skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you don't have access to meditation center book "Mindfulness in plain english" seems like not newagey introduction to the subject.
It describes Vipassana. It's almost like Zazen, but slightly different. In my understanding Zazen is Mahayana buddhism version of Vipassana, which comes from Theravada buddhism, but I am just a begginer so I can be horribly wrong.

I started meditating recently after reading MIPE. I'll try to find a teacher as soon as I can.
What got hooked me up was some research that it improves cognitive performance: http://www.gwern.net/docs/dnb/2010-zeidan.pdf .
There's some evidence that long term meditation changes structure of the brain and improves mood and attention outside of meditation practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_activity_and_meditation#C... .
This post seems like good encouragement as well: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/38947/is-prac... .

One thing which I notice the most is increased ability to deal with distractions and staying focused on boring subjects . It is essentially what one practices during meditation. Dealing with distractions is very important skill for programmer: http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/ . What's more it's kind of skill, that is hard to develop without active practice. I can't think of better way of developing it than meditation.
A to-do list that rewards you for finishing your tasks
I am definitely using that from now on.
Twisted light beats quantum light
Reverse Engineering Serial Ports - /dev/ttyS0
I do not believe a tool can only be useful for either getting things done quickly or solid engineering. Even a monster like JavaScript manages to support both modes quite well.
What was the motivation for Saudi Arabia to carry out these attacks? Was it an independent decision by Saudi elite? Did any events take place that would encourage vengeance of some kind? And why did it take place just once?
Agile vs. Waterfall is a false dichotomy.

The problem is that Agile approaches are perceived and promoted as a solution for these kind of problems. And I don't see well known Agile consultants do anything to change this view. That's why I wrote this.
OK, I'm subscribing to your blog. Thanks for sharing.
Argument by swearing is kind of weak. There is plenty of evidence we've gone too far towards producers in terms of intellectual property, but eliminating everything: copyright, trademarks and all patents seems like it might require a bit more than a few F bombs to back up your point.
These are macros on top of vectors, aren't they?
Somehow related: Has Apple Really Ever Invented Anything? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFeC25BM9E0
It doesn't actually change the charset, it changes the behaviour of a few libc functions and other things that use it (like perl). Sane programs ignore libc locales, as you do not want the behaviour of your program changing randomly based on some environment variables, that way madness lies.
For what it's worth, you can also write Vim extensions in Python. It's got access to all the same stuff as Vimscript. I would argue that Python is the better language when compared to elisp (even if one believes CL or other full-blown Lisp or Scheme variants are superior to Python).

I'm not saying that makes vim a better editor than emacs. Just pointing out that vim has other options for extending. Also, I use vim and haven't found emacs to be more productive; in my college days I tried emacs, in earnest, for a few months. I came back to vim eventually, and haven't felt compelled to give emacs another go since.
Calca is such a great calculator. I've encountered some issues where it refuses to recompute (systems of equations confuse it when you keep redefining variables), but I suppose that's not what it's for. I love being able to define real functions in it. The documentation is also all composed in Calca, which is helpful.
Missing compass because the WiFi version does not contain a GPS or magnetic compass.
Uh, Apple created the Macintosh, the iPhone, and the iPad. I would give them a bit more credit for creating new industries if we're going to start comparing them to Google on that front.
Yep. Ayn Rand called this "package dealing," though she wasn't thinkimng about conspiracy theories in particular.

For instance, "selfish." Is that pursuing rational long-term values, or is that victimizing others in a futile attempt at short-term gain? Catholic priests lumped them together intentionally since the middle ages, and so it continues throughout our culture today to help justify various kinds of collectivism.

Today people are doing it with "conspiracy theories" to try to prevent challenges to their worldview. But the fact is, sometimes, conspiracies actually do happen!
Phooey, I thought I'd solved this. What would you recommend I do instead?

I should clarify for other readers: __sinpi() is an Apple-created addition to Math.h, what it does is multiply the argument by M_PI before calculating. When you consider that my calculator has a key which inputs the constant pi (which is, of course, not actually pi, but M_PI), it all comes out in the wash (cosmetically speaking).

However, what would you do instead? Test before each trig function whether the argument is a multiple of M_PI and then choose which function to use? I would imagine this would fall apart at higher values...

Also consider that 'cosmetically satisfying' is not an unreasonable goal (in my mind) when the calculator really only has horizontal space for 12 digits in 36-point Helvetica, but you're right, as the user could arrive at arbitrary values by other means.
Ahh, hah. My mistake on the kinds. I changed it from an example on Num and Show because I don't much like how they're related.
To clarify, I am using dealing with AST's in Lisp as the metric for triviality.

