skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say posting and getting upvoted on HN should be like a litmus test for the blog posts, write good blogposts, put your effort into it and post it on HN to see if people like it or upvote it. If they don't, get back to work and improve your writing or style enough to get upvoted by itself (not by rigging). By asking your friends to upvote your posts (which I am assuming are not good because if they were, you wouldn't need your friends) you might be able to get couple of thousand views to your website, make couple of dollars in advertising money and then maybe some discussion too, but you wouldn't learn failure and improvement. So all I can say is, treat your posts like litmus test and improve enough that they can't ignore you.

Be so Good, They can't Ignore you - Steve Martin
Depends on the language you're using. ColdFusion, a language I spend too much time using, would just require putting

#year(now())#

within a cfOutput tag.
Unless we're talking about relativistic quantum traffic lights, energy will conserved regardless ;-)
Was CES ever relevant to the people that care about Google and Apple announcements? I've never followed CES much so I'm actually curious.

Looking at the list of past CES announcements, most of them seem to be centered around the video game and TV space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Show#Notab...
Moreover, LED traffic lights with heated lens already exist. They've been around for over a decade.

This is a case of stingy municipalities, not a failure of engineering.
Monads are Trees with Grafting
Private Methods are a Code Smell
How would mkdir not be atomic? It is a logical operation that only encapsulates a single physical operation.

Rename is an interesting case, because it encapsulates two operations - a copy and a delete. Doing two operations in one step is interesting atomicity. Doing one operation in one step (mkdir) is not as interesting.
Thanks so much! Not having this feature made me feel very insecure whenever using Safari instead of Firefox.

Also, a tangential thanks for letting me know that SIMBL had been updated for Snow Leopard. The transition to Safari on Snow Leopard was difficult because all of a sudden all of my plugins no longer worked--no ad blocking, no auto-restore from last session, no force new windows to open into new tabs, etc. Brutal. Now I can go look for 64-bit updates!
This seems silly. "Heating up the LEDs would help defeat the purpose of saving energy". Not if you only heat them when they need heated, which I imagine is trivial to detect. Even then you've got a bulb that runs at the same energy usage during the winter as the rest, and then at a lower rate for 10 months per year.
IIRC opening a file and using link() is about the only portable atomic method of file locking. Works on NFS and pretty much any UNIX. There may have been some other trick to making it work right on NFS but if you're going that far you may just need a lock manager.
Life Plotting
Hmm - there were some threads about new year's resolutions here, and I thought this submission might "gratify one's intellectual curiosity."

My apologies if it's out of place.
Other good examples of how the customer benefits when there is more of a free market are orthodontics and laser eye surgery.
http://www.newty.de/fpt/index.html
Right. Mainstream languages have been gradually evolving towards Lisp but until they adopt a simple uniform syntax they won't get real macros, which I think is the biggest difference between Lisp and other languages today.
This isn't why Lisp is awesome. This is why Lisp was awesome, back 50 years ago. Every single one of these features has since been adopted by mainstream scripting languages. What still sets Lisp apart is its metalinguistic capability - macros (hygienic or not).
I really doubt there are many fanboys that really hate this idea, after all there's "reopen last closed window" already in Safari, the only reason against tabs is that it might work unexpectedly if you don't realize which window you last closed a tab in.

I've filed radars and talked to some Safari engineers about why this feature isn't in there and have been pretty much stonewalled, except about Cmd+Z to undo accidentally closing a tab that used to be in Safari (and is in the Glims 3rd party Safari addon). Not sure why it's still not in Safari, it's been years (literally)...
"any more than you can deny the planet is unequivocally warming and humans are probably the cause of most of that warming"

actually, it's quite easy to deny something is "probably" anything...
The hardware and SDK have multitouch; there's a browser called Dolphin which has iPhone-style zoom gestures. I suspect they did not implement it in the default apps because Google wanted the Android install to be a reference implementation.

However, I found myself going back to the Google browser: on a double-tap, it switches between a website overview and a zoomed view which intelligently sizes itself to the width of the text column you're reading. I've found it much easier than manually zooming to find a comfortable reading magnification.

In my experience, when held between a 45 degree angle and exactly upright, the screen re-orients itself on rotation faster than an iPhone. When overtilted (so the screen points downward), it does not respond -- which is nice when you're lying in bed holding the phone up above your face.

I got my Droid on launch day, so it's definitely one of the same phones that have given people negative impressions. Maybe there are differences in manufacturing quality? I'm open to the possibility.
That would still depend on Verizon letting you use a phone they didn't sell you, without a crippled branded OS and locked hardware. The Droid is the first un-fucked-with phone they've ever sold.

They've promised some 'open network' changes, but the most that's come out of that is the ability to use data cards that come built-in to laptops.
The rare "roll cloud"
I don't think CES really targeted those people, no.

