skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other thing that crossed my mind is that Google is still making use of the books - I doubt that just making them available publicly is part of their plan. If they're also licensing them for spelling correction and translation, how does that affect the pricing?
That's just proof that half a day's of work isn't productive anyway. The guy lives, gets half of his salary for trying to do work and the other half of actually doing it. The guy dies, the productive half of his salary disappears but the unproductive half continues. :)
My project is accomplishing this lofty and almost insanely ambitious goal through the (A) normative, language-neutral, cross-language definitions of, and (B) subsequent standardization of, several distinct parts of the toolchain: (I) compiler and interpreter Intermediate Representations and metadata, (II) editor-client-to-server protocols, (III) source code indexing, analysis and query languages, and (IV) fine-grained dependency specifications at the level of build systems, source files, and code symbols.

So this is the project that Yegge mentioned would turn "all code [...] into Wikipedia." Man, my ongoing project is more similar to it than I thought.

I find it curious that he would even bother to mention (IV) though. (IV) falls right out if you start from the correct data representation, which I would have assumed from (A). I wonder if he's still listing dependencies explicitly.
I learned most of what I know from Internet. Not just programming; but arts, science, mathematics etc.

I agree, basic schooling is very important; there is no replacement for it. College / University education is nice to have, but it is not must.
You can get managed Go hosting for $0 a month: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/go/overview
Thanks for the kind wishes. I think what I (the OP) failed to convey in my post is that going into finance, given my background, would have been the easy way out for me. Having someone tell me "oh you could totally do X" when I thought X was this crazy out of reach thing, made me re-evaluate whether other things I had put on the crazy shelf were do-able, too. Like founding a startup.
Again, you assumed wrong. Makes me wonder what your actual experience with PHP is. The strength of PHP is its focus on the web environment through features and functions that make it simpler to develop in that environment, that have be implemented in code on most other languages. In addition, the huge amount of available mature libraries for a variety of purposes and the large community that supports it, is something I really find hard to believe Go can compete with. Saving development time with mature code is much more important than learning a language that doesn't provide much tangible benefits for the web environment.
When the transition is done.
How is throwing more (truly intelligent) computers at the problem any different than throwing more human brains at it? It's not just computing power that had been exploding, it is also the number of people trying to crack the nut of AI (for instance).
No it doesn't, not for the overwhelming majority of people. It helps in the illusion of creativity, most commonly the effect is dulled critical faculties and the acceptance of sub-par work which has to be redone when more clear headed.

Alcohol is a recreational drug, its association with industries such as journalism has to do with working wierd hours and drugging contacts to get leads, not with productivity, and certainly not with creativity.
Isn't the host still craigslist?
Until the secret-answer fix is ready, users are advised to change their the names of their first pets and/or favorite teachers.
I'm not saying that there is something superior atm, I'm just saying it could be SO much better than what it is today.
I think that a better parallel dichotomy would be features vs quality, in a world where they are mutually exclusive. However, I think Yegge wasted too much thought on this. It is the software that dictates how conservative a piece of software is: bugs and stability are generally tolerated in user-facing software because at worst the user has a bad experience. However, a database better be as close to 100% reliable as possible, which in turn leads to testing and static analysis, meaning typing... It is not really negotiable.

I think there are way too many variables for a linear scale to provide meaningful comparison.
1) Yes
2) Yes
3) I live in the country already, so not the target market :-)

Also, you may not care but some of the homepage looks a bit off in IE8. May not be a big deal, but some people may be browsing from locked down desktops during their workday.

EG The "Always Fresh, Always Seasonal etc" ribbon overlaps some of the text in the grey box.
That's essentially limiting the rights/freedoms of 99% of the population to help that 1% who don't have the emotional ability to act like adults?

I can't say that's something I find very encouraging.
Ruby is more liberal than c (duck typing)

Haskell is more liberal than ruby (functional programming)

C is more liberal than Haskell (weak typing)

Also, I am apparently a radically conservative programmer, but my political views in real life tend toward radical liberalism. I think any correlation says more about age than it does about politics.
Show HN: Tweetsheets – Twitter directly from within Google Docs
posting on behalf of my colleague jollife[1] who can't publish on HN because his account is "too young"?
Is there any way around this?

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.org/user?id=jollife
"Limiting the rights/freedoms" makes it sound far bigger than it is. You could say the same for jobs that require you to start work at a certain time, or to work from an office, or to wear a tie, or not to get your penis out in meetings, or...
Great, let's write one EventEmitter and make everyone else use that. What?

The problem is different - there is no single package manager in the browser world that has taken off.

BTW. In the browser the native and well documented way of dealing with callbacks is by using the EventTarget API:

http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Events/events#Events-EventT...
You raise a very interesting point.

