skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three.js is great, but sometimes the performance isn't quite there for large sets of data. When I made this 3D Facebook connection plotter:

http://petercottle.com/friendMapper2/

I had to switch to barebones WebGL with GPU picking to get the right performance. It would be interesting if someone made a pure data-vis library for WebGL. Like d3.js + a webgl plotter
I thought their revision the first time around was a good way of doing it. i.e. giving HW deadlines but at the end grading by the exam only if that was a better score. That way it's as if you get credit for staying on pace, but none taken away if you went at your own pace.
Right. With HN in our samples users need to do an additional hop over to the main website. I think next time we could compare it on the other HN link.
Ask HN: Do they really build an MVP in a weekend?
Having bitten this hacker bug for couple of days with me, I am just wondering how much knowledge/workout does it take to build a product and say it as a weekend project. What are the best tools/materials to consider before building a mobile app or web app?
How do you choose which tool/api for backend and frontend?

I am just curious whether that would really took only one weekend. Honestly, I believe when you say it as weekend product, it would definitely lower the user expectations on the product and it is my sole opinion. But when I see couple of apps, at least they look good architectures and different api integrations and still they are able to do that completely in a weekend.

I am open to your suggestions and no hard feelings these kind of posts.
Remember the Telephone
Why is this downvoted?

There's no reason to hijack a fairly specific discussion with a much broader ideological rant. This sort of thing has been happening on HN lately and it bothers me. It takes a potentially interesting conversation and turns it into an ideology measuring contest.

I understand that the theory of free markets in general might be applicable here, but the point is the way the GP is framing the debate it can't be resolved without much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Just to add to that, re reversing in Arabic locales: All KDE/Qt apps will do the same with their tabs and have done so for at least a decade, and you can even get a feel for it in an LTR locale by running them with --reverse (useful for devs to check for issues in custom widgets).

(And thanks for the kind words. :)
This is pretty silly criticism, considering the 3 month delays Coursera had this spring.

Coursera's delays were because it is much more closely affiliated with Stanford than Udacity is. In the fall they didn't really have the Coursera name settled upon yet and the certificate printouts they sent to people who completed the courses had Stanford's name on them.

Discussions involving university reputations are always going to be long and dragged out. Udacity avoided them by having a clear separation between the website and the institutions of its instructors from the outset. Coursera acquired that separation over time.

Harvard and MIT's reputations are most of what separate them from FullSail and the University of Phoenix. It is important that they protect them. It is encouraging that more universities are following Stanford into this space.

Courses with broadcast lectures and server-based practice/homework/exams will need the (hu)manpower that universities currently command in order to grow quickly.
Confidence vs. Overthinking
Can't reply to you anymore. I'll check it out. Which browser/OS?
Does it say anywhere how Harvard+MIT will price their courses? Will they be free? I should read the article myself and find the answer, but the webpage design, the font and the rambling text is uninspiring. Like an academic paper! (sorry)
If I am not mistaken it's not the first time Skype send a DMCA to this project. But given where the autor lives, the DMCA does not apply so it doesn't go anywhere.
That's very impressive, and I'm going to be playing with that globe this evening :)
Everyone will get less votes in different proportions, based on their audience.

It's not a linear adjustment for everyone.
Great point about battery. This one ships with 2000mAh. Which is enough for 3 hours of playtime. I wonder how useful such low battery life would be considering that you will rarely have 100% battery on your phone.
The new cascades sdk is awesome, and is available for mac, win and linux !
I submitted this to Hackful Europe as well (http://hackful.eu/posts/968), hope you are ok with this. :)
Look at who is actually doing the work, not the press releases. The first class is co-taught by Anant Agarwal, the director of CSAIL, Jerry Sussman, who is a founding director of the FSF, and Piotr Mitros, who has been active in the free software community since the nineties.
Blackberry's $10,000 app guarantee to developers
As as boss, I understand that happy employees are a good thing for everyone, but similarly it is not enough to convince me to use what I see as a seriously substandard solution.

From my point of view, Node.js is shaping up to be the php of 2012. It's proponents claim it's easy and fun and it's in a language that they are comfortable with. Meanwhile it's detractors see no real advantage over existing or other upcoming languages. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming it's quite as bad as php as that's something very hard to achieve, but equally I feel there are much better solutions.

