skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This would be exactly the same with paper printers.

"You can't print and bind books!"

"You have to order paper and ink!"

"Printer paper and ink are much too expensive!"

"The printer you buy will become out-dated too quickly!"

"Home printing does not leverage economies of scale!"

For something you can pick up at the supermarket for a few dollars that requires a lot of printing/materials (a book) it doesn't make sense. For something you can't (custom items, small parts, little toys, ...), home printing is (or will be) great.

3D printing doesn't have to meet every use case of commercial 3D printing to become very prevalent.
Given that 90% of experienced programmers fall on the side of "i or gtfo", the onus is on you to prove that "counter" is beneficial. Any time I see a long variable name, I naturally assume it is important, and has a large scope. When you lie to me with your code, that makes it harder to read, not easier.
Indeed. Who would have more than one material to print with? Well, probably everyone. And material science being what it is, you can imagine it won't be long before we can combine materials in ways previously unforeseen.

There's also an implicit assumption here that the design of objects will not change to support their production method. So, if we're limited by size or number of materials then designers will adapt to those constraints.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic.

I am not sure a mission to Mars would really inspire people to such an extent that it would be worth it.

We have robots on Mars right now. Think about that for a moment: Humanity has robots on another planet this very second. How many kids are in awe of that? How many have thoughts about this on a daily basis?

The sad reality is that a lot of kids (and adults) are far more preoccupied with moving up the level playing Clash of Clans on their iPads than what's going on with space exploration. One is far more tangible and satisfying than the other.

An "Enterprise One" concept would have real continuing research benefits and an opportunity to, perhaps, elevate awareness and interest in the sciences. Missions to the Moon are far more tangible than a two year run to Mars.

I am all for inspiration. Not sure a dueling middle-aged married couple going to Mars would serve that purpose. The other problem is that all manner of things can happen during such a trip. Darwin forgive, if one or both of them die in transit they'll friggin ruin far-space travel for at least a generation.
It's not just journalism.

At least one major conference organizer / publisher is really skinny on speaker expenses to the extent it costs speakers money to go talk at their conferences.
Never awaitUninterruptibly() on Netty Channels
That's actually a really tough question. I think that there aren't any sources that I consider totally good. I generally read quite a few, and find one or two that cover each issue well. For example, I usually quite like the BBCs international reporting, but have felt a bit let down by their tech coverage recently. The Guardian (UK) can be good, but it can stray too far (for me) to left wing tub-thumbing at times. Places like The Atlantic and HuffPost have the occasional decent article, but I don't usually bother with them unless I know I can trust the author. I used to read the FT's (UK) general news and found it good, but it's been a while since I picked it up.
May want to rethink your proposed hurdles. Printers are too small is purely a function of utility. If the use case changes the technology will change. There's not even a technical hurdle to bridge. It's simply form following function.

Your raw material issue is slain by the same slingshot.

The rest of the argument kind of falls apart after that. No disrespect intended.
I think you're actually missing the main reason why people use Passenger: ease of deployment.

Not having to manage Unicorn forks, processes, sending USR2 signals etc is the reason why I use Passenger. I personally couldn't care less about the fancy features.
the muppets are gonna get burned, again. only a matter of time.
Making it deductible by everyone would help.

As would taxing it no matter who pays.

I can't see any good reason why health insurance should be tax deductible - it's a private good with minimal external benefits.
It's probably Thrift. It generates absolutely incredible amounts of code for even relatively small pieces of data. Quite unsuitable for the purpose of mobile dev.
I took it as a reference to the clitoris being "Nature's Rubik's Cube" --- the most difficult puzzle in the world. Pretty funny, actually.
As far as I know Google has not inserted code to deal with backwards compat. Yet.
OAuth 1.0 implementation using MongoDB and DotNetOpenAuth
Well, words do change with the times. The world hacker once meant the guy with an axe, hacking things.

But it's not like its diluted to the point where it can mean "anything and everything".

