skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It seems simpler, especially on a conceptual level, to just initialize the the duck with everything it could possibly need to be a duck, rather than adding things dynamically.

Yes, it is simpler conceptually. But, in Rails especially where there is a tradition of moving all your application functionality into the "model" layer, you could end up with a single class that is thousands of lines of code long. For example, a User class, with a load of code about resetting passwords, that is only used in one relatively rare circumstance.

So instead, DCI says you should separate the password-reset stuff into a separate module and only add it in when needed. Both User and PasswordReset are simpler and easier to understand and only come together when needed.

(As I said elsewhere, I prefer to wrap a decorator around the User to achieve the same thing).
I dont even think it's a case of pitching to a given knowledge level, it's a question of understanding what is important to the other person and expressing yourself in terms that makes sense in that context.

The article is written in such a way as to highlight Smith's dismay and frustration due to his colleagues' questions and suggestions. As a reader you are left with no idea why the Redroot does not see that a line cannot be red and green at the same time.

In practice this is exactly the bridge that Smith must cross otherwise the meeting ends in disaster. To do this it's not just a case of speaking in simple terms (though this is often effective), it's a case of figuring out what the other people will consider to be 'simple', in practice this /could/ be something quite complicated - especially to Smith since he is not used to thinking in this way.
Why I wiped my LinkedIn profile
It's depressing how little travel time has changed in the past several decades. The Boeing 747 was introduced in 1970, and we're still traveling at around Mach 0.85. In the past four decades, we haven't made any significant improvements to travel time. How sad is that, when in the span of 3 decades in the 1830s, rail travel time doubled?

I think (hope) that we're on a path to change this in the near future. The main reason for our lack of advancement in travel time is the cost of gasoline. The Concorde demonstrated that supersonic transport was technically possible, but economically impossible. What will change the landscape is electric planes. This is not a fantasy - there are several companies with (somewhat) viable piston planes being engineered right now.

The first company is Beyond Aviation (www.­beyond-­aviation.­com) which is producing an electric varient of the venerable Cessna 172 (most popular plane produced, the default trainer option for pilots). It's not a perfect plane -- only 2 people can ride in it, and it's designed for flight schools, not for cruising around, but it's a big step forward for aviation.

The second company is Pipistrel, which is developing the Panthera (http://www.pipistrel.si/plane/panthera/technical-data). The Panthera Electro is a huge step in the right direction. Although it only seats 2, and cruises at 118 knots, it can go for 215NM. This is just shy of NYC -> DC. Imagine if you could travel between these cities for essentially free (solar power).

On the more viable replace-business-jets route, Elon Musk has stated that he wants to build a VTVL electric jet. From what he's stated, it sounds like his main approach to overcoming the lack of energy density is flying higher. Current jets are limited to efficient operation at ~35k feet because the oxygen density any higher is too low for an ICE to operate. Current li-ion batteries, however, don't need oxygen to operate! So they can go to 50,60,70,80k feet for reduced drag and operate just as efficiently as if they were at 35k feet. Musk has stated that he thinks battery density needs to double before this jet can become a reality (and has shown that battery density doubles once every ~10 years historically).

I'm extremely optimistic about the future of aviation. As soon as we can hook up cheap (nuclear, coal, wind, solar) and efficiently generated (~2x efficiency gains at large plants) power to planes, the cost of flying will take a huge drop.
And then what? We'll have nothing at all? I'm certainly not in favour of these patent trolls but you have to have a more nuanced approach to intellectual property than 'Burn down the House'

It's a balance between encouraging innovation by protecting intellectual property, and discouraging it because of patent abuse (etc).

Destroying the patent system completely would most certainly have a negative effect.
have an upvote from someone with a single surname living in a country where the default is to have two...
Heh, I was actually thinking about creating something that teaches Finite State Machines using something like this! Very cool. :)
Mark Shuttleworth. I've seen your balls, and they are big and brassy!
"var" is not dynamic typing. It's just a way to enable type inference - it's still as static as can be. It also has a very limited useful scope in C#, as type inference isn't supported in most areas.
I'll probably be unpopular, but it should be 100% of households.

