skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wish this had been more active - I enjoyed reading OP and ryanto's comments. OP, you might find a bigger audience if you resubmit on a weekday?
One of the more unique programming approaches I've come across is the Leo editor, which was written to support literate programming but also functions as an outliner.

When you're working with Leo, you work with a tree of text nodes instead of working with explicit files/directories. Because the nodes exist in an always visible tree, the natural inclination is to label the node with what the code inside does. This subtly enforces literate programming.

This is good, but what makes Leo novel is the nodes can be cloned (think hard symlink) and then rearranged however you like. You can put a node containing a function's unit tests and another containing its documentation as children of the node containing the function. When fixing a bug, you can create a node that points to the issue's url in your bug tracker and then clone all related nodes as children for both documentation and convenience when you're working on the bug. When working on frontend code, you can clone nodes for related js/html/css for conveniently switching between them. It's very cool.

Unfortunately, it's not really practical to use it as your primary editor. Ed serializes/deserializes the nodes to files using sentinels in comments, so the output files tend to wind up with a lot of "junk" comments. I also missed the Vim command grammar a lot.
I agree, I've also noticed the elevators in my office building are on a schedule and behave differently during business hours than evening and early morning hours.

Maybe it's for the convenience of the after-hours cleaning staff, but after 7PM the close door button can even make the door close before it finishes opening upon arriving at a floor.
Hey, doc, what about insulin and other hormonal stuff? What harm is it going to be short-term / long-term?
Thanks, I knew I'd read it in there.
The rendering seems pretty good. The prose needs some work though. It was only marginally more useful than relatively sparse comments. Didn't seem to add the value I was expecting.
I don't know that anyone can answer you with any substance unless you tell us what the app does and is titled. Icon looks like a good enough icon on it's own merit but does it fit your app? I don't have any info on what your app is so I can't answer that.
There are actually multiple demos going on. If you go to https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html it will put you on one of the projects via ghetto load balancing (read: redirect to one of the demo projects at random).
Many buildings with multiple evelators are programmed to return to a stagger position, so all of the idle elevators are at least one floor apart if not evenly distributed across the whole height of the building. The closest idle elevator responds to a call button.

This is easiest to observe in builds with glass elevators.
I never really understood how the developers and maintainers of the Java language could put up with the overly complicated disaster that is file I/O. They've managed to take something that's relatively simple in most languages and turn it into an utter disaster. I was shocked, years ago, when I was learning Java after having lived in C++ world.
If you're paranoid enough to think Apple is going to make the Mac App Store the only way to install software (not going to happen, but whatever)...

... why on earth would you trust Apple not to remove the third-party app store support in some future release?
I'd be far more insulted if the city spent $2 million [Made up Number] it doesn't have removing buttons that did no harm to anyone.
I've been waiting over 5 now! It's a joke! I even applied to be an editor for the category 3 years ago to try and speed it up...
Ask HN: What would happen to Google's revenue if Firefox came with an adblocker?
I'm curious if people think it would be unethical to ship Firefox with an adblocker and what the effects would be on Google and other sites.
You don't even need a fire... just a key...

I'm a firefighter/EMT in upstate New York. We use an elevator key from time to time to hold an elevator if we know we're going to need that elevator to move a patient in a few minutes (in addition to other "fire related" uses like actual fires, fire alarms, and elevator mechanical issues).
MSR have had a few profitable collaborations with their .net language implementors. The generics system in c# for example was originally developed by Don Syme (who also worked on f#) and Andrew Kennedy. I think once you've had a good example of a successful collaboration between the two groups you're more likely to see future cooperation. The local type inference in c# (the var keyword) I believe was also improved heavily by discussions with MSR.

With regards to your 'from scatch' question I think f# is designed in order to bring useful functional programming techniques to the .net community. This isn't necessarily possible to do with Haskell because of the difference between the way function calls work in lazy and strictly evaluated languages.

Its worth noting the other aspect of the f# story. Ocaml is a huge influence on the f# language design. It was originally pushed during the 1990s as a language that had combined functional programming with pragmatic compromises - for example OOP and the existance of an efficient implementation. Unfortunately the Ocaml implementation suffers from poor performance in multicore environments, particularly constrained by its garbage collection system. This wasn't a huge problem in the mid 90s, but its looking like a problematic design choice with hindsight. Since f# builds on the .net VM it doesn't have this multicore issue.
What do the motivating factors behind Clojure have to do with anything?

Motivating factors dictate current practices. If every piece of Clojure PR says things like "harness all the power of Java from a language that uses Lisp semantics/syntax", of course library authors will be comfortable doing so.

