skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nicely done. I recently released my first app in the app store, EasySal Calculator. As I live in America, I uploaded both a paid (adfree) version and a free (with ads) version. I noticed that my free version makes more money as well.

I like to hear stories like these. I have been gaining a strong interest in Android Development and these stories make me think that maybe I can be semi-successful at it as well. I don't expect to make loads of cash, not even close to what you're making, but even a little bit makes me feel good.
Good work mate.

With regards to boredom, if you have the time, learn to cook. I can't tell you how much my health has improved from just learning to cook. With the right amount of olive oil (or bacon fat ;]) you can make some pretty awesome salads.
Is Time Up for XML? (Twitter deprecates XML in some apis)
Plants need CO2 to grow. Its the main macro-nutrient besides water. The more CO2, the faster it will grow. If you increase the CO2 levels from 300 parts per million to 1200 parts per million you will get a huge increase in the speed and size of growth of any plant. You can increase the CO2 level very easily by buying a CO2 tank and releasing it near the plants, or you can do what I do and brew wine right next to the plant because the byproduct of the yeast creating alcohol from sugar is CO2. But whenever I try to explain this to the global warming crowd, and other facts debunking global warming, they get really really upset. I think one time I even got called a racist for pointing out scientific fact.
Useful! I am following the 100 twitter account :)
I don't think those buttons were driven by anything we would consider "software."
Free holiday Wi-Fi on airplanes from Google
Thanks for the link. I really didn't know that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript himself, is running a podcast. Subscribed!
"I say "American", as that's key"

Actually, America is arguably middle-of-the road, as far as this goes. Apple sells iOS devices into countries that are dramatically more censorious.

While Apple probably don't want an Apple Store in Tennessee shut down by some local sheriff on a distribution-of-porn-to-a-minor charge because of an App Store app, they also need to consider Malaysia, Singapore, India, UAE, etc. Even Australia, for that matter.

Also: App Store slander would probably be a bigger deal with regard to the UK.
> I'm not familiar with python - does it have some magic global sentinel value to indicate "not found"?

No, it has a different method for failable search. The purpose of `get` is specifically to handle "provide a default value in case the key is not found".

> Or how do you handle that case with that 1 line of code?

dict[key]
As a (freelance) product manager type person, I spend a fair amount of my time designing wireframes...

I LOVE Balsamiq (another wireframing option), Peldi (balsamiq founder) is a really nice guy and one of my companies even hosts some of their website... but I've moved over to using Mockingbird for my own work. It's that good.

If you need to design wireframes, I encourage you to try Mockingbird.
I know that some online personalities have mentioned dual facebooks. [1]

Some people choose to go by a name that closely resembles their real name or in someway psuedo-anonymizes them. I think this works in some ways, but if anyone really wants to figure it out they can.

You don't need the same account name on Ebay and Amazon as you would have on twitter. That's a sort of middle ground.

It's important to figure out which is public facing and which is private facing. I'd use a version of noahc or mrnoahc for almost anything I want you to be able to find.

I can say that my hacker news comments have helped me a lot when reaching out to other people, and I suspect at a minimum you could at least point people to your comments on here.

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/families-run-on-facebook/
Fortunately, in most modern languages, functions can be defined in any order -- and baseline configuration can be included in a separate file.

In this day and age, generating the machine-readable version of the file in a different order than the version that is meant to be read, seems like an unnecessary convolution and debugging hurdle.
I used Mockingbird's beta in the beginning of the year for a project with 5 other colleagues, and it is pretty a pretty awesome web app. Hats off to you two!
As a user... I download apps with beautiful icons over apps with ugly icons all the time... in my personal opinion, I associate a bad icon with a generally poor application. To me, if you don't invest the time to make your icon great, then how can I expect that your made your entire app great?
Ask HN: Working at MS vs. Google: Community opinion/Effect on resume perception?
Hello. Currently in the process of looking for new employment, I am curious about the perception in the development community of working at Microsoft versus places like Google, a similarly well-liked software company, or some other fresh, hyped startup.

I understand this is a somewhat shallow question, but employment is closely related to identity and future employment options; and, while I'm experienced in software development, I don't have much experience in the way of socializing in the development community, so I am unfamiliar with the general perceptions on these types of things within much of the SW world.

Let's just assume for a moment one applied to and received offers from Microsoft and Google. My intuition and personal perception is that Microsoft is something of a software dinosaur, bureaucratic and rigid, a bit out of touch with the leading edge of development, whereas places like Google, smaller startups and such are more agile, developer-friendly and forward-thinking.

I have friends who work at these and other similar locations and I reactively tend to esteem the Google employees job more so than those at Microsoft. I'm aware of this personal tendency and it bothers me a bit when considering my own future employment options.

Is this a common feeling, and does it really matter for future career moves?

