skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The tablet point is a red herring. 8-bit micros were hardly portable. So discussions about whether or not you can code on iOS or OS X are tangential.

The real issue is how easily you can code. 8-bit micros hit the sweet spot. No system available today comes close.

You powered up the machine, and the first thing you saw was a BASIC line editor. There was nothing else to distract you. It was instant-on with no setup.

You had to write code to use the machine at all. You even had to write code - albeit one line - to load a game from a tape.

For the gifted, BASIC led naturally to machine code and to graphics made by writing bytes into memory.

No modern environment has anything like the same simplicity, directness, or sense of natural progression.

Xcode, gcc, anything with a build system (never mind a package manager) are insanely complicated in comparison. They're so complicated professionals have to write books explaining them to other professionals.

Even Python - possibly the best candidate for a successor to BASIC - has a quirky IDE and two and a half different popular versions, and a lot of other complications that a BASIC cursor doesn't.

JavaScript? You really have to learn CSS and HTML and jQuery and $(infinitely long list of frameworks goes here) and - oh look, is that the time?

There is a huge difference between encouraging programming by making access to it friction-free and trivially easy, with a learning space that's comprehensibly small but not dumbed-down and toy-like, and making programming possible for users who don't mind hurdling a lot of obstacles.

That first category is completely empty today. It shouldn't be, but it is.
You could just purchase stage lighting.

Stage lighting fixtures use the halogen metal iodide bulbs that he salivates over at the end, and already solve all of the issues he outlined. They provide their own ballasts, are metal shielded, use a lens that acts as a UV shield, have built-in cooling.

In fact the only issues with stage lighting:

1) The cooling wasn't designed to be silent (it isn't expected to be near someone in a near-silent environment)

2) The lamp casing wasn't designed to be near anything flammable (they get very hot)

3) The lens and casing is designed to throw the beam in a very small angle of spread over a reasonably long distance (they're not designed to point at your face from a few feet)

But given that, it seems reasonable that one could put it farther away and reflect it into the space you want lit.

And if he really wanted to go crazy whilst staying with LEDs, then he could just get a few of these: http://pulsarlight.com/products/chroma-range/chromaflood200/ which are used in architectural lighting and each one produces 10k lumens, and they are safe for indoor and outdoor use, are waterproof, and can be driven from standard mains power.
Thanks for pointing that out, and that is what I get for relying on memory.

I did a bit of googling and found this...

http://www.ccfg.org.uk/conferences/downloads/P_Burgess.pdf

... which looks relevant and interesting.
I strongly disagree: the goal with Rust is to offer safe, low-level programming, not to be a test-bed (or whatever) for some programming paradigm. The "discipline" is just a tool to reach the goal. You can see this in the evolution of Rust: the goal hasn't changed, but the tool used to (try to) reach it has. (I know that you mention ignoring the chronology, but ignoring the intent doesn't make sense.)

Put another way: Rust isn't aiming to be top of the pack in terms of enforcing a certain programming style, where as it is aiming to be top of the pack in terms of safe systems programming. (It might happen to be the best language for the former, but that is a consequence of the latter, not the other way around.)
Dunno why you are being downvoted, that sounds correct to me!
"Cotton is just a lousy fiber. On the other hand, wool is a strong and resilient fiber. It also never needs to be washed provided it isn't stained."

You're mixing things up. Cotton is stronger than wool, cotton shirts last many years longer than wool shirts. It's less noticeable with sweaters simply because their fabric is thicker.

On the other hand, wool can be more comfortable to wear because it retains more heat and absorbs moisture better.
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Thanks - failed to pick that reference up.
The brace and bit is still the tool of choice for fine woodworking and cabinet making. It's much more precise than using a power tool and it's easier to control the speed and torque to avoid tearout. It's also useful when removing the bulk of the waste for joinery such as dados or mortises, before finishing the job with a chisel or a router plane or such.