Part of the reason Clojure is great is because we don't have to re-implement all the functionality that Java libraries have given us in order to have a viable language. That benefit goes away if we start saying "stay away from Java".
I don't read Slashdot comments because of the repetitive or off topic jokes that add nothing productive to the conversation.
The governance structure and voting system is very close to the one the Apache foundation uses for its projects.

The retrospectives and 360 compensation system is our innovation, and is untested (except on us!)
I think it's too "out-of-the-box" for most companies, it might fit better with non-profits which are largely driven by volunteers or startups though as their existing working model is closer to the BetterMeans model (i.e. people pick which projects to work on, etc.)

But I think there needs to be some level of hierarchical control rather than a complete free-for-all though, as things like budgets, etc. have to be managed (disclaimer: I told the Wikipedia founders the same thing when they started. I may have been a tiny bit wrong in that case ;-)

The product looks very slick though !
I already registered a temporary domain name (not posted here) with a web app running on a heroku server. The purpose of this url is for testing and my own personal use - yes, I have been using the app for 2 weeks missing many critical features and I still love it. And I do not view this as "wasting time" as the time I spend thinking about domain/startup names does not take away from coding time. I think about these things during fluid dynamics class and right before I fall asleep at night, thanks.
It may be more convenient for the end-user, but it would raise running costs significantly.

If the elevator is needed at the lobby 50% of the time, means it is also needed elsewhere 50% of the time. It means that 50% of the time the lift is travelling to the lobby and then back to a needed floor empty. If it only moves when called then it only ever travels the difference between its end point and new start point which is AT MOST the number of floors in the building.

If every floor is accessed equally (as you'd expect), then 50% of the time the elevator needs to travel half the height of the building (on average) TWICE when it goes into idle state. The average of this method is equal to the maximum of the other...or something.

....but then I haven't had my morning coffee yet.
Could have been a button for a now walled-up dumbwaiter. ISTR that there was one in the NYC apartment I grew up in.
Lack of a career path is part of why I left Apple to start my own company. The hierarchy is quite flat, and the departments are quite compartmentalized. Because of this, if you want to move up, you're probably quitting and applying to a new job that also happens to be at Apple. Of course, it was a wonderful place to work in a lot of other ways.
Mobile Tech and the Evolution of the Nation-State
This Stanford talk will eventually be available on the web as a video. For those in the SF Bay Area it's a free public talk.
Thanks for responding. I already know HTML and CSS (not that I have any eye for design - ha!).

I have a basic grasp of simple JS and ajax, and can usually google how to do a given thing...but maybe that's a place to start filling in the gaps. Especially if I could combine it with learning JQuery.

I already have a one-project Rails portfolio, http://archive-fb.com (as well as several easy practice apps that are not deployed).

I guess I was just trying to ask, given the extent of my learning so far (as judged by archive-fb.com + my comments), how far am I from jobdom and what should I do next to get closer?
i clicked expecting something like roach marking and tracking hack. Reading the comments it looks though that even marking and tracking of health inspectors would already be a start.
What I intended to say was that there are big differences between what services are used where.

If that was unclear I'm sorry about that, but how would I know how Google Voice works when I'm not allowed to use the service?
Fixed newlines!
They offered free airport wifi last holidays - i specifically took notice if their branding because it was such a handy offer.
I'm not familiar with python - does it have some magic global sentinel value to indicate "not found"? Or how do you handle that case with that 1 line of code?

Secondly, saying "it's still .NET" is similar to saying "it's still x64". The F# compiler does a lot of transforms on code that the C# compiler does not. In some cases, this can result in better IL and better JIT'd code. Also, having inlining support at the compiler level can be very handy sometimes.
The point I was trying to make was that on mobile devices where computing power and battery power is a limited resource, not only will it be running significantly more Javascript, but it would also have to render the view - effectively doubling the number of client-side tasks.

If all the device had to do was consume HTML and render it, it would impact performance and battery life less. Also, if you build your entire page in Javascript, you could see as much as 50% difference in page load performance across browsers. Until most users that still browse with IE are on a version that is at least as fast as Firefox, you're allowing client experience to vary wildly outside of your control. Basically, you control how you serve your content, but you have no control over how fast the client builds HTML from server-data. In 5 years this may not be an issue, but right now it is.

The more work you do on your own infrastructure, the more stable your service would become.

