skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This applies equally well to blocks of code within a function that accept input and provide output. It helps to be able to reason about them as atomic units, without necessarily paying the code/maintenance cost of hoisting them into independent functions.

This seems rather... crazy. Functions serve this purpose, avoiding creating function while still trying to think of your code block as a function is just absurd. Extract the function, if it deserves a comment and has parameters, and isn't an anonymous method for use with a higher order function, then make a real function out of instead of polluting the parent function with its implementation details.

The overhead of this additional function you're so worried about is nothing compared to the overhead of the mess that results by not extracting it. Your strategy favors long functions, yuk yuk yuk.

Listening to you talk, I'm horrified by the thought of what your code must look like; I bet your functions often require use of the scroll bar.
This a very context-free analogy.

The biggest reason why it took a long time for cars to replace horses was high price (simply stated: most people couldn't afford a car even if they wanted one) and lack of infrastructure (it takes years to build roads).

We already have the infrastructure and the price will favor self-driving cars.

The laws heavily favor safety in cars (not everyone likes seat-belts and yet we have laws requiring people to use them; we have laws banning using a cell-phone while driving, driving while drunk; cars have to build in a way that withstand crashes etc.).

As long as it can be demonstrated that self-driving cars are safer (and they are), there will not only be pressure to allow them but to require them and eventually ban human drivers altogether.

Once the self-driving cars are allowed, the lower price and greater convenience will make it a blockbuster. I don't want to own a car, I don't want to operate it, I just want to get from Mission to SOMA fast and cheaply and self-driving cars will be able to offer that.
Five Important Characters Behind Every Web Development Process
for mockability, this is the web design equivalent of Icy Hot Stuntaz

BTW, can't they just leave the legacy behaviour in quirks mode only or does slimness and catching Chrome trump functionality?
You would continue to drive yourself despite the fact that, statistically, automated cars could save thousands of lives by reducing accidents?
A better tab management. When I open a lot of tabs, the tab size is so narrow, so it's hard to find the tab that I wish.
Sorry, not buying it. That might be a good reason to fly a camera that's one year behind the commercial state of the art, but not 10 years as seems to be the usual practice.

This stuff matters, whether NASA likes it or not.
Having discussed this with friends, a fair number of people just want their own car that they drive.

I've encountered the same reaction, and I believe it is widespread. But here's the thing: even the people who insist on owning and driving their own cars, and refuse to let it drive them, can still benefit greatly from owning a self-driving car.

Imagine never having to park - you just get out of your car in front of your destination and it goes and finds a parking spot.

Imagine never having to get someone to drop you off at the airport. Your car can just go home afterwards.

Imagine getting your oil changed or other maintenance. The car can do this on its own when you don't need it.

I believe that we'll see a lot of marketing geared towards the people who would never let a car drive them around. This will be a great stepping-stone to help convince these people that it's safe. They'll get it for the convenience, but then eventually one day they'll use it when they're drunk or tired. Eventually, they'll learn to trust it.
The Colossus
Real reasons why working at Facebook isn't that attractive in my opinion:

1. Giant php codebase.

2. All the excitement is gone post-IPO, they've reached an inflection point and growth is slowing down.

3. Mark Zuckerburg doesn't have great social skills/intelligence. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that he runs a giant social network.

4. The corporate mission of making the world more open and connected just doesn't seem very high impact. Facebook at it's core is a way to share photos and keep up with old friends, it doesn't really change social interactions.

5. Their focus is very narrow, they don't work on many novel exciting problems.
You are right, I stand corrected. I recently read this and just assumed:
http://www.businessinsider.com/morgan-stanley-goldman-sachs-...
You want to read Agner Fog's article, How good is hyperthreading?, http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=6. As an aside, Agner is one of those rare people who only writes when he has extremely valuable things to say. His entire website is worth a read.
+1

I can kind of see the logic behind the author's first point. When I write code for fun, I don't write design docs or invite friends over for design reviews. I just do whatever I want, mostly typing in lines of code, until I can't stay awake anymore. And it is a lot of fun. The problem is, it's ignoring things like "making money" and "not annoying users" and things like that. When you need to engineer instead of play, then you need to think about things like: "how can I not write this code". And that's why you need design docs and design reviews and meetings: to learn, to share knowledge, and to ensure that your time spent programming is the best possible use of that time.

If someone said, "your job is to write as much code as possible and push to production every eight seconds", that would be fun. I just don't think the company would last longer than ten years. At that point, that company would do nothing but extinguish fires, and a new upstart would be doing "more with less" and out-innovate them. Name the popular tech companies from twenty years ago that you interact with on a daily basis today. Yeah.
> 100 more cameras at each corner??

There are cameras on the autonomous cars, I'm sure they'd do the trick just fine.

> Second, I still have no idea how on Earth would AC riding on a highway know that it is a black cat, not a black bag laying on the street.

LIDAR. A black bag laying on the street is virtually invisible to it.

> The bottom line: sooner or later AC will make a mistake.

True, but they'll have to make a lot of mistakes to be worse than humans.

> Last, who is liable when the system makes a mistake?

That's a good question, and not one that can be answered categorically for all classes of motor vehicle accident. I'd imagine that the driver of an autonomous car would be liable for their actions in the same sense that a pilot is when they place their plane on autopilot (or a skipper when the use an autotiller to steer their ship). If it can be proven to be poor engineering on the manufacturer's part, then likely the manufacturer will be held responsible. Otherwise it will probably be the driver getting sent to jail. Or maybe a mixture of both if both parties can be proven to have acted negligently.

> ...but I can throw myself under riding AC.

Yet you're incapable of throwing yourself under a normal car? Doesn't this contradict your previous point about sabotage?

Though admittedly sabotage is a very common concern with automatic cars - what if somebody papers over a street sign or throws rocks at the car whilst it is on a sharp corner? In reality, malicious third parties are of concern, but not any more than if the vehicle was not autonomous. Human drivers can still be distracted by noisy passengers, intoxicated by alcohol and blinded by lasers; all you're doing by putting a robot in control is swapping the weaknesses of one system for the weaknesses of another. Ideally, there would be a mechanical backup system which could be controlled by the driver in the case of an emergency, which would effectively make autonomous cars more reliable than normal ones.
So I know this will probably be an unpopular opinion, but I think W3's strict URIs are only a few years from being less important for web applications and only being important for TLDs and web "sites." Reasoning: Chrome's web store and the rise of single page applications that rely on things other than URIs.
It appears they are missing Jack. He was, apparently, behind the idea for Twitter, and now you can see his new venture took off and never stopped ever since. This being said, I think Branch is going to be one of the most influential products in coming years. Death to the monologues.
1) You would still need some form of insurance. It's still possible for a human operator/owner to negligently cause accidents. (e.g. poor maintenance, chair strapped to the roof falling off at 65mph).

However, if premiums become low enough, car insurance policy might even be offered as an add-on to homeowner's or renter's insurance.

4) I think cars will evolve (or devolve) to require less maintenance, and more self-diagnosing.

5) If there are a lot of autonomous cars, owners can simply walk away from their cars, and the cars will coordinate amongst themselves to part in designated spots.

6) You know what bogs down city courts? People fighting traffic and parking tickets.
My favorite thing about Google is that I haven't seen a single "Keep calm and carry on" poster.

Oh, except for one making fun of said poster.
Short and snarky is not as much of a strength for him as he thinks it is.

The snark is why I had to stop reading Gruber. He's a great blogger, but his attitude made me have to walk away every few articles and just take a breather. It's not an endearing trait.
OK, I'll bite on the robo-taxi fleets. The average cab driver makes $10.79 an hour:
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/ta...

Give a 50% overhead and make the cab driver's cost $15 an hour. I used to pay about $50 for a half hour cab ride from LAX to Westwood, tip and surcharge subtracted, call it $40. I would still find a "no driver" taxi ride for $30 expensive.

The point I am trying to get at is that the economies of traditional taxi companies and future "robo-taxi" companies will not be all that different. Taxi companies will not be repairing cars. They already buy large fleets of cars. Also keep in mind that the taxi industry itself is regulated. Recall Udemey's issues in DC with the taxi lobby.

I do think Google will can be successful in the automotive industry, I just don't buy that they will be doing so by attempting to take down other existing industries. Google is entering a space that is much different than the web or electronic hardware. They have so much trouble breaking into the living room, not sure why you think they will make it to the driveway so quickly.

On (5), I meant a decrease in parking revenue is not necessarily a bad thing for a city. Easier parking also means less barriers to a purchase.
Something that would actually allow Quicktime vids to fullscreen so I don't have to use Safari to fix this problem
Hah. Unlikely. We still tax diesel cars several times more then petrol cars because we think they are dirtier. This is only just beginning to change. Tesla gave up here because of the frosty reception from our government. The authorities here tend to adopt a wait and see attitude rather than pushing the boundaries on things like this.
"Estimate this to be around 100 hours of time, as it has to be done manually in text files for every single instance of the code"

search and replace anyone?? carefully crafted query using even Funduc S&R would take it max 5 minutes... but hey, given the content of the site... I would be afraid of a guy quoting bible verses in replies too!
I totally agree. My point is that Google has the potential to become part of the value chain - not replace it.
It's important to create an awesome work environment. But in my experience it's usually a trade off, the downside of which can be having diminished social life outside of the office. You're also probably expected to sacrifice some compensation and the deal tends to be in favor of the employer.
If you ask me this has more to do with JS becoming the lingua franca of web development and less to do with making programming as easy as possible.

