skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of programmers seem to think that (the more code they can jam on the screen at a time the better, and thus any unnecessary newlines are superfluous), but I also don't understand why many are so rabid about it.

We generally don't code on 80x25 character terminals anymore, super high res monitors are cheap, vertical lines in code aren't a scarce commodity.

Personally I tend to like a fair amount of vertical whitespace (either in pure whitespace form or comments) in my code to split things up logically, even within the same function and when the newlines aren't required, eg:

x = 10
y = 20
z = 0

speed = 80

Variables assignments/func calls, etc that are closely coupled kept together, but some whitespace as things become less directly linked. I'd rather be able to quickly scan code in 10-40 line chunks than fit more code on the screen at once.
Ask HN: Auto scroll on phones
In apps like Facebook and Twitter on the iPhone, users spend a majority of their time scrolling through the content, slowing down when something catches their eye, and deciding whether or not to engage with it. Why is there no auto scroll feature available for these apps ?
Show HN: A better npm list command
CLEVAR
Tell you what, why don't the feminists retire "Schrödinger's rapist" first, and then I'll stop being wary around women in tech in case of them decides to point a finger at me on Twitter because she's another Adria Richards.

As for the "different way of thinking"... she decided the best way to defuse suspicion about an affair that didn't exist was to act exactly as if she was having an affair.

That's called being an idiot, and it is not sexist to point that out.
Agreed. I spent a lot of time worrying about syntax in my first year or two of programming. Then, I gradually opened my mind and discovered a whole world of amazing languages with syntax I had found distasteful and previously avoided.
Same thing I'm missing apparently... the page just redirected me to Scientology website (wtf?).

Could someone care to explain us what's this all about?
New drug makes brain cancer cells explode
Will Octopart be passing the hnsearch.com domain along to you since they plan to close the site?

I ask because there are a few integrations like the DuckDuckGo bang search which should probably be updated, but only once a consistent domain & query profile are in place.
> Being regular would mean that you could decide it with regular expressions.

Hence almost regular. Of course, there is no concrete definition for "almost regular", but what I mean by it (Rob Pike himself also characterizes it as such too[1]), is that you get to decide which way to parse a construct quite definitely early in the token stream and you don't have to read arbitrary following tokens to figure out how to construct a parse tree branch.

C++ is the exception here. Most other block oriented high level programming language (at the syntax level) are indeed fully context-free, so just being context-free does not deserve a high prize.

[1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Go-Google
> if most people used rational thought then you'd expect most people to have similar beliefs

Well, possibly. But then again, what if all those people happen to have very different sets of evidence on which to make their decisions?
If Canada is like the U.S., the median traffic speed on those roads you mentioned is greater than the speed limit. Thus it's really not a minority/extremely "can't say" opinion you're espousing, but you're right that there will usually be a (smaller) group of very vocal opponents
I own one.

http://www.handykey.com/

Not very ergo friendly, for my large hands.
Nearly Paid Muppets?
Moving from Subversion to Git
I suppose the answer to that question is that it enabled us to very quickly send our transfer logs into a system that a non-technical person could easily play with. Being somewhat technical helps as well because I can easily create little dashboards (and blog posts!) with great visualizations without having to dive into some nasty graphing code.

There ARE alternatives out there, but they're crazy expensive and usually designed to analyze things like Hadoop data.
If you want Dropbox with clientside encryption: https://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology

I use seafile on a raspberry pi:
http://www.seafile.com/en/home/
SWOOOP
You probably won't like this suggestion, but I think the effect you're experiencing is a mirage. I've spent a lot of time on 3-monitor setups and a lot of time on just a laptop screen and I think the number of screens ranked somewhere around #43 on a "List of things affecting my productivity."

