skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see your point. Punctuation is a vector for meaning and clarity but is Javascript's syntax any more informative than Coffeescript's? It isn't in my observation. It certainly offers more flexibility in style, but why would you need it? I can't conceive of a reason besides minification.

Your comparison with novels I think is a bit skewed. Literature has a whole different set of readability enhancements such as fully justified text, variable-width fonts, as well as margins and padding. Punctuation in English has been evolving for centuries as people settle on the minimum needed to convey the full meaning as unambiguously as possible. But English also has many many more sets of valid (as well as various definitions of valid) constructs than Javascript does and thus may require a more robus set of punctuation.
Reference: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/hhef3/in_which_...
Still not an argument for why intellectual property should be allowed. Physical property is different, you can try and say it isn't all you want, but you're wrong, it is. I can't copy your car, I can copy your novel in milliseconds; these things are radically different. One deserves to be called property, one doesn't.
I've programmed now for 5 years, and I find C hard. But then, I've mainly programmed in C# and Python.
I do believe I said it's popular. That's not making history though.
Well yeah - I didn't mean to say he reached high rating... actually he seems to have lost interest quite fast. But he seemed to get to the upward trend part fairly fast... then again, i went back and checked my own and I seemed to have taken about the same amount of time to get on an upward trend - there were farther dips later on so maybe Mark's span at TC is too short to draw conclusions
Rest was a really big deal in the Java web-app world for about a year...

It was back when early versions of Struts were 'the designated alternative', and in the bad old days of J2EE and JAX-RPC.

Then Java EE 5 came out, which solved large chunks of the pain that J2EE inflicted, JAX-RPC got replaced with the infinitely better JAX-WS and there was a new breed of web frameworks as well, which blew Struts out of the water.

About that time REST essentially became 'yesterdays technology, solving yesterdays problems'.

I find it interesting that the guy banging the REST drum is a Ruby fan. Has REST always been part of Rails? Or is it something that has crept in over the last couple of years?

Is there anything genuinely new here, or is it the same old story, some dude clinging desperately to an obsolete technology?
I'm still using Javascript at the end of the day, I'm just doing so via an interface that I find more readable and writeable. I don't see it as much different than letting a minifier optimize my javascript rather than writing it that way by hand.
Hack a Mac in under 1 min
I'd prefer a Coffeescript that restored semicolons and braces and didn't depend on indentation to denote block structure. Fixing some of Javascript's most serious warts is a great idea but, IMO, significant whitespace is a bad idea here just as it is in Python and Haskell. It just makes routine code manipulations like copy & paste and block refactoring a lot more tedious.
All the urls base to plus.google.com, so I don't see why they couldn't, but I never really understood why a workplace would outright block facebook or anything else for that matter.
Yes. I found it useful maybe 70% of the time--more than most texts.

The critical factor, IMHO, is clarity and conciseness of writing. Zed does a good job with this (I didn't know his name until this thread, BTW).
In a down economy, a requirement that the budget be balanced simply leads to a downward spiral - the state takes in less tax revenue and has to cut it's spending, which removes a large portion of demand from the economy, which results in less tax revenue, etc.
thanks Jeremy, do you mind if I insert your comment in the main body of my post?

I am still a student of computer science and in my university's Java encapsulated worldview they've not discussed the finer points of non class-based OOP. I will do more research on the subject.
actually that's a good example that makes my point. if i said to you - well if you want to retrieve a person's user information, just GET /users/1 with Accept: text/json. If you want their photo, just GET /users/1 with Accept: image/jpeg - philosophically, i'm not violating the 'rules of REST' but it feels wrong to me.
>Would these people like their novels and articles decompiled so that every sentence is on a new line

Isn't that how we write cooking recipes?
Why is the question always framed in terms of "how much" rather than "if"?
These types of studies are flawed in that they assume the same technique works with different people in different situations. The best managers, bosses, founders, etc realize you have to treat different people and situations differently, it's constant adaptation to the situation at hand. Doing that is hard and more art than science.
There's a notification/interaction bar in the top header. You can do most things without going to plus.google.com
Ask HN: Here is my Minimal Product. Looking to make it Viable. Any suggestions?
Hi HN

Here is my M(V)P. I am looking for feedback concerning the site, the app and the Java application.

