skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Violence today is much lower and much less prevalent as a part of daily life than it was a century ago.

Of course, this greatly depends on where you are. Arizona was still wild west, gold mines still hung folks they accused of stealing ore (Vulture Mine) Wars were still being waged between native peoples as well as banditos and cowboys holding up banks, transports, and the likes. Tombstone and the O.K. Corral was just over 100 years ago. And back then, media really wasn't an issue since the average person in these parts was 100% illiterate.

Not to mention in the past 50 years, violence and violent crime in the US is at a near all-time low compared to the 1970's or 1990's.

Also explain how more peaceful societies, such as the Dutch, or the Norwegians, consume more of our violent video games than we do?
diminishing returns
New MC Frontalot video: Nerd Life
The perfect break for a Monday of coding... #nerdlife
Does anyone here who has paid any attention to Ed whatsoever believe he would have written that comment had he known that Aaron had already been financially ruined by an overzealous prosecution that had confronted him with a dilemma of pleading guilty to 13 felonies and spending 6 months in prison or taking a crap-shot at 6-7 years in prison?

NOBODY KNEW THESE DETAILS AT THE TIME. Aaron was apparently prevented from sharing them. They are shocking. It is not reasonable to get angry at people for reasoning through questions and failing to account for secret information.
I wondered the same and checked out the submissions & comments of AaronSw. He had stopped commenting 140 days ago.

And some of the comments on that submission are just downright acerbic. I'm sure Aaron would've checked them and decided HN wasn't going to help him (honestly after such reaction, why would anyone think otherwise).
On a related, but opposite note, don't make one-click log-ins the only option. I almost assuredly don't want to add another point of access to my Facebook/Twitter/Google data, and would rather manage my Lastpass account than monitor my app permissions across several services.
Why Did The Secret Service Take Over Aaron Swartz's Case?
Hey Kale, why don't you put a Gittip[0] button in the newsletter? That could get you some funding so you can keep doing what you're doing. Pycoders Weekly[1] is currently doing this too.

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

[1]: https://www.gittip.com/PycodersWeekly/
Haskell is a special beast, in the sense that it uses single letters a lot for generic types in signatures. Eg:

doFoo :: a -> a

where doFoo will take any type a and return something of the same type. Due to the density of the language, you'll often find plenty of small, commented functions.
I think that's part of the point, as someone else said; that we should reserve such stark judgment with the expectation that we don't know all the facts. Ed was pretty clear in his opinion, but probably would have held a different one had he known all the facts. To be honest, that supports the idea that he (and I; I agreed quietly) was wrong at the time.

I've taken that lesson to heart personally, just from this thread alone.
I suspect - but this pure conjecture on my part, IADNAL and so on - that this may have something to do with prejudicing a potential jury. Any jury member that knows about a case before being sworn in is automatically disqualified. Giving potentially nationwide attention to your case by running a funding drive in your name would pollute any potential jury.

Again, please don't put too much weight on this, it is purely speculative but it is the best I've been able to come up with so far.

A quote on this subject: "One of the most important reasons for not selecting a member of the panel to sit on the jury is prior knowledge of the case."

Source:

http://www.therightjury.com/publications_real_purpose.html
While I was writing that, I realised that it may come down to the definition of what constitutes a long method / variable / class name.

I have usually found that the IntelliJ defaults are enough to make the names meaningful. For Ruby, the inspection kicks in at 30 characters. Interestingly, it's referenced from the ruby style guide here: https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide where I can't find a recommended maximum length.

We're somewhat sidetracked from the main discussion. I'm generally in favour of trying to write code that is as readable as possible. Ideally in such a way that it is understandable even without the comments.

