skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking at this thread is why we need tools that let us structure code the way "WE" like it, but that outputs said code in a defaulted format.

Basically IDE formatting should be outside of the actual code formatting allowing people to format code how they see fit. Some are going to like to see the code the "standards" way and that's fine; Many of us will not.

@tmoertel's point is a prime example of this, as the only relationship I personally see in the aligned code is that they are all variables. His perceived parallelism was not present in my personal view of that same code snippet. Now for me white-space denotes parallelism more poignantly than alignment.

var x = shape.left(),
y = shape.right(),
<--**
numSides = shape.sides();

meh, I give up trying to format this code block. :P

*This denotes parallels between variables to me. Not the alignment.

The only parallel that is draw for me is that all the items are variables (this would also be reinforced by the color I give variables). I group things with white-space; so that means in the context of the function using the variables as I've laid them out above; x,y are related and most likely linked, where numSides is needed but not necessarily associated inside the function with the x,y variables.

So ya, this stuff is very subjective and as @tmoertel said "subtle and tricky".

O.
They're paying people to wear glass? Do you have a source for that?
It is heavily alluded in the novel that culture citizen have been genetically engineered somewhat to smooth their personality.

Except for extreme shyness, they would seem like charismatic well balanced individual (source wikipedia I think). Even the language they speak has been engineered.

So in culture world, nobody would be deviant enough to want to do those things. It is a bit like star trek, there must have been a few dark ages (they must have had eugenism gone wrong at some point) before reaching the fully evolved post scarcity society that is the Culture.
The Dangers of Book Learnin'
The Communist After-Party, and other funny Wi-Fi names
ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW IN BUSINESS I LEARNED AT MICROSOFT
http://www.amazon.com/REALLY-NEED-BUSINESS-LEARNED-MICROSOFT...

You'll find in that they refer to themselves as Microsofties.
I come from a photography and design background, and I've tended to naturally write code much like the author is suggesting.

However, the for loop is mystifying to me, but I don't fully understand the actual code there. Would anyone care to explain it?
The time to produce a rare molecule is the proof of work function[1] in bitcoin this is an enhanced version of Hashcash[2] (I believe). In effect you have to expend computing time (CPU cycles) to find a hash collision which can be varied in difficulty by the length of the collision.

The closest thing resembling a hash, or indeed a structure that can store data is nucleic acids, DNA, RNA and the like.
Assuming you could engineer an organism to perform these tasks you can make some direct comparisons between Hashcash and a biological proof of work.

Instead of hash collisions you could match a DNA base sequence by chopping the DNA at random intervals (e.g. with restriction enzymes) - when you have the correct piece - say GATACCA you can make mRNA from this which codes for a polypeptide the cell can later secrete. Other cells could detect the presence of this polypeptide/protein and know that you had chopped your DNA up correctly. At this point they might take in the protein and combine it with another molecule creating a chain of polypeptides sort of like the bitcoin blockchain.

Somehow the protein needs to represent transaction data, perhaps encoded in the amino acid sequence but apart from that this could kinda work like bitcoin.

I hope I explained that well enough.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
Stop this please.
Michael W Bopp
"occasional performance concerns require putting readability in the backseat, but this is rare"

occasional? Seriously?
rare? Seriously?

"Source code should be written to be understood by people."
Nope, Source code should be written to be executed.
If people can understand it easily, its a plus point, not a baseline.

Considering that the keyboard is the primary way we write sources, I find it difficult enough to keep my fingers in speed with my thoughts.
In addition to that if I have to press tabs to align each of the statements in my 'for's, I'll be left in a much poorer way.
Awesome. Thanks for the update.
It's a nice idea (inserting the card widthways), but it's completely over-engineered. It's never going to be used as a retro-fit - it looks too much like a skimmer. In fact, if they became commonplace, it would make fitting skimmers that look like this device so much easier than trying to hide a skimmer in a discrete housing.

Instead, allowing the card to be inserted widthways, and pulling it into the ATM as normal, then within the ATM read the card either by moving it sideways into a normal card reader (so that the card moves left, rather than forward), or more likely, a reader where the head moves across the magstripe as the card is held in place.

Anyway, as has been pointed out by another poster, chip-and-pin makes magstripes effectively obsolete, I imagine the magstripe is only included for backwards compatibility.
That very link being on top of the front page of HN is precisely what caused me to post this link here ;)
What sucks is that there was already a topic to discuss, and the author changed it. The original idea was simply a place with fewer restrictions, and the author instead decided to talk about a fantasy island anarchy with no rule of law and ridiculous scenarios.

