skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given how people drive around here, I'd venture you're right. (Or they'd realize that not leaving enough space between cars at highway speeds is suicidal.)
I know it's tacky to meta-complain, but public interest articles are one of the reasons I stopped reading Reddit.

I am looking for one particular kind of "signal" in that signal-to-noise ratio, and while this might be of interest to a population including hackers, a population of hackers would likely not identify this article as relevant, outrageous though the article may be.

I've noticed HN's articles growing steadily less and less interesting. Perhaps it's time to move again. Any suggestions? MeFi? Other sites? Does a new one need to be created?
How to choose the right mobile development framework
I agree - and would specifically add things like changing the washer on a leaky tap, or fixing the toilet float...you know, basic plumbing for "those who aren't plumbers".
Anyone who complains about this obviously never was willing to pay enough for the product/service to make it viable -- THEY are the problem, not the site owner. People need to pay for what they like or what is here today might not be here tomorrow. Way too many people have this expectation that everything on the internet must be free.
We use Pivotal, Skype, Whatsapp, Github, Zoho (CRM/Projects), Dropbox. Of all these Pivotal + Github seem to be by far the highest on the list; without those we would be dead.

We have some glue tying these together and we use some in-house development wiki's and live-editing tools for producing faster and collaborating better.

Thanks for wemux; that looks really great :)
Not sure if we disagree at all. I consider him not working for Facebook a good thing.

Good engineers should not work for bad companies. I know there are good engineers at Facebook, what I'm not sure about is that Facebook itself is good.
Your comment was not at all witty, and doesn't belong here.
I'm curious if anyone knows of any open source projects that are similar to what they are doing? This is one area I have a lot of interest in but I haven't had all that much exposure to yet..
I can't answer your question, but if you're looking to emulate a functional style in Javascript I'd be remiss if I didn't point you toward Underscore.js:

http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/
Probably a bit of both. It was only after observing my cousin's son for a bit and hearing about what he liked that people began to remind me how tenacious I was, and really many others in the family. I'm pretty convinced that if I had only been introduced to calculus before becoming a teenager I wouldn't have given up on mathematics so easily. Kids are capable of a lot more than we're willing to admit– I say it's part insecurity, part genuine fear of being 'wrong', expecting too much, etc. thereby helping your kid fail.
FWIW, here is a description how different ruby versions are handled with rbenv by 37signals:

https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/issues/101#issuecomment...
> In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we’ve written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.

Am I the only one who gets super excited like a little girl with this new trend open sourcing if you close your company?
This is an interesting approach.

One change I would make is in the testing of the lib directory. I've found it best to separate the testing of the lib directory contents from the unit and functional tests that are baked into Rails. It requires a bit of custom setup, but it's easy to reuse in other applications.

1. Create a test/lib directory

2. Create a lib/tasks/test_libs.rake file

3. Put the following into the Rake file[1]:

namespace :test do
desc "Test libraries"
Rake::TestTask.new(:libs) do |t|
t.libs << "test"
t.pattern = 'test/lib/**/*_test.rb'
t.verbose = false
end
end

lib_task = Rake::Task["test:libs"]
test_task = Rake::Task[:test]
test_task.enhance { lib_task.invoke }

4. Run `rake test:libs` to test just your lib directory.

[1] Credit goes to http://stackoverflow.com/a/1588496 for this Rake task.
How long did it take to build, and which part was most difficult?
Objective-C, despite not being popular outside Apple, isn't proprietary at all. Many of Apple's frameworks are but the language itself is open. GNUStep is a resource for that.
But you've "announced" your cloud platform, yet I can't justify any time learning or becoming familiar with it since there is no idea on price - it's frustrating.
I'd venture that people are psychologically better off compared to the time when people had no idea how cars worked, and they would hang bulbs of garlic under the hood. (Which happened when the Ford Model T came out.)
WordPress App Store Launched
It's hard enough trying to be a professional male programmer under 50 without being pandered to as a mountain dew swilling minecraft playing hoodie wearing brogrammer, so for sure adding Rails to the mix is just asking to be typecast.
Wouldn't it have to clear it's orbit to be considered a planet?
What we've seen in talent acquisition valuations we've captured is the range is large ($2-$5M/engineer).

How much of that typically goes to the engineer? I imagine that a $20 million purchase of a 10 engineer company roughly works out to $2 million per engineer, but I imagine the founders and early investors would get the lion's share.
There were many potential reasons for Facebook to buy Instagram, and while "buy out potential competitors" was a good one I wondered how much that really had to do with it. I think this new buy-out increases the evidence for that theory, though, and I wonder how that affects the future longevity of social networks. MySpace never had the money to buy out Facebook.
Indeed. But the converse is also untrue: Not everything that people post on the Internet has a basis in reality. I know many people who went to other universities, and many do not appear to have a similar concept: For example, there are probably few superficially serene ducks at MIT, because many of them seem to wear their hard work on their sleeves; and students at Cal have nicknamed their school "Berzerkeley".

