skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is just another example of psychologists trying to sound like scientists. Scientists quantify their claims, put forth physical rules and associated mathematics, after which measurements confirm or refute the quantified predictions.

Psychologists express opinions, most of which don't lead to empirical or quantifiable predictions, but occasionally a psychologist, jealous of real scientists, will try to quantify an opinion, as in this case where 10,000 hours was attached to someone's viewpoint. Then, later, inevitably, other psychologists will argue against the earlier opinion, as thought the refutation was anything more than another opinion.

What psychologists don't do is try to offer explanations, craft testable theories, about their observations, then subject the theories to empirical test. That would actually be science.

> The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real

On the contrary! It is exactly as real as psychology is.
Robert Harper argues that dynamically typed languages are languages of a single Type:

And this is precisely what is wrong with dynamically typed languages: rather than affording the freedom to ignore types, they instead impose the bondage of restricting attention to a single type! Every single value has to be a value of that type, you have no choice!
http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-lang...

Bob in this same article also wrote the now oft quoted:

To borrow an apt description from Dana Scott, the so-called untyped (that is “dynamically typed”) languages are, in fact, unityped.

Now the author of the linked article wrote another piece in 2012 that rebuts this:

It therefore makes no sense to say that a language is unityped without qualifying whether that relates to its static or dynamic type system. Python, for example, is statically unityped and dynamically multityped; C is statically multityped and dynamically unityped; and Haskell is statically and dynamically multityped. Although it's a somewhat minor point, one can argue (with a little hand waving) that many assembly languages are both statically and dynamically unityped.

http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/another_non_argument_in...

It is worth noting:

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt argues the uni-typed classification is not very informative in practice.

The uni-typed theory reveals little about the nature of programming in a dynamically typed language; it's mainly useful for justifying the existence of "dynamic" types in type theory.

https://medium.com/@samth/on-typed-untyped-and-uni-typed-lan...

http://stackoverflow.com/a/23286279/15441
I just returned from a jazz workshop where we talked a lot about practising. The drum teacher said that it's not necessarily the amount of hours you put into it, but also the frequency and how focussed you work on it.
Hex Colour Code Game
I didn't turn it off, but that's the default if you block cookies.
there is at least one person who is interested :-)
I wonder is this is the first step towards Opera taking over IE as window's default browser. That would be an interesting turn of events..
There's a really interesting episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast that delves into this in some depth, particularly relating to sports, where the idea has really taken off, and where there is good evidence the specialisation it encourages actively harms performance: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how...
Aren't you in the perfect position to establish a premium subscription for users, establishing a market place for musicians without the labels? Say, a user could choose the ad-supported model or a model where he deposits some money in a soundcloud account. A musician can then have some songs available for free, some songs available with ads played beforehand or some soungs available easily for a micropayment from the user's soundcloud account (say 5 cents). Soundcloud gets 30%, the musician 70%. If you love the song or album, you sell unlimited access (and download) to the song or album for something decided by the musician.

Just because ads are a horrible way to monetise a web endeavour.
Lytro Illum review
You talk about quantifying claims and at the same time separate all psychologists from scientists.

Maybe read again what you just posted...
Their style guide http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x... is sheepish about it. The authors seem to believe using exceptions would have been better, except they found themselves beyond a critical mass of bad code that would fail or leak on a throw, and now they can't fix it all or throw it away.

I can't understand how a correct init method could be easier to write than a ctor, given that the compiler is required to generate code that knows which of your base classes and fields are already initialized at any point they could fail, which you would have to do yourself after moving to an init method, as well as losing the guarantee you can't silently ignore an error by forgetting to check for it.
Afterthought: and remember to look very closely at the corrosion of other materials the Titanium connects to, you can't just mix two kinds of metal in one construction exposed to salt water without figuring in exactly where the contact points are between the two kinds of metal and how you deal with the potential difference at that point. The typical way is to use some kind of sacrificial anode at the stern of the vessel (and possible a few others if it is large enough), if you don't take care of this you may lose fittings, stays and terminals well before their time.
The latest episode of the awesome You Are Not So Smart podcast is all about exceptions to the 10,000 hour rule;

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how...
Interestingly the article also mentions optional type systems that recently became popular again like in Dart and Hack among other languages.

Optional typing provides a great middle ground between not being restricted by mandatory types when doing rapid iterations, yet getting the tooling benefits for core parts of your code base by using types to annotate signatures.
Does this really contradict that 10000-hour rule? (Well, apart from the fact that 10000 hours may well be an arbitrary number, and not as magical as Gladwell made it out to be)

From what I remember from reading Outliers, the claim about the 10000 hours was formulated more precisely than is posed here: it only said that above a certain level of innate talent (IIRC the particular level wasn't made a big deal of), differences in talent were less significant than differences in practice hours.