So we can talk about that, if we want. But it seems a lot less interesting and much easier to judge that the actual original idea.

What if we really did have a place where we could use driverless cars on the road right now? Where maybe we didn't have to wait for 10 year trials to start using potentially groundbreaking drugs? Where tax money that would otherwise go to the war on drugs, instead goes to health clinics, and drugs are fully legal. Where maybe the education system isn't set up so that kids forcefully progress at the same rate, with kids of the same age, for the first full 18 years of their lives, without a break, instead of being able to learn at their own pace.

I think there are so many kinds of interesting things to be discussed, which are realistic and apply to our world today. But publications like Wired are apparently not interested in discussing them; only discounting the idea wholesale so they don't have to put any real effort in.
The point the original author is implicitly trying to make is that you can't compare to your original frame, where you went to sleep.
I've been a Rackspace customer for many years, and very very nearly left a couple of weeks ago. A program like this one might have been a huge help. Here's what happened.

My startup started getting real traction and doing a lot of business. As my user count grew, I started to see slow response times on my server. I checked out the configuration and everything looked ok to me-- but even during times of super slow response, the server was showing vmstats that looked 99% idle. So I figured this is either a network problem, or something else beyond my control, or a configuration problem that is beyond my talent to identify.

My customer base was exploding, and my infrastructure was failing. In that moment, I would have done just about ANYTHING to solve the problem. I filed a support ticket, but I didn't expect that'd help, and it didn't. I started looking around rackspace to try to figure out if I could upgrade to a dedicated server. It's not really clear to me from looking at Rackspace's web page hard for 20 minutes whether they even offer dedicated servers. If you search google for "Rackspace Dedicated Server" you get what to me is a confusing mixed message, and no clear path for getting a dedicated server. It's not clear to me if that page is comparing how Managed hosting is better than dedicated servers, or if managed hosting is the only way you offer dedicated servers, or if getting the biggest server IS the way you offer dedicated servers.

I damn near just took a shot in the dark and migrated my whole service to another provider in a desparate attempt to see if things got better. For all I knew, it was a misbehaving tenant colocated on my machine. That happened before though, and you guys identified it and solved it in hours.

In the end, I solved the problem for myself by pounding my head against it for 24 hours straight and found a configuration problem in Apache. But having an expert there to help me with this-- I would have paid any amount of money. I still would love to know I'm not going it alone in case I get DOS'd or something. But I'm not even sure who to talk to to build a relationship.
How design thinking transformed Airbnb
From my experience it is some department head (usualy marketing from my experiences) who does not even approach internal IT and goes off spending his budget (he has complete control) on external solution that is cheaper on his budget. Then later on the company or IT department find out and if they are lucky, able to show why it was so cheap. Most usualy end up getting hacked or found to have no backup solution or voilates some law, be it Financial control reglatary bodies or data protect acts or the like.

It is not the IT departments fault, it is the accounts department for letting department heads spend money on IT related items without realises they are bypassing internal IT department and with that company rules.

So it is the Accountants who should be checking those mirrors as they see things the IT department will not even be aware of and unable to see until it goes wrong, usualy badly wrong.

Thats based upon my experience and it will happen again and again, yet nobody mentions accountants!
No source I can link to.
The power of CSS through logo reproduction
Hacking Java Bytecode for Programmers (Part 2)
intrusive advertising kills this post.
That wouldn't work.

If you dropped something it would simply stay right next to you, even if you were accelerating - both of you are accelerating at exactly the same rate.
Has Klout Found the Winning Formula?
I've worked with Samsung, this guy is spot on.
Sure, Windows is in a precarious position. However, that's why it's to Microsoft's credit that they have diversified their portfolio of applications and services so heavily. I can imagine a future where Microsoft isn't prominently on consumers' minds, but I can't fathom one where businesses aren't using a variety of its products heavily.
Last month I had an issue fixed in Eclipse - automatically appending semicolon after call to void method. I filed that issue six years ago.
Yes that's true, I was thinking of the case where we assume the card is stolen.
This "layered" effect of interface hiding is natural in pure functional contexts. In Haskell you often see exposed "Internal" modules for just this reason---they're not the primary API, but they're valuable to have around.

It's harder to have these layered effects in other languages (in my experience) though often distinctions between a concrete and abstract (interface driven) API are a good first layer.
> I'd go so far as to say that most people believe explicitly that there is a privileged reference frame, and that it is an intelligent agent called God

????? Why do you assume God is a physical being inside the universe? (Do people really think that?) God created the universe - God is outside it. Like God is the computer and the universe is the program.

