skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But this doesn't actually do something. Used to be, you could write a functional application with 10 lines of code -but now, because computing is being run by Fashion Directors (I agree with you on this, btw) where 'trends' are more important than actual use, we get a lot of weight added to the truss normally bearing the load of 'usefulness' to the user."

I've been programming since the mid-80s, when I started out doing BASIC on the Commodore 64. Along the way, I touched on BASIC on the Apple II, Pascal on the Apple IIGS, Mac, and Windows, C and C++ on the Mac, Visual Basic, and various other environments. These days I mostly do Objective-C and Java on Mac, iOS, and Android, with a sprinkling of Python and other languages.

It has never been easier to write a functional application than it is today. The ratio of code to functionality for any given app is lower than it has ever been.

Take the C64 or Apple II with built-in BASIC that so many hold up as a shining example of empowering the user. Now compare it to a modern Mac, which ships with AppleScript, Python, Ruby, Perl, and bridges to let many of these languages be used to create real, fully functional GUI apps. I can build a decently functional text editor in a few dozen lines of Python on a brand new Mac, while back in the day that much code would probably not even get you inline editing, let alone spell check, saving, rich text, printing, versioning.... Furthermore, the "exact same tools" as anyone else would have, Xcode, are available free from Apple and you'll get a prompt to download and install the stuff automatically if you try to use the compiler. Massive quantities of high-quality documentation are also available for free.

The reason most computer users don't program is because they don't want to, not because it's harder than it used to be.
Isn't this just a checklist? Something like (for a tutorial type post):

1. Are the steps outlined clear enough?

2. Are appropriate screenshots included?

3. Are error messages explained?

etc etc?
But the tools would be much better when they get to reformatting and not just giving the programmer more work that is rather painstaking to do. (They are working on this feature, but are afraid of it)
Nope, but I bet that would have helped! Instead it was just lots of reading and grepping through the BSD source code.
Pomodoros are very helpful. Here is a 2.5 minute guide to them:
http://www.brevedy.com/pomodoro-power-time-focusing-in-2-5-m...
It's a sack of parenthesis anyway you slice it. Of course staring at anything, including parenthesis, gets easier the more often you torture yourself. Just like talking with a lisp, you get used to it...hence they call the language LISP; painfully charming.
This is a proven method, but care must be taken to make sure no individual gets more than on word to translate at a time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_funniest_joke_in_the_wor...
If you're a gamer at all, http://habitrpg.com uses a system to gamify tasks, and may work for you! I don't use it for work things since I don't work from home, but it's been great to help me with other things.
Our whole economy relies on energy, which ultimately comes from the sun, theres a correlation, doesnt mean its important as you are trying to imply
The alternative to drones is counterinsurgency. For example, the wedding party in Yemen, if it were a target of actual importance, would have been captured and interrogated, with suspected insurgents detained for further questioning. The problem is that we don't have the manpower or the political latitude to do that in all these regions, so we send in killer robots instead and hope we hit the right people. This is a recipe for high false positive rates, even with the best equipment, because the HUMINT and SIGINT that underlies target identification is shaky to say the least.
But unfortunately, it always is.
American life, and American citizenship is more precious than any other life.

I know it's not the same issue, but throughout the whole NSA snooping revelations, Americans have only been concerned by the legality of spying on their own citizens.
All of us foreigners are fair game.

This is similar. The value of an American life is much more than that of a foreigner's life.
This really gets tiresome. Somebody states something pretty obvious, like the fact that the massive environmental harm of leaded gasoline outweighed the minor benefit to drivers, and you're right there asking for evidence without doing any work yourself. But when you make a much more precise and much less obvious claim about a specific set of regulations harming 99% of people, then "it's not a literal statement" and we should, apparently, not even think about asking you to back it up.
On Hacking MicroSD Cards
Today at the Chaos Computer Congress (30C3), xobs and I disclosed a finding that some SD cards contain vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution — on the memory card itself...
fit2rule: "the funding for death-machines was instead being used to deliver water purification plants, schools and education packages, medical supplies - to those human beings living in the 'foreign lands' who really need it."

And what happens when people who accept those plants, schools and education are killed by people who don't want them to accept those gifts from us? Back in the Vietnam era I made the same argument you do (for awhile). But the VC learned to kill villagers who accepted aid. The same thing goes on today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc.

In a better world, one without war, I would agree with you. But that is not the world we live in. Sometimes you have to think things through to second-order and higher effects.
Lock your office.

Unplug the web.

