eblume

Sometimes when I read HN I feel like I must be the only person who really likes most Google products. I think the design is pretty good. I don't analyze it very closely, and... I don't know, it works and it works very well for me.

I'm sure this isn't a new thought, and I will also admit I didn't finish the article so this may have been brought up, but I strongly consider 'teaching someone to program' and 'teaching someone to program using language X' completely different topics with very little common ground that must be taught using entirely different methods.

The first few paragraphs of the article point out problems with some tutorials/manuals for languages getting too deep too fast, but I like that feature now that I know (in some manner) how to program.

No, it's a great point, and one well taken.

I guess I don't really understand why this is impressive - the GPU is still not good enough to handle modern gaming and apparently has some issues with media encoding as well (although I will admit that that section confused me somewhat), and it sounds like the CPU is just a modest upgrade in efficiency.

I'm not saying it's bad, it looks like solid progress form Intel as we all continue to expect, but I don't get why this is considered 'tick+' when it seems less exciting to me than Nehalem.

It's a bit of both. I don't work in legal but I see them going at it from time to time when patent stuff comes up. There is definitely 'the filing cabinet' (more like a room) and it contains one of several copies of the important documents - but the lawyers are the interface to those documents.

Sometimes I can't help but feel that most lawyers do not much more than present an obfuscation layer around standard forms.

I personally discourage the use of squash, I think that everyone benefits with more granular commits. Is this not common practice?

You bring up an important point, I think, unintentionally. Kids may be able to 'screw up and fix' the software components, but it would be very cool to also allow the same interaction with the hardware.

I feel like maybe a version of the RaspberryPi that ships assembled on a breadboard with replacement parts - more expensive, of course, to cover the increased manufacturing costs and extra parts - would be extremely useful to anyone interested in hardware design. (Of course there are other kits that do this, but I think that there would be some benefit to RaspberryPi offering it as well.)

I wonder if something like this could be surgically implanted behind the cornea, and then removed at the end of service? Just a thought.

I agree on all parts - a clickable 'up next' link on the top right, and also a clickable 'previously you learned' link on the top left. Wording should change to fit the layout, of course.

Also some sort of hint that the ToC is clickable, I didn't realize that at first either.

Also, it strikes me that the entire guide should be put on GitHub - did I miss somewhere where it says it is?

All in all this is a great resource along the lines of http://hginit.com/ - which is useful, because the mostly brain-dead students at my university tend to take FOREVER to learn DVCSs. I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain that you really only need to 'git clone' once unless you are checking to make sure you got everything 'right' with the push.

Now instead I'll just point people at this.

Very intriguing but I personally can't stand watches that 'get in the way', and looking at the prototype it sure looks like this thing would get in the way a lot.

I haven't worn a watch for years, so this may be just a personal gripe.

I have a feeling that the JOBS act could actually be a very, very good thing if the right company (or, better yet, marketplace of companies) came around to offer a gateway service to these micro-investments.

Personally I would implement - or would purchase an account on - such a site where companies would advertise for investment, and would be required to provide a certain minimum of disclosure. The site would provide avenues for that disclosure (basically, a feed of reports issues by the companies themselves and perhaps also relevant news stories, a'la Google News) as well as investment portfolio tracking.

It would (still) be up to the user to verify the disclosure and make sure they are looking at companies that are disclosing the right quantity, quality, and purview of information - but the site would hopefully make it very clear what is and isn't being disclosed and how that compares to other companies.

Of course another key feature could be investor/analyst reviews, but this would need an extremely well-engineered system to prevent or discourage astroturfing & other social engineering schemes. Personally I doubt anything less than only allowing authenticated professional journalists (affiliated with reputable publications) could be acceptable, at which point you wonder about the real utility of such a thing.

I feel like this would make an excellent Startup, actually, and might do some work in that regard. I think step 1, though, is spending a lot of time reading about the ins and outs of the law. It would be very easy to grab a 'legal third rail' with both hands with this project and expose yourself to a lot of liability. I find that intimidating, but maybe not too much so.