With the exception of the huge companies (Intel, Microsoft, Sony, etc), it seems generally focused on product companies looking for distribution deals.
It's disturbing that Blizzard will hand over a thick folder of personal information like candy on Halloween, even to (out of jurisdiction) law officers. But there's nothing very Azeroth-specific going on there -- your cellular provider could have done the same thing, basically.
This is what I meant. Openings aren't traps, and openings can branch as players choose different variations, but to stray from the opening book entirely is seldom a wise move. (That's one reason I never got too far into chess; I realized that competitive play would require a lot of opening knowledge.)
The author takes a specific case of iPhone development in which unit testing is difficult and generalizes it to say unit testing is not really needed. System testing is important but it becomes hard to isolate coding errors if no unit testing is being done.

I personally feel that there's a cost attached to unit testing and depending on the way the system is designed, the cost could be minimal or huge and that should be taken into account if you decide to do 100% unit testing or go for partial coverage, in no case I agree with the sentiment that it is not needed since its too hard.
I wish I could dig up the link (have been searching for 10 minutes now) but I remember reading an article that stated that engineering disciplines where very high on the list of professions with a propensity for workplace violence. I wonder if there is some correlation between the two.
It's funny - I didn't even know Safari was lacking this because I've been using Glims for so long.
Why would adopting language X's features make X less awesome?
Maybe it's just me, but that blog doesn't look right unless the browser is > 1600px wide.

Anyone have a simple rules for good web design link handy?
MadMen Inspires HubSpot's New Vacation Policy
$150/month for a desk is way more reasonable than any of the co-working spaces. 8% for $25k however, is kind of silly if you really believe in your product.
De-icing system for traffic signals patent:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=8dJ_AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Yeah, I suppose I should clarify. Instead of storing the plaintext or encrypted version of the password, they should store a hash of the password. Since, if/when the database gets compromised, it's even more difficult for the attacker to retrieve the passwords.

If the passwords are just encrypted, once the attacker figures out the algorithm, then all of the passwords will be compromised. A hash, on the other hand, would require each account password to be broken individually.
I believe that appreciating Lisp's minimalistic, tree-like syntax requires a very mathematical way of thinking. Many (perhaps most) developers have a different way of thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, diversity is a good thing but because of that, I don't think that the S-Expression syntax will ever become "mainstream".
Stay classy RockYou.
Nope, we're on the other side of Broadway, in the building with a slide from the second to the first. That Slide, thought, has been boarded off. Rumor has it someone broke their ankle on it at some time.
It's a repeat of the speech given at the 2008 Startup School, but it's worth another listening.
Apple Tablet Has No Intel Inside
How To Make Passive Geo-Location Relevant
Because awesome is usually used in a relative sense -- something is awesome compared to other stuff.

The implicit other stuff is "everything else."
What's weird is the timeline on that, if you see when it was reported and when it was still present. Surely it can't be that hard to fix this in a proper way ?
Instead of cond, you can use a switch.. it makes it even more succinct. I don't know why this post is rated so high thought.. it's like a copy of the preface of any scheme book.
There is a catch, though; if you have the same file open multiple times, even with different names, then closing one file descriptor will release all locks on that file in the same process, even in different threads.

It's even worse than that. A lock is released as soon as any of its owning processes closes any descriptor to that file. As a result, if a child forks and exits, the parent no longer holds any locks...
A bit unrelated, but based on my own purchasing habits, I have been wanting to express how effective a free Mac OSX app is with a priced iPhone app.
Little Known Ways to Brand on the Cheap: 99 Tips for Poor Web Startups
Custom URL Shortener/ID Encoder in Transact-SQL
My first Mac app: http://www.windowflow.com - it gives you keyboard shortcuts for moving, resizing and tiling app windows. I'm getting ready for a big new release today so if you try and it and it's not quite right for you, give it another go later.
It is now trivially easy to plug in whatever template language you like, and still have all the usual Django shortcuts work with it:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#usin...
I think I agree... I'm undecided though. I actually find JSON to be a positive development, and potentially a step in this direction (i.e. the fact that people now use javascript literal data syntax as a way of serializing general data, and the syntax has been written down somewhere quite carefully and is not too verbose or ugly - at least compared to something like xml). Who knows how far the mainstream will take this though...
I'm not declaring the awesomeness or otherwise of Lisp but you're a shitty C coder :)
When I read interviews like this, it makes me realize just how cool it must be to work at Google.
FTA> Heating up the LEDs would help defeat the purpose of saving energy.

This will only be true if it snows every day! Or are they really proposing switching bulbs twice a year?

(There are plenty of people in MA who keep their incandescents year round 'for the free heating' - ignoring the fact that they have their air conditioning on for 6 months a year. People can be perplexing at times.)
If Textmate isn't an open application, I can't be concerned with whether or not it's developed in the open.

