skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really struggle to take any kind of web dev best practice advice from a site that flicked back and forth between font faces while their custom fonts streamed in.

Anyway, as people have mentioned already this is completely off the mark. The whole principle how CSS long/shorthand works is so you use the right accessor when it suits.

#item { background: #fff url(bg.gif) no-repeat top left; }

is anyone really supposed to believe that cascading to:
#item.alert { background: #ff0000 url(bg.gif) no-repeat top left; }

is more sensible than just
#item.alert { background-color: #ff0000; }

background-color is just one of those ones that I see all the time and always remove from code I use in plugins because I’m a little OCD like that

oh.
Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.
It does not apply to export, only allows or forbids display your email to your "friend"
How To Land a Job at Google
I am beginning to notice "Patience is a key ingredient when you launched a startup." Point taken. I am also drafting a series of posts for the site. Hopefully they will make Reddit in due course.
This may have issues with non-native speakers. You have to know language fairly well to answer those questions.
yes. I have a site that gets enough SEO juice to have 500-1000 uniques a day for the last 8 months...and none of it from the big G. I've done zero marketing...the eyeballs just keep on coming. I think its fine if some of the first eyeballs never come back...but if you stick around long enough and keep iterating, I believe many probably will.
UK response to petition 'dontdisconnectus´
Reasons Django 1.3 will be awesome
I'm not sure if by "app" you meant app specifically for a smartphone, or if you meant for a PC - but I believe RescueTime might do what you're looking for (and they're a YC company I believe):

http://www.rescuetime.com/
I would stay in a popular hostel and ask around in that hostel. There will often be notices hanging there as well.

Sharing an apt can be a lot of fun too, and easier to arrange.
I haven't used the dashboard, so I'm basing this solely on the video, but... umm, yeah, you did pretty much rip off Pivotal Tracker. You moved the Icebox over to the left, added a few new buttons, but in the demo when you start adding values and commenting it's a one-to-one from Pivotal. So much so, that I even looked at the company bio to see if someone from Pivotal Labs was involved.

Great idea, but just because you believe in an open enterprise doesn't mean you should go around lifting everyone else's hard work to kickstart your own.

EDIT: I sit corrected. The dashboard is a dead rip off of Pivotal. I just did a comparison of one of the dashboards linked above to the source of the tracker on one of my projects. Shared class names throughout, exact same structure.

I expect this out of an MBA with no idea of the culture and ethos behind dev, but someone who's at least knowledgable enough about HN to post it here. Wow, that's a new low. At this point, saying you're going to send private emails of apology isn't enough, if you want to be truly open the only way I see to repair your reputation is a mea culpa on your blog. Really disappointed.
One also sees the common advice to include the paired header (ie, foo.c should include foo.h) as the first #include to verify that foo.h is dependency-complete.

The problem with dependency-complete headers is that once a .c file relies on that header for a symbol, if the header is changed to no longer require the symbol, all those .c files have to have their #includes fixed. This can take a lot of time to iterate through in a projects that require hours to compile.
The Practice of Programming, Debugging
For game development, I think it will diversify with the increasing ease of developing and selling indie games that do well. There are lots of languages getting perfectly good game development libraries that can definitely be used for the (often simple looking) indie game market.

However I don't think the big players in the industry will be able to. To deliver games of great scale (WoW) or intense graphics/effects you're going to need something that can deliver the absolute best performance.
AOL and Yahoo: Time to put a Ring on it
بث مباشر مباراة الزمالك والاسماعيلي
Game developers don't only use it for speed. Mainly for portability. With c/c++ they can make (portions of their) code run on xbox/ps3/nintendo wii/ds/iphone/whatever.
BB "bullets"? Really? Gross attempt at a more linkbaity title.
I interviewed a few VAs from Philippines recently. But things did not take off from my end, I still have their contacts on records, if you want, drop me a note (see my profile).
As someone who homebrews, this is fantastic advice. I give most of my product away to friends because I can't drink the quantity I end up producing all by myself.

