skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I looked at their current design first, which seemed to actually be pretty good (at least compared to the original sites of the last few you've redesigned).

Then I looked at your redesign. And it was really interesting to see the things you highlighted. If I was a doctor, I'm sure the MU certification and $44,000 tax credit would speak directly to me. It shows me that (1) the product is trustworthy, and (2) why I would want to try it immediately.

Then I flipped back to DrChrono's original design and immediately noticed the shortcomings that I hadn't realized before:

* There are screenshots of the app above the fold, but they don't really grab my attention (the doctor in the redesign not only did grab my attention, it also made it abundantly clear this was made for medical professionals).

* I also now noticed that DrChrono was using some generic clip art below the fold - it's cute, but it doesn't sell the product for me. In the redesign, you use actual screenshots of the app which made me curious to want to click through. You also had picture testimonials at the bottom, which immediately gave me social proof of other people using the product and made me want to read their stories.

* Regarding social proof, I also didn't even notice the NY Times/USA Today/CNBC logos on the current design. Whereas, on the redesign, those were some of the first things that struck out to me. Like it or not, mass media mentions definitely make me (and just about everyone else) take your product way more seriously and so it definitely pays off to feature them.

* As I mentioned before, the tax credit and MU certification really "sell" the app to me. And on the original design, I didn't notice either. The tax credit is described in very small text and doesn't stand out in any way. As for the MU certification, I was completely oblivious to it on my first pass-over (it's a triangle in the top right). I suspect ad blindness has trained me to ignore anything featured in that way, whereas I couldn't help but notice it in the redesign (the textured background helped especially - it looked like a juicy lemon and compelled me to see it).

* Lastly, the original design definitely felt like a template to me. Almost all of the graphics are boilerplate iPad app icons to the point that you could just replace some of the text and have it work for any other app. That's not a dealbreaker by any means, but it certainly doesn't help if you want people to notice your app on its own merits.
wallpaper looks good. choice of mountain as the background fitting the quotes..
For what it's worth, I'm running Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and I see the same sort of terrible performance the article describes.

Though I did improve matters drastically by telling mds not to index my (Linux) MP3 server and my Time Machine drive. That made it go from nearly unusable to just frequently annoying.

The other crazy thing I've been seeing is it routinely takes Chrome minutes to shutdown -- in fact, pretty much every time I try to reboot my MBP without shutting down Chrome first, the shutdown process times out trying to exit Chrome.
He describes poor quality, client-side apps that can be developed in a matter of hours. If he has made money, that's great, but he's not creating anything with long term value, like Instagram.

Apps like Instagram are businesses with passionate developers and back-end systems that you just can't do with random developers that will work on junk projects for no pay.
Anyone in Hyderabad next week?
I'll be at the Westin Mindspace and I'm looking to meet with some fellow hackers. Email is my profile - let me know.
Comparing the CS department to the athletic department is fallacious; the athletic departments at schools like UF make much more than they spend.
Facebook-Instagram deal highlights Zuckerberg's hacker spirit
Yeah, I think you've got it.

1. Initial page load dumps in as much data as possible to get things started.

2. All writes go through the Django API (we just look for a success/fail response).

3. All new/real-time data gets pushed to the client via socket.io. This includes data that you yourself created.

#1 is kind of a given, but #2 & #3 are more personal preference/app-specific I think.

We could have done #2 through socket.io, but as noted in the post, Python is our primary language and we wanted to push as much of the logic to it as we could.

At first we had content creators reading responses from the API with all other team members getting their updates from socket.io. This was problematic because creators would get content twice (once over the update channel for the team and once from the API). It resulted in some strange race conditions and a lot of "have I already received this message?" code. In the end, it was easiest for us to just always defer to the data from the socket (which was faster as well).
This

I haven't tried ML yet. My MBP is brand new (bought in January 2012), factory configuration (4GB RAM, Lion)

If you use it 'lightly' (that is, only Safari open) it's a breeze. But of course, it's never only that if you want to do any work.

Frankly, 4 GB should be enough! My past machine (with 3GB - and Linux) would rarely swap (in fact I could keep swap off and use a Windows 7 VM) But you can go only so far with an aging CPU

Some of the slowness can be attributed to Safari/Firefox, sure

But it really seems to have something wrong. Maybe they really neglected people with spinning disks.

(Yes, I considered buying a MacBook Air but 128Gb was not enough for me and the other options were above my budget)
Dgrid - A lightweight AMD JavaScript data grid
True, but this is wasteful signalling and should be discouraged.

