skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blech. This is not an easy problem and that's all they offer? <snarky>Is that the dollar value Philly puts on a life?</snarky>
because its "awesome", whereas many of the science students I know like science because they think it is important and interesting.

I think you're right on the money. I just finished an engineering degree and am now doing a MSc. I think my engineering classmates like science because they can learn things that are "true" and "know the answers". We would talk about projects, and standards and make bad puns using our newly-learned technical jargon. My science friends use words like "sexy" when describing theories, and they like to think about things in a far more epistomologically sophisticated way.

They mentioned the high religiosity and conservatism of engineers in the article. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are the traits that distinguish engineers from scientists.
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In Air Hockey, you can move your paddle in two dimensions, you can apply a variable amount of force to the puck, the goals don't encompass the entire width of a player's side, and there are those little holes shooting air that carries the puck. They may look like small differences, but even minute changes to a game's mechanics can result in hugely different gameplay dynamics.
You're not a company man, aren't you? :)
A very similar question was posed a few days ago with some pretty interesting replies - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015079
I don't think an engineer is necessarily a scientists, and I even know an entomologist who doesn't believe in evolution (religious reasons).

Engineers, especially mechanical engineers, don't have to understand why the world works to be good at their practice. I mean as long as you stay away from the theoretical and stick to only the practical, your religious beliefs can always be shaped to fit around your understanding of the world.

That being said, even incredibly intelligent people believe in God. Christopher Langan claims you can prove the existence of God with mathematics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan#Ideas.2C_aff...
He says working really, really hard matters. Just wanted to note that since there's been much opinion to the contrary here recently.
I think this is possibly the most dangerous sweeping generalisation that I've ever read here.

I've found throughout my career that the opposite is true. The more encapsulation the more solid the system. Making the world public encourages unnecessary dependencies.
I agree with your sentiment. Further, new classes have a small (but not immeasurable) hit to performance as each object, when created, must be initialized and tracked in memory.
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I am more loyal than the sycophants who make excuses for shitty products. IE8 is not a good product, and it should be treated like an ugly leper until it gets its act together.
In fact, we can take this a step further, and remove classes altogether, and just have everything be stand-alone global functions! Then anyone can use or reuse them and before you know it, programs will all be amazing!
This is probably a good thing. A large prize might create some rather perverse incentives for, uhh, direct intervention in the data set.
This may be an earnestly applied standard, and it may even be a fairly accurate description of what they do. But the real impact is the internal and external propaganda message: "we're all above average".

In reality, only some few of the best/highest-pressure companies can maintain that for any length of time. The rest probably won't profit from the distrust and ill-will caused by the rhetorical slight of hand that defines "adequate" as "well below the actual standards we consider adequate".
OK, but that paragraph doesn't provide a practical example of what it's talking about, so I'll provide one here:

(define (my-unpredictable-func)
(println a))

In that function the value of the symbol 'a' will change depending on the context the function is called in. This is called an "unbounded symbol" (or something along those lines), and it is the thing that paragraph is referring to. It is true that it is not safe to write code like this, and so most newLISP code doesn't do this.

The proper way to write the function in newLISP is like so:

(define (my-predictable-func a)
(println a))

Here it is plain and obvious what the value of 'a' will be: whatever is passed into the function. This is how most newLISP code is written, and it works, and it's safe, and it's fast. If newLISP used lexical scope you would be complaining about how slow it was.

In very rare circumstances, you may need some lexical construct, in which case you have the functions 'letex' and 'expand' available to you.

From this example you can see that this isn't a "show stopper" but something to simply be aware of. Sortof how dereferencing NULL pointers in C is a possibility, but not a show stopper.
Point to some examples of this 'ganging up'. I've not seen it happen here.
Nice affiliate link he's got at the bottom of the article.

I understand that we've all got to eat, but having an affiliate link in such a praiseful article kind of demolished one's credibility - even if your name is Giles Bowkett.

Considering the number of cranks and scams surrounding this topic, if you want people to take your advice on such matters seriously, at least post a plain link.
The Blizzard Terms of Service note that this will happen following a request from law enforcement.

17.C Blizzard may, with or without notice to you, disclose your Internet Protocol (IP) address(es), personal information, Chat logs, and other information about you and your activities: (a) in response to a request by law enforcement, a court order or other legal process; or (b) if Blizzard believes that doing so may protect your safety or the safety of others.