God isn't at rest/not at rest. The concept doesn't even apply.
Updated design documentation can be found at http://fishshell.com/docs/2.0/design.html
I'm a layman so I ask this question with sincerity. Would your opinion change if the formatting was performed manually, at the moment of your choosing?
Neat, but Fade didn't actually fade (in Safari).
It's ambiguous.

"You are in a dark forest. A disembodied voice speaks to you. They want you to follow."

How many voices? Would it have been more correct to say "They wants you to follow"? Should you contort the sentence to drop agency, saying "You should follow"? Is the pronoun referring to some group of people not included in this paragraph?

s/They want/Ze wants/ solves all of these questions immediately and simply.

In most cases, it comes down to stylistic preference. Some people like to use "it". Some people like to alternate "he" and "she". My preference is ze/zir/zirself. Some people feel threatened by it, as if someone else coding in a new language means their old standby of C90 is not good enough.
Sounds very similar to Guy Steel's "Growing a Language" talk. His constraint was to not use any word greater than one syllable unless it is defined by either one-syllable words, or other words that had been previously defined.
This got me thinking. If you are floating along in a void, and float past a virtual particle - you can legitimately say you are moving (of course you could instead say the virtual particle is moving).

Assume now the virtual particle winks out of existence. Have you suddenly stopped moving? Were you wrong/incorrect somehow to have chosen the particle as the rest frame? Has conservation of (your) momentum just been violated?
Show HN: 3 Day Coder - For Bootstrappers
While I like the idea of talking about typography in code, I don't think it's likely that we're as badly off as the post suggests. In fact, pretty much all of those examples make it harder for me to read.

>We’ve also re-set the data type such that there is no space between char and * - the data type of both of these variables is “pointer to char”

No. No no no. That is how you end up with people who can't parse `char* a, b;`. What you're doing is declaring that `* to` and `* from` are `char`s. The common reading that the post suggests is wrong and detrimental to reading C properly.
I guess your example is so idiomatic that it's easy to recognise what it does at a glance. It's good to use easily recognisable patterns. The problem is that I really feel that pointer arithmetic should be separate, because in more complicated code the above style might lead to off-by-one errors that are hard to detect. Also, I don't think the comparison with 0 is pointless. I feel that you should only remove the comparison when an expression gives a boolean result. One other problem here is that, at least for me, it seems safer to only write termination conditions inside parens and the copying code in the loop's body.
More so that our visual sense is extremely well developed. Human visual recognition happens instantly with little effort vs reading text that requires extra effort and focus.
Therefore it reasons to push in that direction as a way to present a lot of information on the screen. It reminds me of how billboards work.
Here's a link with fewer ads (I think - I have an ad blocker)

http://www.airingnews.com/articles/130797/When-Part-of-Apoll...
My Letter to Etsy’s Executives
I found the article hard to read because of the word length. It created a strange, artificial rhythm to the text that drove me to distraction.
| the right leadership

I think that the lack of this is why they are where they are.
Just because MS has their fingers in a lot of pots doesn't meant everything they do has value. Office and Windows is still their bread and butter while Office continually takes up a larger piece of the pie.

MS is at a crossroads. If they push subscriptions like Adobe has, they could see a mass exodus of consumers away from Office.

The future isn't bleak for MS. What the climate has been showing is that MS is at its best when it comes to business.
Flat vs skeuomorphic design is the wrong debate
Sorry to hijack this thread, but your comment is very interesting.

I've been using an open source project from Rackspace (python-cloudfiles) for a couple of years now and suddenly the repository has disappeared from _rackspace_ GitHub account. I found the repo on the _rackerlabs_ GitHub account with a notice:

"The python-cloudfiles bindings are no longer being maintained and their use is deprecated. They will not be available after August 1, 2013."

I'm a little bit surprised and not very happy with how this is being handled. First because the old repository is now a 404 HTTP error with no information whatsoever (in fact, the PyPi page still points to the old repo: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-cloudfiles), and second because PyPi wasn't updated (207004 downloads of the latest release). A final release would be nice, specially to inform your users that the project is unsupported and what is the alternative.

I'll migrate my stuff to python-swiftclient. I already knew Rackspace wasn't very interested in that library, so it's not a big deal for me.

Looks like an honest mistake, but I'm not sure if I can trust Rackspace's open source projects in the future.

EDIT: typo
> But I still personally feel flat when the knowledge gains associated with a Spike aren't as frequent. How have other developers and math-types dealt with that disappointing feeling of a plateau? Besides just changing jobs entirely, I mean.

I'm not entirely sure if I understand you, but it sounds like we are thinking about the same thing.

