skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java got a couple of very important things right, at just the right time. And it tapped into some trendy / buzzwordy things at just the right time.

On the first point:

1. binary object compatibility. This was huge in a day when C++ and most other "cross platform" languages required you to ship libraries as source code, which bloated your code base and slowed down your compile times even further. Java nailed "library driven development" at a time when people were hungry for that.

2. Threading. Java's threading model is far from perfect, but it made using threads far more accessible, especially in a cross platform way, than what was previously possible in languages like C++ - especially while staying within the bounds of the language / standard library itself.

3. Garbage Collection - has it's pluses and minuses like everything, but a lot of C++ people who were tired of goofing around with manual memory management really embraced Java and it's simpler approach.

On point two above:

1. "Internet" programming. Java had good support for sockets and even basic HTTP stuff early on, and always seemed to do a decent to better-than-average job of supporting network programming (with a couple of glaring exceptions, like raw sockets)

2. "mobile code" - most people never wound up doing much with this, but it was trendy in the late 90's, early 2000's and Java was seen as a good platform for doing this stuff.

And probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. All in all, Java just did a nice job of hitting a good "sweet spot" at a good time and place. And that sweet spot was sweet enough to make it compelling, despite its warts.
This is the right solution.

"DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA" (Try test link before downloading). Add to KeyChain, restart browser.
Here's a few ways the post became true:

Tracking Google Apps for Education students and even paid Google Apps for Business emails to build ad profiles, making misleading statement to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to statements to federal court, lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...

Conspiring to kill SkyHook just with its outsized influence like Microsoft used to.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking.
http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

Google employee access personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email?
http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

Paid inclusion for shopping search results
http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...

Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-...

Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-i...
The thing you call a flaw, I call a strength. Anyone who would interpret the question that way and just shuts down instead of asking for clarification or making any kind of attempt to describe _some kind of_ project they've been involved in... is a red-flag; you shouldn't hire that person.
That's an easy question to answer, I was trawling through the dusty attics of idlewords.com (feel free to go read A Morning in Iceland http://idlewords.com/2003/11/a_morning_in_iceland.htm), I found it amusingly prescient.
When you struggle with a problem, that's when you understand it...if someone was really the person that solved it, they'll be able to answer multiple levels, they'll be able to go down to brass tax.

I probably have struggled many times before successfully solving a problem, but
I'd have difficulties coming up with an example of this in an interview.

I can't even judge what's difficult and what's not. The root of most problems
is missing knowledge, and once I completely understand something, it seems
clear to me.
I would say that is true. Furthermore the Sun team had the advantage of starting with a group of people who had done extensive work on Smalltalk. This gave them both specific technical advantages, such as state of the art experience in JIT optimization, and the general advantage of starting with better OO design experience than was widely available.
Some languages have a sort-of default variable name for cases like this, namely "it":

> put 1 2 3 4 5 | filter > $it 2 | map * 2 $it
Neo – an Ergonomic Keyboard Layout, optimized for the German Language
This project is rad. I spent some time with them as their crowdfunding advisor and it's one of the most impressive projects I've seen.
How do you measure that.

As long as most people are happy with television and similar crap( most free time is spent with tv ), city landscape doesn't really matter; at least on the grand scale; the first step towards nicer cities is always removing personal cars.
Does capitalization add information that otherwise isn't explicit?

Technically the (tiny, one-pixel) period is there, but personally I cue off capital letters rather than punctuation when dividing sentences in my head. They are also helpful when skimming. They provide easy-to-spot anchors at which to resume reading.

Seriously, just look at what I've written. Blur your eyes and slide over the text. You can see the capitol letters from a mile away, can't you? While the periods fade into the page.
It's popular with universities, this is probably the biggest reason.
ITunes 12 and the Case of the Missing Sidebar
So what exactly am I looking at here?

I've got some cool music and some flashy pictures - where's the About page? :)
Focus solely on individual behavior when addressing racism will only cause institutional racism to be hidden in society. Statistics will show what institutional bias exist and then legal interventions done where required. Maybe the U.S. is not capable of fixing its racist problem. But history has shown that state force has been required in schools, the military, and the private sector to reduce racism.
and that he split with the Nation of Islam over saying the Kennedy assassination was 'chickens coming home to roost' while they sent condolences to the family

Except... he split from the Nation after making a pilgrimage to Mecca and seeing people of all races getting along, helping each other and united in a single purpose. That fundamentally changed his views on race (and his religion -- from what the Nation taught, to more orthodox Islam). It is absolutely no coincidence that he was assassinated by members of the Nation shortly afterward.
Control Mechanics – Adventures in Mobile Game Design
I use emacs with the 'viper' mode extension, along with a custom keymap that i made that places the keys i use most on and near the home keys: https://github.com/bshanks/viperre

I actually use viperre with a Colemak keyboard map, but there's a QWERTY mode too.
Seems a little suspicious that this is the very first comment from a new account.
Oh! I had a different sense of "base ... under Docker" in mind.

My interpretation was that Docker was running on top of an OS, which you could call the "base", and say it was "under" Docker in the sense of "underlying".

Whereas he was using the opposite spatial metaphor: the Docker image, which is a "base" in the Docker sense because you derive other images from it, is "under" Docker in that it's within Docker, or lower in the process tree.

George Lakoff would be thrilled by this example of conflicting metaphors.
Seems safe:
https://www.virustotal.com/en/url/c9c5514fd72fa2824a60ea0a67...

What firewall are you using?
To me it just lends a sense of laziness.
Probably a demo for the soundcloud player in the footer

- http://jxnblk.github.io/plangular/

The second link [0] is down though, so I don't know what that's about.

[0] https://github.com/jxnblk/gitfolio/
We could pretend that this is all about the incredibly unique properties of Java and "what it got right." But that isn't really true. It's just wrong to frame the question as "what was special about Java" let alone "what can I do with language x to duplicate its success?"

As of today, the reason is it's old and established and a safe choice, everyone knows about it, and everyone else uses it, and so many people write it, and there's so much existing code in it. Even if it sucks for some purpose, that's what you pay Java developers for.

The story of how it got there is again not about the incredible unique properties of Java but about the decisions of large companies in the contexts of the 90s, both in adopting and contributing to the development of Java.

Those decisions had a broad political and business context, and insofar as they had anything to do with the language itself that would have been in comparison to what were perceived to be the serious languages of the time, like COBOL or C++.
Vídeos Online Grátis – Vídeos Online
The impact of corporate support can't be understated. Corporations love to buy support, meaning, have someone they can blame when things go awry, and charge if they're not fixed on time. Usually, it's little more than a security blanket, but that blanket helps the C-levels sleep at night.
I think that being able to develop on Windows NT (early 2000s context, right?) and run on something bigger was also a help.

Indeed. The company I was working for from 2000-2004 started down the Java path about 2000 (part of the reason I was hired, I guess) and one of the things people loved about Java early on was how you could program and build your code on a Windows box, then sftp the jar to an AIX box, and run it there unchanged.

"Write once, run anywhere" might not have worked out perfectly, but it was actually pretty good, especially if you were doing server-side stuff and avoided Swing and AWT.
There is some confusion here because of conceptions of Liberty and feeling of liberation when using the word "freedom" - you are both correct.
Useful background (not about the Heroku part): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605
“YES” Scottish Independence, A Date with Destiny – The World is waiting
I don't believe my own eyes! Pagination on HN?
https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=30
Aye, that's one of the things in capitalization's pro-column (it's what I meant with "searching" in there).

Of course there's a complex interaction between letter and punctuation design there - if we didn't use capital letters, our full stop marks might be bigger instead. And perhaps that would be more elegant than having two versions of every letter. Now, that's of course a "what if ..." and not a practical argument that should affect your blog post today. (Nor is it an exhaustive argument, emphasized sentence beginnings aren't the same as emphasized sentence ends.)

But it's super-interesting that you bring up periods, because they're a great example of rules vs. the reality of written communication. The rules require ending sentences in periods, but a vast number of people start dropping them when the medium has an implicit full stop, like chats (IRC, SMS, ...) do (line/message end = full stop). Instead the period becomes repurposed as a sort of "aggression mark": http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simples...
Those advertisers paid for thousands of fake clicks,
and I ended up with a decent chunk of change.

I see how you know the second one, but how do you know the first? Maybe they have a grey area of fraud detection where they pay the publisher but don't charge the advertiser?
Give it a couple of months, it will start not feeling right again.
No, I just think that they, like Linus, know the difference between the GCC bug tracker and the Linux kernel mailing list.
A company I worked at was a Perl shop (online academic publishing) but we found it almost impossible to recruit anyone who had even the smallest of skills in it.

At the same time the colleges and universities were churning out Java trained graduates that you could scoop up for a dime a dozen.

Java devs were cheap and as long as you believed that all you had to do was throw more bodies at the problem then you were in a sweet spot.

Having said that the company is still going strong and doing very well thank you.

What it comes down to, and I suspect that this is especially true for large companies, is that if you need a lot of programmers then there are far more Java candidates available that you can hire. They are cheap and replaceable.

Any other language, even hot languages like Python and Ruby, are harder to recruit in numbers and consequently more expensive and harder to replace.

Not sure where PHP figures in all this :)
How does this work out for people with physical disabilities?
Having used "Scripting Bridge" for a few years now, I'm keenly aware of its very real and common caveats, and I'm not comfortable using it in any serious project. If users would like to write something like Hydra using only LuaObjC[1] or something similar, they're free to. But manually bridging function calls gives Hydra a robustness and stability that such an automatic bridge can never truly have.

[1] https://github.com/darrenclark/LuaObjC
Same here. What kind of crappy walls let the sounds of washing dishes through?!
Live feed from the International Space Station
ProductHunt Impressions
Your first paragraph strikes me as disingenuous. Curious, where do you live and how much driving do you do? For most people I know and have grown up around, cars indisputably are freedom. The bureaucratic and law enforcement pieces are such minor nuisances, I don't know anyone that ever complains about them. The true frustrations of car ownership, that crop up on a daily basis, are traffic and parking (and, less frequently, maintenance).

With a car, I can easily drive out of my city and into a spot of wilderness of my choosing, whenever I want. It is freedom in the sense it greatly increases the number of places you can feasibly travel to and the the control you have over how and when you travel there.

Regarding the manufactured human-scale areas, that is the New Urbanism the author mentions. It's a positive trend but the problem is that the city as a whole is still automobile-scale, just peppered with tiny oases, which seems a kind of inelegant shoehorned solution. That you describe them as "manufactured" speaks to that, I think.
Those worldviews are prevalent and that "law" is commonly used as one of the core belief nodes supporting those worldviews.

Here's another example: tool selection by programmers. Many have a false belief that a programming language that performs must be difficult to use or require a lot of manual memory management or plumbing.

This false belief is also supported by that incorrect belief node about the "law".

Also, you know you don't have to sign your name on comments, right? It says your name at the top.
UNSW robots win world football RoboCup
As mentioned in the comments, people should watch 'onkalo into eternity'. This is IRL science fiction (if that makes sense). Scifi-esque questions we're dealing with now.
Thanks for pointing this out; I've filed an issue to add them: https://github.com/mozilla/localForage/issues/218
How very bizarre. Bachmann's point seems entirely based on some view that we should only listen to authorities, and we should only listed to authorities that are correct all the time.

If your view of truth doesn't stem from "what I was taught", that is, from taking some Big Kahuna's word for it, then what Bachmann says seems nonsensical.
It's some French hipster fad. My ex-boss did it too. It can b annoying at times but once you get accustom, it's bearable. I don't even notice now.
That is a fantastic story about the hurricane - thank you !
Another recent addition to Huginn are Scenarios, which are sets of connected Agents that can be imported and exported for sharing. When imported from another Huginn instance, they act like a subscription, pulling in any differences when you update them.
That is interesting, it's in my login keychain, as well, alongside "DigiCert Global CA" that expired on the 14th.

The most obvious answer would be that it's being installed by some widely-used piece of software, but I don't know what.

Pity the "Date Modified" column is empty, and I don't think there's really a log of what added things to the keychain.
Clojure has -> specifically to facilitate writing pipeline code that doesn't read backwards.
You're avoiding the issue by talking about what Mark Klein revealed and ignoring what Edward Snowden revealed. The NSA is not capturing only traffic between Russia and Venezuela or only traffic that crosses a national border. They are sitting on the links into Google's data centers. Google is a domestic entity. So either they're sitting on a link and then filtering out 100% of the traffic (which is preposterous) or they're sitting on a link where 100% of the traffic goes to and from a domestic entity and not filtering it out.
I'm not who you replied to, but here you go: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112...
1) It's never too late to do anything. The idea is not to build a city and for the people to come, but to change places, or make new centres, new places.

2) There are cities around the world (Christchurch, NZ and Detroit US as two examples) which are already suffering for various reasons. Detroit is the centre for this "placemaking" movement - how do we rebuild a failed city?
Looks like a portfolio (http://mrmrs.io) turned into a gif-music-video.
They treat you like an idiot when you first get in because for all intents and purposes that's exactly what you are, and exactly what they have to work with - a kid who will be entrusted with quite a bit of power, and you have to learn to respect the chain of command and listen to orders to avoid costly (and potentially life-threatening) mistakes. I hear that as you gain responsibility and rank a lot of the stupid things about the military start to be less of your concern, but I never stuck around to find out.
>Focus solely on individual behavior when addressing racism will only cause institutional racism to be hidden in society.

I'm not focusing on individual behavior. As a matter of fact, I wasn't talking about behavior at all. I was just talking about the meaning of the word racism.
>but I was shocked at the ease of carrying that kind of attack

From affiliate marketing to PPC ad networks, etc., the implementing systems tend to be built as naively as possible. When you survey the implementations you quickly realize that the designers assume there are no bad actors in the known universe. Literally no thought was given to fraud.

They generally tend to be wide open to abuse, and frequently through simple URL manipulation/automation and standard HTML.

What's amazing is that billions of dollars are at stake, requiring little more than mouse-clicks. So, given that clicks are so insanely easy to simulate, you would think that these systems would be very robust; yet they are frequently the opposite. But, beyond the naivete, it is not entirely the networks' fault. They are locked in a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse with people who have very little to lose and much to gain.
Heh, Scala point release, will last about another 10 minutes on HN front page O_o

Were it Haskell related, well, could be up on HN for days ;-)

Maybe Dotty will bring some excitement back to Scala, these days it's just bashed upon endlessly, which is unfortunate. Personally I love Scala, warts and all, it's a wonderful language that often draws criticism without admitting any of its myriad strengths.
Racism
Is any action or attitude, conscious or unconscious, that subordinates an individual or group based on skin colour or race. It can be enacted individually or institutionally.

Source: US Civil Rights Commission

How is a white person subordinated and controlled in the U.S. based on race to where that white person does not have recourse to the the law, the courts, the police, them finding another job, or just avoiding the offending person? If you have a problem with a person you avoid them or address the law. Racially oppressed people don't escape the situation so easily hence why racism is debilitating.
When Java came out, there was no Python or Ruby.

Python is four years older than Java. When the latter was released, Python was already at 1.0.
>For most people I know and have grown up around, cars indisputably are freedom. The bureaucratic and law enforcement pieces are such minor nuisances, I don't know anyone that ever complains about them.

This says a lot about the people you know, but very little about the subject.

edit: For most people I know and have grown up around, cars are seen as a burden. I was born in a major city, am pushing 40, have lived in a dozen cities, and currently live in the major city I was born in. I have never bothered to get a drivers' license, and have multiple friends and family my age who have just gotten their first car within the past five years, or have given up their cars after moving back into the city from smaller and/or more depressed and/or more conservative towns. I've been dabbling in motorscooters for the past 5 years.

If we're going to be talking about ourselves.
How to handle copyrights after editing open source code
There are many conflicting viewpoints online about copyright attribution when using OSS and I'm curious if HN have any rule-of-thumbs or best practices for developers.

My case must be common - I started a project by editing a sample included in an open source package and now, several weeks later, I still have the original copyright notices at the top of several source files which in some cases barely resemble their original form. I'm not sure how to proceed. Does the copyright only cover the exact original text as one piece? Does it cover each individual line of code? Am I misrepresenting the ownership by having another organization's copyright above what is largely my own code? At what point does the copyright no longer apply, or is everything I could do still part of a 'derivative work'? I'm trying to do the right thing here, not find a legal loophole, I just don't know what right is in this situation.

I could start 'from scratch' to avoid the issue, but I'm not sure what is right in this situation. I don't want to unintentionally 'steal' someone else's work but my intuition is that it feels wrong to stick a copyright for another org at the top of my files because 5% of the code came from their sample. Advice?
Yes, it's a slippery term so probably not the best word to use, however the majority of display and search ads are served by google and unfortunately this does mean they have little incentive to actually address click fraud, though they do obviously make some efforts, we wouldn't hear stories like the parent post if those efforts were effective. Fraud was reported and went completely unaddressed - that's not really acceptable to my mind and indicates they feel little pressure to mitigate it as that's not an isolated report.

Re the absence of lawsuits, I'm not sure that is positive proof of anything.
The support aspect isn't about blame. As a corporate customer, I want to know that if I build my operation to depend on a third party product (ERP, etc) that somebody will be there to help in the event that it becomes problematic. In many cases, buying support coverage is much cheaper than having product experts on staff to address unusual but costly issues.