skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you're going to have that attitude you'd better not be using our roads, parks, public transport or indeed any other government services that have "stolen" money from you

First, taxation is not "stealing", it's literally extortion. A mafia makes it clear that if you don't pay them "protection money", they will hurt you, and governments make it clear that if we don't pay taxes, we will be forcibly hauled to jail etc. In both cases, you're making payments under the threat of violence. Taxation is extortion.

Second, your argument is that I shouldn't complain about taxation because I'm using the services funded by it. This makes no sense for at least two reasons: 1) I can't not use the services, and 2) extortion is still extortion, and immoral to begin with.

If McDonald's decides to extort money from you, and then rams a Big Mac down your throat "in return", does the Big Mac entering your stomach make extortion moral?
Since he wants to start with PHP, I doubt he is going the hip and cool now route.

No offense to PHP, but it really can't be considered hip anymore.
We really need to implement the missing functionality Java applets are providing in plain JS, so applets can die. The last time i absolutely had to implement an applet was to provide my client with this functionality that was not available with pure JS:

- direct access to printer: the user wanted to print on a specific tray of the printer, without selecting it every time. JS only implements window.print() with no fine grained printer control.

- serial/parallel/usb access: access to a POS for card processing, and we needed to write some data on a smartcard.

- plain TCP connections

- read/write files on the local filesystem.

I understand that all these features require more control of the underlying hardware and need to be somehow secured, but we did not want to write a desktop app just for these features, and applets gave us the means to implement what the user needed.
Once JS can do that, applets can die a quick dead.
So I take it you didn't accept the full-time web developer position you were offered 174 days ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6094641

Are you still planning to return to school for a CS degree this January, as you said you planned to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6450381

That would be a decent way to pick up programming skills.
It's open source (http://github.com/laurolins/nanocube), so one could certainly try that. With that said, it is currently an in-memory store with no disk backing, so it would be a significant amount of work to get it going.

At the same time, I certainly believe that some sort of hierarchical, low-footprint data cube would be a great addition to postgis.
Well, I hope you're subscribed to the announce mailing list then. Because breaking changes that require manual intervention do occur, and if you don't deal with them in a timely manner you'll be SOL.

Waiting until the last minute to port all my init scripts to systemd was definitely not a good idea.
Kind of related, I recently made a similar style of visualisation for 99designs.com - http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/dhotson.d2013/page.html

Once I got the data into PostGIS and aggregated into hexes (slightly harder than it sounds) it wasn't that big a deal to visualise using Tilemill and MapBox.

I haven't read the nanocubes paper yet, but it sounds much much faster than my approach using PostGIS. It took me many hours to import and process tens of millions of points in my visualisation. It'd be great to be able to turn something like this around in <10 mins.

Would this nanocubes approach work with hexes? (they look cooler IMO)

Offtopic: After all this, all I can think about—is making a Settlers of Catan MMO. ;-)
I know all those languages and played with them one time or the other.

I am also active on D forums.

However the mainstream developers aren't aware, or even care, about those languages. Which leaves us in the current state of affairs in the industry.
> I can't see people installing nginx on their laptops either.

OS X comes with apache preinstalled though
Developing for the Wii U - the inside story
"as well as he could was not a monopolist"

This sounds very strange to me given the fact that by definition a monopoly is the control of a market by one entity, it doesn't have anything to do with how it gets there.
New? More? Really? I beg to differ... I thin it needs the KDE + GNOME + Englightment + etc. Guys to unite and create 1 full-featured DE, bug-free, with at set of SOLID applications (mail, browser, etc.) and 1 unified layer underneath.

But then again, we all know that's not going to happen and licenses is not the only problem here or anywhere else where you see this kind of fragmentation (android?).
Fashion Designers Are Finally Getting Serious About Wearable Devices
I actually didn't realise that for quite a long time, perhaps due to the obscurity of some of them. Seems 1.0-3.1 were more obvious though.
A sufficiently realistic physics simulation would eventually evolve life, otherwise it wouldn't be very realistic. Simulating an entire universe as a roundabout way of simulating consciousness is probably the least efficient way to accomplish it, but it shows that it should be possible. Now we're just talking about a question of optimization; how can we simulate a single consciousness without also simulating a world around it.
What I Learned in 2013
I deleted my facebook about a year ago now.

feelsgoodman.jpg
WTF?! This entire article is predicated on a Atlas Van Lines survey. Atlas is an expensive moving company used only by corporate/govt and fairly wealthy customers. How is this representative in the least. Maybe for a survey showing where the wealthy are retiring or businesses are trying to establish themselves in new markets.

The article shows the right approach in their leading graphics but then ignores it. Show where people renting cheap U-Haul type moving trucks are moving or no-name movers to find out where the bulk of average to lower income and/or young people are moving. That's the trend you want to look at.
First question: How is java code more tied to whatever framework it is using then javascript one?

