skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Despite an careful attempt in the article to define 'large' (as 'necessarily large'), this is provoking the usual dickwaving from people who think that they are cleverer than those poor fools that write 10K or 100K programs, when _obviously_ these 10K or 100K programs are all _clearly_ just loads of tiny little elegant programs that fit together perfectly.

1 - he's already saying that: "One of the marks of a professional programmer is knowing how to organize software so that the complexity remains manageable as the size increases".

2 - the notion that you can just glue a bunch of small elegant programs together into one large, wonderful program is on of the great half-delivered promises of computer science. Spolsky wrote a nice article about 'leaky abstractions' a while back.

3 - in my experience, there are a number of problems that are simply disgusting and don't break up into small, elegant modules, and are better solved by enormous, disgusting 5 page functions. Really. If you haven't met one, be glad, but don't kid yourself that because you've only ever found nice elegant programs that everything out there is amenable to breaking into nice elegant components.

Disgusting code like this is particularly prevalent when you have to handle a lot of cases up against an interface that you don't control, especially when you have to write code that is high-performance and can't resort to some nice 'script-ish' or table-driven approach.

The guts of a real, high-performance compiler (not one of a toy language, but one that has to produce good code for a huge range of bizarre coding styles on the front end) at the point that it's dealing with actual hardware is a good example. On the front-end you've got input programs (many of the properties of which the compiler designers don't control) and on the back-end you've got an hardware ISA that the compiler designers don't control either. Some elegance usually happens here and there between those two points, but sometimes you have to build a large, complex system with a lot of interactions because you have a large, complex problem with a lot of interacting concerns. NOT because you're not using "Left-Handed Object Oriented Semi-Eager Inverness Haskell".

Often the difference between a successful product and a toy project is the willingness to deal with the nasty aspects of a problem that often force you to write these disgusting functions.

Various PL weenies will no doubt appear and tell us how this was all solved X years ago in language Y, but they were too busy proving theorems, writing a new compiler in Y for the even more awesome language Y', and reimplementing trivial projects (Web server, anyone?) in their chosen language to build anything substantial.
why on earth would you trust anyone with anything?

not saying I'm retiring my gmail account, just that there are plenty of ways that it might make sense for certain cases, despite some folks' knee-jerk inclination to distrust this one particular company.
Owning your @facebook.com address makes it easier for friends and family who are not on Facebook yet to connect with you

Hmmm... I'm quite sure that facebook will still "own your @facebook.com" address.
A contactless RFID scanner (from http://tinyurl.com/5utmtwj) only costs around $150 including shipping. I wonder how possible it would be to snatch people's bracelets (especially from drunk / passed out / sleeping people) and get all their credit card info?
You can't protest your way out of being broke, which is the ultimate truth of this situation.
Most protests are actually about government's spending, corruption and overall blatant plutocracy:

City councils not paying gardeners while the mayor says he's won the lotto for the 4th time in 5 years (obvious shameless money laundering that leaves the council with millions of debt).

Banks pay-rolling whole parties to gain favor which is showed later on with no hint of shame.

In some autonomous communities (Länder), a third of the politicians running for office have ongoing lawsuits about corruption.

They just spend their entire hours wheeling and dealing while the countries becomes the next Argentina.
Making it easy, attractive for the self-employed and start-ups is great and would really help; favorable tax, easy to fire people (horrible atm), etc. And last but not least; educating people that it is an option to start for yourself and that life is not all about maintaining the population their comfort level.
I don't think most people care about "brand trust" too much (some do), HTC is one of the most profitable handset makers and most people don't even know the company exists. For most people, they buy what their friend has, what they saw on tv, what the salesguy shoves in their face.
Show HN: Freebie finding site using interesting algorithm
A little while ago I built an automated website that finds free stuff while filtering out scams. It works in an interesting way. Most freebie sites on the web contain a mix of real, useful free stuff and scammy affiliate and pyramid schemes. I realized that affiliate links are always unique (because they need to contain an affiliate code) while real freebies have URLs that co-occur across multiple sites at roughly the same time. I wrote a crawler in Perl and MySQL that looks for repeating, off-domain URLs that temporally cluster on multiple free stuff sites. I was surprised and pleased to find that this trick eliminates affiliate links with almost 100% success and tends to find real freebies. I then let users rate freebies and provide category and description information.

Here's the result: http://absurdlycool.com

Do you folks have suggestions about how I could make the site more useful? I recently worked on a redesign, but I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer :)
There are a lot of things you can do.

