skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The bits of PHP that are "much worse" are mostly either legacy cruft that nobody in their right mind uses anymore, or bits are rarely touched in day to day programming but are safely wrapped in frameworks, ORM's, libraries etcetera.

Huh? The article in question demonstrates otherwise, note they just now fixed one of the problems with anon functions, a relatively new feature. PHP continues along the path of adding "features" randomly and without even understanding the purpose behind the feature, and so you get half-features that kinda work and don't really solve any problem in the context of PHP, but were just added so they could check off "some feature we don't understand" on the feature list.

>Other than that, I rarely see any relevant criticism, let alone constructive criticism.

In the context of PHP, I think "you should use a better language" is as constructive as you can really get. There's nothing wrong with warning new web developers that PHP is worse than every other language that lives at the same sort of level (perl, python, ruby, pike, etc).
Yes, though if you make it through the program (and offered a job at LivingSocial), you're committed to 18 months at LivingSocial. They seem like a great company so I don't think this would happen, but it does give them leverage to offer a lower salary, reduced benefits, etc.
Jurors Need to Know That They Can Say No
or the lack of subpixels in the case of the Android devices.
> hospital rooms look alike to us, to SIFT they don't

Well, to SIFT they'll all look different. Except for the hospital room in Portland, OR and the hospital room in Portland, ME that each happen to have a sign with "Portland Hospital" visibile in the picture. While I'm alarmed about the potential of computer vision to compromise my privacy, I have yet to see anything in actual use even be competent, let alone alarming.
Thanks for the quick response, j3. I sure didn't mean to be snarky and it looks like you didn't take it that way. I believe you just added more data to my argument. Let me explain...

If there's only a 3% chance of getting accepted into something so important and life-changing (for both of us), then as an applicant, I want to make damn sure I put my best foot forward into a process that gives me the best possible chance. This just isn't it...

I already know that there's no way anything I put onto video or any underwear (my term for source code) can put me in as favorable competitive light than what I can do for you. I'd just lose out to those who can present better than me.

Compare your application to those of the many incubators and accelerators like yc or techstars. For overachieving builders (the exact people you want to attract), it's the exact opposite experience. Filling out those applications is an enriching experience that gets the juices flowing and generates the excitement that you can compete.

Making videos to be judged by strangers on your "team worthiness", on the other hand, is very hand wavy and a total turn off to precisely the people you're trying to attract.

I believe that "fitting in" is overrated and "being excellent" is underrated and that your process is optimized for the wrong metric.

But then again, what do I know? I'm sure you'll try to prove me wrong (and probably will).
BlackBerry will never ditch the keyboard, Why?
Good feedback and I understand what you mean.

The reason for drop vs add button is because some browsers don't support drag-n-drop (they wouldn't see that option).

Maybe I will go back to the drawing board and make dropping/uploading files the primary focus and naming it or changing passwords/expiry more of an option.

Would hiding those items in a collapsable div be the right thing?

I.e. the first thing you see when you get on the page is to upload files. And if you want to change options, click to expand the form and change it there.

Again appreciate the feedback.
Mobile Morning Coffee (12/21/11)
What browser are you using? I'm using a Mac too. Could you describe some of your issues?
I would also have added http://codecs.ofmlabs.org which features hand-ported MP3 and ALAC decoders.
This is a very wrong-headed article. The author seems to think that science should be able to get the right answers on the first try, and that if we can't, it's somehow a failure of science and any attempts at understanding should be abandoned.

I think he has a basic misunderstanding of science. He doesn't realize that "made up stories" to explain how things work are just a starting point to understanding. They have to be tested and revised and re-tested until we come up with an explanation that reliably predicts how something works. And failures are an integral part of the process. Failures advance understanding.

It reminds me of the quote by Thomas Edison, after a thousand failed experiments, "We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb".
I really like the idea of a keyboard friendly task app. Here's some feedback. Hope it helps:

* signup didn't work for me. When I submitted the form, it just took me to the signup form again. EDIT: I think it's because the username I wanted was already taken, but there was no error message telling me this.

* login link didn't take me anywhere

* It'd be nice if '?' brought up a list of keyboard shortcuts - similar to what google apps does

* It'd be nice if shortcuts could be customized

* A call to action in the anonymous list to signup to save the list makes sense

* jumping between the list, settings, and sharing tab with keyboard - maybe control-shift-1, 2, 3

* the UI is slick and simple. I love it.

* how do I delete a list?

* can there be labels / colors?

* will there be an API to access my lists?

* make links in tasks clickable
try treating the object as the first data type you expect, and catching the failure if that type wasn't that type, and then try the second. This allows users to create objects that are close enough to the types you expect and still use your code.