Fire up your editor.
Re-read his post, he said he's a "recent parent".
You've heard of IntelliJ, right?
Eben Moglen and I Talk about the NSA
This is a pretty good book; it's best on the 80ies, early 90ies and the 'PC' era, so it's more of a niche compared with the "history of technology" taken as a whole. But that makes it more thorough in what it covers. It's also quite entertaining and has some smart things to say about how to avoid major screw-ups:

http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Stupidity-Marketing-Disaster...
Two apps helped me best: http://lift.do and SelfControl. Use SelfControl to block all the time wasting sites; Lift for reinforcing beneficial habits/routine such as exercise, eat healthy, meditate.

Work wonders.
Dealers of Lightning

It's important to know how far in advance stuff in research labs can be from everyday life. The trappings of the computerized office of the mid 90's were bouncing around Xerox PARC in the 70's.
Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human - since human lives are being removed from the universe as a result of their actions.

This goes for the current Joint Chiefs of Staff as much as it does any historical figure.
I don't know that blog posts necessarily are (or should be) structured enough to lend themselves to 'unit testing' in any way which makes that term relevant. What OP is describing seems to be basically previewing the post first before publishing it?
I don't understand how we can have a the technology for a drone but we can't fly it close enough to get a good quality photograph. I am all for limiting casualties for the US, but how is it not a war crime to just kill people without 100% proof they are the enemy?

And seriously, if cell phones are going to 39 megapixels, why can't a drone send back a good photo?
I'm not Paul Graham, but Joel Mokyr's book's are all very interesting: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&... . Start with The Lever of Athena but really it's hard to go wrong with any of them.

Mokyr's books aren't exactly about the history of technology: they're at the intersection of economics, technology, and politics.

Another good choice: Steven Berlin Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From.
It's a tough one. I made a collection of tips and stuff here: http://procrastotherapy.com/
> "but I think that doing something to protect your society from evil must count for something."

A very much black-and-white description of the current war. "Evil" is actually the most descriptive form about an enemy that can't be specified, a war that selects its foes arbitrary and which lacks any specific goals for winning. Lacking all that, all a person can say is: "we are protecting the good side that is us from the evil that are them". There is no more specific way to describe it, which also means it can never actually end.
I've been using the beta[1], it works pretty well. If you live in the US you'll have to grab an apk elsewhere[2].

1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.v...

2: http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/
It is. You have less to lose than the average woman in the same spot.

We get fired, we get DEMOTED when asking for a raise. We have a lot less to negotiate with. So we stop when it's tolerable, because the stakes are different for us. We have to be the absolute top of our game to compete.
By discounting all links from before the date it expired.

People used to snatch up expired domains and use the internet archives to put back up the same content and than slowly add links to their sites...

Because of this spam, Google just ignores links to a domain that expired that are from before it went live if the new registrant is a different person I presume but don't know.
The cost of one drone would provide ample resources for a village in Afghanistan to educate itself and defend itself from other killers.

Drop books not bombs!
The difference is that we don't deploy our soldiers in the contexts and use-cases that we do with drones, because the risks are too great. Drones are expendable, so they are used in hostile conditions where the intelligence isn't as clear. That's why in practice they lead to high false positive rates. The real question is whether we should be using this technology to be waging war in areas where we wouldn't have done so otherwise.The choice between risking blood vs. risking electronics leads to a dangerous degree of latitude in how these weapons are deployed, that leads to a subsequent increase in civilian casualties which need not have occurred.

Public health researchers face the same issue every day when they decide whether or not to deploy a new treatment with unwanted side effects. If the false positive rate of your diagnostic heuristics is too high, then the overall damage to society can easily outweigh the effectiveness of the treatment, no matter how technologically advanced or curative it is.
I've worked on building some AI for drones for the US, and I'm fairly certain that advents in new technologies will mitigate most of the concerns in the article. It will make for a seriously scary new world, where devices like this exist at massive scale. Dictatorships will be even more brutal, and oppressors, even more oppressive. The sociopath in control of these machines will no longer have to worry about someone not carrying out orders properly due to emotions or questioning their judgement.

