skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No where in the post is there an example advocating dynamic invocation based on computed strings. No where.

Your example that uses a random number generator to select a string and then use that string as a function name is dynamic invocation based on computed strings.

> What you're arguing is that you should never send a string name of a function to array_map, but should instead wrap the invocation in a lambda.

No, that's not what I'm arguing at all. Your example above uses a string literal, which is basically the same as having a first-class identifier in its place. I don't think that kind of behaviour significantly harms readability. However, there's really nothing more "dynamic" about this kind of invocation than any other invocation in PHP.

I kinda question your use of "dynamic invocation" as a blanket term to cover first-class anonymous function application, higher-order functions and indirection. These are all separate-but-related concepts. My cursory Googling didn't turn up any uses of 'dynamic invocation' that are anything like the way you are using it - do you have a source or reference or is this your terminology?

> What must it mean deep down for PHP to be able to generate valid opcodes on a pure method call to a method that doesn't exist? It means the internal opcode must simply store the method name as a string waiting to be executed

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what the internals of the PHP interpreter are these days, but you appear to be describing the use of a symbol table or something. The use of 'opcode' confuses me, because if there was code generation going on, it would be possible to statically resolve names to first-class function values.

What I'm getting at is that I don't see that there is a difference (in PHP) between the "dynamic invocation" you are describing, and straightforward run-of-the-mill function-calling, given that PHP's internal representation of both is essentially just a string (which is looked up in some symbol table in order to resolve it to a piece of code).

And so my point is that there is no real reason to exploit this quirk of language design in order to exploit indirection on computed strings (which, as I said in my previous post, I consider to be a kind of goto-esque spaghetti code feature).
Is the problem related to cp1252-to-utf8 conversion issues?
My Postscript one.. http://chris-lamb.co.uk/2007/06/10/sudoku-solver-in-postscri...
Learn it early and use it often. It will literally only take a couple of hours to pick up the basics, and then it's jsut practice. Learn more from there as you need to. Even if you're a solo developer, version control is an invaluable tool.

As for which VCS to use, I personally prefer Git. I don't find it difficult to use or awkward at all. I've used SVN in the past and didn't care for it much, though that's probably just a personal preference.
while I agree that F?CKedit is a lot of baggage and not very friendly to program against, the timing out sessions are a problem of the guys that implemented your messaging system and not a problem of CKedit.
It usually depends on what language I'm working in. These days I've been working in actionscript, so that's how I think. I think this behavior is partly because I sorta loose familiarity with other languages when I'm working in one language for an extended period of time.
Gov. 2.0 Fail: usaspending.gov stumbles with google charts API
For this sort of thing, it would seem helpful to release it under "any license viewed as free by the FSF" or similar. Is that sort of statement likely to cause problems? Or at least license it MIT/BSD/whatever. For such a small piece, it would be nice if projects can just import it without having to move from "all code is BSD" to "all code is BSD except bithacks.h which is MIT, but we also comply with that license".
If you read through the whole article and the comments, the author adds more nuance to this advice than the title suggests.

It boils down to "shopping your terms verbally is fine, just don't flash your actual physical term sheet around town."
When seeing a new site, my first two questions are "What does this do?" and "Why do I care?"

The answer to question #1 was a little unclear to me at first. I read the FAQ but I don't believe that a casual user would take the time for that much investigation. I think the site could improve by explaining on the home page that the site is like metasearch for gear deals of specific types.

Things became a lot more clear to me after I clicked through the catalog and view a specific product. The copy about, "Our friendly robots have seen 19715 gear deals. Follow the CamelBak Better Bottle Hands Free Adapter and we'll alert you when it goes on sale" and "How does it work? We monitor sites that put gear on sale for short periods of time. If you follow this product, we'll tell you the next time it goes on sale. It works and it's awesome." made it perfectly clear to me what's happening on the site. I didn't get that conclusion from the home page. Again, I believe that a casual user will give the site very little time before making a decision to continue within it or continue searching on Google.

The site handles the answer to question #2 pretty well. I like gear. I like deals. I like letting someone else work for my gear deals. Nice.

Also, the logo confuses me a little. At first I thought it was a cow, but now I think that it might be a fat horse. I'm still not sure.
Pretty slow.
It's been corrected now, due to this blog post, but it's a pretty egregious error to be live on the front page of a flagship site. Hopefully lessons are being learned here?
"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

Rugby's a great sport, but it doesn't have anywhere near the tactical sophistication of gridiron. It also doesn't seem to involve any actual blocking, per se. Blocking in gridiron might be more like sumo than anything else, but it's probably pretty rough on a guy to repeatedly jump out of a crouching position to collide full-force into a defender, trying to shove him away from your teammates. Likewise, it's probably pretty fucking rough to get slammed into the ground by a dude capable of overpowering a 300 pound lineman. Rugby players are skinny dudes, and a skinny dude running into you at full speed is less force than a fat dude running into you at full speed.

