skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see driverless cars being designed for more household-like activities, as many will want to travel while they sleep, etc. Whether or not that prompts many to abandon their homes remains to be seen, but the changes could make it a more comfortable living space than a car of current design.
>The concept of a jump is not one you want to ever teach,

That is again another arbitrary social more invented by a rant written by Dijkstra. Learning that a computer processes code by using jumps is an important concept to learn, and it's actually a useful technique in many languages. Saying someone should never learn them is just stupid.
Yeah, I don't think this will happen. Why is this different than current mobile homes? Why don't "20-something's and college students" widely adopt mobile homes? Because they're inefficient and you don't need to bring all of your stuff with you everywhere.

This won't change just by making mobile homes autonomous. It will still be cheaper to have a stationary home and a cheap car, autonomous or not.
Teehan+Lax shows how this effect can be applied subtly : http://www.teehanlax.com/
Things I do to be consistently happy
My bad. But If a app will only be used for uploading files, you can do that in a web app. Every user would get a personalized link. No installation required.
Consumer Apps Raised Record $4B In Mobile VC In The First Half Of 2012, Up 25%+
An unsurprising response.
teaching to a broad audience means balancing the likelihood that the learner will be in over their head (too much information) with the likelihood that they will have a negative experience stemming from lack of information (bug due to missing semicolon). given javascript and its many bad parts I believe the first scenario to be much more likely than the second, especially for an introductory text.
The author said it was the owner of the cafe.
I type cyrillic text in: [барто готов]
press enter, nothing happens.

This uncovers at least two problems. Poor unicode handling? No indication leading to confusion?
Just to give some numbers here: Assuming 600 volts (which is the highest rating for voltage I've seen in a commonly available wire) you would be sending 5600A down that wire.

That would require a wire 2 inches thick (1 inch radius), not including the insulation. I doubt most people would even be able to lift such a wire.

A 15 foot length would weigh 416 pounds! (Assuming no ground - with a ground it's 625 pounds.)
2. Copy/paste.

Right click on the flash player, click on "Copy video URL."
The complete guide to deploying with git
Well, the UX is kinda confusing.
By the way... lyrics... please.
I was speaking to the broad generalization of JumpCrisscross who said that "Every government" needs to do this, for the sake of good democracy and social services. I disputed that broad generalization. Nothing I wrote should be construed to apply specifically for or against India.

As to voter fraud, of that I know only about the US. There is a handful of voter fraud in the US, and almost no in-person voter fraud at all[1]. What fraud there is is mostly via the absentee ballot. We had a long history of election fraud and vote rigging in the US, but little of that was due to the inability to reliably prove one's identity.

([1] When you vote, you sign your name to a registry, which is publicly reviewable. This biometric identifier is sufficient to detect, after the fact, if there is significant in-person fraud. This has not been demonstrated, despite a strong desire by some to show that it exists.)
Taking time off kind of by definition increases your productivity per hour. I want to hear a case of time off actually increasing total output.
I type in cyrillic text: [барто готов]
press enter and land on a blank, broken page.
This is a good point. To play a little off your blog post, a person new to Ruby could view the second line of code more as an idiomatic expression (which it's not really, but it can have the appearance of being one) in that it doesn't make obvious logical sense and is harder to translate to a more familiar language...giving a "raising ravens" (Spanish) vs. "can of worms" (English) scenario.

I think it'd be kinda cool if one could develop sort of a "ruby-normal-form" that could take some ruby expressions and translate them into a more normalized form using things like for-loops, etc....granted normalizing a lot of ruby code might be hard, intractable, or maybe even impossible.
OK, I'll bite: how about a system where down-votes can be optionally associated with descriptive tags like "dismissive", "mean", "irrelevant", "false", or "disagree". The tag counts are hidden from everyone except the comment's author.
Cell: Lisp in Javascript
Well I've been hacked and cloned and I'm positive it happened from blackberry, do take your best shot, this guy has taken over my computer, phone, and my identity, so how do you like them apples. I'm scared to death of what he's doing on my computer. I doubt if its leagle.
From my experience with Django (Over 50 websites), using Django Admin with non-technical clients is asking for trouble. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome for prototyping or building the website.. but tweaking it is way too complicated.

