skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: review my project: Big League Fantasy
bigleaguefantasy.com

Big League Fantasy allows you to play fantasy sports (MLB right now) against all of your social connections in one massive league.

I'm particularly looking for feedback on how well the landing page explains how Big League works and is different from other fantasy sports games. I definitely need to flesh out more explanatory content, like the tour behind the registration wall.

I'm also questioning how I sync friendships between the app and Twitter/Facebook. Right now I sync your friendships against the provider API on the oauth callback, but I'm worried that for users with many friends/followers this won't work out so well. So I'd love to read some best practices on 'friends using this app' type functionality, or a discussion on caching for performance versus keeping relationships up to date.

I've been working on this as a side project for a few months. Even though I'm not calling this a Review My Startup, I see no reason to not solicit feedback along the same lines.
I've just switched to Android in the last few weeks and been using the official Twitter application. Needless to say, I've been disappointed. This is far and away superior, and I will definitely share it around to my friends and coworkers as much as possible :)
But it made retina cheaper later on.
Besides security and caching, I think standards/interoperability are key.

I want my next-generation apps to work on a cloud filesystem of my choice, be it Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

That will be the most significant step towards a real cloud OS, and I bet someone's already working on it.
Major corporations like Google? That's laughable.

Reddit users did about 100 times more than Google all by themselves.
At Google managers don't decide who gets hired, but they do (more or less) get to choose which of the hired people end up on their team. I think it works pretty well actually.
Storm + Hadoop (slides)
Article is from 2005, but it's interesting to see how some of the people have faded into obscurity and some have become more relevant than ever.

Replace "obscurity" and "relevant" with "their own fulfilled lives" and "visibly involved in the industry", respectively.
We tend to see the world through a filter of our own experience. :-)
So what are you suggesting they go into? Math, physics, science train the mind, and I would argue, open opportunities like no other disciplines do. If you can do these, you can do anything, CS and programming included. The push for more scientists, misdirected or not, is a realization that the future of our country (speaking about the US here) will be built on science and technology.
Right; in fact: exactly. The challenge, again, is to come up with who will build it any why (or, to put it differently, who will pay for it, and again why). Additionally, as this is becoming increasingly interwoven in this thread: how further innovation of the core protocol will be funded.

Really, my problem is that the original article comes off as a whine to the universe about something that isn't actually something that is fleshed out enough to happen. We've all had these ideas... some of us have even built companies trying. Most of these failed, with the successes remaining small due to an inability to effectively monetize the offering.

That's why I use the term "challenge": if you want to write an article like this, it shouldn't just be "this would be cool": such a simplistic article is simply condescending to the numerous people (which may in fact be "all developers") who have had the same vision.

(some unrelated-to-that-but-following-up-on-your-post parentheticals on innovation:)

(Linux doesn't innovate what it means to be an operating system: the goal of that project is to be a world-class implementation of proven designs. The few interesting mechanisms they have added were taken from other dying environments, like Solaris.)

(E-mail was an attempt to standardize a bunch of existing incompatible practice, and in the zillions of years since it was standardized, Exchange, Gmail, and Facebook are the only real examples of attempts to innovate on the design, and their innovations were possible due to gatekeeper benefits.)
The real economy part is absurd. America has a very real economy. It's the world's largest manufacturer (yes, larger than China).

There are more people working REAL jobs in America than the total number of people in Germany.

And you just insulted all of them.
Both the Apple II and the Commodore PET used the 6502.

I'm amazed that these were not mentioned in the original article.

I wrote a bunch of 6502 code for Micro Technology Unlimited's music and graphics boards for the PET, and even wrote my own assembler in PET Basic. Fun Times!
My hypothesis is that the majority visit HN to learn from those that do participate. Of course, their learning would be most effective if they participated themselves.
Are you kidding?

People I know who know nothing about copyright and don't know what Reddit is were coming up and asking me to explain what Google was talking about.
I use IMDBapi and for one of my project and I can assure you that they are indeed scraping IMDB. The ratings, desc and the poster I get back is ditto to that of IMDB. It is a great service and I have also donated to them but as far as legality goes, not sure how they support IMDB's terms and conditions.
> I think the value add of a `when` style isn't saving keystrokes but improving readability. What happens when the event fires is right there in-line with the button, not somewhere else on the page. Yeah there are editor tricks to command+click to it and such, but that's still some overhead.

With Interface Builder, there is no "right there in-line with the button", because the button (and the entire remainder of the layout) is instantiated and fully laid out in a nice WYSIWYG editor.

That said, as the you noted, you can do this in Objective-C. However, due to the propensity for conflicts, it's bad form to insert un-prefixed category methods into system classes.

