skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I firmly think that C# has it right - only booleans are true or false, everything else has to be explicitly compared.
The time has come to embrace online performance support
great essay. ime, the best programmers are equal part artist and hacker. but, the synthesis would be impossible to describe or even recognize by most non-programmers. and: conversations about their abandoned or unrealized projects are sometimes more interesting than their completed ones.
Ask HN: What languages / environments to build desktop apps in 2014?
Hi hackers.

I have some ideas of desktop applications I want to work on this year.
As I have very little experience with the destkop world I am wondering what are the current ways to develop one. I am mostly a web developer with experiment in backend and frontend, with an affinity for functional programming but I am open to everything.

What technology would you chose to build a desktop app in 2014?

Please, precise the language, framework and targeted platform(s).

(I'm interested in everything, not just multi platform solutions)
John Carmack confirmed what fidotron said in the Quakecon 2012 talk which I stumbled across in the comments here recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw : he talks about ID artists referring to light-map dinking as "painting with light" and generally being reluctant to give up direct control of final appearances.

Likely you're both right, and while it's harder to learn how to dink scenes and assets with ad-hoc rendering techniques than just use raytracing, an artist who has already mastered the black arts of tweaking everything just so is going to resent losing that control and having to let the physics take over.
I can see that it can be lonely for you. However, I do not see that your coworkers are doing anything wrong.
Ask HN: Has anyone used the Safe Financing Docs outside of US? 
Has anyone used http://ycombinator.com/safe/ outside of the US ? We were looking at trying it out in Ireland.
yeah I find it incredibly hard to believe that the ps4 can push 2 x 5" 1080p displays, with the necessary latency to give a real sense of presence, as the the parlance now is.

I can only assume that if the SDK is being made soon then devs may well have had time with it. I am really looking forward to hearing about their experiences.
And I up voted YOUR post because, as a Canadian living and working in New Zealand, there is nothing worse than having a million great ideas and nobody to work on them with. I am flooded with business concepts almost once a week, I love reading them and understanding the problems they can solve.

It seems like you have to live in Silicon Valley, or some Californian suburb, to even attempt to answer these types of requests. I love UX design and development, I'm working on some insanely cool stuff involving automation and industrial wireless, but the audience around here don't even know what they want, let alone wanting to spend a pretty penny on something they haven't had 10 years to "prove it works".

+1 for anyone living on the other side of the railroad tracks. Train for the hardest situations, so when the real ones pop up you can manage them with confidence.
Rebol also does this with only none and false (and any its relatives like no & off) being falsy…

>> to-logic false
== false

>> to-logic none
== false

>> to-logic off
== false

>> to-logic true
== true

>> to-logic 0
== true

>> to-logic ""
== true

>> to-logic []
== true

Like you I think this is the better way.
See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7427486 .
To be honest: From this point over here this is promotion for Mozilla. I'm a Mozilla fan, Firefox user and welcome news that aren't "This demo only works in Chrome" for once.

I don't see it as a sell-out, I see it as competition to the braindead/insulting 'Upgrade your browser' Google notifications and similar nonsense. A sign that Mozilla is very much alive and innovating.
At first I thought you made this account just to do drive-by ad hominems, but looking at your history it seems that assumption was wrong.

I'm not sure you fully realize what you're doing when you write stuff like

> Please go back to reading Cheeseburger or (Insert 'geek' blog here).

You have absolutely no business to come here and 5 days in tell people to go fuck themselves. My primary complaint isn't even the fatuitous nature of that comment, it's the intent behind it. Someone might have expressed an opinion you don't like - and I get that you might feel your religion isn't getting properly respected - but that's no reason to attack them personally.

Next time, please just leave that attack out.
wow, love the volumetric water (in video)!
Well attended a JS conf last year and I got to be at the same room as TJ Holowaychuk. I had no idea who the guy was and ended up asking where he came from, what he works with, etc. Shame on me haha.
How is that different than in Python? Normally, an Object would always be truthy, if you didn't implement the __nonzero__ method. The problem is that the Datetime class does implement that method, on purpose.
Why are you so surprised that someone believes their beliefs are 100% true.

Have you not been exposed to people who actually believe in things before?
I can't agree more, I've studied IT engineering, but spending countless hours on fundamental sciences while at the same time knowing that it will have little to no benefit to my actual profession was too big of a torture to endure.
He completely ignored or sidestepped the fact that non muslim countries could apply the same policy to muslims.
I would agree. With sound, you perceive sounds to be close if they have plenty of bass and far away if this bass content rolls off. You also get phase smearing, where the sound waves coming towards you interact and mush together. A perception of closeness can be achieved by reversing this process, as used by BBE in their products (I have a BBE BMax-T bass preamp that has got this in it; if you take the top off, it's a little chip doing this).

