skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your example is just the type of literary reading that turns off students. When they encounter it without a more gradual learning curve, what they actually learn is both:

1. The king has no clothes.
2. Semantics isn't important in the humanities; it's just playing with syntax and vocabulary.

I wished they taught it more like another sense of humor. Like funny things, authorial intent can make it better or worse, but the thing itself has most of the inertia. Also like funny things, requiring explanation deflates it. When you're just watching a movie or a television show, or reading a book, and it hits you, it makes the narrative so much more rewarding.

As for why authors don't just come out and say their points: nobody likes being told what to believe. It makes audiences irritated, suspicious, bored, etc. (which is how people react to ham-fisted symbolism). But when the pieces are left out for you to discover "for yourself," you'll be a lot more receptive.
Not that Google has a legacy of great design, but don't all these points apply to Material as well?
I'm an experienced Lisp programmer and most of it looks fine to me from a random sampling, as far as formatting goes.

Sometimes a closing parenthesis is on a line by itself:

(defun foo ()
...
)

(let ((x y)
(z w)
)
...)

Historically, it's not been unheard of that Lisp experts (even implementors) do this sort of thing. Exhibit A, randomly picked source file inside CLISP:

http://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/clisp/ci/default/tree/src/clo...

Some of Xah's indentation is inconsistent:

(function
(one space)
indent like data)

(function
(two space indent)
like code))

Not too much stands out otherwise; the code is readable.

I'd have to read deeper to see whether things that are usually done one way are done differently for no good reason. What I would consider "unidiomatic" would be, for instance:

(if (not (null list)) ...)

rather than

(if list ...)

(Any Lisp dialect requiring code such the former is labelled differently, namely "idiotic".)
Why I Hate C++ Cast Operators (2003)
Impressive leveling. And it auto lands. Definitely competition for CyPhy Works Level One drone technology.
Ascend- Send articles to your Kindle
That weather readout would look great with some slick weather icons:

https://erikflowers.github.io/weather-icons/
Wow! Way to stereotype there. I guess the name fits.
7 Ways to 2x Your Revenue Growth by Putting Your User Data to Work
This is awesome!

It would be nice if this mirror could sync with your main device using wi-fi. So it would always be up-to-date with your stock options, birthdays and stuff like this.
We throw away the images because we're quite sure at this point that we're extracting all the useful information (the DNA sequences) that we can from them. This was not true in the early days of Illumina sequencing, when it was not uncommon the save the images and run an alternative base caller on them to try and get improved sequences when the standard base caller failed.
I once wrote a small python code that spat out a melody made from the difference between consecutive prime numbers. Probably not of significant import for mathematical research. But fun to listen to.
This is absolutely fan fucking tastic!!
Thanks. Any suggestions for a purchasable low-cost, low-power, low-medium resolution, largish screen?

EDIT: Self-suggestion : https://www.adafruit.com/products/1287.... and the linked to tutorial has some suggestions.
I agree with the basic and maybe its specially true for a project like linux kernel but there is another side to it too.

I usually refactor after understanding the code specially oddball sections which usually means it's handling some non trivial corner case. Now there has been a fair amount of cases where a rotten code has survived and caused other bits of rotten codes to be added because everyone keeps thinking it must have a purpose when it really doesn't. It is a hard problem but sometimes you have to take a bit of risk specially if the current code/interface keep decreasing the quality of all the new codes surrounding it.

And it's one of the reason when reviewing code I am extra hard on code that solves problem in a complicated way or do extra pointless work since those can cause these type of confusion in future.

I actually did a fair amount of this at work in the latest release. It was a combination of business rule change, data structure change and since it was the core security model we also did major interface change (the one linus is mentioning) so that the rest of the app/developer can work on a simpler/easier model. I spend more days discussing and planning the change then the actual coding for once and despite the few bugs at QA it had been a success. It had been one of the biggest change in my 10 years of work and one of the most stable. My takeaway from that is to iterate over the design a lot then iterate over the code a lot before really pushing it everywhere and probably have some break in between (if it's important enough) to have multiple go at it with fresh perspective.
That's funny, I've actually been doing the exact same thing, RPi2 and a Hover. I have a few blog posts about it here which I was going to post after the project is finished.[1]

I actually just bought all the wood to build the frame and I'll hopefully be doing next weekend.

[1]http://alaycock.github.io/blog/
Took me a second to realize that actual screwdrivers don't cause sticky keys.
I don't have a source, but possibly a rationale you might agree with: It tarnishes records.

Mark McGuire destroyed the home run record, and then it was discovered he was using juice. Would he have broken it either way? Maybe, we'll never know.