Second question: are you sure javascript code owners will constantly refactor their old finished but functional projects to new tool chain instead letting it live while starting new projects?
"Never trust a computer where you can't throw out Windows."

The modern update.
A Slight Obsession Over Page Speed
I think you are right. I don't need to stay focus on the "productive" word.
There are smaller alternatives available on Photojojo :

1)http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/cell-phone-lenses/

2)http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/macro-lens-band/

3)http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/iphone-telephoto-lens...

4)http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/olloclip-iphone-lens/
Of course, you are still left with the problem of how to "retire" obsolescent models. Perhaps the new models could be engineered with the ability to eat foods that are toxic to the old models. In this way, simply turning over increasing quantities of agricultural land to production of the new foods would quickly push "old" food prices beyond the reach of (most of) the old-model human. Without need for overt action, the whole "retirement" process could proceed in an entirely covert and deniable manner.
> This is impossible with sums of continuous periodic functions, such as Fourier series, because continuous periodic functions are bounded, while x^2 is unbounded.

But infinite sums of continuous periodic functions are not necessarily bounded: sin(x) + sin(x/2) + sin(x/4) + ... is an example. So there has to be something else to the proof.
So we've got:

1) doubling is the same as an order of magnitude (or more), ah math who cares.

2) it costs the same amount to heat a house to a given temp no matter the outdoor temp (for a house built to be comfortable down to -30, heating at 40 costs almost nothing)

3) The public is stupid, far too dumb to program something, so lets prey on them with something real expensive that tries to avoid that.

4) average and peak are the same. Pick whichever advances an argument more.

5) Its OK to rip people off as long as you don't rip them off for more money than other people do.

6) I do admit you are 100% correct on the price. And given the mighty power of Google and expansion and wider availability of capital not only are you correct that the price has slightly dropped, but I suggest going further and in the long run it could drop to $100 or so, maybe lower. Fundamentally, from an electronic standpoint, the inevitable Chinese clones will probably only be $75 or so. See also #1 above, 25%, order of magnitude, who's counting.

7) Paraphrase to something like I don't like the results of your math equations, so I'll call you smug instead. Come on, you can do better than that. If we're going to go all playground here, "Your mom" me or something.

Oddly enough you haven't convinced me you're correct and I'm wrong.
They work in the US ( and perhaps some other "first world" countries ) but in places like India, data for even big cities is practically non existent while Google Maps has everything ( and up to date ).
well said. Autonomous small engineering units are the paradigm of current and past inventing. Skunk works, phantom works, etc. All of the MBA's combined with their fancy powerpoint presentations don't amount to 2 solid engineers with a whiteboard.
For Ubuntu, each release uses the next letter of the alphabet. And the names are chosen by Mark Shuttleworth, who writes up an explanation of each one.

The adjectives used also indicate the mission of that particular release--the LTS releases' names have attempted to indicate their relative stability: Dapper, Hardy, Lucid, Precise, and Trusty. Whereas the intermediate releases which debut new ideas and tools have names that indicate their freer status: Edgy, Maverick, Raring, Jaunty, Feisty.

Silly it may be. Pointless? Definitely. But random it is not.
If you've done Codecademy, you should understand the basics (what is a variable, what are functions, etc). The next thing to do is pick a project and build it. A good place to start is something like a blog, or calendar, or some other simple application like that. Heck, an HN clone would be a good starting project.

Once you pick a project, just take it one step at a time, asking for help when you get stuck. Don't worry about making it production-ready. It's inevitably going to be full of vulnerabilities and bad coding practices, don't worry about it. There isn't a programmer on Earth who hasn't looked at their own code from 5 years ago and thought, "What on Earth was this guy thinking when he wrote this???" Build a few projects and you will pick stuff up as you go. Once you feel like you really understand what you're doing, then you can focus on making something production-ready. For right now, just get a few things built without worrying about the details.

Read this: http://prog21.dadgum.com/188.html

When you're starting out, do that. Don't worry about full understanding. Get a solution out there, even an imperfect and brute-force one. Obviously, you don't want to stay at that level, but like I said, you're going to hate your code 5 years from now anyway, so don't worry about it too much.

Read this too, the first quote on this page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/113989.Ira_Glass
Yes, they certainly made mistakes with the PS3 crypto. And those mistakes are now certainly fixed in the PS4.

Although it sounds poetic, I don't believe for a second that the PS3 was protected by offering a limited Linux install option with crippled software graphics. The timing of the break just coincided well with that. Of course this is all my opinion on the matter.

