skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As languages go, C# may be the ultimate "middle ground" because it really excels and providing a middling implementation of [your-favorite-language-feature].

That is, if you're a functional programming enthusiast, you can do a lot of functional programming in C#. Sure, it's often more painful than haskell or lisp or F#, but it's workable.

If you're a dynamic programming enthusiast, C# has a perfectly workable (but ultimately unsatisfying) implementation of dynamic.

Systems programmer? Mark your code as "unsafe" and twiddle bits to your hearts content! It's not as quick or necessarily easy as C, but it's there!

Even its' OOP, which is C#'s "official" paradigm, is probably disappointing to smalltalk guys, but hey, it's better than Java, right?!

It's not glamorous or flashy, it's a workhorse language. And at being a workhorse language, I'd say it really is one of "the best".
And if you've worked on a large project with a lot of cats to herd for both platforms, you will appreciate java very quickly.
Right. This post is just stupid ;)
The last line - "Be passionate, be obsessed, but don’t let it be an excuse for consuming your life."

Can someone help me realize the delicate balance between passionate/obsessed yet NOT 'my life consumed' is?
This kind of reasoning on the part of DHH is troubling to me. He's basically saying that there is always one best way to do something. That may be correct. But what's troubling is that Rails is so focused on its "One best way" to do everything. Rails forgoes complete through-and-through consistency in favor of "magic" -- because it's quicker and easier. That's fine, but it doesn't have the ring of complete truth that I expect from a truly great idea, or framework.
>the second is a willingness to productize your work

not just a willingness to productize, but the ability to do it successfully. Kinect, for example, is obviously a huge technological accomplishment that is the sum of a ton of research and the work of many smart people. but it's just a gimmick for a game console, that many gamers are pretty ambivalent about. I can't help but think it's a bit of a waste of talent.
I hope we just have everything in digital non-fixed size formats so we can display them easily on a device of any size.
You have misunderstood. iOS and Android apps built using C# have access to 100% of the native API of the underlying platform. So all of the UI is fully native. Take a look at our API documentation on iOS, for example:

http://iosapi.xamarin.com/?link=root%3a%2fMonoTouch-lib

You can see thousands of iOS APIs bound, including all of UIKit:
http://iosapi.xamarin.com/?link=N%3aMonoTouch.UIKit
How Brands Should Actually Use Instagram
Interesting proposal, but I'm not sure I have the time for that. I have to think though, that the two avocados and 750 calorie bag of macadamia nuts alone have me at 1100.

Perhaps I'll fire up my daily burn account again and get to it. Part of the fun of this was that I have been able to eat when I felt I needed it and not worry about counting...
>One big problem with non-native code is that example code is almost always written in native code, and can be hard/impossible to get new features working once you try to translate across the language barrier

I have not found this to be true for ObjC -> C# translation. In fact, it's the opposite: translating code is pretty straightforward, and CoreAnimation calls are no exception.
When numbers and words don't add up
iOS 6: Do Not Disturb mode stays on after scheduled time
>Gives me the same output image for these two different regexes:

> ^[a-x]* yo$

> ^[a-x]+yo$

No, it does not.

When you do (something)* , pay attention to the additional path that is created that circumvents the (something) box. With (something)+, there is no such path.
It's not pedantry when a significant proportion of people on Earth are affected by at least one of these falsehoods.

Obviously it's very difficult to design a system that doesn't fall foul of any of these, but we could at least strive for better. Just having "first name" and "last name" fields is really quite culturally insensitive. It pretty much worked when only Americans and Western Europeans were using computers, but the online world is a lot bigger now.

A comment by the author gives examples of humans who don't have names, but certainly exist: "Someone born into slavery in the Sudan, a woman born in rural China, an American baby recovered after being born into a toilet, a feral child, an amnesiac, etc, etc."

It's not quite so important for a social network to deal with this, but a government system, for example, should be more rigorous. Whatever the system, if we can be more global in our attitude, so much the better.
Read in some other HN comment that its just android underneath, so this would suggest that the normal apt-get route might not be an option?
Dear 37signals,

Thank for your detailed step-to-step guide for creating a Yahoo or Google group! I'm making my first mailing list in Google Groups right now.

Sincerely, grateful user

PS: With apologies to http://dearblankpleaseblank.com/
Xamarin's examples for MonoDroid are (IMHO) pretty solid, to the point where I'll go to them first instead of the Android docs (even though I'm writing Java[0]).

It's true you have to re-write the UI code on every platform, but it's still the same language on all platforms, so less of a barrier vs. a total ground-up rewrite. Frankly, I see that as a plus, else you end up with badly cloned iOS-like UIs everywhere.

