skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a noder, I'm like half-way with you.

In javascript, as with other languages, you can totally use inheritance (prototypal in js) when making things. But, it's usually better to expose an object than a constructor (imo) when it comes to exports. Being expected to do something like:

var Foo = require('foobar').Foo;

var Bar = function (opts) {
Foo.call(this, opts);
this.baz = "biff";
}

require('util').inherits(Bar, Foo);

This sort of behavior is all well-and-good, but it should be contained because it's boilerplate-y. In javascript, at least, it's not a very good pattern, and I suspect this carries over to other environments (to an extent).

I also think that standard libraries have to strike a balance between "batteries included" and "not cluttered with a bunch of crap that was relevant in 1995", and that different standard libraries attempt this in different ways. I think python neglects the latter to supply the former, while node swings the other way and compensates by having a really nice package manager. Time will tell which is a better approach, but I'm betting on Node's model.

> The "radical reusability" section is just the author realizing that modules are awesome. Again, welcome to the party.

Modules are awesome! You sound like a python guy, meaning your module system is actually pretty good when it comes to qualified imports. Compare python imports to ruby's require, or browser-side script tags sometime, and I think you'll find that there's an awareness problem when it comes to qualified imports. :( That said, the package management side is kinda shitty for python (at least when compared to npm).
"""Coffeescript is a language where whitespace is held out to be significant, so I’m simply saying “Great! Well in that case, let’s make it more significant.""""

Ever heard of the concept: "too much of a good thing"?
Roger Black : The holy grail, Part I
I used to think I better avoid installing a custom ROM in my phone because it might contain software exactly like this one. This really upsets me. Time to check CyanogenMod out.
Because I actually have used it, which separates me from “experts” like Colebourne.
Shuush – perfect tool for all my Twitter followers
This is one of the reasons to keep the team as small as possible and invest as little effort as possible in your idea to validate it. The less you have invested, the less you have to throw away when it turns out the idea wasn't so great in the first place, and the easier it'll be to make that mental context switch.
Plastic Soda Bottle Prosthesis - YouTube
I was involved in an accident where I caused a fatality in 1999 (guy sleeping in my lane on a rural highway at 3am), so it's not on here. Otherwise I would be able to say something about its accuracy and completeness.
The scary part is when parents who just need a consumption device only buy a tablet. How many of you would've been able to program at a young age if your parents didn't buy the family PC.
This guy needs prison time for lies like these - or at least hauled before congress:

Carrier IQ VP of Marketing Andrew Coward rejected claims the
software posed a privacy threat because it never captured key presses.

“Our technology is not real time,” he said at the time. "It's not constantly reporting back.
It's gathering information up and is usually transmitted in small doses.”

Coward say[s] that Carrier IQ was a diagnostic tool designed to give network carriers and device manufacturers
detailed information about the causes of dropped calls and other performance issues.
And what good are producers without consumers?
A friend of mine recently left Yahoo in no small part because he hated working on their PHP codebase.

I don't know about the other sites you name, but if you had mentioned Yahoo you would definitely have had a point.
For me it is. However i tend to just use in-memory caches instead of a cache server, which may suffer the same issue. For standard websites, this is a non-issue for CRUD, for task/activity based sites that can have long lived tasks that persist after a request this is very important.
I think that the facts matter.

I think that there are zero people on HN that think CarrierIQ is a good idea.

So if all we're doing here is condemning CarrierIQ, let's just replace this whole thread with "CARRIERIQ BAD", followed by a bulleted list of bad things, vote it up to 1000, and then get back to talking about building things.
One lesson I took away from my university economics class is that in a large enough market all competitive products are virtually identical. One may offer X better than the other while that 2nd one may offer Y better than the first but for the most part that is all smoke & mirrors to the consumer.

The point is that people cannot tell the difference without marketing to try and exaggerate one thing over another. Its why people buy inferior products at inflated rates and don't get upset. It is also why marketing is so very important in a saturated marketplace.

