skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Four reasons why they are useful:

1) Not as many people as you think have configured email clients
2) Filling out a form does not break flow with looking at the site
3) Response rates are higher for these forms than an email address (based on my own experience)
4) a form allows you to collect more structured information from responders
Sorry to nit pick, but (for example) variables being global by default it's not exactly an epitome of elegance.
Won't people who use automatic form-fillers be wrongly identified as bots?
One thing at a time. We first need to get people away from the "intuitive" terrestrial mindset that distance = difficulty. The example, that it would take more energy to drop a rocket on the sun than to hit Pluto (directly, absent more advanced tricks) is a good starting point.
> These board creators just want to ease the path for most web developers to become hardware developers. It not only opens up a whole new industry to work with, but also it creates a good 'filter' to filter out the bad ones. I will explain.

What exactly happened to the programmers who, upon realizing that they had to use a new technology, learned the new technology instead of feature-creeping something until it gets to their familiar JS boat.

I'm not going to rant that this is never going to fly. Were it based on technical consideration, the current image of Web 2.0 would have sunk like a rock, let alone even try to fly. But this is horribly inefficient and backwards that encouraging seems incredibly detrimental to our field.

Come on, people, it's not that hard. If you want to do embedded development, a reasonable subset of C is all you need to know, and it certainly takes less to learn that it took to learn half a gazillion JS frameworks. Ask your boss to give you a one or two-week leave and give you a break from your 70 hours a week streak, and learn something that's actually new for a change.
First they got me to go to a college - I really dint want to go - wanted to start "something on my own" - pretty weak argument - I din't have any idea.
Then they insisted to go to a Master - bcoz you need to get above the crowd - and I got into one of the best institutes - that made it even harder to dropout even when I knew after 6 months that I was wasting time

Then I jumped into entrepreneurship - And they insisted that I should get a job to get a hands-on experience. I gave up after 8 months - to their preferences - but this is when I started seeing success, but couldn't prove it to them. They didn't see it as "lasting"

Today, even at this moment, I can feel "the burden of giving up" because most people around me "insisted" on doing something I dint want to do. Ultimately, I am to blame.

10 years later - I am pretty successful in my career, with a job. My job is not "secure" as they mentioned. Its not satisfying and frequently frustrating. I know no "other job" can fix that ... I want to take the jump into entrepreneurship again - and I am doing whatever I can. And many times I wish I could undo that mistake I made 10 years back. It is seriously less riskier and easier to start young rather than doing it after you are a husband/father/etc.

As far as Education is concerned - That is important. But Degree! - I know most universities in India will give you degrees that don't speak for your talent/skill. It just shows that you passed your exams - and if you have extra money - some universities will give you a degree without you reading a single line.
There are plenty of crappy lenses on DSLRs, too, with a very few rare gems in the sub-$1000 range. Canon's 85/1.8 and 40/2.8 stand out in my mind as excellent but the remainder of their mainstream ( non-L ) range is pretty mediocre.

It's how lens manufacturers keep their 'professional series' lenses lucrative... don't want people being satisfied with what they can afford!
Hexacopter, hexarotor, or just simply multi-rotor.
It's the same in JavaScript:

x = 5; // global
var x = 5; // local

Lua just replaces var with local:

x = 5 -- global
local x = 5 -- local
http://www.conservapedia.com/
Sure, if you postulate new physics anything is possible.
OK, I've read all the comments to date, and I'm angry at quite a few of them.

First off, here's a simple litmus test for "is X a misogynistic industry?". Does X have 50% women working in it? If not, and there's no actual genetic reason (e.g. this is an industry of literal sperm donors), then it is VERY likely to have a strong misogynistic component. Is there a company with software engineers where 50% of them are women? Never heard of such a thing. Is there a company with software engineers and no misogynists? Never heard of that either, at least not if the company has more than 10 employees.

Second, for all of you who jumped in with "it's a mistake to jump to the assumption that it's just because of gender" - wrong. You pick the highest-order factor first, and only then do you go to lower-order factors.

Third, yes, America is far better than many other countries at gender equality, but it is merely wretched instead of abysmal. I expect roughly 50% participation in most job markets.

You can't sugar-coat and actually confront what needs to change. If sexism is the #1 factor, you fucking deal with that right up front. Humans aren't exactly the rational actors they think they are, so your ideas get less shrift than if they were presented by a man. It's bloody easy to try this, present the same ideas but by a man. Do you get the same rejection? Probably not.

Also, sometimes you need to fire people. You find the key movers that are misogynists (everyone knows who they are, it's not a surprise), and you fire them. Doesn't matter how good they are, they are preventing you from having access to 50% of the human race.

