skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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Also, why did the experiment succeed for only 6 or 7 of the 100 terms that they tried? There's more than what meets the eye here, regardless of the hype and everyone jumping on the bandwagon.
Ask HN: The State of the Javascript Ecosystem?
Hello Everyone,

I'm a web developer and I've been working in rails for the past year or so. I've been following the development of the javascript ecosystem out of the corner of my eye, but I don't feel like I've truly grasped how all the pieces work together yet.

My question to you all is this: What are the tools and packages that are used in this new workflow? How does the data flow? What packages and code are the most important pieces of this ecosystem and how are they plugged together in different ways?

I realize that lots of people are using javascript in different ways, and I'm interested in hearing about both backend systems (build on node.js?) to frontend UI (jquery?). So maybe another way to phrase the question is: If you were building an end-to-end javascript web application, what tools and packages would you use, and where are the modular boundaries that could be replaced by other technologies?

Thanks in advance!
All the eco templates are compiled and shipped along with the JS files. The server backend only sends JSON to the app. Its much smaller and faster to render, plus its cacheable on the client side. Its a huge win over RJS templates.
This used to be true, but there's a feature currently in testing that will allow anyone (even someone coming from Google) to propose an edit to a post. This edit proposal can be approved either by a moderator or several users with sufficient rep. Hopefully this will make Stack Overflow more wiki-like and help solve the problem with answers getting out of date.
Look at it like a machine learning problem. If you slavishly match the test set you are doing something called overfitting. Your performance on the rest of the web will decrease, because you inherit bias from the test set.
Yes, but quality matters almost as much as quantity. I'd rather hire somebody who got 1000 karma through 10 questions/answers than somebody who got 2000 karma through 100.

Although quantity is important too -- even if it's not a definitive answer, a partial answer is better than no answer to the questioner. It's just that when I'm hiring, those definitive answers really indicate somebody who knows what they're doing.

[edit: answering here because there are several good responses, who are all right. The most important thing to do as a potential important employer is to read a few answers rather than just blindingly accepting the karma. You can't do that for everybody, but you can do it for your shortlist.]
What is Gmail written in?
Why should it transfer? Just because you are a great software engineer(as determined by your 23K rep. on SO), doesn't mean you are a great chief and should have a 23K rep on the cooking SE.
Don't forget market saturation. We are nearing the point where we are getting all of the customers we are going to get. I'm sure there are one or two broadband holdouts clinging to dial-up or just going to the public library, but largely, telcos and cablecos already have all of the customers they are going to get. In essence, the field is dead and utterly useless to investors who expect a large, fast, quick return.
Happy people pills for all
Maybe not from his perspective, but from the perspective of those asking questions and looking for answers, it works pretty well.
I'd like to point out that while I definitely did not write this post, I did feel it easy to relate, because it seems hard at this point to gain reputation without gaming the system a bit. But there are so many ways to get involved...I think the best seems to be being knowledgeable in a very specific area of expertise - answering C# questions is really tough, but if you know Heroku, there are so many more questions there without answers that you can really gobble up quite a bit of reputation by knowing something niche.
US$16500/y transporation costs? What are you doing, buying a new car every year?

Also, "Companies pay professionals more based on their abilities and their age as opposed to their actual years of experience"? Who would want to work for a company like that? Would it even be legal?

Ignoring more subjective points, like the appeal of living in the outback vs. a city or of having a "no responsibilities" job.
The problem with OpenLaszlo is that while apparently its actively developed i rarely hear about anybody using it. It seems to have had its hayday years ago and now is used only by a very few projects.
There's too much information across too many trains of thoughts...I can't formulate a response or an opinion before it jumps to another train of thought. This is sad, because it's a bunch of great information with some strong discussion possibilities.
I was being a little facetious, yes, but if someone to be actually sickened by ebaysuck's position then that constrains my prediction of his beliefs a little more than just not wanting a flat tax for e.g. practical reasons. In other words, I don't think just anyone who doesn't want a flat tax would say what xtho said.
Yes, at $15000 I am afraid the market for it will be quite small. I had to read that a few times to make sure there wasn't an extra zero.
But if I was an employer and saw someone that was really active on Stackoverflow, I'd consider the problem of them being on SO and other sites when they should be working.
Javascript (who would imagine!)
A lot of people are dogging acconrad, but I have to agree with him. I was having a problem with rails, and I found the answer on stackoverflow. The right answer had no upvotes, so I figured I would upvote it; this way the original "asker" would know it is the right answer. However, it said I didn't have enough rep to upvote... I'm sure he'll figure it out but this would save him from checking the other "solutions".
He probably has 8GB of RAM (8192MB); some may be lost to address space holes. I have 12GB, if you're finding that implausible.
Why have most successful entrepreneurial ideas failed to raise living standards?
Then what use is the word "similarly" in your comment? Similarly send? As in via HTTP requests? I think that's either obvious or irrelevant or both.

