skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I miss the most about regexes (and I think is kind of what bermanoid was hinting at) is that we don't have access to much of the expressiveness we usually have available in a programming language. For example, I never saw a widely used regex library that takes advantage of the algebraic structure of regular expressions and that would let me do things like incrementally building regexes or creating named constants:

var regex1 = /some_regex/,
regex2 = /other_regex/;

var regex3 = alternative(regex1, regex2);
var regex4 = kleene_star( sequence(regex1, regex2) );
> Are people driving an article down and flagging it as "inappropriate politically" not because they are trying to keep HN pure but because their own disguised biases are telling them to act that way.

I was banned for an critical comment on Apple. So I can tell you that their biases is not disguised anymore.
> both of which may be improved on-the-fly (e.g., code-on-demand).

It's funny that your'e using this quote to prove your point, when it actually identifies the perfect example that you're looking for.

Image that we have a relatively "dumb" client that can only understand our media type and follow URLs to the next resource. We already agree that this is useful when you have an intelligent actor (human), so let's move on to the part that your'e interested in: "improved on-the-fly".

Let's take our dumb client and add one feature: A Javascript engine. This gives us the "code-on-demand" that Fielding referenced. You can now improve your dumb little client, by adding application logic that can be executed on-the-fly. Your client can now be upgraded to understand new media types, or to change the behavior of interaction with existing media types. And yes, this means the client can be upgraded even when there is no human interaction.

Want a real world example?
I recently wrote a javascript application that automatically runs a set of comprehensive tests on HTTP requests (and their caching properties) and collects the data. I was able to turn the dumb client into a smarter one (for my purposes). It has a single entry point and programmatically follows many different kinds of links. My tests run on approximately 1 billion clients, and I didn't have to update any client software to make that happen. If I want to check the cache behavior of resources behind my business partner's proxy server, guess what: I can upgrade his client (his browser) on the fly to do the testing for me.

Want another real world example?
We used javascript in a webview (dumb client) on mobile platforms to create unit tests for some native functionality. Our dumb client happens to have a bridge to the native code on the mobile device. This allows us to write one set of unit tests in javscript and run it on multiple mobile platforms. This is a great example that falls outside of the standard desktop web browser examples.

So let's take a look at your example.
> In either scenario, the non-human client is just as hard-coded as the other--it's either jumping to external URLs or jumping to internal links.

We were smart enough to develop a dumb client that can execute code on demand. Now let's upgrade our client to validate the input fields _before_ POSTing back to the server. Bam, we just improved our client on-the-fly, without modifying the client software.

So you may be thinking: But how useful is this to me? If I'm developing a new network-based business analysis tool for my company, it's probably not going to run on 1 billion clients. Do I really need to consider hypermedia as engine state and on-the-fly updates? Well no, of course not, that would be overkill. As Fielding put it:

"REST is intended for long-lived network-based applications that span multiple organizations. If you don’t see a need for the constraints, then don’t use them."
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And how are they going to recoup the heavy loses incurred when they release it for free?
I love pandoc too, and there are three things that would make me absolutely giddy if they were added:

1) Proper reference support. In LaTeX you can use things like \ref{fig:foo} to insert autonumbers for things like Figure X and Table Y. (Which is awesome, because if you move a figure, you don't have to change all of your numbers around.) There's no Pandoc markdown equivalent, so this gets lost if I convert to e.g. HTML. I have to work around this with a script that looks for this LaTeX snippet and does the counters before passing to Pandoc.

2) Better footnote output for LaTeX. Right now, if you use a [^foo] footnote mark twice, you will get two \footnote{}'s in your LaTeX (and therefore a repeated footnote message in your output) instead of a \footnotemark for the second one.

3) Better metadata. Both Jekyll and MMD are so much more flexible about the metadata you add at the top of a document; Pandoc seems to think the only items I'll ever need are author, title, and date. If I could only add things like addresses, enclosures, salutation lines, and extra variables my templates could adjust to, I could produce more sensible templates for formats like business letters.
The problem is that he wanted to show it in classrooms.

Most teenagers aren't going to bother to go watch a documentary on their own time (speaking as a teenager, most of my peers probably wouldn't).

Also, not everyone is going hear about this movie. If it is shown in classrooms, way more kids will get to watch it.

Edit: Here's the relevant quote: "That's a problem for producer Harvey Weinstein, who had lobbied for a PG-13 label so he could tour the film in middle and high schools"
If PATCH even has a remote chance of breaking 0.01% of sites, then WHY do it? PUT works fine. I don't care.