Now, the original meaning that the parent laments (something like the historical MIT hackers), has been long gone (as an exclusive meaning).

All through the late eighties - nineties "hacker" in the mass media meant the computer intruder. Like the movie "Hackers" and all. Geeks have tried for years to get them to use "cracker" instead.

Later (circa 1998-2000), it was mostly re-associated with the OSS crowd, Linux, the Mozilla guys, et al.

Nowadays, it seems to mean the developer in general (when used casually) and the more "adventurous" kind of developer --e.g one that dabbles in multiple languages, knows his Lisp etc (when used in a more positive way).

Perhaps the only kind of developers disqualified by the current use of the terms are "corporate drones", Java/Visual Basic guys making tedious enterprise stuff and the like.
The aesthetically pleasing effect of a good font is very much subconscious. Just typeset the same short text in Comic Sans and, say, Zapfino, and ask people which one they prefer. (Not that Zapfino would be a good choice for Vatican's original content here.)
Nike makes first 3D-printed football shoe
Well put, I wholeheartedly agree that personal finance should should come first. I do think the concepts of supply and demand, hording, etc.. can be taught very simply and once they sink in once they can be reapplied to a variety of situations.
I (ab)use Teambox. You can plug it with incoming email so its great for ticketing and also for defining custom processes within your team (hashtags? love them!).
>One of the problems with US health insurance is that it is tax deductible only when "paid" by the employer.

This page (which was the first Google result) disagrees. http://taxes.about.com/od/deductionscredits/qt/healthinsuran...
> You are probably a little behind the times. Like 15 years. The term "hacker" has stopped meaning exclusively these kind of guys for agres...

No. What we're dealing here actually is the effect of the urge of wannabe-hacker kids using inflected forms of "hacking" in unheard before ways next to achievements often barely worth mentioning, especially under the "hack" hat.

I'm hacking new code - I'm programming new code.

I'm hacking in a new language - I'm learning new language.

I'm hacker - I'm a bit above average programmer/web developer/whatever.

...

I simply cannot agree to these alleged redefinitions. To be honest, I also don't care if it feels so-15-years-old or so-70s. HN as a community is the last place I would like to see wholeheartedly accepting casual things as hacking. Hacking is about deep, profound understanding of computer-related stuff and things (far from trivial) you're able to achieve thanks to that.
On the Performance of Premium Domain Names on Lean Domain Search
My memory of that part isn't so great. :-)

I seem to recall the WP guy just backing out his approach and going another way. Often times in dev support situations like that, we didn't get to help with the solution: Just the identification of the problem.
> I will not just be a passive observer in all of this.

What journalism outlets do you pay money to subscribe to?
No compression of any type involved. He writes machine code and saves it to a .com file, which can directly be executed. The first thing it does is activate mode 13h, which gives direct access for drawing to the screen. The surprising thing here is that both these hacks are still supported by various versions of windows. They really used to take backwards compatibility seriously.
Crawling - The Most Underrated Hack
Ask HN: Feedback on a user acquisition strategy
We’ve built an app to have a live chat with people based on their cool experiences and knowledge. The ultimate goal is to make it easy for you to meet in the real world. http://peoplehunt.me

So we thought we could experiment with various user groups to get them having conversations within the app.

We searched Google for Quora Travel and saw “What it’s like to be a solo traveler” was a highly SEO’d topic.

We were in a hostel at the time, so we decided to interview solo travelers who have a lot of insight they can share with others - we want people to get that they can have live conversations with people who have travelled solo, using PeopleHunt.

We posted it on the Quora thread:

http://www.quora.com/travel/What-is-it-like-to-travel-solo/answer/Ellen-Dudley/quote/326924

But by the time we posted it, too much other stuff had been added, so it didn’t make a dent.

Then we posted it on reddit (which was actually more successful)

http://redd.it/19lusr

So far we’ve seen about a 3% conversion rate, (and we’re going to track them to see if they are good users) but that would mean we need about 10 videos with 330,000 views each to get to our target.

