skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I understand the desire to have an upgradable PC, as a developer the single greatest benefit of a console is a fixed target. If it runs on this machine, then it runs on all the machines.

From a user's perspective this means I can easily tell if something will run or not. No worrying about whether I have enough cores, enough pixel shader units or simply enough memory. It Just Works. That's the console promise.

I can't overstate how important this is for both the developer and the consumer. Not all developers can afford to have QA departments to test on every configuration out there and, believe me, there are a lot of OS/GPU/driver/memory configurations floating about.

I think the Apple/Nexus model that says "this is the new device this year" is a workable tradeoff. Then you can say: Only SteamBox 2013 and up are supported. We no longer support the 2012/older models.

However, allowing the user to upgrade their machine only helps the technically proficient and hurts the small developer and less technically inclined users that a console is usually targeted at.
"perhaps the evolution of life, or multi-cellular life, or animal life, or intelligent life, etc - is so unlikely ..."

Bacterial life appeared on Earth pretty much as soon as the planet had cooled down.

An argument could be that some extremely unlikely chemical coincidence was needed to create life, but I think the observation gives more support for the theory that if you have a planet with prebiotic soup, the biotic part is going to kick in pretty soon.

But then it took 4 billion years -- or 30% of the whole universe's lifetime -- for life to invent multicellularity (with some important steps, like the invention of nucleus and thus eukaryotic cells, still unicellular life, half-way in between).

I don't have a problem believing that bacterial life is abundant in the universe. But life on Earth, inventing multicellularity only in 4 billion years, and then sentience only in 0.6 billion more (multicellularity obviously being the harder part), is among the fast ones.

Wait another 4 billion years to give the slower ones a fair chance to discover multicellularity, too.
Mostly vim. Then Xcode and Eclipse(I really hate eclipse but it does some things I need).

I also create my own tools and IDEs to do things nobody has automated faster.
All night long.
I think the strongest argument for a markup language/translator for NSAttributedString is ease of localizing other languages. A translator can learn the basic markdown, and that can be passed along in a .strings file.
Oh, I do see now that there's a license.txt at the top level of your blog repo. Now I feel silly. :)

(Context: I contacted the author before publishing to see if this was alright.)
I don't know if this is an actual discussion or a "launch" for a site, but using page down just bounces you back to the top of the page. (Chrome beta, OS X).
I used to be a vim guy until the visual debugging in RubyMine won me over. That and (jump to function) is much better than keeping ctags up to date via a git hook.
Funny, this exact same thing happened to music. You used to be able to listen to a band's demo CD and immediately tell if they were any good by listening to the drummer, because a good drummer wouldn't play with a crappy group. Now with drum loops and better recording technology, even a crummy group could (on the surface) make a good-sounding demo. The underlying talent may or may not be good, but as the article says, it just takes more time to figure that out.
Wait, why doesn't iOS have the equivalent of the -initWithHTML:documentAttributes method from the AppKit additions? That's been around since, let me check... always. Why would Apple leave it off on the iPhone?
If you are already working on your product and only need a business plan to go with it, I see this as a great service.
> Wouldn't those sources of gasoline from atmospheric carbon dioxide still produce carbon emissions?

Sure - exactly as much carbon dioxide, in fact, as was removed from the atmosphere when the fuel was produced.
I never was a huge fan of Eclipse in the past, but later iterations of it combined with running the huge hunk of junk off of an SSD makes it really quite good these days (IMHO). I'm using it for Python, it has pep8 integration, a nice graphical diff for git and as much syntax error detection as you can expect for a dynamic language.
It could make for fun Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications... but I'm not sure which applications are amenable to 200k Samp/sec.

