skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's wonderfully frustrating that there is truly so much to learn that even the study of programming languages, which is an incredibly tiny field relative to the whole of human knowledge, it is still necessary to make depth vs. breadth trade-offs. I find your choice to focus more on depth appealing, but almost immediately feel a sense of loss for all the breadth such a focus would require giving up.

I think a better balance may be to master things that are widely relevant at depth, while giving less focus to things that are very specific. Put another way: depth for "essence", breadth for "accident". Of the items on slide 181 of the presentation, only calling conventions, memory model, and probably optimization seem like "essence" to me, ie. every program you ever write in any language will benefit from deep knowledge of those topics. The rest of the items are somewhat arbitrary and very specific to the particular history of the C language itself.
The end of that had me in tears. I think I like the "what-if" section more than the comics!

Gems like

Unfortunately, the laser energy flow would turn the atmosphere to plasma, instantly igniting the Earth’s surface and killing us all.

and another article

It's a shame humans wouldn't live this long, because at this point, something really neat would happen.
This likely has to do with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).

iOS updates used to cost a nominal amount of money because new features have to have new revenues. (Why? Imagine you are selling a physical good, and promised a 1 year warranty - you have to reserve some revenue to cover the costs of honoring that warranty. If you didn't it would artificially inflate profits now by hiding future liabilities.)

So what Apple does to get around this is reserve a bit of revenue from each new iPhone and realizes it on the balance sheet to cover the ongoing costs of iOS updates. I imagine this is what they are going to do with Macs too to cover OS X costs, and if this is correct it will likely be mentioned at next week's conference call.
Tech CEO Thinks Women Who Wear High Heels Don't Have a Brain
> "we do some OCR shit so it's searchable"

That's a great idea. I've seen the author's handwriting in the post and OCR may be trickier than they think.

It seems like a neat idea, and I really like this insight into their KickStarter campaign. It feels gently wasteful; I don't think most people are going to do anything like 60 pages per month. I wonder what's going to happen to all the blank pages? (Perhaps this is just my perception though.)

And notebooks sometimes contain historically important bits of information. I'm not sure how the future people will feel about having a scan of the notebook that someone used to design some important thing, versus having the actual notebook.
That's the problem, the people who want this "as art" aren't nearly as many as those who bought the previous mac pro for work, so again you have the same problem the G4 cube had.
I think with Apple, you kind of need to consider their aesthetic. I don't think they like selling anything cheaply. The last few OS upgrades were cheap. iWork is cheaper than MS Office (because it is often an optional extra with office being mandatory) and (ironically) being in the iOS market means that they have an €8.99 version of iWork anchoring he price. Overall software sales are not big money makers for Apple.

OTOH, you they can simplify a bunch of things by making OSX upgrades cheaper. Users no longer need to worry about OS updates (eg time their purchase). They can sell macs as "ready to go with all the software you need" for creative or office workers. A new mac will be easier to get used to. Developers can target a single OS version, this includes Apple. Apple can release features relying on new OS features.

It's just simpler. Apple have an aesthetic preference for simpler. For the cost of whatever revenue these software sales were bringing in they get to improve and simplify the mac ownership experience. They get to differentiate themselves from PCs in one more difficult to quantify way. This is another thing they like. You don't have to buy antivirus & Office or worry about Windows upgrades.

Financially it's probably a wash. Slightly better mac sales or increased pricing power will more or less make up for lost revenue.
Agreed...I love how they do the direction [-left],[-right] and outline [-o] thing. I already loved FA, this release just makes it even cooler.
Yes the diffs often don't show enough context and the errors may occur outside of the diff so you should really review the whole changed function even if you don't need the debugger.

They are always attached to a branch though so you can check it out to review (and run/test as appropriate).
> Sometimes it may take me a day or more to fully get
> my head around a new piece of code I am working with.

Are you trying to perform a design review, or a code review? Code reviews (in my mind, at least) concern themselves with the low-level mechanics of the code ("Handle this exception properly","there's a library method for this logic","follow the team's coding standards", etc.) whereas design reviews deal with the "how is this thing supposed to work?". When reviewing code, I avoid dealing with design issues. If I see design issues, I ask the developer for a design review.
Right, and they were deleted. The code was not there after the refactoring. Except that because they were using an incremental deployment it was not actually removed from one of the servers. It was not really a case of untested software being run, but rather one of the servers running an older version of the software due to a deployment failure. The newer version repurposed the Power Peg flag, but since that one server was still running an older version of the code it behaved differently. It carried out the old behavior, which was not suitable for the current environment.

