skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A show HN a good idea. Even if we don't get any signups, the Hacker News community is really good about giving feedback.

The service we built (couponify.com) is mainly targeted toward merchant affiliates. So not exactly the Hacker News crowd. Nevertheless, I'll give this a shot. Thanks for the advice!
Of course you need context to understand code. You can't get away from that without essentially translating the rest of the code into prose and attaching it to each line. At which point there are enough comments that you need context to figure out which parts of them you care about, reading them becomes a chore, and they essentially become noise. I've seen codebases with insane levels of commenting. I found myself ignoring the comments and tracing through the code.

If the model is simple and the code is clear, learning the context becomes easy, and it fits into your head. Following code becomes easy.
Uber receives C&D in Mass. for using non-standard metering system
Little nitpick: Why make the draw event handler a magic variable instead of a function which takes a function?

Ie:

var draw = function() { point(random(0, 400), random(0, 400)); };

as opposed to

onDraw(function() { point(random(0, 400), random(0, 400)); });

AFAICT there aren't any other variables that side-effect based on what you've assigned to them.
You can have the endpoint servers participating in a VPN with the backend servers. They don't have to be on EC2. This way you wouldn't need to make the front-back requests via https.
Thanks for the kind words! What you're working on sounds neat; is it focused more on tech products than physical products?
Thanks, she is doing an amazing job
No, they would be perpendicular.
It's more complicated than that. The force of gravity is counteracted by the pressure caused by the temperature, and it would not become a black hole.
Is there any simple way of explaining why our model would break down at that point?

The first (utterly naive) guess that springs to my mind would be that at that point the vibration would be sufficiently fast that when sampled at a Planck time interval, there'd be no motion at all. Like overflow of an unsigned int. This is almost surely wrong. :)
It's interesting that you consider yourself a front & backend engineer - does that mean you would apply for both jobs? or Do you concentrate on either?

My conundrum is that employers are actively seeking "Front-End Developers" without understanding what that really means.
App.net Isn't Bold Enough
> That's what function names are for.

A single function for every 3-4 line operation would result in incredibly disjointed code, and would require more explicit documentation of invariants because that function can now be called elsewhere (at least inside of the given translation unit).

> A useful comments says why code is this way, it doesn't summarize or repeat code.

That's nonsensical. Why wouldn't you want to abstract the complex?
In the past I couldn't be bothered to deal with recording / saving my "performances" but in the 1-2 games I play where Kamcord is supported I now basically record everything cause its fast and easy. No noticeable performance / FPS hit either, which is great. Now if these guys could just hurry up and make it work with Temple Run & Drag Racing...
Everything's an inkblot
I am done with all of you so-called "hands-on people" who don't give people real tools to use.

The XO (One Laptop Per Child) and now this.

Please stop giving people tinker-toy environments with tinker-toy problems that have nothing to do with the real world.

If someone's not motivated to learn, yes, they may need this kind of hand-holding. But if someone genuinely wants to learn to program computers for a living, this is - in my opinion - not what they need at all.

Drivers Education is taught in a real car, not in Mario Kart on a Wii. I'm sick of the Mario Kart version of computers being spoon-fed to otherwise intelligent people as though it has anything to do with reality.

I learned to program using Turbo Pascal. I was not so far removed from reality that everything I learned was almost completely useless. I have not given this much attention yet, but so far, it feels completely useless.

PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.
No hate whatsoever. It's a genuine concern, someone will end up using it without realizing it's a "cool demo".
The Land of Raspberry Lisp
OK, but you just said the ISP would put him back online if he dealt with the DMCA, indicating the threats of violence didn't take the site offline. So violent threats took the site down, except they didn't, except they did?
> Of course you need context to understand code.

Comments decrease the amount of code you must personally read and understand, and define invariants that can't be expressed purely through the code.

> At which point there are enough comments that you need context to figure out which parts of them you care about, reading them becomes a chore, and they essentially become noise.

I've never seen this outside of contrived examples from lazy developers that think they're too smart to need to comment their code.

> If the model is simple and the code is clear, learning the context becomes easy, and it fits into your head.

In other words, you must trace the entire system to understand it and then fit it into your head. This is not advantageous to maintainers.
For those who sometimes work super long hours, checkout the sitting + standing desk on Ikea Hackers:

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2011/09/sitting-standing-desk-com...