Again, if you actually read the article, you will come across the section titled "What About The Google Toolbar & Chrome?" I encourage you to read it.

[edit] Also, see this comment and patio11's subcomment further down the page, both of which were written an hour before yours: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165469#score_2165578.
Or if what you do at work qualifies as "real research".
But doesn't a million points mean that you've helped a lot of people?

When I started coding it was a certain Jon Skeet that was helping out almost everyone on the C# newsgroups including the newbie coder that was myself. I'd like to return that favour to the community and points are a close equivalent to one's helpfulness.
I have 170 rep and I don't know how I've gotten that much since I rarely post on StackOverflow. It's really easy to gain rep if you participate with the best answer you can give, instead of trying to post lots of less-elaborate answers just to have a bigger audience.
IPhone App Raises Questions About Who Owns Student Inventions
I meant do they use a specific framework. My understanding was that GWT was created out of the work they were doing with gmail which is why all of the samples for GWT look like gmail.
But wouldn't there be some detriment to the content being a graphic? ALT attr won't convey, either.
So... You made a post about Apple?

Hehe, HN n00b here too - I started coming here when Reddit was clogged with derp derp Apple derp Narwahls, although I still monitor both fairly closely during the course of the day.
Oh, I thought interface was pretty difficult to navigate until I learned that I could use typical 'game controls' like arrow keys or a,s,w,d to navigate!
I've added another post, this one very in depth and technical on how to build a limit order book.

http://howtohft.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-build-fast-limit...
Completely agree. In addition to saving on development costs by eliminating the need for specialized platform devs you also remove the app store Gods from the equation.

There's really only 2 reasons to have a native app: 1) to take advantage of hardware that you can't access otherwise and 2) screen real estate. The latter reason being a poor one to solely base the decision on.
It's instructive to think of the cases where Google can return a search result, even though the searched word doesn't appear on the page. Most often, this occurs because another site includes an outlink to the page, with the searched word. That is, they're 'copying' a publicly-available source that indicates that word is associated with that page.

I see this Microsoft tactic as similar. They're considering search terms that resulted in a visit to the page from other search engines as being important indicators of the page content. If they have that URL-to-URL-trail data legally, and the signal works well, and they are not singling out Google's URLs as the only source of such a signal, I'm not sure what the problem is.

Google didn't get where they are by throwing out legally-collected useful data, and Bing won't catch up to a leader who has clicktrail sensors everywhere, via analytics/toolbar/ads/mobile/etc., by throwing away legally-collected useful data.
The argument for rich people paying more tax isn't because we don't like them, it's because government is expensive and we can't afford it without rich people subsidizing everyone else.

Keep in mind that rich people also have more of a vested interest in maintaining the system, so it's not entirely unfair to them, either.
This being one of the first large production CoffeeScript apps, did you run into any unexpected trouble with using a language other than JavaScript? (Naturally, I ask for selfish reasons...)
I know, but I am getting bored of the reverse - reading bitesized bits of stuff that leaves you disatisfied, so I thought I would 'go large'...
Strangely he didn't mention server-side javascript, which would be the obvious way to share code between client and server.
Looks like I made the right decision to return the Boxee box I bought for x-mas for my parents. This is really hurting their credibility. The most sought after feature was promised and then repeatedly not delivered. Unfortunate because I really like the boxee software.
That's what I mean. The prices linked only affects people using Bell's systems.
LG confirms glasses-free Optimus 3D Phone unveiling set for MWC
Closure

http://code.google.com/closure/
A little bit broken on Safari/OSX, isn't there a way to avoid getting the text selection cursor?

Also, select all, selects the whole page, instead of the objects on the canvas.
And I recently discovered Google Refine, for cleaning up messy datasets.

http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/
In Quebec, the cap is 60GB/month apparently.
Porn copyright troll drops lawsuit against 670 "John Does"
Stack-overflow is amazingly effective, especially when one considers the alternatives like those countless forgettable websites heavily laden with front-and-center ads, and the ones that have nag screens that block responses to answers until you "sign up", and the ones with clueless dilettantes fumbling in the dark.

My only concern is that I think the exchange community might get fractured/diluted if there are too many separate stack exchange sites.
"never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes"
What about Saleslogix and Microsoft Dynamics CRM?
We've taken the view that the server side code and the client side UI are two different applications and should be developed as such.

We write all the server side stuff as "REST-like" web services and then use whatever makes sense for the UI, whether that is javascript, html emitted from the server, action-script or native binaries.

