skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an anti-pattern.

If you're working in a team, on a project, or in an organization in which this is the operational mindset, your first goal should be to get the hell out. You're in a Bs hiring Cs situation. And eventually, if someone inside your organization doesn't solve the problem, someone outside (e.g.: your competition) will. That's a Christensenian disruptive innovation situation right there.

An alternative goal is to figure out how to do the right thing in such a way that you don't get fired / lose standing over it.

Figuring out how to change the culture might be a third alternative, though this calls for very skillful maneuvering to conduct successfully.

There are exceptions to the general rule. Sometimes checks or controls are in place to prevent thigns from going seriously haywire. But even here, simplicity and efficiency should prevail.

And of course, you should take care not to be guilty of this mindset yourself.
UN suggesting US reduce corn based biofuel production
I was excited to read this article, because I want to see more attempts to improve education. But then I saw that this is a for-profit education company.

I know there is a place for private educational endeavors in our society. But if you really want to fix education for everyone, you've got to focus on public education. Yes, it's a big ugly political seemingly unchangeable mess. But it's the only system that reaches everyone.

Every generation has a revolution waiting to happen. Improving public education might be the next significant social revolution in the US, but it won't be led by for-profit education companies.
Building connections via Lunch in the UK
Indeed, the aggregate numbers are there, but it's extremely difficult to find individual examples of success/failure by category or goal. That's the point of TKBM.
Mind the context: the guy said there needed to be a "new VI" to have "better" syntax highlighting (whatever specifically he meant by that). You broke in to emphasize how tough it is to parse C++, which is true, but not entirely relevant; the person you replied to was simply pointing out that it's easy to reconfigure vim's syntax highlighting to almost any requirement. Which is true, by the way.

It appears that you are preoccupied with hard-coded construction of ASTs for some dialect of C++ inside your editor. I never suggested it could not be done. But, this is a different issue.

However, I really don't think many people need that when the facilities for configuring syntax highlighting are so good. The existing system has allowed vim to support a crazy number of languages and have fresh support for languages quite quickly after they start to be used.

If you like vim, and you want something SPECIFIC to be fixed about its C++ highlighting (not just a general complaint that you feel it is 'woefully limited' because it isn't based on hardcoded static analysis for C++) ... then don't waste time on doubt. Just try it. Make your own highlighting script and see if it works to a usable level. If it does not, then you know, and not just because of some a priori principle that syntax highlighting is useless unless it is based on an AST generated by your compiler toolchain or something.

If you really did have any practical reason to believe that the existing syntax highlighting facility was totally unsuitable for more than a handful of people... maybe it would be interesting to have some way of plugging in external modules of some kind to provide ASTs for specific languages. (Because I think the idea of making my text editor totally coupled to a specific hard-coded implementation of a parser for a particular language sucks really bad; but if you don't think that, then maybe you just want to buy a C++ IDE and be done with it)
Am I the only one who finds kickstarter search so frustrating? all I want to find is all the technology products orders by recently added.. am I missing something blatant
The characterization of Clojure is questionable. A conservative would want to avoid risk and would be against change. About the only really conservative thing of Clojure I would see that it preserves the investments made into the JVM and uses an accepted technology as a base. Other than that it is a radical break for the Clojure user base. The Clojure user base does not come from ML or Haskell. It comes from Java, Ruby, Python and a few other languages. But not from statically-typed functional languages and not even from Lisp. Even Rich Hickey does not come from there.

With Clojure you keep one feet on the ground (the Java ecosystem) and the other feet is in the unknown dark water.
Completely agree with your synopsis in the first sentence. The article would have been stronger had he given a more thoughtful analysis to the differences between China and say, America. As it is, he points out a lot of characteristics of China and the Chinese that may be more extreme, but don't seem to be all that different at a fundamental level, than what you might see elsewhere in the world. But this is understandable, given that it sounds like he's been immersed in China for the last 16 years - perhaps he's lost some perspective.
That's kind of you to say. Radio's my day job.
When It Comes to Human Rights, There Are No Online Security Shortcuts
It depends on the organization how long it takes. In a more 'enlightened' organization it's common courtesy to ping an engineer whose code you are working on improving, and then you can hack away. In a more stodgy one, yes, it could take 10x longer to get everyone on the same page if there are some people whose egos are easily bruised.

Regardless, it's a dick move to rewrite someone's code over the weekend and then roll in on Monday and start demoing it to PHBs that the original authors report to.

It sounds like the author had little respect for the original authors and decided he would swoop in and 'save the day' and not even give them a heads up with what he was doing. Then, he had the nerve to demo it to their superiors, and it's probably not hard to imagine him taking this 'opportunity' to explain why the original authors suck.. I mean, failed to think of this solution. The "but, but, I'm just making the product better" angle provides cover if he's called out on keeping the other authors in the dark.