All that aside, the one aspect I don't see getting resolved is the psychological effects of someone relatively "normal" & smart watching the horrors and carnage of war and then heading to the grocery store for some ice cream after his/her shift. Unlike being in a miserable (i.e. battlefield) place where your body is filled with adrenaline and a good chunk of your mental resources are dedicated to keeping yourself alive and getting the hell out of there alive. Having the time to reflect on the serious inequities in the world that you've just been witness to can't easily be swept under the rug. Even if the systems are mostly automated and pictures have a higher resolution, provided that the person/analyst/commander behind the screen is a somewhat sane and intelligent member of society, the psychological tolls might be worse when you're experiencing carnage thru relative safety.
Software crisis
> Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human

Sorry, this is rubbish. This society we know of is built and established with guns and blood. We shall not have police, army or even guns. We fought wars. Your ancestors, my ancestors all fought in war one way or another. If you think that self-defending yourself against some murderer is wrong, then what is the purpose of protecting life?

Life is precious. Why are we killing cows and chicken? I supposed you are animal rightist then. That's anti-animal as anti-human (but humans are animals!)
Um, yes. Capital punishment is barbaric and disgusting.
I've been writing code since the 70's, and this statement:

"It has never been easier to write a functional application than it is today. The ratio of code to functionality for any given app is lower than it has ever been."

.. in my personal opinion, is false. The apparency-of-ease is there, but in reality its just not true. The runway to get something running and useful is about 10x as long as it used to be ..
In that case the PC can be used only as a paperweight. And they are pretty eternal.
The Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover (NQTHM)
Copying is in many cases faster than mutating data in-place by several threads, requiring blocking and cache synchronization. Therefore, it is easier to scale.
Look on meetup under 'programming'.
I believe that the reason its so difficult to understand the internal workings is the intention of the OS vendors - and this is not an altruistic purpose! If computers were very easy to develop for, a lot of people who have a vested interest in maintaining their control and secrecy might have to re-educate themselves. What I see happening in the industry is the same thing that happens in Class-based societies - as soon as there is an opportunity to draw a line, it is drawn - and we then have two classes of people.

Repeat, ad infinitum ..
What would be the benefit of killing a person if he/she can be taken prisoner safely and tried for his/her crimes.
Martin, if what you're saying is true, that's very shady behavior on his part. However, it does not have any impact on what he's saying. Your post seems to say "yes big brands are doing it and can do it because they are brands, suck it up"

I don't think we should accept that same behavior should have different implications depending on who is doing it.
LISP: awful for developers, good for the compiler -> machine (fast)

It's pretty funny that the knee-jerk dismissals of Lisp today are the precise opposite of what they used to be.
How on earth could this possibly be verified?

If I was the NSA right now, I would be "leaking" tons of fake, and fantastic, stories about myself in order to discredit any legitimate concerns.

I can imagine the talking heads now "well what else were these conspiracy theorists wrong about? Personally I'm glad somebody is out the protecting our freedom."

etc.
How to deploy a Grunt Project on Heroku?
Is there something prohibiting you from starting one?
And slightly older people-a 24 year old in 2003 who served in Iraq could be just as fucked up now as a 35 year old.
Violence is a part of nature, and humans are evolved to participate in it like all animals. It only becomes evil in the context of human values, where I agree there is no reason for people to be killing each other. However the ability and taste for killing is a genetic trait that has been valuable for some individuals over time, so don't fool yourself that some people aren't genetically primed to be killers.
Drones, Napalm, B-52 bombing—all weapons for cowards. The problem with remote-control war is that there's no political cost; remember that the Vietnam war didn't end because the great public bought into the hippies' peace&love ideology, it ended because the great public was receiving too many of their sons back in body bags.
Are you asking me? I don't understand your question. I am arguing that if killing is absolutely not allowed at all, regardless of the cause, as he suggests, is wrong.
The thing is, the convenience of drones has made it much easier for countries to carry out strikes without any regard to the damage they will cause.

In the past, the possibility of your soldiers dying on the ground was a huge deterrent to frivolous strikes.
Today, drones conduct major strikes without paying any heed to international borders. Drones conduct missions nobody would have imagined possible a few years back.
While there is a huge benefit to the invading army in terms of reduction of fatalities, there is also a cheapening of war that lets commanders order strikes at their whim.
I'm sure nobody in the US or NATO armies in Afghanistan admits this, but this happens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I understand that it seems like it will magnify the futility, but the way you are describing is the way that has been tried forever. It has resulted in slow change, usually only being realized when society as a whole has been influenced enough to forget the old perspective.