The PS4 lacks Linux install support completely, so if Linux was the protecting factor, then people should already be tearing it apart, right? I could certainly be wrong, and there could be a gaping flaw, but my hunch is that it's going to take longer than the PS3 to crack.
We Just Hired a Chief People Officer (Why You Should, Too)
I'd encourage everybody to actually test this on their site before assuming that no social sharing buttons will jump your conversion rate.

Part of the problem with having them on product pages is a lot of the times people aren't too eager to "Like" or share a product page...especially something like snow blowers or heavy equipment.

I've seen sites that sell products that _do_ earn a lot of social traction on product pages that like increase the conversion rate (the one I'm thinking of sells wall art/decals).
Startup designs drones to protect endangered animals from poachers
The downloader is quite smooth, at least now. You still have to install and update manually, which is a bit annoying.

The one really cool thing in Steam is savegame sync, but not even all games support it.
14 fantastic scrolling websites that tell a story
The letter archives of people in history are a source of lots of useful historical information.
I'm with you on the undesirability of sw patents.

But nowadays, even hw patents are a problem. There doesn't seem to be any meaningful requirement of a patentable idea being non-obvious to "one skilled in the arts." What we have is a race to occupy the available implementation space.

But I don't see the courts addressing either of these concerns. What they are addressing is the troll's ability to misuse patents against companies that make things (good), but they crank up the financial cost and risk so that only big players can play (bad).
It's a little hard to tell from your question where exactly your problem lies. If you've done codeacademy I assume you've already got some coding skills.

You say you don't know how to apply those skills to doing something useful. I would start with an idea for something you want to do. You have an ecommerce site so I'm guessing you have some ideas for improvements you'd like to make to that site. I would start with one of those ideas (hopefully a reasonably simple one at first) then try to figure out how you would code that. Implement your change (in a development/test environment, not on your live site), do some testing and when you're satisfied your code is working push the changes out to your live site.

I'm not exactly sure what your hangup is about "production ready" code. As others have said there's no special magic that separates "production ready" code from any other code other than testing and reviewing your code to make sure you're following security best practices (which should be pretty easy with today's environments, the frameworks typically provide you with simple methods to sanitize inputs and prevent things like SQL injection). If you were building a site from scratch you'd have other things to worry about, like password handling and secure credit card processing but since you already have a site I don't think you'll need to deal with those more sensitive areas at first.

If you'd like to a have a professional spend a few hours reviewing your code before it goes live that's a service I can offer you. My website is in my HN profile and contact info is available there. Feel free to email me if you're interested.
Right. But my argument is that the compile hit as at least mostly compensated for by the guarantee of program correctness, which PHP doesn't have. Forcing you to go through a user interaction to see if your change broke anything, which takes time.
Sadly some of us don't have enough karma for our upvotes to be counted, it appears. Hmmm.

While I'm at it let me plug a slightly similar concept to the posted article, in terms of decomposing things and representation via series: Fibonacci coding.
Not sure how obscure it is but only learnt of it recently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_coding
i'm also going to be commuting about 40 min by bus. I get motion sickenss if I read or look at a screen on the bus, so some podcasts would be very helpful!
Personally, even in my least paranoid moments, I think that's a certainty. Why let things be open when you can charge people for the key? See also: turnpikes.
A one line statement like this is .. not helpful.

Why do you think that? What DEs did you play with and what were the problems? Why do you feel that new distributions aren't needed/useful?

Can you expand your point and create a real argument?
I had to use a secret browsing window to read this without signing up, so here it is for anyone else who has trouble loading the page:

--------

Chalk one up for the enemies of patent trolls: The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a request for trial from alleged patent troll Soverain Software.

The case, called Soverain Software LLC. v. Newegg Inc., is one of three such cases the Supreme Court is expected to consider this year. While the Court will likely hear the remaining cases, which deal with finer points of patent law, its dismissal of Soverain speaks to the potential frivolousness of its claims.

Soverain acquired the rights to numerous pieces of code tied to the online shopping cart, developed in the 1990s. In recent years, Soverain has gone on a litigious tear, suing more than two dozen companies including Amazon, Nordstrom, Macy's and Newegg, an online retailer, which all use shopping carts for internet sales.

Soverain had some success suing on the state level, where a Texas jury awarded the Chicago-based company $2.5 million in damages against Newegg. However, Soverain lost on appeal last year in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which ruled the shopping cart patents owned by Soverain were too general.

Patent trolls typically acquire rights to fallow or soon-to-expire patents with no intention of using the patent. Often patent trolls set up shell companies whose only assets are the patents, which means they have no real revenues or assets. Their sole purpose is to harass small businesses, which usually settle rather than pay for extended and costly litigation.

Patent law was originally written to protect the patent holder, making it easier for the patent holder to prevail in court. For the patent infringer to win, rather, the defendant must prove exceptional circumstances--namely that the patentee acted in bad faith and made baseless claims. This is hard to do. While the patent holder can be awarded "treble damages," or three times the damage claimed, the most the infringer can ever collect is attorney fees.