This is exactly what happened in your scenario. The well thinking mothers were lead to believe that any `laptop` can be just as good as another because someone told them it can be. They believed it without understanding it was all a ploy to gain a customer.
Inside that .7z archive are 3 PDFs in the root directory as well.
Carrier IQ -- the best reason yet to switch to the iPhone?
I think it is very constructive and I expect that improvements caused by it will land in trunk soon.
Check the ingredients list on label. If it says, "cyanocobalamin", you got the cheap stuff. If it says, "METHYLcobalamin", you got the good stuff.

I also recommend Purity Products multi-vitamins. Those are the best I found. They put supermarket/drug store namebrands to shame. Just follow the directions on the bottle. (The only reason I stopped taking them was because they are expensive.)

I agree with you on the NYTimes and other major publications, including TV. I remember when they tried to link Vitamin C to breast cancer. Most of the "indie" stuff I read is in a very different format: General overview, laymen's terms, with plenty of citations to studies and research throughout. I then use Google for more verification and expansion on the issue. I found the world is working against you: It's so easy to get mediocre info. and then think the vitamin/supplement claims are just pure hype.
Google is not bullying you into using G+. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.
Hey, e-mail me at 610198@gmail.com.
Thanks
-Zeeshan
Very awkward to see the number of deaths that I drive past daily...
Even more awkward to think I could have been a statistic on this site a few years ago!

The searching functionality could use some work. I was unable to input the actual address of my accident and had to guess-timate. Like others said, filtering would be highly appreciated as well.
NTT Docomo getting the iPhone would be industry-changing in Japan.

Docomo has by far the best voice and data network in the country, and the users in Japan have been clamoring for it for as long as I can remember. In fact, many of my friends there carry a voice phone on Docomo and an iPhone on Softbank (the 3rd largest carrier which until late this year, was the sole carrier offering the iPhone. They have since been joined by KDDI, the second largest carrier, with the launch of iPhone4S. When this was announced, Softbank's stock price plummeted).

From what I understand, NTT used to be a state-owned entity, and thus their capital infrastructure is seemingly oblivious to the limitations of investment returns. Docomo phones work perfectly fine in the middle of the mountain when all other carriers' phones cease to function.

This being said, I'm skeptical whether they will even choose to carry the iPhone5 (the article only mentions the iPad3), because their iMode service is a massive cash cow. It's been said that the reason they didn't get the iPhone in the first place was because the two sides couldn't come to terms on iPhone's possible iMode support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

Call me an interested observer.
Perhaps bands who want to be popular on this site could provide concert recordings to splice in.
160 bytes per text seems like a very generous estimate. Casual observation would suggest the average is less than half that. I just got a text that seemed pretty long to me, so I went back and measured it. It was 90 bytes (104 characters * 7 bits per character / 8 bits per byte).
OS X Lion has OpenGL 3.2 if your hardware supports it.
Interesting to compare this method of making light-duty false arms out of empty soda bottles with, for example, this story of a UK teen who got a £30,000 arm for £10,000 after asking Mercedes GP to help.

(http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/s/2098108_f1_boss_helps_fun...)

I know that $46,000 arms for everyone is unrealistic, but surely there's a better solution than waste soda bottles?
Just for quick comparison, here are the results from November 2011:

Java (875)
Javascript (787)
SQL (687)
Python (546)
PHP (443)
Ruby (395)
Android (306)
Objective-C (139)

Javascript and Python are higher (than Twitter listings). PHP and Objective-C are lower.
First of all, documents are not data. If you think it's data, you're sorely mistaken. HTML was designed as a way of MARKING UP text, not for making a DOM tree.

The DOM is simply a way of representing HTML for scripting access and whatnot.

Second, it is not to be resistant to corruption, it's to be resistant to human error. Also, many formats ARE resistant to that, thanks to various error correction algorithms.

