skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I'm a newbie python/django person that has been using them both for about 6 months now. I've had multiple rants directed my way by web developers telling me that I was making a big mistake by using a framework - for all the sorts of reasons listed in this rant.

So apparently I'm ruining the universe by employing tools I don't fully understand. I must admit this particular complaint I find a bit perplexing. I'll drop down a level of abstraction if I find the universe demands it of me. Otherwise - I really don't care about what's going on in bowels beneath me. Maybe Gandalf is getting it on with a Balrog for all I know... but for my needs, it just doesn't matter.

I mean - I'll learn assembler if I come up against a use case that demands it of me. But that's just not likely to happen for the silly little things I'm working on.

I also happen to believe that it's a waste of time to teach kids the algorithm that you work through on paper for long division. Give the tykes a calculator and let society progress at the faster pace that technology allows. I mean - claiming that you need to use an abacas to do basic sums because that's how we old folk did it, is just ridiculous. All algorithms are just effective procedures which depend on a certain level of technological sophistication to be employed. The introduction of arabic numerals meant that we didn't have to use abacuses any more. Hooray!

Besides that - I actually know people whose applications I have aped for learning purposes - and I notice that I wrote them in about the tenth of the time, with less than a tenth of the experience, and they also seem to the run at ten times the speed with similar functionality. I hear yarns about how they were doing dumb things like not setting primary keys, or making loads of unnecessary calls on the database etc... and I think about how Django really helps me to steer clear of many of the basic mistakes. I learn about these as I go because I continue to read the awesome documentation as well as digging into the guts of how Django works. Through this I get a lesson on how at least one group of professionals think web development should be done.

I personally feel much better placed going forward than all the folks who've had to roll their own over the past 10 years. When I feel more comfortable with Django, probably the next thing I'll do is learn another framework - so as to get another perspective from the professionals.

I think it's a great way to learn - personally... and folks who think otherwise I'm going to keep ignoring.
great service, one of the best.
Show HN: TasteSpotting meets StackOverflow
Sorry for writing this here but I couldn't find your email in your profile. I am a Turkish CS student currently studying in US, and i would love to chat with someone with your experience. Please send me an email if you are interested.
Good luck girls! Remember you can make it, look at indinero's story...
... and that's the way we did it on Newton.

Well, more or less. No file system, just databaselets and indexes and search.

Ironically, it's harder to reflect actual heirarchies when you have a set of flat, easily searchable records like this. What you probably /really/ need is a multi-edge graph with queries.
Plenty of developers work on embedded systems, libraries, GUIs, adapters, etc. that never need to touch a database. Not to mention many developers may work on applications where data is provide by middleware layers or data services rather than databases directly.

I think you're letting your experience of development cloud your view over what software development involves.
> "But if you think of willpower as something that is not easily depleted, you can go on and on."

That's the problem. Going on and on and on. Usually when it comes to any complex task, going on and on and on is a BAD thing. Forcing yourself to take breaks at a set interval makes you realize and optimize what it is you have actually been spending time on. And assess the next direction to take.

Working without taking breaks is like jamming down the accelerator without steering! You need to do both if you hope to do anything more complex than travelling in a straight line.

"Willpower" is a bit fuzzy and may not be a limited resource, but attentional capacity and working memory most certainly are.
Saying your a C programmer is more like saying you are a carpenter that only uses non-powered hand tools. You can accomplish any task and you take pride in being a master of you simple tools, but getting a job done might take you multiple times longer than the carpenter who shows up with a table saw and cordless drill.
erm, no that is how you copy an app: http://www.weeplaces.com/ratiofinder/
Participating in established open source projects (regardless of whether they are on github) is a bit higher visibility than just publishing hobby projects.
This isn't really true, particularly with Rails 3. If you don't want to use the ActiveRecord database patter, don't use the default ActiveRecord ORM that ships with Rails. Drop in DataMapper instead, and use whatever pattern you wish.