The remaining cases before the Supreme Court will deal with these finer points.

Congress is examining legislation that would fight patent trolls and their frivolous lawsuits by making them liable for court costs, should they lose their cases.

Small businesses mounted 3,400 legal defenses in 2011 for patent cases, a 32 percent increase over the prior year, according to a research paper from 2012 by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer. That cost to small companies was about $11 billion in 2011, also a 32 percent increase over the prior year.

The total median awards to trolls is now nearly twice as high as those to legitimate patent holders, whose median reward fell about 30 percent to $4 billion, according to a 2013 report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
William Gibson did the same thing in Neuromancer. He even had a sentence in there where "it" reached out into the ethos until it found another presence on a peer level with itself in Alpha Centauri I believe.

Need to reread that book.
Heh, I had a conversation a few weeks ago with Jeff Heer, coauthor of a very similar paper where we talked about how to make this stuff work with hexes. I think it can be done, but the hierarchical part is a pain, and I'll need more than a HN comment to explain :) Look me up offline if you're interested and we can chat.
Google’s Nest Acquisition Isn’t About Data, It’s About Creating a Legacy
Maybe with the RPi, but not if you use the board from this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7055540

Quad-core 1.7 GHz Exnyos with 2 GB of RAM for $59.

I just found out about this board, but it appears pretty impressive for the price. Has anyone used it?

You can read more here:

http://liliputing.com/2013/12/odroid-u3-59-dev-board-with-th...
"It's a really tough time to be a patent owner."

This is coming from someone who took a common noun, stuck the words "on the internet" at the end, and then extorted billions of dollars from companies that actually make something.
When's the best time to wage a cyberwar?
Run laps in the isle.
NSA Bugfix
The problem is that at 50 my furnace runs like 3 times a day because the house is built to be comfy down to -30, probably much worse (since it did OK at -20 last week). So you end up saving 25% of very little.

This mathematical model would work for a poorly insulated house in an area that never gets cold. So if in Atlanta the furnace is struggling at 50F outside, then this would mathematically work out. The problem of course is total annual heating bills in Atlanta probably aren't very impressive, so saving even 10% on them still wouldn't amount to much.
Can't remember the VAX page size, but it doesn't matter (see my other comments) because Unix of that era didn't have a rodata section. There was a single data section (eventually a.out separated data and bs , but data was still writable) that obviously couldn't have been read-only.

Rodata sections are a modern idea, the a.out binary format never had it. A.out explicitly documents the data section as writable. Rodata came with ELF.
Try alt instead of cmd.
I've been working on live coding of audio during my commute. It's a good way to keep the brain active and learn a new language, with the added benefit of being hypnotically relaxing. Also doesn't have to require internet.
Of course it's unnecessary; you may note that I called it a cavil, and a cavil is always unnecessary, which is part of what makes it a cavil. But it's to the point and sort of funny, which is why I left it in.

As for the rest, of course it's rude to be "playing with your phone" during dinner, and while it's sometimes necessary to initiate or answer some communication, to leave the table before doing so is only polite. But rudeness in response to rudeness is rudeness nonetheless, and justified only in the face of extreme provocation; such a minor impoliteness as the one we're discussing is far more pleasantly and effectively dissuaded by a polite response than a rude one -- something which, it seems to me, "I will disallow anyone..." evinces a certain failure to grasp.
So you'd thought you'd break the law and steal their content?
Bartender | Mac Menu Bar Item Control
For those wondering why the total is closer to 1% (because of IFP) than 5% (paid), it's because the court is more frequently petitioned by prisoners with IFP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_forma_pauperis
I am surprised that no one has mentioned Elementary OS in the comments yet.
You are right. The biggest problem I was trying to point out is that you need to make your static type system much more complex in order to be able to even state some things that are easy to check dynamically. Also, dependent types on their own dont solve the problem of interfacing with dynamic code.
Oh, I forgot:

> I think you'd be a lot worse off if you decided not to pay tax and go without everything being a taxpayer entitles you to.

Here it's worth pointing out that I can do neither. I can't not pay taxes, and I can't not use the services provided with tax money.

Also, thinking that being a taxpayer "entitles" you to something is wrong. First, you have no choice. Again, you don't choose to "be a taxpayer", and being extorted doesn't "entitle" you to anything - you're just extorted and lose money. It's not like your extorters are interested in giving you anything, they're only interested in taking from you.
Yeah, Arch is a great distro for some specific use cases. I loved it when I was in college and had 3+ hours every other week to get my packages un-borked after some update, but nowadays I just don't have the time... Great distro for bleeding edge stuff, though!
Get a good podcast app and a list of podcasts. Try this list (some outdated):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1644/what-good-technology...