skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Writing lots of code quickly is not a good thing. You shouldn’t be writing more than a few lines of code per day. And if your editor is helping you write a lot of code really quickly, it’s encouraging you to write bad code.

Here speaks a man who has never worked on a green field project, never built something from start to finish, never had to write more than a few lines of code a day.

How many programmers would it take to build a new version 1 product if they're all writing just a few lines of code a day? Would 10,000 do the trick, with six months to finish? There's a time to talk, discuss, prepare, plan, draw stuff on whiteboards, etc. And then there's the other time, when you sit down and build the product, which means writing all the code.

I'm not talking about an app that displays a random number, in which case, fire away with your few lines a day, and you'll be up and running in a few days. I'm talking about products with a capital P.

I'm starting the coding work on a new version of an existing product the week after next, and I'll be spending 15 solid 8 hour days writing code. I've made the plans, sat in the meetings, tossed more than half the features over board. And now comes the time to actually build it -- or at least, a first iteration of it before I get hit with user feedback.
This is the most ridiculous post I've read in a while. It's written by someone who's never used a proper IDE. The IDE makes you write bad code ? This must have been written by someone who's a complete noob, honestly. What a rubbish. "You should only be writing a couple of lines of code per day" ... Really ?
I don't buy the point about forcing programmers to refactor either. Vim gives me access to commands that make text manipulation faster, which often means I can refactor faster.

In fact, I'd say that a slower refactor process would almost certainly discourage me from refactoring.
Fun but easily hacked if you change the class in DevTools to not be disabled, then click click clickity.
> Try it on Java and say you still want a dumb editor or you don't want to program at all.

On the one hand, a smarter editor is a useful tool; on the other hand, if a language makes me feel like I need a smart editor, that means that it isn't clear and concise on its own, and even if the editor helps me find and write things, there's a lot of visual noise in the code itself that's preventing me from seeing things as easily as I want.

The language itself is both a part of the UI, and a part of the infrastructure on which additional programming UI can be built. As infrastructre, its good if it supports good additional tooling; as UI, its bad if it needs additional tooling.

If most of the interaction is through tooling because the base language is not human-usable enough to be the primary interaction mechanism for programmers, then the "source" language needs to be defined in terms of the pieces that programmers should primarily interact with and the other form should be an intermediate representation used internally by the toolchain but not normally exposed to the programmer.
Police our out of control.
"[T]o a depressing extent, [...] our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act."

Let's act: http://www.meetup.com/Hack-Government-Bay-Area

To the broader point, the two party system certainly pulls "to the center", but it's also somewhat random which middle. Those pushed to the fringes of the Democrats and those pushed to the fringes of the Republicans have some substantial points of disagreement, but have some significant overlap as well. We should see how we can work together to pull both parties to a better place.
This, a million times !
What kind of 'third front' do you want? The fact that you don't actually detail what sort of politics it would have makes me suspicious. Who is it that you want me to give power to?
> Advanced visual editors like Visual Studio make the syntax irrelevant and the architecture easy to focus on

I disagree. If they made the syntax irrelevant, there wouldn't be a need for the source code window at all.
Array operations tend to be highly parallelizable by nature. Numpy operations can certainly be parallelized, and even distributed. Take a look at blaze.

https://github.com/ContinuumIO/blaze
There really aren't any semantic limitations of the go macro. About the only thing that doesn't work, is that you can't use the "binding" macro inside of a go macro (but using one outside the macro will work as expected). Go block translation stops at function boundaries, so you can use a for loop inside a go, but since the for returns a lazy seq, putting takes inside the body of a for doesn't really make sense (or work), instead, use dotimes or a loop/recur.

Aside from that, go blocks do slow down the code they contain a bit. From my tests, this slow down is within 1.5-2x the original code. However since go block shouldn't be looping a ton, this shouldn't matter. Functions that are called within go blocks are not modified, and so retain their original performance semantics.

