skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the only real difference between "using and mentioning" seems to be the presence of (quasi)quote. I haven't looked at Julia, but I'm presuming you can do :(a + b - c), which mentions the syntax. But as you point out, the manipulation is still annoying because the syntax tree is strongly typed. In fact, the typing strength of the syntax tree seems roughly equivalent to the amount of "syntax dedicated to semantics" a language has, which is the point that the author starts off trying to refute.
There are infinitely many finite strings.
Lefties Aren’t Special After All
That's a much better approach.

Another one I like is to save my small tasks for the next morning. It helps get my day going by achieving lots of small goals.
You mean indicator of inflation. Inflation is the cause.
Does it really work to (try to) split your tasks in to 15 minutes chunks?

I often feel this kind of approach just ends up consuming more of my time as I'm constantly organising and splitting my tasks instead of just doing them.
> But instagram's lack of paying users does not imply a lack of value being added. And there's almost always a way to monetize a product that is important to someone.

Whoa, hang on a sec there. Do you really believe that is true? If it is, then why couldn't Instagram make money from the app itself? If they could, why didn't they?

I'm pretty sure that if I bake cookies and go hand them out, people will take them. Knowing that people will consume my cookies in large quantities if I give them away is a long way from creating a successful, sustainable business out of the popularity of my free cookies. I'm sure my cookies are important to the people to whom I am giving them, but does that mean that I can monetize my free cookies in ways other than charging for the cookies? I doubt it. But let's be honest, that's exactly what we're talking about here- giving away a useful service with the assumption that I can make money by doing something else related to the service in the future. I still don't understand why these economics apply to internet companies and not more traditional companies, but I guess I am just old-fashioned.
What a weirdly hostile comment.
The lifeblood of this community depends on... embedded "like" buttons?
For the tl;dr crowd: this is a comment in which 'pg says basically the same thing as 'joering2.
Aside (maybe off-topic): "...solve a problem that is important to someone. Wanting your phone's pictures to look better turns out to be a valuable problem for many people."

I'd agree with the first part but not really for the second.

You either have to solve a problem, or make something that's fun. Nail either of those and you've probably got something worthwhile. In this case I'd put Instagram in the latter category.
I didn't mean to give a bad impression of Ruby. I think (and many people have pointed out) that the problems I outline are valid for many developer communities, if not all of them. In the end, those communities are human, and share a good amount of our defects.
This makes total sense for the data storage providers, but it's also clearly not an equilibrium in the long run since it'll be economical for all of the data to replicate to multiple locations (where each group of users has privileged data access rates).
Ten Years of Farbrausch Productions on GitHub
Having swearing as a personal signature is like having a tattoo. It doesn't make you any "cooler", and everyone does it so it's not much of a signature.

It's not that it's offensive, it just says you are unable to convey the strength of your argument without the vulgarities. You lose critical (logical) thinkers when you resort to crass language; primarily because it says your argument relies on emotion, not logic.
In some industries, NDAs are essential. You can ruin a production by releasing important plot details before the product is released.
So far the trouble has been - a flat out "no way."
need to work around that, but I doubt it is going to be quick or cheap. Them's the breaks.
If George Will is giving credence to this idea it must have some serious traction.
Another item to add: Be good at filtering tasks when they come in.

A lot of people are not good at simply discarding work when it comes in, which is the best time to say 'No' or do the quick analysis to see whether it will actually add value.

Unfortunately, this takes some time and intuition to build up. You have to trust yourself that you can make decisions that are fast and accurate.
Legend of Grimrock. Development costs redovered in just three days of sales
Amazon allowed the book sellers to set their price, x, from which Amazon could set the retail price to whatever they wanted (whether at lots of profit or no profit). The booksellers got paid x regardless.

Indeed. A friend of mine was happy to receive royalties on a non-free ebook that Amazon decided to give away for free for a while.
Yeah, this is why I'm siding with Amazon for now. Publishers need to be hurt first, and then we see what we can do about Amazon's monopoly. At least right now I think Amazon is the lesser evil.

The publishers may be more than one, but they are acting like a monopoly anyway (or oligopoly if you will) by trying to price ebooks a lot higher than they should cost. I don't care if they do it through the agency model, the wholesale model or the whatever model. The point is they are doing it, and at least Amazon was trying to bring the price down with the $9.99 price tag, and with the $1-$3 Singles, even if that's forcing the publishers' hand.

For anyone out there still thinking the publishers weren't colluding - just think of it this way - no big publisher would've tried to price the ebooks $15 if the others didn't agree to do it as well. Also Apple wouldn't have agreed to have $15 prices for its books, unless the publishers forced Amazon to have the same prices, too.

