skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I encourage everybody to talk things like this through with their family.

Last year my mom was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. She elected to pursue treatment vigorously, but brain tumors being what they are, there were a number of points where she was unable to answer questions about her wishes.

At every one of those points we knew what she wanted because we had discussed it extensively before. I was incredibly grateful for that. It is bad enough to have to make complicated, life-or-death decisions for someone you love. I cannot imagine the horror of trying to do that without a clear understanding of what they would want.

Please talk with your family about this. Right now if possible. Just forward your sibling, parent, or child this article and tell them it made you think. Then tell them what you'd want. Don't just think you'll do it "later"; the right time will never come on its own.
Living a healthy lifestyle has many benefits, but there's obviously an upper bound to this as a life extension approach. Who was it who said "Eat right, Exercise Regularly, Die Anyway"? :)
If you found this awesome, Bret Victor will blow your mind (the coding tool is the third example): http://vimeo.com/36579366
Architects spend a lot of time worrying about accessibility requirements. Accessibility, fire safety, and car parking are the major factors that shape buildings.
Looks like Dave Winer got full of shit... So sad.
This is a flat opinion piece.
And this somehow makes him an "asshole"? Very polite of you, you sure have this "manners" thing covered, kind sir.

That said, why should an OS release have a "point"?

Besides, you know, advancing the capabilities of the platform, supporting new features, and selling more copies (and hardware units)? You know, like they always do?
Does this say something fundamental about transistors or something fundamental about atoms?
Show HN: This is how online (and real) democracy works in India
Check this: http://hackerstreet.in/item?id=13431

Incase they take down the post, this: http://imgur.com/dj4uu

If you didn't know HackerStreet India is HackerNews wannabe for India.

The issue is on HackerStreet India, I have been now and then raising my voice against arbitrary down votes for disagreement, editing of submission titles by editors http://hackerstreet.in/item?id=13218 and communication by some members via backchannels on what I should post or not to post (since I have good Karma)

Today I received a threat email from one of the moderators asking me plainly to keep quiet because they were running it much before I was a member and that they will "hell" ban me if I continue such "violations" and challenging me to start a new community like HackerStreet. This is after I posted an Ask question on How to fight spam which the moderator said was off-topic and I countered him as you will see in the disccusion.

I really wanted to show you guys in America and rest of the World how democracy in India works with this example. When you go to vote, you will be told by Thugs whom to vote. If you raise a voice against the mafia with deep political connections, you will be threatened at your door for your life. And if you don't play along with seniors, powerfuls and others, whatever your business may be, you will be outcast and made to repent!
Is it possible to see this straight C translation? Using Clang for example. I'm sort of aware of the "objc_msgSend" business, but would like to see more.

Talking of OpenStep, after seeing some of those NeXT videos on HN the other day, I found a torrent of OpenStep 4.2 incl the dev tools. It's a VMware image and boots and runs just fine. Pretty nifty. Then I noticed OpenStep 5.0 redirects to Mac OS X on Wikipedia!
Just to be pedantic, MSQL is not the usual shortening for MS SQL Server. MSQL is actually a product of its own, actually the precursor of MySQL.
You guys are right. I didn't mean to dictate terms or tell anyone to do there job by any means. We are certainly looking for a tech co founder and are open to giving away equity.
Under the technical hood of Page.ly (Part 4 of 5)
Completely agree. Looks natural to me as a python/javascript guy
The diagrams used here are similar in style and content to the environment diagrams used in SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs), which is an introductory (and quite comprehensive) CS text. At Berkeley at least -- and I think MIT as well -- SICP is taught in a course taken by both majors and non-majors are taking CS courses.
how is what he said a "sweeping and dismissive generalization"? he's complaining about women with 'golden uterus complex', which is not a phrase i've heard before but i know immediately what he means. some women derive a sense of superiority from the existence of their reproductive organs, and it can get pretty annoying. he is specifically complaining about those women, not all women.

the tech community has a severe case of male guilt when it comes to things like this. Mark has done nothing wrong, and there's no reason for other male software developers to be apologising for his actions. he complained about annoying people - there's nothing wrong with that, and there's no reason for women in general to be getting up in arms about it.
Why is tornado and node not on this, it would crush the competition.
Sorry, but my guess is that there is no demand for this. You could test this simply - just offer to run these sorts of batched calculations to people and don't specify how they will be run. If anyone takes you up on the offer, then you have some demand. If nobody takes you up on the offer, then you should think of something else.
Ooops.

There's about a half dozen people down_vote DOSing the server right now.
This doesn't do much of anything to increase coupling to Cocoa.

It does represent yet another link between the language syntax and the Foundation framework (along with NSStrings, blocks, etc), but Foundation is effectively part of the language.
2 Reasons why you should start a startup (The Nigerian version)
Definitely a fact, but I wasn't suggesting that it isn't. Everyone knows there are clear and obvious benefits to having a site that is accessible to everyone as opposed to only the majority.

