skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually really neat, but isn't this a pretty blatant copyright violation? Reimplementing agents in JS would be fine, but using their actual content seems to cross the legal line.
It's his font choice. I don't agree with it either, but at least it's intentional.

Edit: Perhaps not. The font looks better on the link provided in the sibling comment.
Feynman is a Putnam Fellow (ie. top-5 placement in the annual Putnam exam for undergrad math majors). That unequivocally qualifies him as "genius".
A better headline would be "How insert multinational coprp avoids paying billions in taxes"
I'm no apple fan, but this is the norm for most (all maybe?) big corps.
It looks like you're writing a comment. Would you like help?
Apple's Fusion Drive: An Inside Look
It's not just Chrome.

I get just as awful a rendering on Firefox ESR 10.0.5 on Win7-64.
Python Serialization Methods comparison
Healthcare Finally Moving Past Wang-Like Legacy Systems
it seems ridiculous because no sane person alive supports those things

I wish that were true.
To each their own, but I'm having real trouble imagining that this could actually be helpful!

I'm sure it's possible to get used to, but I doubt I'm the only one that remembers when they first turned syntax highlighting on, and the difference it made to my productivity then.
Ah, that is a very good review. Thanks. Maybe the parent meant to link to it, too. :)
Reminds me of this about Google:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4331584
I'm always surprised when I meet folks who prefer not using syntax highlighting. At some point the surprise will go away, but for now it's still pretty darned rare. The first person I met who expressed a strong preference for no syntax highlighting was Matt Trout (mst here at HN), who is certainly productive enough to provide a compelling argument in favor of it.

I might even try it again one of these days.
I pay 10$ for 3 GB in India :D
I want to hack my boyfriend's Facebook account.
You know guys, he's a hacker, he's got a new program that guess password.. and that's so unfair to me :( cause' he will always know my password and what about me? I wanna know if he hide me something too. And he's not a very faithful boy..
Please guys, help me.
See this code:

<%= render partial: 'user, collection: @user.followed_users %>

I see (and write) errors like this all the time. Turning :syntax on saves me a browser refresh/compile cycle/spec run every time. Not sure if I'd need a rigorous test to tell me how helpful it is :)
'Presumably' = 'I have no evidence'. It's just as likely to increase groupthink, with disastrous consequences.
Although I think the article as a whole is insightful, I really don't agree with the book analogy. Most of the time, one reads a book in a very linear fashion - left to right, top down, hopefully with little interruption. With code, I find myself having to jump around a lot more - to find where something has been declared, or to look up a subroutine, etc. This means there is a lot more searching for the relevant text in programming than in reading a book, and syntax highlighting helps my eyes identify these parts on a line or a block a lot more quickly.

However, I can see how turning off syntax highlighting could help one learn to keep more code in their head at once, so they don't have to jump around as much, but to me, it's not worth it.
Interesting. Both what Kyle talks about, and also the fact that I've never thought of not having syntax highlighting before. It's just been a built in assumption.

I opened vim and cycled through syntax on, syntax off a few times, and thought about what I think about when I see it. After this short experiment, I think that most of what I use syntax highlighting for is just to add texture to the code. The pattern of indentations and syntax highlighting gives the code shape.

So when I scroll, or scan the code, I've got another a set of visual anchors in addition to the structure given by indentation. It makes me feel more comfortable. Past that, for me, the syntax highlighting is just noise.

Makes me wonder how to increase the feeling of visual structure in the code without introducing visual noise...
I write a lot of code on whiteboards or paper as well, but I could not bear to part with syntax highlighting. When you're off the machine, a missing quote or semi-color won't cause the whole thing to come crashing down. The same can't be said for when you're actually typing things.

As the author already mentioned, strings are really annoying to work with when you don't have syntax highlighting for them. I would group comments in the same category. It's difficult to see where they begin and end without the visual cues provided by syntax highlighting. That can quickly become a disaster.