What is the general opinion in the development world, when meeting someone who works at Microsoft, what's the perception of such a person based on where they work? What's the stereotype? What about Microsoft Research, how does that change the opinion? How does that compare to someone who works at Google?
Some big wins for doing client side UI in webapps:

1. Less latency for the user when navigating the app. Data only updated from REST services as needed. Update when user looks at something else. Tons of optimizations possible.

2. Available offline (Cache manifest). Webapp useable even when 3G signal is lost.

3. Mobile app using PhoneGap with the same code base. Just drop the index.html and js/css files into the www folder.

4. UI can be developed and run from disk, with file:// protocol, no web server needed. No build or network copy step, just open/reload directly from project dir.

CGI, and its followers, were a big ugly hack from the beginning, that is now institutionalized in many developers minds. UI belong on the client, as close to the user as possible, its just common sense.
It provides a method to produce a 'modal dialog / window'.
Yes, Google says in Spanish speaking American countries you can use it that way.
How to get Free Comcast Internet
What I find odd is the crosswalks here in DC where there's sign that says "Pedistrian MUST push button to cross." Yet it's not true. The button does not appear to do anything and a walk signal definitely comes up even if you don't push it.
As Saikat said, I use Textmate. There are decent bundles available for Objective-J/Capp. I'd also add that you should use Webkit (specifically Safari) when profiling Cappuccino apps for the best results.
The author has been doing some really innovative stuff with CSS3 and declarative styles/animations for awhile now so I don't see the problem with these experiments. They're fun, they teach new things, and they're given away for free. Where's the harm?
I'm a bit unclear on this one. He wants cable unbundled but then ends up complaining about the bad Comcast UI.

If you want ala carte cable you can get most every show you want via Amazon or iTunes, maybe with a Netflix and or Hulu plus subscription. Don't complain too much about the cable co's not allowing ala carte subscriptions, the large networks don't want you doing this either. They negotiate their carriage deals with large cable operators across all their properties so if you want Scripps Food Network you're going to have to get HGTV and DIY too..

If you want a better UI then look at GoogleTV. It ads a new layer on top of your existing guide to enhance the experience.

Also look at Comcast's Fancast and TV Everywhere initiatives (TV Everywhere is not Comcast specific) they are allowing subscribers to stream a lot of TV over the web negating the need for a Slingbox.
I don't know for the life of me why you would use either for static templating, use a CMS that publishes flat HTML files to your server farm. It reduces a lot of run-time dependencies and requirements and makes them compile-time concerns. Which as a general rule of thumb is better. For the dynamic stuff well that is where you draw your line server or client. I have become a convinced fan of the client.
Concur, I spent a '91-04 there after spending '79-91 in Boston. The whole zeitgeist including the attitudes of (most) managers is unhealthy. Heck, just compare subway passengers in both areas, the differences are stark.

The only reason for one of us to go there is if we're worried about age discrimination and want to solve it by getting a serious clearance and the work that goes with them. There's also a fair amount of space work in the area, but telecom in the area died pretty hard when that sector crashed early last decade.
Didn't seek product/market fit quickly. A couple years ago, a friend and I started a real-time social shopping tool that we'd hoped to pitch to online retailers.

We spent months and months just building and building. We had a small team of developers working with us as well. It took us about 10 months to get our first prototype out only to find that no one wanted it -- not consumers nor retailers. By that point, morale had already started to drop, because everyone on the team thought we were just spinning our wheels and couldn't see any traction. Instead of spending another few months building in the dark, at that point, I mocked up something quickly in Photoshop and started pitching different ideas to retailers to see what people were interested in. I was amazed that retailers could understand what kind of product I was talking about just by seeing a mock and without actually having a demo or a prototype. After going back and forth on different design iterations, (I'm not a designer, so it was even more remarkable that potential customers could understand my mocks) we finally hit upon one that was of interest to many retailers.

Although we piloted and signed with retailers, unfortunately, it was already too late. The sales cycle with retailers is quite slow, and many of the larger firms plan for their website a year in advance. So we would not have even gotten the data needed to prove out the success of our idea for at least another year.

Speed to find product/market fit was something I completely did not understand then. I should have started circulating mocks on day 1.
A lightbox is really just an implementation of a 'modal dialog / window' - which is useful, because it demands the user's attention before it can be dismissed.

Being able to produce such a window in web applications could be useful in many situations - we don't need to limit them to image display.

The fact that 'lightboxes' have been abused / over-used, isn't a reason to dismiss the technology.
> let value = match dict.TryGetValue("foo") with
> | (true,val) -> val
> | (false,_) -> "default"

groan

let value = findWithDefault "default" "foo" dict

or

case M.lookup key dict of
Just v -> v
Nothing -> "default"

(and for anybody who wants to whine about parameters order, please remember — or discover — that partial application is extremely frequent in Haskell and MLs, and try to read the parameters order in this light, you will be enlightened)
Agreed, that's very annoying behavior.
Thats exactly right. More than 85% of Mozilla's revenue comes from an ad rev share with Google.
> It doesn't necessarily work so well in the scenario where you want to perform some operation if there isn't a value.

