skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
XNA was what I used to build my first game ever. It was a magical experience to realise how quickly I could get things running. Nowadays when I go over game frameworks' documentation, I find myself thinking back to how simple xna was. Not to put down the other frameworks out there, but it felt like I'd never have been able to pick them up as easily as I did XNA.
lucid00's comment above sums up my thoughts pretty well. It's not just becoming more friendly with open source, it's also adopting a better strategy around cross-platform support. Previously, the only "developers!" strategy they had was "never break backwards compatibility". And that didn't so much draw in developers as much as it didn't break existing apps. Backwards compatibility between different versions of Windows was never really there, random APIs and return values changing between versions... eh.
There are better ways of achieving what you want.

When you say "broke" what does you mean? Someone might be able to give you advice about fixing it.

You should probably work out a plan for telling your school, explaining things you could do to replace the laptop and also why you do not want your father involved.

Get help with the wording of the letter.

I'd like to think that teachers would see this as a sign of maturity and would work with you (clearly a non-malicious person) to repair or replace the laptop, but perhaps I am ridiculously optimistic.
Anecdotally, I stopped hearing people talk much about Makerbot right around 2012. Seems to coincide with when they closed source their stuff.
I would agree in general with your proposal, but I'd suggest replacing the iPad by a cheap laptop, like a chromebook: it's cheaper, gives the kids more freedom, and for the ones who will be interested, it can be a first step to programming.
The point is not the specific example, but that swift doesn't support currying with default arguments.
Still beta, Google should have competitive price
Relevant link:

Veritasium, "This will revolutionize education".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c
That's why the fight against Google is merely a red herring...
To the second? I'm not a sundial expert but have seen a few and those that I have seen have been vaguely useful for telling which hour it is. Maybe even which half hour. I assume you could just lengthen the vertical to get a longer and more accurate shadow. But it's still a bit hard to see this being a reference.

Edit: here is a link to some accuracy measurement. I have no idea what the record is, but these ones were getting down to 30 seconds ish. http://www.sage.unsw.edu.au/currentstudents/ug/projects/o%27...
>I think the diversity numbers posted by Google, Twitter, Apple etc.

... reflect almost precisely the pipeline of people coming out of universities. Our culture discouraged young girls from coding. We cut off our oxygen supply and we idiotically sit around arguing about how we should treat the remaining oxygen better so we don't suffocate.

There are not enough qualified women to bring the ratio of software engineers anywhere near normal. You can bitch and moan about terrible companies and culture, but you can't attract a population of people that don't exist.
From outside, US education seems astonishingly bad, especially for a 1st world country. In US, 14 years old kids just start to learn how to solve for X, while in Russia it's time to finish trigonometry and move to calculus.
So do I. I supplied a corrective upvote.

I realise that my post does sound critical. Sorry for that -- I didn't intend that harshness.
Ok. But you blew off the main justification he gave for no sensible reason I can see. You just didn't like it, so you found some other explanation.
How's that any different from pretty much any easily-copied business? How do Nike or Levi's survive, when pretty much any basement shop in China can undercut them on shoes and jeans?

The answer is your brand must must mean something. Be the domain expert. Be the one people turn to with questions. When the clones arrive, you are already ahead. That's easier said than done, and execution is everything and so on and so on. But there's not a vast difference between the open hardware space and other manufacturing businesses.
What makes you say the language is not consistent? Default parameters are a feature of named functions. Currying is a different feature of functions. A curried function is equivalent to a non-curried function that returns a function. Since the returned function is not a named function, it cannot have default parameters. Therefore, default parameters are not allowed in curried functions.

Beyond that, the author's proposed API is most definitely not the best API design to use here, even if the default parameters did work in curried functions. A builder pattern would make a lot more sense. Or just do as Cocoa already does and provide a request object that can be customized before initiating the HTTP call.
Agreed; this is a hit piece.
I guess the over usage might have cut down the connotation? It just doesn't 'feel' like anything that bad... For instance at parties or gatherings if there is some dude standing in a corner looking around girls call him creepy a lot; I don't really think that's a 'very bad sign'. Just a bit of weirdo... Also people call other people who go to gothic dress ups creepy; I think they would consider that a compliment in fact. But again, sounds rather that the over usage makes it less bad sounding, at least outside the US maybe. I still do think it's the US though, mostly because it's so outspoken there with that weird beeping away of 'curse words', saying 'oh my gosh' and making describing some rambling dude his opinion as hostile. Hostile to me has a very different connotation than being called creepy even if it's very sincerely meant.
I'm not sure that's their main problem. Other companies are alive and well selling similar printers to customers that know what they buy.

I think MakerBots biggest problem is that they've marketed (and with Gen5, designed) their products as being "consumer ready" when they're far from it.

