skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that syntax highlighters are wrong...except when they are right!

There are times when you want the comments to recede into the background, such as when you are actively creating some new code and aren't reading your own comments. This is a great time to have comments greyed out. In fact, it is probably the most common case for a syntax highlighting IDE - to help you WRITE code.

Of course there are times when you want comments to stand out and scream at you, such as when revisiting your old code or trying to penetrate someone else's code. This is a great time have them highlighted in pink as the OP suggests.

You could imagine a hybrid, where inline comments are pink but greying out big multiline comments like those that precede methods and classes. Or a million other variations, depending on your context.

Of course, you can sort of do this already by customizing the colors in the IDE's settings area. But you only get to pick on context. Or maybe you can create a couple, but then you have to go back to settings and at least toggle between them.

Bottom line, I think this article could be better if it developed this idea that IDEs/Syntax Highlighters could be improved by giving users a good way to EASILY choose different code reading contexts/modes on the fly such as "authoring mode", "reviewing someone else's mode", etc.
Why Google is Making a Big Deal Over a Little Solar Device
Programming is math, even if some branch falls out of favour, at least the foundations will be useful.
> People who favour systemd generally use it to get shit done [1], not write blog posts about 'freedom of choice' [2].

Exactly. Half of the complaints I see about systemd don't even bother to make any arguments against it other than wanting to move away from it. For instance, see the most recent round of discussion on debian-devel, in which someone gripes that systemd has dared to take over the functionality of invoking fsck on disks at boot time before mounting them. The horror of this scenario clearly cannot be adequately conveyed in an email, or at least nobody in the discussion attempted to convey it.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. There are plenty of other things that aren't the same now as 20 years ago. More people on Macs. More people on Linux. More free or low cost alternatives to Word. Stuff tends to be web-centric rather than 8.5x11" paper-centric.

A book could be written about all the things that have changed since then.

Just because an argument was had 20 years ago doesn't mean it isn't worth having again. Otherwise we'd still be using stone tools.
Red/Green colorblind doesn't mean we don't see red and green, it's just not as powerful. It should read Red/Green deficient. Maybe that is why it doesn't seem so bad because to a Red/Green colorblind person the colors are more subdued.
Awesome. An easy interface explaining each goodie.

Such a simple idea- and yet I've never seen Google figure something like this out. I mean I'm sure it's buried somewhere in Google's technical docs, but those docs don't qualify as easy interfaces.

Well done DuckDuckGo!
MCLAREN – AMADI BRASCO
It's an incontrovertible fact that more people are adept at voice communication than textual.
The usual and expected hatchet job from a main stream media stalwart.

Neglecting the fact the fact digging up the ground to place cable, which is what the customer is actually paying for is entirely different from wiring up interconnects at core exchanges, which costs virtually nothing in comparison.

The customer pays the last mile provider to go fetch with the understanding that what they pay covers everything the provider is supposed to go fetch with some profit added on. Then the provider goes to stiff the content provider for a share of their income, or else throttles the content provider which is essentially robbing the customer of a service they've already paid for.

Why can't the NY Times put it this plainly and simply?
Good luck seeking proof.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument
UK: payday loans

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26539569

http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/Credit/oft1481.pdf [pdf, March 2013]

https://www.getsafeonline.org/protecting-yourself/payday-loa...

Action is mainly around regulation and caps on APR. Scam searches topping out around 2010.

Hope 'Mike' gets to stay private!
As a partially colorblind person (albeit easily capable of telling red from green here), while of course such a mode should not be required for programming, I wouldn't mind using it in general. The EnChroma glasses try to do this in real life, but they're expensive and only work in bright sunlight; if I can at least get the same for photos just by downloading something, it sounds interesting. (And probably already exists, so I should do some Googling.)
It still work if you use different brightness for each color. Being colorblind doesn't mean you see red as white.
Week starts on: Friday – Pirates have no respect for common perceptions
Black Sea deluge is one theory for the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers. Although wikipedia I don't think mentions this directly, the idea is that forced relocation caused the spread of the language. The timeline is approximately in line with what other theories suggest as well. And yes, Ukraine would have been the center. Or more correctly, what is now at the bottom of the Black Sea south of Ukraine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
One.com uses SNI in order to sell SSL-enabled websites for somewhere around $2.5/month.

Edit: We have around 1.-something million websites, though I don't know how many of those have SSL enabled.

(Disclosure: I happen to work there.)
They look shiny on a best buy display bench.