I am getting into marketing it, and while I created the app for myself, I would like to know what market you think would be interested in it :-)

Thank you very much

site: http://www.displayator.com

edit: It is an app for viewing high resolution images on the iPhone. You know, the ones that iTunes downsamples before syncing them on your iDevice. The java app is needed to transform the image in such a way that viewing a 20,000 x 10,000 pixel image on the device does not crash it.
Javascript "The Matrix" effect
They block it because a lot of managers and executives still think that blocking their employees from everything but their work is the best way to ensure worker productivity
Windows Phone 7.5 Mango in-depth preview
That's just to keep a reference to the sprite along with the body. There's no real magic to it. Later in the 'update' function it loops over each body and updates the attached sprite:

https://github.com/ryanwilliams/cocos2d-demo-box2d/blob/mast...
I've wondered the same too. IIRC there was a recent discovery that antimatter still exhibited positive gravity, and it's long been known that photons are their own antiparticles. How then is it possible to observe that distant galaxies are not made of antimatter?
One of the reasons we did not switch from HAML/SASS/SCSS to LESS/Jade/Stylus is the output. HAML and its cousins do the extra little things to help developers diagnose problems like adding comments with the original line # and file; pretty-printing, etc. All these options can be disabled for production of course.
Works fine in Chrome.
Yup, was thinking the same. He didn't do enough contests to escape higher volatility in the low ratings.
There's a principled point about aesthetics and removing unnecessary redundancy. But that shouldn't be confused with whether semicolons affect your ability to think about code. Really I can't imagine how someone could be significantly distracted by semicolons, once they're used to a language, to the extent that it occupies their conscious brain in any way whatsoever. It does take familiarity to get there, but I can't imagine having a mind where this didn't seem transparent and rather irrelevant very quickly.
>"I do agree that it's important not to fetishize leadership and never to forget the team gets much credit too, but over the years my estimation of the importance of true leadership has been going consistently up, not down."

Agreed.
I've worked with some great teams, but if there's not clear leadership (and specifically, good communication) things fall apart. I understand that certain decisions need to be made by the founders, but when there is no good communication and they are pivoting like an elementary school basketball player, it doesn't turn out well.
First off, thanks for taking the time to reply to my admittedly baiting post. I do have a serious point I'm making though. Lets walk through it.

http://www.mywebsite.com/api/getAllPageNames/returnType/JSON

In this string 'get' appears once. However, as an experienced dev, you know that this is a GET request. To you it looks redundant. However to someone trying to understand what will happen when they hit enter with this URL in their location bar it is meaningful.

The question at that point is naturally "But if you don't know that's a GET request then why are you using an API?"

This is the point I'm driving at. There are scores of underserved individuals who want to do interesting things with your website that go beyond your GUI, and they are just brave enough to read through your API docs.

Now, when I'm thinking about API design I have a big initial choice. Is this API for skilled developers who care about the REST spec? Or is this a tool for as many people as possible to get more out of my service than I have time to accommodate with features. This is where I will always say "I don't care about the spec." A really talented dev will read the docs, discover how my design works, and will write something cool on top of it. I can trust the hackers I know to make things work by hook or by crook. The same cannot be said for someone who really wants to extend my functionality but isn't a talented developer.

I feel it's my responsibility to produce a tool that can be used by as many people as possible. I don't want to make a high-end professional camera, I want to make a better point and shoot. I want to extend the abilities of people, not demand they gain a large skillset to use my new tool.

New programmers and enthusiastic users are always on my mind. These are the people who's preconceptions are that it should 'just work' and that if it doesn't it's my fault.

This is why I applaud decisions like Chrome dropping http://
It simply doesn't matter to 99% of the users of the product, and in fact makes browsers less friendly and more confusing.

If I can get my api to work like this, then I will:

'I want to see all the names of pages on mywebsite.com'

If I had access to a deterministic natural language parser then I'd use it. As such a thing doesn't yet exist, I try to remain as true to that ideal as possible.

The REST architecture may be less confusing than others, but it is far from simple.
As a guess: Because many modern people confuse value and money. Kind of like when I was a homemaker and some people viewed me as not really a contributing member of society because the work I did wasn't attached to a paycheck. Without a paycheck/dollar value attached to my name to signal to them what my contribution was worth, they figured it was valueless rather than priceless.
There are many other compile-to-JS languages that might be more to your liking. Perhaps try Objective-J? It's a strict superset of JavaScript.

http://altjs.org/
People ask time and again, and here again: do we really get more productive by saving curlies and semicolons? Really?

YES:

It's not the time saved while writing the code that matters here -- although I do believe it adds up quickly if you work on a project that might occupy you for months or years and have invested the initial week of getting fully into CoffeeScript mode.

NO, it's the time saved reading your code time and again as you revisit your code-base over these months or years of refining your project going forward.

CoffeeScript's "easier writability" may be debatable, but it's its "easier readability" where it really shines. I can glance quickly at my way-fewer-lines of CoffeeScript and parse it much more smoothly than I ever could a curly C-style language. Maybe it's because I first started out in, boohoo, BASIC. But indented lines with no superfluous { syntax; decorators } just flow into my brain much faster.

