skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Geographically we share the sink hole status with New Orleans, only instead of water it's dirty air that our geography grants us. One thing that drives me nuts about these superficial looks at this is that the inversion would happen to us even if we shut down the refineries and stopped driving. In fact Utah air quality has been steadily improving even while our geography remains the same and our population rises and the number of cars on the road go up.

Stories like this are so easy to take out of context. We have the single largest pollution producing facility, the Bingham Mine/Smelting facilities. Yet when that's reported I don't see people mention that it produces the cleanest copper, environmentally speaking, of any other facility on the planet.

Happily we're not burning coal to keep our homes warm any more, but back when we did Utah's air was far dirtier.

I worked for a time as housekeeping in the Salt Lake Temple and the stories I heard were almost legendary of the kind of cleaning they'd have to do in there back when coal burning was THE way to heat homes in the winter.

But good reporting, in terms of getting readership up and people turning their heads, demands things get taken out of context.

And for those people big on Public Transit they need to know that it's all a placebo. It's not actually better for the environment. Just because you don't see smoke coming out of the actual car you're ridding in doesn't mean it's not being pumped out somewhere else down the line, and to add to that you need to realize all the pollution incidental to building and maintaining the infrastructure of whatever your chosen transit option is. Many also don't realize that in a place as sparsely populated as Utah (speaking here relative to actual big cities) public transit is even more illusory. Presently, for example, I'm here in Lima Peru. If there's ever a city that embraced public transit it's Lima. Yet for significant portions of the day a great many busses and combis and all types of public transit run relatively empty. Yes, commutes and weekends the economies of mass transit seem dead obvious, but don't fall for confirmation bias, if your public transit is available all day long then any benefits you get from packing busses or trains full at commute time has to be balanced out from the costs, fiscal and pollution and energy consumption wise, from the whole of the cycle. And if you bleed a lot of advantages in a city like Lima, Salt Lake doesn't have a prayer. I'd wager good money that public transit is lucky to break even with cars when it comes to pollution produced per transit cycle- if fiscal price is any indicator of impact on energy use and pollution production from any and all corners of the full life cycle of things.
I understand it was unintentional, but saying something was an accident in any apology makes it sound insincere. It shouldn't matter if it was an accident or not.
I'd ague that her version is at the very least syntactically much easier to use.
Another way of looking at this is how much code you have to read. This is one of the reasons I hate wizard generated code in a way that I don't hate InterfaceBuilder or similar serialized object trees. If I'm gonna have to read the code eventually, the fact that your IDE makes it easy to draw a button is cold comfort to me when it takes 100 lines of cryptic C to do it (actually pretty common in early Windows programs or Xaw hacks, but mercifully diminished in frequency in these more enlightened days).

Code generation can cause people to neglect library design; the reason why the MFC wizards spat out volumes of code instead of calling a library method is because you might need to rewrite some or all of that. You are not expected to modify InterfaceBuilder output, nor should you have to any more than you would have to regularly rewrite bits of Xlib to customize them appropriately.
I agree. Everyone makes mistakes at some point and that apology seems to be the best possible way to deal with it IMHO.
This may have to do with rubyist who have a distaste for Node (and Javascript) in general (which is actually quite common) more than the JS itself.
Ammunition isn't an especially difficult thing to manufacture. Cartridges developed over 100 years ago are still in use today, relatively unchanged. In particular, the 9mm Parabellum and .45 ACP remain among the most popular cartridges for new handguns today in civilian, military and police applications.

Hobbyists load their own ammunition using simple tools and commercially available components. More enthusiastic hobbyists cast their own bullets from various forms of scrap lead. Cases, powder and primers are a bit harder and don't make sense to do at home given commercial availability. Increase the price a significant amount and the sort of people who have the skills and resources to manufacture illegal drugs in quantity will manufacture ammunition in quantity for sale on the black market instead.

Guns, too are fairly simple to make - see http://improguns.blogspot.com.

Restricting guns and ammunition is not a viable way to keep them out of the hands of street criminals where there is an established black market economy and a culture that says one needs a gun to be a man.
A BIG part of SLC's air quality problem is that we have so much industrial pollution in the area. Kennicott operates one of the largest strip mines in the world in the valley, and their operation alone accounts for ~1/3 of the air pollution. There are also a lot of oil refineries in the north SL area that spew pollution constantly.

I agree that public transportation and re-thinking commuting is a good step, but it would be great to see some movement on the very controllable industrial pollution problems we have in a state with some of the most lax environmental laws in the nation.
This is why I won't contribute to Open Source. I was floored when I saw who was involved. People I have met a few times. Some even call them selfs craftsman, really? I think I will steer clear of these "craftsman" for now on.
If you usw a sharedUserId all your apps have all the permissions combined. Although I am not sure that is a good thing to do. It is deceiving.
Am I the only one who finds replace's syntax much nicer?

