skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about improving coffeescript language? I tested in on a small project recently and run into lot of ugly edge cases, where I had to read the generated code to find out that coffeescript compiled code differently than my expectations were?

example: http://t.co/omIdeNGA (jQuery chaining)

# I'd expect these two blocks ...

$output
.html 'a'
.prepend renderedHtml

$output
.html ('a')
.prepend renderedHtml

# ... to generate exactly same code as this:

$output
.html('a') # you cannot put whitespace or omit parentheses here - but in other places, you are guided to remove them and use spaces
.prepend renderedHtml

Coffeescript:

$output.html('a'.prepend(renderedHtml));

$output.html('a'.prepend(renderedHtml));

$output.html('a').prepend(renderedHtml);
SkyMarshal, check out a new game called Code Hero. It's a game that teaches kids how to control Unity 3D env with code.

Their team just raised 170k on Kickstarter and they have the beta ready for download.

http://primerlabs.com/download

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero-a-ga...
Combine the best of both worlds and host a giant rave with solder stations and lots of whiteboards.

Use an ambisonic rig and have tunable quiet spots for all the half-deaf rocket scientists.
The best case scenario is to find someone when the idea is in its nascent stages. That way the product can be developed with the market and consumer in mind, specifically how it's going to get to the consumer. Tweaks can be made along the way so the the product has a more perfect market fit. Then marketing is easier because, with that person on board, ideally lots pf testing has been done to see if the product ideally fits the marketplace's demand. If consumers don't really want it, then no amount of marketing will help them to buy it. And rarely does creating a fully birthed product and only then thinking, "Ok, now who wants to buy this and how do we get it to them?" ever work.

I say, find someone non-technical or someone who focuses on this from the beginning as a co-founder. Having all hackers means sometimes people can get lost in the trees of coding without even remembering what forrest they're in. Tons and tons of exceptions to this rule obviously but certainly what I've seen. Also, it's much tougher to bring a product to a marketing person that hasn't been throughly market tested and tweaked thereof, and simply say, "Ok, now you do the rest." The market and consumers should always, always be in anyone's mind the entire time they're creating a product.

Also. There are tons of non-technical types with wealths of experience in business, marketing, etc etc. on HN. I being one of them :) Hell, I think it's near impossible to find programmers since I don't run in programmer/hacker circles. So we always have the same question of where the hell do you find a great, technical co-founder who's a compliment to yourself. It's all a bit like dating I suppose.....
"Yes, try to aim for a job you enjoy. But if you can't secure that dreamy job where work feels like play every day, all hope is not lost."

As they always say, "Life is a journey, not a destination." I admire how you strike a balance between work and play, which I have found it to be really difficult to achieve. My approach to this is to give my best shot in every thing I do. How would you know if something is not suitable unless you put in the extra effort? This has benefited me thus far and I am proud to have discovered my passion (even before I finish college).

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to tackling life's toughest problems. One has to be willing to take the leap of faith and explore his or her own purpose in life. The speaker has merely presented his own take on life and we can choose to learn from it, or not. But ultimately, take everyone's advice with a pinch of salt and listen to your heart :)
I honestly don't care if you can provide his social security number. Can you please not drag this crap into Hacker News?

(also, good god, how many aliases do you have...)
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that, depending on the stock vs. cash split (I guess we'll see in the S-1 eventually), the acquisition not only knocks out a potentual competitor/keeps bigger competitors away from Instagram, gains a talented team and a cool product, but also acts as a pre-IPO liquidation event. Instagram now has at least ~10% of Facebook's 2011 revenue banked.
It depends. Most seem to hover in the neighborhood of around $.01 – .02 per word; take someone like this guy, who I've thought about hiring: http://www.mikesirota.com/fees.htm . A typical novel will run about 85,000 words, so he'll probably charge about $1500. I think these guys: http://www.bookdocs.com/ charge similar prices. If you want to publish a 250,000-word epic fantasy novel, that's obviously going to cost more.

How about cover art?

About $500: http://www.extendedimagery.com/info.html . You can probably find people charging more money or less.

This is a topic of great interest to me because I'm probably going to take the plunge in the next six months, if not sooner.
Almost exactly what I was going to say. I have a team of employees that work in San Francisco. I work from home in Annapolis, MD, on the opposite side of the country.

I don't see them often enough and while I certainly love my co-workers, I try to pack as much face time in whenever I'm on their side of the country as I'm able.

If I'm there for a conference, it's because I want to learn, or be enriched by whatever the conference is offering -- but I can bet that for certain I'll be hanging out late with the peeps I don't get to see enough as well.
Infinite scroll needs to die a fire. The devs that write infinite scrolling that also lacks jumping ability, page linking or "skip to end", deserve to be set ablaze in the same fire. What a nightmare. I feel like even rudimentary testing with insufficient dummy data would reveal massive UX regressions.

