skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've really come to believe that all these terms should be explicitly understood to be domain specific. I can not think of a single term in common use that doesn't have edge cases and other such lacunae when it comes to application to real languages. You name the term, "object orientation", "functional", "reference" vs. "pointer", the distinction really only applies to a given language.

Even the putative "true" definition is usually only the "true" definition in the context of machine language, and something like a true Lisp machine might still end up with no applicable definition for common terms.

(Every time I say this, someone tries to correct me, but it is followed up by someone who then tries to debate the definition being used to correct me. It really is all relative.)

So, in this case, the definition being given for "-by-value" vs. "-by-reference" does hold across a wide variety of imperative languages, but as you point out has no meaning in strictly-immutable functional languages since even inside a given function you can't write a "swap", let alone as a function. The terms only have meanings in certain contexts.
It depends whether you count standards as those decided by a committee, or those that people actually use. Sure, the various BSDs are quite active (and all have bash available through modern package management systems), but AIX, Solaris and HPUX are on the decline and have been for 10 years now.
>>Now, I think "IQ" or "intelligence" is drastically oversimplified and bunk.

Interesting, that goes against what I've seen intelligence researchers claim (g, etc). Do you have good references?

I'm not arguing, I'm asking because I'm curious. I'm aware that some idealists breath fire over this question, but I don't have a horse in that race (as I think the expression is?).
"This group of scientists are fighting to establish what is essentially a materialist and dialectical approach to the ideas of time and space and the origin of the universe."

Now there is a Marxist Cosmology" The big bang theory is a construct of faith just like Christian creationism; the dialectical approach gives us Plasma Cosmology, which needs nothing fancier than Maxwell's Equations. Astrophysicists dont get it because they dont understand electromagnetism.</sarcasm>

I am not an astrophysicist, so this article could be straight as an arrow and blow by me, but I don't think so. Contrary to what was said in the article, these are exciting times because there are starting to be observations which can discriminate among theories. Dark mater was proposed because galaxies dont rotate the way Newton said they should. Now the LHC is in a position to create dark matter candidates or disprove Super Symmetry.
You cannot say for certain that they don't encrypt passwords. They could use a 2-way hash.
Yes, but with 3.0 devices won't the outlet allow more power?
It's left me feeling a bit better about Google. My reaction isn't that strong because the route they have chosen obviously makes the most sense for them, especially given that Wave itself is open-source so it's not like they would gain a lot by keeping whatever technology in EtherPad they may adopt secret.
Even if you could get ALL the data in an open and transparent format and were able to scientifically prove that "Global warming is (100% real/fake)" it wouldn't matter because the political/corporate/celebrity forces on the other side would claim that you are "using bad science, corrupt, in the pocket of (liberal elites/big corporations)". Even if you proved that there isn't enough data to prove anything, both sides would say you are wrong.
I can verify that. Did you see these & wonder if they had data connections ready to snare the unwary?
Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge
Maybe you're confusing a "hardcover ebook" with a "mass-market paperback ebook". :-)

But seriously, I found the answer in Stross's full blog post: "Right now, many of the largest publishers charge a cover price for ebooks that is 80% to 100% of the hardcover price." One would think that once a book goes from harcover to paperback the publisher would reduce the ebook price to match, allowing Amazon to sell ebooks marginally cheaper than paperbacks without losing money, but maybe they aren't doing that.
Chrome Extensions launching before christmas
IPhone Reality Show: app development in 7 days, streaming live
Why the down vote? I obviously spent time writing the comment above, I think it would be fair to provide a counter argument or statement.
While interesting, this post may be off-topic.
Er, yes:
50% more power is provided for unconfigured or suspended devices (150 mA up from 100 mA), and 80% more power is available for configured devices (900 mA up from 500 mA).
Via http://www.everythingusb.com/superspeed-usb.html#4
Taking issue with the requirements is a perfectly legitimate technical complaint and you see lots of people complain when some new web application is flash-only.

There's some hyper-sensitivity going on here today.
If you don't have work permit, you cannot work WITHIN the US and get paid a wage/salary by a US person.

What you could do is:

- employed by foreign company

- visit US for MEETINGS with colleagues at a US firm - come up with an agenda (of course you can code during your month here)

- your work cannot be directly FOR a US firm

- the US firm cannot pay you a wage/salary

- the US firm can reimburse your foreign employer for travel/accommodation to/from/in the US, who in turn would presumably cover your expenses while here.

The operative word is "meeting" as opposed to sitting in a cubicle and cranking out code.

