skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
.. and just when I was starting to forget the details of the insane rabbit hole called the "economy" that make leading a simple life, getting a salaried job, and making an incremental contribution to society an utter non-starter. Even more direct subsidies to the bankers who own "your" house, so they can continue their charade of overinflated home prices and demanding hefty rent simply for a place to exist. Never mind that you're still responsible for the maintenance, and probably have not the knowledge nor time to do it yourself, as you're too busy working to service your indentured servant mouse wheel.

I just don't get what keeps most people complaining about one or two narrow pieces of the puzzle, but yet completely accepting of the entire perverted ball of wax of over-abstracted, hollowed out, and corrupt institutions. This mild dissent is then amazingly converted into support every time an election roles around, where the socially acceptable thing is to cheer on your chosen republocrat, pretending that electing new faces will change anything (not that a third party would magically fix things either, it's just a minimum viable dissent). Is it just straightforward cognitive dissonance because of how painful it would be to admit most things you take for granted are simply not there? Is it that most people smart enough to actually see how rigged the game are still able to achieve an "above average" place in society and thus aren't interested in meta questions ? I suppose anything is easier than developing an adversarial individualist perspective which can't be unseen.
There are more integrated, more universal, and in fact I will claim easier ways of accomplishing that: jailbreak the device and hook the scrolling algorithm.
“COSTA RICA VERDE Y LIMPIA” PROGRAM DECLARED OF NATIONAL INTEREST
> If the government wants to recruit more hackers, they need to sweeten the offer; but how can they do so with (a) government-controlled funding and salaries, (b) strict background checks that are required for sensitive work, such as national security and (c) a mandate that many people they're trying to recruit simply don't support?

They can do it with how they are going about it. Lets look at what is going on here.

The US government is funding education that is tailored to focus on their topics of interest. These students then spend 2 years working for the government getting more education and experience.

At this point, (a) is remedied by leaving government positions for better paid contractor ones (I think the US government / contractor relationship is greatly misunderstood in general) or feeding off into private industry. If you read through several bios of people in the industry you find ties to DoD and intel agencies all over the place (some are as contractors). But the idea here is (in my opinion), the government isn't concerned about who is on their payroll, but rather they have more capable professionals trained for this type of work in the country. People whose skills they can pay for one way or another.

I think a lot of people misunderstand the requirements of (b). And those that can't qualify for top clearances can be fed as "infosec engineers" into other agencies where a secret clearance is all that is required (FAA for example). Again, just having more trained people spread about is the goal here.

Additionally, contractors can conduct work in non-classified environments with non-cleared personnel in some situations and/or you have more distant relationships. Think vulnerability selling / purchasing.

As for (c), it is often hard to tie someone's direct work to some mandate. Where do you draw the line? Not working in a specific group? Specific agency? Contractor? Supplier? At some level, Microsoft is supporting the work NSA does. Different people draw different lines at different places.
Asdf - Android Apps on Google Play
But why have a huge complex browser in the first place? Do people really get much satisfaction from HTML gimmicks? Are they more interested in media (images, audio, video)?

Let's say you want to watch video. Download the video using a program designed for that. Then watch the video using mplayer which works fine with the Linux fb.

Same goes for photos. Download the photos quickly and efficiently using the command line and pipe them into a fb-friendly photo viewer.

There used to be this idea called MIME. Using separate programs to do separate things. Small simple programs that do one thing well. Mozilla has all but abandoned this concept. We all had to suffer through the hassle of Adobe Flash, only to finally admit it sucks and watch Adobe kill it. (.sfw = "small web file" - nice try guys)

And it now takes hours if not days for most consumer machines to compile Firefox. The compexity burden for a "modern web browser" is through the roof. The program is a monstrosity.

(And the codec jungle makes a simple video player like mplayer far too complex. We need some common sense here folks.)
What Will the "Phone" of 2022 Look Like?
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

That's the first thing that comes to mind when I see those glasses. I'm all for tech gadgets, but people need to disconnect now and then.
I mostly do Perl, but I vastly prefer CoffeeScript to JS. The significant whitespace thing is actually a negative for me with CS, but it eliminates so many JS annoyances that it's worth putting up with.
Nick & Kelly Schuster combine 3 game styles in their app, Caveman Golf
Nick and Kelly Schuster develop games under Hello Simpson. Caveman Golf combines physics based gameplay with "flick" motion sporting with a tower defense angle. In this fun interview, we chat about the importance of market research, extensive planning/story boarding, and finding the right programmer.
Personally I'm not a fan of the Apple approval process, however the laxity on the Google Play store is just plain stupid IMHO.
It's a question. A buddy of mine in NYC bemoans the fact that he can't actually get LTE coverage despite having an LTE phone. I still have an HSPA+ phone, so I haven't even looked. I'm curious, because it was my impression that outside of a few niche markets, LTE wasn't really a "yay, I get massively fast internets everywhere" feature yet.
> The Dropbox devs apparently didn't want to go through that learning curve

That's not a fair statement. I'm a competent js developer, having trudged up that curve, and I still love cs. Not for lack of learning, but because I value brevity and reduced keystrokes.
IPhone 5 battery life worse than original iPhone
Erdos took amphetamines daily after his mother died in 1971, and claimed to sleep for about 4 hours a day while on amphetamines. He did not recommend them to anyone else, and he objected to the use of amphetamines being included in his biography because he didn't want to cause any kids to start taking drugs.