Just moved into Vegas so there's no Ikea around me :-(, but plan to make the trip to CA just for this
This looks great. I'm curious as to how long on average people who sign up for your site stay with it? Thanks for sharing, and the best of luck with your venture!
I would agree with andrewcooke, but it might also be a bit back heavy. If the rocket doesn't roll over, maybe it detaches in a more dangerous way (falling forward and down into the rocket as opposed to back and away). Who knows.... I don't think there will be documentation online that answers a discrete question like this. Good question though!
http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...
No amount of code is too small, as the recent Oracle v. Google BS has shown. The rangeCheck method that was contested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683 (It made my day when the judge revealed he had former coding experience.) People shouldn't be worried about covering their ass for this stuff, but if they don't it could cost them. The WTFPL is also a frustration at that fact. As a bonus it eliminates the slight annoyance of people emailing/commenting and asking what the license is if one wasn't provided, at the cost of sensitive people complaining elsewhere about the profanity.

I've used a "version 3" (different version, different name!) of the WTFPL that I picked up from somewhere on a few of my projects, it has some additional legal garble that would probably beef it up just slightly if it was ever tested in court. https://github.com/Jach/lucid_demo/blob/master/COPYING
Things word good when the throttle is not pushed on the VM. Also try our conference calls, you will see the difference :)
Maybe I'm just dull, but how is it possible to see the entire robot? Where is the camera mounted?
wow this seems really useful, and it's the best use of twitter bootstrap i've seen in quite some time
They said they would put the site back online if he sent a reply to every cease and desist order. He decided to keep the site offline, having lost faith in the community.
I really love the idea.

Personally I would never use a service like this for anything that needs to be secure. That's nothing against you more my own paranoia and honestly if it was some password to decrypt my files I'd just give it in a letter to the person I trust not surprise her with an email after I die which she'd probably cry over for days.

I'd probably consider using it to just tell the people I love that I'd miss them and what impact they had on my life.

I really don't get the draw about sending passwords, life insurance policies, and other secure data when you're dead. Would my family and loved ones care about any of that if I was gone? Probably not and if the information I stored was useful to them I'd have given them a way to access it offline in the event something happened.

Not against the service I think it's a great idea just think for the non-developers out there they'd probably prefer something closer to the heart to be sent.

Note: I know you didn't really suggest people send super secret things on the site just saying it in response to what everyone else is posting.
It's very expensive (prohibitively so) to reproduce any substantial study. It also feels like there's a lot of potential downside and very little reward, since there's a presumption of correctness in published papers today. Further, wet lab protocols are subjective enough that I'd imagine most labs would ignore a negative result as having been performed incorrectly.

Where does the money for this come from? Are you expecting that labs will write this cost into their grants? Have you seen interest from grant agencies to then actually pay for this?
To bruteforce like this, wouldn't you need every possible application installed on the computer?

If the payload is a zero day for an obscure Iranian made piece of software, no one will ever get that
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs's home burglarized, $60K worth of items stolen
Thanks for sharing! What do you mean by rapid web application development? Does Prontotype have a drag-and-drop interface or does it involve programming?
I've loved Dark Sky from the beginning. We watched and studied their Kickstarter campaign as inspiration for our own, which was also successfully funded.

The apps are fantastic, well worth what they are priced. The copy & marketing on the website and in the App Store don't do it justice, as they don't communicate the benefit of the app to potential users. Using the app though has saved me from a number of issues, and has helped me to well time grilling dinner in between two rain showers, or timing when to dip in for dinner while walking around town.

Great app, nothing else comes close. I look forward to using 2.0.
The truth about Mercedes Benz India - Sneakily replacing dangerous parts
I've been using the ikea standing desk from a few weeks ago -- the lack side table with a shelf screwed to it. I simply put my laptop on top and then use the rest of the normal height desk as a sitting desk. I just move my laptop across to switch. I already had the standard desk and chair, so the whole setup cost me about £10.

I leave the keyboard, mouse and power adapter on the standing side, as motivation to spend less time sitting. So far I can manage alternate hours sitting and standing, which isn't too shabby considering how out of shape I am.
If I already use dropbox, should I also use this?

It's probably worth listing the reasons I should use this along with dropbox/box/sugarsync/whatever else (although it's perfectly valid if you're targeting users who don't already use one of those).

I imagine early users will hit your site wondering if there's something there that they don't already have.
Bonus points for not asking for a permission to post on my timeline, it's infuriating.
In this situation, I don't think emailing their complaints department is going to help - I need the force of HN!
"Reducing the complexity of getting started down to zero will result in more people learning."

Yes, but you're removing NECESSARY complexity, in order for them to learn something barely worth learning.

"I feel that purely textual coding environments (or coding environments that favor textual output over visual output) serve as a highly uninteresting introduction to programming."

There are people who get to use non-textual coding environments, and there are people who get to work with very visual outputs. I feel that by giving them these tools, you've castrated their ability to understand anything meaningful.