You can argue that baseball stadiums shape changes over time, bat technology changes, we learn more about nutrition and training, etc. and they're valid points. That should be how records are broken naturally. It diminishes the achievement, to me, when those before you did it naturally, and you did not.

Would lance have won that many tours, and in a row? Maybe, but now we'll never know, and its a record that may never be broken naturally. Yes, I realize its not actually an official record anymore.
I'm surprised they left out The Engineer Guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp33ZprO0Ck

Not very prolific, but interesting and in-depth explanations of all sorts of engineering topics - from the function of microwave ovens (that's the link up there ^ ) to what keeps nuclear weapons from proliferating.
Everyone thinks they understand what they are implementing but then inevitably encounter some unexpected "feature". Tests help, but yeah... halting problem.

As for those great programmers how many sloc can they write without any compilation error and have the application executing as intended? If they make mistakes then bugs can also happen.

It's only a matter of code complexity.
What are BI / Data visualization tools that work on top of Hadoop
Can you guys recommend any BI / Data visualization tools that work well directly over Hadoop/Hive?
Yes, lots of good info in the Fast Company article.
that would be way too many perspectives to read about.

its not like the world is lacking personal blogs
This isn't a security patch. This is pre-downloading an entire OS upgrade without the user asking for it.
How Hackers Violate Privacy and Security of the Smart Home
I have found the flat design incredibly difficult to use.

In particular, the new Apple Music app was almost completely undiscoverable for me. It wasn't until I was reading patch notes that I realized that it had a key feature that I had been searching the UI for more than a month. That feature was to show only the music available offline, and it's hidden behind a down arrow next to a heading label. (Rather than the ... that other menus have).

Apple has never been perfect at UIs, but they've always been better than this in my experience. Deciding to hide key information and be as cryptic as possible works great for designers that already know the UI, but it works terribly for users that are still learning it. This type of elementary mistake, all too common by those who are deep in the act of creation, is best corrected by stepping back from the problem and approaching everything with the mind of a beginner. That or giving the device to an outsider and observing them, good old fashioned trials.

That's what UX needs these days, not more fashionistas trying to remove data and UI cues. The industry needs a big wakeup call. Mobile and even the web (like Google Docs) are becoming a churn of bad experience.
Not sure what you're talking about. The "underground" lower level is all conference / presentation rooms. No one works there. The simulated sunlight you're referring to is a large art piece installation in the building and the creator chose to simulate light as he saw it during a particular sunset (in Arizona IIRC? It's been a while...)

Check out the new SF office we opened up if you're looking for a more West coast feel.
I dunno, getting the hell off Oracle to Postgres is fashionable as hell. We're doing it and EVERYTHING IS BETTER.
the dramatic loss of color and warmth when the new look came about took me back to the days when I had a PS/2 50z with the VGA gray scale monitor. While everything can look well defined it does at times look a little too stark; if software could have a dystopian air to it compared to what came before they did well.
Unfortunately this comment is really a good summary of the article. I guess it makes marketing sense to cut up big blog posts into two, but as it is the article really is vapid, while it could easily have been the article that makes me consider CitusDB over MongoDB for a particular application.
Yes, and also to Microsoft's flat UIs these days as well. But that doesn't stop criticism of Apple's UIs from being relevant.
$100M Investment into Sustainable Jet Technology
> language drives human interaction.

Very much so - and another reason I am all the more bitter about the waste of time that lit classes were: they also soured me to the whole thing for a long while.

That journalism class was great because, indeed, we also discussed how a story can misinform, even given the same underlying facts. I thought that was very useful and interesting. It was, like you say, about communication, its uses and misuses. The lit stuff never seemed to be about that, it was about obfuscation and the teacher's (?) interpretation of whatever.
Exactly...and I think that only really bad people would disagree.

Often in literature, the prevailing opinion is backed up by material published in journals or highly cited books. And generally to get published in a journal, you need some compelling evidence. So, if I want to venture that T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land as a response to his own struggles with mental illness, I can back that up with citations from journals, or published books. If I want to go even further (and get an even better mark), I can go into the letters where he first hand talks about his struggles.

Just because I can back up my opinions with published material, it still doesn't mean that my opinions are correct.

To reverse your metaphor, let's say that you think pigs can fly and I think they can't. You say that pigs can fly because you saw it happen. I say that pigs cannot fly because of these respected books on physics and pig anatomy. You might actually be correct, but I should still win an efficiently run debate.
why don't people have their home computers automatically join cloud computing clusters during the day so they can be used and paid for computation while the people are at work?
This is a game in which agents can choose their arrival time. Maybe it wouldn't work so well in a scenario where everyone is trying to get something done during lunch hour or after work.
Does it re-evaluate the complete thing at every change?
Or is it smarter, and only recomputes things that need recomputation?
Do the astronauts even do much during the shaky part of takeoff?
The specific number of columns may be arbitrary, but you have to specify some number or your codebase will turn into a mess.