That's the only reason. Everyone buys the shiny thing.
I heard a saying at work: "Python is the second best language for anything." Scientific computing is a perfect example. By being close to the best, Python ends up taking over each sub-section of the SC world.
But kids can get addicted to anything - alcohol, cigarettes, sex, skateboarding, nail biting, abstract painting, classical music, or yes, video games. It's your role as a parent to regulate how much time they can spend on activities, and if your kids get "addicted" then it's your own fault, not the child's. Most games are rated for adults - that means only adults should play them. And those that are not - it's still the parent's responsibility that they are used in moderation. In some countries you can give your kid alcohol legally at the age of 14 - that doesn't mean that you can legally get your children black out drunk - there is moderation required in everything.
What about Zope/Plone?

Not good enough, or any other reason?

I'm curious.
I will not permit considerations of market share, political affiliation, nationality, or social standing to interfere between my duty to send packages from A to B. - The ISP oath.

Neither political storms nor greed nor trickery nor monopolies stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed routes. - Internet Service creed
Very cool. DDG should consider displaying the goodies page as default for beginners, with choice to collapse the section in favour of the plain page if desired. It would encourage more experimentation and additions. Suggesting it because even a regular user like myself had no idea this page existed, much less a newbie.
SciPY for Scientists
Ask HN: Should I continue to developt my QR code product?
Hi All,
I want advice from you people. These days I am working on a very advanced QR code generator website. Which will be much more advance than the solutions out there. But these days QR codes are falling back. Should I continue to develop my product or not?

Thank you
This is something that most code review tools apart from GitHub get right. For example Critic, Review Board, Phabricator and Gerrit all implement side-by-side diffs with correct syntax highlighting on each side. I don't know why the GitHub experience is so far from the state of the art.
It seems like a novelty toy.

Apparently, they won't help you pass the Ishihara Color vision test, http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/glasses-that-solve...
...no? As in China, they adopted red because of its preexisting immense popularity (well, for the USSR it seems they also drew on some "revolution is red" symbolism). Your causation is running backwards.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Soviet_Union :

> The colour red has always been a positive symbol in the Russian culture. The word red (Russian: красный, krasnyy) is etymologically related with the Russian word for beautiful. This can also be seen in Moscow’s Red Square and the Russian Orthodox festivity, Red Easter.
I guess the only consequence being resentment from the people close to you, and missed opportunities to develop deep lasting relationships.
I wonder when literature will come standard with syntax highlighting.
I might take the author more seriously if he didn’t brush off every criticism in the most dismissive, holy-than-thou tone I’ve come across since I was in Williamsburg the other weekend.
The real problem in that case is that every function declaration turned into 1 line of declaration, 2 lines of comments, 1 line of whitespace, and 2 lines of "comment whitespace". Blowing up the amount of vertical space that code takes up by a factor of six really is a problem.

I think the main meta-issue with comments is that they live in the same space as the code at all. For a while I've thought that they might be better as marginal notes like other commentary often is, which is why I'm excited about ideas like Marginalia (http://gdeer81.github.io/marginalia/), though I haven't tried it myself.
I agree, smart people do tend to have a negative outlook of ideas that originate from sources they tend to underestimate. But I would warn against a gross generalization.
this is pretty slick. i'm glad people are making more modular implementations of the programs that i depend upon in addition to creating fancy new programs that i might find useful.

for comparison, the openbsd version of openssh's sshd compiles just under 20k lines, and the openbsd version is supposed to be much smaller than the "portable" version of openssh.
Huh, learned something new today, thanks. (For anyone following along, the C89 doc mentions the limits.h guidelines as well, search for "UINT_MAX".)
"someone gripes that systemd has dared to take over the functionality of invoking fsck on disks at boot time before mounting them"

This is a good example of what the original article complained about: systemd is a step towards monolithic systems and a step away from the unix philosophy:

"The Unix philosophy emphasizes building short, simple,
clear, modular, and extendable code that can be easily
maintained and repurposed by developers other than its
creators..."[1]

systemd is feature-creeping bloatware in the Windows mold and it's no wonder a lot of unix fans who value "short, simple, clear, modular, and extendable code" have a problem with that.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Beats deal could radically transform music industry
Here is the grunt plugin I started.

https://github.com/james2doyle/grunt-jsfmt
Show HN: Survival Thriller Game that uses Echolocation
It really depends on who you are targeting with your site. If you got a niche to market your product to I don't see a reason to stop. If it's aimed at consumers and you don't think the QR code usage is growing in that area maybe it's time to cut your losses and work on something else.
The problem is that while systemd is superficially a bunch of different commands, they are a clinking, clanking mess of poorly documented programs that do their job worse than the programs they replace.

