skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe, contrary to almost all programmers, that this is in fact fundamentally a cultural problem, as the author points, out, and NOT a practical or technical problem. I think the problem is more fundamental than the author suggests though.

Fundamentally programming (or software engineering, web development, etc.) is defined by editing textual source code. That's the definition. WYSIWYG is not, by definition, programming. By definition, WYSIWYG is sort of the opposite of programming. Programmers are proud of their ability to create textual source code that is processed to create programs or output.

Think about a specific programming activity. For example, creating a web application. If, rather than using code, I use a GUI tool to define the fields in my database, create links between tables, define and style forms for entering and displaying the data, am I programming? If that's the way I build web applications, am I a programmer? What if instead I find a Go-based Object-Relational-Mapper, write some SQL scripts to create the database schema, use SASS to define the styles for my web-based forms, etc. Now, did I do some programming? I created the exact same web application with two completely different approaches. Using the first method, I cannot call myself a programmer (some may argue this, but the general impression most programmers will get, perhaps unfortunately, is that I did not do programming and am not a programmer). In the second method, I used much more effort and achieved the same effect, but I did it by writing textual source code. Therefore in the second case I am a programmer. The difference is simply that I wrote textual source code.

Now, I am not saying that WYSIWYG editors cannot produce complex computer programs, even ones that are exactly the same as those created in text editors, or that I believe that WYSIWYG should NOT be considered programming. I think actually we should update our definition of programming to include WYSIWYG, and I believe that old definition is the main thing holding back software engineering.

Its really as simple as that. Text = programming. Not text = not programming. That means we are stuck in the 70s forever. Its a cultural failure.
There's no rule as to how good a WYSIWYG interface can be. Make one that's more productive than the corresponding text interface and we'll use it. Hackers aren't holding back anything.
Ask YC: Where's startup school NY held?
Hi, YC. I was just wondering where in New York City startup school will be held. Thanks!
This is exactly what I was going to post, it's an excellent talk. As Mike says a good contract is good for both the client and the worker, as it ensure everyone is on the same page. It only takes being burned for trusting people once to realize a good contract can be a lifesaver.
What if a conscious person 100% agrees to donating him/herself as a subject for such a test (as a Reciever)?
What if the bodies come from brain-dead patients who have fully admitted to donating their bodies (As a donor)?

I see no problem here if all involved persons accept to the procedure. And yes there will always be shady circumstances, but we also have that today with life-insurances, faked deaths, black market organ trade etc.

Why not just ask people? Why do we always have to talk 100 years about it being ethically OK, when there are people that WANT to be volunteers.
Not sure his argument stands up very well. Not even MS Word can make something looks good on multiple sizes of paper.
> if I'm reading wikipedia correctly, there are only 62 connections

For others, here's the Wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinal_nerves

I'm surprised that it's so few (31 pairs of spinal nerves). I would have imagined that there would be thousands and thousands of nerves.

Since we certainly have more than 62 sensory inputs and motor outputs in the trunk of our body, I assume that those 62 nerves hide quite a lot complexity.
modern perl ftw
> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible.

No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type; they also have tons of puncutation, and are at danger of being mangled by various transports due to line wrapping, escaping, and character mapping.
Should probably be an independent story/Ask/Poll otherwise this will (if popular) pollute the top of this story's thread.
The paper envisions post-op reproduction as possible: "The chimera would carry the mind of the recipient but, should he or she reproduce, the offspring would carry the genetic inheritance of the donor."

If the head and the body came from citizens of two different countries, what citizenship would the child have, presuming it is born in a land where citizenship flows from that one parent?
The problem with WYSIWYG is that it is hard to automate (and is not composable). I have already worked with a "WYSIWIG tool chain" : you can't build something without someone hitting some button on a graphical interface multiple times at periodical time. It is a real pain when you want to set up a CI server. Or simply if you want to execute a build during your lunch... I have no issue with WYSIWIG per se, but you have to provide me with an alternate path to complete the same task automatically/remotly/with a cron job, etc. So the original poster might have relevant points regarding visual design, but there are reason why developers tend to favor scripts, shell, terminal, it is not purely a cultural issue.
First off, WYSIWYG HTML editors exist and have existed for years.

The author is glossing over the biggest issue. Nobody writes web pages like they use word. Nobody just types up an html page from <html> to </html> and then moves on to the next page—WYSIWYG editors would be great at that.

The author mentions "static site generators", and that is the crux of the issue. Nowadays HTML is usually built by templates, sometimes even transpiled from something else entirely (HAML, etc). There's still markup but it's surrounded by template directives which can be fairly complicated turing complete languages in and of themselves (Template::Toolkit and HAML both will let you drop down to the parent language if you need to).

