skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not disputing the role of environmental factors, I'm just questioning how the potential role of genetics has been diminished in this study without justification.

Also, from your link the only study with ability to isolate causation (the adopted korean study) found "23 percent of educational attainment is determined by environment, implying that up to 77 percent is determined by nature.".
I agree with this. The code is not just a message to the compiler to build the binary/bytecode, it is also a message to other programmers. As such there is value in annotating things in that manner.

Even in Python, a very dynamic language, there is a convention that methods that start with _ are private. And I often also separate them into a different (bottom) section with a big header saying this is the private block of methods. So in that case there isn't a compiler rule but rather a common convention (which is kind of a step above comments if you wish).
I see you downvoted (greyed out), but still think you have a point.

They are saying this is the best quarter since 2000Q1 without realizing what's so special about that date..
..holy shit, you just described my life. I've always described it as "hyper boredom". My desire to do stuff is just nonexistent a lot of the time.

but just feeling a stab of "ugh" whenever you even consider starting that is utterly insurmountable.

This, holy fucking shit, this! This problem, right here, is a massive thing in my life!

How did the diagnosis process work? You just explained your symptoms to your GP and they referred you or..?
FlyMAD – The fly mind altering device
A paycheck or few away.
The problem with tables for layout is that the layout algorithm is incredibly complex. People seem to think it's simple, because it kinda does the "right thing" in many cases, but it's actually ill-defined, varies between browsers, and has only a work-in-progress spec [1]. Width calculation is defined in terms of linear interpolation between the closest of four "candidate guesses" which bound the available width. And that's the simple case, when no colspans are involved; check the WIP spec for details on the recurring sequence that is involved when there are column spans…

Regardless of how you feel about CSS 2.1, it's indisputably better than the table-based layout we had before. Speaking as someone who has implemented both table-based layout and CSS 2.1, it's really unfortunate to see people want to return to the bad old world.

[1]: http://dbaron.org/css/intrinsic/
Quantum Key Distribution and the Future of Encryption
Not completely in jest, it
sounds like maybe the dolphins
thought that, clearly,
those humans were idiots, not
worth trying to teach or respond
to!
Unfortunately, CSS doesn't really fix that problem.
This post resonates with my experiences of the last 6 months. I'm a very good web developer, and have been working for a while now on a couple iOS projects. Coming from javascript which everyone seems to regard as dangerous and overall terrible, I expected that after some time I would get used to and appreciate working in Objective-C and Swift. Nothing could be further from the truth. While you can shoot yourself in the foot with javascript, in practice it's not really an issue. The absurd lengths that these languages (particularly Swift) go to make you less productive while preventing errors is ridiculous and unhelpful. I get as many runtime errors writing Swift code as I do javascript, but my code is riddled with as? or foo.bar!.method() cruft just to satisfy the compiler and get on with my life. Rather than thinking about how to solve a problem I'm strategizing how to work within the limitations of type systems.

As someone who learned to code with javascript, ruby, and python, I'm not sure I'll ever really appreciate these "nanny languages".
This kind of thing provides endless material for Raymond Chen's blog[1]. It also explains a lot of the insane backwards compatability that is still in Windows.

[1]http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/
The Sortix Operating System
This is a great idea and limiting it to two days will help corporates not feel like they're "wasting" too much money (you know, because developers are "resources" and if they're being used for something else it's a "waste"; at least I've had that experience in the past).

Though I'd love to see a little more flexible "manifesto". Some months maybe do 3 days, or maybe crunch month you do 0 and the next month you do 4; I'd hate for this to be taken entirely literal.
Interesting; I should play with it. I got the impression they "sorta" do JS, but wouldn't run a bunch of XHR and so on
The problem is, he's done it before. And reported it to the airlines. And they've done nothing about it.

I've heard him talk for years. Same thing every year. So seeing what I saw on Twitter was no surprise. He's not publishing an exploit on Twitter, he's making a joke to the followers he has that all know what he's done. He's making the joke that this year, again, the flight control systems are still vulnerable to literally anyone with a laptop and an ethernet cable.

It's not that he's saying he's tinkering with what he believes to be flight control systems on an actual flight in transit. Of course he wouldn't do that... again. He's already done it once, years ago. Why was there no outrage then?
As a nation born from the labour of convicts and the slaughter of aboriginals, we're pretty consistently a result of Britain's blunders! Criminals and colonialism!
The Baroque Cycle + Cryptonomicon
These protections might be overly fussy in small, one or two person projects. But for programming in the large they are essential as they represent a social contract between teams.

If you call only my public methods, you can generally expect:

- if my public methods don't work properly, it's a bug
- and I, as the library author, promise to care
- if the internals of my library change, I'll keep my public
functions working if possible.

