skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Sweden can absolutely charge and try people in absentia

Perhaps, but that is their prerogative. It's not as if Assange has a right to be charged in absentia. Trying someone in absentia is a rather unusual measure, and I'm surprised that you'd like Sweden to do this, given your concern that the case be handled in the "ordinary" fashion.

>and the prosecutor could question Assange abroad and move the case beyond the "preliminary investigation" stage

Could you give a source to back this up? Even if it is true, the prosecutor is perfectly entitled to decide that they do not want to question Assange in that manner. Suspects do not normally dictate the terms of their questioning.

>Nor does extradition from Sweden to the United States require permission from the Swedish courts as he claims.

I think you're getting a bit confused here. It has been noted by some that the Swedish government has the final authority to reject an extradition request that has been approved by the Swedish courts. There has not, however, been any suggestion that extradition can be approved without a court ruling to that effect.

>On a final note, let us also correct your erroneous statement that the High Court determined that Assange's actions constituted rape under English law.

The magistrates court and the high court both determined precisely what you say they didn't. Magistrates court: "...what is alleged here is that Mr Assange 'deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state'. In this country that would amount to rape." High court (109): "In our view, on this basis, what was described in the EAW was rape". The first quote is from the following blog post and the second comes direct from the High Court judgment (p. 28 of the pdf):

http://jackofkent.com/2012/06/assange-would-the-rape-allegat...

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2011/2849.pdf

However, as you yourself correctly point out, it makes no difference whether the offense constitutes rape under English law. It need only be a crime of some sort for the EAW to be valid. It would be very difficult to maintain that non-consensual unprotected sex is not a crime under English law.

>So you fail to support your claim that the handling of this case has been "ordinary".

What Assange is alleged to have done amounts to rape. Rape is an extraditable offense. The EAW was obtained legally through the normal channels. I see no reason why Assange should not be expected to go to Sweden to face the charges. Perhaps the EAW would not have been issued if he had a lower profile -- it's impossible to say, as far as I can see -- but once it was issued the legal situation was perfectly clear. That is why all of his appeals failed.
In a 1993 article, Carl Sagan considered the atmospheric oxygen content "at least suggestive of biology" (Conclusions, 3rd paragraph).

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/~dag/publications/1993_ASear...
Rails 3-2-stable: add ruby 2.2 compatibility
Lack of oversight by Congress and complacency by the public leads to government agencies to get away with petty things like this and more serious abuses as well.
Crow Intelligence Study Shows Birds Can Solve Puzzles Inspired by Aesop's Fables
I have 2.5 years Rails experience and use/maintain apps all the way from 1.2.6 to 4.2. Using the older versions has given me a real clear picture of the the framework as a whole; where it's been and where's it's going. I think having this experience is highly valuable.
Author here, thanks a lot for the suggestion. I will definitely consider some of these.

I have a daughter and I bought her two capselas back when I wrote the blog post two years ago and she wasn't that interested. I think she expected a more espectacular outcome given the effort :)

I didn't have legos, as I mentioned I'm from Argentina and it wasn't very popular here, we had a clone called "rastis".

This year I went for the first time to US and we bought legos, but not a set, the $ 15 glasses of pieces. I did another trip in March and I bought more and last month a friend bring us another one. My daughter play with this every day.

I think legos in general and capsela are very different, but Lego as a brand has many different sets.

I agree with another commenter than "technic" is similar but it is a set and you know all the time what you should assemble and that's the reason I don't like Lego sets/models but I do like the pieces a lot.

[1]: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasti
Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
I feel that I've been procrastinating a lot in my free time and it's time to learn something new.

I see the hype around Go and Rust and I believe I'm missing a lot in my professional development. I'm involved with my start-up and I am facing a lot of challenging data analytics and software development problems during the day. I am using Java/JavaScript/R on a daily basis, but these are mature languages that have been around for a while and I have a hard time learning new frameworks that are beyond my work scope.

So what (hot) languages/frameworks are you learnin/using now, that give you the warm feeling that you get a lot of useful knowledge out of them, that's widely applicable?
I recently bought some Meccano. I also noticed that the build quality is not so good anymore. The beams bent easily. The Capsula introduced by the topic starter look fun. And they teach an important principle of object oriented programming: encapsulation and the single responsibility principle.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:0...
Gravity Simulator in ~100 lines of JavaScript
Meet ZANO the world's most sophisticated nano drone – aerial HD video capture
Wow, I saw some pics of Robotix and it looks awesome and very similar to capsela. Thanks for sharing!
Chinese service adds 'Sent from my iPhone' for a fee
he was born a pauper to a pawn, on a Christmas day...
I really enjoyed this.

