skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Luckily I don't live in the states. So the jail time or large fines do not scare me. Your app however tells people it's okay to park in front of people's driveways cause we'll just text them right? Also how are you planning on monetizing this? Are you actually going to make money off the misery of others by telling them it's okay to park wherever they want? Imagine my wife has a seizure, some guy with your sticker parks in front of my driveway and I can't rush her to the hospital in time. Can you AND the driver be held responsible for this in court? Since your app clearly condones illegal parking behavior. The rules are simple, if you park somewhere where you shouldn't you will get towed. Maybe you should make an anti-rape app too? The victim can just text the abuser letting him know of his mistake.
Squatty Potty-Toilet Stool: squatting for proper toilet posture
It's hard to "take the time" to read a story behind a paywall when you have no desire to give money to the entity owning the wall.

Based on the publicly-available information, it's not clear that Google did any such thing. They might have refused, or Apple might not have liked their terms, or Tim Cook may have held a seance to get advice from the ghost of an angry Dijkstra, or a hundred other scenarios of varying plausibility. It's hard to say.
Does Go not have higher order functions and pattern matching? If not, are they on the roadmap?
This sounded awfully much like Apple's app store process. Different details, but a horrible and unintuitive experience nonetheless.

Is it simply difficult to make a good developer signup workflow, or are both of these companies unmotivated to make any effort on the front?
To be fair, ODBC is by far the most common DB API.
No, you can really count to 31 on one hand. http://www.glassgiant.com/geek/count_to_31_on_one_hand/
It's a closely guarded secret but at the very least we know that every page is annotated with many different signals, which are combined with magical secret sauce.
or, you could just compile the coffeescript into javascript once and return to your normal javascript flow
It will add another layer to the internet tug of war on advertising.

Hulu and other ad-dependent sites already detect ad-block and won't give you content unless you disable it. I see media providers doing the same to protect their interests.

The question is - will enough sites quash this ad-replacement service from the get go to prevent a large userbase from forming?
Yes, I would call that Siri ad faked.
It's certainly a daring thing. I suspect that you're right and that it won't be such a huge issue in a year or so.

I do wonder if this is an opportunity for Microsoft to sell a complete platform experience while Apple is taking a breather.

Disclaimer: I just recently started working for MSFT in a position not at all related to Windows Phone. I also don't own a Windows Phone.
The two languages aren't really in the same space in the first place. Go is a simpler language that leans more heavily on garbage collection. Rust is a more complex language that can be safely used without the GC at all.

Go is a great language -- I greatly admire its simplicity -- and for its domain it's fantastic. Rust is in a different domain: low-level systems programming in which abstractions must be zero-cost and control over the machine is crucial.
I like this attitude that says because you can't find the source Gruber is quoting, some random counterfactual must be true.

I did not find it hard to read the WSJ article he cited. You did. That's fine. But that does give you license to invent new facts.
Stardock will sell you a Windows 8 Start Menu for $5
Actually, I'm waiting for someone to create the Kickstarter that people seem to think Kickstarter is: a way to get pre orders for a new product.

I mean seriously, there are a lot of people using Kickstarter for this and now they've explicitly said that's not what it's for. So, Entrepreneurial Opportunity. There's obviously a lot of people who need this kind of "pre-order aggregator" service. So when will a motivated HN'er build it and rake in the bucks :-)
It's sad to see the executive branch forcing the judiciary into an awkward position.

What exactly is the judge going to do? Fine DHS/TSA? Where will that money go? Right back into the treasury where it came from.

Ugh. TSA makes me sick.
Rust is what I had hoped Go would be.

Google employs some of the brightest computer science minds in the world and turns out stuff like Go and Dart, which seem to be more aimed at enterprise Java programmers rather than computer scientists or programming enthusiasts.
They could deliver a taxi service initially.

Given that the sensor tech is only theoretically going to become affordable as production ramps up, they may have to start there to keep pushing things forward.
Only if you have 10 possible positions you can place each finger in. The grandparent describes a method by which each finger denotes one binary digit. He even mentioned how it could be increased using knuckles to achieve higher bases.
Your free software website, for dummies
Its a smartly written piece, but to me this just scratches the surface. A couple of issues:

1. If you are making the conceptual jump from 'text' to 'dynamically annotated text', why not go a step further and just let people draw a rectangle with visual tools entirely (like in Illustrator,Inkscape,etc.) and forget the textual representation?

2. The real difficulty comes with representing things as they may arise through a dynamic program, not with just the 'initialization' stage as this shows. This is where code really really gets complex, and also is much harder to add to with these visual systems.

