skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN Parents: How do you handle working and kids?
Do you work from home and/or in a small startup and have kids? Would you mind share some tips?

In my experience (father of a <2 year old):

* work when the kids are sleep or in daycare
* don't work all the other time (I usually check email, server status and such minor tasks)

My daughter gets 11-12h at night and a couple of hours of nap. So, I always try to adapt around her schedule:

9,30h - 13h day care
14h - 16h nap
21h - 8,30h sleep

I started working at 21h at first. This started messing with the mother schedule and staying up late is not always the best solution. Although it's the most quite time.

So i ended up waking up as soon as possible everyday, coffee up and start working for a couple hours before they woke up. Then I'll take her to daycare (which takes 12min*2 walking) to get a mental break, came back home and working till 12h30 when I go back to pick her up.

Then I usually take a nap with her. Then park time, then bath and dinner, then I'll check if everything's ok (altough I keep checking with the smartphone every now and then). I cannot get any job done when she's playing/"idling" around the house.

And that is the only tip I could share right now (TLDR): start working really early in the morning before anyone wakes up.
Maybe not easily but it can far more flexibly than MongoDB. Take a look at Postgres-XC which offers a two-tiered clustering solution for Postgres inspired by Teradata. A bit complex, but you don't give up your formal proof of data integrity in order to get it.
Show HN: DubJS: A New Way to Build Web Apps
I think it needs a way to enable syntax highlighting and optionally a proper editor, plus maybe show the name of the current language somewhere visible.
Gmail/GDrive Integration
To any Googlers who might be around - would it be possible for you guys to add another option in the "Shared with me" Folder that would be something like "File Attachments"<p>It would be a simple list of all files sent to you via email - dated and marked by the user who emailed you the file. A simple thing like this would really make GDrive 100x more useful. The files are already counting against my space, so it be great to have quicker access to them.<p>Toby
The deafness before the storm
Haven't used Telerik's decompiler, yet, but there are several other alternatives to Reflector: open source ILSpy and JetBrains dotPeek. Both are free, since I last checked.

The moment Telerik attempts to charge a penny for Fiddler, I'm betting you'll see alternatives spring up. Quickly.
What do iOS users think about the design of the app? I'm asking because from screenshots and a video, it looks the design is a close copy from the Android app.

How do users accept common patterns like Actionbar or Slideout Menu on an iPhone?
Check their blog. It's more descriptive than their website.

http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready
> And since then? Nothing.

I think there are some Londoners who might contest that.
I wrote about my experience with Paypal a while back. http://mydl.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_easyblog&vi... What a truly horrible and useless company. I've informed every online merchant not to use them since and make sure all my friends know.
Exactly. All this talk about mediocre programmers use java and good programmers use "new cool hipster" languages is just a very biased statement.

There are hackers in every language and there are mediocre programmers in every language.

I've seen more mediocre programmers wanting to learn the new hipster languages than java. In 10 years from now these same languages will be on the java spot, and the cycle will continue.

But it does amuse me how so many people think they are better programmers because they use language X or Y.

Love the predictions analogy :p
I tried one of these around the time of the XBOX360 launch down at the Microsoft HQ here in Melbourne, Australia.

Needless to say: they are terrible.

They have a fundamental flaw of your fingers being in the way of themselves. You are forced to alter your typing style drastically and even then typos are frequent.
Increasing awareness of cookies is not very helpful. People don't give a rats heini about stuff like that.

All it does is make things more confusing causing customers to drop off.

And I still don't understand what is so bad about them being able to profile me. I want them to do that so I can get better ads / better communication in the future.
The browser icon has changed since: http://elementaryos.org/journal/new-midori-icon-elementary
I forgot to say that I live in Spain, which shares timezone with Poland and northern Norway (http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/europe/eutimetwo... >2000 km difference in longitude... I know). We should have the UK/Portugal timezone. So when I say we eat at 13h it's really 12h "sun time".
Thanks for the suggestion - it's something we've considered; the issue with our tests to date has been getting the minute-to-minute fidelity with a circular interface (plus it's actually quite hard to drag something accurately in a circular motion). But we should revisit this all with fresh eyes - and the idea much appreciated!
No, just thinking that HN is a tiny fraction of the world population in general.
taking a relaxed approach to enforcement.