You need to alter the style of everything, add new fields, remove fields, use all kind of ugly hacks for simple tweaks.. and at the end, you realise that it would have been so much faster and easier to get that page done from scratch, like you'd do for all the normal pages of the website.
This is great. It looks like what I would have made for myself, if I had the chops and the design skills. Congrats.
Uh oh...

"PM: You've suggested an asteroid could be brought closer to the Earth to make it easier to mine. Is that really feasible?
EA: It is. One of the ways that we could do that is simply to turn the water on an asteroid into rocket fuel and burn it in a thruster that nudges its trajectory. Split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and you get the same fuels that launch space shuttles. Some asteroids are 20 percent water, and that amount would let you move the thing anywhere in the solar system."

Wtf? EA just suggested a perpetual motion machine. He suggests using energy to hydrolyze water, but then de-hydrolyzing the water to get energy. He's making it sound like more energy will come out than went in (allowing propulsion), when really it would be == at best, and really < because of inefficiency. The only way his concept of storing the energy is even slightly useful is if you were to spend years and years collecting solar energy and storing it as H2 + O2 to burn later in one quick burst. But that's you storing the energy over a long long time, and getting back less than you put in.
Three now. How is the most basic action so hidden?
Awesome design though, I think you should add a way to import and save playlists.
Question for the class: What was the first song you added?
If that's true then I'm disappointed in HN. This is the best take on testing I've seen; I'm having that experience where you see someone has captured a thought that hadn't quite finished forming in your own head.
Gimme Shelter, Rolling Stones
I don't know. You were the one proposing questions regarding liquor laws. Apparently it isn't as simple as you'd like to believe.

But no, ignore questions and remain ignorant of realities or laws.

Edit: I mean, seriously, you try and act like some smart guy proposing "insightful questions" about how there is no difference between paying your friend to bring you beer and paying a company to bring you beer, but it doesn't work that way. Instead of coming off as smart, you come off looking like a smart ass.
Watching robots race cars would sure be boring.

Reminds me of watching a computer program play Monopoly against itself.
When I was teaching myself how to program in VBA, I remember thinking "there's got to be some syntax to take a list of things and iterate over each of them." I was of course looking for a for loop (or for each). Without knowing to even google "for loop in VBA", it was a pretty big deal to finally discover, "Hey, programming languages have loops!"

Later, after coding for a couple of years and picking up .NET, I eventually learned LINQ syntax and really started to appreciate the expressiveness of chaining methods together to iterate over collections. It was a nice addition to my tool box, but it still took some practice more me to grok it. If that had been my first exposure to loops, it likely would have been a stumbling block to my learning.
Reporting Tools: The Right Technology
Building a Reporting Tool on Top of Analysis Services: Helping You Choose the Right Technology
To clarify, I don't think my original post implied that you were against teaching people how to learn each. Nor do I want to start out teaching beginning rubyists everything all at once. It was more to point out how important the mindset of each is. That's the mindset that you want to reach. And I'm not sure that teaching a construct that you'll never end up using is helpful. I think it just creates a mental construct that you'll have to overcome at a later stage.

I don't think .each is so much harder to learn that it justifies getting a beginner in the wrong mindset. Though to be fair I've only ever explained it to people who've already known some programming, so there is a possibility that I'm underestimating the difficulty of teaching it.

