skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to be very afraid of long single lines, until I studied a bit of queue theory in college.
I now feel angry whenever I see lots of small lines, and relieved when I'm in a store that has a larger single line with a bunch of "servers" at the end.

Unfortunately that is the ONLY thing I got from that subject: "single line with lots of servers better than lots of lines with one server each". I can't really remember anything else, like WHY this is the case or how queues work. :/
As a Linux user who keeps a Windows desktop around just for Netflix and Steam, I find this deeply (and devilishly) satisfying. Telling people they're platform isn't supported because it's just not an important enough market is something I've been hearing for over a decade now.

MS coming out the message "but...but...but...you should support everybody!" is a bit of a pot/kettle situation and I hope they are treated with the same passive-aggressive apathy as they treated Linux and Mac users for all those years.

I know I'm being petty but I can't seem to make myself stop smiling.
> Not everyone drank the agile koolaid.

Pure[1] waterfall is doomed from theoretical point of view. You cannot control a system without a feedback loop, unless you have a 100% accurate knowledge of system's state and future evolution. Waterfall lacks feedback loop => you can't really expect much from it.

[1] - in real life there's always some kind of feedback loop in the process; I'd argue that the primary reason why Agile methodologies seem to work better is that they have a much, much tighter feedback loop than waterfall.
Tl;dr
Writers on the web, please provide an abstract at the top of your articles, so I can decide if I want to read it or not, without having to skim through the entire article.
You've got a little typo: "the ability TO tail" under log tailing

Looks neat though. I was looking for a place to work on some Mongo DB stuff so I will probably try this out.
Seriously, I would take Florian Mueller's opinions with a grain of salt.
WIN Over £2,700 of Photographic Gear
When I first started using jquery, that's exactly what I thought plugins would do.
To my surprise, a huge slice of plugins are basically non-flexible widgets. This is rather childish and useless. Why would a javascript developer want a fancy styled fragment of a page?
Daily Mobile Minute #69: QR codes are only half mobile
I had only heard of such clean perl. Thanks!

From these examples DCI seems a lot like lisp's generic functions..
I was under the impression that FSF had a collection of patents that have been donated to them. If so, can it really be true that Apple's not violating any of them? Proprietary companies use their patents to blackmail one another into cross-licensing all the time. Although it's offensive, it's how business operates. Why can't FSF do the same for the greater good of fostering the establishment of standards that will benefit the Free Software community and the public at large?
It's not much better in any browser.
Mobile Morning Coffee (12/09/11)
That might have been true before, but my understanding is that the newer mobile GPUs (coming out now, 2012, etc) have pretty much free context switching. Or so the vendors like to claim.

Even if it's not true, shouldn't Google pushing for the GPU drivers to be fixed? This is a pretty obvious huge flaw [that has been pretty much solved on Desktop].
Which backs up what I said. It's really unusual to see anyone talk about the actual lifetime risk. It's not as scary as saying "your chances are X times greater"... greater than what?

If those numbers are accurate, and entirely due to the effects of smoking (not just other lifestyle behaviors more common with smokers, like drinking) that's easily reason enough to quit. But even in the worst case, the fact remains, most smokers will not get cancer.
Google Checkout doesn't really do anything to help with subscription services though.

They have something coming for subscriptions which is in beta and described here: http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checko....

Chargify have an article comparing their service (recurring billing management) with Google Checkout here: http://help.chargify.com/entries/20110971-how-does-chargify-...
Smoking causes problems other than cancer.
What about heart disease?
I'm with you. I just recently got a U260 and I love it. My wife, who is a mac user, is even impressed.

http://i.imgur.com/R5aw8.jpg

It's a sexy beast. Performance is good. It is quiet and cool too. Battery life is fair, but I keep it plugged in most of the time.
Do you have any examples of what you've build with MonoTouch?

I've done native development for iOS, Android, and WP7, and I'd be interested to see what advantage MonoTouch brings.
"I find if(...){} much more readable."

