skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nope, I programmed in AS for awhile though I left before Flex became well implemented.

I know about the movie clip system and don't deny what you claim. But now you're moving the goalposts as decoupling the elements from the Flash environment requires you to do more, well, hand coding. To do what you claim -- implement the same features with less code -- would require more handiwork inside the Flash authoring tool, which was never really a fun workflow even when Flash was more ubiquitous.

In any case, lowering the code count by relying on MovieClips, which as you say are basically libraries, hardly seems fair. I'm sure all the code in the OP could be reduced to about five lines, three of them being calls to external code and CSS files.
Did you look at Blogofile? If so, how did it compare to Pelican?
It depends upon you! we work hard and currently pushing the limits but it shouldn't feel that way.
I'd say an Xth percentile person in 2012 has a better life than an X+30th percentile person in 1950 at the very least. Most people haven't fully explored all the consequences of everything that's changed in the last 62 years, but they would be outraged to go back.
I made a mistake about Germany (my info was from an old article) - sorry, about that. I did mentioned that it is not commercially viable (it requires government subsidies). Keep in mind that nuclear power is the backbone of France's energy needs (78.8%). I am sure they create a lot of waste - we should at least look at what they are doing to reduce their waste.

I agree that reprocessing is not a long term solution. However, we do have a lot of nuclear garbage and every little bit counts. Repossessing will slow the growth of nuclear garbage.
Look at the amount that is recycled every year (paper, cans, bottles). Now imagine that in added to the current landfills.

Recycling/Reprocessing buys TIME (and so does electric cars, higher MPG, etc). The question is which will kill us first? Nuclear poisoning, climate change, or ourselves.
edit: footnoted for future reference.
I was going to say something to the effect of "Who is this guy and why do we care what he thinks? He seems like an idiot." But it turns out that he's actually a respected thinker and has published some respected books so maybe I'm not allowed to say that.

However, I still think this particular essay is insulting drivel. Taleb uses a lot of 10 dollar words to mast his 10 cent thoughts. He wears his vocabulary and enculturation on his sleeve like a badge so that he can pour scorn on neophiles and other people he doesn't like. Now, this may merely be the predjudice of an "autistic" technophile, but I prefer reasoned arguments to intellectual muscle flexing.

He makes a few good points. As the old saying goes: "The more things change the more they stay the same." Some things about society will possibly never change. But his actual argument is so vapid: We still use glasses to hold liquids that we intend to drink? Just like the Mesopotamians? No kidding. But chances are that glass he was drinking out of was manufactured in China hundreds of miles away with techniques wholly unavailable to Mesopotamia and shipped across a distance, inconcievable to a Mesopotamian, and at a price, proportionally less that the price of the rudimentary earthenware mug that a Mesopotamian would use.

Taleb accuses technophiles of not studying history, but I have studied history, and the world has changed, quite a bit.
Right...so it would be ironic if the city banned airbnb as an operator. But that's not what's going on here. People are being punished for breaking laws, Airbnb is merely the vehicle used to do so.
It looks like location influences results. Tried again at home , same results. Tried on different ec2 instances: fine on us-east, no go on sa-east-1.
I think you're missing the point, but also I admit I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say. So please forgive me if I get it wrong.

The point is not that the future will be like the past, or that things which exist now simply should not. It's that in Taleb's future, technologists will have recognized that technology should eliminate bullshit (think about the toilet and sewers, some of the best technology that could ever exist!) and make it easier to live a life full of the basic good parts of being human: companionship/sex, food, discovery and knowledge. So the smartphone is not incongruous with his vision of the future at all. It enables you to seek all of those things, and adds relatively little in terms of shitty things (I mean, you have to pay for it and keep it charged, but beyond that it doesn't add a lot hardship.)

When he talks about the lack of literacy in technology circles, I believe he's thinking of literature as a tool for looking at human motivations. So, his theory is that if technologists were to read literature (or were of a mindset to be already interested in literature), they would recognize these motivations, and it would provide a path for changing their focus from stupid social widgets to something that will actually create the future.
I knew about Google's Ads Preferences page (http://google.com/ads/preferences), which lists the interests Google has inferred for me. This article taught me about the BlueKai Registry (http://bluekai.com/registry/), which lists the same thing (and a little more) for BlueKai. Does anyone know of similar sources of information for other advertising networks?
Everything is evolving, people should be able to amend the Constitution. What you're proposing would make that illegal.
I think the post was supposed to be satire. I didn't really get that either, but the reactions I'm hearing in other places seem to be along the lines of, "Ha ha, that was funny."
North Korea Says Its Archaeologists Discovered A 'Unicorn Lair'
I guess we wont really know until we see the new Power Macs.