Unique visual design. Appearance of exclusivity. Induce the user to pay something of value for it. Expunge "smells like a blog post" signifiers like a prominent date, comments enabled, etc.

Use forms of content which haven't been played out yet -- those obnoxious infographics, for example, work partially because they were fresher than blog posts. (Thankfully they're on the way out, but they really pushed the buttons of some people whose buttons are valuable to push.) One can imagine doing this in a value-creating way, e.g. by using purpose-built software as content.

Attach signals of social proof and/or authority to the content. People's perceptions of value are not dominated by content quality. Let me say that again since engineers need to hear it: people's perceptions of value are not dominated by content quality. For example, if your CEO is writing something and he has previously been published in the New York Times, you probably want to mention that. If the things you are saying are the hard-won experiences you got from 10 years at selling your software to thousands of happy customers, you probably want to mention that. etc, etc.
Unity uses Mono for scripting in their engine. As it runs on a variety of platforms where replacing the runtime (which is normally LGPL licensed) isn't possible, I believe they have a commercial licensing agreement in place with Novell.

I don't know what the terms are of that agreement.
Ask HN: APIs developed in Boston?
anyone know of APIs that were built in Boston?
Cali Swag District - Teach me how to dougie (RIP)
If you're just suggesting that we need to ship a common bytecode to browsers, then I agree.
I have Facebook email for a while, and I find it incredibly hideous. I have already "trusted" Facebook to more things than I wanted, and I guess I'd hold on to my gmail which is at least operated by another company that is less evi... uh never mind.
Since you'll likely be directly involved politically in this issue (by protesting and/or voting), I urge you to read the comment I left as a reply to another comment further down the thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2558318

It's important to understand the reasons for the crisis. Your leadership should take responsibility for what happened, but the voting public should develop and demand different policies from their successors. I think it's crucial to realize austerity could only make things worse and that it's currently being forced upon a number of the poorer EU countries (I'm also a citizen of one). I'm sure corruption is a problem, but in this case it goes much deeper and runs right into the almost religious adherence to neoliberal economics throughout Europe and the US.
This is cool, it's been around for about 10 years. I seem to recall there was crash safety and leakage issues with this setup.
I left Spain many years ago, seems that nothing has changed (except except for the predictable and spectacular bust of the bubble).

Often people ask me if I plan to go back to Spain, my answer has always been invariable "No way, are you mad? Why on earth would I want to go back?".
Heyo - Matt from DevStructure. Glad you found it, let us know if you have any questions about blueprint - matt@devstructure.com
Change my privacy preferences on a whim without my permission?
congrats GDocs team!
argggggg
Might have been an interesting way to proceed because of various weird reasons 15 or 20 yeats ago, but current x86 plateforms are not that convoluted (for at least 10 years). Just outw (or is it outb? don't remember) the correct value to port 0cf9h (which btw has nothing to do with the legacy PCI conf addr register, which is 32 bits starting at io port 0cf8h for great confusion...) and your computer reboot.
If they only have 25 million pounds of assets under management then they're a "start up" hedge fund. That means that someone bankrolled them for the tune of 25% equity and a slice of the profits until they can "pay back" the 25 million pounds. I swear, "start up" hedge funds have worse financing options than normal start ups. Thank God we don't have to deal with such draconian measures.
I've had this since a week after it's announcement like November I think. I like that chat is integrated with messages but I don't use it like an email account.
Sansa Clip+ also uses micro SD cards. That being said I used to have most of my music around with me all the time, but there was no point in that. It just degraded into this: http://i.imgur.com/p8Egi.png

I bought a Clip and I just load up music now and then that I am currently listening to a lot.
Hey all,
I'm the original author and I saw this popup, so I figured I post a quick comment.

A lot of people have pointed out that I didn't really include and example of a start-up using, which is a legit point. If you're interested in seeing a good example, check out http://stackoverflow.com They're a great example of a company that's very open about their experiences with .NET (both good and bad) and they generally post them on their blog at http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/aspnet/

If you have specific questions, feel free to reply and I will do my best to answer them.
Meh.

I think it's pretty rare for a company to tell someone "Yes, you can definitely work for us, here is a contract for you to sign and a start date and how much you're going to make" and then revoke that.

Which is the equivalent to me telling a company I'll work for them and then reneging.

But of course, yes, they could do it, and you're right that people and companies aren't always courteous.
Well, your assumption is wrong. There is actually such a high degree of unemployment that affects professionals like: biologists, doctors, architects and even engineers. I do have friends in that situation. I'm living in Madrid, just 10 minutes away from where everything is happening.
Much better -- and good work doing customer service directly on HN!
AT&T sideloading officially a go, designed to allow Amazon Appstore downloads
You could argue that the Chinese state as a whole is in fact a large corporation.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need(s)."

