skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And not just the OS, but the associated app ecosystem will stagnate.

Whether you care about apps is a separate issue.

I read in a thread on xda that some people were asking about porting dalvik to WebOS so that android apps could be run without flashing to Android. I have no idea about the practicalities of doing that though (or the legality, given the whole Oracle/Android kerfuffle that's ongoing).
Etherpad Lite V1 released
Franklin and marshall sale
When the British empire was at its height, any British officer could walk up to another and have common ground for a conversation. Even if they were from opposite sides of the world, they had been given the same education. Some amount of common education goes a long way in facilitating communication.
But my disruptive agile cloud startup is going to pivot into being more of a social media cloud platform!!1!1oneone
I was just thinking this - it's saying that how good the candidate is in a particular category counts for more (by a factor of r^2) than how important you have judged that category to be. To me this is the most interesting claim in the article, and it seems like if this were actually what the author was trying to say he would have at least mentioned the reasoning behind it.

Not that this is the biggest weakness with the method, since as others have pointed out the assignment of these weights is pretty arbitrary in the first place, but it makes me think this is just hand-waving all the way through.
Simple edits require understanding 'i' to get into insert mode, 'v' to start selecting text, 'esc' to get out of either, 'y' to copy, 'd' to cut, 'p' to paste. Type ":wq" to save and exit.

There, you're all caught up.
You Are Not a Visual Designer
"Ruby has such wonderful evangelists that somewhere along the line I had gotten the idea that all Rails projects had 100% test coverage, and refactoring was a matter of course."

Somehow, I (somebody with zero Ruby experience, and very little web dev experience) had ended up with the same impression. That certainly is some good evangelism.
See my replies above, Chrome and Firefox's features are nice, but not half of what DDG's !bang commands can do.
How is that not the case for any language?

(This also might be a bad example, but it was based off of code I wrote)
Reads like a subtle hatchet job. Here’s an article saying he’s been interviewing for every possible job, which implies that he’s not spending a lot of time thinking about his work, and that he doesn’t seem to be picky. It emphasizes his failures at HP, being passed over for the CEO job and leading the purchase of Palm (which could have been blamed on Hurd). And then it says his demands from prospective employers are “excessive.”

Now this is public, his ability to lead within HP is very damaged, which will probably lead to him being fired if he hasn’t already privately resigned. Now he absolutely has to go.

How very convenient for anyone within HP—a rival executive, the new CEO, someone on the board who doesn’t like him—who wants him out.
Interestingly emacs seems to be popular in Japan (where I'm based) but I always preferred Vim. Though it is rather complex.

Interestingly if you want to do any Japanese text editing, most IDE's or editors fail horribly. I almost always find myself falling back to Vim.

Mind you, I really like textmate. Sadly, it sucks at Japanese. And will for the time being.
One of the Best Ways to Help Employee Retention
I'd have to study the resulting JavaScript to understand what it's really going to do.

Once.

And then you could use shorter, more convenient syntax for the rest of your life. Worth it?
Spirit doesn't bother me, although it's a glaring exception I did not think of to my above response. Its use of operator overloading doesn't bother me because that's the whole point of the library; you know what you're getting into ahead of time. It let me write EBNF code directly in C++: https://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/master/src/cellgen_gr...

The Spirit code is unlikely to be mixed in with other code. Or, put another way, I was never bothered by your complaint, because I always read it as EBNF notation first.

My real problem with Spirit was performance. It took three minutes to compile a 7000 line C++ program - more with optimizations turned on. The binary with debugging information turned on was 24 MB. And the enormous amount of copying it performed at runtime meant parsing 300 line files took a few seconds. (Luckily the runtime performance of my compiler was never important.) The new version may have fixed these problems.
Taking this even further, an HTML templating system that involves supplying syntactic HTML as strings is fundamentally broken. Ideally you'd never provide a string that ends up as syntactic HTML. You'd build up a data structure that represents your output and a serializer would do the rest, escaping everything correctly since there would be a type-based distinction between HTML structure and element content. Genshi is an example of a templating system that works on data rather than syntactic string snippets.
Obligatory link to Vi Hart http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsE2UKkIKXU This is what you get when mathematicians learn how to communicate.
Github is another problem site. Though it's not just the Javascript, it's all the random AJAX calls. I'm often browsing over a high-latency low-bandwidth connection from a netbook. So just using the netbook also misses an important point, that you need to see how badly your site breaks down when you're in the middle of nowhere connecting over an AT&T USB dongle.
Four Alternatives to PayPal
Which Wordpress membership plugin?
Hi,

I am looking for a simple WP membership plugin, I want to create only one membership level and would like to integrate it my Paypal account.

I have googled but there are so many of them with so many different features and price ranges.

