skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a comprehensive list of many considerations. Top of the list should be to have as small of an API as possible. API is forever. If you expose too much up-front then it increases the surface area of getting things wrong, which developers will be stuck with for a long time or need to deal with eventual deprecations which is fun for no one. Also, more API leads to higher complexity in learning. It is better to see how your API is being used and slowly reveal more functionality as you become confident it is what developers need.

I also believe API should go through a feedback/review processes with peers. Other developers will have used different patterns, have a different base of experience with the platform, and can generally help find common mistakes. So, here's some of my feedback/nitpicks on MGTileMenuController.h :) --

@property (nonatomic, weak, readonly) id<MGTileMenuDelegate> delegate; // must be specified via initializer method.
- (id)initWithDelegate:(id<MGTileMenuDelegate>)theDelegate;

It is very rare for delegates to be required for initialization, and I don't see why the @property for the delegate needs to be readonly? Perhaps an owner would be a better model?

The isVisible property looks like this:

@property (nonatomic, readonly) BOOL isVisible;

But typically for BOOLs the property is the normal form with a specific "is" getter:

@property(nonatomic,readonly,getter=isVisible) BOOL visible;

// N.B. All of the following properties should be set BEFORE displaying the menu.

This makes me wonder what happens if I want to change them later? It seems that they should always be able to be changed, and in general comments shouldn't be required to understand library behavior as they'll just be missed by developers anyways.

- (NSInteger)nextPageNumber:(NSInteger)currentPageNumber; // zero-based pageNumber

Why would the nextPageNumber not be +1 from currentPageNumber? Also, why do I need to supply a currentPageNumber when it appears currentPage is a @property of the class? Is there a difference between "currentPage" and "currentPageNumber" as their naming indicates there might be one? Also, it might be better to name the method similar to the NSIndexSet convention "indexGreaterThanIndex." Should an NSIndexSet actually be used instead?

- (UIBezierPath *)_bezelPath;

This method looks like it is private/internal because of a leading underscore, so it shouldn't be exposed in the header. Also, Apple has reserved naming methods with a leading underscore (especially important when you are subclassing!). https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa...

In general, if the developer doesn't need the utilities, I highly question adding them to the header since you'll be responsible for them for all time.

Finally, why not add the delegate protocol to the header file so everything is consolidated for the developer using the class?
I would not call this "Financial Freedom through Badassity" (his site's tagline), it's more like "Financial Freedom through Being Frugal".

Not that there's anything wrong with that.
"Do you want a guy like this at your company? This is absolutely poisonous from a culture perspective. Not only does the guy not want to work hard, he equates working hard with "losing your health". Somehow I missed seeing that Levchin, Thiel, Brin, Zuckerberg, Pyncus, and every early Googler and Facebooker were in wheelchairs for carpal tunnel syndrome. It's really not that hard to work hard and work out at the same time (even the dreaded brogrammers manage it)."

I think you miss a point that working hard doesn't equate getting things done. I saw a lot of people working hard (in number of hours) and net gain from their effort is zero or less.You should be focused what kind of results you would expect to have from one day's work or pay me proportionally to my output which can be 10x more than that of hard working guy. I am fine with that. Putting long hours just to fit in culture is not smart thing in the long run.
Note one more thing , 'old farts' have more to lose if they do shitty job than some no family/mortgage guy in early 20s.
The problem with the Android version is you got three apps in your app drawer when installing the main Facebook app. That was confusing, spammy, and impossible for the user to opt out of if they wanted to use Facebook on Android at all. A separate app is just confusing (unless you are coming from Facebook's perspective), so it is an improvement. I am positive there will be a separate Android app in the coming weeks.
Couldn't fit in the title, but other properties of these pants that I found interesting are that they are supposedly wrinkle-free even after folding, rolling, etc., and that they are quick-drying when wet.
This guy is fantastic. If what he's doing now with the new incubator doesn't work out I hope he considers applying to YC. Living at AOL is at least a good a story as selling cereal.
The signature it generates is used by Chrome to determine whether an upgraded extension really came from the same source. With this leaked, anybody could conceivably put up an upgraded, evil version of Axis and Chrome would happily upgrade it behind the scenes. I say conceivably because you still need to either MitM the Chrome store or get Yahoo!'s credentials to the store.
> Update 9:31 a.m. PT: This story has been updated with a response from AOL.

What was the response? I can't find it in the article, would be interesting to see it.
Wasn't there an article recently about how the app stores weren't actually a rational use of time for most developers, who were doing it for love, not because it was more lucrative than working for a bank (or consulting?). And the big money makers were actually heavily advertised, disposable, fad-driven, low-brow games aimed at tweenagers and housewives. And the companies pushing these hit games were sausage factories that treated their creatives like dirt?