A drill press is better if you have one available and the workpiece is small enough to fit. I wouldn't choose a hand tool for bigger construction projects if there's a very large number of holes to be drilled or screws to be attached.
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Yet AAPL has the same P/E as IBM lol...Wall Street really hates that company...
I don't have SAD (well, I don't notice any particular symptoms anyway). One can imagine that luminaires pointing at a light matt surface ceiling would produce an effect like cloudy daylight, but that might just be cosmetic - the science needs to be done I suppose.
They reference this article, which was also interesting: http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/the-most-important-tech-compa...
A recent Cochrane review found very little high quality evidence in either direction:

http://www.cochrane.org/CD011269/DEPRESSN_light-therapy-prev...

It's not clear to me why light therapy is considered as a well-researched treatment.
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The backspace key equivalent of pen and paper is crossing things out/erasing them. If there's a line of writing I don't like, I'll cross it out and start that piece over.

If you want to get faster and better at sketching diagrams I'd recommend you practice some of the basic techniques that say concept artists use. Straight lines from the elbow with little wrist movement and a little practice, and you'll be drawing things in no time in no time. Unless I need an incredibly straight line, I usually forgo rulers at this point.

If your handwriting has slowed down, or you're cramping, you might want to give that a little bit of practice as well. No need for the cleanest Suetterlin, but getting posture right and yourself up to speed might be worth the time investment. I've been playing around with the palmer method recently, it seems quite nice for this purpose.

Then there's tools. You don't want to be writing with cheap ballpoint pens on rough paper. The lines don't come out properly, which will make you press harder, which leads to fatigue. My current favourite pens are the Uniball eye-fine which is my go to for writing, as its a very smooth disposable ink pen. I've got one of those in front of me with a Kum ergonomic grip. Fountain pens are also very nice, and an entry level Lamy, Pelikan or Pilot will serve you nicely, but they're more suited for linear writing as they may smudge.

Pencils are nice for sketching, but you have to sharpen them, which is annoying. For regular use I use a Faber-Castell Grip 1345 0.5mm mechanical pencil, which is still affordable but doesn't have many of the issues that cheaper mechanical pencils suffer from (broken leads, leads going back in because of insufficient internal grip, etc.). The Faber-Castel leads are also very nice and sturdy and make decent lines even at low pressures.

Paper isn't that variable, as long as you don't totally cheap out on it. I'm particular to .5cm grid paper, but there's circumstances when plain white is nicer to work on.

It's a bit much of a list, but I think a lot about stationery. You don't need all of these, and if you find other tools that do the job for you, then by all means go for them, these are just my personal favourites. One pen and a block of paper is more than sufficient.

But I do think coding and thinking through problems on paper is a valuable skill. One neat thing it allows you to do is to go to a different place than the one you type things at to go think deeply about problems, because it's a lot more portable than a laptop. If like me, you haven't quite figured out how pseudo-code works and still write straight up source code, it also gives you a reason to memorize reserved words which I find does make things quicker ("was it import or include?"). And finally, your IDE won't distract you by having the gumption to tell you that "hey, you aren't using this variable, you lugnut, lookie look, this import is BROKEN! Aint you got any IntelliSense in you?" when you really want to be thinking about more conceptual things and not tiny implementation details. Sometimes you do do your best work when you're away from where you do your regular work.
The hidden lede here is that he ported Bad Apple to a Vectrex. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aFXvoTnsBU

