skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know for sure but this seems a lot like GMail circa a while ago. Why no comparison to GMail times? It'd be interesting to see the side-by-side between vendors.
Live Q&A: Farbood Nibi (Grockit)
It was indeed. None of the function shorthands made it into ES.next, but the current leading contenders are: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:arrow_functi...

(x) -> x * x

And http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:block_lambda...

{|x| x * x}
smoothjazz = kenny g, peter white, dave koz, michael lington, marc antoine..latin jazz.. Caribbean style

and some blake jazz
Google Plus's Circles System May Not be Sustainable
To throw another variable in there, I expect to see the iPhone on Sprint before the end of the year.
Some things are better found in books though. I've been reading Lisp in Small Pieces for a while now, and there's some great stuff buried in there. I don't think I would have stumbled upon it just hacking away on toy Lisps on my own.

There might be other places to find some of these things, like other compiler texts or the actual source of some Lisp compilers and runtimes, but books are often laid out in a nice pedagogical way. Reading the SBCL or Racket source would be a steep way to get to some of these ideas.

I would amend your recommendation to say, pick the massive textbooks you read carefully. Don't suffer through big, poorly written books.
Its nice to see some good design advice for android getting out there. The reputation for poor usability on the platform is I think driven more by designers treating it as a secondary platform than it is android being difficult to create good ui with. So many apps on the market feel like poorly thought through iPhone ports with explicit exit functionality, loss of state on exit/resume , soft buttons for things like search and back that exist as hard buttons, and glossy iPhone like interface that feels out of place.

The best bit of advice I thought was to actually get a device and spend time using it day to day before designing for it. If you're going to design effectively you have to get into the users shoes a bit and understand their expectations.
Maybe they could implement some sort of "Smart Circles" or "Nested Circles". That could solve the author's "Work Friends" issue.
> there are a lot of people like her

But not enough to sustain RIM as a viable player, which is the core of their problem.
Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
What big sites use Google App Engine? Have you tried it? Is it flexible enough to run big, serious projects on?
Yes. I saw that. It doesn't work all that well.

One of the comments I saw on Google+ is making a distinction between a "plaza" and a "warren". Facebook defaults to plaza though it can do warren with some contortion. Likewise, Google+ defaults to warren and can do plaza with some contortion.

With my wide-ranging interests and extremely, sometimes mutually-exclusive perspectives, personal beliefs, pet philosophies and operating paradigm, I prefer a social network that defaults to a "warren".

In the end, it is probably a case of the "Evil Twin": http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/09/17/your-evil-twins-and-how...
My reading of the title followed the first commenter.

For years we've been begging for locally bound function declarations so we don't have to explicitly pass variables to callbacks and so we don't pollute the global namespace with worker function names.

This article then proceeds to throw all that away so we can have named functions. Worse, you can have names and locality that he ignores:

function bigGuy() {
function littleWorker() { /* stuff */ }
begin(littleWorker);
}

So my question, why do this? What are the benefits?
Even Wal Mart will pay you while training you. If a company cannot meet that standard, something is wrong, imo.
How to nap
Am I the only one who doesn't have a radio in the house?
in a sense it is - it involves magnitudes along two orthogonal directions. there is no qualitative difference between 2 and 0.3 in this particular context.
Here's the click path to the station I listen to most: Genre Stations -> Alternative -> 90s Alternative/Grunge

A problem with pandora is that most stations are too uniform to hold my interest. I like the curation that a real DJ brings to the music stream, so I prefer http://www.kfjc.org/netcast/
Well you wouldn't want to throw off the delicate power dynamic in the relationship by having her feel attractive to you.
So true, I'm completely non-technical but I've built a business that is bootstrapped, ramen profitable and growing - now we are actively looking for a Technical co but I'm realizing that I need to learn the basics myself as well. Awesome article!
Zuckerberg: TV, books, movies next in line for social disruption
Better yet: iPhone development, still much more complex than most people think it is/should be.
Speaking of sharing ideas, I'd love to get some feedback from you guys on a recent side-project I developed at http://thesparkfoundry.com . The premise is that you sign up for various mailing lists for voting on ideas and entrepreneurs can access those lists by agreeing to build them (http://www.sparkmuse.com/foundry/howitworks). Highly voted ideas would then be attractive to a developer as you'd get a built-in pool of potential beta subscribers or people willing to give feedback. Unfortunately I never had the time to fully promote it, but it was fun to build.
I posted the text of the notice e-mail for the curious: http://bitoftech.mkronline.com/2011/06/30/microsoft-hohm-dis...
I really like the way functions are declared in Kaffeine[1]:

(x) { x * x }

[1] http://weepy.github.com/kaffeine/docs/function_extensions.ht...
> One area that RIM/Blackberry is still king is the enterprise. Apple hasn't even attempted to enter this market, for good reason.

