skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I deleted my original comment and the response to your reply; upon review I found them not to lend anything helpful to the conversation but rather to promote argumentative behavior.
How does this further the proper mission of the government, which is to protect individual rights?

I can't fathom a way that this could have anything to do with the government doing the one essential job it actually has to do! It's not just that it's a badly made app. I think the entire fact that the government making apps like this is absurd.

Given what the government actually is (the only agency with the legitimate, legal monopoly on the use of force), it is no wonder that it fails so miserably at doing stuff like this.
yes, this is endemic to startup culture and it is different from university - at universities, you are part of a collective group trying to graduate. in a startup, you are (for the most part) alone with your cofounder. it's a much more individualistic type of pursuit, and this brings extra stress.
Probably the whole process of bidding for any of these reduces the pool of potential contractors to a couple of these giant government contractors who have bidding down.

I know there are bidding procedures for everything to fight corruption but for little projects like this they should come up with a procedure to use odesk or similar services.
PERFECT! I was just about to setup a jekyll/hyde blog, but since I don't use GitHub but are a heavy Dropbox user, this comes in just at the right time!

Aaand it looks stunning. And simple. Superb done!
The BSA is trying to walk the same fine line as everyone else.
In the European Union, governments are legally required to open public works and supplying contracts to competition through an open tendering process. I'm surprised that this doesn't happen in the US.

There's a fair bit of criticism levelled against the EU tendering processes, though. Many feel that the process emphasizes price at the expense of quality, resulting in a "race to the bottom" as another poster mentioned.

Public contracts currently open in the EU can be found on a website:
http://ted.europa.eu

Looking quickly through the site, the contracts seem to have a huge range -- everything from large architectural projects to supplying a small Swedish town with photocopier paper...
Outstanding piece of marketing on Gun.io's part with a clear "here's how my biz solves this" at the end.

#1 on Hacker News is a feat, but this thing has legs on every political and general fluff channel - HuffPo, FoxNews, Conservative Radio, CNN, wire services, etc.

I learned from our own blogging efforts when you have a winner, take it to the bank.

EG - Hit every PR angle you can think of to get redistribution while you've got the momentum.

Any PR gurus out there that would comment on the top handful of ways to fan the flames on PR for a story like this?

I'd love to understand the process when you've got this ripe of content.
This is double-plus not good.
>Isn't a race to the bottom on price the desired outcome

Cheap yet sufficient is the desired outcome in government work.

I'm guessing 'sufficient' was defined too broadly or too specifically, and therefore was not correctly tested for on delivery.
I never had a fully functional install of JDEE, so I won't compare it to eclipse. Configuring JDEE itself gave me nightmares. From what I remember, I would set variables to the proper VM and experience no change. At the time I gave up on JDEE I had the opportunity to switch to Python and I never looked back at Java.

I think JDEE suffers from being too large with too many dependencies. Emacs configurations make almost every install unique and I think the maintainers of emacs projects in general have a hard time supporting users because people generally stop writing documentation when "It works for me." The same way you find your keys in the last place you look.

For instance http://jdee.sourceforge.net/install.html

Download the latest versions of Eric Ludlam's speedbar, eieio, and semantic bovinator packages and install them on your system, each in their own directory.

You can download these packages from SourceForge.

Note Emacs and XEmacs include earlier versions of speedbar that are incompatible with the JDEE. You must delete the earlier version or ensure that it is not on the Emacs load path. Otherwise you will get a Lisp error when trying to start Emacs.

