skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
100% of the time? Probably not. I have seen Blue Crabs do this sort of thing, although it's likely all of them trying to get out of the bucket on their own rather than actively trying to prevent another one from escaping.
I think the phrase "broken record" is used more when referring to someone repeating themselves over and over again.
Yes definitely, you can update directly using the bucket.update() method, and pass in an id and the data object. The better way would be to implement the 'local' callback to return the data, then just call bucket.update(id), and the library will call your 'local' method to retrieve the current state for that id. You can read about the 'local' callback here: https://simperium.com/docs/reference/js/#local

For auth, we'll be adding cross-origin support for https://auth.simperium.com, up till now we've been focused on supporting apps with existing backends which generally use the HTTP API to generate auth tokens from their server.
> That may be, but if Linus had thought this way there would be no Git.

No, because CVS did not track the necessary information. Git does.

> What? Not at all. Take five minutes and watch the video I linked to.

An oversignt on my part. I didn't even see the video link the first time around, but when I saw it in another HN post, I added the following to my post

>> Edit: I take back all I said about your idea being unconditionally too complicated. It seems like it's already being done by the darcs/camp projects. I'll have to check those out eventually.

So, it still seems like it's more complicated than git for the average case (everyone syncing to a common state), but it's obviously not too much information for any one person to keep track of in all cases, since these projects exist.
What's the logic behind how a given category is sorted?
I did some searching and found a few references to "crab mentality", looks like it's a common term in Filipino culture. Still haven't found any evidence on if this is a real phenomena or not though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-crab-mentality.htm
> You don't need to help the poor - just get off their backs.

That's a very naive and over-simplified point of view. During the 1980s' Perestroika, everyone in my country of origin (which was one of Moscow's Cold War satellites) assumed basically the same thing you're assuming: that as soon as those "russkies" got off their backs, they would become rich and prosperous. Well, 22 years had passed since the russkies left, and hopes for prosperity are few and between (some progress has been made but nowhere to the extent that was hoped). BTW, I'm in no way nostalgic for the USSR era; I just don't like when naive opinions like this that have nothing to do with reality propagate because they sound "just".

I now believe that the whole contemporary educational system which teaches students that colonialism was uniformly bad needs to be revised. I have yet to see something good come out of nationalism (with Israel a possible exception).
Since I know the codecademy team is always listening, I'll share my feedback through supporting my two friends through codecademy:

Firstly they love it. The game mechanics and the reward cycle is a great motivation for them. I think nobody can argue that you've found a great way to get TONS of people to enjoy "learning to program".

The second part is a bit tricky... are they really learning to program?

IMO the problem with all pragmatic approach is the lack of the need to understand. I know you didn't intend it, but codecademy suffers from the same tired "tutorial" approach. Users follow instructions to win the prize.

I will say codecademy is better than the tutorial approach, but it's still a tutorial.

The fundamental problem is my two friends need me to teach them how to think in code, how to conceptualize the problem, how to understand that "i am taking this problem, i am working out a solution in my brain, in english, and then i will write this solution in code" They simply do not have the capacity to do that. And they are 5 months in through codecademy.

Just yesterday my friend had the idea that when using a for loop, the loop passed all values at the same time to the nested switch statement, upon which the switch statement would evaluate ALL the variables at the same time, using whatever the hell case was the best match.

He couldn't pass the level because he did not visualize in his head that the for loop passes each value, one at time. Then it procedurely flows down, line-by-line into the switch statement... and so on.

My friends do not have pictures in their head about how code works, why it works that way, and how to use those pictures to draw their own.

They don't know how to code.

EDIT: sorry one more thing. The only lifeline they have when they get stuck (aside from asking me) is to look at the QA. I have never once seen an answer that explained the answer, nope, it was "here put this magic code in it and that way it will PASS! YAY!" And I mean answer in the sense of "why", not why does javascript require a return here instead of there, or why the "right" answer is to put this code before that code, or the strange reason you need this bracket here instead of there -- I mean why! why? really...why?
They all sound like problems that can be overcome, just that it's not worth it for him to overcome them right now.

If it's worth it for his company to overcome them, he has his bargaining chip right there.
Works really nicely on an iPhone – much better than a lot of knob controls in many native apps.
Me too?
Download Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta
Facebook's too? Especially juxtaposed with all of the crisp white text?
But then I have to click into separate folders to view the same emails which I currently take in on a single page?
Thanks, but I cannot see the shadow in it.
I think those symbols are just learned.

Take folders. They look like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/50/Earthwise.jpg

That makes it obvious where the symbol is coming from. The only problem is that those kinds of folders are not commonly used in Germany. I think I never saw a folder like that before I started using computers.

Folders look like this in Germany: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Lever_arc...

The word that is used in Germany to refer to folders („Ordner“ in German) actually refers to ring binders.