What I outlined above is a very common occurrence. Many companies have foreign staff (or staff from foreign associated companies / partners) come in for business meetings.
A case where strong typing impeded learning
> So go to a good psychologist or read books and fix that by yourself.

Believe it or not, people who go out and try to find a good psychologist often wind up with mediocre, or even bad ones. Same with books and many other things. If someone provided the magic keys to help them find good books and good psychologists, you'd still need to know where to get the keys, and it's a catch-22.
He said, "I'm unbiased on issue X, but I strongly believe that Y group of people can not be trusted about X."

The only reason you read this as "I have a strong opinion about X" is because the primary argument in favor of X consist of "trust Y on the issue of X."

(By "primary argument", I mean within the mainstream media. Within the scientific community, there are both legitimate scientific arguments and illegitimate attempts to subvert science via politics.)
We're discussing bias because it's always the case whenever someone's new stuff is being discussed on HN: it's very interesting to see how people's opinion changes by mere knowledge of where that new stuff is coming from.
In the next years, any good book is going to be pirated in the net.In fact, it is today for those that know how to search.

Finding books are going to be easier as copying a book is made simpler and more people want to do it because they have e-reader hardware(people in the hundred of millions instead that in the thousands).

So people will have two options:
1)Decide to pay what the publishers want.
2)Decide it's too much and pirate it.

In the publisher wet dreams people don't have objection to pay the same quantity of money for something that has distribution cost, material cost, manufacturing cost that for something that has virtually null copy cost. People are not stupid.

What I think it will happen is this: Authors will start selling directly, as with music there is no need for publishers now.
As a general rule, your community is valuable, your tech is not. They can reproduce your tech in-house, the user base is harder.

Why did their first attempt fail? Was the tech that bad or was it a marketing problem? If its the latter, I like your chances better.

Either way, I think you should approach them directly. As you said, your current approach hasn't worked, so it may be time to mix it up.
Rise of the Tablog
Galileo's Moon Drawings
Beautiful plots of roots of polynomials
I'm probably missing something, but why md5 the output of /dev/random - won't it have the same entropy it started with?
In fact I bet my two dollars Apple is going to start the authors ebooks market with the Apple tablet making it outdoors-friendly and using their app store tech.
Ssssh. They're re-enactors. Feel free to join in, but don't break character so loudly.
English as a second supplier language
Our supplier members come from all over the world but a large majority of our new members comes from Asia. Based on our own traffic numbers the level of entrepreneurial economic activity in countries like India, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan is very high and there is a lot of suppliers looking for western buyers.
Only problem with this is that now mains wiring is going to be part of the obsolescence cycle.
Hearing this, I changed my password and opened a ticket to have my account closed. About 15 minutes later, I got an email asking this:

May I have your username along with the first and third character of your password?
Hey, me too :)

Although it wouldn't have been my first choice (I was put on an already existing project), I came to like some parts of it.
As far as I know, it’s using the same H.264 codec that is also used by many Flash videos. The “crystal” clarity comes from higher resolution and less compression, and you could do the same thing with Flash, Quicktime, &c.
/dev/random is random bytes, so in order to make it typable, it's useful to convert it into characters. md5 is good for that.

Alternatively, strings /dev/random|head gives some stuff that you can concatenate into a password.
Sounds good, I'll take it.

Considering how we're either warming or cooling (your only 2 choices if you're an atmosphere), and cooling has repeatedly been a disaster for human civilization, we should be relieved.
The user refractedthought at reddit had the best explanation IMO:

Ok, I think the real losers in this discussion are the ones who fail to see both sides of the issue. We can cherry pick "refrence" definitions if we want, but really the nuts and bolts come down to this: Passing by value means that a copy of the parameter is made when the function is called and any changes to that variable will not be reflected outside of the function. Passing by reference means you pass a pointer to your data (and nothing more) so the function can dereference the parameter and affect data that exists outside of the function.

All non-primitives in Java are implicit pointers, so when you pass one of these into a function, you are passing a pointer (or reference) to data that exists outside of the function. However, the reference itself, as it exists inside the function, can be changed to point toward something else. Essentially, the implicit pointer is passed by value, and that value can be altered without affecting anything outside the function.

So technically yes, you could get away with calling this pass-by-value. However, the spirit of pass-by-reference is maintained for any part of the data that most people care about. The syntax is different from a pass-by-reference in C++, and there's a silly little trick you can do by changing the reference pointer (or silly trick you can't do by changing the pointer outside the function) but for all practical purposes you are doing the same thing.