With the huge brand name of MakerBot, I can't help feel that this is going to create a setback for the 3D printer market. It's just sad.
Also Intel with Itanium.
Material Design DatePicker/Calendar Templates for XAML/WPF
Because the ideas were buried in a book that was mainly about dissing his rivals, and no-one saw past the scandal.

Its worth noting that this recreation uses materials and fabrication techniques not available at the time, too. So there is still no definitive proof that it would have worked.
Autocomplete and autocorrect are "guess what I intended" functions. The problem with shells is that the UX is crap: User actions are often executed immediately (review time between typing and executing is a fraction of a second), and most importantly there is no undo. This makes guessing a bit dangerous. However, the fault is with shells, not with guessing. If you never instanty execute anything without review then the issue nearly goes away (more like regular programming than a REPL).
Heat and vibration rubbing the coil wires against each other is what kills flyback transformers, you can usually get replacements for about $50 or so and replacing them isn't hard.
Google had a super majority of the search market, but not really of the ad market.
Thanks for making my case for me. This is possibly one of the most ridiculous replies ever posted to this forum.

The day we start jailing people for their marketing hype is... well, it wouldn't be a good day.
Kreuzberg to Prenzlauer Berg, about 8km.
Label them "shady" if you want but all the big ad networks have linked to malware at some time.
If they fully knew the risks, they would have probably used the device to warm up themselves. The plutonium-238 used in the SNAP devices is notable for not having any significant decay modes other than alpha. So long as the device remains intact, a sheet of paper is sufficient for radiation shielding.
>and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich

That's better than most government research lab projects (in CS) that mostly don't matter and rarely produce anything that the private sector or academia in Universities hasn't already done.

In CS the government research labs are where the washed up post-docs go that couldn't get a tenure-track position and didn't pass interview for a large company with a decent internal research group (e.g. Google, IBM, etc).
You claim that depression is just a form of sadness. Other people prove you wrong by describing some episodes of depression that are not just extreme forms of sadness.

When someone says "all swans are white" someone saying "my swan was black" is useful because it makes you realise that maybe you're wrong and need to rethink. someone saying "my swan is white and I've seen some swans my friends own that are white" is less useful because it doesn't provide much on top of what you've already said.
I once wanted to delete backup files left by emacs in the current directory. Instead of

rm -rf *~

I typed

rm -rf * ~

At least I learnt to use -rf more carefully. Way more carefully.
> default argument values are a property of named functions, not of function types, and cannot be expressed in the type system.

For what reason? Isn't the gripe exactly with the fact that it's not implemented?

Also why are arguments required to be named in all calls after the first, but not the first?

func f(a: Int)(b: Int)(c: Int) -> Int {
return a + b + c
}

let v = f(2)(b: 5)(c: 5)

Stuff like this just eats at me when i use a language, especially when that language is brand new and other languages have had nice syntax for similar features for a long time.
The difference between school and work
The Preferential Internet Problem
looks like http://www.telescopeapp.org/ (meteor) to me.
Here are some more vintage kits: http://searle.hostei.com/grant/ElectronicKits/index.html

source: http://np.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/3325f8/how_we_learne...
Scaling up Project Loon (video)
Netflix begins audio description for visually impaired
Heh, I had one of those, along with the 200-in-1 version. I got them as Christmas presents as a kid. I think mine were from Radio Shack. Hard to believe it was 20 years ago.

Surprisingly, it appears there's a company still selling them:

http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-Electronic-Playground-Learning-...

http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-200-in-One-Elecronic-Project-La...
2Gbit looks like a publicity stunt to me. Customers won't see an actual speed increase from a 1GBit service unless they're willing to give up the convenience of wireless.
You don't get to set the price to what you feel like, much as I wish that were true. I'd love to pay uniqlo prices for Saint Laurent.
I am not a native English speaker. What is that word?
Nate Silver, not Nick.

There are problems with liquidity and volume, and the general difficulty of getting money in and out given that these services tend to be banned in the US.

I once saw a clear opportunity for arbitrage on Intrade, when the currently-bid odds that 8 particular Republican candidates would win the general election added up to more than the odds that any Republican would win the election. But acting on it would have required getting a large amount of money to Ireland for the opportunity to make a small amount of money, and fees would have eaten all the profits.

In fact, some of the bets were clearly stupid on their own, and yet you couldn't really profit by betting against them. Someone would be bidding 1% odds that a candidate would win the election when that candidate had already dropped out and endorsed someone else. If dropping out didn't send their odds to 0, what would? You could make 1% profit but it could take until the election to collect it, so you might as well just put that money in a savings account.

But, yes, if prediction markets were popular, high volume, and legal in the US, then you could make money off of some of their biases.
Technologists don't win by fighting in the legal system - the others have centuries of advantages here. If the others call KVN then they need to know that if they answer they better hope they have never used Facebook and that their daughters haven't shared any photos on snap-chat.

