skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On 1, I didn't see a class declaration inside the mxml file for asteroids, but I may have missed it. For the unpredictablility, if global, any portion of the application can modify the values. This means you don't have any access control or format enforcement. This leads to the potential of unintended changes at any point in the application (say, the level was changed somewhere else) and you now have to catch all possible changes in the game loop rather than providing the proper update on assignment.

On 3, I had to read through the code several times to even make sure the last loop would run for each object. You could have one loop (with one inner loop) and perform the updates (one was 1 line, the other 3-4 if I remember right) and keep the same clarity. It can also be performance impacting given too many objects.

On 4, some of them are subjective (the rbc/wbc for sure), but letters are free and these are being used as code samples.

Code reviews are always subjective, but if it's going to be a code sample, it should stand on its own using best practices and comments when they're not reasonable to follow. Given the sample, I'd ask things like "how does it perform with 1000 game objects?" I hope I didn't give the impression I thought it was bad, it just has some common mistakes that, given a project of larger scope, would quickly become unmaintainable without lots of effort.
Miguel de Icaza: MS has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot (Google cache)
IT Wire writes about it here - apparently, SD Times has removed the article.

http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/37880-...
What would 1 million plug-in cars do to the power grid?
Yes. I was pretty astonished by this comment: "At the moment I can see 3 viable alternatives to Flash for animation: HTML, Canvas and SVG"
China's instructions on reporting on Google
It's apparently this computer, rebranded:

http://www.cybernetman.com/en/products/zero-footprint-pc/zpc...
Whats wrong in writing passwords down? I, myself, keep most important passwords saved in my phone.
On Linked Lists
Tip: Have a separate Google account for Reader. I don't use any of Google's social stuff anyway, but my Reader is nice and clean with none of this stuff going on.

I have an old Gmail and direct @gmail.com account from back in the day, but use Google Apps For My Domain with its domain specific account for everything "serious." Being logged in with two accounts at once isn't really a problem as long as you only use one login per Google service, I've found.
It seems that this is the one:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/11/0910200107.abst...

10.1073/pnas.0910200107

but I'm not completely sure.
Twitter is hiring all kinds of engineers at all levels, http://twitter.com/jobs and @jointheflock has info. Located downtown San Francisco, we're about 150 people now and growing pretty fast. Looking for everything from front-end engineers to infrastructure, performance, storage engineers and more.
Shouldn't this entry link to one of the original articles instead of to some random, er, symbiont? Sorry if I'm missing something here; I'm the new kid.
What about browser plugins? There are a bunch out for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tags/display/RSS?so...). I used Sage several years ago and was relatively happy with it; surely they've improved on it since then.
There have been in the past that failed. In particular, I recall one in Nevada. This isn't the best reference for it, but it was the easiest to find: http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/326/nevadaII.shtml
What's funny about this is that Onion is an online publisher just like the newspaper guys who wrote Django. This would have been more of a story if Django was incapable of fulfilling their needs.
I would rather deactivate Buzz completely than letting it spoil the Reader.
I can't say how good they are (as a guy that uses Django but takes a look at Rails about twice a year), but Google led me here:

http://ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_admin_interfaces.ht...

Typus seems the most Django-like.

Granted, a big advantage (as far as admin interfaces go) with Django is that almost every app uses it or at least keeps it in mind.
Most of the chargers can schedule for night time...
UML: a great idea, a failure
While I agree all web frameworks are roughly on par, they do each have their particular strengths. The Onion could have gone with Rails, SPRING, Wicket, Cake, Symphony, or Pylons. They're equally as "good" as Django or any other framework.

However in this case Django is an outlier for what the use case they needed, after all it was created for content based web apps like LJWorld.
because if you lose your phone, all your passwords are compromised.
Impossible Mission was the best! Unless you were trying to play it on the Atari 7800. :)
The March to Invisibility
The Hidden World Of Girls
If you are really serious about passwords, then generate random passwords offline on non-networked computers. There's an app called launch codes I use to do that. It uses random data from MS CryptoAPI to seed a Mersenne twister RNG. Letting people create their own password is like letting a child run with a knife in his hand.
If it's durable, inexpensive and introduces thousands of children to programming then it's "64-ish" enough for me.

...the deciding factor will be the software, I can see this coupled with Ubuntu and Scratch as being an acceptable descendant; but running Windows and...whatever free and accessible development tools they provide...oh wait...
a friend recently launched feedingo.com - which is exactly that, a better google reader.
Debunking Michael Lewis’ Subprime Short Hagiography
Rubinius in the Rough: High Performance Ruby
Yes, but no reason to fling insults around. Linking to articles you enjoyed and commenting on them is not some kind of despicable act. It’s, in fact, quite normal.
How SEO Book Earns A Profit By Selling Content
Virus negli smartphone Vodafone
Rendering 'Happy Feet 2' at 30kW A Rack
Simulating a bot-net with 10 million nodes
Quick suggestion: Instead of better documentation, I suggest you remove less-used elements from the main screen and put more emphasis on the important ones. For such an important feature (add a node), it should be trivially easy to see how to do it.

