skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ridiculous. Taking a month to learn Ruby is so vastly different than taking a month to learn vim that it defies comparison. One actually has the potential to give you an order of magnitude productivity gain while the other will do so little for you that you might as well call it nothing.

Let's exaggerate in order to enhance the effect.

Both you and I launch new startups to produce exactly the same web software product.

We both get programmers who have zero experience with vim and Ruby. Let's say they only know PHP and only know how to use Notepad++. No frameworks.

I have my programmers go to Ruby class and learn Ruby on Rails for a month.

You have them learn vim for a month. They get to stay with PHP.

Not fair? One is a framework designed to speed time to market while the other is just a text editor? Exactly!

Who do you think will see the greatest productivity gains in a month?

In six months?

Who will ship product first?

Who will ship product with more features?

Who will ship product with less bugs?

Who will go out of business?

Who will get fired by the board?

Right.

Or, let's take a different route:

Our investors just gave us a million dollars each for these startups.

I go to mine and propose that I want to have the entire team take a month to learn RoR due to the productivity and code quality gains we are going to be able to derive by taking this approach.

You go to yours and tell them that you want your team to spend a month learning vim because it takes too long to go from home row to the arrow keys and you can shave seconds while editing.

Sign-up for YC and tell PG that you are going to have your entire team go learn vim for a month instead of something that delivers real productivity gains that are orders of magnitude greater.

Who gets fired?

Again. Right.

When you measure what really matters just about any argument for vim is as hollow as can be.
Why not use something better in the meantime?
I was a bit hopeful when supplies became constrained in the non-Apple Store channels:
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/01/14/apple-thunderbolt-displa...

Shortly after that, Best Buy discounted them a bit ($50), suggesting to me they wanted to empty the shelves for new models (as they surely aren't automatic sales like iPads).

However, at this point I'm not convinced it'll be too soon, as whatever momentum the "signs" pointed to seems to have worn off.
Standard incompetent Facebook UI.
Very good example! And there is an absolutely huge correlation between good testing and domain experience irrespective of freelance/permanent. I've seen entire teams of permanent testers miss critical bugs because they're busy stressing the system and trying edge cases but don't actually use it like a user because they don't know their users.
San Francisco Style
Analysis behind 'Harlem Shake' virality
Ask HN: Do you prefer 'how to' articles to include command line output?
When reading 'how to' articles that require commands to be run at the terminal, do you prefer to see that actual output of the command included in the article, or just the command itself (knowing that you'll see the output when you execute the command)?
No, you're linking to a thread about the Mac Pro, not the MacBook Pro. :-)
It seems to me that Facebook has always been stuck with a damned lot: to make their product profitable, they have make their product worse. This is exactly the problem with "social" games. These games are lousy exactly because the lousy features make them money. With the direction that Facebook is going, it seems to be a service where users volunteer to receive spam. I do not think any company in this position is setup for long-term success.

On a philosophical note, I have always felt that Facebook is just a slot machine company. They make a fancy box that takes advantage of the weaknesses of the human brain (obsession with novelty, gossip, and visual stimulus) to keep users doing an activity for much longer than required to get the benefit of that activity. I could be radical and say that I think Facebook delivers no value to its customers and that most people end up actively regretting the time they spend on Facebook (I think it is uncontroversial to say that no one goes to bed wishing he had spent more of his day on Facebook), however there is always someone with a story about reuniting with a long-lost elementary school friend due to Facebook. Nonetheless, even if this value does exist, in no way does it justify the amount of time most Facebook users spend on the site nor does it describe the majority of user activity. This is not to say that Facebook is doomed any more than Las Vegas is doomed, but maybe people will wise up and be more careful about how they spend their time...

A bit of anecdote: I have noticed people on reddit commenting that they now use reddit more than Facebook as all the good content on Facebook is just copied from reddit. If reddit had some kind of social interface, it might move aggressively into this market.
Apple offers refund after British boy spends $2500 on In-App purchases in 15 Min
Less glare would be nice. Maybe I'm dreaming, but after using a MBPr I think I'd want higher resolution, too.
Your browser has awful defaults. There's no CSS, so your browser is responsible for presenting it in a readable form.
I just freshly installed vi and tried that. Here's what I was greeted with. http://pastebin.com/HxvNP6Tr I've seen the tutorial that you're probably talking about a few years ago when I got curious about vi. It didn't really do it for me at the time.

I'm prepared to believe that people willing to tolerate its ideosyncracies can be very productive in vi or vim. I've seen it first-hand. It also appears to be well suited to potentially reducing rsi-type problems. But it is not intuitive to learn nor is it the least bit friendly. That's a shame too because there is no good reason why it couldn't be so.
It'd be a nice touch to note discontinuation based on overdueness. The classic isn't way overdue, it's discontinued.
> and that essentially creates a new, separate product.