That said, I do think that good comments are helpful and essential if you're building a library. The Spring Framework comes to mind as a project that has a great set of documentation built from the comments (but also has very readable code, along with long method, variable and class names).
A conversation with Audrey Watters about Web Literacies
I played video games from ages ~8-19, and I probably killed a few hundred thousand animals, people, soldiers, knights, Nazis, medieval soldiers and archers, spaceships, aliens, etc. Very few people in history can even claim responsibility for that many deaths, let alone committing them. But millions of people have played video games more than me.
Scaling Puppet in EC2
>So my bet… is that you might start to see development of a Staged combustion engine… and a switch to methane fuel

Not much of a bet – Musk talked about this two months ago.

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/hyperbola/2012/11/musk-goe...

>SpaceX's initial plan will be to build a lox/methane rocket for a future upper stage codenamed Raptor. The design of this engine would be a departure from the "open cycle" gas generator system and lox/kerosene propellants that the current Merlin 1 engine series uses. Instead, the new rocket engine would burn lox/methane in a much more efficient "staged combustion" cycle that many Russian rocket engines use.
Fine art by Bruce Mahalski
Regarding poor_style(), I've never understood this objection (and indeed I prefer the block style you complain about there). Can't your editor fix this up for you in a few keystrokes? This is the sort of thing that an editor should make easy.
"who might once have had a peek inside Playboy or caught a preview of a naughty film on the television channel of a hotel"

This does not go well with the fact from OP article that every boy after ten is exposed to hardcore pornography on the internet.
If it's true, people who "once have had a peek" do not exist and the author of the article you quoted fools us.

Having said that, my main reaction to that kind of reasoning is on the lines of "We're going to watch porn anyway, you won't stop us (and by us I mean everyone) and that's what we are going to do boo hoo. So what can you do? With your religion schmeligion and morals schmorals? Even if we hurt us in the process, so what? You can't do anything about this."

Seriously, he's like a parent who thinks he's going to tell us what to do. But he doesn't have any ways to make us listen. And no ways at all to affect the situation. So why bother at all?
Hur, indie programmer humor. People who think that are idiots. We live in a time when you can buy a computer the size of your hand that can do real time image analysis on a couple of AA batteries for $40. A couple decades ago that would be a classified munition with the assumption that one would build a better guided missile from it. Just because that computer in your pocket is polished doesn't mean it's a toy. A toy is a remote terminal incapable of executing machine code outside of drawing letters on the screen. Or a computer that only can remember 16,000 numbers at a time (that's not enough enough space for a crappy, unanimated GIF). Remember War Games, when he cracked open the handset of a payphone and made a free call by touching a soda can tab between the microphone and a ground wire? That was the level of technology not so long ago. Try writing your RoR craigslist knockoff using that.

Kids these days.
Using voice to drive the web: Introduction to the Web Speech API
I get what you're saying, but it's not always about that. We need exemplars. We need people who are willing to stick their neck out and make change. Because you each think that if you're the only one taking a chance then you'll probably lose, but when we see others on the stage fighting the good fight then more of us will be willing to follow that example, and that allows us to build strength in numbers and win more of our battles.
It strikes me that another relevant comparison would be the Hacker News reaction to weev's conviction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808676
The whole behavior of "tripfags" on 4chan, or /r/circlejerk mirrors how I've seen people go after karma here on HN. I don't like it.
DigitalOcean offers 512MB/20GB SSD virtual machines for $5/Mo
Who would you like to rule instead?
You should be using const variables as much as possible (and in general preferring immutable data). In that case assignment and declaration _must_ take place at the same location.
The Sprinting Centipede Strategy: How to Improve Software Without Breaking It
An unforseen event will make you regret critising [Apple/SteveJobs/Qualcomm/bananas]. In otherwords... stop trying to assign blame to someone for this. We didn't know his intention, nor is anyone directly responsible for it..

It sucks that he killed himself, but its not something you could have prevented unless you were there.
How did you end up on the conclusion that you were addicted, as opposed to a user of, porn?
What if the theory that playing violent games allow an outlet for potentially violent people?

What if Hilter had civilization 5 to play and "conquer" the world?