[For reference, my UHF SDR has a dual-channel (I/Q) 100Msps ADC...]
But if you're competing with a $500 PS4, you're going to have problems. Even when you throw in price savings with scaling and a colossal subsidy, that's the retail equivalent of building a PC which competes with the next-gen consoles for $800 or so. So a marginal $40 is a lot of money in that.
For further reading, I highly recommend Bunnie's book on hacking the Xbox.
It would be interesting to know how much this costs.
Presumably the board will also be offered on it's own, without anything connected to the LVDS interface. One of Bunnie's previous projects, the Chumby, is available this way.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10106
Sean "xobs" Cross is collaborating on this as well. He's more low-key than Bunnie when it comes to publicity but still worth following if you're into the "Internet of Things" (I kind of hate this phrase, but it gets the idea across effectively enough).

Sean was also at chumby industries, by far the greatest collection of smart people I've ever worked with (sadly, on a product idea that ultimately failed).
The Symmetry of My UnAmerican McCarthyist Cancer (the GPL)
High-Fat, Low-Carb Ketogenic Diet Kills Cancer
WANT! I will buy one.

Meanwhile maybe someone can come up with something based on the Raspberry Pi. :-)
Sounds like a great prank to play on non-tech savvy friends.
Obligatory "Just missing a decent text editor" joke here.
The film was produced in New Zealand. Here is a link to a video report which includes an interview with the producer:

http://ondemand.tv3.co.nz/Media-3-Season-1-Ep-16/tabid/59/ar...
If he really made that exact argument, he was very much beside the point. Nobody is planning to use batteries to buffer grid energy production. Batteries are for small-scale storage. For large-scale storage, there are much better mechanisms. Pump-storage hydro is already widely deployed but can't be built up arbitrarily. There are other technologies in development, such as storing energy in the form of compressed air, or as heat inside huge concrete blocks.
You're a little unclear as to why it's called the singularity. It means a point so drastically different that we cannot predict what the world will look like after it happens. However, should a planet still exist on the day after this occurs, you can pretty much guarantee that the company that controls this technology will make Apple, Google, and Microsoft look like technological infants. Well, unless it is Google, which seems to be the play they are making by hiring RK.

Also, World of Warcraft is virtualized, and everything in that game is potentially infinitely abundant. And yet, it still seems to pull in billions. So...
Particles can't be poly-entangled? Why not? A wavefunction is by definition a function of all particles. Breaking it into a separate function for each particle is merely an approximation to facilitate calculations.
The `maybe` in the article allows for this ambiguous situation:

var fn = function (a, b) { ... };
var maybe_fn = maybe(fn);
var obj = {};
maybe_fn(1); // calls fn
maybe_fn(1, null); // doesn't call fn
maybe_fn(1, obj.nonexistent_prop); // also doesn't call fn

In my mind, all of these calls to `maybe_fn` should do the same thing. Maybe not, though?
Visual Studio for .Net, IntelliJ for Java, or Sublime Text for anything else
Maybe tigers "should" be? I know quite a few people who would gladly pay for the ability to have a domesticated tiger as a pet...
You can check out anytime you like
Or initWithRTF:documentAttributes:... No idea.
I'm sorry, I mean no disrepect, but the idea that because you are a programmer by occupation doesn't really mean you understand what it would take bring about the sort of rapture predicted by Kurzweil.

Last night I read several posts on HN about people calling themselves "hackers" or "programmers" because they played with Wordpress and learned a little Javascript on a YouTube. This is not to be elitist but I think claiming expertise on this topic requires a little more insight than what is passing for being a "programmer" these days.

And you're somewhat wrong, I think. There is no reason inherently that traveling "to the stars" has to be unprofitable. In fact, many of those predictions about colonization the parent discussed, usually had some sort of capitalist profit driven motive. The pace of "accelerating progress" could manifest a cheap means of such travel. I don't know that speculative physics about faster than light travel (warping space-time, etc) is any more unrealistic than some of these prognostications about AI and spiritual transcendence, whatever that is.

But honestly, responding to this post sort of reminds of responding to Way of the Master type people anyway. :)
As an adoptive parent myself, I know several couples who chose to not pursue biological children because of genetic conditions.

