skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Correct. But if you want use the form where you just return an array of variables to use inside your template, and have Symfony smartly located the template for you, you have to use an annotation. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12922827/symfony-2-php-te.... for an example.

Your point is that this is required, it's not. Using annotations is optional. The user you point to in the example wanted to use the annotations and wanted to use php templates.

The FACT is that in Symfony2, your Action MUST return a Response object. Using annotations is an easy way to get around this.

> Yes, there are other BETTER ways to do it. Making comment-based annotations available as one of the ways pretty much guarantees that people will use it, and that seems like a bad idea to me. Just remove them so no one is able to choose the bad practice.

Why is this a bad practice? Everything I need to now is right there in the annotation. I know that it's a string, integer, or anything else. I don't need to open up another file to check.

> Uhh, OK? How about comment folding in text editors? Would you, as a developer, be happy if you encountered some code that made heavy use of annotations for critical application logic? I wouldn't--this is what I mean by DX.

... You can't unfold them? You mean to tell me that having an editor that folds comments is bad design for the software that uses annotations? I'm trying to figure out this critical application logic you speak of. If I'm using annotations to describe a column that is a "string" type and has a length of "32" then what is the difference of it's in a yml or xml file? I enjoy being able to tell that as well as what relationships there are.

> The same thing you gain by var_dump()ing any variable--an understand of what's happening under the hood.

Again, why are you trying to var_dump something that has no value in using a var_dump on? An example of using var_dump and it being useful is "var_dump($user->getSomeRandomCrap())". It tells me what is returned by that method. Is an object or something else returned. WHY DO NEED to var_dump "@Column(type="string", length=32)"? I know the property should be a string and should be a max of 32 characters long?
For something like a fetal heart monitor, which has been certified to work in exactly one configuration, why would you allow external media? Have an internal network, and lock down every device. If nurses want to have a computer to use for Facebook, it can be on a separate, non-medical network.
Food trucks aren't better than gourmet restaurants, but they are substantially better than the status quo in many areas.

In downtown San Francisco, where I used to work, food trucks are a huge hit because they are remarkably better than the bad delis, greasy spoons, and franchised soup-n-sandwich joints that litter the downtown core, all of which serve strictly mediocre and uninspired food.

People want good, gourmet food even while at work, but the market in many areas has failed to provide this. The extremely sizable real estate capital requirements (as well as the fact that your revenue is strictly limited to lunch-only) prevents a lot of competition from entering. Food trucks on the other hand neatly sidestep a lot of the real estate capital requirements, as well as open the businesses up for dinner-time revenue. Most trucks head off to more residential neighborhoods once they're done the lunch rush.

Food trucks also offer an opportunity to change things up often. Off The Grid in SF is a gathering of food trucks at fixed locations, with a rotating lineup (and some perennial faces), which helps lend variety without a bajillion more restaurants opening up.
Maybe some AP courses don't hold up as well, but for my part I took AP Calculus BC and Physics C in high school, and using solely what I learned there was able to ace my electricity and magnetism and calculus III courses at a well-respected engineering school without touching the textbook.

My experience may have been skewed by unusually good teachers, but making that kind of legitimate education available to high school students is anything but a scam.
What do you mean? I get a lot of results.

http://thepiratebay.se/search/the%20matrix/0/99/0
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Why use Windows? It's easy and inexpensive to get developers who are familiar with the platform. You can leverage a lot of tools that already exist for the platform. You get a lot of hardware support "for free" using manufacturer-provided drivers.

Medical device manufacturers are for-profit entities looking to make a profit. If using Windows makes it easier to make a profit then they'll use it. If that's problematic to society, from a security perspective, then regulations should be put in place to put make security costs impact the manufacturer's bottom line.

Personally, I'd like to see pentesting as part of device certification requirements.
Could be useful for going in and quickly repairing data.

// find bad data
SELECT * FROM table WHERE ...
// repair
UPDATE table SET ... WHERE ...
There's a lot of disagreement here, but my experience was similar. AP calculus 1 translated into absolutely nothing at my college (this was about a decade ago); my peers who succeeded at testing out wound up failing higher level math classes with heavy calculus components.

A friend of mine came in with AP computer science; during his campus visit the CS prof he met with basically said "if you test out of CS 111 I'll fail you in CS 122." My friend was astonished by the statement, but after taking CS 111 understood what he meant: the AP class was worth just a few weeks of the college class it was supposedly equivalent to.

