skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Assuming that the solution is always obvious from the code is naive and dangerous. You should always strive to make code speak for itself, but there's occasionally cases that require you to do something unintuitive for some reason or another, and comments serve as a useful warning sign or explanation for future programmers (something that a commit message is uniquely unsuited for)

Going through a few files on one of my codebases, here's some of the useful comments that I can find from a quick skim:

- Explaining why a dummy argument existed on a method (a third-party library required it)

- Explaining why we need to set a weird inheritance column on an ActiveRecord model (we're using 'type' as an actual column)

- Calling out some technical debt that could be fixed by someone at some point.

All of these are really about calling out why the solution is not obvious.
Does The Idea Of Open Source Planes Really Fly?
The fixed socials are only on for today, I've made a note to remove them.

Good to have you on board, Let me know if there's any feeds you'd like added.
Agreed. I have used the same method since about 1985 and it works wonderfully. The only optimisation has been change to a mechanical pencil.

I've lost my card stack a couple of times in those years and there has been no negative effect.

I've played with and written various bits of software but it just doesn't make it any better either.

This problem is solved already.
Arctic ice melting at 'amazing' speed, scientists find
The word REPL comes from lisp and means Read Eval Print Loop. The significance is that unlike in, say, python, Read and Eval are separate. Read reads a string and turns it into an in-memory data structure, Eval takes a data structure (not a string!) and evaluates it.

Using Read in a lisp is typically safe, so long as you turn off reader macros and the like.
...and if this doesn't scare you away from using Windows (or allowing Windows to be used anywhere within your company), I'm not sure what will...
It's the title of the site
I think it refers to the use of tags, which allow you to register tag handlers to add custom semantics to whatever data structure follows the tag.
If the presenter is actually saying something that is totally wrong, I would argue that they should have chosen a different topic and Katz was doing that conference a service.

Edit: although maybe he could have been more polite about it? But sitting through the misinformation seems like a waste of everybody's time.
This is one of the two benefits of flashblock for me. If I want to watch a video, I click on the circled F, otherwise it's just a box that takes up space.

The other benefit is that I don't give my cycles and peace to flash advertisements.
Android has map caching, but not for search or turn by turn nav Also, you can't map cache entire continents/countries like on Nokia devices (OK, you can, if you do it tediously in small sections)

So Nokia (symbian/windows phone) still holds the edge when it comes to navigation. When it comes to local search/places, the Nokia offering is nowhere near as good as the (online) Google Maps
I hate to-do lists. The worst are the ones where others can pile up things for you.

The problem with most to-do lists is that they treat your time as infinite. You just have to take one item after the other and chunk trough it. You're just the CPU executing the tasks you've been handled trough like a puppet. Soon enough the list becomes a big graveyard of things you didn't have the time to do and it's depressing.

It's better if the system forces you to filter tasks upfront. Like a tweet, there is only so much you can fit in a day. Get over it, you won't have the time to do X, just forget about it. It's important to have quality over quantity.
Oh come on, does this look complex to you:

(^[-!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{}|~0-9A-Z]+(\.[-!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{}|~0-9A-Z]+)*|^""([\001-\010\013\014\016-\037!#-\[\]-\177]|\\[\001-011\013\014\016-\177])*"")@(?:[A-Z0-9-]+\.)+[A-Z]{2,6}$
Something that I still don't quite get:
Who adjusts the difficulty. As far as I understand there still is a central server somewhere who broadcasts the difficulty and awards Bitcoins which to me kind of clashes with the distributed nature of Bitcoins.
Yes you're right, I got terribly mixed up here. My apologies. That got me interested in the regions history (of which, as I just demonstrated, I have no clue) though, I'll read into it a little when I've got some spare time.
How about giving more weight to upvotes from people with more Karma. I'm not sure if all upvotes are currently equal (I suspect they are).
Wouldn't that mean there would be loads of crap posted to HN rather than just crap comments?
Ads depends on the hosting bill, but I like the clean interface so we'll see how it goes.