New, yes, separate, no. Vim has the same modes, the same handicaps, as its predecessor.

> As for modes - I didn't want to get into this ... (long discussion of modes)

This reminds me of a famous and very funny monologue in "Five Easy Pieces" in which a woman talks endlessly about some truly boring topic, punctuated with "But I don't want to talk about it" over and over again. It's priceless.

> Your argument is that "every other editor is modeless" - and it's false.

It's true. Apart from the occasional editor that ridicules vi by including a vi emulation mode, just as a comic riff for modern programmers who aren't aware how bad things were and how far they've come ...

> The truth is that almost every modern, serious editor includes vi emulation mode

... ah, so that's what you were talking about. Obviously an editor that includes a vi emulator mode can't be accused of requiring what vi requires. Or don't you see that?

> So your argument is simply wrong.

Hospitals are equipped with wheelchairs and crutches -- does this mean that's their goal? No, it means they realize something may go very wrong and they want to be prepared.

The reason for vi emulation mode is to accommodate people who are beyond meaningful retraining. Have you heard that you can't teach a dead dog new tricks?

What I find shocking is that new programmers will start learning vi/vim without realizing how primitive it is by modern standards. This thread can only perpetuate the fantasy that vi/vim is anything but a way to avoid abandoning older programmers and their skill set entirely.

> Would you say that Win95 is the same as DOS?

Does it still require drive letters? There's your answer -- drive letters stand for (but doesn't exhaust) all the things that are wrong with Windows. By the same token, requiring mode switches stands for all the things that are wrong with vi/vim.
The work-stealing part can be understood as automatic, but Java's FJ is responsible for that AFAICT.

Having to state "do this in parallel" (by using clojure.core.reducers fns instead of their clojure.core counterparts) is not automatic but explicit parallelization.

I believe that the idea of a compiler that will infer the parallelizable parts of your code crosses the limits of computability.
Corporations who want legislation passed will try repeatedly until it is passed. They have no incentive not to. What really matters is just how many people will continually combat this. Eventually people tire of fighting and they win.
DyND is being developed as a low-level support library for Blaze.

Blaze is focused on supporting many things like distributed storage, distributed computation, out of core computation, and high level representations of computation that can move code to where the data lies.

DyND is focused on data that is purely in memory, and defines a dynamic multi-dimension data structure that Blaze can use as a support library. The development of DyND is also strictly partitioned into a C++ library, which could be used by other systems that do not want to depend on a Python runtime, and a Python module which exposes its functionality to Python.

They're still in a relatively experimental state.
Potential viral trends need to be picked up by "someone of higher standing in the social media world", he says - Have you guys seen any good apps/sites to identify 'amplifiers/influences' in specific topics - across many social media?
The real crime is that programmers have so little time for the exploratory work that the career requires that they have to do all of that off-hours

All professionals do this: doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. This is why professionals get paid more than non-professionals; they are expected to learn on their own time rather than on the job. Even employers who provide continuing education at the workplace don't count that time as billable time. (Note that people who members of multiple professions must satisfy professional obligations for all of those professions, i.e., a lawyer-accountant must satisfy both CLE and CPE requirements.)

Welcome to the club.
These two are great:

https://github.com/SpiderOak/crypton/issues/21

https://github.com/SpiderOak/crypton/issues/25

"Note that they have been repeatedly factored for such vital purposes as playing games on calculators." You're mean! :)
I mean no offense, but generally it's not a good sign for a lawsuit when counsel goes to withdraw this far into it.
I don't know, but it demolishes the last shred of confidence I had that Wells Fargo had anything resembling a clue about technology, and security of web apps in particular.

I've used a few of their services before, and they are all horrible abominations from signup on through.
I am aware of what you have brought up. Racism is very evil indeed.. We should do all that we can to never be racist and work to stop racism... easier said than done
Macbook Pro (15") was updated couple of weeks ago, why this one says 263 days? Yes the retina one, isn't retina ones are successors of a previous model? Why keep them separate, I think Macbook Pro without retina will be obsolete and won't be updated.
its not always possible to go with the "non-copy" choice. for example, there are very good reasons for having immutable strings, and once you've made that choice at the language level every string function you write is going to copy at least once.

I think Alex Gaynor is correct and that basically what is wrong at the moment is that dynamic languages lack API's that have any sensitivity to performance concerns. There's always going to be a hard limit based on the nature of using a JIT vs. a static multi-pass compiler. There's always going to be a hard limit based on fundamental language choices (implementations of primitives, mutable vs. immutable strings, amount of overhead in object instantation, etc.) But we're nowhere near those limits right now.
The Coolest Experience I Had as an Apple Store Employee
I'm not sure if I understand, do you mean something like this? http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic
The memory hierarchy can be pretty complicated, but the general design, the part that's making the rest possible, seems to me that it's stacking ISAM. It might not be a simple stacking, you need to tune the parameters to deal with various cache levels. But it's the same principle, isn't it?

