skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Java tends to make writing bad code difficult

I've known people who could write bad code in Java with the utmost ease!

It'd probably be more accurate to say that Java deliberately limits its expressiveness, in order to make it harder for people to shoot themselves in the foot, and to make it easier for one programmer to understand what another has written.
tl;dr: use B-Tree indexes.
No more confusions on tricky C declarations
another example: functions should be virtual by default.

No no no!

C++ got this one right, and then C# did better ('virtual' to declare a virtual/overridable function in the base class, and 'override' to replace it in the subclass).

http://www.artima.com/intv/nonvirtual.html

Every time you say virtual in an API, you are creating a call back hook. As an OS or API framework designer, you've got to be real careful about that. You don't want users overriding and hooking at any arbitrary point in an API, because you cannot necessarily make those promises. And people may not fully understand the promises they are making when they make something virtual.
Velocity 2010: Tom Cook, "A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations"
I usually use LaTeX with one of the presentation packages, but if you don't already use/like LaTeX or have significant math, it might not be worth the effort.

Prezi has lately been getting a lot of use at various conferences. Initially Prezi presentations got a lot of positive reception just for the novelty, but I think it's used enough these days that that part might be diminishing. http://prezi.com/

OO Impress and Google Docs presentations are fine for relatively simple things. OO Impress can probably do more complex things too, but I find it sort of clunky to use.

I actually did one presentation in just some hand-coded HTML with prev/next buttons. One advantage to that approach is that you can fairly easily include editable, executable .js code examples.
Regardless of the language, when you get to over 50K lines of code, cute tricks need to go out the window.
Ah, Zurich at no. 10, the place I've chosen to develop my startup. I probably should've taken my hard earned savings somewhere cheaper, but it's a great place to live and has a very good infrastructure.
The site requesting public comment is http://www.nstic.ideascale.com/
Best case scenario... OK, how many apps are in the iPhone app store? 1/4 million I think I saw somewhere? How many of those are open source? A lot of those sell more copies than most desktop apps would dream of. You can put open source apps on the store, and it could impact a ton of people. Why isn't it happening? Android apps, from what I've seen, have a similar comparison - while many of the successful open source apps are unique in some functionality, the vast majority of the polished design seems to be coming from small companies. And Android is far more appealing to most programmers / geeks who value open source. What's the disconnect coming from, if not lack of supply?

I've yet to see more than low-double-digits of beautifully designed open source programs, and the majority of those were made entirely by one person, often open-sourced because they didn't think they could get enough money to make monetizing it worthwhile. I've been watching for years (though I could be watching in the wrong area). Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been utterly rocketing towards more focus on design, and has a long history of success.

Want more evidence? Look at games. Millions upon millions of players, probably approaching billions of copies sold / downloaded, very few of which are open source games. There's an entire industry oriented around UI/UX and design... and where's the open source influence? Bad Civilization / Quake clones? A lot of the unique designs I've seen have been done by individuals without open sourcing the code, for whatever reason.

And yes, OOo is frightening on many levels. It's a worst case scenario, and I recognize it... but I see it echoed frequently in other OSS projects.

I have not said OSS cannot produce good UIs. I have said there seems to be a trend, and at least I have seen far less. And also take into account that this is not done by enumerating all programs ever produced; this is weighted by success, especially with the design-oriented consumer culture lately.
Bringing murder up to justify a moral scheme that few subscribe to is a bit silly. Everyone finds murder wrong, in most circumstances, hardly everyone finds taxing the rich immoral.

These things are complicated. Wealth can be generated in a variety to ways. The Phoenicians were quite wealthy for their time for establishing a trade network in the Mediterranean.

Apple produces virtually nothing (okay they make software but lets pretend for a minute that we are talking about the hardware. People do rave about the aesthetics of the devices). However, they have plenty of 'wealth' to capture than the manufacturers do for their charging price. They having marketing savvy and they are able to get large numbers of people excited about what they think of.

Facilitating transactions and applying knowledge are not exactly producing but doing these tasks can provide a decent living. If you want to extend 'producing' to mean anything that makes people money, your statement could be a truism but it seems you are using produce in a more traditional sense.
Google Gmail to Harness HTML5
The biggest revelation Python gave me is peoples thought process/problem solving process/whatever you want to call it (I call it brains) work differently. And importantly peoples brains are wired to work really, really well with specific language qualities(dynamic, functional, boilerplateish) as manifested in specific languages. But really poorly with other qualities/languages.

So, no you are not a bad person. If you've given Python a honest attempt (took me a year to do that, I had whitespace hangup that was hard to get past), then you aren't missing anything either. Python just isn't the language for you. Move on, be happy.
The Internet makes it harder to lie. Internet:1 Con Artists: 0
Google Chrome Extension Gallery Needs Moderation - Eset Key Finder Extension
There's a lot of other good comments here. Some might be relevant to you, some might not be.