[0] Should note that I'd happily be using MonoDroid if I had a say in the matter.
point taken, the "p value" way of talking is confusing when talking to people doing real work and not reading articles, you're right (I was with my mind deep in reading some medical research articles actually so my mind "stuck" on this wording...)

but it's just about: probability of scooter A and B failing at the same time is their probabilities of failure multiplied and for a "swarm" the probability of everything failing at the same time decreases exponentially with the swarm size - eg. the probability of 10 scooters with a 50% each probability of failure failing at the same time is less than 0.01% ...thinking probabilities is what you end up doing even if you do smth like devops and try to do a good job at it when stretching resources thin :)
How the New York Times Team made Snow Fall
awesome! now i can look forward to upgrades that will kill my phone as effectively as they do my desktop.
> Yes, there is a section for metric in the hardware store. It's the bit at the back with about 1/2 the sizes missing and only the stuff that you don't need in stock.

So, would your proposed law to switch the USA to the metric system require hardware stores to stock every size and always have what you need in stock?
Very awesome. I use http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/ often but this looks much cleaner.

Do you plan to keep it up indefinitely or open-source it?
Well, horrendous code can be created with anything: LINQ, C#, Objective-C... But yes, such easy-to-use tools like LINQ are easily overused and you end up with real monstrous code.
Aaaahh! Yes! Awesome!
Show HN: My 2013 Holiday Card
What Peer Review Metrics are Worth Collecting and Calculating?
IOS 6: Do Not Disturb mode stays on after scheduled time until Jan 7th
Sigh. Okay, let's play this game.

1. "Cutting edge", first thing listed is asynchronous programming. Okay, don't get me wrong, I like C#, I like the Task Parallel Library, but Grand Central Dispatch in OS X/iOS is beautifully simple and incredibly powerful. It does everything I need it to do.

2. "Powerful features" - OOP. Really? And Java/Objective-C don't support OOP/encapsulation? You can't do dependency injection in Java/Objective-C? lol.

3. "Advanced runtime" - garbage collection. I'd rather use ARC in Objective-C instead of depending on a garbage collector.

4. "Reliability" – type safety. Really? And Java/Objective-C aren't type safe? I seriously doubt that anyone considers Java or Objective-C to not be reliable languages when it comes to type safety. This is almost laughable, IMO.

5. "Easy to adopt" - easy to learn. Ok, I'll give you this one over Objective-C. But frankly, I expect a good programmer worth his salt to be able to learn another platform, and I don't consider iOS or Android to be conceptually more difficult than Windows.

6. "Fast execution. C# on iOS is powered by the LLVM optimizing compiler." Uh, I think I'd rather use Objective-C compiled with LLVM. And the bit about "performance of a low-level language"? I don't consider Objective-C to be a "low-level language".

7. "Native access" - sweet, I can use some fragile interface that breaks when Apple decides to deprecate half of their stuff. Can't wait! I love waiting for libraries to catch up.

8. "Portability" - this is a decent point, but let's be realistic - we're talking "minimally portable" here. Write-once run-anywhere is a pipe dream, IMO (at least at this point). There are always platform-specific considerations that need to be taken, and they are not always compatible with other platforms. But even still, this point should have been the main focus of the article. Points 1-7 are minor compared to this.

This just doesn't feel like a serious discussion of C#'s potential for mobile development.

Edit: just for the record, I'm not necessarily trying to refute all or some of the OP's points. I think the original article was poorly written, and the case for C# was poorly made. Hence my "let's play this game" comment.
"FORTRAN and Python are equally good languages. YMMV"-useless and somewhat suspicious.

"Python is generally better than FORTRAN."-more accurate for most people

"FORTRAN is good for numeric computing when performance is absolutely critical. Python is better for almost anything where processing speed isn't a major concern."-most useful and most accurate.
That's not really that surprising though... If someone drops of out school for the 20 under 20, the chance that they'd go back to school if they fail is incredibly high. So then unless all 20 of them are guaranteed not to fail, you'd expect to see "quite a few" going back to school.
I prefer 2.53999999... centimeters, but to each their own.
This is the reason why nobody ever would say "in the 20s" when giving a temperature in celsius. Instead people either say "about 25" or give a range ("20 to 25"). The size of units change how people express themselves.
Maybe use and hack on Inferno? It's a VM which runs over Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and provides a stripped-down unixy environment evolved from Plan 9. The entire OS and VM is compiled from source, it's a relatively small and efficient codebase, and you learn some newer OS ideas along the way. It's written in the programming language Limbo, which is sort of half-way between C and Go. (There's a book on systems programming in Inferno with Limbo to help you along.) Best of all, when you mess something up, you can just fall back to your host OS, so you can try more. (And don't worry about upgrades, the latest full release was in 2004.;)
One of many.