Whenever a group largely objects to a law, it seems that some of the group will say something like "Well, at least they're not enforcing it", or "Well, at least prosecutors have discretion on bringing charges", as though this is better, when in fact lax enforcement is worse. If people are not in immediate danger from a law, no matter how bad it is, they will be less inclined to spend their own time and resources fighting it. This means that in modern democracies, bad laws that stay on the books almost always come with inconsistent or rare enforcement, because that's how they stay on the books: people are not outraged enough to lobby for repeal or amendment.
What exactly is the contradiction? The only contradiction I see is in your comment. Which is it; an oxymoron or a gross exaggeration?

Very few startups ever achieve the billion dollar threshold. They are acquired or plateau or fail or become a middling public company. In fact, very few businesses across any industry ever reach this milestone. So setting the bar for a startup at a billion dollars is still a fairly audacious goal and sets up the premise of the article which is creating a massively successful company with a minimal number of employees.
Thanks man! Yes it's a case of picking battles really at first - even within sleep there's so much we can do...
Workshop Training: Responsive Web Design
Best Practices: When to (NOT) Use Asynchronous Programming
Basically, this contraption seems to take a photo of the iPhone screen and prints that out like a Polaroid. That's basically it. All I can think is, "wtf".
Workshop Training: HTML5 & CSS3
The Buy-vs-Build Shift (part 1)
Of course, knowing when to use an extremely descriptive name is half of the battle. Having a good aesthetic sense as a programmer is crucial. As a general rule, if I can see the entire lifetime of a variable in my field of view, I'll go for short/terse variable names (loop control, temp values, etc). Or if the method name is descriptive, and the code in the method is fairly short, I won't need to repeat myself in the variable names. Good sense is key.

Also, the names used in the article show a very poor aesthetic sense. Names like that are screaming out as needing a refactor. Having a condition in your method name is a code smell. Your methods (read: api) should be abstracted as discreet actions, and the code that calls it should perform control flow.
98% as arbitrary as the "us news" weightings
Start our Special App Week
>because he knew that as soon as the prisoners were released most would go right back to killing again (or do you think that they were mostly innocent?)

Obviously they were innocent by the very definition of it in the US system: innocent until proven guilty. Obviously if we could prove them guilty we wouldn't need Gitmo, we'd try them in criminal court. We didn't because we had nothing on them.

Also, your "went back to killing" is an assumption. How do you know they were killing before? I would expect that, once released, the people who were illegally kidnapped would seek some action against those that destroyed their lives and held them against their will for years.
Borrowing from Stoic principles, you must acknowledge that a) there are some things you can control, b) some things you can't, and c) some things you control somewhat.

A professional golfer can't control whether he wins a match, but he can control how well he practices.

Don't get too emotional or attached to outcomes you can't control.

Do focus on "doing your best" at things you can actually control.

This is the point Dan makes, and I think you can make decent progress with this line of thinking and preserve your mental tranquility at the same time.
Well, yes and no. There is certainly no "global terrorist network" as put forward by some with, as you suggest, a hidden agenda, a vast network of those "out to get" the USA.

But there was and is global co-operation between terrorist groups, which is why sometimes IRA members turn up in Colombia[1], and there is a definite link between global organised crime and terrorism (whether it be ETA buying guns from the mafia or FARC being funded by cocaine exports).