If one chooses to play the game, after having agreed to have their records turned over in such a case, it seems like less of a moral issue. Another reason why people should consider actually reading their terms of service before agreeing.
Wow, this is great! Worth paying for even though KeePassX is free.
Japanese whalers ram the Ady Gil (with video footage)
And it's doubtful he'd be complaining that MSNBC was confusing weather with climate.
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The few times I have tried submitting (what I thought were) really interesting links, I have found that they were already submitted, perhaps a day ago, or a week ago, or even many months ago, but I never spotted them - they had died with a handful of upvotes and a single comment at best.
That may be why you use it, but in general that phrase is used because it's more general, so it's easier to attribute any sort of anomalous climate phenomena to human causes and thus drive public policy.
Now, I think he is talking about increasing the encapsulation through collaborator classes so he's not against encapsulation.

I still agree that there aren't any inherent problems with the several-private-methods-level of data abstraction. Rather, a program's level of data abstraction should follow the needs of the application as a whole.
Perhaps solutions should be aimed at slowing down the churn rate on the "new" page, then? What if everybody were limited to submitting, say, one article per day?
Blink-182's Tom DeLonge tries to sell Vampire Weekend a social network
On the shroud over each light, a number of LED/photodiode pairs should be placed. The LED can be blinked every few seconds. The photodiode will detect significanly more light during the blink if there is snow packed into the shroud. If the controller detects packed snow it turns on a heater to melt it. Similar LED/photodiode pairs are used to detect paper in copiers and other similar situations.

Even though this may sound complex, the parts required are cheap, especially compared to the cost of the traffic light as a whole.

Of the ~40000 traffic fatalities in the US each year perhaps 0.01% are due to this problem, but the fix is easy.
I find the most interesting content (to me) comes from sources I don't already read and follow. If a blog comes up twice or more on HN, I'll have subscribed already (assuming it's full feed and is only updated occasionally - blog interestingness is inversely proportional to posting frequency IMHO).
Read Seth Roberts to discover why practically any sufficiently large dietary change will cause you to lose large amounts of weight... at first. Roughly, your brain learns a flavor-calorie association that tells it how much food is available, which determines your body's set-point weight. Any large dietary change will cause you to lose weight... until your body learns the new flavor-calorie association, and then it's back to hell again.
Wait a minute. How would using a collaborator class as a "functor" for your formerly private methods improve encapsulation? At worst, if the collaborator were public, now other people with no use for your methods would be able to use them; at best, if it were a "friend" class or the equivalent, you would be exactly where you started, and only the caller would be using the method.
What happens when you invariably fly out of range of your BT or wifi network?
I am not trying to nay-say this (As it is rather light weight/simple) but when I read the word "Advanced" I was anticipating it being at least as functional/extensible as the http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ widget.
You can get all the real weight loss knowledge there is for free at t-nation.com. I think the point he is trying to make tho' is that paying for something motivates him to do it. Which is human nature really; people do not value what they get for free.
Bullets are supposed to break up the natural flow. That is what they are there for! If you look at nicely typeset material, the bullets are typically indented slightly rather than lined up exactly with the left margin, which gives a visual cue like the indent on the first line of a new paragraph (or a vertical space between paragraphs).

Hanging quotes fully in the margin is poor, too. The point of hanging punctuation is to optically align the margins so that they look straighter to the reader, because small glyphs like quotation marks and hyphens don't fill the space as much as typical letter forms. The idea is to avoid a distracting "bump" where the text appears to have a small indent, even though mathematically it doesn't; thus the technique complements the sort of thing you should be doing with bullets. But this is a subtle effect, and hanging punctuation fully in the margins like that certainly doesn't achieve this goal: in fact, it's probably just as bad as not hanging at all. (If you want to do it as a stylistic/aesthetic thing on block quotations or something, I'm not complaining, but this article presents it as an absolute rule for normal text.)

The whole Fibonacci/golden ratio thing is just silly, too. Who says these things have a natural elegance? Where is the research, or even the study of more than the three people in the room, to back this up?

Then there's what should have been a good point about emphasis, which completely misses the point of different typographic effects. Italics are subtle effects that show emphasis as you read without grabbing the attention, so useful for indicating things like stress or distinguishing foreign words. Heavy type, on the other hand, affects the typographic colour and draws the eye across the page. This makes it very bad for the uses of italics above (which are unhelpful out of context) but excellent for highlighting key words being defined or headings. Underlining in printed material is almost always a mistake (it distracts the eye and slows reading speed, and is unnecessary when we have proper italics available anyway) and on web pages should probably be reserved for hyperlinks since anything else clashes with user expectations.