And why oh why are people still writing Javascript that uses hashbangs? Educate yourself, use pushState.

(And the new Google Groups is arguably the worst of Google's redesigns. It takes a measurable 2-3 seconds when hitting the [<-] arrow to go back from a thread to the group, not to mention it's the worst examples of both of these issuses).
How much Javascript have you written?

This has dynamic closure. Everything else has lexical closure.

Vars can be declared inside a block but it has no effect, because they are always scoped to the nearest function.

Variables must be declared with var, or they will still work but they will be scoped to the global environment.

Equality isn't transitive.

NaN is not NaN.

The way to convert a number to a string? Append a string.

aString + aNumber = aString

aString - aNumber = NaN

etc.
I didn't miss that point. I agree with what you say. But - there are very few companies that could pull this off so my post was to point this out to people.

It may be obvious to you but all the chatter this week has been about getting big rounds of VC before M&A. My thesis was that this will backfire for 99% of companies. In Instagram's case it worked like a charm. Precisely because they were so valuable to Facebook.

So, yes, I think Instagram "pulled an Instragram" if I could be so recursive.
I am part of a micro social network - a conversation group on WhatsApp on the iPhone. The name of the group changes occasionally but the members stay the same, mostly close friends and family, and everybody understands how it works. It would probably feel different if we tried to do it on Path or FamilyLeaf, or whatever other service pops up to commoditise the experience or connecting with people close to you. I wondered how long it would take for companies to arise out of this natural phenomenon, as Facebook becomes a hardened institution. I've been convinced for a while that new social networks will be smaller, yet more meaningful. I guess I need to look for the next move for my killer startup.
> I want to ask the readership to please find the flaw in the argument.

"The officer had special two-week training that qualifies him to estimate angular velocity whichever the fucking way he wants, even with a completely obstructed view."

Courtesy of Canadian reality. Plot me a graph to counter that.
Life of a C-List entrepreneur (could be any of us)
My friend always appears in court after getting speeding tickets because it is apparently more costly for the court to pay for the session and the officer's time than what they will get from a ticket, so they usually dismiss it to save money. Sometimes the officers don't even show up. He has told me it works every time.
"Don't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group! He takes everything too seriously!"

"Don't have parties at your confs! You're not being serious enough!"

I sometimes skip the parties at confs, but I sometimes go, and I've been to a few which were great. I think attempting to come up with some kind of Canonical Seriousness Level for all developer gatherings is doomed anyway. This is a matter of personal taste.

All you can do as a conf organizer is decide what kind of conf you want to run, and make sure people know before they buy their tickets. Or, if you're running a very large conf, set up loud options and quiet options.

There's also a flaw in his argument here, one which I hope is not significant:

"It's easier for overworked conference organizers to arrange a party than other evening activities which actually require planning."

On its own, this sentence is so dementedly off-target that it initially made me wonder what other wildly inaccurate assumptions he might be making. However, later in the blog post, it turns out that he might mean it's easier because all you do is hand it off to some company who wants to organize the party for you.

Of course, not doing anything is easier than doing something. Can't argue with that. However, if he really thinks parties require no planning, he either has no experience throwing parties, or the parties he throws are not good.
No, infinite scrolling can work. The problem is Facebook and other sites aren't doing it right. As you scroll the URL should update with corresponding hash tags for how far down the page you went (eg /#20 /#40 /#50). Then if you go forward and back the correct block can be loaded. Facebook is the best example of a poorly implemented infinite scroll.
He actually revised the entire speech, added a few more principles, and turned it into a formal essay called "The Psychology of Human Misjudment". I'm not sure if it's online, but it appears as the last chapter in Poor Charlie's Almanack.
How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By
Binge drinking is an unhealthy pattern of behavior. It causes damage to those who partake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge_drinking#Cause

"I forget my problems (41%)"

41% only tracks the number of people who admit this to themselves. If there is a systematic problem of alcohol abuse and uncontrolled excess, we have to ask what is so horrible in the life of a programmer that so many of them would prefer to forget themselves entirely?

Of course I don't really know if there is a legitimate binge drinking problem, or if people are just loud and drunk. I'm not usually at these conferences.
A little tip for Google on Upgrades
A more detailed way of saying: "Taking too much VC money will close more doors than it opens, and you should know which ones are closing"

I'd assign weight 0 to 'interested acquirers' opinions. Until there is a deal on the table, there is no reason to risk running out of cash and being bought at fire sale prices.
This has to be the most beautiful indie game I've seen in a while.

I took a look at the game's history on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fez_%28video_game%29

and it states that it's been in development since 2007. Half a decade. That's crazy. Does anyone know why it took so long and how it's been financed?

