skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Review my Startup: (mobile) Programming w/o Coding for everyday people
Hi HN,

We are a small team of brothers working in Munich (Germany) and San Francisco. We put a lot of work in our startup proxxler.com during the last two years. With Proxxler we want to give non-programmers a platform for app creation without learning a programming language or installing SDKs. Our builder allows you to use ready-built components as well as to implement some logic in a visual script editor. Currently, you can create Android apps (and install them directly to your device) as well as Flash apps for your Facebook stream.

We even hope, this can be helpful for teaching kids and high schoolers basic programming skills. Not too geeky and with a direct result that can be shared with friends.

Thanks HN!
Marco

http://www.proxxler.com

PS: We still have some accounts for our alpha test left. For the first 50 HN users mailing us (contact [@] proxxler.com, use 'HackerNews' in subject) we will give direct access to the service. Additionally, you can register on the site for beta testing, which will start in a couple of months.
Smart Ruby constants
At first I thought that taxi companies would use the vehicles, but now I think it is more realistic that zip car would be first (or someone like them) since not everyone will be fast to adopt and may be uncomfortable riding.in one. Then over time the economics will force cab companies to switch at which point it will be a mature market.

Bschool professors will talk about how cab companies made the wrong strategic choice even though it will really be the only option and one essentially predetermined.

Personally, I can't wait!
We started out with pjax (which is awesome) but ended up rolling our own framework called Stacker which lets us have complete control over the UI.
As an app developer, I'd love to not write custom code for each photo sharing service. This seems to require using the chute hosted platform, though. Can the library be used without the service?
Is the miniKanren talk available somewhere?
Show HN | Gmelius, Towards a Cleaner Gmail (Chrome extension)
No Jobs? Learn to Code (my new post)
Yes, I'm actually checking to see if it contains a plain gcc compiler (like Xcode 4.1 did), currently the llvm-gcc that is symlinked with /usr/bin/gcc with Xcode 4.2 doesn't work too well with software from rvm and homebrew.

edit:
I just pulled down the Unix developer tools, it comes with llvm-gcc and clang. /usr/bin/gcc is symlinked with llvm-gcc. Any packages that need plain gcc will not work with the "command-line-tools-for-xcode.dmg" install. We'll have to keep using something like OSX-GCC-Installer (https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer) for now.

Anyway, this is a positive move for those of us who want to be able to use Xcode and also need/want a normal gcc installation on the same machine.
Windows allows some, I've had to mess with it in the past. Mac OS X allows all the command line network configuration you would expect of a BSD, since, well, it basically is a BSD, while at the same time having a great, user-friendly configuration interface for the 80% case.

I don't care about your mother, she shouldn't be on the command line in the first place, and if she were with nmcli, you'd still have to explain all those terms to her (and they're very basic terms, I refuse to believe your mother is actually that stupid, mine sure isn't).

You've entirely missed the point -- repeatedly. Your mother gets to configure from a friendly GUI limited to the functionality she needs, but anyone who needs anything more advanced is screwed out of it because they can't have the GUI and direct access to underlying functionality, because the former actively impedes the latter. This is a uniquely Desktop Linux state of affairs, no other OS behaves like that.
Also, having a parking place at work for both cars (husband and wife) is also very costly.
On the site itself, you need some words for those "Supported services" icons. I know the first is Facebook; the second I think is Flickr; the third is Picasa; I have no clue what #4 is.
Harvard’s Liberal-Arts Failure Is Wall Street’s Gain
Why Startups Should Care About Content Marketing
Or your car could drive to a high voltage charging station downtown to recharge. When you need to do more than daily commuting you just rent a normal car.
Does anyone have any facts on the case? What software did he write, where was it released, which website used it, and what evidence was presented for the other charges?
Yesterday I started working on a "panes" page for a project and I think shifting the pane so it appears like a stacked paper make a lot of sense after seeing it in action.
My thoughts exactly. How about:

Does it have closures and functions-as-object passing? (amazing feature of js)

Does it support prototypal inheritance? (also great)

I honestly don't know if Dart does these two, but they're pretty important to me. Does anyone know?

Edit: after a little research it looks like the answers are "Yes" and "No". I'd be willing to try it then.
And version two would remove the button. Why would you want to turn it off?
Apparently those of us who feel this way are dwindling in number.
The project source is available at https://github.com/marcelduran/yslow
I don't know why this was downvoted. It's true. That's part of the reason why people love Google. They can do ~everything~ from it.
Royal Palm Beach storm panels
Google owns duck.com. Shouldn't it belong to DuckDuckGo?
They got it in the On2 acquisition and haven't used it since, except to make it redirect to google.com.

I mean, sure, they can do with it whatever they want. It just strikes me as being a bit anti-"Don't be evil" and it'd be good policy if they at least made a secret deal to transfer it or whatnot or transfer it covertly and quietly through a third party.

