skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally disagree about STI.

I once had abstracted a complex application as a directed graph that have only nodes and edges. From there I STIed most of my business entities.

The resulting app had only two tables and complexity relating to the network was nicely separated from business objects. Which was kind of beautiful.

Now, about testing. Testing of controllers is the key, you say?

Strange enough, I think that unit tests (models) are the most important. Because controllers are dumb, and often they are not even the only way to access the logic.

What if your application is called by some AJAX framework that has its own MVC built-in, like Dojo?

If the design is right, I can get all of my app's functionality from command line, ignoring the controllers completely.
what are you talking about?

vary on lot more dimensions?? that's obvious. different people will code differently.

the point is performance which may suffer due to bad algorithmic knowledge or coding skills or due to the tradeoff for time to market. If you write a bad program it will not perform well. It's obvious.

don't really understand how you think or why you need to answer to something I am not saying.
One-sidedness is one of the legal requirements, but it's not the only one.

http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/money_illustrations.shtml
One observation that’s frequently made about Facebook is that you guys seem to be trying to re-create a lot of the functions that are out there on the Internet, but within the walls of the Facebook.com—so people can have an Internet “experience” without really going out to the rest of the Internet.

I feel like Facebook is turning into a modern-day AOL... as a user, I think it sucks at times... but I can't blame them for wanting to grow and expand. At least they have an eye for quality, and a deep understanding of the internet which AOL lacked. You can't discount the fact that they've done some pretty cool stuff.

Side note, if you work at Facebook I think it's mandatory that you wear a North Face pull-over.
How about just a plain improbability drive?
Protecting Company Interests (profit) != Stifling Competition

NDA != License to Engage in Abusive Conduct
Domain Specific Languages, parsing, new language creation in general, rules-based systems, highly-scalable applications, cross-language compilation.

As an example of the last item, the Web Toolkit allows you to write one, er, server page with F# on it. Kind of like C# or VB with old-timely asp pages, where the code and the html was all together.

The cool part is by flagging the methods to either run on the server, client, or both, you just write code to do stuff -- a server method can call a client one which then can call a server one, etc. The system figures out how to do the work. And even cooler, everything is in F# -- the F# language abilities are programmed so it automagically turns the F# into Javascript when the page is rendered.

Cool stuff.
Cisco regexp gone bad?
The Chinese also said their female Olympic gymnasts were 16 years old. I think it's a good policy to take what the Chinese say with a grain of salt.
And how is this any different to the various cross-browser issues web developers face?
Have you tried using Java Web Start? It's wonderfully simple to deploy and (almost) lets you forget about past nightmares with applets.
It's like... a meta-poll system?
Rebuttal to "A hacker's loneliness"
I too "wasted" most of my teens writing "pointless" programs - games in Basic that I never finished, assembly language programs optimized for old computers 20 years obsolete, and C++ programs with extensible architectures that no one else will ever extend.

My father always warned me that one day I would wake up and realize I'd wasted my life sitting in front of a computer screen. Bullshit.

When I was in college I ran into people I'd known in high school who told me some stories about what was really going on in the social circles I'd missed while I spent my days with a computer, and I was shocked. Most of my "normal" peers who had social lives drank heavily and got into drugs - some died or nearly died. Many of them became teen parents. I never even knew! My obsession with computers had kept me insulated from all of that.

Now that I'm a working adult and married, I look back with wonder at the thought of having long summer vacations where I had no responsibilities preventing me from hacking for days on end. Though I didn't appreciate the time I had then as much as I would appreciate it now, I would not change a single minute of how I spent it. There is a depth of understanding I built up during those years doing "pointless" hacking that I simply could not have picked up in the piecemeal way my time is split up today. Every year that I spent working 12 hours a day on interesting problems while I was in high school put me ahead 6 years on what I could accomplish today, when I'm lucky to get 1-2 hours free a day. Whenever I run across a problem today that I can solve in a snap because it mirrors a problem I already solved at my leisure during those early year, I think, "Damn it's good to be a geek."
Any artificial barrier that cuts down on developer freedom and productivity will keep developers away from a platform.
Yes, the author made the assumption that Apple understood that a level of openness is required take a platform's popularity to the next level.

This is a point I see over and over again. People who are not Apple managers telling Apple what Apple ought to do to run their business successfully.

I appreciate you are being sincere, but as a long-time Apple watcher, I also recall people saying much the same thing about clones, about running Windows, about sticking with OS9, about supporting Java on iPhone, about being bought by Sun, and a great number of other things that Apple chose not to do, or chose to do later, or chose to do and undo and not redo.

You may be right that in some alternate universe Apple would be more successful if you called the shots instead of Steve Jobs.

