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mlntnon Does playing video games make you smarter?

Short answer: No. Long answer: Noooooooooooo.

mlntnon You Don't Know JavaScript Book Series

For those interested, I recently found a tool that will convert Markdown files into an ebook. I used it for the Laravel docs, but you could use it for these books too. I'm sure there are other tools, but this was very simple to get going.

http://easybook-project.org/

mlntnon Parameter Hell

There is currently an RFC for named parameters in PHP 5.6. The spec looks good and I'm hoping it gets approved.

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/named_params

mlntnon I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface

As bad as I feel for the OP, you have to take responsibility instead of blaming Google. Seems like they do a good job of explaining when you empty the trash in Drive:

"Files in your trash are about to be permanently deleted, including Google Docs in your Trash. Warning: When using Google Drive for PC/Mac, Google Docs aren’t actual files saved on your hard drive; they are links to files stored online."

If you want a real backup of Google Docs, try Takeout: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

mlntnon My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

> Unless children are given both sides of the story - the value of bible study vs. the criticisms - and then choose to study it, then you are effectively force-feeding religion to someone in their formative years.

You assume that homeschooled kids are not given opportunity to learn both sides. And when have you found this to be the case in a public school?

Regarding "force-feeding": It's ridiculous to think that a parent's beliefs and ideas about the world/religion/culture/science/whatever would not have an impact on a child's beliefs.

mlntnon My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

I was also homeschooled for the most part (k-4, 6-10, then college) and consider myself an excellent speller. For my fifth grade year, I went to a private school where I competed in a spelling bee and won at the school level, then at the state level against other private schools for my grade level. I have never found spelling to be deficient among the homeschoolers I know - quite the opposite in fact.

mlntnon How I'm Predicting Baseball Outcomes

If you want a broader dataset, check out the data from Retrosheet (http://www.retrosheet.org/). You can get box scores and play-by-play data from many years back to dive really deep into stats. You can use Chadwick command-line tools (http://chadwick.sourceforge.net/) to parse the data into SportsML or other formats.

mlntnon Introducing Adobe Blank

You wanted a picture of a zero-width font? One could argue that there were an infinite number of pictures of that font in use on that page.

mlntnon Ask HN: Domain names you bought for a start-up that never happened

brewmasterapp.com - A mobile/online homebrewing (beer) app. Lots of data, but never finished building it.

mlntnon "If you want to order it, use 'view source' to find the commented-out link."

I had a strange experience with these guys. I signed up and didn't get anything back. When I sent an e-mail two days later telling them to just forget it and cancel my account, they told me they were busy and didn't get around to setting up my VPS. Just weird...

mlntnon Hit Shift key 4x on a NYTimes article and see what happens

I tapped Shift 6 times and a nickel spit out of my USB drive. Amazing!

mlntnon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (March 2012)

OPENLANE - Mesa, AZ Software Developer II - PHP, MySQL, etc

http://tbe.taleo.net/NA11/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=OP...

mlntnon Horde backdoored

"Horde backdoored" - Hey, that rhymes!

mlntnon Android device as dev machine

Pretty cool and I almost installed it before I noticed it was the largest filesize (31MB) of any Android app I've ever seen.

mlntnon Netflix is Down and I Just Released My Netflix App

Way to break Netflix... I was just going to watch something. ;)

mlntnon Top Programming Fonts