skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's important to use zerospace to make your bits more readable! For instance:

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Android Developer Income Reports Are Dead
That's a bit like asking why I work out instead of snapping my fingers and turning into a Greek demigod. One is clearly preferable on its own merits — but it's just not going to happen any time soon.

Source maps are relatively easy: There's a public standard, a couple of browser makers have agreed to it, and it doesn't need universal acceptance since it's only for development. Basically, it doesn't require a lot of coordination.

A universal bytecode is almost the exact opposite — easy to describe in the abstract, but a coordination nightmare. I've never heard an actionable plan for making it happen. Just getting the community to agree on a standard bytecode would be a Herculean task†, and then you have to get Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft to all say, "Yes, I'm willing to chain my VM to this bytecode at significant engineering expense."

Basically, feel free to work on this if you want, but you can't expect everybody else to hold their breath until it happens.

† You might think that "Herculean task" is an exaggeration, but just look at how much discussion and compromise was needed to get agreement on stabby function syntax for Harmony. And still people kvetched even once there was "agreement"!
mutex: obviously refers to mutex

mtx: maybe mutex? maybe multi-transaction? maybe library prefix? vendor prefix? maybe, maybe...

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Every time one of these arguments pops up, I'm reminded of this:

http://i.imgur.com/pG3q7.jpg

Different people will end up enjoying different tools. I started web development with Ruby and Rails, but find that I really enjoy PHP. Then again, I don't have to maintain anyone else's crappy code. I find that when I write clean, well tested PHP, it really isn't frustrating or painful.

If you prefer something else, that's great! Use it. I guess these types of debates aren't exactly unique to this industry though. When I used to lurk around automotive message boards when I was younger, I recall some pretty epic flamewars among Chevy/Dodge/Ford/etc. fans. Everyone loved their favourite, and were certain that the others were clunky pieces of crap. Sounds a lot like programming language flamewars... :)
Isn't not programming at all even easier? You don't have to get money, find a computer to buy, buy a computer, install an OS, buy an Internet connection, install a web browser, learn to browse the web, learn about how hosting works, find a host, get money to buy a hosting account, learn about apache, install apache, learn about php, install php, learn about text editors, install a text editor, learn php, write PHP, learn about scp, install scp, scp file to server. By the time you've become that proficient with all that stuff, apt-get install libcatalyst-perl on your desktop sounds about as easy as finding a host that supports PHP.

It's not like PHP solves any of the real problems, like how to manage upstream changes, how to automate releases, how to rollback database schemas after a bad release, and so on. The reason why nobody ever talks about those things is because everyone handles them with downtime and swearing. That's not software engineering. That's fail.
...but, oddly enough, not "correct horse battery staple" (at least, that's how I'm used to writing passphrases; I guess the comic could be interpreted either way.)
MMO Spacewar
World Bank adopts Open Access policy, launches CC Open Knowledge Repository
In my work, I read in XML, parse its elements, attributes, and data, producing new XML. Along with Parsec, Hexpat is well-suited to the task.

I haven't had to parse HTML in Haskell. I use BeautifulSoup for that. I wouldn't be surprised if the Haskell libraries aren't as useful for that kind of thing.
Very clever idea. However, it sounds much more beneficial to the person sending the email than to those who are receiving it.

It will be interesting to see if it will collapse for this reason, or if some unexpected mechanic of humanity will keep it afloat.
"I despise people who presume to know what's in the best interest of others. You only know what's in your best interest. You have no idea what is good for anyone else."

Wow. Are you seriously advocating the equivalent of moral relativism in programming? You have no idea if, say, Brainfuck is good for anyone else?
Both of them are pretty painful, albeit in different ways. OSX Skype could take a cue from Adium, Windows Skype could take a cue from ICQ, and BOTH could take a cue from Linux Skype.
Good points. I read upthread that it's class project.

Let's see what happens. It will be fascinating. I, for one, expect good things from this.

(I signed up).
Looks like the REPL is still affected, though: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1829#issue...
That's called "shadowban" in my neck of the woods.
No there isn't. The one you cite is for strings, not lists. I've always wondered why lists shouldn't also have find, rindex or replace methods.
There's Skypekit, an official API distributed by Skype themselves, with the unfortunate restriction that it cannot be used in any OSS apps.

Incidentally, this is why I'm using Trillian and not Adium right now...
On the third bullet point, that's just a word with two meanings, not a country-to-country difference. The USA is also a State in that sense: it has a Department of State to handle state-to-state affairs (i.e. foreign affairs), is a Member State of the United Nations, etc. The use of the term "state" for a subnational division, roughly akin to a Canadian "province", is a different meaning with the same spelling.