In fact, developing a closed source app "in the open" is a bit questionable. The users invest time and energy into a tweaking a product which remains the sole property of the original owner. The owner, besides simply charging money for the product, can just sit on the product, throw away all the user contributions or take the product in a completely different direction.

It's hard developing software on your own and I can sympathize with the desire for compensation. I'm not sure what the solution to the situation is.
I got tired of fixing layouts in IE and decided it would be more fun to break it instead.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure how practical it is. Has anyone ever tried this approach successfully?
The "switch statement" in C is closer to the CASE macro[1] in Lisp.

[1]: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_case...
China’s Greenest Cities, and Its Brownest: No Match for San Diego
Right and if it were unusually warm out he would be going on MSNBC to talk about how it's proof of global warming.
Sounds interesting. I guess the more users you get the better search results your search will return.
Baumol's disease is a major component -- education is currently measured in hours, so professors tend not to become more productive over time while the rest of society tends to.
If you think of the tablet as an overgrown iphone that makes perfect sense, if you think of it as a shrunk laptop then less so.

Since the kind of application that will run on tablets is probably closer in flavour to the stuff running on the iphone (with no doubt another chapter added to the app store to supply tablet applications) I don't see how this is a problem for anyone but intel.

Apple has always been very practical about their cpu choices, they've gone whichever way the wind was blowing and they've made some pretty drastic decisions in the past which somehow always worked for them.
I miss trhurler.
Dialing a phone number with actual digits accounts for maybe 1/500th of the use of my phone. That may not be common, but I don't think dialing digits is "the task at hand" for a phone anymore.

In fact, Apple's iPhone integration spans so far that I rarely even enter contacts on my phone anymore:

1. Someone emails me their phone number.

2. I mouse over it in Mail.app, click 'Create New Contact'.

3. I click 'Add to Address Book'

...

4. That's it. There's nothing else. Their name and email address get filled in automagically from the email, and within a few minutes the contact gets synced over the air to my phone.
I was specifically writing about features Lisp pioneered which other languages adopted. I think it's enlightening to understand the roots and history of things, and fint it amazing that such an old language pioneered so many fundamental constructs.

Perhaps by 2059, we'll have languages with macros and regular syntax.
Congratulations, you are officially qualified to drive in Massachusetts. ;)
Ask HN: Good recruiter/job agency in NYC?
Anyone worked with a good recruiter or agency in NYC to find a job?

Would appreciate a recommendation. Thanks.
Top Reasons Your Website Should Go Mobile
I do that a lot too. I have a lot of spicy chili in my freezer along with a batch of rigatoni that I use mostly for lunches.

I also have a lot of small portions of meat (french steak, pork chops, etc) that I just fry up with potatoes or occasionally bake in a shake'n'bakeish spice mix.

I do cook a lot but I eat a lot of the prepared stuff too, just because it's good and it's easy.
3 or more upvotes in the first 3 minutes is more or less a guarantee of having people that game the system.

It could be three or more people all multi-submitting the same article that just got posted to a frequently visited site. Each may not know that anyone else just submitted the same link to HN, if they are simultaneous enough. (It has happened to me.)
Presumably they wouldn't turn the heating coils on in the winter.
See Phrack 25: http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=25&id=5 for what it was like when mkdir was not atomic.
Software for making large photo mosaics
CES: Microsoft Unveils New Smartphone
I'm interested in seeing how this works out for them.

We had the same policy at another startup I worked at years ago (Ucentric). The problem was that while the idea was nice, it had a lot of "bugs".

One issue was people who either abuse the system, or more commonly are perceived abusers by other people. People seem to like knowing that certain perks and benefits (like time off) are rational and logical and auditable. Sure, if all your employees are 100% dedicated top-tier people then this is never an issue. The reality is that such a scenario becomes physically impossible once you've grown beyond a core group.

The other, possibly bigger, issue had to do with when the time comes for a layoff or dismissal (and again, one or the other will always happen). If you have a defined vacation policy, then when an employee leaves there is a clear accrued amount of unused vacation time that they are owed. OR, they have taken time beyond their accrual amount and they owe the company $ from their last paycheck. An employee who is leaving, voluntarily or involuntarily, in August who has taken very little time off will generally end up pointing out all the other employees who with less workload have been able to take 3 weeks off, and thus this employee is owed 2+ weeks of accrued vacation time.

Basically this supposed glorious perk turned into an administrative nightmare on several levels. Maybe it will work better now, but I'm skeptical.
I wished that were true.

