skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's odd for you to point out one of the legal protections unions have without also pointing out the things they are prohibited from doing, such as sympathy strikes, mass picketing, and (in some states) the ability to require a union shop.

And the law gives company owners protection against personal liability, and taxes companies different from personal income, while it also prohibits employers from having an unsafe workplace, child labor, and practicing various types of discrimination.

We are far from a free market. I agree with the earlier poster - I think a free market enthusiast should also want unions.
You Sir are very sensible, good someone actually thinks twice before going down with hysteria about "yet another big brother"
But you can't view GitHub Wiki in browser without some preprocessing. In Fossil, I just do

$ fossil ui

And view (and edit) a copy of the whole project website, including wiki, tickets, history, interface for diffs, etc. in my browser.
That doesn't change the definition of "bug", though.
I believe the point was that programming is a seller's market, so the ease with which someone like you may be able to switch jobs doesn't necessarily translate to other industries.

But even for programming, who says there's always another company doing the same work in your area that's hiring? Unemployment may be low for us, and telecommuting may be a valid option for many, but it seems easy to suggest there are practically infinite possibilities for programmers when the list can actually be pretty small depending on your geographic location, resume/skill set, and a variety of other personal factors.
An application of Linear Programming in Game Theory
The other question that remained unanswered is "Why don't cars stop when someone is waiting for a crosswalk?".
Because in the example it's already completely clear that there is a crosswalk.
7 hours into the discussion and no link to "Indie Game The Movie" movie that follows SMB devs for few months prior to the launch?

http://www.indiegamethemovie.com

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942884
Programming is a creative process if you actually know what is programming. Programming is about coming up with an idea of a system that could fulfill a purpose and then implementing and evolving the system over a period of time. I don't think there is anything more creative then programming, if only you understand what programming is about.

In creative writing you express your thoughts using any of the human's natural language and in programming you do the same using a programming language and both requires logical and creative thinking. Just that in programming you can see your thoughts coming to life which makes it much more cool.
Creative writing is a good analogy. All artists have to be taught, even if they teach themselves. Same with programming.

When asked to say, draw a picture of this house, most trained artists, who have learnt the mechanics should be able to do a faithful rendition of that house. The same with a small program, most trained programmers will be able to make it, using their skills.

However, where both great artists and great programmers are the same is that they bring something more than the sum total of the parts to their work. This something more is what cannot be taught.
Bug or not, there are far more important things to work on then this (like IMAP Idle support in the standard client).
BTW, this was already submitted:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956663
There's an argument that this COULD be a platform feature, but it would be fairly simple to write an Android app that provides an IntentHandler for the SMS scheme. I'd never actually come across that particular URL scheme used anywhere: iOS/Apple clearly have it though.
While having no interface is a nice idea, I think that there's also something to be said for "Make common things easy, rare things possible." That is, it's great to try to eliminate the need for an interface, but you can't assume or even expect that you'll always succeed, so you have to have an interface anyway.

Also, a lot of famous security vulnerabilities like the fact that Windows will execute things on a memory stick without being asked, are the result people trying for no interface. Having merchants billing you without you consenting seems really, really sketchy and maybe the video addresses this in a way that would satisfy me, but I'm sceptical.
Let me add to his anecdotal evidence - of the angels I personally know (~15), the vast majority are price sensitive. If I expand that to angels I know slightly, the percentage of price sensitivity increases.

You can argue that they're irrational/stupid, or that they're not the investors you want (some of them actually are very good, you'd certainly recognize them by name), but it doesn't change the fact that they exist.

I can't comment on relative usefulness of valuation sensitive and valuation insensitive investors.
What an outrageous name for a command line graphing tool. I'm honestly curious, why?
Dummy Features And How To Use Them
Lots of times during our product development we face the question, “What’s the next feature that will be most valuable to our customers?”, here is a great way to do that.
Well, here comes the Grey Goo! ;)

Seriously, this is cool. I think we're going to try to make some graphene locally, on the basis of this research .. it'd sure be nice to be able to make super-capacitors real cheap! Imagine if we could power RC electronics with the graphene-DVD .. mind-boggling!
Lately, their primary job seems to be creating fake terrorist plots and finding 16-year old illiterate Somali immigrants to execute them, and than applauding themselves.