And surely it's better than avoiding bad press if DuckDuckGo ever becomes mainstream-popular.
I dont understand why they would drop out of school for this.
Seems like its been done before and the appeal is supposed to be that it doesnt drain your battery as fast ?

I think they need some new features or something to pull people from Loopt, Tagged, etc. I dont see why they couldnt do this while in school. To each their own though
It's good to see alternative web programming languages! I hope the other browsers will add support for Dart and that other languages will follow.
Game Terraria linked to terrorist bombing or clueless?
Perhaps it's because Gruber is aware that Apple wasn't putting on a Q&A session. They rarely do, and when they do, they let you know, in clear terms.

And who knows? Gruber may have asked about Siri on OS X, or may have been told about a host of other features but was asked not to publish them. You don't exactly want to go and do that if you want any hope of being invited to future dog n' pony shows.
i was taught to do that back in the early 80s by a couple VCs i worked for at that time. i've done it ever since.
Agreed. Love the idea but having another external dependency is worrying. I'd rather something akin to OmniAuth
Adding an APK. Will update with a link in a few minute.
Can anyone confirm/deny this?
Interesting juxtaposition of articles like this saying 'coders are the future' and the articles on India saying 'coders are not programmers'. I think the tech talent shortage is more about programmers than coders, but its not at all clear that everyone agrees.
Solve for X: Neal Stephenson talk on getting big stuff done
One thing to be wary of: abandoning the Mac App Store is going to make life much harder for you and your users in the near future. As of OS X 10.8, by default applications cannot be installed outside of the App Store (though a setting exists to change this):

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/16/os-x-mountain-lion/ (scroll down to Gatekeeper)

Here's hoping that 10.9 doesn't disallow such installations at all (or void your warranty instead?).
So, 2 hours of sleep at most?
I agree with you and at our company we try to follow that as much as we can, but we can see other companies doing this kind of stuff and succeeding with it. They are able to generate massive email lists and most of people will never complain or report spam so... It really makes me wonder.
I doubt Iran cares about anything UN has to say.
Inside Europe’s Largest Text Pirate Site
Sure, let me give some further implementation detail.

We were inspired by https://github.com/dmitry-dedukhin/lightweight-uploader, particularly the js implementation from Dmitry.

It turned out, however, that the simple flow control he implemented was not adaptive enough to simultaneously accommodate both low-latency/low bandwidth and high-latency/high-bandwidth connection.

For resumeable uploads to work efficiently for both cases, we implemented TCP/IP-style congestion control (e.g. slow start window size scaling and exponential back-off retry timeout), but over http POST requests instead of UDP packet sends.
Can I have access?? Sounds pretty amazing
The bigger issue to me is that there isn't a second test. You can't just send the samples off to the lab and let them culture for a few days. What's the point of making someone take this blood test if they still have to fill out the mental health questionnaire anyways?
the real way we got homebrew in the wii in the first place was because of a awful RSA implementation done by outsourced devs in the USA.

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2799.en.h...
Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew
It's usually helpful to include a demo with these things :)
What Linsanity Has Done to MSG's stock
Will Basecamp Next use application/xhtml+xml now that it has no IE8 support?
I thought of that article too, I think we need more of everything - coders, programmers, it will fuel entrepreneurship if more people will have the tools to do more with what we already know.
What a day. First the OS X Mountain Lion Preview and now a Basecamp Next UI Preview. Both look great!
x64 is only an issue if you do native interop.

Profiling is solved by using ANTS profiler.
Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire
Pls send an email to contact [at] proxxler.com including "HackerNews" in the subject.
My guess is that we will have a very efficient Taxi system. Using a Smart Phone you will be able to request a Taxi where ever you are; it will already know your favorite locations; your favorite music; it will automatically charge you; we will not need so much parking space.
just the legal question; if I drive with a family and autocar will smash into me, killing my children and wounding me so I cannot walk or work, who is going to be liable? car manufacturer, producer of the tires, software engineers house, or GPS system? Could see 20 years of litigation between all parties involved before I get a dime for recovery, or probably die first.
Like most sane people we have abandoned the idea of XHTML in favor of HTML 5.
Sorry, buddy. missed that part
I built it mostly because my biz partner and I wanted to know when a file changed in a shared folder. We use markdown a lot for meeting minutes, discussions, etc...and sometimes i missed (or just didn't pay attention) to growl on my mac.

This way I had a persisted copy so it reminded to check out the changes.

Dropbox only has a RSS feed for activity that I just wouldn't pay attention to either.