Have you ever heard the story behind kernel panics? Errors should not be shown to end users when they are recoverable. Errors happen every second, if we let them all out, computers would be unusable.

Thirdly, that "XHTML is easy" assumes that everybody has embraced HAML or Jade or other sugary templates. I personally find they all suck horribly, so I use Handlebars (a Mustache variant) and write the HTML myself.
Yes, it could control it with indentation. "Simplify" though? Are you sure?

This whitespace zig-zaging is barely readable.
This is something that should probably be implemented natively, for speed. Preferably with GCC's __builtin_popcount intrinsic, if it's available.
Show HN: Weekend project, Expenses tracking made easy
Dashboard Design: A Case Study
Is it unreasonable for a consumer to want complete control over a device from the moment she powers on?

Is there a certain level beneath which it is not reasonable to give consumers (optional) access? (Should consumers be prevented from "rooting" devices? Should we allow companies to maintain control over devices, e.g. having them "phone home", after they sell them?)

If yes, why?

Maybe a rootkit should just be viewed just like the crapware that comes pre-installed on a PC. Sure it will help some company and perhaps the consumer herself, if she decides to use it. But it's _optional_.

Maybe they could give consumers an easy way to opt-out.
Atos CEO Bans Email
There's some truth to this (as appalling as the notion is). While I'm teaching Python to my 7th grade nephew his school is having him 'program' in Powerpoint. As dismissive as I am of the notion, it does allow students to quickly get some stuff up on the screen and start being interactive.

Fortunately my nephew has taken to Python and is even starting to become a language snob "That looks like a stupid way to program".
Just-in-time interaction would be a derivative of the QR culture. The problem however is that no one can afford to leave their camera on constantly to make snapping QR codes a doddle. And that extends further as when leaving your house, the quickest way to save battery is to kill your bluetooth, wifi and even your GPS. Thus while this is a possible future, the issue we have right now is that technology cannot support it. Until we've got phone batteries that can go days without charge (minimal use scenario) and wireless charging in public spaces (the cost of energy is actually increasing), it's an unrealistic and ungrounded hope. Especially for something like a five year vision.
I made this as part of the "Launch an app month".

I did launch the app, and I'm pretty happy with the minimal viable product that is there. I'm much less happy with the marketing. I wanted to go for the 2000 words front page, but haven't gotten around to it. And I won't even begin about the linkbuilding I had planned.

I guess December will be "Market an app month" for me :)
It's not a really that big a minus when you think about how common WiFi hotspots are, plus Android only really captures two audiences: those without money (cheaper phones), and those who want "openness" - let's face it, nobody actually would prefer an Android over an iPhone if they could pick either and both were equally open-architecture.
It's being discussed here (along with some alternate syntax ideas):

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1889
Wikipedia has physical music sales in the top 20 countries at a mere 12 Billion total. Where are you getting your numbers? I am not seeing any numbers anywhere that would suggest anything near plural hundreds.

Also note that you are comparing an entire industry to individual technical companies.
If you're worried about Carrier IQ intercepting SMS messages. Don't be. The carriers have been doing this for a number of years and even share them with government agencies:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/leaked_911_tex...
"If the founders are aligned, vision invigorates — otherwise, decisionmaking as a process breeds dissent because vision is axiomatic." well said.
The damn whales.
To be honest I haven't looked at NaCl closely, I was just giving an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Is there any way to make network requests and draw to the screen from within the sandbox, or does all IO need to be done in JavaScript?
The Smashing Guide To Moving The Web Forward
Good luck with it! It looks pretty amazing! What did you use to create the charts?
A lot of people here are quick to discount the title "The PC is dead", but I think the actual meat of what he was getting at merits consideration - walled gardens are a lot more popular today than they used to be. No doubt, there are certain innovations that we may never see because of this. For example, what if there's a Mac developer out there who has ideas for a better browser than Safari. You're never going to see it, because Apple won't let you. Today, he has the option of bringing it to PC, but that might be too big of a barrier for him to jump if he's one of those guys who won't buy one.