In my opinion, if you want to insist that Java strictly follows pass-by-value, then I think it has ceased to be a relevant distinction.
Looks like a namecheap representative previously addressed this rumor:

-------------------

Hello All,

Rest assured, passwords are encrypted. We do have one-way password hashes for certain combination to make it possible for CS to validate the authenticity of the customer. The support representative is not shown the full password.

To make it even more secure, we too have plans to implement an option to specify a 'Support Security Code' that can be provided for communication with CS instead.

Thanks,
Mohan

Namecheap.com

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-886490.htm...

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=6365902&pos...
Not really on topic, but this is a great D&D website.
A grab-bag of replies before I get back to work. (Yes, on a Sunday; sigh.)

- The notion that science can be "proved" is a mistaken one.

- I don't think there's much question by anyone that there has been measurable warming this century; so that part of your question is answered. ;)

- How much of the data is really "hidden"? There certainly hasn't been a effort to widely distribute it from a central source (until lately: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/), but that doesn't mean it was under lock and key either.

Personally, I am biased in the other direction: I feel that it is likely that the extreme pressure and politics involved are forcing climate scientists to be over-conservative in their conclusions.
What Gamers Think About Microtransactions
What the?

How has cooling been a disaster for human civilization?
And you do know that with enough global warming we might end up in the next ice time?
On the topic of Namecheap, do any of you guys know of other registrars that offer API access to all of the domain functions? I'm working on a project where I'll need to purchase hundreds of domains so an API is crucial but the best I've found so far is Namecheap.

Now with this whole password security potential problem, just curious if there are comparable solutions out there for API access...
De luxe! Have they scheduled "Operation Screaming Fist" yet?
Holy cow. Seeing this here brings back a lot of memories.

The first serious coding I ever did was back in 1999 on a team that implemented parallelized, adaptive game-playing algorithms for this game on the Cray T3E.

http://www-pgss.mcs.cmu.edu/Publications/Volume18/Rhythmomac...

Funny reading back through the paper:

The Cray T3E supercomputer is currently ranked the twenty-third fastest computer in the world. The Cray’s speed does not come from just one processor, however. The T3E gains its speed from 512 450-megahertz networked processors.
For me the biggest part of the price of watching a movie is my time. There isn't much room for additional physical dollars that I'm willing to put into the experience. I cannot even remember the last time a movie was worthy of (my time + ticket/rental price.)
Bezos defends model of keeping 65% of (kindle) book revenue
While we're on the subject: What domain registrar would you recommend instead of Namecheap?
"Reasonable people?" They're spammers, asshats by definition.
Don't worry, they will make up with the volume :)
The article makes its stance quite clear in the title: "The Fiction of Climate Science." This constant denialist spamming on HN is getting extremely tiresome.
You may be right. I read the guidelines and to me it falls under "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". But that is debatable. It certainly isn't tech related. If I get many comments similar to your own, I will consider them when posting future links. Thanks!
This has the potential to be the way we see search results in the future, imagine when you search it creates a collection automatically out of the results and you can filter through it visually like that... We still need more computing power but Moore's Law will take care of that over the next decade.

With the anti-MSFT bias, don't hold it against their research teams. They have great people. You can disagree with their commercialization strategy but that isn't coming from the technologists.
excellent post, thanks for sharing... what the post fails to zero in on (at least state directly) is that all of these people are simply marketing. is all marketing bullshit? i dunno, but that's what these guys are all doing...
A pattern matching solution is much more readable and it forces you to build small functions if you are pattern matching in the function declaration.
Brin also mentioned the negatives to personalized search and news services in his book "Earth", published in 1990.
Oh cool: this article's from the Canabalt makers.
More than just a visualization of Ruby's grammar, it also has visualizations of Java and JavaScript's grammars. The difference is pretty stark, although I don't know what to make of it yet.
Clarity - an open source web interface to grep and tail
That sounds pretty much like an admission that they do store the password in plaintext or at least some "close-to-plaintext" format.
Very cool. One question:

Can you please explain this line?

55 if (c != client)
Federal bailout czar's new life as a recluse
Greenland wasn't always an ironic name. Around 1300 there was a mini-ice age that caused widespread crop failures (and famine) in Europe, and made Greenland stop being green.
Would you say that building Etherpad isn't hard?

Saying that real-time/comet/AJAX/[technology name] isn't hard is meaningless. I can easily say, for example, that "programming in C" isn't hard. I just don't see what your point is.
Congratulations on your 26 years together. Cross-cultural marriages can be challenging but rewarding. I've been with my Chinese wife for only 8 years and we have only one son thus far. Whether in Shanghai or small town Georgia, he usually gets attention as being the most beautiful child in the room ;). I account for any noticed positive traits mostly to my being a proud father (I probably only notice the compliments).
It might be more than the amount of royalties that most paper book publishers give, but distribution costs are so much lower with e-books that they could probably afford to give even more than 35%.

