skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Closures are a useful feature, but I'm afraid the current proposal is crippled ... and as in the case of generics implemented with erasure and some serious variance problems ... this will be a feature where the complexity added will outweigh the benefits.

The first problem ... apparently they aren't planing on adding capturing of non-ﬁnal variables. This is a PITA since a lot of anonymous classes are using just that by boxing those vars in final arrays ... which is the kind of boilerplate I could do without, but I guess readability of code is not a priority (oh, the irony).

The second problem ... the proposal is not final, but from what I've seen the "Function type" has to deal with primitives, and they are going to do that through code-specialization ... and if that's the case, it would be yet another case where they are introducing exceptions in the language (like it's the case for arrays or for operator overloading). I'm not even going to mention the "special" syntax introduced for collections.

The third problem ... since we are talking about fork/join, it would be best to leave the constructing of the query to the designer of the framework, therefore returning the syntax tree of a closure (instead of the method refence) would be really useful. The proposal doesn't include such "futurist" notions though (LISP's quote is very cutting-edge after all).

The fourth problem ... it would be best to deprecate Java in favor of something else running on the JVM. But what chances would a language have that isn't totally different (in which case it would diverge from the type system, therefore slow or with interoperability problems) or that doesn't have feature-bloat to differentiate itself from Java (like Scala, which IMHO it's an abomination). The point being that adding features to Java makes life harder for everyone (including people using/developing other languages). Why not concentrate on advancing the JVM instead? Still no tail-calls, still no stack-allocated objects (with escape-analysis not delivering on its promise), and invoke-dynamic is one whole year away from being released.

And closures are a language feature that happened long before Java appeared, and it's been talked about it ever since the start. See this article about "Microsoft's delegates" ... http://java.sun.com/docs/white/delegates.html

Now they want to add closures because that's the only sane way to work with fork/join frameworks? No shit. It saddens me because it took a really loooooong time for them to realize this ... design by committee at its best.
That woman is nothing more than a crook - "helper syndrome"? Really? If she was so moved to help the disadvantaged why didn't she use her own money?
In my experience, it is more likely to be the immaturity of the articles that is putting people off.

I have contributed a few edits to Wikipedia over the years. Why not, if I can usefully fill in a blank and it costs me mere seconds to help?

More recently, though, I've been finding subjects where the entire article was so hopelessly wrong that I wouldn't know where to begin fixing it, other than deleting it completely and starting over. I looked for an appropriate marker in one case that would at least suggest that the article as a whole did not represent a neutral point of view or was completely unsupported by any factual evidence, but after a few minutes trying to navigate Wikipedia's absurdly overcomplicated self-documentation and finding nothing but reasons I wasn't allowed to fix anything or contribute, I gave up and found something else to do with my time.

I wonder whether the neutral point of view principle isn't a significant part of the problem. Many of the pages I find most misleading are deadlocked, because no-one can agree on what a neutral point of view is.

Under those circumstances, perhaps it would be more helpful to do what civilised discussion has done since forever: present two articles (or sections in an article) that, by construction and intent, take opposing viewpoints. Let the reader see both sides of the debate, making the best case they can and with the best sources they can find to support their point of view, and let the reader decide. As long as it is very clear when there is a single article trying to present a subject neutrally and when the adversarial system is in use, I don't see why this would cause a problem, and it would break a lot of the deadlocks I've seen and get constructive editing going again.
Er, actually it looks as if exactly what this does depends on what version you're using. The Java Platform SE 6 docs say "This constructor sets the seed of the random number generator to a value very likely to be distinct from any other invocation of this constructor." Same for 5. But 1.4.2 has the text I quoted above.

In any case, creating a new Random object every time you want a random number is unlikely to give satisfactory results. There is certainly no guarantee that the implementation will try to make it do so.
Not too much trouble, but horribly wrong. You are generating a new Random instance with possibly expensive seed generation for every random number, and, even worse, you are completely at the mercy of the seed generation used by your JVM.

Sun's is relatively good:

public Random() { this(++seedUniquifier + System.nanoTime()); }

But GNU classpath contains:

public Random()
{
this(System.currentTimeMillis());
}

Which will give you the same predictible "random" number for every call within a millisecond.
Fuzzy Data Fuels Thanksgiving Claims
Not sure I agree with it.

I can think of at least two people - Henry Ford and Walt Disney whose success came after a long string of failures. And that's just the cream of the crop.
A REPL is nice too:

(reduce + (range 366))
Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner
I Believe in Design
Executing IronPython Code from IronRuby
Universities and Economic Growth
I think you are wrong. Ask a lawyer, though (and again, I did not create the law).