I am not saying that this term or even this phenomenon is strictly unique to Stanford, but I simply have never observed "duck syndrome" used in this sense in any other context. This includes the Internet, personal conversations, and so on. And now, it includes this Hacker News thread, because aside from Drbble's vaguely plausible remark no one has yet come forth that their institution employed this term as well.

My take on it is that, just as everyone has their own mascot, everyone has their own vocabulary, which probably includes their own coinage for this experience if they indeed have this experience to describe.
> However, I do not want to be forced into a single,
> worldwide identity. Either personally, or admixed with
> various professional responsibilities and relationships.

Have you considered using the "Pages" feature? Pages allow users can create an arbitrary number of anonymous identities, and they can be used for any (legal) purpose. The only significant restriction is that a Page identity can't initiate contact with other identities, as an anti-spam mechanism.

> I also don't want to feel an excessive risk of being "unplugged" from
> Google's services.
> [...]
> For now, I think I'll use a secondary identity -- not a false one, but a
> second account -- to participate in Google+. I already have one for casual
> business contacts. In case the feedback is worth anything, I still fear
> committing my primary Google identity to the product.

While the risk of being banned from Google+ is still unfortunately real, this does not extend to other Google products. Even if your account is banned from Google+ for using a non-government identity, other products will still work fine. To my knowledge, nobody has ever lost access to GMail or YouTube just because they used their own identity.
Uninhabitable high-rises
It moves your pinky, your smallest and least mobile finger, to move up two rows, which requires a typical person to completely flatten that finger. Either that, or you end shifting your whole hand. Which means that you end up moving your hand a lot while typing because the underscore may easily be the most common keyboard character encountered in some programs.
It's not about looks. There are 3 criteria to being classified as a planet[1]:

* Orbits the sun

* Massive enough for its gravity to make it all the way around

* 'Cleared its neighborhood' of smaller objects arounds its orbit

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_planet
Honestly the buzz I want to hear is "you guys suck, here's 10 ways you could be better" before we start taking money, at which point it's "you guys suck and you're taking our money, give me my money back". I'm trying to build the service I would use, and the intent as mhicks said up above is to always have a free tier so that folks get a chance to try it out before they commit.
Video streaming over bonded 3G 4G wireless for command and control vehicles
One great takeaway regarding local variances for the people who are fortunate enough to be able to benefit from it: If you're able to work remotely, you can do work for companies in the ~130% areas (e.g. San Francisco, New York, D.C.) and make those wages while living in an area where most people can get by on ~90% of the national average.
Scrambls Lends Privacy to Social Media Messages
Interesting, I'd given up all hope of the flickering being fixed.
The garbage collector is still not mature and could use some optimizations.

For mobile, I'd use reference counting, with an incremental collector working on the cycles. (And encourage the pros to use weak references.)
Mars has an atmosphere, Vesta is mostly rock not ice, and they are all in the wrong orbits to be Kuiper Belt objects. edit: Don't worry, Pluto is also classified as a dwarf planet, just like Eris.
> After all, this is what they were getting in class but could now pick and choose where and when to attend. They would see the liberation. But for an 11 year old, there was a more demanding standard and, on many levels, a standard worth respecting.

This is, in my opinion, the most important point of this entire era of information, accessibility, and everything else. While everyone else is getting grumpy about how the kids are taking all this relatively new stuff for granted, we're ignoring the fact that these are literally the people who will build "the future". People are motivated by what they take for granted– it's the baseline, it's what everyone deserves, and it's what we're responsible for making better all the time.
I've got a feeling that HN crowd is lately loosing it's focus by spending it's time on "hipster" topics too much.

Page long commenting on a fluffy article ( e.g "5 * 5 - 3" beats "5*5-3" ) may be good for your mind but imho, this thing should not be on the front page.
You misread the versions. Windows Vista to Windows 7 takes about 5 clicks, yes.

But there is no direct upgrade process at all from XP to 7. It's possible to go XP -> Vista -> 7, but no sane person would buy a copy of Vista just to do that. Here are Microsoft's official instructions for upgrading from XP to 7.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/help/upgrading-f...

First you export all your files and settings from XP. Then you install Windows 7, which is actually a fresh OS install and not an upgrade. Then you reinstall your programs and import your files and settings back in.
Saying there were obvious, preventable mistakes is different than saying the entire product is a blunder.

