skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few observations knowing nothing about Rust until I read this, perhaps someone can shed some light on these:

THE BAD:

* keywords like "let" are extra work for the programmer because the compiler can infer them automatically.

* I’m not a fan of printf()-style parameters, because they break ordering (remarkably, php does this best with its “.” and “$” notations).

* Mandatory curly brackets are also more work, although they (could) prevent subtle bugs later.

* I’m not a fan of the generics syntax, borrowed from templates in c++ (I prefer the something like the “auto” style more, shifting work to the compiler).

* Forcing the programmer to manually place values on the heap with “~” is annoying, when other languages can automatically optimize such things.

* It seems that move semantics distinguish between objects and primitives, instead of everything being an object?

* Borrow is confusing to me, because I would probably make an immutable object passed to a function as mutable create a copy (but maybe it avoids subtle bugs).

* Lifetimes completely confuse me, as it seems like they would be handled by garbage collection?

* I don’t have a problem with the “static” keyword, except that wouldn’t global immutable variables be static anyway?

* I might have gone with traits (interfaces) everywhere instead of distinguishing them from structs, because that seems to be the direction the world is going, to avoid inheritance problems.

* I’m not sure I would have distinguished closures from functions with special syntax (although maybe it prevents subtle bugs later).

* #[bench] seems a little weird (putting profiling calls in the code), although I do find myself wanting this constantly, so if they conditionally compile they could be handy.

THE GOOD:

* Real preemptive threads it seems (as opposed to Go’s goroutines which are cooperative threads/coroutines).

* UTF-8, non null-terminated strings are good (I wonder how they handle character boundaries though, especially in languages besides English).

* Some argument could be made that borrowing c++ concepts makes Rust more approachable.
Reminder: Third-party Google Voice apps shut down in 20 days
Well said. My biggest problem with ORMs in the past boils down to them being "leaky abstractions". They work fine for simple create/update/deletes, but get into trouble with foreign keys, indexes, "group by", advanced queries, etc.
But philosophus' point seemed to be that it was possible for a secular person to "believe in irony." Personally I think it sounds a lot like "I believe in dinosaurs."
Be sure to read the rest of this thread (and possibly the link to the Reddit discussion), it seems that while it might prevent drunkness, it doesn't do much to prevent the hangover part.
Uh yeah! My wife and I were cleaning the garage and found this tape of our 1982 wedding. I need to convert it to something digital ASAP.
This happens quite a bit, the top result on google is a closed ("duplicate") SO thread. SO should be modifying their robots.txt to try to prevent this.
I'm sorry, I should have linked http://cs.stackexchange.com instead. I do see the problem with having to ask questions on the other sites where there are fewer people to answer them, but certainly that's something that can be ameliorated if people are increasingly persuaded to make use of them?

I don't think anything new has been said about the scope of Stack Overflow for a long time - everyone agrees on the specifics (by and large), the only real point of contention is whether you like the way things are or not. If you do, great! If you don't - you're probably not going to get the people in charge to change their minds at this point.
Douglas Crockford seems to think otherwise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0EF0VTs9Dc
A Screenless Future?
The choice of coroutines is not the cause of the problem, it's the decision to store session state on the server and clearing that state before the user is done.

This same problem can happen in a PHP application, and it can be avoided in a Racket web framework application that uses continuations.
The kind of application is specifically Hacker News, not a generic website or webserver. See the essay linked here for what kind of application this is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7651525
Introducing CALLING SOON web series
Most of my day is taken up with unstructured, creative efforts. I balance that out with Lego sets that allow me to get the desired result by simply following the instructions. I know exactly what you mean.
If a country had a good precedent of telling the FBI to go away and come back when they obtained a search warrant through local courts, an educated population (with a high rate of English literacy), a climate that kept datacenter cooling costs low, and a high potential for geothermal power, I think this would be the time for such a country to push hard for even stronger privacy laws and start up some locally owned cloud computing/cloud storage businesses.