One detail that stuck out at me is that after Thomas makes the claim that the single metric that matters in software is how easy it is to change, he moves on to show a balancing robot.

Now he doesn't directly connect those concepts, instead he talks about the PID algorithm. But what struck me is that Moshe Feldenkrais defined good posture almost exactly in the same way that Thomas defines good software, although he is talking about humans rather than robots. Specifically, Feldenkrais says that good posture in a given context is that which makes it easiest to move into the next desired position (or a spectrum of potentially desirable next positions).
yes, afaik it's the four digit code. This surprised me because the decrypt screen still gave me a full keyboard.
How to clean Macbook Pro from female juices
Since there was no indication on the job ad that the position actually required 10 years of Rails experience, I'm going out on a limb and say that they just didn't want you/the author. From this brief article it seems that the author has a inflated ego, I mean I could never mess with an interviewer like that just because I know that people make mistakes. I think that this particular company didn't do anything wrong and calling them out like the author did doesn't make the company look bad but just makes the author look bad.
Images of Math
This would be neat for linking to source locations in the terminal and in the console output of an IDE.
In my experience, it's gone more like this:

Find an awesome candidate for a position. He's on an H1B. Learn that he can only be hired into a position that can't be filled by a permanent resident, but can be filled by him. Create such a job description.
Should the drinking age be lowered from 21 to a younger age?
> In this vide you can see even a remote control that I never had. I read also in wikipedia that there was a model with an interface to Commodore 64, a Lego Mindstorms predecessor!

Lego Logo predated Capsela and was mostly inspired from Seymour Papert's 1980 book, Mindstorms. It ran on an Apple II through a special daughtercard and was amazing.

I got to play with Capsela as well, but only ever the basic kit without any expansions. Mostly because of the astronomical price of the parts. I wouldn't be surprised if there is someone with a 3D printer trying to design a printable modular motorized construction kit.
C is a pretty nice language, have a look ;)
I usually start with asking about the current position of the person and about the background. If it's not irrelevant to my personal or work interests I usually go saying few words about me. If we you have common topics to talk about then it's easy. In general straight to the point has been working for me. It goes without saying that you must practice. I had the chance to spend few months in the valley, which in my opinion is the best place to overcome your networking fears. It's just that everybody is welcoming and comes from diverse backgrounds, so it's almost impossible to go wrong or not to find common touch points. After short time you'll see the words flowing just naturally out of your mouth.
Does lowering the federal corporate income tax rate create jobs?
The reasons for the studless beams were a design flaw in the original studded beams and that studless beams allowed more realistic designs. More on this: http://bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/1912/why-does-lego...
it is an emacs lisp interpreter, that's it.
Because that overflag makes all the difference (no pun intended), I wouldn't say that they are the same, but that comparison usually involves subtraction.

I remember coming across a set of lecture slides for a CS course on architecture that used its own toy architecture with neither flags nor separate comparison instructions - saying that comparison is the same as subtraction gives people the entirely wrong idea, and leads to the sort of bugs mentioned in this article.
The interestingess of a bug is not necessarilly related to the release date of the program it appears in.

It's interesting as a classic example of an off-by-one bug, one that happens in seemingly strange conditions (8K multiples), and one that affected a major product from a big company.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but it looks more like Counting sort [1], than Pigeonhole sort.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_sort
The hype for Go/Rust is really just on HN.

If you are involved in data analytics then you could always immerse yourself in the Hadoop stack e.g. Cascading, Spark, Mahout etc. It's a platform that is increasingly become a fixture in enterprise companies and plenty of new technologies. For me the future will be "container driven development" where everything will be deployed as a container and dynamically wired together. Loads of new technologies e.g. Docker, Consul and plenty of challenges still around.

None of what I wrote is around languages/frameworks though mainly because I think that the majority of them won't be really used in 5-10 years.
I read the comments to see if anyone had posted this yet. I Had a few small sets of Capsela when I was a kid and by far the most fun was making watercraft. I will forewarn anyone, especially those with kids, that if you let them play with Capsela in the bath -- with soap and dirt and grime and whatever else -- they will get nasty and perhaps unrecoverably ... maligned.
https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/548140622826459136
Wow I didn't know about denshi blocks, very nice and powerful. Thanks for sharing!
> All those pixels make for a luxuriously sharp picture. Text sparkles and images pop, and when you to switch back to a computer with a normal screen, your eyes beg you to reconsider. At least, mine did. Years of staring at bad screens has turned my eyes into ruined orbs, but now, finally, I’d encountered a computer display that was good to them.

I've been told by an optometrist that higher resolution may cause eye-strain and it makes some sense although I read that many prefer higher resolution displays. I can't find any reliable resources either confirming or rejecting my suspicions. Is this question settled yet?
Just as a side comment, the reason languages/tools are fun to learn is because it's usually quite easy to do so. You say you know R, but the depth of packages available for R is insane, and most of it requires a level of math that few possess.