That's a much weaker claim, but a more credible one: if you're already blessed with eg a high IQ, then it pays off to work hard on your homework, and you can overtake the super-brilliant slacker in your class. But if you didn't have a very high IQ to begin with, the rule doesn't promise you anything.

The data in the article just says there's a lot of other stuff that determines the variance in performance - probably that includes "talent". It doesn't try to find if such a "talent threshold" above which talent is less important exists.
38 #Places That Are Number #1 in the World for Some Reasons
> You talk about quantifying claims and at the same time separate all psychologists from scientists.

Think about your argument. If I separate all psychologists from scientists, I'm not quantifying. If instead I say 50% of psychologists don't meet minimal scientific standards, that would be a quantification.

Also, surely you realize what I'm saying is now the majority view on this topic, yes? Even with the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
How is this different than a custom PS action?
It would be really nice to be able to download the chords in midi.
I have a similar story to tell. As an undergrad in a course of robotics, we had to program a wheeled robot and all the robots would be place in an environment with obstacles. The robot should avoid crashing with the obstacles and the other robots. Extra points if the robots moved smoothly.

Me and my friend implemented a very simple algorithm. All the sensors measured distances to objects, and to every reading we would assign a vector whose direction oppose the one of the sensor and length, inversely "proportional" to the distance. Add all the vectors and move in this direction with a speed proportional to the length.

This turned out to work very well to avoid static obstacles and other robots. Most students implemented finite state machines. They crashed quite a lot and their movement was very clumsy, which I suppose was due to the fact that the transition of states was not very smooth.

To be fair, our success was a combination of luck and laziness too. If we had more time, we would have implemented a FSM too.
Am I the only one not amused by easter eggs in software? It's code that I don't know about doing stuff that I don't know about. More code means more chances for bugs, maybe even bugs that results in security vulnerabilities. If the programmer snuck it in without management approval, it may mean code that isn't as thoroughly tested as the rest of the program.
We helped test out the RI and TCK - it was in the end up built for Java EE in mind (that's not to say someone couldn't provide a stripped down version that could work for SE - but I don't think anyone has or will).
Show HN: Bumpvalue – shake or click to race your friends and the world
> This is a useful service

Only if you are trying to make an otherwise unremarkable design look much better than it is. This is gimmicky and misleading. This is what's been ruining Behance and Dribbble for a while now, pushing total crap to the front page just because it looks pretty and forcing others to focus on superficial decoration rather than on actually important parts like interaction and convenience.

The copy is spot on and sarcasm is well justified. Well done, OP.
Doing a lot is not enough. Being critical towards yourself, striving to do better, understand what is better, looking for and listening to feedback, those are as necessary.
For those wondering, this is a few of lines from Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's song "10,000 hours"
What kind of compromises are you talking about?

My impression (based on limited exposure) is that Common Lisp suffers from a lack of clear guidance on how to do things. It's common in Clojure for example to use immutable data-structures and in case of mutation to use atoms and STM. Compromising on issues is seen as reasonable, but not a best practice and often there's a clear path you can take for certain problems. It's an opinionated language without being obnoxious.

To me the attitude exposed by Clojure (and Scala) is a breath of fresh air. Some people tend to focus on how pieces of code look, or on using certain abstractions and optimizations, forgetting that the most important thing for users is a working app. For example, surely things like TCO and continuations have value, but that value is being trumped by a huge ecosystem of libraries and tools that, while not beautiful, are decent.
Update GPS SAT MAP for Your GPS Navigation Devices
The example on the homepage started a countdown from 1 minute, it was "Loading the task" until there were 7 seconds left, then by that time I'd lost interested and it just said "Game Over".

Game over indeed.
Do you know the difference between an accelerator and an incubator?
You don't want a little fluff in your otherwise intense news day? A little slice of sweetened ginger to cleanse your palate?

"Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God", or more secularly, a varied diet is a healthy diet. I like keeping abreast of the news as much as anyone, but I also like a bit of R&R.
I marvel out how perfect this story is in various ways. No real resolution to it, no motive, no discernible point. The unfolding of it all and the brutally abrupt ending; "We are not friends", seemed predictable shocking and sad at the same time.

Interestingly, the journalist has an upcoming movie where he's played by Jonah Hill. A fugitive murderer had used his name as an alias and through that, he'd developed a relationship with him and interviewed him after the person was convicted.
That's why triviality heuristics are there.
Show HN: The 1st app made with Uber API: UberExplore
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Two Problems
Show HN: Free social media publishing for teams
I developed in Python for several years and I disliked whitespace, because sometimes I want the flexibility to format code in a way that makes more sense given the right context and the whitespace was always in my way.

