skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you've spent more time programming the feeling reverses, and visual structures become tedious. Because you know exactly what you want, and finding it in a visual environment becomes tedious.

It's like smileys. In the beginning it may be nice to have a pop-up "insert smiley" list, but in the end it's easier just to type >:-O or whatever you're trying to convey than find it in a list.

Admittedly the more verbose programming languages do end up being fairly IDE-dependent, so they get a lot closer to the visual programming you talk about.

See also: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.h...

DISCLAIMER: I haven't used AppInventor
Ask HN: How do you sell reality to existing business?
Quite frankly, I'd say more than 70% of the stuff customers want end in a product up being worthless and useless to their core business yet they DEMAND IT to the point it's eating up their business.

So, what's someone to do when they know more about their customer's business then their customers do?

Example: Selling your awesome open-ended music and video distribution platform to records and movie companies vs the stuff the they have been buying?
Just like a young Barack Obama. You could be president one day :)
Yes, everything popular you don't like is because people just love assholes.
I received a 3d printer last week, at work. I ordered it to try and make some oilfield equipment models. My expectations in truth were low, the printer is a cheap hobbyist unit (Makerbot Replicator 2). After using it for 2 weeks, I am very impressed. The mechanical properties of the PLA plastic used are much better than expected, and there are things you can make that would not be possible with any other manufacturing process - eg. objects with an internal 3d honeycomb structure for great strength and lightness.

I think the technology can already disrupt such industries as hardware shops, spare parts warehouses, hobby shops and of course industrial model making. In the future I expect 3d printed concrete buildings, and mainstream consumer goods.
Large monitor quirks. Oh well then there are mobiles and tablets to take care as well!
Well, if what you do virtually on line can be considered on a par with what you do physically, so inciting terrorism on facebook for example, there has to be some sort of parallel with virtual soldiers, which we could refer to as spy service spybots, spying on out computers in our homes, or on our mobile devices.

Im not sure the government can on one had work that logic to prosecute citizens, while not applying the same logic to its own activities.

So, things have moved on and so "quartering soldiers" applied to today's society should apply with the same logic used elsewhere. Especially if elsewhere is the law.

Words don't mean what ever we want, but their meaning does change and evolve over time to reflect current society.
Of course you do. And because our natural tendency is to think "you look damn good in a suit, you must be competent and valuable", we need to watch out for that effect in ourselves so we don't unwittingly bias ourselves into making bad decisions.

Y'know, as the article spent pages and pages explaining.
Thanks! Glad you liked it. :)
Has Hyundai released the most insensitive ad of all time?
Our team uses Pieceable, which Facebook also purchased, and which I would also consider a tool for third party mobile developers.

The acquisition announcement [1] states that Pieceable is/was going to be killed 12/31/12, but prior to that date they'd open source it. And, as far as I can tell, that's the last time anything has been said about the product. I don't even know if you're still taking our money, but it's going to suck when you turn it off or it breaks due to obsolescence.

So, my answer is that your prior behavior does not instill confidence.

[1] https://www.pieceable.com/facebook
Copyright was originally much shorter in duration, and did not cover phonographic recordings. I've lost the link, but I remember reading US senate hearings from the early 1900s in which phonograph producers were arguing against music publishers, basically following the same template you see the record labels using to argue against new technology today.

Relevant laws found on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1831 (added musical compositions to US copyright)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1909 (added mechanical reproduction (piano rolls, phonographs) and public performances to US copyright)
Wow. Thanks for bringing the service to my attention! Cut the load times on my sites by a ton.
Why is it OK to have a law against something as general as mail fraud, given that pretty much everyone has used the post at some time or another, but have no law at all regarding computer crimes?

I would understand arguing that CFAA in particular is overbroad but it's hard to claim it's being used in this case in a way that's inconsistent with the rest of the U.S. Code. In fact even the CFAA is more narrowly-focused than the aforementioned mail fraud law.

And that's what I mean by "finding a better case". This is simply not a suitable demonstration of stupendous overreach. Prosecutors pile charges on, that's what they do. They only get one trial to sort everything out and entire swaths of their case can be thrown out in one fell swoop so yes, they'll stick everything they feel they can prove on there.

Even with some theoretical replacement for CFAA that is more fair I would think that at least the authorized access using a co-conspirator's credentials would end up being a chargeable offense, so the difference here is with the remaining accesses that were made. And even those are hard to claim would be "authorized" access with a straight face, as why would any company authorize access to their networks for the purpose of industrial espionage?
What am I seeing done wrong here, where is the "fail"? The practice of sending a user their password in email has been common place for sometime now. The password would hopefully be hashed in the database but it's a simple matter of when registering to trigger an email with the unencrypted password, it doesn't mean that they're actually storing unencrypted passwords.