I did try out going through code just now without syntax highlighting. New and short programs weren't bad at all, but going through files with hundreds of lines quickly became a challenge. This might work for the author, but it's not for me (nor, I suspect, for most people). Colors and font styling make it easy to get a grasp of what's going on. Taking that away does reduce noise, but cuts down far more on signal.
at least for me, it makes code a lot more pleasant to read. there is the instant feedback for minor syntax errors, of course, but even apart from that the pleasantness aspect is more than enough to justify it.
"Promoted Posts" - I see a promoted post. I read the comments. I see some people saying "are you going to the pub tonight john?" (being confused about who posted the post); I see people generally in favour of the post; and then I see people who attack the organisation that posted.

IKEA (one of the largest charitable organisations in the world) gets many "pay your tax" comments.

Facebook may have opened the door to something like sarcastic Amazon reviews.

Another thing: The article talks about this from the perspective of someone posting to many people. I'm interested in the perspective of someone receiving posts:

I want an option to receive everything that everyone I like or subscribe to posts. I can turn down my receive frequency if they post too much. Or I can unsub if they post a ridiculous amount. But this option is not available to me - I have to go through every single one of my contacts and select this option.

And then I want to be able to set [SORT] to be 'most recent' AND NEVER HAVE TO TOUCH IT AGAIN rather than having to reset it every few days. The fact that the sort dropdown is harder to click because the report / hide dropdown down-arrow interferes with it just makes this more irritating.
That abstract is epic. It would be funny if all scientists made a mention of the impact of their research on interstellar highly-relativistic flight.
Personally, I think "rolling your own" is the best way to learn things. Only when you understand things, when they are really internalized, use the built-ins.
GestureLeft and right seem to be wrong.
Corsets and Bustier,all in www.asextoys.com
So let's say I lose a limb at some point in the future. How does one go about applying for these "research" positions? It seems like it would be an interesting hack to get into a mind-controlled robot limb experimental program instead of the traditional prosthetic limb.
Wouldn't a jump drive work slightly better in this case?
SOA Software's Open and Free API Playground
Show HN: Magic Shop
Drop a JS include into your page, turn any image into a buyable item.

This idea's been baking in my head for almost a year. There was a point where I actually took some time to hack up some JS for the front end part but that's it. This year I replaced my laptop and a week later I was positive that I lost the Magic Shop JS so far.

A month ago I found a copy of it and spent a few hours building a little Rails app to make it work, let it sit again. Then this week I saw Helium [0] and got super bummed, but ultimately decided that it's worth putting mine out there anyway, right?

I'm noticing a few more bugs now but still wanted to get some feedback.

Planned changes, loosely in order of importance to me:

- Wider compatibility

- Stripe (duh)

- Order history via PayPal IPN / Stripe API

- Buy button options: positioning, floating, multiple & editable templates

- Additional site controls via overlay

Any feedback is much appreciated!

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728955
Paris se met à l’heure du karaté
Paris accueillera les Championnats du monde de karaté du 21 au 25 novembre 2012. Rendez-vous au Palais Omnisports de Paris Bercy. Les finales affichent complet, mais quelques billets sont disponibles.
Government will one day be online, adding much needed transparency to it. This is just the first steps.
Cheap Christian Louboutin Sale
Fighting is a waste of energy. Find your flow and go with it.
Coke gets hacked (by Chinese hackers) and doesn't tell
Ah, my ignorance of US financials comes through then... so there is no US equivalent of the PAYE system or a withholding tax to ensure non-avoidance by employees?

When tzs refers to income tax, that traditionally means personal/employee income in the UK whereas corporation tax is the tax on profits levied to corporations.

Hence, tzs's statement above reads as if Apple did pay income tax on behalf of their employees, but makes no mention of corporation tax or an equivalent.