Disregard my protections and all bets are off. If you cast away const on an object I gave you and then call a non-const method, you might be totally violating the threading model of my library. If you write and complain about this, I will ask why you thought it was ok to cast away const.

Without these annotations it would be much harder to effectively communicate and enforce the parameters within which the library is "promised" to work.
Radio Shack P-Box kits were interesting: http://my.core.com/~sparktron/pbox.html
Is this a joke that I am not getting? Is linking to google supposed to be a suggestion that there are a very large number of reasons for rejection?
It's weird, Ive worked with a few people from Epitech. They say the same thing about software engineering in France, but they are some of the best developers I've had the privilege to work with. If it drives them to work over here, then glad to have 'em!
Yes. Exactly. But that's why mentoring relationships need to happen organically. So that the trust can be there. That the mentee (if that's a word) can build up confidence and the pair can work as colleagues.
Doesn't seem like they lived up to the "beyond a reasonable shadow of doubt" standard in the methodology, whether they believed they were telling the truth or not. The methods could not support the level of certainty they were obligated to obtain.
If you're using the technology a lot, the developers should already be diving into the codebase and improving it.

No software is perfect and sometimes the best way to fix your code is to actually fix whatever dependency is causing the problem and push it upstream.

I find it disingenuous to imply that developers should not be venturing outside the little garden of code they or their company has written except on certain days and that the developer will even have a choice in the matter.
Not that they're identical, but some Sam's Clubs are now sporting self-checkout lanes.
Nextion TFT LCD equips GPU – build your GUI without any coding
The easiest way to find movies worth watching on Netflix, Amazon, and more
>> “I reserve the right to flip the light on or off between interrogations up to 12 times in total.”

> The wording is very careful :-)

Do you mean he can flip the switch 12 times in total between all interrogations? Or that between every interrogation he can flip the switch up to 12 times.

That's what I mean by poorly worded.
I'd agree it's not completely divorced, but it's much, much better than it used to be. If you've worked in environments where the only access you have is CSS (for instance, locked down CMSes, or editing subreddits), you'll find that many solutions are possible without manipulating HTML. CSS can be very powerful; especially with the advanced selectors of CSS3.
You're in luck.

foo {
display: flex; /* opt into the new box model */
justify-content: center; /* "align" */
align-items: center; /* "valign" */
}

Vendor prefixes may or may not ruin your day (for now), but the spec is there and is exactly what you want. CSS is no longer "badly broken" if that's your metric.
You can use an external subtitle player, that uses a semi-transparent window. You'd have to click the play button twice and be careful to keep in in sync when you pause/play, but it works well enough.

I think it's this one.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Other-VIDEO-To...
This is what I recommend to my students. This is the best answer on here, much better than mine.
That's really counterintuitive; the vertical center isn't an absolute position.
There's an extra ">" in the "Wagtail in action" section.
Big Impact for Small Business due to Google Change
Your last comment strikes me as quite possibly the largest and most possibly damaging false dichotomy I've heard in a long, long time.

This: as much as I like civil dialogue, I like civil rights more.

If that's the way you actually think, to the letter, if this wasn't just a turn of phrase or perhaps not worded correctly on accident, you've very well scared the hell out of me.

You've described your mindset as it's people on your side in one corner, and "civil dialogue" in the other, with the latter given short shrift because, as you well know, you are In the Right, and all of those people who want civil dialogue must therefore necessarily be In The Wrong because they are necessarily against $good_thing.

This is fundamentally irrational, and the fact that you treat that as a badge of honor is hardly admirable.

I'm archiving this thread.. perhaps someone else will be able to respond to this line of reasoning, because it's fundamentally alien to me.
“Safe Spaces” and the Mote in America's Eye
the person didn't bother to collect them, but I think you're supposed to click through one at a time and read the reasons.
Yes. All the time, if the name and signature are enough to tell you what it does and how to use it, which is normally considered a good thing.
Myths of the American Revolution (2010)
It is if you want to learn to do it well enough to push the state-of-the-art.
> abstinence focused.

Why shouldn't the focus be on abstinence?
I don't know why YC needed an interview to tell Sniply that "we can’t see it becoming the huge type of company that investors like to fund." Surely that should have been weeded out in the initial selection. Their story highlights a lack of transparency in the YC selection process. Those who are rejected at the application stage get no reasons at all. Then they hear stories like this and wonder if there is any method to the selection process at all.

If YC has internal tools to assess all the applications (as they claim) then what is the harm in publishing those criteria, and publishing the results publicly. For example, let's say Sniply got 5/10 for market size, but had 10/10 for member ability (and that ability was weighted evenly) then we could see how it was selected, and we could see why it was selected over other applicants. Then all applicants could see where they stand. As it stands it seems to be a real crapshoot, which gives false hope to companies like Sniply, while denying others the chance to be selected.
Works fine here. You might have an extension that's breaking something? Try an incognito window as a quick test, which should disable extensions.
I agree and it really bothers me that all the markups in modern web pages are littered with COL, span, md, lg, xg, 1/2 2/3, with gibberish nestings. Semantic web went out the window, in favor of responsive web.