And while it may be trivial against some other metric to deal with AST's in another language, the solution tends to be a one-off, that is dealing with the AST of C++ doesn't offer an advanced starting position for dealing with the AST of JavaScript - most of the work is in the details of a particular language not at the higher level abstractions of languages in general.
Google is NOTHING like Bell Labs. Bell did real research, not research that had a ROI counter tied to it.

Google researches what makes Google money - period. If this is the current generations "hero", then we're doomed.
(Edit: it is swedish and...) Almost danish/norwegian: Tydelig == Apparent/Clear
Very true, but I don't think that's the conclusion I was reaching. The very things that make some things easy, like dynamic scoping; advising things left and right; wholesale overriding functions in your init file; aliasing or fsetting things. Each one of these things adds technical debt, but in this case, the technical debt has no real cost as it's not often a shared project and is mostly limited to snippets and bits of code that gets stuck in a file and rarely touched again.
WhatsApp on your computer: Pidgin plugin
Thanks for this article, insightful AND funny: teaching people is not compatible with being enjoyable to read...
Of course DNA is not a programming language,
And of course analogies are never exact, but in the end if the reader has grasped some parts of the concepts, why should we forbid them ?
In the end, it looks like sense of humour is not as universal as we may want it to be.
Emacs isn't good enough and there really aren't any radical improvements happening. The problem is the alternatives aren't better.
True. I'll admit that there is probably a fair amount of bias because Google has a better PR department. But I doubt it's that much better than these other guys . . . I think much of the research being done is around incremental improvements, and the point is that Google seems to be dreaming much bigger and thinking much more long term.
This is a really nice article, it seems you found a similar solution to mine.

The only thing that is more or less difficult about testing Angular ist the boilerplate one has to write to instantiate everything correctly. When writing the code, Angular handles the bootstrapping of the application, but in the tests one has to do it manually.

What's positive about it is that one learns how Angular works internally. I would even say that doing TDD with Angular is actually a lot of fun.
so things like the watson ai by IBM or MS Kinect arent groundbreaking tech?

Google does cool stuff, but saying no one else is seems pretty ignorant
Agreed. Bell Labs pioneered lots of essential breakthroughs in computing that we now take for granted. Google has thus far refined previously existing technologies.
Is that tongue-in-cheek or unintentionally ironic? This comic itself represents "cutting away context from facts and arguments and assembling them into reassuring litanies".

"Why is person A saying X?"

"Oh, you can just ignore that, exactly like when Person B says Y... it's just a conspiracy theory. What we do is, we use the mentally unstable, the confused and the mislead as an excuse to not look anyone else in the eye either, whenever it gets uncomfortable. This makes us morally and intellectually superior."
We read Hacker News and Reddit too. I just wish we had something better to offer than a 404 page.
Just because Google doesn't put as much work into keeping their future ideas secret, you can't assume Apple doesn't have equally ambitious ideas. You just won't find out about then until Apple thinks it is worthy of your attention.
Hope you finish it soon! The last quarter or so of that book is really great.
Jasmine tests are still hard for me to master (especially the httpBackend stuff), so I really really appreciate posts like this, I guess at the end of the day posts like these also encourage me to write code thats easier to test as well. Thanks :D
I wouldn't expect (Integral a, Num b) => a -> b, but I do expect the opposite. That seems to be exactly the definition of LSP.

And yeah, if you add System F type binders then you can do all of this explicitly, you just need to also manually pass around instance dictionaries. A morphism from one instance dictionary to another (which "forgets" "methods") provides your subtyping relation.
Top US tax rate is over 55%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates

Going over 58% in 2014, thanks to Obamacare levy.

Like I said, one of the highest in OECD. And arguably most progressive in all of OECD: US lacks severe excise taxes and VATs which target the poor and middle class, coupled with generously progressive income tax brackets.

And of course those infamously high US corporate tax rates: often double the rates of other OECD nations (same link).
Couldn't you say the same about any other company too?
I think credit is given . . . that's the past though, only so long you can rest on your laurels, and creating a snazzier phone and an app store doesn't really measure up to autonomous cars and robots in my opinion . . . its very nice don't get me wrong, but not in the same category of hard research into technologies where there isn't an obvious usecase yet, and thinking ahead 15 years.
For people who don't want to read the essay, I'll just say:

Peikoff argues that modern terrorism is almost entirely coming about through sponsorship by a couple of very, very bad states, and simply ending those states in a proper, just war would solve the problem and make "Fortress America" unnecessary. (Any mistakes here are likely my own, not his.)

maxharris, wasn't this actually a full-page ad in the NYT? Could be wrong but for some reason I thought it was.
U.S. Recognizes A South Korean StarCraft Player As An Athlete
Don't be silly, all research done by companies has an ROI counter tied to it . . . the point is that some do much more forward thinking research into technologies that might not yet have a specific application quite yet, and others are focused 2-3 years in advance and that's it.
To be fair, a large part of why America doesn't declare war is because no-one declares war. After WWII we no longer consider war-making a sovereign right of nations, so a declaration of war is useless.
I got what the main thought was, but I'm not sure about much longer term or greater plans. Maybe broader appeal? Again, related to PR. IBM seems to be doing fine long term with their research, but not very PR active, and when they are you notice that - Watson?
Having control makes me happy/sane. Having unicode set to (on|off) does not affect either diff/patch.
Re: 1 and 2

1) This is almost true. Anything that is committed to Git is recoverable. When you "re-write" history, Git is creating a new set of commits in the history, an "alternate history path." It does not destroy the original commits, but there is no named reference to them (unless you created a branch/tag pointing to this line of commits).

