skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I the fact that you could support it as a necessary evil (benefits outweigh the costs) slipped my mind. My bad. I still thought the post heavily implied something needed to be changed about minimum wage.

Debate and argumentation are essentially the same. Debate can imply something formal, and argument can carry a negative connotation. But both are, by definition, adversarial methods of arriving at the truth. They require people to take sides, if just for the sake of argument.
People can, and have, made reasonably serviceable tanks in their garage and then terrorized cities, supervillain-style. If this doesn't result fearmongering about basic construction tools, why is everyone worried about less practical biological terrorism?
This isn't true, bounding functions are really useful for many proofs. But see nilkn's response.
> the way theremins sound.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say it may partly be due to the lack of transients, which again, goes back to the replacement of a physical process with an oversimplified informational model. In general, the ear is much more sensitive to the transient portion of sound than to the main oscillation. Many sounds can be synthesized with the same exact continuous waveform, but with different attacks, mainly due to the masking effects of the ear. Not to say Theremin doesn't have its place, but it has numerous issues and definitely deserves to evolve.

Thanks for the nyckelharpa video. I had definitely seen it before, but the significance hadn't been as strong then :) Seeing that inspiring performance in the context of this conversation was valuable!

In the past, I've been very conservative about avoiding corny and campy music tropes - there are way too many "wacky" novelty instruments, so I've avoided hurdy-gurdies, believing they had some kind of non-serious association (just listen to the name?!). As you pointed out, the leap from Electric Eel to Hurdy-Gurdy is almost trivial. So perhaps at some point I will loosen up and build some "digital hurdy-gurdies." In fact, one of my favorite instruments both conceptually and acoustically, is the autoharp. Perhaps I could combine the autoharp, nyckelharpa and hurdy-gurdy into something fresh.

In the meantime, I've been concentrating on that "transients and physical systems" problem. As we know, the traditional electronic envelope model, ADSR, is tremendously conservative and unashamedly uni-dimensional. Inspired by Venkatesh Rao's book, "Tempo," I'm trying to make a model of envelopes which is more like a weather system than bouncing ball.
SpaceX, Falcon 9 First Stage Reentry Footage from Plane
If you have tests that don't provide information, that's the problem of the test, not the person getting it. Doctors are still the people actually handing out prescriptions, so if they start telling people, "Look, this $10 test from Theranos isn't reliable as a predictor, stop doing it.", it will create a feedback loop that will stop people from doing those tests that, as you say "border on quackery".

Meanwhile, if I suspect that, for example, that my BMI veers into the obesity range when my TSH is high, it should be perfectly fine for me to try and get a $50 test to examine if there's a correlation. Better than spending that on a DVD of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, don't you think? Might even increase awareness about general health in the US.
I don't consider myself an idiot, as I'm sure most idiots don't, but I've watched several episodes of that program. Yes, it's ridiculous but I was entertained.

Those of us who recall the early days of the history channel remember the constant WWII programs. I think it's better now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(TV_channel)#Criticism...

The channel to fall the farthest for me is TLC. It used to have actual things to "learn" as suggested by the name of The Learning Channel. It's dead to me.

I guess they term this channel drift.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_drift
BioDigital: A 3D Medical Anatomy App
The best new fonts, August 2014
I'm dubious myself. What about their Mermaid special? Someone would have some concrete evidence by now of giant sharks and/or mermaids besides grainy footage. I take this stuff with the same grain of salt I take extraterrestrials: I doubt it.
This is still emerging tech but it's stabilizing rapidly — both Firefox and Chrome play back at 60fps on a MacBook Air. On a sub-$1K laptop it's noticeably slower because things are disabled due to Intel HD 3000 driver bugs but those bugs are now getting a lot more attention since they're so visible. I'd expect the situation to be a lot more viable in a year or two, so now seems to be a good time to start learning the technology and thinking about how to use it.
The irony of this article being hosted on the atlantic whic has an ad popping up.
Worth isn't really a measure of popularity. How is the trade volume doing?
Bourbaki was a French collective of mathematicians, working/publishing together pseudonymously. I would therefore guess that the same kind of structure is in place at Project Euler: It's not one guy, but a joint effort operating under one name.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
It's interesting to me that spelling reform almost always seem to assume that the pronunciation of the word is definitive and it's the spelling that should change. But there are words in English where the British pronunciation matches the spelling (been, in RP, for example) but the American pronunciation does not. I've always thought that any reform should leave a word alone if any major dialect of English pronounced it as it is spelled. The changes that I think would be the most helpful would be to get rid of archaic spellings such as the 'ough' mess, changing ph to f where appropriate, fixing up more of the -ice, -ise, -ize ambiguities, etc. Don't worry about things like doubled letters, that will sort itself out later.
You are mistaken on too many dimensions.
A little late, but I will add a couple thoughts:

- Good programming uses sensible patterns to make code maintainable and flexible. Good design does this too.

