skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you use tabs everywhere, your code alignment will be all wrong:

if x:
----some_long_func_name(...,
---- blah...

Note that ---- is indentation and the spaces need to be spaces. If you use tabs for all of this, it will come out misaligned.

You could say -- then why not use tabs for the indent part, and spaces for the alignment part? Because virtually no editors support doing this automatically (and doing this manually is not practical). The few editors that do support automating this, don't make it discoverable (let alone a default).

What you end up with is a horrible mixture of tabs and spaces, or if you use tabs only, then code that does not align right.

Using tabs simply does not work in practice. Spaces may have the (supposed) disadvantage of a fixed indentation size, but they really are the only way to make indented code work across different editors. And this is not an optional thing, therefore tabs should be banned, completely.
Well, one advantage of the app store is that you can charge for your app.
NullSet, the interest is on the rise. Each day we get more and more people to register.

Full disclosure: I'm helping to organize Hack4Reno

We think this is a good way to get Reno to bootstrap itself. Get people like yourself to see that there is a hacker community and that it is much larger than they would have guessed. Get the City to see that we are here and that we love our town. Get the tech/dev/design community to showcase itself by doing great work right here.

I run the local Ruby brigade with almost all our members, we have about 10, earning their daily bread with Ruby. There is also the Northern Nevada Software Developers Group, which pulls in more of the MS/Java crowd and I hear that there is a small Java meetup happening.
From the author of the Flask:

<mitsuhiko> If you get exceptions randomly then that's because my ep.io account gets limited. I have like 30 apps by now xD
Is this $600bn out of pocket for the German state, or some leveraged fund, or perhaps a smaller contribution to a bigger fund?
Only if you can travel in time back to before this article was written.
I can't post on serverfault, since the question's been locked, so I'll put useful things to consider here:

* 100% SLA doesn't always mean 'It has to be up all the time'. Depending on the customer or the supplier, it can mean 'We'll aim to have it up all the time, but if it's not, we'll pay you compensation according to a predefined scale'. Clearly, in this case, you need to define quite firmly what 'up' and 'down' mean, how you measure them, how you time them, and how you decide what compensation to pay.

* DNS failover or load balancing is often nearly good enough. It won't get you instantaneous failover, since you'll need to have a finite (albeit small) TTL, and some client stub resolver libraries cache stuff anyway in violation of the TTL. But it's an easy step on the way

* If you want true 100% uptime, ultimately, you need a single IP (or range of IPs) which will be permanently reachable. That pretty much means the IPs need to come from one AS number - in other words, one ISP or one company.

* You can choose an ISP or company which has multiple internet connections, peers with a lot of people in multiple locations, and has a well-designed network such that you feel confident they won't go offline. Amazon may be a good example, but they've had several recent high profile failures!

* You could do it yourself - in which case, you'd need to become an ISP, get your own AS number, and set up peering arrangements with multiple suppliers in multiple locations. This can be very costly, and you still have to run a network and servers yourself in a reliable way

* You might be able to find a supplier who peers in multiple locations, and anycasts their protected IPs within their AS. That way, the same IP comes from multiple locations and should be reliable. Akamai might do something similar to this, I think.

* Ultimately, however you do it, you'll have a very difficult time making it impossible for it to fail. You're into the game of making it exponentially less and less likely that it'll fail, but you can't eliminate all risk. At the end of the day, your contract with your customer needs to define what happens if you should fail to reach 100% uptime. Is it breach of contract? Or do you need to pay a penalty fee? In either case, however you host it, you ideally need to make sure your suppliers compensation to you if they have a failure will cover the losses you incur.
> Who said Android apps can’t look good?