As Adam Carolla jokes, if you use chapstick every day, then suddenly you notice that you can't live without chapstick. But, if you never use it, then you don't need it. A lot of things are like this, including, I think, multiple monitors. Go without them for a while and you'll find that they're really not necessary.
This just goes to show that the Ballmer Peak [0] varies greatly by task.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/323/
I read that 'as a point of horror'.
Getty releases millions of free pictures. No, wait.
Review of Smarter by Dan Hurley
Author here. Good point, they are not mutually exclusive. I do think however it's not in Apple's culture to significantly move away from C/ObjC any time soon. For the time being, they are getting by well enough as is today. I think they'll continue to slowly evolve the language, but I'm not so keen to wait for major changes, and I'm hoping to get others onboard with me.
Given that these supposed "energetic amateurs" have created an enormous percentage of the code that web applications across the internet run on, their votes automatically count. If PHP developers had never produced anything of value, that would be a different discussion.
> Even if it fails, a broken server that used to process credit cards is better than a vulnerable one, right?

"I saw that you dropped your wallet on the floor, so I threw it into the river so nobody could steal your credit cards."
Exactly. I'm not convinced that the German government is all that invested in the privacy of its corporations or citizens. The world needs more Snowdens!
> ... but if we only address the women aspect...

Who's arguing for this?
If TV news has taught me anything it is that the number of people who vehemently (even violently) disagree with my (probably only moderately) progressive opinions is not small. My guess is most of us just tend to associate with people who have a similar spectrum of opinions and biases.
http://www.asus.com/Monitors_Projectors/MB168BPlus/
Something like this has been on my wishlist for quite some time personally. Maybe its what youre looking for?
Dude, you're not trying hard enough. :)

Most unspeakable thoughts today deal with isms and phobias: sexism, racism, agism, Islamophobia, homophobia.

There are others of course. For example, I am not a climate-change denier, but if I was I certainly wouldn't say so on HN!

I'm gay so I'll pick on my own group: HIV is ridiculously high amongst urban gay men. To me, it's obvious why this is the case. Evolutionarily, men have had no reason not to try and be as successful with as many partners as possible. Women, who may be saddled with a pregnancy and baby for years, had evolutionary pressure to be more choosy with sexual partners. This created fertile ground for HIV to spread amongst gay men.

Now, could a straight person say that without being ostracized from polite society? Probably not!

The question I would throw back to pg though is this: are we better or worse off for avoiding these topics entirely? The truth sometimes comes at a cost. Let's say that we found out that white people are less smart than East Asians. What good could come from knowing that? I don't know the answer...
I look forward to your update image study with Mozilla's mozjpeg and Google's latest WebP! I would guess that mozjpeg's results would not be much better than the JPEG results in your original study because you used jpgcrush.
Google rejects military funding for its advanced humanoid robot
None of them are white? I have plenty of anecdata to the contrary!
1. Prison. The philosophy of prison as punishment is wrong, but the idea of keeping a murderer isolated from potential victims isn't. So don't throw out the baby with the bath water.

2. Animals, just like humans, die. There's no way around it. Even if the entire world decides not to eat a particular goat, that goat will die. And when an animal dies, it gets eaten - no exception. Either by microorganisms, or higher level organisms. The problem isn't why animals die, it's how animals live. Even if an animal is bred for food, it doesn't have to lead a miserable life, and it doesn't mean we should not respect that life on its own merit. So again, don't throw out the baby with the bath water.

3. I agree. But say, if an old animal wants to die, can I eat it?
I doubt it. About . com has been using a technique like this to put adsense ads on external links for years.
I'm unfamiliar with this dangling else problem. I googled it and I don't see how it could be a problem with significant whitespace.