No, but that's not what the example he replied to does.
It's not such a big secret that most elevator close buttons don't work: if you push them, nothing happens. That's not too hard to figure out on your own. And which, by the way, annoys me greatly and causes quite the opposite of a "feeling of control" in me, as it rather demonstrates my lack of control! (Also, in the back of my head I hear the elevator company laughing at me in a Nelson kind of "Ha! Ha!".)

What is it about those three to five seconds between chosing your floor and the door closing that makes them feel like three to five hours? I suppose it's because we use elevators so frequently that all these seconds start adding up to some actual time wasted without any reason.
Thanks. It's been a bit of a revelation. Two years of bootstrapping turned me into a fatso. I'm getting back down to "fighting shape" and so far so good.

The first 4 days were pretty miserable. It's all been bearable since though.

The most interesting bit has been how my mood seems to have calmed down on the whole. Tedious tasks that use to frustrate me are now more manageable. I wonder if I had "carb rage" all these years that made my body rise up against actions that weren't going to lead to immediate gratification.
BTW while we're trying to climb out of the middle ages, computer engineering == building hardware, software engineering == building software.
As someone that has hired engineers in the past (and presumably again the future) the main concern I would have is what relevant programming experience you obtained at Microsoft.

Assuming you want to work in the future at a startup, very few startups use Microsoft technology as it makes little-to-no financial sense. If you go work at Microsoft you'll only be working on Microsoft .Net stack (unless you work in an edge project like Office for Mac etc, unlikely).

Google, on the other hand, will probably be Java or Python work. That's imedaitely relevant, plus their development methodologies are much more start-up friendly compared to Microsoft.

I think if you spent a few years at Microsoft it wouldn't be the end of the world, but I'd want to see that you kept up with Open Source languages in your own time if I was going to hire you. Otherwise I'd be concerned about the learning curve of learning a new language compared to hiring a different guy who can hit the ground running.

(Also, consider editing your post as we don't do HTML formatting here on HN)
You can also write it this way, which is more similar to C:

x = (a==42) and f() or g()
You could also

[ do_something_to(line) for line in open('todo.txt') ]
Thanks very much. Am deploying now...
Why I fear Firesheep
The centre canvas where things are dragged/dropped or drawn is pretty cool. Did you guys create one yourself or is there a plugin that's available?
The F# user groups in London are filled with people working in finance who use F#. One or two people using it for science or startups (data analysis) as well. Looks to be a fair amount of interest in using it as a language for side projects for the people I spoke to there, while MS are not pushing it as much as C#, they do support its use in the banks.
Why not spend almost nothing to put some sort of notice on the button that it's no longer useful?
Pony request: change the size of the canvas. On my 13" MBP at 1280x800, there are highly-fucking-irritating scrollbars for the canvas. This fucks me up a lot. I'd love to be able to resize the canvas or "zoom out" so this didn't happen. I don't actually need 960px to play with to design for a 960px wide site.

Give me this tiny horse and I'll abandon Balsamiq. Thanks!
A Hands-on Model of the Internet
World’s Pilots Reject Naked Body Scanners Over Radiation Danger, Privacy Breach
> Doing a try/catch

Doing try/catch tells the compiler you know what you are doing. I prefer compilers that take that as a given.
Interestingly enough, I enjoy Slashdot for exactly that reason (and the occasional insightful comment). I haven't found any other place on the net (yet?) with such witty geek humor.
I like to read essays like that: opinionated but not ranty, well researched, encouraging discussion and engaging even for those who disagree with the author's premise. I'd like to see more submissions like that on HN and less news of the day that are going to be irrelevant tomorrow.
I heard somewhere that in the UK, the buttons for crossing the road react faster if you mash them, the idea being that it's most likely a child. I've never tested it, it's always seemed rather rude to give the cars a shorter phase. (god, that's such a British way of thinking)
Great Interview With Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng
Here is a really great and interesting interview on Cinch with Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng where Mark gets into talking about some of the social ideas for Facebook, phone applications and just some general thoughts and ideas of the way of the digital world from Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes.
Really love Mockingbird, really made it easy for me to mockup what I wanted for my startup app. Especially using offshore developers a picture really is a 1000 words. Looking forward to trying the new features
You can actually resize the canvas. Just move the mouse to the edge and a resize tab appears. You can drag that to shrink it or input values into the text fields - https://gomockingbird.com/help/Editing/#resize_page. Hope that solves the issue at least part of the way (zoom would be nice though).
This is good news. Even with simple apps that aren't games he's making a decent amount of money off ads alone.