Unfortunately, I also know some who chose to ignore the advice of their genetic counselor and now have 3 lovely, but severely mentally disabled children (Fragile X run amuck) who will never be able to live independently.
bunnie's history with open hardware design at Chumby leaves me confident that this will be a really fun system to work with. I've hacked around on various Chumby devices (I've got an Infocast 8" running Debian, for instance), and they've consistently been fun, reasonable systems to work with.
The only problem with that is that Willett Kempton is not the primary author and the primary author very definitely does have an engineering background (bachelor of engineering in 2007, PhD candidate in electrical engineering). Running down the list of other authors we have a bachelor of ocean engineering, currently a graduate student in the same field, a master in oceanography and current PhD student as well as one student with more of a policy focus plus the aforementioned professor.

Your comment is ignorant and lazy. Appeals to authority can be valid, sure, but when you make them you better be damn sure you are doing it correctly, for example by quickly glancing at the abstract.

Here is the actual paper: http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/windpower/resources/BudischakEtAl-2...

Have at it.
Same position as you, and I'd add that frankly I'd rather my government were spending their time on more important matters.
Good point! And I remember when they blew it up. :)
SparkFun is awesome, one of my favorite places to buy hardware hackery stuff along with Adafruit and Newark, but if you want to hack on this board for cheaper you can buy Insignia Infocast 3.5 units off ebay for around $40, half the price. The board inside is virtually the same as the Chumby Hacker Board (different arrangements of some of the headers and ports, IIRC) and it comes with a wifi module, 3.5 inch LCD w/resistive touchscreen, speakers, etc.

At $80 for the Chumby Hacker Board most people are better off just buying a rasp-pi, the CPU and memory in it crush the falconwing board and there's a much larger active community of people hacking on it so you get easy access to newer linux kernel versions, distros, etc, but at $40 and including the LCD/touchscreen, wifi, speakers, etc [infocast|chumby One] are still a great deal to use just for hacking on. Still slower than the pi but having the lcd touchscreen/accelerometer/speakers/bend sensor buttons/wifi/etc gives you a lot of stuff to hack on out of the box that you'll have to pay extra for on the pi.
When I first got into MIDI programming, I really enjoyed discovering the manufacturer IDs in the System Exclusive message byte block:

http://www.blitter.com/~russtopia/MIDI/~jglatt/tech/midispec...

It's like a 1970's and 80's time-capsule.
I noticed an oddity when switching between metric and Imperial/US measurements. Metric gave me 94% humidity and 23 kph while imperial gave me 88% and 9 mph.
What languages do you write in though? I'll agree with that in terms of lots of languages, but I've tried writing Java and C# in text editors and that's just miserable without a full IDE. Would you agree? If not how do you survive in a less than full blown IDE for those sorts of languages?
It will be interesting to see what they do about cheating in the highly competitive online multiplayer games. This is one of those rare situations (perhaps the only one) where open systems tends to make the end user experience worse.
I dispute this statement. Vim is more powerful for editing text than anything you will find in any IDE, including "vim modes". However, with or without plugins, it's not in the same league as an IDE like Eclipse when it comes to refactoring, error highlighting, automated imports, etc.

Now you can argue that many of these features are only necessary for languages like Java or C#, and that you can get by without them for everything else.
WOFF File Format 1.0 - W3C recommendation
This is a really good point, lets not airbrush history just because we're uncomfortable with it.

Maybe that discomfort will remind us to be better people.
As a visual person I'm fine with this. I would gladly trade a little bit of insight for a better living environment. Think if someone where to say "There are too many beautiful women in this world, we can't accurately judge their personalities"
It is fascinating how much of preservation effort is related to cuteness. If the animal is not cute, who cares. If you manage to snap a cute photo of it - get ready to get millions of financing.
Aptana Studio (Eclipse based). Works well for PHP, Ruby, Python, JS, HTML.
Your point and the point of the comment to which you are replying seem to suggest a 3rd space.