The degree advantages you describe are merely a way of redistributing jobs from those without the signal to those with it. No value is created, and some is lost due to the cost of giving people useless educations. The world would be a better place if no one had these useless educations, since employers would no longer be able to discriminate against those lacking the signal.
The element of truth in this article is that wisdom is not only not valued by many companies' management, it is actively despised. What they want from a software developer is a cog in a machine, not someone who has enough wisdom to to see how things would be much better if over the long term fundamental changes were made.

After years of doing the same stupid things year after year without ever thinking very deeply (due to such thinking being of no value in that environment), the cog gets burned out, slow, and stupid, and is then easily replaced with a younger cog.
I don't want to discuss whether your pessimistic outlook is more realistic than an optimistic outlook. However, I'd like to point out that SETI isn't misguided in any case.

Heck, if your pessimistic outlook is correct, SETI is even more important, because it might provide the only early warning of an incoming invasion. That may not help in the end, but it's better than nothing.
> That you're not writing in Java/Python/C#/Ruby should be pretty obvious.

I don't think it's obvious at all that the keyword "class" is going to be fundamentally different from whatever OO language you are coming from. Isn't this the single biggest reason why many developers have difficulty learning JavaScript?

> There will be near zero correlation between "class" and performance.

There already is performance differences between constructor functions and Object.create (in terms of initialization, that is).
Just a project for now. I have a few things that I may add in the future that could turn it into something that might make money (maybe a daily featured poll?)

I doubt I'd ever put ads on the polls though.
I had to shut down on a daily basis because of this problem with my system having only 4 GB of ram. There is definitely something broken in there.

http://i.imgur.com/ohBEF.png
Inside Sustainability Base: NASA's Space Station On Earth
I don't believe deferred altruism is as good as it's cracked up to be, because of the importance of motivation. If you tell someone who wants to work in a homeless shelter, "Go to Walk Street instead and give away your wealth" you may be correct in theory, but in practice that person might be a terrible banker and burn out quickly. To desire money instinctively, the way most people crave hugs and candy, is actually rather rare, and most of the rich people I know desire money that way, while most of the poor people don't. I'm not sure an altruist can make himself obsessed with money in order to be a better altruist. I've seen people try and fail.
Amazon's one-click patent only applies to sites with a shopping cart. So if you only offer a single product or allow purchasing of one thing at a time (but that has obvious drawbacks for physical products), you can still utilize the one-click checkout.
I am a 31 year old programmer. I fear the day I start becoming discriminated against because of my age.
This one can be taken even farther and be applied to the "don't discuss your salary". My opinion has always been that this rule exists so that companies can continue to underpay employees.
Most people (self incl.) have 401(k) or Roth IRA. My long term goal is to build a very profitable business that is itself my retirement plan.
I use www.Astrid.com. Started with their excellent free Open Source app for Android... I always have my phone so a good app for it was important. It's both well designed and feature rich. It syncs with Google tasks and producteev so I have sometimes used those on the web, but their website has gotten good enough that I generally just use it when I'm at computer.
implements support for DirectX 11, OpenCL 1.1, and OpenGL 3.1.

This should be a boon for game developers.
Stop looking to authorities such as "career counselors" for answers.
Surely most professionals used cross-compilers/emulators

What is this "compiler" you speak of :-)

I have fond memories of writing a version of Tron's light bikes on my 16k Spectrum by hand-assembling Z80A machine code from my notebook[1] using the opcode lookup in the appendix of the manual.

[1] and if it isn't obvious - by notebook I mean one made of paper
The athletics department funds itself and is entirely separate from the academics budget.
on it! - sneakily making these in class
Or maybe figure out why this particular side project by your employee is important. It seems like a lot of these "side project to fix problem" situations come from a manager not knowing / not caring about the true barriers their employees are encountering or what is really costing the company time and money.
I'll defer to language designers on whether classical is inherently faster or not. I don't know that the question has been answered yet or not. What will be optimized is a matter of priority, however, and likely classes will be given a high priority on optimization (as they should).
It is Instagram, not Intagram.

(sorry, I had to)
Pinterest clones flooding Chinese web space
I don't see the big deal if it's just for one day. (The title was obviously NOT written by an English Major).
Agreed. Note the source -- folks who had gone home to die and spoke with a palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware. There are many people who die without access to in-home hospice care.* Overall they tend to be poorer and I would bet they have some other regrets not mentioned here (and I'd be interested to read up on them).

Still, it's hard to argue with this advice...

* I believe Medicare (covers most Americans over 65) provides some in-home hospice benefit, so I'm not saying this is limited to the extremely rich, but it is limited to those with a home and the wherewithal to seek hospice care.

[edit: formatting]
I googled the good doctor, and wow, you weren't kidding.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

He really does see the H1-B as some sort of Ragnarok for the American programmer.
I strongly agree with this. Remember that being a good developer has as much to do with creativity and in some respects artistry as it does with algorithms (see PG's essay Hackers and Painters http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html). The tone of this question is a bit concerning though. Why are you currently a programmer (if that is the case)? Do you enjoy building things by writing software? Do you want to solve more advanced technical problems that might require higher level Math? Or are you considering a different path because you are tepid about programming? This career, in my estimation, is something you need to have passion for. So make sure whatever you decide that part is true.
The athletic department's budget comes out of the athletic department's revenue. This is very much a budget issue. The reason why UF needs to cut this money is precisely because of this creation of a new University. Even less state funding is now being divided among even more universities.

http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2012/04/blog-generat...
[Earth Day] greendreams: a compendium of environmental APIs
Since when do you have to rewrite everything in Erlang? Erlang is happy to call out to code in C (or whatever) via ports, which are a way for Erlang to run untrusted code in isolation and restart it when it crashes. Unlike (say) Ruby or Python, buggy C libraries can't bring the whole system down in Erlang.
I have 12GB of RAM and Lion runs like crap on my iMac 2.93GHz i7.

It's like the system discards pages of programs just because the app has been inactive for an hour or so. So when I come back and start the same app the f*cking rotating HD I have sounds like a birds nest for too long periods.

Edit: Disabled the pager and the system now seems much more quiet regarding to disk seek noise when I start apps. Feels like a new machine! :-D
Recent Windows NT kernels, recent Linux kernels and recent Darwin kernels will drop disk cache pages the moment something more important needs them. Memory management in modern kernels can be very complicated and just because it appears that a process does a lot of paging it doesn't necessarily mean that it needs more physical memory.
Microsoft Sells AOL Patents to Facebook
These claims sound pretty bogus to me. From all indications (check from Google+ #dartlang ) Dart seems to be alive and kicking.
5 examples, nice
Vint Cerf: We Knew What We Were Unleashing on the World
I may be wrong about this, but wasn't the program that effectively nationalized the banking system the TARP, which was signed by Bush before Obama was elected?
I did this for awhile and ran into an interesting (if fatal) edge case:

I use a 1.5tb external drive formatted in exFAT to minimize cross-platform headaches, and whenever the drive is marked dirty (improper shutdown, eject, etc), OSX will run fsck_exfat on it before I can use it.

fsck_exfat isn't a huge deal -- or wouldn't be, if it didn't have a nasty tendency to leak RAM... the moment you plug in, fsck_exfat's footprint climbs up and up and up... never stopping! Pretty soon it's eaten up 8gb out of my 8gb RAM and poor ol' lappy is unusable.

I can say with authority what happens when you run out of physical RAM in OSX: it hard locks. Nothing works -- no keyboard, no mouse, nothing.

So, if you plug in your large, dirty (you dirty drive you!) exFAT-formatted external drive, with dynamic_paging switched off, and let fsck_exfat do its thing, your laptop freezes! Leaving the drive dirty, only to be re-scan on boot-up... freezing the laptop, leaving the drive dirty, only to be re-scan on bootup...

EDIT: this is with Snow Leopard...
Have checked out kenneth reitz's requests? Its fantastic, you might like it
Yeah, I was using the modern terminology, any Z80 assembler is going to produce the same machine code, it just needs to be loaded into the Spectrum's memory somehow.

Can you imagine using that keyboard 8 hrs a day as a fully grown adult?
I concur. I've seen this exact behavior on two different systems when the hard drive was beginning to fail. Swapping the drive fixed the problem.

My friend had installed a new larger drive that was causing the problem, whereas there were no beach balls while booting off the original drive via USB.
Very well said. As long as you do not compromise your ethics in the process, it is probably good to seek money.

Its worth pointing out that one of the best ethical ways to make money is provide people things or services they want at prices they are willing to pay. As long as you are doing that in an ethical way for people that are also generally ethical, you are probably improving the world while earning money for yourself.
The Internet Gets A Hall Of Fame
All I can think about is Star Trek's Data's evil twin Lore.
Whoa there. Back up a second from the TC this awesome orgy...

More info needed!? Files not in my shared folders or public folder can now be shared using a url? Does it actually generate a link or now everything on Dropbox could be found by guessing a secret url? The Dropbox page explaining this and linked to by the TC article is too dumbed down to understand what just changed and I didn't get any emails or announcements from Dropbox about this... NOT COOL. What happened to "Your files are always safe"??? Why do companies not understand trust? (Yeah, yeah I'm familiar with the usual "your average moron doesn't care about these details" mythos/cancer).
I'm also looking into adding a stream page that will show all the recent polls created on the site. This will allow for polls to get some extra exposure.