Here's my advice:
If you don't have the AH-HAH moment, don't do it.

More rigid framework:

- what's the problem you're trying to solve?

- who is your customer?

- why would they pay for it?
It's pretty rare that I head over to Wikipedia so I can read any random article, but I'll use it to satisfy the mildest curiosity about nearly any noun I interact with. For instance, I used BART for the first time on Thursday, and now I kind of want to know all about it. So off to Wikipedia.
>because those systems force the price down below what people would be willing to pay on their own

This is very far from the truth. Worry not, rich people can spend to their hearts content in single payer countries. They still spend less and have better outcomes.

In the abstract maybe we do want to spend a lot of money for health care. However, medical costs have been growing at double digit rates. Hopefully that pattern does not continue for too much longer.
Or, even quicker and dirtier:

if 1: # x:
block
I do this quite a bit, but unlike with a paper encyclopedia, it leads to exponential explosion of my "TO-READ" stack, as I keep middle-click-opening new tabs throughout the process of reading an article. Often I then eventually get to one of the tabs and have no idea what it is or how I got to an article on such a bizarre subject. Eventually I have to give up and close 40 unread tabs.

edit: http://xkcd.com/214/
The Languages we call "Haskell"
Not even FBI was able to decrypt files of Daniel Dantas
All None Some - Social Scheduling
Intel's Meego OS Shown on Multitouch Tablet
Average iPhone app only earns $2 per day
I'm giving it a try now. Android and SVN plug-ins (the only ones I need at the moment) both installed just fine. It seems to start up a bit more quickly, but I don't have all of the plug-ins I had on the old install, so it's not really a fair comparison.

This doesn't seem to be a major release, so I'm not expecting miracles. Hopefully it will have better performance and less memory usage, though.

---

Update: It seems my dreams were short lived. Auto-complete seems to be absolutely horrible now. I'm getting a 30+s delay on pressing ctrl+space after typing the period on an EditText variable. Yuck.
Cyberspace Protection bill approved by Senate, no Internet kill switch
Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths
Unfortunately the weird Japanese fetish was a sexual attraction to having bookmarklets that open random pages on Wikipedia.
A huge impediment to developing apps for Android seem to be the absolutely incredible shortcomings of Google Checkout. Most countries cannot even buy paid apps, even fewer countries can publish paid apps. That kills pretty much any incentive for many developers, especially with a new "iPhone devs make bajillions" article every other day. The saddest thing about it is that Google do not seem to be moving about this, at all. Android Apps, E-Commerce sites, etc., lots of people are waiting for worldwide Google Checkout. I don't get why Google don't get it.
Wait, what? The third most expensive city in the world is in West Africa, and has 57% of its population living in extreme poverty? What happened there?
I too agree can wikipedia can be overwhelming. That is why I reject any link that does not sound 100% interesting and related to where I am right now. But the sad thing is, i have to close 20 unread tabs
I think the front page has an article per day that's more, um, curated:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Todays_featured_artic...

They also have a way to get random articles from the list of those rated as "featured" of which the front page featured articles are a subset:

http://toolserver.org/~erwin85/randomarticle.php?lang=en&...
I was a philosophy major and figured out accidentally in an academic setting that logic was one of my strong suits. After considering law, I decided I didn't want to live my day-to-life dealing with using tactics of logic and the legal system to battle against others. Of all the classes I ever took however, the most useful class for me personally was logic as it did the most to prepare me for doing business deals. Most business deals finally come down to negotiating and its good to make sure you can justify your value and easily knock down anyone who tries to undermine your value, on the spot, especially for fallacious reasons. And the more you have command of logic, the more your other qualities which are helpful for doing business deals may shine. This seems to be the case especially for those who like to design their own deals instead of take a defensive role to the another party's designs. And then comes the discussions of more in-depth terms, and logic becomes more and more useful all the way through the end of a contract. And ultimately, lawyers, who you may depend on for this part of your deal, are not usually meant to act as advisors to your business and tell you what you want to do, they are usually there just to protect you.

As others have pointed out, calling a logical fallacy card to ding an opponent may indeed often miss the point if the objective is to simply win, though I have found in doing business deals, it is logic that is most useful to protect my value and ideas, as opposed to just winning them.

So I would suggest that this is an article worth close study and that leaning about fallacies is a great way to get right at the elements involved in sound logic.