But I think my main point was that a lot of deductions disappear once your AGI reaches a point where people feel that you don't need the benefit of that deduction.

With Pease Itemized Deduction phaseouts, the effective tax rate for high wage earners goes up independent of their marginal tax rate because more of their income is taxed at those rates.
No, you don't understand, the government needs to use more violence to make the wonderful metric system more common.
Almost no one is facing the same issues as twitter. I find it extremely unlike that DHH thinks Rails is best for every possible scenario, and a single counterexample of an extreme outlier isn't an argument against this.
What is he comparing to? Arguments #2-#5 & #7 seem to apply to Java as well, and #6 just quotes an extremely lopsided benchmark exploiting one specific feature of their C# implementation. Most of the arguments would apply to Objective C too, I presume (though I haven't really used that outside of toying around).

I'd personally expect we'll see a lot more JS for mobile apps: a terrible language compared to C#, but a very well understood UI layer (HTML).
The whole thing seems like shifting definitions. What startup gets in a room and says they should build things they are unsure they need for product success?
Don't drop out just to drop out. There's no statement to be made.

Sometimes dropping out makes sense; other times it doesn't. It's based on that unique situation. Dropping out isn't a matter you can over generalize with blanket statement advice.
I'm working on one right now and will definitely be integrating this into it. It's a perfect fit.
You could do it on the object level or the class level.

Metaprogramming like this generally is most useful for powering "DSLs" and other ways of expressing not-quite-imperative-code in Ruby.
Nice - I'll add this one to my bag-o-tricks.
ThePresent - The annual clock that tells time in seasons
I'd love to see socioeconomic status pulled out of the equation.

i.e. Take 1000 offspring of middle/upper class folks. Measure the difference between those who chose to go to college and those who did not.

Measuring the economic success of people who don't go to college is (most of the time) measuring the success of people who can't afford to go to college.
Rescue Your GitHub Downloads
29c3: Not my department (Jacob 'ioerror' Appelbaum) [Keynote]
Someone could start by enhancing one of the several Boris Bikes apps with a "good samaritan" feature. Some people (like me) would find it fun to help out by returning a bike to a slightly different station on some trips. We'd help out for free. But as of now I don't know of any tools that encourage this.

Regarding complication of hiring Boris Bikes, note that if you want to do a one-time (without an existing account) hire of two bikes, you need to insert and remove your credit card 4 or 5 times, and will get two or three pieces of paper out! The UX is just insane.
MS claims Google continues to block full featured YouTube app for Windows Phone
Apple Files Patent for “Active Stylus” For Use with iPods, iPhones and iPads
#Local is yet to be solved
Private property? If it requires government's nod, it isn't private.

You can't escape your problems by pretending to define them away. No property regime has ever been secured without the use of government.
Claiming "f.foo" should work when "foo" is a freestanding function strikes me as nonsensical, as the "." operator is a namespace operator, suggesting names that are within the namespace of "Foo". Though Postgresql supports this pattern (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/xfunc-sql.html#XFU...). I think it's awkward there too, and has the caveat "it's unwise to give a function that takes a single composite-type argument the same name as any of the fields of that composite type." - basically it breaks namespacing.
Here's a first-order approximation. I'll assume the angle is perfect and work out the speed range. The first ball decelerated to maybe 8 m/s given its altitude at collision and some loss to air friction. If the ball is 25 cm wide, it crosses its own diameter in 1/32 second.

Assume the distance of the collision is 10m from launch and occurs 1.7 seconds after the second kick. The margin of error on the arrival time is 1/32 / 1.7 = 1.84%. Using your launch speed centered around your value of 38 mph = 16.9875 m/s, that means the possible range was 16.675 to 17.300 m/s. Interestingly, that's a difference of 1.4 miles per hour, which is also roughly the precision of velocity that baseball pitchers can produce on demand.

By the way, there's more variables on the inputs to the second ball. The timing of the kick is important and controllable too, creating a three-dimensional map of inputs. This could be transformed into and visualized as a 3D graph, showing all the combinations of speed/angle/timing that will result in a collision.

Also, the left-to-right angle must be on target too or the balls won't be in the same vertical plane for any collision at all.
Obama is not a communist by any measure, but he is certainly leftist by any definition - he is for big government, strong unions, strong government intervention in economy via both subsidies and taxation, pervasive regulation of businesses, highly progressive income taxation, abundant welfare services, nationalized healthcare, redistribution of wealth, identity politics. All are common characteristic of modern left.

Could you name one mainstream left concept that Obama opposes?
According to: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.htm

"the National Highway System Designation Act of 1995 prohibited the use of Federal-aid highway funds to convert existing signs or purchase new signs with metric units."

