skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Few ideas:

1. Part of the issue today I believe is the standardization. Inherent in standardization is depersonalization, lower standards, skewed values and incentives, which leads to a mediocracy, and demoralization ensues, which leads to lack of care, which is directly related to a dying curiosity.

2. Another part is the poor understanding and poor acknowledgement of how humans learn. Meaning the system in places doesn't cater for the basic needs of kids/adults.

3. A third is a potential misalignment or friction between societal expectations of behavior and human nature.

Lastly, just because it could be true that people have always become disillusioned doesn't mean that the school isn't a driving force.
Because the prizes are usually not even enough to recoup the cost of the R&D, much less recoup the cost of R&D once you account for the probability of not winning. The Ansari X Prize was only $10 million, which is nothing in aerospace.

Actually, it somewhat ironic to use the X Prize as an example here. Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites won the X Prize, with Spaceship One. Spaceship One was a joint venture between Rutan and Microsoft's Paul Allen. The investment vehicle was Mojave Aerospace Ventures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Aerospace_Ventures) which is basically an IP holding company that controls commercialization of the patented Spaceship One technology through licensing agreements.

Scaled Composites itself is actually a great example of the kind of separation of concerns that patents enable. They don't make end-user products really. They're a small engineering outfit that does mostly R&D. They make money by consulting, contracting to build specialized components, and licensing their substantial patent portfolio. The company doesn't have a ton of big factories, etc. The value of the company that Rutan spent 30 years building is engineers that could walk away at any moment and a pile of IP.
Full MAME emulator for non-jailbroken iOS
> When Apple dropped the floppy drive they were not trying to screw over consumers, they were looking forward and realizing that documents would not fit on a 1.4mb storage medium for much longer and they were right.

No, they dropped the floppy disk for aesthetic reasons. Steve was adamant about there being only a trayless CD drive, and USB. The original iMac had a CD tray, but it was switched to trayless in the first revision.

This came back to haunt them, as early CD burners only came with a tray, but aesthetics trumped utility.
http://betapunch.com gets you one real user to record their experience using and talking about your website.
I use shift-it for my basic tiling/resizing concerns. Maximizing is just option-command-F, which is pretty natural to hit for me.

https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
The nice thing about building your own computer is you know EXACTLY what you're getting. If something breaks, you have the wherewithal to buy a replacement and fix it yourself.

I don't think I'll ever buy another Mac desktop, because I'm so thrilled with the ability to "look under the hood."
It's implicit in your argument. The idea that immigration should be turned off to alleviate unemployment is a common economic fallacy, which ignores the fact that immigrants also consume and therefore create more demand and more industrial activity and more jobs. This works out nicely economically because the receiving country hasn't paid for them to be educated or nursed through childhood, so the immigrants are effectively little engines of consumption without any social debt, significantly increasing the economic benefit of their spending.

I admit that this won't make much sense if you haven't taken some economics classes, it's counter-intuitive.
For an example of a runtime state machine, you may want to take a look at Russ Cox's implementation of NFA simulation for regexp in go [1]. The concepts may be a little impenetrable for a Sunday, but there are some interesting references in the source.

[1] http://golang.org/src/pkg/regexp/exec.go
Zerofund: Kickstarting Greece’s startup scene
The reason I didn't do that is a function from state to state is pure in a functional programming sense as well as being simple, free from virtual dispatch and indirection, and thus fast. It's also easy to harness for testing, because it's side effect free and stateless.

If you wanted to extend it to perform actions on state change, I'd extend the return values to (State, Action, error) where Action is "type Action int" as well, and use the Action in another switch. Thus you are free to pick which actions you care about, and test the actions separately from the state engine.
What's even worse is that the install script at https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh is also unavailable, which is the default way of getting chef installed onto newly provisioned server.
People keep forgetting that they didn't want a totally paralyzed one either. You're cherry-picking, like most people who invoke the founding fathers to win an argument.
He already knows how to develop knowledge when confronted with his own lack of it

you act like he hasn't already learned linux administration/networking/programming on his own
Combine a Tesla w/ Google's self-driving technology and coat it in an Apple design. One can dream.
Are you going to say why, or just let us guess?
Never happens to me. I'm always eager to finish, release and go on. Good enough for the users? Publish. Not so good? Publish. Some will bear it, the rest will swear it and I'll know what to fix.

I'd very much prefer to pick up an apple that isn't perfect than having no apple at all because of looking for the perfect one forever.
Mathematical notation is ambiguous and therefore unsuited to parsing as a computer syntax. s(x + y) can represent scalar multiplication, or function application. Mathematica only uses s(x + y) for scalar multiplication and s[x + y] for function application to avoid this problem. Sin[alpha], etc. is just a symptom of its consistent naming convention for built-ins. The use of Capitalised names frees you to create your own function names in lowercase without fretting about namespace conflicts.