Rails != ActiveRecord these days.
What would you propose as a "save" icon?
That is fantastically useful, thank you.
Water, Water with lemon, Water, some wine and then some more water. and NEVER corn water (i.e. pepsi, coke, snapple, etc...)
It's tempting to draw a sports/body analogy. Repetition sets up your body for change. Rest and recovery (including sleep) is when you actually change.
It's certainly possible to be a good programmer but to not have picked up HTML, but come on - making a simple web page is easy. A competent programmer should be able to pick it up quickly. (Note the "simple", though.)
It won't. The solution is to force everyone to use the 'car' (or cigarette lighter) variant of their chargers.
If someone got a key logger and logged your bank account name and code would that be considered stealing or "warning you what's possible"?
Startup Failure is a Positive Step Towards Success
Nike Womens Air Max+ 2009 Metallic silver Green
The last one was the most surprising, burglar smash .....

Even with those losses I'm still up from never buying home insurance :)
I think it's actually quite cool that Microsoft invented a new UI, instead of copying iPhone/Android. I haven't played with it yet, so I haven't seen the result, but I like that they are trying to do something new, instead of copying others.
Converting players into payers in 5 steps
ts;dsa - too short; didn't say anything
All of these fancy web frameworks like Sinatra Web.py and Compojure are making us soft. The abstractions that they hide are simpler than these frameworks. HTTP is easy.
Didn't Joel (on Software) write about famously foul-mouthed reviews from Gates?

Here it is:

My First BillG Review
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

"In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f-count, the better."
Mostly Vegan, 100% vegetarian
Gemalto Sues Google, HTC, Samsung Over Java Card Technology
Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design
jMockups is an HTML5-based web app that lets you create and share high fidelity website mockups. A lot of folks use Photoshop to do this, but Photoshop is hard to use, lacks common HTML elements, and makes it non-trivial to share your designs and get feedback. Long term I want jMockups to be not just a tool for designing your site, but a tool that helps you design it well (including built in grid systems, an extensive widget library, etc).

This is my fourth web app, the other three being Domain Pigeon (launched Jan 09 [1]), HNTrends (launched Sept 09 [2]), and Preceden (launched Jan 10 [3]). Being a developer more than a designer, I spent an endless amount of time designing each of them, which is one of the major reasons I created jMockups.

Check it out and let me know how I can make it better--it's something that I hope you can all use with your sites as well.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456471

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810112

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114834

PS: Make sure you check out the demo.
I think you're letting your experience of development cloud your view of what a database is. Almost every program imaginable requires one.
Okay, I must have misunderstood something. At which point does Firesheep get your credentials? Really, the only case I am aware of is if you are on a wifi network, and I'm not sure if all the users on a secure network use the same encryption key.

I haven't seen a hub in ages, so when you're on a LAN you shouldn't be getting any packets that weren't meant for you. When exactly does Firesheep work?
Walking around with a woman looking for a nail.
Show HN: our web app, Hire Marshal for easing the admin burden of hiring
Hire Marshal gives you an easy way of creating application forms for recruitment. Multiple reviewers can then score applicants and decide collaboratively who to interview.

https://www.hiremarshal.com

I'd love to hear your feedback. We have deliberately launched as early as possible, so there are definitely rough corners and embarrassing things lurking in there.

My co-founder and I run a fast-growing company based in London and Seattle. In the course of building our company, we have repeatedly found that hiring is far and away the hardest thing we do. There are lots of hard parts to hiring - and in our opinion it's going to stay a major part of the CEO's job for some time to come. It's always going to be hard to get your opportunity in front of great people. It's always going to be hard to evaluate the quality of applicants.

Hire Marshal is designed to remove as much as possible of the administrative burden.

So, yes, it's a side project of sorts, but none the less exciting for that.

