skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post. As one of the Windsoc developers, I obviously believe in the Unified API. Things typically tend to move too fast for standards to be developed. OAuth is the only real "standard" people are using, but even still everyone does it just a little bit different. http://activitystrea.ms/ is another great standard that very few people use.
""Singletons do make sense when they represent a true physical singleton - for example, you only want one piece of code drawing directly to the screen, the Window Manager, which should indeed be a singleton.""

That's a false dichotomy. Trying to understand the world as global or local data doesn't make sense; It's contextual. What may be global to you may be local to the next guy and vice versa.

What does make sense, is for a programmer to make a judgement call as to whether something could meaningfully be considered global for the particular case he's working on.

I used to like the concept of dependency injection, but I have come to find it mostly just adds noise. If you use a dynamic language anyway. I don't know about statically, compiled languages, since I don't do much work in those.
Hey Maxious - I'm one of the opensignalmaps guys. We're working on opening up our data, we're just trying to figure out the best way to go about it.
Apologies!!!! You guys killed my little ec2 instance! It's back up, but running slowly. I'm going to look for some new hosting. thanks for the comments. i'll take some time to respond later.
Again, video programming is different..you might want to seek out the advice of people from that field specifically.

We have an analogue in enterprise/web programming. Code that interacts against the database. Do you, or don't you, stub/mock out the data layer code? Traditionally people did mock this out. Then Rails came along with ActiveRecord...and now hitting the DB isn't only common, I think a lot of people agree that, at a point, it's the right approach. Because, after all, what are you really testing if you don't hit an actual DB?

But, that's specific to code that has dependencies on outside systems (like the DB, or your graphic subsystem). When I look at your Foo class and the IsValid method, I see a pretty specific unit that really can and should be tested separately from an actual GrSubsys implementation. I mean, you've given it a dependency on GrSubsys, but I'm not sure that's right.

Should the test read:

"it is invalid when the model is null"

or

"it is invalid when the graphic subsystem returned null"

?

The difference is subtle, but important. The first is decoupled from the implementation. Foo is invalid when it's model is null. The second is coupled to the depedency: Foo is only invalid when the graphic subsytem returned null.

What value does that extra coupling, within your test, get you? What should IsValid (either the test, or the implementation) care that why the model is null? Why add that extra complexity which makes your test more likely to break due to changes to the implementation of the dependency?

If you test Foo independently, and then you test that gGrSubsys returns null on an invalid model separately, the two unit tests end up working together in isolation from changes you might make to the other.
Sure, but does patio11 play bingo every day? You don't have to be passionate about the particulars of a product to decide to capitalize on an opportunity.

(Seems like this has been an example around here before! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520311 )
I am happy, but I still don't believe that we've had an economic recovery.
How not to measure scientific productivity
Device that lets you 'Kiss' over the Internet
This is off topic, but isn't Dropbox essentially a backup service? Also, having your important files in git isn't really helpful unless you git repo is remotely stored and backup up.

For your sake I hope it is.
Make Reading For Visitors Better Experience
Your location 'extremely valuable' to Google
It feels slower than doing it by hand.
Hm, I think your statements is too broad: "...the stuff a static language demands of us is really a limitation of said languages." You could apply it to some languages, like Java or C#, but the Haskell and ML folks have an entirely different view of static typing. As Haskell has proven, a good static typing system can make it easier to write short, clear code, correct code. And dynamic types are really just a kind of static types -- reduce a static type system until it has only one type, voila, a dynamic type system. I jest.

I tend to think about it the other way around, as "These are things I can do in a static type system but not in a dynamic one," but never let it be said that arguing about type systems on the internet was a good use of my time.
Raleigh, NC

Rally Software (AgileZen Team) - Generalist engineer

This might look familiar, since we posted a similar opening last month. (We actually filled that opening via Hacker News!) This is a new position, similar to the previous one -- we're looking for someone very strong in and passionate about UI/UX work.

