skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it's obligatory to reach a conclusion in the face of contradictory or inconclusive evidence?

By that logic, any book about the Kennedy assassination that doesn't conclude with the author's pet candidate should be tossed out.

Or was there something else about the piece you didn't like? I personally found it quite enjoyable and well researched.
Yes, it will be.

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-live-webchat-...

Cutts confirmed what Google said when the +1 button launched: Google will use +1 activity to influence its search results.

“It’s definitely a signal we’re paying a lot of attention to,” Cutts said. “It has tons of potential. It looks very promising.”
Business service?
+1 useful. On a related note, does anyone know of something similar that can diagnose and optimize a browser's connection to the internet (the other side of end-to-end performance)?
I agree, no one type of documentation can live in a vacuum. Ideally, javadoc, sample code, tutorials, diagrams, and summaries/explanations would be present for every code base. But in reality I find even a few simple diagrams combined with a insightful description is infinitely better than pages of minimal javadoc.
>>faster evolving languages with faster developing times.

Could you provide citations of any studies done please. i.e. How development times differ for small projects and large projects. For small projects I could see other languages being faster, what about large project or really large projects?
From the source code:

// Yuck! There is no god. John will personally gut punch whoever thought this was a good API design.

https://github.com/Khan/khan-exercises/blob/master/khan-exer...

:)
A simpler solution would involve giving the defendant of patent litigation the option of making their suit winner takes all.(All of the court fees within reason are paid by the loser) This would keep software patents but reduce frivolous lawsuits.
The SCOTUS ruled against the patentability of an algorithm which codified a certain hedging strategy in the Bilski case in 2010. This was believed to reinforce the invalidity of many software patents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Bilski
If you mean that time spent actually coding a program is a rounding error of the time spent conceiving it, then that's an interesting point.

That said..

1. OF COURSE you can make languages that are faster or slower to write code in.

2. Trivializing anyone who jumps ship on a language as being enchanted with the 'novelty of a new language' is obnoxious and arrogant.
45% of entrepreneurs start after 30 (E&Y Survey)
I disagree:

- Ruby object construction performance boost
- Require performance improvements
The purpose of a patent is to compensate you not for inventing something but for disclosing exactly how it works. If what you did is straightforward, why should we grant a generation-long monopoly to whoever bothers to do it first?
The picture of him grinning with (what I assume is) the terminally ill man is just creepy. I can't imagine the non-billionaire, man-with-brain-cancer is quite as pleased with the whole situation.
The exercises are live at http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard.

We're really proud of the improvements we've made to the framework and how much easier we've made it to add new exercises; if you're interested in contributing, please fork the code at https://github.com/khan/khan-exercises.

We're working as fast as we can to fix any bugs that pop up, so we'd appreciate reporting any issues using the "Report a Problem" link at the bottom of every exercise page.
They're not making a Constitutional argument here, but suggesting that the courts fix some decades-old precedent that went astray starting with Diamond v. Diehr.

That's well within the Court's powers. They created the mess, so it's not unreasonable for them to fix it. It's not as though Congress passed a law allowing software patents or something.
I love rdio.
I am doubtful if this is usable with all the firmware compatibility issues it will have to tackle. My Mac's firmware for example refuses to boot anything other than OS X from a regular external USB DVD drive. I had to play tricks with Parallels and Bootcamp to get my Windows installation files on my 2nd HDD to start the installation.

Plus there are also software issues - Windows XP used to send reset to the USB controller on boot for example that would need to be worked around somehow in the Isostick's firmware.

More than anything most modern OSes and hardware setups boot just fine using standard USB stick based installers - Win 7, OS X and various Linux distros.
It's not up to Justice Scalia to do the right thing. It's up to Congress. As Scalia is so fond of saying, garbage law in, garbage decision out. Just because Congress is incompetent doesn't mean we should put it on SCOTUS to fix our problems for us.

I'll preempt the constitutional argument by saying that hasn't been made yet. You underestimate how strong such an argument has to be to succeed. What SCOTUS could clarify is Diamond v. Diehr. That still wouldn't be the end of our patent problems though.
Eh, to be more specific, it's the amount of shit they carry that is undetectable. ;)
National Science Foundation Launches Y Combinator-Like Program
First, I don't know where you're from, but from Watts to the Walmart in Torrance is a 15 minute drive with no traffic (good luck). And its at LEAST 45 minutes by bus (if the buses are running on time -- good luck). You really need to step out of your house and go to Watts. Then come back and let me know.

Please cite specifically what you're referring to as "political propaganda".

Political propaganda is trying to make political claims with no data or evidence. It's not the specific claim that's relevant so much as the fact that its just a post that says it and nothing else.