Too bad he didn't mention what ad network he's using.
I'm getting ready to launch my game/app (http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/) in the next few months and I'm going into it with no expectations.

Good to hear i may gain a bit of extra cash from this project. I'm using mobclix and it was really easy to integrate into my app. However, I don't like that the view doesn't auto resize or fill the parent.
It's quite easy to get lost in one big heap of application that's very hard to maintain

A lot of the issues that you outlines can be dealt with by proper toolkit selection. It sounds to me that you have outgrown the jQuery (and other small rapid to develop in toolkits) and need something more robust. As it sits there are really only two players in the top end game and they are Ext and Dojo. Of the two I prefer Dojo for a host of reasons. But almost everything you have outlined are covered by both toolkits. If you are trying to build full on web apps the smaller toolkits are not a good choice as you are continually having to bolt on features. Whereas the larger toolkits have application architecture built into them.
You can resize by dragging the handles at the bottom, right, and bottom-right edges. You can also use the chrome/safari full page zoom option to zoom out, the application keeps working fine (though there are a few slight rendering errors).
I think that being able to fit the whole source on a single page more than compensates for the occasional indentation problem.
The whole app is written in Cappuccino. To be more precise, that canvas is a custom CPView. :)
Calif borrows $40M a day to pay unemployment
Building A Timely, Event-Focused Mobile App
HFS, I never knew about Chrome's full page option. Congrats, you won my business.

Note: this is exactly like how 25% of AOL's support tickets involved issues with Windows. Remember, your users are always dumber than you are.
CGI, and its followers, were a big ugly hack from the beginning, that is now institutionalized in many developers minds. UI belong on the client, as close to the user as possible, its just common sense.

I can't agree more, we have wasted 15 years trying to hide our heads from that truth but the reality is it produces a superior experience and it is a easier development strategy. We consistently produce better applications on shorter development cycles with JS based UI apps.
Steve Jobs: "The problem with innovation in the TV industry is the go-to-market strategy. The TV industry has a subsidized model that gives everyone a set top box for free. So no one wants to buy a box. Ask TiVo, ask Roku, ask us… ask Google in a few months. The television industry fundamentally has a subsidized business model that gives everyone a set-top box, and that pretty much undermines innovation in the sector. The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it. But right now, there’s no way to do that….The TV is going to lose until there’s a viable go-to-market strategy. That’s the fundamental problem with the industry. It’s not a problem with the technology, it’s a problem with the go-to-market strategy….I’m sure smarter people than us will figure this out, but that’s why we say Apple TV is a hobby." - at D8 conference earlier this year.
http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/
YouTube - TRANSFORM Your IPHONE INTO A STUN GUN
I could respond to this with "in a lightbox gallery there is no reloading or ping-ponging either, and I don't even have to hold ctrl/cmd to open images in new tabs, so it's even smarter", but, instead I'll just point out that with this superb CSS-only solution you can open images in new tabs if you want - the best of two worlds, without involving javascript :)
I came to request similarly, then noticed that if you make your browser window big enough, you'll find there's a green canvas resize grabber in the bottom right of the canvas (when you hover over the canvas). This is great, but definitely easy to miss when the canvas starts out so large.
Paper: Combining Firesheep with ARP spoofing
Given the limited amount of data that can be displayed on a screen at one time, you should never have to wait. If the loading-wheel is spinning long enough to see, I consider that a bug. Yet a stuck loading wheel is pretty much synonymous with ajax. I see it literally everwhere I go. What gives?
Glad to hear it's not just me! I've got a couple friends working there too, the 007 shtick gets a bit droll sometimes.
If Clojure and Scala are popular on the JVM, then why not F# on .NET? And you can write F# code in Emacs, as God intended.

> Why not more effort porting an existing language to the CLR?

It didn't work very well. The mismatch between your favorite language and .NET caused 2 problems. First, the procedural/OO style required to interop with .NET bled into the rest of the program. Second, performance sucked for dynamic types, tailcall, small object allocation, etc. The result was you'd write a program in your language that looked similar to C# but ran 2X slower.

Scala and Clojure get around this by being new languages that try to match the JVM platform better. Plus they provide fat libraries so you don't have to see Java objects too often.

> F# is cool, but C# 4.0 does not seem to lack much, feature-wise.

C# doesn't have algebraic data types, pattern matching, currying, active patterns, metaprogramming, asynch workflows and global type inferencing. There's more, but you see my point.
I know, it's ironic. I chose cakes because everyone besides me likes cake.
I've never used balsamiq as I've always been happy with Mockingbird. They've been really responsive over the only support issue I had as well.
My Hacker News firehose
Why is a robotic car big and heavy? Surely you'll be delivering pizza via Segway-bots long before you use stuff that flies through the air!
The 'Fuck*'s in your request will probably help them get right on it!
Ugh, I still like XML for debugging and human consumption.