I agree the hardware is quite different, vastly more complex.
For example, before the legal profession went to hell, 1200 billable hours was the requirement. Remaining time was for networking, keeping current, attending conferences, etc. If you billed 1500 hours, you were a rock star and guaranteed to make partner. Enough money was made in the billed hours to pay for the off-meter stuff.

I don't know who told you this, but this is inaccurate. 1600 was the normal billable hour standard prior to the legal boom among large law firms; 1500 was the standard among smaller law firms. Government lawyers were expected to spend 1800 hours or more on legal tasks (36 hours/week accounting for 2 weeks vacation). 1200 was only ever the requirement for partners, since their time by necessity include a lot of unbillable time spent with clients or potential clients.

Enough money was made in the billed hours to pay for the off-meter stuff

Lawyers used to bill their clients for everything, including the paper drafts were printed on. When the state bar associations and clients clamped down on these practices in the late 1990s, billing rates started going up, and kept going up when firms realized that clients were willing to pay.
For a minute I've misread it as "overcomes" and thought the article is from the past....
Yup - just exactly as easy as it is for a developer to say "no bugs in my code" and leave the job well before a critical ID used in a database reaches the limit of the "INT" definition that was applied instead of "LONGINT". In both situations you want to build a level of trust (and contracts/NDAs/liability insurances) between freelancer and customer ;)
Is it me or is it weird to say "thanks for the cross-post" for something written by Dennis Ritchie?
I built my own because their design, and I mean literally the way they visualize the data, isn't very good. Or rather, it's not as good as it could be. They even updated the design a year or two ago and all they did was give it a coat of paint, rather than rethinking how to best visualize the data.
I think security bugs in Dalvik have less ramifications, because of at least 2 reasons:

1. Java code doesn't get executed by Dalvik automatically from web sites etc - an attacker has to get the user to install his application.

2. If an attacker manages to get the user to install and run his application, Dalvik security bugs are close to useless to him because Android applications can load native code without needing permission from the user. His problem is going to be circumventing the restrictions enforced by the kernel and system daemons running on the system. Android doesn't enforce permissions at the JVM level AFAIK.

To clarify here I meant vulnerabilities in the JVM that have to be triggered by malicious Java bytecode. Vulnerabilities which make applications themselves vulnerable are more problematic of course.
Software Freedom Conservancy publishes annual report and public filings
rock on luke... thanks for sharing lessons learned with the startup community.
This is a serious marketing problem about perceived value in B2B entreprise stuff. We had the same kind of problem the product was really technological: 15 years of research, a prover, 6-7 PhD and stuff like that. But I decided to simplify the interface to a minimum, and every parameter tuning should be automatic. We ended up with just a few buttons in a toolbar and a few views embedded in an eclipse plugin. Then the customers where thinking that an "eclipse plugin is not worth 10k€", because the technology was hidden.
One of the best designers I've ever worked with had a similar great strategy with clients who considered themselves design experts (usually senior marketing/advertising managers) and who would almost inevitably want to change something in the “final” design.

The solution he had was to leave one obvious minor flaw in the final design – a color which doesn't quite match, odd font choice, etc. It was a lighting rod for unnecessary fiddling and was quite successful for keeping the changes quick and low-impact.
It would be interesting indeed if private industry had already arrived at this and not realised what they had on their hands. My mind is screaming this again http://xkcd.com/664/
Yea, it does get a little paranoid, but the point is certainly valid. In coffee shops and restaurants we tend to have semi personal conversations knowing that even if someone is listening, we'll never see them again and the little snippets they hear of the conversation (bitstream) will cycle out of their memory soon enough. Try having that same conversation when someone with Glass sits down next to you. Its a very valid point, it can change the entire dynamic of a pubic space, without a socially acceptable way of telling the person to stop - like if they were blabbing on a cellphone.

I remember this article a few months ago:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/cyborg-professor-claim...

I sided with the guy with the glasses, after reading this article, not so much.

*Note, when I first read this article, there was no freaky picture with it.
I see you have the same power as L. Laporte.
You could also buy a refurbished mac. They tend to be about $300 cheaper than the retail version and tend not to have any problems. I just bought one and so far its been perfect.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac
> I'm glad you like your modern editors (there's lots there to love), but they are not inherently better than vim just because they're non-modal.