I've downloaded Mathics onto my Mac, unpacked it, installed it and tested it without issue. The web interface works well too. I'm very impressed with this software and appreciate all their efforts, especially what appear to be well commented sources. To complain that a better notation could have been used is to completely miss the point. This is for people who would like to use Mathematica syntax but can't afford the licence. I've got four books on Mathematica, but can't remotely afford to purchase it.
I'm pretty sure that of the many devs who've switched from Windows to OS X (it's really fascinating to see how many) we're going to see at one point quite some switching, like you, to Linux.

Stuff that I can't stand on OS X: no great firewalling. Sure, I can have an "easy" firewall, but not a great one.

By great I mean that on Linux I can do stuff like: "Block every single packet that is not part of an established and only allow user whose user ID is xxx to contact port 80/443 and only allow user whose user ID is yyyy to connect to port 22".

But to me the biggest showstopper under OS X is that you can't have simultaneously several graphical sessions. A browser, for example, is something that begs to be run in its own user account (for example a throwaway user account or one severly crippled using quota + specific firewall rules only allowing that user to browse the web and that's it, no login shells, etc.). Then you can either have that user run it's own graphical session (even at a different screen size if you want) or have that user run its browser in the graphical session of another user (not the same safest, but still way more secure than simply browsing with your main user account -- which has to be the one most insecure thing most devs are doing).

Linux makes all that super easy and as a developer --and for anyone that is a bit concerned about security-- it is great.

You can't do that on OS X. There are limits once you want to "get fancy".

And when the exodus shall start, I'm sure quite a lot will realize that Linux is actually amazing and that they did actually miss a lot.

And I'm no sysadmin: just a dev. But of course it helps when your server are also running Linux (or another Unx) and it also helps when you have to talk to the sysadmin guy (say because your app is ruining its servers' perfs) and that he sees that you know a tiny bit of Unx work ; )
It's the "zoom" button, and it's supposed to toggle between two sizes: user state (whatever you last dragged the window borders to be), and standard state (whatever the application thinks makes sense for the window's content [1].

This works for applications where the content has a natural fixed size (for example, Photoshop snaps the window to the size of the image), but breaks down for flexible content (web browsers, terminal windows, etc.). Also, it's up to application developers to get this right, which isn't always the case.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...
This was my change agent, too. I could finally stop diagnosing install issues and focus on development. Cygwin was great for me from ~2003-2006, but with Intel chips + VMware or Parallels, I could get the right development and not give up Windows Excel or Windows Outlook (even today, the Mac versions of those both pale in comparison), which were still essential for me.
Pointer arithmetic is an important feature in languages like C, but languages like Go don't really want it. The language domain doesn't call for and it plays havoc with the GC.
I experienced laggy bad scrolling on the Nexus 7 and it turns out the problem was other applications running on the device. I rarely have the problem but if I do, I just swipe off some old apps and it speeds right back up. It's probably just one app but I haven't bothered to figure out which.

I moved off of Chrome as my default browser and now use Dolphin with Jetpack -- no only is it faster but it generally works better for pinching and zooming.
Interesting fact about the interesting facts at the bottom: each point is reached an infinite number of times only when a random walk is performed in one or two-dimensional space. For dimensions >=3, an infinite walk visits each point a finite number of times, which means that, while the random walker may return to the starting point one or more times after starting, it will eventually wander off forever. This has been described as, "A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever."
After my 13" MBP was stolen, I brought my CR-48 out of hibernation and have been using it as my primary machine for nearly 6 months.

It is indeed a great computer, but I can't help thinking a used Macbook, Thinkpad, or the plethora of netbooks on the market would better serve even the most avid of hackers.

May I ask what puts you off with it's current incarnation, the Chromebook? It 's only $200 (and up). The external branding can be resolved with a $5 can of 'Plasti-dip', a screwdriver, and a bit of time. You'll end up a with a black, rubberized finish similar to the CR-48.
He writes better then a lot of the people that I've dealt with in my 23 years in the computer industry
Apple is already killing off device support, sometimes (seemingly) for marketing reasons. With iOS 6, Apple dropped support for the first-generation iPad, but continued to support the iPhone 3GS (which I cannot imagine being much faster [edit: see Xuzz's reply to this comment]). The obvious reason, from my layman's perspective, is sales: the iPhone 3GS was on the market more recently, so the (newer) iPad got the ax.

