skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a hard choice.

I was recently involved in a project that was heavily focused on progressive enhancement - we started with a "standard" HTML app with forms and submit buttons. Every interaction required a full page load.

Then we started using Javascript to enhance the UX in such a way that it still worked without Javascript. It was a long and tricky process, because progressive enhancement is inherently quite fragile. You are basically taking an app, and then monkey patching it at runtime to be a different app. This is hard. :) Any change anywhere ripples through the whole app, and the entire thing is an offence against DRY; you are duplicating logic over and over and over.

Still, after a lot of time and effort... ...we gave up. We just couldn't get a slick, user friendly experience with JS, without the site breaking without JS. And frankly, the UX without JS was terrible anyhow. We rewrote the thing as a SPA (single page app). The codebase is much simpler, and the UX is great. :)

For us, the biggest pain point is our initial design had a server the emitted HTML; and accepted forms POSTed back to it. To enable AJAX, we then needed to duplicate a bunch of functionality so it would accept and emit JSON as well; this led to major headaches trying to keep all the logic in sync. If you DO want to maintain progressive enhancement...you need to figure out your site design from the start; it can't be an afterthought! If it's a complex project, you will live and die by your ability to keep your code DRY and enforce Seperation of Concerns.
Making Computer Science a Requirement?
Perhaps a more interesting question to ask is: where are the HN submitters getting the articles that they post here? My hunch is that a lot of us are grabbing our news from social networking services (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) moreso than we used to. In fact, the percentage of our total news discovery from those outlets -- as opposed to, say, from regularly following a handful of blogs and aggregators -- has probably increased dramatically. So, what we might really be seeing is a representation of the sources most frequently shared on social networks.

LinkedIn, for example, routinely offers business articles from the same sources that have been appearing on HN more frequently. In fact, it's not uncommon to see an article shared by LinkedIn make its way to HN shortly thereafter. (The correlation/causation dynamics are unclear, however, so we should keep that in mind).
I really don't get this at all. People spend $30 on programming books with the hopes of learning something and don't blink an eye about it. $7 for something that removes the "this is impossibly complex" stigma that programming has to non-programmers? Please, I would have loved to have something like this when I was copy/pasting Pascal into a text editor with little idea what it was doing.
Mutations in three genes linked to autism spectrum disorders
Snapguide and the content platform
There's your real problem right there: "Playdead has received around $2m in government funds"

Government "playing" Angel Investor. Every investor wants a maximum return on investment. Not so for government. They want to brag about how many companies they attracted (by changing the rules for some companies). This is where things can only go wrong.
That argument could be extended to any business operating anywhere. If we only paid taxes based upon what we directly consume from the government, I don't think many businesses would be collecting sales taxes. Your lease is paid to a landlord. Your inventory is purchased from a distributor. Your insurance premium is paid to an insurance company.
What bothers me personally is that original valuable content loses with mainstream crappy summaries and worthless flamebaits like the ones from zdnet (take a link, write a few sentences with an unproven statement, ask 'what you think', ..., profit!).
Startup Press: Dos and Don’ts
New MOJO Bundle – Over $500 of Premium Themes for Just $29
I've never encountered those limitations, but since you have could you file an issue on the pry-nav repo? (https://github.com/nixme/pry-nav).

Remember, pry and pry-nav are new projects, and bugs can usually be fixed. And the sooner you file an issue, the sooner the bug can be fixed :)
As I noted last time, this is really, really similar to the Self environment (this demo makes it even clearer). More typing, but cleaner (Morphic isn't exactly sexy, and the Self environment's UI is quite messy and could be significantly improved I think — especially on OSX where you're forced to deal with Morphic itself and with the fugly and shitty X server).

I really think Self on iPad could be a nice beastie, it is way more visual and touchable than even an adapted text editor like Lisping (though not a visual programming environment)
It is true it adds an external dependency.
Sometimes I feel every state makes laws made for huge corporations. It is not accidental. They don't "forget they all started as small..."
If I was a big, fat lazy corporation that's exactly how I wanted things done. Lots of laws. Guaranteed to kill any and all competition! Big, fat happy just opens a can of lawyers.
Good points.

Roomify simplifies video conferencing. Google Hangouts/Skype require users to be part of a network. In many cases users do not want to 'Contact' users in Skype or join Google+. Since the room is just a url, users can bookmark it and always return to the same room.

The pro version will allow premium users to have password protected rooms, and to white label the rooms with their own url. Since this is all web-based the 'Create a room' button could be placed anywhere, on your own site or on a corporate intranet. It is like having your own 'Hangout'. Not affiliated to anyone and not requiring login.

Our technology allows us to have 1,000's of users in a single room. We have built rooms apps too (shared html whiteboard, screen sharing etc). So in the long term we are looking to 'Roomify' all physical rooms. You could teach a class, hold a conference or just hold a meeting like we offer now.

