skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who says there's no development toolchain?

Terminal IDE and AIDE for Java. SL4A for Python, JavaScript and Ruby. Ruboto. There's a version of Octave now. And I'm sure there's more besides. There are definitely development options on an Android device.

I've been using SL4A and the Jota editor to teach myself Python (professionally, I'm a .Net developer) on my Nexus 7 and I've been pretty happy with it. I can carry it everywhere, and anytime I have a few minutes to spare I can open up the ebook I've been reading, then go to the editor and/or the immediate window and try some things out. And if I'm at my desk, I can use a hardware keyboard, making things even easier.

Emacs improves the possibilities even more. At the very least, it's a far better editor than any of the current editors (unless you're a vim fan using Terminal IDE) for any scenario where you need an editor.

At best, it could get a whole package management system of supporting utilities that are available to it inside its terminal, and becomes a good way to develop with virtually any language that has a compiler that can be ported to Android. Maybe it even gets w3m browser mode, music player mode, and other awesome Emacs-as-OS features.
If your diagram can explain away the fact that Utah consistently has the US's highest birth rate, then yes. Children largely are a consequence of religion/culture in many parts of the world. The parents use their free will to do what religion/culture has told them is good to do.

The subsistence farmer who has lots of children to help him dooms his kids. What's insane is enabling farmers to do that by saving their kids and nothing else. Since it's economic the farmer may well have even more kids to do even better economically.
I read it as s/backup/commit
I Was Worried About [Programmer] Apprenticeships. Now I'm Resolved.
Making an airplane easy enough to fly that most people could conceivably pilot one, with a similar amount of training as currently required to learn to drive, is the interesting and important thing here. It also happens to be something that this airplane does nothing to address.

Once you have an airplane that's as easy to fly as a car is to drive, you can do all of what you're talking about, and there's no reason to combine it with something that can drive it on a highway. It's not that big of a hassle to switch vehicles at the airport.
The Safari 6 Web Inspector is an Unusable Mess
Healthy discussion can include the word "religion". I haven't made any generalizations that haven't also been suggested by much research by others.
There's no better way to learn.
Oogle starts changing Google+ naming system
As if a self-taught person can't learn what not to do from more advanced peers and get the same benefit?
If I get to repeat a patio11 by integrating them they might earn me a lot of money.
Also how innovative is Stripe really. They provide a service that is fairly obvious when you worked with Paypal or a large bank. The point is providing the service is a lot of hard work, thats what we pay them for. The mere idea of payments should not suck this hard is not their business. It is actually depositing your customers money in your bank account and frankly they don't offer that in Germany.
The vika byske legs in the second build are adjustable 70-107 cm. The utby underframe in the first one appears to have feet that are adjustable at least a few cm.
I've spoken to software devs who (kind of) liked their software appearing on filesharing sites - it was validation that they'd made something worth being cracked and pirated.

Coelho's points are definitely interesting but it seems to hinge on the digital/physical separation of products and how we currently value physical stuff ("to download my books [then] buy a hard copy", songs on the radio / buying CDs)... I guess that the real test comes when you're saying "download my book for free, then if you like it, download my book for money".
Science Exchange Reproducibility Initiative
Useful site
Independent labs to verify high-profile papers
sponsored accounts are an option
To be fair, version control and backups should be separate things.
Not accredited, but I applaud the effort. However, I decided to check out CS 101 to see what they were offering. I am compelled to slog through the entire course to form a full opinion but the content seems to have been assembled from ninth grade term papers. The first two reading exercises contain very little in the form of correct grammar, proper spelling, and coherent thought.
i tell them "I make mobile games", in which case 99% of the time, they'll bring up Angry Birds.
If this is the intended meaning then I disagree. The problem is that the kind of code most of us write isn't pure implementations of algorithms backed by formal proofs. In that case the code is the documentation because it is an expression of a mathematical description of something.