Too many similar terms used differently from one place to another. Now I understand the downvote.
I agree with the author that turning syntax off is like reading a book. When I read in English, I don't want to be bombarded with color or style changes that aren't completely necessary. I appreciate their function as an aid to recognizing patterns, but I've read enough so that I can glance at the entire page and recognize all the patterns I want in a few seconds. Now, when it comes to reading books in a foreign language (e.g. japanese or mandarin) it can be a tremendous aid while you're learning because it helps you make sense of where the breaks are in something that might otherwise take a considerable amount of time to break down bit by bit. As soon as you start getting used to it the patterns become obvious on their own, and the visual aids just become a layer of noise.

My main exception is comments, or footnotes on the side. At a quick glance it's very helpful to skim through a file and see what's documented or, if it's a text/config where each section break is.

Edit: after skimming the other comments here it seems that the preference for highlighting is more to do with error checking than anything (pairing enclosures, etc.). If that's the main concern then why not zap the rest and use syntax the same way you'd use spell? I don't use highlighting for much but I might just drop that into my vimrc tomorrow to play around with it. I would rather see glaring red blocks where there are mistakes than a minor variation in my digital bowl of lucky charms.
I see projects like this pop up from time to time. This might be the first one I've seen that is hardware. Usually they are tracking and/or pattern recognition.

In any case, while some rudimentary communication might be possible, sign languages tend to have a large improv component, plus facial expressions and body posture all contribute to meaning.

Frighteningly ambitious opportunity: Capture all of the signer's output (hands, face, body) and correctly translate that into English.
The Permanent Militarization of America
Well put. I'm sure that, at the end of the day, many NYC Uber customers were happy to pay more for the certainty of knowing that they would get where they wanted to go in the days after the storm. Isn't that what Uber is about in the first place?

Nonetheless, our cultural norm in the US is strongly against "price gouging" during emergencies, which means, I suppose, that merchants should continue charging pre-disaster prices for gasoline, plywood, generators, and car service, and that the lucky customers who get there first get served, while the rest suffer.

The author's suggestions on ways to thread this particular needle are why even lean start-ups need a good marketing lead.
I generally use the -j option to tar primarily because it's less typing. I think the ideal option is for these flags to be provided, but implemented using pipes under the hood so tar -cj folder is just syntactic sugar for tar -c | bzip2. Similarly, tar -cf folder.tar folder/ could be implemented as tar -c folder/ > folder.tar. I think this way you get the conciseness of the flags approach, but also each item of functionality is only implemented once. Just a random thought.
It has been discussed before on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038194
Your criticism may be better directed at those who write the laws, not those who follow them.

It's not only the norm, it a company's fiduciary responsibility to minimize tax liabilities. If these activities are against the intent of the law, a simple rule change should suffice.
Would anyone actually use lua to build a full on ios application though? Is Lua an acceptable alternative to Obj-C?..
Another interactive tutorial: http://www.sql-tutorial.ru/content.html
and exercises: http://sql-ex.ru/exercises/index.php?act=learn
I did the same several weeks ago at work. I turned off syntax highlighting in XCode for doing objective-c coding. More specifically, I created a theme with all the same color: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/68874506/Screenshots/xcodeterm.png

I'm used to coding in terminal screen sessions, and using an IDE is a bit too shiny for my liking so I created my own terminal for XCode :) Now when I look at my co-worker's color-coded ruby code in Sublime Text it looks like a bunch of unreadable rainbows.

Colors are pretty, but since I turned them off I found that I haven't missed them. They turned out to be distracting, and I can't remember a situation where the colors helped me scan the code faster to help me find something. One color means I now treat all tokens equally.
If you follow this reasoning I think you'd also have to shun line breaks and indentation. After all, natural language doesn't put each sentence on a separate line, or indent clauses. It flows in uninterrupted prose with paragraph breaks being the only distinguishing horizontal or vertical formatting.

Clean code is all about structure. Anything that help show structure, symmetry, hierarchy, or other patterns is bringing your reader one step closer to understanding. The difference between a keyword and an identifier is part of the program's structure. Coloring it makes it visual.

