skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. The HN crowd needs to be smarter when we see articles like this. Demand, as readers, that there are no such mind tricks. Article title must reflect content, not hyperbole or agenda.
My dad had one when I was a kid. They were called luggables, and weren't meant to be put on laps....
Problems of gravity
I don't want you to listen to my arguments, I was simply answering to your question about stats. I have often found out that convincing people that didn't want to be convinced took way too much energy.
The problem is that comments visually bloat the code and make it harder to understand. Bad code with useless comments is worse than bad code with no comments. And that's not even counting comments that are out of date and misleading...
Why would you expect a larger (than current) iPhone to be running iPad apps?

Even a 5.5 inch iPhone would be closer in aspect ratio and size to a 16:9 4 inch iPhone than it would be to a 4:3 7.9 inch iPad Mini (let alone a full-size iPad). to me, that makes it obvious it would run scaled-up iPhone apps, not scaled-down iPad apps. In other words, a larger iPhone will clearly be on the "phone" side of the phone/tablet line.

If you want to argue that it is all a continuum and that the scope of touch-based computing hasn't changed, I'd agree with that. But in a thread that started by talking about iPhones, iPads and Windows 8, "tablet computing" is more specific than that.
Internationally banks simply have to be able to acquire sufficient foreign currency holdings. Which is trivially easy because every competent reserve bank on the planet has enormous foreign currency holdings.

But this is all irrelevant to Bitcoin - which is marketed by its advocates a consumer currency, not an international system of exchange between institutions. Institutions have no need nor desire for such a thing - it is a saturated marketplace, with literally thousands of avenues of exchange, of which Bitcoin is a particularly poor one.

Which circles back to my original point: foreign currency transactions are very simple for anyone ranging from consumers to medium or large size businesses, barring tax issues (like not paying a lot of it). Bitcoin does not solve a problem not already solved for centuries by the banking system - this is literally the thing that got it started way back with the Knights Templar.
Myths and Misreporting About Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
So I guess, if we look past the topic of recursion itself - that the moral of the story is that design by committee works if kept in check by a benevolent dictator? Perhaps it works both ways: that a benevolent dictator can be properly grounded by a committee.
you got your facts wrong regarding what HN is all about
It is probably a mistake to summarise the ethereum project as a cryptocurrency, it aims to be a lot more than that.
That said, the problem with this kind of fundraising is that an important part of the "investors" are not apt to judge the technical merits of the project as a distributed app plateform. I cannot either so I wont be investing, but I would enjoy some technical input on the matter.
Autonomous corporations could be a world-changing innovation, possibly as important as the cryptocurrency concept itself.

As for the non-technical aspects of the project it seems to me that the ethereum team has tried to make the fundraising fair and non-speculative. There is a great amount of fear from people who have vested interest in some alternative cryptocurrencies in this thread. It is a shame that we cannot have rational discussions as it usually the case on HN. Greed is not always good.
I'd say the language design and language ecosystem has a LOT to do with it as well. Here are a few lines of Java that I just had to write about 10 minutes ago.

PendingResult<MessageApi.SendMessageResult> pending = Wearable.MessageApi.sendMessage(mGoogleApiClient, mWearableNode.getId(), path, data);
pending.setResultCallback(new ResultCallback<MessageApi.SendMessageResult>() {
@Override
public void onResult(MessageApi.SendMessageResult result) {
....
}
}

Okay, now suppose this were a Python-based API instead? Perhaps it could be something like this, after some relevant initialisation:

wearable.sendmessage(mywearable, path, data)

@wearable.onresult
def onresult(result):
...