The code most of us write is a hodgepodge of business logic, frontend code, and a bunch of glue to make it all work together. In the case of business logic context is highly important. Just looking at the code doesn't convey the whole story or the "why" this code does what it does. In this specific case comments are the difference between saying "we don't know why this works," and "according to BUG-#### we need to send the counterparty this field as a logon credential otherwise their system behavior is undefined."
Cool... reminds me of DEFCON's ninja badge which used 2.4 GHz zigbee to talk to other ninja badges at the conference.

http://ninjas.org/badges/defcon18.html
"On the other hand, think of it as a never ending conference of a very specific type of crowd"

That sounds truly horrific if most web design conference tweets and talks are anything to go by.
Think about it. First off, look at the price of a Cirrus. Not much (if any) cheaper, although it's a fully certified plane (not a light-sport).

This plane offers several important advantages. First, no hangar fees. You land and drive home.

It runs on AUTOMOTIVE GAS. This is a huge advantage.

Finally: weather avoidance. If the weather turns bad, you land and continue your trip on the ground. When it clears up, you go to the nearest airport and take to the air again. This is probably the greatest thing about a roadworthy plane.

The critical part of all this is SAVING OUR AIRPORTS. We have been robbed of thousands of airports over the last few decades by corruption, greed, and stupidity. It goes all the way up from the people who move next door to an airport and then start bitching about it (ahem Santa Monica) to the politicians who pander to them while taking handouts from developers; to those developers who goad all of them on so they can move in for the land grab.

Stand up for your local airport. They are an irreplaceable part of our national transportation infrastructure. Without them, advances like the Terrafugia and electric planes will die because there will be no market.

Take a flying lesson! That's a unique opportunity that the rest of the world has squandered. Just ask Europe, where user fees have essentially destroyed general aviation. And the Obama administration has been trying to do the same thing here year after year after year.
Why People Bought Android Phones Instead Of iPhones, According To An Apple Study
What Losing 40lbs Taught Me About Business
> On Friday Wikileaks complained on Twitter that CloudFlare had preemptively blocked the organization from signing up.

I wonder what the actual error message is. Wikileaks actually had to complain on Twitter before finding out they weren't actually blocked, just that there was a special signup process for high-volume accounts.

If there are high-volume site operators who didn't want to tweet CloudFlare for whatever reason, I wonder who else they could list as customers by now.
I set it up to check an old email account I tend to forget about for months at a time (which can't auto-forward mail). I could set a calendar event, but I don't want to force myself to check it at exact intervals.

There's a web-hook switch which is intriguing, though I haven't come up with a good use case yet.
That's a technique Steve McConnell calls "The Pseudocode Programming Process," and while it's verbose, it's not a Bad Thing. I don't do it, but I'd rather have comments like you posted than none at all.
I think it's actually just one specific program, who's name starts with a special character or high UNICODE character.
>Don't become the old people you hate, always try to learn new things, no matter how alien.
So following that:
There's a good talk about Code Documentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCw7CpRvYOE
"Nothing is hard to the person who doesn't have to do it themselves." Old quote, I have no idea the original source.
Jesus, my research project once depended on this file. The day we deleted it from the repository was a very happy one.
That example is rather hyperbolic and not particularly useful. I can't recall the last time in 15 years that I thought "this code has too many comments!"
"100% Secure/Durable." Okay, if you say so. Why should I trust this? Now I have to decide whether it's more likely that I get struck by lightning or you do. Well, you spent 17 whole hours on it...

Sorry, I don't mean to diss your thing, it's a nice idea. I'm just sick of all the exaggerated reliability claims of these startup projects. Maybe I'm crazy, but if you claim "100% durability" on something fairly important, you're taking on serious responsibility. What are the odds of this site working in three years? Three months?
I think comments should be more to explain the why and not the what necessarily. Even in the example x+=n, the what part is simple. you are adding n to x. But why are we doing it there could be important to comment in the context. May be this addition changes the variable to trigger another action etc ?
Coming soon from Google, Mars Maps!
Firefox Most Popular Browser for Automated Testing
I think their stand will only be impressive when it results in a situation where they have to decide between money and "free speech".
I've seen quite a lot of code that kind of looks like this:

// Increment the total
log.Debug("total before increment=" + total);
total++;
log.Debug("total after increment=" + total);

I find myself looking at it and going where is stuff actually happening!