It's too bad such a country isn't closer to the great circle route between New York and London, Paris, or Berlin. Being able to terminate trans-Atlantic cables on a small Atlantic island nearly for free would pretty much make it an ideal location for datacenters.
What happens if/when another country (China? India?) introduces a similar law, requiring a company that operates there to make data on u.s citizens available even if its stored outside of the country. Will these companies stop operating in these markets?
Housing.com raises close to $18M led by Helion Venture Partners
> That's population not wealth...

I'd argue that the "wealth" (aka "valuation") of many US Internet companies is increasingly dependent on a larger user base instead of a richer one. Facebook paying $16B to acquire Whatsapp (and its 450M decidedly non-wealthy users) comes to mind.
8 x 3TB in one of these: http://www.qnap.com/uk/index.php?lang=en-uk&sn=5050&c=2485&s...

The NAS, whilst it is feature rich, I've disabled everything other then full-disk encryption. The only thing running on it is Squeezebox: http://oinkzwurgl.org/ssods_intro
At least the OS X version installs and runs mostly like a regular app. The Windows one requires installation through Chrome.
Sorting Algorithms visualized, via folk dance
What do you think the trustee is going to do? Give all the remaining BTC to himself?
It is incredibly smooth on Nexus 4. Bummer to hear it didn't work so well on iPhone
I've created a standing desk by using wallshelves.

https://secure.verwijs.org/tmp/standing_desk.jpg
I wouldn't characterize it in such an extreme way. This kind of educated guessing, beard-scratching and "coffee house hypothesizing" is exactly how some of the raw ideas in science are generated.

But yes, I agree with your basic premise of skepticism. No one should accept these ideas because they want them to be true. To me it doesn't sound like magical thinking so much as thinking out loud to involve other scientists in the conversation. Is that a problem?
Indeed - I tried a test after asking a difficult question, I asked an easy one, it was answered quickly + helped my reputation.
The difference is that absent a cell doing what Szotack claims (i.e. evolving in front of him) his theory is basically unprovable and unfalsifiable. The other group stand a chance of eventually reconstructing what they're looking for, but the alternative being presented is just pontification.
The API, providing iOS, Android and Ruby bindings, was released a few weeks ago:

http://blog.lifx.co/2014/03/24/announcing-the-lifx-api/

I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Quick way to get back problems
Hipchat Suggestion: Allow admin to forswear right to view 1:1 conversations
I think I might try out this option next time I happen to drop by IKEA. http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Ikea-Standing-desk-for-22-dolla...
TONS of people start their question with "I'm new to Java"...
Japan's Plan for Centimeter-Resolution GPS
"It appears that in the presence of mutable state, a lot of the advantages of monads become moot."

If you have imperative state then toy uses of the state monad might be overkill. But, for example, in a parser, imperative state is unlikely to help you. Here, you want state to be discarded at failure and old states restored by backtracking. The execution paths are highly complicated (as they always are when you are working with what are effectively continuations), and trying to reason about these paths in the face of imperative update isn't easy, and is likely to lead to weird bugs.

Toy examples are not generally going to help you appreciate monads, and I think there's a fourth requirement to make them work in a language: you need a powerful type-system. I'd say that monads haven't taken F# by storm because F# isn't powerful enough to type-check a library for arbitrary monads. And you want that, because when it comes to reasoning about code using such libraries and then applying it to a monad assembled from a stack of several other monads, you really want your type-checker around.

Ocaml's type-system is powerful enough for this, and I still reach for my monad library when writing Ocaml code. It's syntactically heavier than Haskell, but not too painful. The solution is to make all your monads into modules, which would be a bit like making every monad a dictionary and passing it around explicitly. This is basically what Haskell ends up doing with type-classes anyway, and what Gabriel Gonzalez has suggested one do explicitly:

http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/05/scrap-your-type-classes...