I hope you might also be interested to read (and spread the word) about our plan to spend $1,000 fixing open source bugs:
https://www.hiremarshal.com/blog/hiremarshal/1000-to-fix-open-source-bugs-launching-hire-marshal/
Help guitarists track their tabs
I amused/depressed by all the supposedly tech-savvy bloggers who are pleasantly surprised that the vast majority of the web works on WinMob7 despite it not having much modern HTML5/CSS3 support.

They seem blissfully unaware that Internet Explorer on the desktop is the boat anchor holding all these sites back from deploying these technologies and that they're now adding a second flank with this mobile browser throwback.
better to pay the grocer now than the doctor later... a vegan diet will save you later in life
I dont understand why people dont use consistent icons on their apps.

I always choose an icon set (Oxygen, Tango, etc) and use it for whole project. Sometimes there are missing icons, but i think its worth the consistency i get.

Same style and same palette for all my icons.
Toilets and engineers
Demystifying PR Event in New York City from Hackers & Founders, November 17
Of course they know what it is - it's the 'save icon' :)
Wait, it used to be real?!
Awesome! Happy to help.
Easter egg? http://rmmbrapp.appspot.com/test
$1,000 to fix open source bugs
As long as only the minimally motivated can exploit it, it's not really a problem, gotcha.

How about instead of shooting the messenger, you take some of that righteous anger and point it at the companies with millions/billions to spend who have simply ignored a longstanding known issue?
Putting together a great event discussing the ins/outs of getting buzz for your company. Hoping to have a live webcast as well.
In other news: Ray Ozzie leaves Microsoft.
I made it for Holla - from the jQuery Mobile mockups http://jquerymobile.com/designs
Another explanation is just that the article was going to be delayed for some non-sinister reason. Then WSJ pushed it out the door in response to the TechCrunch article because, had they published it in (say) a week, it would have looked like they wrote the whole article to answer TechCrunch (as opposed to now where is just looks like the released it to answer TechCrunch).
I'd love it if one day Michael Arrington came on here talking about how Techcrunch was once a 'somewhat popular blog'
I think you have misread me. And while my knee-jerk reaction was to meet snark with snark, I shall resist the temptation. If none of your software has ever read from or written to a source of persistent data, I think you should be concerned. :)
With a few lines of code you can easily incorporate tinyMCE wysiwyg editor.

Take it from somebody in the email marketing biz: sending emails in bulk is a massive headache. You need to worry about IP Reputation and whitelisting. If you plan on sending from a single IP, you will get banned.

Smtp.com provides good dedicated IPs meant for email delivery. Best thing to do is get a new IP and send about half a million emails per month / per IP.

Also, charge for the service. It's the only way to weed out actual Viagra selling spammers. Even if you keep it at $5 a year and don't get any income from it...it will be more beneficial to your users who are doing the right thing
You're saying that the BCC server doesn't have even a self-signed SSL cert installed? Or something else?
A Sledgehammer Called OmniFocus
I wouldn't say it "hangs" as everything is actually working fine and "hang" means that the process is stuck. It's just there is no output to provide feedback that it is working as expected.
this is great, I was using google images up until now for this... not anymore
Forget All The Rules About Graphic Design
If your people aren't good, you're not managing them well.
Blame yourself, not the people you're responsible for.
I lived in the UK for a bit and was amazed that brits actually aren't beer snobs. In fact, all of my coworkers seemed to enjoy Stella, which is worse than american macro beers. Not to mentioned Budweiser is all they serve in football stadiums.

Also according to my Italian friend Peroni is the pabst blue ribbon of european macrobrews.
alanstorm of stackoverflow answers that deal with Magento fame (well, fame being a relative term but famous to me, anyway)?
Is Android Open Source or Not? Let's settle this once and for all.
Another mockup app? Oh, well. But jMockups is nicely done.

Personally I'd like a feature to export to PDF and/or PPT and a print-view (which automatically takes care of the PDF-export).