I sort of wish someone would allow comments and logging to be combined as language features.
Problem is that code always breaks in production. What we should strive for is not to cause a critical break that creates massive loss for the company. But code has and will break in production.
At least where I live, we pay an estimated value every month, and then when they come to check the numbers on the meter, they either add a surcharge or a credit to the next bill. So if we lowered our power draw thanks to the device, we'd get a credit after the next reading.

That said, I don't know if the person your quoted is in the same situation or not.
Just like in the article, I beg to disagree. This reminded me of an article I saw a while back (which I can't find at the moment) of a guy who brought donuts into work and then quit his job to start his bakery. He would bring in donuts and then realize that he wasn't getting enough money to cover the donuts when charging per donut so what he did was put out a tip/donation basket/jar and would have a sign stating donations accepted. Turned out he would make more per location doing that than if he charged per donut. He attributed this to the fact that in a group setting people would feel guilty not contributing as well as people's conscious coming into play. (Please forgive the butchering of my recount of the tale and if anybody has a link it would be appreciated if they could post)

Your explanation is incredibly cynical and suggests that people are all completely self-centered and lack empathy. There are still people who will pay for things that bring them value and recognize hard work that goes into a product. It is the same reason why people donate to open source projects. They don't need to. They could easily use the project and be on their way.
Wozniak: Web crackdown coming, freedom failing
You gain a lot by building on other services. When you build on S3, you get their protections. A little more effort and it can be quite durable.

But you never get 100%.
Is the idea that gauss would act like a secret file katamari, rolling around collecting data while it spreads, and being harvested when it "infects" a creator controlled machine? It would seem like any direct data transmission would be detectable and investigated with extreme prejudice.
Keep this in mind next time you correspond with an Aussie
If it was in your price range you would already have a smart phone.
I totally agree. This isn't a "hey this is a service you should pay for" post, this is more of a "hey I built this in 17 hours at a hackathon, check it out".

If it ever does become a service for real I'll need to do some work to secure it, add features, etc.
This is more for pilots who want a more mobile aircraft than normal folk who want a car that flies.

Owning a Cessna means you have to pay for a tiedown or a hangar at an airport. With this, you can hangar it in your garage. The added expense doesn't really make sense, but it certainly makes it more convenient.

The same with premium laptops, people like myself don't mind paying an extra $1000 for a MacBook knowing its an easier, smoother experience. Likewise, a wealthy pilot might prefer this to a Cessna because it makes things simpler.
Increasingly what the tuition dollars actually fund is layer after layer of bloated administration.

Teaching and research are generally the first thing to get cut when budget cuts loom, never the hordes of junior associate vice subdeans.

Even when you get a research grant a large percentage of it (30-50%, sometimes) gets chopped off for "overhead" (i.e., the aforementioned hordes of administrators).

I don't know if MOOCs per se are the answer -- likely they're part of it, but not the whole solution. However, I do know that higher ed is ripe for disintermediation.

Basically, you've got a group of customers who are used to paying tens of thousands of dollars for a service, while the people who actually produce the service are getting paid a very small percentage of that. The situation is especially striking when it comes to large lecture classes of the sort common at the various campuses of Enormous State University. You've got sections of 250 students or more (maybe a thousand or more students across all section), each of whom is paying on the order of a thousand bucks to sit in a large lecture hall and listen to the professor. So maybe $250K per section, or a million for the whole course. The adjunct professor teaching the course is probably getting paid ~$2k-3k per section. If that reminds you of the situation that formerly prevailed in music and book publishing, it should.

