skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding Anon the intern wanting to build lunch_app I've been in a similar position learning programming from the basics and wanting build some apps. I'll put in a vote for web2py as being a good tool that gets around a few of the gripes in the article. It's largely one click to install server, editor, db, debugger etc. and was specifically designed for teaching beginners (it has versioning as well using mercurial but I wasn't able to get that going with one click). It also does most stuff you'd need and is all in Python so you can use the libraries and rewrite bits if you can't get the framework to do something. Even so it would take Anon a while to make his app but I think it's some sort of progress. The creator talks about it here youtube.com/watch?v=iMUX9NdN8YE
Resource for learning Go
As stated before, Floating Point numbers "don't round correctly" according to IEEE Floating Point arithmetic.

There are very simple rules on how to round. This makes calculation of errors a bit complicated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_floating_point#Rounding_ru...

At best, Intel at one point provided 80-bit rounding (ie: 68-bit mantissa). That is, if you use the x87 floating-point coprocessor. But these technically do not match IEEE specifications for rounding.
We don't have pattern matching for unsafe pointers in the language. Nobody has asked for it, probably because unsafe pointers aren't used enough for it to matter.
I have history-search-backward and its reverse mapped to page up and page down. A rare few Linux distributions enable them by default, but the rest frequently have a commented example in /etc/inputrc that can be copied to your ~/.inputrc (note that programs using editline instead of readline will need additional configuration).
I've researched this a bit not too long ago.

My conclusions are that SAAS and app stores have swallowed the market of general applications and utilities. By "general" I mean, software of mass appeal.

The remaining applications that are still sold as shareware are specialized applications.

I think it would be massive fun to work on the second category of software but it seems like a hard market to break, in general.
As someone who once invested in ARM, and has looked at their balance sheets in depth: yes, it's a cent or two per phone.

Your unexamined assumption here is that copyright monopolies are the only way to compensate people for work like this. That's not the case.
ARM would not need to exist if IP didn't exist to restrict the usage of both ASMs and designs of every other semiconductor manufacturer. People would not just stop innovating in the architecture space because they can't profit from it - fab manufacturers who make chips using the architecture can, and do. What you would see is a transition away from everyone reinventing the wheel (how many add instructions do we need?) more towards an open common base set of instructions with extensions per use. And if that standard ever grew obsolete, the technical benefits of any other implementation could be immediately utilized industry wide without the tyrannical abuse of power that is copyrights on the vocabulary and patents on the chip designs.
Intellectual property law adds the force of the state to concepts/ideas/media/etc that originated by the sweat of my brow, to encourage the creation of more, and to enable me to make a living from it.

Except that little pesky thing called the constitution doesn't call it intellectual property (rightly so), and the purpose is not to enable making a living from ideas (which doesn't follow; just because someone has a copyright or patent, doesn't mean they'll make a living from those ideas, and not having a copyright or patent doesn't preclude them from making a living off their ideas). The wording is pretty explicit: "to advance science and the useful arts."
Example: the other guy who replied to my post with a rant against communism.
Low end phones: Moto E vs. Lumia 520 spec comparison
I've found that jokes tend to get downvoted on HN. Your post seems to be still in the black.
A/B testing: a comprehensive guide to getting started
No hate about p90x, I honestly barely register any knowledge of it on my radar. I just remember when it hit big and my military friends spent every waking moment talking about it. When Crossfit started entering my personal sphere, I actually thought it was just some new rev of p90x because it pervaded my social circle in the same way, except it never stopped and became a magnitude more annoying.
Are there any resources for startups looking for a set of sane, standard T&Cs without forking out for a lawyer?
Software development has a long and infamous history of The One True Way to Write Code(tm). Object oriented, agile, dynamic typing, and TDD[1] have all had their moments where it was "known" that it is the only way to efficiently create quality, maintainable software. All of them have their place, but none have managed to maintain the level of importance their evangelists promoted. I've often wondered why software development is so prone to evangelical thinking. I think it is related to egos and the relative immaturity if the field.

I've gotten to where I filter out the value from the hype. There are important lessons to learn from the hype, but my experience is people become more concerned about the religious practice than the actual software.

1. TDD is simply the latest. And, like the others, TDD will have a long-lasting impact on software development. Eventually, reasonable testing will be part of the collective software culture (it's getting closer, but not quite there), and tests will be written for most projects. At that point, the TDD evangelicals will have nothing but strawmen to fight against, and the next religion will form.
What a strange fit of pique. I make extensive use emacs chords to navigate in the shell, and I show them to people all the time if they seem curious. It never occurred to me to be outraged if somebody didn't already know. I suppose I occasionally lose patience with people as I wait for them to find "Copy" and "Paste" in the Edit menu, although I try to bear it silently rather than berating them.