I would imagine that they're just processing audio in a way to create a logical spherical arrangement, and sounds that fit into that sphere at certain points have equalisation applied to them to give the psychological effect of being far away or close; in effect, most things can be done with equalisation! For example, guitar effects boxes these day commonly "simulate" cabinets. Each speaker cabinet has its own resonant frequency, and the speakers in it also have certain frequency responses (they are not flat responses), hence the reason 4x12" Marshall cabs sound a certain way. The speakers also have sharp treble roll-offs, so these cabinet simulators are just putting an equaliser on the output signal that sounds like the frequency response of a particular cabinet. This is also the reason that signals taken from an amplifier's "direct out" that doesn't have this EQ applied sound fizzy - the sound doesn't have the same response as the speaker (which happens to be really ineffective at converting the input signal to the output sound), and so the guitarist will compare the speaker sound to the "direct out" sound and think the "direct out" sounds rubbish! In reality, the sound they are expecting to hear is the massively coloured sound of the speaker but they are hearing the true-sounding DI tone.

(Your ears are far more responsive to middle/treble frequencies and not bass, but bass gives the feeling of power and treble the perception of loudness, hence the reason most "rock" equalisers on hifis or MP3 players boost those two, so you think "Wow, this is really powerful and LOUD!")

BTW, that's a great demo. Haven't heard that in ages.
Its interesting to hear from someone who's more of a hobbyist programmer. You don't meet so many, mainly I think because once you become half-decent at programming you have access to a range of well paid jobs. Of course as you say, those jobs come with certain conditions that aren't for everybody.

I've often thought of quitting professional programming and it to become a hobby instead. I think sometimes great things come from playing around and working on projects you want to and enjoy working on as opposed to the 'drudgery' of implementing someone else's vision. In my experience although the job has its perks, very few 'real' programmers actually care much about the products they work on. Sometimes they do when they start but it doesn't take long for the pressure of getting something done vs. getting something done you have real pride in generally breaks you eventually.

At the end of the day I think if you can write some code, you are a programmer, whether you are a hobbyist or not. Some of the best developers hack on open source projects and live off very little and they're pretty happy with their lifestyle. A lot of paid-up programmers are in fact more like 'impostors' than these guys.
I wouldn't care if they made it an option so people could choose "I want a chrome clone that doesn't violate my privacy" and get the chrome-ified UI, or choose either the 'Firefox menu' Office 2007-ish one, or the classic interface. Instead, they removed just about every customisability-related feature they could.
2048 Game with College Rankings
Pixar were late holdouts against non-physically-based rendering though, apparently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw#t=4410
> Again, look, Ma, no standard deviations or Gaussian assumptions.

You're once again overlooking the context. In a physics context, 5σ has an oft-quoted numerical value that is acquired this way:

http://i.imgur.com/pcjr6cN.gif

Good luck acquiring the universally accepted numerical value without applying a Gaussian distribution as shown.

Remember that this thread began with someone nontechnical asking what the significance of 5σ was to the evaluation of a physics experiment, for which I provided an uncontroversial explanation in that context.
The Culture of Overwork on Wall Street And in Silicon Valley
In my experience there are two kinds of programmers. Those who program (largely based upon practices they are told are good) and those who also really think about their own programming and try to develop their own paradigms in response to their own problems.

The latter tend to be, in the long run, far more productive than the former. However, this takes both motivation and it takes extra time between iterations to think about what problems you are having with development and how to solve them. Continuous iterations get in the way of it, but it isn't clear that the heavy engineering waterfall model gets people to do it either.

Sometimes you need some distance so you can come back and ask "is this good code? What can I do better?" Without distance, it is like editing your own essays.

After 10 years of coding professionally and over 20 years of programming experience, I find that that capacity, which is entirely independent of how many hours someone actually spends coding, is the best indication of how productive someone will be.

If I am ever hiring programmers, my questions won't be puzzle questions. They will be questions like "how do you decide what needs testing?" or "when and why do you comment your code?" Those questions are likely to tell me more about how much someone has thought about their own code experiences than whether they can solve a certain puzzle or not.
If the college degree would only serve to get to the next academic level, things would probably be alright.

IMHO the real issue is that degrees are considered signals for employers - that blows up their value to much, much more than "just" the value of the courses added together.
Yes it. reads like a scene from 1984 too me as well.
Actually thinking about it the zero sum competition of most big corporations is exactly like 1984 as well.
http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html
There do seem to be a lot of rather "precious" induhviduals coming into the industry these days who seem to easily get obsessed with trivial stuff whilst missing the bigger picture.
Grab a copy of "java concurrency in practice", it's my go-to book for when I've got a tricky concurrency problem to solve.
We can't rule this out completely, but I don't know, it kind of seems unlikely since there would have been attempts at communication from passengers in the plane once they would notice the plane flying very low.
If done right, fundamental sciences make for great learning.
"Programming from the Ground Up" (linked from a couple of other posts) has exactly what you want. There's no need to learn C first - it becomes obvious how memory and pointers work when you're actually doing it. It's a lot easier than people make out, just give it a go.
Yes, this is why Unity is so popular.
Spent 45 minutes playing with it after reading your comment and I absolutely love the new UI. Everything is so much more fluid and intuitive. The dev tools especially.