I'm sorry, but this really isn't a guide to good typography at all, beginner or otherwise. It's just yet another list of dogmatic rules that have no sound basis, and the typography world has more than enough of those already.
I think he means kerning, but the way he describes it, he gives the definition of tracking... and if we're talking about this in the context of the web, well, you really can't kern on the web. Adjusting the tracking (with letter-spacing in the CSS) is about all you can do. So really, it depends on the font. If the font has nice ligatures, I think it often looks better left as-is. You wouldn't encounter this problem with proper kerning... which is why I hope that's what he's referring to. :)
And ignoring the fact that the heat wouldn't really be "free". It would be generated by excess energy consumption.

Electric heat (in any form or format in homeowner applications) is generally the most expensive way to turn a given quantity of dollars into a given amount of heat. The only MORE expensive option is burning the dollar bills themselves to produce heat.
Not understanding the downvotes. Solving this problem would easily save hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, in law enforcement and litigation costs. To put a paltry $100 reward for _preventing murder_ is, frankly, pathetic.
And on iSCSI LUNs IIRC, which is how most people would use consolidated storage (SAN vs NAS).
Makes logging things easier, and in correct order!
Interesting that he suggests no more than three fonts; the rule when I was poking around was more like two, one for headlines (if you must) and then a good proper body font for almost everything.
But it migth take an engineering mindset to know what component of the system you need to strike to make damage.
I agree. I still like 9-12pt for print, but for the web, the trend has definitely been toward 12-15pt and it has been a change for the better, IMHO.
This is significant - odds are PA Semi's chip is going to be ARM, not x86... we've suspected the ARM will make in-roads into "desktop" style computing (i.e., not just phones and PDAs), but this is much sooner than I honestly expected.

This may be only the first step in the demise of the Atom - ARM chips are getting more and more competitive for "real" computing every single day.
The prize isn't for preventing murder; it's for predicting murder. There are significant practical differences, particularly with respect to the incentives created.
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad founded the Iranian Tunneling Association in 1998
Agreed. The whole idea is coming straight out of left field:

Sometimes, private methods are created to split complex logic or processes into small, easily digested pieces. Often, such private methods have gnarly dependencies because they directly access or modify internal state. Moving these methods to appropriate collaborators (again, creating new classes as necessary) exposes such dependencies. Eliminating these dependencies simplifies the new API, which improves readability and understanding.

Here he seems to be complaining about bugs that arise due to overly complex mutable state. However that has nothing to do with private methods. The defensible assertion here might be that if you have a big ugly method that has too many state dependencies, then refactoring it into private methods isn't really an improvement even if it appears more readable. However that's a string of failures that only incidentally have anything to do with private methods. It would be more accurate to just state that non-functional code is a smell, increasing in putrescence as a function of the quantity of moving parts.

The resulting code is simpler, more testable, more reusable, more cohesive, and less coupled.

Again, the correlation of privateness to these concerns is dubious. Separation of concerns should be on a logical basis, not based on the structure of the implementation. Every additional class adds mental overhead. Decoupling is useful as a means of reusing code, but only if there is a case for reuse. It's also useful as a way to tease apart complex dependency graphs, but only if the resultant sets of dependencies make sense on their own. Also, let's not forget that encapsulating concerns in separate objects is no more functional than a bunch of private state if you end up passing around objects anyway... Law of Demeter and all that.

What I suspect here is that the author saw some bad code that used a lot of private methods and then honed in on that as a smell even though it has little general applicability. The bar needs to be much higher for declaring any core language construct to be a smell.
I don't think that there is a perfect if/then way of solving this issue...this is why we have humans doing the moderating ;-).
I used to be very much against private methods and though I have eased up a little, I still prefer classes with only a small number of public methods and no private methods.

It's true that you have a lot more classes, but these classes can be separated into packages. The encapsulation is still there (private members vs. private methods), and the encapsulated code has a greater ability to be reused or unit tested (if you're into that.)
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Being able to predict where/when murder happens leads to a more efficient and effective distribution of law enforcement. Other cities have done this with non-violent crime/traffic violations/etc., and crime has gone down. So prediction = prevention.
I think the reason you're hitting a lot of resistance here is that yes, there are backchannels, but no, your assumption of them being mostly abused is incorrect. Based on my observations over the last two years, the cases of abuse are very rare, usually dealt with very quickly, and are much less of a problem than the larger issues with HN, such as growing uncivility (which your rash accusations don't help) and the dilution of the site with politics/vague-economics articles.
"Often, such private methods have gnarly dependencies because they directly access or modify internal state. Moving these methods to appropriate collaborators (again, creating new classes as necessary) exposes such dependencies."

