skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those of you now browsing Hacker News at his cubicle during his break under soul-sucking fluorescent lights:

You can have it both ways (work for BigCo and build cool stuff), but it's not easy. You have to make it happen within the corporate systems and structure.

I have many times. A few examples:

- Boss to me: "Purchasing is complaining that the legacy system isn't doing what it should. Go find out what they need." 3 weeks later, my prototype is the basis for specs for a whole new system. "But you told me to."

- PM/BA to me: "I can't make it to the status meeting. Will you run it for me?" "Sure." Results: 3 new projects at the top of my queue. What the customer wants most and what will be fun to build.

- Big Boss in meeting: "I don't think corporate will approve $2 million for a Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence system, but we have to do something." One month later, after squeezing it in to my spare time: an MVP of a BI system that the users love and was fun to build. Now I get permission to finish it.

- Another boss: "I would love to sell our stuff on Amazon, but I don't know how to go about it." Me: "Want me to find out?" Boss: "Yes." A month later, we're on Amazon. Fun project.

- User VP: "Why do we have to wait 3 years to get anything done on our legacy system?" Me: "Send the quick critical stuff directly to me. I'll try to push it through faster." Almost always leads to building something cool.

The 3 keys to doing these kinds of things:

1. You must find the cool stuff to build yourself. No one's going to hand them to you. Opportunities are everywhere.

2. You'll probably have to make time for extra work. Shouldn't be a problem if you're a good programmer in an enterprise.

3. You'll probably have to hang your cool new stuff off something legacy. So what?

Maybe not as good as building something in a startup for the first time ever, but building is building. You can find a way to build cool stuff from whereever you are right now. "Finding a way" is the key.
A startup's not a panacea, but--man, he sure knows what buttons to push.

This is for the guy who browses Hacker News at his cubicle during his break under soul-sucking fluorescent lights

...that's 10 hours of your workday that is devoted to your job.

The Java Struts web app that you're working on needs to be able to support IE 6, especially because you're not able to install Firefox or Chrome on your locked down desktop.

I could add so much, but he's got the big ones. How about "browsing HN from your smartphone because of the proxy"? We're actually working startup hours here, so combined with a large family it's difficult to get the time to work on the side project. Luckily there are people out there who have demonstrated that it can be done under similar constraints (looking at you, Patrick).
Not quite. What you are probably remembering is this (or something derived from this).

1. Someone wrote a program. It needed to use an arbitrary precision math library, and it needed to use a freely distributable but closed source library.

2. This program was distributed in source form. In the source code there were #ifdefs to allow it to be built to use either of the two most common arbitrary precision math libraries. One of these was under a BSD license and one was under GPL.

3. Many systems did not have either math library preinstalled, so someone who wanted to build this program on those would have to go download whichever math library they decided to use.

4. Stallman claimed that distributing the program induced people to download the math libraries, and since one of the libraries was GPL, the program was inducing distribution of GPL code, and so itself must be placed under GPL.

5. The author of the program wrote a new math library that was just a wrapper for the BSD library, but that provided the same interface as the GPL library. Now people who chose to build the program with the build option to use the GPL library could successfully build by using this new non-GPL library. Since the source code no longer contained a build option that necessarily induced those electing it to go and download GPL code, Stallman was satisfied.
Remove the whitespace from Google+ on widescreen [chrome] [Firefox]
If you are sure that you will be able to market yourself after years of working on some no name corporate stuff, by all means. I've been there and seen guys working 10 - 12 years at the same company, enjoying their 8 hours shift just finding out one day that they are not needed anymore - and with obsolete skills set (you get into comfort zone pretty easily in corp world), some of them having really difficult time to find another job.
Photo search for Twitter
MariaDB 5.5 released (popular branch of MySQL)
Meteor mixes server- and client-side code, and in general the two sides will interact so intimately that as I understand the GPL, simply separating the server-only code into its own files won't be enough to avoid the requirement to provide source code for it. The Meteor developers might have a different understanding of this, though.
I'm surprised this article is still circulating after the hits it received last august. If anyone would like to discuss the subject further or needs some help breaking into a role like this then please feel free to ping me directly through linkedin/facebook

- andy firth (the author)
Complexity fails: A lesson from storage simplification
I immediately thought of Visual Age for Smalltalk when I saw this, but having been done is no reason to not try again.
This is great, however it glosses over the elephant in the room: what if a function is called multiple times, or what happens when code within a function is run multiple times? Which data do you display in the data flow view? What is really needed is an intuitive way to select a context or multiple contexts.