Case in point, recently some chick from highschool asked me where she could learn to code, so I pointed her to some Scheme tuts, nothing too complex since she requested something as easy as possible.

....then she writes back asking if "this is what jquery uses". I say "no", she gets upset and ask me "what the hell is this for then?"

Long story short: for a lot of people out there is not about learning how to code but learn-X-to-do-Y no more no less...
The disk io was pretty low. It is serial get/update/delete (as I mentioned earlier). I even tried moving the data dirs to ramdisk (was plenty of ram), but it didn't help much at all. i/o was certainly not the problem.

It very well could be a configuration issue. I am still trying a few things to see if I can get an improvement.
It's the other way around, language designers go out of their way to conform to C-like syntax in order to cater to programmers of C-like languages.

C's syntax is a fairly low level, which makes it fairly easy to map to assembly, but not very well suited for representing high level constructs (see C++).
Amen to that brother ;)
A few months ago, I wrote a proof of concept that does this: https://github.com/deactivated/video-snapshot. It seems to still work in Chrome 24.

It depends on the HTML5 player and has a few other limitations, but it might be useful for anyone doing something similar.
Is Ticketmaster bot only for the ticket brokers? 
When it comes to Ticketmaster bots, people have a number of questions in their mind and one of the most common question among them is whether Ticketmaster bot is only for ticket brokers or not.
Too LONG; didn't READ.
Luckily no one teaches BASIC, people just play with it because it is installed on their system.
Try this https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jnjfeinjfmenlddahd...
> Real progress would mean people living in compact communities where most trips are undertaken on foot or by bicycle.

That sounds like an unbearably miserable existence. I don't live in a compact community will millions of other people for a reason.
But his hourly rate is $237 an hour!
I figured Atom had hyperthreading because it was Intel's first in-order x86 core in over a decade, so compilers had forgotten how to schedule x86 code, so there were lots of stalls in the ALUs that a second thread could make good use of. Plus scheduling for Atom is pretty hard in part due to the lack of registers in x86.

Additionally, Ars argues [1] that from a performance per watt perspective, hyperthreading makes more sense with x86 and two cores makes more sense with ARM

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/05/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-e...
"Violate privacy and break things" perhaps?
4) This has nothing to do with Google and more to do with auto manufacturers. I don't think the problem is that people can't drive their cars to the auto shop.

5) Agreed. Also better traffic flow if you can get the cars to work together.

6) You're probably right about city courts. I'd also love to see cops focusing on actual police work rather than waiting for people to run a stop sign. But we have traffic courts that handle these sort of things - we have assigned separate agencies to take care of it. It's hard to argue though that we have somehow failed to prosecute actual crime due to traffic and parking tickets - there are probably problems more severe that have caused that.
why is this on the front page of HN?
The bit about there always being room for growth was driven home for me yesterday as I was looking through how to build an object model in PostgreSQL using object-relational features. I went through the features one by one and discovered that I had only scratched the surface of that aspect of PostgreSQL. I suddenly understood how to rethink what I was doing in terms of design patterns in order to build object interfaces in the db for the relational underpinnings.
Rich Hickey is a great thinker.
The antipattern involved isn't the messy work. It's the management's idea that the most efficient way to work is to always do everything as quickly as possible.
Sure, but how hard would it be for Google to create a wholly-owned subsidiary that is an insurance company, which only happens to insure Google?

Patent troll Intellectual Ventures reportedly created hundreds of shell companies. Amazon creates tens of subsidiaries (e.g. Kindle is technically created by lab126, owned by Amazon but a separate company) etc. Whatever the legal roadblocks insurance companies might try to throw, I don't see how they can stop new insurance companies from being created and that's a simple loophole against any anti-self-insurance laws.
So, I accept your downvote and will take it as constructive criticism to look at my tone in the future.

OTOH, I upvoted you as much for your tone as for the content of the message. Sometimes showing a little emotion to make a point, is the right thing to do.
Not suggesting otherwise, I've been eager to try a platform like this with a lot of other users.
I agree with the resolution issue. I don't think I'll be buying one (assuming Gruber is right) because I'd much rather have the retina display.

But he's right about the tradeoffs. The idea of a 7" tablet that weighs as much as my Kindle is pretty amazing. I don't think my Kindle is very heavy, and I keep it in a leather case; without the case it's amazingly light.

As Gruber saidhe retina display would need a bigger battery. Apple touts battery life too much to lower it. My parents (with light usage) can go a week or more without charging their iPad. I don't think an iPad Mini with 4 or 5 hour battery life would be received that well. And the battery requires thickness and weight, not to mention all the additional costs (RAM/VRAM/screen/battery/etc).

$200 or $250 is a pretty great price point. At $350, it's in a different market segment from the Fire and Nexus 7.
I wonder if it is possible to make the CPU be 64 bit only, and how much die space/power it would save by not including the 32 but cruft.