What we need is not to be involved in matters of law, but to have a mutual defence treaty that will ensure the law doesn't get to steal and redistribute what we make. France needs Google, but to Google France is just one customer - and they should treat them accordingly.
That´s true. Silly me. Thanks for the correction.
Rather than tweak the top four web browsers to be more intelligent towards actual user intent, every one of the millions of web applications should change?
At that level of accuracy, however, you will find that the rotation of the Earth itself doesn't keep time that well.

The Shortt-Synchronome clock [0] was the most accurate pendulum clock, known to have an error of less than 1 second per year. It was used in 1926 to detect tiny seasonal changes in the Earth's rotation rate. An evaluation of the clock in 1984 revealed it was even more accurate than thought --- it was in fact accurate to within 1 second per 12 years, the discrepancy being due to "the slight changes in gravity due to tidal distortions in the solid Earth caused by the gravity of the Sun and Moon."

Harrison's claim of 1 second error in 100 days is clearly in the same order of magnitude as the Shortt-Synchronome's known error rate of 1 second per year in 1926, and thus would have been also affected by the tiny seasonal changes in the Earth's rotation rate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortt-Synchronome_clock
Thankyou so much, I was so worried that I forgot the more reasonable ways of fixing this problem.
Your optimism is reassuring, thanks again:)
I've worked a bit on fingerprint recognition devices (using various vendor SDKs) and people clearly overestimate the accuracy of these kind of devices. The majority can be fooled with a fingerprint made by melting gummy bear with some tape to gather the fingerprint. Creating fake fingerprints is really easy and cheap. I'm also not mentioning the crappy firmware these devices are generally equipped with, everything close to metal seems to have really low quality firmwares, most of the time, you need to compensate on your side for some unfixable problems in the firmware.

The main problem is TV I guess, for the average guy, these kind of technologies are completely infallible and people tend to forget that just like anything else, it's just an indicator that can be fooled / misinterpreted / badly gathered.
The classic tale of hindsight, undoing the wrongs of the past where labelling progressive and forward thinkers "insane" was commonplace.

I wonder if we will look back on the forward thinkers of today (Stallman, Assange et. al) in 50 years and regret the scepticism which we throw their way today.
> nor is mindfullness a quack method unverified by science

What specific benefits had mindfulness been verified to provide, in comparison to placebo meditation? I'd be very grateful for any references to peer-reviewed study.
Yahoo could implement QUIC on their servers if they wanted too - there's at least a prototype server in the Chromium source tree
It is not just that, if we allow that search is Googles domain then maps are also in their domain: maps are information and that is what search is supposed to find.
Surprised no one's brought up Haskell's Debug.Trace, which effectively does this, but returning whichever value you tell it to.
You're right, I can't believe I didn't think of this. I can get a bit out of hand but thanks this really helped.
It protects the end user as much as it does the server.
A friend of mine told me about how they once had to dig through their code to figure out why their site was classified as adult by some filter. After days of searching, they found this comment at the bottom of a javascript file:

// Slut.

Which is Danish for "the end".
It's just a huge design mistake to treat "missing" like an empty string in env vars. In many cases referencing a missing var should be an error, not a silent conversion to an empty string.

It's funny how many of us would never use a weakly/stringly typed language to handle our important data, but then we happily use bash to deploy or manage the systems on which our apps run.
They've already said it will be $400 (6x Google Fiber price). I don't know why so many articles don't mention this.

The question is, will Netflix still be throttled at those speeds? Will torrents? Because even now people supposedly have 50Mbps, which is more than enough for Netflix which only requires 3Mbps for HD streaming, yet somewhow when they play Netflix it often works under <1Mbps. Use a VPN and it magically starts working perfectly again. Strange, huh?

So yeah, before anyone gets too excited about this, let's wait and see how it actually works, and whether it will actually arrive soon, or it's just another "fiber to the press release" to keep people cheering for Comcast for the next 3 years until they actually start deploying it.
Awesome Websites by Daniel A. Rivero – Curated links making my life awesome
Ask HN: Can a domain be shadowbanned?
A couple of days ago, I posted this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393122

It got 4 upvotes in the first 20 minutes or so, presumably from people I work with because I'd shared it in a work chatroom. But it never appeared on the front page and sank off /newest pretty quickly. At the time, I saw something else on the front page that only had 3 upvotes.

I don't think I'm shadowbanned, because I've posted other stuff that people have responded to in the past. Hence the question; the domain is for my employer's dev blog so I just wanted to check. Could it be / is it shadowbanned?
> Many doctors will also refuse to prescribe the more addictive drugs out of fear of enabling addiction (this is a huge problem for people with chronic pain,

Most long term pain should not be treated with medication. That medication should be used short term to allow the sufferer to take part in rehabilitation.