What I mean by the stair/ramps remark is that stairs weren't suddenly removed from the architect's toolkit when the wheelchair was invented. Since ramps are clearly not used in all instances they are not always appropriate or desirable.

The same goes with web design, which is as much art as is architecture. Not all sites are going to select between a limited range of colors to cater to a relative few if those colors happen to clash horribly with their intended design.
I like the general idea. :) A first step would be getting rid of government policies that favor larger companies at the expense of startups. At least europe is full of those policies.
While you're at it, check how much RAM it has. Some older, but not too much older, machines end up RAM constrained and can perform significantly better if RAM is maxed out (if prices for the older RAM have not become excessive).

If you're opening the machine anyway to swap the fan, might be a good opportunity to upgrade RAM.

Beware of spending more on the machine than is worthwhile, though.
OS X and iOS ALREADY ARE the same OS.

Exactly. The ways they differ are nearly entirely those ways in which Apple intends for them to differ. (Or, as in the case of most of the publicized Mountain Lion changes, just hasn't gotten around to adapting recent features from one platform to the other.)
How does one open up a socket in Julia?
Thanks so much for the time you put into your posts. They always teach me something.

The overall theme brought this to mind:

"If you give me six lines <of code> written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
John - Can I get a link to the "controlled, centralized vocabulary of about 1,400 skills"? Not finding it anywhere I've looked.
Meme Defense alpha gameplay trailer
You make an important point: treating ageing itself is superior to tackling diseases individually. Ageing is a risk factor for practically every major disease. Therefore reversing, halting, or even just slowing the process would reduce the incidence and burden of every major disease.
Completely agree, just to add a few of my points...

Designers are also ruining the web because they are removing choice in how I view content.

HTML pages used to be designed such that they were a standard markup language. Thus I could change the settings of my browser if I preferred a dark background with light text. Now in the land of everything is a DIV and CSS is used to recreate the markup language, this is no longer possible -- at least not in a generic way. Not to mention it breaks browsing in a completely cross platform way (lynx, small screened devices, screen readers, etc.); you designer, will always forget at least one. And don't get me started on sites that do not load the content without javascript.

My preference would be that designers accepted the constraints of HTML. They are more than welcome to use CSS to offer my browser suggestions to how it should be rendered, but as the viewer, the final choice would be to me. If you MUST make the layout fit some exact format, switch to PDF (or similar) and don't pretend to be HTML.

I kind of feel like in the '90s, we screwed ourselves by having ugly defaults in the browsers. If no-CSS HTML files rendered more beautifully, maybe we would've avoided this mess.
TRWTF is that this a site like this already and is hillllarious:
http://www.thedailywtf.com/

Just kidding. I suppose there's a niche for shortform "sighs" too.
If totally open only means the software, aren't some x86 boxes there already, assuming you can replace the BIOS with coreboot?

My point on schematics is this: I don't want schematics for consumer products so that I can copy the hardware; I want schematics so I can troubleshoot and learn. Maybe that's just me (I'm one of those weirdos that collects and reads the service manuals for classic Tektronix and HP test gear).
Who is Homer Simpson?
Death is a medical failure

No. A thousand times no. Death is part of life. All composite things decay.

Imagine a kindergartener on an ocean beach. They spend hours building a sand castle. They wail as the tide claims it, feeling the sting of failure. Do you agree, telling them that they screwed up in their construction?

I say no. The error isn't in the building, it's in expecting the castle to last through high tide.

For the skeptical, I'd encourage you to watch this documentary: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307385/ It really solidified my view that the transitory nature of all things makes them more beautiful, more poignant.
I had to stop watching this show after 4 or 5 episodes.

It was just too depressing.
Transparency. Consistency. Respect.

If you can't do these three, forget it.

(And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't been paying attention to your own situation.)

P.S.

> Posted from a throwaway acct. Gotta be secretive.

Understood, but not a good start.
I think I recall Paul Irish once saying even closing tags of certain types (<li>, <p> etc) were also unnecessary. The start of the next tag should also signal the close of the previous one (unless you want to nest stuff) -- so whether the </p> or </li> tag or whatever is there or not makes no difference.

HTML parsers cope quite well with that (and have done for a while) but I don't do it. Although I am guilty of not bothering with the type declaration in scripts that are JavaScript <script src="..." />

I know I'm just plain lazy and wrong.
Ask HN: Compile time before you get distracted?
Does anyone else find themselves an order of magnitude less productive when incremental builds start taking more than, say, 10 seconds to compile? Somewhere in there is a threshold where you start websurfing, right? What are your methods to keep yourself focused while you're waiting, so you don't blow a minute or two every time?
I read the initial post about this on Friday morning and spend the rest of the day adding this caching scheme to my almost finished Rails app.