The fantasy really is the belief by many in the US that terrorism equates to a hatred of America, which in reality is not the case.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombia_Three
"I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful"

As a general case, the first thing which struck me when rereading this essay was the way in which Graham's writing style (and his draft readers' editing) has improved. Today, a similarly structured essay would clearly answer the question, "Successful how?"
Ahhhh, hence the "this website wants to track your location"
I was going to say almost exactly the same thing. The items that he listed are certainly detrimental from a startup perspective, but for a big company I think that they are actually arguments in favor of Java. Unfortunately for Paul Graham, and his prediction, the big companies have had more say in adoption than the startups. I agree with you. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. But, it wouldn't necessarily have been obvious at the time.

Personally, I dislike the language wars. I think that a good developer should be able to write good software with the tools available. Arguing the opposite always smacked of the "silver bullet" to me.
Hi HN,

This is my side-project that I've been working on for a while. It would mean a great deal if you'd give me some feedback.
Thanks, after reading that through a couple of times, I think I understand what it means.

Looking back at the article, this is the critical bit:

> the ratio of sqp(abc)^r/c always has some minimum value greater than zero for any value of r greater than 1

That looks like it's just saying sqp(abc)^r/c > 0. But from what you're saying, the bit about the minimum value (1/K) is important. For each value of r, it should be possible to define a minimum value greater than 0 which sqp(abc)^r/c can never be smaller than. Right?

Are those minima interesting in themselves, or just as part of the whole conjecture? Is there a method for finding the minimum for a given value of r?
T-Shirt OS
Grammar pedantry: surely it should be 'The cookie law is dead. You're welcome.'?
Java got unicode horribly, horribly wrong; assuming everything will be in the BMP is like assuming everything will be ascii, only harder to spot in testing.

It got some things right; threading (even ten years on Java has a more reliable thread model than tcl/perl/python/ruby), strong typing (not much use day-to-day, but incredibly valuable for building extensible libraries that can nevertheless be evolved without breaking existing code), maven.

I think it achieved the enormous success it has mostly by being a conservative, incremental improvement over C++ and Cobol. A lot of things introduced in later versions of java were things other languages had been doing for years, but an unwillingness to adopt unproven techniques is the best thing about java. I don't think it even is the best choice for any given problem - it's just that in a real world of mediocrity and turnover, java makes it possible to produce reliable, boring code with minimal risk.
...but this isn't a scrolling view.
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/snd.html

"Snd is a sound editor modelled loosely after Emacs"

As an Emacs user, I am very much intrigued and will have to try this out. Thanks!
One day we will all wake up as slaves to a great machine smarter than any human, we will live, eat, laugh, cry, and die by the machine. And it will know best.

Don't question its authority over you. It's judgement is flawless, divine and infallible. it never makes a mistake.
Outsourcing is still significantly cheaper and less resource intense, particularly when it comes to more automated processes such as HR. However I see your point.

Your second point however makes little sense. The article posits whether this is possible, not setting this up as a goal or recommendation for startups to pursue. As more things become automated or rolled into services, companies have less need for large workforces, which is a trend that has been seen over the past several decades in a number of industries. This is part of the reason for the boom in startups recently. Much of the groundwork such as infrastructure and frameworks have been covered by existing services that previously needed to be created from scratch by previous generations of startups.
Pretty sure 'Academic Peer Review' is just asking other academics what they think of the university. Which essentially makes this a marketing/branding game by the sounds of things.

I have no idea why it is weighted so heavily. Presumably most students care about where employers hire from, and most researchers care about citations/research impact.

Shrug.
There's the utterly retarded getter/setter convention, which while it's the most trivial thing must have wasted billions of programmer-hours by now. More generally I think the existence of a bunch of autogenerated java code (WSDL etc.) has lead many java programmers to write APIs that look like they were autogenerated, for consistency, rather than writing APIs that are actually nice to use.
Can't take it serious when Stanford is only #15
Answered a similar question the other day. Webmaster tools doesn't let you target .io domains globally, as it's intended for the Indian Ocean countries. Therefore it won't rank as well as a .com in the Google serps, which is a big disadvantage.
WebStorm 5.0 released
Let's talk a bit more about #2 then.

