skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These founders are inPulse/Allerta (YC W11) ( http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies.php#inpulse ). Congratulations! Hopefully they'll demo the new watch around the Valley soon so I can check it out.
> Consider the closure syntax in JavaScript:

Proceeds to list example that isn't valid JavaScript.

I have no fundamental objections with CoffeeScript, but I will never use it because there's nothing wrong with JavaScript that CoffeeScript improves upon.

For me, personally, it's way easier to visually scan a file that looks like this:

var helloWorld = function () {

// ...

}

Than this:

helloWorld ->

// ...

It's also easier to grep and sed.

I don't mind if you use CoffeeScript, but don't try and force-feed me some BS about concise syntax, make broad generalizations (complex CoffeeScript is harder to debug than JavaScript), or attack someone as a 'whiner' because they said "It's nice, but not my cup of tea."

My thought process:

1. In order to debug CoffeeScript, I will need to know JavaScript.

2. If I run into a tricky problem, not only will I need to know JavaScript but I'll also need to know the CoffeeScript compiler's internals.

3. If I run into a really tricky problem, or if I need some sort of optimization, I might have to use JavaScript anyway.

4. JavaScript is actually quite a nice language to program in.

5. All of the libraries I will be using will be written in JavaScript.

6. wu.js ain't nuthin' ta fuck wit. [1]

Therefore, I'll keep using JavaScript. YMMV.

[1] wu.js is actually quite a killer library: http://fitzgen.github.com/wu.js/
If they buy Square, they'll be 30% of the way there with the infrastructure along with market penetration. Make the Square app a native app, and change it's name to iPay and you're golden. Also... no more dividends.
There's a reason why crack and apps are the same price

I don't think there's sound economic reasoning behind this.
This fills me with hope.

Functionally striking, visually beautiful -- it makes me feel suddenly like things are coming together in a way that might stick this time around.

In form: Value placed on aesthetics -- beautiful & functional design -- is a concept that's taken root in the marketplace at large.

In code: Like gfodor commented, it feels like the doors are open wider than they've been in a long time to new ideas, and that we see some elegant language mechanisms being rediscovered and rising to the top.

In tools: The same pattern ... with lots of points of reference, a critical mass of seekers and open source contributors, and bootstrapped on powerful tools that allow rapid expression of new ideas, the good ones see the light of day and, if successful, can take an advantage of an unprecedented kinetics of this ecology to rise to viability and then prominence.

I hope you'll forgive me if I'm blowing this out of proportion to wax elegiac or whatever -- it just suddenly feels like a good day to be a programmer.
~~* The Sysop Would Like to Chat ~~
That's fair to ask. We're both trying to solve the same problems in similar ways. Both of us use Node and MongoDB and both of us keep everything automatically synched and up to date between the client and server.

We do things a little differently. We built SpaceMagic while working on a real-time web app of our own and did so with the goal of making our work as easy as possible. Ideally, we want to make developing realtime apps as easy as it is to make non-realtime apps. First, we support semantic HTML templates, allowing developers to turn their mocks into working prototype applications with a bit of javascript. Second, we make developers able to write validation and other important code once and have it run on both the client and the server. Third, SpaceMagic is released as just another npm package that works with your preexisting Node install and packages.
There are numerous laws on the books that do absolutely nothing. For instance, it has been illegal since 1986 to manufacture a handgun containing less than four ounces of metal. No such practical design existed at the time, nor was any being developed, nor was there any plan from any manufacturer about ever making one.
Starting your own or joining an existing start-up?
I got offered a senior exec position at a maturing startup. They are offering stock options that amount to 2% of the company, vested over 3 years. Company is currently valued at 15M.

I have a lot to offer the company, and even though this offer is attractive, I am concerned that it I will be giving the company a hell of a lot more than it will give me in return. This is why I am considering to invest my time and creativity into a start-up of my own.

Thoughts?
Horrible for us and internet in general, but probably as good as Facebook Inc can do to protect ITS own, vast, interests. What if a key US Senator offered them help with a privacy /cookie tracking bill in exchange for supporting this? It's just one of the many possibilities.

Remember the Verizon-Google neutrality thing?
As I interpret the article, it's not about the offline payment market, it's about being able to buy -anything- as an "in app" purchase, e.g. in the Etsy app you'd be able to just buy stuff with no friction because it would use your iTunes account.
Ask HN: Review my side project, Weather Hopper
The idea is to provide huge historical weather data in a friendly way, simply by navigating on Google Maps.
The main user group would be travelers so there is some place to provide also more touristic oriented data.

I'm really curious about what's on you minds, any kind of feedback is appreciated.
What would be your shot if you had to market such website?

http://weatherhopper.com
I agree with you in some regards and I think this is a great point (not because I agree with you, of course ;) .)