It would be like someone posting to HN something that said:

Emacs sucks. Really. It's for dumb programmers who program in languages that no one uses it. If the world didn't have Emacs we'd be better off.

The specific claim here doesn't matter. But I'd be trying to push a specific agenda by using no or deceptive arguments. This Cato post doesn't give any new information. It leads to no new insight. It doesn't present a new perspective. It simply asserts its position.
Congress would appear incapable of any policy to the detriment of the few large software companies that benefit from the existence of software patents. This seems more of a domain for the FTC and Justice Department, due to the implications for anti-competitive behavior facilitated by these types of patents.
That's the whole point of the article: the SCOTUS members don't have to be re-elected and are not going to be lobbyists after leaving the bench - they actually can do such a thing on principle, that's their whole role. Please read the article.
Heh yeah, the Mathjax API is rather awful. Tons of separate file requests, configuration is only designed to work in inline script tags, and other ugliness. We've been experimenting with MathQuill - it's way faster and much more lightweight. Unfortunately it doesn't have all the features that we need otherwise we'd switch right away.

http://laughinghan.github.com/mathquill/
They'll tend to see them as protecting the interests of business, which has, for whatever reason, become part and parcel of supporting the "free market" in contemporary American political culture.
Do you really think that a company with the engineering talent that Apple has couldn't make an existing standard open? More than likely, it was something else that took higher priority (improving performance, version 2.0, supporting OS upgrades etc) and standardizing FaceTime took a backseat to these other needs
Sure, it may not help in THAT case but it would help with people hoarding patents for the sole purpose of suing others. There isn't going to be a single solution that solves the patent problem. It will be a combination of rules like
1) you must have a product on the market using the patent
2) no business method patents
3) software patents are limited to 2-3 years
etc etc
Ok. Did and admin just "put" this post at the top of the pile ? Either that or the algorithm has an an "ask and you shall receive" feature.
> Can't the system just do nothing to signal it's not ready yet?

In an async system that means you either have to suspect execution (for instance by yielding something) or to block. And blocking is bad.
The lack of any apparent activity regarding an open FaceTime protocol is pretty annoying. Has anyone emailed Steve to ask what the holdup is?
Any good examples of some JS that's cool to run?
I dunno, they got a great deal of press when they announced FaceTime, and a huge amount of it harped on the "open standard" feature. A year later, no one really cares. It's not an embarrassment. It's a shrug.
CakePHP is fundamentally old. It does not avail itself of the capabilities offered in PHP5.3+ and persists in a number of outdated patterns that I consider detrimental to writing good, reusable, maintainable code. It is also incredibly slow, such that it is sort of the "gimme" for people wanting to write benchmarks to show how fast and awesome their new framework is.

Symfony2, on the other hand, is very well-designed (separating entirely from Symfony 1.3 to develop Symfony2 was a great decision), incredibly flexbile, and amazingly performant. It is, no exaggeration, the best PHP system I've ever seen, open-source or otherwise; unless you're Mr. Potencier, reading its code will make you a better PHP programmer. You can actually strip it down so far as to be just a microkernel + dispatch, which is what Silex[1] is. You can also built all manner of whatever-you-want on top of it. There's no real downside to using at least part of the Symfony2 ecosystem for any PHP project.

http://silex-project.org/
Ooops.. didn't realize I was browsing the "new" section :) Guess it's not that easy !
This is snake oil until there is much better documentation.

If the original signal had the capacity to carry more signal as an overlay, why wouldn't that capacity have been available to the original sender as well? I haven't seen anything here which contradicts that proposition. There's some hocus pocus about APs arranging for distinct signatures, but that's irrelevant to how distinct signatures can be overlaid without reducing the capacity available to any one signature.

Now, maybe the original had spare capacity which it couldn't use for some reason. But that doesn't contradict Shannon.

And there's no third option. Either Shannon is true and Perlman is false or vice versa.
Well, I did consider writing a blog, but there are tonnes of other sites concerning this area, well-funded and with better quality articles. So, I guess even if I give it a kick-start, I would eventually fail.
So, given that Apple users are almost fanatically loyal, and that Mac sales in the US are getting close to 10%, OS X should overtake Windows here sometime in the not-too-distant future.

[I'm bookmarking this comment for reference in a few years.]
The iPhone did change the industry and it is technically very solid. However, it is NOT pleasant to develop for.

Having developed private apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 I personally find Windows 7 to be the best platform for development, with Android a distant second. iOS is by far the most painful dev platform of the three.

Unless you really like programming like it's 1985 (a not insignificant number of people really do), in which case it's great.
Ah I missed pg's post above - well, a valid point, as long as the title reflects the original blog post title it seems fair. Editorializing / sensationalizing is always a problem (but one that affects blogs themselves, not just re-posting portals like HN/Reddit)
But it isn't a monopoly. There is no single entity controlling all of the public schools. There is no Gates or Rockefeller of education.