Any feedback is much appreciated. Just a small side project.
That's not quite true - as shown in your link, gatekeeper's default (at least for now :) is to allow App Store as well as Signed Applications. If a developer is willing to get their application signed, then end users will still be able to install the application outside of the app store.
So I can't patent 'x=x+1', but I can patent a "system, method, and computer-readable medium for incrementing the value of a variable by one"?
Oh, you've seen that? Cool! The iOS stuff was fun. Thanks for watching :)
Methinks that for a critique of someone's writing this is the wrong forum.

Which wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't for the fact that shooting the messenger and/or his writing style seems to be a treatment exclusively reserved for Gruber. These kneejerk reactions to one particular blogger are pathetic and belong on Reddit, not HN.
Couple questions: How are you making money off this (that is, will you be making money off my users)? Obviously you've put a lot of work into it, and it looks really great.

Also, can you select multiple images at once? Can you select video as well?
I think this is more likely. Living in cities is desirable because you have a vibrant and 'close' community, it is undesirable because its hard to drive and if you do own a car its under utilized.

One of the interesting effects on this might be 'non-bus' cars. Which is to say public transit as a fleet of say 'four person' self driving cars where you walk to a bus top and touch your transit car and one shows up and picks you up. You tell it where you want to go and it takes you there.

It of course destroys the taxi business quite completely. But combines all manner of public transit into a single service which gets economies of scale. Dynamic electric cars would be fine (where they have an electric 'boom' like trains in Europe do).
The stupidity of this article will be more visible, directly proportional to the time since its publication.
Execute a function given its name as a string
Apple’s Gatekeeper is for Security — but not yours
How about flooding Twitter with mentions to @chavezcandanga, asking him to ask the Iranian president to do something about this? They're very close, and his twitter account is really active. I just tweeted him this link.
as a developer I think this is awesome! It would be awesome if apps like instagram, Path used this
I don't know, seemed obvious to me. The fourth is Instagram.
You have no clue what "instagram" is ?
There's two ways you can use patents for defense:

1) patent it before the other guy does, so the troll has nothing to sue you with, and

2) patent everything and hope that one of your patents overlaps with the troll's.
I'm looking forward to helping out with this. Thanks Mike for kicking off this project!
This is a beautiful example of a state, in desperate need of revenue, supporting legislation that encourages businesses to start up without increasing/decreasing taxes.

Now if only the US could do the same thing with stem cells.
12. iPad. Windows has had tablets since 2001.

The focus on feature-by-feature comparisons is why Apple is cleaning everyone's clock. I wrote this 2 years ago when the iPad came out (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025200):

-------

In my head, I call this the "blender" comparison that many technophiles seem to use.

Want to compare two meals? Put them in the blender and analyze the nutritional content of the resulting goop.

What? You don't compare food by spec sheets? (Calories, vitamins, carbs, proteins). What are these subjective "texture, taste, style, temperature, presentation" variables you care about? They offer little or no nutritional difference!
We are, indeed, using only the HTML5 File API and javascript for this feature.
I've pushed the test functionality too, they work well enough in a few preliminary tests, but they need a lot more testing.

If anyone wants to write any unit tests, I would be happy to merge them into trunk.
Just wondering if you can elaborate on what made your job a nightmare.
Sounds like a YC company in the making! In all seriousness, there will be some great business opportunities here. It will open up an entirely new market.
Yes, the lunar orbit of the command module was not far about the lunar surface. That means that when the command module was in the part of its orbit that passed near the part of the Moon where the lander was, the pilot was not far from other people.

However, half an orbit later, he'd be all the way on the other side of the Moon from the nearest people. That's considerably more than a few hundred miles.
I have pushed the index code, now it uses the best available index for each query. I will need to test it more extensively, though.
One of Dart's design goals is to be able to be compiled to efficient Javascript. That does limit some of the choices that the language designers can make, but it means that there should be good performance on all modern browsers.

The VM presumably takes advantage of the slightly less dynamic nature of Dart to make more agressive optimizations than V8.
Every language under the sun has closures and first class function objects now (Even C if you count llvm-specific extensions, and Java if you count one method interfaces as a suitable workaround until version 8).

Also, Javascript's version of prototypal inheritance isn't very good. Name me one thing you can do well with Javascript's inheritance that you can't do well in any other dynamic language with some notion of objects having property dictionaries (Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, etc.).
It's not just your girlfriend's computer that will be a problem for you -- it's _any_ other computer.

Personally, I think it was a big mistake for Apple to do this. I find it very un-intuitive. Even if the design of the way windows scroll was ultimately an arbitrary decision, it's ingrained now. I think it was silly to change it.
Frank, I definitely understand your concern.

I think the primary challenge with a pure native code solution is that each library works a slightly different way and not all will make it possible to trap the callback directly.

As these APIs change and evolve, we'll be constantly monitoring them and adjusting server side - as opposed to having to change your mobile client code.