However, I think jgrahamc and you are speaking to different things. There is documentation, much like our parents did when we went to the beach as a toddler and we took that picture with mom and the sandcastle, and then there is personal curation that lives in narcissism and strikes me as dishonest (or too honest, perhaps).

There is sharing triumphs and failures, and then there is bounding triumph and failure with one's personal accounts as to make the world about the documenter instead of about the documenter as part of, well, the world.

I'm not sure I have this idea completely worked out as this seems subjective and who can really judge another's motives with absolute certainty. All I know is there is a fine line and we would be careful to hold ourselves to a standard that encourages sharing life without making life about ourselves.

After all, you can't be open source (which we LOVE) when you're all closed-sourcey yourself.

Anyway, just a little food for thought that came into my head with your observations.
For many startupps the companies take off after a level of media acceptance. How often was Twitter mentioned with celebrities in the news. Facebook made a great purchase. It is kind of how Coca Cola bought Vitamin Water. People thought Coca Cola paid a great amount but they were able to put their sales channels and marketing muscle behind a brand that was already growing and becoming a threat. If your startup becomes a threat to Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook please prepare to be very rich. It helps if you are able to have the media behind your company. I think Facebook will prove this was a great buy and it will start many sales of social networks. I am shocked RenRen has not been bought. They are the largest Chinese social network and if I had the money today I would buy or partner with them. China is a big market and I am shocked the low valuatio on the stock symbol Renn. I would think the hedge funders would be clamoring for all of the chinese internet companies since their growth is going to be huge and the market is untapped in terms of potential. Will Listen is going to partner with other countries to spread our push internationally. http://www.willlisten.com
It's a little baffling how he thinks that Apple might charge up to 10% to handle payments when they already charge 30% for handling payments.
I downvoted. "Your license is fine" and "open source free lunch is ending" don't seem well-supported by evidence.
Making a visible difference
Yes, we at Flutter feel that we would try the app if it had this design too. :) We appreciate all the hard work that Kyro put in behind this!
The idea came about a year and a half ago. We seriously started working on it, and committing to a public github repository, about six months ago. Meteor's release just changed our public announcement date from "sometime in the near future" to "Friday."
Safari only displays a black square on my Mac. Overall, Firefox gives the best looking result.
Kyro - you rock. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to give Flutter a facelift. We appreciate it..
I wasn't defining a function in that example, I was calling a function that contained a closure as an argument (in both JS and CS). This is perfectly valid JavaScript.

I've edited the post to be more clear on this.
The correct syntax is: helloWorld = ->

You just learn that -> == function() {}

That said, I found it hard to parse until I started working in it for a few weeks and got used to it. Now, reading function() and {} everywhere seems like a mess of boilerplate to me. Really, it is just a matter of what you are used to.

re #3: Also, I can't think of an optimization that JS has that can't be expressed in CS. It just doesn't work like that.

re #5: That seems like a kind of crazy generalization. How can you say that when CS 'compiles' to JS anyway?
Tim - like the idea of waving hi to future. :)
If you're going to have a (management|engineering|whatever) blog for your company/project, have a link to your company/project home page prominently somewhere on the blog.
I think it's about both. For example, the article mentions Restaurant sales. This would have to take the form of an iOS app that somehow interfaces with the restaurant's POS operation.
How Android Plans To Beat iPhone
Seems like Steam/Valve games would be an awesome addition to an Apple-branded television.
I like this way to rewrite it when the end test is slow (I think this is correct syntax):

for(int i=0, len=str.length(); i<len; i++)

One evaluation and you don't have an extra len variable hanging around.
We do not feel this is disrespectful at all. In fact, we love it. Even Kyro is our user, and we love his passion for Flutter.

A/B testing is something that we will add in near future, but when product is still in alpha, we have to continue to focus on improving it.
Maybe. Not so long ago there were a lot of smart people who insisted Apple would never port iTunes to Windows.
The impression I got after hearing some of the 10gen developers speak at a conference is that MongoDB has the same essential problem as PHP. It was written by people without a lot of formal knowledge who, for whatever reason, aren't interested in researching what's been tried before, what works, and what doesn't. Because of that, they're always trying to reinvent the wheel, and make flawed design decisions that keep causing problems.
5 Best Mobile Gadgets Under $500
Well, people wanting to know is a fairly new thing, and I think quite a few people still prefer not to know. I reckon that most people who truly care how their food is produced don't allow their kids to eat school lunches.

That said, I agree--I'm not shedding any tears either. Personally, I care quite about how my food is produced, and as a result, essentially all of the meat my family consumes is sourced from producers with a great deal of transparency.
OK I can promise you here that I will only use your email address to notify you when the product beta is launched. And it'll be interesting.
I think it makes a lot of sense for governments to require local hosting/same-nation-hosting of cloud services that they purchase.

So many legal issues issues become so much easier to handle.