The same is true in some European countries; for example, Austria is a member state of the EU, but its subnational entities (Länder in German) are conventionally called states in English also.
I don't buy your argument. You don't need to try all (or any) programming languages in the world in order to like a single language. I know Python, and I really like Python and think it is awesome. I don't need to have tried Ruby or Haskell or C# to say this.

Also, your comment kind of becomes moot because he goes on to say "I do know and actively use Python and server-side JS ..."
I wrote this satirical response to try and point out the absurdity of developing a laundry list of the things you don't like about a language: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824703
A solid investment :) I hope it comes to the EU soon grrr. Why are there literally 0 good payment gateways in the EU :|
I guess in order to buy into the analogy you first must accept the premise that being a craftsman and using PHP are mutually exclusive. I do not accept this premise. But maybe we can just agree to disagree on that.
Dear Facebook: here's how to not screw up Instagram.
It isn't nearly that simple- they'd have to create the custom front end and get everyone to use it. I doubt one person constantly hitting the site would have any issue, it's the combination of all of his users doing it that caused the problem.
Skype is used worldwide. So when you look at it as 0.589% of the world population, it seems a bit more realistic.
Gee, I never knew that gist was being used to spam live-tv stream blogspot links. I got my hopes up that someone had a script that would automagically connect me to the live baseball game of my choosing... ah well, what was I thinking.

Otherwise it's fun to watch, and a surprising amount are actually interesting/relevant.
Its free for them to find something to charge you with. It costs you a great deal to defend yourself, even if it comes out "fine" in the end.
Just to clear things up, that's 40M people logged into a Skype client, not simultaneously video chatting.
Don't forget Pittsburgh.
So you paid $300K for the house, effectively establishing the last trade value, i.e. the market cap, a.k.a. what "market is willing to pay for the property", at $300K. Not $60K.
Show HN: Meteor, a realtime JavaScript framework
I definitely agree with keeping them separate and not confusing people into thinking they may/may not be connected. It's fine to maybe mesh a few features together from Facebook to Instagram or vise versa, but keeping them separate is a must.
Not programming at all is easier, yes. Not programming is also much more popular than programming in PHP.

Edit: To be a bit less snarky here, you are arguing that the sunk costs of learning to use a computer justify more effort spent in getting a web site running just because the effort already sunk dwarfs the additional effort required. But in fact not only is that cost sunk but once I've learned to use a computer my time and energy is suddenly more valuable.
People who disagree are "programmars" just fine. They just know how to use proper tools for the job given, instead of ranting because they're too lazy to read the manual, like author of the post.
a bit more useful than the dashboard.
Right now I am learning about compilers because if nobody does it, I will.

There are three opportunities right now in front of our eyes we are all missing: a simpler-than-node JS on the server implementation, a rectified php, and a simpler functional language for web development. Bonus point: a universal templating system, like jinja, for all programming languages.

As soon as I finish the course about compilers I'll jump head first to try to solve them all.
Awesome, I'm getting pretty reasonable response times from your blog too, and I found out about Conky from your last blog post.
I have issues with call quality, and many others do too, but it's not a fault with Skype.

I'm just on unreliable and quite slow DSL with a constrained upload/download ratio.
Kicktraq - Kickstarter funding predictor
Sounds like you live near the red or gold lines, I used to take those to work every day when I worked in Old Town Pasadena and lived in Hollywood (two very walkable areas also).

You're highlighting something a lot of people don't understand about LA - there are tons of walkable neighborhoods in LA, the problem is traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood takes forever and requires a car.

LA was originally a dozen different cities, all walkable, all connected by good public transport. It's very, very slowly returning to that ideal but light rail and subway are about 25 years behind where it could be.

With the accelerated transit programs/taxes (new light rail, new subways, new bus lines) currently underway, the gaining popularity of biking, and the increasing telecommuting, it'll get better. Eventually. :)
The Many Problems With Instagram For Android
Hi there, thanks for the feedback. I don't claim I'm right, this is just how I view opportunities. i DO think of every opportunity as a distribution of payouts with varying probabilities. Before going into the venture (and even after it... only once measurement), you can't actually _know_ what that probability distribution looks like.

That said, I don't really believe small is _safer_ -- I'm just saying small costs less and generally has smaller upsides and smaller return variance.

If you read to the end, you'll notice that I don't actually make a value judgement on which path is "safer" or "better" in any way. I think it's just a question of personal preference, influenced by your individual station in life.

I think this has more to do with outcome utility. I personally will probably never spend more than 1mm a year, so building a startup that has a significant tail above 1mm/year in recurring revenue would be great -- but the utility of that tail is very low to me, so its not worth sacrificing success probability.

And yep, just totally guessing what that return distribution looks like.