We are in denial that we can have all of the benefits we want and not raise taxes. The choices we have is:

A) Cutting Medicare
B) Cutting Social Security
C) Cutting National Defense
D) Raising Taxes

Everything else is noise. Choose some combination of A-D.

My choice is a 35% cut in C and D to cover the rest.
All my sources are listed on http://asterank.com/about. Most of the raw data comes from the Minor Planet Center and JPL. The intuition on how to calculate value and cost comes from a number of papers on the subjects of asteroid composition and other asteroid characteristics. The actual value calculations are just formulas that I created and tweaked based on several reference objects.
Apart from DRM that dream could be a reality fairly soon.
However, most clients will only agree to pay for building what they need after you've first built what the want.

Very few businesses are interested in getting paid once if they can get paid twice, so this pattern is perpetuated to the mutual benefit of everyone except the developers forced to spend 50% of their time building something they know won't work, and the other 50% rewriting it...
Oh, I get his point - but you can't forget that there would be two sides to that coin.

If I get hit with a $75 licensing fee, I throw it away knowing that the worst that can happen is that I'll owe $225 down the road.

The fee has to be small enough so that someone will pay it, yet big enough so that the victim company thinks you might sue them to collect it.
Once Google's proprietary stuff was deleted, it was not possible to provision a phone (until the FOSS alternates for things like Provision.apk were developed). I can't remember if you got bootloops or what. There were other problems, too. I think AOSP has been friendly toward patches for that sort of thing... ensuring AOSP without gapps works just wasn't one of Google's requirements (at least early on--it may be now for all I know). Not that you can really fault them for having different priorities.
My rule with criticism is that if it doesn't work to improve the original, it's a waste of your time, my time, and the author's time. :p

What groundbreaking insights would you provide? It's somewhat obvious which points you'd remove; with what would you replace them?
The correctness of attributing of the improvement in speed of travel between 1800 and 1830 to railroads is dubious. This shows the extent of common carrier rail lines in 1835:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USRail1835.jpg

What improved travel was the National Road, the Federal Roads, and the Military Road.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Road_%28United_States%...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Cherokee_lands%...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Creek_lands%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson%27s_Military_Road
Sure, sure, I'd love to go paperless too; just a few little details:

1) No, I will not store it on your server.

2) No, I will not run Windows or OSX to run your software.

3) I'd really like the source code.

Get back to me when you've solved those problems.
I must be doing something different, because performing your exact test doesn't have the results you describe.

I just opened a CNET article on my latest-gen iPod Touch running iOS 6. When the page was half-loaded (header loaded in, no content yet), I placed my finger on the page and dragged it a couple pixels. I left it there for 30 seconds - nothing on the page changed during this time - then removed my finger. I then very clearly watched the story header image progressively download, and it took several more seconds for the page to become fully rendered.
I wonder if they use libhybris or something similar to pull that trick and to use bionic drivers. I hope they'll push for regular glibc drivers as well though.
There is a saying "At times a needle can do what a sword cann't" . Same holds true in case of programming languages !!

There was no excuse. There was a point made - "If one likes C++ use C++ nobody is stopping him/her. But that doesn't mean all other languages are bad or are pathetic."

I wonder if C++ is so good and STL is such a godly thing then why did we need to go to Objective-C. Why do iOS applications need that and why didn't C++ and STL did the magic. The answer is every tool / technology has its application. Loading a heavy container ( vector/ list) doesn't make sense when all you need to implement is a skip list.
There is only one place where the type inferencing is not supported, field declarations. Not sure how that became "most areas".
If the grid goes down continent-wide and stays down, we're not running computers or pumping liquid fuels anymore. We're not delivering fertilizer and other chemicals to farms, either, not that it matters much since if we could produce our normal crop we couldn't deliver it.
Silver.com Acquired for $875,000
That's assuming you have a method to unlock it, you can't always necessarily count on that.