AP classes probably vary as widely as high school and college classes, but it certainly throws another variable into the equation. If you lose the gamble, you wind up retaking whatever the next class in the sequence is plus the class you were testing out of, for a net loss compared to not doing any AP. If AP worked as advertised, that simply shouldn't happen.
6 AP classes here. Nailed them all because of awesome teachers. I was the only one in my school to take the AP Gov test in 10 years. I wasn't anywhere near the top of my class though. And it saved a year of college I would have had to take. I completely agree with your sentiment here.
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Design Talk - Ben Blumenfeld - former FB Design Lead/co-director Designer Fund
The consumer forces shaping enterprise innovation
If the american's could get medicines, books, degrees at much lower prices, maybe medical research would not be so costly in the first place... The cost of medical research is primarily composed of paying doctors, nurses, lawyers, politicians, clerks, programmers etc artificially inflated salaries so that they can afford education and healthcare. Maybe these corporations will drop the price of healthcare and education to compensate for lower incomes as more people become unemployed by competing with other countries.
Couldn't you do that just as easily with a database.update({'data':'bad'}, {$set:{'data':'good'},false,true}) ?
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> However, exaggerating this patent by claiming it is a "linked list" patent diminishes the conversation around patents.

The title of the patent is "Linked List". How is that an exaggeration?

> If Subaru were issued a patent for a new method of fuel injection, would it be appropriate to claim that they were issued a patent for the internal combustion engine?

I think you misunderstand my point. I did not claim that this person patented linked lists. I claimed this person patented a trivial enhancement to a conventional linked list, and did not provide any implementation detail (which is really what makes it trivial).

On the subject of implementation, I do not see a data structure description as an implementation, any more than I see an algorithm as an implementation. Being an electrical engineer I am biased towards thinking of implementation as an actual, functional system (not necessarily hardware). I know there are many patents where this definition of implementation doesn't hold, but that is why I am uncomfortable with software and business method patents in general, and think chemical and drug patents should be a special category.
Because US can use the Patriot Act to get cloud data about foreign users. That's why.
This is a hugely important point, I really enjoyed the story about approaching this question from the perspective of a shared fear as well. I find when I'm at an event and someone asks whether I knew someone at Sun or Google or in Las Vegas (I used to get that a lot because people seemed to think everyone in Las Vegas was on a first name basis) its weirdly tempting to say 'oh sure' or something to move the conversation along because you just know its not going to be some critical fact. I have to practice pushing back on that desire and say "nope never heard of them" and see how the conversation evolves. I had not associated it with 'fear' before but that works as well as anything.
In my case I found college courses to be easier than AP courses. My high school just started offering AP classes and I took 2 (chemistry and calculus; I don't recall if different versions existed for these tests back then). My teachers were not competent to teach the material, so I did extra work on my own. Unfortunately, I didn't do a lot of the material that I should have covered (because the class didn't). I only scored a 3 on the chemistry exam and a 4 on the calculus. I didn't get my scores back for the calculus exam until I already enrolled for classes. I decided to just sign up for calculus 1. Chemistry 1 and Calculus 1 in college were both a joke. I covered more in high school in both cases.
Perhaps it's my lack of training or the projects I work on, but I've never seen a Rails model so large/cumbersome as to justify even one of these techniques.

Is this a case of fixing the wrong problem?
Actually, it's encouraging people to pay more for entertainment items, such as music, movies, or television.
I remember my AP Biology 2 class in high school. It still stands as one of the hardest classes I've taken which is saying something because in university I went out of my way to take the hardest classes available. Our teacher was proud of the fact that 97% of people who passed the class got a 5 on the AP exam. The AP exam was a walk in the park compared to that course.

That class was the exception rather than the rule, but I'll never forget it even if I've forgotten most of what I learned there.
Correction:

"German wages have __not__ fallen due to the EU expansion."
No one has infinite willpower. Making it a tad harder to browse reddit is a useful deterrent. It makes you think twice. If you're trying to lose weight, wearing a muzzle is extreme. However, it's a good idea to remove all the junk food from your house. You can always buy more, but it's that much harder.
You would have less moving parts if you used Tilt+(ERB|Haml|Slim).

Because the test is done on top of webrick, the document size probably matters more than we think. You could also give a baseline by returning a raw string to show the framework overhead.
It is a shame. However, it is surely much easier to reduce wasted heat by simply buying more modern, more efficient CPUs that will probably be more powerful.
Mod_pagespeed is now out of beta
Excellent analysis of this analysis. :) Gives me ideas for my own blogging...
Just because developers, musicians, artists etc aren't suffering doesn't mean that it's right or should be encouraged.
I don't have any research, just a rule of thumb: refactor when it hurts. In my experience, it's easy to go too far in the other direction, trying to craft perfectly generic code on the first pass. That doesn't work very well.