Tell me which one is more in need of commenting.
For another binary-JSON, see "CBOR" Concise Binary Object Representation, IETF RFC 7049 http://cbor.io/
I wrote Python and Go implementations of CBOR. It packs smaller and parses faster than JSON.
Sure, you limit the payload to orbit. But on the other hand you end up with an extra orbital rocket stage in your possession. Given that this is a roughly $45+ million commodity at present, that's a significant savings that justifies the payload reduction.
Life on the eve of war
What if you had really strong legs? You're right, of course.
Comcast Reaches Key Milestone in Launch of IPv6 Broadband Network
I definitely just installed the "Yo" app, just so I could use this. Excellent work!
I see rubbish like this in PHP (and Java) code all the time:

/**
* Frobnicates a foobar
*
* @param Foobar $foobar The foobar to be frobnicated
* @param int $intensity The intensity with which the foobar will
* be frobnicated (defaults to 4)
* @return mixed The result of frobnicating a foobar
*/
function foobar_frobnicate(Foobar $foobar, $intensity=5)
{
// frobnicates the foobar
return $foobar->frobnicate($intensity);
}

It's utterly ridiculous.

Pretty sure I've been guilty of this in the past, too. As I recall, the documentor tools make a lot of noise if you don't supply wasteful and irrelevant values for every single little thing even if it's blindingly obvious from the symbol, context or idiom what it means and what it does.
Do the filters really block all porn on the internet? That's quite impressive.
anecdotally, the people I know who pursue psychology vocationally are not the most rigorous thinkers. more than half have a serious belief in astrology, for instance.

which is to say, I don't know what people expect, but I'm never surprised when I find out that any given psychology experiment is a fanciful construct of lies and half-truths.
How to properly fork a Go Project
Here's another list of software business models, comprised mostly of smaller companies, e.g., SaaS.

https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade#hn-tools-of-the-...
Glad that you like it!
We've just handled the Disconnect problem thanks for sharing this with us :)
I'm genuinely asking, do you know the Business Model Canvas? See http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas.
Hiring in Israel: Join us to build security-focused BI and SecOps solution
SecBI is a stealth startup, based in Israel. We're part Business Intelligence, part DevOps startup, and we're looking for talented people who worked on "big data" analytics, and engineers who developed for large DevOps operations.
In addition, we're looking for amazing UX engineers who are fluent in Ember, Angular, or similar.

We're based in Israel and looking for local people!

http://www.secbi.com/jobs
The comments are meant to be read and used to understand code. So you must test them like any other artifact to ensure that they are a net positive and not a net negative. Programmers make mistakes, which hopefully fail a test or at least cause a crash. Because comments can't be executed, neither of those will happen; they have to be verified manually
According to SpaceX the Falcon Heavy will only fly with reusable first stages. That will bring the payload down but the payload was very high before. The Falcon Heavy should still be able to lift more than 20 tonnes to LEO, which is equivalent to the Delta IV Heavy. And with reusability it should be able to do so at a cost comparable to or cheaper than today's expendable Falcon 9s.
In the US most people[1,2] get their phones on contract, and a $600 subsidy is standard. If you plan to mostly forgo the prepaid market then US customers are cost insensitive, and pricing a phone at less than $600 is giving money away to the carriers. Similarly if a customer plans to stick with Verizon, Sprint or AT&T then they are throwing away money if they don't use the "free" upgrade on an expensive phone every chance they get.

My father-in-law recently realized that he had paid Verizon about $1200 extra for his Samsung Alias 2, and promptly switched carriers to one where you start saving money after 2 years.

[1]about 75M prepaid http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2013...

[2] out of 327M total http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
Shatner even drops by his subreddit quite frequently in person.
Freenet is not really good. For what I know, it is heavy, slow, doesn't work that well in practice, and has a huge and old codebase. What is more, it includes a lot of bells and whistles but (for all I know) doesn't separate cleanly the minimal backend for storage and the frontend of all the features that run on that.

There is certainly a use case for a more modern project that would try to implement cleanly the base features of Freenet, with a clear interface.
Says the BBC: "The filters block pornographic websites, as well as pages promoting self-harm or drug taking."

One of the major concerns raised about these filters at the time the government announced them was that they _also_ block sites which people go to for help.