Apple. They spent the time to "get it right" with iOS, and when Android came along they had to settle for second best in most areas to avoid looking like an iOS clone.
I've said it before. Most are bad. Which do you feel are examples of great design?
I suspect most python developers get the "insert four spaces per tab" for free with whatever IDE they use.
Nmap 5.61 TEST2 - IPv6 OS detection Added
Apple made their big money in the past 10 years really because of the combination of content available and style. People still want style, but the style market is already owned by Apple. Apple doesn't own everyone, because not everyone can afford or buy into it. For the past two years, various companies have captured a big part of rest of the market, but data plans, etc. are still prohibitively expensive, so not everyone has either an Android or iOS device. But, here comes Amazon. It has an extremely large part of the market already, and now they are going to pick up all of the people that couldn't drop $500 for an iPad. AND they say if you get Prime, you have unlimited streaming movies. It is a no-brainer.
Australia vs Russia live stream rugby.
Watch Australia vs Russia live stream Rugby World Cup online broadcast. Wallabies vs Russia rugby World Cup Internet TV. Australia vs Russia live rugby match will take place 01 October, 2011. Watching Australia vs Russia live rugby game. Rugby World Cup live match will face to between Wallabies vs Russia. Don't miss this great opportunity watching Australia vs Russia live rugby. So Rugby fan, watch this exciting rugby world cup match between Australia vs Russia.
Neat packaging for electrolysis, but I'm trying to imagine where/how this would get used. Not as elegant once you add all the apparatus to capture and store the hydrogen.
"Simply having chargebacks is never going to automatically cause your account to be terminated."

False: "WePay reserves the right to close or put a hold on any account that has generated a ["a", as in "single"] chargeback." - https://www.wepay.com/about/terms

No one talks about the ugly fine print. It's always "just a formality", until they need to use it against you, and that's exactly the kind of leverage a competitor or an enemy will seek out.
Why you should quit your job and crash the party
"Super Mario Bros. 2 was the hot videogame"

Actually, no. The U.S. version of Super Mario Brothers 2 came out in 1988. (At that time, Japan had a "Super Mario Brothers 2" that was completely different, but it's just not relevant to to the article).

As for the REAL issues, I wholeheartedly support it.
The screen resolution, according to Amazon's own product page, is a (standard but unimpressive) 1024 x 600.
Jerry here. Here's the statement I gave to Gawker about the Newsweek complaints:

As for the letters of complaint, Guo tells us they "stem from the fact a) I just didn't end up writing about some of the places I stayed, because they sucked and I wasn't about to portray them as anything else and b) Daily Beast and Newsweek merged last winter, and I left pretty quickly after that, so with a lead time of several weeks / months, those stories just didn't get written."

Here's a statement from Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek on our editorial policy:

Mr. Zakaria emailed Betabeat to explain the change. The Good Life, he said, was “an effort to provide a service for our readers and attract new advertisers. It is quite common in that world for reporters to, say, go to a special tasting at a new restaurant or attend a weekend retreat at a new hotel. I relaxed our rules on this stuff for those two pages.
Hey, if we can add personality to the ad industry then anyone can do it. I personally think that a lot of people devalue what helping people have a little more fun can add to a product and many are scared that fun/personable = unprofessional, which isn't the case.

I think another awesome example of a product having some personality is HipChat -- they're all over. They're a goofy and fun group of guys and they have built a product that reflects that.

All you need to do is look at either their Easter egg emoticons (http://www.quora.com/What-are-all-of-the-hidden-emoticons-on...) or the billboard that they had on 101 (http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/22/y-u-no-have-lame-billboard-...) and you can tell that they have personality literally oozing out of their product. Yeah, I said "oozing".
Ok, here's the high-level overview. An antivirus scanner uses the following (basic) types of detection:

1. Hash-based. This isn't as common nowadays, as there's a lot of malware that will generate a unique copy every hour or so.

2. Signature. This can be as simple as a byte sequence (i.e. anything with "C:\Badfile.exe" in it is a virus), to more complicated code using wildcards.

3. Heuristic. This can refer to anything from "files with an invalid digital signature are bad" to "files that have a high entropy and have no publisher are bad".

4. Emulation. The AV runs the file in a CPU emulator, tracks what it does, and attempts to determine if it's bad.

5. Behavioural. The AV lets the file run, tracks what it does, and then might stop it if it does enough "suspicious" actions.