I can kind of understand why they don't want to release it until there is a reference implementation and the software is somewhere near done.

They don't want to suffer the same problem they have done on the desktop where there are a load of device out there which are "kind of" supported and they get a bad rep because somebodies sound , wireless or whatever doesn't quite work as they expect and they have to field a load of support requests and people proclaiming that their OS is "too hard" or whatever.
Guess I'm confused then, because looking at them at the small sizes on the site itself, they have these issues.
The 7th is the first day of the second week of the year.
Well, that's half of it. To my understanding, college used to have more focus on simply becoming a more rounded, worldly individual. If that is your goal, the value of big name schools drops precipitously. It's the perception of college as the next level of education requisite for a job that increases the value of big name schools and leaves individuals weighting expected salary increase vs. tuition.

It probably isn't anything devious- no matter what you believe about higher education today, I think most people will agree that as human knowledge has expanded, so too has the amount of education required to perform and compete in cutting-edge fields.
Andrew Sullivan leaving The Daily Beast for ad-free, reader-supported blog
I got the feeling that this got to the frontpage mostly because of the name.
Since this is just Ubuntu, I'm assuming I can ssh into it and have all of the unix utilities I'm used to without installing something like Busybox, and have full root control.

I'm assuming this has a lot of the normal unix layers we are used to. X.org? Wayland?

If so, this is a significant step up in terms of hackability than iOS or Android.
Yeah. I had a similar idea a while back. I'm not so sure it really needs to be radically decentralized though. Drones travel slow compared to IP packets and I think this creates opportunities to optimize tasks in the cloud.

I think the biggest problem are safety (what if a drone crashes) and theft.

There was an April Fool's article a while back on taco delivery by drones. I think that's a problem that needs to be solved before you can have a drone-net.
Great point, my bad.
> At a code level - no need to write the delegation methods/macros.

You don't have to. They're built into SimpleDelegator. Syntactically the difference is you'd write:

class MyThing < SimpleDelegator

instead of:

module MyThing

And do:

MyThing.new(obj)

instead of:

obj.extend(myThing)

> At an abstract level - thinking in terms of objects, not classes.

It seems to me like you're trying to use a module to solve a problem which can be solved with an object. I don't think that's thinking in objects at all... it's thinking in modules.
>The bottom line is taxes are going up from what people paid two weeks ago. Calling that a hike is not disingenuous to me.

I'm not so sure. If a company has a huge sale for 1 month and everything is temporarily 50% off, we don't call it a 100% "price hike" the next month. Maybe it's just me, but hike has a very specific connotation that isn't appropriate here.
ITerm2 w/tmux (12.24.2012 release)
This is just disgusting. Well, here's their contact, facebook, and twitter information if anyone wants to get in touch with them for services!
Contact: http://www.hkw-law.com/contact
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/hkwlaw
Twitter: https://twitter.com/atllawfirm
Elite: Dangerous reaches its Kickstarter goal
It IS a tax hike. Tax rates increase. The basic fact is: now, in January, tax rates are higher than they were last month, in December. No amount of renaming and shifting blame changes this basic fact. Taxes have gone up. Yes, there were times where taxes were even higher, so what? There also were times where women weren't allowed to vote, but we don't call denying a woman right to vote now "return to Lincoln-era freedoms", do we?

You can claim raising taxes is actually good and not a big deal. That's your opinion and you are entitled to it. You can not claim there was no tax hike - you're not entitled to your own facts.

>>> I don't see how we can ever fix the debt if no one is willing to pay more taxes and no one is willing to lose benefits.