But I'm under the feeling that reality is much more complex: access to more information can as well inhibit creativity as it can inspire new discoveries.

I can't say I fully the relationship between the creative scientific process and information exchange/consumption, but I'm pretty sure that past a certain point, the more papers you read the less likely you are to come up with something new. At a macro scale, communication is definitely a driver of progress, but at a micro scale?...
2 hours? Once thing is reading a tutorial in that time and another is use vim without having to think to enter command mode and moving around comfortably.

I use vim daily and it's my editor of choice (so far, at least), but it needs commitment and time to get use to the modal system and to be used without feeling that is absolutely broken. After 8 years I'm sure it feels very natural (as it feels now to me), but I sure remember that it took me time to get use to it. It's not just reading a tutorial...
Also, this company:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverford

Is huge in the UK, doing a similar idea on a larger scale, so at least your business model is a good one :-)
As much as some commenters are (weirdly?) railing against this classification scheme I think the underlying idea that software conservatism is about risk aversion is essentially accurate.

Perhaps another way of framing this is to ask the question: are you optimizing for the best case or the worst case? This ultimately is a form of risk management. And I'm not talking in the algorithmic sense, meaning complexity expressed as the asymptotically worst case. I'm talking about people, software and ecosystems.

Let me illustrate this idea with Java.

- C++ has operator overloads. Java does not? Why? Because people might abuse them. That's optimizing for the worst case (ie bad or inexperienced programmers). Properly used, operator overloading can lead to extremely readable code;

- Java has checked exceptions and uses them liberally (pun intended). C#, as one example, only has unchecked exceptions. Why? Philosophically the Java language designers (and many of its users) feel that this forces callers to deal with exceptions. Pragmatically (IMHO) it does not and leads to more cases of exceptions being simply swallowed. But again this is optimizing for the worst case ie programmers who should deal with a particular error condition but won't;

- Java has no multiple inheritance. Same story: it can be abused ("it is known"). But also mixins can be a powerful metaphor.

- Rinse and repeat for duck typing, extension methods, etc.

Putting Python two steps from Ruby strikes me as an interesting choice. I'd say the difference is at most one.

I'll also agree that Google as a company (based on my own much more limited experience than Yegge's) is firmly conservative. The style of writing Javascript that he refers to is about writing Google Closure code with all sorts of directives to aid the Closure Compiler (I describe Closure as putting the Java back into Javascript).

I also see a lot of Python code that isn't really Python. It's Java expressed in Python syntax rather than idiomatic Python and that is kind of sad.

Which isn't to say that any of this is necessarily bad (or good). It's just a (software) political viewpoint you need to be comfortable with (or at least can tolerate) or (to quote the South Park meme) "You're gonna have a bad time".

One of the comments linked Worse is Better [1], which is worth a read too.

[1]: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs240/readings/worse-is-better...
I'm trying to think of what anti-macros Clojure talk by a "key presenter" he might be referring to. I'm only familiar with the talks from Clojure/conj, so the only one that I can think of is Christophe Grand's (not= DSLs macros) talk from 2010[1]. If so, I think his summary mischaracterizes the content of that talk, but it could be another talk he's thinking of.

[1] http://blip.tv/clojure/christophe-grand-not-dsl-macros-45407...
All camera sensors are actually black and white. To obtain color information, the sensors have a color filter. This filter is optional/interchangeable in this camera. To obtain a color photo, you take three shots with three different filters (R,G,B). This way you can also get UV, IR pictures - and more.
Pentagon helps build Meshworm reconnaissance robot
There are studies showing one glass of (red I believe) wine per day is beneficial (e.g. http://www.biomedexperts.com/Abstract.bme/15321801/Moderate_... )
I could be completely wrong here, but doesn't this completely bypass the optimizer that makes C so fast?
As the original article states, this benefit will mean more to older employees. Do HNers think this will lead to the median employee age at Google increasing over time?
I agree.

Tools which don't attempt to do too much are sometimes just what you need.
That's obviously subject to whatever your definition of "intelligence" is. The only reason why you can even disagree, is because we don't have an objective definition. So we could argue forever and not get anywhere.

But what matters, is that at the end of the day. For almost any practical and objective definition of "human intelligence" that you might write down. I can write a computer program that will follow those specs and execute it better than a human being. Today. Fact is, humans are nothing but machines and our computers are already better than us in most tasks. Talking about the point which "computers overtake human intelligence" is dismissing the hundreds of different sub-fields in AI research which already got way past that point. Not only with better processing (as you imply), but also with better algorithms than us.

Or we might stick with our current subjective and useless definitions of the word. And keep dreaming about how would it be when we get to somewhere undefined.
Unfortunately they decided not to expose EventTarget as an object, hence where we are today.
A friend of mine wrote an autoreloader for {placekitten}. Mainly to keep his girlfriend busy when he didn't wanted to confront a discussion.