Not only is it more readable, it's more correct in the example given.

"if" is a statement. The ternary operator (?:) is an expression, that returns a value. The semantics are different, and using the ternary operator "merely" to replace an if statement, especially where no assignment of the ternary operator's return value is made, is a code smell.

The ternary operator is great if you're replacing a simple "if something assignment to X else other assignment to X." Any other use is questionable.
I kinda expected more from a group hosting millions of conversations a year and undisclosed$$ derived from it. Think bigger, like Visa's NOC big...

http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/visa-headquarters.jpg
Navigation is not intuition
I use CarbonEmacs [1] on my Macbook. The default 'meta' is the cmd key, which I prefer, as it's closer to what I'm used to on other keyboards. I also remap (globally) caps-lock to be a second ctrl.

[1] http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html
I got a Macbook Air a couple months ago and couldn't be happier with it. Traveling with it has been great. And the battery is awesome so I don't even carry a charger when I take it to the office/a cafe.

I should point out though that I'm strictly using it for development. I'm not putting Photoshop or anything on it. I haven't even loaded anything in iTunes yet.
We've invented the mobile un-friendly site! We are industry pioneers!

How are we missing the -

Paperback + Consultation for $250
Complete 45 page book (45 pages?)
Ships within 2 days
1 hour 1-on-1 consultation
Expert implementation advice

They sound like experts to me. 37signals book Rework only has 288 pages $11. Page count doesn't mean everything, but clearly 37sig is stuffed with fluff. All you need is 45 to change to the game up.

I'm a non-profit and small business owner, I'm sold!
I don't understand how OpenShift is priced. The website does not seem to have any information on it.
11" Macbook Air i7 + 256GB SSD has been pretty great for me.
Lunar Eclipse Will Supersize Blood-Red Moon Saturday
43rd anniversary of the "mother of all demos," first mouse
I think you have an extra two bytes (or a bug) here:

function blocks(l) {
s.map(function(p) {
c.fillRect(p.x << 3, p.y << 3, 8, 8);
});
}

l is ignored, so you can remove it (and the part where you pass it in from the engine). This code still works because s has global scope, but that looks like an accident.

I guess the "right" thing to do would be to rename s to l here, but when you're trying to fit stuff into 4K that's not the main concern :)

Cool program by the way, I'm impressed with how clear the code remained.
I already said it was the overall design aesthetic, not one simple element, but that it's obvious that Apple is a leading innovator in the space of thin industrial design. iPhone, iPod, iMac, the Air, are all some of the thinest in class. Plus you can see how even the CrunchPad/JooJoo changed it's design aesthetic to match that of the iPad after the iPad was publicly announced.

And where/when did monopoly come up in this conversation? To my knowledge patents do not enable a company to a monopoly.
I remapped the Apple key for alt on my MBP. It truly is frustrating; alt is not in a very nice position at all. FN is where I would prefer ctrl to be.

When I really need to get writing at home, I plug in a MS N4K and go at it.
Medical Patents Must Die
The original waterfall spec. describes the usage of prototypes. I wrote a small review of it a few weeks ago: http://emtrics.com/2011/10/17/software-development-a-little-...
I really don't like the idea in general that 'normal law' mode lets the pilots yank the controls any which way and the computer (supposedly) prevents the plane from leaving the safe flight envelope. I believe that sets up the wrong attitude in the pilot's mind about having to carefully and thoughtfully control the aircraft.

If the flight computer is having to intervene and change the flight controls, then at the very least there should be a force-feedback mechanism in the stick which tells the pilot he's doing something wrong, and that he really shouldn't be yanking back the stick that hard.

The other bad part of the user interface is that the two sets of flight controls are not linked, like they were in the old days. With side sticks, it is not easy to see what the other pilot is doing. And averaging the control inputs of the two pilots is INSANE, in my opinion. Only one pilot should be flying the plane, and it needs to be quite obvious who that is at all times.