I've started a job working with C# about 8 months ago. It is a comfortable language to work with. But this job, it's problems (the ones we solve) and C# haven't really exposed me to anything new, which leaves me feeling unfulfilled.

Is that what you are talking about?
No. When you drop something nothing whatsoever happens.

And as shardling said, a reference frame isn't a physical thing that is created and destroyed - it's simply the zero point for your system of measurement - but the measurement would work just fine if you started with any number, zero is just convenient.
Robots Could Put Humans Out of Work by 2045
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What we want to create with ShareCred is a network based on affinities - where you are not connected or linked to others explicitly. It is like Twitter in that sense, but only that sense. We created ShareCred to be much more expressive and richer in experience than Twitter. HN is also a high quality environment, but we believe we can take HN to the next level.

We want to hear from you. Really appreciate if you could sign-up and let us know your impressions. We want to make it useful for you, so all feedback is welcome - criticisms too, seriously.

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ShareCred team
Yes, it seems contrived to me, just like a blog post that the author references, written by himself, where he claims to have forgotten to pay a NYC cab driver because he was used to using Uber in SF. I think the winking thing is likely made up.
> "Source code should be written to be understood by people."

This viewpoint is described well in the Preface to the First Edition of Structure and Interpretation of Computer programs, 2nd paragraph:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html

I would suggest reading the whole Preface. It's quite an inspirational work for this field.
Functionality is to Assets as Lines of Code are to Liabilities
Can someone change the title. It should be "Criminal serving 5-year sentence puts white hat on and invent ATM theft prevention device".
Why? What's making it accelerate? I wasn't trying to talk about some kind of universal/aether acceleration. I meant you and only you should accelerate.
Maybe he means "The theory of relativity in words of four letters or less [than the theory of relativity]" -- i.e., it is an _incomplete_ explanation -- which some of the people on this page seem to agree with.
Seriously, I thought this was extremely clever, and the short, clipped style reminds me of Hemingway or Mamet.
Cocos2dx is also already available for NaCl so will work in chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cocos2dx-test-app/...

Setup instructions:

http://www.cocos2d-x.org/projects/cocos2d-x/wiki/Native_Clie...
Paul, I'm happy to. But when someone directly contradicts me, I think it's only fair that I indicate where I'm coming from. Otherwise, it's just an echo-chamber.
I highly recommend the book "The Box" which goes deep into the history of the shipping container. http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller/dp/...

In a nutshell, it was messy. It's not easy in the physical/infrastructure world to create a standard and then impose it world-wide. (ie, competing standards, etc.)

Then the container literally created and destroyed neighborhoods & cities, but as the article notes revolutionized world trade. I can HIGHLY recommend the book.
As an aside, why do you feel Windows phones are not "great"? Full disclosure I used to work for MS, but I have no product loyalty for any company. My previous two phones were iPhones, and for the first time ever I finally feel like I have a great smartphone with my Nokia Lumia (WP8).

I'm stumped why everyone is so down on WP8. Granted, the app store is pretty grim. If that is the main concern, then fair enough. But I feel like the phone/OS themselves are stellar.
EFF now accepting Bitcoin again
No: I'm not saying you're wrong because you're a moron, I'm saying you're wrong and you're a moron.

It's not an ad hominem, it's an insult.
Touche. I worked at BrightLeaf Sq next to this bridge for a few years. While the wording might be different across languages, all the aforementioned nations use Arabic numerals to my knowledge, so "11.7ft" would mean the same to them, I'd hope.
Thanks for the response and clarification.

I agree with your point about separating the issues.

I also recall (with some vagueness, and with no reference to cite) that Auernheimer may have pondered/vacillated upon what to do with the data, before deciding to take it to a journalist. I don't know whether there is any truth in that.

I'm of torn opinion about Auernheimer. I've had acquaintances and a few friends who deliberately, um... "mess with" "the system", for functional reasons that may be less apparent to many than the "attention" that gets ascribed. OTOH, they tend to draw a pretty sharp (yes, if personally defined) line between the culpable and the innocent (for lack of better terms, and yes in a subjective sense) and to put effort into avoiding harming the latter.

Based upon both your reputation and what you've done for me as well as others (we've emailed briefly once or twice, long ago), I'm inclined to take your point with significance and regard.

At the same time, Auernheimer does seem almost like the perfect... "extreme" counterpoint to the CFAA and its like. On opposite sides, but equal in their obnoxiousness. Almost "made for each other".

I hope he prevails in this case. Putting your customer data at the end of a public URL is the crime, here. And... it fits with my longstanding and poor personal experience with AT&T (à la SBC).

P.S. Given your history, I really hope that my comment and reply are appropriate and not painful.

Best Regards