Is chaining try-catches as a trial-and-error way to figure out a type really the Right Way to do things these days?
Introducing Sugarless - A Functional & Context Oriented way to write JavaScript
But they're not arrays. JavaScript and Lua do the same thing, allowing you to assign numeric or hashed keys on objects (or tables in Lua), but they don't call them Arrays, because they aren't.

PHP's arrays combine both vectors and associative arrays, but both numerically indexed arrays and associative arrays are types of arrays, are they not?

Arrays have expected behavior and implementations. So do hash maps. It's fine to amalgamate them, just give it the right name.

Whether associative arrays use hash maps underneath is an implementation detail, not fundamental to the interface PHP provides to [associative] arrays.
Apple also provides the number of iTunes accounts in existence (with credit cards and one-click purchase access) from time to time.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/02/apple-200-million-itunes-ac...
It's not like there aren't high-skilled jobs in other countries, where those immigrants whom we educate could get jobs.

So it's your desire to consign the Indian would-be immigrant to a life of poverty (i.e., poorer than the bottom 5% of the US [1]) just to make sure your wage stays above $150k/year?

But as long as you are happy with me shipping jobs to India, I guess it's all good.

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...
Dear citizens. It's no longer OK to not participate in democracy. And I don't just mean vote. I mean spread information and encourage others to vote. In essence; Lobby.

Everyone who fancies themselves someone who cares about legislation should be lobbying their friends and followers to participate with them.

If you don't, corporations will continue to do it for you.
BATS Global Markets will start listing stock
Weight Loss and your Endocrine System
GE may play in the services game, but I see them as fairly innovative in a niche of complex systems engineering with real hardware in a way that few of the larger companies quite sustain - their jet engines, and wind turbines to name a couple areas.
Didn't Stanford drop out? How can you beat someone that didn't even compete?
You don't sound smart for mocking the idea that a 8-exabyte message in a communication protocol is "big enough", you sound like you're mindlessly parroting ideas you don't fully understand. Yes, 8 exabytes is enough for a single message, and always will be. TCP works on "messages" (packets) in the kilobyte range, for comparison. Communication protocol packet sizes aren't equal to the amount of data the communication protocol can send.
This sounds like a great opportunity--for those of us without mortgages, families and golden handcuff salaries. If I were younger or debt-free, you could see what someone who's hungry can accomplish.
Holiday-busting IT Crises
Sure there are some researchers who can and do code, but their coding skills rarely do much good to their career. I bet that's why you delegate PoC software development to PhD grunts :) Moreover, it seems to me that most academic coders don't have enough occasions to collaborate on long-lived code bases; I don't think you can call yourself a developer if you can't deal with code decay and team collaboration.

Finally, I didn't realize how many teachers and TAs couldn't code while I was a student--although I had serious doubt about some of them; I fully realized it when I was a PhD and TA, with a background as a start-up developer.

I don't see it as a huge issue, though: as the article points out, many developers successfully learn to develop on the go. In my opinion, school is there to teach you the foundations which would be very hard to learn on the fly as a junior developer: maths, formal reasoning, hardware architecture, algorithms, maybe a bit of formal semantics. As I recall, those happened to be the most interesting lectures, given by the most awesome professors; it's probably no coincidence.
How exactly would you use this with third party code executing on the server that cannot be modified?

eaccelerator's session handler (was) simply built in and requires no modification, just add the one-word setting to your php.ini
What I learned from 3 months on YC and 3 years in SF
I see this as more of a "improving the outlook" update. Control flow bindings, Accessing parent bindings etc. are more of making it look nice and easier. I like it as these are the issues which I've faced and is one of the major criticism of Backbone followers.

Steve's vision with Knockout I assume is to be a binding framework rather than a design one (like Backbone). It's just using Knockout alongside Backbone is too much trouble that both libraries are more or less targeting the same audience.
>No system is going to be perfect, how can "high-skill" immigrants be evaluated with absolute certainty that they are

Why do you need "absolute certainty"
HTC Already Working Around Apple’s Smartphone Ban
I'm referring to the star chart, not the colors. You'll notice the curvy artifacts in the chart that looks like the ones found at this link:

http://www.google.com/search?q=siemens+star+chart

Those curves are an illusion. They don't actually appear in the image. We see them because of the tiny, staggered parallel lines required to reproduce an angled line using a grid pixel array. You can optimize to reduce this effect by using different anti-aliasing techniques that are specific to the type of display you're using. Apple tends to favor "soft" anti-aliasing techniques over accuracy. They also have the benefit of controlling the entire software stack, so their image processing can optimize for the IPS display used in iOS devices.

Some people find the softness downright obnoxious, while others think it results in the most pleasing image. I prefer Apple's method.

Color perception is a very broad topic. It's one of those "why is the sky blue" questions that we've all pondered (and frequently arrive at a false conclusion). I'm not nearly knowledgable enough to talk about it with authority, but you should definitely do some Googling, and be sure to keep an open mind. The answer is probably not what you think.
I like it. I'm using Todoist currently for my simple todolist stuff but I really would prefer more keyboard support there.