For a moment, let's look at one of these components, systemd-backlight, and it's terribly written manual page, http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-back... . Okay, so what return values can you expect? Where on the filesystem does it store the saved values so you can debug if things do go cactus? Why does it always overwrite the value at shutdown? These are all things that a reasonable program either should not do, or should document why and where they put things. Systemd just is not a responsible, well-engineered project.

Furtnermore, the only real reason consolekit is dead is because Lennart again shows a complete lack of responsibility as a developer with that project. He'd rather shove everyone towards his new baby of systemd than to do a responsible hand-off. This is furthered in his inability to document the interfaces used so that people can write compatible software, so that people can debug software, and so that people can maintain things if he ever gets hit by the number eight bus going downtown. It's just not a good way to run things, period.
> Scientific computing is a perfect example

Just out of curiosity, what's the best one?
The Dalai Lama?
Accusing "NN supporters" of having nothing but hollow rhetoric is extremely disingenuous, and I find it hard to believe that even a casual reader of HN would not be able to find out more.

There is plenty of information and details out there supporting this idea, how it could and should be implemented, along with this being, as the article says, a "generally accepted norm" for a long time now.
One of the best description for python that I've ever heard
I thought this article was representative of the relatively quick change among pundits from this deal being a bad idea to one that changes everything.
In this life, you must find someone to believe in. Dismissing this as a "silly appeal to authority" is even sillier.
I missed where he suggests a better color scheme. He references it for pink commenting.
I'm not sure of the judge's reasoning here, but in some cases there is a statutory limit on the damages that can be awarded[0]. So a jury can award any amount that they see fit, but that will be reduced to the maximum amount permissible by law.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727175
Your first mistake was recounting a dream you had about your "mummy" wetting the bed. There's no depth or anything interesting there, except maybe something about you. The awkward irony is that if your mother had actually passed away and that's why she didn't answer the door, you'd have a stronger piece of writing.

Mothers day is meant to be about celebrating the good things about mothers for those who still have them and still get along. Why not write about all the strong and positive things your mother did before?
This is a symptom of psychopathy. A double edged sword in terms of societal value. While I find the argument in favor of psychological diversity compelling, I can't can't help but be revolted by psychopaths.

Check out: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0374291357
Easy enough, but the bottlenecks remain:

(1) What real world problem to solve.

(2) For a challenging problem, how the heck to
solve it.

(3) How to cut through by far consistently the worst
writing anywhere in civilization -- documentation in
computing.

E.g., I'm still mud wrestling trying to
figure out why: (A) In program A, serialize an instance of a class. The result of the serialization is a byte array. (2) To check, in program A, deserialize the byte array and observe that do get the original instance back. (C) In program A, printout the byte array as hex. Transmit the byte array to program B. In program B, print out the
byte array in hex and observe that it is just the same
as it was in program A. (D) Deserialize the byte array
in program B and observe that the operation ends with
and exceptional condition. Why? Documentation clear
as mud.

Just for my basic work, I have about two cubic feet of books, nearly all badly written, and 5000+ Web pages of documentation illustrating much of the worst
mistakes in technical writing.

The bad documentation is by far the worst bottleneck.

The whole thing, the industry and the science, needs to
take Technical Writing 101. First lesson: A word used
with a meaning not in a standard dictionary is a 'term', and
never but never ever, not even once, use a term without a prior clear definition with motivation and likely examples. And, for such definitions, sure, use hyperlinks.

(5) Organization and management of
computing projects involving teams
larger that, say, half a dozen people.

(6) Computer system construction, installation,
configuration, backup and recovery, monitoring,
management, and administration.

(7) Security.
Does anyone have any insight in to why something like runit[1] was never a serious candidate for a sysvinit replacement in any mainstream Linux distro?

[1] - http://smarden.org/runit/
Note that this only partially helps with a subset of the problem (and modules as proposed don't fix the issue, they just help a bit more): CPP still needs to make separate passes for each translation unit, for example. I'd recommend reading the link I put in my original post...
Music Distributor Claims Right to Monetize JFK Speech
The word you are looking for is "convergence".
As an very active twitter user this kind of behaviour is very anoying for me. I would never klick one of these.
So true. And being second best with a very friendly syntax often makes it a first choice.
>The jury made a number of findings in the case, one of which was that the warning on the cup wasn't large enough nor sufficient enough to convey the dangers of the temperature of coffee that they serve.