Nevertheless, I in fact did not know about M-. so thank you for your contribution. For those interested, I found it described here: http://www.aboutlinux.info/2005/08/bash-shell-shortcuts.html

It's not a comprehensive list, it omits one of my favorites, C-/, which gives you undo on the command line. Well, until you hit return, anyway.
fish got it so right, much simpler and powerful than ^R
Intellectual property is a wording that shows, what the intention is:

Making ideas and thinking property, thus de-valuating it

What is the property of "property": Property is owned by somebody independently from the creator of the property. Thus, the person that has the ideas becomes less important -- important is only the owner and the money, that was paid for the property.

Without "IP", rich people can live from their money, and their money pays them a living, just from the interest they "earn". But with IP they can also own your ideas and we all become slaves to the rich.
I would like to know why in every post about Python on HN there's someone shouting "just use Go"!
The article is a reminder to all well-intentioned people: When working on something, design it as if you are going to use it yourself. Abstracting your customer is not acceptable. Especially if they are people with disabilities, or if they live in less developed countries than yours.
If you are making a pump for them, make a good pump. If you are making a football, make a good football. If people need simple but functional, sturdy and efficient devices, make exactly what they need, not a funny looking multipurpose artifact you would never use yourself.
Is the point to compensate them with their current business model so they don't have to make any changes as a company? If so, then yes, you've defined the solution into a corner here and copyright monopoly is the only way to go.

If, however, we look at the actual thing society has an interest in promoting: to get people to do the hard work of original research and engineering optimization, then we find there are lots of ways to solve that problem without granting monopolies or treating information like physical property.
Sigh. This is like that timecop thing -- dumping more stuff in core that lives better as part of a gem.

Resque, DelayedJob, Sidekiq... All have their drawbacks/benefits. I know this can just work as a 'wrapper', but in an agency environment, i've used queueing on about 20% of sites.

Absolutely no reason to want to put this in core imo.
>People would not just stop innovating in the architecture space because they can't profit from it - fab manufacturers who make chips using the architecture can, and do.

Is this real life? I honestly can't believe people actually believe this.
I have always said people like and do Crossfit not for the workout, but for the atmosphere.

It's a subpar workout done in an unsafe manner, but they have created a strangely cult-like culture that people are dying to be a part of.

People want to be a part of something that is "cool" and "advanced".

This is the primary draw of Crossfit. And the girls.
I'm Onno, one of the founders of Taptalk - happy to answer any questions here!
EDIT: I'm sorry three of us replied at the same time. I didn't mean to gang up on you.

> All "property" is imaginary.

When it comes to the current legal notion of property, then yes, assigning something as someone's "property" is imaginary.

The problem is "real" property cannot be duplicated without expending resources, whereas IP can be duplicated for free. For example:

If I make a car, you can't just "copy" it. Taking the car is stealing, and I think that is immoral because you have deprived the original owner of their work.

If I make a short story, then "copying" the story means using your own pen and paper (or your own hard drive to place a sequence of bits) to copy. I don't think this should be illegal. That is, I don't think that having a particular sequence of bits on your hard drive should legally allow men with guns to enter your home, label you a criminal, fine you, and/or send you to jail.

In that sense, not all property is "imaginary." We can make a distinction between tangible property, that exists as mass, and intellectual property, which is a set of ideas/words/code/etc. Tangible property is rivalrous; we can't both use it at the same time. Intellectual property can be used by many individuals at once, so calling it someone's "property" and enforcing that claim with force creates artificial scarcity.

I do feel bad that people who expect and rely on IP laws could feel cheated if IP laws were to disappear tomorrow. But to pretend IP law is some sort of natural thing is a bit naive. People have been creating ideas since we evolved a brain. People will continue to create without IP law. To make money off of your creations just requires a different business model.
Spot check of his links yielded a quite disappointing 100% failure rate: the lecture notes he links to for "phenomenology" (which ordinary people would call high energy physics) are all bad.[1]

Also, I don't think you can discount the value of community when studying anything as fundamentally social as theoretical physics. Maybe a modern Gauss could make his way to the edge of human understanding, and beyond, on his own, but most of us need the insights and encouragement of our peers. I would say that a smart, intrepid physicist should audit classes. Impress the professor with your effort, earnestness, and ability, and there's no way you'd be kicked out of class no matter what the rules say.

