skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like the 80 character limit for readability, but I'm also a fan of what it does to git commits (and any other diffs). When I have to wrap code, say, function calls, I often use one line per keyword argument. When you have to change or add arguments later on, git recognizes that only one line -- the argument -- changed, instead of the entire function call changing.
San Francisco actually does the same. The roof of the building Haakasan is in is a great example. Pretty sure the twitter roof also has trees.
I am thinking you made a typo with the headline "...get do damn complicated . . ." where "do" wants to be "to".

But in reading the article, this potential typo shows up twice more there.
Sad to see CNN give further validity to this non-story. Especially since it has already been established that there was no actual sexism involved.
Globo is the media monopolist of Brazil, in case you don't know...

it runs most major print and music publishers, dominates the TV space and, for good or bad, is picking the best technologists in Brazil and dominating news, sports and some vanity entertainment of the web here.

While other corps are slacking they're doubling down on hiring the Agile, Ruby, Python, Go and etc guys most `traditional` techie companies here ignore and are probably making the other players eat dust in doing so..
Whoa, I thought that read 'medicate'... LOL
Monads are a way of reifying and manipulating context. If that context includes a background mutable state model, then yes. Monads are more useful than just for providing mutable state.

That said, your example is just a constant function, not a monad at all.

The point of monads wrt. mutable state is not that they hide it—indeed they uncover it and make it more explicit. I have to exactly specify where my code makes mutable or world-observable changes. Furthermore, through explicitness I can now manipulate, compose, adjust these abilities very flexibly.
What if formally incorporating your business is a prerequisite for getting real user feedback (i.e. feedback that's not from friends and family)?

Like accepting credit card payments to a merchant bank account from real customers, or setting up an iOS developer account for a premium app to accept payments from Apple?

One of the pieces of advice YC gives to startups struggling to find direction is to "charge users for something". Surely you can't do this unless you're properly setup to accept payments. I suppose you could accept payments into a personal bank account and incorporate later, but most tax authorities would frown heavily on that.
Absolutely. I'd love to have you down, and will certainly keep you refreshed. Later down the line perhaps we can get a microbrewery going in a corner of the workshop!

My absolute dream would be to have a bit of an open workshop for people who like doing stuff.

Drop me an email - me@alexmuir.com
What would be the platform if we let _you_ choose?
Go Cloudstack! :-)
Generally I would agree with this--the problem is that citing papers/books/sites can result in brittle, broken external references. Ideally both a brief explanation and a link to the source material would be helpful.
Nice idea, but the sample code they show in the screenshot uses "FALSE" instead of NO (the Obj-C standard boolean literal).

I'm not sure how they did that (#define?) but stay far, far away. Imagine if you opened up a Ruby codebase and found out I had aliased NO to be the same as the language builtin false... yeesh.

Also, setting boolean instance variables to NO in init is silly since Obj-C objects are calloc'd, so all ivars are guaranteed to start with default values (nil/0/NO).
I recently switched from 80 to whatever will fit (oh, 120 or so) on certain projects.

Its an extremely personal decision because it depends on the exact interface of your skill level as a programmer in general, your skill level with that particular language, your skill level in the business problem domain, AND your own peculiarities WRT to the kind of errors you make.

Given the exact workload I'm being paid for at this time I do NOT make "line" level errors or even "small block" errors but instead get tripped up on crazy "business logic" and big architectural issues. So I am better off at this moment with longer lines showing more "big picture" than with clear little lines.

What I'm getting at is on recent projects I've been making more mistakes with "which blocks of changes need to complete transactionally/atomically based on crazy business logic without causing race conditions" rather than "I need to make it really clear I'm adding these two numbers as opposed to concatenating two strings" or whatever.

This tradeoff of width vs length varies for me, project by project based on actual requirements.

Personally I think this helps "those who come after me". If you see long complicated lines that's a warning that you should tread lightly there and there's probably something complicated at the "vertical" big picture level going on, so I had to make the "horizontal" look icky to make it fit. If I'm just squirting out blah blah code and hitting enter every 20 characters you can safely assume at the big picture there is nothing very complicated going on.

A good (fine arts oil) painting analogy is which is better, portrait or landscape canvas? Well, it depends on the scene. Maybe you personally are only commissioned to paint portraits, well then...
It's funny to see how this story migrated from being about the tech industry to being about startups. Are the two synonymous now to people outside the industry?
git absolutely is a deploy tool.
There are lots and lots of very hardy trees in the world.

http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/garden/07423.html

But you need a meter of soil, two meters would be better. This is 10-20x as much soil as is currently available on most green roofs (or mountainsides).