I feel for your wife, and this is a tough situation, and there are no good answers. Most people don't want to be the person that causes change, because that person typically gets all the pain and no benefit. But things need to change, and some of the comments you've received are appalling, the kind of comment that 50 years from now people are going to look at and say "how could people ever think that way?" In text books.

I wish I had some better answers. I've been struggling with this for a while. For specific cases, often the answer is to go somewhere else. If you can't go somewhere else, then if possible change laterally to a different boss who is both powerful in the company and willing to help promote/push your wife's agenda. While the tone of a company can be misogynistic, it's often just a few people, so you need to either avoid them or work around them, or counteract them.
> That's why hardware doesn't get investment. Just look at kickstarter; great ideas popping up, people wanting them, people getting them.

What exactly leads you to believe that hardware doesn't get investment? Besides Kickstarter, I mean. Hardware development tends to be massively funded. You get less exposure for a lot more money, which is why Kickstarter is obviously not a good place to look, but in most projects I've seen it was software, not hardware that tended to be underfunded.
Touch Screen HMIs for Hospital "Outside Patient Room" Digital Signage Displays
I have two forms on BugMuncher (http://bugmuncher.com), neither have captchas, and neither have ever received a single spam submission.

Other sites I run with much less traffic, and worse google rankings get a fair bit of spam.

Anyone here got any ideas why this is? (not that I'm complaining)
I don't understand why you'd even want a contact form over an email link

Because:

* Some folk don't have email addresses and still want to contact you (it does happen)

* Some folk are using this away from their primary machine and don't have email configured

* The form's are large in-your-face pieces UI and are much more "obvious" than an email address. In multiple usability / split tests I've seen feedback forms get more responses than email addresses. People often completely miss the fact that their is an email address. They're looking for a form.

* A large chunk of people just seem to prefer them - again I've seen this in multiple usability tests.

Personally, I always prefer a plain email link over a contact form - both as a sender and as a recipient.

Me to. But I'm generally not building web sites for me ;-)
This extension has transformed my Chrome and computer experience
> Javascript only has so much room for the bad to hide in--it's a little quirky, but isn't half as open to WTFs as, say, C++ (any generation thereof).

No. Don't compare the unalduterated failure that Javascript is to the sound reasons behind C++ messiness.
> that doesn't seem to help much to verify your type correctness before runtime

I don't think that's possible in Python.

> Also, what you'd really want is something that implements type variables

That is possible, you could check what the type of the incoming parameter is and then check that the return value is the same type. I'm not sure that there's an obvious syntax for saying this, but one could always send a string to @typ and have it parse some made-up syntax.

I suspect this would be a lot of effort and it would probably make sens to use a typed language, instead of trying to shoehorn it into Python. I invented @typ so I could quickly document the types in my functions, & with the added advantage that it catches some errors.

> your printargs looks pretty cool! I might just makes something like that for JS...

I look forward to seeing it.
You're likely going to get some knee-jerk flak from people who misunderstand what you're trying to say, but from experience (I'm ethnic Sinhalese), I can say that this can be attributed to what exactly constitutes "programming" in those cultures (this transcends race and nationality BTW).

If by "programming", you mean putting together a website and the like, then yes, there is a huge swath of people who are semi-qualified to do anything else, but get drafted to do more anyway. If by "programming", you mean problem solving and innovation where writing code is actually one of the last things to be done, then most people will consider that to be a smaller subset.
For a long while now I've thought that some articles should simply stop trying to be perfectly neutral.

Just have two sections in the article: Each clearly biased in a different direction (maybe use colors and do it per paragraph).

Historically newspapers used to do that, each paper was clearly biased a certain way and you knew that when reading it.

Insist on accuracy of course, but the slant in the way something is written can matter a lot even if completely accurate.
> are these things mutually exclusive?

I think that once you factor in things like battery life, mass production price and complexity, they are.

You can have a swarm of lamp-toggling or temperature-showing things built with two reasonably unpretentious chips and a very simple production process, that allows you to build them cheaply and reliably, and have little enough processing power that you can run them off a small battery.

Throw in the stuff you run Node.js on (of all things...) and it's suddenly not such an unpretentious chip that also ensures running them on battery is out of the question.

A lot of people think hardware design is all about milking the processing power. Part of it is, but there are a lot of things that don't get much exposure because most software developers take them for granted. Battery life (and its cost) is a prime example.
An electric motorcycle
Quite expensive though and far away from being the Tesla for superbikes.
> If you are bootstrapping in your side, you will likely work 19 hrs a day and face failure after failure with nearly everyone around finding reasons to make you and your decisions look stupid.