So what warning difference resulted from this case? And would Liebeck really have acted any differently had that been the warning all along?
Utility rates are highly regulated. They can only charge what a government utility commission allows them to charge. Every few years, they generally plead the case to raise rates slightly, so they can keep up with rising costs or inflation.
Oh sure... that'll work well, great idea.
Boost.Compute (C++ GPGPU library) v0.2 Released
R is by far the most commonly used for statistical sciences. As far as I know, the list continues as follows: Matlab & Labview for experimental physics. SPSS for social psychology. SAS for the pharmaceutical industry/medicine research.
Actually I have not decided yet whether I will run the website myself or sell it as a script to others. QR codes are not famous in my country.

thanks
FWIW, "shortwave radio" is a very historical name: the 1.6-30MHz range is no longer "short" in wavelength relative to even broadcast FM at 88 to 100, much less cell starting at many hundreds of MHz, much much less bluetooth at 2.4 GHz. Really, I think "shortwave" applies pretty accurately given the use of bluetooth, and considering the shorter the wavelength, the greater the attenuation with distance.

But you're right, it's not shortwave radio. And since your cellphone doesn't have any shortwave radio hardware on board, I'm not too bothered by that :)
It really depends on the application and area of study. There is no "one best" language for all of scientific computing. For some things R is the best, for others SPSS, and for some matlab. The larger the datasets and the more computationally intense the task, the more low-level languages like C++ or Fortran are best.

But across subfields and concentrations Python is almost always the second best language. Also Python kills for rapid prototyping and testing a concept on a small scale before the much more labor intensive porting to a lower-level language.
The pretentious view that Haskell's core is a mathematical structure familiar to mathematicians is wrong.

Haskell borrows concepts from category theory (a "field" so abstract from most math that most mathematicians don't need but a handful of its concepts) to label typeclasses, and those typeclasses don't always follow from their namesake.

Further, Haskell could exist and keep its property of referential transparency without the the 'mathematical' structures or their names. Here's a version of Haskell without monads: http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/reviving-the-gofer-s...

Monads, functors, arrows, etc. are more aesthetic than fundamental to the core nature of Haskell. They're just a bookish (and sometimes bureaucratic, IMO) design choice. What I mean by that, is that the language designers took a concept (referential transparency) and built an understandable structure, but beside and aside from this, made a bunch of nested, derived typeclasses of dubious value or purpose. Sometimes I look at a Haskell library and have a more academic version of the, "Why the fuck is this a class?" moment.

I'd like to comment tangentially that Haskell is almost the OOP/Java of the 2010's - the programming community claims that it makes your code "safer", and in some sense it very much does, but its features are being perverted and overhyped while its caveats are being forgotten.
Previous discussions of the same article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030097

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6756430
The quote (which I really like, though I only use Python for a very small subset of things, generally quick throwaway scripts) doesn't have to imply that there is an agreed upon best.

Bob likes R. But he'll take Python second.
Ted likes Matlab. But he'll take Python second.
Etc.

The point is everyone agrees Python will do. Consensus plays in to the OP; even if Python isn't perfect for the domain, it's probably good enough, and the lingua franca.
The ugly "includes hack" seems ridiculous today, but in the 90's such techniques were the only way to compile large C/C++ systems in a reasonable time.
Messing with includes and reducing file dependencies while less important nowadays are underappreciated elements of software design (called physical design as opposed to logical design).
For better historical context see:
John Lakos - "Large scale C++ software design" (1996)
I don't know whether the actual history of mathematics is useful for understanding mathematics.

However, I do believe that a plausible story of how somebody came up with concepts is very important. It can be tempting to structure a mathematics lecture in a very sober/bland style of definitions followed by theorems with proof. However, definitions usually arose because somebody was trying to solve a particular problem, and this should be part of mathematics teaching.

It is usually said that "mathematics is not a spectator sport". To fully learn it, you have to put yourself into the shoes of somebody who invents certain definitions and seeks out certain theorems because they have some ulterior question that motivates them.

I would go beyond what you wrote by saying that this applies to advanced mathematics as well. The truly great papers tend to lucidly lay out the thought processes that explain why definitions and proof steps are chosen to be of a certain form.
Regehr came to the Bay Area Rust Meetup a few days ago and talked to us about all this: https://air.mozilla.org/rust-meetup-may-2014/
Google cache of the original post: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U53MirE...

What's surprising is that @unclebobmartin didn't see anything offensive or wrong with what he wrote until a number of people pointed out that it indeed was: https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/465519956088848384
Author of Gregarius here, have a hug.
But yes: that project is dead.