I've seen it happen - you'll get that one guy who likes to zoom a single editor to the full size of his monitor and then just type, type, type all the way to the far edge, making it impossible for anyone else to figure out what the hell he's doing without switching to his idiosyncratic editor setup. He'll see nothing wrong with nesting control structures fifteen or twenty levels deep, because it will all look completely reasonable on his screen, and he'll happily glom up absurdly complicated 30-40 character long identifiers because he has no taste and autocompletes all his identifiers anyway. An organization like Google can't tolerate that kind of crap and a strict code formatting guideline provides a simple first line of defense toward keeping it under control.

Limiting line length makes it easier for developers to work on each other's code, because they won't have to go resize all their terminals or change the length marker on a per-file basis. It's also a mechanical way to push developers toward shorter parameter lists and shorter, less deeply nested functions, which are good practice anyway.

(For what it's worth, I too have been programming for around 30 years, and Google is also the only place I've worked that had an official style guide with line limits. My reaction is the opposite of yours: I loved it, and I've tried to lobby for the practice everywhere I've worked since. I don't care what the details of the style guide are so long as they are enforced consistently - it's a really great feeling to drop into some far-distant file written by people you'll never meet and still find that the code is clear and consistent with the code you work on every day. I like 80 columns because it lets me fit three full size editors on each monitor, but I would be just as happy with 96 or 110 or 132 or whatever as long as there is some consistent limit I can count on.)
Maybe they can divert money from their athletic departments to pay their PhDs $20k more per year?
That analogy breaks down a little - one of the reasons to lament this is because public universities publish their research for others to consume and build upon. Research within private companies stays inside those companies.
> ... it's hard for me to argue against telling people what they can do to their own bodies.

This isn't a broad dictation, though. This is athlete governing agencies working to protect the "purity" of sport. Participating in those associations means you follow their rules: don't want to follow their rules? Don't join.

You're more than welcome to start a competitor to Union Cycliste Internationale and announce that doping in your sponsored events is allowed. But in this group, you're required to dope (to be competitive). And now you're back to effectively telling people what to do to their own bodies.

> It's really not okay for high school athletes to use steroids.

At what point do we transition from "not ok" to "people can do what they want to their own bodies"? Age 18? What about parents who authorize plastic surgery for their 16 year olds—can they authorize doping regimens, too?

So then we're back to standards and sports governing bodies. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) says "no steroids". NFL/NBA/etc. says "A-OK". What about NCAA?

We can draw the line that says, "steroids for professionals only", but that sets up a chicken-or-egg scenario. To play on a professional level, you have to dope, but to dope, you have to play on a professional level. How does one become a professional, then?
Do musicians actually use PEDs? How would they help?
Actually no. Take a look at the Google clock app - it actually addresses a lot of the negatives in this article. The article argues that Apple is bad at UI design, not that flat & material are wrong.
I agree the engineer/scientist move of dismissing all softer things as "horse shit" is regrettable. The older I get, the more I appreciate the sorts of subtlety I would have previously called nonsense. Especially so as I become better at introspection.

On the other hand, I think that an allergy to overextended metaphors and other woolly thinking is a handy bias in an engineer. And a lot of the flights of literary analysis would be much more palatable to we more literal-minded if it were framed as, "When I read X I enjoy thinking about it as Y" rather than "X is Y". Yet another case where a little E-Prime [1] would prevent a lot of argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
"Apple used to lead the world in interface design" does not mean their designs were without serious flaws. Nobody would get up and defend System 7 as the pinnacle of usability, it was downright quirky and strange in places, and by the time System 9 arrived it'd gotten downright surreal. Things only made sense in the context of history.

The difference between Apple and other companies is not that Apple gets it right every time, but that Apple genuinely tries. Some other companies literally do not care how their products look, they just ship whatever the engineering team cobbles together with snippets from from Google Image Search.

Microsoft's making similar efforts lately, so that's encouraging to see, and even Google is making strides in reducing the amount of rampant ugly in their applications.
Serious question.. what is AirBnb doing that's highly innovative and somewhat speculative? Got any links?
Lies, Damn Lies, and A/B Testing
> ... has produced some of the best industrial design in the history of consumer products.

Like the completely non-ergonomic, design-over-function, keyboards?
Github pages didn't show up on my radar until recently, but it's extremely simple to setup a basic blog using Jekyll.

You get static hosting, a readable DNS name, ability to use a custom DNS domain name, Github interrogations, and syntax highlighting of code examples all for free.

https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages/
I'm using these for my smart mirror project, and tied them by index to the Yahoo Weather API.[1][2] There isn't a perfect one-to-one relationship between the API codes and the icons, but it's pretty close.