I've seen rugby matches, and have something of an appreciation for both sports. Trust me: there's a damn good reason for the pads and helmets.
Family Connections: A Private Website for your Family (useful tools review)
Kids Capture Space Photos From Homemade Weather Balloon
Is Free Will An Illusion?
As far as I know codepages is all about the browser (usually handles this well) and server-side solution (your milage may vary). When it comes to problems with (F)CKEditor, my problem in this particular case is usually the markup.

The markup from Word may be "slightly" mangled and all, but you need massive amounts of server-side code to clean it up and it just feels so unnecessary when it actually renders fine in the editor client-side.

Small but very annoying bug. In the end I switched to the YUI rich-text editor and it seems to be working better.
If you've got two OLPC XO laptops you can measure the distance between them using a similar techique:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Acoustic_Tape_Measure
Apple Heist Empties Store in Just 31 Seconds
Op and I should be best friends. I can't count how many times I've solved a PHP problem using Python. Or generated PHP code using Python (won't go into detail, but it wasn't TDWTF material, I promise). Or simply explained something in a given language in terms of Python.
Looks hopefully like a great rewrite. FCK = Definitely a major player in the wysiwyg scene for long years. I have fingers x-ed on this being the step that resolves the search. Finding a wysiwig that is not bloated and overly complex, bug-free and has the essentials, has occupied me for years. The one thing CK clearly swung and missed in their demo though is the seeming thrill they express about being "colorful". The defaults for modal dialog buttons: bright orange, yellow and green!! CKEditor, you could not have done anything more to suggest you were somehow ignoring or out of touch with the evolution of web UI than this. Now I know that this is all css customizable. Great. I look forward to altering those. But really, if you can show us a web site with good design that uses flaring colors in a text editor UI, I will be stunned. Anyway, sorry for the rant... thrilled that you have moved this forward and can't wait to try. I hope though that you quickly iterate the defaults and the demo on the site to be in line with the notion that UI widgets should not scream for attention, but emphasize the clean and functional.
Thoughts about my VC life, four years later
I have no interest in laying out a definition for a "true football fan", but "someone who likes to watch football" is a good place to start.
YouTube lifts music video block (UK)
That's nearly 5 years old. Surely modern linux mobile phones are in the same ballpark regarding size despite being much faster.
Try this book:
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia: 1992-1995 (Perspectives on Intelligence History) by Cees Wiebes.

Then:
Kosovo and the Metaphor War by Roland Paris (Political Science Quarterly, Volume 117, Number 3, Fall 2002) is a good analysis of how metaphors of previous wars and events were used to promote the war.

For 10x infation of number of deaths by NATO propaganda machine in preparing for war try:
Kosovo: Orders of Magnitude by Adam Jones (IDEA Journal, Volume 5, Number 1, July 2000).

On the media portrail and lack of journalistic impartiality try:
Ruigrok, Nel., Schoenbach, Klaus., Scholten, Otto. and De Ridder, J.. "Covering the Bosnian War: ‘Journalism of Attachment’ in Dutch Newspapers" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, Jun 16, 2006 (http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p92731_index.html)

Also note that there was a humanitarian catastrophy and there were certainly terible masacres going before the bombings and there were on both sides and have been going on for centuries. But after March 24, 1999 the Serbian attrocities intensified terribly.

You can listen to press reports around the time. For example Clinton says on March 24, 1999 that the reason for the war is "to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo and, if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military’s capacity to harm the people of Kosovo." However intelligence reports warned him that bombing will actually intensify the attacks and that is exactly what happened. The large number of victim from these retaliatory attacks were then used as the reasons for the bombing.

> I'm pretty sure that is a blatantly false statement.

Well, do you have any sources? Please show that the number of claimed dead and missing Albanians (around 100,000) by NATO media monkeys was true as that was used to justify the war.

Please show evidence that US had purely humanitarian objectives, and reasons for US not getting involved in much larger humanitarian crises in Africa, South America, Asia (especially Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia). Some of then occuring simoultaneusly with the Kosovo war (hint: try Indonesia, it's a easy one).
Amazing to read all these comments. One would have thought that whoever is part of the HN scene is highly educated and reasonably knowledgeable. Obviously not so. Research is only just beginning to copy the way real tree leaves operate:

http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/klug/Research/Artificial%20Photosynth...