And then there is that slight but not negligible additional benefit of extra local jobs in operating that local DC.
Thanks for the tip. We did consider Titanium but heard from several startups stories about Titanium being very hard to debug.
Ask HN: On what factors does the download speed of assets from S3 depends?
How fast can we download files from Amazon S3, is there an upper limit (and they distribute it between all the requests from the same user), or does it only depend on my internet connection download speed? I couldn't find it in their SLA.

What other factors does it depend on? Do they throttle the data transfer rate at some level to prevent abuse?
DoD Comments on Cyberwar and the Law of Armed Conflict
Great work on the new look and re-branding guys!
Good point. For the record, we're at http://kiip.me
Field (http://openendedgroup.com/field) is a modern programming environment that embraces most (if not all) of these principles.
I think for someone who already loves CoffeeScript, this stuff shouldn't be review. This post is intended for people who have specific objections to using it.

Anyway. To each his/her own.
Hi Guys, we just do play/pause right now and only on iTunes and Spotify. It only works on Mac for now too. Yes, we will be adding support for more apps/gestures/windows in near future.

We will also communicate things more clearly when we implement our own facelift. ;-) Thanks for your patience with us in the meantime!
I think I'm ok with that. We tell people smoking cigarettes are bad for their health, yet people continue smoking. Sometimes one has to take responsibility for one's choices. I prefer clear (truthful) labeling over the alternative presented which is relying on surprise (and shock) to effect change, or at least disseminate information.

As information becomes available and becomes more attainable (searchable), people are better equipped to make nutritional decisions. All we can hope is to supply the information and let people decide.

So long as people can be sure than words like "natural", "free range", "fresh", all mean what common usage would suppose they meant, I'd be ok.

In this case, for example, in common usage, beef means cow flesh. It's not equivalent to "cow". It's a subset of cow, in English. Cartilage, sinew and bone are not flesh. That's how I see it.
Sure. But that's only pragmatism in the sense of "I want what's best for me and my project". It's the kind of "pragmatism" that led Andy Rubin to demand rewriting the GPL userspace with a clearly inferior one for Android, for example.

After enough years and enough projects, I find my perspective is broader. The GPL helps more than it hurts. Efforts to explicitly avoid the GPL (not just to use permissive licenses for free software projects -- that's clearly a good thing) tend to hurt more than they help.
Lol 🏩
I'll share back too if it I have some improvement (I am going to test in on my own site first).

Greed is actually a very poor reason for not sharing back. It actually costs more money to maintain a forked code base than contributing the change back and getting it maintained by everyone. It is also fairly stupid to hide what software you are using from a recruitment point of view.

I prefer the BSD / MIT licenses because the sharing occurs on my schedule, less stress, and less friction. I like doing things because it is right and not because I have a lawyer at my door.
I wanted to suggest something in an interesting way. In the context of the product which I should not reveal yet, the interaction would make a lot of sense. I don't expect people to think this is the best email sign up mechanism. As long as it tickles the landing page has fulfilled it's purpose.
How to manipulate the masses by language alone
48 Psychological Facts You Should Know About Yourself - Business Insider
Edit: read this first http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html

I've seen BSD developers switch to GPL because of too many freeloaders were repackaging and selling their code with a minimal frontend without even respecting proper author credit. There was even a counter-rant by Zed Shaw "The Long Beard's Revenge".

There's a growing feeling of discontent with the startup-brogrammer-douchebag subgroup, as it's becoming a significant part of the whole startup scene. IMHE
Garry Tan is a partner and a rockstar. He's given a plenty of amazing pointers and w/o him (and other partners) we would've gotten plenty of other things wrong.

That said, Garry can guide us. His job isn't do design for us... that onus is still no us! Hence, please blame us for poor design.;-)
Google’s Quest for Domination hampering the Open Community?
Shades of 1984 Emerge in Broadcast TV Copyright Flap
I took it as "up to 10% for a non-virtual good" as opposed to 30% for apps and in-app payments for virtual goods.
Making a tiled-based mockup with pretty pictures != making a real app that works well even in edge cases
We won't know if they do right now for another several decades. But even if they do, there are good arguments against them being able to break AES - AES is used by the government in contexts that require the information be kept secure for decades, which they could not do if they reasonably suspected AES would be broken in the near future and certainly not if they already knew.

The Enigma case doesn't really apply here - the US was not using the known flawed encryption themselves, and tipping the public off by calling for the development of a new standard only means that AES might be broken in the next decade or two, and maybe not by quantum computers. Cryptographers already recommend switching from weak algorithms years before they're fully broken.