That documentation might have made sense at the time. but I'm currently using emacs 23.3.1. Is my version of speedbar still out of date? Do I have to downgrade it? Upgrade it?

http://cedet.sourceforge.net/ The cedet page for getting those "newer" packages only provides download links to the entire cedet package. And without version references in the documentation how can I tell if my debian installed version might be good enough?
Thanks bastian, we have a blog post coming in a few days talking about how we made that happen.
30 Stunning Examples of Drop-Down Menu Design
Google Groups hacked; spammers are moving your posts and adding SEO keywords
but windows phone only has 0.11% of the visits, so .net devs maybe?
Problem is in a single sentence you've got almost all of it covered :)

So much here (too much for my tastes) is around manufacturing and the insurance industry.
Yes. Doing business with the Government means you have to spend endless hours in meetings and produce endless piles of paperwork. In small projects such as this one, overhead is probably around 90% of total cost.

Incidentally, that's why auctioning small pieces of a larger project independently is probably not a good idea. Costs could in fact skyrocket: each part would have its own contract, negotiation process, meetings, forms, etc.
Shown HN: A search engine that doesn't ignore special characters, SymbolHound
It's a search engine for programmers where you can search for queries with symbols in them(e.g. if you search for "&&" it will actually return pages with "&&" somewhere in them, unlike google)

See it here: http://symbolhound.com/

There's still a lot of work to be done (especially in indexing more websites, right now everything besides stackoverflow is very underrepresented, but I plan to fix that over the next few months), but it's already been useful to me.
The $200k price tag is unsurprising if you factor in the cost of non-coding work like requirements gathering, travels, expenses, benefits, etc. This seems like a simple app but when you have a design by committee, approvals, etc it can be quite manpower intensive.

The OSHA document is not rendering for me so I can't tell if there's a cost breakdown.
Why a Roll is better than a Feed in Content Delivery for Social Media
Sorry, I will try and be more clear there are some good descriptions of this technique on the web but I can't remember what it's called. Still you have the basic idea and it's downsides. Still normally your dealing with larger objects so the overhead is a little different.

Just think about how a you normally work with objects. Normally you have a pointer to some allocated memory locationObjectPointer = (x00100) which points to a chunk of memory the size of 3 floats (x,y,z). Now normally when you update x and y you overwrite their memory locations which is fast in single threaded programming but you need to worry about something reading after you update x at (x00100) but before you update y (x00104).

However, if instead of updating in that memory block you created a new object locationObjectPointer2 = (x00600) copy'd what was in the original object and then when your done changed the pointer from the old object to your new one. Well, as you say you have the overhead of keeping track of references or doing garbage collection, but at the same time you can do a vary fast lock when you want to change the pointer and test to see if the object was changed. That test is actually hard to do with most types of memory management systems and normally creates a lot of overhead so it's a trade off.
>and provide the documentation they were asking for,

People who've never worked on government contracts cannot conceive of the reporting and documentation projects.

I've been on several (govt) projects where we spent as much time writing as doing.
What's really sad is the money went to a foreign company (aeat.co.uk)

It didn't even stay in the American economy which should be a minimum requirement these days if a US solution is available.
Hiring Data Science Champion
I can't help but get warm fuzzy job security feelings when I see something like this, someone actually paid money for that. Well specifically I paid money for that, warm fuzzies taken care of.
Hmm, interesting. I can definitely see how age-related changes in the endocrine system could cause certain improvements that are similar to the effects of meditation. And being as it is that I'm still 29, that could be a factor.

But if I'm reading you correctly, you seem to imply that all the benefits mentioned could be explained away by age-related hormonal changes. I find that hard to believe based on the strong correlation I experience between active meditation practice and greatly increased mental ability. It is particularly noteworthy that I'm able to observe a clear decline in my capability to stay equanimous and focused whenever I have had longer periods away from practice, which should not be the case if we were dealing with mere age-related endocrine changes.
I've dealt with some Government agencies before in a few different capacities, and they actually WANT To spend their money. The actual cost doesn't really matter, as they are trying to get as close to their budgets as possible, as to not have them decreased the next year.