This is usually why I create private methods in the first place. The methods modify internal state and they're too specific to the problem in question to move them into a separate class. Making them public just doesn't make sense and seems to break the principle of encapsulation.

Also, wouldn't moving these methods into a new class affect performance? For example if you have a private method that does some complex operations on a private/local collection, instead of performing the operations directly on the collection you have to pass the it back and forth to the public method in another class.
If you eat like Dr Furhman recommends, I guarantee you will lose weight and keep it off, assuming you stick to the plan. It's difficult to get enough calories eating only whole fruits and vegetables (vegetable oil and corn syrup aren't vegetables).
I like this idea. However, my browsing habits would mess this up. When I run a search, I'll often open the first two or three results that look good. I do this before looking at any of them. Still, even knowing that a result "looked good" might be enough to improve results.
I suppose the theoretical limit is 1 bit -- if you define the program in terms of a virtual machine that takes 1 instruction -- "play a game of chess".
I got to 10 & had to stop.
If anyone can get the rest of the article up I'd like to read it.
EDIT: sorry, complete brain fart. The Ady Gil was in the other boats "danger zone", meaning the Gil had the right of way not the whaling vessel as I first stated.

Both captains still had a duty to avoid the collision overall.

--------

Hard to tell from the videos, but it looks like at first the Ady Gil was stopped, but then appears to motor forward as the Japanese ship gets closer.

Without the precursor video, it's a tough call. According to maritime navigation rules, the Ady Gil would have been the "give way" vessel in this situation, meaning the large ship had the right of way. Unless the Ady Gil as disabled and/or had lost significant maneuverability.

I don't support the whaling "study", based on what I've read, however from an analytical standpoint the blame for this would seem to lie with the captain of the Gil. He/She either failed to give way and/or put the passengers and the ship in an unneccessarily dangerous position, especially when you consider how much other open water was available in the area for navigation.
clicks-as-votes isn't new. There are many reasons for the last click though.

1. found what you want
2. got bored
3. tried a new search term
4. browser crashed
5. continued your searching session through the site (ie going forward not back)
6. tab based browsing

It's true that you wouldn't keep searching after you found what you want, but that does not necessarily imply that if you stop searching you have found what you were looking for.

Alternative search engines have tried and died.
You could burn the checks that can be converted into the dollar bills, but that's just getting excessive.
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Why can't it be weighted so that if one person up votes the same person all of the time, the up votes start to count for less.

Or if one person up votes more in general his up votes count for less.

Could be the same with down votes as well.

Would be a pretty easy system and would keep people from spamming up votes. Maybe people would choose a bit more wisely about who it is that they give points to.
How about stay away from lawyers that try and make business decisions for you?
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-ducati.html

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

"""What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?"""

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/the-emacs-problem
I think the approach the author is talking about is creating an internal class (either private or public).

It's common approach for large libraries. Each STL container has a public iterator class contained in it and rails is filled with internal, private classes that implement the public functionality.

That said, I don't think such constructs necessarily make code more understandable. Unless your project is really large scale, they're more like an exercise in showing the language and design constructs you've learned.
Encapsulation doesn't make this problem go away at all -- it just replaces interface proliferation with secretive state.

I don't like having state spread everwhere, but I hate being lied to about it.
That's exactly how Google tracks your habits to personalize your search results. And recently they announced they're going to do it for everyone, not just logged in users.
They were hosing the boat down. Were they repelling boarders? Is that legal if not?

They seemed to me to make a deliberate right turn. Regardless of who had the right of way, is that legal? Maybe the ocean made them do it, but I don't think so.

One hostile action (hosing) lends credence to another hostile action (deliberate collision).

I hope both parties turn to whatever governing body is appropriate to assign fault and penalty.
wrt to you last "confused person" question. Has there been any study of how accurately climate models can predict climate (e.g. average global temperature) even five years out from a given year?

Just to clarify...

If I gave a climate model all the temp data from 1888-1990 and then said ok, what's the AGT in 1995? Would it be correct? I guess the difficult part would be finding a model that hasn't already been modified so it would be correct for 1995. You'd have to use the 1990 version of the modeling software.