I'm not at all against new languages, but I'd sooner invest in a new language that brings something more serious to the table. Perhaps the language is more concise so that we can write less code. Perhaps it's really clean with high performance and a steller C FFI. Maybe it leverages exiting mature eco-systems of software such as the .Net or JVM stack. Do you not find Scala, Python, or Clojure fun? I would hope you do!
Huh? Why won't Evernote work in OS X Mountain Lion?
In my view, the Oracle v. Google case may be headed in the same direction.

Judge Alsup has let the case go to the jury to determine whether the "structure, sequence and organization" (SSO) of the Android platform infringes either the compilable code or the documentation of 37 of the 166 total API packages constituting a part of the Java platform. But the judge has reserved for his exclusive determination, after a verdict is entered, whether such SSO is even protectible under U.S. copyright law. In instructing the jury, the judge merely told the jurors to assume for purposes of their deliberations that the SSO was protectible under copyright and to decide the case based on that assumption. This means that, if Oracle loses on the verdict, its copyright case is dead. If it wins, then and only then will the judge need to address the ultimate legal question of whether the SSO can be protected by copyright at all. If the case does reach that point, he will be able to decide the question based on a full presentation of evidence by both parties and that in turn will make any decision he renders far less vulnerable to being overturned on appeal.

I am not saying that the judge will necessarily support Google in its claim that APIs should not be covered by copyright. I do say that Judge Alsup is nobody’s fool and is playing this smart, letting Oracle play out its case in full and only then stepping in to say whether its case is even legally supportable.

Of course, the judge could also have rendered a definitive ruling one way or the other in the pretrial phase. But there are some areas of law where the principles are pretty clearly articulated but get knotty in their application and this is one of them. Yes, U.S. copyright law, like EU law, specifies that something that is functional or a system or a method of operation, etc. cannot be protected by copyright. But what exactly does that mean in the factual context of APIs and programming languages? Maybe those extremely well-versed in what APIs are and what they do can answer that clearly for others who are also well-versed. But in a court of law, a lot can get lost in translation and, in the absence of a clear factual record, skilled lawyers have all sorts of room to confuse and confound the issues as they apply abstract legal rules to a murky factual record. Because of this, the judge is letting it play out through a full jury verdict while reserving the right to rule definitively on the issue until after the verdict.

In this context, Oracle has plenty of reason to be nervous. If it loses before the jury, it loses; if it wins, it still may lose. And, as for the case being a bad precedent, that remains to be seen depending on how the judge and any appeals court may ultimately rule on this issue. For the moment, U.S. law remains sane on this point and nothing bad has happened as yet apart from an overbearing company attempting to pour vast resources in hopes of gaining short-term advantage to the long-term detriment of the developer community.
ASP.NET core it not terribly well-designed, but it has has peripheral things like Razor, design-by-contract, PEX, Moles and there are tons of other interesting technologies from MS research. A lot of those things are genuinely new in some way, and allow you to do something that was completely impossible before.

I can't muster any enthusiasm over Node, because it's really more-of-the-same-but-better. With an attitude like this it's perfectly reasonable to ask "why exactly it's better"? Unsubstantiated enthusiasm in IT is evil.
Engulf, A Graphical HTTP Benchmarker written in Clojure + D3.js
The Lead Engineer should be the Release Engineer
IMHO blog post on why the lead engineer should be the release engineer
Spindlytext: a library for writing in the sky with the Google Earth API
Cab drivers, including Yellow Cab drivers, don't work for "Yellow Cab". Each individual cab is a franchise operation with its own P&L. Cab drivers don't typically have "bosses".
Hitchens seemed pretty anti-theist, and I don't recall him ever saying that belief in a personal god was "fairly harmless".

I was using 'aggressive' from the perspective of those using the term 'new atheist' - should've been more clear on that. I don't think 'new atheism' is 'aggressive', except to the extent that it's being vocal vs 'in the closet' year ago.
I'll give an example of what I think Hickey is talking about. In a OO API you have an

class Employee
private boss
public getBoss()

What IMO Hickey thinks, is that you should have instead a map with a field boss. Yes, you can't then change that field name, in the same way you can't change the method name getBoss in the OO API. But you can change the content of that field.
The Platinum Rule, however, derives from the the Golden Rule. The reason to treat others as they would like to be treated is because (1) you want others to treat you as you want to be treated and (2) you should do unto others etc.
Online education platforms are future, I am not saying that class room education is going away but both can compliment each other. I am taking Udacity classes (one class at a time as it is very easy to get overwhelmed and join 3-4 classes and don't complete any)and I like it.
Like the iPhone version, you need to be a premium subscriber to steam anything. Myself I have the cheaper plan that's only good for the desktop app.
Clean Google Search: Chrome Extension
Now, if they only could sort out the iPhone app as well. It uses a lot more CPU (and corresponding battery) than other audio players (probably due to its Vorbis use), and skips as soon as the os is busy doing something else.
Sam Harris believes in experiential religion - that is to say that he's had mystical experiences/unitive states of consciousness. He writes about the importance of spirituality(or esoteric Religion) in contrast to literalist, dogmatic religion on his blog.