Also, properly-implemented syntax highlighting is essentially a very short feedback loop with the compiler that shows you how your code is actually being parsed. Short feedback loops make creativity easier (this is the basis of a lot of Bret Victor's work).

I agree with the author that "paying attention to what the code is doing instead of the individual elements" is important, but I don't think you have to turn off syntax highlighting to achieve this. At least I don't personally. If the colors are distracting, one idea might be to make them more muted so that they don't demand as much attention. But to me there's no going back from being able to see visually that you forgot to close a string or parenthesis, or include a proper line continuation for your macro.
23MM RC Wheels
It had a pretty bad fall about 5 meters down concrete stairs! Digitiser and screen still (mostly work)! Coped fairly well all things considered. Wouldn't be worried about the little fella! Let him at it!
Which in this case would just be an incredibly strong magnetic field...
I really admire Ev's transparency. It's relieving (and a little scary) that starting a new company seems only slightly less difficult for him as for the rest of us. Money, team, reputation, network are all nice things to have. But none of it matters if unless you make something new that people want.
for the article's author: try this before choosing a font, PLEASE: https://browserlab.adobe.com/ (yeah, it needs an adobe account that you can make in 2min, with no cc, but it's free if you don't exceed a daily usage quota)

...not everybody is using safari on a mac (and I eagerly await the days when people will start using fonts that are only readable on safari on a mac with retina display...)
It is especially annoying because the downarrow dropdown for 'report / block' interferes with my ability to click the 'sort' dropdown.
I'm sure they won't disclose their know-how. Not for $150.
Yeah I'm in the same boat.

For instance, I recently took a well-paying job as an "Integration Engineer" basically just setting up VMs and automatic builds. It's pretty easy and surprisingly pays better than I could make right now doing much else (I worked for the last 7 years as a software engineer). I worry I'll settle into complacency and let my skills rust (if at least on paper alone).

At the same time though I have other projects I want to pursue on my own and have some faith that I'm basically a pretty good software engineer who can land on his feet eventually given that our world is mostly automated now.

Also, the author goes out of his way to paint some sort of bleak picture. If you re-read it, basically, for the last 30 years he's raked in cash, taken multi-month leaves from work, and been unemployed for maybe 6 months total, along with a couple years of lower-than-expected payment around the dotcom burst? That's living the high life, man. We should all hope to be so lucky.
The existence of only two candidates is a side effect of assuming that political opinions lie on only one dimension. The Median Voter Theorem also seems to ignore the polarizing effects of our two-party primary system.
It is not free. Nothing is free. In fact, when I was negotiating an offer, the free food for breakfast and lunch was brought up several times. Yes, this is true even at Google. See http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/
Apple paid 1.9% income tax on $36.8 billion in earnings outside US in 2012
I find it interesting that mst isn't into syntax highlighting as his main language (Perl) has string interpolation. Making sure that variables embedded in a string stand out can be important:

"Number of Records: $numrec\n"
"Number of Records: \$numrec\n"
"Number of Records: ${\ get_number_of_records() }\n"
"Number of Records: \${\ get_number_of_records() }\n"

Or

my $string = <<" HEREDOC";
my $name = "Thompson";
HEREDOC

It's much less important in something like C where you would just being using something like sprintf().
Sorry, mildly off topic but had to jump in here to add additional information. IKEA is the worlds largest charity in terms of cash it's sitting on, but it is not the worlds largest in terms of what it gives away. In 2007 it only gave away 1.3million euros, despite sitting on 31billion and earning far more. The stores also still pays between 700million and 1billion to the founding family. lastly the money it does give away is for the furtherment of architecture.

