skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Manufacturing didn't go away because of anything other than the rise in unskilled labor costs in the United States. At the time it was cheaper to manufacture overseas and ship to this country. With the falling cost of robotics, and the rising cost of foreign labor and shipping, it's likely that manufacturing will return to this country in a highly automated way. If your job can be replaced by a robot, human or otherwise, that doesn't bitch about his pension and threaten to strike, it will be.
Fair enough. My point would be that if people are still doing that, they don't have to anymore.

Also, my earlier response was written a little rashly, stemming for my sense of sheer disbelief. While I stand by my overall point, I'd like to apologise for my tone.
Doesn't play well with others.
For the reading disinclined: It’s not a failure because of soft issues such as marketing, but because the further you go down the purely functional road the more mental overhead is involved in writing complex programs.
Islam and climate change:

Now those are some strange bedfellows.
> If HTML were truly awesome, then you would not have Wikipedia; you would have Htmlpedia.

I don't buy this. The problem with HTML is not that it isn't expressive enough or that it's too hard to use; it's that arbitrary user code can easily compromise the integrity of your website.
Well, the teletype interface used throughout the robot stories, for one. But you could probably rig that up in an afternoon with a daisywheel printer, acoustic coupler, and just a little bit of tty hackery.
Um, in purely functional code isn't this by definition not possible? As in that the definition of "functional" means that it has no side effects and the return value depend only on the input values?
I think one thing that always fascinated me was how anchored Asimov was in reality. I began reading 'The Gods Themselves' which Asimov wrote as a response to another writer (whose name escapes me) using a Isotope which couldn't exist and ignoring the science related ties that it would mean.

His science fiction was always speculative, but in as many places as possible it was anchored to the reality he knew.

Simple amazing.

Oh, and yeah, Google is scary how big, powerful, and... omnipresent it has become.
I find TDD impossible for all but the most trivial of coding tasks. As the article asks, what should the resulting API look like? The act of solving a problem gives me insight into the actual requirements, and the API results from that knowledge.

Another issue I have with unit testing is that the cases which, for me at least, identify the most bugs pre-production are more integration-ish. Does the timeout setting for the HTTP API work as expected? Does this transaction really roll-back against an Oracle DB with the "thin" driver on JBoss? These are cases which are really hard to catch with traditional, use-the-UI testing, either manual or automated. I should read more about what others are doing for these semi-integration cases.

A couple of years ago, I committed a test case called TestHowDatabasesWork because of a team argument about how Oracle handled concurrency and locking. It got a good laugh, but it also documented a few behaviors specific to the problem at hand.
or in other words, sign the get-monty-rich petition :-)
The Silver Thief: a smart burglar who perfected his craft
When writing code, I hit enter to add a line-break in order to make the code look nice. I would consider it a bad thing if next time someone looked at the code, those line-breaks were removed and changed to spaces, even if the code was technically equivalent.

Compilers (except maybe Python) don't care about layout.
Man, I totally blanked on iWork.
"A 64GB SSD? On a device that won't store data because it'll all be in the cloud? Don't be silly." Not my original thoughts, I may even have seen them elsewhere on HN, but I fully endorse them.

I'm reminded of all the speculation about the iSlate, and the retrospective of the iPhone speculation (very hit and miss, mostly miss).
At least with my Topre Realforce 87U there are definitely some perks to justify it:

* The feel of the mechanical keys is fantastic. There's much more feedback; keystrokes make a nice subdued "schlock" noise. The backspace key sounds like the sound from Mario games where he does that spinning landing thing on a baddie.

* Easily swappable keys; my WASD are swapped for the purple arrow keys they come with, and my Esc key is a nice dangerous-looking red.

* LEDs are built into the keys they're for. Not a killer feature, but pretty slick.

* Flexibility; there are dip switches in the back for various tweaks such as swapping Ctrl and Caps Lock on a hardware level - they even provide keys to switch out so that the new Caps Lock key gets its LED.

