skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... does this imply that the orientation change issue isn't a problem if you use media queries properly?

I wouldn’t quite say that. It’s more that whatever effort you put into using media queries to adapt your site somewhat intelligently for visitors with different devices is wasted if those devices ignore your media queries and just naïvely scale everything instead.

For example, one site I work on has a single-column layout that works reasonably well on smartphone-size devices. It also looks OK on a typical tablet in portrait orientation, but there it wastes significant screen space, because it increases the horizontal margins rather than letting text lines run very long. If that tablet is rotated to landscape orientation, we have enough space to switch into a two-column layout, which happens to fit the structure and content we’re showing. This lets us fit more of the content onto the screen than the single-column layout, because we don’t waste that extra space at the horizontal margins any more.

This is all good stuff, and from time to time we get favourable comments from visitors who were pleasantly surprised that the site adapted. However, without some of the trickery we do with viewports, what would happen instead (at least on some devices) is that rotating portrait to landscape would wind up showing a zoomed-in version of our single-column layout, while rotating landscape to portrait would zoom out to fit our two-column layout with much smaller text than intended, or some variation on those ideas depending on the specific device/OS/browser.

The catch with all of this is that for various reasons people might genuinely want to zoom in on our site. Maybe their eyesight isn’t great and they just want the text bigger for comfortable reading. Maybe they want to zoom in on some of the graphics or videos we show for similar reasons. So we don’t want to block intentional zooming by the user, just the browser’s “borrowing” of that feature to second-guess our carefully adaptive design.

Thus today we wind up employing the sort of workarounds I mentioned before. What I’d like to do, though, is just to define the sensible layouts for the site using media queries, and then have browsers automatically fit the most appropriate layout based on the orientation and user-selected zoom level on each visitor’s device.
I think PHP is lackluster, inconsistent, and feels pretty clumsy in general, but to suggest that it doesn't qualify as a candidate for serious application development in 2014 is a notion that arises from ignorance of the platform. Client requirements notwithstanding, it wouldn't be my first choice, but I've worked on very well engineered PHP solutions that were successful and have so far proven to be quite maintainable.

A strong engineering lead is very important (someone needs to enforce the use of composer, adherence to the appropriate PSR standards, testing, modern mvc/routing etc), but PHP is absolutely capable of producing fast, clean, maintainable software.
I think your logic is flawed - a ping would/is extremely easy to disable via a brower extension- a redirect url is not
The brilliant thing about PHP is webapages as templates. It's so simple and easy to get something useful going, both to write it and deploy. Templates weren't new - shell had string interpolation - just simple and useful.

The libraries and improvements to the language follow from its popularity, which followed from its simplicity and usefulness.
Conversely, there's a long list of languages where variables would not be local by default
NO. Don't dox people. Don't threaten to dox them. Don't encourage others to dox. We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by there actions. Think about that every time you start to grab your pitchfork.
I'm a programming language geek, a code lover and a syntax fanatic. And there are a ton of things I love about coffee-script:

class Animal # yeah! real classes!
hello: (name="nobody") -> # nice default variables
console.log "hi #{name}" # sexy variable expansion!

class Dog extends Animal # logical syntax :)
...

f = ->
x=123 # variables are local by default and need no initialisation
It is mostly a nonsense. There will always be contraflow to decentralized systems. The pirate bay situation is classic stick it to the man storytime. When are LEAs in these regions going to reason that TPB is a hydra - cut off one head, and countless others sprout from it? An absolute nonsense
The page you linked says that he normally uses Mathematica, and fell back to Wolfram|Alpha for that piece when it started locking up.

While researching this article, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests.
Low bar or not, if you do anything web-facing, there is no way around javascript. And you will do a lot of stuff in a language that makes variables global by default.
Is there a ProductHunt without the “selection process”?
i.e. a site that actually shows what's new, not just what ProductHunt thinks we should see is new?
> I'd use an embedded compiler running in a fastcgi like daemon.

Sounds like nginx's lua plugin. Anything non-performant can be written in lua. Anything performant can be written and C and called from lua. Best of both worlds.
Enewetak atoll is something to behold on Google Maps. Here's [1] where the very first H-bomb, Ivy Mike, detonated with 10.4MT. Yes, that's a big circular hole in the atoll. The larger one, in fact. The smaller one was classic fission Castle Nectar at 1.8MT.

Furthermore, from the article: "My guide walked up the shallow incline of the dome and stood on its top; impulsively I followed him. I wished I had brought a Geiger counter."

Forgetting to bring a geiger counter is a pretty big oversight for such a trip, and as a result we lack what is probably the most interesting fact from the trip!

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@11.6680237,162.1920549,4599m/da...
Found one: http://www.gamedev.net/classifieds/item/3696-black-helga-loo...
Yeah, I'm gradually coming around to an RMS-y way of thinking – having to tape small bits of an old K-cup onto my Keurig 2.0 is DRM bullshit that I have no room for in my life. Fuck them.