Well, this "if it even remotely breaks 0.01%" and "I don't care" attitude is the main reason things get bloated and stop progressing.
This is not completely true. There are other questions that will probe the candidates design skills, and ability to think about more complex problems.

One of the things that gets passed between interviewers is sheet of paper listing the questions that were asked by the previous interviewers. If I note that the previous interviewers have asked a lot of coding questions, I'll often assume that those interviewers have already covered that, and will ask questions that are more centered around design, and how the candidate goes about thinking about a bigger picture problem.
When is the last time you upgraded your operating system, bought a new computer, or bought a new car?

The pace of technological evolution is exponential, not linear. http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

We have to operate on a day-to-day basis, not a cosmological one. We should apply current scientific knowledge on a large scale immediately.

* Cars/transportation -- Where Robot Cars (Robocars) Can Really Take Us http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

* natural language -- Problems with natural language for requirements specification http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Books/SE9/Web/Requiremen...

* government -- Politicians Are Not Trained To Solve Problems http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvoh2vsQSI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I9-MJKQ4c&feature=relat...

* economics -- ARE ECONOMICS A SCIENCE OF TRUTH OR AN IDEOLOGY OF POWER? http://www.futuremagazine.net/economicsiencie.html

* agriculture -- Urban Farming: Hydroponics in the City http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcBCcSLDlo

* manufacturing -- Hod Lipson on Programmable Matter: Shape of Things to Come http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmPLeQLdfPA

* humans -- not really quite outdated yet, but soon. Jeopardy! IBM Watson Day 2 (Feb 15, 2011) Part 2/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYchgv5dMM&feature=relat...

* infrastructure -- Evacuated Tube Transport http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dK_yxaKvk
I agree. In general, I find the task of "introduce yourself to a specific person" or "make a specific case for something" much much easier than "talk to people about nothing in particular", if only because there is always a specific goal that I keep in mind while talking. So long as I deliver a presentation well and impart all the main ideas, it's going well. I find that small talk is impossible to handle like that because it's too random and there is no specific easy-to-see criterion of success or failure. Others simply paying attention could indeed mean politeness rather than interest.

Staying quiet, I feel, has the unfortunate side effect of making me seem asocial, and I am not quite sure that it is a viable thing to do in a social situation.
There are native torrent clients for a staggering variety of devices. If you can get an IRC client on it, why not a torrent client? Even your old J2ME dumbphones have one[1].

____________________

1. http://amorg.aut.bme.hu/projects/mobtorrent
Independent filmmakers should embrace the Louis CK model and charge a small amount of money, ie. $5, and have it distributed to people directly. I can't imagine they would make a lot of money through movie theatres anyway. If they start the movie with the idea of distributing it that way, maybe they can control the costs at the beginning, and make a cost-effective, but compelling video that people are willing to pay for.
There's a lot of hate in your lite. Looks like you know nothing about economy or history. Stop talking about war and read a book, because all the stuff you said is nonsense and all your theories are wrong mate. There's democracy in Argentina since 1983. And when there's democracy problems get solved by diplomats, not soldiers.
HFCS 55% fructose 45% glucose

Sucrose (regular sugar) 50% fructose 50% glucose

Not much of a difference.
So would it not be possible to mix capturing and non-capturing groups in the same regex? That's useful to do if you have code that expects specific things to be captured at specific group indices, and you need to add grouping somewhere else in the regex without messing it up.
I found it at least as relevant as articles on how to take better naps, which get plenty of upvotes.
For legal reasons, most employers will tell interviewers not to reveal any information at all about how you did. Unfortunately, the US is a highly litigious society, with lots and lots of lawyers egging people to sue over just about anything....
I would say it's more zune/wp7 inspired than gmail inspired.

Both are minimalistic, but the icons, colors, shapes and white space feels very much like zune/wp7.
Thank you all for your insightful comments. I do feel a little better and more informed. I will try to write an unofficial summary using what others (mostly the official wordings from Googlers (sigh)) have said, mainly for people in the same boat as me.

1. You don't have to be from an Ivy League university to get recruited by them. Yay.

2. Internal references are very very important for both getting recruited and getting feedback after the interview.

3. Getting recruited by Google can be very very competitive at times (not necessarily always), and you can be unlucky enough to be interviewing in those times.

4. There is no easy solution to the shallow feedback problem, which sucks very much for the candidate, but I guess threads like this can help you get some insight into the process and the very many variables involved in the recruitment decision.
Show HN: My windows phone app for 30tolaunch, On This Day...
The selectivity numbers I've heard for the whole process are about 1:2000, with about an order of magnitude decrease for each stage of the process (resume screen, phone screen, in-person interview, hire).