Trading is friendly, too, btw. In a good trade, both parties are happier after the trade.
I'm pretty sure that's the motivation. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't work.
Thirsty: Intellectual Curiosity and Success
66,795 is definitely not bad for wearing t-shirts. Not factored into that though, he receives 365 free t-shirts a year! That could be valued around 3650 ($10 per shirt)
Someone said it more succinctly in 1979

"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements." -- Brian Kernighan

and followed it up with

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
I don't think that is true in general. First, you can not evade tax laws just by not using money. What if all companies decided to pay their employees only in "things" instead of money, should they all really be exempt from taxes? Like instead of earning 2000$, you would earn "a new TV and a Microwave, and 10 haircuts".

It doesn't work that way. (Debate about the usefulness of taxes elsewhere please - the fact is atm the government wants our money/part of our production. It is not a result of the existence of money).

Also, you don't need to have a business if your exchanges are below a certain threshold, at least not in Germany. I am fairly certain it has to be similar in the US.
Yes, "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" is a much better headline than "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Improves" (when "better" is defined to be "attention grabbing").

Even the HN headline does this: "Number of Wikipedia editors steadily declining". Maybe it should be "Quality of Wikipedia articles steadily improving". Which is the cause? Which is the effect?

The article says "Indeed, Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix." This would indicate Wikipedia itself is gaining in popularity even as the WSJ headline implies it is going downhill (precipitously, I might add).

FWIIW, I've tossed in my 2c occasionally, but only as an anonymous contributor. I don't contribute enough to qualify as an editor, but sometimes a fact is wrong, needs clarification, or some English is rough. So, is there any metrics of anonymous contributions? Are they up? Are they down?

Beyond that, the article is full of anecdotes of Things That Went Wrong (but were corrected). How is that not a success story? If nothing went wrong, it would be because nothing was contributed. For the risk adverse, the "optimal" trade-off of risk vs. change suppresses all change (this is endemic in large corporations).

Then the rest of the article rolls out the same old criticisms of lack of credentials among Wikipedia editors.

Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it
-- Chinese Proverb
Sugababes and Windows 7
A bit ironic, as the entire premise of a bank is essentially to do this, but regulated, on a larger scale.

Assuming it was really a loan.
In case you found the title confusing, these are intercepts of pager text messages sent on 9/11 (possibly leaked from some US goverment agency?). There's no explanation of what geographical area or what network providers are covered.
The OP stated: "but sometimes it just isn't worth the trouble to instantiate a Random object".

My reply was a counter point to that statement, and not a discourse on using Random.
There is, however, a network effect. I know I often link to Wikipedia because it's the first relevant link found in a search that contains a concise description of a concept that I don't want to define inline in my blog post / comment / etc. This would perpetuate Wikipedia even if it were completely unmanned and read-only.
The Googlephone: Google gears up for attack on mobile-phone market
I reblogged this one as Hungry.

It's tough to remove my bias from this observation. Of course I want curiousity and success to be highly correlated. But Seth did skip over execution. Do curious folks learn how to execute as well?
Yeah, you're right. I threw it together really quickly, I think I'll just replace the randomized partition with a regular partition call.
Highly recommend Neal Gabler's biography, "Walt Disney: The Triumph of The American Imagination". Fascinating and underpinned by seven years of exhaustive research.

The first fifth is about his failures. His failed animation and film companies. The entire 633 page book is about one man's obsession (with the biz ops help of his brother) with bringing reality to fantasy and fantasy to reality.

It may not seem to be your typical startup-type book but it's all about entrepreneurship, failure, and pushing the limits of technology and enthusiasm.

"But for all Walt's continuing assurances of improvement, and for all his genuine desire to make outstanding films, the Alice movies, even with Iwerks's contributions, were only slightly better than routine"
p.86

"In creating a world of his own from scratch, Walt Disney demonstrated, more fully and forcefully than ever before in his work, man's potential mastery, which has always been the inherent metaphor of animation."
p. 275
Whenever I see something like this I'm reminded of the introduction to "Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision", which is where a lot of this "clever math" is described. Essentially, problems considered unsolvable ten years ago are not only solvable, but simple, due to advances in geometry. With just a little math, you can do things like this. I wonder why it took this long for the people doing computer vision work to catch up with the math.
Just FYI: don't worry, it's not possible to create clickable links in text submissions. URLs in comments, on the other hand, are automatically converted.
Chain Drive Garage Door Openers from Chamberlain LiftMaster
LiftMaster offers durability, reliability and lasting performance with their chain drive garage door openers. And LiftMaster offers the widest variety of chain drive garage door openers available in the market today.
And closes the door to interested entrepreneurs.