This is the biggest argument in my opinion against incremental deployment: it is hard to know exactly what is on any given box. Each time you push an incremental piece to a server you have effectively created a completely unique and custom version of the software on that server. Much better to package the entire solution and be able to say with certainty, "Server A has build number 123."
See Bill Gates letter to Hobbyists in this thread
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Microsoft has always had animosity with the hacker crowd, and vice versa. This has been going on for four decades.
It depends on what's at risk. So far he hasn't asked me to meet him in a cornfield or other out-of-the-way location.
I think it's easy to know but hard to do it well for these tips
Thanks. Just read the GotW.

http://herbsutter.com/gotw/_102/
I believe the MRSA-like infections you're thinking of are the Gram-negative bacteria [1] mentioned in the article. Based on the Wikipedia page for phage therapy [2], it should be an effective treatment option where the bacteria have polysacharride layer in the cell envelope, which most antibiotics cannot penetrate. There's more in the treatment section [3], which doesn't mention phage therapy however.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram-negative_bacteria
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram-negative_bacteria#Medical_...
I'm glad everyone's doing well with Authority!
The author doesn't understand Apple. Apple doesn't view software and hardware separately. Coincidentally, I just wrote about this, but I'll copy and paste here because it seems relevant.

A friend of mine recently asked me how Apple expected to continue making any money while giving away software that Microsoft charges $200 for. Understanding how Apple can give away their software and still make money comes in understanding Apple's business. Apple pundits frequently circle back to the point that Apple is a “hardware” company. As it turns out, they are wrong. Apple is a “devices” company. What is unique about Apple is their view that a device is made up of hardware & software, and that these two are inseparable. Apple believes this is the best view if you want to deliver a superior experience to the users of your products.

If you look at Apple as a hardware company — which I believe is a mistake — they make better margins than any of their competitors. Following that flawed line of thinking, what they're doing now is using that extra profit to subsidize the software side. This viewpoint only holds if you view the hardware and software sides of the business as separate entities though.

Apple has combined the two. You're not buying hardware or software, you're buying a device. What good is a microwave without the software that connects the buttons to the timer, microwave generator, etc? Thats how Apple views their devices. By making Mavericks and iWork free, theyre expanding their notion of the "post PC world". They're not just talking about iOS devices, theyre talking about their entire line up.

If youre wondering why Apples “PC” sales continue to grow while everyone else is sinking, I think youve found your answer.

http://www.bradlanders.com/2013/10/23/apples-greater-vision-...
> If my ringtone were the sound of a gun firing, or a bomb going off, would I be banned from the airport?

Probably.
You're exactly right. I've heard a lot of developers burn out over the sheer amount of work github generates, let alone the amount of entitlement people feel to your labor once you publish your code. If we want to do social coding, we need to be sociable about it.
I mean specifically the syntax for OOP support. Otherwise, much of the syntax is the same.
622mbps is interesting. Same as OC-12c... Something COTS?
Security fixes on Mavericks v10.9
What should we call a "fork bomb" then?
I'm not sure if that includes the complements that you yourself produce. At least that's not what Joel argues.

There are business models (eg, razors & razor blades) where you commoditize one to sell the other, but commoditizing complements that someone else now makes at razor thin margins is the coup.
> Eventually bacteria will evolve, and they’ll adapt ways around that to overcome that obstacle.

I am more optimistic than that.

Sure: as long as antibiotic resistance is crucial for bacterial survival, bacteria have a natural need to evolve it. And, they will.

But, this will come with a genetic cost to the bacteria.

The reason that antibiotics work is because they are attacking some function that has deliberately evolved, through natural selection, to be like that. Antibiotic resistance must literally cost bacteria some efficiency in some of their other functions.

This cost was originally such that the bacteria would die. Fantastic. But note: we wouldn't actually benefit from all bacteria dying at the mention of the word antibiotic, and some bacterial resistance is good for us.

Under normal circumstances, bacteria that don't need to carry around antibiotic resistance with them will most likely have a lower genetic cost and thrive better. This may be why we have seen MRSA predominantly in hospitals and rarely in the 'wild'. (If MRSA was necessary or not costly, all SA would be MR all the time).

This gives me some hope - that antibiotic resistance is balanced, genetically forcing bacteria to be less effective in other ways and less competitive in other circumstances.

We humans are not out yet.
How predictable is the New York Times?
Then couldn't a voter be proud of the accomplishments of the people that have been elected?
The return of the sanitarium and things like leper colonies could be in our futures.
If you will recall, Twitter in its early days was essentially unusable due to high load. That was a private company that ultimately found its way.