There are already pictures in this thread of buildings with trees on top, so... the idea that somehow trees are subject to instant death when lifted off the ground is silly. The conditions are not any harsher than trees living in an asphalt jungle in the city are subjected to every day.

http://www.bergoiata.org/fe/trees/Single%20Pine%20Tree%20Ato...

^^ Honey badger don't care
Oh man what an interesting question!

The short answer is that a tall hill or mountain represents a broad elevation change that's contiguous with the surrounding landscape. Difference in air quality from sea level is not a simple function of elevation, but of air flow and direction. You actually have to treat the air near the surface as a flow.

Check out this extremely kickass old film:
http://youtu.be/7SkWxEUXIoM?t=29s
The drag near the solid surface greatly slows down, and introduces turbulence to, an otherwise laminar flow. This means that the air near the surface of the earth is doing a lot more interacting with the earth than the other air, and is getting and keeping a lot more heat and dissolved gases. Above that turbulent layer, you just have cold dry air. It loses heat, water condenses, gases fall out.

What can you use as an indicator for the height of the wet air layer? The height of the local trees! Their tops are about at the top of the survivable boundary layer in the air. Desert plants are short, rainforest plants are tall. Interestingly, this might lead you to wonder where the tallest trees in the world are.

Probably in some place where there's an ocean wind that blows into a blind valley, right? Because that thick boundary layer would just pile up and up, right?

Here's an elevation map of California:
http://www.netstate.com/states/geography/mapcom/images/ca_h....

And here's where the Giant Sequoia redwoods are:
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/sequoias_of_yosemite/distr...

So being on top of a tall building is like being on a spike up above the livable atmosphere for trees. Unless your city is built in a place that already had giant trees, it won't have much success growing them at heights above their native height.

Unless you choose very specific trees.
> 80 characters is an accident of history

So are many useful inventions.

The reason it matters is readability. News papers for example have been using columns for readability and to me that makes it easier to read.

Having the same for code is great.

I have 3 vertical monitors so I want to have as much of the code go vertically and then I split the monitor into 2 or 3 columns (vertically), I find I get much better productivity, and my eyes get less tired. I like scanning up and down not too far to the left of right.

I have not always followed this and looked at some old code with 160+ long lines in some places.

Besides terminals are still used when logging in via SSH into a server it is still nice to not to have to keep re-sizing the terminal according to whatever the largest line is.
Helium balloons don't need all that. They get by with significant positive buoyancy and a simple string. Seems reasonable for any balloon replacement to do the same.
That is the musee de quai branly. It's a vertical garden on one of the sides of the main building. If you look really close there is a lot of infrastructure to water and feed those plants. Also, at this altitude and orientation the plants are shielded from weather extremes fairly well. The architect was complaining that these high-rises don't have any of this plant nutrient infrastructure nor the shielding. If you've been to the top of the Eiffel tower you'll know the wind can get pretty intense up there. Now imagine trying to exist as a tree up there.

The problem is that architects are trying to make their buildings look more ecofriendly, green by putting more trees on it.
White hat hacker, Nir Goldshlager, Saves face For Facebook - Again
the sad thing is, the whole PyCon situation is not even a representative example of sexism.

if you're a woman planning to walk into a men's restroom, don't complain about what you hear and see - their comments were not targeted towards her, nor towards women. the whole thing makes about as much sense as some guy going to a largely-female yoga class and outraged about two women making jokes about breast sizes.
At 80 characters, I often find myself worrying about line length more often than worrying about the problem I'm trying to solve. 120 is fine. Also, I orient my (widescreen) monitor vertically so I don't have anything side by side anyway, just top and bottom where I can see more lines of code.
It's about pageviews my friend. You know, writing anything controversial and attaching it to a broad evergreen topic like 'Start-ups' will result in more pageviews. Which means more money for the site. Fuck these shitty media sites. Infact, this is a very poor reporting on the incident and has so many un-related knots.
From all the app code generators I've seen and used, the experience is absolutely horrendous. Memory leaks, does not five you full access into the API etc... It's a lot easier to suck it up and learn Objective-C than having to deal with these tools.
This is awesome! My kid would be ecstatic if we drove a firetruck to the grocery store.
Pebble Watch Teardown
"What's hard is she isn't the first person to get fired for speaking out, and she won't be the last."

No, she wasn't the first person to get fired.
Hrm, the your link labels smear campaigns as "falsehood-related", what falsehoods are being spread by persons annoyed that a upper-class mom "needs" someone to send her daughter to summer camp?
People make software for other people. We do it in the context of a society of people. That is our industry.

There are times when you can ignore the people and focus on the machines. But only for a little while, and only if you do a lot of careful work before and after.
Some of the articles surrounding this seem to hint that the app was failing. Is this true?