[1] http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~Gadda001/goodtheorist/pheno....
I agree with the second half of your post, but hunter-gatherer was an unfortunate choice of words. Societies tend to "evolve" due to scarcity induced by population density, as the first steps of the technology tree simply aren't that enticing when nature still provides plenty. Arguably we see the same thing with fossil fuels today.

What I'm saying is that I'm not so sure reaching a higher population is hindered by a liberal approach to sex (pre-contraception).
Dijkstra also complained about lazy students who wasted valuable computing time on assemblers instead of just writing out the machine code by hand.

I am strongly in favour of mathematical methods but that doesn't preclude exploratory work or visualisation. The idea that mathematicians spend all their time constructing rigorous theories and proofs is a complete illusion. It is common practice (outside of the Bourbaki school, at least) to alternate between building intuition through examples and solidifying intuition through rigorous proofs. See eg http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-... (by Terence Tao, one of the most talented mathematicians alive).

By comparison, we are extraordinarily lucky in programming in that everything we deal with is computable and representable. It is far easier for us to display examples and visualise systems. So while I agree that more understanding of mathematics and proof would aid in programming complex systems and I have certainly found that my degree in maths was a good preparation for programming, I don't see why we shouldn't also take advantage of the power of computers to help build the intuition that is necessary for rigour.
Ask HN: What would you use an epic supercomputer for?
If you had a computer in your possession that was 100, or even 1000, times more powerful than supercomputers available today, what would you use it for?

What kind of commercial applications could processing power of that kind provide do you think? Out of the box ideas are more than welcome :).

Hypothetical question... of course :)

I'm thinking such a system could have some interesting implications for cryptoanalysis, for one.
It was nice to share, thank you! I remember how excited I was the first time I learned about this command.
Er, what? Floating point numbers do "round correctly" (in binary) -- that's pretty much the whole point of the IEEE standard.

In particular, to compute a product of two 53-bit floating-point numbers with correct rounding (as the standard mandates), it is certainly not sufficient in general to compute just a 54-bit approximation and round that.
Google Maps Adds Elevation Profiles To Bike Routes
I want to believe, but there's an elephant in the way.

GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came before them. You can see it from the surface down-- the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac, and the OS kernel is a copy of AT&T Bell Labs Unix with ideas from other newer OSes.

I've come around to the view that the basement/garage hacker who changes the world is largely a myth. It's a very popular one and a very American individualist one, but I see few if any real world examples.

Most people around here have probably seen this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

This wasn't the product of basement hackers. It was the product of enormous amounts of DARPA money used to pay a good number of very smart people to focus on the problems of human-computer interaction full time for many years.

I want to believe. Please show me the basement/indy hacker equivalent of that demo.

Sure, basement hackers can make innovations... a little here, a little there. They can also do an excellent job making copies of commercial/military stuff, and in some cases the copies are a bit better than the original. I'm not saying this work has no value. But it doesn't innovate much and it certainly doesn't invent. Invention is a hundred times harder than innovation.

IP sucks. It's a bad system. But consider what it is attempting to accomplish. It's trying to create a mechanism whereby really innovative work can really pay. It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward. In its present form it does a poor job of that, but that's the intent.

Edit: I think the same logic also applies to startups, but to a somewhat lesser extent. Startups do sometimes have money, and can therefore focus on problems and employ people. But they must get revenue fast, which hugely limits their ability to play and experiment. As a result startups can innovate -- improve existing things -- but they generally cannot invent. Most startups that attempt to invent run out of runway and crash in the weeds. Invention seems to require a financier who is willing to throw money away, such as DARPA, NSF, etc... traditionally either nation-states or really freaking huge companies with money to burn. Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it. That's the problem that IP attempts but largely fails to solve.
Comment financer sa nouvelle extension Internet? | gTLD.club
As written, if you suggest something, it seems to me that they'd own the idea - and you wouldn't be able to use them yourself.

'... all right, title and interest in and to ... including all associated IP Rights...'

While it may be intended to protect them, that's hardly justification for such a sweeping transfer. Less total licensing could have been worked out.

Indeed - there's an example of such in the article:

'... shall have a royalty-free, worldwide, transferable, and perpetual license to use or incorporate into the Service any suggestions, ideas, enhancement requests, feedback, or other information...'
Genuinely curious: what do you think would be some other practical, achievable ways of ensuring that the people at a company like ARM get compensated for their work without "putting the force of the state behind their 'thought-property'"?
You aren't debating, you're just shouting.
Two points, one on the project you mention and one on the article..

I worked on the Colalife project in Zambia via Zoona, a mobile payments company, and it's worth understanding how distribution of the product actually evolved.