If the publishers are so worried about Amazon, maybe they should stop giving them so much power themselves as a gatekeeper by asking them to use DRM. Amazon has a huge lock-in because of that, and it's only getting stronger. If they know what's good for themselves, they will make e-books DRM-free yesterday (and obviously that doesn't mean giving Apple a pass on DRM either).
I corrected a couple of those upon indication from readers. I hope there aren't any more :)
I would find getting an auto-reply for every email I send to someone, just telling me they won't be looking at it until later that day ~incredibly~ frustrating. I do not need that email on my phone. I do not need that email in my box. Perhaps a rapportive like sidebar, but not as an email proper, please.
Just like a tattoo, it shouldn't distract critical thinkers when judging the contents and the point of my argument.
The self-driving car will (eventually) be only one part of a larger ecosystem. A scheduled trip on your rent-a-car share may well take you to a dynamically-scheduled bus that will aggregate many people's trips. Also, the car you call will be only as powerful as it needs to be, so you won't be routinely driving around in an SUV when all you need is an efficient sedan for a given trip. Electric cars work much better in this environment, because they can easily either go charge up or do battery exchange on a commercial-fleet scale instead of at a neighborhood gas station.

Personally, I'm also pretty sure the net effect of self-driving cars will also be to spread out the suburbs even more too. Most people imagine self-driving cars that are still owned by you and have single-owner use patterns, but the economics of that don't work; in nothing flat owners start renting their car out during their off times, AirBnB style, and it's a short hop from there to simply providing cars as a service. Somebody is going to get very rich being the somebody who wins on the network effects and creates "the" transportation-as-a-service company. It's going to be an enormous change, and I find it unlikely it's going to play to the city's advantages in terms of people actually moving there.
I'm curious, does ASI actually hurt the performance of JS parsing ? I mean, will there be any performance difference between a code that properly uses semicolons versus one that relies on ASI..
This is not a good analogy. More like the superintendant will let you into a different apartment, or let you into your apartment and then punch you in the face. You just don't know.

But you don't need analogies to understand why ASI is a bad idea. ASI means that when you leave out a semi-colon you get unexpected behavior instead of a syntax error. Failure is always better than the unknown. At least then there's a chance the bug will be found and fixed.
I've only seen tests on highways; afaik Google's car can't yet technologically manage the process of showing up to a random spot you want it to. For example, it can drive on 280, but it can't exit 280 into SF, navigate surface streets, and pull up to the curb where you're waiting.
You're not supposed to touch your minified js after you generated it
Get Top Sellers Toys Department 16 april 2012
> Actually, Facebook was first.

I followed my friends' photos on Flickr when Facebook was still a php website for Harvard grads...

This strengthens your point however; first is overrated.
I agree with everything you wrote, but couldn't resist adding: being first is good, being great is better, but being lucky is best. After a certain point entrepreneurs have to humble themselves down and accept the fact that sheer luck, or more scientifically, factors that you can't predict or model, play a huge role in the outcome. I'd say most people are overanalyzing this, there's no point in trying to analyze chaos, unless you're literally a theoretical physicist trying to predict an orbit somewhere.
Well, I can think of nothing better than responding to some lazy stereotyping in one direction with some lazy stereotyping in the other direction...
Your snip answer lacks experience. You can't cache what you don't know a user will do next. And queuing next n results is very slow over cellular networks.
Related: the abysmal state of IP clauses in developer contracts. This and the NDA bandwagon all stem from the same root sickness in society - the delusion that someone can own an arbitrary piece of information in the same way that they can own a physical object.

http://www.exratione.com/2011/11/the-miserable-state-of-inte...

The topic for today is the sorry state of affairs that the intellectual property behemoth has brought to contracts between developers (programmers, coders, pick your word of choice) and companies that hire developers. The standard legal boilerplate incorporated into every consulting, contract work, or full time hire paperwork I've seen in my years in the industry included one or more of the following declarations:

a) All intellectual property I produce during the period of work belongs to the company, regardless of its nature, regardless of whether it has anything to do with the work I am performing for the company, and regardless of whether or not I produce it on my own time.

b) All intellectual property I produce during a period of time (commonly some months) after the work ends belongs to the company.

c) All intellectual property I have ever produced in my life belongs to the company, barring that which is listed in an appendix to the contract.

d) I may not create intellectual property on my own time and be remunerated for it by anyone other than the company during the time I work for them.

e) The onus is on me to prove that I own any of my own intellectual property.

I sent back every single one of these contracts with edits to remove the obnoxious and grasping provisions, replacing them with some variant clause to say that "what I produce for you while working for you on your software is yours, and everything else is mine."
I didn't need to grow old to watch relatives and friends fighting cancer. I know how serious it is, and I really admire that you're working in that particular field. That said, I used the metaphor on purpose, because of its power, because I think it's a perfectly valid analogy.
I honestly can't remember the last time someone cited "first-mover advantage" when talking about startups.