However, that is really here nor there. I am always hesitant to make an armchair judgement about the execution of a development project without all of the facts because there are so many places where things can go pear-shaped. That is basically my point.
Table Saw Safety
This, right here, is the biggest issue. Routine, minor surgery? No longer a risk free proposition. This sort of antibiotic resistance will have, and is having, enormously deleterious effects on the kind of basic health care and medical science we take for granted.
Scariest video I've seen in ages.
Thanks, I thought his quote was a string literal so a search with that yielded no results.
There is reason for guarded optimism if we can eliminate, or at least drastically reduce, irresponsible use of antibiotics:

The capacity to resist antibiotics extracts a small metabolic/competitive "tax" on bacteria. In the presence of antibiotics, the costs of this tax are outweighed by the obvious benefits of antibiotic resistance.

In an environment without antibiotics, the costs of the tax outweigh their benefits, so these antibiotic-resistant bacteria will eventually be outgrown by "normal" bacteria.

If we can discipline ourselves to use antibiotics only when necessary, gradually antibiotic-resistant bacteria should become less common. Unfortunately, I doubt this will happen until the antibiotic-resistance problem becomes much more serious.
Saturated fat is not the major issue
Not a huge amount yet. I haven't been invited to any conferences yet, if that's what you're asking :) I have noticed that friends who are implementing Stripe will come to me with questions and usually I can answer them right away, which is a nice feeling.
WebPipes.org
Hi everyone, I'm the new maintainer of hk. It's actually not very new :) You can see that Keith Rarick did most of the work on it over a year ago, along with some other major contributors: https://github.com/heroku/hk/graphs/contributors

What is new is that I moved it to the Heroku org this week and will be spending a lot of my time turning it into a proper replacement for the Heroku Toolbelt & gem.

It's still very early stage software, though. There isn't currently a supported installation method, and it's very far from having all of the necessary features to fully replace the old client. Also, the UX will probably change frequently and things may break, eat your data, etc. So don't rely on it just yet :)

That being said, I'm really excited to see where we can take this in the next few months. Hk is already a great starting point. Go is very fast and lightweight, and offers some nice advantages over Ruby on the distribution & installation fronts.

Hopefully we'll have something exciting to show in a couple months!
I'm not going to watch the documentary to see the full quote, but taken on its face, this is a false statement. There continue to be many infections which will still be treatable by antibiotics for the foreseeable future.
Stallion, a Python package manager
I'm annoyed that gaming is defined solely as multi-player FPS twitch games. Astronauts / colonists into chess, go, poker, real role playing games, pretty much anything that happens in a casino, single player of any sort, wouldn't really notice.
Apple doesn't want all software to be free. They want all the devices on the same platform to then have ALL the apps available to them. That 30% cut is a much bigger piece of pie than selling a $30 OS
i feel like people, especially designers, would want their originals. could you offer to send back the notebooks with the next package you send out?
I feel that this integration effort is probably exactly where most of the expense came from. There's more to it, of course, but I can see where that one part was probably the large heap of their troubles.

I was not thinking rationally about this whole issue when it first came up and thus didn't measure my previous experience when I was thinking about the issue, but I actually have worked with healthcare systems integration before. Even with all government inefficiency/management aside (we were a private company), interfacing with healthcare providers is an extremely complicated and painful business.

For instance, there is a HIPAA standard interface protocol for things like Eligibility and Benefits and Claim Submission, and most (though still not all!) health care plans have some sort of system through which you can interface for that information - though often it's hidden behind miles of red tape and fundamentally different implementations for various custom fields, and different interpretations of the meaning of many fields. That alone is painful, and that part is supposed to be "standardized".

I can't even imagine the state of healthcare provider's policy estimation systems, particularly when it comes to interfacing with them. It's speculation on my part, but I imagine that each healthcare provider would likely have to have their estimation systems tied into. I wonder how many even had it exposed in such a way at the start of this project that you could tie into it, and how many of them had a wide variety of custom inputs to take into account in their estimating. Though you are right that perhaps the new law allowed/forced them to simplify this estimation process, in which case each of these providers likely had to modify the ruleset of their ancient systems before the integrators could actually work with it. Yeah, I could see even a simplified ruleset for policy pricing and eligibility as being a major factor in slowing down this process.