Art isn't just a guilty pleasure, it's intimately connected to our creativity and inspiration. Look at the style within modern sites, services and products. People need art, they want it in their breakfast cereal and basic daily business.
Reason and science are not separate things.

Aristotle's argument was possibly valid, however it was not sound, as (at least) one of his premises were incorrect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness

I think the point the author is trying to make is that sometimes one must assume that their premises are correct, using one's intuition. However, one should test argument premises as soon as possible because, hey, our intuition could be wrong (just like Aristotle's was).
She didn't give money - she loaned it.

She basically loaned money from the rich to the poor, without asking the rich first. I assume everyone got payed back, but the article does not say.
I don't agree with this at all,

even though Chrome OS is meant for Netbooks, the number of people that own netbooks and use them to communicate via Messenger, Skype etc is enormous. And people who do use Skype on netbooks will not opt for the Chrome OS because you cannot use Skype in an online application like MSN or Yahoo for example.

Personally I use skype a lot and was looking forward to Chrome OS as a substitute for Windows/Linux on my netbook, and was even considering buying a netbook for my girlfriend just for this purpose, however now I will not be doing that.
Is this some kind of joke? On http://911.wikileaks.org/files/messages_2001_09_11-08_25_200...:

> 2001-09-11 08:26:01 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 93-if you want to say goodbye, i will understand but i will always be in love with you. that...

> 2001-09-11 08:26:03 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 2...will never change. if i don't hear from you, i probably won't bother you when i get to...

> 2001-09-11 08:26:05 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 3...work. so if you want to talk to me, in this case, you will have to make a move first. if...

> 2001-09-11 08:26:07 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 5...how much. i miss you and i miss us.

> 2001-09-11 08:26:09 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 4...not, then i get it. i told you i'm not stupid. I LOVE YOU!! so much in fact, i hurt with...

> 2001-09-11 08:26:07 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 5...how much. i miss you and i miss us.

Sounds like either an affair or someone paging the script to the Young&Restless….
Yup, Steve Laueys is among the leading specialist about consciousness disorders. His team is also behind the methodology of the fMRI study that showed that a woman, thought to be in a vegetative state, was able to perform mental imagery tasks (like imagining she's playin tennis, or wandering in her house).

I work at the same university and I have already had the occasion to talk with him. He's not the kind of guy to buy phony stuff. I'd be very surprised if he accorded any credit to FC, even though the patient's family might do.

BTW, he works in the same lab as the people who publishes the early birds/night owls paper featured on HN a few months ago.
Modeling Human Drug Trials — Without the Human
And so Eddy hit on the idea of a soup-to-nuts model that would capture everything known by modern medicine, from the evolution of disease in different people — as shaped by factors like race, genetic risk, and number of hours spent doing yoga — to specific physiological details, such as the amount of heart muscle that dies in the hours after a heart attack and the degree to which medications like aspirin can limit that damage.
Hopefully they'll help clean up Wiktionary. I downloaded the English dataset the other day and it's a mess. IIRC, less than 1/3 of the words are properly tagged as English words, and a significant fraction of the words aren't even rendered in the English character set.

The good news is that the editorial standards are extremely consistent, so it's easy to extract information. They also allow batch updates, so if I find an easy way to correct vast swaths of this data, I could send a batch update file once
I'm not saying this to undermine the article or suggest that I'm in any way more experienced or knowledgeable (I'm probably not) - nor am I disagreeing (at least, not with all of it) and certainly not saying this as advice to others, but heres my, personal, responses to these points:

Not using a proper ORM

I solved this one by switching to a NoSQL database. Fancy ORM? Bleh, too complex, brittle, hassle, whatever - schema free databases let me store my objects however I like and give me other (potential) benefits too, like MongoDBs sharding, replication, nicely parallel map/reduce etc. I also free myself from having to come up with future proof schemas (or emulating a schema free database with complex tables).

Not learning generics soon enough

While I agree with this, I think it misses another issue: over-reliance on the OO paradigm. By only using OO when it actually makes sense and using other abstractions when it doesn't (streams, trees, lists, tables, relationships, immutable state, whatever), I've achieved even more generic software components and reusable code than generics would give me and also (potentially) gained other advantages too (better abstractions for reasoning about my solution, clearer code, better concurrency...)

Reinvent the wheel

If you're reasonably new to programming (or even just a single language or paradigm or domain), the only excuse to reinvent the wheel is as a learning experience. At this stage, you don't have enough experience to write your own production ready version. No excuses. Later, though, I think there are times when its appropriate to reinvent the wheel and at this point you should have enough experience to recognize them, but even then, I imagine its rare.

