skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Meh. You're talking about 10 years ago.

Hmmm? Apple still sells iPods. And I wouldn't be surprised if Apple still took the lion's share of the profit in that market. They sold 12.7 million of them last quarter (including Touches). Surely if consumer hardware headed towards commoditization in the fashion you describe, someone would have released a quality 16GB MP3 player for far less than $150 and been able to push Apple out of the market.
Keep in mind that Getco is one of their investors. That is serious conflict of interest! These unsophisticated retail users are going to be eaten alive.
I used to be really annoyed by that too, but I'm not any more. It's _really important_ in commercial software development to understand where your code comes from. Having a local repository act as a gatekeeper does a nice job of that. It's a good idea to always have builds run where maven settings force use of a local repository. You can then easily track everything that's going into builds, and scale that up over larger numbers of projects.

You can also push libraries into the repository that aren't open source, and know that you've done so.

Running a maven repository doesn't take much. Sonatype's basic offerings are fine and quite effective.
I'm a Pythonista that loves JavaScript and thinks Node.js is a waste of effort on the part of humanity.
Tracking Users Online
Baremetal MIDI file player / LV2 synth host for the Raspberry Pi
Not sure how this comment is an accident:

Steve Klabnik
‏@steveklabnik
@harthvader @zeeg nothing's _wrong_ with it, but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding

http://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/293830888003887104
Agree entirely. I charged straight for the comments to rant about the stupidity of #8 (the monoculture argument) in the face of how Ubuntu and GNOME (prior monocultures by their criteria) are now on the wane in the face of more projects that are more responsive to their users.
explaining what I said had the affect of feeling like I was trying not to apologize

Steve - http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/affect.html
No, I'm not. Also "impossible" was a bad word for me to use. It's impossible in the "not enough time before the sun burns out" sense, not in the mathematical proof sense.

I should have said impractical, but then people sometimes respond by talking about how fast GPUs are advancing, not getting just how far off they really are.

The best known attack to find a first pre-image is 2^123. To put this in perspective, using a slightly modified common analogy to describe how long 2^128 is:

"Imagine a computer that is the size of a grain of sand that can test inputs against a hash. Also imagine that it can test a hash in the amount of time it takes light to cross it. Then consider a cluster of these computers, so many that if you covered the earth with them, they would cover the whole planet to the height of 1 inch. The cluster of computers would find a valid pre-image on average in 1,000 years."

Even then, you would not have a useful preimage to mount an attack. You wouldn't even have ASCII. If you got ASCII, it wouldn't be syntactically correct javascript. If it was, it wouldn't do anything remotely malicious.

You would have to keep doing this until you randomly generated an input that happens to be valid javascript that performs your malicious action.

So, I rounded up to impossible.
I've always thought of a fiasco as a series of FUBARS, each compounding the last. Not sure I know a term for series of fiascos. Maybe GoDaddy are breaking new ground here.
I'm just curious if you're aware how much money beyond that 250 a month is subsidized by federal money? You seem to imply that the cost is outrageous to expect people to pay, and I'd agree, yet the irony is that few things are as insanely subsidized as FrontRunner and TRAX (Utah's light rail system). TRAX has a per rider subsidy, if you factor in construction cost and maintenance, of 6-7 dollars. So if the people were actually paying full price for just ridding the light rail they'd be dishing out about 22 dollars for a two way trip. If they were smart they'd never have built light rail, but rather have taken that same money and quadrupled the whole bus system in Utah to actually give us a transit system that was actually responsive to the transit needs of our population. They would have moved more people, displaced more cars, and not have an absurdly 'tightly coupled' infrastructure where a single technological failure shuts down entire valley transit lines. But people see electrical trains, feel and see a smooth ride that can accelerate really fast and, to the best of their discernment isn't 'dirty'. And since they're protected from the real cost of the system they have illusions about it's capacity to cure traffic woes and save the planet. Never mind that when Utah was growing full tilt the number of new cars on it's roads replaced what TRAX's entire network managed to replace after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.

Here's another interesting fact. When I looked into Front Runner's costs (which relative to other faster trains is relatively inexpensive) and did the math to spread it over the population for whom it was moving their commute off the road and found that the costs equated to over 50,000 dollars per rider. That's to say that we could have bought everyone a nice hybrid and we would have done likely a better job for the environment, for less money, and not have had to extend a rather limited and fragile infrastructure.

Trains make no sense, not even in Japan nor Europe. Look at the actual numbers, whether it's the fiscal costs or the total environmental costs of the system and it's support systems compared to their equivalents in a trainless world.
Your list of 'serious problems' mostly seem to be social issues, i.e.

1) It has no current users.

2) Developer preference for what you call 'power languages' as opposed to HTML5/Javascript.

