skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TwitterContests - Twitter contest generator. Running a raffle or a giveaway on Twitter is a bitch. This app is a way to automate that. Set the criteria for winner selection, timing and ways to qualify, then collect analytics.
Because face to face is that much more valuable; there's no replacement for it; it's worth it
rubyspec isn't intended to be a specification per-se, its more meant to be able to test against mri behavior for other ruby implementations. Which isn't much help since the mri maintainers seem to ignore it. Until there is a proper actual spec, rubyspec is about the most complete "here's kinda how mri works, we think" without digging through the c source. Which is at times, maddeningly annoying with comments that are wrong etc... I'd say hop in #jruby or #rubinius on freenode and you'll quickly learn how annoying conforming to mri ruby behavior can be.

My biggest gripe with ruby is that unlike most other languages its development is rather opaque unlike say python. I think this has to do with the primary group being Japanese.

http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_... looks to be the current status of the ISO standard, found a draft version but its in japanese, severely limiting what I can glean from it.

http://www.wiki.ruby-standard.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&... looks to have been part of the standardization process but hasn't been updated for years.

But yeah TDD is pretty heavily promoted, but primarily from the rails side of rubyists. I've used ruby for 10 years, only just now made a gem with tests in it, mainly to see what all the rage is about. Is it nice? For some things yeah, but not entirely necessary, I agree with Rich Hickey, only throw up guard rails where accidents will occur. Don't hit them all the way to the store.

Sorry for the rambling, back to my cage.
Agreed. In fact I would argue two things at least historicaly in the US:

1) Men tend to take risks more than women.

2) Women tend to focus more on family than men.

Additionally, I would add, that it's likely that the bulk of businesses owned at any given time in history, counting part-time businesses have always been owned by women. Indeed the great influx of women into the work force in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had to do with industrial processes undermining their businesses!
Should Apple Make a TV? No, says The Reckoner.
For funding, the median is less useful. I wouldn't be surprised if the median series A returned a loss.

If optimizing for the median outcome is your goal, VC funding is probably not a good plan.
I look forward to pushing this to the absolute limit. Chat? Can we do something cool with voice? What about websites-as-desktop-software that started when Ajax got cool, but paused when developers ran into the limits of Ajax? How far can that now go? GPS services?
I like the idea of TwitterContests. I definitely could see the potential for using a contest on Twitter as a marketing tool!
Why I'm Still Excited About Computer Science
Null coalescence in C#. Reference types must be checked before trying to access their members. So you’ll see a lot of:

if (mything != null && mything.User != null) {
Do.Something(mything.User.Name);
}

I’d like to write:

Do.Something(mything?.User?.Name);

It’s syntactic sugar, but would greatly improve readability, and a compiler could do it with no change to the runtime.
Yes, it's possible to integrate ATS generated code into a C project. ATS provides control over the names of the generated functions so you can only convert the parts you want to be verified as safe by ATS if needed.
In my experience, almost any productivity "treatment" works at first, until you get used to it. But, I hope I'm wrong and this continues to work out for you.
Many businesses already do this. I see hundreds of SMBs running contests on Twitter every day. Usually you have to retweet and follow to enter, but there are some other rules too occasionally. It would be nice to automate that workflow and/or help them define it.
"There’s a popular theory that people are most productive when they all sit together in big echoey rooms at communal tables with no dividers between workspaces. I think that’s horseshit. The only people who are “productive” in those settings, in my experience, are the type of management people who feel compelled to come over and interrupt you in person rather than send you a fucking email you can look at once you’re done tracking down a bug six levels of callbacks deep. "

yes, a thousand times

I realize that we have large variance in both what people work on and how people work on things, but with my personality and most of the work I've done over the past several years, I need a quiet place with no disturbances to get my head wrapped deeply around what I'm working on.

It's amazing how management will spin any little thing to gain control over the workplace.

While I'm ranting, if any managers/other people designing spaces are listening, use soft/indirect lighting. Overhead fluorescent lights that I can't turn off are the devil.
I also found that really funny - especially considering the fact that it was posted on Bloomberg.

Michael Lewis wrote a similar tongue-in-cheek "Advice" article a few years ago if you like this one.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...
Show HN: Modds, Beautiful Poker Odds.
I try to buy from the Tattered Cover (http://www.tatteredcover.com/) when possible since they stood up for civil rights (http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020411_hodes.html)
Facebook App For Offering Giveaways & Contests
I use and like Vim, but I feel like the articles that make it to HN all say the same thing ("I had a conversion experience," followed by some configuration details, followed by basic keystrokes, etc).