I'm surprised, but also glad, nobody pulled the plug after the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th year of development. This is unusual for the game industry.
A lot of the members of .theprodukkt joined Farbrausch[1]. You can still find the productions by that team, including .kkrieger on the Farbrausch site[2].

[1] http://www.farb-rausch.de/
[2] http://www.farb-rausch.de/prod.py?which=114
The Working Class of Computer Art?
ملابس اطفال صيف 2012
ملابس اطفال صيف 2012
ملابس اطفال صيف 2012
ملابس اطفال صيف 2012
NaN !== NaN is not a JavaScript thing so much as a floating point thing. === is transitive as far as I know, and you should have a pre-commit hook that prevents anyone from ever using ==.
very interesting convo. i think your app looks promising. apologies in advance for any "i know best" tone in these remarks, but here are some thoughts:

1. $14.99 was indeed way too high to get impulse buys (the question of what you deserve being separate from the question of what you'll actually get);

2. i agree with the earlier comments about the need to market more energetically;

3. however, slight disagreement with those who said that the central issue is "what problem does it solve?" that's very rational and all, but people love aesthetic beauty and simplicity, and your app looks gorgeous. so I'd play up that aspect of it.

4. that being said, i agree with 'tawhaki': people have to know what it IS first.

5. most important, though: strong agreement with 'terretta' that the app just doesn't look finished yet. haven't tried it myself, but if the one review on the App Store is correct (viz. no preferences, no window resizing, no font or font size options), then maybe you released it a bit too early?

BEST of luck to you. like I said, this app looks well designed and I think it has promise.
Business Plans Suck? | Capital Business Plan Software Free
It doesn't work well, and many people spend a day or more setting it up correctly on OS X (there was one commenter in the thread announcing his project that said that he had spent 3 days getting it working right). That's the point.

I can see many ways he could spend 5 months making this great and configurable setup utility, and since so many people will use it if it's good, it's worth one person spending a long time on it. It will probably save 40k of value in terms of time for the world within the first day of its release, and after that, it will keep on giving.
Tim Berners-Lee's original WWW proposal (1989)
There's a cultural inhibition on HN against editorialising article titles. It's technically in the guidelines, I think.
I still don't get Dart. It looks like it has the worse bits of Java and JavaScript, while only giving you minimal improvement in semantics.

Why bother with optional types (if you're enlightened enough to realise that you can just throw them away, since they're not needed for optimisation) when you could have richer compile-time contracts? Why bother with classes at all, when you could just have prototypal inheritance + interfaces?

I don't quite get what the goal is.
Oracle Missed at MySQL User Conference...Not
Some are job related where I've visited remote locations to check on resource sites or in conflict zones. Otherwise, I often go off the beaten track to find out what its like in remote areas. Originally for the landscapes, flora & fauna, now also to meet the people who live locally and to see how they live. Though I try very much not to be intrusive, exploited or voyeuristic about it, as I feel many westerners do that, still very much in the 19th Century tradition.

Its usually best to go on personal travel, though obviously more expensive and usually without a support network & connections that work often provides. For work or relief organizations it can be better, but you also may not have the easy option of leaving when it gets a bit dangerous, as can happen in some regions on very short notice.
It is also fun sometimes. And it happens in every business, not just tech
I wonder if bitcoin users feel threatened by this project..?
I need to apologize: I hate it when people respond with assertions, rather than facts; and I did that myself there. Sorry!

So; taking stemming as a concrete example:

* With Lucene/Solr, stemming is done with a pluggable class; you can write your rules as a series of exceptions, word by word, but really you'll want to write code for anything non-trivial. Here's an example for Norwegian: http://e-mats.org/2009/05/modifying-a-lucene-snowball-stemme...

AWS only allows word-by-word exceptions, and only allows 500KB. If you need more than 500KB, look like it's more undifferentiated heavy lifting for you...

* With AWS "some basic algorithmic stemming is always performed, such as removing plural suffixes". I think that means you can't turn it off. A lot more documentation is needed there, not least as to what these immutable rules are.

* Solr ships with a bunch of different languages built in; AWS appears only to support English (although I can't believe this is right!)

I'm sure AWS will fix some of these points eventually; but they might not consider it worthwhile to do so, or may not do so on your schedule. With open source, you always have an option.

And this is just stemming! With scoring functions, you're limited to the AWS mini-language, rather than being able to write whatever you want. etc.
It seriously has nothing to do with bitcoin. It's more like paypal but with hardware tokens that can store value. The money on the chip is canadian dollars.
Not sure if it helps your perspective or not, but the quoted material was written by our stalker rather than Rachel. He has many accounts on social networking sites and manufactures credibility by replying to his own posts with links to posts on other sites (usually ones he's written). He's been doing this for a long time. Even I have a hard time sorting out the sock puppets from the non-sock puppets sometimes. He's a brilliant, evil, genius. I would be jelly if I hadn't seen how he actually lives and had a glimpse at his mental illness.