Any ideas to increase the conversion rate? We love making videos!

Thanks!!
The average Joe doesn't know he cares about design. Sure, with comic sans, he'll think nothing of it.

However, Comic Sans is totally overused. Anyone can appreciate that a unique (or "solemn") font will make this piece stand out for the better. I'd love to see some A/B testing here.
So, let me play Devil's Advocate here. If meeting up with your co-workers in person is so enjoyable, would it not make sense to just do it every work day? ie make remote work the exception rather than the rule?
As an aside, I've talked to a number of people involved with manufacturing and product design who use 3D printers for prototyping. Not a single one of them believe that we'll have 3D printing factories at home (although one of them did mention that 3D printers might be popular as toys).
Lonely Planet and the rapid decline of the printed guidebook
"what did we learn by going to the South Pole?"

We learned what was there. In 1911 there was no other way to find out except to go there. Thats not true of Mars, where we have high-resolution mapping data on most of the planet available to everyone [1] and a couple of active rovers on the surface. I'd like to see humans go there to land, explore, and do science. Something like robomartin describes [2].

You mention adventure. Apollo 8 was a real adventure: new hardware, the second crewed US flight, the first to leave orbit, and they took it around the moon when comparatively little was know about it. Titos's proposal is not the same thing. The crew will apparently have little to do during the 500+ days of the flight except for during a single brief swing around Mars. They won't even orbit.

I suspect there is a good chance that the crew will come back psychologically damaged for no real gain. Am I a killjoy for saying that?

[1] http://www.google.co.uk/mars/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324850
Unique CSS3 Header Styles for Copyfitting Typography
Specialist journalism is doing fine, most industry specific news journals are comfortably profitable (companies are willing to pay subs as they have decent ROI in terms of staff education and bizdev), as are high-end news magazines like the Economist.
I'm enjoying working through this book. I admit I got it to fulfill a need, to quickly analyze huge text files before squeezing them into a RDMS and data warehouse for "proper" analysis and reporting. (Which is a more time consuming process require all sorts of meetings, approvals and effort.) A couple of fellow MS-DBAs threw a "shit-fit" when they saw it on my desk. (NIH Stockholm syndrome?)
Monads should be a familiar concept for the seasoned C# programmer. LINQ's 'from in' syntax and the haskell monad 'do' syntax are almost the same!

Heck, the type signature of SelectMany and (>>=) are even the same!

(>>=) :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b

and

public static IEnumerable<TResult> SelectMany<TSource, TResult>(
this IEnumerable<TSource> source,
Func<TSource, IEnumerable<TResult>> selector
)

m = IEnumerable
b = TResult
a = TSource

=> m<a> SelectMany<a,b>(this m<a> source, Func<a,m<b>> selector)

The type signatures are _EXACTLY_ the same. This isn't a coincidence. LINQ is actually a monad :)

So I think taking this approach to explain the Monad voodoo to a C# programmer is the way to go. He actually uses them already :)
He said they weren't doing enough. You're pointing out he'd also complain if they did even less.

Seriously?
Show HN: Increase your productivity with ambient noise
hahaha which is the complete skillset of the good hacker?
Another thought: Want to inspire kids of all ages? Put 1,000 robots on the Moon and make them remotely controllable via the Internet.

How is that for a startup idea? I'd probably pay a few hundred bucks to get some time programming a robot for a mission on the Moon.

Imagine what science class would be like? Comms delay to the moon is in the order of 1.3 seconds. That, for all intents and purposes, is real-time.

