skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This prediction only holds true if the market has enough viable options of electric cars. As for now, Tesla and Nissan are the only two all electric cars.

I just purchased a diesel car and diesel fuel IS at around $4.40 per gallon... I would have gladly purchased a electric car.

Tesla's price point is too high and their lower priced model is still a little ways away from release. Nissan Leaf can run only for 100 miles before it needs to be charged. This makes it a difficult substitute for a regular gasoline car because it will not be able to satisfy most Americans driving needs.

Therefore, for this prediction to hold true, its important to have enough viable options in market.
(On using *, the trick is not to put two in the same paragraph with words between.)

You're right, "dereference" was a poor choice of words because it means something more specific in Perl. And I think a programmer would need at least a year of experience before they could possibly understand your main paragraph, while PHP was dumbed-down enough to be approachable by amateurs.
Same thing for php. I really don't want to use Eclipse, but its a pain navigating source code using cscope. For instance, if you are looking for a method definition, it may list hundreds of matches. It has no notion of semantic analysis. It doesn't know what class is calling the particular method and if you're looking for something like $instance->execute, you're screwed.
God, I seriously hope string-switching doesn't catch on.

In a prev job, I saw this block of code -

-------

public int getDaysInMonth( String month ) {

if( month.equalsIgnoreCase("january")) return 31;

else if( month.equalsIgnoreCase("february")) return 28;

else if( month.equalsIgnoreCase("march")) return 31;

else if( month.equalsIgnoreCase("april")) return 30;

...

}

-------

My eyes bled. I said folks, just map the month to an int M in range [1..12] and simply write 1 line of code

return 30+((M+Math.floor(M/8))%2;

( except for 2, which is 28 or 29 depending on a leap year)

I was overruled. "We are programmers, not mathematicians" was the response!!!

Now they'll happily use this string-switch to do

---------

switch( month.toLowerCase() ) {

case "january" return 31;

case "february" return 28;

case "march" return 31;

case "april" return 30;

...

default : return -1;

}

-------

which is an even nastier abomination :(
Indeed. All I see here, is an aptitude-driven advancement system (Kahn) coming into conflict with an age-based advancement system (public schools).

Clearly, if we're to reap the benefits of an aptitude-driven advancement system, we need to erase the core assumptions of the public school curriculum. (age-based peer groups, pass/fail an entire grade at a time, etc)

When students are permitted to progress in different subjects at different speeds, the desire to see "brakes" put on tools like Kahn's will evaporate.
too simplistic to be allowed here.

Allowed by whom?

Cato only exists because advocating private ownership of profit turns out to be profitable

And this is somehow not simplistic?
I've read though most of our comments here and I have a question. Are people concerned with the education of their neighbors kids?

I'll be able to afford private schooling for my children. The average demographic here probably can. I relish at the idea of seeing how a Khan Academy Classroom could teach my child (maybe in some sort of "Free school" environment?) and I realize that public education probably wont be able to cover that.

What I worry about more is that my children's friends wont be able to go to a private school, and while I realize Khan Academy is free online. Most kids will probably be sent to public schools.

I was educated in public school and I don't think it was horrible but I do think we can do better.

I think the question is;
How do we bring this type of learning to public education?
Earlier this year there was a "Socialbot" project where bots controlled Twitter accounts and were awarded points for follows and replies from humans. The team that won (http://aerofade.rk.net.nz/?p=152) programmed the bot to ask questions and use some Twitter culture (Follow Friday). There are also quite a few funny conversations in the post.
I'm a little disappointed that people are still talking about tagged ints. There are so many better ways to avoid the overheap of integers being a refrence type (namely type specializing everything under the sun, particularly your JIT'd code and data structures).
> Can't imagine where I'd be without the PC revolution.

Probably it wouldn't be much different. The revolution would have happened anyway, but with Apple, Atari, Amiga or someone else.

And perhaps multitasking GUI OSes would be mainstream 5-10 years earlier ;)
More (Logitech) Google TVs returned than sold
The mere presence of authority could have been threatening to some people. We'd need studies for this too, though.
Strictly speaking, government-operated schooling is an oligopoly, and one very stringently protected against meaningful competition. As the other two replies at your reply level I see here pointed out, a private business having the same market position in the United States and the same preferences that government-operated schools have would probably be illegal.
I clicked back to the prelude because I didn't know what RO was but then came across this sentance:

"Thanks to 17 USC 102(b), some privacy laws, and inter USA-Canada-China-Korea legal confusions, running emulated software is apparently legal, as long as you make it really annoying and costly to find you."