Some people will use the new Keurig and its DRMed cups because it provides them with enough value. I will completely bypass this nonsense and make a DRM-free cup of dirt cheap coffee that stimulates my senses, as outlined in another comment. I suggest that you do the same.
Unless one assumes that industry staffing should closely correlate with overall country demographics, I don't see its relevance.

Ie that's like starting a scientific paper that aims to demonstrate that g=5 (and not 9.81) with the opening 'Let's assume that g is equal to 5'.

I'll give you an idea of what I am talking about. Let's say we had a few cases of women / minority staffed/founded companies that just blew it out of the park. So one could point at them and say - 'Look at how these guys did when not encumbered with white patriarchy'. That would be example of data that would challenge the notion that SV is meritocratic .

Or another example - showing how top CS programs have 50% graduates who are women / minorities but Google only having 10% as developers. That would also mean that something is amiss - why isn't Google hiring them?
Ask HN: Is it time to build a torrent directory on top of the bitcoin blockchain
Or maybe some young inexperienced engineer wanted to show what he could do and did THIS. That is one way of growing up and becoming experienced: bad judgement.
The real joke is the Marketing concept: that making coffee starting with water, those dirty, scary soil colored grounds, and having to wait 5 minutes is too much work for a cup of coffee.
Printer companies have tried doing this. IIRC, they lost in court.
http://www.blackgirlscode.com/
The Stargate Project
Just invoking BlubParadox seems condescending.
Yeah, different perspectives indeed. But to me it seems unreasonable that for example the tablet I'm writing this on somehow came into existence by itself. Touchscreen, CPU, OS and no creator at all? The things we see in nature are much more complex than my tablet?
Don't like global functions? Don't use them.

It's really that simple.
And on a related Google Maps note, all these zits in Nevada were underground nuclear tests:

https://www.google.com/maps/search/nevada+test+site/@37.0173...

Imagine, spies would have killed for these pictures a few decades ago!
Shut Up and Take My Money – Cool Gadgets and Geeky Products
Basically amazon warehouse workers are forced to go through a security check that lasts up to 30 minutes. They wanted to be paid for that time, since they were mandated to undertake the check by their employers.

The supreme court ruled that since Amazon could remove the security check without interfering with the intrinsic nature of their job, it's not covered under the law. To be clear, Amazon won't have to remove the security check, and it's still mandatory for amazon warehouse workers, but now it's definitely unpaid time.

This Salon article may be helpful to put this in context. http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_...
I don't currently use either but Perl6 grammars[0] are pretty dang awesome. If I were writing parsing code and my choices were Ruby or Perl6 I would choose Perl6 just for the grammars.

[0] http://doc.perl6.org/language/grammars
10 Unforgiveable Ways You Should Never Use Facebook – NEWS CULT
Postaic (http://postatic.com) isn't a traditional "blogging" platform per se, but I've seen a few people using it as a content posting platform. It looks like you can certainly use it as a blog platform (I don't think it has text editor that is as good as wordpress).

It's used more to create online communities and audience though. Maybe you might want to take a look at it.
As far as i can see, smart people of HN is failing to grasp the meaning of a simple sentence.

You won't see ANY amateur using R. Period. In the PHP community you find people building hairdressers websites and distributed systems experts. It's not about having scientists or having amateurs, is about having them together, at the same time and in the same room.

As a side note: Blub paradox doesn't apply.
> I think PHP gets a bad rep because there is a lot of bad code out there and people blame the language for the bad code, which is like blaming car manufacturers for drunk drivers.

This a thousand times, and it's not just PHP, but every mainstream language (like people blaming C just for the sake of blaming C).

Languages are tools, and they should be used when they make sense, you are not going to use C to build a website, and you are not going to use PHP to write a firmware.
Configure Postfix to Send Mail Using an External SMTP Server
Obligatory standard explanation, which has been linked a thousand times already[1]: http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

[1] not yet in this thread, but at least once each in a thousand other HN PHP threads
Can we fix the title please? Twitch acquired much more than just Evil Geniuses, they acquired Good Game Agency which owns and manages quite a few teams and other e-sports related things. (As he points out in his statement)
Thanks for the 2.0 update Dave! I having been using Skeleton as a starting point for side-projects for a couple of years now. I really like how light it is compared to Bootstrap.

Happy Holidays!
Why does blocking Pirate Bay lead to banning all torrent traffic? If anything, they've made exactly the distiction you're afraid they wont.

Anyways, I doubt PirateBay will be down for long, in France or otherwise.
I think it's a self-enforcing trope, though, these days. Everyone uses PHP because every host has PHP. Every host has PHP because everyone uses PHP.
> I wished I had brought a Geiger counter."

sidenote: while not for atolls, Google Street View cars could have long time ago been outfitted with Geiger counters too.
Of course, and yes: http://www.amazon.jobs/results?searchStrings[]=alcc
California prosecutors sue Uber; Lyft settles
http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ (it's actually a pretty decent article, anti-PHP or not.)
It has been blocked before in different countries, the blocks were not very effective for any length of time (measured in hours or days)
Web Technologies for your project. Does it matter? Three ways to build a website
The overreach that companies with big pockets like Sony Pictures Entertainment have when it comes to enforcing their ownership rights over content they own scares me. It's 2014 and a company like Sony can get a swat and forensics team to take down a website hosted in a completely different country. Just trying to get your local police department to find a stolen car or help you recover a stolen phone can be struggle enough. But heaven forbid, people are sharing magnet links on The Pirate Bay, we must send in the big guns.

I know that Wired is speculating that this is because of the Sony hack, but there have been numerous cases where companies have had incredible global overreach like in the instance of Megaupload.

Seems Sweden has become a US lapdog, this isn't the first time Sweden has bowed down to copyright infringement enforcement requests from the USA and it won't be the last. They've been trying to take down The Pirate Bay for years now, it will never die. It goes down, it comes back within a day or two, why won't they just give up already?
Oddly, it was that realization -- more than all the other many nits people pick with PHP -- that started making me want to claw my eyes out when I thought about PHP.

PHP has come a long way in many respects, but it's still fundamentally wedded to a 1999, CGI-ish model of the web: pages are fundamentally static entities that you add dynamic bits to as needed. It's a "template engine" because it's basically designed to embed scripts that we would have previously stuck in /cgi-bin right in your web pages. In that world, PHP was pretty awesome.

But in a world of MVC frameworks, "every request starts fresh" means that on every request, the entire framework starts from scratch. It loads libraries and configuration files and ORMs and controller routing on startup -- and it has to do it every single time. Yes, I know things can be and are cached, precompiled, lazily loaded, etc., but that can't completely overcome that. From what I've gathered over the years, PHP is a pretty fast language -- but PHP frameworks consistently get their asses kicked in benchmarks, and I can't help but suspect there's a correlation.
> torture, murder, whatever, it doesn't matter. Doing it in the name of war or national security doesn't make a moral difference.

Well it seems that the narrative of your post veered toward violence. I don't agree with sadistic methods for extracting information. Violence would be the absolute last tool in my belt to resolve a conflict. War is brutal and unseemingly unnecessary these days. I do agree that not only the elite, but our society treats war as a game. Most of our society is (successfully) far removed from conflict, many of us don't know what it is like to lose our home, security, a loved one, a limb, etc. all to war.

I am fully aware of what our "enemy" is capable of, of what they have done to us, what they do to their own people. I can't say that I get a knee-jerk reaction to the thought that certain parts of our government employs methods of torture when in the back of my mind lies countless stories of reportedly worse violent methods by others. I can't condemn the methods used in the report until I fully read it. I do condemn the overreach of power, misleading our elected officials, and other politically subversive actions.
Yeah, but it would be neat if it was a word instead, for example "that". "*" is hilarious, though. How do you multiply in Perl if the star is taken? I also like that it's named "whatever star", reminds me of Scala's Pimp my Library feature[0]

0: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=179766
The world's smallest ruby http client
Apple to Open New Research Site in Japan
Looks like a Comodo, other CAs have a less terrible process:
https://www.digicert.com/ssl-validation-process.htm
CoffeeScript is interesting. So far I did not experiment with it too much. So I'm not sure if I would like to do work in it.

On one hand, it looks nicely terse. On the other hand it looks a bit cryptic.

The thing that stops me from trying it for a project is not the language, but the available environments. Having an additional compliation step adds complexity to the system and the workflow.

One thing I cannot resist to say is that to me "hello $name" is sexier then "hello #{name}" :)
You don't say "I'm going to build an extra robust tool, let's start <?php class ExtraRobustTool { ... }"

To build an extra robust tool you need a lot of planning, and a lot of factors are considered during the planning.
Now that I am aware they're trying to monopolize small plastic coffee packets, there's no possible way I'd buy anything from them.

Build products for consumers, not against them.

Although, on second thought, I guess I was never going to buy a Keurig in the first place; producing a ton of trash in exchange for expensive mediocre coffee was enough to convince me it was a bad idea?
> Like I've said, we've gone from a system where there was some opportunity -- albeit in a shitty model with shitty record labels -- to a system with no opportunity outside touring and merchandise sales.

> You can squeeze by on that, but you can't build a career on it.