But if we can return to the point of the post, it is that Steve Jobs is the CEO, Apple is doing what it does rather than what you or I want it to do, and it is foolish to make bets that Apple will reverse one of their positions just because you or I think they ought to do so.
MySQL v. PostgreSQL
I've been a long time user of MySQL. I neither love it, nor hate it; but I do find that it meets all my database needs. I was reading the Reddit job posting the other day and I see that they use Postgres as their database and I thought to myself, "is there something I'm missing?" I've never really looked into Postgres, but it seems like I see it popping up all over the place. What's the consensus? Is Postgres superior to MySQL in some way I'm unaware?
Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron?
http://weblog.raganwald.com
Programmers tend to push for more testing, continuous integration, lots of short iterations, quiet time and space.

Management tends to push for more meetings, more things you can track and measure and more tracking and measuring and ways to lover cost.

None of this is bad, what's bad is that where ever there is turmoil, good ideas and crap ideas get mixed up.

Like pair programming and/or co-location vs. private quiet offices.
JQuery lightbox clone - prettyPhoto
True, but I think this is what the 1 laptop per child concept is all about. US minimum wage is 6.25/hour in other economies over a billion people would be happy with 1-2% of that. The trick is finding something useful for them to do and handing them the tools to do so. Anyway, I expect the cost of outsourcing low end jobs is only going to go down as digital work becomes more common.

PS: My point is mostly about what constitutes a "living wage" in most of the world and has little to do with Amazon Mechanical Turk as it exists right now. I expect most people using Turk are making a lot more than 1cent / min of work or are just doing it as a hobby where the cash value is almost zero incentive.
Does it worry anyone that startups are doing this kind of Chamber of Commerce stuff?
Browsers, start your JavaScript. The race is on
Age is a Funny Thing | Psych2020
Spore what is it good for? | TechJaws
That's because it applied to science-fields, and it applies to software engineering, which is more of a craft than a science.

Agile is essentially lean production for software, and I've heard it's not so ridiculous.
postgre used to be superior due to the fact that it had a ton of features that mysql didn't have. now they're approximately even, although postgre does still have more robust features.

mysql, i believe, performs better in most situations and configurations. in the black art of performance tweaking, you can tweak them both down pretty well, but mysql still stays better performing (edited to add:) in general. YMMV based on the needs of your app.
Data integrity?
14 celeb-powered start-ups: Where are they now?
I did not claim that Apple would be more successful if I called the shots instead of Steve Jobs. I think that not one in a million could have staged such a successful resurgence as Steve Jobs has.

However, I believe Apple is harming their platform in this matter. It is possible that I am wrong and Apple will be better off with this decision.

In any case, some developers and authors are being due to their assumption that the platform would be more open. This will lead to many developers deciding to spend their work effort developing for other platforms.
Django Reference Sheet [pdf]
To Patent or Not To Patent?
Unalone had a great quote regarding Seth Godin's popularity on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305741.

"It's [his popularity is] because he writes short articles that usually make sense on the surface and so people read him because they think it will make them rich."
I thought the straightforward handling of routing in CI and the other basic plumbing was very nice. I really didn't like the way you have to load all the other classes wacky-style to work around PHP 4's deficiencies. So it was as much maddening as helpful for me. Kohana is just like CI, except without the PHP 4 fail.

Of course most people won't get into the PHP 5.3 features, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

And HaXe... I've been thinking about it for a long time, but I always end up thinking no. What's the web framework and view/template story there? It doesn't appeal for writing client-side JS b/c there I have jQuery, and I very much doubt HaXe would end up easier to write.
Does Google use this internally for their company-wide ask-Larry-and-Sergei meetings?
Wow! comparing Palin to Chester Allen Arthur, BURN!

While I don't know how Obama would come out ("qualified" or "unqualified") in a Lessig-style analysis (which is, more or less, just a rhetorical style), this talk shows some pitfalls of one-to-one comparison. One pitfall being that Lessig's Power Point format (something he's carried over from his Free Culture lectures) glosses over what one DID as Senator, Mayor, Secretary of War, etc. These are titles (just like Major, Congressperson, VP) but the eras and jobs have changed.

Also, in saying that Palin is "qualified" or "unqualified," Lessig (slyly, but brilliantly) does what he seems to rail against: classifying a political figure into a pass/no-pass binary through a series of soundbites.
I'm not sure how well Godin's strategies work for people, but he is an absolute master at marketing one thing: himself.
Yes, every Friday at TGIF people can submit questions using it, or they can just ask them in person at the event.
It's not really a polling system. It's a system for ranking user submitted entries.