Furthermore, kudos to the founder for creating this thing at such a young age, but is he really going to have a space at Yahoo?
Ask HN: What's the best way to introduce my Grampa to the internet?
So, my Grampa is celebrating his 89th birthday today. He was a dairy farmer and a plumber and pretty amazing guy. He has recently fully restored an old Studebaker and just bought another one (from 1917) to work on. He's got all sorts of engines and incredibly mechanical machinery, and now he'd like to leverage the knowledge and social base of the internet to learn more about what he has, potentially sell some of it, and tell people what he knows.

I'm helping him catalog his collection and am researching some of the more interesting pieces for him, but he really wants to be doing this himself. I had dinner with him last night and he was literally fist pumping and yelling "I want to go online!" He's smart, but not savvy about this stuff, and prior attempts to teach him how to use his computer and navigate the web haven't gone well. I'd love to make this happen for him, but figured there might be other people who have more experience getting folks like my grampa online.

Thanks for any thoughts or considerations!
Dear Fellow Geeks: WTF?
Fix their iOS app as well.
Improving Memory Management in C and C++
>Given the choice between recognition of basic civil rights (same sex marriage, reproductive rights) and a not-insane view of copyright law, I think I'd choose basic civil rights.

What makes you think you have to choose between them? Marriage is a state issue. The federal government has no business in it, and when try (e.g. DOMA) the courts can strike it down. Which means you can vote for Republicans federally and Democrats at the state level and get both of the things you want.
The Python project pexpect is nice to work with. In addition there is some overlap with Fabric, but anyway, fun stuff all around.
Expect is the precursor of web scraping.
Yes, thank you, sorry for too big of a mental shortcut.

By bad tests I mean trivial tests (much like trivial comments that just state the obvious), or ones that work on an assumption that need not be generally true and thus changes of the code that are correct from a logic standpoint might still make them fail.
Or 2 files + a sidebar (using an IDE), 3-panes merge, etc...
Is there a reason that funding original/exclusive content in music wont work the way that it has in video? (the way that it has worked for HBO/Showtime etc and that Netflix is now trying it?)
Steve Jobs manga portrays him as a drug-fueled genius that girls could love
Oh, that makes sense, thanks. I was under the impression this managed everything (including DBs and other services), so I was wondering how this was possible.

I guess this ties in with another post I saw the other day, which was a lightweight container format you could add your environment to and deploy (and sounds like a game-changing idea). If we have a functional, standardized, self-contained container format that provides reasonable security and that you can install an environment to and just deploy to a server, it would pretty much mean that you can pick your app up and copy it to another host and be running in five minutes.
Why are self-espoused feminists so sex-negative?
> Who are you to choose when and how I code

I'm asking the same question when 80 chars limit is enforced on me.
Should be taken with a grain of salt since the author is in the business of building web/mobile apps (products).
The Web IS a platform. The things TFA is talking about, angular.js, Play, etc., are just tools / libraries. The platform is TCP, HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. And what makes it beautiful is that you can build anything you want on top of that platform, without worrying about what Google or Apple or Microsoft or IBM or $WHOEVER thinks.

Curation? Beautiful app-stores? Feh. I'll pass on both if it means giving up the freedom to build anything I can imagine, which is what you get with the general "web as a platform".

Never mind nobody is forcing you to "play keep up" and constantly use the very latest and trendiest tools all the time. I haven't even touched Angular.js, nor do I have any overriding desire to do so anytime soon. Same for Ember.js and any number of other libraries. I'm sure they're cool, but I'm too busy building stuff to spend all my time evaluating libraries. But it's neat to know that they are there, and one day down the road, if I start to feel the right kind of pain, maybe I look at pulling in one of those (or whatever the "library du jour" is at the time).
Great Article.
I highly agree. It seems like that all web-related technologies doesn't make our lives easier. Sass, Less, Compass, Rails, Git, Capistrano, Ajax, Rest, ... the list goes on and on.

I wrote a blog post about a similar topic. All these technologies are supposed to make our live easier to produce better products but learning these technologies takes time and therefor money.

But learning all these tools and master them seems impossible. So you have to choose between mastery in a few areas or mediocrity in all.

The question is: Is good enough?
http://sebastian-rupp.com/is-good-enough/
The ability to learn from reading. That and knowing were the parenthesis keys are without looking.
Why? Because the television comes with an off switch. If you don't like the channel, change the channel.

But that absolutely does not apply to one's job or one's profession. You can't change those in milliseconds, and it's unfair to suggest that people should.
Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String
Then such bad tests don't mislead, they are just a waste of energy and provide no assurance. At least if the test fails and the code is good, you will know to fix the test. Nothing like that with comments written in human natural language.
Canada opens tech accelerator in Kendall Square
Expect for Windows
A Look at American Airlines' iPad Electronic Flight Bag
So, you want the "next big thing," but not the next sex pistols? I agree that you should encourage civil and thoughtful discussion on the site (can't check it out now because of HN load, I assume) but I'm sure you know lots of new important music is controversial. And it's easy to forget that some massively influential and accepted bands started out controversial. Controversial usually means "offensive to many" so you might want to reassess your decision here.