Finally, we are planning a payment system that will allow room owners to charge to attend their room. So teachers and speakers could earn money from their attendees.
Once again, every brick and mortar pays a for-profit for nearly every service that enables it to do business, so that argument does not hold water.
I prefer the homakovs of the world rather than the Anons (they would take full advantage) of the world. To have one vulnerability that could lead to another is undesirable. Homakov's actions could be considered aggressive, but sometimes that's exactly what is needed in order to push something. (no pun intended)
Fix USB device related issues in Windows with USB Fix It.
He only says that search is crap, but not really how to make it better. Except for Siri.

He claims we could do better, but how?
You almost sound like you're laying down an ultimatum to the company, you've done your job by notifying them so let sleeping giants rest. If it's a known exploit I don't see any reason to publish your findings, if it's something you've come across that hasn't been published than by all means publish away.
How are you using this data ? - are you using the file-size to detect if it's changed or to ensure you have enough disk-space, etc ?
Search is dead. Long live the semantic web.
This seems to be a semantics issue. "To search" has multiple meanings, and only one of them implies loss.

In computer science, you don't (only) use search as an information retrieval mechanism. You use it primarily (whether that's Google, find <dir> | xargs egrep <pattern>, Microsoft/OS X help, etc.) as a mechanism to reduce entropy.

Information stored in files or on the internet is generally too vast to be easily absorbed by a brain that, marvellous as it is, has difficulties processing more than 7 +/- 2 symbols at a time [1]. We need a way to reduce the entropy and extract and filter information. And that's what search tools in computer science primarily tend to do (online or offline).

This is also why by default we use "and" to combine search terms and are generally more interested in narrowing search results rather than expanding them.

Some people admittedly also use search as a tool to look up information; I recall that there's some usability research where some people prefer using search, while others prefer a catalog scheme (such as bookmarks) and that forcing one type of person to use the opposite scheme reduces their productivity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...
Draw Something fastest growing mobile game ever: 50m downloads in 50 days
Mod Brings 720p, 10Mbps Video Recording To Most Of The Xperia 2011 Phones
It's a version of HN which only counts votes from users who've been on the site for at least a year.
>I mean, there is no legitimate list of vulnerable buildings created by white hat burglars, is there?

But the interesting question is not whether such a list has ever been written. The interesting question is whether such a list is legal to write.

Maybe such a list would be beneficial in the long run. Anyone who has practiced lock-picking knows that most lock-based security is little more than an elaborate honor system.
I never have to force-quit XCode, no matter how shitty my code is. If my code hangs, a Command-'.' kills it and I can continue working, even if I'm debugging multithreaded code that hangs somewhere outside the event loop while the main thread is waiting for it to post a semaphore.

This article is nothing but useless XCode-hating. I can make a list of 20 things I don't like about XCode that would actually be valid issues with the tool, and none of the issues in this article would be on it. The things I don't like about XCode are how they dropped a lot of useful features between XCode 3 and 4, UI/usability issues introduced when everything had to be docked into a single Window, pretty lousy basic editing functions (where the f*k is 'find and replace in selection' and why do I have to use the stupid mouse so much when editing).

There's lots of things XCode can improve on. That said, if you look at how much the tool does do, and how well it does those things, my net conclusion is that it is still a great IDE, one of the better IDE's around, even despite all its flaws. Let's not all pretend Eclipse or Netbeans are so great and have absolutely no downsides, because IMO they are not even close to XCode in many ways. Visual Studio used to be very nice, it's been a while ago since I used it, but I can remember it was top quality.
I like that last idea a lot.
Do whatever is easiest first. JS can be pretty, but hard -- at least, the DOM is much harder than HTML. Get an HTML serialization of your data working first, before you try to use client-side JS to write this data dynamically into a form -- not because it helps us, but because JS mappings are harder than PHP echos.

It will also give you a better appreciation of the places where Web 2.0 can really streamline a system. Just to give an example, Gmail is a massive JS app which uses a frankly unbelievable number of divs to reimplement an iframe window where you can view your email and/or lists of email subjects. It's quite possible that the communications reduction is so big that this is important to Gmail, but you're not that size yet, so just use an iframe rather than reimplementing that functionality in a special way.

There are other situations where JS is a bad technology. I should be able to navigate your site without JS, and if you demand JS for navigation you're probably doing it wrong. I should potentially even be able to log in, if you're not using OpenID or BrowserID or client-side crypto.

AJAX can be useful for creating chat applications, or for situations where you want to be able to see, query, and throw away lots of little pieces of information. Javascript is also useful when you want a control which should never hit the server, like folding a tree of comments -- which I recently implemented as a user script for HN.