So, in short, with all the various types of detection that modern antiviruses use, false-positives are almost inevitable. The teller is how fast the vendor reacts - and in this case, Microsoft seems to have reacted rather quickly.
Who wants a RIM job? BlackBerry maker is Canada's 'Most Attractive Employer'
How iPhone iOS 5 Assistant Feature Might Work? [video]
(2) Amazon's market is different. They aren't competing with other "Android vendors." Yes it essentially runs Android, and by some peoples' definition, it's a tablet, but in the end what the Fire really is is a well-integrated portal to Amazon services and products. Nobody else can really offer that to consumers. Plus, it's highly unlikely that other vendors can afford to sell their hardware for $200.

Also, a lot of people seem to be assuming that Amazon is looking to upgrade the underlying version of Android. I think they are forgetting a key part here; Amazon is running a fork, and I think it's pretty likely that the only compatibility they care about is with Android Apps (and Bezos has said they will work hard to keep the Kindle Apps compatible with other Android platforms). The OS version doesn't matter at all, as long as the device is fast and pleasant to use, which by all accounts, it is here. There's really no reason they couldn't just keep working on their port indefinitely with no regard to what Google is doing with future iterations of Android. And if a new feature pops up that they like, nothing would stop them from cherry-picking it and putting it in to their fork.
This is definitely something that is missing from the startup ecosystem - tips on giving your product personality. All the great companies seem to have a personality.

Surprise is a really good point and something that we can generally apply.

But I am not a fan of the theme/brand point. Lots of people say it, and it seems easy to say once a company is successful - but hard to figure it out when you are in the early stages.
Well, to be clear, I'm only speaking about our own service, not WePay. Anyway, I think we've covered the issue here but if you feel like you need further discussion I suggest reaching out to support@stripe.com.
MapReduce explained in 41 words
Technically that's incorrect. A parameter list has an implicit line continuation so the 4 spaces aren't necessary.

if x:
----some_long_func_name(...,
blah...)
----fn2(x)
else:
----fn3()

However, I do agree that using tabs in python quickly becomes an enormous headache.
Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/74.html
Jeff Bezos on the Kindle Fire
This is the sure sign of a bubble when a finance guy can quit his job and be funded in six weeks. Awesome idea, but.. really?
Hey Vineet, I agree that figuring it out early on is hard, but it's not just something successful companies "say" they did.

You as the product creator have to make decisions about what your product means, what it stands for and how it will come across. Imagine your product was a real person - how would they behave? What would they say? Those are the kinds of things you'll then need to build into the product.

No one said it'd be easy, but I think it's worth it.
Python Job Opportunity - NYC location
Interested in building high quality systems using Python, AMQP, and SqlAlchemy?

In this role you will work for the market leader in an expanding sector, and your work will impact the daily life of 30,000+ current end users.

We are looking for 5 senior developers with:
* Solid programming experience in a UNIX/Linux environment
* Language expertise with Python. Java is a plus.
* In-depth knowledge of RDBMS/SQL
* An understanding of a DVCS like mercurial or git
* The ability to execute on ideas, take ownership and get things done
* Excellent written and oral communication skills

Medical Benefits, 401K, and a casual work environment.

Local NYC candidates only - no third parties please.

Please send your resume to Steven Pincus spincus@ttiofusa.com and if interested, he will get back to you within 24 hours from receiving your resume.
Somehow we ended up with very different experiences. I played with Sencha Mobile Kitchen Sink demo on the iPhone 4 and it was quite impressive. http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/demos/

Yes, it lags ever so slightly, but faster CPU in iPhone 5 should take care of that. My only other complain is that they messed up calculating tap areas for tabbar/toolbar items - Sencha has tap area equal to the visual size of the button, whereas UIKit assigns entire section of the toolbar (44 pixels tall in portrait), which makes a lot of difference in tap detection. But I don't see why they can't fix it, and then it would be pretty good...

