skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Engineering is actually getting more like programming, with CAD and simulation testing taking the place of coding and testing. And some types of engineering (circuit design in VHDL/Verilog) is programming.

I've never engineered, but from what I've gathered, the main difference is that in engineering, you have to be really careful about writing down a design, because once you design a car or an airplane or even a shoe, it takes a lot of human effort to build the actual car/airplane/shoe, and you really want to make sure it won't crash before you test it. It's costly to reiterate a design before release, if that iteration involves a full design-manufacture-test cycle. Whereas in programming, we can build the actual program whenever we want (compilers are fast and cheap) so we usually start from an initial design that's completely broken and incrementally refine it. Even the largest scale programming, done right, has a "nightly build", the engineering equivalent of changing your airplane design in the afternoon, manufacturing it at night, having a test pilot fly it in the morning, and discovering that afternoon why the test pilot and your new airplane are now in hundreds of pieces spattered across the Nevada desert.
> multimethods (dispatch on anything, not just type)

Care to elaborate? I know Common Lisp's multimethods dispatch on class and object identity

(defmethod foo ((obj class-name)) ..)

(defmethod foo ((obj (eql object)) ..)

The first one dispatches if obj is of class "class-name", and the second dispatches if obj and object are EQL (i.e. strictly equal by value or pointer.) and this second one allows you to do very clean switch/case style dispatching on actual values.

How does clojure do it?
Health Care’s Wireless Future: Vital Signs in Remote Real-time
Here's the website for the app:

http://touch-plan.webs.com/
Well you can have roundabouts with traffic lights. They work well in Chandigarh, India.
There's a discussion about that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387997
You should have thought about this before buying an over-hyped DRM-riddled gadget. This is EXACTLY why DRM schemes are BAD.
Thanks so much for posting this! Now I know how to answer non-questions, and avoid endless pointless debates.
Live Video feed of Space Shuttle Launch
https://www.getdropbox.com/install?os=lin
If you read the book Millionaires Next Door they pretty much tackle this problem and show that owners of small->medium sized businesses are the bulk of the millionaires. A lot of these businesses are just run of the mill things like construction, commercial real estate, service stations etc. The home runs from taking huge risks are few and far between.
If you're not pushing yourself forward what are you doing instead? Perhaps whatever you are doing in place of pushing yourself forward is the marshmallow you need to say no to.
No.

It is a new business that had an unexpected acceptance and growth, where there is a lot of subjective human involvement in the approval process, and a lot of issues dealing with banking systems all around the world.

Stop making it look like a disaster because it is not. It is the greatest example of what can be done in online purchase and delivery of software, be it games or whatever.

Most software companies are just jealous they didn't come up with that idea first. A working idea to be more precise.

Clear? So stop the FUD now.
When I posted this, there were 4 minutes left until launch
pfsense! http://www.pfsense.org/
you can put pfsense or its sister project, m0n0wall (scaled down version), on any machine or an embedded machine. Really extensive feature list, reduces costs to hardware.

There's also DD-WRT (which you install onto commercial appliances, then overwrite their firmware), but I haven't tried it out yet.

Didn't upvote the article, you're absolutely right about it being fluff.
assuming it has at least one virtual function

Which you can't do. Seriously, when did it become okay to call out a problem with the general case as nonsense because there's a specific case that avoids the issue?
The speed of grabbing the set of 'random' profile pictures needs to be faster. I think many users will get tired of waiting over and over and eventually leave.
> How many more statins?

Are you claiming that the existing statins address all relevant cases?

> which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion

That's a non sequitor.

> Finally, the NIH is picking up most of the tab for fundamental research

"fundamental research" isn't a significant fraction of the cost of drug development, aka "getting a drug into the pharmacy".
Ask HN: How do you design your web pages?
For years I have emulated the look and feel of other websites because my design skills are lacking. I want to be able to make my web-apps look attractive on my own, and would love to hear the experiences you all have had.
I feel like people miss one of the main points of this FQA. The author repeatedly asserts that most people who think they need C++ do so because they think they need the performance it can offer. Most of these people, however, don't actually need the extra performance and would be much better off with a higher level language. Those that actually do need the performance and know what they are doing would be better off just using C with assembler.

In many ways, I think he is right. C++ tries to be high-level, low-level and everything in between all at once, and the end result can bring a lot of potentially unnecessary frustration to programmers. There are several projects, such as LLVM, for example, that get by using a "tasteful subset" of C++, and I would be interested in learning what that subset is.
I read by quickly identifying paragraphs to skip in an article like this.