Please advice which one to use.
OK, reasonable point, I had only mentioned that example in another reply because that was the one he used. Do I agree that there will always be semantically wrong bits of code that can't be detected by a compiler (whether as part of a type system or otherwise)? I'm not sure I do. OK, sure, it's probably possible to come up with some contrived examples that fit the case, but generally? No, I think that most problems are more tractable if looked at as a language design issue (be that literal language design, some form of internal DSL, or other) than as a convention issue.

And surely bringing up something like Haskell is germane? The article implies that this is the best/only/right way of dealing with issues like this, when that definitely isn't true for languages with a different/stronger type system, as one case.

Of course, this is pure opinion and supposition on my part - I suspect a proof either way is NP-BloodyImpossible. I do feel like coding conventions such as those he suggests make code harder to read, even if only a little bit. And that's ignoring IDE support as well - I feel the same if I'm in Emacs. If there are enough things in scope that I can't hold in my head the relevant [meta] information about them for that usage, that's a problem for me, probably of quite a different kind.
What about push notifications? I think that's the biggest legitimate use of UDIDs and was not mentioned in the article.

According to the docs, every time an iOS app starts up it sends a device token to the push provider. From time to time, this device token changes, so it is nice to have the token linked to the UDID so that one doesn't try to send push notifications to invalid device tokens.

Reference: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Networ...
I'm afraid you're getting tripped up by the Backbone.js library, not the language itself...

`this.options` is the options object that was passed when the View was created, and `this.el` is the default DOM element that wraps the View. For more info, see:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#View-constructor

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#View-el
Exactly! But o be clear I have to add, that doesn't mean the story won't be finished. It's just supposed to show the team the consequences and what it means, whether something is done or not.
Thanks for the heads up. I didn't get that far initially.
Overall, it's very good. Your message is very clear. Agree with the other comments specially a coming on xx month.

I would probably add a little message on the top of your tagline for the people getting married. Something like:

Worry no more. We are creating a community for top wedding vendors.
You don't build software, you build businesses. I don't know what percentage of the merchandise available on Amazon is available from 3rd party retailers through the marketplace, but there is a lot.
>Which distro is still using syslog?

FreeBSD
From the article: "In fact, offhand I can only think of one commercial greenfield Ruby project I’ve participated in."

I can say the same of C, C++ and Python in the context of my personal work history. Is Avdi's experience so unusual in the Ruby world? It seems that most development jobs primarily involve working on other people's code if the language has been around for any time at all.

Edited to add: I've also seen everything listed in the "But Rails is different!" section in every commercial project I've ever worked on. I suspect most developers that just want to hack away on commercial code without any discipline end up having nearly the same set of justifications, no matter what language they're using. (Especially that bit about ignoring/disabling warnings.)
Also, HNers may find my open source book on CoffeeScript useful: The Little Book on CoffeeScript http://arcturo.github.com/library/coffeescript/
Send them a list of data breach notification laws by state: http://www.csoonline.com/article/439940/state-breach-disclos...

That might scare them into action. They have very real legal obligations and if they are in Europe the laws are even more strict.

Edit: A more complete list: http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/TelecommunicationsInforma...
I'm sure this was initially caused by the updates to crypt_blowfish (to fix the 8bit character issue we talked about a couple of months ago).

Interesting: Their build server has a failing test for crypt: http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_3&func=test...

So I would assume that this should have been caught by running the tests before making the release. Or whoever ran the tests had them passing due to build artifacts of previous builds.

Or there are just too many tests that fail regularly: http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_3&func=test... - when you have 201 failing tests, one more probably isn't going to cause any concern.
What a strange article. As someone with a background in the humanities I'm certainly a fan of more creativity and communication, however it wasn't until near the end of college (thanks to a math major roommate) that I finally started to understand the true beauty of mathematics. Still catching up on what I find to be essential math skills I continually feel that US student are completely robbed of a decent math education in k-12 (and for the most part college students as well).

The problem with math, at least in the US, is it tends to be taught by people who really don't understand it themselves, so it becomes an ugly, mechanized process. I remember asking one of my early hs math teachers if it was possible for something infinite to be larger than something else infinite. She just sort of smiled and shrugged her shoulders. Almost a decade later I learned about the cardinality of infinite sets and was finally able to answer my question. The sad thing is that if my hs math teach has said 'well let me show you something...' it would have taken me far less than a decade to not only get my answer but also become fascinated with mathematics.