And to address the quote specifically:

>If you have no objection to a band, song or album cover that degrades your mother or someone else you love and revere, then hey, maybe it should all be fair game.

I wouldn't want users to degrade me or my family. But I've got no problem with a band calling itself "kill the families of all the atheists" (wouldn't go out of my way to listen to them, but that's a separate issue -- I'm an atheist, btw, so I'll choose that example) and if they're good their music should be on any good music site.

Depending on where you want to go with the project, it might be better to design the site to discourage participation by people who take band names and lyrics personally. Those people often don't have a lot to contribute to music discussions anyway...

edit: typos. Also I realize now that this is addressed as though I'm replying to the author of the original service, but I'm probably not. Sorry for any confusion that causes.
Then that's just a necessary step towards getting your product in the hands of people then.
However, do you really need to charge customers until you've validated your ideas? I see a lot of projects offering their product for free while in beta, perhaps that's more in line with what the article is trying to argue.
Have you seen it recently? I was very happy with it the last few flights/road trips I've used it on. A year ago it was awful--crashing all the time--but now it feels quite polished.
No one knows whether NetFlix strategy of financing content will work longterm...

Why wouldn't spotify finance content creation in the business where they have the most market knowledge before jumping in to video? Video has to be just as hard, if not harder than music to make a profit from right?
Is Google Rethinking Shutting Down Google Reader?
I use expect all the time. It saves soo much typing.

A while back I wrote a short blog post on it with a more advanced example on a debugging workflow with Rails:
http://www.chocobrain.com/Terminal-Automation-expect-Advance...

(ssh into production -> open rails-console -> type out initial commands -> let user enter commands)
I see a lot of complaints about companies not doing business in every country. When I look at the tangled mess that is the worldwide copyright system, I feel privileged, not entitled, to services like Spotify and Netflix. They've put a lot of work and effort into making their service legal and profitable (not an easy combo), and so if they're not available everywhere, I give them the benefit of the doubt. Every company would love to be ubiquitously global, but the copyright system is what's blocking them, not their own ineptitude.
The problem with this is most people have bad taste in music.
Well, nobody else may have paid attention to your idea, but for what it's worth, I think it's great.
set colorcolumn=80

is another nice way to keep yourself within the bounds, it also has the bonus of not being a hard limit, just a visual indication that you're overstepping

edit: (already mentioned)
As a Supply Chain professional, Amancio Ortega is one of my biggest role models. Their returns rate is almost zero, their discounting is nonexistent, their conception-to-floor time is two weeks, and they manage to do all that with the labor costs found in a developed economy.

It surprises me that the fashion industry has largely overlooked Zara as a technical leader, referring to them as nothing more well-practiced copycats. It is just a pathetic excuse. Zara can create a similar design (they never blatantly copy, they always have their own spin), mass produce a garment and sell 50k units in less time than it takes the original creator of the "copied" garment to solidify a production plan with a Honduran Maquila with a 6 month lead time.

New fashion companies should be aware that if they can't compete logistically, they have no chance at survival. Old fashion companies with bad logistics practices are only squeaking by due to brand cachet.
Samsung UK gets a lesson in sexism
Debating Homeopathy Part I
I was assuming the material is rigid (which is wrong). So my idea (continuing the suggestion of parent) was to put / remove air from the surrounding volume to the mylar balloon (which means, in the aerogel) to modify the density of the system and thus the buoyancy. This would require energy to run the pump, so it is not clear this would be more efficient than normal air balloons (but would be less dangerous, since no fire is needed).

Of course, nothing mentioned here makes any sense since the material is not rigid.
Is Children of the Mind any good? I was kind of put off by how Xenocide ended.
CNN has a pageviews problem.

Don't worry, they're working on it.
I don't see why that is a complaint or an issue? Its the good part about the web. No matter what you choose you can build your app using it. The standards around the web are open and with IE's popularity down you no longer have to learn the quirks of any specific implementation. So its the way things should be.
How To...Have A Virtual Meeting
> How do you define and track the "online" world though?

Wink wink, nudge nudge, that's the secret sauce. ;-)

But more seriously, the plan of attack right now is just to scrape newsfeeds from news sources via rss.

While of course this is susceptible to bias in the media, my hypothesis is that so are the stocks. A rising tide lifts all ships as has been said: so long as you buy lowish and sell highish you'll do all right[1]

Other routes might be:

- twitter

- stock trading forums

- industry news sites

[1] bear markets demand some kind of shorting strategy I believe.