Walter Mischel is a slight, elegant man... SKIP

Mischel was born in Vienna... SKIP

The family settled... SKIP
Agreed. Additionally, I found meditation was useful for increasing my self-control. Many types of yoga are focused on meditative practices but not all. I think these are just mind tricks (hacks?) and this jives with the research the article presented.
That's a tough question to answer. The big game studios, for the most part, focus on console titles simply because console titles are wins, economically. They are harder to pirate, etc. Even id Software considers the PC a secondary platform, which does not bode well for Mac gaming. If you are only going to reach a minuscule number of customers, why spent the effort putting out a Mac version of the software?

I have no idea how the smaller game studios view the Mac, however keep in mind that the iPhone and Mac are very different platforms, and games that work well on a phone may not translate well as a desktop gaming experience, especially considering what people expect of their games in this day and age.
Also see GNU libjit and lightning (no ARM support, as far as I know, but it has SPARC and PPC.)

http://www.gnu.org/software/dotgnu/libjit-doc/libjit_toc.htm...

http://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/
Learn to Think Better: Tips from an Autistic Savant
I hate the whole idea of anti-trust.

Charge more than your competition and your abusing your monopoly.

Charge less than them and your pricing to destroy competition and monopolise the market.

Charge the same as your competition and your colluding on price.

Anti-trust laws simply penalise big, successful companies for the fact that they're successful.
It's hard to see myself choosing this over Dropbox. Currently no cross-platform support, and it's still a proprietary client.

*edit: My bad. I googled for 'ubuntuone license' and the excerpt said it was proprietary. The Launchpad page now says GPLv3. No code released yet, but I'm sure it will follow as the project goes public:

https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client
> Try saying that in... Colorado and see how far you get before you get your lights punched out.

I said "buy". Even Coloradans have mastered the fine art of saying "no thanks" when someone offers to buy something for a price that they don't like. And, when the price is acceptable, they sell.

Yes, Water rights are for sale in Colorado.

And, most people don't live in Colorado (or the Mojave).
I tried it out but had problems with entering information in the form. Every time I pressed enter it created a new text box that was difficult to deal with. (IE8 Windows XP)
i do, you just have to log in. that's the value add - of logging in
I am tempted to agree.

Perhaps the resources allocated to anti-trust measures can be spend more productively on lowering barriers to market entry.
Even if programmers do something all the time, that doesn't mean it's right. The reason is simple: every opinion has arguments in favor of it. If someone offers five arguments in favor of an opinion, usually at least two are reasonable. If someone attempts to rebuke all five points, they're usually being unreasonable. It's also counterproductive, because bad counter-arguments call for counter-counter-arguments, which detracts from the actual points under discussoin. If you think an argument isn't persuasive and doesn't have much weight, then that is what you should say, instead of searching for some nitpicky way to counter the argument, usually ending up in discussions about semantics because you actually agree on the point.

As for this article: if this was intended to be humorous, then it contains far too much that seems to have been intended seriously, for my taste. After a few points he could have stopped beating the dead horse.

Wrapping criticism in humor is an annoying strategy similar to the 'poisoning the well' fallacy: as soon as someone tries to start a discussion, you can go "where's your sense of humor?" and your humorously wrapped argument remains unchallenged. That gets under my skin and may have impaired my humor detecting capabilities here.
Hulu's tug of war with TV
I had no idea there was so much instrumental content on Youtube. It would be cool if you also sourced from one of those mp3 search engine-type sites (like Songza)
The results show you how many seconds the worker took to answer the question. You could also do some statistical analysis on the answers compared to the other people who worked on the same HIT.
"Now let me state the present rules,"
The lawyer then went on,
"These very simple guidelines,
You can rely upon:
You're gouging on your prices if
You charge more than the rest.
But it's unfair competition if
You think you can charge less!
"A second point that we would make
To help avoid confusion...
Don't try to charge the same amount,
That would be Collusion!
You must compete. But not too much,
For if you do you see,
Then the market would be yours -
And that's Monopoly!"

--"The Incredible Bread Machine"
This weekend NPR's "On The Media" had this sad story about a Dallas Texas newspaper owner who was willing to bite the bullet and accept Amazon's 30% offer to his content if they dropped their other requirement: their right to re-license his content to others, on any medium, for the rest of eternity, for free!

That's right; they will pay the paper 30% for each content on the kindle, but they can sell that very content in other mediums, including print, and he gets nothing. The balls on Bezos!
You mean, one 5* review.
Use my php framework, of course ;)

http://phocoa.com

It is modeled after Cocoa development (Mac/iPhone apps).

If you already know Cocoa, that makes it very easy to learn since the architecture and concepts are all the same.