Each school is controlled by the state and local government, which is in turn controlled by elected officials. There are federal and government regulations, but aside from that, it is run by the people.

If you don't like what your town or district is doing, get on the school board and change it, or vote for someone who agrees with you. And if you really don't like what the state is doing, offer your own option through private education.
> Why can't the industry tell Congress "This sucks, fix it"

Because the part of the industry which has money and congressional ear either protected (by a huge patent portfolio) or in the game of using their patent portfolio aggressively.

> the way the military did with Don't ask, don't tell?

1. the military is a major reason why DADT was introduced in the first place

2. apart from Mullen (who mostly punted the responsibility to congress), the military (active, retired officers really don't count) did not do anything until well into BO's term, even though repealing DADT was one of BO's campaign issues

the military and DADT really is not a good example of "this sucks, fix it".
My wife: "Will you take the trash out?"

Me: "Yeah, for sure. I'll take it out tonight."

Tonight rolls by and the next day she tells me "You didn't take out the trash. You lied."

Did I lie? Or did I have honest intentions of taking out the trash with circumstances getting in the way? Maybe I just forgot?

I don't presume to know Jobs' intentions but without a history of lying during presentations I'm going to assume his were true. Maybe the team pushed back? Maybe he just changed his mind? Maybe they are still working on it?

"Steve Jobs Lies" just attracts allot more clicks I guess than "A Year Later, FaceTime is Still Just A Tech Demo."

I would have preferred the later.
Post something that we find interesting.
> several companies have been guilty of twisting open to suit their needs

Not just companies. Many individual are wont to try and blend "open" into "open source" or "free software", which as far as computer standards go, is at best revisionism.
NSF Unveils Startup School Modeled on Lean LaunchPad; Steve Blank Speaks
An Excellent Mentor
WSGI is _not_ a framework. It's a gateway interface, like CGI. Django is a web application framework. You don't (usually) write apps using a raw gateway interface like WSGI or CGI. You write web applications in a framework like Django or Pump.

The framework then needs to work with the web server -- but how? To be portable and useful, a framework it should support CGI, SCGI, Fast-CGI, ISAPI, HTTP, etc. That lots of work to do for every single framework. Big ones and little ones all need to support all those interfaces, and you know they won't. That's the whole point of WSGI: to be one single abstraction to bind all web servers to all frameworks.

If you want to write a framework, WSGI sets the bar pretty dang low. It supports pretty much everything you need to do HTTP without too many awkward quirks. You don't need to worry about how to implement a fast-cgi->nginx adapter. You just make your framework talk WSGI and plug it into existing nginx->fast-cgi and fast-cgi->wsgi libraries. Done.

WSGI was carefully designed to be as simple as possible, but no simpler. It is simple, but powerful and flexible. It's possible to write powerful composable middleware that works with any webserver and any framework, because middleware is just a WSGI app that wraps a WSGI app. Middleware can transparently add sessions, caching, compression, chunking, etc, that don't need to be tightly coupled to the framework or the webserver. So, just like WSGI can bind all webservers to all frameworks, any middleware can insert itself between any framework/webserver pair (I'm sure there are exceptions, of course). The framework shouldn't have to screw around with chunked encodings or compression. WSGI's design allows one good library to easily do that work regardless of the rest of your stack.

This article spoke about how awkward send_request() is. What it does is make it trivial for middleware to read, add, and modify headers without having to parse HTTP. Suppose you want to write a javascript obfuscator. One way to do that is to write some middleware that detects Content-Type="text/javascript" and obfuscates the response. Because of the way send_request() works, you detect javascript by looking at a variable, not writing an HTTP parser. Also, if you write that middleware for Django, it'll work unchanged when you get fed up and switch frameworks.

The whole write() vs yield vs return thing can is awkward, but it makes it easier to write a wsgi adapter for older cgi-based frameworks that respond via sys.stdout.write().

Only framework, middleware and gateway authors have to care about WSGI. If a framework author is complaining about WSGI, he or she almost definitely don't understand where WSGI came from or what problem it's really solving.

WSGI is minimal, composable, and elegant, even considering that it's backwards compatible with older frameworks. If everything supports WSGI, then everything can just be plugged into everything else without much screwing around. Composability and loose coupling are very powerful, especially at the levels of the stack where WSGI lives.
I'm not sure if whichsituation is "the norm", but my area (southwest Georgia) and many surrounding communities only have one cable choice. In some of them there is a public option as well, but not many.
CodeIgniter's documentation is indeed very good. Much better than Symfony2's, at least. I'd agree with you on that.