I'm genuinely surprised to see it writ here about a photo-sharing app.
There's nothing inherently placing good schools in the suburbs and bad ones in the urban areas, though. These things historically have shifted in many cities, in respond to a wide range of things like housing stock.

For example, in NYC the center has gentrified; most of the slummy areas of Manhattan are now desirable to live in. While areas that used to be quiet and suburban in Queens and the Bronx have ended up being sketchy, in a sort of inversion. In most of Europe that's also happened; if you can help it, you don't want to send your kid to a school district in the Paris suburbs, if there's any way you can manage to get them into a good urban district.

As a different example, Houston is developing into a strange multiple-rings shape. The city center is gentrifying (medical center, Rice area, downtown), while the inner suburbs are going downhill as the housing stock gets older (60s/70s-construction suburban neighborhoods aren't looking so good anymore), and then really far away suburbs with newer construction (20+ miles, 1990s-present housing stock) are upscale again.
Thanks for looking ;-) and the wishes, I need that.

This is really nothing to shout about compare to people pulling out weekend projects, selling off apps for millions, or coding something really cool at much much younger age. I am just starting out, hopefully there are bigger things down the road :-)
For something unrelated, what's the point of code like this?

<script>
(function() {
var hn = document.createElement('script'); hn.type = 'text/javascript';
hn.async = true; hn.src = 'http://hnbutton.appspot.com/static/hn.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(hn, s);
})();
</script>

Why not just put in the generated script tag? Moreover, why does it matter where the tag is placed if it's loaded with async as opposed to defer?
I'm a frigging idiot today.
> In the amount of time it took you to write this comment you could have typed "Alexander Haislip" into Google

True

> and spared all of us having to read it.

Unnecessary.
Enterprise sales has its own set of issues which lead to generally a long sales cycle.

Corporate inertia, difficulties finding key decision makers, the start-up stigma (no big company wants to be reliant on a start-up that might not be around in a year's time.)

These roadblocks make it difficult for enterprise-focused start-ups to diagnose lack of traction. Is it product? Distribution? Market?

These issues aren't as pronounced in consumer internet start-ups. The end-user is your target (not some manager who will never use/understand the product), and fortunately around here, users are willing to try most anything. Think of how many apps you have downloaded that you don't use anymore.

Start-ups are inherently hard, and each market has its own set of challenges.
Ugh, "learn to code." That's lame advice. Seriously, its like saying "you don't need someone to write your first round financing document, just learn to be a lawyer."
I'd still be figuring out the hello world tutorial if I'd listened to this guy. I can understand code just fine, but making code actually work is beyond me, and I'm not going to wait around on my start-up when I can befriend someone and get it up and running in 1/10 of the time.
If you can't see the point because of the "harsh language" then I apologize, I might publish a politically correct version for you then :)
>Driverless cars will help almost all of those. Think how much more viable zip cars would become if you didn't have to get to the car in the first place. If you could just call a car with a smartphone app and it would show up.

Congratulations: You've just described taxi cabs.
I don't think that's Rails, or Ruby or whatever paritcular tech we're discussing. I think that's a common trait in human communities, and I'm worried about the one I feel mine, but I'm sure everyone can see a part of their community reflected on my post.
I think it depends upon what you define as "first." The iMac wasn't the first computer in the sense that it wasn't the first machine with a keyboard, mouse, and operating system. But it was the first along many important dimensions including beautiful packaging and marketing, great software, etc. that are very difficult to pull off for companies attempting to create replicas (just look at how hard HP is trying to rip off the Macbook Pro). I think being first is absolutely important if you define first as being the first to create a well-executed specific product offering within a larger category. In many ways this sums up the evolution of products- one comes along that does things differently and much better than its predecessors. That in my opinion is what has made Apple so successful over the past decade- they have been the first in phones, desktops, laptops, tablets, and music sales along several very important dimensions.
You hit the nail on the head! I thought of some other things that would have floored me 10-15 years ago.

* Ask yourself what you used to search before Google? In fact, remember Web Rings?

* How did you share pictures before Facebook, Myspace, or Flickr?

* How about the holy grail of watching videos online before Youtube (Otherwise known as the dark ages of Real Player)?

* Remember when you had to print out Mapquest directions to somebody's house? God forbid you missed a turn! When was the last time you consulted a paper map other than for fun?

* How did you deal with the mountains of spam before Gmail, or any other industrial strength spam filter?

* How about getting the internet on your cell phone?

* When was the last time you had to pay for WiFi? Granted there are some holdouts, like airports, but WiFi is practically everywhere. If you can get into a Starbucks you have access, for free, to the internet.

* How about downloading a 10mb file in less than an hour? God help you if the connection was interrupted...

The things we do today are astounding in both the scope of their capabilities and how much we take them for granted.
But most of a car's energy is spent accelerating, with the rest spent fighting wind resistance. Improved traffic flow helps with both -- no stop and go means no energy wasted to braking, and automated car trains will allow cars to take turns drafting off one another for a significant reduction in drag.