Being a bit of a cowboy and having tact are not mutually exclusive things. This particular story reeks of someone looking to not just highlight their own skills but to do so at the expense of others.
You are right, piping with xsel is very cool.
This reminds me of Dan Pink's talk on the science of motivation [0]. Ask a bunch of people to do something for little to no reward, and they find the task much more pleasurable than those who are highly rewarded for the same task.

Likely there's a good dose of cognitive dissonance thrown in: people who are highly rewarded justify doing the routine task for the money; those without pay have no extrinsic motivation so their brain fools itself and finds intrinsic reasons to enjoy the task.

In the case of the Festivus of Athletes™ (not 2011, not 2013, but somewhere in between) the volunteers get to have an insider's experience they otherwise wouldn't have, it's short duration so they don't burn out and get bored, and they experience camaraderie with the other volunteers.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
And a power vacuum in search created.
With VBA, you can't just copy-paste code from google - it's rare that you'll find something that does exactly what you want it to do on your specific spreadsheet. Readability, then, becomes important - and Python is easier to parse and edit for someone with basic programming skills than VBA is.
although I've used vim for a while now, I still feel like chuckling when I see something like 'gg"* yG:qa!<Cr>' written out, because of how ridiculous it looks to anyone who doesn't use vim.
... you'd need some preprocessing first. The ASCII characters `0' and `1' aren't easy to use to write a program, though you could do it with nasm and some '-' and '+'s I suppose.

If someone can prove me wrong, I'd be very happy though. Writing a program using just '0' and '1' (the ASCII characters) would be awesome. (in an established programming language, and no homomorphisms. :) )
It's not just Olympics that capitalize on volunteers. Any industry that is viewed as glorious/glamorous with a potential of high payoff (not just monetary, but also in terms of fame and reputation) exploits volunteers and low-paid workers to death.

Acting ("When someone in LA tells me 'I am an aspiring actor', I ask 'Which restaurant?'"), fashion, arts, music, charity, design and architecture to some extent. Take for example http://workinculture.ca/ You would never see that many volunteer and unpaid internship positions in IT or engineering.
No - they're still building out these tunnels.

My uncle worked briefly on the project in the 60's but its very much active

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gfSEjMtAoc
Property and sales taxes are not what is fueling the benefit/entitlement programs on the federal level, which is what is truly out of control. That is why people cite the 50% of people that don't pay income taxes so much -- we have half of the country paying nothing into the system and about the same amount of people taking out. It's not sustainable.

To say that the government needs to keep handing out entitlements because otherwise companies will run out of customers is such an awful argument - and one that I have heard often. If the government would get out of the way the market would respond like it is supposed to -- and prices would come down. Would some companies go out of business? Possibly. But only the companies that were unsustainable without government propping them up to begin with.
It's wireless transmission. Your bandwidth is a function of the frequency of your communication channel, and long-distance transmission generally uses low-frequency signals (and as a result, low speed).

The one way to get around this is to use a multi-channel link, that is to say you communicate over several frequencies simultaneously. This is more difficult, both technically and because you must find unused frequencies.
Agreed. The author focuses on the right and wrong of things, but it is really about conventions.

One could argue that opening brace on the same line makes code look more "natural", or opening brace on a new line makes it look more "symmetric". But instead of reasoning about which way is better or worse, one should focus on coming up with a rule that is prescriptive and covers all cases.

For example, the "opening brace placement" rule should prescribe the position of the brace in all these cases (for C language):
1. if and for loops
2. Function definition
3. Switch statements
very cool! where I envision them to be next is holding up a CD to your webcam, and taking your body measurements in proportion to the disk you're holding up, and customize shirts and suits from there. thanks for sharing!
Yeah it's Arq, iPad auto correct gets me way too many times.
I just feel there needs to be a lot more work put into web intents ( http://webintents.org/ ) when I see stuff like this.
Very cool...what I would like to see is duration of fundraising, if you were able to collect this?