This could bring the whole idea to a whole new level.
http://leaverou.github.com/prefixfree/

Thought I'd share this because this was giving me the shits.
Yes, that makes more sense. In which case it feels like the point of the post is more to do with following your own path before accepting the path that is 'mapped' out?

Perhaps you actually say this in the post somewhere, but it I don't recall seeing it. IMHO it would make an interesting article if you emphasised that point more.

In my experience there is something to be said for NOT always following the money but following the 'fun'. More than once the 'fun' turned out to be surprisingly lucrative after all ... :)
If they expect taxpayers to foot a $2.6B bill they need to give serious consideration to things which cause excitement and emotional resonance in same taxpayers. Having state-of-the-art resolution cameras (and audio microphone, in my opinion) in order to capture and transmit back a "you are there" experience should be a priority. If it were totally a privately-funded operation, then they can do whatever they want. I understand the desire to have rock-solid confidence in the overal system and it's components, thus testing-fest, thus analysis-fest, thus ultra-conservative instincts. But I'm sure there are ways to, say, isolate a "higher risk" component like a modern camera/microphone, and design for redundancy. And if you're going to spend $2.6B you might as well cough up an additional $100M, for example, if that's all it would take to put better, human emo-optimized sensors on there. Precisely because it takes so long and is so expensive anyway. So once it lands there and deploys, you can yield maximum ROI, including emotional/psychological ROI.

Anyway, if a NASA operation never gets around to doing such a thing, I bet if SpaceX puts a craft on Mars they'll have the philosophy where they could justify doing it.

And this is only a minor criticism on my part. I have massive appreciation for the NASA engineers and team, and what they just accomplished with the MSL landing. I think this issue is just one little blind spot it's easier for somebody outside their org to see and point out. They clearly nailed all the hardest bits of the mission, and "stuck" their EDL phase, even though it was so seemingly complex. Between SpaceX, the NASA Mars teams, and Planetary Resources, Armadillo Aerospace, etc. I feel these folks are taking us back to the historical trajectory we all thought we were on as kids. They're taking us back into the Space Age again, leaving the static doldrums of the Shuttle/ISS era.
Facebook Questions Has Died A Quiet Death
They added the banners in 2000 and removed them in September 2005 - to give you an idea about the time I am referring to. If anyone's curious, they can probably still download version 8.0 or so from sites such as cnet.com (but beware the crapware installers they use there).

I actually tracked down a version of Opera 5 (from 2000) and installed it in a VM, here's a screenshot of the ad preferences: http://666kb.com/i/c69ez5xf671f79fk4.png

As you can see, it's more or less what the article suggests. Opera gave up on the idea after 5 years - but then again the (worse) feeling of being tracked by everyone and everything didn't exist back then.
They sent back video as they were remote controlling their robots, using video sent back at a decent resolution and lower frame rate, or low resolution and high frame rate. They needed this to ensure the robots did not get stuck, and because they couldn't build a robot that could automatically navigate for the length of time they hoped the mission would last (3 months).

It just seems amazing that this footage was sent back, but not recorded. I presume it was filmed (in much the same way that the US lunar video was captured on film, from video sent back to earth), but that it has not yet been released, or was lost or otherwise destroyed.

To me it feels like this would be very exciting footage to see - the first footage ever sent back from a robot on another celestial body. The video would also have been important for helping scientists understand the make up of the moon. Remember these missions were from when the Soviet Union had only been able to return 109g of lunar samples to earth. Not the 50kg the USA had from two manned missions.

This is as close as I've come to finding video: http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_Luna21_Video04.jpg
> that makes IDEs simpler and more accurate in code navigation and refactoring

IMHO, that's one the OP's main arguments, that for example there is a whole class of (liberal?!) people to which IDEs don't matter at all, so that someone (a conservative?!) arguing "hey, this static typing thingie makes IDEs more easy to use" doesn't matter. So it makes sense to at least know on which side of the fence each of us sits, so that we won't argue as much :)

(just to be clear, I'm trying to use the concepts "liberal" and "conservative" as they're defined in the article)
I think the high price subsidizes the free fitting.
Given that intelligence is probabilistic and approximate, doubling the circuits would increase accuracy. I think it's pretty plausible that intelligence does work this way, since humans make mistakes all the time.
>Sorry, I didn't mean to attack you or anything.

Oh, no problem, I didn't get that impression.

>I'm just praising the model and abilities of open-source and how much power it gives to the user.

Well, what I'm tried to say it that much of this is "potential" power and not actual. It takes a community or at least several interested programmers to actualise it. Else, it's just the same as if the user didn't have the option at all.