Keep in mind that like most statistics, these are misleading. Google gets a lot of applications from people who just want to work at Google and have no relevant skills, or who may be friends/SOs of current employees, or who ping their local Googler on Reddit or HN to submit their resume. These go into the system because who knows, we may find a gem, but realistically they have about 0 chance of being hired.

Getting to the in-person interview stage basically means we have reason to believe that you're a competent software engineer, but the acceptance rate is still something like 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 from that point. It's tougher than getting into Harvard and roughly on par (perhaps a bit easier) than getting into YCombinator.
Kids’ Bedding After the Wedding
Are you new to the family oriented lifestyle? Did you just bring a little bundle of joy into the world? Or did you marry into a preexisting family and are now trying to figure out what this change of lifestyle is going to entail?
I learned how to program windows phone and submitted my app On This Day... Please take a look and let me know what you think.

It turned out to be a very pleasant programming experience, I highly recommend anyone to try out writing a win phone app.

Even better, Nokia sent me a new Lumia 800, totally worth the effort.
Ask HN: Quantum Computers - the Future?
As a high school senior starting college next semester, I'm doing a lot of looking forward for careers that will explode in numbers and usefulness. Quantum computing seems, to me, like it will dramatically change the world in the next 10-20 years, much like the PC revolution did. Am I wrong in this assumption? Would it be unwise to major in something as specific as computer engineering and quantum physics?
Use coco instead of coffee-script
It's enough of a difference that Mexican coke is flatter and tastes sweeter than the HFCS flavor.
While I totally agree with the ideas you've described from an academic point of view, I don't that they adequately consider the human side of consuming APIs.

Yeah, it'd be awesome if we could all consume APIs with standard interfaces using Content-Types, however I don't think the current solution is realistic or even good for innovation.

Having to define a Content-Type like "application/vnd.my-service+json" and submit it to a standards body and then approved like described in Amundsen's book is hardly practical or desirable.

The standards process today sucks (see the CSS prefix debate for a prime example) (and, I'm not claiming I can do better, just making an observation)

The way I see it, defining types in a JSON format to help with type-marshalling until that format is successful and thus merits standardization is far more effective at promoting innovation than starting with submission to a standards body so that everyone can comment on (i.e. bikeshed) about a format until it gains acceptance.

There is a an interesting dynamic between pragmatism and academics, but I think it would be best for the academics to actively move the pragmatics towards the ideal instead of staying in an ivory tower and letting the pragmatics take twice as long to discover the "pure" solution.

RESTish solutions should become RESTful through standardization into a proper media type. Maybe the RESTful solution is derived from the coordinated cooperation of several participants with RESTish solutions.

Acknowledging and adopting the human element is likely to move things forward far faster than a steadfast insistence on being pure. We could probably have far more useful media types if we assumed that formats eventually become a media type once they become popular enough. Pave the cowpaths.

Anyways, not arguing with your comment. I agree with most of what you said and ot was enlightening. Just saying, that it'd be great if people actively considered the fact that human beings are involved when discussing ideas. Ideas are great, but they mean nothing if you can't humans to go along with them.
Like, the article said, the reason this R rating is damaging is that the filmmaker wanted to show this movie in schools.

"That's a problem for producer Harvey Weinstein, who had lobbied for a PG-13 label so he could tour the film in middle and high schools"
Friendly criticism:

The background are really distracting (and not very aesthetically pleasing). There is not enough contrast with the light colored links. These two things combined make the whole sight difficult to read.
Thanks for the comment. I've been watching shark tank for a couple of years now and it's interesting to hear what it's actually like on the inside.
lol, I'm with you on this one wslh.
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Thanks for the HN love. This is actually one of my side projects. I'm a character and type geek and use this as a place to experiment and play with the data. Really glad to see other people find it interesting.

Let me know about anything that would make it more useful. I've kept it pretty minimal so it's easy to change things.

There are lots of little features that aren't immediately obvious, like user profiles: http://graphemica.com/people/alphabetum Also, cool stuff on the cjk characters, including definitions: http://graphemica.com/戰
When I was 14 I bought certain magazines down in Chinatown and sold them to a bunch of my friends at Catholic Schools. I made over $9000 in 3 months. BUT then a little thing called the internet came along...
Upgraders are a case where someone may be doing there homework and get confused, yes. Luckily most upgraders have a local techie in the family who can guide them. When it comes to Anytime Upgrade, Microsoft does a pretty good job of directing you to what you should upgrade to and why.