Even if there were some sort of nice, usable, visual programming language, WYSIWYG would still be problematic since you would have to show the loops and conditionals and such superimposed with the HTML (otherwise how can you edit something that isn't shown) and as soon as you see the structure of it all, it isn't WYSIWYG any more (by definition).

The fact is, we in the hacker culture don't embrace WYSIWYG and hang on to our terminals because we're stubborn old codgers, it's just that we've experienced both and we know which one is better.
On the other side of the coin, I think people should be allowed to opt-in to such an experiment if they are fully informed and not being financially coerced. E.g., if someone's body is dying and they want their brain to live a little longer, and they need several extra days to finish saying goodbye to their loved ones. But there would need to be a ton of anesthesia and other calming drugs given both during and the entire time after surgery. I don't think that experiments like this should be off the table if needed for progress as a civilization, but I think we can't force very lucid animals into these experiments and not give them anesthesia. The experiment itself isn't necessarily good or bad, but forcing a lucid animal into this even if it expresses fear or wants to flee is wrong.
How would they not be the same if they are indistinguishable by any experiment?
Or perhaps there are physical constrains like the durability. On pebble's website it does mention being scratch resistant but I don't know if it can endure the frequent impact it will encounter in many sports.
Plain text is not superior, merely more well-supported because the libraries for it have been around longer, and standards for it had been created. If adequate standards for WYSIWYIG were created, it would be definitely better than plain text from an end-user point of view.

In fact, there are numerous cognitive drawbacks that can by corrected by using secondary notation (available either in WYSIWYG and markup), so unadorned plain text is objectively worse than rich text - if only good tools existed for the latter; the author is right in wanting hackers to make those ubiquitous.
The "purpose" of the opening is to get yourself into the sort of middlegame position you like to play. (Some players love having white against a French Defense, for example, while other are quite comfortable with black's side of it.) Understanding which types of positions you prefer takes experience, and while you're gaining that experience at the lower levels tactical skill can dominate. So it can seem like knowing the "book" moves for a bunch of openings is important when in fact the problem is that your opponent has better tactical skills than you or perhaps you have trouble judging a position and developing a plan. That's why specializing in a few openings can be helpful -- you get lots of practice with similar middlegame positions at the same time you limit the number of lines you have to deal with.

Now if you like open games such as the King's or Evans Gambits (i.e., fashions of 100+ years ago) things will get tactically bloody pretty quickly and so gaining a knowledge of where the booby traps are will be prudent. But if your taste runs to semi-open games, say, you can limit your opening study to a relatively small number. I happen to like the Dutch Stonewall formation as black for example, and the precise move order for getting into a position I'm comfortable with doesn't require a lot of memorization.

Happily we live in a time when computers can not only entertain us in chess but also help us with learning chess. You can improve your tactical skills by studying a tactical positions card deck in Anki for example. Or you can work on a particular opening by setting the computer to always start games from a particular position. You can use that same starting position trick to train yourself in endgame play. The important thing is to find ways to keep the game fun while you improve your play.
Which of the 2?
I find this idea of a cultural problem interesting, and in my opinion that we program with plain text is essentially a completely arbitrary choice. That said, in practice almost all of the non-plain-text tools I know are some kind of special case tool and then you still need to write source code for all the pieces of the program that don't fit the mold of the GUI tool.
In other words, an API?
I would love to contribute to make it faster.
I picked up an allergy for WYSIWYG while reading through the works of Engelbart. It's not flexible enough and locks you down to a way of think which does not properly leverage the advantages of our new medium; related:

>Our approach was very different from what they called "office automation," which was about automating the paperwork of secretaries. That became the focus of Xerox PARC in the '70s. They were quite amazed that they could actually get text on the screen to appear the way it would when printed by a laser printer. Sure, that was an enormous accomplishment, and understandably it swayed their thinking. They called it "what you see is what you get" editing, or WYSIWYG. I say, yeah, but that's all you get. Once people have experienced the more flexible manipulation of text that NLS allows, they find the paper model restrictive.

We weren't interested in "automation" but in "augmentation." We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge

- Douglas Engelbart; http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/mouse_pr.html

> Question:	Isn't it great the we now have WYSIWYG technology so what you see is what yo get. You can print it out, you have wonderful, good looking documents with all kinds of typefaces?