Google uses it internally every Friday at their TGIF to prioritize what questions Larry and Sergey should answer first (in addition to the ones asked in person). All week long people submit questions or concerns and Googlers vote on them to determine if they are relevant or not. It could be used for other things too though... really anything that needs ranking. Ideas could be ranked, or you could pose a question and have the answers ranked. I'm sure there are other novel uses as well. It's a pretty general system.
... it depends ...
I'll say the same thing I said when it was Obama vs Hillary. I'd rather have a stupid, inexperienced, incompetent friend than a smart, experienced, highly skilled enemy.

I would much prefer to see Palin fail miserably at reducing corruption than see Biden successfully reduce civil liberties (for those unfamiliar with Biden's record, http://news.yahoo.com/s/cnet/20080824/tc_cnet/83011357831002... ).
First off. This isn't hacker news.

Second, who really cares about experience? Bush came in as pretty experienced and then gained even more experience in his first term. Did that affect his behavior in the 2nd term? If anything, it may have made him more confident. Someone who lacks experience may not be so confident and that can be a good thing.
Historically, Mysql was "faster" than Postgres (it's called Postgres or PostgreSQL) in the same way that a bicycle without brakes was faster at going down hills. These days, Postgres is a lot faster, and Mysql, with InnoDB, has things like transactions that make it an actual database. I've always been partial to Postgres because it was an actual database with more features and without any of the licensing weirdnesses of Mysql.
Google Maps JavaScript API on the iPhone
Banks barely get by as it is right now from a technology standpoint.

The struggle just to provide enough of the basic online banking services to their users. There is a continual stream of new features and products they support (with daily banking being a small part of that).

I have worked on a lot of banking software - and there is absolutely no chance those institutions would be able to compete in this space. They don't want to, they don't need to, and they don't know how to.
Except it rains during the full academic year. Very nice in the summers though!
Where're the agile-accountants or pair-plumbers then? I stand by my original point.
Usually, when a company makes a consumer device, they either market it as an "experience" or as a "platform".

When a company is trying to sell a device as an "experience", it finds other large companies to partner with, and makes them all sign NDAs. The partner companies make legal agreements ahead of time so that both parties know what will be developed/accepted. Due to the cost and limited number of partners, only a few applications are made for the device, but they are high quality. This is the model used by game consoles and some mobile devices.

On the other hand, when a company tries to market a device as a "platform", it courts as many developers as it can, from big companies to hobbyists. Usually, the development tools and documentation are free. There are no NDAs to sign, no vetting process; developers create with the assurance that end-users will have access to their product, regardless of how crappy it is. This is the model used by personal computers and some mobile devices.

What is unusual is that Apple is pursuing neither strategy. They want developers to work without prior approval, but they also want to arbitrarily block distribution. They want developers to work on their own, but they also want to keep them from talking to each other.

This approach is unexpected from a device manufacturer. It was not unreasonable of the book authors to expect that Apple would have dropped the NDA by now, as it serves no purpose other than as a barrier of entry to development.
Micropayment Idea
I have thought for some time thought there is a need for a mobile, web application that would bring credit card payments into the realm of impulse decisions, similar to the impulse purchases that got folks into debt in the first place.

It could be called, Save-a-Latte, and would work like this: You are walking down the street, see a Starbucks and are about to impulsively go buy a premium coffee beverage, but if you resist the urge you could open your phone, and pay $3.89 toward your credit card debt, thus getting some sort of satisfaction right on the spot.

It could hook into your personal finance software and bank accounts, display some nice graphs and encouraging data.

What do you think?
Startup Speed: Agile Acclerators
A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle
its def a niche, but we see a big market, especially in the college crowd both from a premium brands perspective and custom printing.
I don't think this is an overreaction. The NDA means that an iPhone developer can't legally blog about developing iPhone apps. That's a bit wild, isn't it?
I think 20-somthings have a bit more of a hormonal relevance.
All I know is my vote is heavily influenced by YouTube videos. Whichever candidate gets their YouTube in just before I close the curtain is probably getting my +1.
It worries me that startups in other areas _aren't_ doing this kind of stuff!
I wouldn't go as far as what you're saying, but having only been an Apple user for 4 years (and a wannabe iPhone developer for 6 months), this was an eye-opening experience to me. I assumed that Microsoft was "evil" and Apple was "good". But it's far more complex than that. If this is how Apple treats developers, they deserve to lose them.
Rails Programmer at Inkling
Inkling is looking for a Rails contractor (1+ months) to work on some interesting projects with our current design/development team. We want people with strong Rails skills and who can write beautiful code, but we also really appreciate people who are good writers (substance over grammar), could communicate well with our clients if asked to do so, and have an eye for good design. We are working with some pretty cool technology over here, which has included building out our REST API, abandoning Subversion for Git, moving to Memcached and Sphinx, etc. and there will be plenty more fun things to work on as we continue to ride on the leading edge of what Rails can do.