- Insanely great programming is a little insane - it breaks the rules. Insanely great design does too. But you can't shortcut to this step - you have to put in the time.

- For me, I learn the most programming by looking at what other people have written, and modifying it in some way, or applying something to a project of mine. Learning design works the exact same way.

- I would argue against learning anything like color theory, typography or information hierarchy. This is like take 5 CS 101 classes before beginning programming. You might have a better "foundation", but you will probably get burned out before you even start. That stuff can wait. And it will make a lot more sense when you have some corpus of work to set the context for what you are learning (same with programming).

- Don't worry about making anything look like "cool" websites. Honestly most trendy designs are simply terrible to use. Design should make the products more enjoyable to use and easier to use. Anything else is intellectual arrogance.

As with programming, I find doing things like katas is really useful. So grab a pen and paper and start drawing. Sketch like this - http://strongdesignstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/is..., boxes for stuff and lines for stuff. don't try to add the detail. keep things light and easy to change. use a pencil. then start sketching stuff.

- make a landing page for a construction company

- make a page to market an event

- make an app "page" to find good barbers nearby

You will naturally start asking yourself the right questions. "What information is most important?" "How should information or pages be broken up?" "Who will be looking at this page?"

if you have more questions feel free to email me jeffchuber @ theBIGsearchgiant.com
Mostly likely someone from secret service is going to end up winning the auction.
It turns out it makes more business sense to have programming that caters to a particular viewer demographics, regardless of subject matter.
Once facial recognition technology is deployed on a large scale, it can be leveraged in some scary ways.

First, when it's tied into a network of surveillance cameras, the cameras become useful for tracking a person rather than a location. They could easily search for any video caught of you, forever.

Second, when you have a network of cameras you can track everyone's location at a very fine resolution, orders of magnitude better than tracking via cell phone towers. (And the cell phone tower data can be used to help with facial recognition since you can narrow down candidates of who might be in the photo.)

Third, once you're tracking locations in a network, the accuracy becomes pretty much 100% since you just need to match an unknown person once and then you can propagate their identity as they move around.
I've seen way worse CSS recommendations, but this still comes across not as a way to write sane, manageable, scalable CSS, but as rules to make working with insane, unmanageable CSS a little easier. Verbose comments and consistent naming and formatting do not address the underlying causes of CSS hell.

The worst CSS practice today that developers insist on shooting themselves in the foot with is the monolithic CSS file. Whether this is one 15,000 line file or 20 smaller ones that are combined at compile time, if you are going to ignore the tools CSS has for limiting the scope of styles and include all styles on all pages you are going to have trouble.

The rules I use that work well to manage style sheets are:

1. A primary style sheet should be included on every page, but it should only contain styles for structural elements (header, navigation, footer) and common default content styles. It should only be changed after extensive deliberation and testing. If you have sections of your site that use a completely different template, they should use a different primary file (main_sales.css or something.)

2. If a section of the site uses the same overall template but needs custom content styles, use a secondary style sheet and only include it on the pages that need it. I know that having more HTTP requests hurts performance but 2 includes is not unreasonable for the benefit of controlling the scope of styles. If content styles in a secondary style sheet appear to be useful for all pages, move them to the global style sheet only after proper consideration.

3. Use embedded style sheets. I know you were told this is "bad" and never do it, but have you ever stopped to question why? Coding CSS directly in the HTML is the correct technique if the styles are meant only for the page they are on. If this is the case, embedding styles improve maintainability (no need to hunt for the external style sheet, it’s right there next to the HTML) and performance (no extra HTTP requests.) If embedded styles are judged to be valuable to other pages, move them to a secondary sheet after proper consideration.

Including all styles on all pages (what I call the "monolithic style sheet") is a maintenance nightmare because no matter how you comment or name selectors, you cannot predict the side effects of even small changes. Because each page’s layout could be affected differently, every single page must be checked by a person who knows what layout was intended. This is a Herculean task that is not inherently caused by the CSS specification, but by poor architectural choices. Please, for your own benefit, start thoughtfully using secondary and embedded style sheets.

edit:

I forgot to mention that monolithic styles sheets also significantly hurt performance due to loading and parsing large amounts of unnecessary code.
What about white boards?
Euler has forums. Most likely you'd be looking at huge spam/abuse problems. For the core functionality, though, it might be okay.
Radical Habits of Highly Successful Remote Teams
Why does she wear a turtle neck? lol
Yeah, I guess the real magic is Ink. Do you do much work with it?
I did this and it worked for me. I taught myself design after finishing a code-heavy computer science degree. I learned how to use Photoshop quite quickly along with some design theory but it took time to get really good.

