skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple's weird in the way they couple things in different ways than the rest of the industry and against the conventional wisdom. Since essentially nobody has an investment in Objective-C-without-Cocoa or Cocoa-without-Objective-C, I don't see any problem with them evolving them together whichever way seems best to them.

Also, there's long precedent with @"…" syntax for embedding NSString literals and most of the changes are really just preprocessor/static analysis-driven syntactic sugar — sometimes extreme sugar, yes, but optional, highly-predictable, purely-syntactic-cleanup nonetheless. So if they ever decide "the future of Cocoa is Ruby!" or something like that, I'd think most of the sugar could be, to mix metaphors, transplanted.

On that note, though: I don't see Apple moving primarily away from Objective-C any sooner than I see .Net moving primarily away from C#. It's "the language" until something huge changes the landscape, in large part because they've been able to so substantially evolve it, just like Microsoft, who also controls the primary framework used with their language, has been able to do with C#.
Unquoted attribute values in HTML and CSS/JS selectors
Here's a 2007 article on the same topic for those like me without the ability to get past the Science paywall:

"So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn't That Special?"

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html
yada yada yada God is just. Holocaust is a shame.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\QUIX.TXT

e him tell some story to amuse him as he had
proposed, to which Sancho replied that he would if his dread of what he
heard would let him; "Still," said he, "I will strive to tell a story
which, if I can manage to relate it, and nobody interferes with the
telling, is the best of stories, and let your worship give me your
attention, for here I begin. What was, was; and may the good that is to
come be for all, and the evil for him who goes to look for it--your
worship must know that the beginning the o
Quantum computing could be five years away
Sure. With a lot of organs, the function is a relatively mundane process. The heart pumps. The liver filters. The skin grows and dies and grows some more. This simplifies things a bit.

The challenge is to get all the right cells in the right places. Heart cells need to be arranged specifically so that the heart can pump. Wikipedia has a good animated gif of how the conduction wave flows through the heart [1].

Fortunately, this is a surmountable challenge. You can throw progenitor cells into a pre-built scaffold and they tend to organize like they should. This is because most organs in your body are built of relatively interchangeable parts. E.g. Most of your heart is the same kind of muscle cell.

The brain is a bit different. First, the type of damage is very dependent on the disease state. Have we lost entire neurons? What regions are affected? Are our neurons de-mylenating?

Second, your brain is unique to you. Sure, we both share stereotyped architecture: we both have a hippocampus, a cerebral cortex, a cerebellum, etc etc. The structure inside each region is pretty stereotyped too - we both have cortical bundles in our neocortex.

But when you drill down to the cellular level, we are very, very different. Each neuron I possess in my brain has a unique (and dynamic) synaptic arbor that connects to thousands of other, unique neurons.

If I suffer a stroke and a portion of my brain dies, you can't simply throw more neurons in to compensate. Effectively, neurons are not interchangeable parts like heart muscle cells. You need to coax those neurons to:

A) live in relatively hostile environment

B) synapse to appropriate neuronal populations

C) weight those synapses correctly.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ECG_Principle_fast.gif

Side note: Thanks for the heads-up on the Cloudera post - I just migrated themes and servers last night :)
I guess it would've been helpful to actually link the project! https://github.com/daeken/transformana
At first, I was confused by this statement, given the data..

> "...modern medicine may be doing more to complicate the end of life than to prolong or improve it"

1900
65 -> +12
85 -> +4

2007
65 -> +19
85 -> +6

The engineer in me said, but we've improved! But then I realized that evaluating life by measuring in years is like reviewing tech products by looking at spec sheets.

"But it has more megapixels!? Aren't megapixels what we want?"

Reality is far more subtle.
My goal is not to add Lisp-like macros to every language. That would be a bit bit presumptuous; not all languages want Lisp-like macros.

My goal is to make AST's as available and easy to traverse/transform as they are in Lisp. This is the foundation that makes things like Lisp's macros as powerful as they are. And easy access to AST's enables so many other things like static analysis, real syntax highlighting, and detecting syntax errors as you type.

In a way, Lisp-like macros are just a special-case of tree transformation that puts the tree transformer inline with the source tree itself. But this is not the only possible approach. You could easily imagine an externally-implemented tree transformer that implemented GCC's -finstrument-functions. This tree transformer could be written in any language; there's no inherent need to write it in C just because it's transforming C.

It's true that a complier/interpreter could be reluctant to expose their internal AST format. But there's no reason that the AST being traversed/transformed has to use the same AST schema that is used internally; if you can translate the transformed AST back to text it could then be re-parsed into a completely different format. And with a correctly implemented AST->text component, this would not be a perilous and fragile process like pure-text substitution is.
When you say "fascist regime" you are invoking emotional connection to Mussolini Italy or Nazi Germany. Citing the technical definition of the word doesn't change the intention of the rhetoric. Many emotional appeals use technically correct words.