I'd punt on learning a new language and instead master a new skill - up your stats knowledge, force yourself to learn how some algorithm works, whatever,.. these things are all infinitely reapplicable skills, whereas a pretty compiles-to-JS language or prettier-C-derivative generally aren't so much.
At least for the foreseeable future, we still need plants and natural ecosystems to survive on Earth.
If learning is going to be a hobby, then learn something different (because that gives you perspective), but also something that has some connections to what you already know (because if you learn something part-time, then it's good if you don't need to re-learn all tools, environment, etc.).

I would not care of the 'hot' stuff too much - frameworks come and go.

I'd try some Clojure (you're familiar with the JVM and IDEs, but one should learn a bit of Lisp once in life). Or Scala.
A less technical but very important question: How do they make money and will they stay around for at least a decade?
A virtual machine in Excel
You would be correct, in that I have never seen source code written in Unicode in multiple languages.

However, i'm trying to make an argument that text is fundamentally more free than the alternatives. When I say "simple, persistent, and platform-agnostic" I mean, literally, you don't even need a computer to deal with it, much less an IDE. Source code is a means of communication between people, as well as between people and a machine. Imagine how restricted the development of the early web would have been if you couldn't just bang together some html and javascript and put it on a server?
C4 photosynthesis is an adaptation to higher temperatures and lower atmospheric CO2. And C4 is a very recent innovation (25 to 32 million years ago, says Wikipedia).

But yeah, I don't know if even the C4 plants could handle 0.01% ambient CO2.
Yeah, I think that's what killed mine for good. The floating things are cool, but don't use them with the electrical pieces!
If AIs were taking over left and right we'd still expect to see some kind of evidence of their existence. Since they'd only be replacing biological civilizations I don't think it would count as the Great Filter, not in the context of Fermi's Paradox at least, as you'd end up with roughly the same number of technologically capable civilizations after the filter.
I think you're right but it goes deeper. Integers as represented in computers are not integers.
That's exactly what I'm talking about: Distracting formatting codes, too wide text width (by default), mono-spaced fonts (by default), ... Yes all of this can be dealt with but it would still be great to see a LaTeX editor that assumes writers and not coders as its user.
0) technologies evolve over time. JSON-over-HTTP will be supplanted by something, eventually, which almost certainly will also be something that acts to commoditize labor

1) Not me, the market. I think it is silly, too.
well since you're using Java/JavaScript/R on a daily basis
I would recommend Dartlang. It has futures, awaits/async, enum, SIMD. Works in client and server side. Its also really fast. www.dartlang.org
Not to mention that Bootstrap hasn't been called 'Twitter Bootstrap' for almost two years now...
Not just me that got that vibe from the article then - its more of a personal rant rather than a considered look at they ways in which salaried professions can and are taken advantage of by employers.

Not that the union busting mentioned in the article isn't worthy of interest.
If your self-admitted problem is that you "have a hard time learning new frameworks that are beyond my work scope", it probably means your experience is deep but narrow.

If that's the case, you don't need to learn a hot/new technology, you need to cast a wide net and get a better grasp on today's software ecosystem in general, until picking up new things is no longer hard.

You could nonetheless kill two birds with one stone if you hacked on something current but wide. Docker and its ecosystems come to mind.
Sbot phbot mod silkroad mbot gold bot games
I don't need to imagine it.

Just went through the wonderful world of codepages, codemaps, ASCII 7 and 8 bit, EBCDIC and many other formats.

Text formats on mainframes, mini-computers, home micros and many other hardware and OSes.

Text, easy?!? No it ain't.
When people say "text files are universal" what they really mean is 8-bit ascii is all text files should be.
> It would be interesting to see a discussion of why Golang
> didn't implement sum types.

The discussion is alluded to in the FAQ:

http://golang.org/doc/faq#variant_types

"We considered adding variant types to Go, but after discussion decided to leave them out because they overlap in confusing ways with interfaces. What would happen if the elements of a variant type were themselves interfaces? "

I would be interested to read the original discussion, if it was carried out via publicly accessible mailing lists.

> I suspect that part of it is efficiency... right now,
> the sizes of Go structs are known at compile time.

