skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Citizens United was not about corporate personhood at all, it was about freedom of speech.

From the decision: "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

Corporate personhood is irrelevant as far as Citizens United vs FEC goes, except in minor points (Citizens United, rather than a list of members of Citizens United, was one party in court).

The only "rights" corporations have is the same rights that property of their members has. If you pass a law saying my computer can't criticize the government, you've violated my freedom of speech. The court ruled that you similarly can't pass a law saying my corporation can't criticize the government - that would violate my rights, not my corporations rights.
It is only fitting then that you make a gross generalization about how all programmers make gross generalizations about "systems".
Yep. Running in snow with Vibram's is quite cold. I made it about a mile before my feet started feeling numb.
The title was obviously just an attention grabber implying a little about the content, it was the title of the original article after all.

I upvoted because the article weighed in a little on the debate initiated by the other article recently posted. Both made some sloppy claims but also enough interesting points to warrant attention in my opinion.

Edit: I shouls also note most of the readers of HN aren't cancer researchers. They may not spend as much time thinking about this as you, which is why I think instead of this thread, your contribution in the comments would have been more valuable.
So true. Every day when I come home from work my 2 year old runs up to me and asks to play on my phone. (Android in my case) She knows how swipe to unlock, open the apps and find her favorite game.
Very good point. I had lower back pain until I switched to being mostly barefoot or wearing barefoot shoes. After a few weeks of not heal striking, my back pain disappeared. Sample size of one, so take that for what it's worth.

It's not a stretch to think that adding new elements to a complex system that's developed over millions of years may introduce problems. Eliminate the new element, and you may eliminate the problem.
It's time to break them.
(I'm the guy in the video.)

I haven't had a need for Unicode in Lua, but when I stumbled across some information about it, the essential story was that there is nothing stopping you from writing code to manipulate Unicode data (obviously), but there is also nothing built in to help you. All the built in string stuff is ANSI/ASCII/whatever.

However, the language Io (which often gets mentioned in the same breath as Lua, though it's quite different in some ways) has a stronger Unicode story: http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoGuide.html#Unicode
Ah I see.

Don't really like the Blackberry platform, however if MeterRec is a hit (unlikely) I may port it to other platforms. If I did then iPhone would be next likely platform I would target.
There are several reasons that others have pointed out as justifications, I will simply note that the "weekend HN" is a different beast than the Monday-Friday HN. The weekend HN gets lots of political BS and lower-quality stories popped onto the front-page by smaller group of people who up-vote similar stories.
Furthermore, the original article was clearly primarily referencing environment.

"A quote from David put out by the University of Manchester saying "There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle" caused particular consternation."

from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19591-briefing-cancer-...

I believe the OP has just misunderstood what the second article was objecting to.
Well, I think this post (not just the headline on HN, the real one, naturally) is misleading because on an uniformed read it could make you assume that cancer is something that has occurred because of the modern lifestyle - and for that there is no direct evidence.

If you look at the rate of the death toll directly related to cancer, it dramatically increases after about 40 and goes high after 50 (as said, except for hereditary cancer, which always has been "around"), as the story correctly quotes. So if that what you thought is all they wanted to say - that everything is as we thought it was all the time (i.e., lifespan increase has increased cancer incidents) - then even more the question of why vote on it?

So my question is at the very least justified in a sense of "why is this new", but much more because the way I understood the way they put things, it seemed to advocate my former take on it, which is dangerously misleading.
My wife had an 88 SR5 pickup when we met.
Now we have an 88 land cruiser and a 74 fj40
I imagine you wouldn't get very far drawing a picture in MS Paint, either. Some tasks are inherently visual (like laying out controls in a 2D plane.) Do you think you could have managed to build a CLI app?
Facebook Disables All LOLapps Games and Apps
The Lua philosophy is far different from the philosophy of other languages. That's why videos like these, that cover the advantages before the tradeoffs, are a good thing. Knowing the positive things about something really effects my perceptions of the tradeoffs.

Also, Unicode is an odd thing to consider to be an essential part of a programming language. Usually when I hear it I think the person must think it's a part of accepting those that speak other languages. I would point out the fact that Ruby took much longer to get Unicode support than Python as a counterpoint to that, as Ruby's creator, Matz, is Japanese.
I find it curious that it's impossible to find simple leather moccasins to buy. Most of these "barefoot" shoes seem way overengineered and overpriced.
http://luaforge.net/projects/ul-str/

Last updated June 21st 2010.
Readme seems to indicate it supports all the important stuff like compare, concatenate, encode, lower<->upper, Regexp, url escaping.