I haven't spent much time learning unix utilities, so that might explain it. But I can't help but shudder at find . -type f ! -name '.min.js' ! -name '.py' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -ri 's,var,let,g'
I don't do much JavaScript or Node development but her projects look cool. As frustrating as this must have been for Heather, I hope that in the long run she might get some value from the publicity.

I was going to comment on the twits (misspelling intentional) but decided to stay positive.
Different because Mauro is talking on behalf of the Kernel and claiming obviously bad changes are good ones. Linus is reprimanding a subordinate that is supposed to be one of the most well-informed members of the Linux community as a kernel maintainer -- he's not criticizing a stranger for posting a tiny script in case it "might be useful".

Linus is DFL (not so benevolent sometimes) of Linux, and can lash out when one of his trusted lieutenants is acting like an idiot. What these guys did is call out a stranger on the street and said "YOU SUCK!"
Having tried Ruby for a year, I have experimented this myself. With a strong OOP background, I can assert that it's not even an elite that enjoys ridiculing noobs.

It reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0

Also, just look at the top comment in that video. The irony.
I've been coding since 1993 and I have never made room in my brain for stuff like -print0.

Moreover, there are times when you'll want to do this stuff from within another program. What are you going to do, shell out to a find(1) pipeline? Then people like me will be giving you shit.

There's nothing wrong with rewriting sed in Javascript.
Replace looks a LOT cleaner to read and write though and more intuitive though for smaller/simpler things such as these examples.
I'm sorry but I don't think this is something to be solved (primarily) with technology.

Until as a society, we stop utilizing guns as a cultural norm (by this I mean the use of arms for all purposes not just ownership by private citizens), all tech is going to do is at best slow down the use of weapons, to the point where they are effectively useless or make it such that only criminals have easy access to weapons.

I strongly believe in guns don't kill people, bad people with guns kill people.
She was able to simplify her command line interface in order to support only the features she needed, so of course her syntax is nicer. Whereas sed/find/xargs can do a lot more things, so of course they come with a more evolved syntax.

It is the usual tradeoff between simplicity and features.
Fair point. Once I read the names of those involved, I was a little taken aback for this very reason. Friends I respect think quite highly of Corey, for instance.

Also worth noting, both [Steve and Corey] have published apologies on their own blogs. Both are worth reading.
I didn't intend to make you look foolish. I just wanted to fill you in on the story you missed somehow.

Personally, I don't think I've been back to the Dropbox website since I reset my password!
The worst bit about it is that it's part of a petty language squabble?
That's politically and historically a non-starter. Guns are protected in the same category as free speech. Driving, drinking, etc are not.
I know about the program. Terribly named.
Indeed. +darrenkopp missed the Mid-Jordan line, the West Valley line (both currently operational), the airport line (opening in April) and the Draper line (also opening in 2013). These are mostly east-west lines. Also not included is the Sugar House street car line.

SLC mayor Ralph Becker says, "by the end of 2013, we will have witnessed the largest expansion of an urban rail system in the nation." [1]

"70 miles in 7 years" seems pretty ambitious to me. [2]

[1] - http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55680450-78/salt-lake-beck...

[2] - http://www.rideuta.com/mc/?page=Projects-Frontlines2015
Japanese firm designs perfect cat home after studying cat and human interaction
Because acting like a childish asshole is how you maintain your web presence in the startup world.
Isn't it (scientifically documented) that if (a software project) A is threatened by B then supporters of A start to bash on developers and users of B? Because that's what I see here. node.js is very much a competitor to rails, and Steve Klabnik is very close to rails.
I always cringe when i see a blog post along the lines of

"A great way to do X in unix"

because it is almost always followed by the true unix gurus coming on and schooling the poster.

literally, people: assume any unix script you post, no matter how trivial, must meet the standards of a mathematical proof to Fermat's Last Theorem.

and i must confess, i look down on bloggers that blithely post a unix script. Not because of their lack of Unix foo, but rather the shear naivete of posting it (and the ignorance of the fact that the grey wizards will come out of their tower and pound you for anything less than perfection)
My mind went there too. I didn't mention that one because it doesn't seem to be exponential. I actually found a past entry on the xkcd what-if blog:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/7/

For a given amount of ship mass, you need 20x that mass in fuel to get it into space. That seems to be multiplicative growth, unless I'm interpreting something wrong.
Netflix announces 27 million US subscribers, posts unexpected profit
Sure. My point is anyone who really seriously gets on their high horse about how great they are by looking at a simple little script that is essentially background noise for professional engineers are probably pretty far removed from even a sophomore CS undergrad level of sophistication.
Have you been reading research papers from the 1950's? If you get on any bus anywhere in the US, you are virtually guaranteed that the bus is less than 10 years old. The average replacement time for Municipal buses is 7 years...10 years with complete engine replacement.
Ruby is an awesome language. The community, particularly the community that revolves around rails, and the "uncle craftsmanship" baloney, leaves many wondering WTF. I can't stress enough how nice it is to use the ruby language to code and solve problems.
> There is only one case that justifies reimplementing things