Finally, the more I've learned and studied the more I've come to see that just about anything interesting you want to do is almost always improved by a solid mathematical understanding of the world. And not just a superficial understanding, but a deep meaningful sense of the mathematical principles that can describe the world around us.
The Domain Expert Founder of the 2010's
The notion that we "don't need to make a thing out of science and math in K-12 because people will be able to explore it on their own" is somewhat myopic. A significant percentage of Americans, especially those from lower income brackets, don't have broadband in the home. Many more don't have home environments conducive to doing what Bill Gates and others did (keep in mind that Bill Gates grew up in a very wealthy home) as many households may be sharing a computer between family members, etc. Exposing people to science and math in school is absolutely critical.
Can you move IO onto another thread, or use asynchronous/non-blocking methods? Blocking IO should never be done on your UI thread.
This isn't the first time a major bug has been introduced and found shortly after release. How do these major bugs get past testing? Does PHP have poor test coverage? This bug would have been found pretty quickly with basic unit testing.
The path to bliss: Autoscaling
"Hell is other people." -- Existential Star Wars
Of course web surfing helps at work. First search result for "vim highlight search" on Google is:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Highlight_all_search_pattern_match...

Just to make sure we're highlighting everything we search for set:

:set hlsearch

Next, click on the link in the above page that says:

"Searching"

From the resulting page:

"In normal mode you can search forwards by pressing / then typing your search pattern. Press Esc to cancel or press Enter to perform the search."

So press /, e and finally enter. Done. Crap, I'm missing the upper case Es? Search for "vim search case insensitive", get:

http://joysofprogramming.com/case-sensitive-search-vim/

Oh, I need to do:

:set noic

Try it again, get all the letters highlighted, 3-5 minutes later I'm done.

Why was websurfing more productive in this case? Obviously because I can spend the remaining 15 minutes posting the trivial solution to HN. ;)
There's been lots of good news in medicine lately. Here's to a decade filled with great scientific advances.
Lybia is hacked, should I buy .ly domains?
Will .ly domains go under or will they final.ly be the cute new thing every business wants?
Live isn't always that simple.

For example sometimes you get a piece of HTML that you have to include verbatimely for policital reasons (ad banners come to mind that need to be included character by character because of the Terms of Service - see AdSense for example).

In that case you really need an option for direct, unescaped HTML inclusion.

Or you might need to hilight the a syntax that's hard to parse, and the only available hilighter spits out HTML pieces instead of parse trees.

My point is that a template system should be able to deal with such realities, and it doesn't make it "fundamentally broken".
S&P and the Bilderbergers: All Part of the Plan?
We (iSEC Partners) have a whitepaper on the topic that explains most of the basics.

http://www.isecpartners.com/storage/white-papers/web-session...
This paragraph is in dire need of citation:

If your apps have some heavy logging to do, and you can't afford some more expensive setup, then you really should forget about syslog, because normally it doesn't scale well if used with high traffic web applications. It's best used for things like logging done by daemons and system components that do not suffer from the load that a web app with decent traffic can have.

I've seen syslog incite a holy war on HN recently, with one camp espousing that syslog (really rsyslog and syslog-ng) does not scale. As an interested third party, it'd be very helpful to have references to articles or blog posts detailing just how it didn't scale, or at least some first-hand commentary. The article describes an issue with the syslogd daemon in which it grinds to a halt at a mere 10 requests sent amongst 5 concurrent threads. That kind of issue is not going to burn you months down the road when your production deployment refuses to scale. Any stories of the newer open source implementations of syslog failing or severely degrading at production load, or conversely, syslog success stories?
Consistency is definitely the high-order bit.

But then again, I have no problem going into a badly formatted hunk of code and fixing it. I have, on occasion, reformatted entire source directories because the original sources were so terrible.
Ready Player One: Set in 2044, with an 80s Arcade Heart
It should be noted that the TouchDroid team is largely composed of, and led by young teenagers with not a lot of systems programming experience, and no history (that I know of) of "cooking" ROMs.

That's not saying young teenagers can't accomplish anything. They just spent too much time on their website and getting on the front page of every news site and too little (a little poking around) time looking into the feasibility of it, or getting any work done on the port.

Don't buy a TouchPad if you're thinking you'll be running TouchDroid on it any time soon.
Top 20 Upcoming PC, Xbox 360, PS3 Games with Gameplay Trailers
I've used CoffeeScript extensively with a backbone.js project I was working on. I really liked it (and backbone).

But I haven't been able to bring it into my main rails app since I'd like to have all of my JS consistently in coffeescript. I don't like having both JS/CS, just like I don't like having HAML/ERB mixed together.

It would be a big project migrating it over and not as simple as HAMLizing a project.