Our app is a SaaS project management system that makes it easy for users to visualize their work. While Rally's primary business is enterprise software, AgileZen's customers are primarily small teams and startups.

We started as a two-founder startup in Ohio in 2009 and were acquired by Rally in 2010. We're now a team of five with intentions of expanding to seven by the end of the year. We think and act very much like a startup, report to the CTO, and operate with relative autonomy within the company.

Experience in any development ecosystem (.NET, Java, Ruby, Python) is great, but JavaScript knowledge is a major plus. Our frontend is a whole bunch of JavaScript and CoffeeScript, and we're exploring doing more with Node.JS on the backend. We like people who are good at lots of things, and excellent at a few.

Review My App link on HN (from our launch in 2009): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691673

More about us at: http://agilezen.com/

More about the job at: http://bit.ly/kZrHzs
Hey all, we do something similar on http://opensignalmaps.com except by crowdsourcing the data from our Android app.

Yes, our name says "open" and we're not actually "open" yet...but we're working on it.
Dish, Echostar agree to pay TiVo $500M to settle patent litigation
Show HN: AppHorde - LinkExchange for Mobile Apps
Steve Yegge wrote on this some years ago, calling it the Simpleton Pattern. http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/singleton-considere...
Antimatter is not going to help you there. You need exotic matter of the negative mass kind. which are not thought to exist.
Of course it is justifiable. The 9/11 attack was spectacular, something which a writer could imagine in fiction. That act stole peace from the world. The following invasion of Afghanistan had and still has almost unanimous support. It also was a direct response to 9/11. So one can say, it was Bin Laden who really killed those civilians both in America and Afghanistan.

Now Iraq maybe is another story.
That's what check sums are good for. You can use a file system that has them build in, or add them manually.
Funny Bin Laden Facebook Status’ & Photos
A California police officer in a major cities makes even more but those jobs are just as hard to get.
It's impossible to unit test a component whose criteria for 'working' is tightly coupled to dependencies out of your control (video hardware & drivers).

Thus you'll never be able to unit-test a video game completely. Or even fulfill other forms of testing with the same breadth as is possible in other software, unless you have every possible configuration to test on, or stick with consoles. Games are among the buggiest of all software, but it's not for want of trying!
...assessed and properly placed so the students that already have some knowledge can move ahead and start learning right away, while the remaining students can take the introductory courses at an appropriate pace.

And enrollment would drop because half the class skips years 1 and 2. Not to mention costs would rise, because instead of paying for a 250 student lecture on "=" vs "==", you'd be paying for a 50 student lecture on compilers. Good for the students, but bad for the college. Probably will never happen, except at a few very good schools.
Oh Julian, how arrogant you are. Every time I read this guy spouting off, he just continues to lose credibility and respect. If you don't want employers or any other companies looking you up on social media, then don't use it - or just use an alias or a fake name.

Nobody HAS to have a Facebook page or partake in social media. If you don't want people tracking you, then don't use it. DUH
I guess in pointing out other people's ignorance, I ended up pointing at my own. Thanks though, I guess I should at least familiarizing myself with Haskell before I paint such broad strokes.
Have had mine for just over 3 months, no problems whatsoever.
Maybe they are celebrating the chance or renewed hope to now have peace in our time.
I've been building AppHorde out as a side project for a few months now and would love to get some feedback from the community. If you are an android developer then please feel free to try the service out.

Beta Invite: yc
Whoops; for the record, "file" is not written by GNU. It was originally written by Ian Darwin and is currently maintained by Christos Zoulas, see http://www.darwinsys.com/file/
At least when I'm sitting behind my desk getting fat and ruining my body I don't regularly have to worry about getting stabbed.
Wow! My standard way of dealing with companies who send me correspondances like: "We will automatically renew your subscription on 3/1/2011", is to go into their interface, and change the expiration date to the current month. Then the card "expires" at the end of the month.