Who are you to decide how she may spend her time? Why in the world do you think that she has to justify to you what projects she creates?
I wonder if Microsoft does the same with Skype, but I wouldn't bet on it. It would be great if they tried to be as open with government requests as Google is, though.
This is really cool. Except, why the need for a google account?
If you were ever in an accident, or became incapacitated, those passwords would be irretrievable in your head.

I think that a software password manager (regularly backed up) with a master password stored in a secure (offline) location is the best solution.
When we foreigners get together, we talk about pollution and the GFW since most of us don't hope to buy a house or get hukou :)
I'd argue that wrapping crappy syntax is decent syntax is 90% of what tools do.
dude, unix is serious.... oh, wait a minute...

Never mind.

"Everybody gets a Trophy!!!!!"
I don't think the really good hackers evaluate how they spend their time based on purely economic concerns (eg "Can I get good press out of this for my personal brand?")
I've got a modest proposal - the second simplest idea of them all.

Instead of beating around the bush with restrictions that should be ruled unconstitutional but won't be, simply ban all firearms. The building-a-better-world folks would be happy to finally get their wet dream. The constitutionalists could stop deluding themselves as to its applicability, and thus choose to secede or revolt. And everybody who wants personal freedom would be free of a red herring and could better concentrate on functional ways of neutering the modern governments' ability to do things like ban personal tools in the first place.
TechCrunch gives up on Facebook comments
I miss K5 sooooo much. I don't think we'll ever see a community like that again...
I must stick up for "replacize"! I think it's the very best thing in the script. Yes, "replace" is better English, but that would make "replaceFile" misleading — it's not the file that's being replaced at all, but regex matches within the file. To get clarity you'd need something like "replaceMatchesInFile", and that is quite a bit longer. Moreover, it's generic. When your program has a specific and unique technical concept, it's better to give that concept a specific and unique name and use that name consistently everywhere. (Best of all is when the name is lexically unique so you can grep it to obtain every single instance of the concept in your program. That property is so valuable that it deserves to have an essay written about it.) Generic English words are not always an advantage in code. As a program grows, they're likely to appear in more and more (unrelated) places, which makes them less and less valuable for conveying the program's key semantics.

"Replacize" is one of a zillion ways to get the desired effect, but it does it well and with style, and I like it. More than that, it's the one thing in the script that gives it conceptual unity. If you highlight "replacize" in your browser and jump between the various occurrences, the structure of the program immediately leaps out.

This kind of terminological pidgin, unique to a given program, can be very helpful in making code clear without making it verbose. The trick is to make sure that each such term has exactly one well-defined meaning and that it's used consistently everywhere that it applies. Eric Evans has called this the "ubiquitous language" of a program. The current script is tiny, of course, but if I see a programmer taking that degree of care with their writing anywhere, it's a stroke in their favor.

The thing in there that makes my eyes water, if not bleed, is the unfortunate duplication between the async and sync versions of the logic. But that is hardly the script's fault. It would have to be rectified at the level of the language and/or platform; little can be done about it in a program like this. Error handling too.
Why do people hate Node so much?
What exactly do you mean by "gun safety"? I don't think you're talking about accidental or negligent discharges resulting in injury or death. Firearm enthusiast groups, firearms manufacturers and dealers have put significant effort in to educating the public about safe handling which has reduced unintended shootings by a large amount over the past 50 years or so. This would be a strange problem for someone not involved in the firearms industry directly to tackle.

If you were to include suicide, which accounts for the majority of fatal gunshots, I submit that there doesn't appear to be much if any correlation between suicide rates and access to firearms internationally. I'd certainly try to keep a suicidal friend away from firearms, but it's just not that hard to find a quick and reliably way to end one's life. Suicide prevention probably shouldn't focus on methods of suicide.

If you're talking about reducing gun crime, I actually do have an idea. Right now, very few people who fail NICS background checks are prosecuted, yet many of them have committed a felony by lying on the background check form they're required to fill out when buying a gun from a dealer. If it's due to criminal history, the police should show up to deliver the news about the failure in person - and arrest the buyer. If it's for mental health reasons, the person should be involuntarily detained for psychiatric evaluation. Obviously, the false-positive rate needs to be low for this to work.
Total self-awareness is a biological impossibility.
Beijing is quickly moving to battery-drawn electric buses (not to mention traditional electric trolley buses). LNG is another solution, but for some reason, electric is catching on here (maybe b/c a lack of natural gas when compared to the states?)
So perhaps one of the HN responses could be "legalise, regulate and tax most of the illegal drugs". That would certainly send an interesting message.
So someone saw that an independent PC repair shop is offering to downgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 7 for a fee, and took a photo of it. A site called Cult of Mac writes some breathless commentary, slaps a rather sensationalistic title on it, and posts it on a page with a 3:1 advertisement-to-content ratio.