If you follow this approach, Common Lisp and any other language can pull it off by making all monads into dictionaries. All you lose is the type-checking.
I am curious why this was submitted now, especially in light of the recent removal of cacert from Debian's ca-certificates package.[^1][^2] It seems that the discussion of cacert's removal highlighted serious concerns about cacert's process. A request to include cacert in mozilla's certs sat in bugzilla for four years before it was--thankfully--closed.[^3]

[^1]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718434

[^2]: https://lwn.net/Articles/590879/

[^3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215243
EU based internet services are looking better and better each day - especially the German ones.
I try to learn from every failure and after some of the biggest fails of my life in '12 I came out a rather different but much better (for both my environment and myself) person. When you are in a dark place, everything looks like a failure even though it is not; once you notice that success is back.
"This whole petty vengeance thing is quite barbaric, to be honest."
It's not vengeance, it's getting back what was stolen or defrauded from you. If you wish to pardon peoples' debts to you, then that's your humanitarian deed, but leave it at that.

Instead, you want to make a legal loophole for people to steal from you. And then people like you whine and complain incessantly about "the wall street wolf banksters and corporations that stole money" etc etc. Yeah, well that's a natural consequence of you making legal loopholes because you feel sorry for the poor and get taken advantage of.
The documentation on the Go site is really good. You don't need much more than that. The early access book from Manning is really good so far (http://www.manning.com/ketelsen/) but it's only a few chapters finished. After that I find myself reading the source for the code in the standard lib which is well written and relatively easy to follow.
When I first started asking questions I learned a lot, the most articulated answers always came from the same users. It was also these same users that downvoted me, then upvoted when I corrected my mistakes. I've learned so much from my mistakes. I now welcome the downvotes just so I can prove myself!

After a year on Stack I started answering questions and still today don't hesitate to downvote users that don't understand what constitutes a valid question. I find people 'used' to react well commenting... "what did I do wrong?". Its the recent reaction to downvotes that changed.
An open letter to Eric Schmidt from Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer
[edit: I've been at Pivotal Labs since '06, not '96. In '96 I was at IBM Global Services.]
Yeah, that was the "Too Localized" reason - it was actually aimed more at things like "where's the error in this 500-line code dump?" but... uh, no one understood that. So we got rid of it about a year ago.

There is a small but vocal population of users who will use any excuse to close questions they already know the answer to, regardless of how clearly-written or novel they are. That's... kinda insane, but in a community-moderated system there's a bit of a learning curve for everyone, including those moderating. If you see something that strikes you as wholly inappropriate (e.g., a good question closed for a bs reason, not a bad question closed for the wrong reason), don't hesitate to bring it up on meta for review: http://meta.stackoverflow.com
It sounds like your concern is more with the language of Linda Geddes, who wrote the New Scientist article, than with the scientists. Are you sure your caution shouldn't instead be more applied to science journalists?

For example, the "spark of life" is from the New Scientist, not from the researchers, and the word "spark" doesn't exist in the underlying paper except in the references, in the title of another paper.

Nor does the paper say something as simple as "when you heat up sugars ...". Instead:

> Due to the complexity of the metabolic pathways, it has been argued that metabolism‐like chemical reaction sequences are unlikely to be catalysed by simple environmental catalysts (Lazcano & Miller, 1999; Anet, 2004). However, to our knowledge, this possibility has not been tested systematically, and at present stage, thermodynamic approaches are not predictive about which molecules form in the presence of simple catalysts from a precursor (Amend et al, 2013). Here, we studied the reactivity of intermediates of glycolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway upon replicating a plausible chemical composition of the prebiotic Archean ocean. We report that under these conditions, the intermediates of the two pathways undergo non‐enzymatic interconversion reactions and form neighbouring intermediates that constitute these pathways in modern cells.

That is, the goal was to look for 'metabolism‐like chemical reaction sequences', and not the creation of more complex sugars.
I was also there at the beginning (the beta). And both of you are right. I don't use SO much now either. Really, the only time I see it is when it pops in a search. And then, the question/solution is usually closed.