I can't imagine kids and adults not getting into this. Control my own time-shared robot on the Moon and go take some pictures? That would be amazingly cool.
Tug of war shows us how to effectively collaborate
Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads
There's a part four as well: http://ericlippert.com/2013/03/04/monads-part-four/
Maybe journalists need to be rebranded into "intelligence gatherers." Not many people will pay for stories. They will pay for useful intel that isn't shared with a wide audience. "They" being governments, corporations, investors.
Personally, I've never seen that work. And it doesn't even sound like a reasonable approach, unless you're trying like hell to stay under some annual or lifetime coverage cap. [1]

Before I had insurance I was getting ~$1200 quotes for procedures. Paying up-front would get that knocked down to ~$1000. Paying cash would get it knocked down to ~$800.

After I had insurance, the claims statements showed the insurance company's negotiated rate at ~$400 for the same exact procedure.

If I let the up-front bills go to collections, the due amounts would drop massively from that $800. But that's not a sustainably advantageous strategy. And even then it's not going to be appreciably better than even paying cash at the insurance company's negotiated rate.

[1] In which case, you really aren't a person who should have a capped medical plan. It's always going to cost you more to carry such a 'cheap' plan. Even if out-of-pocket payments are cheaper than going through your insurance plan and paying the difference. You'd be better off paying more up-front and getting proper coverage, if at all possible.
Not long ago there was an article here which reached an opposite conclusion, for hospital costs. It is just unwise not to have health insurance in this country. Hospitals can charge you arbitrary amounts. If you pay cash and have not agreed on everything in advance it is not a good deal. Paying cash probably makes sense for some routine procedures in case you have a high deductible health plan.
I don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing or not. I mean, sure, it's handy to be able to switch distros seamlessly, but has that ever really been possible (aside from going from, say, Ubuntu to Debian, or Fedora to CentOS)? Going from Fedora to Ubuntu or vice versa, for example, has never really been a completely seamless experience.

It's always been the case that, in the strictest sense, "Linux" is a kernel, not an Operating System, and each distro is really it's own OS. That they had a lot in common was a fortunate bit of happenstance in a lot of ways. Now, they start to diverge, that may mean more competition, which should lead to faster innovation and even more progress. And as long as everything is F/OSS, the distros that pick a bit of tech that "loses" can always switch to the "winner" later.

I'm not saying that it would be totally pain free, mind you. But I can see how this sort of move might benefit everyone in the long run.
When I first had a diesel car a few years back I would occasionally stall it while moving - the steering became borderline unusable and the brakes were almost impossible to use (and I'm a fairly big bloke with excellent leg strength).
IPhone.com was not always used by Apple
It's not overly easy to read on a 1920x1200 23" IPS display panel monitor either.

Viewtext.org makes it a bit easier: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Frobertheaton.co...
It's 110% broken from a consumer point-of-view, which is funny because most of the people that defend the status quo in the US are political conservatives who talk about the 'free market' and such.

When no one in an entire building of service provides can give you even a ballpark of what a service will cost you, there's no free market at work - at least not at the consumer/individual level.
Google Glass in direct sunlight
As someone who has a stutter. Good for them. I will check out the product later.

Somewhat unrelated. I really hate how you cannot see a web version of the Apple store. If I click the link app it tells me to install iTunes. I don't want to. I just want to check out the app now, see the price and hopefully motivate me to get it when I get home..

xbox, playstation, google play stores all allow browsing. Weird Apple doesn't.
>A good start, but shopping around is hard, if not impossible

I think shopping around, properly conceived, should be the primary care physician's job. If a doctor is referring e.g. 10 people a month to a specialist, then obviously they are going to be in a much better position to evaluate the options than a patient.

I believe that Sherpaa, Jay Parkinson's company, provides this "shopping around" service (https://sherpaa.com/).
I agree, monad explanations that use analogies are bad. There is no need for analogy, it is a simple concept, and is easiest to learn from an explanation of the actual concept, not semi-accurate sometimesish analogies.