Now, I'm still a fan of single-page apps, but for initial page loads it still makes sense from a performance perspective to render it on the server.
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525951113?ie=UTF8&tag=... like the plot of this book</a>
Upvoted because that's good code reuse in the scenario that you only want to store a default value, and I can see why you replied to the commenter with it. It doesn't necessarily work so well in the scenario where you want to perform some operation if there isn't a value. Or if default needs to be computed. I'm assuming that the idiomatic way of doing this in python would be:

try:
value = dict['foo']
except KeyNotFound:
value = do_something_interesting()
dict['foo'] = value

If you could pass a function in as a default of course this point is moot!
This Stanford talk will be available as a video on the web at some point in the future. For those in the SF Bay Area, it's a free public lecture.
As someone who is pretty active in the health/fitness community I HATE n=1 studies like this that get so much press. All this does is give people yet another excuse not to eat a healthy diet and it gets quite annoying.

Of course if you starve yourself of calories you will lose weight, but how sustainable is that in the long term? The reason 90% of diets fail is because people can't keep to them, and who can keep on such a calorie restrictive diet. Never mind the fact that you will be losing muscle mass along with the fat in a starvation type diet like this.

The Calories In = Calories Out dogma, has been ousted out of the hardcore Health/Nutrition community (See Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories). The quality and type of foods you eat, i.e the macronutritent ratios, are infinitely more important than the total number of calories. That is not to say that we can eat 10,000 calories of the right food, but you can eat to satiety or to your BMR and still lose weight by eating food that in the right macro ratios.

A diet like the one described here would be destroying this persons insulin sensitivity and in turn his leptin sensitivity. He will be at high risk of Type 2 Diabetes among other things.

If you want to lose weight and get healthy easily, cut your carbs dramatically, eat protein and fat to satiety. Lift some weights and do some slow steady cardio every other day (brisk walk etc.) Fix your sleep hygiene (this is super important) and you will be blown away at how the fat will disappear.
Although I agree that it'd be better to know more about the app, I think the icon needs some polishing either way. A good logo/icon isn't created overnight and can always be benefited by conversation.
Ask Not What Your Company Can Do for You...
Does the facial recognition signal N170 generalise/apply to other species too? Dog faces? Cat faces?
+1 on this. This type of diet must be destroying his insulin sensitivity and in turn his leptin sensitivity.
Here's another demo to reproduce the "broken" back button:

1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker
2. Click the "Innovation" link in the ToC on the right
3. Click the "Entertainment" link (you can just see it) under the "Innovation" one.
4. Click the back button.
5. Observe how you're not taken back to Hacker News.

Now imagine this is a really long page of FAQs, with a "Return to top" after each question, and the same ToC at the top (something a clueless user probably sees everyday [I know I do on O2's site all the time]). You can see how it begins to look like a browser implementation problem.

Maybe the browser should automatically pop all "#<identifier>"s associated with a URL from its history stack if a user reaches the original URL again (via backs or clicking some in-page link, doesn't matter); I don't know. But I honestly consider this a browser implementation problem, not a web developer problem. I think anything we've been doing till now has been to mitigate this and we shouldn't have to.
They do try to discourage the airmiles-purchasing behaviour:

"The immediate bank deposit of $1 coins ordered through this Program does not result in their introduction into circulation and, therefore, does not comply with the intended purpose of the program."

and

"There is a 4-box $1 coin limit for every 10-day period on any and all $1 coin orders. Beyond that your credit card will not be authorized. If you need quantities greater than this, please send an e-mail before placing your order to directship@usmint.treas.gov explaining why your order should be exempted from the limit."
Because having a button there, even if it isn't active, reduces the number of people who will walk when they shouldn't, because they think that the light will change sooner because they pushed the button.
Sorry about that - a description is in my profile. The app is called Clipper, and it's a clipboard/snippet manager.
Of course the HTML5 audio tag doesn't support MIDI. MIDI is (basically) a command set for interacting with tone generators, and beyond that, has nothing to do with making sound. Think of it more like an electronic equivalent to sheet music.

Nonetheless, implementing MIDI through javascript would be kind of cool. I'm about 90% done an HTML5 emulation of a Boss DR-110 (warts and all), and while the timing of the audio playback ain't great, I'd be curious to see if better results could be achieved by sending the sequencer data out as MIDI instead.

Considering how picky folks get about latency in audio software though, generating MIDI with Javascript seems more useful as a learning tool than an actual music production tool.
Since you claim C# only runs on Windows and yet mention mono in the same sentence I'll pretend you said instead that mono is not production ready (which I think I could buy, at least for SaaS).