And honestly I find violent movies more distributing than violent games.
No, but he did assume he was asking for funds simply because he wasn't manning up. How many hundreds read/upvoted and made the same assumption? He should've held his judgment, especially with the weight he carries around here. I've been reading his comments for years. I know he's a good guy, but I still think it was a stupid comment to make.
Techniques for Responsive Website Advertisements
Lawrence Lessig Remembers Aaron Swartz [video]
Depending on the definition of developing countries, I think you would find "developing" countries can have much better connections than many western developed countries. This is $10/mo: http://www.speedtest.net/result/2436462597.png (local server) & http://www.speedtest.net/result/2436466252.png (across the pond.
It is also notable how many non-profits aren't necessarily what people would conventionally think of as charities, despite being given a special tax status, etc.
Here's a variant of that ternary chain, used in Perl Best Practices:

sides[i] = dot < -LIGHT_CLIP_EPSILON ? SIDE_BACK
: dot > LIGHT_CLIP_EPSILON ? SIDE_FRONT
: SIDE_ON
;

This is a little cleaner if your values are longer, and has slightly nicer diffs if you add conditionals.

Note that this won't work in many languages whose ternary operator precedence is different (PHP comes to mind).
I would like to add that those of us who knew Aaron (however briefly) can say that rarely is anyone as simple & admirable in reality as they are painted in obituaries. Was Aaron a good person? Did he mean well? Certainly. But our relatively brief, pre-Reddit friendship ended years ago because I couldn't take his sometimes relentless negativity… something Cory Doctorow hinted at in the obituary he wrote for Aaron. Cory wrote that Aaron's mentors were a support network for each other because it was emotionally hazardous to be on the receiving end of Aaron's disappointment. Aaron was never, ever mean to me, but still the overall bad feeling was a weight I couldn't take. I'm incredibly sad that it appeared to be a weight that he couldn't take, either.

It's been my experience that a lot of "bright" people are angry that the world, and the people they know, don't "live up" to their "in a perfect world," clean-room expectations. Instead of using that as fuel for empathy and character-building, they use it as a weapon and turn it outwards to attack others, or inside to stoke their own misery. Sometimes this drives them to try to achieve more and more and more to shut up the desperate voice inside, but this never works. Maybe they achieve, but achievements don't make them feel better.

This makes the whole situation sadder because everyone expects a person with achievements to be happy.

Unfortunately, sad truths about how a person contributes to his/her own troubles and miseries, aren't considered kosher or polite to mention in the wake of a tragedy. But Aaron was a complex human being and I don't think it does him any honor to whitewash the complexity.
It isn't just Ed's comment that contrasts, most prolific commenters' tone was downright acerbic.

Some calling him to face what he was directly responsible for and some going as far as siding with the prosecution.
Lisp is the language of languages.
I'm convinced there has to be something bigger than that trial. Trying to rationally explain a suicide by pointing fingers at prosecutor might relief a bit of guilt for some but it's IMO naive. As far as I'm concerned, Aaron committed suicide because he didn't want to live on this planet anymore. He tried so hard to change things, to make the world better. And he actually succeeded, but that probably wasn't enough for a brilliant mind like his. Could it be that he was disgusted at how indifferent people were? By people, I mean most people, not just the governments or some particular entities.
DOJ drops charges against Aaron Swartz
People here think they are smarter than everyone else, and immune to the travails that others go through. Most wouldn't agree with that statement outright, but you can see it in the lack of empathy comments often have, like the one highlighted in the article.
That's my current top contender for the switch. I figure we'll start with g.raphael.js and then if we outgrow it we can just upgrade to the full library.
I can get on board with common sense decision making :-)
Thanks for this reply, appreciated.

I think you're absolutely right that an in-person meetup would definitely help build that level of trust; it's something I'll do as soon as possible.

