skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since we are doing the animations with CSS transitions when available, we are affected by several bugs in Chrome's 3D CSS transitions (mainly when switching into and out of composited mode):
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=87437
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=77126

It can be seen as flicker in Windows and there are some reports of black flashes in OS X. Switching the 3D acceleration off seems to fix them, but unfortunately it can be done only with a command line switch. We may forfeit the CSS transition animations in Chrome in later releases if we can't find a fix for these issues.
or "how does it compare to jQuery Mobile?"
This strikes me as written by someone who knows a lot more about programming than about writing. The title would be a lot less objectionable, by the way, if it said, "What programming has in common with writing."

They're really not much alike. At all.

A program is a modular structure, usually hierarchically organized, that sets up highly structured, deterministic processes in a CPU, which in the course of execution develops a run-time flow that is nothing like the original program, and entirely under the programmer's control in principle, creating a tiny but complete causal universe from scratch.

Writing is a linear sequence that provokes reactions in a human brain with an entirely different and far more sophisticated instruction set, creating a realtime flow that closely matches the linearity of the original writing while being far more sophisticated and a whole lot less controllable than you thought it was. Most of the complexity is in the brain, rather than the writing - the writing just pulls levers on a far more complex machine.

Bicycle riding is a linear sequence of realtime reactive motor outputs that both powers and steers a mechanical aid to travel.

On the level where writing and programming are similar to each other, they're about equally similar to bicycle riding.
Hate to jump on the negative bandwagon, but... I had a momentary hope for something truly novel, but found the usual aggregation of data-binding framework, templating language, and widget kit, where the widgets have various bugs/quirks that make them undesirable to use as is.
It's difficult to explain without lengthy examples but we aren't seeing a lot of collisions (really none) because we're very careful to only nest when necessary and only as deeply as necessary. We aren't taking a stand here and completely obliterating cascading, we're just being mindful about when things really should flow to child element instead of just letting it happen all the time.
I'm in the same boat. The problem I keep finding with a lot of these UI libs is that they don't have layout managers. We settled on dojo because we wanted an open source option with a layout manager, but it's got other headaches we need to deal with.
Forget the IPO, Facebook could reverse into Yahoo
Time "slows down" asymptotically as you approach the event horizon, so you will never "see" anything cross it. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Event_horizon...
Rob Go: What went wrong with daily deals?
Source code is written for people as well as machines.
> I like pointers and recursion but do not see understanding those as defining a great developer. I've seen plenty of people who were way more adept at pointers that couldn't design a fuctional system if they tried.

I think you're misunderstanding the argument a bit. The argument is that people that don't understand pointers and recursion are less likely to be very good software developers. This is not the same as saying that people that do understand recursion and pointers will be good software developers. It's just one of many metrics used to weed people during the interview process.
I didn't want to get further involved, so thanks for that. Have an upvote.
What they really mean by that, is ideas are on the critical 1%.
You can mess up a lot on the execution, and still have a viable business; but if you're building the wrong thing, no amount of execution will save you.

But! In terms of energy spent, ideation consumes less, than a percent of the total investment: hence, a guy with an idea (even if it's the right one) can't claim to have invested much effort into the business as the one researching / custdeving / building it.
What 95% of Bosses Don't Realize
Apple on pace to sell record 4.5M Macs this quarter
How about:

code - comments == specification of algorithm for computer;
code + comments == explanation of algorithm for humans
Despite its linkbait title, this is one of the more thoughtful pieces on CoffeeScript that I've seen in a while. The behavior of nested list comprehensions in CoffeeScript has been the subject of much debate, and the excellent Coco fork adopts the Python-esque behavior.