I can understand making it faster for the parser, though.
I'm actually looking forward to this one, and I've never been so confident of a quick software release.
Surprised how many people seem to have skipped over your last statement and focused on whether or not 1, 2 and 3 were really things you couldn't say. I'm pretty sure I can guess what it is you can't say though.
No, the web exploded in popularity as a development target because the labor pool is so diluted that it's easy, quick, and cheap to hire (and fire) any random "webdev" who is good enough for their purposes. And that's why, unless I get desperate, I wouldn't put PHP on my resume and would only list non-webapp projects for other languages I've used professionally but which are also used for webapps (e.g. python)--I don't want to put myself into that (cheap) labor market.
Actually, I'm surprised by the upvotes. I don't think people are imagining this hypothetical future very concretely, because it's rather disturbing if you think about it. Future people would view prison as barbaric, but have no qualms forcibly drugging criminals and/or subjecting them to brain surgery. Anyone who ate mammals (or anything with a complex nervous system) would be rehabilitated in such a manner.

And as I said, I left out the things I really can't say.
I realize that, I made my comment towards this being a metaphor and I still stand by it.
There is a .plumbing TLD.

Jesus Christ.
Cool. I monetize most of my Android apps with ads.

I found it hard to do this with games. I have not figured out game monetization yet. I guess in-app purchases are what a lot of people do. I ported an open source game to Android which is on over 40,000 devices currently. Normally that would mean over $100 a month in ads, but this app generates nothing.

A lot of what I have been porting has been C++ (or C) code written in OpenGL 1.x, with lots of things like glBegin/glEnd statements etc. There are some bumps putting that on OpenGL ES but it has been OK so far. I know some game companies have a 90% common OpenGL ES C++ code base, and then the other 10% for iOS and Android specific hooks.
2 lines is certainly better than 1 line. 10 better than 2. I don't know where it tops out, if ever.

100 chars/line better than 200. 60 better than 100. I don't know where it bottoms out.

That's how it's a good thing (not sure if you were being serious).
Unambiguous parsing is not a requirement for a language to be context-free. Your use of "actually context-free" is a stretch of the definition by a huge margin. In fact, the definition of a context-free language does not depend on a specific grammar at all. You can have a context-free grammar that parses a language unambiguously and another grammar that ambiguously defines the same language.

It is true, however, that most formal grammars for programming languages define a strict superset of the actual language and then restrict it according to semantic rules (e.g. type checking, definite assignment rules). That is why in my original comment, I was careful to use the phrase "programming language grammars", instead of "programming languages".
I comically interpreted your example of hi-res monitors as jamming more code on the screen at once.
You are probably being buried because most people are less pessimistic. ;)

Don't worry. Some of us agree with you. Sadly I'm one so I can't explain as to why you got buried.
Paypal has fairly high transaction fees, as they mention in the article. If you pay one euro for an article, 40 cents go to paypal.

Don't get my wrong, paypal is awesome for other stuff, but not for microtransactions
> What if the offended person is a Sikh or Muslim or Hindu?

I would say the same thing in a different way, because I try to discourage groupthink in general. But your hypothetical person most likely wouldn't have the luxury of being offended, because dealing with their situation is more productive than trying to get a savior to punish people they aren't going to end up working for anyway.

This whole concept of openly proclaiming "offense" is based on the goal of group-shaming people into thought-conformance. If you think this is mature behavior and a good thing to do, then you're no better than any historic oppressive mob.

It just so happens in this case that OP says he subscribes to a belief that's fundamentally based on rejecting social delusions, so I have a direct connection.

> I have nothing personally against highly religious people

It's not that they're religious, it's that they're constantly proselytizing. If you don't want to subject yourself to their drivel, avoiding them is the best you can do, as it would be wrong to force them to shut up.
PHP is fast - I've been there, made ~4k RPS websites in PHP & memcache.

There's one big, primary reason for it.

PHP is dumb.

You can't do clever things in PHP with the language, you have to all the clever things in how you design with it.

You can't overload functions or redeclare them later.

You can pretty much resolve a function at call-time, without worrying about decorators around it or about any meta-programming.