The CRM mechanism to take over flight controls should not be saying the words "I have control", it should be flipping a big switch on the center console that visibly indicates who has control.
Memory requirements vary a lot depending on the task at hand. You may get away with 2 GiB, but I have 12 GiB and it's not quite enough. I compile huge pieces of software that require insane amounts of memory at compile time.

2 GiB is a ridiculously small amount these days, 4 GiB is not a lot on today's standards. A 4 GiB hard limit for max memory is definitely a minus for the computer in question.
> I'm not saying Redis is the ideal choice for these particular cases. I'm just quickly braindumping some examples.

Exactly. You're inventing weird use cases that only half-fit Redis's properties, instead of carefully considering the design and architecture of your application.

Software that attempts to solve all problems becomes Emacs.
BrianMay.com Site Guide
If I was answering a survey on IDEs, I'd say I use Vim. It's what I use to do something that people use an IDE for, ergo, it's my IDE.
How to report bugs on Twitter
Amazon FPS is usable from the UK but it demands you have a "US-based credit card" to sign up for it so it somewhat defeats the point of being available in the UK since getting a credit card with a US billing address is rather complicated.

Google's system is another waste of time because it demands you bill in your local currency and can't support anything else. Not much use if you're in the UK and have mostly US customers.
I just launched a site with hardly any features
Thanks for the feedback.

I was trying to gauge interest amongst a community I perceived to be early adopters in line with 'lean startup' principles.

Nevertheless, you raise a good point. I will try to find some members outside the HN community to run the idea by.
Chargebacks are expensive because it's an extremely manual process, especially representments - $15 is not outrageous. Many issuers will simply not charge back small amounts because it's not worth it. If you want to commit fraud, just buy small amounts at Starbucks on a prepaid card with no balance - they generally don't auth (to give that smooth consumer experience) and will not charge back when their forced post comes in because it's not worth it for them.
You have a choice of koolaid. The waterfall brand is implicit in the statement "We don't write a line of code until we know your business as well as the people who keep it running every day." - it is founded on the assumption that you can finish requirements for the entire system before starting to deliver working software, and no feedback or iteration is needed.

My experience is that for the majority of software projects, this assumption is horribly broken. And even in fairly well known problem domains where it might work, for the majority of business users wanting new software, the ability to communicate every detail of what it is that they want is horribly lacking.

Scope creep, architecture problems, unanticipated requirements etc. can and does break waterfall projects; this was well known 10 years ago. The probably of it going wrong rises with the size of the project, and it's a curve that's well above linear.

There are two ways out: You can plan for change or you can make the penalties against change more severe - roughly, do even even more big upfront design and penalise change requests; or do less of upfront design, iterate and embrace change. In many cases the "big upfront design" way is impractical in time and expense.

Edit: I found the old article on this subject: "Theory P and Theory D of software construction: Which theory fits the evidence?"
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/06/which-theory-first-evide...
Talent acquisitions: Facebook’s kiss of death
I think what you have highlighted is really a general problem with a lot of freely available software and that is the authors set out to solve a problem that they have, release it to the public and then get deluged with feature requests, which being nice people, they duly implement. Before anyone knows what has hit them, the little solution has become a big bloated piece of crap that is too large to use.

I've released a number of WordPress themes and I always get requests like "put in an option so the menu can be on the left or the right", "make it so I can pick any font from Google fonts using just a dropdown in the theme options" and many other wacky requests. I find myself having to draw a line between useful requests that everyone will benefit from and crazy edge cases that just serve one or two people but will destroy the elegance of my original vision. It's hard saying no to people, but it has to be done.
Here's what I would like to see from a consulting company for once. Don't interview the stake holders of the company, they don't use the software like their employees do. They have a high level overview based on feedback from their employees. When you interview them, you're getting second hand information that will likely be missing key points that they forgot to mention or just simply think is obvious and doesn't require mentioning.