However, I think the objections here would be moot if CoffeeScript's "list comprehensions" were called something else. They don't behave like list comprehensions in Python, but their behavior is perfectly consistent with the CoffeeScript philosophy that every expression has a value, and loops are expressions. That means that a single loop has a single list as its value, and a loop within a loop produces a list of lists. Note that unlike Python—or Harmony—there's no special delimiter to say "Give me a list comprehension." It's just the natural implication of how expressions in CoffeeScript work.
Overall, the story is verbose, and I think it would be much improved if you shortened it by 25-50%. In the beginning, you use too many pronouns ("he" or "him" is in nearly every sentence). I liked the juxtaposition of changing to she half way through. Maybe you could also add 1st and 2nd person narratives for more variety. Similarly, the first usage of sentence fragments was a good change of pacefrom the stilted introduction, but I think you started overusing it towards the end. If you replaced some of the narrative with dialog, you might solve these problems. But be careful not to get too close to the style of "the egg."

Keep it up! I love fiction like this that tries to tackle deep topics.
> all you can really do is code C, compile with -O2, and then guess and check on optimizations

This is just not true for performance-critical code. I've seen huge swings in performance from hand-arranging code to achieve better instruction-level parallelism, less loop overhead, etc. Not an order of magnitude but 3-5x routinely.

This is not worth doing for random bits of code outside serious hot spots, mind you, and it's become quite difficult to guess how a modern processor (e.g. Core 2 x86 or beyond) is going to execute instructions. Profiling with event counters as well as using IACA (Intel's static analyzer) becomes necessary, as does close reading of their optimization reference manual.
The Zinn-Segaran Experiential Greatness Scale
They want to emphasise a point. But think of what is indispensible. If the program was unreadable -- maybe the source is lost -- you still have a running, useful, device. But if you do not have execution, you do not really have software anymore.

Software as function -- for execution -- and software as representation -- for humans -- must be pretty much equally important, in the end. But surely the key constraint, the definitive matter is what software does, what it is as an artifact. We can communicate about anything, but software is software because it performs some action.
TestFlight SDK Released
It's funny this came from SICP's authors because I always found that Lisp was harder to read/write than languages like Python which look like English.

I'm not saying one is better or that one is easier to maintain than the other, just that Python is really close to the pseudo-code, design notes, and specifications in English that I write. Not just logically, but syntactically.

In Java, I used to write some pseudo code in comments before attacking a particularly difficult method. I rarely do this in Python now.

Still Lisp can be closer to English than some Perl one liners :-)
Advanced Python Programming
This is a bit off the topic of your actual framework, but as far as branding, I love your logo. Do you mind sharing the person/company that designed it for you?
I blame Pret A Manger. They have been doing this for years, I think the goal has been to make you think it is not a store, but a collection of foodstuffs curated a manic pixie dream girl, and oh yeah, you can totes buy the bananna bread! It is sooooooo good!
Barcelona vs Ac Milan live streaming UEFA online 13 September Free
Needs a lot more baking.

For web apps built now, I use ExtJS. The newest release has been a little too buggy, but they are working hard to make it better.
>I think the point was that you should be able to flip a switch and get mongo in a fully functional Rails stack just as easily as you flip a switch and get mysql (sqlite being the default).

Mongoid, the premier mongodb rails adapter, has fully functioning model generators and its API is built on ActiveModel, the same as Rails' own ActiveRecord. Thus it is fully compatibile out of the box with the majority of other rails components, such as form builders and authentication systems.

It doesn't really get any more 'flip a switch' than that, even in the world of rails. Since 3.0 rails has been decoupled to the extent that other db adapters etc exist pretty much on an even footing with the rails defaults.

EDIT: apparently the mongomapper adapter also uses activemodel these days.
For a trivial, synthetic write benchmark that I usually use to benchmark hardware and/or config changes, I'm seeing slight slowdowns for non-concurrent loads, and solid improvements for concurrent loads with.

For 1-2 clients, I'm seeing ~8% slower.

For 4 clients, 7.2% faster.

8 clients, 15% faster.

16 clients, 16.4% faster.

32 clients, 11% faster.

64 clients, 10% faster. Aggregate performance starts to level off here, so I stopped.