Also Doom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuVnoqFF3II
AWS, or their own version of Box/Dropbox. (I guess that's why they have such a strong partnership with Box now).
Actually torrents are pretty bad for storing "rare" files. Maybe someone should offer a fix.
For example code that computes robotic motion via non-linear optimization of non-linear differential equations? Code that computes CFD of Formula 1 car aerodynamics? Code using advanced computer vision allowing autonomous drones? How many of your developers would understand what is going on? Do you think their code review input would be different than a handful of useless comments such as "here is an extra space", "the name of this class has lowercase letters" etc.?
I thought that a large part of the positive response was due specifically to light in the blue part of the spectrum.
Hence blue LED devices, ironically blue light should help you if you're feeling blue.
I used a light meter app on my iPhone to measure the light outside in London on a sunny winter's noon, and that came in at 25 Mlux; suitable for an operating theatre apparently.
Last year an MRI scan was made of my brain. This was part of a promotion research at the university. All I got back was a lousy screenshot of my brain. ;-)

No but seriously - it was a big shock to see my brain in a picture. It is a really weird experience, similar when I saw myself for the first time on film. Maybe this is a normal experience for the current generation, but I hadn't seen myself on film before age 15. You have an image how you move, what you look like, but then you see this on film, and it's a total shocker. All these small movements you make, typical for you, and everybody around you knows them, except for you. So everybody else sees nothing strange when viewing that movie, except you.

I've seen many MRI scans in films and tv series, although I can't remember one since then. From these I have a general picture of what a brain looks like. I've seen plastic 3D brain models. And then I see my brain and it's so different. It's clearly me, no doubt, but still... Totally weird!!!
Programming is a specialised trade like carpentry or metal working or ship building.

Of course you can build things with it. That's what specialised trades are for.

That doesn't mean everyone needs to learn how to be a carpenter or a brick layer or a mechanic or an architect. Most people just aren't interested, and even if they are, they don't have the mindset for it - never mind the time.

There may eventually be a way to get AI to the stage where people can "program" by telling an AI what they want, and leaving it to the AI to work out the details.

But that's a long way off. (Amazon's Echo is probably the closest thing for the moment.)

For now, the idea that most of the population is itching to play with build systems and scripting languages, or that their lives and/or brains would be improved by same, is pure fantasy.
Suprised they did not include error correction in the requirements list, at least in the canonical/long form.
One very good reason for using a hand drilling tool (one without gearing) is when you drill in hardwoods and you want the hole wall to be wood rather than charcoal. This is a very important thing when drilling up the holes for pins in old pianos, if the hole walls burn during the drilling then the piano will not keep tune.

By using a hand tool you are purposefully limiting your speed (you may still need to stop in between to let the wood cool).

Hand drilling tools still have their place, the above is just one example of many like it. But for most purposes a motorized tool (electricity, air, gasoline) is more convenient and a lot faster.
> The Andrei guy says that Rust places too much emphasis on "clerical" memory management. This is not like a person who learned PHP from a couple w3schools article deciding that Lisp is "weird". The criticism is not that Rust is "weird" or somehow unintelligible, it's a direct critique of the language designers' choices.

It might be a direct critique, but it's a critique of an incomplete picture of Rust: the rules that allow Rust to avoid a GC offer benefits far beyond just that, such as being a core component of Rust's concurrency story[1], and avoiding problems such as iterator invalidation (not generally a memory safety problem in a GC'd language, but still a semantic one, e.g. Java's ConcurrentModificationException).

(The "Weird feature #3" part of the article is exactly this point, although I think it doesn't go far enough in calling out the incomplete picture of Rust implied by the original quote.)

[1]: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.ht...
> Introduce just one diode and the system of diff equations needs to be solved numerically

Not really. Maybe that's why nobody invented anything with a diode in the signal path before computers were commonplace right? Like radio and guitar distortion pedals

> Therefore there is no reason to even bother with Laplace transforms nowadays

Sure, let's forget the math and make engineers totally dependent on numerical simulation without knowing the basics, I'm sure that'll work just fine

> For hobbyists (and the vast majority of professionals) I would consider it completely useless knowledge.

LOL

Sure, in the same way that sorting algorithms don't are useless for computer science students, right? Just call .sort() and you're done!