Answer: That really is nice for the people who want to stay where they like used to be... That ignoring hugely all the other options you have...

http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/glossary/wysiwy...
I think the author is rather talking about <textarea> vs rich text editor widgets for user supplied content, and not really about things like Dreamweaver.
I'd recommend another guide. "Pro Git" by Scott Chacon is excellent and welcomes patches, source for the book and its translations are on GitHub http://www.git-scm.com/book
* MaskMe - $5 (recurring)
* RailsCasts - $9 (recurring)
* IntellijIdea - $200
* VPS service - $20 (recurring)

That's why I pay for personal use.
Since we're in a thread about GPS, I don't think it's too pedantic to point out that GPS and cellular tower positioning use trilateration and multilateration respectively rather than triangulation.
I don't think I could agree with you less. The Amazon patent claims are EXTREMELY narrow and specific; any deviation from what's claimed (changing F-stop, ISO, number of lights, etc.) is not within the scope of the claim and is therefore not patented and free to be used. You emphasised that making such changes would be obvious, and yes, I agree, but that's irrelevant unless someone tries to patent a similar process with some of those changes made.

"It should be emphasized that the above-described embodiments of the present disclosure
are merely possible examples of implementations set forth for a clear understanding of the principles
of the disclosure."

Please read the above link about how to read a patent. That has absolutely no baring on the scope the pqatent covers. It's just there to cover the lawyer's arse when the examiner tries to say "Your claims don't match your examples so it's not [reasonably based on the description]#". Examples are necessary in a patent application, but should not be used to limit the scope of the actual invention defined by the claims if all the information to produce all embodiments of the invention would be reasonable ascertained from the description.

Again, why on earth bring up the Apple DESIGN patent? They are practically unrelated topics. It's like saying a Nissan GT-R is a shitty car because you don't like the Tiida (hmm, does that geolocate me too much?). just because they both have patent in the name does not mean that one is related to the other.

# I'm not sure what the US term here is, in most of the world it's "fully supported by the description"
By using completely different mathematics.
Bees eat M&M's and create Blue Honey
The main reason I prefer to work in a text editor, is it limits the number of tools I have to learn to use.

When I used to work as a 3D designer, I became an expert at Cinema 4D. But there were times I had to switch to another application due to the limits of C4D, and I would become lost in the UI of Maya or Max, unable to perform the simplest of actions without the assistance of Google.

My preferred text editor is Emacs, and I rarely need to use another application other than Firefox. With my text editor I can code, write markup, keep a calendar and todo list, open a shell, chat on IRC.

In a WYSIWYG world, you have a dozen different applications to perform a dozen different tasks, and each requiring an in depth knowledge of that application. Yet in reality, each application is simply editing plain text.
I imagine finding stuff is going to be pretty tough in such a large area - but it'll sure be interesting.
I believe that should be called out when they're outright lying as the commenter I was replying to clearly was (though probably doesn't know it). I've tried being more "constructive" in the past, and it never does any good; people like remaining ignorant so they can feel indignant
Delivery Drones Already Exist – And They’re Way Bigger Than Amazon’s
Yes, not sure how much evidence you need. I mean just look at the Tiobe Index:

http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/images/history_R...

1.9 was initially released 2007, 1.9.1 was released in 2009... Not sure if you remember it, but one of the early 1.9 releases was reeeeally buggy.
Why Can’t America’s Newest Stealth Jet Land Like It’s Supposed To?
The biggest change is the move towards deprecating ascii-related functions:

Use of any of these functions in the POSIX module is now deprecated: isalnum, isalpha, iscntrl, isdigit, isgraph, islower, isprint, ispunct, isspace, isupper, and isxdigit

these are going to be littered throughout most perl code - its definitely in a lot of my code.
That's the "curse of End-User Development" (akin to the "AI effect" [1]): as long as any kind of automation task is made easy enough that end users can perform it reliably, it's no longer considered a programming task. It happened to spreadsheets, retrieving records from databases through GUIs, publishing and styling blogs as you explained, or the mere possibility to copy-paste large amounts of content (clearly a memcopy loop operation, but nobody sees those as programming anymore).

* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
At least the whole Google Appengine Ruby suite never worked on 1.9. Also JRuby took some time to be 100% 1.9 compatible.
I know two startups who did it or are planning to. They didn't explain their specific problems with their Ruby (on Rails) platform to me.
Your argument seems to be that switching between WYSIWYG applications can be confusing whereas not switching between text based tools is not. Presumably if you were continually switching between multiple text-based editors, each with their own abstruse command key combinations, you would find that even more difficult than switching between graphical tools.
Perl 5.20.0 represents approximately 12 months of development
since Perl 5.18.0 and contains approximately 470,000 lines of
changes across 2,900 files from 124 authors.