Says beta and I haven't tried it yet tho : /
A LegalPerson implements the methods signContract, enforceContract, sue, beSued, ownProperty, transferProperty, and I think that's about it. That's what was hiding in my "plus a few more".

LegalPerson does not need to implement getPersonalityType.

If you have a problem with the Bolivian government passing a law making it illegal for anyone besides Bechtel to sell water, take that up with the Bolivian government. That has nothing to do with corporate personhood. They could easily have granted monopoly rights to a flesh and blood person - would that have changed things?

I'm not trying to address the "oh noes, big scary corporations, lets pretend they have a mean personality" part of the movie. I'm just pointing out that corporate personhood doesn't mean what you think it means.
You are wrong http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOLQtHl2Coc
Learning Data Visualization
More specifically, Unicode is one of those things (like bignum support) where Lua's design for embedding assumes that if it's a priority, your project will already have settled on a library for it, so anything Lua came bundled with would just get in the way. The GMP library, for example, is almost four times larger than the whole Lua runtime.

Besides, Lua strings are interned raw byte-arrays (like atoms in Erlang or Lisp atoms), and can have \0s and other arbitrary binary data. While the standard string library is ignorant of Unicode, there's nothing preventing extra libraries from providing Unicode-aware string operations.

Lua also left out native regular expression support, because it would be larger than the rest of the standard libraries put together. You can just load LPEG if it matters.
Perhaps off-topic question: how is HN traffic affected by Startup School? I want to see a traffic graph with each speaker's talk time marked ;)
Yes, right. I even think there is quite plausible space to argue that cancer IS increasing because of environmental pollution. However, that is still quite hard to prove.

Concerning your last quote, I think it is not only related to programmers; It is a common state most prevalent in a human species we call "politicians" :)
How To Deal With Customers
All of the fears he mentions are present all of the time when coding - fear of working on the wrong thing, fear of not being able to solve problem X, etc... Those fears are healthy and there for good reason - to enable the planning and execution of software projects from small to large. In fact, a developer who did not have, say, the fear of working on the wrong thing would...spend a lot of time working on the wrong things.

I'm not really sure I buy the idea that any of these fears would be substantial enough to impact the allocation of time on programming unless the person in question had some issues to work out such as procrastination.

Afraid of what others will say? Don't tell them. The practice is still going to be worthwhile.

Afraid of not finishing? Break down the project into small chunks, write tests to make sure the small chunks work properly, and iterate between planning out the next steps and executing the next step in the queue (in theory, any number of subsequent steps can be added, removed, deleted, or re-arranged after executing any single step).

Afraid you won't know how to solve a problem? Which problem? Did you read the Wikipedia article and consult the relevant textbooks?

Afraid you're not working on the right thing? First figure out what the right thing is, and justify why it is right. If you're working on anything else, stop. Now start planning how to approach the right thing. You are now working on the right thing, for a discussion on when to transition to coding, see Code Complete.
Agree, but I feel like the Emacs core is more stable and complete than the Yi core. Every time I try to do something with Yi, I think, "oh, that's why I still use Emacs".
It will still give you a good taste of the language, but PiL 2nd ed. and the reference manual will be much more useful in the long run.
OK sorry, I was under the assumption that you did not have the revenue to carry both full time. Not that you can only afford one and not have enough left to contract someone on a short term basis. That is a tough one.

Now this is coming from my context and it has a lot to do with how we develop applications, but we do not do server side UI development for the web anymore, we do all of our UI work with JavaScript that communicates to REST services on the back end (we build web apps, not web sites).

Given that disclaimer, I personally would go with the UX designer, so long as s/he is a UX developer that writes the UI. An average back end developer can usually stand up some services that will suffice.

For my group, our reputation is that we can provide web apps that simplify business workflow or increase customer conversion so it is our bread and butter. Please keep that in mind because it naturally creates a bias in my logic.

As well though I think a UX developer (that only does UX) is less utilitarian and therefore if you can afford it, it would be the highest candidate to hire a short term consultant to provide the brain dump for someone else to implement.
"Right now he's not alive or teaching math at Yale"?

Not quite as funny, though.
> Also, Unicode is an odd thing to consider to be an essential part of a programming language.

It really depends on what the language is used for. Web-facing applications are, in general, going to received unicode input, so for them it matters. But for an embedded programmer, for example, it might be utterly irrelevant.

Horses for courses, really. It just so happens that Lua has other properties that are very attractive to web apps too, which the presentation outlined.