Erdos was also apparently more prolific after starting amphetamines, perhaps because he started sleeping significantly less.[1]

[1]: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Paul Hoffman, http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Loved-Only-Numbers/dp/07868840...
Consolas and Monaco.
Yep, you are right. I can't believe I forgot that.
I'm a little surprised by the number of negative comments in this thread accusing the three Dropbox engineers of wasting company time.
ASPR/HHS (US Gov) Twitter challenge sparks innovation tracking health trends
Correction: Nexus S, not Galaxy Nexus :)
> Because any device but has to be sold to hundrends of millions people

Or, they could make more than one device. Brilliant! Of course everyone else except Apple has already figured that out.
The question remains to be seen if the hipsters will be found walking around with these bulky things on their heads.

You can be sure i'll be there, interacting with my computer through a head mounted instrument in public, in my car, at the restaurant, in the club, in the bathroom, everywhere, much to the chagrin and dismay of onlookers.

I'll also be using my smartphone to interface with it in case I need to configure something.
It says they mostly just ported the JS over using JS2Coffee. Maybe they plan to go back through everything and actually convert it over to coffeescript?
I once visited a friend's home and his living room furniture was covered in plastic. I asked why and he said his wife had it covered in case the President ever comes over.
the question that should motivate a change like this:

what does new-language let your team accomplish that you can't accomplish with old-language?

question isn't answered in post, the answer is probably somewhere along a 2x increase in the complexity the same team can handle. i dunno if it is worth disturbing an existing codebase and the QA cost of making sure you didn't introduce any defects. meh. where i work, we have maybe 100k lines of javascript, and its not really a problem other than lack of types when refactoring imperative code, nothing near the scope of the problem of Java's lack of higher order functions.
I just have to comment that in his page, I disagree on using dual n back as a measure of mental ability. As the mind repeats a task over and over it learns what to expect.

I personally view n-back as any other repetitive task, only it is mostly in the mind; the more you whittle, the better you will be at whittling.

If you look at the wikipedia page [1] you will see that there have been papers both for and against n-back improving cognitive ability.

The way I propose to test effectiveness would be to have a bunch of subjects all try to learn a difficult task that is unfamiliar to them. Those with the placebo supposedly would not be able to learn it as quickly or understand it as well. The large sample size would account for statistical inaccuracies and differences among people's abilities.

I personally took nootropics this last winter for three months. My theory is that people who claim improvement are looking for improvement, and notice more just how good they are at tasks... I took piracetam, choline, aniracetam, and oxiracetam (and a tiny sample of pramiracetam, the supposed best, for free), and noticed nothing the entire time. Originally I thought I noticed improvement, but only realized I was looking for improvement in every task I did, which made me notice everything I did. After this realization I didn't notice anything at all, for the rest of my supplies. I learned more than just their ineffectiveness during this self experiment...

EDIT:
I will revise my statement to add that I do not think that *racetams are completely ineffective. I do believe that they are relatively useless on healthy individuals without any disorders, though. Most of the studies in the wikipedia page are on people with disorders, and I do remember reading before that their benefits on people without problems is disputed.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back
I found it a very interesting article, and as a glasses wearer this excites me a lot as I would not have the discomfort of wearing something 'unnatural'.

I think the early release and slow building up is how Google does new products. Most of the technology in their existing products we've seen slowly develop over time and this is one of their first entrances to a new market.
Show Us Your Balls, Win a Month's Supply of Bacon
what about library support? are libraries i use in java translated as well? performance?
There is a youtube link with a thumbnail of a bear and some fire and lasers or something, I assumed it was decorative because most of the visual aspects of the site are.

Upon further investigation you can try the tool right on the page, I just didn't know this because there was no CTA for it, as there was no "See it in action!" CTA over the video. Startupers pitching your project to users: make it as simple as possible to see your value prop- don't make me work for it :)
Not sure how I'm supposed to respond. Have a nice day.
"Quick test - name the sprinter who won the 2008 100m sprint. You probably guessed Usain Bolt - which is correct. Who came second? Exactly.... Want to know why? No-one cares. This is how the world works - in business and in life."