The whole web is fad-driven, so I'm glad at some point, pendulum will swing back.

Meanwhile, I'm just happy parallax fad is dying out.
You sure it's a proper bug?

Unless you're scraping IP addresses, this didn't work.
Yup. And Ember's getting even ridiculously fast post-load, too, thanks to Glimmer. When it comes out, it should be the fastest full-fledged framework. I'm sure the others will catch up super soon though!
Just goes to show, anything can look sensible if you measure it poorly enough.
Why Classic Rock Isn’t What It Used To Be
You need absolute positioning because margins in the normal flow are special in that they're subject to margin collapse, and trying to specify some sort of special interaction between margin collapse and "margin: auto" would be too complex. Absolute positioning is also nice because it has a well-defined notion of a containing block, which allows CSS 2.1 to easily define "what I'm vertically centering relative to".

The way absolute centering vertical alignment works in CSS makes sense once you understand containing blocks: you specify "position: absolute" to disable margin collapse and establish a containing block, you specify the offsets from the edges of the containing block that you want, and then you invoke the vertical-centering feature in CSS by saying "margin: auto".
Exactly. I haven't done HTML layout since circa 2000. I tried WPF about 8-9 years ago and well, it was just simple to get layouts right. I'm sure there's some reasonable reason for it, I just don't understand why browsers couldn't do similar, or just rip off WPF.
I disagree with rayiner in that I think the things he thinks are good are actually bad, not worth feeling good about, and furthermore bad for society. Whether or not you agree, I think this is a pretty meaningful point of difference, and not sure what variety of alternate interpretation led to your epic rant.

We're not talking about Pareto-optimal market transactions here; the externalities are the point of giving money away or not giving money away. So it's an interesting position, telling me I am "wrong" for being concerned about whether one is purposefully helping or harming others. It's probably a good thing that most of the world does not share your interesting perspective.
Could you name these 3 projects?
If you go down that path, there are no semantic elements left at all.
`private` is a joke in C++. Coupling happens at the header file level, not the class level. Any C++ programmer who cares about reducing dependencies should be thinking about header files, not classes.

Man, we really need a module system.

I think the problem is not that `private` exists, but that it is taught/sold to programmers as a silver bullet for making software architectures better. People think "Decoupled systems are good. `private` hides my variables from the outside world. Therefore, if I use `private` variables, my system will be decoupled." This is false. A program can use `private` extensively and still be tightly coupled.

So, I agree with the author that `private` encourages myopic engineering, but I think education is a better way to fix the problem than removing the features.
There can be umpteen number of reasons for rejection. As long as the process is opaque, people can only speculate.

Time to move on, focus on what's critical for you to succeed.
> Though it won't protect you from malicious intent

It often does feel like junior developers are malicious. While I commend their ingenuity in solving the problem, code review can be a real schlep.
Why assume people keep working? How about they become creative, or pursue education, or care for one another?
And that spot could have gone to someone with a bigger/better idea but sadder application, huh? Makes sense.
I'd be interested in seeing either Frederick Pohl's Heechee series or Ben Bova's Grand Tour series.

For batshit insanity and HBO skinflick appeal, maybe L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth.
Don't be silly. The robot do everything BUT care; we are then freed to care for one another. That's the whole goal!
"Simply schedule it in like you would any other work."

When I schedule in work, usually it involves a client paying me for that work. One of my clients for one of my larger ongoing projects expects my team to produce 20 days of development a month. How exactly do I explain to them that instead we will be doing 18 days of development for them, and two days contributing to, say, Rails? I don't think they'll really see that two days of contribution to the improvement of Rails is equivalent to two days of adding features to their product.
And yet, Mt. Gox.
I disagree with the exact statement but also agree with its sentiment. The functionality of a language should be applied for a specific engineering reason, and protection features are sensible at the right scale. But at no point does it replace documentation efforts. You can surface the simplest possible interface to your users and still have questions and concerns that need supplementary text.
Ok, how does this compare to machine learning tools in packages like R and the other api's out there.
> YC doesn't have some sort of moral objection to solo founders.

I disagree with you here. Sure, rest of the bay area sucks even more, but YC (being the frontier) can't get away from its terrible karma here first.
Thank you for saying that. The last 15 years have seen tremendous heat and noise exhausted in fantastical debates the end result of which brings no obvious improvement. If we were honest, we would say something humble, such as "Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a great genius, and we are all grateful for what he gave us in 1989, however, since that time, we have learned many things, and the technologies proposed then did not give us what we actually need. HTML strains to fulfill two discordant goals, one is to give us structured documents, and the other is to give us a GUI for TCP/IP. But we now realize these two goals would be better served by two separate technologies, and HTML should be retired."
This old canard.