For instance, he has this really bizarre fascination with women named Vanessa and Rachel. He's been "married" twice, once to a Vanessa and once to a Rachel. He has this compulsion to have three women at once (named Vanessa or Rachel) that he describes in metaphysical terms.

He does tons of designer hallucinogens he buys from labs in Japan. He often talks about himself in psycho-spiritual terms of superiority, such as "I've gone farther out than any mage. I flew right past [Carlos] Castaneda into expanses of the abyss he'll never know".

More often than not I find myself feeling sorry for him. Until, of course, he goes on the offensive again.
Posted at the top of the scoreboard. The FAQ pointed to this for advancement.
Sure is frustrating that you can't get an update ('scroll') event from -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch, so I left the scroll effects with regular overflow scroll.
Do the other blocks have to load before it when I come back from having clicked on a link? Has anyone implemented an inf scrolling in such a way that doesn't violate these things or at least force me to experience a very displeasurable leerching around the page as it loads?

Do I still get paginated links as well with this?
Clouds of very thin computer satellites
Ah, that's why nothing happened when I plugged the USB stick in. I never noticed that it was an adapter for the chip.
I'm glad to see a magazine, even sporadic, that has been around on and off since my days BBSing. It is fun to go back and read old articles in Phrack, 2600, and others...

I hope to see more.
I think that's a great move by Udacity. I am trying to catch up on unit 6 right now in CS101. It's definitely a challenge to keep up if you are doing the course as a "hobby". Of course I also don't really care about the certs so as long as the course material is available I'm happy.

For noobs like me I highly recommend the CS101 course, I found that a lot of stuff I was struggling with in Learn Python the Hardway (a great resource as well by the way and many thanks to Zed for making it available) and other sources online became clearer to me during the CS101 course.

I am looking forward to CS253:Web Application Engineering next.
I love this, very clean and straight forward.

I wonder how often the data is updated..?
The Justice Department Just Made Jeff Bezos Dictator-for-Life
Some of us can't get married.
Totally, totally gangster.

(seriously, what?)
Interesting. So if you lose the token, you lose your money, like a real wallet?
Handling repetitive strain injury
Applying fiction to software development
Yes. There's a limit of $500 you can store on the chip.
College hacker takes on Amazon. Briefly and accidentally wins.
rvm or JewelryBox should be fine to me under Mac OS x
A simple game that makes you think, “Wow, people can be really petty”
This is a very static analysis. It takes the current spread of power generation emissions and applies it to the future electricity load of EV's. This is fundamentally flawed reasoning.

EV's will constitute a significant new load on the grid and we will have to build modern power plants to supply the extra load. New power plants produce significantly fewer emissions.
That's very ambitious. Do you know who they're targeting with this? Legacy systems perhaps?
Thanks; changed.
Google Fined for Impeding Data Collection Inquiry
"Vague, but exciting.." how prescient.
First, we assume a spherical car...
My understanding of hardware support from SmartOS and Illumos was that it only worked on Intel hardware and not AMD. Is this still the case?

Relevant to this discussion : Joyent releasing SmartOS
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2887170

AMD support from SmartOS wiki:
http://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Technical+FAQs#S...
MySQL Tips For WordPress That Don’t Suck
Wonderfully articulated. So thankful this is out there. I <3 github.
They're graded by a computer program. Usually you are writing function(s) and need to return a correct value.

As CS373 progressed it got more complex: you worked from some helper code (like a matrix class) and had multiple test cases to test your program.
Plus falcon patches? Here's a ruby-build formula for that:

$ cat share/ruby-build/1.9.3-p125-falcon
## Hat tip to @burkelibbey and @metaskills - who did all the real work

build_package_combined_patch() {
local package_name="$1"

{
curl https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/47.diff | git apply
curl https://raw.github.com/gist/1859082/performance_and_backport_gc.patch | patch -p1
autoconf
./configure --prefix="$PREFIX_PATH" $CONFIGURE_OPTS
make -j 8
make install
} >&4 2>&1

}

CC=$(which clang) install_package "yaml-0.1.4" "http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz"
CC=$(which clang) install_package "ruby-1.9.3-p125" "http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz" combined_patch
How I Got Ripped At 500 Startups
I once failed to beat a speeding ticket by not noticing that the officer had forgot to introduce the ticket into evidence. I introduced it, the judge said "Really? Are you sure?", I missed the hint, and since a ticket is evidence of speeding in Massachusetts, my case was kinda shot...
FWIW, I was reading the article as someone with no Objective-C experience (outside of skimming a few references) and I could tell he was talking about a library rather than a language. It'd almost be analogous to writing an article titled "In praise of Javascript" and proceed to talk about jQuery functionality. jQuery has certainly had an impact on the Javascript language; but the two (despite popular opinion to the contrary) remain entirely distinct.