Also, its not too hard to imagine a day when Microsoft follows Apple and makes their own marketplace. Probably won't be anytime soon, but it would be naive to say it could never ever happen. The main thing stopping them is probably the fact that they're still the big dog and can't get away with doing what Apple does. People judge them differently. In a few more years though, I could see them pointing at what Apple does and saying, "There's precedent here. Let's go for it." Some people would jump ship and move onto Linux, and say "I still have freedom" but what about your mom and dad who will keep buying the Walmart special every Black Friday? As an indie developer these things are limiting what you can do.

I think the solution here is to take a look at what people like about these marketplaces - a convenient way to find apps, and duplicate it - without the bad stuff. Make a marketplace and don't limit what goes on it. Also, make less profit for yourself than what your competitor (Google and/or Apple) makes. The toughest thing is traction. Getting it in front of eyes as something to use instead of the other one. Get past that, and you're set. Am I missing anything? Has this been done and I just don't know about it?
> but the framework author certainly had to deal with thread safety

usually not. if your framework builds off the common web integration system for the target environment, i.e. Java Servlets, WSGI in Python, etc., you're already handed a request scope within a thread. It's only web servers and containers that really have a heavy lifting job to do.
HTML is for representing data. CSS is for formatting documents.
There's also the reliability/error-proneness continuum.

Haskell is probably less powerful than Common Lisp (Template Haskell technically yields the power, but it is less practical). The type system may also rule out some useful programs.

However, Haskell yields more reliable, less error-prone programs. The number of runtime bugs that get through the Haskell compiler is substantially lower than that of Common Lisp (I venture this is still true if you use CL's optional typing).

Haskell also has forms of power that as far as I know, Common Lisp does not have. Namely, type-classes allow expressing various forms of static-type-based polymorphism that's not expressible via Common Lisp (e.g: Return-type polymorphism).

In practice, having a smaller emphasis on macros pushed Haskell to abstract various repeated patterns using means other than macros. Some cases are covered by laziness. Others are covered by passing around simple functions. Some are covered by special wrapper types and combinators.

My personal opinion is that the extra composability of these alternatives is more beneficial than their weaker power is detrimental. The cases where alternatives to macros cannot be found are relatively rare, so the extra cost of Haskell's macro system (TH) rarely needs to be paid.
Very much so. Otherwise you get this, at best:

$('.class')
.find('.sub')
.remove()
.end()
.find('.stuff')
.addClass('other')
.find('.more_stuff')
.removeClass('things')
.end()
.end()
.filter('li')
.appendTo('#my_list')

Or, to match jQuery's documentation style for that function, this:

$('.class').find('.sub').remove()
.end().find('.stuff').addClass('other').find('.more_stuff').removeClass('things')
.end().end().filter('li').appendTo('#my_list')

Matching .end() with each selector change is equivalent to writing valid XML by hand, without the aid of an auto-tag-closer, and without a validator - you only see the error on run, and only if you hit that code path, and only if it does something you notice isn't correct.

None of this is meant to imply that chaining things like this is a Good Idea™, and I avoid .end() like the plague and use intermediate variables. But when you don't need the root or intermediate results for anything else, yes, this is more readable, more easily optimized (you can't get it wrong, every level is cached for you), less prone to error, and significantly fewer characters / lines of code. That's simplifying and improving.

-- late-edit:

Less whitespace zigzaggery is also possible (I agree, not easy to read such dense zigzagging), and similarly easier with significant whitespace. My example was essentially just a trivial one, I tend to see larger ones where I see that kind of indentation at all. Is this better?

$('.class')
.find('.sub').remove()
.find('.stuff').addClass('other')
.find('.more_stuff').removeClass('things')
.filter('li').appendTo('#my_list')
until there are tons of actual iPhones harmed
that way, as PCs are ...