In addition, I added the pjax system to my app.

In less than 1 day of work, my app feels significantly more responsive to user commands.
"There are some misconceptions that shell scripts are only for a CLI environment. You can easily use various tools to write GUI and/or network (socket) scripts under KDE or Gnome desktops. With the following tools you can build powerful, interactive, user friendly UNIX / Linux bash shell scripts."

What's even better is that you can use BaCon to unify, and expand upon, pretty much everything mentioned in the article. BaCon is Basic Converter, created by Peter van Eerten, who also created GTK-server, which provides a stream-oriented interface to GTK, and which can be used with BaCon. Convert your shell scripts to BaCon, which then turns them into C, which is then compiled. Any calls to external commands can remain. Switching from shell scripts to BaCon is easy, you can stick with the tools you know, you can have as much GUI as you like (while remaining at the CLI), and the executables are lightning fast (compared to shell scripts).

http://basic-converter.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK-server
Well this is good news. I have nothing to complain about here, it was even done with the obviously correct syntax following the principle of least surprise. Yay!
Show HN: My Saturday night project: Supercoinflip
When I have a hard time deciding which restaurant to go to w/ friends or my girlfriend, I usually fire up coffee and do something like:

choices = ['pho', 'gyros', 'pizza', 'burritos']
console.log choices[Math.floor(Math.random()*choices.length)]

Supercoinflip is meant to save me some typing (although I went back and forth on the styles enough that its payback time is probably in the 10s of years). It is written in coffee/sass, compiled into a single static html file, and then run on heroku w/ rack.

http://supercoinflip.com
Can I ask why you use "right" and "left", instead of democrats and republicans?
Data, Data Everywhere, But Not a Drop To Drink
clickable: http://supercoinflip.com
Yes, both Ruby and Python have active communities and are very popular languages for beginners.

I can't really give you any further suggestions without knowing what you plan to develop. If you're having trouble deciding what to learn, I would suggest doing a bit of research into the specific area(s) of development that interest you and get an idea of what everyone else is using.

Don't fuss about it too much though. If given a choice, just choose one that feels good to you and move on with learning it.
> Both need to be pleased,

I disagree with this. Users are not customers, we are the product. Google need only be slightly better than the second best option. Now that they have such momentum in search I don't see any reason why they need to care about users, only advertisers.
Would have been funny to include craigslist.
Inside various p* scripts in Pyramid 1.3
sudo iptables -I INPUT -s <offending ip> -j DROP
Both are views of death are technically correct, but focusing on the former while ignoring the latter is problematic for reasons described at length in the article.
Working 16 Hours A Day Without Going Insane
Fortunately, most of the time voters choosing "representatives". As human creatures, we do tend to be better (yet far from optimal) at recognizing worthy people to follow.
Hackathons are primarily a way for companies to more easily identify good developer hire candidates, and likewise, for developers to make new connections and promote themselves. Everything else is a shared lie and/or a distand second in importance.
I'm not confused between null and None. That's obvious and wholly pointless.

You should know that you must initialise all types to a default value. Then you don't need a language feature for "None". Being lazy or stupid is not a reason to add a language feature.

Oh and none of my code has thrown an NPE for over 10 years. That was when I started using pre and post condition checking which ultimately solves a lot more problems than some language feature.

There is nowt wrong with null, if you truly understand what it is.
I would encourage you to be skeptical of arguments of this form, "I can't imagine X, ergo it's probably not true."

There are many things that people at age 10 can't imagine about people at age 20, or 20 imagining 40. There's no particular reason to believe that problem goes away.
But if you've only space for stairs or ramps, then you'd have to use a ramp, which everyone can use, rather than stairs, which most but not all people can use. Similarly, if you can only have one colour scheme, you ought to be picking one which everyone can read, not just most people. It's not as if it inconveniences non-colour-blind people.
Forget cost. The important question is quality. In cameras, extra megapixels can mean the sensor sites are so small that they have a harder time distinguishing electronic noise from actual light, leading to worse pictures. Likewise, what good is getting me 10 more years if I can't do anything with them because they're spent in total agony.
There quite a few Lisp environments that compile to native code as well. Have you explored that route?
I spent the last 5 years in the rails world.

Noir has been really fun to work with. It's really fast, API is predictable and easy to learn. It seems to be inspired heavily by rails but without the constant dependence on "magic" to do simple things.

It's also nice to break away from the Active Record overhead and be able to find new optimal ways to model data with Redis/Mongo.

I'd still recommend rails to the newbie developer, but if you're experienced in developing web apps, I'd highly recommend Noir.
Hackathons are not meant to make production ready code, or even "elegant" code. It is meant to be a hack - a project where decisions are made in favor of speed or elegance.