Great point. This is actually not constrained to India but propagate through most of Asia, including the generally rich Singapore. Seems like a favorite "past-time" to watch people fail. It's a society that lives by the saying "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

Which is why Silicon Valley is such an attractive place to pursue a startup. The support system is there and there are little social stigma attached to failure.

Failing after putting in all the long hours and weekends is not something that is easy to stomach alone. Failing and having everyone around you rub it in is brutal.
Understanding Nginx location blocks and rewrite rules
Obligatory SMBC reference: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2999
They are in ES6 which will be standard any year now. If that's not good enough for you then I guess there's nothing stopping you from just writing anything you need in 6502 assembler.
> Wrong. Javascript has typed arrays. When's the last time you actually looked at Javascript? 1998?

See comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6468339

As recently as a few months ago I had to base64 encode a binary protocol because the JavaScript guys couldn't handle decoding the raw bytes.

> They are using lua.

Yes, but it seems like lua is merely used as a target rather than a programming language. What language people actually code in is highly relevant if your goal is to make a domain more accessible.

> They just have a front end to lua that uses javascript syntax, it would seem. Because languages without curly braces are scary, and the goal is to make this stuff accessible.

There are a lot of languages with curly braces that aren't half as scary as JavaScript.

> To the expert, making your niche accessible to plebes is scary. I understand.

I appreciate your "understanding". Next time you are trying to make the big "I can read your mind" power play, you might want to read the context a bit more carefully.

I don't generally do programming that talks directly to hardware, so even by your rationale I have no reason to be threatened, and I'm all for making this niche more accessible. I've seen excellent jobs of making hardware accessible to novice programmers using Java, Smalltalk, and even things like SCRATCH and Alice. I think that stuff is great. As you put it, "making a niche accessible to the plebes" is a great endeavour and what I have spent most of my career striving for. I've learned a thing or two about that path along the way. This isn't the first time a choice like this has been made. I thought I'd share that this particular choice, if anything, undermines the goal.
For anyone not familiar with conservapedia, keep in mind that half of the site is supposedly written as satire that the original creator is unable to recognize.

It's debatable whether at that point it's still satire though.
There are many countries, just like India, where exactly the same thing happens. There are countless examples of people who live a wealthy life (this tends to be the common denominator of success in societies where poverty is rampant), but most of the middle- and lower-class inhabitants are convinced you can't get anywhere unless you're at the top of your class.

Folk statistics doesn't work the way you describe it. I know it's frustrating to watch, but it simply is that way.
>Nobody seems to care or want to talk about it. It strikes me as a looming disaster, to have such a large and growing segment of the population without either an education or job skills.

Well, I can't speak to the 'education' part, as I don't have one, myself. I think that education is overrated; I mean, If, for instance, a competent party with money came in and bought my company tomorrow? Yeah, I might go get a history degree. It would be a lot of fun. but, really, of little commercial utility. Clearly, some people do learn useful things in school, while others get little (aside from 'personal growth') from the experience.

However, the 'job skills' part? that /is/ youth unemployment. You can't get work experience... without a job. And getting a job when unemployment is high and you have no education or experience... is difficult.

I was able to get a programming gig at 17, in part, yeah, 'cause I was a smart kid, because my father and stepfather were programmers, and because I had worked through high school as an IT monkey. (My "programmer" title was a little misleading. While I did do some programming, the bulk of my work was systems administration.) But a huge factor was that it was 1997. Standards, quite simply, were lower. (I was shotgunning resumes; The one that landed me my first programming gig was me accidentally sending my resume to the place I currently worked as a call-center tech rather than the local university where I actually intended to apply. Oops.)

Now, I was able to turn my work during the dot-com into really good experience that I was able to leverage to get jobs through the crash. However I can tell you right here that if I had started out looking in 2001? I would have been fucked.

I mean, yeah, there were a bunch of factors that lead to me becoming employable. But without timing? without the economy demanding a huge number of workers with my skillset? I, as a kid with no education and no experience would very likely have not gotten a chance.

But yeah... that's the point. High unemployment rates mean that you have a large and growing segment of the population without job skills... You get job skills from... your job. It's quite difficult to come up with job skills without a job.

Hell, even if you have had a job in the past... those skills are perishable. You need to have recent experience.

So yeah; the national attention, I think, needs to be switched away from rich people problems, and focused back on the unemployment problem. Well, that or they need to figure out how to run a society with a large number of permanently unemployed folks. Some people think the natural consequence of automation is unemployment. I'm not sure I agree, but either way, Yes, long-term unemployment has long-term consequences.
Take it up with Brendan Eich:

Remember, I was recruited to "do Scheme", which felt like bait and switch in light of the Java deal brewing by the time I joined Netscape. My interest in languages such as Self informed a subversive agenda re: the dumbed down mission to make "Java's kid brother", to have objects without classes. Likewise with first-class functions, which were inspired by Scheme but quite different in JS, especially JS 1.0.[1]

I presume you saw the word basically in my post? There's no doubt it is simplified, but that's a strength as well as a weakness.