Looking forward, we're also planning to do a lot to help speed up this process and enhance it with other features and services.
Blog spam - http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/tech-preview-of-chromium-wi...
First, I assume by the time that self-driving cars are mass produced we will also have affordable fully-electric cars. Second, I think you mean anthropogenic not anthromorphic ;)...probably.
The icons look very clean, simple layout yet effective layout, and quite glad to see such a reasonable price :)

I noticed only 49 icons are showing on the front page image, yet the site says 55 though?
Is the Nevads government subsidizing research into self driving cars with tax money? If not, than I see no parallel to stem cells.

For the last 10 years or more, you're welcome to do anything you want with stem cells. Go crazy. You just haven't been able to get tax money to fund it, if the stem cells happened to be embryonic.
Apparently there was a change to (or at least a change in the interpretation of) the law - I got the same email. Also found it mentioned here: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/amazon-web-services-collect-sal...
On a project page, the text area is like HN comments. Too wide and hard to read. Why not introduce a right-handed sidebar on the project page for just the basic navigation: Discussions, Todos, Files, Documents.
Hey, thank you so much for the information. I hope you don't mind to share a little bit more (it's okay if you don't reply due to IP or whatnot, I'll understand).

How do you handle where to put the files on which disks? do you write custom software or there's some sort of off-the-shelf software to do this?

The reason I asked about this is because it looked like a few people I talked to seem to prefer to use Distributed File System such as HBase, GlusterFS or something else so that they don't have to write extra code.

And I'm guessing you back them all up on daily base as well?
Parenscript looks neat! I'm blatantly starting a new project because I feel like I can only materialize my vision if its built from the ground up. Think of it more as a research project at this point (though it works well). It would take too long to change existing projects (but who knows, I might be doing that in the future).

My main complaint about Parenscript is it's too Javascript inspired. I don't want the "return" statement. Parenscript also seems to have no interest in compiling out to other languages, like Lua.
Email sent, but for other readers' reference, shots taken in anon chrome:

ddg:
http://i.minus.com/iKakLPppwCv14.jpg

google:
http://i.minus.com/iZvY24AxfnHRR.jpg
Lowercase k stands for kilo; K stands for Kelvin (as long as we're being pedantic).
Well said. And, I agree. I didn't even think of enhancing an existing basic JS slider with additional animations using CSS3.

I'm still not sure if I'll switch from SlidesJS to Sequence, just because I am quite familiar with the SlidesJS source. But, definitely good work by ianlunn--I'm going to attempt a similar effect with SlidesJS sometime soon.
Clever use of location and user-agent data
If anybody from Stripe reads this, do you guys have a better resolution version of your logo I can swap in?
FYI, the latest update to Final Cut Pro X was a major update, adding impressive multicam support which uses "audio waveforms from the different cameras to sync them together. The audio doesn't have to be the final production track and can be used for syncing purposes only,"[1] chroma keying, media relinking, import of photoshop layered graphics, support for XML 1.1, and beta broadcast support. This new update has an average review score of 4.5 stars Mac App Store.[2] While Final Cut Pro X started out weak, it looks like it's becoming very solid.

[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/31/apple-updates-final-cut-pro-x...
[2] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/final-cut-pro/id424389933?mt=...
Do we really need yet another discussion of this? http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=duck.com
I've yet to read Nevada's regulations, but having it be the same as for regular cars would make the most sense. In an isolated accident, the operator's insurance company is liable. If there's a fundamental flaw with the cars, the manufacturer issues a recall. It's far more likely that an inattentive human driver will smash into a driverless car than the reverse, though.
That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.

Seems to me that not everyone at Apple was thrilled with the one-man spectacle that Jobs made the company into. I'd wager that most of the executives (especially Forstall) are going to raise their public profiles in the coming years in an attempt to use the rather high launching pad that is Apple to make a mark. Under Jobs that wasn't easy.
Any plans to open source Stacker?
Actually that's incorrect. You can't install completely unsigned applications from the web in 10.8 without changing a setting, but the default isn't the "Only MAS" option, it's the "MAS + identified developers" option.

So while you can abandon the App Store without penalty, you shouldn't stop paying Apple the $99 a year you need to do so to get the app signed, even if you aren't going to sandbox it or distribute it through the MAS. They just want the option of pulling a cert for a dev found to be distributing malware, not to personally review and reject every application that runs in OS X.
Maybe. I find that if the code I'm working with is decently written (i.e. paired on, done via decent TDD or BDD), then the need for a debugger rarely arises.
one possibility is today's system - whoever owns the car (whether it's a private individual, a cab company, or the city) will pay for insurance, and that insurance will pay out to cover any damages.

Now, what happens if there's a bug in the software, causing a lot of damage at once? Can the insurance sue the programmers to recover losses? Probably; but at the least, the victims should be paid promptly by the insurance contract, without the need to wait for a court settlement.