The privacy policy is a copy, paste, find, replace from another site I run, didn't expect this heat. Added to todo.
wouldn't miss it for anything!
How would a union data type work?
already posted and discussed here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438495 if you want to see more info
There is a meaningful subset of HN'ers who have fairly direct access to PG and the other YC partners - the current class and alumni of Y-Combinator. For the rest of us, PG's essays cover a lot of his background as does his book Hackers and Painters.

The format of Ask PG seems to work pretty well. A mix of technical questions regarding YC applications, changes to HN, and interesting business questions tend to get deeper answers than is common within the limits of AMA.
Wow, I never noticed that Github enforces password rules, as well (Must contain one lowercase letter, one number, and be at least 7 characters long.). My passwords are usually HMAC-based, so they'll most likely validate.
"what we need are dumb todo lists" so right. However I found Workflowy even dumber than Trello and having used them side-by-side Workflowy also did it for me usability wise. In Trello there were just too much sub categories and sub windows and too much navigating around for my liking.(note: I use it as a todo list/note taker only. I don't share anything or try to make it act like a bugtracker)
I was lucky enough to speak with Ben last fall and hear this story in person (minus raising their C round). I was also lucky enough to see their new offices in NYC.

My take away is that Ben is one of the most genuine people I have met who has learned some very important lessons and mistakes that he is willing to share. This is a trait that I have seen is great leaders of companies. Quarky is a company that is really thinking outside the box.

People reading HN are not their target demographic, their target demographic spends money on appliances and home nicknacks. Quarky is essentially a self contained Kickstarter, where they are vertically integrated. They sell products before they are made, but have the capability to crank out the products once their order goal is met.

My takeaway from this blog post is that Ben has been humbled by his experiences and is willing to share those with other people. This is most likely one reason why he has been extremely successful with Quarky and has raised money from some of the best VCs in the business.
This is great! It would be great, if I could see my google reader O/P in skimmed format as opposed to sources curated by you!
It's not 1.5 paragraphs, but in essence, yes. Have you tried it?

With a book or slow ereader, page turns interrupt your reading, but on a phone they're instantaneous so pretty much disappear as a reason to prefer large pages.

When reading, your eyes focus on an area about 3 lines high and about 5-10 words across. Unless you're a beginner reader you don't read one word at a time. Because the width of a smartphone is the same as the width of what you're focusing on, the lines above and below your current reading line provide full context for your brain to help interpret the current line, improving reading speed and comprehension.

Also there is no eye scanning or head movement required, which I really appreciate when reading in bed.
I wonder if the iPhone 5 will have a bigger screen. The iPhone 4 screen seems very tiny compared to my Galaxy Nexus. What is the use of fancy 3d if the screen is tiny?
The cycles part is actually non-negligible. Those things are usually so horribly written that they'll eat up processing time in big chunks. But that's not a Flash-only problem. I've seen JS-things on webpages actually spinning up my laptops fans even though there was really nothing much on the screen, and it's not like I've got a bad laptop either. It's not high-end but an i7 with 8gb of RAM shouldn't notice the load of a pretty average webpage.

But that's just my 2 cents.
This is like the desktop idea Microsoft stole from Apple. Doesn't matter that Xerox did it first or that it was inevitable as computers were becoming more powerful.

It's not like there is prior art for most of the touch patents with the diamond touch. The patents are also as absurd as patenting the double click.
For any touch device, we want to maximize touch area. To do that, a square is best. A square doesn't fit well in pockets so a rectangle is better for a phone. It's also very uncomfortable to have a rectangle with sharp edges in your pocket. But wait... we don't have the freedom to design something useful, Apple did that first!