I give all my thanks to the proliferation of laptops in the consumer world. Laptops are junk, all of them, no matter how long the hardware lasts. They cannot be upgraded hardware wise, and the vendor will stop supporting older models for drivers and software updates. Combine that with slowing hardware, and you might as well just buy a new laptop every 2-5 years, solving the upgrade problem.

I don't view tablets as a point where A) anyone could have reliably predicted their explosive growth or B) desktop software will remain dominant. It's not that Windows didn't innovate enough to keep up with tablets, its that people decided smartphones were good enough. It remains to be seen if people keep up on that approach.

The desktop is dying, and it has been for a long time. Technology moves on. Terminals stopped being the in-thing, just as mainframes, UNIX, and DOS. When a formerly dominant technology is gone the competitors didn't kill it, time did. Time will kill everything. Linux is in a state of extreme renovation (though still lagging behind in some areas) and OSX is no spring chicken anymore. Microsoft is the only vendor who seems to be defending their core business from the onslaught of consumerization. Apple seems content to just let the desktop die (MS has had radically different XP, Vista/7, and now Win8 while Apple just has the same decade-old OSX), and if iOS doesn't make some changes to keep up with Android and Windows Phone, everything they have will crumble.
I agree with your sentiment, but I think the advice has some merit in the sense that if you have an offer that might be the difference between life and death of your company, it is probably not the best decision to fight over 5% of equity. Of course, 40% vs. 90% is a different ball of wax.

On another front, I think the best part of the show (I'm a fan) is that it shows how much leverage shifts from investor to entrepreneur when the entrepreneur has built a real company (usually means has sales on the show). In those cases, the investors often fall over themselves and compete giving the entrepreneur a better deal then they came in asking for.

There is a great lesson in there for entrepreneurs to focus on building something valuable first and then raising money. Because when you don't need it to survive, the negotiating leverage and power totally changes.
If only the desktop version was sold at a reasonable cost, I think they would make more money.
Here in Louisville, the tiny grocery down the street sells it for $1/bottle, not even a particularly Mexican area. Lot of coffee shops here have it too for a bit more.
Feedback noted. The reason some characters are missing is because I haven't had time to update it to include the new Unicode 6 characters. I'll do it ASAP.
For Reddit, you should check out the Reddit Enhancement Suite[1]. It shows you a realtime preview of the post as it'll show up.

[1]: http://redditenhancementsuite.com/
See also the lengthy GitHub discussions about this issue:

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/348

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/431

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/505

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5130
In Portland, OR they can be found in convenience stores and Walmarts for 99 cents/bottle. If I recall correctly, the employee-owned Winco food stores carry them for 88 cents. I haven't checked to see if anyone will give a price break for buying a case at a time. (Proof I guess that I'm not a Mexican Coke addict ... yet.)
It does. But it beats catching a cold or flu every couple of months.

And it's not as if hand-washing is some kind of crazy placebo:

In a research published by British Medical Journal on November 2007, physical barriers, such as regular handwashing and wearing masks, gloves and gowns, may be more effective than drugs to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses such as influenza and SARS... Handwashing and wearing masks, gloves and gowns were effective individually in preventing the spread of respiratory viruses, and were even more effective when combined... Another study, published in the Cochrane Library journal on 2007, finds handwashing with just soap and water to be a simple and effective way to curb the spread of respiratory viruses, from everyday cold viruses to deadly pandemic strains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_washing_with_soap#Disease...
I apologize in advance for being a pedant but since you do say you find it interesting, "pas besoin" is used in the context of [subject] don't/doesn't need [noun] rather than in the sense of having "no needs" which would be written "pas de besoin".
We seem to have different ideas of progress. To my eye Rails is picking up bloat like there's no tomorrow and happily adopting questionable decisions like the above. Meanwhile fundamental issues remain largely unaddressed.

There's still serious performance regressions.

The asset pipeline is still sort of a trainwreck.

There's still no automation for schema migrations (perhaps hobo fields will finally bring some relief for those who adopt it).

They still don't seem to have realized that code generators are a no-go.

I see zero efforts towards modernizing the bloated routing and MVC cruft to accomodate modern fat-clients (and imho the "resources"-magic was a terrible idea from the start even for regular apps).

The whole thing is still riddled with ungodly amounts of magic that likes to break in unpredictable ways (my pet bug: the monkey-patch to really suppress browser stack-traces in production changes about every 3 months and it's worrying such a bug was deliberately created in first place).

I could go on for a while...
</rant>