Subscription counts in G+ are only a problem (to me) if:

A) They are too low for a user to engage anyone, which is simply untrue (I have lots of fun and engaging conversations - with strangers, often - on G+)

B) The product relies on a massive user base.

You'll have to ask Google about point B as far as profitability goes, but for me, point B does not apply because I don't care if my Aunt is on G+.

To me, G+ is a much nicer Twitter, and a way to organize and meta-tag my contacts. Nothing more. I use it every day and I am happy with it like that.

I would be very sad if G+ ever became like Facebook (which, in my very cynical opinion, is basically a 'happy birthday' rotary club & dating service).

Ah, point taken, sorry about that. :)

I beg your pardon, but you do not 'need it in JS', if 'it' is referring to using === instead of == to compare strings.

Here is what node.js says:

    > "9223372036854775807" == "9223372036854775808"
    false

Perhaps those two lines are the same in JS and PHP (I do not have PHP installed so I can't confirm, but I do have node installed):

    > 9223372036854775807 == 9223372036854775808
    true
    > 9223372036854775807 === 9223372036854775808
    true

However, that is not the two lines written about in this post. The following works as one would expect on JS, but (I assume, based on the report) not in PHP:

    > "9223372036854775807" == "9223372036854775808"
    false
    > "9223372036854775807" === "9223372036854775808"
    false

I think you may be missing the point, or maybe it's I who am missing the point. Your three very thorough examples are a good way of showing how (most?) languages handle floating-point arithmetic vs. arbitrary arithmetic.

But it seems to me - and let me stress that I am not a PHP developer and won't be bothered to install PHP on my machine at this time - that PHP is failing to exhibit exactly the behavior your code examples are giving.

Put it another way - type coercion 'run amok' being another thing entirely, you are correct that this bug stems from the fact that PHP is converting these integers to floating-point, and the standard floating point implementations will all behave in this exact way (thus, not a PHP bug.)

However, the issue here is that (again, "most?") languages also provide an easy way to get to arbitrary-precision arithmetic - and indeed, in the three examples you posted, you simply encode in the most natural way (by simply writing them) the two integers and they automatically compare correctly.

My understanding is that this is not the case in PHP, and that is a shame.

Whoops, I got something important wrong there and the edit deadline has long passed: his takeaway was that writing extensions for Google+ was hard, not for chrome.

His complaint was the lack of a G+-specific DOM API, and how (at the time at least) Google kept changing things that broke everything.

I've never maintained a hugely popular open source project so maybe my opinion on this will change when that happens, but at the moment I am always over the moon (very happy) when someone submits any Pull Request to one of my projects.

And hey, sometimes I comment & close the request with "Thanks for this patch, but this isn't something I want to support." And that's OK!

My point is that my message to the author of this comic is to be bold and keep sending patches.

I agree, and a friend of mine actually had a working Chrome extension to support filtering by tags (implemented as hashtags, but transparently, so if you had the plugin it rendered the tags in a prettier way.)

Unfortunately his only takeaway from the experience was that designing extensions for chrome was really hard, and stuff kept breaking. He eventually gave up, IIRC.

For the lazy, if you enter "correcthorsebatterystaple" the password strength gets set to "lol" with an info-box that reads something along the lines of "Don't take the webcomic too seriously. :)"

I think it was a Science Friday, if it helps.

Thanks, and that wasn't rude at all.

But again - those 27 million users are almost certainly already on Facebook. If Facebook came out with 'Hipster Pics for Facebook!' (obviously I should not be in charge of naming things) then I would assume the vast majority of those users would begin using 'Hipster Pics for Facebook!' instead of Instagram.

I guess it would make some sense for G+ to buy it in the hopes of driving use of G+ with it...

If you visit the site you'll see 'Edit this page' links at the top of each page (sans a few) - go ahead and click it to find out!

As far as the OP's product goes, I think it mainly helps you in the design & layout phase along with the WYSIWYG editor. It's a CS club, so WYSIWYG is not going to be popular, and we already did the design & layout. So I don't think so, but I do see OP's product as an endorsement of the idea.