OTOH, if you don't know Cocoa, then there's a learning curve. In that respect, I suggest you follow others' advice and don't give up after a few days. Better yet, find a mentor for that framework, it will speed up the learning curve by a huge factor.
"How convenient does it prove to be a rational animal, that knows how to find or invent a plausible pretext for whatever it has an inclination so to do." - Benjamin Franklin

(Sometimes quoted as the punchier, "Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe." That's probably just a paraphrase, though.)
Both of you got it right -- the value is in being ready to adapt to change.
The concept of "I should have run it by my wife when I equated estrogen and insipid" is pretty stunning. Shouldn't everyone know that might offend people?
you might want to give these guys a call:

http://www.influxis.com/

they do FMS hosting
Genius.com Pranks Harvey Mudd College Professor Mike Erlinger
> Will three judges really think she can't use the water that lands on her roof?

Odds are, yes.

What other laws do you want judges to ignore? On what basis? What are the odds that they'll only ignore the laws that you think that they should?
Start ugly, refine until you love it.
Few people want the raw facts and to have to go through the work of making their own judgments. Even fewer care if it's realtime.
It's the "fast track to everything", if you humbly accept that is not going to be fast AT ALL -- depending on for how much perfectionism you strive.
Amazon Launches Kindle Store for iPhone
I have a friend who is a designer. I help him with some basic code for clients (newsletters, wordpress installation, etc.) and he does design stuff for me.
I liked this guy's post on the education bubble, but this one seems like he's grasping at straws. All he's proven is that people Google terms a lot more often when they need to sound like experts on the subject. Brilliant!
BlackBerry Storm 9530 3G Unlocked
Blackberry Storm 9530 offers a number of great features like 3G network, high-quality voice, 3.2 megapixel camera. Using a very advanced touch technology that treats the screen as a keyboard. most advanced touch screen phone ever to be released.
The author of this article writes more for us, people who want just the substance, on his blog: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/

He still wraps the information, but not to the extent he does for other publications and he frequently separates the substance into its own paragraphs. It's a great blog and I recommend it.

Two other cognitive biology blogs that I recommend are http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/ and http://merzenich.positscience.com/
> I'm wondering if this is analogous to a few large plantation owners locking up great swaths of arable land (which their ancestors acquired in good Lockean fashion after killing off the native inhabitants) and refusing to sell to a poorer entrepreneur who might use some of that property in a more useful and efficient fashion.

People who use resources inefficiently eventually lose them to folks who don't.

Or, were you referring to national parks?
Very well put. See also, http://c2.com/xp/TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign.html
Here are two things have been useful for me:

1. Looking at a bunch of nicely designed sites and inspecting the background images and source code so that I can see conceptually how effects are achieved.

2. Using a CSS framework that abstracts many browser-specific idiosyncrasies away.
I love these kind of ideas and would absolutely be in the market for a suite of applications and/or products that would allow me to track how my body is functioning.

I find it unfortunate that I can monitor and tune an enterprise database so closely, but cannot keep track of my heart or liver function.
I hear you, but to me that's a difference of scale, albeit one that allows you a greater tolerance for risk during the engineering process.

I wouldn't argue that chip design is not an engineering process because because the risk/build profile differs from that of a bridge, nor would I make a similar argument for bridges versus cars or dams or spaceships. To me, engineering is a really broad term that encompasses software just as easily as it does physical components.
Well, anti-trust cases do depend on evidence of collusion between market participants, rather than pricing information alone. As Adam Smith said, men of the same profession seldom come together save with the intent to defraud the public.
Just shows that someone who needs to run his opinions by his wife for approval might sometimes need little time off to be a Macho Man(TM) on the internet.
whats wrong with emulation?

even in building a slick, new, innovative startup, you're rarely striking out into purely uncharted, untouched territory. (for example, if you use a framework, a big chunk of your code will look exactly the same as a lot of others out there). odds are you're just taking solutions and concepts that previous people have pioneered and combining them in an new/innovative way, possibly throwing in a unique idea/element or two into the mix.

whats wrong with doing the same with respect to design?
You would be surprise how many verticals you could find within Youtube.
"Anti-trust laws simply penalise big, successful companies for the fact that they're successful."

Simply?

Hmmm... let's think about that...

Rockefeller wouldn't ship his oil on anyone's railroads except Vanderbilt's. Vanderbilt wouldn't ship anyone's oil except Rockefeller's. They did this until they were the only 2 left.

That is until we the people said, "Enough of this."

If we treated each other fairly, we wouldn't need rules.

If we followed the rules, we wouldn't need laws.

If we obeyed the laws, we wouldn't need courts.

So many of us hate rules, laws, or lawyers, but still refuse to behave in such a way as to make them unnecessary.
He gave his 75% answers. The readers of this article will have their own 75% answers, and if they don't, then his are just fine for the demographic. It's pretty smart really, and subtle.