Apple also tied app support for the iPhone 5, and future iPhones, to ending support for the iPhone 3G and its ilk; I understand that long build times are far from desirable, but this move seems like a great way to encourage upgrades.

Then again, maybe I'm just a cynic.

Edit: I've not used an iPhone 3GS on a day-to-day basis, but I've seen better performance out of my first gen iPad (and maybe it's just me) just before it was EOL'd than I ever saw with the iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2G family, both of which were truly awful performance-wise before Apple pulled the plug. I'm guessing the real reason for keeping support for the iPhone 3GS but not the iPad 1G was, as coob mentioned, the fact that it was on sale when iOS 6 was released.
This was proposed in 2011 http://microformats.org/wiki/rejected-formats#Logo
The thing that mentally holds me back, rather than the immigration issue, is the threat of patent trolls. I don't know whether this threat is real or imagined, but it appears to be a non-issue if you're operating outside of the US.
Even with no context, there are (at least) two ways I can imagine responses to this post:

1) "What a prima donna! She shouldn't complain, she should be glad she has a paying job! Those who count in this world don't say 'it can't be done' or 'I don't want to do that', but instead get working on the solution."

2) "Good for her for standing up and deciding to make a change and doing what she enjoys, and not letting others pigeonhole her."
> I absolutely resent that idea that "science" should only be something for the experts, and everybody without a PhD should shut up about it.

making some off the cuff, armchair observations within a particular field of study (and blogging and serially promoting them to hacker news) without even making casual efforts to familiarize oneself with at least portions the vast amounts of knowledge publicly available on that field is, generously, pretty bad "science". And less generously, it's just hubris. This is not an "amateur researcher", this is someone who apparently based on posting history has a really high blogging-to-value ratio.

Of course, we all have the right to be clueless. I only requested that perhaps Hacker News doesn't want to encourage a culture of armchair cluelessness and particularly someone who appears to be a serial armchair blogger/HN promoter (see https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog).
It works for me with most things, just certain apps break it. If you use the bookmarks widget or have multiple Wikipedia apps on the GNex you'll see what I mean. And it's (surprisingly) worse on the N7.
As someone who uses Transmit... what would you recommend instead? Command-line sftp?
That was my thought. Anything that can be grasped solely by reading wikipedia or blogs isn't actually very cutting-edge. Not to say that stuff on wiki or blogs can't be very difficult to grasp, if previously unfamiliar.
A good reason for jailbreaking is to allow you to set any browser as the default browser and allow any 3rd party UIWebView application the ability to use the Nitro JS engine that Safari uses.

My default browser on iOS is Chrome and it runs as fast as Safari.
I don't know how many Asian immigrants you've worked with, but the vast majority in my experience were well-heeled in their home country.

My last job was in India, so I know a bit about it. The living conditions of the "middle class" in India are generally well below that of the poor in the US. Upper class lawyers and executives in Bandra and Colaba (richer areas of Mumbai) were little better off than people in housing projects in the US.

The very richest people were able to afford luxuries like 23/7 (undrinkable) water, electricity, or maybe even a car. In contrast, about 70% of the US poor have a car and nearly all have water+power. But you are right that those who could afford a car could also afford a driver.

The bulk of immigrant software engineers might have been rich by Indian standards. But they were very likely poor by US standards.

This graph makes the point well: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

The top 5'th percentile in India is poorer than the bottom 5'th percentile in the US.
I wrote a userstyle for Firefox mobile that gets rid of the different sized text on comments and makes the whole of hn more readable:

http://userstyles.org/styles/82587/hacker-news-responsive-fo...
I've tried other browsers and I keep coming back to Dolphin because it has some things that nothing else has that I've found. (This is on ICS)

* Gesture-based commands. I read a lot of long text pages (OK, very long text pages), and I love that I can tap in the bottom left corner and swipe a V to go straight to the bottom. The reverse gesture also works, and there are both forward and back options as well, though I don't recall which gestures I've added and which were already there. I may have added the "Close current tab" one. By the way, you can also define your own gestures. I think this may actually be my killer feature for it.

* Tabbed browsing that works well for me - I can long-hold on a link and "Open in Background" then go to that link later, though I'll admit that this sometimes seems flaky - I've had enough times where it failed to open the link that I sometimes verify with a quick downward swipe on the page to make the tabs show at the top.

* Plugins - in particular, quick access to LastPass and Save to Pocket - I have others but don't tend to use them. these are accessed by a swipe from right to left.

* Bookmarking and bookmark editing - A swipe from left to right will open the bookmarks, nested folders are available, hitting the gear icon lets you edit, etc. There's some sort of synchronization available, but I don't use it.