My retort:

1) Google launched behind a hord of other search engines like Lycos, Excite etc, but they conquered the search market. They simply did search better.

2) Show the data. The fact that the existing platforms imposed certain languages on developers doesn't mean that developers would voluntarily work in them if they had an option. Cordova/Phonegap seems to be a counter point to your claim.
And some of them have:

- http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

- http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html
Can an experienced JavaScript developer provide some constructive reasons as to why that code might be problematic? (e.g. Is it the eval?)

Might be a good learning opportunity for others, too.
Penn Jillette made an excellent observation when confronted with a question of how can we solve a problem together as a species?

He said, the best question to ask is how can we solve this problem with more freedom rather than less?

So my only point is that we should be looking for ways to use technology for freedom, such as spreading information about safety or getting help for mental health issues.

And not trying to restrict the average normal healthy citizens with technology. Which has been proven again and again throughout history that technological restrictions are rendered ineffective against clever hackers or criminals.
A use case would be a document like this one: http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/

or this one:
http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/

Both by Bret Victor who as far as I can tell invented the idea. At the very least he’s certainly been effective at popularizing it.

For completeness here is Victor’s library that helps you create such documents Tangle: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/ , which is used by Fangle.
Meritocracy is a term that is wheeled out by a critic when he doesn't think those involved have any merit.
Thanks for the correction, I got lazy there.

I think the problem with 'Asperger pride' is it tends to focus on how neuro-typical people have wronged people on the spectrum. A lot of times the painful truth is that person with aspergers is at least partially culpable for the negative outcome of their social interactions.

This becomes a major problem when you work in a place where almost everyone is on the autistic spectrum. There are no oppressive neuro-typical people, yet stubborn asshole behavior skyrockets because all the nerds are being dicks to each other.
And it's still a weasel apology
That is my number 1 complaint with Twitter. Sometimes when I write my tweets, I find that the app randomly inserts expletives and will turn the entire message into an @ reply. They must have some really wild NLP stuff going on too, because sometimes I'll even have words of praise switched out for ones of ridicule.

I mean, it's already hard enough to be civil in 140 characters.
I got it from a briefing by an LAPD guy teaching policing strategies to military in Iraq/Afghanistan (he was a reservist, but I think they did an official program later involving LAPD and possibly FBI and NYPD) -- i.e. how to shut down networks of supply for insurgents getting weapons.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/gu... is a decent source. There's another source I saw recently which talks about young or new guns being the majority of the problem, but I couldn't find it on google in 30 seconds.

One problem with saying "1.2% of gun dealers are responsible for most of the guns used in crime" is that a lot of dealers are very low volume or very specialty (target, etc.) anyway, so mainstream sales may happen mostly at 1.2% of dealers, too. I.e. most of the knives used in killings are probably bought at Wal-Mart, not the Global store in Tokyo.
In this age of smartphones, it would be possible to mandate that all guns radio 911 with the current location whenever all the following events occur:

- they are withdrawn from the holster

- the safety is disabled

- there is ammunition loaded

- they are not at a shooting range or hunting area

This could help reduce the carnage from mass shootings and draw police to legitimate threats sooner. It is compatible with gun owner's rights. Heck, it could even take a picture and record audio whenever a shot is fired to aid in the legal nightmare that is sure to follow any gun discharge.

Another technological solution: RFID rings that must be on the shooting hand in order to discharge the gun. This keeps guns away from kids, prevents theft, and prevents guns from being used against their owners.
Proud Spartan here. I can remember witnessing a demonstration in the same era of an IBM 360 reading morse code that astounded me at the time. Now I can get an app for my phone that does the same thing.

Brings to mind the Bill Gates quote:
"The path isn’t always there. Sometimes you have to make it. Sometimes people will think you’re crazy. Sometimes you are just ahead of the curve. it’s a dream for a reason, and sometimes making your dreams happen takes going out on a limb and giving your all for what you believe in."
Death, prison, and felony convictions are not the same as public ridicule and hurt feelings. Only a nazi would equate such things. What?
Impossible to memorize? I wrote all these examples from memory. I tested them in a shell and had a single error (sed -ir needed to be changed to sed -ri because -i takes a glued "suffix" argument). I really don't think it is that hard to memorize the basic find/xargs options. You only have to memorize them once in your lifetime. They are a basic cornerstone of a Unix skillset. By comparison, I often forget the custom syntax of my custom scripts I wrote years ago.
That's not technical, though. This is specifically for 2 technical meetings they're having on technical measures to deal with gun violence.
شات همسات خجوله
Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions
a girl?

does that make a difference?