So here's what you should do. Over the shoulder review of a representative employee of each department. HR, AP, AR etc. Actively watch and understand the processes they go through. FOR AN ENTIRE 8 HOUR SHIFT.

No, seriously.

Now, you've got a good idea of how its done current.

Then do the stake holder interview to find out what they want to do differently.

Then plan, develop and deploy your software.

I seriously don't get why despite there being a recognized need for understanding the problem scope which everyone one will invest hours in meetings and conference calls talking about, no one actually invests any (significant) time doing, or reviewing the actual process. It's the fastest most efficient way to understand the problem. It would totally diminish months of back and forth "here's what you asked for" "no, that's not what I asked for" development review process that almost _always_ occurs with consultant projects.

/rant
IANAL and I hate to sound like a fanboy, but can't Apple claim that the 2007 iPod touch is prior art, since it's basically a small black tablet with rounded corners and a single button at the bottom? It looks much more similar to an iPad than the 2008 crunchpad.
Sorry about the site outage; my little linode 512 instance took a pounding :) I've moved it to a larger one. I hope that'll do!
Well, you can turn off the shocks for training days when they are practising stall recovery, but leave on the shocks for regular situations.
NOC-style dashboards seem hardly appropriate for the first thing you see when you walk into an office..
Even if Apple loses on appeal, what do you want to bet they'll settle the case rather than just allowing the injunction to go into effect?
I mean the dictionary definition of "proprietary": controlled by a single proprietor, in this case Google. Google proposed the Pepper API on the plugin-futures mailing list a year or two ago, but Mozilla and Apple believed that it was unnecessary to maintain a parallel Pepper API for plugins to use when Web APIs were already there (and could be improved where they were not sufficient). Google implemented and pushed Pepper anyway. Thus, proprietary.

Likewise, Google is not open to input regarding the direction of NaCl, or whether it is a good idea for the Web. It is also proprietary.

Whether proprietary-but-open-source technologies are good for the Web is a separate discussion -- clearly, Mozilla and Google disagree. But it's unarguable that NaCl and Pepper are proprietary technologies.
Which manufacturer copied the home button?
That's probably not correct. The grandmother playing Russian Roulette is truly the beneficiary of random chance. She's still susceptible to bullets.

The centenarian smoker likely was never susceptible to smoking-induced lung cancer in the first place.
I'm wondering what would be an effect of moving a standardisation organisation to a software-patent-free country. In such case software patent issues wouldn't be any obstacle for the organisation in their standardisation processes. On the other hand, created standards would be useless in countries where technologies covered in the standard had already been patented.

As a result, isn't it so that software patents in some countries inhibit the development of standards on a global scale? That's troubling.
Yes, but I'm talking about cancer. The fact still remains that the statement "Most smokers will not get lung cancer" is a controversial statement for some reason, even though it is demonstrably true.
have you _seen_ the US's defense budget?
Do Free Classified Ads work? Tips For Posting Free Classified Ads
As someone who loves photography, I'm deeply passionate about copyright remaining with the original artist. I guess I'm your target user.

The main thing that hit me about your current landing page is it's lack of vibrancy!

The photo apps/sites that do well (500px, Instagram) thrust beautiful images at you at every opportunity and it works!

While you aren't responsible for the quality of art stored in your accounts you are still trying to appeal to those that are attracted by great images and proving that others entrust their greatest works into this service.

Having some great photographers use your service that you could showcase,would speak volumes to other potential customers.
No they don't. They could have to stop...and that isn't the same thing.
You're right, but that isn't the problem.

+ What if we change gateways?

+ What happens when someone gets a card declined for an unspecified? Retries? What if the error was fatal? Sends an email? Does it cut their service immediately or after a grace period? If they pay on day 2 of the grace period, do they get 30 days of service or 28?

+ What happens if someone wants to upgrade from the $29 / mo account to the $79 / mo account on the 4th of March if their anniversary date was the 25th of February in a leap year?