As I mentioned elsewhere, most of pg's observations still hold in 2012. But, he clearly missed the implication, as you mentioned in point 1. I believe Java is still going strong precisely because of the attributes he regards as weaknesses (that it appeals to suits and programmers in suits; that large businesses like to use it; that its syntax doesn't try to be revolutionary)

Based on this, I will boldly make the following prediction: in 10 years' time, the most popular languages will still be some variant of Java and C#.
My issue is not with your way of input, but with the question itself. My sleep patterns shift forward every single day.

I no more have a time I go to bed every night than I have a US zip code or a ten-digit cell phone number.
Show HN: Hacker News - Front Page Reader Android App
Why another android HN app?

I simply wasn't happy with the current solutions, I wanted something simple that I can read the news from the front page.

The goal on this app is to improve the readability and ease the browsing of the links. Also readability.com web services are used like alternative for the external links.

Here some screenshots:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2111778/HN-Front-Page-Reader1.jpg
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2111778/HN-Front-Page-Reader2.jpg

You can download this app for free here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vladocar.hn

Technical stuff:

HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PhoneGap is used for building this app.
PT Serif (Google Fonts) font is used.
JSONP from http://api.ihackernews.com/

What do you think? Suggestions?
I'd gladly pay £100 or more.. If I actually believed the product would work on me. However, there is so much crap and scams on the internet that it is hard to believe a web site programme would be effective. All the thousands of "get abs in six weeks!" ads has made me cynical. Maybe if someone I trusted had taken the programme and could recommend it to me it would put be over the trust threshold.
"How many lives could be saved by directing anti-terrorist organization's funding towards preventing car accidents or other preventable causes of death?"

Yeah, but it's harder for the government to spy and control you using infant mortality or traffic safety as an excuse. And using tax dollars for improving infant mortality is socialism, while using tax dollars to grab your balls is patriotism.
Ah, new rankings are up.
Vakantie: waar skiën tijdens herfstvakantie - Richting Vakantie |
I would already be happy if they allowed me to cut-and-paste in Finder and allowed to turn off my MacBooks internal display when an external display is attached.
After reading this I'm completely convinced that Go will be one of the world's most used languages within a decade.
Interesting. Thanks! That will be my response from now on...
Similar devices were made for the PalmPilot (never tried one, but remember they were being hyped back in the day):

http://www.hutchison-whampoa.com/en/media/press_each.php?id=...
I especially like the fact that the reddit hive mind has completely ignored this story, but any time some pizza guy gives President Obama a hug, or Mitt Romney stumbles on his words, it makes the front page.
Keyword Research With Market Samurai
"in 10 years' time, the most popular languages will still be some variant of Java and C#"

thats because in 10 years, 99.9% of folks out there will be still be dumb
While the solutions (it's more suitable term than startegies) described in the post might be useful to boost efficiency, the main clue is the last sentence. The real issue isn't the scale of hires but using such vanity metric for PR purposes.
I feel like I miscommunicated and we're talking past each other, so let me try to fix that.

I guess I was reflexively reacting to a certain culture that tolerates mediocrity. Yes, tools are important. Code review, source control (Git, not that Perforce monstrosity), and continuous integration are necessary. For every level of programmer, such tools are necessary, but they shouldn't be used as an excuse to keep trying to nail 100 mediocre programmers together and make them build something. It still won't work.

Modern tools should be used because even great programmers have lapses into mediocrity or even stupidity. Version control has saved my ass on multiple occasions. I would, frankly, just assume that every decent programmer is going to insist on using a version control system.

Practices: I agree with you that code review is beneficial-- necessary, even. It's not enough, sadly.