This has worked with DirecTV and Intuit so far.
I think people may be overselling this a bit. It is true that antimatter bears certain resemblances to matter traveling "backwards in time" when the math is examined, but the mental images conjured up by a plain-English reading of that phrase are almost entirely wrong. It's not like you tap the antimatter and the motion goes backward in time. I hate using metaphors, but it's somewhat more like you have a guy walking forward on the road, but if you hit him violently enough he'll end up turned around, walking back-first but in the same direction. Yeah, he's walking backwards through time! ime! ime! ime! but it's not like you can actually send messages backwards or anything; give him a message and he's still walking in the positive-time direction. There's a lot of cancellation of the negative term that goes on and he's still dancing to the tune of the same arrow-of-time as the rest of us.

I'm pretty pessimistic that antimatter will be repulsed by gravity, because you would suddenly have a term that would have to appear for the potential energy of the now-flipped gravity field. It makes much more sense for it to be affected normally. It's an interesting question that we might as well look at, on the off chance that the science will be wrong (which is when it advances, after all), but I wouldn't hold your breath.
...And I have an SSD that came installed with my Macbook Pro almost a year and is still working without any hickups. Single data points aren't all that valuable.
So America is a crazy place. We already know that.
Be sure to click on the "A" and read the Google reviews.
Thanks! Possibilities include:
- Payable invoice URLS (include small charge)
- Branding/templates
- Edit in place beyond invoices

For now though, I'm concentrating on iron out the UI and then building a back end.
My suspicion is that Al-Qaeda is like Anonymous, organization-wise. It does both them and the media a lot of good to leave the impression that they are a vast hierarchical organization, when really they are a loose association of radicals with common goals.
Ask HN: Version control for PHP?
We have a 5 person team, we are looking for a version control system for our PHP project, any suggestion / direction? We use a mix of windows / OSX. Using a Linux based web server.
In reality, every erase is followed by exactly one (amortized) program, so it doesn't matter which one you track.
Appreciate the input—interesting ideas.
You guys realise that this essay was published on January 23, 2010 right? I'm sure it's been posted here before.
You're welcome.

I don't know what it should do. Showing variance is fine, and my professor for probability theory actually preferred variance over standard deviation.
> Antimatter is just matter moving backwards in time

That could finally put an end to the chicken-egg problem. There was an anti-matter chicken in the first egg and it had moved back in time to lay its own egg after it hatched!
$100 says antimatter is also attracted by gravity. Anything else would be too cool for school.
Still mad, personal data is still out there being sold.
Classes of Mobile Web Apps
I'm guessing this is in response to this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505857
>> which are not thought to exist

which have been observed a few times in colliders
How Niche are Your Web Directories?
Well, in the same manner that a cow is spherical. :) I use it to motivate that antimatter is not so different from matter and not this exotic thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war#Differences_between_...

It all falls down to what you prefer.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505688

Especially:

Book: Lion's Commentary on the Sixth Ed Unix

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2506176
You'd ask, what is really the point of buying stock in a company that will never pay dividend in its lifetime?

They can distribute profits via share buybacks. Instead of distributing 1% of the companies value as dividends, they can buy back 1% of shares. You then have the option of selling 1% of your shares back (equivalent to taking dividends) or keeping your shares (equivalent to reinvesting dividends).

This only works if you are a big shareholder - if you are a small time player on ETrade, transaction costs will kill this idea.
Some of the Coolest Hippie Van Illustrations
http://www.pictrmania.com/some-of-the-coolest-hippie-van-illustrations.html
Doom needed 4mb of free memory. If you had 4mb total, you had to create a boot disk. 8mb machines worked fine without a boot disk.