Can someone explain this? There are lots of Ultima Online shards that run without problems. On top of this classic emulation software has been legal for years (I'm thinking NES, SNES, MAME, console and system emulators, etc). Or is it not legal at all?
In Thomas Sowell's A Personal Odyssey, he recorded an exchange with a black student (p.223):

"I just don't understand it, Dr, Sowell," he said. "The Jewish students do twice as well as we do."

"Only twice as well?" I said. "When they work three times as hard? What I can't understand is how you fellows do as well as you do, with no more effort than you put into it."

Earlier in the book, he talks about how he nearly flunked out of Harvard during his first semester there because he was working like he had at Howard and it wasn't enough. (pp.118-9)
Have anyone done any performance comparison with the openjdk yet? GC related tests would be of high interest :)
Steve Perlman unveils white paper explaining “impossible” wireless data rates
I used a lot of systems. AFAIK, they all give some way for you to set your own transaction ID, and they all provide you with a gateway transaction ID, too. A good system will have a backend process to reconcile records based on one of these and would of course flag anything where the dollars don't match. This is the (inadequately explained) basis of my contention that the price editing is not a big deal. Of course, it could be a big deal if they botched a lot of other things, but by itself it doesn't mean there's an actual serious problem.
Looks like this version is not open source. Is there an open-source version of Java 7? Edit: Yes! http://openjdk.java.net/ has an announcement at http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/announce/2011-July/00.... So why would anybody "accept the Oracle Binary Code License Agreement for Java SE"?
The Axis of Eval: Everything you always wanted to know about JavaScript...
This is not related to today's events but an older article.
On its own, the fact that women represent less than 50% of the people involved in programming is not proof of sexism being worse in IT than in other fields; many other fields show significant gender imbalance.

On its own, the fact that a number of women involved in IT complain publicly via the internet of sexism is not a proof that the situation is worse in IT than in other fields; women in IT are more likely to communicate via the internet than those in other fields.

Yes, there are other factors in play (parents & school counsellors bias, peer pressure, etc.) that influence the choice of a career. But when you put it all together, it is hard to deny that there is a sexist attitude in IT. The fact that there might be a sexist attitude in other fields is not a valid excuse for not doing the right thing and call out those that show a lack of respect towards women in IT. [Yes, the same point could be made about other fields.] To deny that there is a problem is to be part of that problem. Respect from others is not something one should earn, it is something everyone should expect to receive.
It seems like Google is a bigger offender than most tech companies. At least at IBM or Cisco they will tell you exactly where you are going to work before you accept the job offer. You will probably be stuck there or get moved around in the future and won't have much choice on what project you want to work on next. But at least you are told what you will be working on, unlike Google.
I don't understand this code. In the Ruby example, mouse_x() appears to be a method on the current object, in the Python one it's a method on some other object (a module named "processing"?). Since the code examples are the same, I'd say whichever language I'm wrong about is the less clear one.
I don't think the issue involves monopolies as much as a historically based needs.

Our education systems were formed as part of the drive that became known as the industrial revolution. Standardisation was a key focus, because people needed to be able to become part of the industrial processes that surrounded their day-to-day lives working in factories and offices.

Workers needed to possess skill sets that are known, and they ultimately needed to become replaceable.

It stands to reason that our education system will change as we move away from the industrial revolution and into the next.

The question should be: what do (and will) society need from an education system in the coming 50 years?
"Uses fat32"
So how long before MSFT demand a $10 patent fee per device ?
The Color Pink Is Bad for Fighting Breast Cancer
How to remove yourself from all background check websites.
I don't think I would say it's floundered. I came back to Java last year after 10 years of C++, and was really pleasantly surprised: Programming in Java now is a nice experience. I would say it has matured, not floundered.
> "100 miles ... will not be able to satisfy most Americans driving needs."

Most Americans commute 30 miles per day. 100 miles per day covers something like three quarters of all drivers. Range anxiety is a largely psychological concern; it has little to do with actual needs.
If you are struck with a revelation that hasn't had its rehashes rehashed, write it up and submit that. Please don't post crap articles just because you feel the topic is important. Fighting breast cancer is important, but I wouldn't submit somebody's tweet saying "i oppose breast cancer, cuz i like boobs lol." It does not move the issue forward at all. If anything, spamming an issue makes people wary of it as they perceive somebody has an axe to grind.

To give a positive example, I loved Jolie O'Dell's article on this topic. Rather than the usual samey tirade, it was smart and different and enlightening. I felt like I was in a different place after reading it. If you find an article like that, please submit it. But don't submit articles just because they're on the same topic.
For me, it's less about the numbers and more about who did it and the complexity.

The coordination involved in hijacking multiple planes.

The symbolic effect of destroying and damaging icons.

The foreign organization and leader who has a history against the U.S due to the country's involvement in the Middle East.