To anyone who says they don't have patience, don't worry. Beginning with extract brewing, a very simplified approach is boiling a large pot of water for about 2 hours and then tossing it in a bucket for a week. Don't worry, the first batch will be garbage. Learn why it failed (it was because you weren't clean enough), and try again.
That comment came from the original, M-x shell, btw.
I came here to post that too. The only thing I can think that means is that it is laid out better for large teams to program on without stepping on each other's toes. Sort of like a Java argument against dynamic languages - those cool scripting languages are fun and productive for an individual, but large teams would just screw each other up with that.

There really isn't "scalability" in client-side JavaScript. Scalability is usually thought of as the ability to serve many users at once (as opposed to speed which is how fast you serve one person). So, sure Ruby is slower than Python, but it doesn't matter too much since you can have 4 web servers and a load balancer rather than 2 web servers and a load balancer and you're fine.

However, client-side JavaScript isn't serving multiple users at once. It's trying to serve one user as fast as possible.

Maybe someone has a better explanation? It's early and I haven't had my coffee.

EDIT: It seems like YUI might allow you to pull independent pieces by calling YUI.use(some-cool-piece-of-functionality). That could reduce download times, but it could also increase HTTP requests and the associated overhead. That's pretty cool. If 90% of your users aren't going to be using a piece of functionality, it doesn't load that code, but can load it dynamically if needed. While cool, I don't think I'd call this more scalable - this is about speed. And I don't know if it would be faster in a meaningful way since JS can be nicely cached. I shouldn't have said that - in the absence of evidence from testing, I shouldn't make assumptions. Maybe someone else can shed some light on how well this works in the real world.
The Brewing Network (http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/) is also a great resource for beginners and all the way to advanced and commercial brewers. They have a handful of live shows that are archived to podcasts ranging from completely offtopic drunken chatter to clear cut how-to's.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong at various points in the process of putting the details in the ui and getting a printed card out the other end, and there will always be bad batches. I'm not sure that its a general problem with the paper stock though.

Did your client mention the problem to customer service? There's a chance that he/she could get the cards reprinted.
I'm more interested in the opposite side: why can't jQuery scale? If it was served via Google and Yahoo CDNs the way that YUI is, what's the issue?
No, the JMM specification is not vague. Abridged, it provides a minimum set of guarantees in terms of data visibility between threads -happens-before rules- that the application programmer can expect. Think of it as an abstraction layer that portrays an uniform view of the myriad of hardware configurations on which the JVM runs -e.g. cache coherence strategies-, thus relieving the programmer from the burden of knowing the nuts and bolts of the target system for which its code is intended.
Indeed, I've done that -- but my intuition told me that it was stopping due to friction, not due to the exponential decay of an infinite number of bounces. :-)

But your intuition was correct! Without friction the bounces would be perfectly elastic and wouldn't go into exponential decay! :-)
More federal workers' pay tops $150,000
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Selling Rain Futures
The first letter in the word "titties" is?

Beware if you have users that might be sensitive to such things.
Strange Loop 2010: "Making Your Open Source Project More Like Rails" video
Seconded. A feed and/or an API would be super useful.
The Great Cyberheist
Another proof that you may look like a fool when trying to predict the future (Bell's argument).

Also interesting in this context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887215
I recommend the book Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher. It's a fun read, comes with a crap ton of tables of what ingredients add what flavors and comes at brewing from the angle of wanting to make the perfect green chile prickly pear doppelbock.
Did you or that guy already have another job lined up, or did you just walk?

Also, when you decided to leave, did you give your former employer 4 months notice or was it less (the standard 2 weeks) and it grew to 4 months? If you already had accepted the other job, how did you handle pushing back your start date with them?

I'm curious, because I'm currently entertaining changing jobs. More money isn't the main reason, it's because I want to work on more modern technologies, and my current job is stuck in the mid-1990's.

