enko

This is a rhetorical question. Of course it could. I've ridden driverless trains in at least three countries - the technology is unquestionably available, proven, and safe.

Is it possible politically? That is the real question. Perhaps not, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with technology.

This series is invaluable. I have been programming in Ruby professionally for over 7 years and did not know about Array()! Since then I have been joyfully combing through my repos and eliminating literally dozens of

  obj = [obj] unless obj.type_of?(Array)

Integer() was another head-slapper that I can't believe I didn't know. And the series is full of them.

Thanks very much to the Author(s)!

  TypeError: can't convert nil into Author

A little too much snark for my taste but this is fundamentally a good point. The same people who would rail against MS's rule-bending are very likely to be the same ones cheering on regulatory disobedience in startups, and frankly the latter's is often far more unambiguous.

Good food for thought there, thanks.

That website was so obnoxiously ignorant I at first thought it was a parody, but if so, it is profoundly unfunny.

It embeds a video called Why is money being spent on contraception when people are starving?. It features a chubby man on a couch (username SPUCProLife) sincerely arguing that very point, seemingly unaware of the irony anyone with an IQ over 70 could readily perceive. With his bad hair, misaligned glasses and tragic fashion sense, he reminds me of Dwight from The Office, except rather less amusing as he draws straight-faced comparisons between contraception and the nazi Eugenics program.

As Obi-wan would say, michas, you should go home and rethink your life. This trash - for idiots, by idiots - has no place here.

You can download the entire thing as a PDF! That is frigging awesome!

Have I ever lived with someone who had unwelcome sexual advances made to her at a party? Yep. In fact I myself have been the victim of "sexual assault", to use your rather inclusive definition. I would imagine a large proportion of the population have.

I was not there, but taking the post at face value, it was right for Joe to be dismissed. His behaviour was inappropriate and unprofessional. The company's whitewashing was also regrettable. But I have difficulty dismissing the notion that the rather extreme reaction from Justine is indicative of some underlying issues she might have. I concur with the top-voted comment that she may benefit from therapy.

What Joe did was wrong, yes. But there is no line that connects that dot with Justine's boyfriend tying his fucking ankles together while sleeping on a couch. That is something else entirely, and I stand by what I said.

Yeah, "amazing" is not really the word I was thinking of. There's a lot that is strange about this story, and that detail about the boyfriend tying his legs together with a belt is just the icing on the cake.

That is bizarre, almost disturbing behaviour. I am not going to comment on the case at all but for me several details from this article cast a very strange light on the whole scene, and that one just takes the cake.

Unfortunately CORS is not really doable if you have to support IE and need non-cookie authentication, as my company recently discovered to our sorrow. No custom headers, so goodbye to your X-Auth-Token. That has only been fixed in IE10.

> a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them

I am not at all surprised to hear that. I have family in Japan and have observed many times an inability to remember how to write a certain kanji eg. when filling in a form. Typically people will then type the word phonetically on a cell phone or computer, which prompts them with matching kanji, jogging their memory. There is a strong reliance on these technologies or, I suppose, dictionaries, which are also organised phonetically.

It is of course the case that English speakers occasionally forget words - I've looked up "diarrhoea" more than once in my life! But it's not an everyday thing like I've seen with my japanese relatives.

Yeah, modify to taste. I only wanted to post some example code to show how easy it is to automate tagging.

My code won't be appropriate if you don't use master/staging/production branches, either.

  after "deploy:restart", "deploy:tag_release"

  desc 'Tag release'
  task :tag_release do
    `git checkout #{rails_env}`
    `git tag #{rails_env}_#{DateTime.now.strftime "%Y_%m_%d-%H_%M"}`
    `git push --tags`
    `git checkout master`
  end

Boom!

While I am pretty sympathetic to the anti-TPP cause, the video is awful. It started off with ridiculous scaremongering about "frankenfoods", ie GMO foods, which have the potential for incredible benefits for mankind. It even specifically calls out food grown in a lab - do these people not realise the environmental damage we could prevent if we could grow meat? The nutritional benefits? The cruelty averted?

And that's the very first thing they said! I couldn't tell you the second thing, because I closed the video.

What is it about these activist organisations that compel them to so consistently throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I really like the story. I recognise it, partially.

Downvoting you because your link is to unrelated "Patriarchy 101" nonsense.

> fully operational by 2065

That's with a late-2020s start, presumably to avoid having to make any decisions within anyone's political lifetime.

I view Hyperloop as an extremely optimistic, naive and totally unproven idea. Wake me when someone actually implements it. Preferably Mr Musk - if the idea's such a winner he should have no trouble at all raising the necessary capital.

Meanwhile, Japan has been building its shinkansen network for 40 years this year, a long term project the likes of which we can not even conceive of in western politics, to our very great loss.

Dear Microsoft: Out of ARM and x86, choose one. Just choose one. For the love of god, choose ONE.

Can you imagine Apple, or anyone else, deliberately releasing two different tablets, with the same name, which can not run each others' software? It is inconceivable, and for good reason.

MS cannot make decisions. That's what will kill them, long term. Just choose one!!

Fair enough. I suppose the entire HN corpus would probably not be that large compared to modern HW capabilities.