Never once have I heard of a similar sting operation being done for insider trading or other kind of financial crime.
At least in the US, some forms of copyright infringement are crimes, as demonstrated by the Ninjavideo, TVshack, and Megaupload cases.
I created this small app for you, if you like to write
Although having the stripes light up makes it even more visible. So its not really a new idea, and IBM isn't really in the business of making road signage, but as a marketing campaign it gets their message across in a nice way that their main business (which is consulting) is willing to implement "your" (and by that I mean the customer) bright ideas.
Art in programing is expressed through arquitecture more often that with algorithms.
There's also a fair number of union workers who are not allowed to strike at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_action#In_the_United_Sta....
IANAL, but I have heard of something called the Reasonable Person Standard. Since the US is based on Common Law, I believe this standard could be used if this were really tested in court:

``The reasonable person (historically reasonable man) is one of many tools for explaining the law to a jury.[1] The "reasonable person" is an emergent concept of common law.[2] While there is (loose) consensus in black letter law, there is no universally accepted, technical definition. As a legal fiction,[2] the "reasonable person" is not an average person or a typical person. Instead, the "reasonable person" is a composite of a relevant community's judgment as to how a typical member of said community should behave in situations that might pose a threat of harm (through action or inaction) to the public.[3]
The standard also holds that each person owes a duty to behave as a reasonable person would under the same or similar circumstances.[4][5] While the specific circumstances of each case will require varying kinds of conduct and degrees of care, the reasonable person standard undergoes no variation itself.[6][7]
The "reasonable person" construct can be found applied in many areas of the law. The standard performs a crucial role in determining negligence in both criminal law—that is, criminal negligence—and tort law.
The standard also has a presence in contract law, though its use there is substantially different.[8] It is used to determine contractual intent, or if a breach of the standard of care has occurred, provided a duty of care can be proven. The intent of a party can be determined by examining the understanding of a reasonable person, after consideration is given to all relevant circumstances of the case including the negotiations, any practices the parties have established between themselves, usages and any subsequent conduct of the parties.[9]"
The writing example isn't that sound. First he asks if you can teach 'good' programming, but then expects 'great' programmers to come of it. Rhetoric like that smells a little fishy. Then he rests his conclusion, that great programmers can't be trained, on the point that we have perfect knowledge of every great writer that ever wrote? I don't buy it.
Mostly B. Also, s/millions/billions. Which together is really terrifying.
Can you post a link to the winner?
This is called FFI.)

And yes, a language with which you cannot dload and call any shared library you wish is, how to say, handicapped language.

NodeJS, Java to name a few. Look what they do due to inability to call, say, libpq.so.)

But of course, re-monkey-patching everything from scratch by amateurs coders is much better idea. And, you know, you could create an entire "standard" with hundreds of pages of specification and then push your bloatware - JDBC.
I'm interested in the technology stack. What are you using?

You're not a developer at all or you're not a web developer?
It might require an intelligent programmer to create, but as a library, can be used by regular, unintelligent programmers. If he documents his monads well and shows how to use it, and it's effective, then it's not such a big deal.

Or, you know, this is more of an attempt to show programmers stuck in simpler languages what other PL features have to offer.
I'm curious about Cringely's ceaseless attacks on IBM. I wonder how legitimate they are -- claiming that IBM is rapidly outsourcing almost everything, not delivering as a consultancy, etc.

I only know IBM Labs people, who do complain about weird bureaucratic stuff, but no worse than anywhere else, and a few barely-competent people who work as "solutions architects", but they may just be outliers.
To continue the analogy... most sceenwriters, copywriters, columnists etc. probably did take creative writing classes.
Here is another 2 yr old bug that I just ran into this week.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=14924
We have something similar several places in Norway too, which are triggered by what seems to be motion sensors. Since the actual crosswalk can easily be covered in snow/ice during the darkest parts of the year, usually the crosswalk signs placed at either end of the crosswalk light up and blink instead.
In this case Sony is trying to change the agreement post employment. I wish the OP had said what HR said about ownwership of the sex tape, I really would have liked to use that example with the Google lawyers to see where they came down on it.

I don't doubt that future contracts will say "We reserve the right to update this in the future as conditions change in order to remain compliant with applicable regulations and laws and in order to protect the interests of the company."

Once you sign that, even with a permissive clause, they come back later than blam! Change it and you've pre-agreed to their changes which can now be much more restrictive.
We already basically do this by paying people to provide services (either directly through government, or indirectly) which are essentially unnecessary for production. Or by over-staffing government agencies above what is needed to actually do the work.

This is super common in the middle east. You can make $200-400k/yr doing a make-work bureaucratic job, provided you're a local.
I've never even considered taking a performance enhancement drug for anything (other than coffee, if that counts). I wouldn't have thought it was that common.
Why All Entrepreneurs Have Founderitis and How to Control the Monster Within
Superb for writing, but what do I do once I'm done? Really like the sound as I type though my mechanical keyboard makes them for me already! :)
I've thought a lot about how we can seperate bicyclists and pedestrians from vehicles on the road. I think it would be amazing to have all roads completely underground and replace the roads outside with parks, for example. I can just see kids running up and down the grass 'streets' playing soccer with skyscrapers all around.