It's possible that you only used the words because they were correct, and do not share the emotional connection to them that most of your readers will have. If that is true, you should note the common effect of that phrase, and avoid it in the future during rational conversation.
I seem to remember some promising experiments that grew replacement hearts on an existing extracellular matrix. While they were still a long way from being true replacements, they showed enough functionality to look like a promising direction.

Did that not pan out, or are there other major hurdles that would prevent this from being viable within a couple decades?
A byte of Vim
Oof. This is beautiful on so many levels.
It moved above the IPO price due to the Facebook IPO announcement and the related launch of the social media ETF (Tape C, ticker SOCL)
The kind of expertise that consistently commands the high rates requires a level of experience that cannot be developed through training. It requires in-field domain expertise developed over a few years. What you are talking about is what many consulting companies actually do, and it is one of the reasons that consulting companies have such a poor reputation for execution. Customers are paying for the expertise you will not pick up in training or by reading a book.

I ran a successful consulting business many years ago (and hated it). One of the things you learn is that you live and die by the quality of the people you can deploy because that goes straight to your reputation. In practice, consulting businesses are very difficult to scale. While you may start out high-end with a great reputation because you really know what you are doing, it is very difficult to bring in additional people with your level of skill because there is almost no overhead to them working independently. As a result, "scale up" often involves diluting the quality of your overall team to the point where the rates you can charge decline as well. Consequently, you either have to run a very small boutique consulting shop that can maintain its standards and billing rate or run a large generic shop that makes up for the lower billing rate in volume. For people that care about the quality of their work, the former is more rewarding but the economics work out such that you will make about as much money by going direct as a highly-paid contractor to another company.
Domain issues aside, Germany's own privacy laws (at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the US) are just as likely to cause anti-business sentiment. I would hate to build a product that collects user data on German servers.

A decent comparison can be found here: http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html#privacy
Was it y = x perhaps?
Because MIPS needs a good, high-performance JavaScript engine?
The Growing Success of Seeing with Sound
It's a compelling story, BUT, are libraries really the best way to solve this social problem? Most tax payers don't realize just how expensive their library system is. In my county, we spend $90 million per year for our libraries - about 0.5% of property taxes. As a home owner, neary 15% of the cost of your home, is being funneled to the library system.

I am very in favor of community public investment, but I am skeptical that our libraries are an efficient allocation of the very large claim they already have on our public taxes.

Note in this story how the grandfather was so poorly served by the system. It's not designed to serve those who need the system most. In the end he only gets reluctant help from someone overqualified (overpaid) to give him the kind of assistance he needs.

Unlike other suggestions in this thread, I do not agree that the answer is to prop up the failing library system by pretending to use its services to make their numbers look better. We should be demanding that our libraries evolve to remove wasteful and expensive services (that many of its users can already afford to pay for directly), and focus on the needs of those who cannot pay.

Our average library staff salary and benefits cost $25/hr - couldn't we double the assistance to the underprivileged by paying trained "Web Assistants" $10/hr to help them instead?
I do believe the GP's message was that the tutor told him his solution took one "step", which is not equivalent to O(1), because sorted() takes O(nlgn).

In other words, he was pointing out the limitations of the tutor program's analysis.
Surprisingly, I've often heard the following argument (except your point about space). Traditional intersections, despite being cheaper to install, are less economical from a total cost of ownership and all associated externalities perspective

The other benefit of roundabouts is they provide a much simpler situation for cars to encounter, since the intersection could be dumb and simpler heuristics should be able to resolve the management of traffic. A simple four way stop sign wouldn't be too hard, but I can't imagine trying to figure out much less optimize a complex highly trafficked 4 way intersection. A 4 way intersection basically forces you to coordinate centrally to optimize, instead of distributing the logic among participants in the intersection and only putting in central coordinating logic when traffic is very heavy. And even then, I'd expect it more to provide information to the vehicles entering about the vehicles already present and about to enter and letting the vehicles decide what is best.
Renovera Badrum Stockholm - Allt om badrumsrenovering
Lets imagine for a moment that cross-platform backwards compatibility is a high priority, and that every change leads to a frustrated group of users running scripts from many years ago. How could you make a destructive change?

As an example, this works in bash 3.2 but not 4.0:

diff <(awk '{print $1, $3}' file{1,2})

in 3 it expands to

diff <(awk '{print $1, $3}' file1) <(awk '{print $1, $3}' file2)

whereas in 4 it expands to

diff <(awk '{print $1, $3}' file1 file2)
It's a sad commentary to think that the best way to improve the system is to pretend to use its services.
You are the only person Ive talked to who has such a strict definition for the terms. Everyone else seems to either use them interchangeably or has very loose definitions.
error

http://dpaste.org/0fO2k/
Because there is a very significant amount of devices running MIPS processors, including a bit of upcoming Android stuff,.
It's not so much the death itself but the fact that we can't really fix falling organs, just put band-aids to keep it running.