From personal experience of having many times asked other HNers to have a look to a story I submitted (often not one from my blog, but simply a story I felt deserved some attention), it is true.
http://research.google.com is new for me; thanks for introducing me to it
Over the holidays, I made a few of these out of large picture collections for family members, and the mosaics turned out great. I made the mosaics with this software (free) then used an online poster printing service to print and send poster sized pictures of the mosaics (~$50 for a 3ft x 2ft poster from largeformatposters.com).
People ganging up on other people is a serious issue, and yes, it does happen.

I have not seen this happen. As far as I can tell it's a non-problem.
Hopefully not a thermostat but rather a proximity or a frost sensor.
I'm not sure Netscape's investors would agree with you.
Bear something in mind: a code smell isn't something that's bad. It's something that indicates that something may be bad. Therefore, don't run out and refactor all your classes with private methods.

However, if there is a class that has a lot of methods that you're not comfortable exposing to the outside world, then there's a good chance that there's a way to split that class and make your code easier to maintain.

Either that or you're being too picky with what methods the outside world can access.
I think the point is clearly, "Fuck you, Internet Explorer." It's a sentiment many on the internet share.

I've got a few places where I simply block IE with stylesheets myself.
I/O With Monads
Thanks :). Now if only I can figure out how to get people to actually use it, haha.
Yeah, I'd like to see an example of this showing where the creation of the private method to begin with seemed like a good idea, this refactoring technique, and how doing so improved anything.

Stating something is a smell doesn't make it so.
The point of the posting wasn't to say "don't use private methods anymore". It's saying "private methods are an indicator that something might be wrong", which I agree with.
It's worth pointing out that when the very first G1 showed up in customers' hands, people complained that there were issues with speed and responsiveness. The standard reply was "wait until the next phone comes out with better hardware, then Android will really shine!"

It's been a year and three months since then. Each new phone on the market has bumped things up a bit, and now the top of the line has roughly doubled every hardware spec on the original G1. And there are still issues with speed and responsiveness, and the standard reply is still "wait until the next phone comes out with better hardware, then Android will really shine!"
I disagree, I'm a big fan of encapsulation/information hiding. I'd rather have this stuff hidden 20-30 classes than have 200 new classes cluttering my intellisense
My issues (and I think most peoples' issues) with dynamic scope have nothing to do with being compiled or interpreted. From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_%28programming%29#Dynamic...):

"However, this benefit relies on careful documentation of all variables used this way as well as on careful avoidance of assumptions about a variable's behavior, and does not provide any mechanism to detect interference between different parts of a program. As such, dynamic scoping can be dangerous and almost no modern languages use it."
This approach would seem to be asking for an explosion in classes...it might be useful if there were repetition among your private methods in different classes but as a blanket code smell statement--that may be taking it a little far.
True, but Verizon isn't the only CDMA carrier.
I feel that the connotation of "code smell" is a little stronger than what you state, but mostly I take umbrage to this statement:

"Moving these methods to collaborators and making them public creates opportunities for future reuse without reducing the clarity of the original code."

This is the crux of the argument. After all, if you aren't planning for reuse, there's very little motivation to create a collaborating class unless the main class really is getting excessively large. But if you're guessing at future refactorings, especially when dealing with the types of specialized methods being discussed, you're probably optimizing prematurely.

I do strongly agree that private methods often have unnecessary dependencies. But this is a different design issue.
Right, but a cintiq that runs an OS would be pretty killer ;)
Taking small steps to improve design leads to flashes of brilliant design inspiration.

I would take issue with this statement. I've found that making small changes can clutter a design. Instead of just changing a bunch of small things, working out a crisp, simple overall architecture seems to work best.

Indeed, lately I'm worrying that having a good test suite lets me write code that works but which I don't understand as well.
thats exactly what this is about, thats exactly how the link that you are worrying about was posted
This isn't an enumerated list, obviously, but it piqued my interest in Lisp, among other things:

http://wiki.alu.org/RtL_Highlight_Film
"Today, they desperately need new markets to grow. Playing defense by destroying potential markets like tablets through FUD is not going to rekindle their stock growth"

Unless there is a credible threat of someone else dominating that market. Then it's "dominate or destroy".

The tablet space looks a lot like what Apple encountered with the MP3 player market when they launched the iPod: several products, all of them sucking really bad. I say there is a huge threat of an Apple future in that area.
I'm reminded of fast food places that label the smallest size of drink or pizza "medium".
Here is a video of the talk (since the podcast is audio-only): http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...
Well put. For the record I regularly upvote things passed to me by other HNer friends (some of them YC alums), but I always read it first and make sure it's something I'm comfortable upvoting. And I occasionally bring articles (both my own and other people's) to those same friends' attention.

The ultimate decider has to be whether the article is good and worthy of an upvote. I think I have mistakenly upvoted something that was actually bad maybe 3 times in the two years I've been here, and each time I felt really bad about it. Basically, if you wouldn't happily submit it yourself, don't upvote it.