The reason why OKC makes more sense is because the damage was caused from within by their own citizens, which potentially has a different scope as to what should be done next.
Android Now Outsells Blackberry 2:1 In The U.S.
BUT, a big thing in favor of MS is that DOS/Windows didn't sit on proprietary HW. Apple/Atari/Commodore were all proprietary systems. I'm not sure if we would have seen the rapid rise of video cards in any of those systems.

Hindsight is 20/20, but all things considered I think the tech world is in a pretty good place today.
Infinite Reality: Virtual worlds in our lives
Contrary to what the headline suggests, this is just speculation.
if you can get away with a very small MVP to test the idea out, then why not try something like http://www.weekendhacker.net - I realise you don't want to share the actual idea if it is fairly simple, but hey, you could word it a little obtusely.

You can, of course just hire a web developer - some advice from Derek Sivers http://sivers.org/how2hire
Corn ethanol is an indirect way of converting farming subsidy into electoral college votes.
wow, that's bad.
JavaScript performance was iffy? Opera always had the best JS performance by far, except for that year or two when everyone else started using JIT.
Are you serious? An "abomination"? The switch statement is fine, and using an array [31, 30, 31 ...] would be fine as well. Your 1 line isn't really 1 line because you have to convert the month to an integer anyway, and then the array lookup is even shorter than your solution.
It made me sick to my stomach to read this. Why are people so frightened by intelligence and more importantly, intelligent children? It's sad to see that we've become so competitive and complacent with our shit education system, that we're willing to limit intelligent students on purpose. True educators will find the value in the Khan Academy and similar services. Heartbreaking to learn that people are actually trying to limit the success of a company that promotes free knowledge.
Indeed, As Charles Nutter (JRuby) wrote:

"There’s a very real chance that invokedynamic could improve JRuby performance many times, putting us on par with our statically-typed brothers like Java and Scala. And that means you can write Ruby code without fear. Awesome."

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/jruby-1-6-released-now-w...
It is called openjdk: http://openjdk.java.net/
Actually, one of the best ways to learn something (even after you think you know it) is to try to explain it to someone who doesn't understand it yet. There's a big difference in depth of understanding between "I can get the right answer to the test questions" and "I can explain the subject well enough that now you'll be able to answer the test questions".
When Google kills your account, what happens to your Android phone?
Your one-liner is more difficult to understand. The string switch is very explicit and understandable.
Might want to link to page 1 of the article: http://hbr.org/2011/07/defend-your-research-the-color-pink-i...
One problem, land that is ready to grow such crops is finite in supply not infinite..ie same land that corn was used..which will also impact food supplies..
Couldn't that goal be reached in mess than four years?
Technically, all the code in your program could rightly be called a "code example." But it's not very good for determining how to use the code in your program. Test cases are closer to being good code examples, but they're still generally optimized for checking correctness rather than illustrating use. If nothing else, a good, complete set of test cases will be full of distracting noise.
Nice going, guys. As a med student, this sort of stuff really excites me. It seems like the government is willing to incentivize the adoption of electronic mobile technologies in clinical practice.

To all who are making quips about the $44k incentive: the amount of money that is spent on resolving logistical, administrative, and medical errors because of disorganized, incomplete health records, yearly, is astronomical. Doctors are often very technologically stubborn and those who run their own practices will usually opt for implementing whatever traditional, paper-based system they're accustomed to as they have concerns that lie elsewhere. $44k (or less) in government incentives could prove to be an amazingly cost-effective investment if adoption of these technologies can truly reduce the risk of error.

I've been eager to play around with Dr. Chrono, but I'm not practicing yet, so is there a demo I can play with? I suppose I could just sign up for a free account.
I agree. They should do the same experiment and replace authority with $$. Maybe they did but I cannot find reference.

I think you will see 60% of people will do horrendous things for a little bit of money.
I have to admit - I never even thought that there would be an easier math-formula way to calculate it. Though I would have written the switch:

case "september":
case "april":
case "june":
case "november": return 30;

It's sad, but still need to go through the poem in my head to remember most of the time.
Well put.

Finally, I basically hate most aspects of public school.

I was ready to agree with this. But then I reflected. What I really hated were my rotten peers (and, to an extent, my rotten self) from around the start of junior high to the end of high school. They weren't horrible, mind you. Just middle-of-the-distribution-curve kids, with the inevitable psychopath or two. I don't think privatization is going to filter that out.

And I rather liked my public community colleges and universities.
> This completely ignores the fact that you can build native apps using HTML5

You can and you can't. You can wrap a web view inside an app, sure, but HTML5 apps never look as good or work as well as native solutions- the UI doesn't match, any attempt at using a map view is a mess... the web browsers haven't received enough attention to make them look as good.

About the only OS in which this works well is WebOS, where, IIRC, you can write a native app using JS and HTML.
1. Interacting with people through text is different from interacting with them in person. People are just naturally wired to express themselves better in person. That's our opinion.