The Popup-Controls are well-done, but I'd like to use cmd-c an cmd-v to duplicate instead. Images should be upload-able.
Many browsers give warnings when mixing secure and insecure content. Know of a good cross-browser example that mixes http and https requests?
8 core per die MIPS based processor at 1Ghz.

Not much else to the article other than a "China doesn't need Intel/AMD theme".
I think you're on to something. There are a few sites that let you run newsletters (Constant Contact is one I've used) but they are just terrible to use.

I think you're going to find out pretty quickly you'll need to charge though, especially if you want any of your emails to actually get delivered. That's a non-trivial problem and involves actual labor to prevent spammers from using the service. Just making someone verify their identity by putting in a credit card will help a lot.
I'd include a demo on the front page. I know it is a simple concept, you know it is a simple concept, but you have to show your users.
I'd be careful there: optimizing for activism doesn't optimize for social welfare, it just optimizes for the moral satisfaction of activists.
A Google Suggest Venn Diagram Generator
I had never heard about Juggernaut -- is it any different than Socket.IO? A cursory glance indicates they are very similar.
The APU doesn't run in-flight (unless shit gets real and the engines are disabled or need to be re-started). Everything electric pretty much runs off the generators powered by the main engine (in-flight), or ground power (at the gate).
I think the floppy icon will stick around a while longer. How many times have you heard the rotary phone ringing bell sound used as a ring tone lately?
How will you find your truest, most productive niche?
How about you recognize that there are a lot of innocent people who will be hurt by this stunt? There are hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of people who are targets for this, and most don't have a spare million lying around.

Hospitals, nonprofit groups, anyone running a website has to drop everything to lock it all down now. The effect is a lot like loosing a new virus (and might ultimately be treated that way).

> As long as only the highly motivated can exploit it, it's not really a problem, gotcha.

^ This modified statement is correct. All I'm saying that making something easy to use and publicizing it widely is going to result in a lot more people using it.

[Edits - hey jfager, I don't know you from adam and don't particularly enjoy flamewars. I agree that in the long run this should be fixed, ideally in such a way that 99.99% of people can blissfully go about their day. I just wish that the energy to secure stuff had taken the form of (say) a post on "here's how Google converted Gmail to https" rather than Firesheep. Hope we can find some common ground and you can see my POV.]
Meh, I hate analogies with a passion, but here's my useless rewrite:

Calling yourself an Emacs Programmer is like saying you're a Hammer Carpenter.

Calling yourself a C programmer is like saying you're a framer.
Calling yourself a Ruby developer is like saying you're a brick layer.

Both can be used to build a house and it's usually better to work with what you know.
Maybe they never felt the need to do it?
Most other mockup apps focus on creating low-fidelity (sketched) mockups, whereas jMockups focuses on creating ones that look like the real thing. It fits somewhere between Balsamiq and Photoshop.

I hear you on the Copy/Paste. I want to make it so that it works across browser tabs, which is a bit tricky, so I put it off until after the launch. Thanks for the feedback.
They covered that objection in the paper, which is available free on the website of one of the authors: http://www.stanford.edu/~gwalton/home/Publications_files/Job...

In study #2, they manipulated people's beliefs about willpower by administering a "push poll", and then tested willpower depletion.
MIPS processors in general, haven’t been tested in the context of the modern supercomputer

O RLY? Someone ought to tell (what's left of) SGI about that.
I find it striking that the biggest, tangible impact that everyone has pointed to when discussing Ozzie's career at Microsoft is some memo that he wrote 5 years ago.
Employee Equity: The Liquidation Overhang
Main reason they used those find_by / find_all_by methods is that there's no good way to shortly express one-field finder.

Compare

DM: Article.first(:author => person)
AR: Article.first(:conditions => {:author_id => person.id})
AR shortcut: Article.find_by_author_id(person.id)
AREL: Article.where(:author => person).first # not sure about that
No, most embedded programmers will never deal with any form of database unless you stretch the definition of database so far as to include lookup tables. I am pretty sure arrays are not databases.
Certainly you can, but I find that bookstores generally don't, and I don't at home--force of habit.
"Web frameworks are enabling a whole generation who can't even use a scripting language without relying on plenty of magic."