Why does everyone feel the need to re-tell the same story?
Cool, but a slight bug with the UI. You can only drag the handle to resize the windows if your mouse is over the resize element itself. If you mousedown and move your mouse quickly, it will go outside of the element and things will then go a bit wacky.

Chrome 15, Windows 7 64-bit.
I'm not saying it's logically more difficult, I'm saying that in practical terms, it puts one more hurdle (or maybe several) in the way of anyone who wants to hold the culprit accountable.
I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but when I first ran it I landed on an error page. Then I tried to open one of my existing projects. It tells me to select the project folder, but the file uploader wants me to select a single file, so I can't do it. Then I tried to start a new project, but it just says "An error occured, please contact the administrator."
Theron clearly does not like labels
Theron clearly does not like labels
In NEW YORK Charlize Theron is a had of a once razor sharp language and b a very flexible individual when it comes to the individuals she performs.
It does work for Firefox, which I don't use on my Mac, but not for Safari, which I do. It seems first party apps and ones installed with a proper installer are not susceptible to this vulnerability, so you would have to rely on the presence of third party apps that don't get installed with installers. I would guess Mac App Store apps are also protected, but I am unable to test that. You are right that there is a vulnerability, though it's extent is questionable.
new can be useful. I believe instanceof only works with objects created with new.
It is an exact quote of what he said.
Firefox will probably get more this year.
They had a long term deal.
Red Beats by dre (Solo HD) From Monster for sale
This is a great reason to get a phone capable of tethering.
to me the numbers show that album sales are down because of an unbelievable change in the way that people buy music today as compared to 15 years ago. Buying a single song has replaced buying an album. The RIAA is claiming that album sales are down like 90 percent. DUH... but that's not due to piracy, it's due to itunes raking in 9 billion dollars for the music industry. If the itunes downloads were the 10 dollars or more that an album costs..... well you can do the math. So downloading may be killing the record labels, but it's the LEGITIMATE downloading of songs.

If you think about it, apple takes HALF of the price of a download, so that's 18 BILLION downloads last year alone.
You are right. I will fix it first hand.
Websockets browser support: http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets
http://www.illuminate.com/whitepaper/ explores this question, and finds that though they have fewer resources than man-led start ups, woman-led start ups have lower rates of failure. A complete answer probably depends on what definition of "success" is adopted.
How to stop a divorce
With the divorce rate rising on what appears to be a daily basis, it is no surprise that people are wondering how to stop a divorce. The good news is that it can be done, it is relatively easy when you put these five steps into action.
Yep, they undid the crazy 8 bytes of body that wasn't declared by content-length, back in hixie-76. The current protocols play nicely with HTTP aware proxies now.

They introduced plenty of other crazy things.. but at least it works with proxies.
Concur: To lose a customer is to lose some chunk of revenue. To lose a user is to lose some chunk of page views to be sold. A very important distinction. You can offset shed users by adjusting the product to generate more page views, as publishers well know. Lose too many customers, though, and that's a lot of money that's simply not hitting your pocket anymore.

With that in mind, I'm pretty sure Netflix would not email me asking to know about the quality of a given streamed movie if I were merely a user.

And the way I know that is that YouTube has never once checked in on me to see how my streaming experience went.
Also, colorschemes are supposed to set the colors_name variable:

:let colors_name

Though this doesn't always happen.
I personally think Occupy Wall Street is a great movement and am very excited to see Americans speak up but I have to admit I'm not as impassioned with it as some others are. I know its selfish but I think this probably has to do with the fact that I feel satisfied with my socio-economic situation/place which mostly is tied to being a software engineer ... I feel like I'm rewarded pretty decently and have many future opportunities (note: I am not rich). I think we're all very fortunate to be in the field we are in. Now saying that, I have 1) a lot of empathy for those who are struggling with cost of college, healthcare, etc in that it is very unfair and 2) a lot of concern as to how the current political, cultural and economic paths of the US will impact everyone in the future (including tech).
htmlspecialchars() is for html sanitation. For the sql in insert.php you will want mysql_real_escape_string().

insert.php writes to the database. You may want to wrap that inside some kind of session checking so that only logged-in users are allowed to run the insert. As it is now, anybody could send parameters to the script and it would run an insert.

You may also want to create some protection against a double-insert.

"break" is repeated in index.php characterData() case TITLE. This won't cause any problems but it reminds me that PHP lets you say "break 2" to break out of two layers of looping, if you ever need to do that.
One of the best tutorials, to get started with Vim, I've seen around. Well done.
I have list of features I am going to add and the ST2 is my top priority. Because it was in BETA I thought not a good idea. And yeah +1 for writing that quick app!
Work at Bump (YC09) - Python, distributed DBs, functional programming.
--- Server Engineering at Bump ---

Bump has grown to be one of the most popular mobile apps of all time. Each day our users send millions of items to one another, and we think we're just getting started. Help us build out the core back-end components that support new features and products, and have your hand in millions of user interactions each day.