The BBC have decided to ignore this concern (which they know about) and copy+paste the government's promotional text.
That new syntax is astonishingly ugly and bizarre.

I'm sure it'll be a real joy to use that for anyone who's been using Sass or Less (and who doesn't, these days...).
I enjoy working outside on a covered porch (for shade). I have neck and wrist issues though, so the standard laptop-in-lap setup doesn't work for me so I build a laptop stand: http://benjiyork.com/pictures/outdoor-office.jpg
last 'streaming' applications we wrote, some for audio processing, others for image processing, we used the source/processor/sink notion (didn't even think of using drain) - source = origin of data, sink = destination fordata, processor = data goes in and comes out again, so basically sink at input end and source at output end. But I don't think I ever saw sink to be used as a source of data.
The sky crane will probably never be used again. It was an engineering marvel but the requirements that brought it into being were a management nightmare. (Requirements to not use any carbon-based propellant directly on the surface of Mars, which probably got violated anyway because you can still see blast marks from the sky crane where MSL landed.) And it was only useful for one very particular mass window -- much lighter and it wouldn't be useful, much heavier and it couldn't work.
Windows systems set to be merged by Microsoft
Bitcoin and Stripe: presenting a false dichotomy
"Form is liberating" is also cited in The Mythical Man-Month.
Show HN: Orat.io, simple PRO and CON feedback to replace blog comments
They would need physical access to the device and know your unlock code.
The point is that comments can become out of date, and there's no automated way to enforce they stay up to date.
SO pleased for Ben & Aanand, this is the best possible outcome for Orchard/Fig. Brilliant news.
Zach Weinersmith of SMBC put this very well in one frame and a caption: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3025
I know what you mean, but there is surprising, err, "design value" in keeping the layout minimal.

In any event, the simpler the layout, the less work the browser layout engine has to do, and the snappier everything is.
This just shows it's not about actually helping people.
Appknox also mentioned in their... #jfdiasia
Very sorry you had to hear it from HN - we had our email, blog post etc. ready to go out but there was a scheduling mishap. We also emailed our active customers from last month in advance yesterday.

The space has matured a lot, so there are some great alternatives out there. Happy to help you migrate - give me a shout at aanand@orchardup.com
The main difference between a sky crane and a soft-landing rocket stage is whether the braking/hovering engines are inside the thing landed (SpaceX) or outside and discarded after landing (sky crane). Since SpaceX is doing their best to not discard things, a sky crane is the opposite of what they want.
This seems a quite dangerous toy to me... a portable laser strong enough to cut through metal.
Is it possible to pre-register handlers before jQuery is loaded?
Show HN: 60 Minutes Chat – Anonymously chat in self-destructing chatrooms nearby
And bad code with good comments is more useful than bad code with no comments. It strikes me that replacing "comments" with "tests" in much of our thread would lead to the same outcome. I guess we're just going in circles on this one.
Great news that Orchard are staying in London and there is now a European Docker office.
> Style guides that eschew comments, IMO, are counterproductive. They feed on the developer's ego and disregard reality.

To be fair, the style guide that's linked to doesn't actually say not to write comments. It says that if you're going to write a comment, think twice. Maybe you can make the code clearer instead.
I still can't get over the, "I need more face time!" Yea, another generation, but selfish, narcissism is never cool.
He does look good for his age though, but so do most leading men who didn't lose their hair?
This style guide DOES recommend avoiding unnecessary comments and is an easy one to understand and remember. Good start for all novice coders. https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/shell.xml
The devices have to be paired though (with the trusted computer thing), and to complete that pairing process you need to unlock your phone with the passcode, if it is locked. If it's unlocked you just have to poke a dialog button, but if it's unlocked you're screwed anyway :)
What about the Code Complete examples posted somewhere on this thread? ("above", at the moment)?

What about checkable specifications together with a comment explaining the formula, particularly for anything with a nice physical intuition? This kind-of addresses the out-of-date comment problem.