There's a lot of power into both taking the full fears of another into consideration while simultaneously trying to present the full fears of their Other to them.
He didn't mean he was watching it clearly in 4K resolution when he said "great detail", he was trying to convey that he had a good understanding of what was going on on the ground even though he wasn't on the ground.
Sounds vaguely plausible, but do you have any evidence that substantiates this? In particular, "taking shelter in a rainstorm" seems like a pretty far-fetched survival trait.
Because Norway, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, France, etc. are all failed states. Sure wouldn't want to live in any of those hell holes.
Krugman says calling Bitcoin "evil" was a joke
From the reporting, it looks like they had official documents with an actual price list for various exploits, along with details about what they entailed ("rigged monitor cable", "USB nubs"). What exactly do you consider to be 'verified'? Alexander or Clapper standing up and owning up to it? Good luck with that...
On Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
I totally agree there should be one set of rules and thats it.

Thing is, there IS one set of rules already - and thats governed by the google organic results algo which looks at a sites backlink profile as a whole.

If its mainly crap links with no authority then the site will get banned. If its a big brand site with authority and reputation, its really tough from Google's perspective to simply ban that site and all its pages because there are some links of questionable authority pointed at it.

IF they did that, the search results would be a pretty lonely place, and it would be super easy to remove sites positioned above yours in the results!
(Nice: You de-Godwin'ed yourself with an edit.)

We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.

With the tools and technologies we have available to us today, why is that purpose still to maim, murder, kill? Shouldn't the purposes have been aligned, by now, to make the trillion-dollar debt of the American people worth at least something to the rest of the human species?

We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.

Yes, I'm a 'peace-nik'. I'm human.
Many people have already recommended exercise, but I would advise you not to jog or lift high rep.

Why? It's repetitive and time consuming. It also doesn't do anything for your testosterone level.

If you're a guy, you have to keep your testosterone high and that means short burst of high intensity exercise.

That's the #1 priority. It will increase your willpower and ability to cope with stress. It'll also lessen the pain of social isolation.

You're going to be socially isolated no matter what. Working at a coffee shop doesn't matter because you'll most likely won't spend your time talking to people.

Testosterone will also keep you from packing on the fat, which is really easy to do when you work at home.

My solution to this is eating healthy and stimulants.

Caffeine and nicotine patch will reduce your appetite significantly. I feel no desire to snack between meals.

It will also keep you focus and motivated. They're much more sustainable in the long run than prescription stimulants.

Lastly, take fish oil and vitamin d3. This is not optional. Most people's diet don't contain enough fish oil, the inflammation will bring on depression and sap your mental strength. Same for vitamin d3, most of us aren't exactly outdoor creature.
One of the best books to read to get a feel for how America commits its war crimes is Kill Anything that Moves about the Vietnam war.

http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American-eboo...
Sure, but go the extra step: Drop the mandatory :, make just "ls" run ls. Then you need a syntax to get at the programming language, not the other way around. That's all that's happening here.

shok could have put ruby or python or some other language behind its {} syntax. That would be less NIH-syndrome, but maybe there's merit to trying something more ambitious. Or maybe not.
The advantage of a drone is it can "lurk" too far away to be easily seen. Building a camera that can take very clear pictures from a long way away is impossible (because of distortion from the air and weather). If you make the drone itself smaller, then you hit the Rayleigh limit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_criterion#Explanation
A Form of Madness (HTML5 forms)
You should ask the "Greatest Generation" what they did. The door to door fighting through Europe was in no way clean.
I'd prefer:

if post.editable?

to everything I've seen. There's a concept behind the if statement that should go in the model. I realize this is sort of off-topic, but it kind of negates the whole discussion since you can wrap up the cute/ugly and test it alone. :)
You could install the Kindle for PC [1] version, which allows you to buy and read Kindle Book Editions from Amazon.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/pc/download
what wories me the most with that UAV analyst problem is that there is only two solution. Minimize or even stop these operations or automate them with computers. I'm "curious" where this later option could lead us.
The survey results are now out: www.sitepoint.com/best-php-frameworks-2014
I find adding my to do tasks to my calendar assigning time blocks to specific tasks makes it much easier to just do the work and much harder to waste time.
Another method is assigning a specific amount of time to a task. And setting a stopwatch and taking a break when that time is up prevents me from taking more time than needed for projects.
What right does America have to kill a wedding party in Yemen?
Indeed, what right does America have to kill any "suspected terrorist" in Yemen?

This is just another example of how the convenience of drone strikes has led to the belittling of war.
The argument that society was built on foo can also be used for arguing for slavery, the oppression of women, child labor, etc.

Just because we did do something in the past does not justify doing it in the future.

The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale. The places that these drones are being used are not places that have a credible military threat to the united states. (unless you count their governments having nukes)