These are just cycling super simple INSERTs/DELETEs against the same table, columns data is 1K string, 100 byte string, then a concatenation of the pid and current iterator count. No indexes or primary keys. Each client is just a fork that performs 10,000 INSERTs, then 10,000 DELETEs in a loop of 10,000 iterations.

For the record, that's around 6,729 writes per second with 32 clients. If I set synchronous_commit = OFF in each client before running the benchmark, it's 27,157/sec. Then, if I reduce the first column size to 100 bytes, it's 50,592/sec. Impressive. I'm sure the synchronous_commit improvement would be much more drastic on disks without BBU write caches.

Database server is a 4-core Nehalem-based Xeon with 16GB RAM and a SAS disk array. PostgreSQL configuration has been decently tuned and full write durability is retained all the way down to the disks.
Nice but decent upload widgets these days include support for drop-zone uploading.
How much did you invest in Hunch?
"Am I the only one who feels that TechCrunch is the startup world's Jersey Shore?"
Yes there are some articles that don't involve actual reporting. The problem is that those articles get the most page views and people respond to them the most.
Look at this post from today about a true entrepreneur that is doing real innovation in the e-commerce/fashion space.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/after-ebay-acquisition-gsi-...
The article has a meek 3 comments and low social stats.

This was even published before the TC drama that came out today.

Keep in mind everyone always talks about how TC doesn't cover start ups and only highlight the big players. If you actually look through the stats of what they post about, it isn't the case. It is just their cheezy/TMZ-ish articles get the most attention and stay in memory for longer.
I just tried to send a message from Facebook to an actual email address that is hosted by Google. Guess what happened? The email from my Facebook account ended up in the spam folder in my gmail! :-) Now that's interesting on two accounts. First I didn't even know I could send an email from Facebook messages. Second, Google treated it as spam.
Agreed. We all end up naming our designs Index_01.psd, Index_01a.psd, .. anyway. I don't think commit messages are that important in design.
Node Knockout Winners Announced
Free Music Contest 2011 - FreeMixter: The winners
Technology to simply create beautiful designs using copy&paste/drag&drop is about 2 years off... just as it has been for the past 20 years.
Note: You cannnot use this library on your web site. The licensing agreement forbids you from redistributing the library, whether or not it's minified. It further states, "You are not allowed to integrate the Software into end products or use it for any commercial or productive purpose." So private deployment is out too. It's strictly for your own evaluation and amusement.

http://www.kendoui.com/download/licenseagreement.aspx?skuId=...

Have fun with that.

[Edit: Their web site has conflicting information in the FAQ. See below.]

[Edit: Updated link. Thanks pakitan.]
I just sent an actual email to an email address from Facebook messages. GMail treated as spam, which is kind of funny. :-)
How Scientific Ideas Flow Around The World
Thanks for mentioning my book. For people who are interested in maps there's a map of all the locations in The Geek Atlas here:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&#...

And if anyone's got the energy they can enter them all on the Nerdy Day Trips web site. I've done the first 22, but need to do other stuff tonight. If you do that and enter a significant number (say > 30) then (a) please add a note "This is one of 128 geeky places from the book, The Geek Atlas" and (b) email me and I will send you a free signed copy of my book.
Apes, Words and People
Don't forget the world's tallest (guyed) structure, a TV broadcast mast in North Dakota: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVLY-TV_mast

First man-made structure to exceed 2000 feet in height.
This is an interesting discussion and I agree with some of your comments. As guidelines for interest you seem to prescribe (i) company size and (ii) public-private (this fails for intensely polarizing people like Zuckerberg, though, guy had a movie made on him). Fair enough.

You blame TechCrunch (and its ilk) for pumping the "Hollywood for geeks" culture, which is of course true. But this, as any Hollywood star knows, is a two way street. Many of the geeks thrive on their stardom, with thousands of people following their Twitter feeds and blogs. This in turn leads to investment in their companies (and appearances and book deals, etc.) I'm not saying that all geeks (or Fake) employ such Kardeshian-like tactics to get attention, but some do. TechCrunch is a channel for these people to get and focus attention (although Arrington's style does sometime get crude). It's the same dynamic as movie/TV stars and late night shows, if you're in that business you have to do the rounds.