I'm organizing my todo list like this

== today

- task 1

- task 2

- task 3

== tomorrow

- task 4

- task 5

== next week

- task 6

- task 7

etc because some blog article I read about Tadalist suggested this, and it works fine for me. If you want to move e.g. task 2 + 3 into tomorrow, you simply move tomorrow after task 1. I don't like to set up dedicated due dates because most often you won't be able to comply with them anyway...moving stuff into tomorrow / next week etc. is more simple.

Thus you maybe want to add the possibility to add descriptions (which you can move like tasks).

The pricing of Todoist ( 29$/year) sounds reasonable to me.
FUCK ANDROID
I think you can wear a steel watch around a strong magnet, there will be little magnetic filed penetrating the outer body. AFAIK, gold watches are not recommended.
It's a reference design, doubtful it will reach market. It looks rather generic to me.

How do you know they copied the antenna design? Because the outside rim looks like polished metal?

My phone has a rounded sim card slot and it most definitely does not look like an iPhone. Does Apple own the rounded sim card slot look now? Really?

Speaker grill too? I don't think Apple owns that one either. Although with the iPhone 4s the white ones have a different grill than the black ones for some reason.

I think this "everyone copies Apple" thing has gone far enough.
My book is going to be a lot less relevant if SOPA/PIPA passes
Introduction to configuration management
I can kind of understand their logic. They'll definitely watch the videos of people they're interested, but it'd be somewhat tedious to ask people that they may be interested in to submit a new set of videos. Yeah it might be a bit of a time sink, but putting together a few videos shouldn't take all that long (2-3 hours, tops?)

Plus, you can get a feel for someone after a couple of seconds of video. Even if they don't watch the whole thing, they probably have people screening. Did you know that Paul B looks at the YC application videos before anything else? In any event, think of all the other applications that we spend ages on, where most get very brief reviews.

As for the programmer part - I'll tell you what I'd do. A certain percentage of the 24, I'd take good proven programmers. A smaller portion I'd dedicate to people who don't know advanced programming, but have undeniable potential, and a basic understanding. Because, really, basic code (if, else, while, for) takes an hour at most to learn.

Why? Here's an anecdote: My friend's father was recruiting developers and received among many applications, one whose only previous job experience was delivering pizza, and he didn't have a university degree. He was bored and intrigued, and decided to interview the guy. He turned out amazing. Perhaps they're trying to hedge their risk, while hoping to chance upon someone brilliant :)
Right. We're entering the post PC era. Pretty soon everything will be done on tablets or 'in the cloud.' Neither of which require hard drives.
If the argument is that their presence here makes our country richer, then the more smart Indians that there are in India, the richer that country will become.
As I mentioned above, I agree that that needing to pass maximum message size out of band makes some things more difficult. Whether that was the right tradeoff in terms of convenience vs protocol complexity I think has yet to be seen. At any rate, an extension to perform this in band should be trivial. Perhaps I will try writing one to test out my extension handling code.

I do see your point on the "endless streaming" section of the RFC. Stating that "(section 5.4) The primary purpose of fragmentation is to allow sending a message that is of unknown size when the message is started without having to buffer that message." implies that a web socket implementation should support this sort of operation. Indeed, if you want to support sending messages of unknown size you must expose an interface more complicated than the default message based one.

That said, a message only implementation that does not allow sending unknown sized messages is 100% compliant with both the spec and receiving such messages. The RFC probably could have made this fact more clear. I believe that endless streaming mode will not be a common use case and have not implemented it in my generic WebSocket library. I do believe, however, that fragmentation of messages provides important benefits even without unknown size sends. Once you have message fragmentation there is no additional protocol cost to allow unknown size sends.
I read Cryptonomicon a month or two ago and really enjoyed it. Seemingly serendipitously, a post about encrypting email turned up on Slashdot the other day:(http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/20/0158227/do-slashdotte...) and I realized that with everyone basically using webmail services now, the chance for something like Ordo to take hold at-large is even less (given that fewer and fewer people actually use email clients anymore).

I'd like to fantasize that there could be a way to use a social network like Facebook with a tool like Ordo -- that is, most the data (photos, in this case) you upload to FB is encrypted, and only people who you've approved can decrypt it. Using steganography this is probably already possible with FB, probably not practical, though.
Inclinometer | B MFG. Inc.
R&B MFG. is your source for the best in the business.
I really like it.

Only thing I would like to add is the ability to have multy line tasks. Or more info for a task :)
The WebSocket protocol works for both small and large messages in a single frame (message based), and also small and large frames in multiple fragments (stream based)... It's capable of being used for both. It's a good idea to restrict frame sizes on your application if you know what your limits are.
It's a cost issue usually disguised as a "skilled immigrant" issue. Large companies want technical workers (the new miners and factory workers) who are willing to accept a much lower wage than native workers. So when they talk about "skilled" they usually mean "skilled and willing to work for $40k/year instead of $80k/year".