I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be a software developer on this project, thinking more about how bureaucratic and inefficient both the government and healthcare providers are. I still feel like, even then, 500 million is a dubious number - and I'd like to see where that money went. (how many people were employed on the project and for what cost, what were they being charged for hardware and datacenter(s), etc...) But as a software engineer, I would certainly not have enjoyed working on such a doomed project regardless of whether the money was as well spent as possible or if it was lining the pockets of those further up the chain.
When originally revealed, the XBox One was supposed to have this. This was then decided against, as the price would have been way too high for a gaming console.
Dumbing it down on purpose might be the key to political action.
Woz Is Unimpressed By Apple’s New iPads
And if I purposely inflate a party balloon too far? If I smack an inflated brown paper bag? Would you defend describing those things as "bombs" as well?
I wish he mentioned the massive dumping of antibiotics into our food supply via feedlots, et cetera. You think the fact that all the meat we eat is swimming in antibiotics for its entire life has something to do with this antibiotic resistant bacteria in our stomachs? It'd be a damn shame to undo one of the miracles of the twentieth century so your chicken sandwich is fifty cents cheaper.
I've bought some of the books mentioned in the article, and many more which have been marketed with similar tactics, and have generally been disappointed with my purchases.

They are often the authors first book, heavy on the white space, with large fonts and so on, haphazardly organized, and night and day from something like a Pragmatic Programmers title.

I'm as susceptible as anyone to the copywriting strategy of "this book will solve your particular problem and, if you save even an hour, it pays for itself" but too many launches of this type have soured me on self published business and technical books unless there is absolutely no other place to get the information.

As a rule of thumb, if someone is selling a book in multiple "packages" , to me its an indicator that the quality will be poor and I will regret the time wasted reading it.
Looks like a closed source Ipad clone of mypaint.
If you want this for the desktop I recommend mypaint instead, it already has 8 years of development and its free.
47 Stats You Need to Know About the Google Apps Ecosystem
A round up of the most important stats about the growth of Google Apps.
audio-video.gnu.org/video/2013-08-05--rms--new-york--new-york-city-university.ogv

also rest of gnu.org, fsf.org etc.

(is this a trolling question?)
> So if you find out someone is infringing and want to sue, you begin registration for copyright and file suit shortly after. It doesn't say it had to be registered when the infringement happened.

Technically that's correct -- but there are some possible adverse consequences if you don't register before the infringement begins (or alternatively within a three-month window after first publication). Specifically:

a) you forfeit the option of seeking "statutory damages," and instead you have to prove up your actual economic loss and any additional profits made by the infringer arising from the infringement; and

b) you don't get to seek attorneys' fees from the infringer if you win --- but if the infringer wins, the infringer can still seek attorneys' fees from you.

See http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/412
I know the article tries to explain things in a way a layman can understand, but the wording when it comes to evolution is quite poorly chosen IMO. Saying thinks like 'Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive' and 'bacteria will always change in order to survive', are just incorrect and will result in big misconceptions.

To my knowledge, bacteria don't have an agenda, they don't want to survive and they certainly don't change in order to survive. Instead, they change at random, which sometimes helps an individual to survive and sometimes not.
The bacteria hate it too.
+1 for Whitelines (though I've had a bit of crash trouble with their iOS app of late).

Frankly, I don't think I'd love to have notes leave my physical possession, if are important enough to pay for scanning in the first place.
They certainly can. They choose not to.
>The reason that antibiotics work is because they are attacking some function that has deliberately evolved, through natural selection, to be like that. Antibiotic resistance must literally cost bacteria some efficiency in some of their other functions.

I'm not convinced that there must be a cost; furthermore, I think it's unlikely that if there is a cost, it is high enough to be significant. Bugs evolve, but they do not necessarily evolve optimally all of the time. It is possible that an evolutionary step towards resistance might also improve the fitness of the germ overall (for example, by further optimizing the efficiency of a metabolic pathway). That evolutionary step might have been inevitable, but required additional selective pressure or the presence of a more active mutagen to actually occur.

Your claim is sort of assuming that each bug is already optimal for its environment, and any change must therefore be deleterious in some regard, but I hold that neither fact is necessarily true.
Not to be too pedantic, but I don't think this situation fits the formal definition of commoditization. For a product to be a commodity, the various alternatives need to be interchangeable or indistinguishable.

Edit: Web apps (Google Docs/Drive, Spotify, Basecamp, Facebook, etc.) would fit the bill as a force for OS commoditization.
And Julia! :)
Great list (especially "off the top of your head"). Thanks a lot for sharing. Several of those can actually be implemented in an automated tool (styles, short variables, spacing, unused variables even). What's your take on automated tools? (Disclaimer: my company built one - pulreview.com).
I'd say this is a fantastic idea if they used something other than PHP, but that's personal preference I guess.
This makes the assumption that evolution results in a perfect organism, which it does not. Instead, it results in a "good enough" organism.

The definition of "good enough" for bacteria has changed over the last 50 years, so these changes are occurring now. It doesn't necessarily require a cost, or at least not a cost that matters to humans.
There's an entire section on the use of antibiotics in agriculture.
can someone tell me how they are getting these data? is it real time?