What really ticks me off is that touch based phones were coming with or without Apple as the technology was becoming cheap enough. The only difference is that Apple did it first and they did it well (few companies do anything well). They didn't really invent much in the process but combined many existing concepts into an awesome product. What scares me is that most of these patents are obvious and completly ridiculous and shouldn't be grounds for granting Apple a monopoly on smartphones.
I saw these issues last night but couldn't work out what was causing them. Thanks for the explanations Mike, added to todo.

Update: Fixed. I think, but those &amp; are still showing up red in source.
This is the problem that GTD tries to solve. Omnifocus is a great piece of software that's built on this methodology

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produc...

http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/
BBC PHP framework is Zend Framework, it's sad to see such a lie as one of the main selling points. If Symfony is used at all in BBC is perhaps only to experiment the alternatives.
And yet it's not enough. According to the standard,

"my@scary$doublequoted.address"@example.com

is a valid address.
Amazing pics captured with Google street view
You also don't want to penalize comments on articles that have dropped off the front page. They're useful to people who get to an article through Google. These readers are much less likely to be logged in and thus, much less likely to upvote.
There was another news reader on HN recently, but this one is much better on the iPhone (where I seem to be doing much of my reading lately).

I'll be using this page from now on. Nice work.
Absolutely love it. Thanks for the share.
The problem, as with all great communities, seems to be the abundance of new users and, thus, the widening of scope on submissions and comments.

To me, it seems obvious that to improve HN, the community needs to stop expanding as much and get its main user base back to a niche.

The only tried and true method (that I know of) would be to follow Something Awful and start charging for an account. Something trivial, like $2, would be fine.

Of course, this will never happen. This isn't really something I want to happen, but, to me, it seems to be the only way of limiting the user base in an effective manner.
Do I Really Need a Style Guide?
Using it now, but kinda stuck on an ia32-libs problem

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ia32-libs/+bug/101...
Kansas City subsidises Google Fiber
They have at least confirmed they use Silex, which is based on Symfony components.
There is no such central server. The difficulty is adjusted using an algorithm that all the bitcoin clients implement. This looks at the generation times of the last 2,016 blocks and works out from that if difficulty needs to be higher or lower.

Since all clients implement the same algorithm, they all get the same difficulty value.
Although what's $2 for a site that I check every day?
Why not just have optional pro accounts that people can get for a fee? "Pro" tags would be a quick way to make "serious" posters visually distinctive.
I second the disagreement. There are a number of companies that deal with interesting technical problems without being complete scum. People like you that don't "discriminate against" morally bankrupt business models are what allow distasteful businesses all the way down to flat-out illegal businesses to continue.
This project is the opposite of this project: http://www.frequency-decoder.com/demo/slabText/
The downward spiral feeling comes from after reading HN for a while, you start to reread the same articles and same comments.

It does not mean HN gets worse and worse, it means you extract less and less value.
Never underestimate the effect a few tweaks to the ancient parts of your brain can have. As one anecdote, I was quite surprised how much of a difference was made in my motivation by coloring my passing/failing test cases green/red using ANSI escape sequences.
The ColdFusion scene has stars?

There's... there's a ColdFusion scene? Do you guys have dance-offs with the ASP Classic guys or what?
i think the idea is more like stackoverflow - where your points (karma) gives you access to certain things. If you have 0 karma - you cant comment. If you have low karma - you want to 'save' your posts for valid comments that are likely to get upvoted, thus giving you more karma to make more posts etc.

i.e. people who post 'crap' and get continually downvoted will eventually be silenced.
This is interesting; it somehow reminds me of http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/business/global/american-t...
Traits of (Corporate) Serial Innovators
It is difficult to restrain users from posting too often when creating new accounts are free: how do you compete with free?

You can't make it worse than creating a new account because then the users will just create a tons of new accounts.

So somehow you need to make account creation "more expensive" to be able to have a working cost/rate-limiting on posting.
How I Booked $20,000 Tickets for $362.80 with Travel Hacking
YMMV I guess. I just hooked a new monitor up to my laptop running 12.04 last night. I had to manually install the ATI drivers, then change the settings in Catalyst. I was required to reboot after each change. Then, I had to change the display settings in system settings. It took about 2 hours to get right and was a huge pain.