For something I'll be typing on for many hours a day it's a worthy investment.
It makes you sad that this isn't the best we can do?
I would say that ontologies built by hand won't scale well. It would take humans to understand ontologies perfectly and consistently to build a good ontology. But humans don't understand ontologies that well, it is just not how we think. In the sense that one person's interpretation might be different than another person's. So which interpretation should be encoded in the system?

I probably should qualify the above by saying that lower level and domain specific ontologies might be manageble. That is where a lot of work has been done. The problem is moving up the hierarchy of abstraction where the ontology meets encoding of common-sense items.

Cyc has tried for years to encode common sense rules and terms in hopes that it would approximate human common sense. But problem I see with that approach is that humans (those entering the rules in the system for example) themselves don't know how common sense is encoded. They just know it, but it is hard to formalize that knowledge and it is very much personalized.
Funny, but I've actually had to build stubs like this to test crypto stuff. In the case I was dealing with, we had to produce an encrypted string that met the requirements of another system, and I wanted reproducible test cases to show that our code was correct. We were pretty sure that Java crypto libs were not broken, but the legacy system had some "features" that required us to DOUBLE Base64 encode our output and other such niceties.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#L...
Seconded. I suddenly feel like a blub typist, and I want to know why.
OCGM: A New Windows User Experience
Not harsh at all. IMO, the kind of attitude that equates the responsibility to maintain your open source projects to the parenting of a child is one thing which scares people from contributing to the open source community.
IPhone and Android Development
I think my ideal chair would be a treadmill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadmill_Desk . Being able to walk a couple miles every hour would definitely increase my energy level and focus.
So, what's wrong with a tape backup drive and a box (for the tapes)? My dataset's 6gb. I currently use zfs incremental and full snapshots to generate a single file per backup to save.

There are two issues I haven't seen addressed:

(1) No guarantee of privacy: all my data's on someone else's box. I haven't seen any of them go to court to defend a person's data yet. And this isn't a phone log or URL list, it's everything they have. Backup privacy is not an area where you screw around.

(2) Upload bandwidth. Most network links available anywhere I've lived are asymmetric, with a massive bias downlink-side. Uplink speeds are still measured in 100s of kilobits/sec. $160/month bought me 1.5 mb down, and 768kb up, with a static ip.

I'd rather run my dataset through gpg and write it out to tape.
IMO, if one is to choose between theoretical background and EE/CompE, the latter is significantly more valuable. Of course, both are important.
Learning oEmbed: Convert Links Into Embedded Content
The Jump Of Freedom | The Princess Of Poker
I like your idea. But why not go after real content? Talk to Time Warner/Disney/somebody like that.

Personally, I'd pay to let my kids watch a few minutes of on-demand cartoons every day in a walled garden. Can't believe Disney/etc. hasn't done this yet. Their existing iphone apps/web sites for kids are a joke.

(They have a few "watch a cartoon now" type things, but its like a bad TV station instead of a youtube-like experience.)
Hitchens: The truth about airplane security measures
Those all sound like neat aesthetic benefits, but the OP made it sound like there's something objectively wrong or buggy with less-expensive keyboards.
Ah, thanks. Everyone noobs out at times. For some reason, because he said '/best', I assumed it was '/noprocrast', but that 404d.
I am glad Schneier's article got on cnn.com. General public would benefit greatly from reading this. Unlike other pundits and "experts" he actually knows what he is talking about when it comes to security.

To paraphrase my comment to a related thread: both security theatre and terrorism is about managing _perceptions_. One is just a response to the other in the public and media domain.

Therefore, the government will respond using theatircs and flare. They will do whatever it takes to _seem_ like they is doing something. Lots of rules, directives with cryptic long numbers separated by dashes, TSA employees with uniforms resembling those of real police officers, etc, etc... This is quite different than actually making anything or anybody any more safe.