They are not my answers, but that's very far from being the point. Well, actually, that IS the point!
An important thing is to try multiple radically different ideas. Oftentimes I'll feel like a design is okay, then try a new one and realize how much I would have regretted staying with the old one. So now I always try to create at least 3-4 different layouts/designs before I settle on using one.
Seth Godin: Why tribes, not money or factories, will change the world
wow, this is just ridiculously over the top.
Too bad they didn't directly integrate it into the Kindle iPhone application though. (It launches in Safari.)
Is this a poem? Or will it compile?
Ask HN: Listing customer logo on "Who uses this site" page
Quick question: what kind of permissions do you need to list company names/ logos on your service's website? I'm looking specifically at 37 Signals' customer page (http://37signals.com/customers). Do I need to get explicit permission from the companies, or can I proceed until apprehended with this?

Thanks!
Travis
Agreed. tl;dr for me. I'm not looking for or expecting a biography given the title.
Right, if Twitter could get their XMPP features back-in, it would be quite an amazing service. It would work like an IM, real conversations could take place.
Templates, the implicit ctor/dtor paradigm coupled with scoping, to name a few. I know Lisp has a unique feature - let's say, unity of code and data, but hey, there are plenty of languages with unique features not found in C++; nevertheless I think my statement still applies, that no language compares to C++ in terms of power of meta-language facilities.

Umm, lisp macros can implement all of C++ meta-language facilities and more, so how are said meta-language facilities more powerful?

And then there's the meta-language protocol....
Cute.

Funnily enough, I've been tinkering around with a service that does just something kinda similar in my spare time. The idea is that it will take a calendar published in ical format and automatically publish calendar events as tweets.
Keep emulating but start studying design principles as well (color theory, composition, typography, UI fundementals, etc.). That way you'll be able to identify the elements in the design and why they work.
Great comment from Avdi Grimm:

Something that DHH still doesn’t seem to grok is that some of the most prominent artists and rock stars in this world are deeply professional people. The members of U2, for instance, are professional musicians in every sense of the word. That doesn’t make them any less artists.
Rather than ask "why" just flag it like I did.
I am budgeting to hire a designer, having accepted that I, for once, am not good at something. Graphic design traumatizes me: I have photoshop, gimp, paint.net and inkscape. It will take an act of God to help me figure any of it out.
I needed to use code formatting to get it to honor the line breaks.
You can write a function that determines the dispatch action.

In the example below we dispatch my-add based on a function of the two arguments. This function returns a bool that determines the function to call, but it could return anything that you could then use to define the method upon (e.g. a symbol).

(defmulti my-add (fn [x y] (and (string? x) (string? y))))

(defmethod my-add true [x y]
(str x y))

(defmethod my-add false [x y]
(+ x y))

(my-add 3 4) ==> 7
(my-add "3" "4") ==> "34"
Greg is one of the two VC partners I know who still program. (The other is Albert Wenger of Union Sq Ventures.)
"Good artists copy, great artists steal." -- Picasso (attributed to)
I think it's "The Novelty Effect" like Steve Blank mentioned: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603401
To add onto the title point... yes, smart people can rationalise and explain anything.

This is why I rarely ever change my mind during a conversation. There's two parts to that.

1) I am usually able to construct a convincing counter-argument to whatever the other person is arguing, and so it is difficult to "win" the argument, so to speak.

2) I am aware of this, and also aware that a smart person I'm talking to will be equally able to construct a convincing argument - irrespective of the merits of what they're arguing.

So, to me, a good heated argument is just a good device to bring out pro and con arguments and clash them "in the field", so to speak. But a heated argument is not the place to come to a conclusion about which side of the argument is more correct. That needs to be done after the argument, in the peace and quiet of your own head, over the following days.

The funny thing is, often, I do change my mind after the argument (even though I was making a strong case for the opposing view during the argument), and it can be quite surprising for people to overhear me, 2 days later, arguing the very opposite of my previous point with equal vehemence.
We could use more 'dealing with stupid people' submissions. I appreciate the help.
Lack of Vision To Blame for Newspaper Woes
Git solves all your problems....Almost
Check out http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ (by Brad Fitzpatrick and another Google engineer).
I really like this. Offline browsing for a full 7 days, video and even a crossword puzzle? That's a pretty good bridge between Web-only reading and traditional newspapers. This app could really take off if they promote it right. At the very least, this would be awesome for an airplane or car trip.

Hopefully they roll out an iPhone/Blackberry/Whatever app too. Make it as mobile and easy to read as the real paper.
Makes sense, my underlying question being if this whitespace is significant.
This is good news for Google Android and the Android Market, if Apple decides to further pursue this policy. Can you imagine how secure Google's position in search would be if their competitors censored search results tangentially related to BitTorrent?