*note: this comment was not meant to be an argument, just a "subjective" comment for consideration.
I recommend slidedown - http://github.com/nakajima/slidedown. It processes markdown into great looking HTML slides that have code highlighting via pygments. I used it recently for a JavaScript presentation - http://jpignata.github.com/jasmine-bkjs
Ask HN: What cool mobile apps are still missing?
What mobile apps have yet to been done well, or at all? How much would you pay for such apps?

(Specifically for iPhone, Android, iPad, Palm, &c., whether native or web-based.)
ASCAP seeking donations to oppose Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and EFF
Bill Gates's Playboy Interview (1994)
Yes. If you're in this situation Zookeeper will change your life.
This thread prompted me to subscribe to the Daily article mailing list. I'll give it a try for 30 days. I like getting information by e-mail because it lets me read it on my phone (oldschool Blackberry 8510c, $25 shipped via eBay) when I don't have access to a computer.

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-article-l
Nope and I stay the hell away from deliriants.
Some of my startup ideas are based partly on the expectation that trusted curators will become more in demand in the future in any area where the Internet is disrupting like you described.
Former eng manager actually.

In this preso he's focusing in on just one aspect of how Flickr does things. He did a more wide-ranging talk with ops guru John Allspaw last year.

http://velocityconference.blip.tv/file/2284377

For instance, as people noted already, he's advocating testing features on live servers -- in a controlled way. This doesn't work unless you have the kind of dev/ops cooperation that he describes in the above video, as well as practices for quickly rolling back changes and a culture of not blaming people.
I mention that in the post, get specific with the characteristics of the particular B+Tree that we just constructed, and even link off to the relevant Wikipedia entry. :)
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide covers almost everything. If you take the time to read it, you'll know javascript very well. Then get into jQuery (this guide looks good: http://www.rebeccamurphey.com/jqfundamentals).
First make a small startup that sells ideas for startups.

Even if sales don't pick up, it might come in handy.
Sometimes Apple’s material choices are questionable. Their iPod touches have this really slick, polished metal back. It looks really great – for a few weeks. Then it’s quickly getting scratches.

I don’t know whether they picked that material for sentimental reasons (all iPods back to the first one – except the smaller ones – had that back) and whether you are just supposed to accept that back that’s slowly getting more and more scratches. (I won’t use cases. Never. I have to be able to put your gadget in my empty jeans pocket. If I can’t there’s something wrong with your product.)

Apple knows and used better materials. My trusty six year old brushed aluminum iPod mini pretty much looks like new and has been treated far worse than my iPod touch.
That sounds like a really interesting story. What kind of regulation shuts down sand producers? Is sand environmentally hazardous? Does warning workers about silicosis with sand MSDSes cost a lot?
The book is very concise and probably one of the books with higher ratio of relevant content per page. It also teaches you the grammar of JavaScript in one of the most simple and unambiguous ways I ever seen in a book (railroad diagrams).

On the other hand it was one of the shortest book I ever read in which I had to reread and go back more times. JavaScript can be a bit confusing at times and the book only says things once and in a succinct way.

Everything was going fine until Prototypes and Constructors and the very bad 'new' operator, that somewhat surprisingly was used in the good function which achieved Prototype Inheritance (example in here: http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html), but after a while I got it. ;)

It's the only book I've read about JavaScript yet. I consider it very good if you already are proficient in other programming languages, but it doesn't really show you what to do with it (and it wasn't supposed to), so I'm now planing to buy JavaScript the Definitive Guide.
IPhone 4's 'Retina Display' claims exaggerated, says expert (UPDATED)
MultiMethods for Python
Not sure why we are posting alternative language implementations, but here is the Scala version :). You could say that this was an exercise for me in learning 2.8, which I am unfamiliar with. A for comprehension isn't needed because Scala already treats Strings as a sequence of characters.

(Set("letters in this sentence":_* ) & Set("and this one":_* )).toSeq.sorted.reverse

Or you, can take advantage of Scala's rich choice of collections.

import scala.collection.immutable.TreeSet

import scala.math.Ordering._

TreeSet("letters in this sentence":_* )(Char.reverse) & Set("and this one":_* ) toSeq

The machinery Scala has in place to make the second example work is quite impressive, and I was pleased to see that it worked. Even though the intersection method returns a brand new set, using implicit arguments it correctly creates a set of the correct type (TreeSet) with the correct ordering function (Char.reverse), without any duplication of code in the standard library (like overriding '&' in every sub-class).
a = '''O'Malley says "Hello"'''
Ive is right. My new iPhone is like a work of art. Like a piece of art in a museum, because I can't touch it either. The unit I have has so many problems, simply holding it makes it lose both 3G and wifi signal. I'm exchanging mine or switching back to my 3GS
There's Scott Chacon's interesting approach to presentations called ShowOff: http://github.com/schacon/showoff
No, the "dismissing" of thoughts goes like this:

1. Recognize you are having a discoursive thought
2. Identify it
3. Release it

It's not repression at all: it's acknowledgment, like saying hello to someone you recognize on the street, but continuing where you are going.
Postabon's mobile website can access the users GPS location, if that capability is present on the user's device. smanek can chime in here. (I wrote their iPhone app.)
Living with a high standard of living in a poor city is not necessarily inexpensive. While labour and land will be significantly cheaper, importing western luxuries will likely be quite expensive, since there's far less of a market for those kinds of goods. And that's not to mention potential for corruption, extreme tarrifs etc (but I know nothing of Angola in particular, so I'll stay away from jumping to conclusions there).
> Apache vhosts are already handled like that.

And they are not much better :) (actually I prefer Nginx - better syntax)
Here is a Factor version:

: print-ing ( filepath encoding -- )
[ [
" " split
[ dup "ing" tail? [ print ] [ drop ] if ] each ]
each-line ]
with-file-reader ;

It's kind of ugly because it's designed to print out the values without leaving anything on the stack. It can be prettier if it produces an array of matching words

: collect-ing ( filepath encoding -- seq ) { } -rot
[ [
" " split
[ "ing" tail? ] filter append ]
each-line ]
with-file-reader ;

and then just prints that out

: print-ing ( filepath encoding -- )
collect-ing [ print ] each ;
visit Postabon.com from Safari on an iPhone
Hillegass spent time and text comparing Cocoa constructs to other programming languages. On distractions.

Steinberg's approach had better technical progression, tighter focus and superior editing.
If I was making a product that wouldn't be done for a year, I'd think about targeting next gen tech. But for apps that take at most a month or two? No way.

I tried making an iPhone web app... tooo slooow.
I should add that I mean the mobile versions of both. GMail's desktop interface is great.
It's really not. Is the UK more or less part of Europe than Norway (non-EU country), Poland (non-Euro country), or Ireland (non-Schengen country)?
What would I do then if there weren't silly little writing errors to nitpick about...
If you're still wondering about this, contact me directly (my info's in my profile).

My advice would be not to try to sell it.
LOL, I tried all sorts of variations but it never understood what I was on about.
that sounds like a great app!
I am OK with passing judgement like that. I was more concerned about confusion with another meaning of the term Real Programmer:

"A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal Real Programmer likes to program on the bare metal and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been tuned into a state of tenseness just short of rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write documentation: “If it was hard to write”, says the Real Programmer, “it should be hard to understand.” Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of other programmers — because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their successors generally consider it a Good Thing that there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A. The term itself was popularized by a letter to the editor in the July 1983 Datamation titled Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form." (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/R/Real-Programmer.html)
In practice, it turns out to be easier to do with if-else statements as well.

A factory pattern is useful when you know ahead of time along what dimensions your system will change. You can build an interface with methods for each of those change points, then call out to those methods when appropriate. For each experimental variant, you provide a different implementation and instantiate it based on experiment selection at the factory.

Unfortunately, these types of configuration changes, by definition, tend to be experimental. Meaning you have no idea how the app is going to change to accommodate them, you just have an idea that might or might not help users and you want to test that hypothesis as quickly as possible. Rearchitecting your app to build the appropriate factory interfaces takes significantly longer than just throwing in an if, and it's all wasted effort if the experiment comes back with a null result (as many do).

If you find yourself making experimental changes to the same areas often, then you might want to look at introducing a Factory. But design patterns in general are something you reach for once the system has matured, not something you do when you're still experimenting and exploring the domain.
Lunch in Copenhagen for $36. Wonderful.
The way to do a presentation has changed a lot. The way you do it today is with a image and a caption to explain the idea, when you are explaining the idea; and when you are describing a code snippet embed it.

Obviously you iterate over the process. If you do it in powerpoint or keynote, it sucks. Are you manually going to copy paste the code every time?

Use latex with beamer class. Even tho' it is old, when customized, it _is_ still the best way to do presentations.

<shameless plug>

I created a (what I believe is) awesome presntation: http://www.slideshare.net/scorpion032/building-pluggable-web...

using Beamer class and here are the custom commands used: http://github.com/becomingGuru/gids-django-ppt/blob/master/c...

</shameless plug>
WWPGD?

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
2. http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
Dude, i am impressed.WT really rock!.Just one problem how do Python programmer learn C++ fast?
Some things may be as hard as a complete rewrite, though.
Does anyone have an actual LIST that I can look at AT ONCE and compare the entries, spot patterns, etc?

I can't even hover over the images/thumnails and get the name of the city! Even the URIs are numbers and not names, so I actually have to click through 50 pages!

EDIT:

Here y'all are: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp