skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except his point isn't what you say it is. You quote only:

> "Experts" can be wrong

His point in its entirety is:

> “Experts” can be wrong, and say things that sound right – so build a habit of evaluating new information and check it against things you already accept as fact.

Emphasis mine.
Unfortunately, in the 21st century that sort of common sense can no longer be relied upon.

It is much more "efficient" to have police issue on-the-spot fines for minor offences, without troubling busy magistrates with trivia like providing evidence or allowing the accused to explain themselves.

Road traffic laws are enforced by cameras and Fixed Penalty Notices, allow you to go from driving along to having points on your licence and paying a fine with almost no human involvement in between.

In most cases, you can still refuse summary justice and have your day in court. Of course, in doing so, you typically risk a much greater penalty if the court finds against you, and in any case, even successful defendants do not receive compensation. It is not uncommon for someone to plead guilty by post to a speeding ticket (you can't enter a plea of not-guilty this way) and send an explanation to the court saying that in fact they did not speed, but it would cost them more in lost earnings to attend court to defend themselves than to pay the fine.

The idea we're talking about here will be one more step in the same wrong direction: summary, guilty-until-proven-innocent justice administered by remote control, and with no adequate means of getting mistakes fixed quickly and with fair compensation for any damage caused.

I don't know about you, but I rely on my Internet connection for work, and I don't illegally swap files on-line. I find the idea that my personal livelihood could be jeopardised just because a computer system run by Big Media got confused to be abhorrent. Knowing that in the end some European human rights case might find in your favour is little comfort if you've been unable to work for months and can't pay the mortgage/rent...
To be fair: Twitter today is a rather different product as well. Gone is the emphasis on SMS, and instead it's a micro-whatever social thingie.
My life under Windows is made worse daily by its lack of, among other niceties of civilization, symlinks.

Hard-links would also be a nice addition. I am sure NTFS supports them deep inside it.
Sorry for being naive. How would saving company money in a private account increase savings?
The same could be said for business partners. That's another very painful lesson to learn the hard way.
Also, the "success of twitter" still really has to yet be proven. They get data through their free backend message queue, but can that be converted to cash?
Dammit! I thought it was a game!
very true, but it's the fact that the founders let it evolve, surviving past the bitter cynicism I think is the lesson here.
There's now an online petition at:

http://gopetition.com/online/32354/signatures.html
When he says the new collections syntax creates immutable collections, does that mean modifying them creates a copy, or that objects in the collection can't be added/changed at all?
The interesting thing for me is that there is a real overlap between the locations of datacentres. It's obvious why this happens, but the possibilities it opens that's really cool. If you include the backhaul each provider has all the clouds suddenly get very close.
First thing I thought of too. Though at least with the iPhone you knew which way was up, didn't have to take a 50/50 chance.
Computer Games and Traditional CS Courses
Basics of physicalization
Not quite, more info here:

http://www.droidforums.net/forum/droid-news/3616-droid-camer...
1) Thanks - should be fixed now :)
2) Really? There should be an "alarm" icon displayed for that point...hmm...let me know if you can't see it and on what browser/os you are. thx!
Traffic Ticket Attorney
Traffic ticket attorney, Amir Soleimanian helps you fight speeding ticket, DUI offense and all the other infractions and traffic misdemeanors.
Symlinks are actually pretty handy. Have you never seen/used:

Current -> MyProg_1.8.9
MyProg_1.8.9
MyProg_1.8.8
MyProg_1.8.7

How/why would you do that without symlinks?
Do we really need to repost this story every few months?
debuggers help joe blow ASP.NET coder implement his spec faster. it doesn't really matter if he understands what's going on under the surface, nor does it even matter if his code sucks, because he's just a monkey. processes have been implemented so his crap code isn't a project risk.

edit: I work at a place like this.
This is pretty interesting: looks like they're laying down the foundations of their Map/Reduce framework with this --
this approach to their Group function is one of the most flexible I've seen so far!

In essence, they have implemented their Group function as a real simple Map/Reduce job, in which the "Map" phase is skipped partially Instead of completely decoupling the Map and Reduce phase, a Reduce is performed right after each object is Mapped: you perform a Reduce directly on the source object. Regular Map/Reduce frameworks usually decouple the Map and Reduce phase completely: you perform a Map on the source object, and a Reduce on all the emitted Map objects. This of course brings a lot of overhead (lots of Map objects emitted with just the value "1").
for that matter, you ain't taking MY debugger either, because it helps me understand everyone's complicated code faster and better.
That's a bad illustration, since the false fact is used in the argumentation.

I find bad spelling a better analogy. If the OP's spelling and grammar were insufferable, it would have "taken something away from the whole" and still not be worth commenting on.

That said, no big deal. I only felt compelled to reply to your comment because I found it strange that it was the highest ranked.
How the H1N1 vaccine is made
This first scene from HBO's Lucky Louie is the best example of this: http://www.videosurf.com/video/lucky-louie-101-58075787
The straw man is the "typical UCD process" diagram you put up. UCD doesn't just lump all of implementation into a black box like you imply.

There's nothing in the UCD process that precludes testing on real customers. But the point of using UCD before testing on real customers is that it's a far cheaper way to provide basic realignment.

Can I ask if you've ever done a paper prototyping exercise before? I've lead paper prototyping sessions both in classroom & commercial settings and it's common to find people who question their value before it's performed but rare to find anyone after they've experienced it. Often, paper prototyping sessions lead to a drastic reworking of the interface because the originally designed interface is practically unusable. It's far cheaper to get this feedback on paper than on final implementation, even as the cost of implementation continues to fall.
It actually does less than nothing.

Since an e-petition site like the one linked gives people opposed to an issue the impression that they've accomplished something, those people are that much less likely to do something substantive to resolve the issue they're concerned about [Citation_Needed -- I couldn't be bothered to find it].

So, less is actually done to oppose the issue than if the site never existed in the first place. It actually helps those who are in favour of the issue opposed.

E-petitions aren't useless: They're worse than useless.
I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.

Heh.
“When I needed something, I found that it would just come into my life. My glasses, for example. There was an optician who was a member of the Tauschring and he gave them to me in return for some therapy sessions.”

She still lives with money, just not with the physical pieces of paper.
Is Passion Serendipitously Discovered or Painstakingly Constructed?
Ha, very cool! I was reading through and found my comment from then.

"Looks interesting. Any word on how it might tie into Odeo? The privacy options are key. I’d never want any of my text messages public… especially the drunken ones. Nick over at valleywag, might have a new gossip and scoop source. Overall though, cool site, with lots of room to grow if it can fix a few things."
clean interface! I think one thing that might be nice is to do in-line taste matching.

I didn't bother to really answer the tastes section. When it says OPTIONAL for sign-up sheets, my motivation for filling them out drops to zero. This is a concern, because the user experience is directly proportional to how context appropriate it is to the user.

The site presented a list of games that didn't really interest me. As I was checking "not interested" down the apps, I quickly lost interest in the recommendations, thinking the engine was broken.

Perhaps when the user first comes on, you can offer the top apps from different genres. Depending on what the user clicks on, then you can hone in on what user's tastes are, instead of requiring the user to explicitly list them out.

Third or fourth click in, you might have some unobtrusive way to ask, "We notice you are enjoying PRODUCTIVITY APPS would you like to add that to your tastes?" The idea is to make the browsing and learning as seamless as possible. (I have http://likebetter.com in mind)
trust can be more than a boolean, and P(captcha) can be proportional to my trust. I bet of the people who have done hundreds of captchas on stackoverflow, exactly zero of them are going to bot their accounts.
Could Twitter’s stalled growth could spell bad news for Twitter ecosystem?
The only problem I see in the post's story is that the tech lead didn't create a logging standard and reviewed the code to make sure the team followed it. I don't see why we should blame debuggers.
I think he meant adding a new item would create a new list. Which makes working with operation expensive but a bit safer.
I found the initial example to be invalid, especially having worked in "physical" industries (auto parts manufacturing, to be precise). The four choices are presented as if they are mutually exclusive - they are not - and are in fact quite often used together.

Options 1 through 3 are incredibly useful for early prototyping in order to whittle down a large set of potential solutions. Certainly every design process I've ever been a part of has also gone through option 4. To present these choices as if people are blindly walking down paths 1-3 and only them, is IMHO the straw man.

tl;dr version: The article brings up the classic "look what dumb people are doing!" example, but yet I don't see people doing these dumb things that are supposedly being done.
I think there's a little more to it than that when you are talking about frameworks like ASP.NET. It's simply not plausible or necessarily even possible to log every piece of information you might possibly need to debug a given problem. That said, I am all for people putting more thought into logging and tools that help troubleshoot in production.
reminds me of a Monty Python skit
I don’t think it’s as black and white as this article suggests.

We don’t know what causes Autism and to the best of our knowledge it doesn’t exist in any other species. Even if it did exist in other species it would be almost impossible to diagnose. So there’s really no testing (other than long term trials) that can be performed on perspective treatments. This results in a marketplace where completely bogus treatments look no better or worse than ones that have potential. Combine that with Parents who are desperate to help their children and you get a very dangerous and volatile situation. That situation is what this article tries to address.

But I’m not sure you can fault parents who try alternative treatments that are supervised by physicians. These researchers act like their opinion should be the last word on the findings in their report. That’s especially frustrating when their opinion is “we don’t know what it means and have no real way to find out”. All these parents are doing are taking an aggressive approach.

Again, I don’t support anyone who tries a treatment that isn’t supervised by a physician but I don’t see anyone doing that here.
Regarding the first item (biofeedback), I've seen Emotiv's demo live at Tokyo Game Show, and it's not at the point where everyday people would want to use it. Basically, it's a lightweight cap that can detect when you're getting relaxed. As you can imagine, this does not lend itself well to the kind of subtlety required to control anything.

That being said, it has interesting applications in quasi-meditation practices, and of course for the disabled.
The UK constitution is (and this is debateable of course) based in part on the concept of 'parliamentary sovereignty' - one commentator put it that 'parliament could make it legal to kill blue-eyed babies'. Since UK entry into the EU, passing of the Human Rights Act 1998, and the Scotland Act 1998, there are things it cannot do with its laws (until, like David Cameron proposes, Parliament does away with those laws, to get back to the blue-eyed babies position).
As things stand, the only testing of a law is a declaration of incompatibility with the HRA or EU law. Sadly a lot of powerful new EU law (under the Lisbon Treaty) doesn't apply to the UK (or Poland - both got waivers to certain treaty obligations).

To answer the second part of your question, I think the proposed Bill includes a provision for you to appeal a disconnection. There's also the interesting possibility of a business suing an ISP for damages after a wrongful disconnection (which, given the way this Bill is so poorly structured, I would expect will happen)... what would the ISP then do? TalkTalk, who started this petition, isn't happy (but doesn't mention this reason in the petition description)

Frightening to think how easily a rival could have any YC business based in the UK disconnected, through weak Wifi security or any other means of making it looks like that business is infringing this new proposed law.
I think the author is trying to encourage the practice in general. There are certainly ways to do it right and ways to do it wrong.

Just blindly asking for status emails so you have some numbers and justifications for your charts would probably not go over well. Asking for status emails regarding real milestones and to verify functionality, check metrics, or suggest current progress be analyzed can be very helpful.

Good management seems to include knowing when someone needs some guidance or help and when they just need you to stay out of their hair.
I'm reminded of the reference book "Writing CGI Applications with Perl." In the introduction the author warned that there will be several purposeful mistakes in every chapter as an exercise to the reader to find and correct. Using this technique in a reference manual was bad enough but it made things even more difficult given that there was no key.

I got rid of the book. Tough to learn from a book that lies.
You're implying that the money is placed there as embezzled/a tax dodge/both?
Absolutely correct.

And more to the point, it's impossible to live "without money." Money is not a possession, it's simply a measure of wealth.

And this:

When something hurts, I put my hand on it and say to myself I have the power to heal myself and the pain goes away.”
Attaboy Sumon, good comment
I don't even try to conceal the fact that I make mistakes. I tell my students that I'll sometimes lie and often screw up, and that they shouldn't trust me.

Sadly, they rarely listen. I'm told that 95% of what I say is right, and it's not worth the effort to figure out what falls into the remaining 5%.
I think his message is not so much to trust that their statement about progress is truthful, but rather to trust that others can do a good job and get it done well.

I'm sure many of us have had that feeling of, "I know I can do this better, I should just do it." The point of this is to trust them and instead say, "I know I can do this better, but I need to delegate, so I trust that this other person can do a good job." That's the first part of delegation. The second part is to verify that the work did get done to a high standard, and make it clear what else needs to get done.

You need to be able to trust employees to get the job done, and you need to verify that it did get done in case it did not.
As viraptor said, it's always safe to just use the most restrictive type. Type inference is quite useless if you just infer everything to be an Object :)
And beside, in cases of ambiguity, you can mandate the use of the verbose form.

I was thinking specifically of the example in C# where you can do something like:

var list = new[] { "hello", null, "world" }

which the runtime casts as a string[].

It just seemed like these collection literals would be good candidates to use the new type-inference capabilities they're rolling out.
Quicksort in Scheme and C: First post in a project to be a better programmer
You are not stuck dealing with the forward/back button structure. iPhone web apps can be bookmarked like applications. The author can tell the iPhone that it wants to be launched in full-screen mode, without the nav bar at the bottom of the screen. (I believe this also works on Android)

Furthermore, web apps can be created that explicitly manage data and assets in a local store. Web apps can be quite responsive if they take advantage of this.