This makes for a fast VM in PHP, because it can make assumptions about function call-order much more than something like python.
Tried it again and it all appears to work!
Maybe it is because I've been programming in for something like 24 years, but I don't find them annoying to type at all; Also, maybe I'm just slow, but my typing speed is hardly the bottleneck for me in writing code; I doubt it would be even if I typed at like 20 wpm (about 95 wpm for me, and I don't touchtype). And then lastly, you can always remap your keyboard to make {} non-shift characters and/or use a language parsing IDE/editor that auto-inserts braces.
It is a variable, not a language construct. The docs are just recommending `$_` as a convention over something like `$temp`.
Random google search found this: http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/profiles2011/United...

Seems to imply that 16-19 year old girls make up a very tiny percentage of internet users.
lol brilliant!!!
This is not about 'New' Syntax.
Use eclipse or vim plugin to generate the template for you is better. So you never type ‘}’ again
Thanks for the nudge to get my application submitted already! ;-)
Not true. It is quite possible to report both sides of a story. Fair reporting doesn't mean opinion less.
http://rudradevbasak.github.io/16384_hex/
they can and will be replaced or exchanged with no effect on the system as a whole

Which just punts on the next question: why? Who set up the corporate structure that way? Answer: other humans.

Corporations and othe large organizations don't come into existence by magic, and they don't develop structures that make people, even at the CEO level, into replaceable parts, by magic. Human beings have to make choices for those things to happen. Human beings can also make choices to change those structures, if that is what needs to be done. But to do that you have to stop ignoring the fact that it is human agency, not some amorphous "corporate" agency, that is causing the problems in the first place.
Value systems revert to older norms all the time. In the 20's, people were liberated-then in the 40's and 50's, conservative. 60's-70's? liberated and alternately naive and cynical. 80's-early 90's? conservative.

This happens all the time. People go in cycles, not in a line.

Sure, Hegel, you can argue that the cycles have an overall slope, but that doesn't always bare out.
You can do it via Android apps too, not sure about iOS.
Can you say anything more specific about the nature of the game?
To me, it's easy to see what needs to be done with objective-c when you write a tiny class that creates a dictionary:

@interface MyClass
- (NSDictionary *)createSimpleDictionary;
@end

@implementation MyClass
- (NSDictionary *)createSimpleDictionary
{
return @{
@"keyForNumber": @1,
@"keyForBool": @YES,
@"keyForArrayOfStrings: @[@"one", @"two", @"three"]
};
}
@end

How much cleaner could this be if we dropped C backwards compatibility! We could remove the header file, and get rid of all the *'s and @'s:

class MyClass
- (NSDictionary)createSimpleDictionary
{
return {
"keyForNumber": 1,
"keyForBool": YES,
"keyForArrayOfStrings: ["one", "two", "three"]
}
}
end

This new language would get rid of many warts of Objective-C, bringing it up to speed with modern languages, while keeping performance and interoperability with the Cocoa toolchain.

There may be some perfect, completely new idea for a programming language out there, but Apple would never go for it. Developer experience is a distant third to the User experience and the Apple experience, and the only thing they will go for is an evolutionary, backward compatibile change such as this.
Bowling is kind of viewed as a lower-middle class sport, and the economy has wiped the lower-middle class out.

I thought the complaint was that the center has been pushed a bit downwards, which would suggest to me that the lower-middle is at least as robust as ever.

My completely unfounded guess for the reason is due to fashion. It used to be OK to acknowledge one's working-man lifestyle (coincidence that the article cites bowling's heyday at the same time America was enjoying "Urban Cowboy" and "Smokey and the Bandit"?), but we're all supposed to pretend to have more sophistication today.
Thanks. I can now use this instead of proxies to scrape Google </evil unintended use>
http://coldewey.cc/
Not for long. XPe is already at EOL. Support ends in 2016 and license availability ends in 2017.

Our products using XP Embedded are expected to still be in the field well past 2020. We are already making plans to transition to Windows 8 simply because it will soon be impossible to buy XPe licenses.
Being paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
Ok that second chart is kinda a mess due to too much data, and an only partially visible legend.