In any event, I thought the essay was totally worth the read even if I didn't agree with all of it. Thank you for it.
I'd pick Qt. If you are more familiar with web technologies, the QML based UI-design comes naturally. If your app is very simple (like static content with state changes), you can code most of it in QML/JavaScript. It's cross-platform, quick to develop, native UI, etc.
Thanks for sharing, that was an interesting read. I agree that comparing the two isn't really viable given the different set of circumstances that each faced (location, competition, investor atmosphere, etc).
Liked the clean UI. Very useful stuff.
But it stopped after playing few (-5) songs everytime, the youtube player keeps showing that the song is still buffering.
I got snipits of info on my phone and google would put in his phone numbers for me, so I did a little detective work and found out that my hacker worked for rim. I think he's since quit, as he has a lucritative business on my computer in my name. Blackberry refuses to help me at all, so I'm thinking of taking action.
I really like the idea of digital bottles delivering your feeling randomly to someone else. But it's a long way from chatroulette isn't it and calling this the Chatroulette for grownups kind of implied something related to sex/porn and it's not good? On this topic, is there any kind of automatic filtering/moderation on the content sent? To avoid having the same problems as opening chatroulette and seeing what you really DON'T want to see?

Is it possible, in any way, to "resend" a message you really liked? As you could with a real message in the bottle? For someone else to discover it? I think I'd like that! On the same way, are messages stored anywhere? Or just sent randomly to someone already registered and then immediately deleted? If not, how to prevent spam, mass copy of the same message, etc, if yes how do you handle privacy?

Another thing is that the design kinds of puts me off. I'm not good with UI so it's hard to explain but there's too many divs of different sizes and it doesn't feel intuitive what to read and where to write. I don't know if I'm making any sense sorry !

And I think it would be nice to have a graphic connection with the term bottle? Maybe through a logo instead of just the background being a bar/pub!
Does Instagram have a child porn problem?
"Why wouldn't my opinion matter as much as someone else's who only has a few more years of experience than I do?"

Those few more years of experience may mean that this other person has:

- Talked to many more customers than you have,

- Shipped (and had to support) working code,

- Seen projects cancelled or companies go out of business because they overreached their available resources.

Maybe they've already tried your wonderful idea in the past and had to clean up the mess when it failed.

Sure, I'm willing to listen to what less experienced people have to say, but they have to earn their credibility by being able to convince me that they have some idea of how their ideas could be turned into reality.
Just because a way of expressing is not the absolute rudest thing you could think of doesn't make it a euphemism. If anything, under normal circumstances, "Do this or be fired" is a dysphemism for just telling somebody to do something.
Raising the Ritalin Generation
Because there's a single thing that makes presence useful, which is the device going off or to sleep, y'know, like a desktop computer in the nineties. There aren't many people who maintain their availability by hand, as that's just a pain.

A cell phone is always on, so depending on the solution, I'm either always "online," or always "away" with some single blips of "online". Me being "online" doesn't mean I'm really paying any attention, I just took out the phone for a second while my friend was in the toilet, or anything, and now I'm gone, but will still appear as green for some time.

What's App and iMessage solves this by replacing online with read receipts, and in case of WA, "last seen online" data. Much less pretense makes it way more informative.
It is pretty obvious that that good managers are mostly alike, because it is true for most good (or useful things). Likewise the variations for bad (or things that are not useful) are going to be much, much higher.

As a consequence the search space for great is much smaller than the overall search space and so most will look the same.
Feynman and Reading
I don't think there's a technical way. I think the problem is (mostly) social / cultural, and I wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/comment-when-you-ha... .
Oh, it's you - I'll take your word for it (seriously). I guess I haven't ever really used for in with Ruby, thought about other languages.
Thanks everyone for the recommendations so far! Looks like we need to check out Qt and wxWindows. BTW does anyone have any experience with Adobe Air for this? (Not sure if still maintained or not..)
I'll believe it when I see it.

Nikon and Canon's target market, photographers, want to spend their time taking photos, not writing code for their camera.