I used to look at those sites that were popular a few years ago that list well designed websites, and take inspiration from one or several of them at a time by combining the elements to create a new design.

It helped that I was working for a company that wanted a new design created to a brief each week as it helped me to get better quite fast.

Reading a lot of design, UI and UX blogs to understand why things worked was crucial to my development too.
Pure CSS 3D Polyhedrons
https://hackdesign.org/ is a really nice collections of design articles, videos and tutorials.
There is only one successful Tetris clone lawsuit.[1] Most Tetris clones are removed just because they are fairly aggressive with their claims (not necessarily because their claims are valid).

The successful suit was due to the playing field having the exact same dimensions as well as very similar visual expressions as regular Tetris outside of the just the game mechanic.

[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-06/20/tetris-clone-...
Great post.

I see you've chosen redis over other NoSQL variants. Does it give you a certain advantage in this scenario?
2014 Crack Me If You Can – Team Hashcat writeup [pdf]
So, I've been meaning to write a new sim for in-browser swarm manipulation and programming, taking into account things like message loss and noise in odometry readings, right? Seems quite reasonable on the face of it.

The problem is that you get genuinely weird stuff like IR comms just not working inside a torus of say 18 inches, but farther or closer working fine. Or issues where, when the motors both kick in at the same time, maybe a pin gets held a little lower for a little longer than it needs to be, and that causes an unrelated glitch (for a better story, look at http://www.quora.com/Software-Engineering/Whats-the-hardest-... ).

For any neat sim you make (and there are many!), people will inevitably just say, "Well that's all well and good, but have you tried it with robots?" Failing to do so consistently leads to a lab culture where you simply don't have the expertise in-house to do meaningful debugging, design, or research, because everybody's busy playing with their toy sims.

You'd think that that code would be still useful, but given the general quality of academic code and policies about reproducibility (which is to say, lol), pure sim work just disappears as a waste of money.
this works on LG G and Samsung Gear Live watches
Looks pretty cool, I'll check it out
I think it would help OP to understand programming in general sense but then I am still a newbie so correct me I am wrong.
"Nesting in Sass should be avoided"

Aren't you missing the best feature of using SASS in the first place? It's a joy to create highly targeted styles with proper SASS nesting... why is it to be avoided?
Incredible works using only CSS!
Yeah quite a bit, it’s a real lifesaver for people making email templates. Zurb really did a great job on that.

The only downside is that you have to handle a lot of tables. Like tons and tons of tables. That’s why I thought a way to simplify that would be helpful.
Will he leave the ware on there?
Does anyone know how big the full domain name set is?

Does anyone know how much bandwidth it would take to keep up with the changes on an hourly basis? (So, yes, I'm looking at the peak rate of hourly change.)

Alternately, if you did a diff from Day 1 to Day 2, how large would the compressed diff be? How about Day 1 to Day 30?
Spring, the app trying to improve the mobile shopping experience, has launched
Mind shooting me that PDF? I had a colleague that worked with the kilobots last year while we were preparing our own paper. :)
Off topic: Are the drop caps supposed to be lower than the line of text to which they belong? It looks kind of silly IMO.
Show HN: I created a Laboratory Customer Relationship Management Tool
we've used redis for our scheduled jobs and does a pretty good job. we still do use mongoDB for our 'main' data. the reason for the redis option was because we liked the 'kue' - https://github.com/learnboost/kue
Flattr does this. You pay Flattr once a month, and they pay each site once a month. They just count up how much each user owes each site and makes a lump charge/payment.
In my experience, there are two kinds of programmers. Top down and bottom up. Top down programmers have good success going from high-level languages to low-level. Though, learning a low-level language for them is not really necessary. Bottom up programmers don't grasp many of the fundamentals of programming until they can build them from basic underlying concepts. Some bottom up programmers may never get to a higher level language and end up as systems programmers or embedded programmers, maxing out with C as a high level language.

Personally, I am a bottom up programmer. I started with C and I found it confusing and ended up really disliking programming (I was in an EE program). Then in a later term we used assembly and once I got that foundation, everything clicked. I suddenly realized why C was necessary and what it provided. High level languages were then built up from there.

Everyone is different. There won't be one path.
Shall we swap friend groups? :-D

I'm thinking about switching to Ruby (or at least learning enough I can join in.)
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2dmqc0/tcp_stea...
Twitter originally had a chat interface. It's where most people I knew, used to use it - via pidgin. I think it was an AIM bot.
Actually, I should have mentioned this in my own post. I can't emphasise the point about git enough. I didn't really get it at first so shied away. Version control is one of THE most important things you'll learn, for a whole variety of reasons.