What I mean is to have that in the current view...seems more useful than how many days ago it ended?
And you are correct that there are cases where this is true - but the best approach is to use an element of judgement and make a call when this is likely to pay off in the long term. Always using primitives for everything or never using primitives because you might need to augment them structurally at some point are both silly extremes that are equally bad.
Making Ubuntu 12.04 useable
Waiting for the Speakularity
Jon, you guys solved a problem of mine, so I can relate. My trouble with ill-fitting shirts is what led me to prototype swagger: http://brownieinmotion.ca/swagger/api/beta/ an apparel recommendation engine that filtered by fit, size, budget, etc but only for brands in your neighbourhood.
I have no idea what "our side" is supposed to stand for in this context. Is "our side" the side that wants unlimited copyright infringement? I support that side as little as I support SOPA-like bills.
So your biggest problem with VIM is that pseudo-VIM plugins for other software aren't implemented very well? Right...
Hi Cindy! Thank you :)
YouTube responds to DMCA requests so I assume copyright holders would contact them first, and not need to send notices to Google (search).
True, but as opposed to, say, France, the dropping of hats in China may take centuries, if not millennia.
The federal government's Medicaid mandate is destroying state education budgets-- Medicaid is literally crowding out state public university education spending.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/medicaid...
Thanks for this. I'm still a newbie in Javascript.
ehsanu1, your comment is dead, don't see any reason for it.
20 Year Archive of Firsts on Newsgroups
> Always using primitives for everything or never using primitives because you might need to augment them structurally at some point are both silly extremes that are equally bad.

I agree.
Stripe may be a cool idea right now, but it won't survive a better pay-by-phone alternative without external devices.

You need my money? I'll tap an app, enter the amount to send, enter the receiver's id and presto, the transaction shows in the receiver's phone/desktop app as completed.

Somebody will crack it, and he will be the next king of the hill.

* Even though I was confused with 'Square' and their card swiping device, the premise of a mobile payment app still applies to the web. In the future your phone will be your wallet.
USA Political Obama Vs. Romney - A Prize Fight?
If you log into Chrome, your bookmarks, history, plugins, settings, etc. will sync across all Chromes that you log into with the same user/pass.
"as opposed to the theater of customer service one normally gets from the paid "customer support" staff of large organizations."

Keep in mind also that the olympics is a short term thing and a job is a long term thing. It's easier to remain enthusiastic over the short term and for something that you choose because you wanted to do it. As opposed to something you have to do.

So the group of volunteers is both self selecting and additionally short term.
Wait: are you saying that non-profit education is ripping students off and making lots of money?
edit: with the help of connivance from the Democrats? Because that seems to be what you are implying...
OClint, A static source code analysis tool for Objective-C and related languages
I feel there's a big difference when you compare the US to either Europe or Asia as a whole: we are very open about it and our failings with it. It's in our consciousness to work hard to fight against it.

I think Europe is getting there with this frame of mind, but I don't feel that Asia even pretends to try.
My guess is that the copper oxide would be much cheaper to work into much thinner sheets than silicon, which is also expensive to purify, so although the raw material may be more expensive, the processing costs and volume used might be where the savings are made.

Also, the abstract on the referenced paper seems to indicate that the efficiency of this design is reasonable. I didn't go beyond the paywall to find out more though.

Photovoltaics (PV) are a promising source of clean renewable energy, but current technologies face a cost-to-efficiency trade-off that has slowed widespread implementation.(1, 2) We have developed a PV architecture—screening-engineered field-effect photovoltaics (SFPV)—that in principle enables fabrication of low-cost, high efficiency PV from virtually any semiconductor, including the promising but hard-to-dope metal oxides, sulfides, and phosphides.(3) Prototype SFPV devices have been constructed and are found to operate successfully in accord with model predictions.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl3020022
So if you want to decrease a competitor's search engine placement, would you just have to file C&D notices on them?

I don't see how the amount of C&D notices correlates with value to users. Google does not appear to be benefiting its users in doing this.
I think a big aspect of the problem is that people literally are children (or less than a year into adulthood) when social proof from their high school classmates dictates that they choose a college. As PG said in "Why Nerds are Unpopular," if he could go back and give his thirteen year old self advice, he'd tell him to realize the world around him was fake. Most students coming out of high school simply don't have the perspective to know "the big picture" like you did, nor do they know that they should be seeking that perspective. By the time they might realize this, they may already be half-way (or fully) invested in a bad decision that has significant barriers to fix.

(edit: "Nerds are Unpopular" => "Why Nerds are Unpopular")
Free Akamai Jacket (10min Survey)
So you rewrite everyone's code to make it "better" without their permission. Now who maintains all that code? You do. Life's to short to own all the code in the world.
FTA:

> Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site.

Following the link, you get to this page of stats ( http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/... ) on take-down requests. If that page is what they make their basis on, then YouTube doesn't crack the top pages, so I would guess that it won't be hurt too badly.