Besides, most of the "possibilities" listed in the article are already available on a lot of cameras (like the intervalometer), better done in post processing (like previewing on ipad), or easily done using a $20 wireless remote control.

Don't get me wrong, it's cool that he's hacking on his camera, but I don't see Nikon and Canon ever promoting it or going out of their way to make it easier.
Is Cold Fusion Finally Being Accepted by Scientists?
Hopefully this will put some premature optimizers to rest - including me ;)
As much as we all know HN has lost enough of its luster that it's worth mentioning, I really do think at this point, unfortunately, the damage is done and there is no going back. HN is old enough an large enough now that for a while it'll still be awesome and beloved by many but soon enough it'll go one of two ways: it'll either die, become lame, and it's only inhabitants will be those it sought to keep away for so long or it'll continue to be high quality but become more like StackOverflow or certain subreddits - having great discussions and people but with everyone who knew HN it's prime knowing that it doesn't hold a candle to what it once was.

That's the thing about subcultures which I think HN most definitely is in that it is supposed to attract the most intelligent, entrepreneurial, techiest people. When it's new it's great because it makes you feel like you're part of not just a club but an elite club. Inevitably others who find out about your club want to join because they feel they deserve to be part of the elite club. Oh yes, they have all the makings of a genius and need to be part of it. This kind of self selection sucks and what's happening to HN happens to everything on the web that can be considered cool. RIP HN. We can bury its remains in the same plot as MySpace, Digg, and soon enough Facebook.

Although I would've hated it when I created my original account, I wonder if having an invite process would've helped like Dribbble and Forrst have.
If you want to be clear in your writing you avoid idiomatic speech that will be unfamiliar to your audience. Using the idioms of your audience doesn't impede clarity. The woman in _Airplane_ who "speaks jive" employs idioms to increase clarity!

Idioms, by definition, aren't universal. (By etymology, too: an idiom is idio-, one's own; think idiosyncracy or idiolect.) it. It's very odd to contrast the idiomatic and social mores.

The linguistic analogy is really confused, anyway:

"These idioms are also not language dependent, but actually locality and culturally dependent. I could move to England, the home of English, and they'd use many new and different idioms.

What you don't see is people in England demanding that I say "the dog's bollocks" in order to visit."

1. There is no single language "English" which has its home in England but is also spoken in America, Australia, Canada, South Africa, etc. The contrast between language and locality/culture is extremely tendentious.

2. You had better believe that certain changes of locality and culture are accompanied by demands that one change one's idioms. If I go for a job interview at a conservative law firm, I am not going to praise something by calling it "the shit". If I normally spoke AAVE, I would do my best to suppress that.

3. American English and British English are mutually intelligible (but there are chains of mutually intelligible Englishes whose extremities are not mutually intelligible), so you can speak AmEng in Britain. If you want to speak the way your hosts speak, though, you'll say "boot", "lift", etc. when you would otherwise have said "trunk", "elevator", etc., and you might find that some of your American idioms actually aren't comprehensible. Your British hosts might well demand that you say something they understand to them.

4. You can speak AmEng in Britain, and you can write Fortran in Ruby. It is pretentious for an American to affect an accent while in, or having come from, Britain. By contrast, it is only reasonable to do things Rubyishly in Ruby.

"Because people quite literally freak out when they see non-idiomatic code, and go to great lengths to correct everyone who doesn't write idiomatically, these can't be idioms."