Still seems to be a bit fragile, though. I am assuming persistence is a periodic thing, making the system vulnerable to eg. power failure between persist events, ie writing the text files. To be balanced against the simplicity gains of only having to deal with in-program data structures, though, I guess.

Then again it's worked flawlessly for 5+ years so what do I know!

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Comrade, I look forward to reading your riveting manifesto .. elsewhere.

You have got to be kidding me. The machine this server runs on must have a lot of RAM!

> Easy karma, pg.

Considering pg can likely award himself arbitrary karma points with a single SQL statement, I think your assumption of his motives is probably mistaken.

> The only thing that's changed about Zuck is he's learned to not say these things out loud

I am not a fan of Zuckerberg, but I don't think you have any right to claim such a thing. People can change.

It's good to hear you were so responsible at age 16, but not everyone matures so quickly. My own personality has basically done a complete 180 since my high school and uni days, from the biggest prick you ever met to someone who genuinely tries to show compassion and consider others' points of view. Is it all a façade to conceal the inner asshole? I'm sure you could make that case, but in the end it's outcomes that matter. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the flip-side of that is that sometimes people who might still be assholes internally can do a lot of good.

Track record is important, yes. But giving sincere people second chances is also important, and that goes for Zuck, too.

I also live in Australia and use Whatsapp all the time. Skype is way too heavyweight. Facebook ... I do not trust facebook at all, and do not wish to tie up my messaging capabilities with them.

> Also, everyone I know wouldn't pay for a communications protocol, no matter how good it is.

Dude, it's a dollar. One dollar. That's your contribution to the infrastructure that is handling 27 billion messages a day.

Was your phone free? Are your phone calls and SMS free? Is anything else in life free? I don't get it.

It's extremely hard to measure, but stunts like that seem to definitely add to "hype". I mean, it's being posted organically here on HN, isn't it!

"Hype" definitely gets sales. It leads to people checking out the game/movie, paying attention when they otherwise might not have - it's a form of social proof.

$800m in sales, first day. How much of that was due to marketing? Who knows. But it looks pretty positive to me, and stunts like this are part of it. Almost certainly positive, IMO.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that's a bit obnoxious, especially when it's something as gratuitous as a slideshow or something with CPU-hungry fading eye candy.

I believe mobile is currently about 18% of web usage market share, and windows phone is about 2% of mobile, so your situation is probably less than half of one percent of users - well below the level where specific support is economically viable, especially since it would probably require a lot of work.

As you said, the solution is for you to get a new phone.

> It's not clear to me how disclosing NSA's decryption breakthroughs benefits the public debate much, unlike previous disclosures

Well, that's the problem with trying to keep everything secret. If the majority of these "disclosures" were in the public interest - they should have been public knowledge. That would have made it far less likely for someone like Snowden to feel the need to "blow the whistle".

There is such a thing as a "presumption of trust", which the NSA has squandered. They likely had it before these leaks began, but now they have lost it, no-one listens even when they might have a good point.

> it's not just numbers on a balance sheet

I think you will find that it is, actually. The only thing stopping some deux ex machina reaching down and writing new numbers is a desire to not mess with "the system". But what happens when the situation is such that its very existence calls "the system" into question? Japan's debt is such a situation - and the USA's, too, actually.

Let's put it another way. There is no risky debt issued at 1% interest, ever. So why is this debt issued at 1%, hm? Are all parties involved simply stupid?

Of course not. The whole thing is a sham. It is simply covert, deferred, inflation. The only way a government can have in-country, in-currency debt is if it chooses to.

The Japanese debt will never be repaid. The USA's debt will never be repaid, for that matter. What do you think would happen if the USG tomorrow issued a statement that it was defaulting on all its debts, immediately and irrevocably?

I'll tell you what would happen: nothing.

At this level, debt is no longer about money, it is about fealty.

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. What conspiracy theories? We are talking about the frigging news.

Do you know what a troll is? It's someone who asserts deliberately stupid/annoying arguments to get a rise out of everyone else, who are trying to have a sincere discussion.

In other words, someone who sounds exactly like you. I won't be wasting any more time here.

> No, it's hyperbole. It's unsupported nonsense.

Do you think repeating yourself makes you right? It does not. You've not earned any kind of right to dismiss the matter with statements like that.

I actually looked at the age of your account before replying because I thought you were a troll. Unfortunately it looks like those suspicions were well-founded. 822 days - wow, you bided your time.

I can't tell if you're arguing against me, or the UK government - you know, the ones who detained the partner of a journalist using anti-terrorism law. That is where this connection was made.

Of course I think their actions are outrageous and unreasonable. In the light of them, however, hypothesising that supporting The Guardian financially may be construed by those in power as financing terrorism is mere extrapolation.

I know you think you're being very clever, with your disingenuous "A LITTLE", but ironically it really is only a little hyperbole in the grandparent comment. For fuck's sake, partners of journalists in the UK are being intimidated by the government. If I was the journalist I'd be very hesitant to travel at all. This is in bloody england, remember, the progenitor of everything we think about when we think "the west".

Open your eyes. Look how far things have come. This is not about LOLPOINTS™ on the internet, this is actually getting pretty damn real, and people are worried.