(1) There are IDEs, which include things such as build automation, debuggers, function lookups, etc. (2) There are text editors which maybe give you syntax highlighting.

I don't think I'm saying anything novel by suggesting that there is also an in-between: something that provides syntax highlighting, function lookups, etc., but which doesn't try to build your project for you.

You can use emacs like this, and you can use an IDE like this. So, many people voting for text editor and many voting for IDE may actually mean something more like this.
Pardon my lack of precision. I should have said "thoroughly entangled". What you say is true of partial entanglement. But partial entanglement is not what we are dealing with in event-horizons and virtual pairs. As the article states, in order to maintain consistency between observers, all particles must be thoroughly entangled.
Including functions from an external libraries?
Vim with dwm, TMux/TMuxinator, and urxvt. On the plugin side, I use slimv (I know editing Lisp with Vim is blasphemy, but meh), Easytags, and Syntastic. Just discovered Syntastic: I highly HIGHLY recommend it for everyone ever, just because of how much it shortens the compile-check-fix-compile cycle. Easytags is there basically to make omnicompletion more convenient. Of course, it's all tied together with Pathogen :P.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I'm primarily editing C, Python, and Common Lisp, but there is some Perl, Haskell, and C++ too.
This is pretty much the exact post I was about the write. Visual Studio at work (with a smattering if Eclipse/Netbeans/IntelliJ). Visual Studio is hands down the best IDE I have ever used. Big fan of it and C# (just wish Linux support was better).

Otherwise Notepad++ for everything, including Linux development (all done inside virtual machines).
I use Emacs. Ostensibly, it's a text editor. But for some languages, it's essentially an IDE. For example, I use typerex for OCaml which takes advantage of OCaml's type system to provide a bunch of high level features like showing errors in the code, auto-complete and some refactoring.

My main point (apart from the fact that OCaml and Emacs are awesome) is that there is no clear delineation between text editors and IDEs.
Yohui, on an iPhone but will do My best.

Traditional AI has had 1/2 a century of failed promises. Jeff's numenta had a major shakeup over this very topic and has only been working with biological inspired AI for the past 3 years. Kurzwell also has just recently come around. Comparing Grok to Watson is like putting a yellow belt up against Bruce lee. Give it some time to catch up

In university I witnessed first hand the insitutional discrimination against biological neural nets. My ordinal point was that google could use the fresh blood and ideas.
The question here, as I understand, is not whether breeding programmes are ethical, but whether misleading the general population with false information is ethical.

Is it ethical to ask for donations or ticket prices to zoos by giving people the impression that their money will (partially) go to conservation efforts, while the money is spent to breed animals that cannot survive in the wild but only for "marketing" purposes?
Don’t Forget Us | Socyberty
This is a good point, and may be an argument for having a "formal_maybe" or perhaps having it check at least as many arguments as there are formal arguments. However, I don't think that this situation would be as important in practical use. You would normally use this function to allow for passed arguments to be null or undefined - not to allow for some arguments not to be passed.
Sublime Text 2 but with GoSublime, it does most of what I want out of an IDE.
I've been very happy with PyCharm too.
WebStorm + Emacs
Also, make friends with the friends of your friends of the past. (If that made any sense...)

I find that the bulk of the people I meet who are not in tech are friends of my college acquaintances. I went to a liberal arts college, and then my path diverged from my classmates rather drastically after college. So most of my college friends are humanities types, either going to law school or med school or struggling to find employment. And their friends tend to be like them.
Depends on the job he was applying for. Data structures might be important.
Wikipedia (English) starting to migrate to MariaDB
"Most self taught programmers ... aren't going to be able to grab academic research from the 60s in optimizing graphs and apply that to their code when needed as the type of language and math involved is going to push them away."