2. Ah, the grammar nazi in you is strong. Your correction sounds better to us (cheesiness aside).
To be honest your one liner takes me a while to parse and you forgot to close a parenthesis. OTOH It is really hard to read or write that switch incorrectly.
It's time for the American Association of Pencil Makers to demand a $45K reimbursement for doctors who use pencils.

How else we will maintain out national bureaucratic reserve ?
good definition! You are right. To expand upon it: "not fully tested / MVP / not yet able to handle all possible cases"
That seems fairly normal in the consulting world. Granted we are expected to create a transition plan and only given a few months to find a new assignment but it's not that uncommon.
Also I don't think we can assume that teachers are able to give tutoring in all the levels the children might get too using the khan videos. You might say "how hard could it be for a 5th grade teacher to tutor trig?" but they like anyone else (including khan) probably would have to review some concepts (most teachers don't remember heron's formula by heart). This means they have to prepare multiple tutoring subjects at the same time. In one on one tutoring sessions that's easy but with a class of 25 children it can get quite hard.

It requires a rethinking of the way schools are designed I believe. Maybe have multiple teachers per class with each one specializing in a level to tutor. Classes would be bigger but you'd still have a similar teacher to student ratio.
That's why it should should be flagged, killed, and left for other sites to debate.
I've also encountered the idea of swapping batteries at the fill station. This idea has a lot of problems too but probably gives the best end user experience.

You're probably thinking of a startup called http://www.betterplace.com . I wonder what their analysis on gas prices would be to come to the continental US (their strategy right now is to go for densely populated areas).
Look at the data stored on your credit card magstripe using flakes of rust
I'm sorry my post was too long to read, but I specifically mentioned speaking up several times. Pushing for change within the industry is different than just speaking up when an asshat makes a sexist comment.
I've always thought there could be an interesting use for Twitter just as a transport system for psuhing/pulling data between applications. You wouldn't follow those accounts, they'd just be data feeds. It's definitely not the use case Twitter started with, but it's viable now.

The advantage of using Twitter over another messaging system is that it's public and open. Anyone can easily push or pull from it without you having to build any additional infrastructure. On top of that it's reliable and can handle a lot of data.
we need to erase the core assumptions of the public school curriculum

Great, I agree. Why do you think these assumptions are so hard to change? Who are the people holding the assumptions? Why haven't they changed their minds already?
Fight software patents by filing applications...Expose prior art for good
That's a possible outcome, I'm just not convinced of its probability. Unless the government enforces equal prices at all the private schools, via some sort of fixed tradeable credits scheme, I would expect the most affordable schools to be those that cater to a large proportion of the population in a cost-effective and fairly standardized way, and that those would be by far the most popular schools. Essentially, that education would look like many other market sectors, with a power-law distribution of market share.

There could well be boutique schools that cater to people with specialized interests who are willing to pay a significant premium (the BMW rather than Civic), but that's also true today.

A major difference from communist Yugoslavia is that private education isn't actually illegal; anyone can buy any education they want. Perhaps more people would buy boutique education if the public school system were abolished along with the taxes that paid for it, since their overall disposable income would be higher. But I suspect most people wouldn't buy a significantly more expensive educational solution if a cheap and decent one were available--- not much more than they do today, even if the price gap were slightly smaller. Instead, my guess is that the vast majority would opt for a cost-effective, fairly standardized large education provider.

(This does depend on how exactly it's implemented. Many of the voucher schemes being proposed would in effect prevent low-end competition, by giving movable fixed-dollar-amount vouchers that aren't refundable, which would make the more expensive schools seem relatively more attractive. For example, if it's a $6k nonrefundable voucher, there's no incentive for a private education provider to improve efficiency to the point where they can provide education for only $4k, because why would you go to the $4k school when it's no cheaper than the $6k school? So that in effect would put a floor on prices and make boutique schools more competitive. That's not really a libertarian solution, though, but sort of a social-engineering-via-managed-market solution.)
Amazon Buys Pushbutton, LoveFiLM's TV App Designer
Interesting article; however, I would suggest that the Universities themselves are to blame. There were very few courses that I took where the professor encouraged us to talk to one another about problems and assignments. Usually it was the reverse. We were told in no uncertain terms that we were not to talk to anyone else, nor were we to work with other students in the class. Any collaboration was considered cheating and plagiarism.

Obviously, this did not apply to things like study groups, but once you have had it drilled in to your head that collaboration was bad, it is very difficult to then create the network necessary for a study group.

Universities need to change the way they teach and mark such that collaboration is not only suggested, but required. In addition, I think universities, if they really care about these differences, need to create some form of mentoring program for incoming students.