[EDIT] To clarify further, relating to comments below - The OP's main intent is "how do we redesign programming?" [for all programmers] and my comments relate to this, not just to the use of such techniques for students as a step towards learning traditional code.
I'm sure that Go has higher-order functions, I just mean that Rust encourages you to use higher-order functions all the time. For example: in Rust, `for` loops desugar to higher-order functions (it's very neat, actually). Furthermore, whereas in Go you spawn a goroutine with the `go` keyword, spawning a task in Rust is done by handing a function (usually a Ruby-esque closure) to the `task::spawn` library function. (Note also that "higher-order functions" are not the same as "first-class functions".)

Go does not have pattern matching, to my knowledge, though without algebraic datatypes I don't think it's really a big deal.
Idle iPad Mini Thought
Not really: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=m...
I have a hard time believing Apple didn't see this coming. This isn't like Siri staggering under its load; the gaps in Apple's data, and moreover in the Maps feature set, are plainly obvious.

Apple knew this was going to happen, and did it anyways. It is therefore part of a strategy.
I predict "ordinary people can experience this" means as an E-ticket ride in Disney's "Tomorrow Land".
> What I admire is people who take this difficult terrain as a given and find a way to get to their destination anyway.

Same here. Alas, I'm not one of them. I'm not both a scientist and politician. Like a lot of folk on HN I have a software development background. I'm used to working in a field where ideas flow freely. I was shocked (in my naivete) to discover it's largely the opposite in science. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have bothered to write down my thoughts. I don't see much point in pushing something on an unreceptive community.

> Of course it's hard, but it's an acknowledged part of the job description.

"Complaint" was accurate, but "lament" is more so. It didn't used to be this way, not as hard as it is today. Scientists of yesteryear were more like hobbyists, like HNers. Now it's a cutthroat industry, with grant money and careers fiercely protected. I see that the advance of science, or physics at least, is slowed to a crawl as a result, even moving backwards in some cases.

As far as sharing ideas goes, I've redirected my energies to web development. It's way more rewarding!
If [1]mentions can be in the metadata, I wonder if mentions within the status itself can look like a footnote reference? That way you don't have to display the full URL in the message.

[1] ^https://example.tent.is
Yeah, I was surprised that he kept positional parameters and added scaffolding to explain them. Why not named parameters?
> I like this attitude that says because you can't find the source Gruber is quoting, some random counterfactual must be true.

I didn't say that at all, and you don't have the excuse of not having access to the entirety of my publicly-available comment. I don't consider it implausible that Google refused, I simply have no basis for believing that over other plausible scenarios.
But the Internet told me it was a good idea!
1. Because a big part -- perhaps the biggest part -- of "learning to program" is understanding how to move between the picture in your head and the text that makes it real. From both directions: "What does this code do?" and "What code do I need to write to make this happen?"

Purely visual programming are, IMO, noble lies.* You want to start with an environment that echoes the final state, not one that's totally dissimilar.

e.g., training wheels vs. computer bicycle simulator.

*: The exception to this is when you're teaching children ~13 or younger, in my experience. It's always a question of what mental models a student has at their disposal.

2. By the time a student is at this stage, they have more sophisticated, general models the teacher can rely on. In this essay Brett is working in a world where someone might not have the right mental model for assignment, variables, looping, etc.
So the reason why LibreOffice sucks is: Excel?

I didn't ask which of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite is better than the programs in the LibreOffice suite, I asked why LibreOffice sucks.

Also LibreOffice has Python.
Yes, you do: the WSJ article that reported that. The one Gruber not only cited but linked to.
Clojure and Go are sexy right now, but I see no signs of that fading.
This is the web version of the talk I saw him give at StrangeLoop yesterday (https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/taking-off-the-blindfold). I'd highly recommend the video presentation when it's released (later this year?) on InfoQ.
I think the goal was to show how _JavaScript_ (and by extension, Khan Academy) could do the things he's describing. He did show how languages like Smalltalk get something better via a sort of "named parameters".
One of the weirdest things about this article is the fact it does not mention wireless carriers once. If Motorola makes phones with stock Android, but no carriers decide to carry it in their stores and on their websites, it is no different from a Nexus phones.

Former Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha previously suggested that phone skinning and customization was heavily driven by wireless carriers, as well as phone manufacturers: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/10/2697939/motorolas-sanjay-j...
First of all, the number one component of the Java ecosystem is the JVM - a rock solid execution environment on pretty much any hardware/OS combination you're likely to find in the wild. Also, the JVM is a very decent environment. For one, it has no trouble with high levels of concurrency. Neither Python or Ruby particularly likes concurrence (but achieves it with multiple processes). Write once, run anywhere might have been a mirage when Java came out, it's not anymore.

Next step on the ladder is languages. You can mix any combination of Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, JRuby, Jython and others with little or no friction.