I have a dual monitor set up at work on 12.04 and it works flawlessly & smoothly. It is absolutely hit-or-miss. There are driver issues on Ubuntu for dual monitors.
In a dynamically typed language, every value is a tagged union.
Picture too perfect: Nokia says sorry after faking new camera feature
I don't think the source was released back then
Things I, as a designer, wish more tech startups knew
I feel that this creates elitism. Anyone can buy a 'Pro' tag. What makes a person's comments, who is willing to spend money, better than one who is not?
Unshortened: http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secur...

edit: That's a lot of bitly links to "Symantec Connect Community" https://bitly.com/u/threatintel.rss
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431994
Surely that can be addressed by weighing comments differently base on the position of the post or the number of page views etc.?
It's like http://www.popurls.com: really good aggregator.
I do care about karma.

I care because it's a measure of whether what I say is agreeable or disagreeable. It's not about fitting in or following the herd, but if I say something that loses me karma I want to understand why. Maybe I'll end up with the same opinion anyway or maybe it teaches me to think more before I talk. Mostly, karma helps me reflect on my opinions and question those opinions.

The only thing I would do with HN is to _force people to comment when they downvote_

If you agree with me, then an upvote with no commentary is fine. If you downvote me, tell me why. Maybe I could learn something, maybe I get the chance to explain myself better, maybe an open disagreement on a point enriches the community.
Primitive version of GTD. GTD solves the issues raised in this post and more. Many todo apps work with a GTD workflow. I use Toodledo (web app) and Due Today (Android), they sync perfectly. Re-reading the GTD book every 6 months or so helps to be consistent with applying it, because the devil is in thinking 'oh I'm just going to skip this or that task for now', or not being diligent in e.g. assigning contexts. For GTD (any system, really) to work, you need to hammer it into your habits until it's stuck so snugly that it feels weird to do things any other way.
John Gruber -- Apple’s Favorite Blogger
My rule of thumb is that you can't expect people reading the code to go diving into the revision control history. So if a reader of the code needs the information, it goes in a comment. Commit messages justify the change; comments justify the code as it stands. I think these are different kinds of 'why' (though they can certainly often overlap a lot).
I'd like to see a Kindle version (Symfony 2.0 Book)
Yamaguchi Partners: Genesis Acquires Rival Sun Healthcare.
Adding a Table of Contents to Your Github Wiki
Evolution could explain the placebo effect
I do it a few years ago (when compiling all of this take 1 day per step). I totally recomend it. It give you the background needed to understand an operate system, unix, kernel, modules/drivers, stdlib, et cetera...

You should do it.
It's fun to follow the rip off phone market from China, where all that phones look fairly decent on features, but in reality they are often so bad they are impossible to use. One iPhone knock off I bought for fun, had a radio tuner, and dual sim support. The touch screen was so bad, it required a stylus to operate and even with that it was almost impossible to use. The software was also really bad. For example, if you were composing an SMS and made a mistake, which would happen due to the bad screen, you had to hit two buttons to correct it. Both options were right next to the option to cancel the entire message, which you would inevitably hit. It also would answer the call if anything was touching the screen when a call came in, which was always unless it was on a table. Video playback was at 12fps. It shipped with two batteries, which I thought was nice, until it turns out that they die after a few charges.
I'm really glad that this works for you, but it sounds like hell.
I think that brings up new problems, e.g. dealing with someone with a paid account/subscription that submits enough posts or comments to get that person banned or hell-banned. Or a scenario in which a hell-banned user wants to upgrade to a paid account.
Hire PHP Programmer For Website Development
Looking for website develpment? Expertsfromindia.com is a one stop PHP and MySQL web development company having skilled PHP developers and dedeicated PHP programmers for developing customised websites globally who works on all PHP technologies. So hire PHP programmer from EFI full time/part time basis at an affordable rate.
See also: http://jsdrama.com/
Wunderkit was entirely native. There were 0 iOS developers involved in working on Wunderlist with Titanium as you simply don't need native developers for Titanium code (the maintainers in the past were Javascript and front-end developers). I joined as the first iOS developer and worked on Wunderkit. Now all the developers work on the native client. There's also a lot of shared library code between the Mac and iOS team
I know, however last I heard it wasn't enabled by default and many packages don't support it.
Why not? Have you used a language other than Arc to write a web app recently?

