skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you overestimate most biology labs. It's really easy to screw up a protocol in subtle ways. Often it took the original lab weeks of debugging to get it to work (yes, to get it to work, not to produce a false positive).

Things get more reliable as time goes on and methods become better understood, but the critical steps in most experiments are usually nontrivial to replicate in the beginning. Especially by CROs, which are notorious black boxes, incredibly expensive, and often just plain old unreliable.
> A large number of people tried for a large number of years to get lisp to take off.

You know, it was fairly popular for a time.

> I don't have to personally know every language. Languages grow in popularity by picking up users.

This is a tautology.

But let's pretend for a second what you meant to say was "Languages deserve the usership they gain in a sort of mindshare stock exchange." Then let's rewind 10 years and show you Clojure, Ruby, Java, and Javascript.

Can you ever imagine someone from 2002 picking Javascript over those alternatives? Someone sane, I mean. All praise to the pragmatism of the 'net, but Javascript's popularity is a function of its largely unrequested deployment and the failure of competing products (mostly due to artificial and non-technical business-enforced nonsense).

And yet here we are with Javascript being so popular that startups are raising $9m just to build frameworks in them. And yet by any reasonable metric Javascript is a "worse" language. The most highly-recommended starter book for javascript is "The Good Parts", because a whole lot of the language is just so bad it has to be ignored or worked around.

All we're really doing is appealing to popularity as a justification for using perceived popularity instead of real technical metrics. Which is–to some extent, anyways–fine and good; it certainly is traditional for people to do this. But let's not pretend we have access to some deeper insight while we're doing it.
Not really. What I get from this, it's basically just a personal loan, which you pay back with interest. It's like Kiva, but for different market.

Did you read the terms? The income is the income on your tax report. You don't have to pay anything if you earn less than $30,000 annually. If you are very successful, the maximum annual payment is 14.99% of the loan (otherwise 1-7% of your income, depending on the total amount). You always pay for 10 years. However, these terms are rather confusing and I didn't see any actual interest rates etc. on the site.
As with so many companies/business models proclaimed dead, I would hazard a guess that it's not dead yet. Too many people have invested too much in the concept for there to be no attempt to modify the execution while retaining the overall premise. Bidding? Fluctuating discounts a la travel sites? Lower caps on the number of coupons offered? Existing in a different economy, elsewhere in the world?

Someone out there believes in arbitrage so strongly that they believe they can make money for themselves while lowering prices for consumers and creating long-term benefits for business owners. Although I've unsubscribed from Groupon and haven't been excited by some other companies' recent efforts in the daily deal space, I would actually celebrate a successful and ethical daily deal company.
But a driveway is a solid is that different than a gas? You can really have a wedge effect with a gas?
Amazing WebGL demo: A 4-dimensional rendering of a Klein Bottle.
You know I was persuaded by the big screen/long play session argument the other day, but don't the gameboy and DS seem like contradictory evidence?
That was a fun search and replace exercise I bet... ;-)

I imagine searching for Z, R and O in a large code repository.
i think the uber service is great. that said, we (collectively, the startup community) can't keep using this "we're an innovative tech company and the laws we're breaking weren't written with our great innovations in mind" argument. it doesn't hold water. it just sounds childish and pompous.
Hashbangs existed for a very short period of Twitter's life. They were a mistake. They're gone now.
This really depends on what your goal is. Do you want to get a job as a sysadmin? At a startup as a DevOps guy or as a BigCo Sysadmin? Do you want to host your own website?

You'll probably hear this a lot but start by creating your own Linux VM. CentOS is a free distro and actually maps exactly to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can put on your resume "I know how to administer RHEL" which would actually be recognized by an interviewer. Then start doing little challenges.

Ex: Write a bash/perl script which takes a word and a number. Use curl to download number of images from flickr with the search term.
Or: Write a kickstart file which sets up an apache server and is configured to serve out a static page you created.
Or: Using ping, awk/sed, grep etc, write a bash script which emulates the tracert command

Bonus points for all of the above: write your scrips in vim/emacs.

every time you don't know what command to use, find a random script in the /etc directory and try to understand what it does. When you find a command you don't know, read the man page, then google it b/c man pages can suck a lot.

Use version control. For everything. Git gets a lot of press on HN but Subversion will be recognized by a lot more people who would interview you outside of the startup world (though this is changing slowly).

Some people recommend you get familiar with your shell/editor preference files (alias commands, change colors, change shortcuts, etc). I'd argue that effective working sysadmins can get by with the defaults in bash and vim or emacs (though i feel vim is more likely to be installed on barebones Enterprise Linux distros which happen to be the ones you actually would work on)
It sounds something like that to me. I am doing something similar with hubski.com, where you essentially blog into an aggregator.