I setup hosted Exchange via RackSpace for my client (a Pharma manufacturer) and their managers/exec-team use iPhone to sync their email, calendar, and contacts. BES has lots of neat features but none of my users need anything beyond the basics that iPhone offers. I don't see any reason to switch from Apple to RIM products.
The analysis and wording are misleading, but I find it hard to believe that no one identifies the Verizon iPhone launch as a motivator for these numbers. There's a clear stall in new smartphone user iPhone purchases that starts right after WSJ announced the Verizon iPhone launch. There's also a clear spike when the Verizon iPhone launch occurred.

I guess you could say Apple's departments handling marketing and Verizon launch details are driving smartphone adoption.
Being able to earn minimum wage while going through
school helps to open up the opportunity to learn more
valuable skills for many people.

Yeah, that makes sense. Minimum wage gives those who have it a better opportunity to improve their situation than if they didn't have it, opposite to what I said in previous.
Apple up, Android flat and Microsoft Nowhere in smartphone growth.
FYI and despite what the URL indicates, the Widgets SDK is now called "BlackBerry WebWorks": http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/30182/.... Same name for Playbook and phones.
You make a good point and thanks for the performance link. I should have been more clear. The first and third examples are only comprable in the way they create closures - which is equivalent, but they are meant to demonstrate different things. The first demonstrates nested callbacks while the last example demonstrates named functions that are organized by closures.
Poll: Precede Questions With "Ask HN:"?
Lately I've been noticing more and more 'ask' submissions without the "Ask HN:" leader in their title. I figured this was mostly newer users making submissions and thought about making a post requesting that people do that, for consistency. However I also realize that most self-posts live in the 'ask' page, which makes it less important to differentiate them in the title.

So my question is: Do you think that it should still be customary to start question posts with "Ask HN:" or the like?
Read this: http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/6949/forming-a-new-s...
you can set PyCharm to upload files on save. it'll scp all changed files for you and can run post upload scripts, for example to restart httpd.

Settings -> Deployment

Point to your Vagrant instance IP

Settings -> Deployment -> Options

and select 'upload changed files automatically'

EDIT: sorry I lied re opst upload script, must have confused with something else
Technical people know they're in the position of being able to do something that's largely inscrutable to the business-building type, and most technical people can easily understand what it is the business-building type does.

But that doesn't make them talented at it.

Most technical guys aren't well-suited to building a business, and most business-builders aren't well-suited to technical things.
Yes, they did have something somewhat like it. (Heroku Garden I think it was called.)
This seems like a case where naming a bad actor is worthwhile, although probably not a safe choice for someone like Brad Feld.
Thanks for the initiative! thomas.peklak@gmail.com
Thanks, we'll be working on that.
It's not intrinsically tied to the ORM. Sorry if I gave that impression. However it has many helpful shims and subclasses that interface with the ORM.

I'm looking at ModelResource as my example.

If you aren't working with a NoSQL database or a search engine, or grabbing data from an tertiary resource then the sheer complexity found in TastyPie might not be for you.

Django-Piston doesn't offer many features, but its dead simple in its usage.
Ironically, their website is not handling the load from HN (and anywhere else they're presently linked from), from what I can tell.

I don't mean to complain - when you're so focused on other parts of your business, it's easy to let things like preparing your front-end for heavy bursts slip by.
What's the benefit here? App Engine already has a downloadable dev environment that gives you everything you need and is instantly updating as well. You can use the App Engine Launcher [0] to test multiple sites locally and then deploy to GAE. Best of all, you can operate at local speeds using an editor you're already comfortable with and it works even if you're sitting in a lead bunker with no connectivity.

What am I missing?

[0] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/05/app-engine-launc...
It was delightful before 2007. Times have changed, since, though. The rest of the world grew, RIM didn't.
Perhaps they should do YC W2012? $170k on great terms with huge value add, and then introduction to top-tier investors, seems like a slam dunk.
I can see the attraction - it's a sensible idea, it's just that I can also think of it being stressful: who did I just tell I'm going to quit my job? Who should I tell that we're moving? Is someone going to get offended if those circles leak and they've been placed in the 'wrong' one?
Workshop: Identity in Research Infrastructure and Scientific Communication
If you swap margin for padding, then:

box-sizing: border-box;

magically solves this problem and already works in all browsers (including IE since v8).
The guy who died is not the YC fellow, but the YC fellow's father.

Condolences to him, anyway.
How do you guys maintain an ever growing code base?

It seems to me that the practices you have--TDD with full code coverage and regression tests, pair programming everything, many client libraries--would lead to a massive amount of code that needs to be maintained.