It might turn off some Firefox users but I really dig it.
>Cheating in academia is exactly the same as piracy: It is a service problem. If classes taught useful information/skills in a non-boring way, cheating would be significantly reduced.

This is true, but only for certain subjects. I largely agree with you when it comes to many Comp-Sci courses. Differential Equations, not so much.
interesting that BICEP2 polarization from gravitation waves as they describe it http://bicepkeck.org/faq.html:

"strong B-mode polarization at the much larger angular scales--2 to 4 degrees on the sky--where lensing is a tiny effect but where inflationary gravitational waves are expected to peak. "

is of about the same scale as 500 million light years period of Baryon acoustic oscillations period (ie. baryonic (gravitating) matter density period):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_acoustic_oscillations#BA...
This must be true because although our ears are funny shapes, they only have one ear drum each, so we hear in stereo.
Improved dev tools are a separate issue to removing every customisability option they could (small icons, status bar, the fscking ability to reorder toolbar items...)
(replying to myself)

It's particularly bad because it is the kind of "clever" unnecessary code which is unlikely to see widespread adoption, clashes with existing conventions, and will eventually be disposed of after the author has left the company to pursue other opportunities.

Don't write clever code!
CAPTCHAs’ Effect on UX and How to Fix It
> Since I started about 3 years ago

Let's get some perspective here. If you were an undergrad you'd just be about to graduate. Nobody would expect you to be particularly good at programming at this stage -- your career is literally just beginning!
agree, I was a school drop out and then went on to do a degree in open university, then did my masters in IT and the IT degree would not be awarded to me because I did not have my school completed. (Note I passed in distinction > 70% in every subject of that degree)
Essential Steps To Follow In Identifying A Good Franchise Business Model
"Purchase" doesn't quite reflect modern TOC, I believe the more exact term would be "pay a premium for a longer term license to view video content that is revokable at vendor's will; neither continued availability nor immutability of the initially licensed content is guaranteed".

I would really prefer to pay per view instead and retain a high degree of control over my hardware and software configuration as well as having a reasonable choice of options in terms of video quality, various subtitles and audio tracks.

Ideally I'd be able to buy audio track or subtitles separately to combine with the video content for viewing (plug-in), then there would be a robust market of competing translations.
For an idea of the tremendous impact Leslie Lamport has had on computing to date check out this page:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
It seems the OP is trying to compare himself with the internet. We may hear about great achievements every day, but often those achievements while only taking minutes to read about took years or even decades of work and labor and were hardly achieved by one person alone.

A Real Programmer is simply one who keeps on learning and doing. It is important to look back occasionally on what you have achieved, instead of what you have not.
They look very interesting. Steve Mann is on their team I see. He looks very amusing with his Borg-style facial additions and his cheery grin.

Hopefully the product will be good. But I can't see myself using one and sat there waving my arms around like a lunatic. Instead of typing on a virtual keyboard, why not just use a laptop or netbook or something? It seems to be built to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
Yes, let's invent/promote a bunch of select technologies to the extent of directly integrating them into _some_ browsers and then call-it a "plug-in-free web". At least they came up with asm.js...
The instructors mentioned were not teaching the course this student planned to cheat on, though. And without a revolution in American education, there will never be the students to sustain schools without the notion that there is a credential at the end of the level. Nor will there be any significant proportion of classes that have no unengaged students.
Let your fellow developers know they’re great
>> That context is the normal distribution.

> No. Here is an important use of standard deviation not related at all to the Gaussian distribution ...

Before you troll through the world's imaginary problems again, I am going to ask you one more time to remember how this conversation got started (the context), and why I answered as I did.

Someone nontechnical asked what the significance of 5σ was in the context of a physics experiment. I replied by saying that 5σ was mapped to a p-value this way:

http://i.imgur.com/pcjr6cN.gif

And the p-value was the point, leading to a discussion of the high level of discipline in experimental physics compared, say, to the social sciences, which accept p-values of .01-.05, values I included in my original reply for comparison.