Yet no news about any meaningful spending cuts - so far they just kicked the can down the road, as if anything will be different in two months.
I dont think I have your email address, but would love to share with you a tool I have been prototyping to identify the hard cycles in Objective-C that are causing the above leak problem.

In short, you should not need to manually Dispose, but you might need to use weak references from children to parents.
"First, it’s almost certainly true that functional programming is the next big thing"

It appears that the future of FP remains immutable.
Why do I need to know why laughter improves my health? This is a serious question. Do people laugh because humor helps cope with stress, which leads to better immune systems, reduced risk of heart attack and stroke, less pain during dental work and a longer life? Or do they laugh because they find something funny? I would posit that there is not a single person who read that blog post and thought "gee, I should laugh more often because it has all these health benefits!"

Perhaps that's the problem with the post in general: it is not practical. For example, instead of (or in addition to) saying that exercise is good for you, it could say "here are some exercise programs for beginners" and post links to P90X or Couch-to-5K. That way, the post could become a useful resource for people who actually want to improve their life, rather than a regurgitation of commonly-known facts.
You're right. The var keyword isn't dynamic typing. The dynamic keyword is though. dynamic C# 4.0 can do mixins, method missing, etc: http://amirrajan.net/Blog/dynamic-c-sharp
Medicare and Social Security are broken systems. Until you fix the problem you are only making it worse.
Seems like calendars and time are really hard to get right.
The missing December on Android is a good example of that too.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-conspicuousl...
Unrelated, but the snow show stamp looks really cool. I love that some innovative, and real value producing products are coming out of WI. I might move back home some day.
The Dating Mind
See my response to Cl4rity.
I've long suspected that when programmers ask for dynamic typing, 95% of the time - or more - they are really trying to save FINGER typing, and not data typing.

This is perfectly fine and good - bookkeeping is one of those things that computers are good at.
Linux has almost no manufacturer support, and seems fine. If the installer is easy enough, then I don't see a problem.
Many, if not most, restaurants in China have picture menus.

Update: that's in the major cities anyway.
Maybe they're pushing an update on the 7th
So that seems like they're doing some kind of math using the week of year in the calculation- but for what purpose? The UI doesn't seem to give you any options for day of week, just time of day.

Maybe there's code in there that checks day of week but it's hardcoded to run every day to make the UI simpler.
Quantum measurements on one island determine behavior on another
You did look at how fast Medicare and Social Security grows? If yes and you're still thinking they can be sustained with current growth patterns by defense cuts and non-confiscatory taxation levels, you probably have some private math where 1+1 can equal one trillion if you believe hard enough.
More people search for "Tumblr" than "Blog"
You forgot to mention that it IS possible to make a 17 minute connection time with this :). My dad and I only 3... it was amazing.
Then why use C# over F#? F# has a more flexible dynamic system (provide your own implementation), better type inference, and even more unsafe access. So you lose nothing but goto and a bit of loop flexibility.

In theory, a better JIT could provide as-good-as-C output, but in practice you end up screwing around and ending up with less-than-optimal machine code. But F# actually provides an advantage here: inlining. The F# compiler can inline any function, whereas the JIT is somewhat limited in what it will inline. This makes a big difference, as the CLR JIT does a much better job optimizing inside one function than it does cross-function.
Sure. I guess we're just disagreeing on how much of a problem it is and after how much time this will get to you. I suppose it's a subjective thing.
The perl equivalent (run-time role application) normally caches the extended class by default and re-uses it. Provided you don't have a pathological number of combinations, that seems to work out pretty well.
The Bush era tax cuts were also never meant to be permanent. That is why calling it a tax hike is disingenuous at best.
How do you propose to "fix" Social Security?
Microsoft: Google Is Blocking Us From Building YouTube for Windows Phone
The Tablet Era Will End. Will Apple be Ready?
Is this mostly with credit card churning or mile runs?
Why Venture Capitalists Are Bearish on 2013
Two Words: Donner Party

They did eventually get where they were going. So worst-case travel times have improved even more than these common-case data suggest.
I went paperless back in 2011[1], never looked back since.