With underground streets you could even collect the pollution the vehicles emit and store it instead of releasing it into the atomsphere.

But the huge downside which I have no idea how I could make this practical with is the construction costs. Maybe the first city to do this could get an increase in tourism thus offsetting the costs?
So sad to see matrix.itasoftware.com's amazing search engine get most of it's features ripped out and replaced with a pretty UI that does so little.

For folks who like hipmonk? Do you really travel? Their search engine also fails to find most good fares. Pretty but useless.

Most people who are serious use expertflyer.com and matrix.itasoftware.com to find fares. Yes you have to learn a bit about how air fares are constructed, but this is hacker news not consumer news isn't it?
The repercussions of dropping out of college constantly cross my mind.

Luckily, articles like this ease my self doubts. :)
Amazon Cracks Down on Fake Reviews
That could happen, but really that would be a "bug", not an inherent problem with the design. That would be the developer's job to fix.
We look forward to seeing all of your account passwords posted in the next comment, then. I would recommend starting with your Hacker News account.
Investors | Chris Zacharias
I am sorry but the idea is not new at all.

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/air-zebra/
And the implementation is in the works - laws being passed to make those required.
You can close it and go to bed. If you come back in the morning, your poem/story will be loaded for you.
100 trillion creatures are living on you right now -- and that’s okay
This whole thing sounds an awful lot like Bret Victor's “Magic Ink” paper (that's a compliment): http://worrydream.com/MagicInk

If you like the ideas in the OP, you owe it to yourself to chew through Bret's paper. A lot of the same ideas, expanded and thought through.
I used to be one of These Guys who never used JavaScript, too, but honestly? It's 2012 and JavaScript is a thing pretty much everywhere worth targeting. Demanding that somebody cater to your microsegment is a little much.
Both Hipmunk and Google Flight Search help you sort out bad flights in ways that other websites don't - Hipmunk calls this "agony". To see this in Google Flight Search, scroll down to the bottom of a results list, you'll see something like "123 longer or more expensive flights hidden. Show all." - these are the longer, no less expensive layovers that you probably don't care about.
I can't agree more. hipmunk is totally useless for truly finding good fares. matrix is the only site i start with, then i go to sites that aren't on ITA (jetblue/southwest/some south american airlines like gol) but i try to avoid those airlines anyway (and like you i'm usually travelling internationally so they're not relevant)
Is that list of steps to use Google Wallet in this article correct? If so, that wasn't the promise of NFC at all! I have an Android phone on which I use the legacy Japanese NFC system which doesn't require waking up the phone at all (it even works if the battery is depleted).

He says that tapping a device against another one is undesirable, but I think people like that kind of "I have to do this for money to disappear out of my account" reassurance.
The Verge is painfully slow to load, even on mobile. Their content is good but their page is so heavy I tend to avoid it.
No he doesn't. I figure it's less relevant today because it's much easier to find examples of good code via open source projects, and online resources like Zed Shaw's books.
Cringely has an axe to grind, nothing really new there, but its a valid point that IBM seems to be changing the way they do business that seems a bit strange. To their credit though they are still a going concern, Sun is toast, and HP is in what appears to be a death spiral. So one could argue they are surviving better.
I haven't quite figured out how the hyperbolic "I've got nothing to hide" gets past the issue of account passwords.

Even if we assume a new "real name only" global system of online identities, that would still require that false testimony or simple errors never get attached to such identities.
The problem with Monads is that the people who understand them are the least qualified to explain them to other people.
It doesn't go Ka Ching when I hit enter...
I think for many people it's going to be hard to fulfill the following:

> ... except for those inventions that either: (1) relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer ...

As a programmer, there's not a lot I can do that is going to be considered wholly unrelated to what I'm employed for... at least it would be murky enough that the employer would have a good court case. This is infinitely more so for anyone working with Google, Apple, or any other company that has got their fingers in everything.
Dissent: just one misinterpreted statement away from jailtime.

...because the FBI and DoJ have such a long and varied history of making sure that the free and legal exercise of one's first amendment rights are upheld.... riiiight.

This is the same FBI that tapped the phones of MLK Jr. Fuck them.

To DanielBMarkham: what fucking world do you live in where this is your reasonably-considered view?! Please go read some history.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Wax On Wax Off - The Accelerated Learning and Productivity Cheat Sheet
You Want A Gun? Then Do Something For Me
I've worked with and trained quite a few people over the past 15 years and, though I don't really say it to anybody, I do think great programmers are born not made. Though you can be made into a pretty good programmer that can be a great player on a team. And you can also be a great programmer who is lazy and doesn't live up to their potential. But you can see it in their ideas and way of solving problems.
Honest question: how could they have avoided that?
Moving things underground tends to be prohibitively expensive.