The hugely hyped media coverage of celebrities is not really a good model for anything in the real world. We don't all buy products and services from only the largest business in any given market sector. If I'm buying a car, or cellphone service, or software, I'm certainly going to consider offerings from companies that are not the #1 company in their field.
I wear glasses already. Give me a pair with my prescription and I don't care about how I look.
He said it right afterwards: "Something like PHP only worse..."

(http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...)
I work as a Java developer here in Mad Town, but I must say that I know some really nice, welcoming and seriously excellent Ruby programmers here.

Glad to hear that my impression of the local Rubyists was not wrong.

Mmmmm ... Wisconsin cheese is awesome! :-)
This strikes me as SaaS as having gone too far. Are people signing up for it? Isn't some sort of Jquery plugin more appropriate?
It's not a LoC in terms of code complexity, but it is another line with symbols to parse when you're reading code and it's another few keystrokes to type out each time you have a function or object.
As the founder of taab (http://taab.co), I'd have to mostly disagree. I know that I'll need some help from SF or NYC, but so far, I've received tremendous amounts of support from friends, family, colleagues, and networks here in Toronto and Waterloo.
> You would look like just as much of an idiot as you do now.

Please try to refrain from ad hominem attacks as it doesn't help in proving your point.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That's what I meant: the TN-1 and H1-B visas are the US visas that Canadian employees get in the US.
Ok, I will do this one more time.

The authors of go come from my generation. Back in those days, the term "Systems Programming" meant something different than what wikipedia, and probably most everyone today thinks of it.

Systems Programming in those days meant writing compilers, text processors, unix command line programs. It did not then mean programming an operating system, or anything near hard real-time.

Not a very high quality article.
I've wondered this too. I'm sure Apple _is_ working on something like this (or a dozen something's like this), but they aren't going around blabbing about it to everyone who will listen. Seems like all this does is publicize a failure if they never get it to work, or take all the luster off the release of an awesome new product.
This discussion has been highlacked by morons talking about the cases.

The main point is - Apple's marketing is so good that people suspend judgement.
'});' is absolutely a line of code. I would even consider ',' a line of code. Forgetting either one of those in a line of JS results in errors. Errors you have to spend mental effort looking out for. Don't discount the value of not having to match up all those ridiculous parentheses and curly braces. Oh and semicolons.

I have personally had more problems from not closing something than I ever had from assigning a variable.
I'm an American going to school in Canada, studying computer science. Before I started, I was so excited about all the people I was going to meet that would be interested in pursuing tons of computing projects outside of class.

It's three years later now, and I've found a total of two guys that share the same interest in creating something from nothing, and putting it out there for the world to see. People aren't totally floored by the idea of a good idea, they just do their classwork, get good grades, maybe do some internships, but that's about it.

Now, this is a somewhat sweeping statement, based solely on a small amount of anecdotal evidence. Maybe it's due to the fact that I go to UBC and not Stanford, maybe some ideas are just too ambitious or overwhelming, maybe I haven't run into all the right people, but those are my observations, and my frustrations parallel those discussed by the OP.
> }); is not a line of code.

CoffeeScript agrees.
That's along similar lines, but more like guards in Haskell:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Control_structures
This is a great article! I myself am Canadian and agree with many of articles points.

Living in Toronto it's noticeable to recognize it's the financial industry runs this city, then comes marketing and advertising. Tech here in Toronto primarily just service these industries.

Now when it comes to getting people to invest in tech startups, is not a lack of money - it's the investors who have money and lack of knowledge in the tech industry. (Most of them having financial backgrounds)
I never used cases - as a result, both my 3GS and my iPhone 4 ended up with overly scratched lens caps - so much I had to actually remove the cap on the last one, since taking pictures was basically impossible...
More accurately, the 'problem' is that it seems there is no overarching wish to have a Canadian internet consumer software sector. People are just fine going to do that in California, and there haven't been waves coming back. Nothing wrong with that, maybe Canadians as a whole are content doing other types of technology work. You don't hear a lot about mechanical engineers going to work in the U.S.
Facebook EdgeRank 101 – Class is Now in Session
Justin Bieber is actually a 2. http://oracleofbacon.org/cgi-bin/movielinks?a=Kevin+Bacon...
In BC, setting up a proper BC company is easy. I started by going to http://incorporate.ca/ and then had everything redone when I had the cash for a real lawyer.
Its true for the most part, everyone here likes to think they are different from a community like Reddit or 4chan, but thats not really the case. If this had Apple in the headline instead of Google then im sure there would be a lot more heavily biased comments ready to jump to all sorts of conclusions with out anything resembling proof. This lot are just as biased as most of the die hard Apple haters from those communities. You know what im tired of hearing, is comments like "Apple never innovates", "Apple is due a fall" ..etc Oh and my favorite one is "The patent system needs reform" but thats all we ever hear from this community. Oh well, deal with it and move on I guess.
> Well, I could agree if I saw any computational-heavy JS application (and not a microbenchmark) doing well compared to native counterpart, especially on multicore.