=== Responsibilities ===

Within the first 6 months of work, you will design, prototype, implement and deploy one or more major, mission-critical services underlying our mobile apps. The process will include developing an early understanding of the product, participating in design review sessions, documenting design and code details and engaging in periodic peer code-reviews.

Write code. Clean, elegant, practical, well-covered code - primarily in Python.

Work with other people who you will learn from -- who are dedicated to improving each other's craft.

Own your code. You wouldn't hesitate to perform production support for stuff you've built.

Proactively fix bugs and solve problems. You get upset every time someone else finds a bug in your code, and work tirelessly on (occasional) time sensitive issues that crop up.

Contribute to a service that will help millions of people communicate & make them happy.

Work in our office in Mountain View, CA. May be open to telecommute from northern OH.

=== Requirements ===

* Take pride in writing modular, clean, simple, maintainable, well documented, code.

* Strong background in networking, operating systems, and security

* 3-5+ Years of engineering experience with Python, PHP, C, C++, Java

* Solid knowledge of unit and integration testing methodologies, and the ability to write, debug and deploy testing frameworks

* Experience building and scaling distributed, highly available systems

* Knowledge of document, key/value or other non-relational database system such as Redis, Riak, HBase, BigTable, Dynamo, etc.

=== Exceptional candidates will have ===

* Experience with Haskell, ML, Lisp, Scala, or some functional language

* Notable contributions to open source software projects.

* A Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.

* Good communication, organization and project management skills

=== How to Apply ===

Email hn@bu.mp -- Please write a short paragraph telling us about you and why Bump is interesting to you, and send links to any relevant projects. We encourage you to make your application stand out however you choose.
A Facebook App For Offering Giveaways & Contests
It really doesn't. Advertisers have committed budgets and have switching costs that are often much, much higher than those of end users. It would take a sustained, double-digit-percentage loss of users to impact Google's bottom line.

One user fucked over out of 1,000, even if they never return, is pretty easy to paper over. Which is why there's no phone number a user can call if they're in trouble. They don't really matter, so it's not worth the cost to address their issue.

AdWords advertisers, on the other hand, they can get a human on the phone whenever they want. Because if they have an issue, it's honest-to-god cash money that stops flowing into Google's coffers.

They're the real customers.
I've been using Vim more or less exclusively for the last year or so, and there is only one feature of Aptana Studio that I miss, and have not been able to find in any Vim plugins. In the directory/project tree in Aptana, files had different styles based on their git status. I think I just need to take a weekend and learn enough vim programming to make it happen as a Nerd Tree plugin.
Please, tell me, what senior engineers in the Phillipines or India have 15+ years of software development experience. They don't exist, because the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years.

So please, take this "our senior developers (with only 2-3 years of real experience) are just as good as your top US developers" idea and stick it where the sun don't shine. There is a huge benefit to hiring people that have been eating, sleeping, and breathing code since age 10. Our 15 year senior developers might only be 25 years old, but they can code circles around any of your 2-3 year experience engineers.
There are people who don't do this?
The reason so many experienced people suggest learning the basics of Vim (or, in my case, Emacs) in one go is because it works quickly and efficiently--certainly more quickly and more efficiently than an incremental approach. Additionally, just giving up on arrow keys and the like does not necessarily entail a "huge volume" of memorization.

I am an inherently lazy person; I cannot just sit down and memorize stuff (one of the reasons I'm in CS). Yet I definitely support giving up the mouse and arrow keys immediately.

When I originally picked up Emacs, I went through the tutorial and promptly forgot exactly which keys did what. However, I decided to follow the tutorial's advice and learn how to navigate properly. To do this, all I did was not use the mouse or arrow keys for editing some text. For the first couple of days, I had to keep looking the keys up each time I did anything; later--relatively abruptly--I started using them without realizing. There is no way I would have learned nearly as much as quickly if I had not got through a couple days of not knowing what I was doing.

Once the standard moving commands became second nature, I started using some of the more specialized ones (like moving around by line or paragraph or expression). Without having given up on the arrow keys and mouse, I would probably never have learned the more advanced movements which are now exceptionally useful.

Basically, to follow your suggestion would be to avoid a couple days of bumbling around in favor of being less effective for a very long time. On the other hand, with my approach, I did spend a couple days being incompetent but then the bindings became natural. Ultimately, to me, being lazy involves not just minimizing work immediately, but increasing efficiency in the long run as well.