Right now they don't have to, but as competition heats up for e-books, it wouldn't be surprising if royalties went up (unless there's a cartel situation).
Gonga: Ngaro virtual machine in Go
A curious SIMD assembly challenge: the zigzag
Intent Is The Problem
Right, AND being able to match on multiple fields and destructure them means that several awkward "which class owns the method" problems never arise in the first place.

(Multimethods are similar in many ways, though I find pattern matching far more useful.)
Someone could probably make something like this themselves. Of course the "non-vampire" energy saving technique would be slightly harder to implement, but I don't see any other reason why this would be too hard to implement.

Of course without UL approval you might not be covered by fire insurance if your house burned down....
the problem with pattern matching is that its hard to dynamically change the dispatch table, in javascript I can just do

dispatch_table[newthing].handler = function() .....
I have edited the title to reflect that it also includes Java and Javascript.
in fact, people already have, but the cost is about 10 bucks anyway!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Outlets-of-the-Future-aka-in...
So they're storing a password hash, and a hash of combinations of the characters of the password to allow customer support to "verify" requests without hearing the whole password.

It would be funny if they had hashes of every combination of passwords. Hopefully, it's just one.

This is pretty goofy. Among other things, those customer services will themselves be trivial to break, and are probably password-equivalent (use them with support to reset your real password).

This looks like a case of a company going out of its way to be marginally less secure than a typical non-secure framework application.
Cool stuff, but it would be cooler with more context as to what each graph represented.
yes, it is too bad that the interviewer didn't bring up the question of distribution costs when Bezos made the comparison
They get the same benefit whether the site is for software developers, materials engineers, scrapbookers, the satanist chapter of La Leche League, or the Skifree Yeti. It's about search engines, not the site audience.
I think a janitor with top secret clearance can make $50K.
My point is that if they wanted to build their own company they should remain committed to the product they built, and find a better support model for current customers/users than shutting down without notice.

I do not begrudge them making money at all. But one reason that they have "millions of dollars worth of Google stock" is because they offered a service that people adopted and paid for. I think they have more of an obligation to customers and users than the initial announcement indicated and I worry that not taking better care of customers in the transition makes it hard for other startups.

It now looks like Google has reconsidered the shutdown and EtherPad will be on-line until open sourced. http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/etherpad-back-online-until...
implicit tuple packing in python doesn't count ;)
"New York Times: What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub?

Bezos: "I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.

New York Times: "What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub?

Bezos: "If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know."

A good interview for giving a glimpse into the personality of an entrepreneur.
Very creative and useful!
Don't really know anything about the app store but maybe there should be some sort of listing by rating of people that have paid for it?

It seems a bit stupid that to see more copies you need to have a high volume to crack into a best selling list.
Huge list of Keywords and Niches with price / volume info
I don't think it is specific to software development, it sounds like you just aren't getting respect from your colleagues. The same could happen to folks in chemical engineering, public relations, or any professional setting.

Set boundaries. If an unreasonable deadline is set onto you, insist on the reasonable date you previously agreed to. Tell insensitive colleagues to straighten up, or you'll leave or go to HR. If you are on a romantic get-away for the weekend, make it clear that the problem will be your top priority Monday morning (or Sunday night). If things are on fire and you are the point man on the situation, you should stand up, but you should not bend over.

Be willing and prepared to leave. Keep enough money in savings to be able to walk away from the job and take a few months to find a better fit.

Good luck!
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Is 2 Minutes Too Fast?
Add Smalltalk grammar for a beautiful and stark contrast.
puuuurty

i'd like to know the error involved, and if it has to do with the fractal patterns seen. finding roots of polynomials is difficult to do exactly. typically iterative methods are used that can only converge to the root.
Something like this seems a little more flexible, assuming it works just as well:

http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-BZ103050vTVL-Surge-Protector-Ch...
You can change the clause database in Prolog by asserta/assertz/retract, but that runs headfirst into the typical trade-offs involving mutable state, as does your Javascript example. Erlang also lets you change patterns by hot-loading code, but its design goes to great pains to do so with reasonable safety.

Also, pattern matching doesn't require all of the variables to be bound. A pattern may specify some values but just partially specify (a list with at least one remaining value) or constrain (any positive integer) others. This makes it vastly more flexible than just dispatching based on one value.
At the end of the article he makes the assumption that he would sell 50K no matter what the price is, but earlier in the article states that decreasing the price can raise you in rank which can be 10X the units sold...