But it raises a question for me on the draw order used. Is that the default draw order? As while I could be wrong it appears to be alphabetical same as the legend order. If this is the default it seems like a poor default.

Now not considering that most people will want attention drawn based on the data itself some how. It seems that if you are going to do the legend in alphabetical order the draw order for the lines should be reverse alphabetical order to ensure that the lines which are most visible (drawn on top) are also most likely to be in the top part of the legend.

I just am curious if this is a poor default or just a quickly made example chart. Or maybe it is a great default and I am missing something.
And the Apple store near me was full as I went past today (Birmingham UK). Nice to know Microsoft are not really interested in us.
Go is beautifully straightforward and blatantly obvious as to what is going on.

I agree.

I've argued similarly on the Lua mailing list when someone wanted to change the comment characters used in the source code to be C-style instead of Lua style (double minus).

If you're going to change the language, really change it, and give enough benefit to make a break with existing code. If you are going to tweak something like comments (or in this case use significant whitespace), there isn't enough benefit (other than programmer preference) to justify the switch.

If nearly every gopher thought thought this was great and switched their code, then that's OK. But if you start using iGo, you're still going to be spending most of your time looking at regular Go source. So you need to learn the rules for Go and iGo, for negligible long term benefit.
Letting your kid believe in Santa for a while is far more powerful learning experience than showing it that others believe in this nonsense: not only can't others' beliefs be trusted, your own beliefs can't be either.
I don't think it is so clear how or why people make the choices that they do.

That's often true; but that doesn't mean people aren't making choices. It just means they're making uninformed, and often bad, choices. And to fix the problem, they need to make better choices. Pretending that it's not human choice at all, but some "corporate agency", that is causing the problems is not the way to fix them.
+1 for mentioning medical information. Right now with the Affordable Health Care Act, no penalty for preexisting conditions, but get a republican controlled congress and white house, and that might go away.
It's only possible when you're able to report all the facts. If this was the case we would have no need for journalists, we'd all go straight to the original source. As soon as you need to choose a subset of facts to present, you have to choose which subset, which introduces bias. And remember that a fact is something like "When we MRI'd this subjects head under these conditions, this is the image that resulted", not "Scientists believe that wearing tin-foil hats causes cancer."

Take global warming, for example. Many media outlets seek to present an "unbiased viewpoint" on that issue by reaching out to climate-change deniers in addition to climate-change scientists who believe in global warming. But that ignores the fact that climate-change scientists who support global warming outnumber climate-change scientists who deny it by something like 400:1. But that ignores the fact (principle, actually, technically this isn't a fact) that science isn't decided by majority vote, it's decided by looking at the data and the evidence.

The actual facts in the global warming debate is that we've recorded these temperatures at these locations across the globe, and they appear to be rising over the last century. But that's not what people are interested in: the "story" is "Are humans causing it? What can we do about it? What will happen next?"
I'd be surprised if PhDs in either of those fields genuinely disagreed with that.
Hacking Hack on Heroku
God, those pants :O Please, fellow devs, dress better than that.
BUt corporations don't behave like human beings; they are not run by moral human motives. You keep your job at a corporation by promoting the corporate interest. That means profits, efficiency, etc. If you fail to make your numbers, you'll be replaced by someone who will.

So corporations are definitely NOT run by humans behaving sensibly, but instead by a strange machinery specific to the corporate ecosystem.
That's sort of like reading this bash quote: http://bash.org/?574642 and saying "What's so funny about people being shot?!"
Virtual desktops are a big help.

If you have the space, moving any reference querying over to a tablet (iPad, etc) is one trick I use. Actually, the biggest use for my iPad is as a reference book.
I'm all for being creative in marketing... but this kinda seems like link bait spam. Interested in seeing if/how companies use it, but hoping it doesn't turn into ads for weightloss and sex enhancing pills.
Ask HN: How do experienced programmers learn new languages?
I imagine this is different once you have a few languages under your belt - so I ask you, how do you go about this?