This is an appeal to emotion, but I must be honest: I'm concerned about the day that I'm asked to take over maintenance of a Ruby Motion project, especially if it's likely to diverge significantly and arbitrarily from our community's existing best practices.
Microsoft likes to take their product names and apply them in weird places. Maybe they can call it MS Bing .NET Fund.

I wonder how much of a Bing tie-in the projects will. Red to have? If it's none, the name is silly. If it's too much and they try to force it, I can't see it doing well.
Yes, but you also loose the flexibility of not doing it. I'd rather work in an established RDMBS and configure in the design I'd like to use rather than use a database that requires a specific configuration.

I'm sure that Datomic has it's place, but the examples you gave in this post aren't that convincing.
It's probably a lot easier to understand a larger project like a game or a website by trying to implement something substantial on your own. A lot of the obvious approaches to coding that work for small examples don't scale well for one reason or another. In the process of running into roadblocks and finding solutions (typically with the help of google) you'll encounter some of the pieces that end up in something like an iPhone app and at that point you'll probably be in a much better position to understand them.
The temporal aspect seems to be somewhat ignored by mainstream db development - in some fields, e.g. BI you'll have slowly changing dimensions; and the event sourcing pattern promises a time-machine view on data.

Since I'm writing a history-aware application at the moment, I recently looked into different patterns for this and trying a mixed strategy at the moment (SQL DB used as document store and a single event log, that accumulates changes - a lean approach though, a few hundred lines python for the data access layer; what always gets ugly is the validation, which your application must take care of).

I wish, there was more hands-on material on the subject (some resources dive depth into bi-temporal modeling, but I feel your schemas can get complex (= expensive) very fast).
"I don't actually know what it's doing"

Sorry, but that means you couldn't read it.
I've just recorded a short 3 minute screencast showing an install and demo of Collide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 - to just see what it looks like in action, jump to 1:45.

(Please note, I have no special connection to the project.. just saw it here this evening, installed it, and poked around slightly ;-))
> But I do know that it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who doesn't think copyright law is a joke.

Are you serious? I'm genuinely interested. I'd claim this is simply not true. But dear lord I hope it is! That would be fantastic.
Some of them are only inhabited by bottom, no? I cannot write down a function f :: a -> b besides:

f :: a -> b
f = undefined
Sad thing is that since the floods in tailand they have for all extent manipulated the prices. Even sadder is we all know this and we have had no choice but to pay for it.

Saddest of all is down the line they will get fined a large sum for price manipulation and we the consumers will see none of that money back and it will go to the goverment who already knows this is happening and yet will wait a bit until they can justify a realy large fine.

Sad cycle of events, but happens again and again. Consumer abused, goverment sits back and counts the money and then later on collects giving nothing back the the consumers who were raped.

Who is to blame.
Hey, thanks. Yeah, I haven't yet fully explained all of the simulator.

0xfe is a random number - a new random byte is generated on every instruction.

0xff contains the ASCII code of the last key pressed.

My simulator is adapted from the one at http://6502asm.com/beta/index.html - that has a help screen with some more info. I mostly cleaned up the (atrocious) JavaScript and added a memory monitor and disassembler (and implemented a few instructions they'd left out).
Yeah my bad, it was .com :)
Wireless Firms Are Flooded by Requests to Aid Surveillance
I think the way that one learns to program says a lot about the programmer. I, like many people, started with games and websites, but although I understood conditionals and loops, and even glimpsed OO, I wasn't very good. My software sucked, I got bored of it, I slowed to a stall.

A couple of years later I picked up Python, and instead of trying to make games or websites, I worked on stupid little puzzles. Pointless things, really. After a lot of work I built a Befunge interpreter (probably my own "tipping point"). And many useless puzzles later, I somehow wound up a genuine computer scientist.

People always talk about "getting things done". I just worked on meaningless puzzles, and that was the best thing I could have done. Anecdotally, to me it was about achievements and challenges. If you grow tired of the drive to "get things done", make something pointless.
There have been numerous triple stores. Mozilla/Firefox even used one as its core backend for a while before ripping it out and replacing it with SQLite. Why do you think those failed, and how is Datomic going to avoid the same failures?

That is, I've seen this pitched as the solution to all our data woes numerous times now, why is this time different?
by my understanding, datomic's persistence[1] layer is just a big huge persistent[2] data structure. there is tons of literature, books, papers, etc about persistent data structures in the functional programming community.

[1][2] 'persistent' means different things here.
Once 2014 comes around, that won't be an issue in the U.S. anymore.
I agree with you this is not on its own necessarily a good reason to switch to Datomic.

I will be getting into more detailed examples later. My real point with this post was more to talk about how to model the data using datoms and not specifically the temporal aspects of it.