SubText's approach to this is to let you dig deeper in the call tree by clicking on function calls, but for a language like Clojure you also need a way to select a context for a piece of code nested within a function. For example suppose you have

(map (fn [x]
...
...)
xs)

You need an intuitive way to display or select a context for the fn.
Tips for showing you understand your client's business
We're getting data directly and indirectly from a number of sources, that being one of them.
I don't want to post on a forum but send me you email and I can connect you.
I can relate to that feeling. I usually don't start enabling Adblock until a site I frequent does something particularly noxious.

One example was my local newspaper, which put this flash overlay of a local bigmouth car deal floating in the middle of the screen -- in a area that you typically click on.

I click it by mistake and end up with a high-volume "it's huuuge" booming across my office. Screw that... adblock=on.
Did you create autoglance.com as well? Both are very impressive startups. Good job and keep it up.
"It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission".
Using Chrome as well and I thought it was broken but then I tried it in Firefox and it looks the same. So my guess is it just looks broken to most of us.
Whenever I get the chance to use a spreadsheet, I really enjoy it. I find it really satisfying to set up cascading functions and see them update in real-time. I'd like to see that experience translated to general programming. I'd like to update code and see the unit tests update automatically, and an understandable representation of the objects being manipulated.
The new AirPort Utility is basically a clone of the iOS version, and is extremely dumbed down compared to previous versions. It removed the ability to configure all kinds of useful "advanced" features, of which IPv6 is just one. I assume this was done to simplify the UI, but the new version is a huge step backwards in general. We can hope that they'll add the missing features back in as time goes on, but it remains to be seen.

IPv6 still works fine, and Apple still provides an official download of the previous configuration utility that allows IPv6 configuration and all the rest.
I really like the idea of seeing multiple functions (which might be in different files) on the same page at the same time. In Textmate it would be great to see the whole MVC of one function at once.
JDBC sucks? Make Hibernate.

Because JDBC didn't suck enough...
DARPA’s Looking For ‘Robotics Challenge’ Teams
You sir, are "Getting things Done!".

You are the real-deal.
Oracle contends that programming languages should be afforded the same protection as any unique language

um... they don't get any. Look up Loglan vs Lojban.
Firebase is a lot more than a database with a REST API. It pushes changes to you live, as they happen, in a way that is fast enough that you can use it for real-time gaming, collaborative whiteboards, and other apps could never work with a polling architecture.

It also does the work of managing distributed state of data across all of the clients and the server, and merging that data as needed to prevent conflicts in a distributed network like this. In fact, it allows you to run operations atomically across this distributed system -- operations that are latency-compensated, and work even in offline mode.

And finally, it can scale, with no work from the developer.
their "talk to us and we'll see what we can do" policy puts too much risk into my business plan

You're thinking of adopting a framework that has been publicly released for a grand total of three days and this is the source of risk to your business plan?

Have you tried talking to the Meteor folks directly about licensing terms, yet?

Maybe so. This comment sounds like the opening of a public negotiation, an aggressive one in which we try to get the other side to name a number first. We do so in public to leverage additional social pressure ("Look at all the commenters who want you to sell your work at a fixed rate, so that we can derive much more valuable things from that work and keep the profits for ourselves") and to better evoke the as-yet-imaginary competitors ("you should give out your code on flat-rate terms, because otherwise we'll switch to Project X, which is just like Meteor, has a more permissive licensing scheme, and ships with ponies and rainbows").

The last threat is pretty empty, though. When a customer tells you "I don't like your price, I'm going to wait six months and download a clone of your code for free from the Internet" the correct response is generally "good luck with that, and enjoy your six-month vacation". Those clones will always exist - in the case of Meteor, unless it proves to be a flash in the pan, they will exist by the dozen, and some of them may even get written by programmers with the same skill as the Meteor folks, and I wouldn't even rule out the ponies and/or rainbows. But that doesn't mean Meteor stands no chance against these "free" alternatives: No code is one hundred percent free. You pay for the code, you pay for the support, you pay a developer to do the support, or you pay with time, but you still have to pay.