>But you can't tell me that having the option to do so isn't so freaking awesome. Would you prefer abandonware instead?

No, sure, Open Source is better than closed source abandon-ware. Only pointing it that open source can be abandon-ware too (tons of abandoned projects on SourceForge and GitHub -- and not all for lack of interested users, mainly for lack of interested programmers).
Last line of the article:

> This is my writing exercise. If you find any grammatical or spelling error, plz tell me!

Also notice that it's a predominately Chinese blog.
Wow. Didn't know about nodebox. I wrote a similar tool named info-beamer (http://info-beamer.org). Its focus is livecoding for interactive OpenGL visualizations. Think about digital signage controlled by Lua. It was inspired by Inventing on Principle: I'm using inotify to reload the Lua code each time you save. Documentation is at http://info-beamer.org/doc/
> Haskell is more liberal than ruby (functional programming)

Not according to the article, which is what my comment was in response to.

> I think any correlation says more about age than it does about politics.

Quite possible, I'm 26.
Well that probably ties in to how I was taught to "don't use pure black" in high school art class: when drawing with India ink and pen.

(BTW I just see on Wikipedia that the Chinese paintings you're referring to are quite different, but I'll tell the story anyway.)

Most of our drawings would be made of shading, which is done by either cross-hatching or stippling. When you'd need a shadow area to be really dark or "black" you weren't allowed to take a brush and simply paint it, no you had to stipple or cross-hatch it until you reached the desired level of darkness. Rather tedious work for large areas and most kids hated it, though I kinda liked "zoning out" doing it.

And you could tell, too. A properly shaded dark area could be really really dark but always have some white specks in between the layers of cross-hatchings. Very subtle, but it would make it look way more "real": we were shown examples of pictures where the darkest shadows (a hole in the wall or something) were painted flat black with a brush, and they'd seem (also literally) "black holes". They'd punch right through the image without any sense of depth-proportion. Obviously, because there wasn't any: you can't shade part of a black hole darker than the other bits.

Describing this, it makes me think of working with DSP/audio applications. Volume is measured in dB, and if you turn it down, you can go to -36dB or -48dB and it's pretty much "silent" (-3dB is half as much power) as long as you play it next to sounds at full volume (0dB). Turn it further down and the software cuts the value to -Inf dB, when there is really no sound ("pure black").

BTW I'm not trying to say that you should never turn a sound all the way "off" in an audio mix :) [I'm not a professional sound mixer], just that the concepts seem really similar. In both cases, our eyes and our ears have a tremendous dynamic range, and they are sensitive to ratios, mostly. Using a "pure black" paint (I think NASA must have some that comes pretty close) confuses those ratios because it "divides by zero", in some sense.

Your example of Chinese classic paintings is interesting though, I think it also shows that tastes and customs in painting vary over the ages. The "don't use pure black" style is really ubiquitous in current-day digital (web/app) design, but it didn't use to be always like that. Nor is "realism" a necessary quality, (Jackson Pollock used pure black and they are the prettiest images before the invention of TV static!).
Great idea! Now how drunk do I need to get Systems so they will actually install Go on our servers? Because I'm sure that they would just love giving several thousand students, staff, and faculty the ability to run arbitrary machine code!
Where does that really cool Kudos widget come from on distributionhacks.com?
You can render svg into a canvas using canvg.
I am trying the same approach now. Everything is fine except the animations, also you can no longer interact using mouse events.
Do let me know if it works for someone.
Well the poster failed out. There's no proof that he even was able to learn the material at all, let alone in an afternoon.

This whole attitude that you are above college is just ridiculous. You get out of college what you put in. If it's really so easy, and you are so self-motivated, then you would put in your 15 mins a week to get your degree with the understanding of the benefit of the diploma, and then pursue your own self studies / startup / career on the side. Or if the cost-benefit isn't there you just don't go. You don't go, and then fail out, and then make excuses about how you were too good for it. That's not to say you can't game the system what with grade inflation and easy classes, but that's not a true indication of the potential value of college.

I found the early CS classes extremely easy as well, you know why? Because I've been programming since I was 10, so of course the class is going to have to move a little slow to allow beginners to grok pointers and recursion. It doesn't matter how smart you are, you have to turn it over in your head for a while, which some of us happened to do before college. On the other hand, by year 3 when I was taking 5000-level Networking, Graphics, and Compilers it was definitely not so easy, and I guarantee neither you nor any of your brilliant friends would be plowing through that material 10 times faster than the course was designed.
Well I think it's also much bigger to be told I can't fall in love and/or find someone attractive just because I work with them. And we can probably agree that office crushes are just as bad if not worse than office romances.
...except that most of the features you mention are in Scala in some for or another, yet he classifies Scala as "hardcore conservative"