(honest question)
Linus has in the past called OpenBSD folks a bunch of "masturbating monkeys" because of their stickler like attitude towards security.
I can think of no better advertisement for replace than this post.
Right... she had different requirements, so she wrote a different tool. Which is why I find your near-rant above somewhat disturbing. It seems predicated on a (seemingly) very arrogant belief on your part, that you know more about what harthur needs, then she does. Personally, I am very sceptical on that point.

There is only one case that justifies reimplementing things

Or, um, how about the one that goes "I felt like it"? That's sufficient justification in my book.
New Google Image Search Is Faster
agreed, but the more ads you cram into your app, the less valuable the service

this is true for every app except google - therefore, your consumer internet ad-supported business model probably has an inherent flaw
Explaining fixed income investments to new investors.
Yeah, who needs TextMate when you have vim, right? Or Ruby when you've got Perl?
Yes! That's a great introduction, but you must have a sense of humor. I love that book.
I'm going to tread as carefully as I can into this hornet's nest; keep in mind I'm not defending anyone:

I think the 'eyes bleeding'-type comments come from the author's rewriting sed in javascript. It seems almost like an exercise designed to provoke: rewriting one of the cornerstone nix utils (loved by many nerds everywhere) into a node.js package (despised by many nerds everywhere).

Like any good conversation starter, replace.js comes with a bit of incorrect information:

It's similar to sed but there are a few differences:

1. Modifies files when matches are found

Easy enough to do with sed: -i

2. Recursive search on directories with -r

find . -exec sed [...] does the same.

--

In my estimation, that's the reason for the vitriol. I am intentionally leaving out any analysis on the morality of the reactions to it, but the above should explain why some reactions were less than great. It wasn't about the code itself.
Here are some of Heather Arthur's other projects on Github:

https://github.com/harthur/brain - neural network
https://github.com/harthur/classifier - bayesian classifier
https://github.com/harthur/clusterfck - clustering
https://github.com/harthur/glossary - term extraction

You can see more here:

https://github.com/harthur?tab=repositories

Nice stuff.
To much work. Just create an unrelated login.
Honestly, I think you ended up really making the case for replace. The nix CLI examples are convoluted at best.

I've used CLI tools for years, and it would probably take me 5-10 minutes of scanning the man pages to reproduce all but the simplest of those snippets. Granted, this boils down to the sporadic use-case, but that's the entire point.

The replace examples are all clean. It would mean I would not be juggling little peculiarities of arcane syntax, such as which sed flags to invoke, or whether to use exec or xargs.
sed -i the way you use it is not portable. BSD (and therefore Mac OS X) requires a mandatory argument to -i (the suffix to use for the backup files). In Linux sed the suffix is optional.
> You can own a gun in US without license, but drive a car without.

Man, if I had a dollar for every time I heard this argument.

I can park an Aston Martin in my back yard and not have a license for anything. I can be 3 years old or have 25 DUIs or be as mentally ill as all get out. I might have to pay property taxes in some states. But other than that I'm home free.

I need a license to DRIVE the car on PUBLICLY owned roads.

You're suggesting a license to park a gun in my backyard.

I don't really want to argue over whether or not we should do what you suggested. I just want people to stop using drivers licences as examples. It's not a 1-1.
I'm also not seeing the connection here. A few mean tweets over code quality vs threatening someone with life sentences over downloading documents is a very poor analogy on how we should be spending our time.
* Require gun insurance and make gun purchasers criminally responsible if the guns they buy are later used to commit a crime.

* Provide incentives to encourage people to rent guns if they are going to shoot recreationally at a gun range. This could be accomplished through a flat tax on guns owned by individuals, combined with storage and tracking requirements for guns at ranges.

* Basic GPS tracking would seem easy and straight-forward, and reduce the problems with stolen (or "stolen") weapons.

* Repeal the second amendment. Any gun ownership should be based on efficacy and maximize safety. Currently gun ownership can not be optimized because it does not have a defined aim.
I don't even get what the issue is. People have a problem that she even wrote this? I wrote something similar because there IS no standard replace tool along the lines of grep. Sed is awful (it's essentially impossible) for multiline expressions for example. Could this really be penis measuring because people think they are so cool that they know unix commands exist? Congratulations, you have turn invocations of a simple, convenient tool into a shitpile trainwreck of find and sed. Golf claps for infinity.
Hear hear!

I've had a sed book on my shelf for years and I've used it more than once, but 99% of the time I end up giving up on sed and using a GUI-based tool instead of trying to concoct the cryptic lines given above as examples.

I absolutely would rather use the clean interface of replace, written in JavaScript or anything else, than to memorize that steaming pile of cruft.
Web-based interactive documents were probably invented by some guy at Netscape doing Javascript (let's call him B. Eich). Bret has popularized a nice interactive presentation style, though is Learnable Programming document used embedded movies instead (I did this for a paper I wrote once, did anyone know PDF can embed quicktime movies?).