Notice that cars have markedly different highway vs. city mileage ratings. The old BMW I used to drive would get better than 26 (not great by today's standards) on an open freeway, but 17-18 in city traffic due to repeated acceleration and idling. Algorithmically optimized traffic flow would allow cars to spend more time in the highway range.
Entrevista a dixson waz el concon de la alegria 1ra parte
> Instagram’s competitive advantage comes from being first.

first in what? first in photo sharing or first in image processing?

first in what?
Also, TV and radio broadcasts formed a huge part of the mental model for how media was created and distributed.
Obviously they weren't the first mobile photo app. They were the first photo sharing app that let you ironically pretend to have a polaroid style camera like a massive bloody hipster. Polaroids became cool again just after the world's supply of polaroid film ran out. "New age fun, with a vintage feel." That's what they were first with, and that's ultimately why they're now rich.
They treat college like a party, an excuse to extend childish behavior

Are you sure this is a recent phenomenon? Just two examples I'm aware of:

1978: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/

1985: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
It is the case. Natural gas spot prices are at a low.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/natural-gas-prices-fa...

As fracking takes off globally they'll probably decline even further.

Cars can run on natural gas. Many, perhaps even the majority of taxis do in Australia.

When people get self-driving cars whatever is most economic, natural gas, petroleum or electric power will be used.
This is the same stuff we've read on music and movies, saying that low prices will kill the authors, even go as far as to kill creativity, if you are inclined to believe this socioeconomic-romance.

That is not at all what is happening. Publishers and "music labels" are bleeding out, not writers and authors. It's killing the middlemen, not creativity. And I won't shed any tears on their demise; for their existence is only because of technological shortcomings, and capitalisms very nature is to straighten the process and eliminate them.
For the HN audience you probably could, since we're all on modern browsers. The pattern above is what GA uses to guarantee most consistent behavior across all browsers. It comes down to browser support for the async keyword: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1834077/which-browsers-su...

As far as async vs. defer, here's a good summary: http://www.sitepoint.com/non-blocking-async-defer/
I belong to a car club that lets you take these out. Supposedly the GT-R eventually disintegrates its own transmission. So did a Ferrari F430. The newer Ferraris don't anymore, supposedly.
Comcast is currently filtering www.slutload.com [NSFW obviously] as well. I really hate their monopoly.
The author sounds sad.

Also: Articles like this is why TC stinks.
> We could make the web a lot faster and/or do some really cool stuff if we had a lossy image format with an alpha channel.

We do!

http://pngquant.org &
http://pngmini.com/vs-webp/

Sadly, very few people know about it and make good use of it. Mostly it's lack of awareness and dominance of poor/outdated tools (cough Photoshop cough) that don't fully utilize formats we have.
Back in my academic days, I became a proponent for open-notebook science.

Far too often, researchers never release code because it's never "polished" enough.

So I began publishing my code on github from the moment I started the project. e.g. https://github.com/turian/neural-language-model

However, some of my more conservative colleagues were averse to this approach. I constantly debated with my office-mate, who was of the opinion that there are many reasons not to present half-finished work.

So there is also a large cultural barrier to more open science. If there were publishing pressure on researchers to open their code, then it might effect a cultural shift.
There's occasional talk of running commuter rail on the I-45 corridor from Houston to Galveston, through Clear Lake and other SE suburbs, on the existing (little-used) freight line. If Los Angeles can do it with Metrolink (which similarly runs on existing track), Houston should be able to do it, but I'm not holding my breath. I believe there's substantial demand; the park-n-ride lots for the downtown express buses from Clear Lake have been completely overflowing for the past few years, as driving on I-45 has gotten less appealing with the ever-increasing traffic.

I do see more construction nearer to the center, at least. There are condos and townhomes in the Medical Center area that were abandoned and/or slums 10 years ago.
There Are Lots Of Seemingly Trivial Ways To Make Your Text Harder To Read.

yOu mAy sAy tHat pEople wHo hAve tRouble rEading sUch tExt sHould jUst mAke mOre eFfort.

But.you.are.writing.the.blog.,.so.surely.you.want.to.be.as.widely.read.as.possible.?.

Postel's law (gently reformulated) is important when you have one-to-many communication. "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept".
Obama lawyer admits birth cert forgery
Of course each app/service/product is unique, which is what you're really getting at (and I agree).

However, stretching this to the point where someone attempts to claim that a given app has first-mover advantage for mobile-photo-apps-a-bit-like-polaroids-which-you-can-share-and-add-filters-to-etc-etc seems a little ridiculous.

Taken to this extreme, every startup (that is not a direct clone) can arguably have 'first-mover advantage' for their particular set of features.