This is especially true in the last 30 or 60 days - to the point where you invoice and are paid before the job is done just because it "has" to be in the billing period.
More good new from Northwestern hopefully it leads to some form of treatment. My best friend's dad died from ALS a few years ago, it's an absolutely horrible disease--finding a treatment would would be spectacular.
This is an app specifically designed to help protect your life (one of those rights) from unsafe employment. I get the dig you're making but this seems a weak target for it...
If anyone is interested in a simple, no-nonsense version of TeX, check out Thierry Laronde's KerTeX (http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html). The whole thing comes in at a bit under 10 MB, and it can run on Linux, *BSD, and even Plan 9! I compiled it on Plan 9, built LaTeX as per his instructions in the README, and have been happily generating LaTeX documents since then :)
Thank you for the info on MuckRock! Never knew about the site. hopefully one day my country will pass the freedom of information act and we the citizenry can request this kind of information.
Govt = epic fail.
I agree with his point regarding source code.
Often I have interacted with web applications supplied by parts of the UK Civil service and they have obvious bugs that I often feel should be fairly easy fixes.

I often feel that I would happily fix them for free as a public service in a fairly short time period, but no doubt it takes months and lots of $ before they are addressed.
Self-Proclaimed "Fail Factory" 500 Startups' Recipe For Success
I use Knockout heavily at work and agree that it can become a mess. But most of the ugliness I've seen is when people try to be too clever, not really understanding what Knockout can already do (e.g. writing custom bindings to do lots of 'dynamic' stuff, when each binding is already essentially a dependentObservable and perfectly capable of doing what they want).

I actually find writing custom bindings pretty enjoyable. That's where the nice separation and reusability come from.
So it's based on inbound links (aka popularity)?
Chrome Gets Improves Memory Performance, But Firefox Leads
New Humble 'Introversion' Bundle
You've obviously not been watching BBC4 - I really recommend keeping an eye on their schedules.
We've had a similar project live for a little while now. It's opt-in only though.

http://www.workforpie.com/
The title should be edited. It's 200,000 for all versions Android, iPhone and Blackberry. The Android one was 100,000.
World’s Most Historical Incredible Libraries Around The World Architecture
thx. @neosavvy and i are running the event.
Clickable: http://symbolhound.com/
For Palo Alto it gives me only non-hireable people. And Facebook.
Conversations with a Client
HP shareholders better be patient, alright
I usually won't up-vote cross posts from reddit, but this is certainly an exception. Thank you for all your efforts.

BTW, if you get the urge to get steamed about something similar, find a tune by Johnny Cash called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," listen to it, and then go learn the full story behind the tune. The UK government isn't the only one in need of handing out more than a few apologies.
Interesting stats! Thanks for sharing.

Something tells me that the majority of those using IE are those forced to at Microsoft-only shops, like I was until recently.
Blame your browser, it barely modifies the default styling.
Congrats Brett!
I hope you also write a blog post about your amazing pivot from a b2b company to hall.com (awesome domain, btw).
Another Random Axiom
The Garden Gates unveils Holiday Gift Guide for Shoppers
Custom paper
Our paper writing website is recommended by thousands of students because we create good essays and keep up your instruction.
Heh to a Java programmer, the answer would be - everything.

Here are my thoughts on it.
- I get val myList is some sort of list...
- Seems to be a list of Strings. But what is ::?
- Nil means list is nullable. Wait is one of the parts of list 'myList(println)' (looks a bit like Smalltalk)?
- Why is println the argument and not the method? Is that syntax correct?!

Compare same thing in Fantom. Note ; is only used as a separator and is equal in all respects to '\n'.

myList := ["Jim", "Bob", null]; echo(myList)
Red Hat OpenShifts Into the Cloud
And what people want is Mercurial -> ?.
Searching 'detroit' gives results from Munich. Searching 'detroit, mi' gives Zurich.
Thanks Thomas, if people want to hear about the pivot, I'm ready to write a post. Let me know!
Really cool service. A search engine that doesn't ignore punctuation has been on the wishlist of just about every programmer I know for ages. I'm surprised no one's done it sooner.