Also don't forget Digital Signal Processing, that also relies on that "useless knowledge"
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Apple to launch 4 inch iPhone 5SE in March- First look vid leaked
From research around the Internet, D3 is generally seen as safe (http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/vitamin-d/safety... is pretty typical on the safety information) Personally I take a D3 supplement of 2000IU/day during the dark months (along with some other supplements due to a mostly vegan diet, some of which contain low D2/D3 amounts, so my actual supplemented intake is around 2400 IU).
The guy over at the primitive technology vlog on YouTube just added a neat video of himself making a cord drill and a pump drill. http://youtu.be/ZEl-Y1NvBVI
New approach to A.I. development. I opened a site for my research fundraising
Stress-testing airplane wings
Shows how far it has come though, when moms have awareness of Tor & Bitcoin at all.
Causality and physics is also what makes GP's wish near-certainty given continuing technological progress. Hiding information is going to get only harder.
anyone hoping to read about a new music genre will be disappointed
Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley
Overly paranoid... I believe the person who could make robots able to wipe out 5.1M jobs is the one that creates 10M new jobs.
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I thought of Minecraft too, and the other games that can be modded.

The ComputerCraft mod is interesting, especially a version where you can use a simple GUI inside Minecraft itself to create Lua scripts that control robots "turtles" and computers in the game world: http://computercraftedu.com/

A seven-year-old can make programs (maybe from smaller functions that they've already written) that will hopefully find the diamonds, build the houses, and manage the farms of their Minecraft life.

This seems possible because of the limited number of objects and actions in a Minecraft world, while Minecraft is still rich enough for plenty of experimentation, trial and error, and aha moments...
Excellent points - here are a couple more factors:

- Often reservoirs are filled via gravity from elevations that are higher. If the precipitation at those higher elevations is falling as snow, you have to wait for it to melt before seeing the benefits.

- When the ground is dry and the aquifers depleted, less of the rainfall will make it into the reservoirs. I'm from central PA and MOST of our water is actually stored in the natural aquifers (under my area of the state, it's water-fllled limestone caves). So to be fair to el Nino, you have to look at how the aquifers are responding to the rain.

- California would be an unpleasant place if four years of drought were reversed in a single year.
Except C actually NEEDS building whereas JS do not. But then using all of these command-line tools makes JS start to look more like a 'real' programming language and now any noob can't just walk in and take my job since I obfuscated the hell out of something essentially simple.

It is simple Machiavellian protectionism applied at rapid pace. Back in the day it was done within the purposely obscure UNIX environment (not just anyone can be sysadmin!) and now its being re-applied to web environment.
There was this article I read about crowd decision making, but I cannot for the life of me recall where this tidbit was in, but I found the conclusion interesting.

Essentially wisdom of the crowds works when the members have at least some knowledge of the underlying thing. The example I heard first was guessing the weight of a bull at an auction, where the averaged crowd estimate was incredibly close to the actual weight, more so than any of the local expert estimates. The Oscars cited in this article would be another example of something where members of the crowd have some knowledge of the event, and the aggregate knowledge may surpass expert knowledge.

But then there's the same kind of crowd predictions in things crowd members have little to no knowledge of, where things frequently deviate from actual results. Crowd expert systems will fail at things like medical diagnosis or aircraft maintenance which require high degrees of specialized knowledge the average person possessed little of. Applying them to systems like these results in horrible mistakes happening.

If anyone does recall the book or article this was in, that'd be neat, even though I think the point stands to a degree. Crowd intelligence isn't necessarily the panacea it is made out to be.
The error there is that people assume that online reviews are by real, independent reviewers that have bought the product with their own money.

Sampling online reviews does not at all have the same kind of confidence levels as independently interviewing actual users of a product.
aw... i thought there was something I could play with... like this http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au/Telerobot/instructions.html
You need to read more of them, you'll soon get into the rhythm of reading them. Once I figure that it's a long story, I bookmark it for later consumption.