I like the pieces of what's here, but I think masonry is a bit overdone, I personally like a higher information density.
In my experience most implementations either have a way of binding the context per method (JavaScript), or use a loose convention of passing the sender as the first argument (Objective-C).

It seems like the Ruby libraries cited are the real issue, rather than a fundamental misconception of the concept of delegates or indeed inversion of control as a whole.
I'm not sure what is the news here, I've been using OS X for five months and one of the first things I did was to get JDK from Oracle. I understand that Apple has stopped distributing it and Oracle will be the standard source to get JRE and JDK but I don't get how it was unavailable before this press release. Am I missing something? Otherwise title is misleading.
As I say. There is write-once code. When I write it and nobody else can't read it. Then there is worse, there is wire-once and even I can't read it.
Daily Deals are not dead. The model is promising for a variety of businesses and Groupon has it well executed. It also has significant barriers to entry if you don't have a size advantage or experience with cold sales. Groupon's stock might be in the gutter but the company is for here to stay and for a long time. It's possible that there will be a couple of (well financed) competitors continuing to fight for first place, but most of the wannabes have already disappeared.

In addition to the deal hunters that are in their customer base, there are many addicted to this type of purchases. I have quite a lot of anectodal evidence for such behavior, and if you ask around, you'll find many more.
> feel like this streaming syntax might be better suited as a meta-programming framework of sorts

I think that is why the criticism is more apparent. It is exciting to have those features, but then the syntax just pushed you away.
Don’t Innovate, Imitate
Except it stifles innovation in other sectors. There may be alternatives that are better but aren't subsidized which makes it harder for them to succeed.
I'd love to check this out. Are details available? Screen shots?
It's not a small thing: the web is made of links.
> With Uber, the payment takes place later and an e-mail receipt is sent, and the fares are seemingly intentionally obfuscated (see: the controversy about displaying peak v. off-peak pricing as a multiplier rather than a dollar amount). Hence, a driver using a malicious Uber Driver app to report a few more blocks travelled on each trip is much less likely to be detected than a cabbie physically and obviously entering additional fees. I suspect Uber would find it difficult to prove that the driver's (fake) extra mileage wasn't actually rider-requested or an attempt to circumvent traffic - and I also suspect most riders won't notice.

Au contraire, Uber provides you a much easier way to audit your ride, a detailed email receipt seconds after you leave the cab with a map, origin and destination addresses, breakdown of your fare, how it was paid, and a customer service email address. On your phone, you also get a couple survey questions about the ride (how was the car, driver, etc.) too.

https://skitch.com/bkerley/ecigm/skitched-20120814-192957

I haven't had to deal with them (Miami doesn't have Uber yet :( ) but I suspect that their customer service is more interested in customer happiness than pinching pennies. Since it's paid with a credit card, even if their customer support process breaks down, you still have a powerful recourse.
I make iOS games for a living, and our hands are full enough trying to handle the fragmentation of device capabilities on iOS/Android. Adding another code path we have to worry about testing so that we can support a market that will be a tiny, tiny percentage of the whole? Yea, no.
A $1.2bn Simulation of Civilisation
In fewer words: comment why, not what.
Source for the renderer and the rest available on github. https://github.com/adrianbg/n22d
> Both of those languages have great tools (rails, for example)

I am surprised a Clojure programmer would have much respect for Rails. Its aggressive share-nothing approach leads to inconsistency, poor performance, awkward architectures, and over-reliance on external state management.

Perhaps one might admire it for making a bold claim about configuration vs. convention, but a valid criticism of Rails is that they went so far along the convention line in rebellion of bad tools like Spring that now they get accused of excessive magic.

> But I can't see Clojure pushing either Ruby or Python out of the water any time soon.

Like I said, success is fashion. But then, people said this to me about Git Vs. SVN after I gave a tech talk to a bunch of ruby folks about how git would take over the world. Two people left that talk and went on to found Github, so... "High Fashion."

Clojure has all the power of Ruby's dynamism, but with a better solution to the expression problem (protocols are namespace contained, allowing for monkey-patching that doesn't taint the world). It has access to a lot of fantastic high-performance libraries. It can safely deal with high degrees of parallelism with a degree of ease few environments can claim. It has a minimalist syntax which can compete with even the most terse and convention-driven ruby syntax (i.e., Compojure vs. Sinatra).

Similar complaints can be leveled at Python with less of a performance angle and more of a power angle; Clojure gives you access to many of those features that the python community feels are "too awkward" to use in the OO world, but are entirely natural in the Lisp world.