But anyway:

A metascircle evaluator: https://github.com/mozilla/narcissus

It's not Homoiconic, and nor does it have macros - but a number of the languages the OP named as "good" languages lack both these features too.

I stand by my point: Javascript is a perfectly good language.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786720
When it comes to notation, there is always a tradeoff. The question is, what's worse?

In my meager opinion, APL was plagued with acceptance problems from the very beginning. Note that acceptance is a very personal thing, free of such diverse distractions as logic, reason, the right thing, and so on. Having used APL for nearly 40 years and having made a decent living with it for nearly 35 of them, looking back, a significant fraction of my projects could be called "APL Exit". Whether it was a customer leaving a timesharing service for something cheaper, or a corporate mission to migrate to a different, allegedly standard, technology, APL was being replaced by something else. The language was thought to be declining, dying, no longer taught in university, not commonly known, and so on.

Arguably, two items which didn't help APL's acceptance were the usage of strange and Greek symbols (of which there were five?) and an order of execution which contravened that which was learned in third grade. This is not to say that they were worse, just not accepted. Nor is it to say that J, K, and Q's notation is better or worse - that is largely a matter of personal taste and maybe technical upbringing. Maybe a thoughtfully ASCII-transliterated APL where the scheme did not play second fiddle to the "genuine" APL characters (APLUM and STSC APL Plus PC come to mind) would have boosted the acceptance level to the point where APL would still be growing. A large user community vs. a better notation? What's worse?

Back to GNU APL, I'm very pleased to see that this finally happened, and really do hope that this is a start of a great comeback.

PS: I am happy that GNU APL is not written in Java.
It does seem familiar. Almost as though the news recently may have featured a government somewhere somehow lying being called on the lie and then repeating this cycle a few times. </sarcasm>

I hope that these types of tricks start getting taught in schools so that young people learn to recognise them at an earlier age. More important than analysing Moby Dick.
It doesn't say 6GB of RAM, it says 6Gb which is not the same, one stands for Gigabits and the other for Gigabytes;

1 Gigabyte = 8 Gigabits //
6 Gbits = 768 Megabytes
Come on people, it's not hard- if you want to program computers, reasonably structured assembler is all you need to know, and it certainly takes less to learn than it took to learn half a gazillion C libraries.
1) Self taught from books, some urging from my mother but not a lot of real help. Occasionally she'd show me tricks. I remember seeing my first loop from her when I was trying to make a line of text scroll across a screen.

2) Five or six. My mother owned a ZX spectrum - this would be around '93 '94 - and she had a bunch of old magazines that had programs in them, so I started typing them in. I'd also done some programming on a BBC before this - but that was with my mother's urging so not really a self-taught thing.

3) I was 16 when I sold my first program to a shop I did some volunteer work at. It was a simple thing that just did ranked correlation coefficients to arbitrary sets of data so that they could keep track of what their KPIs were telling them.

More substantially, I did it after uni. Graduated with a philosophy degree, which was the subject I found least objectionable, and found myself largely unemployable in any other line of work.
Iranian Hackers infiltrated US Navy computers - The Hacker News
Yeah but each side will still try to edit the opposing sides point of view to ruin it.
How long do you think the list is of languages that didn't wait until revision 6 before adding support for working with bytes? or are you seriously trying to suggest that it has to either be JavaScript or 6502 assembler?!

Do you think it is maybe possible that a language that had standard ways of working with bytes say within the first decade of popularizing it just might be better suited for talking to hardware?
The reason for that of course is that it's so trivial to embed it in a C program, that if you want a library you can just expose a C library in lua. luajit even makes this absurdly easy with its FFI api.
Keeping Your Laptop Plugged in All the Time Will Kill Its Battery Faster
Ballmer thanks Microsoft Employees in farewell address
If you are arguing in favor of "local by default", there are strong arguments against this: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LocalByDefault
That's not amazing, that's just sad.
I believe any programming is self-taught. I know that I had some course in a community center when I was very young, probably like 10 or so, and while these courses probably got me interested and taught me the basics, I think most of my skills came from solitary practice and studying books.

Moocs can be a better introduction to programming than mere books, but I haven't seen any evidence on how successful MOOCs are at teaching programming.
Rockstar programmer and Rockstar teams
I realize you only just threw this together, but this only detects the CSS display attribute. The visibility and opacity rules are also easily detected, and a large negative left/margin value could be detected with a small amount of code. However, detection becomes more difficult when you start to consider other techniques such as z-index. It's not as simple as you seem to be implying.