Although, I have no idea if their count for YouTube is accurate or not. It's not like they wouldn't have an interest in under-reporting the numbers.
Hey Jon, reach out to Adi at loose button, good friend of mine that does sample-shipments for cosmetics. A partnership would help vastrum reach women, no?
Harvard Researchers Find A Creative Way To Make Incentives Work
Avatars-as-a-service. Oh boy. I wonder where this will stop.
I guess I'll fold when someone goes at profit-as-a-service.
Kaspersky Labs uncover 'Gauss' Espionage Malware hits Middle East banks
Obviously, matters relating to shortfalls in our education system are important, but the real problem is campaign finance. With election candidates raising the vast majority of their funds from special interests, there is little incentive to fix problems that are profitable for said special interests.
Post-apocalypse, not post-Holocaust
I wonder if people are often scared of Paypal, even after it's become so entrenched in online payments. I would think the process for the average user (regardless of payment system used) is:

1. Do I want to purchase from this website
2. Do I trust this website to provide my payment info to it

If they use Stripe, there is no real "signal" that it is Stripe, the user thinks it is part of the website, the website they have already decided to trust. If a user answers yes to 1 and 2 with Stripe then they will purchase. With Paypal there is another step:

3. Do I trust Paypal to provide my payment info to it?

The user first has to trust the website and then trust Paypal, whereas with Stripe they only have to trust the website (because they don't know what Stripe is, and as long as they remain on the website they assume it's the same thing). So there is an extra step that the user can be turned off at, even if only 1 in 10 people answer yes to 1 and 2 but then no to 3 it can be significant.

Might be a crazy theory... but it seems plausible. Although at the same time quite a lot of people (my parents for example) trust Paypal and any website that uses Paypal, so it could be the case that the value of the Paypal brand negates the customer loss of people that have never heard of Paypal and decide they don't trust it.
How to Create Compelling Content that attracts Readers and Search Engines?
I've been using RoboForm, not well designed (it seems like they are improving though) but works great on both Mac and PC (sucks on iOS).
If if YouTube does receive a high level of copyright notices, you can bet they have a special case for ranking YouTube videos, just because they own it.
As a random bit of trivia, tapping esc followed by another key counts as hitting meta for that key. It might be easier to simply slap 'esc x' than try to chord alt-x.
You'd probably have to file thousands of takedowns and hope the site doesn't challenge them.
Huh, no, not at all. The last 10 years have been spent increasing photosite density. Today's sensors can have 10-20 times the resolution, and be the same physical size or smaller.
Today's sensors are also more reliable, less sensitive to dust and noise than sensors made 10 years ago.
How is this partnership going to benefit Filepicker over anyone else that implements Aviary?

This looks like an example integrating Aviary, with a seemingly sensational title.
Autonomous robotic plane flies indoors
New Samsung Cortex A15-based chip opens door to “Retina” Android tablets
I know just what you mean, it looks absolutely ridiculous. I occasionally send coworkers very long vim macros just for the enjoyment of explaining how useful some 100-character line of gibberish is.
What's wrong with the choice? The vast majority of people won't even see the choice (since they're not formatting their drives manually in Disk Utility) and will get the case-insensitive default that Mac OS has always had. But there are occasional reasons why one would actually want a case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem and for those people, there's a choice.
That's true in grasses, but not in trees. In grasses, if the aboveground leaves get shortened/killed, from fire or mowing, the belowground roots die back, then both regrow in a similar manner.
I've noticed the same thing - but I've interpreted as an inferiority complex. As a Chinese, I feel like the Chinese feel an incredible need to prove themselves.

After all, the 19th and 20th centuries have been one crushing defeat after another. The yearning and obsession with past achievements (like, 500+ years past) is symptomatic of a general lack of confidence in the present state of Chinese society.

You meet a lot of Chinese with a chip on their shoulders and a remarkable need to assert that China will be strong once more, along with vague threats about how naysayer countries will get their comeuppance when the time comes. This all sounds quite similar to "The South shall rise again!" - an attitude borne out of defeatism, not true optimism.
I must say that this was a completely worthless posting and completely misses the point of coding conventions.
- locked
- stucked
- one true way
- never changes

WTF? What is he talking about?
And somehow coding conventions inhibit innovation, exploration and creation? That's news to me.

Innovating and creating in languages like python is probably impossible in his opinnion, yes?
If a private college wants to give financial aid to a student who is poor, that is its business and it gets to define what 'poor' means for its purposes.

Kids from households making $200,000/yr may not be Maybach rich, but they don't need Pell Grants. and I certainly wouldn't describe their state as "purgatory" just because they aren't getting handouts.

The basis for giving this kind of handout (which I understand along with the general opposition to any handouts) is to improve class mobility and give poor kids a chance (after all, they did not choose to be born to the 'wrong' family). What reason is there for people with plenty of money to get that sort of handout? This I don't understand.
Readline has vi mode, and it's amazing. I use vi mode in zsh, bash, ruby, python, mysql, etc. and I can't live without it any more.

I still have fit-of-rage moments when I try to use things that either (a) try to roll their own line editing or (b) use some inferior readline clone.

rlwrap is nice, but typically the shells I'm using have other functionality that I miss too much (tab-completion) if I use it. For instance, I've given up using rlwrap with the Scala repl for this reason.