I think this is the best monad introduction I've seen: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...
It shows you why monads are a thing, what kinds of problems they can be used to solve, and then you see the overall pattern of how those different problems share the same underlying pattern (they are monads).
Running a hotel is not fun; playing in a rock band is fun. This is why you have to pay people to run a hotel and people will desperately make and spam you with demo tapes for a chance at consideration for a spot to play for free. This isn't exploitation, this is the fact that the world does not owe you remuneration for doing something you love.
Flying cars and helicopters are not the same thing. The idea proposed in the early eighties was that "everyone" (meaning the majority of consumers in first world countries) would use flying cars instead of normal ones. This isn't even close to coming true (or being feasible), even if flying cars actually do exist (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHXnLCIgNug).
Wow the people are really adamant about not implementing Two-Factor-Authentication in Evernote.
I'm still not entirely clear on what Google's policy is on real names, even after reading it.

Is it acceptable to have an account with a fictitious name in addition to one's own account? It's not clear to me from their policy whether this is allowed or not. I had assumed not, but I know of at least one G+ "Suggested User" who maintains an account under a different name.
Though I don't work for 37Signals, I don't think remote work is the rule there (hence why they have a rather nice office in Chicago).
This is very hard to answer without more detail on the application.

Contact me on linkedin: Mitchell Abdullah if you don't want to reveal to many details publicly.
Would u buy an iWatch?
I believe it's the same case with Airheads mystery flavor
Fab Auto-Opts People Out of Emails They Don't Read
In India, common procedures (e.g. blood test) usually have prices listed on a sign. I had surgery done there, and each doctor gave me a price estimate with the diagnosis ("approx 85k for the basic, 1 lac if you want the deluxe private room").

Of course, there are many big differences between India and the US. India is mainly free market health care, unlike the US. India also has a 15-20% savings rate. And insurance is really insurance - it covers emergencies, not your monthly birth control/adderall/psychiatrist.
Oleg Kiselyov uses exceptions for control flow in his Delimcc library for Ocaml, and if that doesn't establish that doing so is perfectly acceptable, I don't know what could.
iirc, one the primary reasons they they wrote the compiler was to not have to deal with legacy php code. Is this some sort of pattern at FB? If the code doesn't work, let's fix the OS/compiler instead?
I'm not sure. I know some niche's are pretty well covered with offerings, but I'm always surprised at how bad products can be once you wander a little off the reservation, like a music organization app. I bet if you looked into that space right now you'd find that there's still some room available for something creative.
Looks like someone has a bad case of the Mondays. On Tuesday.
Hmmm, so who do you consider to be high quality journalists? Is it time to chase names rather than institutions?
My Google Interviews
The sad reality is that a lot of kids (and adults) are far more preoccupied with moving up the level playing Clash of Clans on their iPads than what's going on with space exploration. One is far more tangible and satisfying than the other.

When curiosity landed on Mars, Time Square was paying attention. The world was paying attention. That will sparks childhood dreams.

I believe that a flyover to Mars will do the same thing, but hopefully on a bigger scale. Plus, they will be communicating with the world constantly.

I am all for inspiration. Not sure a dueling middle-aged married couple going to Mars would serve that purpose. The other problem is that all manner of things can happen during such a trip. Darwin forgive, if one or both of them die in transit they'll friggin ruin far-space travel for at least a generation.

Inspiration and science are not the only reason to do space exploration, but also space colonization as well. How are we going to colonize the solar system if we never sent astronauts beyond low earth orbit and the moon?
E-prime begins with English and then removes the being verbs.

E-prime removes all conjugations of "to be" from English. <-- Not sure if quoting "to be" as a noun counts. :)
Math for Pictures
> "Using real names is useful," Cerf said. "But I don't think it should be forced on people, and I don't think we do."

I guess he hasn't seen YouTube's argumentative 'give us your real name and link our accounts' wizard, then. While you can find a way to answer the questions to keep your handle, you may have to lie to do so.
Its possible but I don't see how sending essentailly a flying camper van on a 1000 day mission will bring anything new to the table apart from seeing how crazy 2 people get in a confined space for such a long time.
An Advance in Structural DNA Nanotechnology