The line up is shifting downwards towards the Air.

iMac = desktop Air :)
0 to 20,000 Email Alerts in 2 Months
I think this is something that could be very helpful. In college, I didn't get so much feedback on code, so I would be interested in having a "coding coach".

In fact, I wonder if anyone would be interested in helping a small group get better at coding. The coach would provide feedback and answer their toughest questions. I guess it would be like a small independent coding bootcamp. I'm not sure how compensation would work, but I wonder if anyone would be interested in it?
This is satire, and is a direct response to how several art critics have dismissed "games" as capable of being considered fine art for reasons that are just as silly as this blog post, which is precisely why it's funny.
I knew I shouldn't check HN on a Saturday...I blame it on the reflexive groan I make every time a Square-Enix game is mentioned in the context
gnarly!
The tie is a sword. Now, you don't wear a sword to threaten violence. It's a social status symbol because only free people were allowed to have swords, much less wear them prominently, in the time that such was fashionable. Decorative rapiers were pitiful in comparison to battle weapons, but they made a point: high social class or (alternatively) the freedom (from typical aristocratic structures) of mercenary soldiers. In fact, the reason ties are called cravats is because they evolved from the cloth "knives" worn about the neck by Croatian mercenaries.

The suit is, as one might imagine, armor.

I don't see these as bad things. Unlike real swords, ties aren't hurting anyone. But yes, they go a long way back. There's a lot of legacy, for sure.
This is probably the only time this link is relevant here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGvNE9y5POI
There's a clearly defined procedure for amending the Constitution.

"Whatever some government official wants to do" isn't the criterion.
"When a builder builds a house he gets paid for his work. If he wants more money, he has to do more building. He can't just sit back and take a payment every time someone enters that building for the rest of his life."

A builder:

- is hired by a single client
- to build a house for many months
- and is compensated throughout the engagement with an hourly/daily/monthly wage or salary,
which is pretty much guaranteed (unless being let off for typically external reasons).

An author/actor/game developer:

- also takes many months to complete a book/movie/game but
- he is not hired by any single client
- his income is directly related to the reception of the end product by the audience.

I'd be interested to know how do you think should the creative professional be compensated if not by the actual people who benefit from it.
I've been looking into these schools as of late (including the one in SF - forgot the name)

And I've been trying to calculate how good of an investment these programs are. They help with job placement, which is valuable. Then again, the market is so hot for developers now that anyone who self-studies for 6 months could find a job fairly easily on his own.

As for the instruction itself, there are so many resources online (free, I might add) that it seems almost wasteful to drop 20k to learn when you could learn for free, assuming one possesses sufficient self-motivation and knows where to look.

Finally, there is the possibility of a potential huge opportunity cost one can't overlook:

the option of finding a paying jr developer job where one learns on-site. Instead of -20k you get 30k (based on 60k/year working for 1/2 year) and I assume end up roughly even in coding ability. That's $50,000 extra in your pocket, with demonstrable real-world experience rather than "school" experience.
Keyword arguments are not that important. They're a very nice feature but most of the benefits it will bring could be emulated easily using hashes (not telling you anything you didn't already know I guess).

It's nice to see that we won't have to rely on smart hacks though and that real keyword arguments are now available, but it's nowhere near earth-shattering.

As for refinements, it's theoretically a very nice feature, but it seems that the details are still hazy and the green-ness of the feature raises more eyebrows than it solves problems.
I personally use Jekyll for my own blog - because I spent a lot of hours setting it up, and now it just works.

However, for my homepage[0], I use Asciiweb[1], a - As a fan of ASCII art, I'm really happy with it. It's great for a static homepage, though not that great for blogging.

It uses a custom markup language that supports a couple of great features: optional per-page configuration, executing scripts through a nifty <exec> tag, and the script's output is placed in the web page. I use this to run a BSD fortune script[2]!

[0]: http://www.hardikr.com

[1]: http://tastytronic.net/asciiweb/aw.cgi

[2]: http://www.hardikr.com/aw.cgi?main=fortune.rfk
Installing more RAM or a new HDD is hardly an intensive or complex process on a system designed to be upgradeable. On pretty much any tower and certain laptops, it would take three minutes, tops.

On the other hand, I'm currently dealing with an easier-to-upgrade-than-this-one iMac (late 2006). I'm having an incredibly irritating time sticking plastic cards into odd places, finding multiple different sized Torx screw bits, and prying various pieces off, all to replace a failed HDD.

If only one or two components don't suit your needs, spending money on an entire new computer is just a waste.
I work on Hadoop, and we do dip into assembly sometimes. It's very rare. One example is the CRC calculating code in HDFS.

If you are working in a research context, it's not really worth writing assembly-- just getting it to work is more important. If you have to buy more hardware, then just do it. Traditional HPC is not really known for being very cost-sensitive.