Then there's infrastructure. There's a good selection of rock solid application servers - Tomcat, Jetty and Glassfish comes to mind. The entire JDK toolchain, especially VisualVM, JConsole and JMX. Get a stacktrace or a heap dump from a running java process? Trivial and built in.

Finally, the libraries: JDBC is pretty neat: Every database under the sun plugs into the same interface. Terracotta has a pretty interesting line up (http://terracotta.org/products). Hadoop - it's a full ecosystem of it's own. Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA. Apache POI for MS Office doc manipulation. Apache FOP is supposed to be pretty powerful. Lucene. Apache Commons.
> 1. Is Bret Victor now the Linus of cutting-edge programming environments?

Linus actually implements his solutions to things that he rants about, and releases his code, so that analogy isn't quite right. Bret gives us nice big-picture ideas and leaves the implementation for others.

I think many of the specific ideas mentioned by Bret will quickly fall apart when trying to actually implement something non-trivial. But that's okay, it's useful to have a really inspiring big-picture vision.
"Older phones not getting Jelly Bean is a silly complaint at this point, can't we get past this?"

I would imagine we can get it past it when every phone capable of running the newest Android version is allowed to upgrade to the newest Android version. Until then, it is an issue for developers who want to use the latest APIs.
Securing a Website with Client SSL Certificates
As much as I love Bret Victor's ideas, I feel this is a bit harsh on Khan Academy. There's nothing wrong with criticism, but it shouldn't be your only kind of feedback. Even if Khan Academy did nothing right (which I think is clearly false) they should at least deserve praise for attacking the problem at all, when so many people are content to ignore it.

If you're trying to lead a revolution in programming, witholding praise from your strongest supporters isn't the way to go about it.
The history of the Printrbot kickstarter project[1] and business[2] provides an interesting anecdote. The original idea was to make available affordable 3d printers, compatible with repraps (that is, mostly reproducible by other 3d printers, except for electronics, motors, power supplies and a handful of standard metal parts that can be bought cheaply anywhere) -- but as the popularity exploded, they realized it would be easier and cheaper to provide a version that was mostly laser cut -- they had exploded past the level where large scale manufacturing became cheaper.

It is also interesting to note that the laser cut version is capable of producing the parts needed for the other, self-reproducible design.

There are two parts to this revolution so far: Designs prototyped on a reprap can be printed/cut in any material, at any scale -- from wood to aluminium.

Designs that work in abs plastic: cups, glasses, lamps, sockets, casings for certain electronics, dolls, toys, action figures, clips, replacement parts for various items around the house -- they can all be printed at home, right now.

See for example the updates for the Hex Bright[3] kickstarter project -- the first prototype parts are 3d printed in plastic, the final design is in aluminium.

This is indeed a revolution, and it will change industry. Maybe not all of industry, but a large part of it.

Think about it: if you can prototype it, you can order 500.000 copies of it. That by itself is significant.

Then consider the fact that the price of milling and printing equipment is moving into the range where individuals can bootstrap themselves, also for producing industrial strength parts -- and significantly building the parts needed for production equipment -- and we are closer to a democratization of the means of production than we have ever been.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printrbot/printrbot-your...

[2] http://printrbot.com/

[3] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/527051507/hexbright-an-o...

[edit: formatting]
For most users, MS Word 2003 is like MS Word 1997, except that it takes a much more powerful system to run it. Most people never use any feature of Word that wasn't there in 1997.

2007 is different because of the ribbon, I'll grant, but preference for the ribbon is far from universal.
> Evolution means science can be a complete philosophy, replacing traditional origin myths, without relying on religion to postulate a supernatural being pulling the strings behind the scenes. I thought I made that clear, but apparently not.

That's nice, but isn't expressed by "Large in that evolution describes how complex systems can exist without a creator."

I get that you think that "can be a complete philosophy" is a big deal, but it doesn't actually matter. (Moreover, the fact that evolution can do certain things does not imply that those things were done by evolution any more than the fact that I can drive to the store implies that I did drive to the store.)

Since you disagree, how about some examples of things that one can do with a science that is a complete philosophy? Heck, not even the things that folks do with recombinant DNA depends on evolution. Do you want to argue that physics depends on evolution. (Which reminds me, our physics friends might not agree that evolution makes science "complete". I'm pretty sure it doesn't handle the big bang, for example.)

>> This thread has basically been a sequence of "The sky is green, therefore evolution is true."

> Well, how about "Gold looks golden, therefore special relativity is true"?

How about the color of my car? After all, that has as much connection to the arguements offered in this thread as your attempted "restatement".

Your desire to have a good argument does not imply that you have one.

> This gets directly at my second point: All science is connected.

Yet, you've provided no support for that point.

I'll ask again - how does evolution affect physics? How about geology? Heck - what can I do in biology with evolution that I can't do without? (And no, "explain" doesn't count unless that explanation lets you do something that you can't do without that explanation.)