"Obviously, right now we’re not teaching very much in the way of traditional Computer Science content,"

Yeah, approximately none of it.

"We decided that it was much more fruitful for us to tackle the most challenging problem that exists with Computer Science education first: Getting people excited about programming."

Of the people who are AT ALL interested in learning about programming, I have encountered exactly zero of them who aren't already excited about it. Why do you think that GETTING them excited is the "most challenging problem"?

I absolutely applaud the effort, and I sincerely wish you success.

I just personally think you're doing it all wrong.
I had the same experience over the weekend. Wanted to use google apps for one my domains. They wanted me to email .html file which google gives you to a hotmail (really?) address and then give them the password as well to my 1and1 account. #fail
play with the subject matter during the lesson

Kind of removes the need for a "lesson" and teacher, in favor of a facilitator that can go around and help those learning to discover things they hadn't considered.
Were the sitters and standers otherwise performing comparable work? (such as typing and staring at a screen) Or were they moving around a work station, moving physical objects, etc.
It is possible to use Scheme in the browser too:

http://www.wescheme.org/
The Art of Naysaying
anic is the reference implementation compiler for the experimental, high-performance, implicitly parallel, deadlock-free general-purpose dataflow programming language ANI.

One other thing: anic is buzzword-compliant.
Why do we need threads?
Granted this is certainly not JS best practices, but following best practices was not our goal here.

Explaining variable assignment is much simple than explaining callbacks and/or higher order functions.

On a more practical note, this is the convention that processing.js uses, and thats what we're using to render the canvas.
Facebook? Um, no.
Except I don't make over 200k so I can't fund anything. I wouldn't call it "getting crowdfunding right".
I agree in part that poor management has been the problem at many airlines, but the another real problem is that the airline industry has high fixed costs in a perfectly competitive environment. Before the airlines were deregulated in the 80s, ticket prices were high, everyone made money. The 90s ushered in low oil prices with strong US economic growth (good for cyclical businesses).

After deregulation oil stayed cheap until the mid 2000s. For whatever reason, South West hedged far more oil than industry practice and when oil went up dramatically in the mid 2000s the airline benefited dramatically. I have looked at their 10Ks, Qs, (P&Ls) and have studied the topic in some level of depth.

South West has a great culture, which could be unrelated to their profitability, but no one knows that for sure. Their profitability has far more to do with fuel hedging than any other single factor. My argument which cannot be proved, but I hope is considered is that the culture has more to do with the employees being compensated well, and the airline seeming stable than the reverse.
If those are the studies I'm thinking of, they looked at people who sit continuously for several hours. Bad things happen to them, even if they exercise regularly when not sitting.

Best is to sit in a good ergonomic position, and about every 30 minutes get up and move around for a couple of minutes. Take a walk around the office, or go get a drink or something--the key is to get moving.

Do that and you'll beat both the long sitters and the long standers.
Everything you know about CSS is wrong (again)
Completely ridiculous. How do they get away with this kind of stuff? I genuinely think the only way to put a stop to it is for an article like to get popular so they're forced to think.
I agree.

> integrates into your desktop and lets you seamlessly send files

I think you should replace the screencast on the right with a graphic that communicates the part I just quoted.
The truth about Mercedes Benz
You Probably Have Too Much Stuff
I would really like to see something like a Khan Academy for introductory computer science. As it is, it seems there's nowhere to learn computer science basics at a below university level.
Hi, this is Bilal from Science Exchange. We are in discussions with funding agencies and foundations to possibly gather increased financial support. We feel this initial launch will provide a proof-of-principle to gather support.

Currently though, we hope investigators will pay for the validation themselves. We believe it can provide a valuable service to those in small biotechs or those who want to commercialize their research, to improve the robustness of outcomes for potential licensing opportunities.
I wonder if they've added any help for transitioning out of their sandbox. I know when I first learned programming, one problem I had was taking what I learned in the classroom on Apple IIs and transitioning to using GW-Basic or QBasic at home. Transitioning from a browser-based sandbox to editing HTML and real files would probably be even worse. It might be nice if there was an easy framework they would let people download to help them create things in a more normal environment, so they don't get stuck and give up at that point.
1and1 is horrible anyhow, leave, fast!
Wish I could write from the future ...
And ...

The striping actually is redundancy -- it's a redundant ordering indicator for the deck. The nominal ordering is ... the card order. But should that be disturbed, the stripe (a diagonal marking across the edge of the cards) will indicate which cards are out of sequence.