Yes, in point of fact, they are better than vi/vim because they are non-modal. When all is said and done, dropping vi's modes makes an editor better and more efficient.

> Like delete the next four words? How do I do that in a modern editor with a single keystroke?

You can't delete four words with a single keystroke. You can delete [N] words, but only after switching modes and choosing the desired number.

Source: http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/vi2.html#delete

Quote: "ndw : Deletes the next n words starting with current"

The above assumes you're already switched to the required mode, so a minimum of four keystrokes if the number [N] is a single digit. Then, to continue typing, you have to switch back to the mode you started from. Total five keystrokes minimum.

> In the end, two things sealed the deal for VIM for me. 1) it's on every remote server I have to access, and 2) I've put the time into it, so I'm quite efficient in it.

This is circular reasoning. The reason vi or vim is out there on all those servers is because of the number of people who haven't learned anything else.
What I would find useful is seeing the things blocking each update. E.g. Mac Pro waiting on new Xeon CPUs from Intel, new iPad basically not enough time since last release, EOL for iPod classic, etc.
Yeah, Apple counts it as a release. The updated retina MBP 13" describes itself as an "Early 2013".
Hmm, if so and so is going to happen, it will take someone to actually do it, so the real question is who will do it, and how? Anyone up for it ? Anyone?

10 bucks says, it will be 2014, not 2013, given how much time it will take at minimum to catch up to FB
yep.. its a theatre all right
Flowers To Brighten Someone Else's Day All Year Round
> I disagree that Pico is easy to use.

I didn't say Pico was easy to use. I said it was easier to use than vi/vim.
> No one wants a major version bump in Bundler in order to change the primary rubygems URL because historically there is a lot of potential pain in Bundler updates

SemVer seems pretty much tangential to that, that's a problem with the particular history of the particular project.

If the original claim had been "Bundler's history of major version updates means that they don't want to bump their major version; combined with their commitment to SemVer, that means that any backward incompatible changes are avoided", rather than just that SemVer alone led to people in general seeking to avoid backward-incompatible changes, I wouldn't have challenged it.
IntelliJ IDEA has both "expand selection outward" and "wrap selection in if/trycatch/while/etc" functions. They both work pretty much how you describe them here. They're language-dependent, too, so they work in any language that the IDE can understand internally.
Exactly this. 5 years ago I would spend many hours browsing friends walls and playing games. These days I check it for 5 mins for messages and try to ignore the superfluous ads and like spam. Most of my friends have gone from having a new update every other day to updating monthly or less. Facebook will stay around as a tool but it is certainly no longer a social destination.
There's a (Dilbert?) comic somewhere out there about this. Can't find it at the moment, though :-/

edit found it: http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/...
A bit of propaganda is always good.
I've been watching this with some interest. It was particularly interesting to see how much better Canonical did creating a credible 'desktop->laptop->tablet->phone' design for an OS than Microsoft did. Microsoft could do a lot worse than just copy it.

That said, Glass and what not threaten to upset the applecart. There is a lot of potential in the 'smart brick in your pocket' linking to a variety of UI devices around your body, that has yet to be played out.
I know this isn't curiosity, but it remains the greatest commentary on the Mars Rover program yet.

http://xkcd.com/695/
Obviously at this point we're talking about the fact that you are harassing me, not money transmission laws.

PlainSite's database of public information (which is freely available to non-lawyers) is a public good. Operation Asymptote is an attempt, from which I have no way of profiting exclusively or directly, to increase the value of that public good. The only way that I might profit from Operation Asymptote is indirectly. So your argument that the "effort that happened to be remunerative to [my]self" is plainly false and deliberately misleading and possibly damaging to my reputation.

Your insightful comments about computer security on this forum are a public good. You might profit from them if someone finds them one day and agrees with or wants to know more about something you say--but so might anyone else.

The difference here is that you are (wrongly and publicly) accusing me of improper conduct for failing to note that I might profit from more public information being available, and I am not accusing you of anything because helping to improve the commons is supposed to help everyone profit, and I am glad to learn about computer security from you, and to also see you make a living from it.

So this is my last warning. Stop harassing me.
"We write programs & formulas to deliver the best results possible."

No kidding.
Thomas has a contrarian bent. I've disagreed with him as much as anyone, I think, but I wouldn't take it too personally.

Thanks for all the information, though. That was a fascinating read. FWIW, I'm on your side and would like to see some sensible regulation at the federal level, rather than a patchwork of state laws.
Vint Cerf envisions an interspecies internet
A price drop would be enough. Surely they could sell them a lot cheaper at the high volume they would get cutting the price.
I started using pelican recently and I really enjoy static site generation. It's amazing how little needs to actually execute server side (blog content in a database?) It's also much easier to focus on writing when I don't have shiny objects distracting me.