As for security issues? i can see why some would be worried sending a plain text password via email to be insecure (especially if someone were to get access to your email), but if someone got access to your email account they could simply do a password reset anyway. And are we forgetting some services will auto-generate a password for you and send it to you via email, same thing as what we're seeing here to be honest.
Ask HN: Has anyone been fired for not wearing a suit and tie?
For the old timers here, what was is it like in the suit and tie culture of the past? Do you know or have you been fired for choosing not to wear one?

Any stories of employees firing their best employees or passing over a really great candidate because they refused to follow dress code?
Yes, its used in single board applications like the mini2440. Though android 2.3 is quickly gaining popularity due to how simple it is to adapt and run.
Plus, as far as I know this is interesting trivia rather than practical information for most engineers. I have a BSEE and don't remember the speed of electrons ever being brought up; for everything I ever learned it was more important to know about the speed of electricity. (But then I did software my whole career so maybe I'm missing something.)

It was mentioned that the direction of current is opposite the flow of electrons. But again you never cared about the electrons, just the electricity.
Health is definitely a hot startup niche that is getting some traction. For years the health industry has been lurking in the shadows, a rotting archaic industry heavily controlled by lobbyists and pharmaceutical companies. Seems people are trying to change things, if you succeed in the health niche, you're set and others are starting to see this.
Hackbright: Women Can Code
Likewise, I was under the impression that Edison was fairly ruthless when it came to wax cylinder production and musicians' rights.
As part of the team behind the now-defunct http://mentor.im AngelHack project, I wish you luck, and would love to hear how it goes! I love the concept.
DoD has a very effective PKI system using smart-cards deployed, so I wouldn't be as surprised as you to see them develop a baseline of software for Android.

What I would be surprised about is whether it's usable without needing 7 different contractor apps installed, or less than 3 years behind the times.
Mudlet runs pretty well, but it's nice to not have all my time disappear down that particular rabbit hole.
Seems like a great idea. I expect most of their contributions will make it back to open source via AOSP, and people will be able to run their own secure non-proprietary versions of Android.
Well this is not the future I was hoping for with Parse and our apps. What to do, what to do...
Oh, I don't think the game is not replayable, I had a lot of fun playing it and L4D2. I just don't think it was at all obvious accomplished their goals with the director AI that they set out to. Hence "replayability section" (directly referring to the PDF)
I seem to recall that the original assumption in porn was that men would prefer unattractive men, but reality (as measured by sales) proved different.
We Are Not Programmed for Abundance
As one of those young people I can tell you that we lack the domain knowledge that the old dinosaurs who produce crap code have. Who is easier to bring up to speed is hard to say but I'd bet against us.
Those are very good questions: the fact is that there is a huge amount of tension between the judicial and legislative branches, and within the judicial branch itself, about there the boundary between jduges' interpretation and reaasonable interpolation of teh law, and the text of statute as written. Conservative jurists like Justice Antonin Scalia think you should always go by the text of the law, and that it's dead wrong to consider legislative intent, no matter how obvious or well-documented it is/was; this approach (known as textualism) holds that if a law is no good, the correct remedy is for Congress to rewrite it. Judges should only dismiss a law as unconstitutional or go around it in cases where there is a clear and unambigious conflict between the Constitution and the statute. Other jurists, such as Justice Stephen Breyer, look at the Constitution as more of a framework document and think that you absolutely need to examine laws within the context in which they were passed and in the light of which problem they're intended to solve.

This is a very gnarly question, with good arguments on both sides - but in addition, there's a lot of unstated political baggage tied to both sides of the argument, so that what is on the surface a question of legal philosophy is on closer examination rooted in quite different philosophies of governance.

Now myself, I like the common-law approach and I would prefer a general class of crimes and that the details of individual cases be taken up by wise jurists. On the other hand, it's not a foregone conclusion that all judges are wise or selfless, and of course there might be judges who are both but who would come to quite different conclusions from me because they operate on a different moral calculus. So for the sake of consistency and predictability, there's a strong argument to have laws debated and promulgated by legislators rather than judges, so that anyone can do and look them up for guidance about what is and is not legal. Of course that involves some idealistic assumptions about legislators...

If you like high-density reading material, I strongly recommend How Judges Think by Judge Richard Posner.
I just don't see the phone-sized form factor working too well. Maybe for taking log readings or simple lineups shifts it would be nice, but anything beyond that is either going to require SUBSAFE certification (e.g. fly-by-wire interfacing) or need to be tablet-sized or larger (e.g. running DC Central or looking up operating procedures).