* Simple home screen customization - I really have 4-5 sites I hit most often, and they're right there with one click when I start the app up.

* Various useful menus for tab operations (long-hold on a tab) and page operations (long-hold on the URL field).

* Dolphin Jetpack - I can't overstate this one enough. For a long time it wasn't clear to me which browsers were actually doing their own rendering vs. being a skin on the built-in Webkit. With Jetpack, Dolphin has its own much-more-updated rendering backend with HTML5 support, etc. and for many of the pages I read the performance difference is extremely visible.

And addressing things that other people have commented on:

* Full-screen mode is available with that same right-to-left swipe.

* There is a privacy mode but it's inconvenient (Menu-More-Settings-Privacy&Personal Data-Private Mode). You can create a new gesture to switch quickly to "Browsing without history" but I'm not sure if that's entirely the same thing.

Biggest annoyance:

* Using Swype beta and entering URLs, the combination of Swype attempting to do autocompletion and Dolphin trying to do autocompletion is painful at best, and I've had occasions where Dolphin will just silently die (e.g. trying to type in "baen.com/Eleutherios.asp" which died after I'd been poking around writing this, but worked fine after I restarted Dolphin).
I think your extension was one of the few I tried. Sorry for the slight bashing, I appreciate what you're doing and I'd actually like to help you out in any way I can!

Have you tried getting in touch with Chrome developers? Printing out info when hot swapping failed would really make you extension useful.

Weirdly, I haven't noticed failures while using the Chrome editor. Might be that I just haven't logged enough hours with it yet, but so far it was working flawlessly.
That is fantastic, thank you for this.
That's a Maserati problem ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444003 ).

I wouldn't worry too much about that one... when you're a success you'll get sued for something no matter where you are based.
Writing correct code is about chosing correct data structures for the problem at hand as much as "coding".

And chosing the correct data structure comes down to understanding the performances (using Big-O / best-worst-average or Analytic Combinatorics) of the operations you're going to perform and the algorithms you're going to use on these data structures.

It really sucks to have to refactor a codebase because some coder thoughts that lists would have been great there when actually a bi-dir map was what was needed (and vice-versa).
I tend to get pedantic about it given my background in compiler design.

I find sad that young generations mix languages with implementations and get wrong concepts that a certain language can only be implemented in a specific way.
Mardi Gras music visualizer
Those crazy, cajun coders at Team Rave (aka NCR Studios) have released a new hack for

Mardi Gras: Give Me Beads music visualization. It is the first visualizer designed to

work with cloud music sources (Pandora, Last.fm, SoundCloud, or any music input).
I assumed dropping the iPad had more to do with pushing all those extra pixels and low memory problems.
The iPhone 3GS is much faster than the original iPad. On the iPhone 3GS, you have a reasonably slow CPU and GPU, but you also only have 320x480 pixels to deal with. On the iPad, you have a slightly faster CPU and GPU (but still single core), but have to render to 1024x760 — way more pixels. You also don't have any extra RAM on the iPad, but your images and framebuffer still have to cover that extra area.

The net result is that the iPhone 3GS is much faster in practice than the original iPad (or the iPod touch 4G, which has similar issues to a lesser extent — but which they still sell, so can't drop support for). Another similarly underpowered device is the iPad 3, so I'd expect them to drop support for that even before the older iPad 2.
Machines do lots of 'programming' and there are lots of contexts in which they do it. For example GCC works with GIMPLE

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/GIMPLE.html#GIMPLE

All sorts of compilers write machine code based on intermediate languages or human readable source.

If you want to know what paradigms they follow, you would have to look at the internal data structures of each tool. Usually, a machine figuring out how to 'go fetch a beer' is only going to use the tools and techniques that its builder designed it to.

Even if you have built a powerful optimization system, its optimizations will probably be over-optimized to the point where no single identifiable paradigm for solving a large number of problems emerges. Programming languages and paradigms used by people are practical trade-offs that meet the majority of problems in a good, but not the best way.

That's why it sometimes is dumb to pursue languages or paradigms that fit a particular problem extremely well or to explore esoteric and meaningless language constructs except in the hopes that it will lead to some practical and general usefulness later. Mathematics historically has always had people diving into the most esoteric depths, not because it was useful, but because it was a conspicuous display of wealth of time and effort.
"Done is better than perfect" is brilliant. It is motivational, succinct, and easy to believe. From my particularly context of a side project with no real deadlines, however, I can have perfect if I want to. There's no race against the clock, nobody to report to, nobody relying on my results -- just me and my idea.

At any rate, I'll tweak the "done-perfect" lever more towards done.