Also, it could be great to have a project open by default when you first open the application.. instead of the: file new project.

Oh, and everyone can down me, I don't care, I use a smurf account. Constructive critism = down vote, while saying wow good job, is +5 karma. So, I have 2 accounts: one to say wow, and one to say real important critismes.

Guess what, one is always around 0 karma while the other is high ranked.. what a shame :)
Do you really expect college students, most of whom have little money, to line up to forgo ~$10k of income (roughly the amount you can make at a programming internship, varying wildly of course) so they can do an open source project?

People should go where they can get the most overall value. Getting $10K for an in-the-flesh internship at a development shop is easily better value than $5K from the GSOC program for most people.

People who are good for open source are attracted to it naturally. They care about more than money. That's my whole point really.. that the best people in open source aren't motivated by cash, so why attract people who are?
Setting up an office for a software company.
IPL T20 Live Scorecard Updates from Real People
> There's none of that nice, slow maturation of product and increased customer base you may get if you make, eg, bug tracking or database software, operating systems etc. Each release is potentially a very big, maybe-the-company-won't-survive flop.

What you're saying is that "VCs shouldn't invest in studio based game companies" and I think you're right. There are other development models that do not have the same schedule/single-release problems. Free to play is the first that comes to mind, just looking around at the facebook scene (where games are launched and often fall flat until someone iterates and finds the right spark, only to then watch their game blow up). Another example would be WoW. They did a lot of things right at launch but if you look at the product today it really shines from the years of public iteration it's been able to go through.

Unfortunately those development models really don't work for boxed retail console games today, so there are lots of valid reasons to work in a studio model.
check out the appengine_utilities code on google code... it has some useful stuff in it.
MySQL+Memcached is still the workhorse
what cause? open source is not about charity.

"Open source" is commonly considered a "movement" or philosophy. While open source can be as simple as the process of merely releasing your code, the term typically refers to the more philosophical angle.

People who contribute to open source and end up getting paid to do that are one thing. People who only start to get involved with open source because they see a reward being waved about are quite another.
I don't know if I can agree with the stick shift argument. There are benefits over an automatic transmission, and you can choose the same model of car with either transmission types. I'd equate the differences to having a settings page with defaults and then advanced user options. I like a better design than not, but I think the traders use bloomberg terminal largely for the data that it displays. I don't think that is is going to change much between the current and potentially redesigned versions.
At some point in the future the web will become like the book: static to the end user. Or, gasp, worse: the dvd. At least a book lets you skip pages. Is it that hard to see a future where groups like Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Warner Brother, Disney, Sony, etc. force content consumers to consume content the way they want it to be consumed? Take a look at all the new digital set top boxes out there that disallow you from making copies of your own content.

Today Facebook goes after the script author. Tomorrow they will go after the end user. This is straight BS. We can't let it happen.

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."
--Martin Niemöller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came
Wave motion in javascript
Does this slow down chrome once installed?
This is why I've never put much stock in the TIOBE index. If you're honestly trying to tell me Google Go has nearly half the developer support that Objective-C does (.921% to 1.970%) I'm officially calling you a fool.
Nothing wrong with writing them down, but put them on paper and keep them in your wallet or a safe. We put our SSN cards, driver licenses and passports and credit cards in our wallets. Why not our passwords?
I'm not sure if this can be truly generalized to the whole population, since this study was conducted on middle-aged women.

What the article (and perhaps the study) does not mention is the dietary habits of the women over the 13 year span. Exercise alone does not define your health, diet is very important, too.
My attitude is pragmatic.

Both S. Korea and Japan transitioned from totalitarian governments to open democracies peacefully and smoothly. These transitions were stimulated in part by strong economies, a growing middle class, a more educated populace, etc.

But enough with examples. Tell me an actionable plan for China to transition to democracy. You're not offering anything but nice sounding sound bytes.

That and the people in China themselves are not fully clamoring for democracy. Economic progress, rise in standards of living, and a better future is what the Chinese want.