I don't really think people program like this. When I tried using rails 2 years ago, all the magic it was doing behind the scenes actually made it impossible for me to use it, as I had no idea what magic was there and how it related to the underlying system. After some time of writing web apps "by hand", then trying out sinatra and padrino, I just recently looked at Rails again and suddenly understood how to use it.

What I want to say is that I don't think that the magic Rails does leads to stupid programmers. It will only help those that actually know what they want to do and make the repetitive parts easier. Honestly, I don't want to write a login system with hashing etc. ever again. I don't want to think about how to save old versions of the entries in the database. I don't want to write my own form helpers. I am happy that Rails does this for me and I can spend time thinking about the interesting parts of my program.
I think the spammer comment was about the fact that this is an email newsletter service, not that this is a self plug. I have a friend who works in email newsletters, we all joke that he's a spammer.
Very nice technology. But I think you've chosen the wrong domain. I don't think there's a big (or even small) market in doing "pixel-perfect mockups". We have Photoshop for that, which (frankly) provides better tools than yours.

I would take the technology (which looks great) and search for a better field to apply it to.
OK, that sounds like a marketplace, honestly.

Like: i'm tired of looking for work, let the work find me.

Create an auction with "hire-me" apps. It may be half-baked/weekend projects/proof of concept things etc. People come over to that kind of a "marketplace", and make an offer, no CV/interview required.
Maybe, but one of the first things I look for in a prospective candidate is open source contributions. That is what I consider an ideal reverse job application. You're benefitting the community and I get to see your code.
Plain old files are perfectly valid sources and sinks for persistent data, if you don't need all the other features of a database.
The question is: is there a space to be filled between Photoshop and Balsamiq?

In fact, there is one, it's detailed wireframes. It's not pixed-perfect html mockups, sorry. I think you've chosen a market that doesn't exist here, I can't imagine anyone actually using this in their work.
There is of course always the option that instead of you going to _look_ for a job you _create_ a job.
Lots of embedded programmers I know don't consider web development as "programming". Just sayin'.
Dr Tell Whitney,CEO Anita Borg on Success & Technical Women
Files are not databases.
Visual Studio 2010 Client Profile for Mono 2.8
It's probably tied to the start of Microsoft's PDC 2010 conference on purpose.
Good example of PR. This is a nice example of how you take a story that is fresh in everyones mind and ride on it.
That's nothing more than ego-fear in the extreme - after all, you don't have to step out of your comfort zone, success is just luck.

This, of course, isn't true at all.
Lots of people think the sun revolves around the Earth. Just sayin'.
I feel a little weird linking my own blog here, and know that Visual Studio isn't exactly the IDE of choice on HN, but I figured that there might be some folks beyond me that would rather use VS to target Mono than MonoDevelop (since the VS license is already bought & paid for anyway).
The APU doesn't run during normal flight, since the engine generators more than handle the electrical load.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=instant+search+something
My comment wasn't intended to be snarky, but when someone questions my credentials, albeit inadvertantly and through ignorance, I find it a little hard to be entirely objective.

I do read and write persistent data stores, I've just never had to use SQL or a relational database. I've just gone and looked it up. I do know the concepts of inner, outer, left and right joins, and I use similar constructions every day.

But this is counter-productive. I've made my point that there are areas of programming that don't use SQL or relational-databases or web technologies. Making sweeping statements about the competence of programmers based on their knowledge of technologies they don't use is blinkered.

Yes, programmers who work in web development most likely should know about databases and HTML. If they don't, then they are most likely either inexperienced or limited in their capabilities. It may yet be that the code they write is clear, clean, well-designed and bug-free, but databases and HTML are strongly correlated with productivity in this field.
Symbian OS Is Broken. Can It Be Fixed?