Steve Albini strongly disagrees with your theory [1]:

"...As a result fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity. Back home, gigs that used to cost five or six bucks are now 20 or 30. Over here the ticket inflation has been more pronounced, with club gigs going for $80 or more. As a result gig income for bands has increased exponentially. My band has been playing a lot of the same places for the entirety of our existence, over 20 years now. I guess you could say we’ve saturated our audience, no matter how long we stay at it. Some of these perennial gigs are now paying an over of magnitude better than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That’s right, some places where we used to earn four or five hundred dollars we now earn four or five grand."

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k...
The Aeropress makes the best coffee I've ever had at home. I've tried moka pots, regular coffee brewers and French presses.

The Aeropress is better than all of those hands down.
Can I recommend an Aeropress? It's only a little more work than a Keurig (about the same as a french press), and makes some of the best coffee I've ever had. It's also $25, and has no moving parts or electrical components.
Running SQL Queries on Amazon S3
The combination of UA and accept headers need to be changed in sync. Good point - any other things like that that should be watched out for?

And DNT is currently at around ~8%, so, although it does leak some information, it doesn't leak an absurd amount (~3.6 bits). (That's using data from here [1], which is FF-only. If you have a better source of data for this, please let me know.)

[1] https://dnt-dashboard.mozilla.org/
It's worth noting that the Sony Corporation itself is based in Japan, while the subsidiary that was hacked, Sony Pictures Entertainment, is American. Also, there's no proof that they're behind this, only speculation from Wired.
Interview with Charles Nutter aka the JRuby Guy at GOTO Night Chicago 2015
7 Key Points from the C.I.A. Torture Report
the argument here is that the search engine should not be privy to which result you selected.
On the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8724760
I don't know. Just today I was crying because I can't pass an object property to a function with proper scoping and that I can't pass an instance method as a closure. These are interpreter deficiencies brought about by weak programmers writing a programming language.

Both of these things can be rectified by some gymnastics or call_user_func_array (very slow), but it's something that I could do in JavaScript or C# or almost any other language if I wanted to, but not PHP.

It drives me crazy, and almost every day there are one of these things. I never have to say "I wish JavaScript did $x," unless there's a library I need that I don't have. On the other hand, in PHP there has never been a time that I've had to say "Oh, there's no library for this."

It's a game of tradeoffs, and, for me, bitching about syntax is greatly preferable to having to port a library to another language or start from scratch.
That's why they don't come cheap. You want to buy a subnet you can count on.
I just want to point out that Jeremy Ashkenas, author of backbone.js, underscore.js and probably lots of other things I'm not aware of, got a byline on this. That's cool. Shame it is about something so... horrible...

edit: Here is a list of articles with Jeremy as an author: http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&con...

Good to see a fellow programmer finally "make it" ;)
Smart move. It's amazing how far the e-sports industry has come in the last few years. When I was invited to compete at CGS Combine (which Alex references in this post), I knew it was way ahead of its time. There's a lot of big opportunities and unsolved problems in this space to tackle.
Artificial Intelligence in the Cloud
I love how such a simple solution can bypass a DRM scheme that Keurig probably invested considerable time and effort into producing. In some cases DRM is warranted, but for a coffee machine, it is just plain ridiculous and anticompetitive to have DRM to block out competitor coffee pods when history has proven that printer manufacturers like HP have been trying and consistently failing to do this for years now.
NASA's Curiosity Rover Finds Clues to How Water Helped Shape Martian Landscape
Thank you so much for the detailed explanation. Makes sense, and gives me a much better understanding of the trade-offs. Cheers!
Ask HN: Does anyone remember this link that was posted?
I remember reading (several months to a year ago) a famous VC / businessman talking about the best cold email they've received asking them for advice. Among other things, it asked a question right there in the original email, that was easy to respond to with his expertise.

Does ANYONE know what I'm talking about, and if so, do you have the link saved somewhere? Or a clue in the right direction? We're reaching out to advisors and I remembered there was a really good example in there.
Classic replay attack.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

So DPL-licensed patents can never be used offensively in the future, but wouldn't they also greatly reduce the inventor's chances of ever making any money with their patent?

Large corporations will just use your patent for free, because their own patents are held by separate shell companies, so they are "part of the DPL network" by default.

And if you can't make any money with your patent, why make a patent? It's costly and complicated. Might as well just publicly disclose the invention (in a legally acceptable way), and the result will be the same as filing a patent under DPL.
There is cloud computing, now we have AI in the cloud. I found this on Betalist, thought the HN community might be interested.

Machine learning is in its baby steps. I'll be curios to see where the future goes in the next 5-10 years.
Looks like it's Free Invention, yeah. Soon we'll have people reminding us of the importance of terms like Free and Open Blueprint Innovation, which will confuse their therapists to no end.
What Lexmark lost in court was a case that they brought claiming that the DRM circumvention violated the DMCA. There's no law or case prohibiting printer makers or coffee machine makers from implementing locks like this though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int'l_v._Static_Control...