+ A bug screwed up Bob's data and we're offering him $125 of credit to say we're-so-sorry. You built that feature, right?

+ Our accountant wants to know "How much have we billed this year?", "How much have we collected this year?", and "How much money have we collected that have we not earned yet?" You built that, right?

+ Foo Corp filed a chargeback against payment #123456. This means we got a callback ping and did something consequential as a result of it, right?

+ Why are you answering these questions when you could be writing code that people actually pay for?
Ask HN: What do you think of my site name?
What do you think of the site name http://cultivatus.com?

The site is aiming to be a technology/Internet news/design and coding blog.

What do you think?
I'm using a mid-2010 MBP 13", which was meant for iOS development only but just after a few weeks of using it I switched over to it as my main development machine.

I have modified it to 8GB RAM and removed the DVD ROM to make space for a SSD/HDD combo.
Compared to my previous Windows based desktop PC, it is just so much more silent. The SSD makes up for the spec difference between my desktop and the MBP, so cannot complain there.
Compared to my Asus Laptop the MBP provides less battery time (Asus ~8hs, MBP ~6hs) but it is much faster, so that it works out quite well for me.

The only regret I have is that I didn't buy a 15" or even the 17" MBP, since for development work the 13" just doesn't provide enough screen estate, so for me an external monitor is a must.
Headline is not true. Motorola won a patent case and now can make Apple stop selling iPhones/iPads, they didn't yet. At that point Apple's lawyers will appeal the ruling and who knows where it goes from there.
This sort of thing was popular during the dot-com boom.
Sounds to me like your CTOs should have been fired and the admins kept their jobs. If your company can be crippled by a single box being destroyed, it's probably not the individual devs or admins at fault. An errant 'rm' or damaging programming error is more of a risk than a disk failure or a building fire. If you don't plan for that, your company is making a scapegoat out of the person who made an honest mistake. At my last two companies I worked for, it would have taken multiple geographic regions being simultaneously affected by major catastrophes for 4 months of work to be destroyed, and I'm not even sure that would have done it with any degree of certainty.

Where were your redundant source control servers, local and offsite backups, iterative staging environments, etc? Hell, I have all of those at my current workplace and I still keep unofficial backups of everything critical on my workstation. These are all long-established best practices and relatively simple and cheap. The only way I'd fire someone over 'rm -rf /' was if it was done with malicious intent or was one of many examples of someone's ineptitude of negligence.

On an open-source project with low/no budget and less checks and balances, I think you have to be even more forgiving.
I think FrameMaker would be another one.
To tell the truth it looks to me that if something requires even 1 GB of memory during compilation than you have a bigger problem than lack of RAM on your laptop :) So I'd like to know about some real-world example when you need that much RAM for compiler.

For most cases when people claim they need more RAM the actual bottleneck is I/O rate which is kinda improved by having RAM to use as cache, but SSD usually works out even better.
"""Even beyond plainly bad logic (you patent every "obvious" idea you have?!)"""

If it's a multi-million making idea, why wouldn't I? (In my case, though, a little Googling reveals that someone else has thought of it first.)

You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away?

""it's contradicted by a continuous stream of "bad patent with prior art" stories on this site and a hundred others."""

How does this contradicts it? It cuts both ways, you know. If anything, it makes it even easier for someone else, like Opera, to patent something, if they can still patent it while prior art exists.

"""Because that's is the whole point of patent law, according to the US constitution at least."""

The whole point of the patent law is that ...the public should benefit by something X invented by bypassing X and getting it from their competitors?!!!!

You're reading it totally backwards. The whole point of the patent system is to PROTECT X invention.

"""Apple isn't trying to make sure we get pinch-zoom from them, they're trying to make sure that web applications cannot get pinch-zoom at all."""

Wrong again. Web applications get it in mobile Safari and Safari OS X. So, yes, they're trying to make sure we get it "from them".
The Done Manifesto