Plus, its whitespace-based syntax was used as an argument to not evolve the language, being one reason for why they haven't added proper anonymous functions.

I can't comment on LISP's parens much, for now it doesn't bother me, but Python's whitespace did and I tried liking it for about 3 years.
It's a shame that the solution isn't shared and isn't public.

If they've a cross-browser and widely supported way of making underlines in text be more readable, then it would be great if they offered this knowledge to the wider web by sharing it, as readability is an issue that affects everyone.
> The experience was pretty bad, but who are we to take away someone else’s livelihood?

Right. Next time, if the same guy kills someone in an accident because he "thought" that a road was empty, you _may_ think that you had a chance to prevent it. Good times.

You have to realize, you are not "bad" for giving a bad rating. You are stating the obvious: the driver was an asshole that almost get you injured.

A bad review would be: One star because driver didn't say "have a good night/day/whatever".

It's not bad to state that someone is indeed incompetent at something, especially if that "something" can harm other people.
Sintra Recebe XVI Congresso Ibero Americano de Urbanismo Em Outubro
> Does this really contradict that 10000-hour rule?

No, it contradicts the premise that there could be such a number with the meaning attached to it. It's not about the value the number has, the issue is the number itself -- the idea that the thing under discussion could be assigned a specific value.

But the deeper problem is that it assigns a quantity to something no one understands well enough to quantify. Scientists avoid attaching a number to something until there's an explanation, a theory, that makes the number both compelling and testable (i.e. falsifiable).
I'm talking about something like this..

def foo():
do_this()
and_this()

later I change it..

def foo():
if something():
do_this()
and_this()

oops... and_this() should have been in the if block and I won't find out till I run it.

(imagine a much bigger more complex example of the above function)

In large pieces of code this can be easy do.
If you are forced to use parenthesis it's much more difficult to make this error. One could argue that experience prevents you from doing this but I have sadly found this not to be the case in practice.
I did the same thing, and my mom was also a touch typist (she did word processing at NCR at the time)! I felt really guilty, because I didn't understand how it was supposed to be turned into the program, so she spent a few hours typing in hex numbers for absolutely nothing.
Developer here. I created this because it was getting very difficult to manage teams and social networking accounts. Because every time a team member would be re-assigned, the social networking account passwords would have to be changed. Security was becoming an issue. This allows you to publish to unlimited Facebook, Twitter accounts. Am adding other services like LinkedIn and Google+ (if they give API access) soon. This service is absolutely free as compared to any other options available online (Buffer for Businesses, Hootsuite etc.). You can add unlimited team members as well as accounts. You can schedule posts as well as use the recommended feature. Happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Yeah I know that but alas this isn't "Saved stories", this is barely "Random mess of stuff I've liked, stuff I wanted to keep an eye on and stuff I wanted to look at later"
The only thing SoundCloud was missing for artists was monetisation. I just hope there isn't a user backlash. I've already seen a lot of people complaining.
I remember reading once that best musicians actually worked less than the average ones. But, the difference was that the best had 2 highly focused 1.5-2hrs practice sessions per day (deliberate practice) and rest for the remaining of the day, while average had several shorter practice sessions throughout the day.
Klipper of kde has had configurable actions for ages.

I've always found it to be too intrusive and I've kept it disabled.
Average sleep by city
There is also MixCloud: http//mixcloud.com/ with a very similar service. I've read that a lot of DJ types migrated to MixCloud when SoundCloud started to block content because of IP issues.

MixCloud doesn't let you download (which SoundCloud does sometimes) although it's not difficult to find out the streaming URL.

I use both services, but I'm not really happy with the playlist systems of neither. Recommendations, contrary to what other commenter said, are very good.

I don't really use them with the phone: too much traffic, also train tunnels are bad. I wish it could cache, downloading while on wi-fi and listen later.
> The "10 times rule" is also interesting: it will take 10x more efforts than you think...

You see this one all over the place:

90-90 law: the first 90% of the project takes 90% of the development time. The last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the development time.

Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even after accounting for Hofstadter's law.
Initial success in biologically extending human vision into the near infrared
Here's the frontpage of their experiment:
https://experiment.com/projects/can-we-biologically-extend-t...

Fascinating project. I absolutely love what the democratization of experimental science is making possible.
That's even worse! Why do people even do that?

Isn't it easier just to nick it from Aldi?
Confirmed: Microbial life found half mile below Antarctic ice sheet
>> "The reason artists like Soundcloud is it gives a way to distribute music directly to the fans for free."