For me it's not that small is safer, its that there are a lot more resources to fall back on for small. I personally don't have the chops to build twitter scalability. But if I wanted to open a restaurant, there are tons of resources and many people have blazed that path for me, and I can look to them for advice. It's not "easier" it's just that the path to "success" is more well documented, and I consider that a valuable tool that increases the odds of "success".
Skype uses P2P to handle the majority of "call" data, so the load on their servers increases less than proportionately as the number of users increases.
I 'm glad this got topvoted.

PHP is the MS Word of web programming. It will be here for a long time, just get over yourselves and concentrate on what you write, not how you write it.
This is great news. I tried Kubuntu briefly and I thought it was a great project for those familiar with Ubuntu but looking for an alternative desktop environment.
False dichotomy. You can do some things quickly in PHP (vs other languages), and some things in life and in programming need to be done quickly.

There's a place for doing things fast, and a place for doing things right. You're wrong to assume everything requires the latter.
);

OCD kicking in.
Skype only gives the appearance of being centralised. It's almost all P2P.
I'd say the jury's still out on that one.
In the meantime, if you (or anybody) can point me to modern compiler techniques I'd appreciate it a lot. Been devouring all I can find online but nothing satisfies me.
True, but the median wait time would be merely 693147 days, or around 1900 years.

1-(999999/1000000)(693147) = 0.5
JQuery Blog: Getting Touchy About Patents
Full ZIP codes are actually 9 digits: a 5 digit prefix, which is what people are used to -- and a 4 digit "block" extension.

Each city will typically have many block extensions, and probably multiple prefixes associated to it.
I really love that they used that famous photo of Andrew "Alynna \"Pookie\" Trypnotk" Beaudoin for the C as seen by PHP fanboys cell of the table.

Oddly enough, that man's programming preferences are even more hilarious: he likes to do his web development in the scripting language for his favorite furry MUCK. I'm not even kidding; he bolted it onto a Web server somehow and actually did paid contract work in this language. And since he was the only one who knew how to use it, it meant job security. Up to a point. After he got fired, he was also the only one who knew about the back door he snuck into their MUCK-based application server.

Mofo was Dennis Nedry in a dirty fox fursuit. Or not, as the picture shows.
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> always will find CoffeeScript appaling and unusable. ... otherwise perfectly ... codeable JavaScript?

Wait, are you being sarcastic?
How to Make Learning Addictive
If you don't have time to do things right, how are you ever going to find time to do them over and over again?
40 Million People: How Far We've Come
And you can also call all of Austria a `Land' in German. Same applies to Germany.
This is fairly useful if you are trying to get mailing addresses, though you have to be careful about rural route areas and other crap. There are also plenty areas where people are required to use mailing addresses that do not match what the zipcode says.

This is completely non-useful if you are trying to get residence addresses.
Among other things:
1. There are plenty of places in the US where the zipcode serves an area many miles (IE 20+) away from the "city" associated with the zip code.

2. Postal boundaries do not match a lot of boundaries, and aren't updated as often.
There are times when, for example, zip codes for towns in maryland were served from DC. So if you did reverse lookup on zip code, it would give you the wrong state and city.

This still happens near boundaries of states.

3. ZIP+4 does not solve these issues with enough accuracy (It's only about 95% accurate). ZIP+9 is still wrong about the city in plenty of cases.
It's definitely not black and white.

I think of every opportunity as being a different dartboard with different values. These were just examples of _A_ small startup and _A_ big startup.

It's our responsibility as an entrepreneurs to pick the board that best fits our risk profiles for the best cost.

Not all boards have a positive EV.

The "use dad's connections to buy my product" startup board is just 1 big fat positive number (imagine some nearly "risk free" opportunity)

The "punch people in the nuts for a dollar" startup looks like a board of all zeros (as far as I know, most guys aren't interested in this service)
"Defense in depth" is the usual phrase.

"Belt and suspenders" means something totally different in British and Commonwealth English - the mind boggles.
I was addressing the part where it said "it's the photo app". It isn't "the" photo app. You can make the case that it's the most widely used mobile photo app after Facebook. But that != $1bn valuation or YouTube-like status.
I prefer gitlive.com
In France, Paris, Lyon and Marseille have multiple postal codes, and some postal codes are used for multiple cities (postal codes were attributed to delivery offices in 1972, and new offices now use the number of the nearest numbered office).

(And no, Ziptastic doesn't work for French postal codes.)
I have no idea what you mean by "what SQLAlchemy does" - I'm sure it does lots of things and most of these are perfectly doable in any language out there. You must be meaning some specific thing that is a favorite of yours - and indeed maybe it is hard to do it in PHP (or maybe not - since you didn't tell what this thing is nobody can have any idea). Who cares? I can name a bunch of things that is harder to do in Python that in some other language, but I don't run around shouting "Python sucks".