To be clear, I am still staying away from UIWebView in favor of UIKit, but I am getting increasingly interested in this.
Writing F# 3.0 Type Providers - An Intro Guide and Samples
Microsoft Security Essentials removes Google Chrome
I don't know if he ever submitted it to the IOCCC. It would have been a good entry, though!
So true. Hipchat has been great about adding quirky little bits to their product. You might not like their Y U NO billboard but it's definitely got personality.
Just wanted to say you guys were one of the few "startups" I actually gave my email to in the beta page when you announced it. I could care less about the next social app, or next reminder app but as soon as I saw your value proposition, I KNEW I had to be notified when it was out. Thanks for making something that actually solves a crucial problems. This is much much needed, and you guys are definitely on your way to success
Yes, it is here! Our bootstrapped startup has been working out of the Reno Collective for 6 months or so as well, and there is a lot of cross-pollination in that space. Eric Jennings, my partner, was at Techstars Winter 2010, so there is talent here, they just telecommute or work for themselves. It's time for us to meet one another. Please hakers and developers, come out of your caves and meet us.
Sensitive skin treatment
It took m a few seconds to realize what is wrong with "HTML5 fist of rage" logo in the article. The fist has 6 fingers. To be fair the original HTML5 logo isn't that much better...
Kid Inventions (video)
Tiny subsidy for Kindle Fire
Amazon Silk is hiring only if you relocate to Seattle.
Does our homepage load quickly or slow for you?
Trying to get some feedback since we have gone to the Amazon 'cloud' for content delivery. Can you check out www.choicr.com and then reply with the browser and load-up time it took you? Thanks so much for the feedback.
_It's not about the buzz. It's about addressing the needs of the users, all of the users, and building an ecosystem that provides them with the necessary tools to discover, learn, participate and improve. That and building up brand loyalty through meatspace efforts._
Not that this hasn't been discussed to death here at HN, but how do you explain the success of github comparing to bitbucket for example?

_One cannot make the case for a model that has converted 50,000 over an eleven year span in comparison with another who has surpassed 1,000,000 users in a relatively short span. Common sense._
I don't think a github user has the same role as a berlios user, at all. So those 50.000 vs 1 million are not comparable.
Sure github is centered on distributed development, but among all the forks that spawn all over the place even on pastebins (gists) or wiki pages, which percentage ends up pushing code back to the parent?

Don't get me wrong, I like github as much as any other developer do. But I fail to understand why must we refrain from state that things such as hype do play a major role on github success. Is it just because github is a huge success and does provide a good service for a fact? When did both became exclusive?
This is like assuming that a popular band is either good or a hype. Why can't it be both?

My point: berlios, sf, savanah, never really aimed towards being a social network. There's nothing wrong with that approach.
Samsung Galaxy S II (AT&T) trusted pattern lock Security Bypassed
The packaging is a relatively minor problem though.
It's a clever trick!
Adoption agency
Jason, I actually agree.

I did not mean to say that I don't like doing it - just that I have heard it so many times and that making it happen is hard. I would love to hear more people breaking this branding thing down.
-1 Wow! this article has no rigor. P/E numbers are a benchmark not a valuation methodology. This is like a teacher telling students: "As the other classes average exam grade is 5 out of 10, I'm not going to correct your exam cause you're probably a 5 too". Additionally, mixing the net income and capitalisation of two completely different businesses is just mathematically wrong. Why is the author valuing the cash from the interest generated by Apple as it were cash from operations? It definitely hasn't got the same growth and risk profile. Very lame
Yep, you can definitely use property lists but our solution integrates completely with the queries going to the backend. So you don't have to worry about a lot of complexities that are sure to arise if you do it yourself.
Not new news....
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380760
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2381709
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726170
Germany guarantees €211bn, this is part of a previously existing fund created by all EU countries. I assume they provide the money as needed, not upfront.
I can't see how doing a startup in Canada in general is a good idea. Policies there are a lot more restrictive than the states. It's a great place to visit, though.
An example of a product that has great personality that I personally love using is WuFoo
Yes, the web is like that. How does that affect my argument?
Hm. How do you handle progressive loading? Do you even bother, or do you just load up the entire news feed and let the WebKit struggle with keeping images in-ram/in-cache etc?
I've had similar experiences over the years. I started out at a startup with inexperienced founders, which resulted in micromanagement and eventually my departure after a few years. I was then hired on at a couple traditional server hosting companies that have been repositioning themselves as cloud hosts. At one of the hosting companies, I did have some measure of autonomy but politics and micromanagement were in full swing.