I hope that helps.
i don't really think the article sold the point. Software brain doesn't necessarily equate to a simulated brain.
Nations are not based only on the ability to collect tax. And a percentage of income or sales are not the only kinds of tax which have been collected in history.
There are very good reasons for some businesses to use ALPR technology. EasyPass and other automatic toll-collection schemes use RFID tags on cars to uniquely identify them. There are parking-lot control systems that use RFID tags to allow access to paid parking lots. ICS, the largest vendor of car wash management systems, sells an RFID subscription package. One of their tags is on my car's windshield: http://www.icscarwashsystems.com/index.php?product=17

ALPR has some technical and business advantages over RFID. The RFID car-identification solution has been around over ten years; ALPR wasn't as effective then. If it has been, we'd probably have ALPR toll-collection systems instead of RFID.

I hope this pushback against ALPR won't extend to private uses of it for reasonable and limited purposes.
Roots also cause community, and make people more likely to organize to protect and improve the conditions of the place where they live.

edit: As a simple illustration, I am a typical single, firmly middle class professional who lives in a neighborhood that I have no connection to, is nowhere near any of my family, and I know maybe one or two of my neighbors by name. If the city decided that it wanted to dump all of its garbage in the middle of my street, end rodent control, fire, and police protection in my neighborhood, and add heavy metals to the water, I would just move to a place where they weren't doing that, and leave the people who couldn't afford to to rot.

As one of the members of the top 10% in household incomes, I could conceivably keep doing that until 90% of the populace was mutating in a nuclear wasteland, and I was reduced to a shitty studio apartment for $6000/mo in the outskirts of a walled community guarded by our private paramilitary massacre-rape squad, which periodically makes incursions into the wasteland to seize kitschy furniture to sell to us on the inside.
Using voice analysis to figure out who you are? Please....
Does anyone have the #'s for say, shootings?
Nope, that's not just you. This blog post drip so much hatred I had to clean my hard drive.

I read Sean's piece without knowing it was him (now reading it again, I feel stupid for having skipped that) or even knowing what happened. You know what this piece felt like without knowing these two informations?

"Some guy had a nice wedding, the public went nuts about some false (according to him) information and he's coming back to tell his side of the story, ask for the public to reconsider their wrongdoing in this public lynch mob he's finding himself at the mercy of. He alsto tries to remind everybody that a wedding is supposed to be the most beautiful expression of love between two persons and even if something that you think COMPLETELY WRONG happens because of said marriage, there would've been better ways to say it than repeatedly calling your spoose names".

Okay, not quite 9K words. And yes, maybe he didn't need that many words. But I think "yo guyz, I didn't cut no trees, u shuld chill out dudez" wouldn't have had the same weight. Seriously, what's f*cking wrong with a "9666 words essay"? That's CHILDISH coming from a guy who wasted 1186 words spreading hate. As for the "[TechCrunch] [bending] over backwards", what was the alternative? The local school's publication? This piece was written for the tech world, because it's his world, as much as the world where all his current and future network live in, so he had to come clean to these persons and whatever your opinion on TC is (we all got one, don't worry) this was one of the best mediums available.
Machine-Learning Project Sifts Through Security Data
As the volume of data created by security and network devices multiplies, researchers look for ways to teach computer to better highlight attack patterns
>Roots cause unemployment, since they make people less likely to move to a new job

That's true, but unemployment is not a huge problem in the US compared to problems like addiction and father-less children which are made worse by rootlessness.

In other words, the genius of America is how it removes barriers to people's becoming economically productive and following individual visions, but it is possible to take that spirit too far, particularly in domains like subsidized housing for poor people.

For most of the last 2 million years, most people were surrounded by the same people all their lives, and interactions with strangers were rare. Although it is necessary for most of us to diverge from that ancestral way of life to maintain what we have achieved as a civilization, diverging too much causes social pathologies, particularly addiction.

Someone very close to me has spent the last 18 years in a subsidized apartment building for poor people in the Bay Area. Half of this person's neighbors are the same people as when he moved in 18 years ago. There is value in that.

There is more to maintaining a healthy society that young people pulling up roots to move to the Bay Area to do fearsomely economically-productive things with computers, young people moving to Cambridge, MA, to become research scientists and young people obtaining law degrees and moving to Washington, DC, to gain enough influence to inject some wisdom and sanity into our government. In particular, there is a "social fabric" that can become diseased by too much emphasis on individual freedom and economic efficiency.
This doesn't prove that economics is wrong. It just proves that something like one of every two economists is wrong. This is not a hard problem to figure out the answer to by looking at historic data either. Read both sides closely, and if you're paying enough attention, you'll figure out which one is right pretty fast.
Except that in far too many areas, crime is still increasing. Are they painting houses with lead paint again?
The channels themselves are a bit hard to understand because there's a careful dance of locks/unlocks to get it all to work correctly, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out.