My attitude may be "self defeating" but your attitude is self-righteous.

http://gizmodo.com/5500578/google-would-remind-my-grandpa-of...
How many men went into engineering because of the well known male engineers? I'm thinking the number is low and most went in because they had the knack or interest. Heck, you have to actually brave all the crap stereotypes Hollywood creates about engineers.
the more i think about your comment, the more i'm not sure you become a "rainmaker" by executing...rainmaker is really a term for the guy who brings in the business...often that guy as a sales bent and thinks big, but isn't great on execution...every rainmaker needs a strong team who can execute...but i don't think the two are as closely tied as you suggest
I decided to go with the Raphael library again, and hacked out code from http://www.ultrashock.com/tutorials/flash8/wave.php . Given another chance, I'd probably go with ProcessingJS/Canvas, but I'm not too unhappy with this attempt. (Move your mouse along the gradient up and down)
The trouble with that is that Reader is the Twitter of RSS readers. Why do I say that? Look at iPhone feed readers. Pretty much all of them use your Google Reader account to synchronize unread/read etc. so you don't have to read just on your phone. It's the API and data store for synchronized feed reading.
It seems as if this Google-China row is indicative of a larger trend taking shape: the divorce of Western capitalist enterprises and the Chinese government. There was an article saying as much in yesterday's Wapo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...). It will be interesting to see how this affects other Western companies suffering under censorship issues there--I heard something about Godaddy possibly pulling out of there as well.
It'll grow better if the government wasn't so damn corrupt.

It may even grow even faster if the caste system is abolished.
Agreed. As far as I'm concerned, a manual transmission and an automatic transmission are completely different animals altogether. In my mind, his whole argument fell thru once the statement was made. It's like comparing a text-based shell with a GUI interface. There are trade-offs to be considered and neither of them are "better" than the other, they just have different strengths and weaknesses.
Not a problem in my case; everyone I have as a contact in Buzz is someone I was already following in Reader.
I don't know about all of you...but for me even 1 hour of exercise a day is a high time commitment, especially when you have to look at the overhead (drive to gym, get clothes, change clothes, drive back)...it can easily turn into 2 hours a day
I've not noticed any slow down at all.
I'm absolutely positive that this can not be generalized to the whole population. Furthermore, I am completely sure that this report has absolutely nothing to do with HN's primary, secondary nor tertiary audience. The submitter should be absolutely ashamed at himself for posting something that should not come within miles of a site like this. It is not even fit for Reddit.
About the 80 lines width: yes, and it is much more important now than never (in my opinion). Have a look at most news websites, or at a normal book, or a newspaper, or LaTeX (and even Word!) standard text-width, it's all fitting in around that size because it is very efficient to read. Unlimited width for text is a UI anti-pattern, as the eye gets more and more pain to find the next line.

A great example of site respecting the 80 chars rules is Paul Graham's essays site, reading it is a pure pleasure also because of the fine presentation.
Intel Capital's view of the Internet
Hit Command+Alt+I for the web inspector. Quite nice. However there are some added features in this (resolution, outlining, form state manipulation).
So I see that the OP's title is "Duct tape considered harmful" but the title here is "Why Joel Spolsky was wrong about 'duct tape programmers' being good programmers."

These are two very different propositions. The OP's title suggests that duct tape is a bad idea and when you read the post you discover the essay was prompted by Spolsky's post. Whereas the title here suggests that the focus of the article is Joel Spolsky. In fact, the if the article is really about why Spolsky was wrong, this admits the possibility that Duct Tape programming is helpful, but that Spolsky got the arguments in its favour wrong.

I'm not arguing the editorialized title is a poor choice, just pointing out that it has a very different and much more personal focus than the OP's title. What do people think: Is it an improvement on the original?
OK, so at 22 miles the balloon bursts because the helium expands as air pressure drops. I get that.

Now suppose the guy sends up TWO balloons, one filled and the other only half-filled. At or near the 22 mile mark the first balloon bursts. Wouldn't the second balloon still be intact, and provide further lift for an even higher flight?
The fascinating thing about graphic designers is, if you use Photoshop then what do you get, a tool palette, in stark black and white, full of cryptic symbols. In other words, they tacitly acknowledge that for a busy professional, learning a "difficult" interface is fully worthwhile. Yet they continue to peddle "design" as if this isn't the case...
Good point, but couldn't you mitigate lack of connections with explicit networking? One could attend different networking events to find people with common interest and then work with them remotely to establish bond - common interest should help in that.

I'm not saying it's easy, but if there are practical things you can do increase chance of creating connections it may end up worth it for all the benefits of the nomadship.
The script is very useful. Using it seems like using twitter. No noise.
Brilliant. I'm glad to see a sex positive startup being recognised for its value, rather than shunned because investors are too prudish to see value. This kind of stuff really improves the quality of people's lives, creates value, and generally makes the world a better place.
Startup idea: Self-inheritance via reincarnation.
PiratFrog >>> Un-hacker-algerien-a-pirate-le-site-internet-de-la-Banque-d-Israel-ou-il-a-poste-un-message-pour-denoncer-la-politique
I can't be sure, but maybe they are giving everyone their own copy so stuff like accidentally removing things people already bought doesn't happen.