CodeIgniter also has no conception of how to actually work in PHP5.3. Perhaps CodeIgniter will acquire that down the road, but right now it's a poor routing kernel surrounded by a lot of inconsistent and very ugly modules that are duplicated or improved upon in the other major frameworks in common use.

"Doesn't require a lot of coding" is nonsensical; I can build a Symfony2 application to do nontrivial task in less time, with better and more reliable code, than I can the equivalent in CodeIgniter. And I used CodeIgniter since around the time of the original release. There are not many cases where something is top-to-bottom dominant in its field, but aside from documentation, which is being improved upon incrementally, Symfony2 really does fit that bill.
Man, that argument is an uphill battle though.
As much as I'd like it to be true, I can't help but find this line of reasoning a bit specious. As Simon Peyton-Jones is fond of pointing out with regards to Haskell's functional purity, a program that is just pure math won't do anything except make your computer heat up. Math doesn't write files, it doesn't draw on a screen, it doesn't send packets across a network.

Am I wrong somewhere in there?
IVA
Reduce Debts By Up TO 80%, Reduce Monthly Payments And Freeze Interest
No love for JSR 310?
CS student -> too much free time -> INTERCAL
Sounds like a weekend project. Add rankings and this site could actually change shit
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Java Magazine
As the article discussed, Bilski was decided on very narrow grounds; and it relates to business model patents, not software patents.
So is it more or less efficient overall to eat vegetarians?
> I would have preferred the later.

Sure, but then no one will read it. Sensational headlines is the way the internet rolls.
Thanks, didn't know about this!
Fake it 'til you make it - web development for CS majors
future prediction: the right will claim that it would hurt small businesses, as far from opposite this statement is. What they mean to say is it would hurt the profitable businesses that have lobbyists and fund their campaigns
I have not seen a greenfield, or even brownfield, CakePHP or Zend project in years, outside of $BigCo environments. Calling CakePHP in particular a "market leader" seems rather wrong.

Zend is well-written and solid, but old; it hasn't been materially upgraded for PHP5.3--which is all you should be using these days, there's no good reason not to.

Symfony2 can trivially use Zend-based components. (It does, for some tasks.) I've heard it wise-assedly called "ZF3" because of its compatibility in the past.
to me the situation reminds the 1976 when somebody needed to build and start selling usable personal computer, ie. Apple. We have all the components in place, yet attempts to convert regular car into electric (amateurs as well as Tesla/Nissan, etc...) clearly show limitations of that approach. The 500kg 30KW $10K block of batteries is the centerpiece (or spread along the floor) around which the car needs to be (re)designed the way it is designed now around gas engine and transmission. Designing for the pure electric one would get the main things taken care about - weight and shape resulting in 200+ miles range car.

Saw here, on 101, a guy driving at ~60mph a bare metal 4 wheel electric drive platform (with a couple of kind of roll-over bars) and it strangely evoked associations with Wozniak's Apple I.
I paid $5/unit with $50/semester cap back when I was at JC here in CA. I'm probably a little older.
Ahh, good point. I'll add that to Java 8 hotness list. Thank you.

UPDATE: Couldn't add it to the original post (edit has expired), here is more info about Joda Time for Java 8[1] for folks that are interested.

[1] http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/what_about_jsr_310
i am actually just searching for a domain right now
Are you not involved in communities such as Hacker News? You don't exactly have to hunt for places where working against sexism could be helpful, you can do it from the comfort of your own home. We live in an online world, and in our industry, our culture is reflected and built online as much as in real life. You don't have to wait for things to show up on your doorstep.

Most importantly, though, just because you haven't seen sexism in the workplace, doesn't mean it hasn't existed. A little bit of education never hurts anyone, and being able to better identify what is problematic might show you that things are not as squeaky clean as you thought.
I don't think that a calculated decision not to deliver something indicates that he lied in the moment. Its faulty logic. It means that he set out to deceive rather than made a mistake, spoke too soon, didn't consult with his team or whatever the case may be.

Downvote away, but its true. What may be a lie after the fact was not a lie in situ.
Unfortunately, Eldred v. Ashcroft indicates otherwise. There wasn't even a pretense that retroactively extending copyright length would promote the progress of anything, but the Supreme Court ruled that Congress can do pretty much anything other than making terms literally infinite.
Show HN: Chrome extension to find noisy tab, automute background tabs
Leaving money on the table
I believe it runs around 20k.. which is a pretty small number compared to cost of labor to build something that would pass the certification. That said, I'd certainly love it if it were cheaper :)
Yeah well, that's what I said by the logic being faulty and got nicely down voted.
Whoa, this is very cool. (I have a legacy Midgard MVC app I'd like to get rid of.)

Between Symfony2 and Silex, I'm not sure what case there is to use anything else anymore. It seems like the low and high ends are very well covered in the Sensio Labs environment, and I'm not sure how much room there is in the middle.