Another example which came to mind is a Lamport comment about some sort of layout-related thing, I can't remember specifics. The comment gives a really good intuitive feel for why his code produces a nice-looking layout. Without the physical intuition provided by the comment, the code is pretty difficult to grok. I can't find it, so I really hope I'm not making this up...

edit: 2nd par
I find that the better I understand a problem, the simpler code I can solve with it. But I can also understand the problem better by solving it with code, and repeat a few times for a few months to approach an ideal solution.

Writing simpler code is more expensive than writing complicated code for that reason, unless you are a genius who can simplify any complex problem instantaneously. Anyways, your argument basically amounts to "do good, no do bad."
Just to be picky.... Clojure doesn't have TCO, it has 'recur' as a substitute instead.
"How I got featured on the AppStore"

I was expecting an explaination.
I believe he wears a wig.
Lower frequency (50/60 Hz) AC is the only really useful choice for transmission on low cost long runs (think 100 km and more). To push high voltage DC on long runs generally means special cables and possibly super conductors. Pushing 60 Hz AC at 230 kV goes over simple cables (granted with fancy insulators for holding it to the towers).

Stepping AC up or down in voltage is simple, build a transformer. Stepping DC up or down requires switching electronics, which usually will also have a transformer (if the step is reasonably large).

That distribution of power inside houses is AC still is a legacy problem and because half the things in your house still use AC power motors, and generally those things are the big current consumers (air conditioning, fridge, clothes washer, etc). Your PC, phone, etc which run on DC draw tiny amounts of power in the typical house compared to an air conditioning unit, but running an air conditioning unit on DC would likely require an inverter to generate the AC power for the compressors and fans.

Motors like AC, it's what makes them spin best. "Brushless DC" motors use an inverter system, usually. Even brushed DC motors effectively generate AC inside themselves with commutation.
Depends on the idea. If the idea is based on real world data, strong feedback and statistics - then, why not.

Otherwise is a complete zero. I personally have ideas for 10 lifetimes of work and that is just the top which I don't scrape after a brief analysis.

As others said - ideas, in their initial states, rarely worth anything. Experience shapes idea into an unrecognisable state and even the right ideas, without the correct offering, may fail.

---

Sometimes an idea can be worth a lot. Image a working company in a bottleneck situation on their concept. They have a problem that blocks their scalability. If you bring up an idea, that will fit their situation and be an elegant solution - they this can be worth a lot. But this requires a tremendous experience in the field.
my apologies for not be clearer, while the movement of the Earth is a concern I was replying to the idea of trying to land on a floating platform which I do not see as feasible. Both from the standpoint of trying to find such a small location to the fact it is not going to be a stable landing area because of wave action
Yeah, obviously they need to avoid conflicts but surely they could have found a single character to use as a prefix instead of "--", like "$" or "@".

The "var()" function is just.. redundant. Or maybe I'm missing something?
Disagree.

Reason: In Software Archeology (a.k.a. maintaining legacy code) you are often happy to get any kind of clue as to what went on inside someones head. Maybe they saw an edge case?

Of course you should write self-documenting code with variables and function names that explains most of it but when you either have to

1. factor out a new function

do_this_to_fix_that_weird_thing(weird state)

or

2. have to add a line

state == weird ? fix = fix+1:continue // weird is a weird state that sometimes occurs even though vendors api docs says otherwise.

please think twice.

Outdated comments are a problem but very often a problem I'll happily deal with compared to not having them at all. If a comment doesn't make sense you can also try checking VC history.
According to the security researchers, these services are available over TCP and existing pairing requests & responses can be replayed to access them.
I wish there is someone in the medical domain equivalent to Elon Musk.
As another commenter said above, comments shouldn't say "what" your code does, but "why" you do it,... when you need an explanation. There's no better comment of what code does that code itself.
That's the only thing that must be said about this topic.