So yeah, every time someone writes a server in Node.js I think to myself, "You could have done it in Clojure and had just as much dynamism during development, just as easy a deployment story, and also perform easily an order magnitude faster under load, and you don't have to run like a scared child from parallelism."
Rafting klub Tara Adventure
Tara Rafting Adventure Club, the best rafting club for organizing rafting tours on the rivers Tara and Drina, hiking tours, jeep safaris and the like. Choose your own adventure
I've been using Oracle supplied JDK in the last five months and it's been always present there: http://cl.ly/image/07422e283m0G
I can't fully wrap my head around it - don't have Twitter, can't try it out - by just observing the surface details but it looks like a collaborative content platform with lots of emphasis on design. Love the large format photos and responsive design.
I will "me too" this as interesting. I think everyone can agree that the medium (no pun intended) for news and other written content has been in a general state of flux for the better part of two decades now. It seems like there is a new model for soliciting, curating, and distributing this content which is hard to exactly put a finger on, but we're getting closer. Efforts like this are refreshing to see, and hopefully will become something that much closer to the next "it"
App.Net Stats
Yeah, it is a little cryptic isn't it. I should have been less so with my comment. To get it working:

1. Sign up for an account at http://notifo.com

2. Download one or more of their client applications here: http://notifo.com/mobile_apps and enter your details

3. Enter your notifo username in the box on your HN profile page.

I think the reason this facility exists here on HN is because Notifo is a Y Combinator company.
I meant that it is broken at a specific organization if you end up doing an in person interview, they walk up to the whiteboard and do not know what a closing brace is. They should never have made that far through the organisation's interview process, unless that specific process was broken.
Everyone has performance and concurrency problems, eventually. What's great about Clojure is it gives you a path to ease into them.

Compare a Noir or even bare Compojure web service vs. a Sinatra web service. Is there really a big winner on brevity?
I'm not following your point. I'm saying that true delegation as defined by the article is in fact a useful tool for good software design. Maybe not as broadly useful as standard message forwarding, but something which deserves its own term.
Note that the return to the investors is capped at 15% of their investment annually, and it's automatically deferred when you're un- (or way under-) employed. Using it to raise a huge amount is probably ill advised, but I don't think it's more crazy than a small bank loan, and much better than putting it on a credit card.
Repl.it: repl for 17 languages
good point. I'll verify the citation and update it.
That would do it. Thanks.
> “Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.”

That's advocating against bad code, and specifically the fairly widespread practice of commenting what it does rather than fixing it.

It's not a blanket statement against comments in general.
Great work, but I have some feedback about the first video shown to everyone who visits the Computer Science page.

1) It jumps right into talking about syntax of programming instead of showing screen shots of what a person will be able to build after completing the lessons, the benefits of learning about Computer Science, some cool problems they will know the answer to, etc, like Udacity does.

2) It is spoken way too fast. It's going to turn off almost all non-native english speakers, as well as confuse many english speakers.

3) As if that's not bad enough, anyone who turns on closed captioning to get a transcript will be even more confused, as YouTube's transcription is both messy and flashes quickly. It's so useless, you should look into disabling the CC button for the videos while looking into other approaches in the mean time.

Example:

"according to a common just by out of the two facets to the front and we call this commenting out coat now the fun we skipped and sometimes this can get away with the land was for".

4) When re-recording it, I hope the speaker (who is female) says "men and women" rather than "dudes" when talking about programmers several times. Lots of women have contributed to software development. Otherwise, she made some great jokes!

http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/1-welcome-to-codecanvas/882454...
Quora Removes Feed Stories about Views
Quora: Removing Feed Stories about Views
While I agree that the concept of Daily Deals and Groupon as an implementation of that concept are not dead, I still think Groupon is going to struggle.

1) The model is promising for some businesses, but a lot of them end up being one-time customers because the results are so poor. The most sustainable customers are those with high margins and high sales costs - a big market, to be sure, but enough to justify a multi-billion dollar company? I'm not sure.

2) I would be more worried about competition at the local level, which has smaller barriers to entry. Lots of companies (newspapers, tv stations, etc) have existing sales infrastructure for a region and can compete aggressively with Groupon. Add to that a handful of well-funded, competent competitors, and it is easy to see how Groupon's margins could continue to be squeezed.

Is Groupon going to be around for a long time? Probably, but I doubt it will be as a multi-billion dollar company with good growth prospects.
Functions have maintenance and implementation overhead. They define an API that is accessible from the translation unit, and they thus require defining some amount of invariants. They also require breaking flow from the current function being implemented to hoist the code upwards.

A short, atomic unit of 4-6 lines of code does not deserve to be a function simply because it's an atomic unit, but it does warrant a simple comment that someone skimming the code can use as an index to determine where they want to look.