-- and yes, still alive and commenting :P
I generally find anything like this to be very cheesy, but that genuinely moved me. Thanks for sharing.
It's a novel insight to me.
The most impressive part is that he imagined how dorky it would be.
Peter Thiel: $100k grant to 20 founders who drop out of school
Switching from Mail.app to Gmail - Pro Tips
Have you ever considered how necessary the "toe" aspect of them are? If the problem is the sole, well fine wear something with a thinner sole. But then you'd really feel like you're just wearing flip-flops or ballerina flats for men. The genius of the Vibram Five Fingers in particular over all other alternatives that meet the same end of improving your gait is that they look ridiculous (read: distinctive). That's why they get all the press mentions (possibly in addition to having a good PR firm) and that's why people wear them: they start conversations. I'm not discounting the value you see in them, but I'm curious if there were other similar products that you considered, and if you find any particular value in the toe-sock nature.
As someone who does a lot of interviewing at RethinkDB I agree that these numbers are in many ways bullshit. Firstly they're pretty clearly hyperbolic (I think we all knew that already). However I think they also tend to be the result of a short memory span. Whatever the actual numbers may be (we should keep track) they are bad enough that every once in a while you get a run of ~5 interviews that really make you scratch your head. Which is about the time that these posts get written.

The linked list question is designed as a smoke test. Admittedly it's a piece of code that one can do loads of coding without ever having to write. But bear in mind that in an interview we're looking for some code indicative of one's ability in the space of an hour, code that you actually write for production takes weeks-months-years and we simply don't have that kind of time. Questions like this have a high signal to noise; they're just esoteric enough that few people actually have a full implementation committed to memory but simple enough that anyone who gets the concepts of pointers and recursion should know just what to do.

When runs of bad candidates pop up we do indeed reinspect our process. One major improvement to the process is to ask people question their resume suggests they should be more comfortable with. Ask questions in the more esoteric languages they know, ask questions in the field they did their research on. Obviously this greatly increases the chance of correct answers, thus these type of questions have a smaller correlation between a correct answer and a good hire. But what these questions can really do well is convince you that when this person understands something, he really understands it; he gets it well enough that he can very quickly explain it to me. This is very good sign in a potential hire.
FWIW, I use a simple format inspired by stuff like markdown. A Mail-like header for metadata, followed by optional headnotes, ingredients prefixed with "- ", and finally instructions.

Example (hope this comes through ok):

Title: Recipe Title Here
Alternate: Alternate title here
Category: Entree
Flickr: 1234, 3204, 29384
Author: A U Thor
Image: foo.jpg

Some optional headnotes. Usually one paragraph.

Additional paragraphs separated by newline.

* Ingredient Heading
- ingredients start with a dash
- 1 cup milk
- 1/2 small onion, chopped
* Maybe another ingredient heading
- 1 tsp another ingredient

Instructions follow the ingredients, with blank lines separating
the paragraphs.

More instructions.

I'm currently using these text files and a bunch of home-grown software. I started out with YummySoup, exporting to this text format by hitting their CoreData database with a little python app. (You need the .mom file in the app bundle to pull this off.)

For my stuff, I got to define the format, so it's pretty simple to deal with. Stuff like mealmaster seems to vary widely in practice and is tricky to parse.

I also allow headings in the instructions, too, so I do have to peek ahead to see if a starred line precedes an ingredient line or not.
This article is from back in 2008, and does go through waves of popularity, so you might have seen the same brand of shoes each time because it's this same article each time. :)
I agree and think people are getting caught up with writing complete running code on a whiteboard which should not be what the whiteboard is for. A whiteboard is for writing pseudocode to quickly build algorithms, work on design or solve other 'thinking' type problems. It's not for testing if someone knows obscure syntax issues (there are actual tests for that!).

In school we were taught to work through algorithms and other design using pseudocode and pencil and paper. Doing this also helped reenforce that languages are very interchangeable using the same algorithms and designs. I wonder if that is simply not done anymore in school?
No phone left behind?
As a Finnish software dev I can say that in these days native support for Unicode is a must. We have a couple of special characters in the alphabet (åäö) and if you have to do a lot of manual work to use these, the programming language is pretty much unusable for real world stuff that involves any use of Finnish.

The fact that Ruby took so long to get real Unicode support is due to Japanese resisting Unicode in favor of their own encodings, EUC-JP and Shift JIS, just like Finnish used to cling to ISO-8859-1(5) for so long.
Mark Zuckerberg On Facebook’s Strategy For China (And His Wardrobe)
Gmail Security Checklist For Safer Gmail Account
It's likely you keep seeing the brand because they were the first to market, and everyone else has been so slow to follow that they're the only serious game in town right now. That doesn't stop this article or any of the others you've seen mentioning them from being a PR piece they wrote or promoted, however.