It's important to have a meta-awareness while programming - how firm is your grasp on the code? How confident are you that your changes will do what you expect? At some point, you feel that grasp slipping, and then it's time to refactor.
Top Rackspace lawyer: "We'd love to get rid of software patents"
Not all apps require these techniques to stay maintainable. My background is working on larger Rails apps, built up over multiple years by teams of 6+ people, so the post is shaped by those experiences.
I'm enjoying the conversation too! Your point about the scaling properties making LH2 more favourable for larger vehicles is something I hadn't properly appreciated in those terms, but is certainly correct. As far as T/W goes, I think that you do need to be able to pull 3G off the tower, and moreover do it with one propulsion system (or cluster of identical systems). Again from a systems-engineering point of view, the point where a launch vehicle design jumps the shark is where you're strapping together completely disparate types of rockets to get the desired effect. I don't think that an LH2 engine has ever actually done this, although the the X-33 designs perhaps could have worked. (I always thought that the Venturestar was emblematic of everything that can go wrong with an LH2-driven design, since it basically turned into a (non-)flying kitchen sink exposition. But the DC-Y was elegant enough; I would have loved to see somebody make an honest attempt at that.)

So basically, it sounds like there are three things required to make a cryogenic first stage/RLV viable:

1. A market for large payloads -- large enough to allow the scaling laws to work out in LH2's favour -- with sufficient frequency to pay off the development costs. As such, this doesn't exist yet, but it's certainly conceivable that someday it could.

2. New types of LH2 engine designs, which are much more durable than SSMEs (which I guess would be the current benchmark of LOX/LH2 durability? Or would that be RL-10s?) Presumably with some substantial revolutions in materials sciences. This may be well underway already (as you allude), but is not public info yet.

3. New, cheaper ways of generating hydrogen. As long as the lowest-cost method is steam reformation, then hydrocarbons will, by definition, be cheaper. If that's the case, then you'd end up in a curious situation where LH2 might only be economical in the middle of the spectrum. In an ELV which is primarily concerned with capital costs, hydrocarbons clearly are more more cost-effective, since they're much easier to develop and build. On the other hand, in an RLV which achieves true airline-like operations -- where the cost of fuel begins to become a meaningful concern, which it currently is not -- then hydrocarbons win again. That might only leave a thin band in the middle where LH2-based designs are the most cost-effective. On the other hand, a new low-cost hydrogen-generation technique (eg., bacteria that exhale it) could change the game.

So yes, I guess I'd echo your sentiment that this is something that could be relevant in a decade, if all three of those items develop in the right way. Definitely promising enough to merit some R&D, but not yet assured or inevitable.
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You can be intuitively against something, but not be able to work out why. A few hours later, you often realize the rational reasons behind your original feeling.
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Well and good, but she might have written it with fewer $5 words. (Pardon me, "formulated it with a less sesquipedilian vocabulary.")

"it fancifies a simple ideal (be honest), but because in so doing, it’s emblematic of the very culture that fosters fraudulence in the first place: the too-often obfuscating, gate-keeping, stratifying milieu of higher education."

"I’ve seen young writers contort their prose into incomprehensibly pretentious muddles, all in a disastrous bid to sound more erudite than they are."

I bet she has. I hope she put her advice to them more plainly.
I can think of times when I've been the single up-vote and/or single
comment on a submission of yours. The most recent one that comes to mind
easily is your post on a claim about total memory in ancient computers
(I think it was 53K in 1953 if my memory serves).

It wasn't that the post lacked detail or depth, instead, it's a problem
of varying interests; few people have an interest in ancient computer
system design and history, let alone know what "mercury delay line"
memory is.

When you combine a more esoteric interest with the fast queue of the HN
'/newest' page, the result is an exposure, visibility, and discovery
problem, rather than any real flaw in your content.

Also, robertjmoore, thanks for a great article with data.
Any editor that starts with comments collapsed is going to hide the functionality buried in comments. But that's a minor issue.

Comments are exactly that - comments. They are not intended to be executed and can be changed or removed at will. They are not necessary. They exist to provide further explication for code that is not self-documenting (or just plain programmer wankery).