As a rule of thumb, if I've thought more than 20 seconds about what a particular section of code has to do, I comment it.
And how we know that William Shatner himself is on reddit? Or is it somebody who work for him?
What's "manditory" about the porn filter, if you can opt out of it? Not to say that the filter is a good thing, but the title of submission is an oxymoron
This actually works even in natural language. If you think about it for a moment, sometimes what you thought isn't necessarily what you said, and most likely you will, either intentionally or unintentionally, resort to other means to communicate the thought, such as facial expressions, what you are wearing, and so on.

I think it's a common fallacy to believe that it is our failure when we can't express a particular thought. The language itself, be it human or the far more restrictive and qualitatively restrained computer version, is deficient in many regards.
Employees vote up anything related to their employer.
SEURAT is a research project that attempted this. I was a test subject for it a while back and found it pretty interesting. But its implementation at the time was an Eclipse plugin that probably hasn't been kept up todate. You can find a paper on it on the ACM digital library:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1368215

I'm sure the dissertation is available somewhere on cs.wpi.edu, too.
QuickMail.io – Get more responses from cold emails with less effort
Isn't that fairly easy to do during a code review?
Remember your gas mask if you ever check out literate programming...
Well, define 'flawed'. It is flawed if you attempt to interpret it as being representative of how people in the general population would behave in a setting without an active experimenter interfering, sure.

It does still reveal the influence that one person can have on a group of people and how much can be changed about behavior. It would be unwise to throw away discussions of the experiment because people can't properly place the data in context or evaluate the strengths/weaknesses of the experimental design and implementation (which is what Psychology courses should be teaching you to do in the first place.)
>> Are new users joining Facebook?
> Yes.

I think more eastern people join, while more and more western quit. (some month ago it was in the news that their are less US users).

Last time i use facebook is.... i think 4 or 5 weeks ago.
I'll add comments to already existing bad code, describing the results of my archeology.

I should refactor. But sometimes it's not feasible when you're in a hurry and the area has no unit tests to prop it up. Adding a tag "TODO: CLEANME" or something similar works as a reminder.
Flipkart, Indian e-commerce site raising $1 Billion
It seems to me that the Haskell wiki's recommendations on commenting align pretty well with Uncle Bob's. Personally, I'm glad for this. On this topic, I agree with both Uncle Bob and the Haskell wiki.
The diagram is completely different from what the text says. Specifically, the text says:

"People can be any combination of these."

And yet the Euler diagram[0] shows no intersection between "Hackers" and "Developers", and it's claimed that all "Hackers" and "Developers" must also be "Programmers."

When code and comments disagree,
both are probably wrong.
-- Norm Schryer[1]

In short, while there may be elements of truth, I think the whole article is ill-thought through.

[0] It's not a Venn diagram, because not all intersections are present: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_diagram

[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Norm_Schryer
The point of Haskells type system though is that those annotations tell you most if not all of those things, they're a form of documentation that is very powerful and designing your types clearly makes it even better.

Plus your annotations are updated! Comments wither and die.

[Edit] to be clear, if there is something going on that would cumbersome to "document with types" i just write comments. There's also a place for function description and example.
Ask HN: 0 defects per 500,000 lines of code
(c) "Harlan Mills pioneered 'cleanroom development', a technique that has been able to achieve rates as low as 3 defects per 1000 lines of code during in-house testing and 0.1 defect per 1000 lines of code in released product (Cobb and Mills 1990). A few projects - for example, the space-shuttle software - have achieved a level of 0 defects in 500,000 lines of code using a system of format development methods, peer reviews, and statistical testing."

(from: http://amartester.blogspot.nl/2007/04/bugs-per-lines-of-code.html)

Now, I've read about NASA's rigorous software development process before and I can imagine their software to be of the highest quality but I just cannot believe the above-mentioned claim.

Does anyone have further information on how this is possible or can perhaps put this quote into perspective?