Addiction to painkillers that do not work is a big problem for people with chronic pain, and now they not only have the chronic pain but also an addiction.

There's a segment on this radio programme where they visit a pain clinic in Bristol (UK) to talk to people who are taking huge amounts of opiod pain killers and not getting any relief from their pain.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04wv052
Sadly, the local system is only a small part of what you can screw up. It becomes the undo-email problem pretty quickly.
Clickable:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393122
70's COSMAC 1802 is still available for sale at $19 - http://www.sunrise-ev.com//membershipcard.htm
> And Hamkins shows it can go all the way down to eight-year-olds.

At the bottom he mentions his previous visit -
Math for seven-year-olds: graph coloring, chromatic numbers, and Eulerian paths and circuits
http://jdh.hamkins.org/math-for-seven-year-olds-graph-colori...
Peter Thiel Says America Is a Technocracy, Not a Democracy
Ask HN: Are data structures and algorithms necessary at web startups?
How important are data structures and algorithms for web startups?

I'm seeing a lot of startups running rails and django that follow very strict and stringent interview processes. They pay a lot more attention to algorithms than proven, demonstrable examples of code.

Some will quickly cast aside great chops if they can't explain data structures. What part of rails or django, reading log files and bootstrap theming does CS skills entail?

Is their a perception that a genius with algorithms would be a valuable engineer? Doesn't that completely fail to take in account their willingness to accept the stack and interests of the business?

Are startups mistakenly adopting interviews too strict for their needs?
I don't think truth can be crowd-sourced. It's as simple as that. I don't think the majority is always right, or even that it's right most of the time. Which doesn't mean I'm anti-democratic because (and I'll paraphrase Popper) while democracy is certainly a bad system, it is the least bad of all the available systems.

I would certainly agree that matters of social policy fall firmly into the realm of what I would call opinion (doxa, to use Plato's terminology). But then our language should reflect that. Let's not talk about true and false, or even right and wrong. We can set up some kind of goal (for example, the utilitarian goal of the greatest happiness for the greatest number), and define good or bad, just or unjust, in relation to that predefined goal. But there is no epistemological basis here for truth.

I have no objection to people using opinion as a basis for public policy - it could hardly go otherwise in a democracy - but then, let's recognize opinions for what they are and avoid turning certain currents of opinion into moral crusading that shuts down debate. If we are in a democracy, in the realm of pure opinion, then all opinions deserve a hearing, however much they clash with what seems obvious to us and to the group we identify with. To deny one group the right to articulate their opinion undermines the foundations of democracy.
I'm a CLR man myself. Just the path my career has taken me really. Does anyone know if there are equivalent documents for CLR or CLR Core?

I don't see LLVM, JVM or the CLR going anywhere. They'll evolve, get smaller, reach more devices and platforms etc but personally I'd like to appreciate the how and the why better.

It'd be useful to know if there are any reasons why I may pick one over the other in certain circumstances I appreciate how there ecosystems and culture are different but I'm curious from a purely technical perspective too.
On the other hand you just proposed that the parent commenter gets on a terrorist list of the NSA, GCHQ, BKA, etc.
CodeMentor.io
Wow, that indeed doesn't look good. In France I learnt trigonometry at 13 (I gonna turn 34 this year so maybe it has changed by now).
The headline is a troll; the technology revolution in education is not iPads, it's reinventing the purpose of teachers in a classroom. The flipped classroom[0][1] might be the single greatest advance in education in a hundred years, made possible largely by our ability to rapidly distribute compelling instruction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...
So much of your post is just so disgustingly misinformed.

For some people, HBO Go IS too expensive. For a lot of gamers, 20 dollar games ARE too expensive. Those gamers aren't the same ones spending 500 bucks in video cards - those guys buy 60 dollar games every time they want.

You won't get anywhere near the same userbase if you offer your stuff for free, and if you offer it for 1 dollar. However, remember that advertising is at WELL BELOW $1/user. Advertising treats your userbase as if each individual is worth pennies - because they are.

Don't expect your userbase to completely transit to a pay-for-content model without huge losses. But it doesn't mean you won't profit more in the end, it all depends on what you set the price to and what your userbase is (some markets are obviously better suited for pay-for-content models).
That can either be a good or a bad thing...
Well spotted. But why is this article still on the front page 4+ hours later? Are people disagreeing, ignoring the comments, or appreciating this for historical reasons?
IMO: This may be one of the important papers to read (also the link within it) because it gives such a good perspective on things. "Some sees the the Model View Controller model as some observer patterns, while it really is to map the datamodel of the program onto the users mind model" It provides a great perspective.