I made many mistakes in my original data models in datomic based on many years of rdbms thinking.
I did freelancing (web, then iOS) for 8+ years based in the US, but for companies (large and small) around the world. I rarely worked with companies in my local area. The problem is thinking of the clients as "employers".

If you think of them as just clients and you have a lot of inbound leads (built up by word of mouth over time), then you can choose the projects that interest you.

In my experience, projects ranged from 6 weeks to 6+ months, but I almost always had multiple projects in various stages happening at the same time. There were often a couple other freelancers on the project, coordinated by a project manager. It's useful to work with or through a design agency or "interactive" agency (as they were called 10 years ago). The key is to manage the entire project from start to finish for the client. The worst problem is clients who don't deliver content/approvals/etc, so you need someone focused on bugging them.

I also usually set a per-project price, not hourly. I hated tracking hours and it didn't give me the motivation to get stuff done faster. A fixed price also forces everyone to agree on a detailed spec up front. Add a little padding into your price, so you you can be kind about implementing the inevitable changes.

tldr; Yes, it's totally possible to make a living doing freelance development, all from home (or anywhere you want).
Well, in the community basically it is weighted towards early contributions (duh) but typically it is people who countribute well to the project in all levels. The core committee has never had more than six people in it, and currently is down to three. There have been some political issues that have come up with some nominees unfortunately so I won't say the process works perfectly.

However those who contribute well tend to get commit privileges and those who contribute to strategy beyond code have tended to become core members most of the time.

Also regarding management and leadership.... Management is typically a command and control structure for the leaders. If you have a flat model, leadership becomes something different because you lack that command and control structure, and so does management. Someone gets to make sure the machetes are sharp. Maybe someone else is in charge of water....

But yeah good thoughts.

BTW, I don't think flat orgs work everywhere. The companies that seem to be successful are those with a very narrow focus, like Github (building things around Git) and WL Gore, which builds things out of one, very specialized, form of plastic. Flat orgs scale up to any number of employees, but they don't scale up to large numbers of goals. I can't imagine how you'd have a flat org structure at Microsoft. Well I can, but it wouldn't be all that flat and it certainly wouldn't be a single org....
Failure is not an Option - DivineBytes
Well at least Cuba will have one reliable internet connection after this. Question is, once they do leave/close the base - which company will fiscaly gain by purchinging that connection cheaply, rest you know. Hope I'm wrong but hey, happened before and will happen again. Goverment invests alot of money into infrastructure and then sells of cheaply to a cliche private company who then rapes the consumer.

Place your bets now.
All my replies have been in response to your "Blaming the banks who sold these seems totally crazy to me. " remark.

I'm afraid I don't find it crazy. I think they deserve an enormous amount of the blame (as I hope I illustrated in my earlier replies) and frankly, I find it vaguely irritating that anyone would try to defend their actions with arguments revolving around caveat emptor.

This by no means suggests I believe they are solely responsible. On this, we can both agree. As far as I'm concerned, the ratings agencies, regulators (pre-crisis at least), brokers, press and government also deserve a large amount of the blame. Irresponsible consumers don't get let off the hook either.

However, regulators (at least on the European side of the Atlantic), government in general and consumers have spent the last 5 years learning from their mistakes and are at least making efforts to correct the situation. The big banks on the other hand have continued to take the piss virtually un-fazed. I'm hoping the LIBOR scandal will now be their watergate moment.

Edit: and when I say "virtually un-fazed" that's charitable. Active denial would be a better choice of phrase. They have heavily lobbied against every single banking sector reform proposed since the crisis began. That takes some hubris. I mean christ, in London up until fairly recently the banks were effectively resorting to blackmail: "make these reforms and we'll have to quit the city and move our operations to a more 'enlightened' jurisdiction".
Big Data by Nathan Marz is a Manning Early Acces book (i.e. not fully written yet) that explains how to hand-roll your own custom Datomic style DB in Hadoop/HBase.

It might be of interest to you given your current project.
The OP is talking about using one's house/apartment for storage.
I get the depositing analogy, but how is he withdrawing anything when he competes? Competing is just training with more incentive. If anything, he's much better/stronger after having performed at a competition than before. After resting for a week or so, of course.
It's going to be hard for the caste system to stay rigid because in larger cities there is no way of verifying any of this. In bigger cities like Mumbai, it's already pretty apparent with most kids growing up indifferent to the complex caste adherence of the past. Most of these kids would not be able to attribute a caste to people based on their last names as that knowledge has been lost. Going with the theme of this thread, this is definitely not true across the board but definitely applies to the large majority, at least in major towns and cities.
It's not a triple store. It's closer to an OODBMS focused on persisting large object graphs with an immutable append-only datastructure, thus maintaining full history and being quite scalable with a single-writer many-reader configuration.
Microsoft loss reflects Web display ad world's woes
Thanks for the tip, will take a look at it. Probably after this project, the current app must be lean (no big dependencies, just install a database scheme, pip install and go).
Probably because your comment is extremely difficult to understand and looks a lot like spam.
You do understand that you are talking about a law in a country where religious riots are pretty common? It is similar to how race-hate or sexism is viewed in the U.S. It better to have laws that disallows picking on people's sensitive sides and causing a blowout than ignoring it. You could do a simple risk-benefit analysis and come to the same conclusion.
Reddit's campaign may have produced more activists, but Google likely reached more eyeballs in a matter of hours than Reddit had in the preceding months. In the end, it was the widespread, mildly (somewhat blindly) anti-SOPA sentiment, not the loud minority, that turned the tide.
Yeah, because having an interest in anything athletic-related makes you a brogrammer.