2) In this case, if you want to actually destroy these unreferenced commits, you must run "git gc". This IS a destructive command. It will remove any unreferenced commits from the repository. (gc = garbage collect). If you never garbage collect, you will always have access to anything that was ever committed. It just might be hard to find since the only reference is the ref-log (if it was recent) or the commit hash.
A system of courts and due process is inconvenient and sometimes means the guilty are not punished, but it is preferable to the alternatives.

I've seen no evidence that he was travelling with a targeted individual, or even that the targeting was justified, the statement was I believe 'he was not specifically targeted'. That's because there was no trial, and no evidence presented. Have you seen any evidence, or merely the assurances of gov. officials? Does proximity to a criminal while eating now warrant instant death?

As to the Yemen trial, that applies to Awlaki, not his son, and you have a remarkable faith in the Yemeni justice system. If the US is to assassinate people, I do think they owe them at least a trial in their own courts.

Personally I think this policy is wrongheaded and damaging to US interests in the long term, given all the innocents inevitably killed by drone or missiles in civilian areas. However it's also a sign of declining respect for the law in the US. According to Obama, and yourself if you accept these assassinations, his will is law.
A foreigner asks: Non-racist, non-sexist workplace possible in the US?
I am a foreign citizen who came to the US to study and subsequently started working for a software firm. I have consistently heard at the workplace such remarks as:
1. "Is there anything good at about being a woman?" (vis a vis being a man)
2. "You'll never see any black people on the spelling-bee"
3. "Afghans are a treacherous bunch"
4. "Islam is a religion of peace" <derisive snigger>
The list is pretty long, but these are the ones I remember now. HNers, is there any hope for a workplace where one can just work in peace and do not have to put with this such silly conversation?
BTW, I've fixed the strlen code (although differently). I didn't know about SALC! That's a very clever way of zeroing AL.

I think at this point I might be able to get away with CLD since I never STD any more :)

Some of the obvious tricks it misses are probably because they're not obvious to me, while others may be just because I haven't gotten to them yet.
Yup. Not good enough?
A bug-proof language is like an uncrashable car.
Functions, parameters, and pointers are also optional concepts in python. None of them are needed in a hello world program, nor for a few weeks into an introductory course. Variables, expressions, conditionals, lists, strings, and loops can all exist on their own without any "extra stuff".

Learn things one at a time; "best practices" can wait til you can demonstrate why it is a best practice. Why should I make a function? Until you actually face the problems that abstractions are used to solve, learning them is confusing and difficult.
New technology warns drivers about cyclists
Small UX Details Most Websites Miss
Thinkgeek has always been really cool. Unfortunately, some time ago they really wound down their Linux-centric products. I really miss that, as I am not really into pop culture, even geeky pop culture. A stuffed Tux mascot is no longer available from ThinkGeek (or, as far as I can tell circa the last time I looked, the general internet).

I hope ThinkGeek does well, but it's refocused its efforts away from my buying interests.
thats true, but Apple would not release projects like Google Glass which are ahead of its time. Apple nowadays is a consumer company and they will only release products when they think the mainstream market is ready for it. They also dont have a real Research program like Google/MS have.
I judge what I see . . . can't speculate about other companies. The robotics acquisitions were kept secret for a long time as well. As were autonomous cars. Eventually they came out. I don't think there is some super secret lab at apple that is working on groundbreaking inventions, and not one thing has come out of it yet, bit of a tall tale in my eyes. . .
Does everything have to be a 'hack' these days?

But more constructively, I'd recommend "How to make friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. For socially awkward folks like myself, it was helpful to have the basics explained.
I was amazed after finishing The Idea Factory and realizing how much we (as humans and as the tech industry specifically) owe to Bell Labs. The invention of UNIX gets literally one sentence in the book and I think that's the scale it deserves given their work in every other piece of communication and electronic technology.
"macbook air, mac pro, os x + apps, and airport network"

So:

1. A smaller, lighter, computer in an industry where every generation of devices is smaller and lighter. A trend that existed before Apple even made laptops.

2. Mac Pro. A faster, more powerful, computer in an industry where every generation of devices is faster and more powerful. A trend that existed before the Macintosh existed.