And the first threat is empty, too, because Meteor doesn't need to court everyone in the world as a customer. It doesn't necessarily matter even if their non-GPL price is too high for all but one customer. They may only need one customer. Ask the folks who sold MySQL to Oracle.
Hey I'm the founder of TicketData. This is a side project to our main startup / YC app (hence the barebones design, less than optimal performance, etc). Any feedback / comments / suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Wow, Code Bubbles (http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm) for Clojure, and done right!
The thing is String.length() doesn't do any re-computation. All it does is return a variable defined in the String object that is modified when the string it contains changes.

See my other comment saying you should ignore any speed suggestions by the article.
Sony release tool for analyzing and modifying Android apks
Great little article bootstrapping the start-up. I hope to see a follow-up if the company gets traction. These article help me keep in touch with the technology that is currently being used. I was unaware of SendGrid until I read this. On a side note, I'd like to see complete solutions a la Google Mail - Send & Receive Grid.
Opera and IE do not support CSS3 animations.
those are just the engineering challenges,

you could probably do some sort of reverse retina scan to make sure they're only used by the intended wearer

the threat of hackers applies to any number of technologies currently in use by the military

human causulities are the biggest limitation on the projection of US power, you might as well work on the assumption that you have to emerge from every battle as unscathed as possible
Google Drive integration leaked
Yes. This is a sideproject that I had sitting around for a while, just recording data. Figure I'd launch it and see what happens, nothing to loose.
This is a dated article but it does give a good overview of how the screen readers work, some items have been improved in the screen readers since 08 but for the most part it is a good starting point http://northtemple.com/2008/10/07/javascript-and-screen-read... also this is a good stack overflow conversation on getting the readers to read dynamic content http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3670570/getting-screen-re... and finally a little more bland but still containing a lot of good info the wai-aria specification http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/ . Also look at Dojo in my opinion they have the most advanced accessibility library out of all of the toolkits.
Cloud Link Roundup 4/13: Apache/CloudStack, OpenStack/Red Hat, IBM PureSystems
Http://www.huanan5.com/tianya/
I "got" indentation after spending 2 days hunting down some bug in calculations only to have the teacher take 1 minute to reformat the code and another minute to point out an instruction that was sitting in the inner loop. With proper formatting it was a glaringly obvious mistake...
Pretty much everything Searle has ever written on the subject can be predicted by starting with the argument "but only humans can understand meaning!" and working from there.

In part c of that link, he lays it out quite clearly: even if you manage to build a detailed working simulation of a human brain, even if you then insert it inside a human's head and hook it up in all the right ways, you still haven't "done the job", because a mere simulation of a brain can't have mental states or understand meaning. Because it's not a human brain.

In other words, he's an idiot. Or at least he's so committed to being "right" on this issue that he's willing to play the dirty philosophy game of sneakily redefining words behind the scenes until he's right by default.

But in any case, he's not talking about any practical or mesurable effect or difficulty related to AI. He's arguing that even if you built HAL, he wouldn't acknowledge it as intelligent, because his definition of "intelligent" can only be applied to humans.
A lot of the freelancers on HN are listed on this site, myself included http://hnhackers.com/users .
Be that as it may, the invention of the printing press wasn't a watershed moment for writers everywhere. Getting a book published in print even now is quite an undertaking when you consider all the individuals, money, and infrastructure involved. The elimination of that infrastructure and closer coupling of content creators to their channels of distribution (i.e. fewer middlemen between them and publishing) will probably provide a bit more leverage to content creators, but it's still not clear how much, how fast, or what the cost will be to everybody else. It looks like we're still trying sorting that out, especially given the current suits around publishers and Apple.
I find it hard to stomach the attitude of this comment.

You are sitting on top of a huge stack of free, enterprise-grade software which has sprung up in large part because of the insistence of some of its authors to use GPL. The authors of a little new library that sits on top of it ask that you open source the portion of your product that you derive from it. Not your whole product, not even the whole client-side part of it - a portion of the client-side javascript that you derived from their library.

And your response to this is to whine about it and tell us how they're limiting their user base.
This is really amazing ! Wonderfully explained . And i LOVE the documentation everywhere concept !