That's another plus of using HTML, by the way: it makes it easier for scripters to hack on your site to add their own personal features. I tried to do user scripting on Gmail at one point, it was damn near impossible. Their divs belong to memorably named classes like "vI8oZc cN" and "nH w-asV" and "mq nH oy8Mbf". Such are the perils of trying to build your iframes dynamically out of divs.

Anyway, once you start to get into user interactions, JS becomes much more fun and important. If I am coming to your site to play an HTML5 game, then I already know I need to turn off NoScript, you don't have to tell me. If you've got an interaction which simply screams "drag and drop", then do that instead. Some of the nice uses of JS I've seen recently amount to visualizing graph networks and allow you to drag nodes around to optimize the display; that's a good candidate for a JS implementation.

JS is not merely for facilitation, and can have real uses on a CRUD-type site. Just be sure that you're not reinventing something which already exists without JS, like iframes, URLs, and so forth.
You still have the choice. You can always sell your Android tablet.
Yup that seems more realistic (my estimate was too optimistic then). Works out to around 2.2ct/GB. Personally I haven't seen a CDN quote below 10ct/GB, but we also measure our traffic in TB/month, not TB/day.
Too steep for a next generation programming app, but not too steep for a coffee and a muffin.
Some of those are better than others. The Atlantic is usually original reporting or long form journalism.

extremetech is very annoying to me at the moment. Some of the articles are vaguely on topic for HN, but the coverage is usually well below what could be appearing on HN. I would much rather people link to the original source than to places like ET or The Register or the aggregators.

EDIT: Has anyone created an HN stats software? It might be interesting to see graphs of sources; votes; comments; etc.
Google would be empowered to a live/recorded stream of video of every user.

This sounds like the kind of feature that some users would embrace, and could even become a selling point. Remember justin.tv?
JavaScript is a requirement for my work applications. We have a lot of core components that get used in almost all of our projects and they rely heavily of JavaScript and jQuery. I know for certain there is no interest in providing a non JavaScript UI flow for our users as it would require far too much time and money to rework existing frameworks and components.

For my personal projects I had thought about allowing for non JavaScript users. I started making sure that things worked under both scenarios but in the end I figured that if you don't have JavaScript enabled you really aren’t going to get use of the main features of the project. So now I don't bother and can use that time for adding more features rather than a user path for a very small minority.
There's a saying that goes "offense can only be taken." This implies both that offense can be taken as a result of anything and that it's peoples' responsibility to not be offended rather than not to offend. The fact of the matter is that we are all offensive to someone just for being who we are. This approach will have too many side effects as it attempts to create a world where nobody is offended by addressing the wrong end of the issue.
The Day The Music Died
I assume there is some way to export or sync the (virtual?) filesystem to another location.

Very cool project, though!
Still better than talking to their phones? siri...? bluetooth earpiece...?
If they're borderline report him and let whomever take care of it. Best case scenario here is that you're not only a hypocrite but one who feels the need to say things he considers so bombastic it requires hiding behind a throwaway account.

By the way, his email address is in his profile. If you were really that concerned about "communicating with care" you could be a professional about it and mention it privately to him. Of course, that wouldn't satisfy your need to respond to every stupid, incorrect statement he makes about his new employer, really.
Yeah, I should expand on this and say that, if you want your page to be bilingual, it helps to have a central gateway through which your data will pass. If you know that you're going to want to request X, Y, and Z as JSON later, then there should be an intermediate form of the data as something which you could easily serialize into JSON -- and your HTML pages are then just a particular loose-and-quick view of that data.
What you've described is a threaded Forth, which is indeed the most common type of implementation. I was thinking about writing a subroutine-threaded (no inner interpreter) Forth that inlines common primitives and does some peephole optimization. Not necessarily as compact, but much faster. Forth still provides a flexible, structured programming environment compared to raw assembly, to say nothing of Forth's metaprogramming facilities. I'd also say that a fair amount of Forth's compactness comes from the programming style- lots of tiny subroutines allowing extensive code reuse.
送老人的礼物
Windows 8 will support more development languages
Looks neat, I bought it.

I'm toying with the idea of getting an aws server and run an ssh client there, to get Emacs and bash. With dropbox installed on the server and an external keyboard -- I could maybe skip my heavy portable?!

Anyone has experiences/advice? [edit: E.g. git/svn integration instead of the Dropbox on the server? Or should I use an ssh app for file sync?]
I deleted my comment because I didn't think it really added to the discussion that much, but since you've replied I might as well too.

You're right, $7 shouldn't represent any barriers. You'll spend more on the coffee you drink while playing with it. It's easily disposable for anyone who can afford an iPad.