Another point worth mentioning is that TSA has yet to show at least one foiled or stopped terrorist attempt in all these years since its existence.
NYTProf v3 – Worth the wait
I actually came to the article expecting it to be completely based around the FedEx logo. Once you see the arrow, that's all you'll see on every truck.
I agree. I don't see why Jeff didn't just start a GitHub project himself as a new starting point for the community.
Use LinkedIN to improve your product
Chat system with WebSocket and node.js
How will you define "real"? Clearly the representative set of bits that make up the image are not "real". If you're attempting to determine whether the underlying scene was real then this photo alone may not be the best evidence. If you're trying to determine whether the image is original and unmodified, then you have already lost. The image is modified when the picture is saved on the camera itself and then any time the image is saved in any other program.

If you clarify your definition of "real" then your bet may become more enticing.
What is the problem with using one language to produce another? How do you think your primary programmin language gets converted to assembly and then to machine code?

As far as I am concerned this is a useful abstraction on a trivial problem.
Would love to play with it again, that is if the .deb file worked :(

$ love
love: error while loading shared libraries: libopenal.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
$ ls -l /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2009-12-22 13:38 /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 -> libopenal64.so
MP3 Transcription Services
Dear Ms. Cranton,

Are you seriously suggesting that criminals won't intercept calls in order to blackmail and insider trade because call interception is illegal ?

I don't remember anyone going to prison for these :

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World#2006_Phone_Ta...

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20...

Did you know that if you took the five pound notes it cost to buy 2tb of disk drive and laid them out end to end it would go from here to the end of my desk and back. Your book comparison is hilarious.

Who on earth is suggesting that anyone is going to make this into a commercial product?

I'm not sure whether you are naive or you think I am.

You should be giving FULL DISCLOSURE to your users, not platitudes.
It really is shameful that you are just trying to cover your arses.

Yours sincerely,
A writer's persistence
Court orders three H-1B opposition sites disabled
YouTube is first and foremost a destination with an ancillary platform. Something that lets people make and curate collections of videos on it is a lot like what Netscape was to Windows.
Ship them to you, no printing at this time. Generic vouchers good for any show, any time.
I found the article interesting if only for the comparison of information connectivity to electrical connectivity. Just as some people feel that electricity is a basic necessity, people also feel the same about communication. A mere 30 years ago, people could not have imagined such a statement.
See, I really enjoy freezing the API early. The API should be very, very simple. I tend to code by designing top down, then coding from the bottom up.

APIs should _not_ be from the perspective of "this is how I solve this problem" and should be from the perspective of "this solves my problem."

For example,

TempCalc tc = new TempCalc();
tc.f = 50;
System.out.println("50 degrees farenheit is " + tc.convertToCelcius() + " degress celcius");

is bad design. Yes, you may need to get a farenheit value, and change it to celcius, but I don't care about setting internal state, then calling functions to change it. I just want an "fToC(int f)" function.

This is an admittedly contrived example, but I see this principle in API design all the time. Everything should be from the perspective of the user, not the coder.

"I'd love to use this api if it looked like this."

Anyway... as far as that integration stuff goes, have you used Selenium? I'm not super up on Java testing stuff, as I'm a Rubyist, but I use it, and I know it has Java bindings of some kind...
I do agree with the general sentiment of the article, but on the other hand, you should begin writing tests before it's too late and the code is too interdependent to test without a LOT of effort.

When you write your tests first, you will naturally never end up in that situation.

Of course, when you see that you have a hard time at writing unit tests because, well, the units are too big, then you can (and should!) start refactoring, but how do you refactor with confidence when you don't have tests to see whether the refactoring went well?

Chicken and egg I guess.
I think that TDD is like Wittgenstein's ladder, which can be discarded once you climb through the window, or the Buddha's raft, which can be discarded once you cross the river.