My grandmother has osteoporosis and surgery isn't an option. When her bones finally give in and tie her to a bed, that's the end of her life, even if she lives for a few years more.
Interesting. Do you happen to know why caffeine withdrawal symptoms tend to kick in after (for me) about 36 hours?
I think he means the latter considering that he seems to be employed by one of the biggest phone manufacturers. However, it's in China so I wouldn't be too shocked if he actually is 11.
I wonder if the residents of Easter Island had a similar dialogue before all of the resources on the island were consumed and they started eating each other. If the dialogue is creationist vs. destructionist, what happens when there are no towns left that are friendly for business?
Ask HN: Share your experience with Basecamp Next, Asana, Trello, Do
WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images
I do have feedback, but I don't have a twitter account (gasp!) nor a Trello or Github accounts. Oh well.
Related article from a few months ago, "How Doctors Die": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313570
This will be interesting for the next generation of Loongson/Godson CPUs. Maybe the RMS approach of using Chinese Lemote Yeelong hardware driven by entirely open-source software will become more plausible for the rest of us.
There's an ethical question that you're dodging though.

Personally I don't think immortality is a good thing, and I suspect most arguments in its favor our heavily driven by fear of death.
IANAS (I am not a statistician) so this may be completely wrong.

You might not need to start at zero, but you do have to start with something meaningful. Like minimum wage or the poverty line.
It's never before fully struck me how cleanly the "Objective-C is too verbose" complaint really breaks down to two separate issues: one of them being that method names are long (which is arguably a plus) and the other being mostly comprised of the stuff that's apparently mostly taken care of with this release. Actually, I suppose there used to be a third, too: (auto)release/retain statements all over the place.

As somebody who loves the long method names but of course wants less syntactic cruft, I'm really happy with their recent progress.
You can get a lot of great snippets for WordPress functions.php from this thread http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/1567/best-colle...
It's a philosophical argument, not an evidence-based argument. Do you have a criticism of it other than that you are an empiricist who dislikes philosophy? Do you have a rival idea which isn't refuted?
True but overly defeatist. Fixing one problem would not solve things. Fixing several problems (cancer, intra-cellular junk, extra-cellular junk, etc etc, Google "SENS" for a suggested list) would actually cure death from ageing - or at minimum, would reveal what other problems we would also need to solve. People get sick because they are damaged, and they are damaged because they are old, but the damage is in principle something that can be repaired.
The Chinese are aggressively building new MIPS designs (called Loongsoon/Godson) and building them into hardware which is totally open (see RMS's Lemote Yeelong). Having a fast JS engine for MIPS could help these systems become more viable for those who aren't staunch Openness gurus like RMS.

There's also a large community of users of old SGI machines, and a few of them have a good amount of free time to pursue MIPS projects like this.
50apps.org focused on few of the most interesting languages - Python and HTML5
Spicing unix shell scripts
This "interest-based community" is exactly what [StackExchange](http://stackexchange.com/sites) sites are, although the post doesn't even talk about them.
So, in other words you would prefer to use euphemism? Isn't a big part of the problem that US media and politicians already do that?
I'd guess your argument against immortality is one of those covered many many times: overpopulation, overlords yadda, yadda.

If you believe in 1000 years humans are still living to 80 years old, and are STILL bound to ONLY this planet ... well I think you're crazier than your love of death ( the norm ) suggests.

It requires a bit of human insight to realize that the slice of cake religion advertises IS escape from the vast darkness of a perception-less void.
That is correct. I installed Mountain Lion developer pre-release and Xcode 4.4 this week. BTW, I like Mountain Lion: I have it on my "work" laptop; seems solid.
MongoDB is a VC-backed technology, which has spurred its adoption at funded startups. Since they're funded, those startups can also afford to pay engineers more.
I did vote on Scala, but actually I would rather that we return to languages that compile direct to native code.
Re #3, that's Tom's point: your decision is affecting HOW readers compare the two numbers.
Indeed, but it won't even accept the following O(n) solution. I get "(stopped after 20 steps to prevent possible infinite loop)" when submitting this:

def maxPairSum(lst):
if lst[0] > lst[1]:
top, top2 = lst[:2]
else:
top2, top = lst[:2]

for i in range(2, len(lst)):
if lst[i] > top:
top, top2 = lst[i], top
elif lst[i] > top2:
top2 = lst[i]

return top+top2
How could you make a destructive change?

Well, the same way that everyone else does it: by versioning.