Although I disagree that that's why artists like SoundCloud this won't change that. Ads will only play if you choose to monetise a track. Don't want ads on your track? You don't have them.
Liking the idea, too bad it's simply an awful experience with all the HN traffic. I hit "Sign up with Facebook", then "Edit what CodeFights can see", and the counter had already begun. After authenticating I got an empty pop-up which I closed by myself, and I finished the challenge. I then got the error "Authentication error".

However, I like the idea and understand that this experience is not what you've made so I'll give it a chance and upvoted it.
Weird so many people went for FSMs. You would have thought that a simple literature search would have brought up all sorts useful nuggets. Given the scenario you describe - no goal other than avoid collisions, the scheme you implemented is basically a simplified potential field approach.

All that being said, I can appreciate the core of this story. I spent my final year implementing, testing, and optimizing D-Lite for a robot (basically a fancy incremental version of A), only to find out that in the end, given our sensor performance, the stock A* planner that came with it did almost nearly as well. Oops.
Open Source ain’t charity
Replying to self since I can't edit: d'oh. Yes, I totally mis-read the original code. I should have relized why the other comment questioning this practice had been down-voted, heh.

Of course not unlocking the mutex in non-debug builds would be a problem.

Thanks, and sorry.
Ironically, on OS X Yosemite their underlines look worse than the default OS X rendering.

OS X now correctly leaves gaps in underlines around letter descenders [1], and Medium's CSS underline style breaks that.

[1]: Example: http://i.imgur.com/rXBvmbx.png
Why Lisp? That is understood.

Why Racket? From an ignorant outsider's perspective, all Lisps seem to be more or less interchangeable when it comes to the language. They only differ in the details, and each seems to be about as difficult to learn as the other. Although this article does make somewhat of a case for specifically Racket, it seems to be a rather weak one - tools are nice and some language details are nice. But the same general arguments can be made for other Lisps, most notably Clojure. It seems to me that Clojure is a lot more practical: it has many good libraries in both Clojure and Java, it has some great tools, there's a lot of momentum, and it can be deployed everywhere (including the browser).

So, being an ignorant outsider, is there any reason the Lisp I should learn isn't Clojure?
That should be up to the programmer to decide. If fork() fails, it's almost always a transient situation that can be recovered from by spinning until fork() succeeds. Or one could have jobs doing useful things that can finish up, state saved, etc, for when the process is re-run. Just dropping everything onto the floor is usually the worst option.
Exactly. It's cargo-cult science. Attaching numbers and equations and quantifying things to look more credible. Math is supposed to be used to help focus and constrain thinking, not to make opinions sound More Serious.

Sadly, I know a lot of people (mostly wanna-be-rich entrepreneurs, whose only skill seems to be the want to become rich) who buy into such psychology BS without second thought. Things like "cone of learning" or 7-38-55 rule, which sounds absurd if you think about it for more than a second.

(then there's another part of the equation, i.e. "journalists" and business consultants stumbling over a paper with some numbers and specific claims, who then throw out constrains, exaggerate the conclusions and make a run for it)
How Google Changed Over the Years
> If you are forced to use parenthesis it's much more difficult to make this error.

By "parentheses" you mean delimiters, which create visible boundaries to defined areas in code. Parentheses are an example of delimiters, but not all delimiters are parentheses.

Bash has if ... then ... else ... fi

Ruby has if ... else ... end

C/C++/Java have (logical test) { controlled area }, nested to any practical depth.

And so forth. Python doesn't.

> One could argue that experience prevents you from doing this but I have sadly found this not to be the case in practice.

This is an argument against complex functions that do a lot, as opposed to breaking program logic up into smaller blocks that are easier to understand and control. The old argument against this practice was that a large function that did everything was faster than the same logic broken into smaller blocks. A modern compiler will generally prevent this from happening.
Xbox One New 'free Play Day with Gold' Feature Spotted
"Joe Passanante, a doctor from Chicago who did a stint at Beijing United Family Hospital, told me that he was once performing CPR on a woman when the parents of a girl with a fever walked into the room. “Here I am pushing on a dead person’s chest, trying to revive her, and they’re asking me to see their daughter,” he recalled."

It seems like a totally different world in so many ways but this quote highlights it for me.
https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ
Same thing for me. Start the timer when the code is loaded and stop the timer when the user pressed Ctrl+Enter.

One other suggestion is to add Cmd+Enter for mac user.
OSCON 2014: Dart and Polymer
Good read, thanks. Is it possible to run an own, modified version of an open source app on sandstorm.io? As a non-techie user? Like - say - a small modification of Wordpress?