This changes the deal. This means that some comments are required without providing clear boundaries to those who are not cognizant of the new convention.

PHP would be better served by adding naked @annotations and leaving comments to be non-parsed.
I've been a git super fun for years. But I have to say Hg is much more friendly to newbies. My reason for git's popularity is:

The code is out of the hands of Linux kernel team, so you can believe that git will work well.
And the fame of Linus and later github also count.
Quick note: your link to this HN discussion was invisible to me the first time I saw the page. It looks like a subheading that someone can very easily miss.
Fascinating. However, one must be careful about jumping to conclusions from analysis like this. I see a few items where the author that might have come to the wrong conclusion.

- New user growth. I don't think its b/c a 'saturation point' has been hit for the HN community as the article hypothesizes. There was a period in the last few years where there was an conscious choice by HN to restrict user growth in order to maintain a higher signal to noise ratio. Newbies are now marked with green and there is no register link on the homepage. for a while there wasn't a way for new users to sign up.

- The NYT more favored compared to the WSJ? most likely not due to the quality of the writing but b/c WSJ articles are not available to non-subscribers by default.
That's a good point. It sounds like what you're describing is essentially a Facade. That can be useful if you need coordinated objects to manage complexity, but want to keep it simple for clients to use that part of the application. I sometimes create a Facade for a Ruby module that is a package of fine grained classes.
This speaks not only to students, but also to professionals of any industry.

How often have you "pretended" or "bent the truth" and then found yourself in a tough spot? It usually leads to stress, either by rushing to learn so you appear to know, or a loss of trust when called on it.

I have much better conversations with people who I know are bright and are humble about what they know.
Looked it up and this article mentions PTSD, schizophrenia, and Autism. There are some scholarly reference out there too. Seems mixed, but they want further studies.

http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/12/17/drug-‘ecstasy’-may-h...
That's a great summary. It's easy to lose that meta-awareness, even if you're an experienced coder. You are holding a hammer, and the nail isn't going in, so your first instinct it "hammer harder". But usually it means you need a screwdriver.
you shouldn't have so many if at all utility classes in java as well
services should be used to compose process behavior not domain behavior IMHO
service -> enroll user
user -> domain behavior eg. concrete distinct action in responsibility of that domain object
I hate when people write code like this
get attributes of object
do something with attributes
set attributes back

instead having operation on object doing this and clearly encapsulate behavior and hopefully data as well
Poll: How big of a project would you build with JavaScript?
Somewhat like a Skiplist, which is introduced in a 1990 paper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_list

I'm certain that at least one older algorithms text I own mentions skiplists, and there is no doubt much other prior art here, seems like the kind of thing that might find its way into kernel scheduling queues.
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Photos from inside Google datacenters
I assume those stories would be included in both averages?
So very true. I've been apprenticing a junior developer and it's been a huge productivity boost for me.
It's a great point, but I don't buy the connection to actual cheating. There's dishonestly pretending to know something that you don't, which is what she's addressing. That's done to save embarrassment. But she connects that dishonesty to cheating, which is done to avoid failure.

Yes, we can categorize embarrassment as a kind of failure, but I think they are clearly separable in their effect on us. As she demonstrated, if you just say "I don't know" in conversation, you don't actually look stupid. But if you fail to write an essay, your grade will suffer.

But, back to her original point, I have noticed that the smartest people and best researchers I know are not afraid to say "I don't know" when asked a question. I've warned people who give interview talks here that their audience will be filled with very smart people who aren't scared of looking stupid. Which implies that they'll ask questions without fear of asking a "too obvious" question, which in turns implies they are more likely to ask fundamental, difficult to answer questions.
Thanks for the comment. I totally hear you - it irked me a bit too at first, but ultimately I thought to myself - the feature was out in their production environment already, and the chances of this really actually having any effect on Pinterest were pretty slim to none. If I'm wrong, then perhaps they have bigger problems.

Think about how much more valuable this test data would be though.. if you have people using this heavily despite the fact that they have to go through this whole process every time they want to block someone, I think that would say a lot about how important and needed this feature really is.

For what's probably a really small percentage of the Pinterest user base that actually has the patience and skill to use it, they probably really need this feature. Otherwise, I expect most people to pretty much just say, "Oh, cool", and let it be a neat "easter-egg" type of thing.

Anyway, I totally get where you're coming from, and agree with you that it's probably not that big of a deal :)
That's pretty amusing that the corporate firewall is making your system far less secure. There has most likely been hundreds of security issues fixed since Chrome 15.