pertinhower

Coupled with the many recent articles highlighting the unreliability of studies like this, I'd say this research is worth exactly squat. Example questions for practicing skeptics: The actor either (a) asked for a phone or (b) apologized for the rain, then asked for a phone. Could it be that the study simply demonstrates that saying some other pleasant thing before asking for something makes the request more effective? Must it be an apology? Must it be about something the person has no control over?

Polls like these are amusing but they're not particularly helpful. They broadcast subjective feelings about the "coolness" of languages at the expense of objective evaluation of languages.

How many of you upvoted "Go" even though you've never really tried Go, just because you feel like it has got zeitgeist and pizzazz and you're attracted to trying Go? Did you downvote Visual Basic? Have you ever used it? If not, you probably downvoted it because hating Visual Basic is a mark of an Enlightened Programmer; wearing a Visual Basic t-shirt to work would either be a joke or a mark of death. But these are social, subjective, impressionistic evaluations we're talking about. Do the languages actually deserve these judgments?

So, if the goal is to propagate and entrench the existing impressions that people tend to muddle around with (because, after all, how many of us really have the chance to deeply learn---deeply enough to form a sound opinion---more than one or two new languages a year?), then mission accomplished. But if the goal is to shed light on the respective value of languages, darkness has fallen.

Well, I suppose this is a decent start... ;-)

Another astounding way to visit this ancient past is to talk to one of the billions of people who are over 30 and who perfectly remember that no one was this plugged in even a few short years ago, and many still aren't. Might want to take a compass while you explore these dusty roads.

...which also handsomely shows the real complexity of modeling systems where the human mind is involved, and the folly of over-simplified "1 car per 2 seconds" systems that look good in a computer model but fail to capture the real experience or decisions of piloting a car.

As a matter of general policy, if you're going to declaim another article as wrong, you really should bring clearly stronger evidence—generally in the form of citations—to the table. Otherwise it's just "he said she said" as in this instance.

Well we learned a lot about Tommy Refenes. The insights into the controller were more vague.

A hate to trivialize a thoughtful article with a typographical point, but boy do I like my paragraph breaks when I can get them.

Evolution be praised.

Flash can actually export to HTML5/JS for you, so you might try Flash itself.

Thank you. I was a bit confused by that myself. Why say you're not eating when you've just changed what you're eating? Shock value maybe? Helping to make the whole expedition feel more important?

Neat. Not vastly different from gitk. Crashes for me after I try the fetch button.

What I read: "Blah blah blah...Twitter developed a novel authentication system...blah blah blah." Anyone else think that trusting Twitter (or any other company without vast mathematical and security chops) to securely deploy an existing authentication system, much less develop a new one, is likely to end in tears?

Not even reading the article. Just upvoting for the title alone.

Why are people upvoting this post? It's attention-baiting and deceptive.

Am I alone in thinking that the 2005–09 logo is clearly the strongest image? I'd like to see the results of a poll. Designers can talk their way into all sorts of things; a bit of objective measurement of opinion would be interesting.

I... uh.... How did this get here?

The customer is always right, but the customer is not always aware. Getting noticed is the great challenge of the age.

Man, never noticed how the quality of front-page HN posts on a Sunday morning really bottoms out.

Are you serious? This isn't a joke?

I don't believe this is a joke, but I do think the organizers need to be much more forthcoming. The crucial unanswered question is what timeline they expect to follow.

I believe it would be possible for an expert C++ programmer (and this is clearly who they're targeting) to write an essentially compliant ("fully" sounds difficult, and I expect some fudge there) compiler in a year; two, perhaps, if it's a nights and weekends effort. This estimate comes straight out of my bum. It's an intuition. I'm not including the standard library: that would be a multi-year job even for a small team of truly excellent C++ programmers. But if we focus on the compiler, and allow a little fudge in compliancy, I think there are some individuals who could do it in a year. So I don't believe the scope of the task implies a joke.

The lack of information on the site raises worries. Do the organizers lack the confidence to reveal themselves? Or are they scamming? They shouldn't leave this a question.

Minecraft LARP.

Nice idea, badly implemented.

The interface teaches me how to use it very badly. The most obvious interface clues are the arrows to either side of the page, but these work in the usual manner (hopping from page to page), so they distract me from the heart of your interface.

When I do happen to mousewheel, I can't immediately understand what that does. Am I moving myself or a divider? Why is the divider coming from the top? What's above the divider? Why is it snapping like that, instead of scrolling smoothly? The snapping erects a level of indirection between my (smooth) wheel movement and the movement of the divider, which obscures my ability to understand what's happening. I can't decide whether to scroll upwards or downwards—which is "forwards?"

Why is there a white page "behind" the text if I scroll the divider upwards? Is that what's on the next page or the previous page? Why are you showing me a white page?

The sense that I'm reading downward yet new text comes from above feels very strange. I see how you've ended up here, but it's highly unintuitive. Alas, it's also fundamental to your concept, so whether the concept lives or dies (once all other problems are removed) is a question of whether people can adapt to this spatial "warp."

The "snappy" movement of the page divider line feels clunky. Move per pixel, in immediate response to mouse wheel (or touch drag?) movement—preferably with inertia—definitely not per line.

This is not the way I want the world to scroll. But I see where you're going: leaving the text in place makes sense, and if you're going to do that then using a divider from the top follows inevitably. So the idea is worthwhile, but this implementation is its own enemy.

No, we don't see causation at the neurological level. The "correlation ≠ causation" meme doesn't just undermine overspeculative econometric conclusions: it undermines overspeculative biological conclusions too. The article may show correlations at the econometric level (I'm not convinced). It reports correlations at the medical level. But correlation still ≠ causation, and so it's not clear that lead causes crime "neurologically". Indeed it's not clear that any single factor trumps the human element in committing crime. At some level, crime is always a human choice. That's why we call it "crime." The overall fallacy of the article, therefore, is that statistical analysis—with its weak ability to establish causation—can shed more light on crime than human factors can, when crime is clearly a highly complex, volitional, and "human" behavior that resists analysis of any kind.

Did I miss something? The New Orleans maps show soil lead levels and income levels. Even if these maps were to show correlation (it's not clear they do), and even if they suggested causation (which is anything but clear), we would need to see a crime rate map to even get at the question the article deals with. The maps are pretty. What are they meant to show?

Instructions for how to build it would be nice. I see source code for the NXT brick, but no diagrams.