TDD offers novice (or stuck) programmers two powerful nudges: 1) to break tasks down to trivial units, and 2) to think about what you're trying to accomplish before writing the code. Once you get the hang of doing this, TDD is just dogma to cling to.
A tape has several downsides:

a. It is physically close to your original data's location.

b. It's a hassle to back up (remember to perform backup, insert tape, zfs, label tape).

c. Redundancy and versioning is at an extra cost.

d. Cannot be utilized for remote access to files.

.

As for the two issues missing -

(1) The data is encrypted before uploading. In addition, it is sliced. So, no single machine should have access to the whole file - nor would it even know what the other parts are. Moreover, requests for slices would be digitally signed, so a different machine could not even request slices it does not "own".

(2) Upload bandwidth is indeed an issue, but not a serious one. The general argument goes that what works for torrents would work for backups in this matter.
Is there any special feature of tarsnap that I'm overlooking, or is it just another kid down the block?
It amuses me when people are surprised by product development. Here are the rules:

- if the consumer will buy it, it isn't a flaw
- if the consumer won't pay extra for it, it isn't a feature

This is how all products in all markets are developed. On the rare occasion that a product developer takes it upon themselves to deliver a better product they will make less profit (reward), and therefore be less competitive and more likely to fail as a business. These companies are often called hobbies. The only way to improve products is to improve ("educate") consumers, and I'm not holding my breath on that one.
MarkPack Home/Packaging Material, Equipment & Material Handling | label systems
Boxes, poly bags, corrugated boxes, bubble wrap, cardboard boxes, packaging supplies, moving boxes, shipping supplies, mailing tubes, plastic bags, cleaning supply, janitorial, tubes, strapping machine, kraft paper.
I think that the 20th and the 21st centuries will go down in history as the best time to be a mouse on this planet.
The Balance of Convention and Innovation
Do you know what Worse is Better means?

btw. the top500 Linux boxes run with OS bypass because the kernel just isn't fast enough. Nice try though.
if(this.innerHTML.toLowerCase().indexOf(tags[i].toLowerCase()) > -1) {

I think 'keywords' is more appropriate than tags.
Now let's not let realism get in the way of a good movie! Every story gets a few points where you suspend belief, then the rest has to make sense in that context. For this one, let's say that it's an exotic material that has only been found on Pandora. Unrealistic, but so is the fact that the aliens are humanoid shaped.
This is both funny and sadly true -- if we tolerated as much failure in people as we did in mice who knows where medicine would be today.
Only in a quoted passage, and Atwood didn't engage with that portion of the quote.
That's a pretty brilliant idea. Currently I just pace up and down my office.
Why are most comments here negative? HAML already shown this technology does have value to a significant amount of people. Someone took the time to write this, seems to have done a pretty nice job and is releasing it for anyone to use. I can't see why anyone would feel the need to put it down in the comments. If you don't like, just don't use it.
GQueues
Funny, but not a correct answer.

The XKCD comic is based on the point that getRandomNumber() gives you a random (i.e. selected randomly at coding time) number, but it isn't a random number generator like its name implies.

The Dilbert troll may be a random number generator.
From the Design page (http://www.tarsnap.com/design.html):

The design of tarsnap was guided by the following four principles:

Security: Backups should be secure against attackers ranging from "script kiddies" up to major world governments, even if they can compromise the systems on which the backups are being stored. Backups are supposed to be a tool for mitigating damage — not a potential vulnerability to worry about!

Flexibility: Backups should be flexible and convenient. When you decide you want to create an archive, you should be able to store in it whatever files you want; if you decide that you want to delete an archive, you should be able to do it whenever you want, without impacting other archives; and there should be no arbitrary limits on how many archives you have stored, how often you can create new archives, or how long you can keep them for.

Efficiency: Backups should be efficient, using a minimal amount of storage and bandwidth. If you archive the same file twice, it should still only be uploaded and stored once; likewise, if you move, rename, copy, or make small changes to a file (e.g., adding a small amount of new data to the end of a log file or mail spool) you should never need to re-upload the entire file.