And God only forbid you drop one of those mobiles in the bilge...
How I gained 1000 followers on app.net - The story
Conflating trademarks and copyrights is not going to help us come to a rational agreement on the appropriate nature of either one. There's also a considerable difference between commercial and personal infringement.

I support the use of trademarks to prevent consumer confusion; I don't support the abuse of trademarks (e.g. to attempt to suppress commentary, comparison, or criticism). I also support short-term copyrights for the benefit of authors, performers, and creators. I don't support the current system where copyrights can extend beyond 100 years.

Tell you what: if I still have legal control over and working backups of my startup's software 28 years from now, you can contact me and I'll send you a CC0-licensed copy of my most recent release as of this date (Apr. 25, 2013).
I like this idea, except that I'd be worried about money entering into the scheme. In a real world setting, it's not unreasonable to pay someone to do the work for you, but in a school/learning setting, I dislike the possibility of people paying their way out of the work.
Iron.io Joins OpenStack to Drive Open Cloud Message Queues
Because it's a legal and/or regulatory requirement, which are not required to make sense in the scope of unusual market environments, let alone normal ones. :-/
Jordan, thanks! This is Sumit, another founder of Mentii. We had heard about you guys! Would love to catch up and get your thoughts -- emailing you.
The features you add should be up to you, not the customer. Because as you said, you know better than them what they need.

This article sums it up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5570679

Either find better clients or put your foot down and say this is how it's done.
Nothing in the article you linked supports your claim. It doesn't even mention the words "Gandhi" or "pedophile".

Intrigued by your claim, I turned to Google to find more. The only credible link was an article by the Huffington Post [1], and the claim had been redacted.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/irene-monroe/the-gandhi-none-o...
Getting Fuzzy with CtrlP and Vim
AI has been and is always full of such papers. That explains the attitude. People are just tired of snake oil. Note: I am not saying that this is snake oil.

If a new theory comes up and it is being reported in the press before anything convincing has been built, it is more efficient to be negative and suspicious.

But wait a minute, people here have actually read the paper. Look at the top comments.
The former. burglary (in some places criminal trespass) is entry to premises with the intent of committing a crime [1]. Anyway we're on the same page, insofar as you're OK with extending existing law to cover virtual intrusions. See my other comment upthread, though.

1. The exact definition varies by state - in some places only residences can be burgled (but you can have criminal trespass on commercial premises) and now that I think of it burglary is usually defined as taking place during the night, whereas in the daytime the same crime would be breaking & entering, and so on.
NSA handles crypto, certainly (though even that is being pushed ahead by NIST), but the Navy already has been developing software (or overseeing its development) for decades.

They named a ship after Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, after all, and even today their Virginia-class SSNs already use Linux in some areas.
The Multiplier Effect Of Amazing Customer Service
https://gist.github.com/brianpattison/5463282 "Being acquired isn't part of our game plan for now. We want to build a viable business that people can use and enjoy. We have 50k apps built on our infrastructure and a huge customer base that is growing rapidly. Everyday we have more and more Basic, Pro, and Enterprise users paying us for our awesome services."
With all respect, bad idea. The next logical step would be the ability to choose any arbitrary trait to punish for producing an unfair advantage, like being smart (an overrated trait in many circumstances).

Abraham Lincoln was both tall and smart -- such a program would have ruined him. :)

Also, ideas like this only add to the power of governments. I think most people will argue there should be a limit to governmental power. People differ on what that limit should be, but I think most would agree that taxing height or some other trait goes too far.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5610833
Well, there's shit-talking the newbies, and then there's refusing to lower your system to the lowest common denominator by dumbing it down.

Not being careful of that second one gets us things like the GNOME 3/Unity/Windows 8 design-by-committee that seems to be loathed so much by power users.

Is it so wrong to expect some basic minimum level of competence in a system before someone uses it? And then suggest that someone take the most basic of steps to acquire that competence before asking questions? (By R'ing TFM?)

Systems should as a rule be somewhat intuitive (IMNSHO), but you can only take that so far before you start hamstringing yourself. Devs would never get anything done if they spent all their time training people how to use systems.
Nice work Nitin!

-kris
Too busy consuming to create
gcc 4.8.0: 1.640625 +/- 3.703323
clang 3.2: 1.718750 +/- 3.772718
chrome : 23.28515625 +/- 3.636932727324763

So chrome is about ~14x the native compilers.