I look at them as mini-novels / long short stories. Since I read non-technical things for relaxation, they fit in. Places like the NYT, New Yorker and Rolling Stone often have long articles like this. (Heads up, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone writes these really long stories with lots of detail. Problem is that he's mostly writing about the scum of the earth, so your blood pressure is rocking before you get done.)

This one was good TL;DR; Guy scammed farmers out of millions, but all the details, back and side stories were very interesting.

Keep trying, there is more out there!
No, for example in Japan there's a decent amount of Japanese movies/TV shows that I'm fairly certain will never be on Netflix USA
I keep my notebooks for many years and occasionally have fun looking back at old ones and trying to understand what it was that I was struggling with at the time. Usually I can't so somehow these doodles were extremely helpful while trying to pin down some problem long enough to be able to solve it but they definitely don't serve their intended goal as long term documentation for me. I probably should simply discard them.
You misunderstand me: I don't disagree that Rust is all about safe systems programming. I disagree that "data race freedom" is Rust's (only) core guarantee, and I disagree that the "seemingly arbitrary rules" are about "data race freedom". They're about so much more, since the same rules get us memory safety as well, among other things.

I don't think that Rust is trying to test out a programming paradigm or whatever, I'm saying that these "seemingly arbitrary rules" get us a lot of things, by proxy of a certain paradigm, and reducing it to "data race freedom" (when it's so much more) is something we should avoid.

(My comment seems to focus on the discipline, I was just using it as a proxy for all of the things it gets us)
Of interest

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10802144
While both are related to lack of day light exposure in the winter time, lack of vitamin D production is another issue, probably not related to SAD.

Regardless, a good reminder. Fish has also other health benefits. I'd still take some vitamin D supplement on top of that.
s/API/microservices/
OMZ Global (AS34329) is an industrial process company (eg steel, manufacturing, ship building, etc). I'm going to assume someone who shouldn't have had access to BGP is trying to use it to block GoogleDNS or similar inside the corporation.

That or some pretty hilariously heavy-handed state-sponsored hijacking.
The fabric can't always be rotated 90 degrees. Some T-shirts body portion is made from tubes of fabric. The ones with seams on the sides have the possiblity, but that highly depends on the weave of the t-shirt material itself. The material is knit in a way that is stretchy, and turning the pattern pieces (the only logical way to turn the fabric 90 degrees) can make the shirt not stretch the right directions when worn and/or force changes in the garment itself.
There's a way simpler option: https://github.com/paulfertser/fso-el/wiki ;)
I also read it as PDB, but in the sense of Windows C++/.NET debugging symbols.

I'd look for a name less likely to be confused with other existing things.
I have one of these on my desk, right next to the monitor. Working in front of it for 30-60 minutes a day really helps. Live at 60.5 degrees north. Also take vitamin suppliments and exercise more in winter; it's hard to tell what causes the improvement. With a lamp like this, you don't have to do anything outside of your routine to get more light. You can keep it 20 centimeters (~1 foot) from your eyes, so reduced irradiance due to distance (as this article points out) is not a problem.

http://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3318_60/energylight
This is nice. It would be even nicer if this was complemented by medical records, and genotyping data (e.g. from 23andme).
OMZ is also Russian, so state-sponsored isn't out of the running.
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I'm a pens-and-notebooks power user, and I know exactly what you're talking about.

The trick is, whenever you're writing anything, add notes for your future self to make sense of whatever you're doing. It's like adding comments to explain your code.

It's a little extra effort and bookkeeping but it makes old content so much more valuable!
IIRC the only commonly access service hosted in that IP block is their DNS servers. There are easier ways to hijack DNS traffic than trying to hijack the entire prefix via BGP.

A casual browse through the other entries seems to suggest that people mess up BGP announcements all the time. My favourite one below involves the AS belonging to S & S Discount Market Pvt Ltd.

https://bgpstream.com/event/18050

Edit: It has happened previously

http://www.bgpmon.net/googles-services-redirected-to-romania...