I did, consciously, refrain from putting a link to the project I'm working on now because I didn't want to limit this 'partnership' to one specific idea (and to be honest I'm not sure the idea is really profitable at all, it's just a good start->finish app for me to learn some iOS features at the moment) but I do understand the need to be passionate about whatever it is that we’d both be working on.

Thanks for the suggestions on how to present the parnership, I definitely am not trying to get a 'freebie' from someone and I'll make sure that's clear with whoever I speak to.

I'll have a think about how I can show a past 'portfolio' of some description too, I really should update my personal website anyway and I can add links etc. then.

Thanks again and best wishes to you.
On the other hand, the comments on this post (120 days ago) is quite supportive of Aaron and criticizes the govt for its harsh indictment.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528083
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameSpot#Gerstmann_dismissal

GameSpot terminated their Editorial Director after giving a game a less-than-glowing review. However, this occurred before CBS purchased CNET.
Keeping the stack has always been the problem for me. At least for larger numbers. Luckily, there's RealCalc on Android which is by far the best calculator app I've ever seen.
A very interesting read. I'd be interested to hear commentary from people who use languages like Haskell, that I'm not very familiar with, what their take on this is.

Amongst a lot of positive things one can say about this scheduling system, I think there are a couple of downsides:

* The scheduler needs to be able to interrupt things, so my guess is that it's harder to compile code down to native code, otherwise you might not be able to interrupt a tight loop.

* The bit about regular expressions being implemented in Erlang so as to be able to keep track of how much time they've taken up. This has a cost: slower regular expressions because you're doing them in Erlang rather than C, and not sharing nice C implementations. The one in Tcl is pretty good and very liberally licensed, for instance. Turtles all the way down means having to reimplement stuff instead of just borrowing it.

That said, for certain things, Erlang is superb.
As a photographer who has rented lenses online I'd say your biggest issue is lens options. Especially under featured lenses.

The vast majority of people who need to rent lenses due so for a professional shoot where they cannot afford to drop $2k.

The lenses you need are popular pro lenses. The lenses you have can be bought for 3 weeks worth of rental. Basically no one rents kit lenses because they are so easy to buy used and are not very good relative quality.

You need stuff like:
70-200 f2.8 constant app

Go after getting people with those lenses and offer them insurance or some other comfort and you can prob ramp much faster.

Consider a very strict system for checking out the lenses and a very clear policy on what is who's fault.

Add in fraud protection of some type etc.

Then you will be offering a real service.

Eliminate lenses which are not a minimum of $300usd from your site
Personally, I found some of the horizontal spacing excessive. There were several lines that even forced me to scroll horizontally within VisualStudio (with a few side-panes open, admittedly), despite having a widescreen monitor. I'm pretty sure I chunked those up. Maybe Mr. Carmack has a much bigger monitor than I did.

Besides that, I think the stylistic changes this author is commenting on are fairly minor. I think the conciseness of vertical space was a bit confusing sometimes; this article only shows the simple functions where it works. The almost complete absence of templated is more likely because no STL code was used.

Certainly, the code base is very thorough. When I realized I had to use quaternions to represent the player's orientation in the game space, there was already an idQuat class ready and waiting and fully functional, which was very nice. I think that idQuat class was never even used anywhere in the base code, so it was cool -- for someone with who never knew about quaternions before then -- to have a class fully implemented and ready for me to use.
I think he should have risked pissing off the judge and getting the word out, but hindsight is 20/20. Its sad this is the way our justice system works, feels like a modern day witch trial.
I distinctly remember that thread, and not commenting. I was disappointed at the responses. I had given a small amount towards his defense fund since I thought his goals were worthwhile. I consider it a privilege to have contributed.