As a contrast, I know many classmates who have tried to learn Emacs your way. Most of them can use it, but not much more efficiently than notepad; I regularly see them spending minutes doing menial tasks that would have taken seconds had they known Emacs better. In the context of a 90 minute lab, that is not trivial at all; even in the context of working full time, the amount of time they can save should not be ignored.

Ultimately, all it takes to learn Emacs (and, I imagine, the same can be said of Vim) is a little bit of patience and willingness to embrace change. By jumping into the deep end immediately, you can learn really quickly, and reap the benefits almost immediately.
The article fails to mention why this change happened, and what motivated it.
Robbing a Bank as Part of a Penetration Test
I was sick and tired of every page I'm a fan of running a contest with absolutely no structure. Not to mention all the violations to the facebook promotion guidelines they commit.

http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php

So I built an app for pages to offer giveaways.
I have my eyes there. I plan to add this thing very soon.
Inversely, I think it's up to each one of us to communicate how we should be interrupted when we're busy. If we don't say "headphones means send me an email" then our co-workers don't know that we're in heads-down-mode and they'll keep walking over.
I'm personally holding onto my Core2Duo until a general-purpose processor with 32 cores is available to consumers. It's completely arbitrary, but 32 cores is for me, psychologically, the point where it feels like a crime not to design a program in a concurrent fashion.

Picking such a buy-threshold also has the added benefit of suppressing any desire that I might have to update to the latest and greatest. I look at something and I think: "Well, that's nice, but it's no 32 core processor."
To get more people to use Vim. It's also annoying when IDE people assume that Vim and Emacs people are just old-fashioned and using inferior tools; explaining why and how you use Vim is a great way to dispel these misconceptions.
Yes, look at Linux. Most servers run on it, most smartphones run on it, an ever-growing number of home electronics such as TVs run on it...

Oh, by the way, "most smartphones" includes the ones running WebOS.

That Linux isn't widely used in desktop PC operating systems is a point of ever-shrinking interest and of little economic relevance.
Fair enough, and I can certainly empathize with wanting to use C++ so you don't have to rewrite everything for another platform. My perspective is going from the C/C++ (on Visual Studio for the most part) I used in school (so none of those nifty libraries/frameworks), to (for the most part) working on a data driven mobile application for iOS/Android. And after working with the Cocoa frameworks, I did say "Holy shit, Cocoa sure made this task easy!" :)
UK Police to test laser that 'blinds rioters'
I have never seen someone encouraging young bright males specifically into starting a business. The words we hear target "bright people", "bring minds", sure, but never "bright males" or "bright men".

We either see people saying "people should try running a startup" or "women should try running a startup". Thus, the author's point is that the latter is unnecessary because the former covers both bases.
Russian legislative elections 2011 - statistical evidence of vote fraud
Funny you should ask, there's a 10 $.10 apps x 10 days promotion going on right now.
I had considered that -- there's plenty of evidence to support the idea that "charity" doesn't often help achieve big picture goals like substantially decreasing poverty.

That said, a lot of the things his foundation is working on are more immediate-need types of issues, like access to doctors and medication for malaria and other diseases. In these venues, charities can have a much bigger, more immediate impact than trying to grow a market to deal with the issue.
For a time I was embarrassed to even admit that I read it. I still am. The book is full of incredible people and events that don't and should not make any sense to a rational person. So I have written off this book as a third class fantasy novel. BUT: what is important to me here more than the book's content is the personality of the people who like it (knowing the fact that the author presents this as true facts). Steve jobs seemed to have a need in supernatural / magic to be able to perform magic. This book (and probably others like it) kept reinforcing his belief and created distorted reality for him like he used to create for his employees.
eventually re-integrating children into day-to-day life

What's not to like about our current approach of factory farming children?

In my view the future (and I hate to say this on a VC's site) is in family-run micro-businesses, not startups. Both parents work from home at least part of the time (one or both may have part or even full-time jobs elsewhere), integrate child care into the realities of this life. Sure this won't work in every field but it will work in many.

The thing is by integrating everything as you put it, this tradeoff doesn't have to happen. However making that integration happen requires challenging our ideas of the role of capital and labor in our society.
I let socket.io worry about that. Great library.
Yes, exactly. AppSumo has been running a lot of promotions recently that are based around social sharing in exchange for additional entries in whatever they are giving away. It would be interesting to automate the AppSumo deal process.
Buy Yellow Lamboghini Beats by dre Studio Headphones From Monster for Sale
Click link, crash browser.
How to use services like objects
A bit late to the party but wasn't this exact text posted somewhere else at least 6 months back? If not more. I am 100% sure I read something like this with the exact same title before. On topic: What on earth does a child really need Gmail or anything for anyway? I would like my future children to learn about technology and be interested in how things work but on the other hand giving a 8 year old a cellphone or something seems ridiculous.