It appears from my reading of the law that the prohibition expired in 2000.
Why is C#'s OOP disappointing to Smalltalk guys?
Apple: iOS 6 Do Not Disturb Bug Goes Away After January 7
I just finished reading the book "Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869" (http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-18...). It talks about the building of the transcontinental railroad. The railroad greatly changed the shape of the country due to the fact that within a span of a few years, travel times across the country dropped from months to a week.

What is particularly interesting about this was how similar the methodology that they used was to the Lean Startup methodology. With the way that the Railroad Act was structured, there was significant award for moving fast. While they were in the wilderness, it was rather difficult/expensive getting supplies. They used lower quality cottonwood ties to build out fast knowing that once the railroads were built, higher quality replacements could be brought in for far cheaper.

Anyways, I'd highly recommend this book for those of you in the startup scene.
System 76 is not Canonical, though. And you can't buy them in stores. They were a lifesaver though when I wanted a linux laptop, and my current laptop is a S76 Gazelle running Slackware. I recommend them.

Your first paragraph I'll give you. I actually started using Linux with Ubuntu in 2006 before I moved on to other distros, so I'm not actually sure what the pre-Ubuntu Linux world was like.

However, I still contend that the most important thing the GNU/Linux world needs, both now and in 2004, is to be preinstalled on hardware and sold on store shelves next to Macs and Windows machines. If Canonical can do this for phones I'll take back all the things I said about them after the Amazon ads debacle. However, I'm not holding my breath.
Great insight about autodidacticism - sometimes it's just really hard to (1) even know what to do in the first place and (2) do it without structure or extrinsic motivation.

I think in an ideal world, self-study and maintaining an ongoing education while out in the field are great. Unfortunately in a practical world, finding that motivation intrinsically is pretty difficult. There's actually a great video by Dan Pink delving into the specific components of motivation: http://reelsurfer.com/watch/share/22832

(credit a forum post on improving at StarCraft for this actually, haha: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=374...)
I have used it in SF a couple times, and it's been a poor experience every time. They only have one location. The cars are not very well cared-for. I've never been able to get out of the parking garage without a hassle. The fuel card was missing once. I just have the strong impression that Hertz is not serious about this program.

At least it's cheaper than ZipCar though, which is why I occasionally go back to try again.
They already showed the tablet (Nexus 7 hardware) before.

So the next step is a phone. Since they don't have an OEM partner yet for either might as well announce a phone.

> Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them.

Well that exactly why they picked phone, isn't it. They want a phone to be a light communication device for sending brief messages _and_ also a full fledged OS that can consume long-form content.
"college also teaches the life skills needed to succeed"

Whoa. Is this subtle irony? I can't believe anyone who isn't actually a college admissions person wrote this.

College can teach you some practical techniques, it can be broadening, and it can be a place to build relationships. But life skills? If that's what you want, you really would be better off dropping out.
Embracing failure: How research projects are like startups
Not all code is created equal. That 30% that needs to be rewritten for each device could be difficult to tune for each platform. Personally, I'd like to see some more information on what exactly was reused.
I've always wondered why there doesn't already exist such a tool. Regex strings are so opaque and hard to read. We can't really fix that for code (short of building objects), but what we could fix is a better way to write them.

A graphical tool to create them, built of units instead of just strings, and the output could still be a regex string.
A Dao of Web Design
It's also important to note that Bill Gates' high-school was private and very rigorous. In fact, it was one of the first high-schools in the US to make computers available to its students.

Excellent point about connections... Also note that Paul Allen was BG's high-school friend.
for #1, there's a bit more to asynchronous programming in C# these days than the TPL. Take a look at the new async/await keywords in C# 5. Lets you write asynchronous code without having to deal with callbacks.
Can you expand on what exactly you mean by LINQ? Do you mean the .NET library support (extension methods on IEnumerable/IQueryable)? Do you mean the language features added to C# (anonymous types, expression trees, nicer lambdas, query syntax)? The language features, with the possible exception of query syntax, seem like hugely beneficial additions, to me.
Well, off the top of my head C# doesn't support mixins or multiple inheritance.

You can get around the lack of mixins with extension methods and tight scoping but it's messy.
> A comment by the author gives examples of humans who don't have names, but certainly exist: "Someone born into slavery in the Sudan, a woman born in rural China, an American baby recovered after being born into a toilet, a feral child, an amnesiac, etc, etc."

I don't know if this is a peculiar idea, but in those circumstances perhaps a "Generate Name" button is the useful feature.
I already know about Inferno, but unfortunately, it's an experiment and can't be used on a daily basis. Some of the underlying ideas are great, though!
I work on a pretty huge C# code base. Use of LINQ is the least of it's problems. If anything I'd say one problem is people not knowing about things like lambda expressions, linq, generics or whatever. It can really make code harder to parse when it's written in ways that don't take advantage of the full power of the platform.