I also, amazingly, remember running some early version of Pagemaker on that machine. When I went to link text, I would click the mouse to start the process, go get a sandwich, watch some TV and come back 10 minutes later when it finished.
You like your Commodore 64 BASIC (or Ye Olde Fortran)?
Wait, I spend 99% of my time programming in dynamic languages, and I still use dependency injection. Why would I want to resort to hacks when I can just pass stuff in to my classes instead?

I will admit that I need the hacks from time to time, though. Recently, I wrote an overly large method that calls a callback when the command completes. For my test, I needed to run a bit of code right before the callback was called.

Runtime role application to the rescue! In my test, I wrote:

my $done = AnyEvent->condvar;
$done->begin;
my $called_callback = 0;

{ pacakge FixupCallback;
requires 'update_table';
around 'update_table' => sub {
my ($orig, $self, @args) = @_;
my $cb = pop @args;

# this is like "super"
$self->$orig( @args, sub {
$called_callback = 1;
$cb->(@_); # call the original callback
$done->end; # then return control flow back to us
});
};
}

Then, I just find the instance of the class that I need to tweak:

my $view = $app->latency_publisher->view;
FixupCallback->meta->apply($view);

And now I've fixed up the code enough to write a sane test. While cool, this doesn't negate the need for dependency injection. I want my app code to be 99% clean, and use the hacks for that 1% case where the hacks result in cleaner code than "the right way".

Also, I've never programmed Java or C#, so don't say that I have inherited bad habits from those languages :)
> The first is that capital gains taxes tend to be on investments made with income you've earned, so there's already been an income tax.

I don't really get this counterpoint; isn't everything in the economy a flow of money that has been taxed at a previous point in the flow? If I have $100,000 that I've already paid taxes on, I could invest it in external assets and hope to make capital gains on them; or I could plow it back into my own occupation and use it to generate income (say, by setting up an art studio). Why should I pay more taxes in the second case?

Consider two eBay-painting-seller scenarios. In the first, I buy painting materials, paint paintings, and then sell them on eBay. In the second, I buy existing paintings on eBay that I think are underpriced, and then resell them later for a profit. Why should I pay more taxes in the first case, just because I painted the paintings? In both cases my occupation is basically "selling paintings on eBay", but in one I'm creating new ones and selling them for an income, and in the other I'm flipping existing paintings, making a capital gain. In both cases the starting capital is money I've already paid taxes on. If anything, the first occupation seems like the one policy should encourage, rather than the second, but at the very least I don't see any reason to actively encourage the second version over the first.
Alternately, you can implement such context-sensitive features in another pass after the parse.
Coping With Stress Ignite Talk
The thrust of this post is wrong; while I'm looking for a good breakdown of tax burden by quintile I'll just observe:

"We live in NYC and according to our accountants, we pay a marginal fully loaded tax rate of 47.62%. That means we keep about half of the ordinary income the Gotham Gal and I generate." The second sentence glides over the key word in the first sentence, "marginal". AVC and GG pay much lower rates on the first income they earn during the year -- it is only the income that exceeds what most people will ever earn during a year that is taxed at the higher income rate. Conversely, the first income -- the income they have in common with ordinary people -- is subject to social security and unemployment tax -- but the extraordinary income that makes them very wealthy is not. They also probably pay much less of their income in sales tax and small fees that most Americans.

Finally, according to the IRS in several recent years 10% of the capital gains income in the entire country has gone to the richest 400 tax payers, whose average tax rate is not the 47% rate AVC cites, but 17%: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/who-benefits-fro...

Edit: here's total tax distribution by quintile: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/01/07/moving-fr... . Note that the 34.5% paid by the richest 20% drops sharply for the very richest.
I'd like to know too.
I don't think that's it either as Google Earth shows that imagery as being dated 3/22/2001, whereas the compound was supposedly only built in 2005.
Does this upset anyone because they seem visually inefficient?

Not to say they're computationally innefficient, I couldn't be sure that they are, but they seem to be slow by way of a lack of estimation or some such.

