particle nor a wave, but a distinct thing that seems to behave like both under various circumstances.
Doctor: ADHD, as currently defined, does not exist
The Difficulty of Hiring Non-Senior Developers
I never knew this existed. With OneNote for Mac not supporting local or encrypted notebooks, I'll be trying out Outline.
I'm more likely to act as if I trust others, which is behaviorally very similar to trusting others. I don't, though.
The one big feature that is missing for me is the print to onenote printer driver.
I just started at a Microsoft shop a few months ago (first time for everything), and I actually quite like F#, now that I've had a little while to play with it. It's a good contender for the NQAGAHBMIAL throne.

Having used CMUCL/SBCL for a while, I always found ocaml's "well, you can compile your code, but then you can't run it in the REPL" to be off-putting. (For my purposes the CLR JIT compiler for F# is good enough.)
Distributed Hash Tables Slides
Agreed. However, Node doesn't really fit their request based abstraction as Node assumes to have a long running server that holds things in memory (like Socket.io connections).
But I haven't really used Node enough to make statements like this, so correct me if I'm wrong.
That does not answer my question at all. Just because you can't solve it conclusively with Google doesn't mean that it's not an interesting exercise to work on. Again, what's the problem? It's harmless, it's interesting, why fight it?
A really nice comparison of just C/C++ hash libraries is http://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/comparison-o...

Good discussion too. khash.h uses macros for C templating, but is quite fast.
A quick google led me to this (https://github.com/svijee/taskwarrior-androidapp). I did not develop it and, unfortunately have an iphone 4 for the next few months. It looks fairly promising though (looks like it is still being developed).
"Shenandoah" Java Garbage Collector tested on Role-Playing Game Desktop App
I'm curious as to what compelled you to state that my estimate of the impact complaints had on the situation, even though entirely unquantified, was probably still too high?

Regardless; I can confirm that many people complained about it and roughly a week or two after the whole 'PG is a sexist' kerfluffle sexism related threads stopped being flagged off the frontpage... It seemed like relevant information for the OP.
Possibly related:

http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2011/03/uncovering-adv...
Could a smartphone app improve your eyesight?[video]
Package manager for the C programming language.
Basically the lazy-man's copy/paste promoting smaller C utilities, also serving as a nice way to discover these sort of libraries
Github has a value of $750m on paper. That doesn't mean that the company has any significant revenue stream out of which it can pay a $5M settlement. And $5M would be 5% of their recent $100M Series A funding, so it would a large chunk of their working capital. In any case, if that $5M goes to the plaintiff and lawyers, it won't be going to pay the yearly cost of 25 developers.
I'm afraid to say that in Australia the reaction to these privacy and personal rights issues has been lethargic and frankly lazy. Under some circumstances, a lowly under educated clerk with no security clearance of any kind can, with the approval of a single supervisor, access data such as metadata for a variety of reasons. The reaction of the vast majority of the population is complete political apathy.

Australia began it's modern europeanised existence as a police state, and I honestly don't think that it's evolved through law beyond that initial modality.

It has never had in it's constitution the expectations on rights of the citizen that underpin the US constitution.

It's unlikely that there'll be much resistance from the public to these proposals.
Both Edinburgh and Glasgow (the only cities I've worked in) have very diverse populations - European, American, Asian, Indian, Australian. As a "local", no first hand experience of applying but I'd infer it's pretty common, sure.
> Says a person who has obviously never been in such a situation and can't even imagine the reality.

I worked on a community care facility for developmentally disabled adults when I was in college. I was young when it happened, probably 19-20, and an older woman I worked with made constant unwanted sexual advances. We worked unsupervised in a two person team in a group home, and for about six months she would never let a day go by without pointing out that she would be willing to engage in intercourse with me, right here and now, in pretty graphic terms. I was pretty low on the totem pole, the woman harassing me was very good friends with management, and so I never did anything about it.

So yes, I have been in a situation like that, can imagine the reality, and would totally be willing to go through it again and do it right by reporting it and maybe saving others from getting that treatment in the future.
Programming languages and work opportunities
How do those "to js" code generator behave when used together with frameworks like backbone or angular ?

I know things like typescript or dart have special versions of the framworks, but i'm curious to know how the ocaml to js tools behave ( since i've searched for a decent strongly typed server side technology for years, that would be an argument for me to try that language).
Yes, but note that there are differences in how you can work in experimental/historical sciences.

Your friend^2 would probably gain by reading more about the scientific method, see wikipedia etc. (But then, so could probably you and me both, too.)
Two types of errors
what are you whining about?... they found a potential problem and notified you and fixed it.

Grow up man
What's exciting about FiveThirtyEight is their scientific/data-driven approach to journalism. While all other news outlets clamor over one another in their quest towards the elusive notion of "objectivity", FiveThirtyEight actually seems to be making strides in that direction.
Have you tried remote contract work? I know my company has a number of remote contractors making around $70-$80 per hour.
"You should be optimizing your time to get the most value out of it."

Why? What makes that lifestyle any better than the lifestyle where you sit back and chill?
...which seems to be unreachable for me at the moment. I'll have to check it out later. In the mean time....

Cosmic inflation has always bothered me. I just don't get it. I'm not a physicist at all, though. I get why it's postulated. (The uniformity of the universe requires it to all be in close proximity and the time scales don't have enough time for that part, IIUC.)

But the expansion of inflation is significantly faster than the speed of light. What's up with that? I know, spacetime is expanding rather than things moving within spacetime, but still, during inflation, this particle here is watching that particle there recede at >> C. I doan geddit.

(Grump.)
Microphone! If you connected a microphone to OneNote it would sync the audio with your note taking (I had a Tablet which I used to hand write my note) Was the best thing EVER.

OneNote will even search handwritten notes and audio.

Study Guides = I would then click on my notes and OneNote would play the audio of the professor and I could relive the lectures that went with the study guide. Everyone loved it in my class. I would email them the audio files if they missed class. No one else ever would use it. I even had the college I worked for purchase OneNote for all students and no one ever connected a microphone and few used it. SAD
Time to change to new archs
In terms of the technology sector, Scotland and especially Edinburgh is an exciting place to work. Edinburgh does have the traditional banking industry, but also great companies such as Amazon and Skyscanner, with a collegiate/academic environment. There are also many career and techie opportunities within the many start ups.

I found it's a city with good worklife balance. I have made the most of the techie meet ups and I have really enjoyed my time here with the Hip bars and restaurants and affordable accomodation! I have not had an issue with being English in this cosmopolitan city.
>In the wake of this, I’m starting to think all of the problems we’re seeing with Silicon Valley these days—the ineptitude at politics, the clumsiness with handling inequality in SF, the lack of gender and racial diversity in the industry—are actually rooted in a systemic failure to understand how power works

I'm completely lost here: so the way to solve the problem of people with a lot of power oppressing people with little or no power is to replace the oppressive people with power with better powerful people?

Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good?

EDIT — Kinda ad hominem-y: "Until November 2012, she ran the Obama campaign's technology office in San Francisco where she recruited technology volunteers to build software for the campaign."