RSA and other key exchange techniques are another story though, as the article mentions RSA is theoretically significantly weaker to a functioning quantum computer than AES to start with, and I don't really know the extent to which the government uses RSA.
A Pixel is Not a Pixel: PPK Explains Viewports
Facebook Acquires Another Startup-Tagtile, A Mobile Loyalty Program
Skype 5.9.0.114 Portable on Downloads App
Source Maps will solve the line number mismatch problem: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...
Love, love, love this post. I'm not a hacker so to speak but I can totally relate. I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit and NEVER wanted to be a lifer who spent 20 years bored to death making someone else's dreams come true. And, I think that spirit is the trait that marks the startup generation and the reason posts such as this resonates with so many.
I agree you should tell users why they should enable JavaScript, but sheesh, don't take it personally.

"Someone who is thus actually pretty tech-savvy, and who actually took the time to wade through his browser’s configuration to find the switch to turn off javascript."

Or someone who's nephew decided to install AdBlock and NoScript along with antivirus software when they were cleaning up their computer.
Federal regulators want brake-override systems in all cars
More likely he will offer them a far better deal than 30%.

I also think apple tv and gaming will be discussed.

Also relevant: Valve has JUST started advertising for hardware jobs: http://www.valvesoftware.com/jobs/job_postings.html

see "injection molding" etc in job descriptions.
A-Z list of some JavaScript idioms and patterns
Also relevant: Valve has JUST started advertising for hardware jobs: http://www.valvesoftware.com/jobs/job_postings.html
see "injection molding" etc in job descriptions.
Show HN: Word Wars- HTML5 real time word game
For PC connecting to monitor, CGA was introduced in 1981. I'd say by 1985, it was a very popular choice. Before that, many home computers that connected to television were already color.
Mathbabe nailed a couple of key points on what people use to steer toward a career... knowledge the career exists, and belief they would be good at it. Most youth view their options in life based on what they see in their immediate social sphere. Having parents as mathemetician lets you know it's possible and probably also contributes to the belief that you could be good at it.

If we want more women programmers/mathemeticians/etc, we need to show female examples earlier on to let girls know it is possible and weed out the fools in the education system who espouse girl brains don't work as analytically as boy brains. I bet a lot of girls don't go to mathcamp not because they think it's "uncool" but because they either don't know it exists or don't think they would be good enough.
The gist of these kind of articles is that you have a choice! A job is just another kind of mutually agreed relationship and you have the power to change its parameters or end it. But I guess some kind of Stockholm syndrome starts developing and some people need to be reminded that. Not only that, but their skill is in high demand so the is little to no risk in switching -- something that also needs to be said out loud. It's basically a form of self-help which isn't bad but should be labeled as such.

The assumption that only large consumer-facing products are worth working on is wrong. There is a whole world out there you don't know about and it doesn't run software on iPhones. It depends on the person, but you shouldn't need external confirmation to be proud of your work -- either you did it well or you didn't.

Generally, the problem isn't the project per-se, it's just the management. A horrible boss, ie. a horrible person will wreck your day regardless of what are you working on. If you are hired to write internal reporting software, don't be surprised you will work on internal reporting software. Make the most of it!

Software is depressing because that's the best you can do sometimes. There is this type of corporate developer that's just at the edge towards a good developer but he just believes he's the greatest. He'll always be unhappy because the Man just won't let him try the latest fad and if he only would be allowed he would make such great software. But what does he do? Crappy software! A certain degree of modesty is required in software because not everybody before you was an idiot, and if you had free reign you would make an even crappier solution with the latest fad and all.

But essentially, the kind of people feeling bad are just unmotivated because the job is not a good fit. That's it! As the RSA video said, they need more autonomy or a "higher" purpose or just want to get better at something else (mastery). But sometimes what's missing is a degree of realism.
This reminds me of Bret Victor's presentation http://vimeo.com/36579366. He presents a few demos with similar concepts and a great talk nonetheless.
Javascript for novices? On the contrary, CoffeeScript is Javascript for professionals.
A domain dedicated to one Unicode code point!

I guess it's only a matter of time before "pile of poo" (U+1F4A9) gets its own domain, too.
One grossness doesn't justify another. Any 10-year-old can tell you how weird and gross sex is. But you're still allowed to say, "Honey, I'll pass on the scat play, thanks."

That's especially true when the grossness is concealed from you via PR and corporate BS. Dog meat is probably not different nutritionally from hamburger. Heck, it could be better. But if McDonald's "fortified" their hamburgers with 5% Lassie, people would still be rightfully pissed.
This was a great quote for me as well.

A mentor once advised me when I was in the manager roll of deciding to lay off or not lay off someone, to write on the board two columns, "pros" and "cons". Then write the first one that came to mind (either pro or con) and that was the decision. If the first thing you thought of was what was a real benefit then keep them, if the first thing you thought of was a consequence, then lay them off. The theory is that you have already ordered and prioritized the pros and cons for this if you've been thinking about it, and you naturally order them in your thinking in magnitude. So doing the physical action pulls that ordering out of your brain and into the open.