The simplest approach would be to have /bin/bash2, /bin/bash3 etc., with /bin/bash defaulting to the last (current) unversioned bash release.

Then when you write a script that depends on a new feature you'd reference #!/bin/bash3 or whatever. More complex schemes are possible but probably not needed here. It's not rocket science.

And as your example illustrates: This kind of versioning is actually needed even in the current (almost stale) development-mode of bash. Its absence is the reason why many people still target sh as the lowest common denominator...
"The value of this case keeps getting smaller and smaller"

But the lawyers fees are still getting bigger and bigger.

Plus ça change.
TLDR:

We all are afraid of death and the reason humans invented religion was to cope with this fear.

If you're going to downvote...

Instead say something so we can discuss!
I didn't like this poll, with only being able to make one choice. Should be a "favorites" poll. I rely pretty heavily on both Clojure and JRuby for my work, and for experimental learning projects. I would have liked to vote for both languages.

Edit: I just took the poll a second time, problem solved :-)
Why I Unlicense
Living in a Borg Society
This is useful feedback in itself. For now, can you contact me through here: http://jclaes.blogspot.com/p/contact.html ?
Interesting perspective.. I agree, however, every time I read Ruby code.

Yeah, it's probably as fast or faster, but Python's a clean, beautiful, efficient language with a huge community. It does what I need, and with Django there is virtually no upkeep. It just works.

As for the IDE, I use PyCharm from JetBrains.com. It's pure awesome-ness.
Love VLC. Plays anything you throw at it. Enough said...
The Great Web Framework Shootout – On GitHub
> Can you give an example of a "more complex programming structure" where this would be detrimental to understanding?

It is difficult to imagine what kind of knowledge novice learners will construct while using this tool. I could imagine, for example, that their operational meaning of a variable becomes that of consecutive boxes with values in them. Given that knowledge, how would such a student start to understand a variable in a closure? Will it fit their existing understanding of variables as boxes? Maybe it does, maybe it will not. Maybe they have to deconstruct their understanding of variables first to connect it to their budding understanding of a closure, building a deeper and more widely understanding of variable. Maybe this will be not too much of a problem. Maybe this becomes a hurdle. We don't know unless we try it out, of course.

Learning isn't an exact science. I think that dynamic representations like this one are very useful in teaching and learning. However, I would also argue to use these tools with care and conscience. Although it seems to fit our operational view of a program, that does not mean it is a good fit of a novice learner's operational view of a program. Whatever tools we use will influence that operational view. What I want to ask teachers is to evaluate and reflect on the best way and place (in space/time) to use these tools to make learning as optimal as possible.
Very true, but more shocking is that more than 1 in a 100 Americans are behind bars.

It actually costs more to send a person to prison for one year than tuition at Princeton!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/chart-on...
All the discussion is on the submission from yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606394
Are schematics available? (A quick search didn't turn any up for me.) I don't think I'd call a product totally open without them.
My argument is that if we could develop functional immortality we could preserve the lives of the next Newton, Einstein, or even some currently living scientific minds like Hawking. Rather than have the great generational risk of losing all the collective knowledge such people accumulate and then suddenly have them die and expect their void to be filled by bright young minds interested in the same material, who then have to commit half a century just catching back up to where their progenitors were, it would be a never ending cascade of innovation and progress.
I agree, I much prefer native compiled languages. I really like clojure and used it for about a year. I stopped because In doing a lot of embedded development so I need to use C and Ive been using C++/qt for desktop gui apps. Since then, though, Ive been kinda put off going back to clojure because its not native compiled even though I like the language itself.
I'd like to see ABCL in that list (a Common Lisp implementation for the JVM).
Take a look at how Go handles interface types, because that is basically dynamic typing, and Go can allocate data as unboxed values.
Developer selling full rights to top 100 iPhone app on eBay
In fact, that is the solution they give (if you click on the "hint" and "solution" links).
Piratebay down?
I've worked with so many graphic designers claiming to be web designers who didn't know the first thing about good web design. IMHO, you can't call yourself a web designer unless you write your own CSS, and graphic designers should NEVER have the final say in web design.
Libraries are one thing I miss a lot in India since returning from US. Public library system is virtually non-existent here. It is sad to see it getting destroyed where it existed.
I don't know. We clearly won't be defeating death in our lifetimes (and frankly, I'm not sure I would want to live forever stuck in my 80 year old body).

Not only is death necessary for new generations, it kind of gives meaning to the time we do have.

So… I'm open to the idea that we should know how to care for the dying instead of merely prolonging their misery. Everyone reading these words will die one day. Better get used to it!
Inertia is a good thing, but necessarily have to switch tasks from time to time.

Better would be, decide beforehand what are you going to do in the next hours/days, then do it relentlessy and leverage the inertia.

When the time is up, however, move on.