Sounds like the music business does have a lot in common with app stores.
"It's the 'finishing the back of the drawer' - you can argue that people will never see it and it's very hard to, in any rational sense, describe why it's important but it just seems important. It's a way that you demonstrate that you care for the people that you are making these products for."
That quote probably sums up why so many other companies fail at doing what Apple does with hardware.
It's somewhat in following with the Unix paradigm; do one thing, do it well.
In part, for the same reason (in part) that Instagram blew up. iOS doesn't have Android's intent feature.
Not so different from the tweet-bombs that act.ly pioneered and Kony 2012 tried to use. However, there's a big difference in impact between real people taking action on issues they care about, and a bunch of bots unleashed to annoy decision makers. This idea is definitely on the "slacktivism" side of the line.
How interesting: I installed and launched the app expecting to see the standard "Log in with Facebook" screen, but instead there's a big button that says "Continue as [my name]" (and a smaller one, "Not you?"). I wonder how exactly they're doing this, and if it will make its way into 3rd-party apps. It made the first launch experience quite seamless.
If the argument is "piracy is bad because it results in a loss of profits", then the counterargument "that's ok I absolutely would not have bought it anyway" is completely valid.
Facebook Introduces "Facebook Camera"
An Open Letter: Dear Patrick & John Collison (Stripe)
Hi Patrick & John,

I'm excited to see that you are growing Stripe and hiring support engineers. We've exchanged a few emails and chats in the campfire room. Please don't let this personal touch die. It's great to see this position which leads me to believe that support is a core focus (especially developer-centric support). I hope that it is, that you find people that will represent Stripe well, and take ownership of user's concerns like the existing team has done. And I hope you maintain some time to chat with us developers ;)

Thank you for making an awesome product and supporting your users. This is a great example to set for the entire tech community.

Lee
Wow! That's pretty cool.
> Contacted for comment, David Temkin, senior vice president of Mail and Mobile for AOL, told CNET, "It was always our intention to facilitate entrepreneurialism in the Palo Alto office -- we just didn't expect it to work so well."
Not easy to do on iOS when your main app relies on hooks to a web browser. iOS forces apps to use an older Javascript engine.
However bad instances turn out, we should view the standards process the way Churchill viewed democracy: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Just to be clear - I'm not the creator - just a huge fan who thought you'd all be interested in it.
I'm starting to think that the key is to help the unemployed, the '99%', the 'others', to learn how to build their own businesses, their own livelihoods. To stop depending on someone else to provide a livelihood for them. That's where we're heading, in my view. That's the only way out of the current mess. Not to get too hippie-ish, but it's about combining self-interest with empathy for others.
Most of the older coders I know tend to focus on niche technologies. Many do embedded systems work, or database design.

Specializing is often very lucrative. Ruby on Rails and PHP programmers are a dime a dozen (no literally they are astonishingly cheap), while a database designer is mid six figures. It is hard to get into those specialties, so naturally they are going to have older participants.

I get the feeling that older coders tend to dismiss all the current fads, and are stuck in the fads of 10+ years ago

That is a short circuit argument often used by people when they face resistance to unsupported ideas. Several years back I posted several essays critical of the NoSQL euphoria. Being in my 30s, I wasn't surprised to see several argue that it was because I was just too old, man. Only that was a steaming pile of horseshit: My criticism was founded entirely in a knowledgeable, experienced analysis, and not simply brash adoption because something was new and different (an affliction that impacts developers of all ages). The new silver bullet.

People see what they want to see, and it's the root of all prejudices.
Should Startups Be Thinking About the Federal Government?
Yes it does...you deprived the artist of making money as opposed to depriving yourself of music and movies. How does that not apply? You took for free what others paid for.. Your income doesn't matter. Poor people aren't entitled to free goods because they were never going to drive business anyway.
"A separate app is just confusing" Is this not a new separate app on iOS? I realise it's not installed alongside the Facebook and Messenger app as it was on Android but it's still separate of the main application.
I like it. There's less wading through non-native in-app menus. I want to read my timeline or generally waste time? Facebook. I want to send a quick message to someone I don't text? Facebook Messenger. I want to share a new photo or three from my friend's commencement? Facebook Photos.

One tap and I'm there, and ready to do what I want to do. Maybe two, if I have the app in a folder.
Can the point of separate apps be justified in reinforcing that Facebook is more of a platform than just a website?

They also have Pages & Messenger. I like the idea of isolating these aspects because it gives more utility to these individual functions rather than obscuring them by combining all of the site's functionality into one, slow and poor performing app.