What I don't get is I've seen questions that were answered closed? Why close any question that's been marked as answered?
The term "mod" is a red herring here. The engine will auto-reverse obviously targeted voting, and the community team reverses cases too subtle for the engine to handle, but that are clearly personally targeted.
> I’m not a fan of printf()-style parameters, because they break ordering (remarkably, php does this best with its “.” and “$” notations).

Rust's println! macro also supports named format parameters, which don't need to be in the same order as the format string.

println!("{foo}: {bar}", bar=5, foo="abc");

> It seems that move semantics distinguish between objects and primitives, instead of everything being an object?

Structs fulfilling the Copy trait (meaning they don't have destructors and can be duplicated with a simple memcopy) have the same copy semantics as primitive number types.

> Forcing the programmer to manually place values on the heap with “~” is annoying, when other languages can automatically optimize such things.
> Lifetimes completely confuse me, as it seems like they would be handled by garbage collection?

Rust is a systems language. The language makes memory allocation and management explicit, by design. Lifetimes allow Rust to provide memory safety at zero run-time cost. They're how the programmer proves to the compiler that pointers are valid at the time of use. There is no garbage collection by default; only when you use the Rc or Gc types from the library.
Yeah, you don't want to use this.
So is coffee, olives, licorice, and blue cheese.

And it's a widely-accepted objective fact that all of these listed food are in fact literally the best tasting foods of all things, ever.

Not all of them at the same time, mind.
They have the same sense.

The reason why they have not taken CL… wait, for starters why must they? Haskell is far far more advanced in the ideas of abstaction (strong static typing, — so it just needs to be). Experienced lispers will put yet another DSL, experienced haskellers won't, for “it's just monoid in the category of endofunctors, duh” (haskell forklore)
I kind of view "failure" as just another folded hand in a game of Texas Hold'em. At some point, you might take down a pot to make up for past failures. You might not take down that pot and you might end up broke and penniless, but the outcomes don't really define whether or not you played the hand properly.

You always have to play your hand to the best of your abilities, even if you get dealt life's equivalent of 7-2 off-suit.
Love the name ;)
Well that's just nonsense.

You can have maintainable and unmaintainable codebases in any language.
Meet super-hacker, master coder and Bitcoin boy Amir Taaki in his Hackney squat
>This is going to end badly for American Internet companies.

Agreed. Of course, it's going to end badly for Americans in general. The "undue burden on the government" reasoning has been used to weaken almost every right that we have. Police don't have to announce themselves before entering, or even have a warrant (if they get one later), because these things would constitute an "undue burden". It is a very strange loophole that the government uses, again and again, to break the law. My rights are worthless if they inconvenience a police officer. And in this case, a companies rights are worthless if they inconvenience law-enforcement.

I think it's time we hang up the "undue burden" loophole once and for all. The constraints on behavior our laws represent should not be conditional on convenience, particularly not on the convenience of law-enforcement.
Along similar lines, suppose you are GM, and you have known for over a decade that faulty ignition switches on your cars have been killing people, yet you have not applied the cheap fix for the problem, and that this is at least grossly negligent and possibly criminal. Can you just ship all the incriminating physical documents to a GM branch in another country so that US prosecutors and US plaintiff attorneys and US regulators cannot get them?

It would be one hell of a loophole if a person or company in country X could put documents (electronic or physical) that they fully control completely out of the reach of prosecutors, plaintiffs, and regulators in country X simply by storing those documents in country Y but still fully in their control and easily in reach when it serves their interests to access them.
Looks like doing business with US companies is now in severe trouble as the US does not care to obey foreign privacy laws. At least it's official now.
Didn't they do that in Happy Days?
China has a several thousand year history of not getting it's shit together so it might never happen.
I don't remember the details, but luckily google knows everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeSycf6A7pI.
> * Lifetimes completely confuse me, as it seems like they would be handled by garbage collection?