Yet I had never a problem dealing with folders on computers, even though the visual metaphor was unfamiliar to me.
Oh my god, this is so good! I especially liked how he put two line breaks between each sentence. The post just went on and on... it felt like it would never end! Man, who are these people? Why would someone take the time to rant about their email client's user interface? What, are you the next Pete Cashmore?
I looked into replacing the old AM radio in my ancient dodge with a modern one, but eventually decided I simply liked the look & feel of that pushbutton thingie, and anything more modern just looked wrong in that car.
I got one of these. The display is really good and the watch is surprisingly robust. Updates on the screen happen really slowly, so I guess it's a real E-Ink display.
It's slightly more complicated than that.

For example, in his "Markdown Mark" example, he's careful to make sure that the rectangular border is exactly three pixels wide on every side. Just rounding straight lines to the nearest pixel boundary wouldn't guarantee that (it's pretty easy to wind up with shapes that should look even, but are 2px on one side, and 4px on the other).

TrueType fonts face exactly the same challenges as described in the article, and they include bytecode for a specialised VM to describe how to nudge control points to pixel boundaries. The open-source FreeType rasteriser has code that's pretty good at doing this automatically, but it's very domain-specific to font-rendering; it would be no use to a general SVG renderer, for example.
> Isn't a processors instruction set just the API for the processor?

Especially now that most modern-day processors (at least of the x86 family) translate their native instruction set to a microcode.
How to get your app into the Windows Store
Levitating Balls Can Be The Future of Computer Interfaces
TL;DR: If you have the initiative and skills to do this, you can be doing a lot more than hoarding a bonus pool.
You can just process main.css.php (or whatever)

Here's some of my (old crappy)code:

color: <?php echo $foreground1; ?>;
font-family: <?php echo $font2; ?>;

But I'm sure there's libs out there that make it really easy and pretty.
Phunction 2.6.2 - PHP 5.2+ HMVC framework
Does anyone here use phunction as their PHP framework of choice? Or at least have tried it and be willing to share their opinion?

I just found phunction recently myself and I'm planning to use it in my future projects. I have no experience in any other frameworks, but I've read the documentation of some (mainly CodeIgniter and Laravel), and I'm still leaning towards Phunction being the simplest (lacks documentation though), and most powerful relative to the size of the framework.

If anyone agrees or disagrees, I'd love to hear your opinion and reasoning. Thanks!
> developers couldn’t resist the siren song of ‘It Just Works’ married to a Unix kernel

For me, it's more than just a Unix kernel. It's the usability of the system as a whole, the application ecosystem I use, the tools that are preinstalled, the Unix kernel and a proper terminal, and the fact that all of this is bundled into a nice looking, well made laptop that combines all of the previous points seamlessly.

The last time I bought a Dell laptop it had great hardware, but didn't get close to approaching a Mac Book Pro in terms of build quality - has that changed?

Sidenote: Tynt blows, why use it?
I love that quote. In a way, this article is talking about the "unknown knowns" -- the things that are so obvious now that you don't even remember learning them, or can't imagine not knowing them. These are the lurking biases and preconceptions that we aren't even aware of having, and may be just as dangerous as the "unknown unknowns".
Something I don't understand: when your fundamental value proposition is moving data between platforms ("everywhere it's needed"), why didn't you consider your MVP to include an Android library?
Honda's robot Asimo 2012
Interesting. I'm 46. I've used reel-to-reel tapes because they were the normal thing to use at the time. But it has never once occurred to me that the voicemail icon represents a reel-to-reel tape.

Now I'm trying to figure out if I'm stupid or not.
I can personally attest to this. 25 years of software development has blown my L5 disc, causing unbelievable pain and sciatica-like symptoms.
Though - the banana-bots would get rid of the biggest problem in the equation: highway laws. Not sure that it'd be that hard technically, but almost certainly more expensive. Even at $50K a bot (that's probably way low) it'd need to be 20x more efficient to even breakeven with cheap labor...
> I never said anything about this charter city one way or another.

Why didn't you? It's really weird that you have the top-rated comment in the thread, and gave a good perspective on the history of the region, yet you didn't actually say how your history lesson relates to Charter Cities.
I suspect the Facebook Apps will be HTML5 embedded in Facebook? The Apple App Store still has the advantage of native apps. Is this basically the Chrome Web Store but built within Facebook (full access to user's data)?
Nonsense.

The guy accepted the $2 raise. He could have said, "No, I want $xx an hour," or "I'll sell you the script for $xxxxx," but he didn't.
Soybeans soaked in warm water naturally release key cancer-fighting substance
GEVEY Ultra S Can Unlock iPhone 4S GSM on iOS 5.1.1
This phenomenon - of the difficulty of being able to teach something once it is obvious to you - has the rather unfortunate name - "the curse of knowledge", and it is well documented based on research in other fields too. There is a good discussion about it here : http://37signals.com/svn/posts/213-the-curse-of-knowledge
Yes, you can find more here: http://www.chartercities.org/
I wonder if DOS would have got off the ground if this Oracle view was generally accepted reality. The makers of CP/M would presumably have had a field day.
"We did something. It did not work. Clearly the solution is to do more of it."