Inkling was started in Dec 2005 through Y Combinator (ycombinator.com) and in our humble opinion, our service offering, Inkling Markets, is the best prediction markets software service available today. And it’s been that way for almost 3 years now, because it’s easy to use, runs fast, and remains reliable (full Rails test suite and Selenium to top it off).

We’re in Chicago, but you don’t have to be. Position also has the possibility to become full time if you’re looking for some more stability in your life.

To apply:
Write jobs@inklingmarkets.com with Rails Developer as the subject. Please send along a resume, references and anything you think would help introduce yourself: where you blog, anything open source you’ve developed, your favorite beverage, etc.
If anyone who is anyone happens to read this:

We need a search function / question 'checker'. For instance, there was a question, "When can I use Google Moderator for my site?" So I submitted: "When can I use Google Moderator?" It was accepted and put in the question queue. Instead, it should say, "Your question looks like this question, would you like to vote it up?" or something like that.
Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM)
Yes it's wild, and I'm glad I'm not developing iPhone apps, but for me, that doesn't make Apple evil.
yeah, there's no doubt about the fact that its situational.

just like picking a language
In terms of stored procedure language and locking strategy Postgres is still light-years ahead of MySQL. You can almost think of Postgres as the free Oracle. Going feature-for-feature by introduction date, MySQL is 10-15 years behind.
question -- would you be paying $3.89 toward your CC debt with...what? your CC? aren't you doing that by not buying the latte with your CC?

i mean, i like the concept, but its a little flawed based on how you're describing the idea.
I'm a fat libertarian. Wonder where we're supposed to go?
Our World of Middle Earth: Obama Against W.S. Welfare State Supported by Citizens
Excellent. No-one can complain about me using C, can they?
How To Build A Next-Gen Business Now
Some sort of floating cities in the ocean, last I heard:-)
VC's Livid With Digg: Cash Was Not Meant for More "Bongs and Beer"
It's interesting how many of these accelerators match up with the YC model.

I've always thought there was an extremely close relationship to the way small consulting teams that write software work in the field and the way a small startup team works. It's do-or-die, it's time-boxed, it's close-and-mind-meld the user, it's hard focus on one thing.

Anybody see the differences?
If you've got family there are many cities within about a 30 minute commute of Boulder that are much more affordable (larger house/more land for same price). This would include towns such as Longmont, Firestone, and Erie. Some towns in the area border on being rural, but have become less so over the last fifteen years.

I grew up in Longmont and worked in Boulder for a couple years after college. Great area to live and work. I've since moved to Seattle, but I enjoy every trip home to see friends and family in the area.
Seth is a free thinker. I may not always agree with what he says.

During the Q&A session at a Seth Godin lecture I attended, a parent asked him a question about how he taught his kids. He answered with a story about how the school his children attended was doing a play. Seth suggested that instead of having one kid play the lead role for the entire play that they rotate it - so that every kid could get the chance to be the star/be the main role. The kids loved it, most parents loved it.
while I agree with you there are ways around this. Many people have a savings account or similar where the money could be transferred to. Alternatively the company could have an account where you transfer money to. This way you can see your account grow when you log in - maybe you can specify a goal in your settings (pay off xxx $, buy a stero, whatever) and when the goal has been reached the money is transferred back to your account.

I think it's a great idea, and I'd love to give a hand with usability/conceptual/whatever stuff. Sounds like fun...
Colorado School of Mines is in Golden, CO. It's about a 45 minute drive from Boulder.
hmm, if my memory serves me correctly you may be right on this one. :-)
I know, I'm a fan. I just noticed that all your comments on this post made it look like you where starting to blog again, but in HN comment section :-)
right, but would it be a bank draft from the checking into a savings?
I think it's because it is easier to tell if someone is good at programming then at other disciplines. If the only thing people can rely on is education, it becomes important.
Q: The contribution for which I most want to be remembered:

A: The C++ destructor and the programming techniques that rely on it.

"C++ destructor": Java/Python/etc.?
That's an easy thing to say, but it's just not true. Seth hates promoting himself, it makes him uncomfortable, and he goes out of his way to avoid ever mentioning his own books or his startup on his blog. When he releases a new book he'll usually post a couple paragraphs from it on the blog, and that's about it. In the three years since Squidoo went into private beta he's promoted it maybe three or four times on his blog and probably mentioned it less than ten times total.
Hardware Rendering for 3D in Silverlight or Flash. We need this
something along those lines, I'm not really into mobile payments so I don't know how it can be done - but I'm sure there's a way.