Given that the remainder of my week will be spent with perl and shell scripting, neither of which have I used before, I suspect you'll be getting quite a few visits from me.
I think you guys overdid this. While the reporting tool on G+ implies fast reporting: you just select and write a feedback on one page, in less than, say 30 seconds; with Wishbox you have to wait here and there, go from this screen to that and at the end you also spend your time filling the form.

If I actually was to report a feedback with Wishbox, I wouldn't do it because of time consumed.

Please, simplify the process.
we hope so! what we don't like about the other services is the neighborhood bucketing... you have to choose a (sometimes arbitrary) label for the area you're looking at and can only browse in that way....

if you live in SF you know that these labels are constantly changing - better to just give the user complete control. one person may want to look at two blocks, someone else may want to browse an entire metro area.

thanks for the feedback!
Ask PG: Why not show comment up and down vote count separately?
At the moment it's hard to distinguish evenly contentious comments from ones which receive few reactions.
Starting many instances of emacs and using tabs, of all things, suggests a certain "you're doing it wrong".
In case anyone else read that article and wondered "what's all this gate-last vs. gate-first business?"

http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20111114-gate/
The irrelevance of x-years with y-technology
Thanks, it helps the cause to stick to the facts.
Looking at all users and gross profit currently. But, these will vary by the type of business. If I had to choose one, I'd just look at profit, mainly due to my current financial situation.
Life on the Virtual Frontier
Did you ever try buildr? I've never used sbt, as, coming from a Ruby background, the fact that buildr sits atop of rake appealed to me more than sbt. It uses maven repositories underneath the hood, but then again, as I understand it, so does clojure-leiningen.

Part of me thinks you're conflating two separate things: build systems and package repository systems. Even people who hate Maven's build system (myself included) tend to agree that Maven's package management system is really good, and as you like clojure-leiningen, you must agree in some sense.
Stuxnet style sabotage a fear in new hacks
Another alternative to Pathogen is Vundle (https://github.com/gmarik/vundle). I've been using this one for a while and really enjoy it.
Revolution OS -- the documentary every hacker must watch
Netflix suffers 2012 loss and potentially irreversible brand damage
I've looked at the source code for the application (which is available), the claim that this can be done in 6 hours is absolutely right.

Another thing. It seems like the company outsourced the development as well to these guys pixelbitcreative. The entire application contains ~1400 lines of code. I wonder how the money got eaten as we went up the chart.
I've experienced this problem with Ubuntu and Linux Mint which are supposedly easy distributions.
Fancy an (HTML5) game of (Opa)Tetris?
Discussed on the Diane Rehm show on NPR today
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-11-22/new-development...
I don't think so though I'm not totally sure. That paper isn't really about logic programming in general - no vars, no unification.
I will come out as one of the 100 WP7 visitors.
Is this really much different than outsourced projects for huge corporations? Seems like large organizations get charged a premium for the same amount of work.

Government can hire technical people who can do the work in house, or who are qualified to evaluate the work. But because of the pressure to keep government small, qualified tech people go to the private sector and overcharge the government. Seems like one can't win here.
“Sure the type system is complicated, but I don't really have to understand all its nuances in order to get my program to compile and work.”

This is key. People sometimes look at the type signature of the map method (as above) and freak out. It's good to try and understand everything, mind you, and eventually you probably will. The key here is that the crazy signature of the map method simply means the map method will do what you expect. That's it! “But I would write X to do it in my language” is irrelevant, because you don't write the map method. It's provided. There's a paper that describes why the signature is how it is and everything, but you don't care, because it's complicated so that when you're actually using it, it just works.
No software should have bug, all software, even bug trackers, will have bugs.
What about in-app purchases? Why not a set of free in-app "purchase" options for large sets of these packages?
It seems to me that Sabre et al are all overly complex, left over from the days when you had to physically go to a travel agent's office to watch them clatter incantations into a monochrome terminal as they manually assembled your itinerary...