[1] http://www.devotedit.com/2011/11/09/paperless-office/
The economy is not a zero-sum game. If we concentrate on getting the economy to grow, most of these problems (the deficit, federal spending and revenue) are easier to solve.

But our government (both sides of the aisle) seem to do everything in their power to stall the economy and create uncertainty. For the last 6 months, what business person could make a reliable forecast as to the state of the economy? It certainly has not been an environment where you would want to invest in growing your company or employees, given the number of unknowns (future taxes, economic growth, spending, even health care expenses).

Our politicians on both sides seem to be creating a system where they and lobbyists are the only winners. By making short-term decisions, various interest groups are forced to pump more money, more often, into this lobby/politician funnel.
And capable of funny things as well. This is a 2009 video of that same guy who roams the streets of Montpellier with apparently some soccer balls to spare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfKFIzX7jSY
I don't think going paperless is for everyone, and I even agree that paper just feels better.

That said, I'm personally transitioning to mostly paperless for purely pragmatic reasons. I can't keep my papers organized, and I no longer want to be bothered to constantly store and move them. It doesn't help that I save a bunch of papers "just in case" that I end up never needing again.

I think I would be better off with a scanner and digital backups for everything. If I really need the information in paper format, I can just print it on-demand and not have drawers, folders, or bins lying around. Getting rid of all my old papers even has the added benefit of making every paper I do have that much more recent and important, which will (hopefully) lead to it being dealt with more promptly and efficiently rather than getting lost in some pile on my desk.

That said, I'm certainly not joining this. I'll reconsider when my plan eventually blows up in my face.
So maybe the service updates it's schedule weekly but the calculation ignores the year. This throws up an error at New Year's and borks the code that would reset when it's toggled on/off?
I have a hard time (ow) having much anger over time-related bugs these days. Seems the only real way of getting the calendar more programmer-friendly is to switch the world over to Unix time.
Furthermore, the number one selling laptop on Amazon.com right now is a Chromebook: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...

In other words, the number one selling laptop today can't run any desktop applications - just web apps. I'm a developer, and I simply can't ignore this.

It's time to focus our efforts on fixing the obstacles web apps face, instead of doubling-down on desktop/native apps because they're easier to make, or run slightly faster.
Odd, but not new:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4916627
most people will not wear a seat belts while driving a car if it was not mandated. same applies to air bags, they are not effective if seat belts are not worn.

http://www.nsc.org/safety_road/DriverSafety/Pages/SeatBelts....

here is the link to seat belt legislation and compliance

though the first seat belts came in Saab, volvo and mercedes in late 50's early 60's it took 80s to get them as a law in US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_legislation_in_the_Un...

The usage of Seat belts for every state is between 72.2%(New Hampshire) to 97.6%(oregon)

if we can achieve those numbers some day Americans will feel more like Canadians
Ask HN: Recruiter Reviews
Like most SWEs and those with related professions, I get a fair amount of email traffic from recruiters. Some are hiring for a specific companies and some appear to be independent of the "give me your resume, I'll show it around" breed. I'm not looking for a different job right now, but I am wondering if there are reviews available on those kinds of recruiters. Which ones can I trust with my resume and which ones I should add to my black-list. Having somebody who keeps my name in head and an ear on the ground sounds good whether I'm looking or not. Having somebody who blasts an "enhanced" copy of my resume everywhere and constantly bugs me about jobs which have nothing to do with my career goals or even qualifications sounds a lot less interesting.
It helps that they don't have carrier or manufacturer branding plastered on the front.
In current law it is already fixed. When it runs out of bonds in the "trust fund," it will automatically decrease its payouts to become revenue neutral.
I noticed a bug in another tool today, caused by the week-of-the-year value returned by strftime() returning '00' until the 6th. Possibly related?