I'd also be interested in any details you'd be willing to share about these fallouts.
*buckle.
Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
Brewed my first batch last month. http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html was essential. Everything went to plan...except when we got too vigorous a fermentation and the airlock blew off at 3am. Thankfully the beer turned out great, but next time I'll be using a blowoff hose.
Social Media Investing [scribd]
Payment Card Industry Pursues Profits Over Security
Optimizing AMD Opteron Memory Bandwidth, Part 4: single-thread, read-only
It strikes me that the specific example of buying something is generally sufficient confirmation of identity even without a Captcha. Not that your point isn't valid.
Not to get to C, but simply to get somewhat better speed, /somewhere/ between Python and C, which is where Lua stands.
What bothers me is that Google is taking the stance that they have the right to lock my data in their service if they feel like it.

That's why that position, to me, is untenable. Don't do evil indeed: you just conceded the other side (Facebook) their main argument (that they don't have to be open, only if they feel like it).
So something that's been bugging me lately about NYC. Why isn't Park Avenue adjacent to the park?
Those VM designs are pretty heavily skewed towards class-based OO languages, though. Most VMs have some kind of behavior (polymorphic method lookup, unification, message-passing) that they do very efficiently because of the language they target, but others are omitted. For example, it isn't possible to do real tail-call optimization on the JVM without a trampoline, AFAIK. If it had been created for (say) ML, TCO would be a given, but OO stuff would be an afterthought.

The Erlang VM is another interesting platform, albeit one heavily skewed towards fault tolerance, concurrency, message passing, etc.
"The godless groups say they are mounting this surge because they are aware that they have a large, untapped army of potential troops."

Wow, that's some biased-sounding reporting right there. Is that a quote from someone? Did anyone in the campaign talk of armies or troops? I'd like that attributed.

And "godless" is one of those loaded words, generally used to attack.

This doesn't read like unbiased reporting.
Ask HN: What's your startup's blogging strategy?
I want to start writing a blog for the startup I’m working on, but I’m not sure how to approach it.

For example, say I spend a week implementing a new feature. When I’m done, should I write an article announcing it with screenshots and use cases? Or should I write a technical article explaining how it was built? Or both? On that note, if I’m writing a tutorial for my product, should I post it on the blog and link to it from the support section of my site, or should I write it on the support section and link to it from my site?

And there’s more: should I try to position myself as a thought-leader in the spacing I’m working in (mockups/design/ux), by writing high level articles on the subject? And as a sole founder working on this part time, I could write a lot about that too, but I’m not sure how interesting people using my app would find it.

There’s a lot of options. If the answer is "all of the above" is there a balance I should strive for? I feel like constant "I added feature X" updates get old after a while and don’t contribute to building a community.

If I’m going to write I’d like to get the most value out of it, but I’m not sure how. Any suggestions?
>Why does an iPhone cost more than an iPod Touch, a standard 2G phone and a 3G USB dongle? That's all the hardware is.

Currently, that's not true. The iPhone 4 has a much better camera than the current iPod Touch. Not sure if there are any other differences.
Thanks a lot, I wouldn't have been able to look at this without your comment.
Sorry for any perceived "valley-centrism"; feel free to substitute "small industry" for "small valley."

What does Zuck's level of personal awesome have to do with anything? This strikes me as a major confusion about the business/consumer relationship. I know Zuck, and I happen to think he's a fine guy, but you don't, and you shouldn't have to.

I don't trust Google because Eric Schmidt is spiritually advanced, or because an engineer who now works at Facebook coined a tongue-in-cheek "Don't be evil" motto 12 years and 25,000 employees ago; I trust it because its search business' incentives are aligned with mine as a searcher.