The early release was a mistake. A mistake that cost them billions of dollars and did nothing to help them measurably "win" against Sony. [1]
The nonsense being grafted onto XBox Live and the dashboard in general is also a mistake. [2]

The 360 is an overall success despite those things.

[1] The 360 succeeded largely on the strength of XBox Live and Sony's shooting themselves in the foot over-engineering --and thus overpricing-- the PS3.

[2] Allowing publishers to erode the experience. Muddying up the formerly-clean media experience with largely nonsensical divisions of functionality is a mistake.
Underscores are silly! We only use them in code to separate words in tokens because the default natural word separator, whitespace, is already used to distinguish tokens.

At my old job, we had DSL that allowed and encouraged very descriptive variable and procedure names with space in them. To implement this unambiguously the language had to exclude all the operator characters from variable names and procedure calls with a sigil. A line of code may have appeared like this:

line slope estimate = @some function( x - step size ) / ( x - step size);

Feels a bit strange at first but quickly becomes natural, especially when dealing with wordy domains (math was a bad example).
Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js – Passport
The death penalty is required. The judiciary just needs to have conclusive proof of the crime.

For example, right now, in one of India's jails lies a man named Ajmal Kasab. He is one of the terrorists involved in the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. He was caught on tape mercilessly killing people with his AK47.

If you do away with the death penalty entirely, how do you execute this fucker and others like him?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks

Edit: A lot of people asking similar questions. So I'll just answer them here.

Being identified by eye-witnesses and being caught on camera are not the same thing. People make mistakes while remembering. Cameras don't. Further, he was apprehended by the army/police in the middle of his killing spree. There is NO WAY it was someone else.

Handing him a life imprisonment just puts the system at risk. It will just lead to terrorists resorting to kidnap to release him as has been done in the past. A well known example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Airlines_Flight_814
I don't think it's about the ambition, it's just that it seems to me that us Europeans generally lack the Americans' "screw you guys, I'll do this my way" approach to things. We're more comfortable with following established patterns which inevitably leads to having a smaller number of really meaningful businesses.
"An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one."

It needs to be explained how he determined that this isn't related to _why_ they are obese in the first place, i.e. whether these are purely correlational facts. It would be nice if the New York Times wasn't susceptible to elementary statistical fallacies like this but... well this is nutrition after all.
I bet that's what they used to say on Reddit...
Just to be clear, the code inside of the lib and test directories is not actually inside of our rails application. They're inside of a different git repository and are packed as a separate gem. It makes more sense to me once you've isolated the code this way that you would then write "use case tests" and then role tests (which I haven't gotten into yet.. next post :))
this is why there's a flag link for each submission

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I do that about 3 times a day. I also got rejected for an openshift license plate because of that significant f...
Best explanation I've ever read for what "majority privilege" means.
What the heck do you mean by 'the Bay Area likes ...'

Some people living in the Bay Area like the current density. Some people living there would like it more dense.

There are probably also people wishing these youngsters would move out and the whole area would turn into farmland again.

To me, denser is better. Denser means shorter commutes. Denser means lower rents. Denser means more energy efficient. Denser means more hospitalable to public transportation. Denser means more vibrate neighborhoods.
Fking ridiculous.

Doesn't this make the prosecutors in this case guilty of murder?
Admitted file-swapper begs Supreme Court for help
Amazon's protocols were clearly designed by a Java EE developer. Not that there isn't anything inherently wrong with them, and they are very flexible. They're also somewhat stuck with them based around the huge amount of code which interfaces with S3/AWS.

There are some problems with no good solution, namely the signed parameters in Amazon's case. How do you sign JSON? Is there a "canonical" JSON format that will allow signing consistently, and verification? All the approaches I've seen are incompatible in some way.

Client-side SSL is another solution, but its much less flexible (i.e., token-generated requests wouldn't be easy)
If you're interested in checking out how to get mongo running on openshift, here are some things to get started

- Good list of resources: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/developers/mongodb

- Lots of goodies in here: https://github.com/openshift

- Part 1 of a 4-part series on building mobile apps with titanium, mongodb and openshift: http://blog.10gen.com/post/23089705899/mobilize-your-mongodb...

- Upcoming webinar on node.js and mongodb with OpenShift: http://www.10gen.com/events/building-web-services

Disclaimer: I work at 10gen
Sorry you're wrong based on my many years experience with dealing with non-programmers and this exact situation.

Seeing what is already being done with computers on a daily basis gives people knowledge of what can be done without knowledge of programming. Knowing programming but not enough could also be an impediment as well. You may not realize there are simple ways of solving an issue that to you with your limited knowledge seems like it could take a tremendous amount of effort. There is an expression "a little knowledge can be dangerous".

And how many people are going to take the time to learn to code enough anyway to see all the possibilities?
Thinkfuse co-founder here.