Groan
Caste is the most insidious poison to ever walk the face of the planet, far worse than all the wars, disease, famine and genocide committed, because the people on the right side of caste find ways to justify it.
What's the differentiation with the gazillion other hosting platforms out there?
I thought this for a long time as well. I always enjoyed ragging on PHP but wondered if it was just because I wasn't familiar with it.

A few months ago, I got the opportunity to do a little PHP programming. I was wrong. I didn't have a bad impression of PHP simply out of ignorance. In fact, my opinion of the language is now much lower than before. I honestly can't conceive how anyone could legitimately defend it for anything other than its ubiquity.
Mashery would be another example.

Often companies that have a strong business case for developers using their APIs will sponsor hackathons, so you could find more such companies by looking at lists of hackathon sponsors.
STORE_ACCUMULATOR may be easier to understand than STA, if you're seeing it for the first time, but it's not easier to use once you know what it means.

Incidentally, I wrote a simple 6502 assembler back in the days, and I took the opportunity to invent my own notation, just for fun. I became quite adept at reading and writing it, and standard notation felt very verbose after a while.

Here is, in standard notation, a program that copies 256 bytes from ORIGIN to DEST.

LDY #$00
LOOP LDA ORIGIN,Y
STA DEST,Y
INY
BNE LOOP
RTS

Here is the same program in my notation (yes, all on one line. I used a space character to delimit instructions).

Y<0 LOOP: A<(ORIGIN,Y) A>(DEST,Y) Y+ #LOOP ]
A friend had an N810, inspired me to buy an N900. Still can't find a phone that matches all its features. There's something to be said for using a 3270 terminal emulator over VPN on my phone.
I don't think it's that strange. Ultimately you have to play in order to read ahead in the game. People who think they can sit down and learn to read ahead will struggle. But if you start actually playing, a lot of the basic reading ahead will become second nature and then it's on to harder/deeper reading. The same is true of chess. Someone given the rules and a set can't hope to get it in any meaningful way though it is theoretically possible. For Go, if you can find people better than you to play against and keep it up for a year you'll look back and realize that even your initial worries were just a misunderstanding. DGS is not a good place to start. You need to play in volume. Bulk practice.
It is actually implemented more like a triple store than an oodbms. Just with time added as a 4th parameter.

Their Entity class makes it feel a bit like an oodbms though in that it kind of acts like a hash map.
I installed it and I got this message:

This is a trial version.

Vico will expire after 15 days of use.
I think this distinction between personal and impersonal emails is a good one. The frustration (for me at least) comes in when email isn't relevant, when it's redundant, or when it's unnecessary. My guess is that the problem isn't actually email itself - but it's instead the systems that keep it impersonal.

To paraphrase a blog entry I recently posted (http://blog.klaviyo.com/2012/06/18/making-emails-better-pers...), we need better informed, more intelligent systems and thought to drive what emails are sent/received. For instance:

- There's no reason a company should email me about a feature I already use or a product I already buy. They know this - they just haven't bothered to integrate their systems.

- There's no reason I should have to send 10 emails to schedule a meeting where/when everyone can make it. Our calendars should be able to make this easy and painless.

- There's no reason I should get 4 separate emails from friends containing the same article. Can't I get one message saying four people sent you this?

As Seth Godin said in his Ted talk, something's broken. All of these examples I cite can be solved - and there's a ton more just like them.
We ourselves for doing nothing.
English doesn't distinguish between male and female because it's important, it does so because it is sexist. Read this[1] to see what it would be like if our language were racist instead, and then you might see that sexist/racist analogies are valid.

Will we ever reach a gender-neutral English language? Not in the near term, but it's worth being aware of.

[1] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
I'd argue it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who understands how copyright law actually works. But if you explained it to them, yeah, they'd probably find a lot of it a bit odd (there is just no way to portray limited terms of 120 years as being reasonable).
So, what are the limitations exactly?
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'Greeley Panorama' from Opportunity's Fifth Martian Winter