As far as conspiracies go, you don't actually need to buy their product to try it for yourself - just take off your shoes, run for a bit, then try to maintain the same stride when you strap your shoes back on. The only reason you'd need "barefoot shoes" is if you like it and end up wanting to run barefoot often enough to warrant wearing them to protect your feet from glass and other dangers.
I'd say lua is great, well good, it's just that it's entirely reasonable, which makes it kind of boring ;) It as been the least surprising language I've used.
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This seems very useful had not given much thought to pricing grids (easy oversight I guess). Though I don't know about hiding the free packages, if your not going to promote it why have it and surely a free customer is better than none. I Think this calls for some A/B testing.
I can feel a difference while I walk, as most of my foot lands and then my toes touch. I can't speak for whether that actually represents any measurable benefit to it, gait-wise.

I suspect that it'd make you more stable just because your toes can settle on slightly different levels on uneven ground, but that's just guessing.

Mainly I like that it's letting my toes spread out as much as they feel like. My toes are less lumped together now after a day in shoes. (And my old shoes weren't overly narrow or anything like that.)
You're right - I missed the date. It's been different articles before, but the time sounds about right.
Well, that is a good answer, too. I did not read it that way but then seeing it that way (based on pollution) actually is quite agreeable - although not proven. (We simply do not conclusively know the impact of cancer rate increase because of pollution except in special cases where the pollution is above "normal" - at least I am not aware of any such publication.) Also, what cancer-related organizations quote as bad - "There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle" is exactly that - a very misleading phrasing. So, yes, you can interpret this article two ways: either "pro" Schütz or "pro" David/Zimmerman. I understood the article as advocating the latter, however, to my relief most people seemed to anyways see it as it should be understood. So, maybe my question was not clear in the first place - or, more like it, I think, you guys have quite elegantly resolved my concerns :)
Quite important, actually, I'd bet. They keep your toes from toeing-in like essentially every shoe does. Just look at how many people have bunions - they're almost exclusively caused by shoes, plus some genetic causes which typically start much later in life.

There's also a very big difference in toe strength from having them be able to move separately, and I've had a noticeable improvement in balance from wearing them. And I'm pretty stable anyway. When your toes are stuck moving together, they don't develop any ability to do so, and toes are pretty important to walking / balancing.

(edited for toes instead of bunions, as I think it makes a better case)
Thanks, but the credit for organizing it goes to Kirsty Nathoo, Jessica, and Kate Courteau, and of course BASES. They organized everything. All I did was show up and speak.

This was a good one though. The speakers really delivered.
You're certainly not alone here. In a couple of cases in the not-too-distant past, I've upvoted HN posts that I thought were on the crappy side, but I was very interested to see the discussion in the HN comments. I don't do this too often, but now & then it seems like a worthwhile thing to do.
If you really want to keep wearing something similar to the five fingers over the winter take a look at some wetsuit boots. They come up your calf a bit, have a flat decent sole on them and will keep your feet quite warm. Keep in mind that your feel will probably sweat a bit in them, but that thin layer of water is what will end up keeping them warm.

Example: http://www.billabong.com/eu/product-cat/225/booties#_
Pi seconds equals one nanocentury
You should try some Nike Frees. They are very flexible and have the flattest sole of most athletic shoes. Other than the Five Fingers talked about above the Frees are the closest thing to barefoot without being barefoot.
It also prevents the user's id from being leaked in the http referrer header
Also available on its official site: http://www.lua.org/pil/
Moccasins certainly do meet many of the same goals as these shoes. But the area they're missing in is having enough of a sole to feel confident while walking through an urban area. There's enough random broken glass on the ground that I wouldn't entirely feel comfortable knowing that there's just leather between me and it.

I'll agree that the "barefoot" shoes are on the more expensive side, but I'd expect that's a function of being in a relatively niche market.
I've been toying with it a bit today, and it's definitely the best recipe manager I've tried out on the iPad. In no particular order, some notes:

- When entering the recipe name consider changing the autocapitalizationType property on that text field to UITextAutocapitalizationTypeWords.

- Some sort of auto-numbering for the preparation steps field would be nice, but I do understand this is non-trivial. Certain recipes have multiple concurrent groups of steps, so the solution would either have to be perfect or free-form would be better.

- When creating a recipe in landscape mode, the keyboard hides a couple of the fields in the modal panel. You have to manually dismiss the keyboard in order to see them.

- Also when creating a recipe, consider auto-selecting the default recipe name for easy deletion as well as defaulting the category to the currently selected category rather than "Uncategorized".

- Overall I very much appreciate the simplicity of the app. I'd just like some way to bulk import my current database into it and I'd likely use it more frequently than my current desktop app (SousChef).