When you're working in a commerical context, performance starts to matter more. It's the same reason why a one-off hand-soldered electronic device isn't built to the same standards as an iPod. If you're only building one, don't waste time on polish.
Your first instinct was right.
>Cloudflare makes websites unavailable if you use services like unblock-us.com

No they don't. CloudFlare just has a security mechanism where known bad or risky IPs are presented with a captcha. However on sites with "max" security, I believe it simply blocks them entirely.
Thanks for D3, learning it now and it is awesome!
Some might argue that if you're using Ruby and are worried about the cost of hashes, you might want to consider switching to another language. There are other concerns about "expensiveness" in Ruby that far outweigh usage of hashes.
Private torrent trackers are also fuelled by this drive. The 'game' abstraction has been made so real with ranks, stats, leaderboards and so on. It really is quite amazing how willing people are to sink time into providing a service, moderating, sourcing, encoding (people sink LOADS of time into learning the finest details of x264), cracking, uploading and distributing all for for no material gain outside 'the game'.
I know Jeff. Jeff taught me rails. If my kid was of the age where it was productive for me to spend this level of money on Jeff teaching him, there's no question in my mind I'd do it. Fwiw, I've been trying to get Jeff to teach me a "How to Teach" class for 5 years.
I agree strongly with that. It's easier to use, solves the deployment problem and does not even force the concept of objects onto a newcomer.
I don't see how Free software has anything to do with his post. First, there is only good Free software for certain things. Especially when the author was younger, there were no good Free software alternatives for many popular commercial products.

Even today, GIMP is no Photoshop, Blender is no Maya, Openoffice is no Office, and the list goes on, and this has been after decades of trying to catch up. The truth is that for many domains, commercial software is the standard and has been shown to be adept at outpacing Free competitors. (This is not true in many domains as well.)

And besides this, a teenager who is a sponge for learning the coolest and most popular software could not care less about the tired philosophical debate about free vs Free, they just want to be able to play with Photoshop because that's The Thing.
I think Taleb's distinction is that sci-fi was about the future, while the rest was about the past.
Ingress: Doing Google’s Legwork, Literally
It's not really that interesting to me. Ebert's argument is based on the idea that art needs to be good to be art. There's plenty of bad art, but it's still art. Indeed, the bar as to what can be art is startlingly (and often maddeningly) low.

Video games are part entertainment, part engineering challenge, part craft. Just like all art forms.

I enjoy reading Ebert's film reviews, but I think with this debate he's just stirring up controversy for notoriety's sake.
"A web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically predictable half a century ago […] when it finally happened, it was something of a surprise."

That made me think of Bruce Tognazzini (TOG) in "TOG on Interface" (http://www.amazon.com/Tog-Interface-Bruce-Tognazzini/dp/0201.... From 1991, but seems unaware of the existence of the world-wide web):

"I want the United States Library of Congress on my desktop. I want the collections of every major museum in the world available to project against my wall. I want every issue of every newspaper published in the English-speaking world sitting in my laptop.

Is this really too much to ask?"

I remembered that first paragraph as ending in "in my pocket", but, apart from minor technical details (for example, wireless communication allows us to shrink the device even further then laptop size, and he isn't asking for all of Hollywood or even for all radio recordings ever made) I think that is a decent prediction of where we are heading.
You can disable the captcha-feature, as far as I know

Cloudflare displays a cloudflare-branded error page when anything goes wrong. That happens quite often, and as far as I know you can not turn that off. Oftentimes Cloudflare claims the "the backend is down" when the backend is, in fact, serving fine (which I've verified on more than one occasion).

Furthermore Cloudflare significantly degraded both latency and availability outside the US when we tested them, versus using the US origin. We've seen their error-page and 'connection refused' errors spike into the 10% range multiple times a day. Latency variance was pretty wild, with europe spiking into the 500ms(!) range.

The only other CDN I've seen similarly atrocious performance from was MaxCDN.

If you're looking for a CDN to speed your site up (duh!) then I'd recommend to go with one of the more established players. Cedexis provides a nice report that tells you which CDNs perform best in your market; http://www.cedexis.com/country-reports
(I'm not affiliated with them, take their figures with a grain of salt, do your own testing on an evaluation account!)
I think that is the biggie really, DTrace probes. Much more than refinements or keyword arguments, GC or other features.

Put in the right hands, this will prove to be a deadly weapon.
My mistake! Clearly nuclear is far more energy dense.. memory failure. TBH i thought there would be a far greater exclusion zone around it than shown on your links (good source, btw)-- obviously fission is going to be off the scale on energy/kg of fuel.
The story is called "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
GitHub needs to take open source seriously - half of Github is unsafe to use
Calling it: There will be a blog post titled "Ruby Two's Day" on release.
I've read your comment, and a follow-on comment to someone else, and I think understand now.