In my experience I've found that TDD often leads to a huge amount of code that needs to be rewritten if you do a major change to your codebase. If you have a new pattern you want to implement it may require rewriting dozens or more tests. Also, when I'm working alone I constantly go back and clean up functions and what not to make them shorter and clearer. I've found I do that less while pairing because you want to keep moving forward.

My opinion is probably just biased by the fact that I've done relatively little pair programming and TDD. I'm sure the more you do the better you get.

But I'm curious if you could take some about the size of your code base and how these practices effect that?
Why should the SMS use case limit the general use case? If someone wants to submit a review by SMS (really?) then they can deal with being limited to 140 characters. Problem solved.
my sister has a blackberry, and while she's not the touchscreen-and-tons-of-apps type, she was definitely annoyed that voip integration came built into my phone, and she couldn't get it on hers. (i think there are some apps now, but a few years ago it just wasn't doable). there's always the danger of missing out on that one killer app that everyone suddenly decides is a smartphone sine qua non.
None of them use it for the keyboard or its (in some ways superior) messaging capabilities?
(1) You should put your email in your "about" section so the rest of us can see it.

(2) Do you have the source of it? Do you have a non-obfuscated version?

(3) Even if the answer to both questions in (2) is "yes", I still doubt any serious cryptographers would take a look at it. They (mostly) do things to write papers, and you don't get a paper out of "we broke a really weak encryption algorithm in a botnet". The chances that the paper is instead "this botnet has a reasonable encryption algorithm" are so slim, they won't consider it.

(4) That said, there are a number of non-serious cryptographers who would find it an interesting challenge, but if they can't break it, it still doesn't mean it's any good.
Thanks for sharing your concerns, and I understand where you're coming from. I encourage you to check out the TOS's for Google App Engine and Heroku and other cloud-hosting services, which have similar wording, as I understand it. If you have suggestions on better wording that meets the needs of what we need to be able to do to provide the service etc., we welcome suggestions on that. Thanks.
Am I the only one that doesn't understand everyone's obsession with CSS grids?
I mean, I understand why grids are an important part of design, don't get me wrong. I use grids and I try to adhere to a baseline, but I don't actually formalize this into my markup. I keep that formatting strictly in the CSS.
If you're going to use a CSS grid, this formatting spills over into your HTML via those dorky ambiguous classnames that really remind me of Dreamweaver.

I'm sure this "grid.css" is great, really concise, etc. But do we really need to be using it?
I like to type out comments on HN and never hit "add comment," today I will.
And the profit margin will be a lot smaller on "dumb phones".
You also inadvertently prove a more subtle point of internships. Employees who offer the greatest value are ones who are engaged with the company and want to be part of it. If someone doesn't think enough of us to want to go through the trouble of an internship, and think working for us is absurd, then they would not have been a good fit anyway. No loss to us if they don't work with us.
You obviously want your partner to know that they're attractive to you, but there are healthy and unhealthy ways of letting them know that. Doing things that let your significant other know that you find them attractive is good, but I don't think that explicitly telling your them that they are hot on a daily basis is necessarily conducive to a healthy longterm relationship. (It could be I suppose, but it depends how it's done.)
I'm neither pro Google or Facebook.

I merely make a comparison between the early days, intentions and motives of both Google+ and Facebook, how they're different and why I think that difference is important.
though if you saw the OnLive CEO's talk posted on Engadget yesterday you'll see that there is the potential for some revolution in the wireless game

For anyone curious, here's the article (includes a video):

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/29/onlive-ceo-reveals-entire...
Artificially restricting themselves to only corporate and government users would be a terrible move. They would still bear nearly 100% of their current costs, but have access to maybe 10 or 20% of their current market. This is a recipe for disaster. Being "corp and govt only" has no meaningful exclusivity. It's not elite. It's just bureaucratic. No one lusts after overpriced government-contract devices. And certainly very few people want to carry both a corporate and a personal phone. Those who do will probably like the Blackberry less, as it becomes a symbol of inconvenience, and as it's constantly compared to their latest iOS/Android device

History has shown that general-use technology eventually wins over niche technology. How many companies are running Alpha chips these days? SGI workstations? Sparc servers? The niche players lost as the mainstream passed them by. Intel processors ended up crushing the dedicated "corporate" processors, because the mainstream market could support larger R&D efforts and provided a volume that allowed a far superior price/performance ratio. Ditto with nVidia. This is a story that's played out the same way again and again. The niche player loses unless it can deliver (and continue to deliver) significant value beyond what the mainstream players can provide. No one cares if there's an "elite" status to owning a rack of Alpha processors when a rack of Pentium 3 chips can do the same job for a quarter of the price.