Not to disparage the good people at Cult of Mac, but color me unexcited. One technician disliking an operating system and seeing an opportunity to make a few hundred bucks in it is absolutely great fodder for an amusing photograph. And it's no secret that Windows 8 isn't winning any popularity contests. But it wasn't too long ago that manufacturers were actually shipping new PCs with a Windows XP downgrade disc included in the box. Call me jaded, but compared to that, this seems pretty tame.
great work guys..
Toggl and Freshbooks here. I personally love Toggl - some of my favorite features are its "you've been idle" notification that lets you drop, keep, or move the idle time to a new entry, the extended entry autocompletion (autocompletes all fields from typing into the description), and how easy it is to continue. The cloud solution helps a lot - I have a setup where I can just hit super-shift-e to log out of Ubuntu and close all programs and simply walk away without losing anything.

My one issue with Toggl is that it only syncs a specific task with Freshbooks once. This can be a pain at times if you need to go back and change some previous entries. Overall, however, it works pretty well.

What have your issues with Toggl been?
AMD's vision of "heterogenous computing"(I think they came up with a new name for this?) would essentually be the "true" fusion of a CPU and a GPU in a sense that the chip consists of general purpose execution units(current CPU cores) and of special purpose parallel processing units (curent GPU SIMD/VLIW units) which operate concurrently in such sense that both sequential and parallel code can be executed efficiently on per-thread basis and as threads processed concurrently.

Something like this would really help with things like raytracing. But then again, as Carmack mentions, the huge disadvantage are the acceleration structures which need to be discarded and rebuilt per frame for dynamic objects. It's like saying that raytracing is by it's nature inferior(or at least very wasteful) from performance point of view. It's like a problem to which you simply don't say "Just throw more hardware at it!".
To my (naive) eyes, your examples act as a compelling advertisement for her library.

The sed/xargs/etc. examples look increasingly like impossible-to-memorize line noise to me, while the --include, --exclude etc. options in `replace` are comprehensible and seem to follow standard command line argument practices.

Again, this is from a very entry-level unix tools perspective, but there it is.

It also seems to me that reimplementing things with the stated goal to make them easier to use has to be one of the best justifications around, no?

I hope I sound as respectful here as you did in your comment -- I certainly appreciated seeing a clear response to her library, so thanks for that.
Fuck it, ship it.

At least you're contributing to the world and bettering yourself.
If you would like some _actually_ horrible open source code to make fun of, feel free to peruse my early repos which are mostly from my freshman year of college (github/jpwright), including this god-awful function I apparently once wrote: https://github.com/jpwright/debcite/blob/master/search.php#L...
Video of Michigan State professor ordering a pizza using a computer in 1974
More important: why are you listening to what anyone on Twitter says? For that matter, why are you listening to what anyone on Hacker News says (assuming you read this)?

Personally, I have no idea what anyone might have said about any of my code on github on Twitter, blogs, or otherwise. No, scratch that, I remember a terrifying moment when I realized the link in a sentence along the lines of "who says Haskell isn't ready for the real world?" pointing to my serial port library in that language. Anyway, that's beside the point.

You should have a short list of people whose opinion matters. Hint: your family, a set of people whose character and abilities you respect, and anyone who has direct power over you (though if the third isn't a subset of the second, you might want to work on that, too). Random people on the Internet don't count, no matter how famous they may be in their sandbox.
You would need all nodes to hold almost all geometry, even when you achieve this, you would have to cut the screen into 10,000 pieces of pixels, and then trace each one individually. Some of these small ares would finish much faster than the others, and it would be hard to move them to do another job (or expensive).

But that's from my simple understanding, possibly there would be other problems too...
No, a "use case" is what we can do with it, not what it does.

So far, I am clueless as to where and how I can utilise this technology.
As long as we are comparing apples to grenades, a 20 yro bus with hardly any emissions equipment produces about 200 times soot as a new car with modern emissions. Its one problem we are dealing with in Beijing, that some of the older buses are so utterly primitive that they do more harm than good. Thankfully, these are going away.
Ridicule is an extremely poor motivational tool, and when someone of Linus' standing does it, other people think that makes it somehow ok.

There are many ways to reinforce meritocracy, or reinforce a culture without telling people to shut the fuck up in all caps.