Separation of concerns.
This is something that always bothered me about git. Anyone with access to the repository can delete or overwrite a branch. Would be nice, if github had a way restrict deletes of a branch, or a prevent a force push. Not sure if git architecture actually makes this possible.
I went through a short period where I really cared about what my profile looked like there. I don't know why I ever felt that way. I think my top voted answer is telling someone what I thought important concepts in C to communicate to students are. I don't think that says anything about me positive or negative to be honest.

If you look around the top contributors to the python tag you'll realize there is a lot of room for people to submit good, thoughtful answers. If you take the time to write something good then it will get voted up and if that's what you want you'll be all set.

It seems like no worse of a way to spend your time than anything save perhaps reading a good technical book and let's face it there aren't very many of those.
Obviously at this point it is best used for applications that essentially provide a mobile interface to a web application that utilizes some of the advancements in UI design gained from the iPhone and Android generation of smartphones. Eventually I see the full gamut of APIs for things like camera, notifications, Geo tracking, etc. It will get more responsive too as people learn to use local storage to cache the app.
If you look at the "behind the scenes" video, you'll see they are also trying to photograph sculptures by panning around them in 3D. You can't see any of them on the site though.

Do you think they will be able to make navigatable models of sculptures too? This would be exciting.
Maybe release it all on the same day, so the information is available but it's more compartmentalized. It would encourage blog comments at least.
Great article and all, but why has he tagged it "Wedding Day Diamonds" at the bottom?
All the while one does not / is not able to answer questions, he can learn from the answers that have already been submitted, no reputation gained but knowledge (I have heard people compiling e-books on the best posts from Stackoverflow). I call that a step forward.
I would say the attractiveness of micropayments is it's less of a commitment, but subscriptions are generally better for both sides if what you are providing is valuable to your users.

As long as a subscription doesn't make it super difficult to cancel and notifies me when they're billing me I am usually fine with it.
> hacking/innovating new drinks

Not that this can't be fun, but my ambitions are a bit higher.

> being a bartender is not a low status job

I'm pretty sure being a software developer is a higher status job than a bartender. Of course being a bartender can be more fun for the "partygoer" demographic - which, I suspect, has a narrow intersection with the LessWrong or HN demographic.
This sounds similar to how Discogs has implemented quality ratings (via votes) for arbitrarily edited content, in between full editorial control and open wiki.
I don't think our little blog will stop anyone from making infographs.
When asked by SearchEngineLand, Google's Singhal seems to imply Google Toolbar clicktrail data is never used for ranking, but his wording is actually a bit vague:

Absolutely not. The PageRank feature sends back URLs, but we’ve never used those URLs or data to put any results on Google’s results page. We do not do that, and we will not do that.

Put any results could be read narrowly as "this data isn't used to add pages to the index", or more generally as "this data isn't used to rank results relative to each other". Also, Singhal's pledge that "we will not do that" is much stronger than any statement I've ever seen in any Google privacy policy, which all pretty much say Google may use any info they have to improve their services.

Matt Cutts, can you clarify if Singhal in fact meant the 'narrow' or 'general' interpretation above?

And, if the 'general' meaning, then is there any statement about the use of clicktrail data in Google's published privacy policies that is as strong as Singhal's?
A Practical Guide to Varnish
I wrote a greasemonkey script that removes them. See http://www.acooke.org/cute/HidingHNKa0.html

Hmmm. I wrote it for FireFox and haven't used it recently, after switching to Chrome, but it appears to install in Chrome too (oh; but the total top right is not removed - am looking into why now).

Note - it also "unhides" most greyed out comments.
This will encourage more students to put their ideas in practice.
"So Apple wants to block companies from allowing people to see content that wasn't paid for through their system. "

No. Sony is butthurt because they broke a long-standing app store rule about in-app purchases, and is working the refs by going to the press.

Every few months a story like this comes up, and there's a huge orgy of pearl-clutching, and then it turns out to have been nothing after all.
The antenna apparently has more gain, but the design flaw was that its conducting parts were on the outside of the case. That's just asking for trouble in a hand-held device.

But they are apparently on top of it. As soon as the flurry of complaints came in, they posted a job opening for an antenna engineer!
Writing an In Depth Slavery Essay
In order to write an effective essay on slavery students should be knowledgeable about what slavery entails. With the knowledge they gain through thorough investigation of slavery, students will be able to write a comprehensive essay.
>tl;dr: grow up..