The IOC go macro is huge (about 500/600 loc) but it's pretty straight forward. Its really nothing more than a micro compiler that pareses clojure, does some analysis on it, and spits it back out as clojure. If you've done any work with compilers it should be very easy to understand.
> When Edward Snowden and I voted for Obama in 2008 we would have agreed.

Edward Snowden did not vote for Obama.

Edward Snowden: "A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblowe...
"... Git branches are just labels attached to change-sets".

Then wouldn't the clearest thing be to call them (named) change-sets?
I think one of the tensions underlying this article and responses is a quite longstanding debate over the relative strengths of writing text and interactive editing for specifying and editing computations. Smalltalk was perhaps the first to take a strong position against writing text as the best way to do things, and instead pushed for an interactive system that just happened to have text as one component. A certain style of macro/DSL-oriented Lisp is perhaps the other end of the spectrum, which aims at coming up with expressive code interfaces to a problem (though there are also very interactive approaches to developing Lisp, going all the way to the extreme of image-based development where there actually is no easy way to recover the running image's source code). The Lisp impulse (in one flavor of Lisp dev) is to find a way to write a macro as a new interface to common patterns, while the tool approach is to find a way to write refactoring/manipulation/codegen interfaces to deal with common patterns.

Maybe some defenders of XML are one extreme in the tool-oriented direction; some explicitly argue that human-editable syntax doesn't matter, because concrete syntax is for machines, and how a human should input it is an interface-design question. I'm tempted to think some C++ advocates also have views along those lines.

Anyway I think a lot of these debates are about where exactly on that spectrum constitutes a sweet spot, so point to some fairly deep splits. I personally lean towards wanting expressive source code, and start getting suspicious when I'm shoveling around huge amounts of boilerplate with an IDE; I start thinking, why is this something I'm manipulating in an editor, rather than something that gets abstracted by a macro or language feature? But I still use a number of semi-automated things in vim, certainly the low-level stuff like variable-name completion and folding.
That ideal was gone at the time those words were written, when the founders had slaves.
There will always be flamewars and defensiveness about technology choices. Some people are insecure, some aren't. Not everyone becomes a dick just because they've mastered an editor. My best friend for many years used vim while I used emacs and we used to constantly rib each other about our choices. But we still worked very well together. Maybe you need to work where people don't care what you use to get stuff done as long as it gets done?
Edward Snowden: The geek Turned Deep Throat
Agree, the ability to clone the repository should be a highly available/easily discoverable action. It will generally be the next thing the user wants to do (perhaps after forking) on first visiting a repository...

Also, the idea that he needs to change the clone URL box so that it can autofocus is wrong. In fact, his current workflow for cloning is flawed:

> "my current workflow for cloning of double-click to select + cmd-c"

He just needs to click _once_ on the button to the right of the URL, which has a 'copy to clipboard' tooltip pop-up. He even showed this icon in his UI wireframe sketch.

Perhaps it isn't noticed much by people because developers may have flash turned off, which is the mechanism used by GitHub to access the clipboard?

To be honest, I didn't know about the feature for a long time, and used to do the same thing - select URL then command-C to copy it - myself. It was actually something I found out about from the GitHub blog post about the recent re-design!
On setting goals
You know what I don't really get? Why do we need anyone to give power to? Keep it to yourself. We've got everything we really need to make ourselves happy and live our lives. Why do people so desperately need someone to reign over them? This sounds like a Stockholm syndrome.
What's Codea?
You'll Never Know if the NSA Is Breaking the Law or Keeping You Safe
> The US government is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian regime.

> The US government is on the verge of throwing out the Constitution & just doing whatever the hell it wants from now on.

> The US government is on the verge of declaring that there is no such thing as a law, only some rules it has decided to enforce to its own benefit

The US government is rampantly, and problematically, violating its constitution and its founding principles in a dozen different ways. But this much has always been true. Are we closer to a totalitarian regime than when we imprisoned all Americans of Japanese descent, or when we threw people in prison for speaking out against World War I, or when COINTELPRO and MKULTRA were going on?