So while it may be large, I don't think we can let it off the hook of its tax arrangements, just because it's a charity.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14675
Ah, my editor has separate error highlighting, so I don't have to forgo that immediate feedback to turn off syntax highlighting.
Tax witholding for salaried employees is entirely normal and customary in the US, but the article is not about those individual taxes, and US taxpayers wouldn't ever describe the taxes as being paid "by" the employer on employees' behalf.
Jacques, I think you misunderstood me. Since, corruption is one of the key motive of this case you could piggyback on IAC's stand against corruption to get your problem solved. However, since media expose in an issue (which I did not know about earlier) it does not sound like a good idea. Please keep us updated. I have no political connections in Delhi but can help you with information.
It's an interesting idea.

I've actually gone the opposite way recently. In the past, I'd only have code highlighting. Different parts of the syntax would be rendered as different colors--nothing surprising.

However, recently I've been writing a lot of Haskell and OCaml. At least in Emacs, both Haskell and OCaml have an additional option to syntax highlighting with color: your code can also be highlighted with symbols. That is, parts of the syntax are not only displayed in a different color but actually displayed as a Unicode character rather than ASCII. As a moderately contrived example, something like

\ a b c -> a >= b && b <= c || a /= c

would get displayed as:

λ a b c → a ≥ b ∧ b ≤ c ∨ a ≢ c

Now, real code doesn't usually have symbols quite as dense; this example just shows a whole bunch of them at the same time.

I find the second snippet far easier to read than the first, especially if I'm just scanning over the code.

This is also a very good reason for using a typeface like Deja Vu Sans Mono: it can support all the symbols I could ever want. It's also very readable.

I personally find this, combined with syntax highlighting, extremely useful for reading code. Actually, thinking about this, I've found syntax highlighting even more useful for Haskell and OCaml than other languages, probably because they have very minimalist syntax. I really like the syntax, but the color does make the overall structure of any given function much more evident, which is nice.

Coincidentally, for the same readability reasons as above, I'm significantly warming up to Unicode identifiers. I think something like:

set1 `union` set2

is not nearly as readable as

set1 ∪ set2

And, as a bonus, the second version is easier to type:

set1 \cup set2

Additionally, using Unicode identifiers and operators matches the way I write pseudocode. With the right identifiers, my Haskell code actually looks very close to what I would write on a whiteboard to explain some concept. That's one of the reasons I really like Haskell's syntax.

As an aside, the expression

set1 `union` set2

is a perfect case study of why I find syntax highlighting useful. First of all, I think it's strictly better than the prefix version:

union set1 set2

I've found being able to use arbitrary functions in an infix position can sometimes make certain expressions much more readable and natural.

However, if you're just scanning over the code, it might be easy to miss the backticks. Happily, in Emacs, operators get highlighted in a different color from normal identifiers. This includes things in backticks. So the `union` gets highlighted in a different color, making it obvious it's being used in an infix position.
Erm. It seems like the problem is not with Chrome's rendering but with the site owner's font selection.
When I was learning for the theoretical part of the test for my driving license, there were questions like:

You are approaching an intersection form a secondary road and you see the "Stop" sign. Do you:
1. reduce speed
2. stop
3. go ahead without reducing speed
4. yield to the traffic on the main road

The "correct" answer was 2.

But I argued, in order to stop, don't you have to reduce speed?

Well, the policemen understand that "reducing speed" means just slowing down without stopping, not slowing down. You see, they have hidden domain knowledge that is not present in the question, making its meaning ambiguous. The theoretical questions were all like this.
I love this quote from the abstract:

Diffuse interstellar H atoms are the ultimate cosmic space mines and
represent a formidable obstacle to interstellar travel.

The paper[1] is an interesting read too, but of course there are other obstacles to relativistic spaceflight, such as reaching velocities capable of relativistic spaceflight.

[1] - http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperDownload.aspx?paperID=2391...
I imagine that it has a lot to do with the language too. Things like Perl, Ruby or even shell scripts have a lot of syntax that benefits from syntax highlighting (I'd say most of them related to strings and string interpolation), while C maybe doesn't.
Wax looks good at least for experiments and prototypes. However, a quick look at Wax issues on github reveals the project has issues that have not been addressed in recent months. So it appears to be a fixer-upper for now.