> Now I think you're just being petty. Obviously an underscore isn't what we're talking about here. Take your straw man elsewhere, please.

What he's talking about here is known and talked about for 10 years. It's just function names, it's not that big a problem. Yes, we know old function names are inconsistent. No, we can't change them because that will break code. If that's what makes or breaks language for you, PHP is not for you, and most languages are not for you, because you're obviously not interesting in solving the problem, you're interesting in boosting your self-esteem by boasting shiniest tool out there. Nothing wrong with it, but PHP is not created for that. If that means for you that PHP sucks, fine, but for 99.99% out there shininess is very low on the list of priorities. So if you want to discuss important stuff, leave old stale stuff like ranting about strpos alone and discuss important stuff.
I definitely agree that entering an established market with a product that is just going to take a bite out of it is easier due to the prescribed path.

And like i said, maybe it makes you some cash and allows you to build more stuff on top.

I'm coming from some experience in that I've built some small businesses that just didn't make enough and didn't have enough potential to be worth the stress.
I haven't been thinking about an FPGA myself. Mostly because I don't know verilog/vhdl well enough.

I've been thinking of how hard would it be to take two 32k SRAMs and an AVR and do some fancy bank switching to handle it. I know I could probably manage it by using the onchip support directly but then I'd end up with some memory inaccessible from addressing holes.

It seems like it should be possible to do, and then it would be easy to allow real IO and everything later when that's standardized.
Thanks. Incidentally your startup is in a spookily similar field to mine. Email me? mistergeorgespencer at google's email solution dot com.
I landlord 3 properties and I REALLY need your little startup. Spread the word! The pain landlords feel, and the crap we sometimes put tenants through because of crappy tools/laws should be solved.
Mythryl: an implementation of SML with a C-like syntax
If you are a Django developer, please be aware of (and use) the capability to mark data as sensitive to exclude it from error reports. Most people won't need this feature since very often as you don't often define your own new sensitive variables, but it's important to know that it is there:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/error-reporting/...
That's fine, anybody is free to rant on his blog. That's just a rant and not some revelation about something significant about PHP.
Maybe Facebook will one day as their upcoming Hiphop VM evolves. Until then, there are better options.

Then again look at what happened with Perl 5 / Perl 6 transition or specifically with the one that didn't happen.
Your time really isn't worth $1000/hour. If everyone starts pretending it is it'd be silly to write a single line of code yourself, why would you when you're worth $7-10,000 a day?

I still do understand your point, but this is Hacker News after all, not Outsourcing News. This thread reads a little like a couple of suits just came in here to stomp on a hacker's opensource project.

I mean replace the words 'subscribed socket connections' in peterforde's original comment with 'web server' and suddenly it looks odd to be paying $19 or $50 a month for something like this in this day and age. Where would we be if there were only IIS out there to use? Or no MySQL/Postgres?

I've not used websockets in anger yet and I know it's still kinda ropey, but this is basic programming stuff, paying someone else for it is a bit, well, raise eyebrows time. SMTP is hard because of the configuration problems and dealing with a ton of arcane and opaque problems with major email providers.

This is something that's actually fun to muck around with. In the end the solution of Pusher is only marginally less complicated than the original problem.

At the moment maybe Pusher's a good solution for a fast moving business to a problem that's not well solved in the open source stack, but it's only a matter of time till there's the equivalent of apache or nginx.

And this is perhaps the first step. So kudos to daraosn for putting it out there, also seems the perfect kind of problem to be using node.js for.
Hey everyone! The four of us have been working very hard on this for the last six months, and we're excited to finally take the wraps off. Can't wait to hear what you think!

We've got a lot more stuff coming over the next few months, and if there are particular things you'd like us to do/prioritize, I'd love to hear about them!
Preview of Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple's Success
I agree. Like religion, unless someone tries to force it on me I tend not to care as much.
WinJS Promises
Sometimes, doing things fast opens up opportunities to do things right.
I for one plan on writing the first in-game magic-pixel-collecting DCPU16 botnet.
Facebook has added way more value to my life directly than the NYT. I have a million sources of news and commentary, mainstream and indie.

The deadtree papers represent the old megaphone model of information dissemination (hi capital, few speakers, many listeners). It's been obsoleted.
I think your statement is somehow not well thought out, and by "your" statement I mean "almost everyone's" actually, I just semi-randomly picked out yours to comment on because it captures my counter-argument well. You're saying Google released the video prematurely, based on your assumption google does not want everyone to try beat Google to the punch. It's obvious that Google is well aware that every piece to realize this tech is out there already. What I don't understand is how it is not immediately obvious to everyone that Google wants this idea out there, for people to experiment with it, for people to share their thoughts about UX concerning such a piece of technology which is what they really need at this point to develop this product.

The linked video and the comments it generates are an excellent example of this.