The bulk of the system remains safely in place. A government on the verge of throwing out the constitution does not have a Supreme Court throwing out federal laws.
I think the article isn't really about elected representatives, it's about the attitudes of ordinary Americans. Like the author and many other pro-American Europeans, I've been pretty disillusioned by the recent reaction to PRISM. Like drone assassination before it, most Americans aren't saying "how dare our government do this" but "how dare our government do this TO US CITIZENS".

(I'm not talking about spying on political leaders, the military etc - everyone does that to everyone else. But it seems that most Americans think it's perfectly fine to invade the privacy of ordinary people on a massive scale, just as long as those people don't hold a US passport.)
Chicago had 532 murders in 2012. With 1/3rd the population of NYC
The Supreme Court is going to rule on a Massachusetts law that forces protestors at abortion clinics to stand 35 feet from the building. The problem isn't just the noise and the traffic delays, there are also issues of physical harassment and intimidation. I think its a pretty reasonable law - protestors are perfectly visible at that distance and passers-by can have a certain amount of personal space.
Yikes, sorry I definitely did not mean every department is using ALPR, meant this is a list of every department using. Fixed headline, thanks.
Snowden's options appear to narrow
> Who is it that you want me to give power to?

To yourself, I meant.

I removed the term 'third front' because it does contain the political bullshit angle that is certainly suspicious. Thanks for pointing out.
sigh

I'm going to cross-post from another forum, where we had a similar discussion on ALPRs.

My reply was in response to how a town can use ALPRs to justify the layoffs of 2-3 parking personnel.

"Nope, the way you justify this is you don't pay for it.

The way it actually works is the manufacturer employs a team of grant writers, whose job is to know about any and all municipal, county, state, federal grants. In conjunction, with a team of lobbyists to influence the increased disbursement of funds to towns to help in the "war on terror". And the cherry on top, is the team that works with each state (or each regional purchasing authority) to get the manufacturer's products onto the approved list of law enforcement-related purchasing items.

The manufacturer then sells 2-5 systems to your town as a way of increasing revenue collection for the cost of $0 (see, grant writers?) plus annual maintenance cost. Your town sells it as a way to crack down on drug dealers and other undesirables. The manufacturer gets about $100K in revenue at this turn.

Then the manufacturer sells professional services to integrate the camera lookup system into your town's DMV, property tax, and criminal databases. So, you're not limited to just parking tickets.

Then the manufacturer sells the use of a certified company employee as an "expert witness" in case you need someone to testify to the accuracy of the system during a court proceeding (that is a result of their surveillance technology).

Then they sell the mapping/GIS software integration at a rate of $300/mile driven for cities, and ~$80/mile driven for highway patrol/state troopers.

I seriously wish I was joking about how the game is played. *

This is what happens when you base all of your municipal revenue on inflated real estate prices/assessments and the floor disappears from under you. You go scrambling for any sort of revenue you can get.

* = I've talked to some officers and detectives in my old town, and they state that they turn the system off when riding with it, because it generates so many hits that they cannot possibly respond to each individual one. My suspicion is that its both that, and the cost per mile driven."

And someone else's follow-up to my post:

"Thanks, you gave me the perfect lead-in to explain my comment.

A lot of these will receive "grant money" from the DHS with the stipulation that the culled data is fed to the DHS for their global database.

There was a PBS Frontline on this subject about a year ago."
OT/@Mods: Help required... I can't save/upvote this and recent stories (Upvote not preserved).
I started programming when the editor wars were between vi and Emacs. Somehow we've ended up on the same side.

Good programmers did, in fact, refactor even with simpler tools. They did use descriptive names. They wrote tight code because they were good programmers, not because they weren't perfectly capable of generating reams of boilerplate.

I'm seeing a lot of negative comments in this thread that miss the core points made in the blog post. Boilerplate is a code smell. The need for broad refactorings is another. Not being able to understand where methods are used is yet another. A good programmer will use tools that help him or her identify and fix those issues. IDEs allow bad programmers to create the smells far too easily.
Bitcoin offers very little here. If you are smart about how you interact with it, it might be substantially more anonymous than other digital payment mechanisms. It is not any more anonymous than physical cash, and governments collected taxes just fine when everyone was paying with cash. They do this through audit and threat of force, and that is just as applicable to bitcoin.