Just look at how many H1B positions are advertised and how much legal but shady stuff goes on. Put ad in local paper among classifieds for "free dirt available", if any resumes are received from US citizens they are discarded (note they have to be "considered" but not accepted), and so on.

If it was just about "skills" there would be no need for this shit to go on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU&feature=plcp&...
You're the only one bringing up Mexicans. So I'm not sure who you're complaining about.

They're associated, rather than "linked" because, well, they're both immigration driven by a labor shortage.
To be fair :

1,000 applicants x 8 minute videos = 133.33 hours, not 8,000

In addition, it's common knowledge that interview questions - whether in person or on youtube - are crafted for the benefit of the interviewer. i.e.

"what's your biggest weakness?"
"well, I find it hard to delegate (because I'm such an awesomely hard worker, etc)"

This is inevitable, and not a flaw specific to this format.

However, I think your last point is valid.
Realistically, they will be picking people with some background in programming. That said, it's unlikely that applicants to a RoR bootcamp will have absolutely -no- exposure to programming. They might not be professional developers, but I think most of the applicants will have had some exposure to web technology and/or scripting.
Bingo Card Creator (etc) Year In Review 2011
That's really the crux of it.

We can pay the smartest people in the world to work here, or we can pay them to work elsewhere. If they work here, we get the externalities. Hence, no-brainer.
What I do has nothing to do with the article. It is the article claiming that.
True, but besides this there are time constraints to any project where money is on the line. You need to get something out quickly that satisfies the market requirements (which usually start off pretty low when you're first entering said market).

So you build the minimum viable product, measure demand (one measure is how many people care enough to complain about your product being so crappy), and then iterate. If you have lots of unit tests, refactoring becomes a less risky proposition, even to the point of re-architecting large chunks of functionality to meet emergent requirements.

Is it slower than building the perfect product up front? In the long run, yes, but in the meantime, you've already tapped a paying market and have gained valuable insight into how people use your product, which guides your further design refinements in ways that cannot be anticipated up-front. And if it turns out the market is dry, you can fail quickly with less resources invested.

That's not to say you should eschew up-front design, but rather the up-front design should be done with the understanding that you're only going for "good enough" with some suppleness built into your architecture for the inevitable refactoring.
Mono in 2011
For Mobile OS’s, Three’s a Crowd
U. of Colorado buys .xxx domains, but not before brothel owner gets Colorado.xxx
What a mindless and boring rant.
The Hobbit Trailer
I am pretty certain you're correct. Those Moire patterns were the ones you see when a fast image-scaling algorithm is taking every nth pixel, not what you should see with different underlying pixel layouts.

In fact, looking at the iPhone zoom, it's blurred in the middle -- it's absolutely had a filter applied to it. You still see some Moire in the center of the image, but that could be a filter artifact.

You'd need the chart rendered at exactly screen resolution, with proper filtering for that resolution (so that it doesn't end up with Moire patterns inherent in the image), and then to display it using code that's guaranteed not to apply a filter. He seems to be using the built-in slideshow apps in all cases (or maybe a browser?), and it looks like the iOS one has a better scaling filter. Which is interesting, but not what he's trying to prove.

On top of all of that -- his photographic resolution can also be coming into play, adding more Moire patterns than you'd see in person. The lower resolution iPhone screen may not have had as much interference with his camera resolution.

So I'd say it's an article fail.
Picking a random element from a stream
IntelliJ is very good for Scala, more responsive too. One of the intellij plugin updates did get very confused and was falsely highlighting errors in my project, haven't checked for a more recent update, but it was fairly recent. Glad to see the eclipse plugin getting some tlc, since most java devs love using eclipse even in cases where it's not the best choice.
Here's a link to the Stack Overflow question I found this from.

Pretty cool algorithm!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2532218/pick-random-prope...
AKS Primality Test
It's only capable of being used for messages if there's something to guarantee that all hops along the way are going to preserve the message boundaries in ways expected by the application layer. Can the protocol split single messages? Can the protocol merge adjacent messages without reordering?

Unless the protocol specifically guarantees certain behavior and commonly-used systems regularly exercise this guarantee, it's just not going to work reliably when it's needed.

Hearing some of the "works for me" discussion from developers suggests that we're heading for that magic situation where it works 99.9% of the time. I.e., the system looks fine in testing and then fails in mysterious ways (that require deep protocol fixes) in production.

Ideally, implementations of such a protocol would intentionally fragment the messages somewhat if they were not going to guarantee they were atomic. But there are very few developers (and code reviewing managers) enlightened enough to let that kind of thing ship.