IANAL but it seems like this would make the data _yours_ instead of them providing it as a streaming service. Which means if they are e.g. forced by a court for whatever reason to not provide a specific song anymore (if the author plagiarised it for example), they can't take it away again from you because it's yours. If it were a simple service you could access to get a copy, they might be forced to not provide that anymore.
It's not just UIs. I was in the closed beta for a computer game (friend was a dev), and one of the goals of the developers was to lower the barriers to entry for new players to get into the genre. Nearly universally, the self-described 'hardcore' players decried the changes as dumbing down the game and removing the skill barriers between new and old players. In fact, some of those changes were UI upgrades, like making the item shop easier to navigate. While that one was more generally accepted, there was still a vocal minority that thought that noobs being able to easily purchase the items they had earned would lower the competitive aspect of the game.

While there's often an initial loud and forceful resistance to change, it dies down as people get used to the new system, except for a few die-hards. In the example above, it took about two months for the community to come around and realize that removing some obvious pain points let the players focus more on strategy and whatnot. Of course, it helps that the new system is clearly superior to the old system. Microsoft Office's Ribbon, on the other hand, is not clearly superior, so people still bitch about it years after it was introduced. I happen to think it's superior in theory, but the implementation was botched a bit (menu names and organization not intuitive), so it's not a clear upgrade.
I don't get two parts of Smith's debunking. If someone could explain that to me, I'd greatly appreciate it!

- The 'long side' at the time and with hindsight seemed so much larger; blaming the few (known) shorts who ultimately profited for enlarging the market seems counter-intuitive, to say the least. How could they have gone short on dozens of billions of synthetic products? Can anyone confirm her numbers?

- Also more philosophically, whose 'fault' is it to profit from madness? The one who recognized it and bet against it, thereby fueling the fire, or the one who invented madness in the first place? She seems to deem the shorts responsible for Wall Street's foolishness not being able to come up with liquidity fast enough and therefore going virtually bankrupt and needing a bail-out, which they undeservingly get. So why exactly does she consider the shorts responsible for Wall Street's failure in foresight/calculation?
I don't use Buzz, so the problems mentioned in the article aren't an issue for me, but I was getting frustrated with Google Reader for plain usability reasons, and also have unrelated privacy concerns with it, in the sense that at some point I assume Google is going to start doing user tracking to see what you read, how long you look at particular items, and so forth (not for any malicious reason but purely because they can probably somehow make money from it (ala http://www.newsweek.com/id/233773)).

I tried a bunch of different RSS readers for Linux and disliked all of them, so I ended up writing a RSS to email script that pulls down my feeds and sends me mail for new entries. I actually find this much more usable than Reader or any standalone reader - mutt (or sup if you prefer) is already is built for handling lots of information, and especially handy for sites like hacker news where I can just scan titles in the index and delete-delete-delete and pull up the occasional interesting story. Also reduces random 'wonder if anything good is new on reddit/hn' polling, so I'm finding it to be a big productivity win.

My script is at http://www.randombit.net/code/grab_rss/

And there is of course also rss2email which is basically the same thing - http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/
4 amazing organiozations which are making Edu20 a Reality
If human factors efficiency was the only factor driving interface design, we'd all be using Dvorak keyboards.
I do wonder, every time I see someone recommend 133+ing the vowels ("m0d3ltf0rd"), how many dictionary-attack programs and script try those as a matter-of-course. People who do that don't seem to do it "randomly" - just as in the example used, they tend to change every vowel to a number in a single word (or less often, phrase).
Taking full page (or canvas) screenshots in Windows
> If it's durable, inexpensive and introduces thousands of children to programming then it's "64-ish" enough for me.

Amen
Ask HN: How does a hacker have maximum fun with 500 euros?
Recently I recieved an email from my boss that I'm about to receive a gift of 500€ ~= $675 (and no he doesn't work for our nigerian branch ;)). The thing is that because of taxation reasons it needs to be spent somehow and I just can't take the cash and save it for something. Most people have taken gift cards to subvent their spending on TVs, holidays, etc. I've been traveling more than enough during the last 12 months (I've spent about 3 months at home) and I don't want/need a TV or a set of speakers.

So my question to you good people of HN is: what should I do with the money to have some hacker fun? Ideally I would of course want to spend the whole 500€ (it probably can be several items but a single purchase).

I like building / hacking things, I like hobby electronics and I don't want an iPad.
The thief wouldn't know where the passwords go, nor my username.
I use http://feedafever.com/ and I love it :)
pwgen tries to make remembrable passwords
Okay, gotcha. Thanks again. :)