So, what are Facebook's incentives? Facebook wants you to use its service to communicate with friends, so that it can show you targeted display ads. In the long run, using the service requires you to feel comfortable with who has access to your data, so Facebook's business has to get privacy and openness approximately right. Like everything about a customer-facing service, that turns out to be harder than it looks, at least while providing a stream of new features, but get it right we must for the business' health. But you're about to find out all about that...
I like it a lot, though I'm unclear on the intended use. You should be able to get all the information from http://www.pro-football-reference.com/ in, which will just provide an awesome UI to a site with great information.
Apartments Leme
Leme Apartments - Rent a Leme apartment for short or long term stay.
I think (hope?) that the next wave in hacking will be understanding programming paradigms better as hackers - the specifics of language choice will probably matter a little less. I like the idea of languages that support multiple paradigms internally (e.g., you can embed logic programming into your functional programming language). A while back I spent some time reading Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming and I wish I had found this book earlier in my career. I probably wasn't ready for it though.

This aspect of software development was largely missing from my formal educational experience in programming language paradigms.

What I am trying to do now is develop a better "taste" for what is "easy" using one programming paradigm compared to another. I'd ultimately like to have a better problem to paradigm mapping internalized. I've toyed with the idea of putting together a seminar or undergrad course to do flesh this out.

The elephant in the room is more market based - what programming languages will someone pay you to use in the future? We already have a number of interesting programming languages. But when you do your job search these days, I see a small number of large buckets. The .Net/CLR C# world, Java in the enterprise, Ruby (really the Rails framework, but even so), and a strong side of the data storage backend of your choice (RDBMs or NoSQL or sexps - kidding on that, pg keeps our own forum in files full of sexps).
Could you elaborate on the different size your cards have? As I understand, the size is perfectly normal by European standards, and might make American customers stand out. What I'm wondering is why you don't offer the US-sized cards to customers who may prefer them for reasons such as being able to fit it into a business card holder?

Reading the reddit thread[1], a lot of people scoffed at the size and chose other brands over yours simply due to the size. There might be some interesting things to be learnt and taught if you get some guys to pick their brains about what they think. At the very least from a PR point of view.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/e3i8j/guy_ordered_th...
Having worked with Xserves in the past, this article is pretty well formulated. The only thing i disagree with is that they should have moved to a 2U system.
Many educational institutions that were running maybe only one or two Xserves did not have 4Us in their rackspace for 2 servers. Small schools only had half racks to begin with.
I wrote my own job search engine after getting fed up of the existing crap. It pulls in rss feeds and mailing lists and even does a bit of crawling via HN and Reddit to find jobs. I used a trainable classifier to filter out most of the dross.

The main problem with job sites is matching jobs to applicants. As far as I know noone has gone beyond simple keyword searching. If you had an actual userbase you could make use of collaborative filtering techniques (like Amazons recommendations) to provide a tailored service to each user. CVs, personal blogs and github accounts give you enough information to seed each users recommendations even before they start rating jobs.
I took that to mean scalability in the sense of UI complexity. Building something like some of the denser Yahoo pages in jQuery would be painful.

However, most of the YUI-based stuff I've seen struck me as overly complex and slow and heavyweight, like Ext/JS. If you want to build something that looks and feels like a desktop app those libraries are probably the right choice but I almost always prefer something lighter and cleaner in a web UI.
Topics that I think will be important:

- Functional Programming
- Logic Programming
- Managing asynchronicity
- Managing concurrency / Managing state
- Pruning bad directions in OO (see the first two)
- Type Systems
- Virtual Machines

Languages/technologies that I would look at more closely given these are Haskell, Scheme, Prolog, Clojure, Qi, LLVM. I love JS but as far languages go, I would not look there for new ideas. At best I see it becoming a fantastic compile target.

I also don't see Haskell and Clojure being particularly specialized. They are very general purpose and suitable for tackling any kind of programming problem - simple to complex, JS on the other hand is a language with a very specific focus.

I don't see the importance of being able to read and understand C/C++ diminishing anytime soon as those languages are intimately tied to our operating systems.