What causes people to think like this?
I hope they do not succeed in their mission. We are already tracked enough in this world…
The common thread in most of these is dematerialization: like the phone example, discrete physical objects have been replaced by software functions running on generic computing devices, i.e., the main cause of obsolescence is the system itself.

So what can the system use for icons? Rows of "smartphone" icons or "computer" icons?

(As a text-mode purist, I am not too sad about this.)
Richard Feynman answering the question "How do magnets work" in an informal pick-your-brain type interview:

"I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we said the magnets attract like rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands. I'd soon be in trouble. And secondly, if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain. So I have cheated very badly, you see. So I am not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract each other except to tell you that they do."
It's also possible that each issue, once figured out, became something I know how to avoid. There really just aren't that many things that break in a browser across operating systems.

Also, in my mind, there is a huge difference between "this font doesn't render pixel-perfect in this os/browser combo", and "the javascript broke". One causes much more customer support cost than the other.
Definitely a good tip. Looking forward to the other 4.
I agree. As a founder, having confidence and arrogance are arguably very good traits to have. It's important to be aware of the irrationality of your arrogance in believing that you will be able to "get it right and create a successful high growth tech company", but it is also very important to harness those traits so you can fearlessly fight to turn your vision into a successful company.
Not that the floppy disk being used as a Save icon was actually floppy, of course.
I don't know, my "cool Apple owning friends" told me for years that unhinted font rendering was better, and I always thought they could pry my Bitstream Vera from my cold dead hands. Then I used OS X full-time for a while. Upon switching back to Linux, I immediately turned hinting off. It just... looked "wrong".
Disrupt NYC 2012: The Agenda
Okay! This NYtimes article is not a good introduction to the concept.

Here's the main website: http://www.chartercities.org/ (with an FAQ! http://www.chartercities.org/faq/11/faq )

Here are the related TED talks:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/paul_romer.html from July 2009

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/paul_romer_the_world_s_firs... from 2011

To the people screaming "colonialism!", please read/watch these things first.
Judge Alsup unmoved by Oracle argument, may order new trial
The the full ios version of wolf3d is free[1] today too :)

[1]http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wolfenstein-3d-classic-platin...
Every major current generation browser and last generation browser supports SVG images except IE 8. So IE 8 users just wouldn't see the icons - not a big loss since I suspect IE 8 users make up a tiny amount of the user base.
I actually find the "sharper" Hulu icon to look worse... because the curved parts of the letters stay blurry, while the straight parst are razor-sharp. The "L" and "S" look in the "pixel-fitted" version look totally different, like they don't go together at all.

I don't mind the "extra blurriness" all over everything on my screen at all, because the mind gets used to it quite quickly, and it actually allows for more detail, because our brain automatically interprets sub-pixel width changes, curvatures, etc. This is why fonts on Macs look have more accuracy and detail in their letterforms, because they aren't hinted, i.e. "pixel-fitted".
Love the redis docs! Redis powers the background queue at Scripted.
Protip: If you want to make small incremental changes, mousedown on the knob and drag way out, making the radius of your turning motion much larger.

I actually thought that part was kinda nice in allowing me to make either quick large changes or small incremental changes. But then again, I'm not your average interwebs user, so I probably would be aware of the same issue if actually implementing it.
Yup, agree wholeheartedly! Will work on that shortly.
I'm not the original poster, but I also force my browser to render in a particular font (specifically, same font used in the rest of my desktop applications).

In my experience, I'd say about 0.5% of pages are fancy demos of things you can do with web-font support, 1% of pages use custom web-fonts but look just fine without them, and 0.1% of pages are like GitHub where they actually require a custom font. Everything else uses some "web safe" font, and often very little care is given to selecting which one. Forcing everything into the same font is an excellent solution for the 98.4% of sites that don't use custom fonts, and an decent solution for 99.4% of sites.

It should be noted that most of the "easy reading mode" extensions only work well for article-type pages, not for sites like Hacker News or Reddit.
> When most people talk about "un-ambitious" people they're talking about "cogs". People working in some generic job in a big company.

No, that's exactly what I mean. You are not better than the "cogs" simply because you've made different occupational choices. We all have our reasons for choosing what we do. And some people don't even have much choice.
Could try a completely different tack.

Given that all bananas are sterile clones and banana trees can walk, perhaps they would be suitable for risk free genetic engineering so they got themselves to market without any machinery at all.
http://caniuse.com/#search=svg is a more visual look at this.