The average person with a CS degree isn't familiar with the research literature either. That's the kind of background you usually get from doing a PhD.
Interesting. I'm not an expert on the subject; could you explain what thorough entanglement vs partial is?
My friend told me: "Looking out from [falling into] a black hole you see the life of the universe pass before you. That means if you've managed to fall into a black hole, no one in the history of the universe cared enough to rescue you."
I checked 'other' as well because I don't actually write a lot of the code I use software to write it for me. The idea of programs writing other programs has fascinated me pretty much since I started with computers and it has never left me. So if I feel that a piece of code is repetitive I write a chunk of code to write code like that and then re-invoke the generator when I need more code like that. As an example: structures, serialization, de-serialization, validation, allocation, freeing, database storage, variations of the same algorithm in different languages and so on.

To a lisp programmer this would be second nature (they'd wonder why it's so special) but in other languages it can be quite a hassle to keep multiple instances around of similar code.

Code generation is a real booster, the biggest gains I'm getting are 100:1 (a small 10 line definition spitting out a 1000+ lines of code), there is nothing to re-factor just update the generator inputs and hit 'make', old generated code is stripped, new generated code will be inserted into the project so you can inspect it afterwards (and to the compiler it looks just like ordinary human written code). The code generator writes comments as well to clarify the output.

Writing the generators can be quite tricky, you have to think on two levels at once (the code you're writing and the code you want to generate). There are some shortcuts here to make that process easier.

The end result of this process is to have code produced very with - once a single example has been produced and debugged - a much reduced chance of errors.
zoho office / email. Fast mail. If you want a good client, go with Thunderbird. Who cares about web clients anyway? Any email worth anything has IMAP and let's you retrive / delete locally.
HTML to NSAttributedString conversion also makes if you're displaying data from a CMS backend.
I hated that dropbox wanted to sync my photos. "Oh no, there goes some of my quota" I thought. But I was lazy and didn't turn off the feature and now wonder how I got along without it. Take a picture and like magic it's on my computer.

So now I get it, but I really resisted it and am not sure how Dropbox can over come this singular messaging problem.
Imagine a silicon brain that we create that is 10% more capable than our brain. It's nothing astounding, but it's smarter. And it has access to all knowledge within seconds. So this brain is able to actively comb through that information, and look at it's own design, and being 10% smarter, it's able to design a more efficient AI. That AI, now X% smarter will be able to do the same, etc, etc... It's not unlike what we do now. You couldn't design and build a modern computer without a modern computer. But the AI will be able to do it better, and faster. So it's not about a potential advancement that changes the world a little. It's about the possibility of being able to jump human knowledge by years or even centuries in a very short period of time.
Yes. You can create a tags file for any header file, no matter it's origin. I like to keep mine (for boost, GL, SDL, etc) in ~/.vim/tags and set that as my default tag directory, then use a plugin (Easytags) to auto-update tags for the current source file. That + Supertab + omnicomplete = win.
From Venture, Back To Operations
Most beginners are not going to be looking at their error log, or even know where to look for it. In a development environment, I think display_errors is a very reasonable behavior, and is in line with PHP's goals: be easy to get up and running, even (especially?) for novice programmers. Even people that have been doing this for a decade may forget to tail their logs, so having execution-time warnings makes a lot of sense, and is really the only practical approach for an interpreted language.

I've made vague suggestions (though not written up a full spec/RFC... one of these days) about improving the overall error handling system in PHP since I think there are a limited set of common behaviors that involve a lot of repeated code to get, which basically amount to "use strict". That way people doing serious projects that need a flexible language can get decent and consistent error handling, and newbies hacking together their first dynamic website can continue to work without hitting a brick wall of a learning curve.

When I was first learning to code, something like display_errors would have been great. As it was I just had a few compiler warnings, but (especially as a newbie) who cares as long as it compiles and runs? Getting random warning text printed out on your web page is a real incentive to fix things, but without being so harsh that you just give up. Of course that doesn't scale to larger projects, but it doesn't need to. In PHP's case, that's what set_error_handler() is for.
> Solution: Wrap it.

Conversely, cut your losses and use something saner with better internal and API coherence.