Maybe one day I'll do it, or wait for a future rails projects.
It seems like the removal of parenthesis is a bad idea, because it's bound to create a bunch of inconsistent code. Notice how all the rest of the code samples on the page keep the parenthesis in?
The same could be said of any language you are unfamiliar with. Ignoring the inheritance, which should be familiar to anyone with class-based OO experience, that code basically translates to:

function ItemView() {
this.render = function() {
this.options.items.each(this.renderItem.bind(this));
}

this.renderItem = function(item) {
this.el.append(item.get("title"))
}
}

In this example, I don't see any significant difference as far as readability goes, to be honest. I will note, in case it is not entirely clear, that the use of Backbone in the example is unrelated to CoffeeScript.
HP TouchPad skyrockets to the top of the Amazon bestseller list
How to Create the Perfect Landing Page
IOS and Earthquakes in Japan
An attorney. There are some things you don't want to skimp on.
If there are enough things in scope that I can't hold in my head the relevant [meta] information about them for that usage, that's a problem for me, probably of quite a different kind.

This is a brilliant observation, thanks. Reminds me of Yegge’s observations about large codebases being like dirt, and the more dirt you have, the more machinery you need for pushing dirt around, and the more people, and the more systems for managing people and dirt-moving machines, ...

And the better way forward might simply be to have less dirt.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.ht...
The use of platform, in the creative agency space is somewhat different. A platform doesn't need to have an eco-system if it creates value for the consumer and develops a community around that value. In this sense Nike+ is a platform. Twitter is too.

The idea that a startup is only a platform if one can build on top of it, may be taking the idea too far.
Revealing user names (As in "you are trying to log in as Luke") is usually considered a security issue, though.
Here is an app that helps support Local based business - Lets make a difference
I posted this as a response to a comment, but it fits here too:
I gave the wrong impression. We still need math, physics, and all the fundamentals, but being able to communicate those things is important. People like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox are up against a sea of ignorance that's rarely willful.

Making sure all mathematicians and physicists are able to respond to someone outside their field when challenged will help fix that.
I've always had a soft spot for TAP's output format. It just seems like it has potential for much better debuggability. The concept of a plan alone puts it above xUnit styles in my mind. That and the expectation that each assertion has a descriptive message just makes it's output seem easier to follow.
If you read the bug report, looks like the tests were failing, yet nobody bothered to either test, or investigate the results...
We've had this already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907664
Yeah, I'm undecided yet as to which is best. My colleagues seem to be promoting keeping the parens in. Typically when we try stuff like this I like to push it to the max to see how it feels, then scale back.
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Not identifying this bug was the result of an (in my opinion) egregious human error. PHP has decent test coverage, and this issue does cause the current tests to fail. I really don't know how this was missed.
Your point about language mattering is spot on. If your language has the right features (even just `typedef`), I don't think you need any flavor of Hungarian. In the right context, though, it can be useful.

For example, I do a lot of Excel+VBA programming. In VBA, the native data type is `Variant`. And if you pass something from Excel to a VBA function, that's what you get. But you also know that legal Excel values are just a subset of what VBA allows in a `Variant`. So I find it very useful to stick a clue to myself in the variable name, so say, `f(parm)` becomes `f(xParm)`.

I have libraries that work with the `x` subset of `Variant` (and subsets of that - i.e. `xs` denotes a simple value that can go in a single Excel cell). The prefixes provide useful clues that the language can't reasonably help me with.
‘Fantastic’ BlackBerry PlayBook sales reported by major Australian retailer
points for using 300 to explain coffeescript
Thanks for pointing out the errors guys. Updated the post with corrections.
"vigorously insist" & "sleaze"? Someone may have a case of the Monday's...:) Maybe you read something into it that wasn't written (you'll notice I ended w/ "if it makes sense.") Anyways, point was you don't know where you'll end up so think big and go for it.
There's a javascript to coffescript converter:
https://github.com/rstacruz/js2coffee

Although I did have a few problems with some more complex code, it seemed to do the trick for more straightforward javascript. You'll lose your comments, but it's worth checking out.
What you are building is either an app or a platform. If you try to make it both you will fail. And there are very few (if any) examples of successful platforms that started as a platform.
Satış Ortaklığı, Potansiyel Müşteri, İnternet Reklamcılığı,
201 failing tests is really shocking to me. Does anyone know of similar pages for languages such as ruby or python?
With a young language, the ratio of people working on greenfield projects to legacy projects is going to be higher than with an old language.
Microsoft gets over 500 responses to WebOS recruitment.
> Exposing people to science and math in school is absolutely critical.

I dunno. I'm a physicist, and a lot of people tell me "I hate physics" when I tell them what I do. I think K-12 is doing more harm than good.
Apple may introduce a radically different Mac product family by year's end
Social Media Marketing is Long Term
Yeah. Agree. I need to get around that and change that to a font stack instead of simply "hidden".
Nokia vs. Android