In 2008 an estimated 1 billion PCs or more were in use and 95% of those had Windows on it. By contrast, in 2011 by Apple's statement 100 million iPhones were sold to that date and let's be reasonable here - many of those were upgrades, so the total number of users is less than that.

So you can feel safe, but only because your platform is not popular enough right now, or useful enough for anybody to bother (PCs are wonderful for building botnets).

I don't care about those people. I'm not targeted
by some Dr. No style guy.

But you should, as those people are the people with the means to distribute mallware on a massive scale. And they will, sooner or later.

And, statistically, I'm totally safe using an iPhone.

Statistically? I just gave you as an example a freaking website that can do whatever the author wants on your iPhone and you're giving me statistics?

Seriously?
A Wannabe Founder...
I was just making a joke about some of the stereotypes people hold for hillbillies.
Assessing Data Management Maturity Using the DAMA DMBOK Framework – Part 1
Waterbear: creating draggable, snappable block based programming languages
typical operations during transactions that are more complex than this? I suppose if several variables are modified in sequence

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fgktt/transacti...

this haskell guy didn't get the memo, 80k variables! tldr, ghc in 2008 was pretty amazing
Facebook API: how to post TO a page and AS the page
Today I will show you how you can post to Facebook pages with the identity of those pages. One of my readers came up with this question and truth is it is useful if you have various pages to administer.
Great point:

This whitespace zig-zaging is barely readable.

I considered an example like this in the post, but it confuses accidental with essential complexity. If you’re going to do all of that, then I suggest that significant indentation is a win over everything being a chain and using something like jQuery’s `.end()` to discriminate chaining from cascading.

It’s a lot easier to spot an error in indentation than a missing `.end()`. That being said... This could be a false dichotomy. Perhaps the right thing to do is use named temporary variables or structure the code another way.

Although I don’t see a ton of it in the wild, it’s 100% valid to write your own custom jQuery traversals, filters, and so forth. my own jQuery Combinators includes `.K` and `.T` combinators so that you can break code up into functions so you don’t need to write elaborate trees.

So... I agree that an elaborate tree is a difficult problem to handle, and perhaps neither significant whitespace nor `.end()` is the answer. But for the limited and possibly artificial choice of a fluent interface OR significant whitespace, I prefer significant whitespace.
Either that or they fully understood its limitations and were satisfied with them.

I'll happily get my 2 year-old a Leapfrog/LeapPad type device and he'll be happy with it and learn from it. Even if I could get a laptop at the same price point, I wouldn't. Why?

The LeapFrog type devices are made to be handled by toddlers. That means they can take being thrown across the room, tossed out a window, and used as a hammer and still come up smiling. Try that with a laptop! Not to mention that with the specialized device I don't need to be concerned about loading DVDs, CDs, etc: the media is similarly rugged.

Don't be too quick to discount what those parents were doing: they may have a better idea than you what type of environment the device operates in.
I want to move to your dimension. In my dimension, the bad-ass America of yore imprisoned the entire Japanese population of the west coast during WWII. Compared to HUAC, the TSA is positively rational.

It is not remotely hard to see why we have the TSA and it has nothing to do with cowardice; it has to do with rational actors and their incentives. To wit: there is no incentive whatsoever for anyone in authority to dial back airport security. It's the same reason you have to "turn" "off" your iPod at takeoff and landing.

This isn't some scary new trend. Our whole system of government is designed with the assumption that stuff like this is going to happen. The Constitution isn't an electric fence. It is the constraints provided to a stochastic and inefficient algorithm to get it to eventually converge on an answer John Locke might have approved. 10 years is the blink of an eye in historical terms. Give it another few decades.

Meanwhile, it is simply people's job to hypothesize about "harmlessly" "scanning" mass transit passengers. I guess it's good that we freak out about it, to quash it earlier in the process than later. But nationwide deployment of strip search scanners at train stations isn't imminent.