I'm pretty sure that there are things in biology that one can't do without evolution, but they're in the noise. And, contrary to Nye's claim, there's nothing outside of biology that requires evolution.

As I asked before, what's the point of making clearly false claims about evolution?

> That's another way of saying All reality is connected.

Don't do the brown acid.

> Which is another thing schools as they are now are lousy at explaining.

Which teaching evolution, or not, won't address.
>Now, about live accounts. You might know this: live accounts are tied to everything you do with Microsoft. So if you have an MSDN subscription, e.g. the one which costs over $5000.-, it's tied to this same live account. But the fun thing is, you can login with your live account to the MSDN subscriptions with just the account id and password. No additional code is mailed to you. While it gives you access to all Microsoft software available, including your licenses.

>Why the draconian security theater with this Windows Store, while all I want is to publish some desktop applications while on other Microsoft sites it's OK to simply sign in with your live account: no codes needed, no verification and no certificates?

Cannot believe he's serious. Doesn't he see the massive malware problem with Windows applications? Microsoft is going to such great lengths so that anyone submitting applications with malware, disguised or not, will have some accountability later. i.e Expect MS and/or law enforcement to come after you, that's why all the identity checking. Also, this discourages fly-by-night operations from trying to submit malware to the store.

Comparing that to MSDN login is a pretty invalid comparison. If someone hacks in to your MSDN account, MS potentially loses a few thousand worth of software. If people are able to distribute malware through Windows Store, care to estimate the damage caused by the inevitable headline "Microsoft Windows Store distributes malware" even though MS just links to the software ?

Apple's answer to this was to heavily sandbox OS X apps, due to which there was a lot of outcry with developers jumping ship to normal distribution.

Also note that Microsoft is not forcing developers to pay 30% of the desktop software sale price like Apple is, so the cost of those certificates might pay for itself down the line.
Blackberry serenades developers with REO Speedwagon cover
Has anybody heard if they've finalized a spec yet, or at least come close? I've thought about getting into Rust from time to time, but the lack of a finalized spec and/or stable reference implementation has always scared me off.
1. Nobody fact checks
2. Procrastination kills
3. Shipping something awful is still a numinstance of "shipped"
4. Writing is easy when I write about what I like and know
5. Making a plan and sticking to it is now a .hack

Sorry for the pedantic response, but when an article trolls us, I want to return the favor.
Show HN: A Project I helped build for a client is finally beta
One can wish that Google would block them from the SERPs. Let's see if they can succeed while being invisible.
No, but if it had been a competitors product it would have been graded, and harshly. But instead it's an Apple product that's clearly a bit rubbish so we get some meandering drivel about how they were forced to do this for the greater good and Google is smart and evil but also incompetent and ignorant, and Apple is noble, pure and selfless for foisting half-baked maps on its users. Because a phone constantly reporting your position back to Apple so it can build maps and sell phones is so much less creepy than doing so to help Google build maps and sell ads.
Ha ha. Yes, it can take even longer. But I think even 3 months is much longer then most people expect. :)
David Lee had a good recent post on this: http://daslee.me/6-months
> Maybe your driveway is replaced by a compartment container.

Lots of folks don't have driveways, garages, and so on.

More to the point, they may not be at a "personal storage location" when they're dropping off the rental car.
Hmmmm, suddenly the $79 sounds a lot more reasonable... (providing data is easily exported).

I have no need fo SPSS etc (beyond my pay grade and comprehension) but I've been frustrated with the limitations of Excel (love pivot tables) and I have no $$$ for http://www.tableausoftware.com/

Note: my main interest is actually CLEANSING DATABASES (finding outliers/anomalies, and edit the data set, hence my questions re: changing data)

Evan has created another lovely app by the way (http://magicmaps.evanmiller.org/) which makes me more confident that it will all work properly.
You're talking about the product, jimrandomh is talking about the business/legal environment. He doesn't mention the fact that it wont be appealing to consumers, just that it'll have a handful of very large entities gunning for it's demise.
There's an interesting discussion about the MakerBot 2 going on at Practical Machinist by people with considerably more manufacturing experience/knowledge than the average HN'er.

http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/general/3d-printing-mak...
1)Because that is not learning programming, which is entirely what this essay is about.
1.b) Learning programming is about learning to reason about problems. Not about learning to use different tools.

2) I think I agree that dynamic programs would be more challenging to do this with. On the flip side, this demonstration is so far beyond my reasoning that it doesn't mean much to me. It's all stunning.
Mayer and Yahoo to focus on Personalization and Mobile
The point you're making has nothing to do with the article. The article isn't "meandering drivel"; it's a summary of actual reporting on what led Apple to make the decision it did.