Rational, literal, dead religion is often harmful but mystical, experiential, living religion is quite the opposite.
How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone
Meta question: how is this related to hacker news (related to technology or science)?
Udacity has started mirroring their course content videos. You can check on Udacity web site.
Hakin9 Magazine May Issue Released: Cloud Computing
Agreed. Anedotal - I've been using Youtube since it was released, and I just found out a month or so ago that you don't have to dig through the annoyingly short paginated comments below videos to find replies to yours, there's a page in your dashboard that shows all that.

I'm not a heavy Youtube user and don't care that much, but it was not intuitive or apparent.

Further, I mostly like G+ (except for one complaint [1]), and I'm all for better integration of their properties with it.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3828010
Has anybody tried their Linux preview? I am thoroughly impressed, so far its the best app on my Ubuntu in terms of UX.
Revealing too much in banner ads
As long as we are dictating what other people should be thinking about here is a quote from the late great James Baldwin I think you should mull over.

'Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty'
These are old, but great. Drepper's history with glibc is a little checkered, but his whitepapers (there's an equally great one on the NPTL work from back when that was being done in glibc) are gold.

Understanding the DRAM cycle is critical to performance tuning in modern code, and my experience is that virtually no application developers know how it works.
Pirate Bay enjoys record traffic on the back of news that UK ISPs must block it
AFAIK the DMCA takedown applies to Github, who are in the US, regardless of where the author of the project lives.
$99 Xbox 360 + Kinect bundle launching next week with two-year subscription
Man, people really like to make ridiculous predictions about which big site is going to be "the next Myspace." Youtube has DAYS worth of video uploaded every single minute. When people talk about online video they always mention Youtube, not Vimeo, not some other site. You really think that it looks increasingly likely that Youtube is going to somehow go under? Sorry but that's just bogus.
If I comment or upvote here, it is not broadcast to all my "friends".
Presented very nicely~ Makes it easy to choose.
Very useful information, but this is way overkill for what "every programmer should know".

Every programmer should have a basic understanding of latencies.

This is slightly out of date but still gives an idea of relative latencies:
http://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers
http://iprl.wz.cz/
is now apparently displaying some obscene video.

The original(?) on http://esquire.ru/clock is working though.
What the Heck? Did someone just get a patent on "managing appointments"?
Just to offer an anecdotal counterpoint, I thought Professor Widom was incredible.

Had you taken a distance learning class before? If you just stick a random professor in front of a camera, odds are pretty good that they're less interesting to watch and listen to than the "early adopters" that have been a part of this new wave in education thus far.
or that a bazillion other sites only give you the option to log in with your Facebook account. Haters gonna hate.
We spent a little over 6 months developing this app and really focused our efforts on a clean UI, a great new user experience, and a complimentary set of features to the web app. Would love to hear your feedback! Easy download link: http://www.weebly.com/weebly/mobile/landing.php

Funny story: We filmed the demo video outside our offices on Pacific Ave. To get a smooth tracking shot down the sidewalk, Richard (our Head of Customer Service) was filming Trish (Office Manager) from an Aeron chair being pulled backwards by David (CEO). We shot another scene a few feet away and turned to get the Aeron for another take and it was stolen! Total film budget was $25 for the music and $500 for the chair :-)
> About the only thing I know for sure is students from Stanford and MIT are in general more capable than those from a community college, people with degrees from online for-profit colleges like U. Phoenix and CIS degrees from anywhere can be relied on to not know enough to perform.

Yet this statement completely undermines your point. I graduated from community college instead of going to high school, and now wherever I go I get dirty looks for having some random "fake" school next to a top-ranked one. I've been flat out rejected by people who stated that "[they] know what community college portfolios look like", without knowing the whole story.