I first encountered this trick in a college library with a physical card catalog. Having been pranked once too often by students re-arranging the drawers, the fronts of the catalogs were crossed with multiple bands of different colored tape. Any out of sequence drawers could be immediately noticed and quickly sorted visually.
Nice. Do you actually make a reasonable amount of money the on service? The reason I ask is because these dollar/lifetime web services are popping up more, and I find it to be an interesting pricing model
Thanks for the feedback Matt. I think you're right. I'm going to remove the CC info fields from my sign up form.

By the way, bugmuncher looks cool. Congrats!
In Silicon Valley, Finding the Next Big Thing in the Ordinary
a good point raised in the comments is that the "arabic or hebrew" part really meant to say a "non-letter us-ascii value including curley brackets, tilde, and pipe". not sure why anyone would want to jump the gun on narrowing down geography in this way.
The videos for CS are brilliant. I don't think programming videos could possibly be more perfect than this.

For example: http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/booleans/839898911

So you can scrub through the lesson and play and pause it, and the instructor can type code into the editor directly causing it to output on your screen in real-time. But the amazing outcome of this is that the viewer can pause the lesson at any time and fiddle with the code directly, instantly changing the outcome. The downside to this is that if the lesson is then resumed, your modifications are kept and the code will be out of sync with the teacher's.

Another cool thing is that the teacher can draw directly onto the program output section just like in normal Khan Academy videos.

Brilliant. I'd say it's almost just as good as having someone right next to you teaching you how to code. The virtual teacher is typing the code directly into your computer!
2. Partial commits... Edited file X and made a fix to file Y? No problem. Commit file X, then commit file Y.

partial commits can be made @ line level also, w/ `git add --edit`

-e, --edit
Open the diff vs. the index in an editor and let the user edit it...

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-add.html
The former is much easier to understand.
Not a book, but a great resource.

http://train.usaco.org/usacogate

There are readings, and problems which increase in difficulty as you progress. Covers general CS topics such as algorithms and data structures.
I think the most common are probably Ad-supported, Subscription, and Freemium(especially for games).

As we're seeing with all the issues being brought up about Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga, these current models do not always work. And even when they do, there are still issues.
There is huge potential right now for new revenue models, so I would recommend getting creative with how your idea could potentially make money.
If app.net succeeds, then there will be more of a transition to subscription services versus free, ad-based services. Currently though, the majority of users prefer free. The challenge is figuring out how to make money from them, which is why ad-supported services are so prevalent.

So try something new. And don't be afraid to ask for money.
Standard CDNs will also accomplish this goal, and their bandwidth is normally cheaper than EC2 instances.
Fuzzing For Correctness
More on Performance Metrics: The Relationship Between IOPS and Latency
The best predictors of storage-related application performance have always been latency and IOPS. Hybrid SSD and HD systems are changing how those numbers should be viewed.
Introduction to Software History
There are various keyboard layouts that are superficially English but which allow various diacritics via dead keys, such that, for example, you can type AltGr+" followed by u to get ü. (I just did exactly that.) I know of us altgr-intl on Linux (that is, xkb), but there are similar layouts on OS X and Windows.
Yes, I do. Unfortunately the author of this article doesn't, and didn't bother to test his examples before making entirely false claims.

The following example will do something very different from what the article says:

int myarray[4]= {1,2,3,0};
int *p = myarray;
while ((*p)++) {
printf("%d ", *p);
}
Wow, the design for Resumonk is beautiful and the functionality looks great as well. May I recommend requiring people to pay for the product up-front instead of doing a free offering? I feel business-wise that freemium might not be as profitable. Of course though, I could be wrong!
Is there a University that offers distance learning for a CS Degree (not necessarily free)?
Could anyone tell me if this would work on Windows? (I typically dev on something like xampp) but I would love to get this working as authing across several apps is very hard problem and creates horrible UX. It would be awesome to see something similar to hybrid auth integrated (http://hybridauth.sourceforge.net/) where we could choose auth providers.

Awesome project looking forward to seeing it progress.
We use facebook so that you can start sending files to your friends with minimal friction -- gmail integration is included as well.
>You're almost certainly not succeeding

You seem pretty convinced, so I don't have high hopes of changing your mind with a post on an internet forum, but in my experience most comments can be replaced by clearer names, better abstractions and better tests. The ones that can't tend to be about the "why" rather than the "what".

>Unless your section of the industry has no interest whatsoever in maintainability[...]

My primary motivation is maintainability, and your claims to the contrary come across as pretty condescending.
Normal CDNs don't do this with dynamic content that changes on every user request. Each api request we serve is different and saving 200ms almost doubles the performance.
The "How to read documentation" link is dead...
http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/how-to-read-documentation/1102...
This looks like a great tool. I think changing the domain name might be a good idea since some people may not infer that mylpg = miles per gallon.
Yelp Homepage getting a makeover