For example, BananaBread compiles 120,000 lines of code of a C++ 3D game engine, including AI and physics and so forth. It also uses 3 cores during startup processing

The difference between JavaScript and C++ is less than one order of magnitude, and note that this is a hard case to optimize for JS engines since LLVM inlining creates huge functions that JS engines just give up on optimizing currently. So that the game ends up still running as fast as it does in JS is a nice surprise.

There are also lots of other compiled examples of real-world code, like Box2D and Bullet. Typically the speed of JS compared to C is 5X-10X slower, again, much of it because of large functions not being fully optimized.
Really good point actually. Every time I pick up my iPad with the smart cover off (and that's very minimalistic of course), I think Wow, this is so thin!
Website Credibility Checklist
I like Jerry Seinfeld's attitude about cases. (14 seconds in)

http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/joel-hodgson-a-taste...
No More Needles: ‘Painless’ Laser Injects Drugs
Ignoring and being selective are different things. The golang designers have made intentional choices and the reasoning is provided in the links I sent. I am not a fanboy. IMHO, Go would have been MUCH more interesting if goroutines did not run in a shared address space and if they implemented generics (even as a hygenic macro..)

The things that you left off your list that I think are much more interesting are:

- Weak/Strong purity, enforced by the type system
- uniqueness typing
- chan is too special. The difficulty with implementing a good netchan interface is starting to show this.
Quora has been a fine weekly newsletter. So what if most often you see a 25 year old millionaire against another 25 year old millionaire going about their gripe and appreciation of newly acquired money!

As a weekly email newsletter, I get nicely curated content without participating a minute of my time at the site.
> How can you say it was a mistake when it only took one week? There was a cost, they paid it, now they can reap the benefits.

The cost is not just time (although that's certainly a big cost). They rewrote working production code for fun. Why this is a bad idea will likely derail the conversation so I'll just direct you here:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
"Generating HTML" on server side is done in some predictable time, while you can't make any assumptions about your users computer/OS performance thus the user experience will be random. It means problems and many lines of javascript code to solve them.
Actually not even that is true for every version for emacs. Auqumacs for OSX supports almost all standard editor commands like

Cmd - s
Cmd - z
Cmd - Shift - z
Cmd - c
Cmd - x
Cmd - v

The only thing that doesn't work reliable for me is

Shift - left/right

to mark text.
And I can sure you that many people will be there ready to insist (either legally or physically) that you refrain from recording them, their friends and their family without express permission. It is a legal requirement after all.

Will be interesting to see at what point you decide it just isn't worth it.
We felt Madison Ruby was a huge success. Reading Wendy's story makes all of the hard work worthwhile.
Why would they want to advertise Google or Android? They have a product to sell! Focus!
we're still using the present tense? shouldn't this be "why quora did not scale"?

or is exponential growth one more thing that isn't the same as it was back in the day?
It would be interesting to see how many students from Waterloo and UofT alone, leave Canada to go work in the tech industry in the US.
Interesting. The 4S is clearly the best for the city shot, but for the indoor shot it's the sharpest though I think the 3GS colors may actually be better.
Scala is the same way, and their rational is that it makes it easy (in the parser, I guess) to just omit the type.

It is weird at first, but you get used to it, like everything syntactic.
Yeah, I'm not anti-CoffeeScript, but from the article this sounds like a big reason why they switched, which is a perfectly valid reason.
The (Real) Most Interesting Man in the World
I thought that the whole point of converting these latency numbers was to convert them into something meaningful. Distance traveled by the speed of light is just as abstract as the original number itself.
personally, i wish they would follow the legal guidelines for unsubscription that were posted here a few days ago.

i've tried several times to unsubscribe, and failed.
If you want Sinatra with scaffolding there is Padrino which I personally find to have superior scaffolding compared to rails.
Wait, do I have to provide my own Amazon S3 bucket? Also, do you do any security checks on filetypes - namely content sniffing? That's my biggest concern when it comes to handling files, given IE's use of content sniffing to determine MIME type.
Yikes, so I've just stumbled across this and a couple of points to note: Firstly I wrote it over a year ago, secondly, I've written an awful lot more about it since then. In particular check out my most recent article - http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/08/27/the-spector-of-game... and the video of my session from Casual Connect Seattle a couple of months ago - http://casualconnect.org/lectures/2012-igda-lectures/skynet-...