Overall, the app looks good but I'm not sure what's the deal with Instagram now.
I wonder if he was eating our food. Playdom has three meals a day "up stairs" in that building, where we are headquartered and have an entire floor. There is also another startup incubator in this building. It's pretty funny they just mention AOL in the article.
it is given that minimum you should be able to do is to code but that doesn't say at all can you actually develop something (think about that for moment)
Low level stuff is generally easier to master (hence low part in name) than high level abstract thinking and concepts.
Most people can learn low level stuff but most people doesn't grok high level stuff and implications of decisions they make.
Visualizing tweets at JSConf
Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.

Because they optimise a particular use case, which makes it more likely people will do something, which will make it more likely that facebook can use the shared content to drive more people towards facebook.

Take photo sharing. Photos are often spontaneous. So the more responsive, quick and simple it is to take a photo and share it the more likely it is to happen. Ideally I want to hit the photo app and by the time I've moved the camera up to my face be ready to take a photo. Facebook's new app is much closer to that experience than their current generic app. I bet that it will get more photos on Facebook. More photos == more traffic == more dollars.

You can't fix the current generic Facebook app to work as a better photo taking app - since if you made it the ideal photo taking application, it would be sub-optimal at the other things that facebook want the mobile app to do.
http://www.blumberg.com/invoice.cgi?rm=view_cluster;cluster_...

http://www.legalzoom.com/legal-incorporation/incorporation-p...
"Strike it rich" implies fame and impact. You are arguing
terminology.

They are not the same. Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Linux and Rails are fame and impact. Github is smaller than Zynga but has much higher status in the programming community. You can't go long years with low salary if you are motivated by money. This isn't just double think, the kind of people who achieve high economic status via startups usually care more about social status and proving something to themselves and the world than fancy cars.

That is why Peter Thiel talks about CEOs paying themselves a low wage as the best predictor of startup success.
The best approach I've seen for expanding APIs in iOS is the one Apple tends to use: pass a single NSDictionary of keyed parameter values. The API parameter list never has to change, it's guaranteed to be backwards compatible and you can still enforce use of semantic objects as the allowed values for the new keys you are adding.

(It just struck me that this mirrors the approach Apple used often in Mac Toolbox: passing parameter structs with a version field, instead of modifying the API parameter list itself).
You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it. It's worked for many people, and it can work for you. - Ron Minnich
Isn't what you described true of the entire job candidate market? Naturally the ones applying will be dominated by the unemployed, the let go, and the ones that haven't been picked up. This is true at all ages.
I don't disagree that this might be accurate description of what's available now. But that's just a snapshot, and the situation is dynamic. It changes every day. Things get easier every day.

Software and virtual goods are getting more abundant and easier to access every day. I think the next big step will be applying those same lessons to the physical world. Freeing ourselves from scarcity.

(yes, I watched a documentary on Ray Kurtzweil recently and may be extrapolating and getting ahead of myself. But that doesn't mean it can't be true)
A new organ discovered in baleen whales
Citation of a CS PhD from MIT does not constitute proof that he could earn a 4.0 in Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science at CMU studying only an hour a week.

no need to take it personally
Qute-
have a nice day!
Apple Has Removed Airfoil Speakers Touch From The iOS App Store
He also has been solo the whole time, which makes it more impressive. He had a cofounder who gave up, but Eric never budged.
> It doesn't make the password any less secure. (It's actually only one other password.)

It does make your password less secure, it's just that Facebook judged it an acceptable compromise between user experience and security.
Reminds me of the story of Graphing Calculator:

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
http://allfinancialmatters.com/2011/02/15/gold-vs-sp-500-ind...

Shows the S&P 500 clearly outperforming gold from 1973 to 2010. Of course, there were massive fluctuations; what this says to me is to be diversified (and diversification includes stocks).
I love that child innocence when they discover 'new' stuff , ahh good old days I miss that :-)
Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Linux and Rails are fame and impact.

Jimmy Wales is worth some $25 million, and basically lives his life off the Wikipedia books. Linus can write his own ticket anywhere, and has virtually unlimited potential. Rails....partner at 37 Signals.

If you have fame and impact you can almost always convert that into a lot of cold, hard cash.
"API is forever. If you expose too much up-front then it increases the surface area of getting things wrong, which developers will be stuck with for a long time or need to deal with eventual deprecations which is fun for no one. Also, more API leads to higher complexity in learning. It is better to see how your API is being used and slowly reveal more functionality as you become confident it is what developers need."

This is so, so true. If you find yourself thinking about exposing something because someone might have a use case for it or to provide greater control over some very specific corner case, write it down, file it somewhere, and revisit that when you see how people are actually using your API. Don't mistake all the ways your API could be used for all the ways people want to use it.
To make a site really, really freaking fast serve static content.