Hackathons don't generate code ready to ship, but that does not make it nonsense. They are meant to create "sketches" of programs. Sketches are created to convey an idea, and solidify the imagination. They are not the end product themselves or are they the basis for the end product. They are instead an aid. Similarly, whenever I hack and decide that I actually want to pursue the project, I start from scratch. The hack helps refine the design and architecture of the project much more than simply thinking about the project.

disclosure:
I'm an officer of the Hackers@Berkeley club in UC Berkeley. From what I've seen, hackathons are when students really step out of their comfort zones and learn new skills to create innovative projects. Great things have come out of them. Once in a while, those hacks even become the sketches for new startups.
Oy. The mistake was actually in posting too late and not using the proper code tag. Don't drink and post, kids. ;) When I brought the code into vim I used the same indentation as the example, I saw that the indentation changed, but you're saying "The shape of the function is wrong."

It's quite possible my experience as a programmer today would be different than when I started -- I mean, I made it through a few chapters of SICP without such troubles, but in the back of my head was the memory of trying to figure out my logic error in a bit of code when it was really a misplaced paren.
"If developers don't like a language they won't use it."

Do you have any reason to believe that's true?
Walmart is very nearly everything to a lot of people. People do get oil changes, fast food, haircuts, furniture, household goods, food, banking, prescriptions, movies, games, sporting goods, gardening supplies... The list goes on. Convenience trumps almost anything.
Right at the higher levels of human achievement, I believe that it is curiosity and inquisition that drive us. Certainly impending death can focus people, but I do not believe it delivers the spark that lights ingenuity.
I hate this view so much. How are we better off not having people like Tesla, Newton, Einstein, etc. anymore? They had to give way so we could have Dragonball Z and reality TV? The notion that we gain something by people dying is beyond nonsensical.

The only benefit death will bring is when everyone who has this ridiculous view point is gone and out of the way.
Jwzhacks
... and Linux on the desktop
Hackathons have an "inspirational" value. By forcing an artificial constraint they demonstrate to participants how much they can do in a single determined sprint.

There may be little further connection to what it takes to make good software (let alone a good business), but there is value in realizing that something of utility can be built under time and money constraints.

It is kind of silly, though, how many of those are popping up, and how they are turning into competitive formats. And I'm sure some people misunderstand the point of the idea. So what? That's true for many things and it doesn't make them worthless on its own.
"Quantum computing could be five years away"

They said this fifteen years ago on a radio broadcast. I was sitting there. I heard it.

Now, for the last time, where is my jetpack?
I'd love to see this in debugger form!
Starting a startup is not equally risky for everyone. Some people have their own safety net (family, saved up money, etc) while others don't, making it too big of a risk to start a company.

Most entrepreneurs I know didn't take any crazy risks. They knew they'd be ok if their startup failed. Many people don't have that luxury.
The JVM is already crowded.

Personally I think Xtend, Ceylon and for that matter Kotlin are "me too" languages, just trying to get some piece of the pie, and most likely won't go nowhere.
I've used Unlicense before, but I have since been persuaded that this was a mistake. Frankly, I think that unlicense inadequately protects user freedom. It does not contain a patent grant or estoppel. While I don't care about attribution, the disruption of provenance is problematic. I should hope that there are few companies interested in shipping code that, as far as they can tell, fell off the back of a truck.

Suppose that Foo Corp releases Unlicensed code that includes patented material. Baz Ltd goes on to develop a widget that uses Foo's code. Later on, Bar Inc buys Foo Corp and files suit against Baz.

No disrespect meant to Arto, but he simply isn't a intellectual property attorney. (Edit: And neither am I.)
Friends who understand (or no friends).

Sure, this bullet-point proves the author has not been going insane...
Nice to see someone that shares my viewpoint. I wrote an essay about death:
http://beyond-impossible.blogspot.com/2012/02/atheism-death-...

Let me know if find it interesting (or not :))
Having recently been an advocate for an elderly patient with severe medical problems, I can say with confidence that this is a terrible idea twice over. Not only would it not work well, but it's also so lacking in compassion as to be horrific.

The time to educate people on these choices is years before you have to make them. The solution isn't to take people thrust into tragedy and threaten to kill babies if they don't do the "right" thing. It's to change our culture such that people consider these hard choices much earlier and life, and feel comfortable discussing these issues with their families.
>But there are no signs that OS X UI and iOS UI are gonna get reunited in the most important distinction, the touch UI thing.

Keep in mind, with Launcher, you're basically 75% of the way there. The apps are mostly compatible (look at the number of straight ported iOS games on the MAS for confirmation here) with no UI rework done.

Bringing in Notifications brings it to ~%80ish, IMHO. It's becoming that the only real difference between the two systems is Finder.