A native app will likely be more responsive, but a web app isn't as limited as you seem to
think.
IFixIt Announces Answers: Do Not Return Product to Store
That bit and the spirituality angle indeed was unsettling but I posted this here maily because of the 'service/goods bartering' angle which seemed like a cool hack.
"and a few select insiders were playing with the service at the Valleyschwag party in San Francisco last night." I enjoyed that, because I was at that party. Though not one of the "select insiders." However I'm tempted to think "a few select insiders" is actually Mike Arrington weasel words for "me."
I think this is a very poignant essay given the place in history we are at. In 1991 this essay looked like sour grapes over forgotten history, but I'm more interested in what lessons we can learn from previous system. It's interesting to hear about a time before SQL and relational systems, and how early developers dealt with persistence problems. The historical account on the controversy of relational technology rings true today given we are struggling with it as well.

I heard someone say that when the industry was moving away from big iron to mini-computers and PCs the programs they wrote were considered worthless because they couldn't reuse them on the next platform. It was the data that was the jewel. Relational technology embraced separating data from the program to enable reusing data within another program or different hardware. Prior to that data and program were tied together. They were fixed and non-portable. Relational technology came to occupy separation of data and program to facilitate data portability.

What's changed is the way in which we write programs. We aren't tied to machine architecture like we once were. We use python, ruby or Java which is portable among many platforms. What was once trash is now treasure because we aren't constrained to one architecture.

Does that mean let's go back to flat files? No. I think it's combination of the two. The features like data separation is important. Network access to data is important. Query languages are important. Hierarchical has always been important, but we've probably down played how important. Scalability and speed are ever more important.

What's not as important anymore is relational. Those other features can be separated.
Nice features, shame they didn't do them 10 years ago.
Can you imagine a web service launching publicly today without making sure Mike Arrington had a working account?

Good find, thanks for submitting.
Identity in the Browser (Firefox)
RecipeBridge Searches Over 1.7 million Recipes & Counting
I'm going to make a whole bunch of core algorithms in at least 2 languages per algorithm to help drill the basics into me. You guys think this is a good tactic to make yourself better at something?
The ultimate answer to which, of course, is "I read it on Wikipedia".

Also acceptable, telling your child to "just google it".
I launch web services publicly on a regular basis, and don't really care whether anyone at TechCrunch has an account.
What is important here though is that they are removing the concept of an "accepted market value" for these services/goods. There is direct interaction between the provider and consumer with out mediation which determines the subjective value for both parties. I wonder what marx thinks about that?
You work for the Blue Brain project? That's amazing. Do you have a blog or anything where I can find out more? Can you tell us more about what it's like? I think it's one of the most fascinating projects going on right now.
Definite resonates! What's your startup?

If you don’t have a proven business model,
you need to make figuring it out your NUMBER ONE priority.

Amen!

Naturally this will bring up facebook, google etc. who may not have focused on business model for a while. Like Steve Blank said in one of his talks, if you think you've a google/facebook on your hand, ignore every rule and good luck:)
"Doing a startup is like jumping off a cliff and trying to assemble an aeroplane on the way down."

That's great.
Looks nice so far, but why do you need my name on initial signup?
NTFS does indeed support both symbolic links and hard links in recent versions of Windows, and they can be created with the "mklink" command-line utility. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link)
What an excellent way to explain this!
or not ;)
Wow, stereotype and generalize much?
Or go one better and extend the language to do true type unification. It's not like this isn't well-travelled territory.
Amen. I read TC but the idea that you need to get TC'ed is emotionally flawed.
As others here have pointed out, she's not living without money so much as making her own, on the spot, when she needs it - in the form of the very adaptable just-in-time currency known as barter. Douglas Rushkoff's book _Life Inc._ and his recent talks are all about centralized currency's corrosive (or rather, extractive) effect on society and are an excellent source of more economic-hack ideas. Here's his talk from the Web 2.0 conference last week:

http://rushkoff.com/2009/11/21/radical-abundance/
Climate hack used open proxies
You're no longer arguing your original point, or at least, you're no longer arguing against me. Your code and my code are now nearly identical, except for the fact that you use an add function and I use an add operator. In fact, if I just say "my add operator can manipulate promises" or whatever, then they become 100% the same. Since my original point was that I'd like to use a preprocessor to make asynchronous programming as easy to transition to as possible, this would be very easy to achieve (just replace exp1 + exp2 with add(exp1, exp2)). That's what I meant by "just work", not "almost work". The goal was to not have to use callbacks and nesting, a point that both our code snippets have reached, so I'm not sure exactly what we're arguing about.
Yeah, it was before TC comments jumped the shark. I don't know why they don't use a much more aggressive moderation policy; the toxic comments rub off on the rest of the site.
Damn title got me interested, but she lives without money because she relies on bartering.