I was just saying that I think it will, and that's a shame.
It's San Francisco. The parts of the city that haven't burned down yet, and been rebuilt, will burn down eventually. :-)
What about a "community" section that was home to Show HN, Ask HN - basically posts for the HN community? I think that's actually a great idea...
There seems to be a lot of hate for this. I like to applaud companies for making videos like this. Regardless of if it'll make the market in 2-5 years, it inspires the imagination. It gets you thinking "If that is possible, I wonder what else is possible" And then the ideas just flow. Same even goes for that MS video with all those flat transparent screens. It really gets the creative juices flowing with what can be done. Even if it just sparks you to think of something completely different from what they show you. I like it.
How a Programmer Lost 46 Pounds and Survived
Who will be the first one to build a DCPU16 computer inside Minecraft?
That depends. The Knuth MIX architecture is much like the architecture Notch has in mind. But the more recent MMIX architecture is far more like a modern 64 bit RISC system. In fact, it does look odd that Notch would prefer such an old behemoth nowadays.

An MMIX like ISA would open up the world for compilers much more. With this, it looks like people should be confined to writing simple stuff - which is kinda the point but still rather sad.
How to use Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
He will fit right in at Microsoft then. They call bing lots of things like "decision engine" and "doing engine", but never a "search engine".

Despite the tooltip for the magnifying glass on bing reading "Search"
No, they are stating that Macs are not susceptible to PC viruses, which is true.

They are implying that viruses are a severe problem on PCs that Mac users do not face. This was undoubtedly true when they were running those adverts.
You would have saved a lot of time and frustration by building the single page app first and putting analytics on it to see how many non-JavaScript clients you where getting (most are surprised at how few the number is) and then if the number justify it, build out an older style UI separate from the modern web app that just proxies data to the same REST services, then use a sniffer to decide where each client goes. This is a simpler solution than trying to layer on dynamic functionality while trying to support the least common denominator. 9 time out of 10 though, when faced with the decision, the effort to chase older browsers is better spent chasing a larger market like Mobile.
DTU is providing extremely good education.

You consider taxes as unfair, but if they are still in play, after getting left and right governments, it is maybe because in fact, Danish people are happy with them.
Maybe at large scale, I have spent my career working with 200k - 500k loc systems in java, c#, and ruby, and in my experience, the thing that makes refactoring possible or a nightmare is well written test suites, not compilers. Compilers definitely catch a certain class of problem, but tests catch many more.
Actually, I think the "Ask HN" posts have really been slow lately as I always include the best ones in my weekly Hacker Newsletter. The last couple months it has been hard to find more than three or so quality ones each week.
Interesting article - but I don't think the author should be so certain of his conclusions.

Just because people take longer to solve the 'difficult' candle problem with financial incentives, does not mean they take longer to solve ALL 'difficult' problems when offered financial incentives...
Please don't use blacklists, use parameterized queries or stored procs instead
I've been having pain in my hands and forearms for 18 months. The initial pain was so strong that I had to stop working for 2 weeks. I did the following:

- replaced keyboards at home and work with Microsoft Natural 4000

- installed browser plug-ins that provide Vim-like navigation (Vimium for Chrome and Vimperator for Firefox)

- switched back to Vim (I had been experimenting with Emacs for a few months)

- moved the mouse to the left (now I moved it back to the right in order to relieve my left hand)

- installed Workrave to force myself to take regular breaks (I temporarily stopped using it because I'm experimenting with Pomodoro and it includes a five minute break every 25 minutes)

- enabled sticky keys and latchlock

That allowed me to work over the last 18 months. I'm trying not to use a computer at home. I'm planning to take holidays and give my hands a longer rest ... and some Voltaren! ;-)
> Most of those "free" things are not really free also.

That's true in everything, if you want to be pedantic; every "free" service, like Dropbox's claim to have a "free" tier, is misleading because actually someone is paying for it (in that case, through a hidden "tax" on Dropbox's paying subscribers, some of whose funds go to pay for resources used by the free tier).
Except just days ago the Mint's CFO publicly criticizing BitCoin. Maybe a coincidence, maybe a declaration of war?!
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/02/us-traders-bitcoin...
I doubt it, Apple forbids apps from downloading executable code (including your own). If it's anything like Codea[1], you will have to copy/paste your code in and out of the app.

EDIT: Per the manual: "Lisping registers the .scm filetype with iOS so that you can import Scheme source into lisping by emailing a .scm file to your iPad." You can use Dropbox, etc. to get code in/out as well. Given Apple's history, doubt this will survive long.

[1] A Lua IDE and game engine for the iPad http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
Is anyone else not surprised that the doc is working for microsoft? Perhaps instead of associating himself as a former googler, former professor, and former startup founder, he should assert himself as an individual and an authority on whatever new and exciting product he's working on at mcsft.

I guess that new and exciting product is posting negative blogs about a former employer. Step it up doc and contribute something meaningful.