The context is the normal distribution. Wake up and smell the Cappuccino.
Mozilla Patches Firefox 28 Pwn2Own Flaws, Adds Gamepad API Support
I live in the UK, which like the US has serious problems with income gaps and class mobility. When I say redistributive, I should clarify that I don't just mean 'here poor person, have some money', but more that I would aim towards a more Scandinavian-style economy, where more money/effort is spent on social programs.
Chromecast now available on Amazon UK
What Happens to Older Developers?
Ask HN: What is a suitable wordpress theme for a freelance developer
I am a freelance .NET developer and I am building my website and blog. I am having a hard time finding a suitable WordPress theme for the purpose - I find that most of them are oriented towards freelance designers with heavy emphasis on portfolio and design. As a developer, I am looking for something more simplistic with emphasis on coding and content.

Are there any freelance developers around here that have found and use a nice WordPress theme?
Yup, little teams like Rovio with there obscure games about pigs trying to steal eggs wouldn't dream of something like that. Or that game no one's heard about where you launch aliens into space. couldn't possibly work in Unity.
What software testing types to use and when?
well most of the time its about asset stripping and loading up a company with expensive debt and selling it before the chickens come home to roost as a recent number of company collapses in the uk proves)

Or its about forcing companys to do trendy things - bad for the long term by selling off core assets on the cheap BT selling O2 is a classic example.
The distance thing is the best way to improve your own code in my opinion. I have a medium sided codebase to look after. When I have not touched a bit for a few months and I need to go back, it should make sense to me very quickly (I wrote it after all). If it doesn't I ask myself why it doesn't and what I would expect to find to make it more understandable. Then refactor from there. Its too easy to be focused on the details of a piece of code, and not see the bigger picture. That's why being away from a piece of code gives me the best opportunity to evaluate it objectively.
While I agree with you that not being in bookstores is no dealbreaker any more, I'd like to add that the way things are going is not really satisfying. What if the book/media market, in its natural state, converges towards one big dominating online shop?

Call it the Amazon-takes-it-all system. That can't be good.

But it seems like it can't be avoided either, doesn't it?
The gremlin is older (and broader) than that movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlin
Perhaps a David Copperfield comeback?

...zing?
I personally see VR as it stands today, (yes I have demoed an Oculus) as the dying 3Dtv. Not going to work out until technology advances to provide a better, more lifelike experience. Even then I don't know if it will be popular. Who wants to sit in a room with their face covered up for hours each day. You cannot really converse with or communicate with anyone else. You are just kind of shut off.
Dude, maybe it's just that you use the same template?
How did you do your website?
The plaintiffs are seeking payouts for millions of Gmail users. The financial damages would amount to $100 per day of each day of violation for every individual who sent or received an email message using Google Apps for Education during a two-year period beginning in May 2011.

So assuming at least 1 million users, they are seeking:

1,000,000 users * $100 per user * 365 days per year * 2 years = ~ $73 billion in damages.

I'm not commenting on whether data-mining on Google's part was right or wrong, but why isn't there any limit to the amount that companies can be sued for?

It seems impractical for the people suing to sue for around 73 billion dollars when the product/service is essentially free.
Is this a serious comment? Opt in for mail search, spam filtering and anti virus filtering?
I'm a hobbyist programmer, but I'm able to use my programming in my work - even though it's not strictly related.

Programming skills can be a nice extra to a creative or administrative skillset, especially in smaller & boutique companies.
> PS4 going to be able to handle rendering its existing games x2

Well, yeah, at 10fps. Currently if the PS4 outputs 1080p it drops the framerate to 30.
More info at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henderson_Brooks%E2%80%93Bhagat...
coming to the industry? I am working with a bioinformatics team leader who seems to be obsessed with his hipster stack Mongo, Node , Angular, hang on...
nope, changed to Tokyo Cabinet,
Nope, its Elastic Search this week.

Its basically a relational problem we are trying to solve, but because it is moderately big data (will be a few terabytes in the end), we NEED to use NoSQL.
Firstly the EULA (which nobody reads) does cover this and then the aspect of you get what you pay for and again their choice compeletely how they wish to spend thier money, or not in this case as it is a free service they are using.

Also the cusomised ad advertising is an option you can opt out of, so once again I'm not understanding the issue here beyond grabbing some headlines for mistakes that were avoidable on many levels.
Full EU Net Neutrality Proposal [pdf]
If you send an email to a gmail user of course you are consenting for their email service to process the email. Things like spam filtering and preloading images depend on this.
EA Games website hacked to steal Apple IDs
Here is the full Proposal: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7682/RegulationoftheEuro...
maybe "solve your own problem" and build a service to match people wanting to do things with other skilled people :)

could set baseline requirements like have to have attended one of x schools and have to enter url to live project etc

all the best finding a co-founder! :)
My first impression is that the face looks slightly too big for the wrists it is being modelled on. If the pictures are representative of the final product then I can't see it being worn by many women, or men with slimmer wrists.