Every major current and previous generation browser supports SVG images except IE 8. IE 8 users just wouldn't see the icons - a reasonably graceful degradation.
i had a great experience with OO design in an internship in grad school. i was sole coder on a java project, a networked whiteboard app, and i had the time and flexibility to scrap the whole thing halfway through and rewrite it from scratch once i had some clue about the problem domain.

the best thing is that since the main functionality was a vector graphics editor, i actually got to implement one of the classic blackboard OO examples in practice, and see how it really worked out:

Interface Shape
AbstractShape implements Shape
TwoPointShape extends AbstractShape
Rectangle extends TwoPointShape
Ellipse extends TwoPointShape
Line extends TwoPointShape
Arrow extends Line
Text extends AbstractShape
Icon extends AbstractShape
Raster extends AbstractShape

(or something like that)

obviously this was the product of a lot of refactoring (i think the TwoPointShape "insight" came to me relatively late in the project)

of course, i ended up spending most of my time chasing ConcurrentModificationException and jumping back and forth between two or three boxes tracking down network synchronization bugs (client A begins moving an icon, client B begins moving the same icon, client C begins moving the same icon, client B releases the mouse, client C releases the mouse, client A releases the mouse: what happens?), but that taught valuable lessons too:

specifically, all they really ever teach in school is what i call the data paradigm: your app starts, takes input, does stuff, stops. gui- and network-event-based programs, and how to design, test, and debug them, barely come up.

of course once i got into industry, i got turned on to array programming and never looked back :-)
Well, my main point in my comment is that choosing a different occupation or choosing a different company to work at doesn't make you a better person.
Mixpanel: We're looking for our first dev-ops person
Hello HN,

Mixpanel is looking for its first ops guy/girl to help us scale across the internet.

Here are some facts:

-------------------------------------------------------

- We have over 150 servers

- We did 5 Billion data points last month

- We've already built a lot of failover into our infrastructure but want to do much more

- A lot of our deploy/build process is automated but we could do so much more. We use fabric (because we all write Python), but are very open to newer things like Puppet.

- We don't manage our own machines, we lease them but one day we will eventually manage them. Probably when we get to around 1000 servers.

- We care deeply about our uptime/reliability. It's vital to our business. People depend on us.

- We've done a lot of things very elegantly, so you won't be walking into a giant mess.

What we're looking for:

-------------------------------------------------------

- Someone who is a developer first

- But loves operations (UNIX, automation, systems)

- Who is not afraid to manage 150 severs that will, one day, go to 1,000 (we'll hire more people like you to help)

- Who is willing own the systems (as if it were their own boxes) and really take initiative on things we've needed to do for a while.

- Who wants to write processes like Netflix's Chaos Monkey program and thinks we can get there someday.

- Might want to even be the leader of an ops team later. We don't mean management, but instead someone that acts like the "CTO" of the ops team.

If this is you, we'd love to talk to you. Please email me directly at suhail@mixpanel.com. Please tell us your story.

Sincerely,

Suhail Doshi (suhail@mixpanel.com)

Founder @ Mixpanel, Inc.

PS: You can learn more about us at http://mixpanel.com
This blog post is fairly useless without proposals that do a better job of communicating these concepts. It almost seems that the author wants to do away with metaphors entirely? If we aren't going to use an address book as an icon for our list of contacts, then what on earth are we going to use??
Did you watch the video at the bottom? This post is done in the style of the Old Spice commercials.
10 Ruby technologies you should know
Introducing Facebook App Center
Sortfolio is listed for auction on Flippa - https://flippa.com/2739829-sortfolio-com-web-design-marketpl...

Opening bid is $250K. Buy It Now is $480K.

Listing includes traffic/revenue claims. Check out the site details page to see incredibly strong keyword ranking: https://flippa.com/auctions/2739829/due-diligence . No prize for guessing which language its written in! ;-))
I think it might be interesting to have a knob-like control that responds to the scrolling action of the mouse/touchpad. At least with that, you'd have (somewhat) clearly defined up and down actions. Touchscreens could support this with a two-finger-up/down gesture, and then we'd be very well on our way to Trek-like UIs ;-)
learning from other's mistakes is the best way to go!
Definitely, but I didn't know what a clipboard was before I started copying and pasting (text on the computer)... You probably learn which button is "Save" when learning what saving actually is, I don't know how intuitive the pictograms for these actions can be.
This is pretty great, but it would be way more useful if it worked on diffs in the discussion and diff sections of pull requests.

Nice work though.

Edit: I've opened a couple pull requests against your repository. One allows highlighting on pull request pages and the other makes some minor improvements to the build script.
we dial a phone number as well - I haven't actually seen a dial phone in 20 years.
I chuckled when I read your post, because at TripAdvisor we have one in every meeting room. And they actually get used.