As far as "playing catch up with a moving target", I don't see how that's terribly relevant, the end result is still a platform that continues to improve and advance. If the C# code that runs on Windows and mono is still more advanced than, say, Java or Perl, and continues to advance (even though not as fast as C# on Windows alone) then that's still a benefit. Given the advent of monotouch and the coming of monodroid it seems like even a hard-core MS hater could come to appreciate C#.
Using JQuery, XMPP and Atmosphere to cluster your WebSocket/Comet application
The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open technology for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice etc... The protocol’s adoption is phenomenal, and this time I will show how easy is to use the Atmosphere’s XMPP Plugin with GTalk to scale and cluster a WebSocket/Comet application.
Opera Mini tells you about that (and that the connection isn't actually protected) and discourage you from continue when you try to enter any https site.
It says in one of the linked articles it would cost roughly $400 per unit. That's $1,000,000 right there.
Hate to steal EeePC's thunder, but this has been done in embedded PCs on mini-itx form factor computers since flash storage was available, pre-sata connectors. It looked like a 1-inch nub that fits in the IDE connector. It was perfect for embedded PCs since power requirements were always very low for flash memory and an easy way to save a watt.
In practice, this isn't a problem. Coffeescript is more of an alternate syntax for Javascript than a different language. Sure it has some great sugar, but it's really easy to understand how that sugar translates into plain old Javascript. I'll usually have the .js file sitting in the next tab, being compiled live as I write code in the .coffee tab and hit save. Work like this for a little while and you'll learn to recognize which javascript is generated from which coffeescript really efficiently.

coffee -cw -o js/ coffee/

Plus, your variable names in Coffeescript are well-preserved in the generated JS. Ultimately I find it harder to follow exceptions in my production javascript because of the obfuscation caused by minification (I use yuicompressor), so on my staging and development servers I point to a non-minified .js.

Bottom line: try it, you'll like it!
Dont like how when i press the back button i get a history of pictures i have viewed. If i am at liberty to choose whichever picture i want then i dont need the back button to preserve my selection history. When i click back, i want to go BACK to the site i just came from.

I assume this isnt some bug or some flaw, and that it can probably be coded to behave differently, but as things stand that would prevent me from using this particular lightbox.
For companies that interface with another business to reach customers, another thing to consider is that a happy intermediary rarely implies a happy customer. Knowing your end user better than you know an intermediary's official requirements, not just better than you know yourself, makes for an even more meaningful success.

Think Apple's choice to give up a Verizon partnership rather than let them interfere with the iPhone's OS. Despite that move, I hear the fruit company is doing pretty okay.
I understand your argument, and it makes sense; however, I disagree.

The user clicks the image in order to see it full-size. The lightbox overlays the page that the user is on. The user is not conscious that they are navigating to a new page, or even just a part of the page that they weren't at before (to the #image). Though the workflow is in actuality following a link, the user is not aware that they are following a link, so the back button functionality doesn't work as expected.

Links are well understood by everybody that uses the Web. They change the page that you're on to a new page, or a new part of the page. Lightboxes were invented so that the user doesn't need to leave the page, or the part of the page, that they are on.

So in my mind, lightboxes that don't behave like lightboxes and instead behave like links are broken.
Hey guys, Saikat from Mockingbird here - I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about our operation transformation framework or about our launch.
Then in your proposed extension what is the internet equivalent of taking the keys out of the ignition but still parking in public places?
now imagine these babies filling in a rack cabinet.
Nothing against scala, but you can program in Python and get all the goodness of JVM compat by simply running your programs in Jython...
Your errors list JS line numbers. I didn't find it very difficult to mentally map the JS errors back to my Coffee source though - you get the same program structure and variable/method names before and after compile.

Let's say you found a bug in line 41 of my JS source here: https://github.com/dpritchett/chatbox/blob/master/public/cha...

Digging into the Coffee source shows the same short method with all the same identifiers and the same basic structure... just less boilerplate: http://dpritchett.github.com/chatbox/docs/chatbox.html#secti...
yes, very true. closer to Erlang or Caml instead. I guess I see the value for a functional programming language written on top of the CRL
You're doing an awful lot of projecting based on one guy's account of his friend's working hours.

The web isn't exactly swamped with "Apple Wives" blogs, so you might consider the possibility that this grave injustice that you're so worked up about is primarily occurring in your imagination.
3 is a more useful factor for many applications, including measurement for architecture, art, photography, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds

If I had to rank factors that would be most useful for measurement, I'd put 2, 3, and 4, and even 8 above 5.
If the close button had an 'onclick="javascript:history.back()"' attached to it, we wouldn't have this problem :)

[We can argue the pureness of the demo after that till the end of time though.]
Not true. Nothing has changed, MySQL is still under a GPL/commercial dual license. If you're not embedding, then of course InnoDB is free.
Default Java File I/O is pretty horrible but like a lot of things about Java, the widely-used Apache Commons makes it better:

String fileContents = FileUtils.readFileToString(new File("blah"));

Still not quite as concise as Ruby/Python/etc though.
Open source in higher education - why not?