Tools: Usually, tooling wars end up involving the command-line-vs-GUI debate, so I'll address that and ignore the others for now. IDEs are a double-edged sword. Use them when they make you more productive, but if I can tell that your code was written using an IDE, that's bad on you. I like Google's read-only IDE. IDEs are indispensable for certain types of forensic work but IDE-dependence is just awful.

Management: ok, I agree with you here. Managers who insist on quality and are willing to pay for it are a godsend (and also rare).
SEO Competition Research With Market Samurai
Neat idea, and pretty visualization. I think they could have done a lot more with it, though. For instance, sometimes dragging the slider to a point produces no result (other than colore dots on the map - no sharing lines, though).
I can't comment on the methodology used to rank the universities, but I think it's interesting that a specialised (as opposed to "fully comprehensive") university has come out on top. MIT would probably not be a great choice of university for someone looking to take an arts degree :-)
Owning a Casio F91W digital watch may put you in the Guatanamo prison
Trolling Linux to get answers
Pythonista: create interactive experiments with the iPad (and Python!)
Understood. Fair point.

We've taken what are the clinical standard measures - and some indeed feature counterintuitive questions. And you're right, one of the main issues with 'insomnia' is an unreliable sleep pattern.

We don't want to know how you slept last night, since this may be unrepresentative; but as you say an 'average' may also not capture it/be a natural way to report it. 3 x sample points ('last 3 nights') may be longwinded. Will consider...any ideas on a better question?
Maybe hackers tend not to like Java, but that doesn't mean that there aren't hackers that like Java.
StarCraft Was Once a Busted Pile of Crap
It has a visualisation of who is listening to it on the page
suggestion: on main landing, change green button for an inputbox for email request + a green button.
This could really do with a more descriptive title (the HN submission, not the blog post).
Kudos for the effort, but it won't fly.

Writing everything in JS isn't gonna make it better all of a sudden, even if it's sanitized JS. HTML and CSS are fine for the jobs they do which is data description and layout.

The problem is JS itself. Specifically, the lack of opinionated language design infers on code. Then we end up having to reinvent the wheel all over again, and again. And we all know how productive that can be.

We have two options here. Writing in yet another language and compiling to JS or writing a JS framework that works around its flaws. I vote for the latter.
You are both right about goals, but missed the important part.
Uhh, I was just going to say "Ruby 1.9 by default" but ok.
> To all the people bashing the EU e-Privacy directive [1] (the "cookie law"): have you bothered read it all?

I haven't read it, but I guess the BBC guys had http://i.imgur.com/b0CYo.png
Actually yes, rizzoma goes to different market.

BTW I like how Ivory works. Me and other guys from rizzoma team played a couple hours with Ivory. My congratulations for developer!
Thanks. Can I ask why?
Essentially a good idea, but really badly executed. Looks like a flash website from 2005
>a) the producers aren't necessarily driven by a profit motive

Sure, but I wasn't thinking just material profit; any kind of reputation or warm fuzzies or whatever they get from distributing would be diminished if there was a lot of it already out there.

>b) it's not like they spend a lot on sets and crew and equipment, so 'break-even' isn't even an issue. They'd be taking that trip to Thailand anyway.

Interesting thought. I have to admit I have basically no idea what motivates child porn producers/distributors, I just assume they must be gaining something from it. Otherwise, even assuming you did take the pictures/videos, why distribute them?

>c) Porn customers value novelty, so there's pretty much always demand for new material, whether or not there's a viable business model.

Not the impression I've got; I remember an interview with a "normal" porn producer where he said that 1) there is nothing new or original in (mainstream) porn; every single shot you can take has been done thousands of time before and 2) the widespread availability of free porn on the internet was driving a lot of porn producers out of business or at least into more specialized niches.
I think the sharing options were more limited w/ the previous app. (Mail, msg, twitter, ?)
Am I the only one who believes that SVG is going to eat up the world in next couple of years? Quite a few applications/start-ups focusing on it lately!