I'd liked your post up to that point.
This is 2011. We have Netflix, gigagbytes of free online storage, dropbox.. Try living in New Zealand or Australia for a while. You start spending time checking your services are not downloading updates automatically, or disabling dropbox except a few days of the month so you don't blow your limit. You wait 2 days for a DVD to arrive in the mail from the local Netflix equivalent. You don't watch local news videos, or upload HD to Vimeo. You get upset at your US friends who email you a 5gb mp3. You're careful about where you hit play. You install AdBlock and worry about not supporting communities that rely on ads. It goes on and on and on - the fact is, our internet culture has grown to where downloading and uploading is a necessity, especially for the youth. Limits are serving to put media control back in the hands of those who control the method of transmission. The entire topic infuriates me as I've experienced limited and unlimited connections, and I certainly can attest to the greater production output I have when on an unlimited connection.

The reddit post points how exactly how ridiculous it is to be charged for something in this manner, the sheer unfairness of it. ISPs need to be reproached by their customers, and that will only happen by making it an emotional issue.
LEAKED: AOL's Master Plan
Email Template to Get Customer Testimonials
I think employers who have that attitude would probably NOT even be reading stackoverflow.

In any case, one can reasonably argue that stackoverflow actually HELPS one get work done faster. Many times a thoughtful response to a pointed question saves hours of fumbling around with unclear documentation.

For the folks doing the answering, there is a strong benefit that comes from writing down some cogent prose. NOTHING solidifies expertise in a subject like helping or teaching someone else.
Neat, everybody loses. Now that's thinking different.
Where as Digg, Diggnation and Revision 3 founder Kevin Rose. Is not using Rev3 for his new podcast Foundation or his other new show "The Random Show".

The reason Kevin says for charging for Foundation is "I'm spending money on equipment, and editing"..

It all sounds silly to me, and shows just keep disappearing.
I've found plenty of helpful information on StackOverflow via Google as well, but I definitely would not say that it "really really works."

I've asked two questions (C#/.NET so there's a large pool of potential answerers) and neither question ever got the answer it deserved, even though both got answers from genuine experts (Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert). I found the answer to my first question on some MSDN blog after I asked on StackOverflow, the second question is still unresolved.
They're marketing it to businesses as a replacement for traveling somewhere -- $15,000 isn't a lot to pay for that. If it lets one executive skip one trip, it's paid for itself.
"Wedding Day Diamonds gives away pop and cookies."
I'm not sure that high karma answers indicate anything other than that the candidate is answering basic questions. Correct answers to obscure or deep questions won't be trafficked as much and won't collect upboats. You should look at something else, say the answer:question karma ratio, unless you're looking for someone to answer the phones.
I would agree that quality not quantity matter, but quality as determined by votes isn't the quality I would be looking for. A high number of votes indicates several things:

The question was easy. Since a large number of people felt that they could determine the right answer and thus voted for it.

The answer was well written. Good this is what we are looking for.

The question was somewhat political. People tend to get in there and vote when they feel strongly about the answer.

The question was about something mainstream. Pretty much the same reasoning behind the is easy question. Playing a numbers game requires numbers. Answering questions about the factor programming language isn't going to net you a huge rep no matter how eloquent you are.
Naturally, the first thing I did was search for The Art Institute of Chicago.

Defeated, I found "Evening, Honfleur" in the Museum of Modern Art.
It wasn't quite the same, but my inner dork was satisfied. ;)
Microsoft, historically, have been kings of the desktop. With the rise of the web (which post-dated MS's rise), the desktop has become less and less relevant. Google is fast replacing them - my email, documents, search, advertising, analytics is all handled by Google. I don't use Microsoft for anything in my day-to-day life. Even on my main windows machine, my files are in my dropbox, outside of MS's control.

MS are desperate to regain control. Google will soon launch their own web-centric OS properly, and bam, MS will have no business apart from selling to an ever-dwindling number of companies who can't believe MS don't rule the roost any more. In 20 years they will simply cease to exist if they can't come up with a world-beating online product and win back control of people's computing lives.

Notice how they're diversifying into games and search in order to prepare for the worst case; that their core OS and 'boxed software' business fails.
While I actually can empathize with the author on wanting to help out, he's really making stackoverflow sound awesome - knowledgeable people are falling all over themselves to answer your question, and don't worry about being a freeloader, they already have too much free labor going into the answers.
The funny thing is that people with the Bing Toolbar are still using Google to do web searches.
What Does Link Building Look Like?
Mobile Data Explosion: 75 Exabytes by 2015
Thanks. Any downside?
There is nothing sucky about the stackexchange sites. They are designed to be useful and growing repositories of frequent question and answers. The whole rep/voting thing is just a gaming layer on top to make the process of participation a little more fun but if you just focus on the gaming aspect and take it way too seriously like this guy then you miss out completely.
What does this thing do that makes it worth as much as a mid-range Ford Fiesta?