The amount of complexity and arbitrage that goes on in selling plane tickets today is just nuts. I don't like actually flying Southwest, but I think they have the right idea with regards to booking - always, and only, on their website. Ensures a consistent, branded experience and saves them the headache of listing in a GDS.
Strange. I've used it for forms heavy apps and glamour apps with no forms and had great experience with both.

Yes, I have a lot of custom bindings, but most are very reusable, and many have saved my butt (like wrapping bindings to include JQM's markup enhancements).

That said, I wasn't new to MVVM when I first came across Knockoutjs, so I used it efficiently from the get-go.

If you don't like MVVM, you won't like Knockoutjs.
Side note: not sure how, but you apparently somehow broke the ability to zoom in or out on iPhone, so I had to pan back and forth to read this
I always imagined the Dell Ultrasharps were the defacto startup montior.
More Free Stanford Online Classes, Starting Jan 2012
Fatburning Furnace
This post feels like utter bollocks.
Corporate GPOs restricting browser usage.
My company JUST upgraded to IE7, though as I am in IT, I can use Chrome
Yep, I'm about 110 wpm without adjustment last time I clocked on a regular keyboard, but I can't maintain this for long periods of time. I suspect that ergonomic keyboards allow you to maintain high speeds, not necessarily to reach them. I don't personally don't find myself slower on, for instance, my old natural elite.

My only written reference is the material by "ergonomic experts" included with my Kinesis Advantage -- a bit on the unreliable side. Would love to know if you and Google can turn up anything else.
iPhone 4S now second most popular camera phone on Flickr
Beberapa Jenis Kanker
Limitless Profits Review
The app itself was outsourced. Someone else did the development, a company that caters to the government put in the work to do the bidding. Money just happened to fall between the crack.

BTW I looked at the code, and there's nothing that an average iOS (and probably Android) developer couldn't do in 4-6 hours.
Maybe they should have created a competition for finished apps instead. If the app is as simple as it sounds (not sure what it actually does), maybe some high school kids would have entered a better version and raked in 5000$ as the first price.
Been back and forth to DFW and SFO about 6 times in the last few weeks all on virgin ... for those flights I have probably spent a combined 5 hours on hold for one small change or a misbooked flight etc. but their $139 first class upgrades and friendly staff almost always make it all better for me. I'll be glad when they get this all worked out thats for sure
Why America Has Nothing to Learn from Silicon Valley
The collaboration features are a great idea. Looking forward to using them. Thanks for the tools.
A lot of government agencies, as well as groups within large companies, want to keep their budgets (or increase them), so there isn't an incentive to be cost effective -- as you mentioned.

But, as another person commented, the overhead around government projects (documentation, reports, meetings, etc) will bloat things beyond a simple time/materials development contract.

The FBO has a site listing the contacts, but there are actually some pretty interesting projects that pop up to be bid upon. Only downside for someone new to the process (or a small shop) is that the big boys (SAIC, etc) have this part pretty streamlined as well as sometimes having in's with the agency requesting the proposal.

Edit: The site -- https://www.fbo.gov/
Eh, innovative research in all fields of biomedicine is difficult to get funded. Hell, even super-safe run-of-the-mill research is difficult to get funded. There simply are not enough dollars to go around and it is only getting worse.

The NIH has taken the view that steady, incremental progress is a better use of money than swinging for the fences. While I'm not defending the NIH's decisions, I can understand the reasoning.

And regarding de Grey...well, I can appreciate his contribution to raising awareness. Otherwise, his views are somewhat akin to claiming "Like, what if we are living in the matrix, man?" as "Philosophy".
If someone is interested in how the government procurement process is gamed, "The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders" in Rolling Stone is a good read - http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms-de...

It sounded to me like the whole business was getting the contract written correctly. Once the contract was procured, fulfillment it was more of an after thought.