3. OS X + Apps. I consider the app store a step backward for humanity, as it centralizes something that had been decentralizing and democratizing over decades of hard fought battles between open and closed. The best things about OS X are the best things about UNIX. And, I consider Linux a better UNIX (but, I'm willing to admit that the Macintosh experience for most users is superior, due to it being a unified hardware+software product, wherein Apple can make it all work together flawlessly). I don't consider it revolutionary, however.

4. Airport? WTF? Expensive WiFi is revolutionary?

I'm not really an Apple hater (aside from my strong preference for Open Source over proprietary, especially in important platform choices), but it's absurd to compare Apple's innovation to self-driving cars (or the kinds of innovation Bell Labs used to lead the way on).
Thank you for putting this together and sharing it. I've been flirting with the idea of meditating more seriously for the last few years, and I always find myself making excuses not to continue with it. A 50 or 100 day challenge seems like a manageable experiment, and a better way of deciding if it's worthwhile to continue.

I have a question. Could you explain "The Deep" in a little bit more detail? What happens to your body and your mind? What is going through your head?
"The US would be attacking one its closest allies in the region."

But if the Saudis were, indeed, responsible for the 9/11 attacks, they would, by definition, no longer be our ally. They would have had committed an act of war against the U.S.

If the U.K. or France had blown up the WTC and the Pentagon, they would no longer be our allies either.
Simply observing that most parents don't research the medication they give to their children would suffice. I don't see any reason to attribute character weaknesses.
Right. My point is that the evidence is there but there's a difficulty in developing or accepting an intuition for evolution given the huge timescales involved in unicellular-to-human evolution, even though it's well-supported by inductive and deductive evidence.
Yes, precisely why I said it hadn't made it to production 'yet'. I haven't had time to contribute like I want to, but believe me, it's up there on the list.

My advice? Get involved with this project now. It's going places. The only problems it has will be solved by 'confidence-convergence' -- i.e., as the project continues to be awesome, more people will contribute, making the project more awesome. NixOS just needs more package maintainers. That's it, really.
Note that you can also do this in Chrome/Chromium by turning on the "Enable experimental Web platform features" flag.
I just use gmail. It blocks spam without requiring people to solve a puzzle in order to contact me.
OKRs – objectives and key results
> If you can't be bothered to deeply study and understand your tools then you probably don't deserve to use them anyway.

I hadn't even gotten past the evaluation stage. Bad documentation is a huge smell for the rest of the framework—I'm not going to waste my time pursuing a tool that I'm not going to use.
Up until recently - I would have agreed with you. I just find I'm getting spam much more regularly now on my Gmail account.
But that's redefined as new constants again right? The internal representation of the CSS inside the browser would just need to update the inlined values.
Coders Trade Secrets on the Smartest Corner of the Internet
The story from a couple of acquaintances that work there is that it's very much like a tech startup: doesn't pay very well, expects constant overtime without pay, and not very welcoming to female employees.
Surely mappings onto programming concepts can provide a different kind of understanding to programmers than biology textbooks. I'm kind of appalled by the anti-cross-disciplinary attitude displayed on HN sometimes. (Like the recent 'This guy's a physicist. He should shut up about a.i.' in regards to David Deutsch.)
Other than a foreign power, one of this country's largest trading partners, aided and abetted criminals who staged the largest act of aggression ever inflicted on any country in the last 50 years.

You have an interesting definition of the word "extraordinary". Also, let me tell you about a little tea pot which is right now in orbit around the sun.
i just wanted to keep this safe for the non-hip-hop fans :)

Point taken though.

I'm going to kill the greyscale hover. It doesn't do anything meaningful and had no idea it changed the text.
Your article was written quite a while ago. Could you please update it to conform to more modern ways of of the web (e.g. less tables, more floats and divs/sections) if it's not much trouble? I like to style pages client-side, and the tr td stuff gets a bit in the way.
I find it pretty interesting that you see a lot of people say 'within an order of magnitude of C' when talking about performance for dynamic languages and JITed VMs, etc. But they rarely take this kind of thing into account. If you wrote this in Python, you'd be trying to get your implementation close to that original number - 1733.4 MFLOPS - but there's not much discussion on the real target being 17985.4 MFLOPS which needs very specific coding. I think a lot of our code we write today is a lot more inefficient than we admit to.
Impressed to see only one comment, with no discussions, mentioning Bret Victor. His influence is clear on this work.
Definitely agree with this. The function passed to the inject() method where you set up your controller and inject mocks seems to have a bunch of repetition in the unit test suites I've been writing. You can use $provide (http://docs.angularjs.org/api/AUTO.$provide) to swap dependencies at the injector level and I'm starting to wonder if doing that would be a lot more repeatable across unit test suites.