Also, Apple and Android are both making significant headway into the corporate environment, as employees tire of carrying two phones or being limited to a Blackberry device. Even in companies where Blackberry is the only "supported" device, they often give employees access to Exchange on their personal devices. If employees use their personal iPhones rather than receive a corp-provided Blackberry, that's a loss for RIM (and arguably a gain for the corporation, as they don't have to pick up the tab for another corp phone).
MySpace user data now in the hands of an ad company
Great suggestion on #1, and I recommend looking for a store that specializes in office furniture - not Staples or Office Depot.

When I started working from home, I did exactly this and sat in two dozen different chairs. I settled on this one
http://www.bestofficefurnituredeal.com/Eurotech-Mid-Back-Erg... and never had a sore back from it in the 2 1/2 years I sat in it.

Now that I'm back in an office, I sit in a Steelcase Leap and have enjoyed this chair, too.

Just don't randomly pick one based on reviews, try them out. Even check to see if your local office furniture will let you take one home for a test drive.
I'm working through David Malan's "CS50: Intro to Computer Science" course at Harvard (http://cs50.tv/2010/fall/) and also Chris Pine's 'Learn to Program (http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/).

As a complete beginner, I've found both to be very accessible, although the CS50 course is much more rigorous and much more of a pain since it's mostly taught in C99. While I can zip through chapters in Chris Pine's book, which teaches Ruby, I spend days working through each of the CS50 problem sets.

At the beginning, the biggest surprise was how hard it was. It sounds obvious, but programming is about thinking like a machine. If you're like most normal people, this is going to be hard because you just don't naturally think like a machine!

After a while, the framework of approaching a problem becomes more second nature, but it's still hard, especially if you're learning by yourself. I remember showing off what I thought was a completed program to my girlfriend. She played with it for about 5 seconds before breaking it by putting some input I hadn't planned for.

If I started again, I would have enrolled in a community college for physical course just so I could have peers check my work and people to talk to when I hit a wall. I quit my job to learn to code so I'm fairly motivated, but even then, working by yourself has a way of a eating that away. I'm moving to New York City next month and the first thing I'm going to do is get plugged in.
> I would say the biggest problem with text configuration files is that you can't ever be sure what the default is.

Arguably defaults are always there, whether configurable or not. Thus you cannot claim to be familiar with an application unless you know how it behaves in its default configuration (whether that is in a GUI or a text file).

I think this is fundamental and not an issue that configuration (text, GUI or otherwise) needs to deal with.

> 1. Config files need _visible_ defaults

I agree, but I don't see that this should be in the config file. I do think that there should be a way to see what these are. Your postconf example is perfect for this.

Like you, I'm in favour of keeping the bare minimum config file only. Comments should only describe something local about the site (just like "i += 1 # add one to i" is wrong). Documentation of configuration variables should be somewhere else.
Are you aware that you can achieve visually identical effect with `box-sizing`? (it can change "W3C" box model to "quirks" box model on any container)

width: 25%;
padding: 10px;
border: 5px;
box-sizing:border-box;

gives same effect as:

width: calc(25%-10px-5px);
padding: 10px;
border: 5px;

Also, it would be nice if your framework had at least half-decent fallback for browsers without calc() (I think `width:24%` would be better than leaving it auto).
Having been a German Praktikant (but a British national) I have a lot to say about Unpaid/Low Paid internships. Unfortunately I doubt ycombinator could handle that many characters ;)
Actually, it has been shown that in the absence of substance abuse, schizophrenics are no more violent than the general population.

I have a family member with mental health problems. It annoys me to know end when I see yet another episode of Criminal Minds where the killer has paranoid schizophrenia. People with mental health issues need support not alienation from society.
Wonderful advice, in particular to just go ahead and at least build the user interface. It is defiantly possible to reach the MVP stage through outsourcing - just get something out there!
I switched to TheSixtyOne a while ago. Put on the 'remix' mood and I'm set.
App Engine has a lot of really awesome features going for it. There are some pains for sure, but not the ones you find people typically griping about. The datastore and all of that aren't a big deal. What's annoying is the lack of library compatibility, and no real SSL suport. Having access to a relatively small subset of available libraries for Java/Python sucks, each time you find a library you'll have to find out for yourself it it works on AE or not.

As for SSL. I mean come on. It's 2011, it's absolutely unbelievable they don't support SSL for custom domains. Unbelievable.
Factual  Local Table Mapping Now on Github
Android 3.1 does have built-in screenshot functionality in the UI.
Imagine a Klout Score for Developers: Meet Work for Pie
we use it at ligertail.com and dont see a reason to switch to aws so far :)
I think that's because they are selling them as pocket computers, and a lot of people don't care about having another computer. Those who did already got them.
TagTime: Stochastic Time Tracking for Space Cadets
I can't watch to ditch this android for iphone... I tried to talk a few people out of androids here at work, but they didn't listen until about a week after using it; Finally they realized I was telling the truth and returned their phones for iphones!