Changing gcc to use -O2 instead of -O3 gets:
1.562500 +/- 3.630922.
You have a fair point that sending me the password after sign-up does not prove they are actually storing it as plain-text however e-mailing the password is still considered by some to be a poor practice as explained below by http://plaintextoffenders.com

Here are two issues we have with being mailed a password:

Email is not a safe medium. Man in the middle attacks are easy to pull off between server. The communication protocol in itself is not encrypted.
If someone were to hack into any mail account, all they need to do is search for ‘password’ and they have all of the user’s passwords.
The fact that you send the initial password in plain text doesn’t mean you store it, but as you can see from the site, many people use the ‘forgot password’ option on sites and get their password sent back to them - a clear indication that the password is stored in plain text (or using reversible encryption, which is pretty much the same).

All in all - it’s not a safe thing to do and an indicator of low security standards. We use emailed passwords as proof of that.

also see http://plaintextoffenders.com/post/7006690494/whats-so-wrong...
NMCI is actually quite successful in meeting most of its design criteria. Unfortunately said criteria don't seem to include rolling releases to recent software, or cost effectiveness (the contract seems optimized to ensure you have to go through the help desk for anything and incur a charge).

I can't speak to ERP but I'd be surprised if it were any worse than our existing menagerie of mainframe-based "corporate data" systems that run batch transactions once a day and require tedious manual correction seemingly all the time.
Copperhead - Data Parallel Python
I'd love to see the numbers for the asm.js version running in Safari and Chrome
>>Thinking back, I almost totally stopped posting stuff around the time they did because the site just began to feel creepy (foto tagging, etc) and started feeling like a mostly empty room at the end of a party.

I can almost picture your friends snickering at you saying thinks like "Boy, look at vabmit, still has not realized that Facebook is so yesterday"
I was intrigued too, but was traveling at the time when the reply came in; thanks for clearing that up.
So wise.
Side projects in this case refers to programming side projects, I'm fairly sure. Personally I'm not interested in side projects with hardware or physical components, but I've still heard of the Arduino. But that really says more about the type of people you know, I guess.
Postgres Background Workers
Wow, I couldn't even send you a message through the site to ask you to delete my account due to a bug :(
Nice try. It's well known that the uneducated don't do much family planning. A comic that says the opposite with zero to back it up is worth the paper its printed on.
Graph Search – An Advertiser’s Wet Dream?
I've made my career on the knowledge that if I get a new client lead and its a woman, if I have one face to face meeting, I know I've got the gig.

For some reason a lot of my clients are fashion startups.
Mm, I agree with this just on principle, but the problem is that not every law that needs to be passed will be popular.

(The problem with having representatives just being direct, non-autonomous proxies of their constituents is that people will vote for things that benefit them and then not vote to pay for it..)
> For the old timers here, what was is it like in the suit and tie culture of the past?

There's a bit more to it than that. There's the East/West coast factor to consider. East coast companies are much more likely to require/expect a suit and tie than a Silicon Valley company. At some East coast companies, even the janitors wear a suit and tie. I'm not making this up -- I've worked at several such companies where it was true.

> Do you know or have you been fired for choosing not to wear one?

It might be better to look at one's advancement prospects instead of fired/not fired. If you don't dress like you belong in an executive suite, chances are you won't be asked to occupy one.

> Any stories of employees firing their best employees or passing over a really great candidate because they refused to follow dress code?

This way of looking at it unfortunately suffers from self-reference. Someone who won't meet the dress code won't be looked on as a "really great candidate", so the exercise is undermined at the outset.

Suffice it to say that following the dress code is so basic and essential that no meaningful study that correlated dress and advancement could be done.
Of course not. That's the nature of perfection.
The group as a whole has to be aware of it to tolerate it as a whole. This is not the case with a lot of Reddit users. Personally, I didn't even know this happened until these articles started popping up.
Probably not without some work. I think you have to get the PageSpeed Optimization Library and build it from source, as described here: https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed/wiki/Building-PSO...

(hi!)
Gradle does generates pom.
It's the problem with optimising on metrics.

It seems unlikely that you would encounter someone who naturally reduced line counts while making code worse, but once it's being checked whether you're reducing line counts...
Tsarnaev Brothers' Carjacking Victim Describes Harrowing Night
Sorry about that. Drop a mail at support @ mentii.com and we'll remove the account right away. Do tell us briefly as to what exactly happened.

Best,
Nitin
Genes don't feed your face.
This was most interesting, thanks for the link. I should have my hacker credentials revoked for not picking this up on my radar.
You can grab his repo and try it yourself, but as I commented on the blogpost, on my machine I see firefox without asm.js optimizations and chrome as being about the same speed, both of them are half the speed of firefox with asm.js optimizations. (I don't have a machine with safari to test on.)

Which means the asm.js version is faster than other JS versions, even without specific asm.js optimizations.
In fairness, having similar culture within a company may not be a bad thing. Windows programmers and Unix programmers can both get things done, but put them on a team together, and ... well, I'm skeptical.