A leaders best ability is to lead. Hence, you would end up with intellectuals, scientists, economists and others who have a strong grasp of complex theories and systems. Opposed to having actors and political pretty boys leading.

Marx's saying goes even further with the corporate metaphor. The lower the 'worker' in the 'corporation' the less they get 'paid'/'need'. How is there any real difference with how Walmart views its minimum wage workers to how China views its farmers or sweatshop workers? From the top they're all just pawns to make a profit.
Show HN: Two great .io domain names just dropped, who.io and track.io
Consider this a PSA - I've got no interest in the names, have just been watching them during their 3-month redemption period. If they were $9, it'd be a no-brainer, but at $100, you need a purpose. :)

They both dropped in the last 5 minutes, so first-come, first-served:

http://nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=track.io

http://nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=who.io
Thanks for the info. I got it running locally with those bins you mentioned. There is currently no further backend action.
Oh but it's so sunny! I feel you paisano. I'm 24, finishing my second BSc and will probably flee soon.

Still it hurts so much to witness all this.
If you're having issues with ssh picking up your keys, you can always call it out explicitly:
ssh -i path/to/key.pem ec2-user@blah.amazonaws.com
Show HN: How HN helped us pay for our wedding.
So my fiance and I are addicted to Hacker News and we have learned a lot about startups on here. We had an idea for a startup that would have taken a lot of time and resources to build but thanks to Hacker News we have learned about people like Eric Ries, Steven Blank and the whole customer development strategy.

We decided to build the MVP for our startup to see if there was a market for our original idea and also raise money for our wedding. We shaved off all of the crazy features and launched https://www.crowdbundle.com/

Hacker News taught us to build a MVP and make sure there was a market first: By getting people to make purchases so far we have been able to validate that we are providing something of value and the right people are being targeted.

We learned you need to charge money from day one when you are bootstrapping. This was an easy decision because we want to know if we are providing something of value to the right people. If people are willing to actually take out the credit card and pay us for something then we can measure how valuable they find our product.

We learned about social hooks for making a product or service go viral. We all know push marketing is not very effective but personal recommendations are. That is why we have integrated twitter and facebook into the checkout process. If someone is willing to let us tweet or update the facebook wall on their behalf to show a personal recommendation for our product we now have personal recommendations towards their friends. To promote this activity we built a system that gives major discounts for such behavior.

If anyone has any other suggestions to help validate our MVP please let use know. :-)
> I even wonder, is the hiring committee a computer?

That information is well above your classification level, citizen.

Are you a communist?
While this is a great move from Facebook from 'getting everyone on our platform' POV I find it hideous and disgusting.

The interface is crap. It offers no folders/labels, no outside contacts (not sure?) and is a lock in system.
Not only that, it doesn't bring anything new to email.

Value added? None. Just more lock-in, propriety, FBI-friendly BS.

I can't wait for Diaspora to be stable and public. Long live FOSS and the revolution!

EDIT: Yes can send email but will include your profile info. Gee thanks! Just what I wanted!
Also Spam?

Also note that my post is intentionally agressive, I hate the 'Facebook attitude'.
The Facebook integration is a big win-win for Bing and Facebook.
Patent Troll Sells Licenses For In-App Buy Buttons, Then Tries To Explain Itself
I'm sorry, but that is completely irrelevant to the situation in Spain, which among other things just suffered a housing bubble that almost makes the one in the US look like child's play.

The employment market and other aspects of the Spanish economy are stuck in the middle ages.

Surprisingly, the big Spanish banks were mostly responsible and have done better than banks in other countries, but the rest of the economy is bust because half was in the construction sector and the other half was is the government sector, you can't have a viable economy like that, you need private productive industries, and for that you need to make it possible for people to start new business and properly run existing business.
Great we can expect Student, Home, Media, and Professional Editions that no one knows what the difference is.

This strategy is going to fail--the tablet market has been consistent and uniformed since the iPad, none of this gimmicktry that works in the PC/phone markets by released dozens of SKUs with only slight changes. People won't fall for this when they can just buy an iPad that will be current for a year or more.
But if they are good at what they do, they really cannot find the creativity to fix their situation? Like move to another city where there is work? Start your own company (there is subsidizing for that, at least in Andalusia)? Do your own marketing better? Why are people sitting in Madrid '10 minutes away from where everything is happening' and then just wait until 'something' happens??
pivot table is probably the most interesting interface to BI cubes, I've hardly seen them used elsewhere!

so i can't really agree on your assumption that "other data sources" would represent 0.1%, in most business places i would say "other data sources" represent 100% of the usage
I had a feeling it was some inside joke. Not sure about expressions like these. If you're not familiar with the reference, it just looks like incorrect grammar or a typo.