That cool curl command against rakeroutes.com:

Total time: 0.439
Time pretransfer: 0.175
Time starttransfer: 0.270
Size download: 17506
Speed download: 39888.000

That's off a regular ol' shared Dreamhost account.
Gil Lederman
RadioSurgey New York (RSNY) is a premier center for cancer treatment in New York, offering radiation therapy for multiple cancer variants.
Less click. Instead of Facebook -> Camera -> whatever you directly access the feature you want.
This is fantastic. I hope Facebook continues with the break-apps-up strategy, because it makes a lot more sense for mobile. On mobile, you have less screen real estate, a less precise pointing device (fat fingers vs. a mouse), and you're generally shorter on time, especially compared to when you're wasting time on Facebook on your laptop. All these things mean that simpler apps with fewer UI elements and with a single clear purpose are much better on mobile. I already use Messeger alone as much as the actual Facebook app, which is disastrously unwieldy. Here's hoping we see events and contacts as the next apps. Games is also probably a big priority.
Ask HN: Starting with Gevent and Ginkgo
I was recently introduced to gevent and gikngo and I found a couple of good intros. The issue is that they both lack decent documentation. I was wondering if anyone encountered any good advanced tutorials or maybe some examples. I'm not looking for something as fancy as 0mq's zguide (although that would be wonderful), but at least some advanced applicants, methods of use or detailed descriptions.

Thanks!
The style reminds me a lot of Google+. It's good that they're willing to accept design inspiration from outside Facebook.
I wrote this because I thought it would be cool to let people host their own HN sites with very little overhead. CouchApps make it so easy to deploy your own site, simply push the code to a CouchDB. Also I learned quite a lot from building this. More info can be found here: https://github.com/lmatteis/hckr.it

There's still lots of work to be done, so don't hesitate to contribute :)
The laziness factor
I spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina, having the time of my life, and only spent $27k for EVERYTHING. (K13.5/yr) [1]

I think living on less than $20k is easy.

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/the-price-of-adventure
Why should you be entitled to something free because you never planned to buy it? Please explain
Because historically, that's what you've been able to get. You can't look at a 5 year timeline (and, obviously, cherry-picking the 5 year time period where stocks dropped by half isn't exactly fair). You should be looking at a 30 or more year timeline.

Even on a 30 year timeline, you can find runs where the average return is less than 8% (just as you can find periods where the return is greater). That doesn't mean it's not a reasonable forecast of what you can expect.
JPMorgan Runs The World's Largest Gambling Operation
Memes of enterprise software users
Github: CoffeeScript cracks the top 10 languages
Another classic one is Gerstner saving IBM and turning the company around. Then his successor successfully kept the company on the same track until he hit retirement age.
I disagree 100%. I already posted it here, but it's worth noting I drove from Alaska to Argentina in 2 years for $27K ALL IN. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, the complete opposite of lazy. This is what I plan to do full time when I "retire" in a couple more years.
This is exactly what I've been talking about wrt App development on Apple. If Apple likes your product, and they steal your features for their OS or apps, they kick you out so they don't have any competition.

IMHO, it's a real douchebag business decision, and anyone with a popular unique app should always expect Apple to screw you over with no notice and have a contingency plan in the works.
I literally paused reading when I read this simply put exact statement. I try to focus on minimal, simple apis and preach it to developers and clients for quick integration and maintenance. Now I have this powerful statement to save hours of explaining mainly to non technical people. I have always thought this but never so crisp and to the point. We need t-shirts. Doing a quick search of Google, it appears a few others have recently stated this as much but it is an idea that should take hold: http://www.kryogenix.org/code/apis-like/
Even hackers hate working on the weekend
Are stories on the frontpage ranked solely by points or do they fall off over time? I couldn't find any code like this. I was curious how you'd implement time-ranking using couchdb views, which can't emit different values as time goes on in a simple way.
I'm saying that the fact that the WSJ published something which was negative to the stock (by the same author) in advance is not conclusive in helping you make a decision. You can read pieces that are pro and con to a particular product, service, stock all the time (remember the publicity surrounding iphone as one example). You can always go back and say "see here is what I said I was right". The question is how many things has someone said (or a newspaper) and what percentage turned out correct. My point is it was great that there was that info saying "stay away" in advance. But there have also been those writings that have turned out wrong.

I don't think this is done anymore but stock brokers used to call prospects with hot stock tips saying "not asking you to buy this today". Not everyone got the same tip of course. They would then call back weeks later but only call the people who they had told about a stock that increased saying "see I was right, now buy this stock from me now". (A variation was in "Boiler Room" I believe).
Wow! That's scary, and I'm super impressed by your wife's approach. I have been the subject of 2 nuisance lawsuits. I won both. But I don't think I'd have your guts.