Accreditation is the sticking point. That's going to have to be revamped or an alternative mechanism will have to be devised.
Version control won't save you if you start tidying up (and introduce new bugs) before you commit changes.
I'm checking CS on Khan academy every few weeks with hope for something like this, the Python class was great, but this is really exciting, and having Vi Hart do the videos is cool (or someone with a very similar voice...) - correction: it's narrated by Jessica Liu, who is doing an amazing job too
I'm sure Jesse Lovelace (of the WhoIs record) will be happy to be on a receiving end of all inquires pertaining to enforcements of "your insurance policy."
I miss VMS, it solved this problem in such a naturally elegant way.
Wouldn't that be even more reason to just pick a license that doesn't ruffle feathers? BSD is nice. So is MIT. Says the same thing but doesn't get people to post "Why'd you pick that license?" posts.
I would add: Don't release on a Friday.
> Is that a problem?

Yes, because it means I might need to read 6 layers of code and wind through multiple modules, instead of just reading the top layer that defines the invariants of input/output for a module.
Better yet, retain a lawyer for this purpose. The difference being that the lawyer can make determinations this site cannot. For example, you might think that a one week period is sufficient however you'd be better off with a one month period just for safety reasons as you might be stuck on some mountain or locked up with some mob boss for a week and you don't want the dead man's switch to trigger. But what if you're coming home from the mountain climbing trip or the meeting with the mob boss and you get in a car accident and in order to relieve brain swelling, doctors have you in a medically-induced coma for six weeks? Oops...

A lawyer can make such a judgment call without falling back to the binary decision of "has the time elapsed with no check-in?".
if nothing, tell them "I build stuff that will change your life. So buy it now!!"

Jokes apart, first explain a problem that they understand. If they get the problem, then tell them that you help solve that problem by [add whatever here]. Simple.
Daring Fireball, App.net, and admitting who our heroes are
Yeah that's kind of tongue-in-cheek. It's most likely not either of those at this point. I just threw some stuff up there that a service "might" say if it was for realz.
Khan Academy Computer Science Platform Announced
Yes, I'd gladly share my super-secret - so secret I only want it revealed when I die - stuff with some random website. No bueno. I'm sorry, but this is basically one of those services you can't really run on a hosted environment.

I think the ultimate solution is a dead man's switch that is tied to something physical, aka a password in a bank vault that unencrypts a file somewhere. Yes, you have to trust the bank, but it's unlikely the bank knows what to do with this random password.

This is what I do - all my passwords and super-secret stuff is in an encrypted file with the passphrase something I have memorized. It's also written down and stored in a secure location that my wife has access to, should something bad happen to me. I don't care if she accesses this password when I'm not dead - it's only in a secure location to prevent accidental disclosure (theft) of it.
Wouldn't it have took you less time to check the wattage of each bulb on the house than having to buy, receive, install and run this meter?
Some user populations very, very much do not want their phone number available to everyone on the public Internet, particularly when posted next to a photo of them and a guided tour of their residence. "Nobody will ever see your phone number unless you give it to them." is a selling point for these users.
Cold Fusion researcher Martin Fleischman dies at age 85.
This could easily leverage CoffeeScript or even an education-oriented language that compiles to JS, but then the students wouldn't be able to immediately turn around and build real-world apps without additional cognitive overhead.
This is beautiful and succinct. It makes me wonder what part of this whole operation can even be considered a "success."
They said it didn't rely on the JOBS act.
I find this kind of thing fascinating. Personal observations from New York are "go ahead" vs "after you" and finishing a transaction with "you're all set". Maybe I'll tone down the use of exclamation marks when corresponding with by British and American colleagues!
> Is that senior enough for you?

No. Have you read 70s and 80s C code? Tried tracing through the original UNIX kernel sources? Tried working with them?