I'd also be curious if it was possible to software translate 32 bit arm binaries into 64 bit while retaining comparable performance.
I do agree that there is merit to documenting public interfaces, but there are tools designed specifically for that job so that you do not have to go slogging through the source code at all when you want to look up a definition.

As a result, I feel that is a different matter to commenting for the purposes of code maintainability, which is what the parent poster is speaking to.
This is a Reuters release, but could it be that a story like this is planted by some interest group? This is something I've always wondered. Could someone with experience in public company politics shed some light on this?
I wish I had something analogous to Multifox, preferably operating on a per-tab basis.

I looked into making something of the sort, but unfortunately the necessary API calls (e.g. notify my extension BEFORE a cookie gets set) don't seem to exist, so any solution using the existing API would be a bit hackish.

EDIT:
It may be possible to do at the level of intercepting all HTTP requests in the affected tabs? (No idea if the API allows that, or if it would be a good approach even if it were possible.)
I'll have to do a follow up post to clarify, as this seems to be the common second reading of what I was trying to say. Programmers of all levels can do Macgyver Programming. I was trying to point out that it is a mistake for any programmer's boss to want all code written that way.
It's better, cause there's a version formatted in .doc for all your offline needs: http://www.constellation7.org/Salvation/Salvation.doc

This make 1986 Print Shop hot shots look like Michelangelo in comparison.
There is zero guarantee that the route you took is the route Google Maps would give you, though. And the time estimates are way off in many major cities.
Which resulted in a discussion on a different thread? http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2012-...
The tests I've seen only showed a 10% improvement on average with hyperthreading. I don't think it was worth it for ARM.
Software Engineering Distilled to 20 Tweets
Do you seriously not understand how a hot tub could be inappropriate as part of a job interview?

Not as bad as a casting couch or a swimsuit competition, but still bad. Obviously, indisputably bad. I just hope that part of the article was not inspired by truth.
The reason is, while HN may be filled with all people who like startups--in fact, it may be primarily white males--so many people know so many different things, and have so many different perspectives, that I consistently fin conversations of a higher quality than anywhere else on the Internet.

I think this is true only with regards to sort of the 'classic' elements of HN; discussions of technical matters, startups, and overall just strong advice is wonderful and keeps me coming back to the overflowing well.

Discussions that include fanboyism of any kind (politics, education, and Apple v. MS v. Google chief among them) are aggravating. But bad parts don't negate good parts.
Of course, best of both worlds would be better, though obviously not possible for every question.
Given that they handle payments, its considerably more than a communication network.
On Feeding Your CPU With Data
SMT generally doesn't require any ISA support, which is why it's confusing that Kanter would mention it.

Also, a lot of code (think pointer-chasing) can never be made "tight".
Which States should support the National Popular Vote Bill?
The only thing worse than uncommented code, is wrongly-commented code. In my experience, code is almost always wrongly-commented, either because the programmer wrote the comment wrong in the first place, or because they wrote the code wrong, or because the code was later updated to do something different, and the comment was not updated to reflect the changes.
In my experience, especially in an old codebase, it's extremely rare to find a piece of code that is both thoroughly and accurately commented.

Given that reality, I would rather forego the comments for readable code. Readable code tells me what is going on, and doesn't lie!
I do not, in general, comment my code (and I know and work with many other programmers who do not) but I go to great lengths to ensure that my code is easily understandable. Commenting is not the only way to communicate intent.

I agree that commenting is not the only way to communicate intent.

I don't know what you mean by commenting code though. I find in general that the people who treat commenting as a last resort, and look for every other method to clarify code first, tend to also have some of the highest comment to code ratios, as well as the best comments.

This was driven home to me recently when I wrote some PHP classes for interfacing with LedgerSMB. I checked them into github and added the project to Ohloh, and was stunned when it said I had as many comments as code. But virtually all of these were interface documentation.
Hey Guillaume, looks nice. I'll try to benchmark it against the famous Akka Pi.scala example.

Btw since, language is not important, why didn't you write this in Scala?
Well, for the kickstarter-like campaign they ran, $50 in one lump sum makes sense. I would hope when it's live, they would also offer a monthly payment plan as well.
Success of engineered tissue depends on where it’s grown
How to Rebuild the City as a Platform
I wonder if Apple is going to replace the iPod Touch with this.

Think about it: the Touch didn't get a spec bump while the iPhone, iPad and even the AppleTV did, and it sells for the same price of a Kindle Fire, Nexus 7 or Nook Tablet, all popular small tablets in the category where this iPad mini would compete.

PMPs are dead mostly because the same kind of people who bought PMPs are now buying tablets and Apple can't make this new iPad too expensive or it will be too close to the iPad2 and consumers will buy that one instead, nor can it make the Touch cheaper or it will cannibalize the Nano.