You're saying that the future will be cool, but your disagreement with him is more in the definition of the word cool than with his point. When he says cool, he means what you're calling weird. This is all semantics, more or less. (Right?)

Another point you make is that Taleb misses the important fact that in the future (hopefully) a far greater number of people will get to enjoy these pleasures. I think this is important, and the biggest weakness with the article. Taleb seems to argue from the perspective that either a) there's no substantive cultural or societal difference between the West and East or b), the West will continue to be dominant. But in reality, the future may look radically different from today, not because of technology, but because a different (and much larger, of course) group of people will be using and furthering the technology.

I addressed your 3rd point in another comment.
I'm rather 'well read.' I don't say this boastfully as I feel a lot of it was a waste of time (although I also found a lot of philosphy/literature etc. very insightful).
Python primitive types are also objects. It's been that way for many years.
This has to be the most head-scratching hellban I've ever seen.
> Not to exaggerate, but you can actually achieve this with 0 lines of code in Flash using just Movie clips.

And this is why your comparison is apples to oranges, at best.
You spend a lot of time insulting Taleb, and relatively little time actually addressing the problems with his arguments.
Power is not a zero-sum game. Some restrictions of power/rights enable more power/freedom than they take away. This is obvious. The restriction (or convention, but I think the point still stands) to drive on a particular side of the road allows us to do so much more than if we did not have the restriction, our net 'power' has increased. Similarly in many other cases.

I think that many of your examples are good ones and that arbitrary restrictions of freedom are wrong, but restrictions on the possession of weapons by the general public is not arbitrary and if you want to make a utilitarian case you are going to need to talk about the pros and cons of gun control itself not more generally about freedom and rights.
Do you have a reference for this? As someone with a Bloomberg terminal I've found their wire service completely free of that kind of junk more typical of tech journalism, MarketWatch, or StockTwits.
I'm a military veteran. I've been to war. What the article is written about is not a war. It is a competition between companies in a safe and opportunistic market, which is the furthest thing from warfare and destruction that I know.
Compared to a designers salary, $50/mo to keep them on the latest software is money well spent. The Joel Test #9.
CBS Developing Draw Something Reality Pilot
If I understood it in this circumstance, I wouldn't have asked you to explain it.

--

Edit: link added for future reference: http://xkcd.com/1053/
Women ARE better at multitasking but when you compare their work when they've multi-tasked vs. when they uni-tasked, the most error free, accurate results come from the uni-tasking.

So it's not so black and white, men shouldn't multi-task but women can. More like, multi-tasking is bad for both genders but not as bad for women as for men.
The way to get around the "everything" is an object thing is to just ignore it. Object Orientation is mostly a convenience at that level of programming and you can do almost everything without even bothering about it.
A fun article whose real value will likely be missed by many here who will be rushing, misguided, to defend their ideas of 'technology' or 'progress' from attack.

The points that Taleb is making here are best discussed, not by considering technology as artifact alone, but technology for what it really is - a set of artifacts, systems, processes, and artifices that take place in a social milieu and as a two-way relationship with society and civilization. To think otherwise is naive folly, from my perspective. (Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technolo... for a primer on this, it's fun reading if you're unfamiliar).

Technophiles (myself included!) will often project things out because they fail to understand that technology does NOT just show up and leave an imprint on the world, deus ex machina style. Instead the world shapes technology back. You can see this for any kind of technology, from the bicycle (Bijker's famous example, shown in the wikipedia article) to the Internet, which has its present design because of the real fears / threats / motivations that abounded during its establishment.

It's the (mostly) impossible nature of this dis-entanglement that throws people off track. In some world of scientist-kings of technocratic technophile dictatorships, yes, we'd have moon bases by now. But that's not how it works, and as a result people - messy, annoying humanity - get in the way. For better or, for often, worse.

The future WILL be cool - I'm still an optimist. But it will be cool in different ways, and maybe for different reasons, than many here on HN might imagine.

Since this thread is already a bit long let me instead just close with a great quote that I reference often. Relevant here.

The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this,
that were our political and social and moral devices only as well
contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating
plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment
be no appreciate toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the
pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful
in its value. There is more than enough for everyone alive. Science
stands, a too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred
masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too
stupid to use.
– H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1904)
Not certain but Dreamspark requires some type of "student verification" process, which may be prohibitive to many young people who could stand the most to gain from access to these products.

I certainly can't imagine my 13-year-old self, who was a big enough geek to be giddy warezing Turbo C++, getting access to Dreamspark.
I know, and it's actually even linked from fugitive's Gitorious page if you click "more…" in the description, but as an Emacs user, I didn't know about fugitive.vim before choosing the name of fugitive, and the name is too awesome to change.