Now, in the case of Fake, I don't know why leaving the company is her "private life" but most people here seem to think so. Arrington in his blunt way hints that there is "juicy" bits to this. If that is the case, I have no interest. My question was not to pry into Fake's dating life per se. I am much more interested in understanding the thought patterns (or the downvoting patterns) on HN than this issue.
Of course. Descriptive theories still help identify things better than no theories at all, even if they are wrong. Because then you can at least cross one off the list
Thanks Rob, means a lot.
A Sexy DSL for Arguments in Node.js
Posting where you cribbed the story from doesn't make things better.
I see your points and will address all of them. In the meantime feel free to email me adam@eventlogapp.com.

Thanks.
Ask YC: Do consulting companies get funded? Why or why not?
I suspect the answer is no, and I can think of some obvious disadvantages, but I would like to gain some perspective on this. Also, hybrid companies that are working on product, but aim to be somewhat self-funded by consulting at the same time.

(This doesn't have to be specifically for YC - anyone involved in angel or VC funding is welcome to share their perspective.)
Show HN: I'm testing the waters on a short term project matchmaking service
I'm gauging interest for a service that would help connect devs/designers/copywriters with folks who have short term projects (a few days or weeks of work). The projects would range in value, but should ideally be at least a few $100.

Through Forrst, there are already thousands of such people available to work, it's just a matter of if this is interesting to the other side. If it is, would you leave your info? Thanks a ton.

Form: https://kylebragger.wufoo.com/forms/short-term-project-matchmaking/
Clickable: https://kylebragger.wufoo.com/forms/short-term-project-match...
Ease of first time developer installation should never be the deciding factor in these decisions. I realize it is pretty rampant, but it's not something we should be proud of.
There is a drop zone if supported by the browser. Try dropping a file here:
http://demos.kendoui.com/upload/async.html
in Chrome or Firefox.
32 Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read
To be fair CouchDB is very explicit that to get any sort of performance, everything must be a view. "Ad-hoc queries" (i.e. queries that are written on the fly instead of uploaded as a view) are clearly stated as "for development only".

Where CouchDB really falls flat is for write-heavy applications. The default configuration in CouchDB is to not reindex a view until it has been read. When a read occurs, any new data in a view that was added since the last read must be re-indexed by executing the map/reduce functions on that data. If you're writing frequently to CouchDB but not reading a lot (as in a data warehouse) the first query you run is going to be extremely slow, since it will need to run map/reduce on a lot of new data. CouchDB doesn't distribute work to multiple nodes like Hadoop, and I've found even simple reduce functions to slow down re-indexing by a factor of 10. I think CouchDB has settings now to update the index on commit, or you could always run a cron job to regularly query the view and force a reindex, but it's still going to be slow.

BigCouch (https://cloudant.com/#!/solutions/bigcouch) might be a potential choice for data warehousing, since it advertises full compatibility with the CouchDB API but offers distributed map/reduce like Hadoop/Hive/etc. I haven't used it though.
Actually, that's one of the reasons Strauss & Howe are a big deal - they did make some fairly specific predictions, and invited people to hold them accountable for those.
You seek the Rosetta Code.
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Text
Did pg say "I worry..." on purpose?
See http://blog.mongodb.org/post/5545198613/mongodb-live-at-crai...
Fifty new exoplanets discovered
I think Sencha is possibly the closest to that for the web right now. I find it fairly similar to writing form-based desktop applications.
If I remember correctly it is only with MyISAM you get instant count(*) while InnoDB, just like PostgreSQL, has to look at every row of the table (or every row of the index since InnoDB also supports index only scans). This is due to both PostgreSQL and InnoDB being MVCC (multi-version concurrency control) database engines.