I don't know if or why Google discontinued Snippets. Generally, we don't spend any time thinking about Google Snippets really. It just so happens that the writers really like to tie a story to Google :-)

Even when I was at Google a few years ago, it was clear that Snippets weren't the right fit for all teams. Smaller teams sitting around a single pod of desks probably don't need a tool for written status reporting. Larger teams create too many individual reports, so that's no good either. If I had to guess, the extremely simple Snippets tool simply didn't scale.

That said, the key insight we gained from Snippets was when we viewed it through the lens of "Social Enterprise Software". We were looking at products like Yammer, Chatter, Jive, etc. And said "Do businesses want social for social's sake?"

Ultimately, we've come to think of our business as "What would Microsoft Exchange look like in a post-Facebook world? How would it work if public folders were the default and private inboxes were secondary?"

It just so happens that weekly status reports presented a wonderful opportunity: reoccurring, broadcast messages, and required by a manager. It just oozes with potential for bottoms up viral distribution.

There's a lot of depth to this idea of reoccurring, semi-structured, broadcast business communication. Status reports, meeting minutes, stakeholder updates, trip reports, and so on. While there are armies of tools for making gantt charts and tracking work items, there are precious few for facilitating the flow of information. Coupled with the simple fact that businesses have a heartbeat measured by communication on some cadence, and you wind up where Thinkfuse is going :-)
Your opinions on capital punishment don't have to be mutually exclusive. I firmly believe that some people have to pay the ultimate price for their deeds, but I insist that these people should have so much evidence pointing them to having done the act that there is no possible way that they could be innocent.

IMHO, capital punishment should be so rare that it makes the news, and also sets a deterrent for future criminals wishing to do something similar.
How do you execute him - you don't.

Every person ever convicted is, in theory, because there was enough conclusive proof. Mistakes will always happen.
Snippets was only a tool in as much as you could e-mail a magic address (by replying to the weekly reminder) and it would go to the right place.

I mean, there was a web site where everything wound up, and you could go and enter stuff that way, but why? I'd only go in there when backfilling a week I missed due to vacation or whatever, or to edit a mistake -- both rather rare occurrences.

I'd wager that snippets went away as an extension of the project database going away. They killed it last summer - after I left, to be clear. I heard about this from various sources.

Killing that is just another sign that the old Google is dead.
Why do you see execution as the only option here?
The following statement is false:

People who write LabTalk choose to write LabTalk.

It is false because I am a person who writes LabTalk and I did not choose to write LabTalk. I hate LabTalk with a passion. However, I am forced to write LabTalk to interface with one of the systems at work. The following statement is also false:

People who write Tcl choose to write Tcl.

I had a coworker who was forced to learn Tcl to maintain a legacy system. He hated Tcl, mostly because it wasn't Fortran. Honestly, though, I have a soft spot for Tcl, so the following statement is true:

Some people who write Tcl choose to write Tcl.

Now that statement is trivially true and most of your original argument applies to it. In fact, I'll even agree with you that

Some people who write X choose to write X

applies to virtually every language. All people who write a language different than Python are people. The original statement does not make that claim. It makes the claim that the set of people who write python does not contain any elements from the set of people who did not choose to write python. That claim is not true for Java, Perl, C, C++, LabTalk, or Tcl. It may not even be true for Python. However, it is a meaningful claim.
I was thinking "well, perhaps this article explains how forensics (and hence science, or statistics, etc.) was botched, and the discussion could be about how technology can be used to avoid such tragedies in the future..." but then I skimmed the article and realized that there was no mention of such scientific procedures within the text.

I wonder how the article made it to the front page in the first place though. Must it not mean that HN's audience (according to the algorithm) finds the article (or at least the title) to be intriguing and interesting?
Let Me Build a Solution to Your Problem
> If you do away with the death penalty entirely, how do you execute this fucker and others like him?

what
While I disagree because I can't see why anyone would deny anyone else knowledge, there IS a mainstream fad about programming that seems to be out of touch with the reality of the thing.

I read an article not too long ago in one of Quebec's most important newspaper about how programming was becoming an essential skill (up there with reading and basic arithmetic), which it clearly isn't. Of course the author didn't help her case by confusing programming with setting up a wordpress site and changing its CSS.

IMO learning to code can't be a wasted experience. It's just not the life-changing, essential skill that increasingly more people make it out to be.
Katherine Archuleta - "Why I'm Here"
Wunderkit (http://wunderkit.com) runs on dotCloud. So doe Punchtab (http://punchtab.com). Both serve many millions of monthly uniques.
Actually you are the intended audience. We are keenly aware that people want this capability. The free tier won't have this built in, but the other tiers will.
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