I'd probably have to make sure it was optional though as people might only want to poll a private group of people and not have random people answering.
This makes a lot of sense and I look forward to trying this out in my own project. Thanks.
Personal Data Connector Singly Raises $7M
CrossFit For Your Contact List
Our Investment In Singly (distributed social networking by Jabber/XMPP creator)
I've always wondering how large companies buy and sell patents in bulk like that. Do they just point at a filing cabinet and say, there's 650 patents in there, it's yours for 550M$, take it or leave it. Or do they have an army of lawyers pour over them one by one?
In three years you will be 28 no matter what you are doing. Better if you are doing something you like.
(From Platitudes 3:14)
Windows notepad in pure CSS3
Make the new Gmail suck less
I have a technical degree, but I tend to disagree. There is a good deal of pure signaling involved, but graduates of humanities programs on average can write and research better after they graduate then previously. Heck, most can read or write better than my CS-degree-having colleagues. I also think there's considerable value to society produced.

In any case, it's easy for companies to solve that problem, if they see an inefficiency. If IBM thinks people without degrees are an underutilized/undervalued labor pool, they'll start hiring them. And if the market stops demanding degrees, people will stop getting them. Until then, it looks like a demand-side problem to me.
> 1) Prototypical inheritance is different from classical inheritance.

This may be true, but JavaScript's flavor of prototypal inheritance is much closer to classical than it is to pure Self-style prototype delegation.

In Self, you make new instances by taking an existing object and cloning it. That creates a new object that delegates directly to the one you clone from.

In a class-based language, you make new instances by invoking a constructor, which is often a method on some other object that represents the class. That creates a new instance which shares a set of methods that all other objects created from that constructor share.

Which of those sounds more like JS? JS by virtue of having constructors and `prototype` already is 90% of the way to being class-based. It just lacks the syntax to make that pleasant to work with.
Idb.filesystem.js - HTML5 Filesystem API polyfill that runs on IndexedDB
dates to Shah days..folks replaces sometimes the export terrorism for political gains strategy
This was submitted while reading another more current article about the TSA testing out new ID system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878142
At the core, it is a library that extracts text from various document formats (PDF, xlsx, docx, pptx, etc.).

It is important to note, however, that Tika in itself doesn't implement the text extractors, but rather combines different different projects (e.g., Apache POI) into one simple interface "getText".

If you are performance-oriented, thought, you may find that you will find yourself using the individual parsers as you'd want different settings/options to maximize throughput.
for my usage pattern, still no reason for me to move from the core 2 quad.
I wonder if making it easier for millions of people to have quicker access to larger social graphs isn't the cultural equivalent of curing cancer or privatized space travel. The effects may not be measurable but lives are undeniably enriched by easing the flow of communication. Even if it's just cat pictures (what's wrong with cats?)
I have an 8-way Xeon Mac Pro w/ 20GB of RAM, almost half of which is 'free' at any point during the day unless I'm doing something really out of the ordinary.

Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open.

I really don't give a shit how it's not "technically" broken - that's broken from an experience point of view. And I haven't re-installed the OS (this was an App Store upgrade from Snow leopard) because that's a major pain in the ass as this is an actual workstation used to do actual work.

I can't believe this is actually advice, either - that's what Windows users used to say in the 90s. Anyway, I guess I'm just ranting. OS X is wonderful except for the fact that it sucks at managing memory to keep a system snappy.
Well it's a product that I use every day and I'm always eager to try new stuff if I see it could be cool. I was really interessed by the article and headed to the website to see what it offered, and I felt it wasn't a plugin that would suit me. There is always place for improvement, even if I think Gmail is great as it is right now.

Sometimes, you're so used to a certain interface that you don't even know you can improve it until someone comes at you with something new and say "look, here's a new feature we thought you'd like : " and you go "yeah! why didn't I think of this first?".
Open Source Shakespeare (in MySQL)
1in5, 5x5 or 5by5 but not 5in5, no?
even before they made the switch official the AppEngine devs were active SO users and the site had become an unofficial knowledge base for the product.
This seems pretty bold to me? Anyone else suprised by this? Could put alot of pressure on home improvement retailers and industrial suppliers. Reminds me of Octopart - right? that YC supply search startup?

In any event, this is very cool. Especially for home robotics hobbyist :)
Why was "don't work too much" rewritten as "don't work too hard"?
Why don't you spend $140 and add an SSD to the pro? You can keep the HDD for an extra $80 with a cd drive bay HDD caddy.
I agree completely. Why does the US have so much crime? Because there's no safety net. (The War on Drugs also contributes in a major way.) This ends up being foolish, because we pay more to keep people in prison (over $30,000 per year) than we would by providing them with education and training. We have the resources to get rid of poverty, but we're spending what we have in phenomenally stupid ways.