So ... what do you think gets taught in elementary, middle, and high school english classes? Idiomatic formal english! You are corrected if you don't write idiomatically! Many people freak out when they see nonstandard forms of English!
Perhaps people wouldn't mind jumps so much, if they called them tail calls?
Show HN: Pinterest hacked our browser history
The UI is a mess. You need to do some work on that in order to compete with other services.
My only advice would be to ditch libc dependencies and build out things from scratch, and try for simpler approaches. I think you'll find the excercise good for you as a programmer, and good for your project here. Looking at a current libc implementation may help.
Things from BigVideo that would be varying degrees of PITA to roll your own, pending the browser support:

* measuring window size
* creating a slider slider component without full <input type=range support>
* having appropriate snap points on that slider
* event model normalization
* pub/sub
* detecting when an image asset has loaded
* $(body).prepend() equivalence: insertBefore() can throw if someone's HTML has a comment comment directly inside the body tag (typical with HTML5 Boilerplate code)

Sure it'd be nice to have this be plain old JS, but as a developer you're signing up for a lot of pain that is merely just plumbing required to build your unique component. If BigVideo was targeting IE10 and everyone else, then we'd have a much better looking story in the code.
I was looking at Google Maps the other day and mistakenly asked for the driving directions from Massachusetts to Taos, New Mexico. Absurd! It would take four days, at least!

But not if your automated car can drive straight through: It would take a day and an half. Four fueling stops. That's enough not to need the loo built-in. With two passengers, the economics are compelling.

Airlines better figure out a way to reduce the overhead around air travel or they are toast.
Many-worldser here (aren't we all?), and I'm unconvinced.

First argument is basically that it's possible that QM itself will be disproven (if only because we're having difficulty reconciling it with gravity). And of course it's possible, but should that happen it won't be a great vindication of the Copenhagenists, it will simply mean that all interpretations of the theory are equally wrong.

Second argument tries to address the parochiality argument by raising the suggestion that decoherence may be necessary for consciousness, which is itself exceedingly parochial. Sure, we haven't observed consciousness in a coherent quantum system, just as we haven't observed photosynthesis, or planet formation. There's no a prori reason to focus on consciousness like this; it's an ordinary physical phenomenon like any other, and it's extremely unlikely that it would be dependent on QM.
Mapping down to the millimeter is great, but the conditions on track are continually changing. Weather (rain, sun, track surface temperature, air temperature), debris (dirt, grass, marbles, spectator thrown shoes), rubber being laid down on the track, changing condition of the driver's vehicle and other vehicles are all things that need to be contended with. Simulation helps, assuredly, and is used in human based efforts extensively, but you can't exactly just play back your simulation on a real track and expect the car to stay on course at race speed.
2 keywords:

- First loop programming construct

- Beginner

Exhale. Inhale.

Now back to the blog post and see how many constructs to understand .each correctly vs "just accept it for now that this is how it should work, we'll come back later".

Have you ever read such books? the ones with "we'll come back to it later".
If it threw in explicit returns at the end of each method and added back in all the optional parentheses, you'd be close to the average "Ruby code written by people who don't know Ruby that well" codebases you see in the wild so often.
I'm excited we get to demo here at #socialhack in 15 min. at heroku.
That's what I was arguing, that you can't classify something as a gift just because technically there is no exchange of consideration. Even though tips formally have no consideration, they still fail the detached/disinterested test, and count as income.
Interesting. Could you source that quote? I don't disbelieve you, I'm just interested.
He also knows the community quite well, as well.
Cool idea. Would be nice if you programmed a few songs based on those chords and roughly timed them out. Sometimes it's more hunti feel like you are playing a song.

Another thing you could do is add a finger chart that shows the chord layout after a few seconds if you can't remember it.

Either way, good luck with the guitar.
From the OP:

I'm saying teaching [idioms] as if they are the universal truths is bad. I teach them too, but I teach them as if they are just arbitrary bullshit you need in order to code with other people who have been indoctrinated.

While I agree with the general argument Zed's making, I think it's important not to create a false dichotomy where an idiom is either a universal truth or little more than arbitrary bullshit.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer constructs like "each" over for loops and it would be a mistake to let that get lost in the noise.
Sound advice, especially the part about having multiple ways to win. I'm happier when I'm more gentle to myself for things I have little to no control over such as winning the startup lottery, ranking high in Google, or physical shortcomings.
I was stumped for 10 seconds and closed the tab.