Now, I wish I had given more, and I wish I had commented on that thread.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke
I agree about the website. They stuff customers into "Home and Office", "Medium Business", and "Enterprise" silos and it's very hard to compare products across those arbitrary boundaries. However, I do like how you can type in a service tag number and get information on just what was in that system when it shipped. If you can decode their highly obscure component names, that is....
Yes, but I hope that it didn't entice you to murder which was the intent behind the original post. :)

And yes the amount of violent activity in games far outweigh that in real life but there is another huge difference. Games are not real and even the most naive of us have a very clear differentiation: there is no respawn in real life.
`A spokeswoman for CBS Interactive said CNET retains editorial independence in covering "actual news."`

I'm sure nothing makes a tech reporter want to stay around like being told their reporting is not "actual news" and thus is not worthy of editorial independence.
TIL....
I can't compare it to HAProxy, but nginx load balancing was probably the simplest and most reliable part of our web infrastructure, and did exactly what we wanted and needed. Never played around with SPDY, but I liked the various options regarding server weighting, SSL termination, and like you mention the ease of configuration. It wasn't too fancy, but solved a problem and solved it well.

Unfortunately we had to switch off of it due to PCI compliance concerns[1], but I'd use it again in a heartbeat.

[1] not because there were actual issues, but because other solutions were fully audited out of the box. I'm hardly surprised that we've had more issues with those solutions than we ever had with nginx, including the time when we barely knew how to configure the thing. One of the unavoidable hazards of PCI Level 1 :( We still use it for the actual web requests quite happily.
In retrospect, this comment by "mibbitier" is particularly saddening.

"I agree. He was extremely foolish and arrogant at best. I don't think this belongs on HN.
Also didn't he make a ton of money selling Reddit?! :/"
And the witch hunt continues. This is all very reminiscent of the furore around the prank call nurse who committed suicide in the UK, with people calling for the unfortunate DJs to be charged with murder. I would have expected a more rational, dispassionate response from this crowd.
Isn't the idea to upvote useful and interesting comments? A message can be of value even if you greatly disagree with the content of it.
No, but they should stop overstepping their bounds.
Future Firefox to Bring PDF, WebCam Streams to the Browser
Among other things already mentioned, it makes it impossible to be "const pedantic" as Mr. Carmack professes to now be, i.e. declaring everything that is only initialized and then never changed as const.

I most certainly am const pedantic as well, and I was back when I worked on this project, too -- quite a few of the "inconsequential" lines I checked in were simply moving a variable declaration down to where it was initialized, and adding 'const'. I found the resulting code much easier to read.
Interesting. I might be persuaded to recommend something else. What alternatives do you think are better?
"...judges hate it when parties talk publicly about their cases."

This seems very unjust, when the prosecutors love to hold a media circus where the handcuffed "perp walk" is the star attraction.
Thoughtworks using any opportunity to market themselves as usual. I hated working there.
I like the last one better. I think it reads more like "assign one of these values to sides[i]" and less like "do one of these three things".

"By this latter I mean, if you change the code a little bit, you don't have to rewrite it; it looks basically the same."

I'd say that's kind of the point though. The first one would look "basically the same" if in the last else it assigned to sides[j] instead of sides[i]. In the last one it would look very different if it was about "doing stuff" rather than choosing which value should go to sides[i].
I've been using it heavily under production loads, and the balancing portion hasn't blinked.

I'm also doing SSL termination at it, so I don't really have any metrics on the balancing in isolation, but for moving 50-100 concurrent connections around it hasn't blinked.

I do really like HAProxy's more flexible up/down monitoring, though. In the past, we've done the trick with separate control connections that we can bring up & down with iptables to shuffle traffic around without any broken connections.
New Star Wars Film Based on Seven Samurai Coming from Zack Snyder
"So what keeps a company, when winds shift, from being nimble enough to shift with them?"

Answering to Wall Street. Going private would give Dell tremendous flexibility without the risk of shareholder activism in the form of class action lawsuits. It offers opportunities to pursue long term strategies without worrying about quarterly dividends and pundits' predictions.

If Dell can go private, it is a sign that someone sees a long term upside or profit from liquidation. The former seems far more likely than the latter.