My one complaint about the icons is that they flow outside of the boundaries of what you'd expect them to be contained in, which can lead to some accidental overlap if you aren't careful with your margins.

[1] https://github.com/alaycock/SmartMirror/blob/master/public/j...

[2] https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/documentation.html#codes
Peter Thiel Backs Biotech Unicorn Fighting Cancer Stem Cells
Say I build a house in a town near a forest in Idaho. Now, there are 20,000,000 acres of national forest in Idaho of which 200,000 are currently burning. So only 1% of the forest is burning and mostly in remote locations in which there are no roads. Even if one of the fires happens to be near me, I am not too worried: I have a metal roof and a fuel-free buffer zone around the house. Additionally, the local fire department has my back.

This is a one-time event for me, because the same forest won't burn again in my lifetime. The chance of my house being destroyed by a wildfire in any ten-year period is practically zero.

Note that high deserts also burn, and the wind moves those fires along at a frightening pace. Forest and desert are pretty much the only choices in places like Idaho or Montana.
At least do the hacker thing and explore the system for weaknesses. Some of my most memorable times from school were, when asked to interpret a work, intentionally crafting the most defensible interpretation I could find that would be offensive to the most people. Sometimes I was praised for my creativity, sometimes I was castigated for getting the "wrong" interpretation, and sometimes I would delightedly watch a professor squirm, knowing that they had painted themselves into a corner by previous disarming any attempts to refute interpretations to prop up their own.
How can I report an Uber driver who is not my driver?
Ask HN : Absolutely the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Can someone explain, how the phone screen is being displayed in the mirror? It is behind the mirror, it's not in front of it? Since the mirror won't understand touch, there is no touch based control and one needs to pull the phone out to change app etc right.

Thanks
It's a link to an ad to pay for the Washington Post? That's pretty useless.
not sure if this has been mentioned, but this sounds like the Rubber Ducky

http://hakshop.myshopify.com/products/usb-rubber-ducky-delux...

just contributing something of interest.
Xkcd: I Could Care Less
I created and manage hiTask, https://hitask.com the Team task and project management tool. Started as pure web application 7 years ago it is now platform with multiple components, google and outlook sync, apps for iOS and android. Competing with companies like Asana and Basecamp that employ tens, hundreds of people.
Building the Viral Site “Twins or Not” Using Azure
The author is not claiming that all of Apple's hardware products are home runs (I certainly agree with your take on the keyboard, and can't stand the Magic Mouse), but that some of them have been absolutely world class. Do you disagree with that?
20 Life Changing Productivity Tools – Infographic
Antler Design Wedding Favors for “The Hunt Is Over” Engagement Party
Show HN: Proof-of-concept HTML5 version of Starcraft 2
PSA: With climate scientists having 97% consensus that climate change is mandmade (NB not wheather it exists or not), and the remaining 3% been shown to be seriously biased (to say the least) and having ties to interested parties,
there is no such thing a a "climate change skeptic". There is only "climate change denier".

Thank you for your attention.
Glad you like mlbriver.com. I can't believe how it's expanded my knowledge of baseball in just a few days. It's been a long time since I got caught up. Too busy with other things I guess.
OP's link covers more topics but I prefer Steve Yegge's emergency elisp for quick and dirty things.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/emergency-elisp.html
Location: Baltimore, MD, USA

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Software is harder than hardware. Both are incredibly hard, but software is harder. Software has to rely on the hardware, that's why any truly serious builder of software deeply understands the hardware and Apple understands that, with limited resources, hardware is more important to get right.

You can always change software later. Hardware stays in the consumer's hands for years. Bad decisions there will go uncorrected, even if you take the extraordinary step of issuing a recall, not everyone will bring in their kit.

This dynamic means that every company that has limited means, that is to say, every company, is going to have shitty software. Because hardware is more important, so it gets all the design attention. But software is harder. And if you're not doing hardware, like Microsoft, then your software is still going to be shitty because you don't understand hardware.

It's why your VCR was famously hard to program, it's why the entertainment system in your car is horrible, it's why the old stuff that doesn't have any software at all is way more reliable than the new stuff that does.

The answer here is not to criticize Apple, but to help them out by engineering better software. I used to hate texting on an iDevice because I loved using Swype and iOS didn't have it. Apple responded to the market with Smart Keyboards, they're not perfect but it beats the old way. Now they have an ad blocking API for browsers.

Apple is the tech world's quality champion. No other company in the world can pump out quality like Apple. But again, software is really fucking hard. So let's work together here, folks. Show the world a new way.