Too much documentation

Unfortunately hes right.. which is problematic, because not documenting isn't the answer either. Having self-documenting code is important, but ultimately won't help user-of-your-api (who may never get a chance to review the code to figure out what it does) as much as some real documentation.. Anyone whos ever had to code with only some standards committees spec knows how fun this is... Same goes for having only an API reference available - great if you already know how everything works together and need.. a reference.. useless if you have no idea how anything works yet.

No automated build

I totally agree with this. I often don't use automated builds for my own projects, but once they get in any way complex, I write at least a shell script to make this easier.

Rely on visual inspection and debugging too much

You can never do enough to ensure your code is as good as it can be.. unfortunately costs mean you have to draw the line somewhere and leave it be. Debugging and visual inspection aren't proactive enough to ensure quality and theres a large amount of things that can be done to try and minimize error, but at the end of the day, its likely not quite enough and you'll end up debugging anyway.. :-(

No unit test

I agree here too. One of the techniques to help above. Also helps protect when refactoring and helps minimize wasted effort.
Google OS: the end of the hard drive?
I upvoted and checked immediately, and you're right: it presents an upvote in the JS interface, but a reload reveals the truth. Not counting reply upvotes does prevent long, mutual karma-generating exchanges,
but if it's trying to disguise that reality from users it isn't very effectively disguised.
I'm not 100% convinced it's deliberate, but it could be, like that idea of making trolls invisible, but not letting them know they are invisible (not sure how that's applicable here, maybe so people don't explore trickier ways of getting karma)

I agree that ORMs are good for the basic impedance mismatch, but are hard to optimize for more complex queries. I do wonder if working directly with the database is becoming a dark art, as most practitioners would prefer to avoid it if possible, and they often can.

"So you plan ahead, you build for the future, not for the simplistic view you have today." So you disagree with those agile ideas of "you ain't gonna need it" and "release early, release often". You're describing something like the waterfall model. I'm actually not against the waterfall model, it's just that you need to have done a few similar projects to have the requisite level of judgment, like a carpenter building his 10th kitchen. Most practitioners aren't at this level of expertise - they'll still learning what the problem is. If they try to do what you suggest without your level of experience, they'll really make a mess. It's a matter of a novice knowing that they don't know.

I agree that working with experienced folk would help, but such folk are in short supply (though possibly many people are reluctant to find them, and would rather be the "experts" themselves - maybe this is what you find objectionable).

I guess he could have gained much more experience in 5 years, if he had done several database projects over that period, instead of improving just the one.
There is readily available software that allows you to intercept pager communications. The two protocols mostly used by the paging companies are FLEX and POCSAG, and the nationwide paging networks all operate(d) on the 929-931 Mhz band.

The two most prominent intercept applications are:
- POCFLEX, a DOS based software package that requires a 4-level FSK interface to the scanner
- PDW, a windows based software package that uses a soundcard to recover the pager text from the scanner baseband.

You can download both packages here:

http://www.discriminator.nl/software/index-en.html

Most likely someone setup a few radios and archived all pager texts from the different major nationwide paging networks, and then consolidated the data into one set of files.
While I think JQuery is an impressive library, I think it is light to replace a full desktop UI programming model. As well Cappuccino favors the developer over the designer, in saying that their Atlas tool goes along way to remedy that. Currently, (my personal opinion) I think Dojo and to some extent YUI have the most robust libraries to replace the desktop UI development model.
It does appear to run without glitches. But your comment indicates that you never played the original Quake. Which ran at 60fps, software-rendered, on a Pentium I, with no audio latency.
Could You Raise Your Rates?
In addition to other reasons mentioned, Flash is also single threaded, so a lot of developers use pseudo-threading to get around this which is where a lot of lag creeps in.
For anyone keeping track, the comment I am replying to is the kind of comment you should not be voting up if you want votes to mean anything. By extension, that also includes this comment itself.
I don't necessarily agree with the "package" deal but the first point is extremely valid.
The judge suggests that at least some of the loans were never repaid: "It's difficult to find an appropriate punishment here. On the one hand we have big losses. But on the other hand we have here this altruistic behaviour, which makes the case very different from the norm."
"I wonder which comes first, the curiosity or the success?"

That's a weird question to ask at the end. Children aren't born successful, but they can be born curious.
Well let's hope the forking happens sooner than later. I still can't believe I was told stating that a cat was an animal would require citation.
Dups:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954882

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=953961