Cant wait to try this out :) Cheers !
Why does Apple care what some random RFC says? That RFC, in particular, is pretty silly. A couple guys from TWC might just as productively get together and write a document declaring the sky to be plaid.
Really cool concept, can't wait to try it !
Shutup and take my money.
I think it won't be considered derived work if you simply include the Meteor library as a separate script tag. But I don't think Meteor separates out their library code from your Meteor client side code. In addition, if you minify the concatenation of Meteor code with all your other client side js libraries, then I believe that will trigger the derived work provision.
That is correct from the String source I am seeing. It simply returns a field, so the JVM probably inlines it into the for loop conditional making this advice not really necessary.
like was said in the article, a js in-browser implementation, if possible, would be great. Imagine being able to get back to your work from any computer of any kind, anywhere, without having to download any ides or set up remote debuggers or anything. a great idea that would be even better (and I think manageable) in the cloud
Judge Napolitano Weighs In On Conneticut's Death Penalty Repeal.
See Part 2:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2012/04/13/foods-bi...
I have a hard time imagining that this guy reading HN is going to let his/her skills become obsolete. Besides that, was there really no writing on the wall? They really had 40 hours of work to do every week, and then suddenly none, with no warning?
Very interesting, especially if multiple language support becomes part of it. Is making this a "generic" IDE a project goal?

I for one would be most interested in Python, and even SQL (for the docs / drafting table).
MIT has a class like this as well, 6.00

https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp12/6.00/index.html

This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience.
It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation
can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of
their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small
programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the
Python programming language.
The support for IP6 is now mandatory vs the previous optional IETF RFC and has now also the status of a best practice.

Talk to your ISP if they still don't support it.
I find the concept cleaner than doing it javascript but I had to admit that when I look to the source code, it looks a bit weird to me too.

Maybe we need some kind of CSS framework for animations, which will simplify all animations in the same way Jquery abstracts the DOM.
Editing complex functions in a spreadsheet is an absolute nightmare though. AS long as he doesn't recreate that part we are good :)
I did not make the item but would like to know how is it broken ? It looks fine in my latest chrome (18.0.1025.151) and FF 11.

Full View URL - http://cssdeck.com/item/preview/308/awesome-rotating-css-ima...

Any screenshots or videos (can make one with screenr.com) would be helpful. I would like to know whether it is a problem related to the item or to the website.
It's quite entertaining to see "Proprietary Software 2.0" developers complaining about finally being affected by a requirement of Free Software.
Dynamic Mathematics with JavaScript
Freakin awesome.
What Instagram and the Titanic Can Teach You About Launching Your Next Product
Wasn't IPv6 on by default in AirPort Extreme? Why do you need to configure it?
Netflix To Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys
Unicode Love Hotel
"This is for the guy who browses Hacker News at his cubicle during his break under soul-sucking fluorescent lights."

Described my previous-life to a T, best decision I ever made was leaving those fluorescent lights.
Nifty and all, but there is a lot to be said for picking the right tool for a job. Unfortunately, ~600 lines of css seems a bit excessive to achieve this effect.
Ask HN: Should law school students be allowed to take programming courses?
I'm at one of the top 5 law schools in the US. As part of our studies, we are allowed to take up to 5 non-law courses and receive credit toward our degree.

I've dabbled in programming (back in high school circa 1998-2002), and was hoping to take an undergrad programming course because I believe that having some familiarity with computer programming is an increasingly important skill to develop. I recently registered for an undergraduate computer programming course, only to be told by the registrar that the only undergraduate courses law students are allowed to receive credit for are foreign languages. Computer languages, it turns out, do not fall into this exemption.

The graduate level CS courses are well above my level of aptitude in the subject matter, and many have prerequisite requirements that I do not meet. Therefore, sadly, my school's policy effectively prevented me from taking any CS courses at the university.

I'm graduating in June, so the opportunity has passed for me. However, I strongly believe that law school students (or any graduate students for that matter) would benefit from the ability to take computer programming classes. I'd like to write a letter to the dean requesting a change in this policy, given the increasing importance of a foundational knowledge of computer programming.

What is the strongest argument to be made for allowing law school students to take introductory (undergraduate-level) computer programming courses for credit?

HN, I would truly appreciate your input and any relevant sources of reference.
Yes, it looks like the new AirPort Utility was released a little too early. It's fine for basic configuration but the advanced features are missing. It is a rewrite however, so hopefully these features are added as time goes on.

I think the title of this article is a bit misleading.
The Key to Testimonial Success
We also had Virtual Machines with snapshots and rollbacks doing the things VMWare is now pushing so very hard.

I have missed those tools for the past 13 years, since I left the language. The idea that I might get those tools back, in a language that also supports all the emacs-or-gtfo coders, is like promising me a perpetual motion machine. I will believe it when I see it, and until then it will taunt me in my dreams.