And MyISAM is only fast in very specialized workloads with low write and read/write concurrency.
Sorry but I dont seem to have the ability to edit the comment any more. Hope the story remains enjoyable for first time readers inspite of that
Probably the case, which may have the judge and the employees in question both making the same error.
This is roughly what MVCC does under the covers. Of course, you don't have to implement it, the database just does it for you, and it's not eventually consistent.
YC’s Graham: Apple is taking over the world
Make Beautiful Icons With Image Sprites, CSS3 font-face, or SVG
Big dreams of Trisha | Koimoi
> I have significant experience with CSV, SVN, Perforce, Source Depot (Microsoft's internal Perforce fork), Team Foundation Server, Mercurial, and Git.

TFS is a worse source control system than CSV? That is bad! ;)
As for philosophy, the pedigree is certainly there. Philosophy gave rise to, and helped develop, logic, and logic, in the early 20th century did rather give rise to programming. You could easily make an unbroken line of thought. So there certainly is something significant in common. But software is essentially about practical application.

Programmers seem to have difficulty in simply saying that programming is most like engineering design. It is probably because most people are unfamiliar with what engineering design is -- they perhaps think it only about material, or about absolute control. Engineering is at root logical and creative -- in a particular kind of combination, and for practical purpose. That is just like software.
I'd seriously consider using this, just because of the stagnancy of jQuery UI. It's a massive project with hundreds of long-open tickets (despite thousands of dollars spent on incentivizing developers over the summer through http://rewardjs.com/). 1.8 was released in March of 2010, and the last milestone release for 1.9 was back in May.

To be fair, a lot of jQuery UI's development headaches come from supporting IE6, while Kendo only touts its support for IE7+...
Hmm, so you filter reading and discussing posts on TC, HN and others by the companies you invest? Either you are very rich or you don't get to read and discuss much.
New Solution Automates Security Across Multiple Cloud Providers
Are you planning on putting some content up?
Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramifications
Corporations in the US are legally persons. Persons earning greater than $350,000 per year have an income tax rate of 35%.

The problem is probably that they're legally defined as persons.
That link just takes me to an error page. The FAQ says "Kendo UI is dual-licensed, Commercial and Open Source (GPLv2)"—and furthermore, that "During the Beta phase, no commercial license is available."

[Edit: Updated link did work. Yeah, that license agreement is... not GPL-compatible. I'm guessing they duplicated the same boilerplate that they use for trial versions of their .NET libraries.]
It's true the workplace is transitioning, just not as fast as the type of work being done. Everything is becoming more personalized, faster and more efficient. We (for the most part) don't expect to stay at a company for 20+ years or even 10 years because everything is changing so fast.

It would be great if the workplace transitioned at the same speed as the work involved, but this can't be expected. We need jobs that fulfill our own personal career goals (rather than us adjusting them to fit the career), that can be worked on intermittently throughout the day (to take full advantage of our ever-shortening attention spans) and that have opportunities for growth (as we work in a dynamic world now).
Not what I implied at all. You said that investors would have a right to know why Fake left Hunch. You also expressed entitlement to know. So, I assumed you were consistent in your positions.

Or, are you saying you'd like to know just because you want to? Do you feel you have a right to know? Is the world being unfair to you?
... and SmartClient.
Love the idea! But please can you make the map the default action for mousewheel scrolling? I want to zoom into the map, rather than up and down a page I'm not going to read anyway.
Battery Powered Cars: Vehicle of the Future [funny kids]
Want a vehicle with style, power, low fuel cost and high adventure? Then the exciting world of kids battery cars is for you!
Inside the Mind of a Billion-Dollar Acquirer
I think this is a symptom of a larger problem in the sense that if you really explain what it is most of these micro-startups do, it sounds like a ridiculous thing to expect to ever make money from.

Even when they do explain themselves it is always in the vein of "Like Heroku meets Google+ meets Github for todo lists".

wtf does that even mean? Get a real job.