If writing web apps in other languages isn't still painful where have other languages/frameworks caught up?
I think this could possibly work if HN was a paid-to-post service, even if it was just $1 p/m. The only problem I can see otherwise is this would open the possibility of an underground currency for karma. It might result in user accounts who exist purely for karma collection, getting upvotes from droves of dummy/spam/bot accounts, then posting spam. It would be possible of course to try and detect this, but not trivial I would think to avoid false positives.
Streamline yourFrontend Workflowwith Clarify
... And much of the time, I think asking for a comment with a down vote is a good idea.

Except, there are obvious trolls. Or someone else has already explained why the comment was inappropriate.

It happens enough that the reason for the downvote seems—to me—facially clear ... so while I agree it's a good courtesy in most situations, I don't think enforcing it would help. Maybe a UI change could encourage this behavior (e.g., highlight "reply" on downvote), but this loses some of the clean look of HN ...
Interesting, that's not recommended by python devs. Ubuntu follows the guideline of keeping /usr/bin/python as Python 2 (which will not be installed by default), and /usr/bin/python3 as Python 3.

ETA: Arch Linux actually did this before there was an "official" guideline. http://www.wefearchange.org/2012/04/python-3-on-desktop-for-...
> Banks are not doing merchant processing for most people.

Well, US banks aren't. Dutch banks are doing it just fine:

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

Works very well and I trust this method a lot more than a payment processor that's not my bank.

I'm not entirely sure what the rules are from the merchant's side, however.
5 points developers should know about WinRT
Despite occasional complaints from users being down-voted, I have appreciated that in most cases when a user is down-voted and asked for an explanation he is given it.
Students forced to build your iPhone5?
I disagree, it has to be something substantial, at least $10. The more you charge, the more value it has.
I really really hate this practice. It only works for me if (1) the methods pulled out are simple and obvious (usually means they fit recognizable patterns) or (2) the method names are spectacularly more descriptive than they usually are (which is to say, to someone who didn't write the code or to my future self: never). Otherwise, it's like reading a paper or chapter where important comments are left as end-notes. As you are reading along you have to break your train of thought to go find the goddamn thing that you need to help you understand what you are reading. Totally annoying.

It's much better to me if things that are conceptually linked are chunked together. I don't mind scrolling. I don't mind reading. I hate hunting when I am trying to crystallize ideas.

The exception is if there are reusable methods involved. These I always factor out.
The Ad-Filled Vision Of Jeff Bezos
Symfony 2.1.0 released
Yes, the OP explains that positively voted submissions would be necessary before voting.
I think we should concentrate on

1. Submitting better articles

2. Upvoting better articles

3. Posting better comments

4. Upvoting better comments

5. Add to the signal

6. Stop worrying about the noise
An alternative solution would be to hide (by default) posts that have no response and that have been made by users with karma below a certain threshold.

It would also be possible to compute the average number of upvotes for each comment thread and show the threads with the most upvotes first.
I wrote this Election Screensaver in 2008. It still works
It sets goals very clearly outside of 'I need a working system'.
Sexy lingerie
Sexy lingerie, de nieuwe online lingerie winkel
Although I like the idea, I personally prefer Pulse.me. It has pictures and resized articles according to their significance.

Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/W1NKw.png
Start thinking in terms of what you or your non-tech friends like to do already. What you come up with doesn't have to be extremely innovative or even new. You can subsequently focus on executing that idea in the best way possible.