Most recently, I had worked at a BigCo that I left a few months ago. The environment was soul-crushing and toxic. The experiences wore me out mentally and put my health at risk, so I left.

I'm still trying to figure out the next step myself, whether it be leaving the field for something else or starting my own company. For me, it has meant a lot of introspection and lurking on sites like this.
completely agree, this article is a -1
"“When the stars align, they align quickly,”

Not so fast. The toughest and most challenging alignment to get is paying customers. Everything else is easy in comparison
Only if you relocate to Seattle.
It does take a little bit, and the content seems to be rendered by layers (first the black one, then the logo, then the gradient).

Once its all loaded, awesome design :)
Btw, I took screenshots if you want me to send them.
No need to bash if you don't know anything about it. Winter in Canada is better than most places. Instead of getting lots of rain you get lots of snow. It's nice to have more than 2 or 3 seasons.
You still need PhoneGap to build an iOS/Android app.
berlios actually overshadowed sourceforge for a while, back when sourceforge was stuck with CVS as the only option for an ungodly long period of time.
Sonico
It goes to show that Google doesn't put much thought into these kind of design details.

Maybe Google thinks, as I do, that designers should be able to make their stuff look good in a variety of resolutions. Desktop/laptop computers have a range of resolutions and aspect ratios, but people have been making UIs look good on them for years.
The ingenious and tactful hustle read here only makes me want to work harder. Love how they crashed the party from a tweet all in the name of pitching Dave.
99.999%=What companies like Google or Yahoo can achieve

Even worse. Five nines is five minutes of downtime per year. The core Google search experience blew five nines for half a decade with just one outage -- the one where they marked the entire Internet as a malware site, which took somewhere like 40 minutes to address.

This kind of thing makes me dismiss talk of nines as fetishism or sales-speak. You can say your system is going to have five nines of uptime at the application level. You're probably lying.

P.S. Pricing-wise, a client who wants > 99.5% either wants to pay mid-six figures (and up up up) or they want something which is deeply irrational for you to offer.
YSlow...it's what's for dinner.
IIRC, the Java license used to forbid use in life critical systems, including explicitly listing nuclear reactors, life support systems and avionics.

I still wouldn't trust any of those things to a virtual machine, or to Java.
As a Programmer I am agree with your teacher. yes it is good if you can write a program on computer. But that's not the case in every scenario. Suppose your are building a complex software at that time you have to foresee the potential breaking points before you start writing your code so you can avoid the bugs at that time code or logic on paper will help you.
added to topic descrip.
Great read.

A shortcut to injecting personality touched on but not highlighted in your article is building around a spokesperson.

These come in three flavors:

Anthropomorphic mascot that doesn't age, doesn't go on benders in Vegas, doesn't get divorced, etc:

-= GEICO Gecko

-= Aflac Duck

-= Reddit Alien and follow-up of HipMunk.

-= Mickey Mouse

Or your "over the top" fictional people:

-= Old Spice guy

-= The Most Interesting Man in the World, etc.

-= Betty Crocker

And the grand finale if you can't pull it off, the founder as hero / personality

-= Steve Jobs

-= Dave from Wendy's

-= Larry Ellison
They may be the most attractive company as noted in the report, but what about the job security there?

They recently fired 10% of their global workforce: http://betanews.com/2011/07/25/rim-begins-round-of-2-000-emp...