I don't think this would warrant much concern. To use your own example, emulating sum types via a tuple of `(foo, bar)` where both `foo` and `bar` are nil-able implies that they are interfaces (or pointers), which (AFAICT) means that the return type of your function is always going to be the size of two pointers at runtime (16 bytes on a 64-bit platform). If you replaced that with an actual sum type, the runtime representation would consist of a single pointer and a tag, which would be between 9 and 16 bytes (depending on padding and alignment), so even in the worst case it's no more wasteful than the tuple approach. Additionally, using tuples here, every time that you add another potential variant (i.e. `(foo, bar, baz, qux)`) you inflate the size of the return type by another eight bytes, whereas the sum type scales gracefully without getting larger. And if you're worried about a sum type where one of the variants is some huge struct, then you're free to store a pointer to an instance of that struct instead, in which case your runtime size is, again, no worse than 16 bytes (assuming all the other variants aren't huge structs as well), and it's not like this introduces any greater runtime efficiency than the tuple approach given that interfaces already (again, AFAICT) demand a pointer indirection.

(I'm not an expert on Go though, I could be wrong! Corrections welcome!)
T. Rex Might Be the Thing with Feathers
As a general rule, we shouldn't take seriously any computer models for which the source code is not available.

There is no valid reason why this should not already be a universal practice. If you are looking at any paper which cites the output of a custom-built computer program but omits the source code, it's probably safe to assume that the program is a mess and therefore the conclusions are not (yet) robust.
Assange is a honeypot, please, PLEASE - everyone who is sitting on some documents worth sharing, either wait or use a different aproach
Set Your Goals
iWish is the most beautiful app to set goals and make your dreams come true! It inspires you with 700+ ideas to capture all the things you want To Do, Experience and Achieve throughout your life.

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The second thing I thought about was Brian Eno and his attempt to 'learn' a sound recording of a city street by listening to the recording many times. He began to anticipate certain sounds and hear them as belonging to a structure.

I'm not finding a Web reference. It was described in a book by David Toop
The alternative (at least in the extreme) is bad as well --- scientists who can't program anything and are rely on pre-canned point and click analyses and programs. There isn't a button for X and so I can't do X. I pressed the Y button and so of course my Y analysis is valid. Etc.

Edit: you think this is hyperbole but I've heard the above two statements more than you might guess, coming out of the mouths of prominent scientists.
You said Javascript but didn't mention Node.js. I would recommend learning Node.js if you haven't done that already, just because it's so darn useful.
I suspect you have to avoid the temptation to use smaller fonts.
Powerset – recursive algorithm in Haskell
I suppose Bayes' theorem can help us estimate it:

P(filesize is multiple of 8192 | crashed) = P(crashed | filesize is multiple of 8192) * P(filesize is multiple of 8192)/P(crashed)

Where:

- The likelihood of crashing given the filesize is a multiple of 8192 is 1;

- The naïve prior of the filesize being a multiple of 8192 is 1/8192;

The task is now to estimate the probability P(crashed), which is the probability the program will crash for whatever reason.
German Bundesliga vs Fnatic(eSports)–Social Media Following
I once taught a short course in usability. I used an exercise I learned from someone else: design the controls for a microwave oven. Given them a set of requirements and have them do a paper prototype. Partway through, change the design slightly. (In mine, started with the assumption that the time could be set automatically from the mobile phone network, then I added the requirement that it needed to be set manually.) Then have them do user testing for scenarios which test those requirements.

I used someone who wasn't in the class as the test subject, which was also a chance to mention the ethics of human testing: make sure that the test subjects know they can stop at any time, let them know the goals of the project, etc.

This is small enough to do in a couple of hours.

I've heard of a technique for teaching some of the ideas you want to teach. Have them develop a code project. Part way through have the teams switch code bases, or form new teams using the original code bases as the start. I have no experience with that technique, and it probably takes longer than you have time for your workshop.

As for things to cover, get a copy of Rapid Development and review it for the topics you think are the most important. There are way more things to cover than is possible in a workshop for inexperienced developers.
I would have to disagree.

If you think it's just hype, try and calculate the enormous waste of both time and money from memory leaks caused by code written in C and C++. Rust solves this, and it's only going to get better once we're on the other side of Rust 1.0, and the library ecosystem grows.
Here is another one, used to be very popular when I was a kid (but too expensive for me), friends had it and I played with it at their house:

http://www.fischertechnik.de/en/Home/products.aspx
Open data portals should be API [First]
Pirate Bay Founder Fredrik Neij Is “Wanted for Hacking”
That's why operator overloading is a bad idea, even if it gives you nice matrix operations in C++. The amount of times I came across abuse of this facility is much larger than the number of times where it actually made sense.
I had the big kit. It was one of the most awesome toys. I looked into buying one again but there seem to be a lot of poor reviews of the newer versions. They don't make them like they used to, and the old versions are pricey retro items. I thought about 3D printing something similar, but for the amount of time involved it's worth it to buy the real thing.
Would this be faster if we not calculate powerset xs twice? I don't know how GHC works well enough so I ask.
I was specifically thinking of uni-level questions.