Utility: Backups should be provided as a utility, with linear (i.e., per-GB) pricing. Forcing people to figure out ahead of time how much data they want to back up so that they can sign up for the right "plan" is dumb, and having some customers subsidize other customers is inherently unfair.
2010 Google Trends for python, ruby, and php
Hitchens would be much more readable if he cut the overwrought (and parenthesized) banter by a third.
I don't think his goal is to be "readable".
This is marketing at its best. Consider the quote:

"today, for titles that have a Kindle edition, Kindle book sales are 48 percent of the physical sales."

That sounds really great: however, how much percent of the books have a Kindle edition ?

In addition to that, more importantly, this is only within the Amazon audience: I bet a lot more Amazon customers fall into the eBook audience than the average audience of bookstores. But by stories like these, a lot of people will be made aware of the success of the eBooks, and will be afraid of missing out on something.

However, over here in The Netherlands, some numbers were released today: 60,000 eBook sales in 2009. Compare that to the total of 50,000,000 books sold, and you can see eBooks still account for about 0.1% of the total book sales. Hardly comparable to the "48%" named in the article.
Baidu can not be sued for copyright infringement in the US
Ask HN: Bypassing "Accredited investor"
If you do not meet the monetary requirement...

Couldn't you invest money in the company and just join the company as an unpaid "employee"?

Is this illegal? or is it bad for the investor or founders?
"but on the other hand"? Isn't that the same hand? "My own practice is to have good, automated tests, but these don't get put into place until the cost/benefit ratio makes the tests worthwhile; which is rarely at the start of the code development and always by the end." and "The important requirements are to have good, complete automated unit tests, to develop code for testing, ..."
Looks like someone had to stand in a line at the airport over the break.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

For example, consider the following two strings of length 64, each containing only lowercase letters, numbers, and spaces:

abababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababab
4c1j5b2p0cv4w1x8rx2y39umgw5q85s7uraqbjfdppa0q7nieieqe9noc4cvafzf

The first string has a short English language description, namely "ab 32 times", which consists of 11 characters. The second one has no obvious simple description (using the same character set) other than writing down the string itself, which has 64 characters.
For example, the whole retreat to an infantile world bit. The examples are cherry-picked. In television, the most acclaimed and talked about shows have characters far more ambiguous than decades past.

We're exiting postmodernism in favor of a world less nihilistic and relativistic, which makes heroism attractive, even when the hero is morally questionable (e.g. Jack Bauer, Dr. House).

On the other hand, casual sex is as common as ever, so nihilism and self-loathing haven't gone away entirely.
Out of interest, what's the source of the Netherlands statistics you've mentioned?
Because;

1) by posting link to it on discussion site you are assumed to be soliciting opinions.

2) it was called "beautiful". A claim so false as to require immediate and forceful contradiction.
Old Ideas Spur New Approaches in Cancer Fight
This is a truly excellent article, and I really appreciate the tone. Calling attention to the false dichotomy between pure TDD and test-last development especially spoke to me.

In the real world, everything is a shade of grey, and the same is true with software testing. Puritanical pursuit of theories and practices is silly. TDD is useful in some instances and not in others. A skilled and experienced programmer should be able to know when it's appropriate and when it's not.
Agree. TDD in the middle tiers of the app is easy, but that's not where the difficulties lie.

Testing the UI layer is quite difficult (at least in the absence of something like MVC, which too many developers can't handle and only want VB-like or WebForms-like coding). And in any paradigm I've ever heard of, real testing of the bottom layers of DB interaction is darned near impossible.

As the OP asserts, imposing a well-defined testing regimen is where most of the bang for the buck derives.
As others have pointed out, you can look at the window and see where the city is. Also, while your argument may be otherwise logically sound, that's a long string of suppositions that I'm not convinced hold. Do you honestly think that what you've described is the rationale for the policy?