EDIT 2: I added Type Systems above. I think Haskell has shown the power of an expressive type system. However it has it's problems. I look forward to see the distinction between languages w/ strong type systems and those without being abolished. Languages should support turning the type system on and off - see Qi. Type systems also should allow the typing of a much richer set of values - Qi's sequent calculus types is eye-opening in this regard.

EDIT: I'm opinionated about this, but the constant announcement of new languages that simply continue the traditional stateful OO paradigms (perhaps tacking on a couple of syntactic niceties or a crippled static type system) seem like complete dead ends.
You might just look at examples for ideas. One of the longer-lasting successful startup blogs out there is: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Bash Shell Variables an Introduction
The wise advice, that my own father gave me yesterday, unsolicited, as I mentioned leaving civil engineering for a different field, was not to do it. I've invested so much, he remarked. It's secure.

But the wise advice is not so wise: those years already invested are sunk costs. Ignore them.

Compare the potential job satisfaction of switching with the possibility of falling behind your peers a year in programming.
> this creates an incentive to vote down jobs you've applied for already hoping no one else applies.

Should be fairly easy to solve this. You can only apply for jobs through a form that appears once you vote up. Once you apply your vote is fixed.
In what way is Google taking that stance? Last I checked, Google was taking the exactly opposite stance.

http://www.dataliberation.org/
I approve a warning 1000% - it's not like they are stopping you from exporting.

This will slow down my AOL-using friends who gave away all their contact info to Facebook and now I get pelted with spam from Facebook using my name and list of friends (and I don't even have a Facebook account).

Google has never spammed me or share my name and location, Facebook does it all the time, pick who's more evil.
I've had a Mac since the original 64KB model. I remember the FIRST PARAGRAPH of the programmer's manual listing it as a single-user, single-task OS.

Third-party devs led the way, first with installable drivers that munged keyboard, disk, ... and an amazing task-switcher. But those became the bad old days of Macs: OS9 was falling apart due to overload. At huge expense -- Apple almost died from not tackling the issue well -- OSX started with a clean slate. Apple finally took control of the feature set that users wanted: pre-emptive multitasking, multi users, control of various daemons, etc.

Over time, that, too, got overlaid with all sorts of cruft. My upgrade this spring to a new MBP caused me a day's worth of debugging after I migrated files: some long-forgotten and actually no-longer-used third-party system extension conflicted with another module on the new hardware. Over a day's worth of debugging and cleanup, including an hour's worth of tech support (fortunately bundled with the hardware). Cost (very roughly) a thousand dollars.

So I think it's a bit disingenuous to advocate all these "neat" iOS hacks without acknowledging the possibly of really badly busting iOS, even for expert users, and "it just works" -- already a bit tenuous -- with it. Especially stuff running in non-user space can cause issues far-removed from the source of trouble. And unexpected software can either cause bugs or expose OS bugs that were otherwise benign or devs had worked around. A program that was tested only with Apple keyboard features can suddenly fail to work, tarnishing the app developer AND the platform. And like my incident, resolution can be very difficult and expensive for all concerned.

As my history indicates, I've been a big fan of hacks. But I already have seen enough issues with "good" apps such as the NYT crashing, or calendar entries failing to synch, that if I were still a developer, I would NOT want the added burden/expense of the sort of unstable OS that hacks have caused Apple in the past. Especially given the rather modest rewards for so many developers.
Help me start a FOSS Tithing movement
It seems to me that this wouldn't work. There are not so many different types of phrasings, so it would be fairly simple to write a parser generator which would then pass to a very basic interpreter to solve them.

For example, to solve the "Which of these is a T: W, X, Y or Z?" you would just put in a rule like "BodyPart ::= Foot | Knee | Leg | ..." "DayOfWeek ::= Monday | Tuesday | ..." "Color ::= Red | Blue | ..." and then have it match against those.

Maybe the next time I have some free time I'll see if I can go and implement it.