In the meantime it is probably even better to just reduce CO2 out put rather than try and store it. But as people seem to be unable to kick a habit easily - even if it may kill them longer term see smoking - why not store it.
Scheme, though I end up having to translate it to Python 9 times out of 10.
I like how he calls it "feed the family" money and mentions an upper bound of 1.5 million USD ... he must have a large family that only eats caviar pasted lobster or something??
That's cheating, you took it out of context. The preceding sentence is key:

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list. It is the ten traits that came to me on a 15 minute subway ride.
NL-completeness, Graph Theory and Dinosaurs
"solar panels, distributed across deserts and areas with almost 24/7 sun"

Um... I don't think so...
Google Explains Why You Didn't Have Gmail
They should hire this guy to redesign their site:

http://feltron.com/index.php?/content/2008_annual_report/
Migrating to Snow Leopard for Rails Development – A Definitive Guide
Ask HN: Which Google/Bing mashup do you like best?
badabingle -> www.badabingle.com |
bing vs google -> www.bing-vs-google.com |
bingle -> bingle.pwnij.com |
bing and google -> www.bingandgoogle.com
Technically we would all be accomplices to murder (after all it is quite hard to find a not-Orient-Express scenario in which more than a couple of people kill another one), which does not usually get the death penalty, so paradox is avoided. I do agree with you, though :-)
And thus, we could also expect a boom and bust cycle for the solar tech industry.
Boom: Let's see how fast we can make money selling solar panels.
Bust: We sold so many solar panels that we have more energy than we need.
Even when you are working on something you love it can be hard to stay motivated.

It's important to recognise when your motivation is dipping and switch to something else or take a break.

Too often I forget this and keep pressing on regardless - and the task takes twice time it would have if I'd just parked it for a day or two.
The thing about CO2 and O2 is that its a loop. We breathe in O2 and breathe out CO2. Plants "Breathe" in CO2 and "Breathe" out O2. It just seems very dangerous to me to sequester a lot of that underground, more so than climate change.
How about passé or gauche or some other fashion term, with perhaps, all the implied connotation?
it's html 5.
I've always been on the fence on this issue due to two concerns I always saw as conflicting until recently:
* Causality
* Perception of free will

In my mind, it always made sense that I couldn't have free will with causality as then my brain is really just an insanely complex chaotic system that only appears to be random. Allowing for freewill in something like that would appear to warrant the idea of magic.

But then my friend remarked that instead of the universe being driven based on causation why not imagine it all being correlation based? Any scientific experiment really only proves correlation to a mathematical model. Unlike pure math you can't prove a hypothesis using anything nearly as rigorous as induction (since the infinite is out of our reach).

By not taking that extra step of saying science proves causation of certain phenomena and just leaving it at correlation I think ideas such as freewill and the odd uncertainty of quantum mechanics can mesh with our macro level view of the universe.

shrugs I thought it was interesting at least. :)
Aren't laptops in stores usually attached with more than just power cords?
If effect necessarily follows cause then yes.

If that is true, then "repeating" the universe would lead to exactly the same outcome. Hence we have no free will.
First I think visually about object classes and data structures, and how they relate to one another. Then I think in pseudo-code.
GM's Original Electric Car (and it's not the one you're thinking of)
shrug Eric Sink said it himself: "DVCS's and git are conceptually much harder than tools like Subversion"

personally, I agree with him, and given that the issue at hand is "what should this guy start out with to gain the habit of using version control" and not "what is the most awesome version control system ever where you could just imagine a merge and it does it for you while you're on an airplane using a hand-cranked One Laptop Per Child", I think conceptual ease is what we're really going for here.
Private exchange to aid startups seeking more cash
"Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by-play during a game."... "The NFL has strict regulations on who can report what from its games."

When will major organizations realize that these new-fangled web tools actually increase the value of the organization through user/fan involvement? Probably won't happen for a while...
That shows you how powerfully a good visualization can deceive you.

Here's the same statistic, shown in another light:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/lying-with-numbe...
Privacy advocates want regulation of behavioral advertising
Ah yes, very good point!
Here's a link to the paper mentioned in the article (abstract only as this is an SAE document):

http://www.sae.org/technical/papers/670175
I think in the subdialect of English known as social media stream of consciousness.

Ask Lazyweb about my blog's new design... that's like using the crowd as a source of wisdom... crowdsourcing...
OMG I invented a new word wait check urbandictionary... oh cool I'm getting answers... upvote... hmm this submission is tangentially related to my blog, i'll promote it in the comments...
upvote... hmm should I change my profile from 'social media expert' to 'social media genius'? Too
forward? Oooh one of my older tweets is getting retweeted... Follower count... damn, just got rickrolled again! Hmm the world is
moving to Twitter... it's a killer of something... subscriptions... RSS... hmm there's a photo of me that isn't
tagged, let's come up with a clever nickname for myself in that tag... RSS Killer... means RSS is dead...
Email alert... new follower! w00t fellow social media expert... I'll follow her too... doesn't
seem as smart as me though... oh shit, it's Follow Friday! who's mentioned me? who's mentioned me? hmm I need a "10 Things" post to submit to Digg... 10 Things I like
about you... funny movie, who was that actress? check imdb... is it in my Netflix queue? Oooh shiny funny new failblog post...
I wonder what's new in the app store...