Thank you all.
Regarding speed, my thoughts exactly. I'm a Ruby programmer and I see this being thrown as a weak point of Python/Ruby all the time. I remember the days where Javascript and PHP were supposed to be slow. Now that Facebook/Google/Apple/Mozilla have thrown dozens of millions of dollars in across the board optimizations, they aren't so slow anymore. Not C-fast mind you, but (especially for Javascript), definitely not languages you can call slow anymore.

It's really only a problem of investing enough money for JIT and GC technology that would make any language "fast enough" really.
How many more tutorials on Git do we need? It's like article authors find it a "rite of passage" of sorts to explain Content-Addressable Storage, references and all kinds of whacky command-line keys.
Accounting.js  format money / currency in JavaScript
Part 1: Lessons learned tuning TCP and Nginx in EC2
Morgan Freeman’s Voice on Helium
Building a Successful Team with Love and Respect
Sometimes you need to treat people like stars
Dependent Charts
The namecheap website is dead - AFAIK no domain services have been affected. All of mine are fine anyway, and a random selection of some other folk I know on there are fine too.
Another similar library: http://josscrowcroft.github.io/accounting.js/

Used on many projects, works well.
US Marines pilot app to offer drone deliveries for combat troops
> There's nothing to gain by sticking with Python 2

There is a lot more useful code and libraries out there for python 2.
Smartphones, the Internet of Things, and the Death of Software
This scripts [1] searchs for links in the user timeline and replaces shortned URLs with the original (stored in the data-expanded-url attribute).

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/186801
I'm using Python 3.4. All the libraries I need are available, including the world's best database library, SQLAlchemy. It's a more pleasant experience than Python 2.x. And I have the peace of mind knowing that I'm not stuck on a legacy, deprecated platform.

I used to stick up for Python 3 on HN and other places but I've given up. I have no interest in converting people going to Go. And no matter what Python (or any other language) does, they are going to lose users to JavaScript.

Also, my experience is that people who feel passionate about Python 2.x will shout down people who are using Python 3 with "nobody uses Python 3." Who has time for that?
Conversely, when embryonic stem cell research was crippled in the US in 2006, South Korea (and others) leapt ahead... China, for instance, has no legislation prohibiting such research - the ethics are judged quite differently in other economic (and even religious) cultures.
That's exactly when to use such a machine. While I appreciate a great cocktail, that's not what I'm getting on the average Saturday night at the dance club. I would prefer a faster cocktail in many of those cases.
I would add "git - the simple guide. just a simple guide for getting started with git. no deep shit ;)": http://rogerdudler.github.io/git-guide/
One of the goals the VPRI team had in the STEPS project was to put together a WYSIWYG document editor. They did so within their 20,000 total lines of code limit.

Which isn't to say that doing it is easy just because the amount of code needed is small - it's more a statement about the industrialized model of coding that we've chained ourselves to. Nobody can afford the pure-research grade of time and dedication to build and iterate towards a beautiful design that is not just engineered well, but aspires to a mathematical grade of implementation with not a character wasted.

So we build ungainly things to meet our hair-on-fire needs, and copy things out of them when happenstance allows them to be reused. And so in all likelihood we're constantly, invisibly shortchanging the future because we have to focus on shipping our shovelware instead.

And I think the text files end up being part of that, because they're precisely the protocol that makes it so easy for stuff to be copied _inelegantly_. We bend everything around whether it's easy to copy from text and whether the editor we already use can read it.
This has serious potential to be a very nasty source of CO2 emissions and habitat loss if they decide to industrialise it.
Maybe folks are retiring at 50 in your company? I don't know, but I see a lot of older guys in the industry in my area (Europe) so it can't be total ..
> I need to lose a bit of weight. I know that for me, the best way to do that is to significantly change my "generally good but occasionally indulgent" diet. I know from experience that I can't willpower that into happening.

I had the same problem. The way I increased my willpower was by:

1) Weighing myself every day (always at the same time if I could)
2) Writing it down.
3) Graphing it in Excel

I found that seeing how my behaviour over the previous days had affected my weight gave me the willpower to eat smaller portions and forgo snacks. And having a short feedback loop allowed me to correct if I started slipping. I still ate plenty, and had snacks/biscuits etc. between meals, (I didn't feel like I was starving myself) but I found that a small change in daily intake was enough to gradually make the weight come off.
And by the way, two of the most important kinds of transposition are:

1. Players who want to play Queen's Pawn opening but avoid certain lines in them start in an English instead.

2. Players who want to play Queen's Pawn or English openings but avoid certain lines in them start with 1. Nf3 instead.
Who will create the Netscape of the Blockchain era?