Coke has enormous distribution into the farthest reaches of rural Zambia because there is enormous demand for the product, which Coke has achieved by its excellent marketing and a smart distribution model.

The Colalife project did great, entrepreneurial work to identify an issue and get a new medical product on the market, but it quickly found that distribution didn't happen by putting the product in coke crates as intended. When demand for oral rehydration salts/zinc increased, traditional distribution mechanisms took over -- boxes of the product making their way on trucks, bicycles, etc. There are things we can learn from Coke's marketing to help design solutions to social issues, but that's not the same as the consumer product itself contributing.

The article makes a good point that caring != ability to create something that produces social impact, but seems to miss the most important part: engaging with and actually understanding your customers, regardless of who they are. Caring itself is not a problem, it's that people conflate those good intentions with understanding, and since they care that is enough to push forward with an idea.

The missing principle, which is as true for affluent as well as disadvantaged customers, is to really engage with, understand and get feedback from your target market.
It's funny that many people here seem to think TFA is a criticism of TDD, which is telling, IMO. It seems many people feel that TDD is always a net benefit to the software development process, regardless of how it is implemented. I saw the same thing with agile development and object oriented programming: just follow the buzz and software will be better.

The author is not arguing against TDD. Instead, the authoR is simply stating it is possible to do it poorly. Everybody should be looking at every process they implement and deciding if it provides value and how it can be done better. Doing anything else is cargo cult development and doesn't lead to better software.
Since this is an open forum, replies may be targeted at the group even if they are nested under an individual's comment.
New York City photographed with the Game Boy Camera in 2000
I am an injured crossfitter. I herniated my L4 vertebrae's disc, and I will likely never be the same. That being said I also used to be a 305 pound man who became a 192 pound man on Crossfit and its concepts. I have never been a "zealot" but I do have some problems with this article.

My problems with this article are multiple, but the big glaring one which people seem to be repeating here over and over again are that Crossfit level 1 certified coaches only "spend a weekend". They make it sound like these people literally came off the street never having done Crossfit before and got certified that weekend.

Maybe that's true. But I've never met a person who took the level 1 let alone became a coach at a box that didn't already have a good chunk of time actually doing WODs and improving from them under their belt. They have gone through the discipline in their own practice and have decided coaching that would be something useful for them. Unlike NASM where you can read a book and get certified, there is a hands-on/lab teaching component. This should be lauded. And no, not everyone is a great teacher, and the best judgment is on the community to determine if someone is working or not. (I've seen Crossfit instructors be dismissed from boxes.)

I would like the OP to quote some articles and provide some science around why the Crossfit HIIT/circuit style training is actually dangerous. I understand the concept, that when in fatigue doing additional work is dangerous, and that Crossfit encourages this at some level, but it's always on the discretion of the participant to put the bar down, to stop doing the pull-ups, and to stop where they got to that session in a WOD. The real challenge in Crossfit is not to leave it all out on the floor, it's to know when to stop leaving it.

What Crossfit does that I see a lot of personal training and individual training programs neglect are concentrations on proper mobility, warm-up, and form. And this comes from a guy who started Crossfit basically near the worst possible shape you can.

Another thing is I was able to study for a year+ with a multi-year Crossfit Games placing athlete, and they used Crossfit WODs to train. Pretty much exclusively. The volume was amped up for sure, but the same movements and the same formats. Maybe the really, really successful people don't do that? But the interviews I see with Rich Froning and Mikko Salo tend to basically say they do three workouts a day in the crossfit-style format. Metcons, endurance, strength. Oh well, I'm late to this party, but my $0.02.
If you are open to other options than weightlifting you shoul look at www.gymnasticbodies.com it's a gymanstics streght training (no backflips and that just bodyweight strenght), that takes care of mobility, joins preparation, etc from raw raw beginers (I'm talking inclined pushups kind of raw) to iron cross. It has lots of videos and a nice forum with plenty of helpful people.
Neat! Interestingly, many of these stories made it into dead tree form in Karla Jennings' _The Devouring Fungus_, which provides a nice narrative around this folklore and investigates some of these more thoroughly. She also goes into computing history a bit (Babbage, Zeus, etc.)

I was surprised to see it's still in print, so if you're an old neckbeard or interested in computing history, it's recommended.
Well a techie with a tool box for a tech skills feels a bit out of place in the e-commerce space where technology is done the boring way and where innovation happens in the business, marketing and sales departments.
He has a problem with the transfer of IP.
He quotes a ToS clause from another company with grants a perpetual free license to your idea, which he has no problem with.

With the "transfer-style" clause you could submit an idea, an then be sued if you use your own idea yourself. That indeed seems strange.