</satire>
Bad title, as ever, it's a course in use of various "citizen journalist" sources discussing ways to verify stories, etc.. Twitter is mentioned as one possible source however.
iirc, yes. i even remember playing with an ipod that had a security cord on it that i pulled too hard by accident and it set off an alarm.
Top 25 Sites for CSI Fans
If you are interested in learning more about CSI, and even see some great images and videos, here are 25 CSI fan sites that offer you a chance to go deeper into the show.
I think is algorithm, state-diagrams and images;and curse in Hindi :)
We'll always find a use for that excess electricity, especially if it's renewable.
Vonage App Comes to iPhone
The first thing that came to mind is that it's waaaaay too wordy for the front page of a product you're trying to sell.

"Automatically adds authentication bar with username and logout link to all protected html pages"

Could be changed to:

"Adds login bar to all of your website's pages"

(It's implied that since this is helping me do something, it'd better be doing this automatically.)

The three lines about API, SOAP & REST could be summarized in one line:

"Multiple interfaces & authentication methods (API, SOAP, REST)"

etc.

Plus, I'm not sure whether you want to announce stuff still in development, cf. Osbourne Effect: http://is.gd/2Q0x9 .

I'd remove the "Lite", call that your base version, and when you're ready, announce the Pro EnterPrise Solution Version ;)
So I am guessing the European Court of Human Rights condemning Turkey for human rights violations against civilians from 1984-1999 is just bogus? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Turkey#European...)

Alright, "my facts" are that European Court has consitently condemned Turkey for human right violations agains Kurds. "Your facts" are that you claim to have Kurdish friends. I think, I'll stick to "my facts" for now...
List of Machine Learning Software
having worked in... a high-level functional language gives you some mental machinery that doesn't rely on decomposing this thought process into some concrete syntax

This is what we are really talking about when we claim that reading, e.g., SICP will make you a better programmer even if you don't work in Lisp.

SICP is not a book about Scheme. It's a book about computation that happens to use Scheme. And it is resolutely abstract, encouraging you to think in non-linguistic terms. One of the bits I remember best was near the beginning, when they talk about the shapes of computational processes -- iterative processes have a different shape from recursive processes. Now I use that sort of mental picture all the time.

The goal is to think about software like a mathematician thinks about math. If you're thinking in a language, it's like the way I thought about math when I was nine years old -- to the extent that I knew what a mathematician was, I thought it was someone who was really really good at the long division algorithm. Someone who could subtract really fast!
It's not bigotry at all; it's just the logical conclusion from a set of premises. If Silicon Valley is provably the best place for a technology startup to be, then the people who want their companies to succeed the most will go there. The factors you mention are things that affect one's motivation to do anything it takes to succeed. No one is saying people who don't move to Silicon Valley are untalented. The comment you replied to specifically said that, so I don't see how the talent issue was brought back up.
It depends on the problem. If it's something algorithmic that fits into a given data structure, I go through a bunch of mental visual representations; graphs, trees, etc. If the model fits, I usually imagine the code in the language I used the structure the most in.

If it's about something I don't know much, I'll go through pseudo-code and/or a list of tasks the code has to perform and then imagine it in the best-suited language for it.

If it's more about organizing concerns or how should a larger problem be split up, I'll take a sheet of paper and draw components and tasks, then linking them with arrows until it makes sense and it's clean. I then try to fit that in the language best suited for it; usually for that kind of splitting, actor-based languages do the best job. It's probably why I like Erlang/OTP so much; they provided actual design patterns for higher-level representations such as Client-Server relationships, Finite State Machines, Event handlers (such as loggers and whatnot) that make it really easy to turn a visual representation into an actual application with minimal boilerplate code.
Definitely.

One of my favourite interview questions to ask is, what version control systems have you used. I don't really care if it's not what we use. But someone who can't talk fluently about whatever system probably hasn't worked on a large project, probably hasn't worked as part of a team, and probably hasn't had experience dealing with regressions. That's a red flag.
I often times feel like this when I am told by upper management to try and push a change on a vendor that will mitigate a problem specific to our architecture. Most of the time the support person is gracious, saying they will take it to their product development team. But, deep down, I know that as soon as the team hears the request/suggestion it goes straight to the waste bin.
"I don’t think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don’t need neuroscience to reject it — any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will!"

--

That's a rather large philosophical debate to be skimming over so glibly... and the world is not completely mechanistic (quantum mechanics).
How much energy would it take to produce and ship that many solar panels?