Interactive visualizations are not that new these days. I have a hard time seeing how text-based visualizations would be very useful though. Pretty much, the interaction occurs in some sort of rendered graphic that can't be easily expressed using markdown.
Which is kind of sad, since old ruby community even had MINSWAN motto (Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice). I don't know when and why everybody became so abrasive.
I don't hate node However, the tools around using Node and JS are inferior to other languages (C/C++, Java, C#, even PHP and Python). Further, the language doesn't have the cleanest history in terms of design, so in a project with multiple people on it, you are leveraging coding guidelines, linters, and the like to have any real consistency.

A colleague raised an interesting question which I will paraphrase -- given the desire to build a project that exposes webservices from the ground up, what language would you choose?

My first response was, it depends on the platform. If you are using Azure, for instance, C# is the first class candidate, Node and other languages are tier 2/3. EC2, sky is the limit. Heroku, probably start with Ruby. If all things were equal, I would personally choose Python over Javascript.

Python and Twisted give a lot of the same benefits as Node in terms of async development. Python is more consistent and has a more mature (and featureful) standard library. Node and modules are plentiful, but a lot (even socket.io) still show some signs of being young.

For me, the choice is - right tool for the platform, group, and project you are working on. Personally, I will err towards the more mature when you are talking about scripting languages. (PHP doesn't count, it's super easy and I've used it a lot, but I always feel dirty afterward :) )
CYA blog post
Tiles convey information. I don't think iPhone does this. Android has had this since the beginning I believe. E.g., you can add a weather tile to see forecasts. Or the clock tile.
Or you could use org.codehaus.mojo:latex-maven-plugin, stick your latex and graphics in src/main/latex/<doc>, and watch it 'just work', like I do.

I agree that not every maven plugin does exactly what you want it to, but a lot of them get pretty damn close, and as the authors iterate them, they gain a lot of flexibility.
A bullshit apology would have been full of prevarication and "I'm sorry if you were offended." Timing aside, this was a full-on "Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa."
In theory this is a good idea, but I'd be afraid of slippery slope. When a teacher comes upon two kids fighting, the temptation to use a "non lethal" emergency device to break up the fight would be a lot higher than the temptation to shoot one of them.

You might be able to deal with it by declaring use of the device the same as using lethal force, with criminal liability for any use where deadly force wouldn't have been otherwise authorized.

I would be ok with the NRA "arm the teachers" IFF the teachers were given ~10-14 week sheriff's deputy/POST level training, and volunteered, in addition to regular CCW. I couldn't imagine an elementary school teacher doing this, but a college professor or a high school science teacher or someone seems like a reasonable candidate. Putting full time armed guards at most schools is just insane from a cost-benefit perspective even if it did help (which I don't believe it would, overall). $1-5k of extra training for a volunteer teacher would be a lot more reasonable.
A Guide to Searching and Using Pictures in Your Posts
I was driving behind a bus in the US just last week - every time the bus accelerated a huge cloud of black smoke poured out of it.

Yes, new buses are good. But there are still plenty of old ones. (And this one didn't look old.)
I take it you haven't seen @zeeg's tweets on the subject, then: https://twitter.com/zeeg

Sorry to disillusion you about the Python community.

Personally, part of the reason I stopped using Python heavily professionally in 2007 is because I was sick of hearing and reading Python web developers regularly disparage Ruby and the "Ruby community," a tradition carried on in comments like yours to this day.
No sincere apology ever starts with "Soooooo".
I often write wrapper scripts to make complex syntax simple. Just for me.

Don't get me wrong. i actually _know_ the f* syntax because I'm and old crazy fart like that by now. But when it comes to use it, it takes a while to type. Sometimes I make typos. Sometimes i forget one specific option or character and I gotta look in man again.

The simplified syntax wrappers make it f' easy.

The other day I made a csv column grepper. It just calls awk and assign numbers to column names, so i can just grep by column names no matter their order.

So yeah, a huge line of awk can do it. An even less understandable line of grep can actually do that too. Some other tools as well. Mine is just ./supertool colname colname colname ... | awk "$2 != blah" |column -t

(For the record, there were similar wrappers in python and perl, each of which were 5 to 35x slower (200 to 1000 lines script) than my 20 lines bash script, which is another complain I have. Reimplementing that stuff in high level languages is generally a bad idea, specially when you don't understand what happens underneath.
What is their criteria for determining if a registration is legitimate?
SLC, and every other major American city for that matter, is never going to solve their smog problems when they are built such that inhabitants REQUIRE the use of a vehicle to perform the necessary tasks to exist.

Elon Musk might have a solution (thought I'm skeptical) but public transportation cannot to fix the environmental effects of urban sprawl.