To understand all the invariants of one small aspect of the system quite often requires tracing through the whole system until you get to a well-documented input/output module point (via comments, man pages, or otherwise).

Also, the quote (aside from it being out of context) says to not comment bad code.

> No, they are actually advocating to put more effort in thinking about stuff: how you name your functions/methods/whatever, how do you name your arguments/parameters, how do you write the code itself.

You can't define all the invariants -- or summarize for readability -- in pure code.
As a potential user, I would certainly not like this. I think if your product is good enough for me to pay, I will pay for it regardless of whether you got my cc info upfront or after the trial period ends. So keep it simple. Do not ask for cc info unless you are charging at that point. Like I said, the user who thinks your product is worth it, will pay for it later as needed.

Only use case I can think of asking for cc upfront is not related to payment. It is more related to checking authenticity if you own a critical website and want real users (may be). But again, definitely not for the case you mentioned.
Ask HN: What developer tools do you use on Mac OS X?
Looks good and simplistic. +1 for ease of use...

We use D3 for data visualization and graph something similar to http://bl.ocks.org/3202712
It's an expression of frustration at how much effort has to go into understanding licensing. For this amount of code, no author or reader should have to consider the terms of a license. (And the license-to-code ratio would be even more ridiculous. )
Firewalls Are No Longer a Fait Accompli [regwall for full]
Well, Gauss requires a file in %PROGRAMFILES% which is considerably more difficult to plant.
For what it's worth, you can beat the TSA for under $30k - a used Cessna 150 can be had for around that price. The cost of a rental car at your destination will take quite a while to add up to the other $270k.
I didn't disagree with it.

I was speaking more generally to the attitude of contrarians that we come across. Hope that clarifies things.
Didnt notice it on my iPad either.
Using Dropbox for a free, private repo
"the attackers are looking for a very specific program with the name written in an extended character set, such as Arabic or Hebrew, or one that starts with a special symbol such as “~”."

I suppose µTorrent is too obvious... Anyway, these kinds of mysteries help re-ignite my interest in Cryptography. I'd love to hear feedback from a fellow HNer about the course from Udacity (perhaps via email since it will probably be considered off-topic here).
Maybe people who get around to publishing articles in the WSJ aren't really procrastinators.
TokBox overcomes Flash Media Server CPU Consumption
By rolling out their own messaging infrastructure.
Agreed, trust is key for a service like this. Ideally the contents need to be secure, but not so secure that you are the only one who can read them--otherwise what's the point since you're probably abducted or dead?
Don't forget to close git directory from the web.
The point of the page is to 1) acknowledge adjustable standing desks are spendy, and 2) provide possible cheaper standing desk alternatives.

Is it really that hard to grasp? Get a drafting chair. Or close the browser tab.
You get a different message at http://www.lendink.com/
A lot of us don't have drafting chairs—I'm in a conventional Aeron, for example—and I don't like the feel of my feet not being on the ground.
What an amazingly tasteless headline.
When it can take 3-4 statements to perform a single logical operation, there is still value in summarizing each block with a comment, even if the function isn't "too long".
Geez--no need to hate. This is a "cool demo" not a real service that I'm selling.
If you build a custom desk for yourself, you don't need it to be adjustable.
Sorry, I only give away my reveal-only-after-death secrets to businesses that are totes for realz, not ones that are only pretending to be.
Curiosity's daily schedule and how to drive it from the earth
TL;DR - fiber is good, Google is installing fiber in Kansas City. Nothing new here.
This is what I used to build my own adjustable standing desk: http://www.leevalley.com/US/hardware/page.aspx?p=40573&c...

Note that the description is wrong. It's not a maximum of 20 lbs, it's just that the counterbalance is weighted for 20lbs. If you have 20 lbs worth of tabletop on top of it, there's basically no effort required to lift the table. I'm not sure what the maximum would be, but I was not concerned about my 45 pound monitor at all.
Video: How to Secure Your iPhone