When it clicked I remember thinking: "Oh, it's like save games for coding."
Remember when MTV used to play videos?
What are your short, medium, and long term goals? How much do you understand about how computers and networks work?

If you want to start by creating web pages but eventually move to programming, learn HTML. Get really, really good at it - but without CSS. Then learn CSS, and learn how they work together, how they complement each other. Then add Javacript and DOM manipulation. You can do some very cool stuff, you'll learn a lot of logic along the way, make interesting mistakes, etc.

If you want to control a computer, get something that speaks Bourne shell (OSX, Linux, etc.) and get really, really good at defensive-minded shell scripting (by defensive-minded I mean always being alert for errors, always quoting variables, always checking return codes, etc.). You will learn a lot about how computers work, how they are structured, etc.

In both cases, you will also begin to feel the frustrations of working with these tools: Why doesn't this work, why is this so hard, etc., etc.

You could start with something more modern, more powerful, like Python or PHP or Ruby, but will you appreciate their power if you don't have a good understanding of the problems they were created to solve?

But that may not matter, if you want to build web apps using powerful modern frameworks. Where are coming from, where do you want to go?

There are many, many other ways to answer the question, depending on what it is you actually want to accomplish and how much you understand about how computers work.
Elevator pitch: "It's like email but for messages"
Why is everyone hating on PHP?
Design lies somewhere between art and science, and that makes it harder to teach and harder to learn. There are universal design rule about what looks good and works well, and even if you can manage to distill what they are and vigilantly apply the rules - it doesn't guarantee the result is good, only that the result isn't bad.

Likewise a person with no knowledge of best practices and the science behind colour and layout can intuitively design something great, and it's greatest where it naturally aligns with design truths and weaker where it strays from them - but it's hard to teach that 'eye' for design that feels what is right when it can't be measured as easily.

My advice is to learn design from a clean-room approach. You can use HTML and CSS to learn design as easily as Photoshop or Illustrator. Use a tool that's comfortable for you to manipulate, and start with empty files. Only bring in the elements you want to use, and experiment with them. Change their size, colour, font, placement, rotation, and style. Try different shades of grey on different backgrounds and get a sense of what is legible and illegible. Try finding a pair of colours thst match and feel good together and recreate that harmony using two different shades you have picked.

There's a lot about design thst you can learn by experiencing it, but the true knowledge happens when you research and play around with things.
I've found Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans: Design Sins and Virtues: A Designer's Almanac of Dos and Don'ts to be very useful - each page is dedicated to one design rule, and the justification, tips on use, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Thou-Shall-Not-Comic-Sans/dp/032181281...
Police: Before Shooting, Brown Robbed Store
Octopart Talk at MakeIt NYC
Thanks rcruz. Redis has a few advantages over other NoSQL databases

1. Redis is a Disk-backed in-memory database so its blazing fast.
2. Redis also has an easy pub/sub built in so you can easily use it communicate between servers in your nodejs cluser.
3. Kue is an amazing open source priority queue which uses it as a backend by default.

For small datasets that don't require you to query within your json, its an amazing database.
Given that you're already using Redis with Kue, why not use Redis in place of MongoDB?

Additionally, why have you chosen to use a key-value store initially instead of a traditional SQL store?
No. State school. Shit area.
Everything was looking up-and-up back then,[1] and the sky really seemed to be the limit

Plenty of older sci-fi was pessimistic as well. Star Trek TNG was produced before the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the height of the cold war. I doubt we will be talking about most current scifi TV 20-30 years from now. It's the stuff that changes the world that will be remembered, not the spoon-fed fear mongering of mainstream dystopian sci-fi drama.
Connected Car Tech Shifts IoT Boundaries
Readability.com tried this, and couldn't get many sites interested in participating. http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/
Snapchat bootstraps its social graph on top of the already-existing social graph of "people who have each other's cell phone numbers." Actually learning and typing in people's Snapchat usernames is possible but not common.

Exchanging phone numbers is already integrated into the social fabric of our society as a step in escalating a friendship or asking for / receiving the opportunity to date someone. It's a somewhat intimate act, and appropriate for a communication mechanism that's basically only used between people who are already friends.

Snapchat doesn't have the ability to discover acquaintances / friends-of-friends nearly as easily as Facebook does.

I also wouldn't say it "took over messaging." People don't really have actual conversations on Snapchat, they send photos of themselves making weird faces or Twitter-style status updates. New class of thing.
> There's nothing that prevents a non-Microsoft calendaring system from supplanting it, other than on agreeing on the protocol.

Google and Apple both have integrated calendar and email systems. They just use separate apps instead of having everything in one silo.