When self-driving cars are common, there won't be a need for street-side parking, which will give more walking area in urban centers. And the lidar navigational system will be far safer for pedestrians, so it won't be a safety issue to mingle cars with people.
What's the Deal with Snapchat?
Gdev: First-Class GPU Resource Management
Not entirely true. A fever is a symptom of an immune system at work, but at high levels it can cause organs to fail. I was hospitalized and given ice baths when I had a 105f fever with dengue...and ice baths are considered to be a last resort for controlling a fever.
Truly nice.
Simple and beautiful. can i use it on my website?
Two things, besides the limited usefulness of it:

sound on keypress, really?

save on keypress, really?
That is a fantastic read. Just had to say it was worth more than an upvote.
LocalStorage FTW
The employment problem is precisely why I do not think the housing market will ever "recover". Housing prices did not crash, they simply aligned themselves with current and forecasted salaries. Attempts at raising housing prices to "normal" levels is a fools game. Create the jobs and the salaries first and the rest will follow.
"Yes, you can quit and work somewhere else"

How exactly will it help when all employers adopt stupid and evil clauses in their contracts?
Because that's what they do. Legal documents ("best practices") seem to circulate between companies, growing more bulk with each round. There's no place in this process for the consideration of employees' wishes. There can't be because legal department is famously isolated from the rest of the company and only cares about covering their own ass.
They don't care about productivity. They don't care about happiness. They only care about having all bases covered. So I don't see why they won't grab every right from you that they can without violating the law.

If the law is where they stop, then there should be the law and nothing else. There's no reason for all those contracts-writing people to be employed.
Quite awesome

I would like to be able to
Write different notes tho. Apart from that, pretty neat concept.

And the design is beautiful.
A few days ago my gf tried to book a flight. Like most people, she starts with googleing flight tickets. And sees Google flights for the first time and starts using it.

Gets to the point where Google kicks you off to the airline's own page, and that's where the trouble starts. She is forced to pick seats but can't, because the only ones available require being a specially background checked and known passenger. Eventually she gives up.

Then she googles Expedia. A few minutes later she has her tickets. Yesterday she printed out the boarding passes complete with her seat assignment. On the same flight Google Flighs couldn't book.
Do I need to use the same browser or does it ID my computer some other way?
Worst interface is one that's trying to learn about my habits without having a broader knowledge about my personality and the world as a whole. I don't want my axe to adapt to my hand and to my way of using it. Most of all I want my axe to be reliably predictable.

So no, thank you, no self-learning climate control systems, microwaves or lawn mowers.
TFA is saying it's back in the US.
I firmly believe great programmers can be trained, but it's not going to happen after six months. I firmly believe in the 10000 hours rule, and I think it applies here as well, but to become a great programmer, that has to be 10000 hours of:

* writing a lot of code,

* reading other people's code,

* evaluating and re-evaluating the code you've written and read,

* learning and using different paradigms, languages and tools, and

* being mentored by a great programmer who can teach.

And, not surprisingly, these are all things that nearly anybody you consider a "great programmer" would have done to get to that point.

Very few people who are not already inclined towards programming are going to be willing to put that kind of effort in. As a result, while I firmly believe great programmers can be trained, I think there are very few who actually are.

In the end, I'm not even sure that "trained" can even be used as a classifier. I think a better classifier would be "self-selection". So, can a person who has not self-selected to be a programmer become a great programmer? Can a person who has not self-selected to become a basketball player become a Michael Jordan? Genetics may say yes one in a billion times, but most likely not.

It may be easier for programming, thou, because you can spread those 10000 hours out over 15 years while still making a reasonable salary utilizing the mediocre skills you have today. Salary is a strong motivator, but I would be most people are willing to stay at the mediocre level.
In smaller companies you can sometimes rewrite the contract. I've done this, specifically to remove this clause.
Same browser for now.
I'm impressed by the simplicity of the Javascript. Well done. :)
That was exactly the point being made. That things like coding standards often need somebody to make a decision and enforce it, and that RMS didn't do that.
Why not?

<iframe src="http://solitarydesigns.net/write/"></iframe>​​​​​​​

Difficult to read the data with that solution though, if it had one JS API, it would become more useful...
If we're going to have regulation, I think it would be more productive for it to make it easier to quit your job. That should actually improve the free-market dynamics.
Awesome. Two requests:

1. No sound. It's distracting.
2. Support of markdown?
I actually had fun with this. Any chance of adding word wrapping? It lost its charm once I had to scroll to see my longer sentences.