If you're a fire-and-forget coder who writes line after faultless bugless line that you never need to revisit, review or simply recall and still get a meaningful composition of a program, app or site that isn't just a house of cards built on quick-sand or a simple batch job at the end of the day -- I envy you! In my case, 99% of my classes and functions are an API to each other. So I look up how the stuff I wrote days, weeks or months ago was supposed to be called or initialized constantly. I read my code more often than I write it.

I like writing CoffeeScript but what matters is -- I love reading it. Before, I liked writing JavaScript -- but I hated reading it.
You're absolutely right, I spent most of the past three years writing Java, C++, C, and C# and they all use semicolons and I certainly forgot about them whilst coding in those langs. But the penalty is in transitioning between languages that use or don't use those features. When I'm writing in C and the like, I tend to stick within that language. But with JavaScript and Ruby, I do a lot more context switching back and forth. Anything I can do to reduce the penalty of moving between one and the other is worth doing in my opinion. Especially when it doesn't affect the final result.
Looks similar to Buxfer and Billmonk...
South Korea plans to convert all textbooks to digital
Books and code have different usage patterns.

In books, you typically start from the beginning and read to the end. You consume the book serially and the only breaks you are concerned about are pauses (period, comma, colon, etc.) and page breaks (chapters).

In code, you typically scan. Scanning a book is a painful experience. The sentences never start in the same spot. In code, the heirarchcal structure and text layout helps for scanning and identifying quickly. As someone said previously in this thread, cookbooks are done the same way and for the same reasons.
Last time I looked into sass/scss/less, I decided Stylus is for me. Looked into that? Not just getting rid of semicolons and curlies, but even colons :) plus macros, functions, variables, calculations, all the "usual" stuff.
> Because the OS already includes a home screen.

Right, but if you are looking for a different one it means that you need/want something different than what's provided and satisfying your need surely must have some value to you.
clickable : http://www.displayator.com
Why all the downvotes? Is it really true that NOBODY understands REST or HTTP?
Inflection Points: Bravery vs. Foolishness
Though still available in google's cached pages. Still for the dozen or so I have looked at, most of the users who chose to share their sex lives only did so under an alias with no picture or a pictures that you could not see the face. You really have to give these users a little more credit.
Richard Gabriel's thoughts on the whole thing: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
It's really beautiful. I was surprised by the site. Your remarks made it sound to me like it was slapped together and incomplete. Perhaps you can elaborate on what you feel is needed to make it "viable"?

Best of luck.
I remember Len barking at a squirrel on a tree during one of Cypherpunk gatherings at Stanford campus in early 2000s.

It was one of more coherent threads at those meetings.
Yeah, creating something thas is popular IS history... people will still remember Michael Jackson... and Facebook... and another bunch of useless extremly popular things.
Go for it. In a nutshell:

An object is a unit of code and data that can be treated as a distinct entity. Classes and prototypes are both way to make objects. With a prototype, you start with an actual object as an example, and make more objects just like it. With a class, you start with the abstract set of properties that describe a type of object, and make more objects from that blueprint.

Think of it as the Platonic ideal of a thing (the class), versus the canonical example of a thing (the prototype).

To get specific: The idea of Bicycle, versus my blue bike with red streamers. Both can be used to make more bikes, in JavaScript.

newBike = new Bicycle
newBike = Object.create(myBlueBike)
Death of the Salesmen? If software is great, salespeople aren’t needed
Awesome. Thanks for that. I've always enjoyed the link between Platonic forms and object Classes.

ahhhphilosophy.jpg
And presumably these can be flicked off in production, for speed?
This bothers me so much about C/C++ syntax.
int* a, b;
should clearly declare two int pointers, not one int pointer and one int.

Stroustrup wrote something somewhere where he explained that
int* a;
is more appropriate for use in C++ because C++ is supposed to be more focused on types, and
int * a;
is more appropriate for C because of something about C's philosophy, but I can't remember what. I wish they would have changed the syntax for C++, but I guess he couldn't have while still keeping C++ a superset of C.

edit: found it: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#whitespace

"A ``typical C programmer'' writes ``int p;'' and explains it ``p is what is the int'' emphasizing syntax, and may point to the C (and C++) declaration grammar to argue for the correctness of the style. Indeed, the * binds to the name p in the grammar.

A ``typical C++ programmer'' writes ``int* p;'' and explains it ``p is a pointer to an int'' emphasizing type. Indeed the type of p is int*. I clearly prefer that emphasis and see it as important for using the more advanced parts of C++ well."
Well I won't have a phone for another few months, but if you're still looking for testers then, I would be happy to help out.

And if you're already done testing, then I'll download the app anyways!
Thanks!

Basically, I would really like to know who to market it to. Art students? Photographers? Globe trotters?