As much as I wish credits and degrees didn't matter, this is not universally true in application. In fact the less they matter on their own, the more accessible they should become! It doesn't force anyone to lower their standards. That is why sooner or later, the credits will matter.
as spyder posted there are npms providing this functionality. there are 8,000 packages for all your needs.

But the point is another: the npm world is much more modular than the Rails mononblock, there is much less magic involved. You setup your own stack which is simpler than setting up Rails, rvm, gems. Rails isn't bad—it's great but getting off track or looking behind the magic can get a tedious task ...
WOOT: https://github.com/apenwarr/git-subtree/commit/8cd698957f57f...
The Facebook SDK uses the same method. I wonder how long until it is rejected.
I have taken numerous amounts of online courses from h.s on up. The classes I truly enjoyed were hybrid courses when the class would meet every so often. I loathe 100% online courses I like having people around to ask questions,see how they did something,etc. Posting on a messageboard just doesn't give the same vibe.
Ask HN: Are you using MonoTouch/MonoForAndroid?
I'm interested in trying out some app development, mainly for personal use but maybe I would release something in the future. Let me just say right now: no Javascript! I hate HTML5/Javascript apps, etc - sorry, they just don't feel as nice to use.

I'm an Android user but I'd rather not be tied down to releasing for just one platform, if possible, in case I decide to develop something for general release in future. I'm not a big Java fan and not too eager to learn so was looking into MonoTouch, etc.

Does anyone have any experience developing with Mono for Android and iOS? Does Apple have any problem with MonoTouch applications? Do MonoTouch applications feel just as native or will they always be a second-class citizen?

I would much rather learn Java for Android development if Java provides the best experience, but if Mono could be used instead for an equal experience then I think I'll go down that route. So, has anyone used Mono on iOS or Android and if so, what have your experiences been?
I very strongly agree. Udacity courses gives you this feeling that they step back, and tried to reinvent how would an online course be if it was invented today, taking advantage of the tools we have today. While coursera has that feeling that they took existing courses, and just threw it online and hoped for the best. For example, I have the feeling that Python was chosen for udacity (among other reasons) specifically because it could have an online interpreter. While coursera feels like they just reused whatever language and tools they were using before, just because. If I try to consolidate the udacity advantages it would be:

- Short videos: This have many different advantages and works well if its other properties. Let's you set your own pace, instead of following the long video's pace. Easier to separate topics into different parts you can easily click to go back to. When necessary, it's easier to pause between topics (since the video pauses automatically) for you to take a step back and think about you just learned for a minute. It matches the interpreter nicely, learn something new, try it, learn something else, try it. It allows the instructor to better separate links to appropriate material in the description, by topic.

- Online interpreter and automated tools: I suppose this is one of the reasons why they chose python. Similar to how codeacademy works, udacity is like codeacademy + video instructions instead of text. And this is genius. The videos are taking into account that you have an interpreter with you, and everything is integrated. The lessons, quizes and homeworks are all automatically integrated with the interpreter to make sure that you try out what's being taught and the class can give you instant feedback if you're doing it right.

- Production value: Not only the videos look better, but they are edited to be more efficient. Unnecessary parts are cut out for brevity. The video and sound quality makes sure everything is easy to see and hear. Some other online courses often times display a printscreen of the IDE, with low resolution, which makes the code unreadable. On udacity, the code is always readable and the audio always easy to listen. The better UI makes it easier to navigate. And of course, the superior visual quality just makes the whole thing more pleasant to consume.

These 3 characteristics I wish every online course would try to learn from udacity and implement themselves. It's important to note how these 3 are glued together and help each other. Short videos gives you breaks to use the interpreter. Higher visual quality makes the code easier to read and then try on the interpreter, etc etc Udacity just feels like a consistent and smart bunch of ideas put together to make sure we learn easier. Hopefully, others will evolve with them.
> With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree?

I can't speak to the effectiveness of github and stackoverflow as signals of programmer ability, but I know most other disciplines do not have such services, nor will they anytime soon.
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Teams will relocate to Cleveland, OH for 12 weeks to work in LaunchHouse’s 23,000 square foot Silicon Valley-esque space. Its furniture and colorful, collaborative work space promotes genius and impromptu brainstorming sessions, day or night, with awesome, like-minded people. Accommodations will also be sponsored by LaunchHouse.

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Create a Gladiator arena and place the "groups" within it. Let them fight amongst themselves until a clear victor rises. When all is said and done, decide the startups fate by granting them a "thumbs up" or a nothing at all. (on facebook)