I feel rediculous being upset by it, as though it were a person behind them and not an algorithm...but gddamn, why can't you just...oh, well, because its a computer and it has no eyes... >.<
I am not a tax lawyer, but my understanding is that capital gains only count as such if you've held the asset for at least a few years.

By the way, in the first case, your outlays are tax-deductible.

(edit: I'm not an expert, so downvoters, please explain your disagreement.)
I can't see the soundscan charts, but some of the later charts are inflation adjusted, are you comparing those to Nielson's possibly non-inflation numbers?

Regardless, I think it's more interesting to look at the proportions from one year to the next than to compare the dollar value.
Even if you do not actively register at Facebook yourself, your friends might give them your identity and social group by allowing Facebook to harvest their e-mail accounts.
Everything is done with continuations and if you wait too long your's gets GC'd.
and as reported by BBC, he left the city to live in peace and quiet for a while.
CouchDB-OCaml
You can write "A * B" and depending on nature of A, that would be a declaration of B as pointer to type B, or multiplication of A and B. You could say that this multiplication would be 'void' (as in 'not assigned to anything') and I could come up with even more complicated example, like "A * B();" where this is either function declaration or multiplication of A and function named B() with side-effect let's say. But that's not the point: if parser has to do heuristics like that to parse language properly, it is already context-dependent or at least not LALR(0) or LALR(1).
If The Problem Were American Schools, Asian Children Would Be Failing as Well
5 SSDs here, got the oldest 2.5 years ago. No failures so far. I've run them as system drives, DB storage and so on.

I'd think a reason for quick wear out may be swap memory. I've never put a swap file/partition on mine.
I guess I sort of see his point, but isn't he overstating things? Take Facebook out of the equation, and it's still incredibly easy for intelligence agencies to find out everything about you. They can still tap your phones, do surveillance, check your bank records, bug your home and read anything you write online that doesn't happen to be on Facebook. Maybe Facebook made some of that easier, but it certainly didn't make possible the impossible.
The Gamification of Fast-Food
That's in practice what happens, but it does make for a bit of strangeness from the perspective of fundamental valuations. At least in idealized theory, a stock is worth the time-discounted value of its future dividends plus any terminal liquidation payout (if the company eventually gets sold for cash). A share buyback increases the share of a company that a given stockholder owns, by getting rid of some of the other outstanding shares. That should make the share more valuable, because it's now entitled to a larger percentage of those future earnings... but raising the percentage of future earnings you're entitled to is only valuable if there are any! So either there have to eventually be some dividends or a cash sale, or else we have to abandon that view of valuation as having any tie to future earnings.
> I've been writing flash file systems since 1991. They're fun as hell to work with.

Could you recommend any good resources for someone new to file system technology that is interested in their inner-workings? Thanks!
"Over 120,000 people apply every year, according to the state Legislative Analyst's Office, but the academy only enrolls about 900."

I could only think about how if California spent a similar amount of money on teachers, they could (apparently) attract some serious talent that they could be very selective with. Such a talented pool of teachers might be able to produce a generation with a much lower crime rate (reducing the need for California's insane prison system) and much higher productivity (tax base). Countries like Singapore have proven what a valuable investment education is. It is maddening to see how much more we invest maintaining the highest incarceration rate in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...).
Citation needed. Matter with negative mass would be big news.
Android app kapturem : A gameified take on social photography
When Redis adds a new command in the future, the Lua API code will already work with that new command without needing any modifications - hence forward compatible.
Who is Seth Priebatsch?
>>> k = "gWU`UAXYjT[ig\\eBWca"

>>> ''.join([chr(ord(c) - len(k) - 1) for c in k])

'SCALA-DEV@GUSHQ.COM'

Can I get a job as a translator?
I think it does matter, although my example fails to make clear why. Type identifiers have different syntactic requirements to regular identifiers (the parens in sizeof(typename) are required, but the parens in sizeof(varname) are optional).
Why is the decoded mail address pointing to a server in china?