I do like the trend of having apps that can launch from the menu bar like Alfred, Dropbox, Growl.
I think this paragraph is extremely important:

"Developers may not actually prefer the GPL license, but there is so much GPL licensed code available for (re-)use that it often seems silly to reinvent the wheel. If you can use a GPL library to do much of the heavy lifting for your application, it’s often easier to go with the flow: use that library and license your whole work under the GPL."

My gut feeling is that most developers who release GPL source do so either because they're using other GPL source, or because they don't have a strong preference and are using GPL because they don't know any better.

I also think the over-generalization of "Open Source Developers" is harmful. There are different types of open source developers, and they have different habits. For example, GPL is relatively uncommon within the Cocoa development community.
Kalahari79birdwatching
Sunny? One of the reasons I left is because I could not stand Summer at >45C.
The combination of Facebook's blatant disregard for privacy and American authorities' wide access to snoop means that I won't be using Facebook email.
My own personal "horror" story.

Google reached out to me, unsolicited, for a web developer position. I wasn't looking, but I thought cool, I'll at least talk to them. The recruiter kept asking me about how good my Java was. I repeated what it said on my resume, that I only used it in college, but that my OO skills were strong and transferable. Afterwards the recruiter emailed me, and said I wasn't a good fit because I didn't have enough Java experience. I didn't even get a technical phone screen.

Java experience is serious business.
> architects and even engineers

How is this surprising after one of the greatest housing bubbles in history burst?
Design decisions powered by A/B testing are a great way of incrementally improving your product, but trying to use them to drive the overall product direction can lead you to decisions that fly in the face of common sense.

Good lord do I agree. At a certain level, you just have to trust your gut.
Why not just pay for an IMAP account at a provider that doesn't invade your privacy?
You seem highly optimistic about the JVM's appropriateness here. In reality what the browser needs is something more like the Dalvik VM, which is designed for compactness, efficiency, and multi-process models.
Agreed. The Veer looks like it was specifically engineered for children.
I'm sorry, but it was the middle class that went along with the insane bubble.

The big Spanish banks, unlike banks in most other places, acted relatively responsibly and have not needed to be bailed out (the 'cajas', which are local banks controlled in part by politicians on the other hand are totally bust).
There's a consistency in these stories from different people over the years that tells me this is one of the normal processes at Google. It may not be intentional, but it is known and there is no sincere desire to fix the process. That that is so tells me the process is about asserting power and place, and not about looking for talent.
That doesn't excuse them. These days we have databases. There's no reason that an entry can't be made for each applicant which is handed off to other recruiters when one leaves. That the process seems so tied to individuals is surprising to me.
Why don't app marketplaces allow vendor responses to the reviews?
While in the short run this may seem possible, in the long run it is difficult. Bing relies on Facebook which only has information on how users behave online. Google on the other hand Android, which when embedded in all the devices can provide both online and offline user preference. More http://truvoipbuzz.com/2011/05/google-android-everywhere-wor...
(Posting anonymously because I'm in the middle of interviewing with Google)

My experience so far has been very different. I was contacted by a recruiter a few weeks ago. I had a phone interview within a week of the initial contact. Within three days, they got back to me to schedule an onsite interview.

The one negative I've encountered so far: Google has an office near where I live, but will not interview me there. This will require significant travel on my part.
Just bought it and it looks great. However; it uses 70MB RAM which seems a bit steep for this type of program. It is not possible to move its location in the menu bar which is irritating. An alarm clock/countdown timer would also have been nice, which is really what I need on my Mac.
Why wouldn't a startup that I start use .NET? Because it's too late. The time to catch me was 5-10 years ago - when I was a middle school/high school code monkey playing with the Linux/GNU/gcc stack.

Now it's simply too late. Sure, I could and would invest time and money if your stack was orders of magnitude better. And I often do learn and use new stacks (the ML family; common Lisp) if they happen to be by far the right environment for the problem at hand. But if .NET is just "Java, but a little better", it's really not worth my time.
While fine-targeted spending can foster growth and productivity, that thing you've thought of about having one person digging and other one filling holes is completely wrong.

How do I know? The idiot in charge in my country spent thousands of millions of euros developing that near-sighted idea to no avail. He just kept the housing-bubble men busy for a while longer.

And then along came deficit.