Interesting misconception :)

Lifetime is used to avoid garbage collection. By expressing the lifetime of a variable preciously in the code, the compiler knows statically (i.e. when compiling instead of in runtime) when an object can be destroyed, avoiding GC overhead and offering deterministic destructure.
www.cacert.org uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided.

(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)
Weeks? That's early detection; that's success :) The longest example of that who I know of is a guy who hired me around 10 years ago; at that time his company was 15 years old and he had not made any money with it. I spoke to him 2 years ago, so his company 23 years or so old; he decided to close up shop as after 23 years he found that what he did was useless and a waste of time. 23 years. 23 years without earning any(! seriously) money and chasing a product no-one (in hindsight) will ever want. That is brutal.
Flavio, you raise a good point. If a loan is denominated in USD by someone who "thinks and breathes in USD" then it's not really a BTC loan, is it? It's really a USD loan, essentially, with an intermediate transfer currency.

You had said: "The bitcoin price doesn't matter for the linked loans" - well, sure, for USD loans by people who arne't using up their BTC investment holdings.

In this sense you can use anything that has a spot price, including rice, pork bellies, or gold, to make a 'loan' that is really denominated in USD.

Presumably, nobody is actually borrowing the pork bellies for some investment purposes qua pork bellies. It's just a medium of exchange.

On the other hand, even if you denominate a bank loan in USD and have to make it in pork bellies, to be received back in pork bellies at a future price, - this raises the problem of actually having to source those pork bellies.

It may not be a problem if it is possible/easy to buy BTC. On the other hand, hoarding behavior may make the purchase of the BTC a bit more difficult to acquire so that, like pork bellies, it's a rather poor medium of exchange for actually making the USD loan.

Regarding my suggestion that you look at whether some BTC loans are ponzi schemes (relying on previous investors being paid off and happy, to secure ever larger loans and reputatoins by the same party), what did you find personally (not speaking as an employee or on behalf of your company of course)?

I'd be interested in your thoughts.
Ask HN: Would you pay $3k + 25% stake for an MVP?
I have some room on my table to build an MVP. Framework : Laravel/PHP.

The cost is $3000, with 20% down($600) and 25% stake in company.
I'll also do:
$5000, with 20% down($1000) and 15% stake in company.
$7500, with 20% down($1500), and 5% stake.
$10,000 with 20% down ($2000), and 0 stake.

I have 2 years experience building apps in laravel, 10+ in php. If you have an app idea send pitches to pixelgremlins@gmail.com - I only have time to build 1 idea.

See examples of my work at: recycleabook.com(laravel) medicareplanstoday.com(wordpress) salesgoliath.com(wordpress), or my resume: resume.patrickcurl.com

If accepted I will email you my paypal, you'll submit the down payment, and depending on size of project it'll take me 3-6 weeks to build.
Was Imageshack the one that was hosted on several different volunteers' servers? I remember back in the day being a part of a goon-run image hosting service and I can't remember which one it was. In the one I'm remembering when you'd go to e.g. imageshack.us/image it'd send you to e.g. kalleboo.imageshack.us/image for the real hosting of that image.
For context, they are showing ads to referers from social media websites (Facebook/Twitter/G+). (Wrote a blog post about it here: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ )

If they did that in Reddit, hilarity would ensue.
It's using highlight.js, but doesn't seem to be one of the default styles. [0] Maybe it's custom?

[0]: http://highlightjs.org/static/test.html
"You say the fact that it was stolen is irrelevant. Lets say someone ram raids the office, holds a gun to the CEOs head and demands the keys to the bitcoin. Do you think that he should be personally liable in that situation?"

Well, that all depends on what sort of agreement I had with the institution in question. This is precisely the sort of thing that insurance is supposed to fix. If the owners failed to get insurance to cover whatever agreement they went in to, then yes, they should be held fully liable for the losses.