I am a professional Objective-C developer and have been for several years. Type safety is not an absurd length. Eliminating an entire class of errors from your program by having the compiler infer and enforce types is not ridiculous. Using a type-safe language is a very good idea.

We are human. We have stupid unchecked nil object errors come up in our code bases all the time. Swift will ensure that does not happen again. That's like the least part of what I am looking forward to.

If you are having trouble writing a program that compiles with strong typing, I don't know what to tell you. Using types is nothing more than stating what you expect the shape of the data to be in and having the compiler make sure that is so.
PG has several themes in his essays around this idea. Others have talked it about it as well. It isn't a hidden secret or unknown. Most people just choose to ignore it.
The caller does indeed deserve whatever woes befall them, but sometimes the caller is loud enough, powerful enough, or prominent enough that you have to support them... even when they're bypassing your actual API and hitting your internal methods.
Meh. It's fine. But it's not hyperbole if it's true.

Just learn to live with different kinds of people a little eh?
That's just the US (where their market share continues to grow). Google controls over 90% of search in most other developed countries [1], and Google has close to 90% of the world wide search volume [2].

[1] http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2013-sea...

[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-s...
(a) If you don't know what work may help that person, why do you presume he/she would be a good mentor for you? You have to research/know what your prospective mentor is doing, has done, is interested in etc before seeking mentorship.And you get this knowledge by actually doing some work in whatever area your prospective mentor is an expert in and coming across his work in that field. (vs choosing someone famous first and then deciding to seek his mentorship)

"If you don't know what work may help that person, would you ask directly how you may provide a benefit to him/her?"

No I wouldn't. I get these sort of emails myself,though I am just a programmer and have no world class expertise even in programming, and I know what timewasters they can be.

More importantly I let my work lead to potential mentors than the other way round. In other words, I'll work on what interests me/I think is important even if no mentors are available. Mentors are an occasional aid, not a dependency, to doing good work. Which leads me to

(b) The desire to take the "optimal path" (no such thing exists for most realworld situations) can in itself be a paralyzing factor. Taking some paths, realizing they are not right for you and then backtracking is part of the learning process. This time is not "wasted". Seeing it thus only shows you are at a certain stage in learning how to learn, and need to move a little further.

Doing this exploration and backtracking improves your skill in choosing and walking paths. Sure, too much of it can be debilitating, but knowing when to stop and when to continue is itself a valuable skill, which can be acquired only by gaining experience and reflecting on it, not by someone else trying to guess the 'right path' for you.

If you completely avoid these situations, waiting for someone else to give you an "optimal" path, you end up (in the best case) as someone who can take a path only when someone else lays out all the pros and cons of each path. And that is not a good place to be, even if such a situation were possible (which is usually not the case, though in some highly structured environments like studying for an academic degree, it might be possible)
Chronicles of Amber would make for a good TV series.
Show HN: A timer to help you alternate between phases of focus and relaxation
Down vote for "doesn't make sense". It made perfect sense to me.

The phrase you were looking for is " I don't understand what you're saying."
Snow Crash was originally meant to be a graphic novel--with some clever screenwriting, it could easily be stretched out to 12-13 episodes (or at least a miniseries).

Anything in the Slammerverse could be made into a serial form, again with a little work to preserve continuity. It's already got a lot of material in the anthologies, so it shouldn't be too hard. Hell, if you could get Drake to revisit the Lacy and His Friends universe, it would be rather timely.

A series based on Niven's Gil the Arm protagonist would be fun for a series or two--the writing chops required could be found in anybody with experience writing crime dramas or who-dun-its, with a bit of extra worldbuilding for organlegging and telekinesis.

Maybe something based on The Stainless Steel Rat? Harrison is dead and buried (sadly!) so he wouldn't be too offended.

Honestly, the problem with a lot of science-fiction books is that, once the core ideas are explored and the conflict resolved, it's best to kind of move on.

EDIT:

Actually, a post-apocalyptic series based on Lucifer's Hammer or War Day would be great. Jericho actually had its moments, but went too soon.

Comedy option for HBO: The Stone Dogs.

Even better option: a port of Turtledove's World War alternate history.
If you want to enforce this more stringently, you can even prefix methods with __ (double underscore). Python will mangle the name:

__mydef -> _myClass__mydef

You can, of course, still access the method, but it's very useful for keeping implementation details of a base class out of a subclass. This way, your subclass can have its own `mydef` without overriding the base class.