I got 3 sales (Italy, Sweden, China) when the price was 10$ at launch time, but as I haven't put analytics into it, I don't know what they do with the app.
User Experience Fail: A case study on Godaddy.com
Actually, C89 can distinguish between parameters that are modifiable and those that are not. The syntax leaves a bit to be desired ("const foo_t x", "foo_t const x" and "const foo_t *const x" all have different semantics) but it can be done.
This is well demonstrated in the Louisiana purchase - Jefferson believed he didn't have the constitutional authority to make it happen, but went through with it against that judgement because he figured the ends justified the means (in this instance, at least).
Piecemeal Growth
Your thesis is surprising, so I'll have to look more into your data.

For now I will say that (1) because of the tight correlation between employment and demand, you'd need a very solid argument that demand has recovered but employment hasn't and why and (2) the data you have in your comment doesn't show that conclusively. The only measure of demand you site is Manufacturer's New Orders, which does show an increase. However, most of it is due to airplanes, which are volatile by nature (and is partly fueled by public defense spending). Also, the best predictor of future growth in that category (Core capital goods), while growing, isn't back to 2007 levels yet. [1]

I think it's too early to say demand is back, and it's lack also explains unemployment well.

[1] http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/durable-goods-new-or...
"Timezones are a presentation-layer problem!
Most of your code shouldn't be dealing with timezones or local time, it should be passing Unix time around."

I can attest to this. At a previous job our entire API used UTC. It was clean and worked at every layer of the app, from django to our client-side javascript. When we needed to display a human readable version, we did the translation at render time. All interactions with time as data was done with the UTC timestamp and saved much headache.

A couple months before I left, one of the engineers proposed switching everything over to a textual representation according to ISO_8601. I forget the nature of the argument, but it was inane(to me). This actually led an extensive back/forth email exchange between various members of engineering, me as one of the frontend engineers, and even the engineering manager who seemed to favor the idea.

I argued, "why change the entire stack which works just fine, etc etc". Fortunately, in this instance a heavy workload and group apathy about taking on unnecessary additional work allowed this entire concept to wither and disappear after a couple days.
As per gakman's comment in the Google+ crosspost[1], be wary of the Unix millenium bug[2] if you use integers for timestamp storage.

[1] https://plus.google.com/106356964679457436995/posts/Hzq2P7V6...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Was there something particularly wrong about my comment(s) here? Seems I was down voted on all 3.
I have a deck with ~40,000 facts for the USMLE Step 1 & 2 licensing boards that I use daily just for fun. My goal is to have flashcards that cover an entire medical school curriculum.

Here's the spreadsheet that I am making the flashcards from...it is primarily medical facts but lots of assorted knowledge as well.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21526819/Master%20Memorize%20List.xl...
Upvoted because I like your solution for pagination and for further information via an :href attribute. However, I don't see a real problem with the way Rails does things because it's "by default" and I think a dev ends up causing a lot of unnecessary trouble for himself by using stock to_json. The more I work with Rails building out a JSON API, the more I realize that .to_json is just another way to "scaffold" - it's not useful in production. :)
You're missing the point and attacking a strawman to boot. Nobody suggested you take out a warranty on things you can probably live without, like a toaster, iPod or TiVo.

Other things like a washing machine, you might do, because losing access to it incurs extra costs: taking things to the laundrette, travel to friends, etc. (if you're in a rural area I hope you know people there). This is especially the case if it's work-related equipment.

In the case of something that is too expensive to replace without insurance, you just decided that the cost of insurance is greater than the opportunity cost of using a cheaper/inferior good over the time period covered by the insurance. Do you really think that's true in all circumstances?

What you should not do is look at insurance narrow-mindedly and declare it a great big scam because the mathematics works in their favour. Well, no shit. They are paid to remove risk, they can't do that if it's an unsustainable business. If you can operate on the same business model as them and make an amortised net profit, do that - but don't assume everyone else can.
As someone working working on time sensitive code on embedded systems (DVRs that get UTC from the broadcast), I can certainly agree with the issues laid out in the post.

As an example: We have some certifications our product must pass and the certification body plays a 4 minute looping broadcast stream with the test condition in it. It turns out I handled the time jump hat occurred when the stream would loop around poorly and this caused about 1 week worth of headaches and delays in getting our certification. None of my code expects time to be ever increasing now.
This is cool :)

Any estimate on when it will be complete?
Anyone else having trouble comprehending the text?
I've ended up doing without ActiveRecord's to_xml/to_json to (among other things) accomplish HATEOAS within Rails. Instead I'm using xml builder and a roughly equivalent json-from-ruby-hashes template system. The process is a bit ugly at times, but so far the results have been pretty promising. We've already had api changes break enough internal clients that people are pretty excited about that never being their problem again.

I could wish that Rails had a cleaner path and this regard, though. I've never understood the thought process behind Rails' serialization system. Why use MVC to deal with html and email but almost ditch it entirely for other document formats? Especially when we're dealing with something that could really benefit from embedded hyperlinks.
An Intuitive Guide To Exponential Functions & e