I recently made a university CS club website [http://csclubsjsu.com/] using the Jekyll+Github stack. It wasn't using any platform in particular, just a Jekyll project automatically deployed to our server from a Github project using post-commit hooks.

The entire thing took almost no time at all and I've received a lot of positive feedback about being able to edit most pages 'live'.

Here's what I don't understand, and I'd love to hear why I am wrong about this because I am sure I am wrong, I just haven't grok'ed /why/.

A lot of people seem to be arguing that this move may have been not to get Instagram tighter with Facebook, but rather to prevent any other platform or company from acquiring Instagram. Ergo, it's a move by Facebook to further cement their lead as 'the place you share stuff'.

Ok, if that's true, in what way does buying Instagram 'further cement their lead'? Isn't Instagram really, extremely easy to code on your own? I'm in the process of learning Rails and I feel confident I could bang out a Heroku app using S3 for storage to upload/display/process photos. Then all you need is a thin native device to grab photos from the library or from the camera directly and upload it to that app. You don't need to have any platform-specific code outside of handling the camera and photo roll on the device.

Point is - did this do anything to stop, say, Google Plus from making their own Instagram?

Another related argument is that this means that the existing user-base of Instagram will get folded in to Facebook. Personally, I would be flabbergasted to find that more than 0.1% of Instagram users don't already have Facebook accounts. And if you are not using Facebook for photos already, you're either not going to want to share them at all, or else you've already got someplace else you want to share those photos.

Basically - where is the value in this acquisition? I mean any value at all? It seems like they paid 1B to avoid having to develop a very very small app.

What English is good at is expressing a huge variety of ideas. I once heard someone argue on NPR (sorry, no citation) that English is perhaps the /best/ language at expressing absolutely any idea to another person precisely because it has such a huge vocabulary and so many idiomatic phrases.

I've sometimes heard of programming as an art, like poetry, but if so I'd prefer to maintain that it is a minimalist art that enjoys pragmatism and flourishes when reduced.

Put another way - I don't want to write 'A Tale of Two Cities' in PHP, I want to write a website in PHP. Or more correctly, I don't want to write a website in PHP.

I hope that the lesson learned here isn't to never make mistakes, or worse still, that if you do make a mistake you need to cover it up.

There is also a third, even more frightening potential lesson here - if you arrive at a surprising result, assume you are incorrect and sweep it under the rug.

Hopefully that's not what people will take from this. Hopefully all they will take from it is to always report new science with a great deal of qualification and skepticism. It won't make headlines as well, but I think we've seen time and time again that the short and hyperactive media news cycle can't handle modern science.

That's really interesting - is there a place where I can read more about these early Rails performance issues?

Content contains some NSFW images.

The site clearly isn't aimed at me, I don't speak or read any asian languages, but the design seems cool. It's a bit cluttered but it's cluttered entirely with content (I think) so it works. I like the endless scrolling somewhat, although it makes deep linking problematic.

I may have misread this, but I'm confused about the point of the article. It seems like the article is reporting that 'the nerds of Silicon Valley are all upset' that rich people are getting rewarded for success in a meritocracy.

So, if that's the point of the article (and I missed a sarcastic twist somewhere - very possible), I have two problems with it.

First, where are these meetings I've been missing where all the nerds of Silicon Valley get together and decide what they like and what they don't like? I for one did not vote on the Meritocracy Referendum - was this my mistake, or were other nerds disenfranchised in that regional election?

Second, isn't that exactly what meritocracy entails? The key is that at any generation, in a true meritocracy absolutely anyone with a good idea (or work ethic, etc.) will be rewarded and elevate themselves. But beyond that, the general social flow will be that reward begets affluence, affluence begets smarter or more upwardly-mobile children (I'll say 'better', meaning better in a sense valued by the meritocracy), better children do better in the meritocracy, and the system repeats.

Put it another way - the youngest generation of rich entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are the children of successful hackers (or at least some of them are). Is this surprising anyone?