It's all about making the code approachable in bite size pieces for future maintainers, your collaborators, and your future self. Breaking it into pieces and describing the code means that maintainers are not required to trace out all the code and swap in a huge amount of knowledge just to determine what a given function does, and why, and what is safe to change within it.
I didn't try Compojure, but Noir seems succinct enough. It's just that functional programming doesn't blend well with my brain. For some problem it does, for some it doesn't. Since you mention performance, I am wondering and was not able to find any benchmarks in Noir vs. Sinatra for rest server for example.
In my experience, GoF is most useful in that it says, "Patterns exist in software architecture as much as they do in physical architecture."

The rest is details.
Clarifying the underlying concept is great. Self-style delegation gets to the heart of why "this" is dynamically bound in JavaScript, which is one of the language's most confusing features. Self-style delegation is also just generally cool and more people should know about it.

At the same time, getting hung up on terminology and trying to mandate a definition that goes against current usage just because it's older is a fool's errand and doesn't help.

Language is a social construct. It's very important for us to have consensus and agree on what words mean so that we can communicate efficiently. At the same time, there's nothing wrong about having definitions change over time.

"Car" used to mean a two-wheeled Celtic war chariot. It wouldn't be helpful to insist that it still mean that, and it's just mean to proclaim that everyone who uses "car" to mean "automobile" is wrong and doesn't understand the idea of war chariots.
Finally, Bloglovin staff replied to tweets. It's working again.
Stop Publishing web Pages
No, much worse actually. Arrogant and left me with no clue as to what they are doing. Won't even bother looking.
I agree. I'm a bit ashamed to say that, in addition to what you mentioned, I've noticed that companies and stores that I did frequent fairly often that did end up doing a Groupon or similar daily deal, lost more of my business after the fact because I experience the same service for less. Somehow, after getting close to 50% off something I enjoyed, the full price didn't seem as enticing to me.

I do like to support companies and stores that do a good job, but there's the simple fact that in my head I think that the intrinsic value of this service is somehow less after the Groupon style deal.
More importantly, Uber is neither a cab NOR a private car service.

It's a communications network that links private car services with people who want to get a ride from the private car service.
As does LANdesk
If you call them, you can be almost certain that they're genuine. It's really difficult to hijack a phone number without detection, and then to staff it for random calls suggests a level of dedication difficult to find.

So if they call you, never give anything related to security. Always call them back on a publicly verifiable phone number before giving security or very private info.
And Twitter is even slower...
Out of curiosity, who are you referencing as the $9m funded startup building Javascript frameworks?
Rails Dev Box - A Virtual Machine for Ruby on Rails Core Development
Finding Derek Sivers (and other super people)
> Basically it's complicated in structure [...] but simple in interface, and that's pretty much the right place to be.

Thanks for posting this, this is a great analysis. It gets right to the heart of many of the disagreements I have with system design orthodoxy.

I think it's exactly the wrong place to be.
wish all the names were links back to that person's app.net

side note: feels awkward to say app dot net like that, but things changes
Thanks. I had only installed the JRE. When I installed the JDK it showed up in there for me too.
Conversion-focused copywriter on how to write subject lines that get opened
> - poor single node performance

I am in the process of evaluating riak for an project, and have run across this too. I am not sure if it is specific to the eleveldb backend (I just used the default values so far), or just a bad config on my part. Even when I relaxed consistency down to r=1,w=1 and used the protobuf interface, riak was still performing rather slowly (compared to some other things I am testing) in single node performance.
> Sorry dude, language doesn't work that way.

If his post persuades everyone and they start using it the way he wants them to, then language does work that way.
Same thing happened to myself in Seattle, except with a laptop and Dell Axim. Confronted the thief at a bowling alley with the cops around the corner. Guy rolls up with 5 friends/girls. I tell him I know he stole it from my house. Cops roll over. Epic public shaming and got fired from his job because of it. Instead of using Burner I had to coordinate with friends for the meet.
OK, but how does MA decide which equipment is considered a measuring device used for trade? Are grocer's scales and gas pump meters a special case that's explicitly regulated, or is anything that (a) takes a measurement while (b) in the path of a transaction regulated?

My supermarket sells cheddar for $8/pound. When they take some cheese and price it, the scale that decides it's 8 oz of cheese is a regulated scale.

But my co-worker's friend sells D&D dice for $5/cupful. Is that cup a measuring device that would technically need to be certified by DWM for trade use?

And if not, what is the bright-line test for whether the Uber app is a cup or a scale?
It's important to note that this isn't a complete reversal -- Quora's still going to display views from "in the feed". They're also blocking all "adult" content from the Views feature as well.

The changes should alleviate most of the pressure that was being placed on Quora. I'm glad they rolled back the most egregious parts of Views.