skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No, it's "If a language that provides for many ways to write terrible code (incl many ways to write the same code), people will write hard to read code."

A prime historical example being Perl. A second one being PHP.
Fingers crossed for this to provide a foothold for a GOOG San Diego campus :)
IPhone 5 pre-orders begin leaving China
When you go to the supermarket, you may see products calling themselves "quality" or "luxury" or similar. Words like "powerful" and "scalable" are like that.
Of course, the next step is that the massive proliferation of panel displays all over everything will make them tacky and gauche. Look for first class seats and high end luxury cars and nice hotel rooms to begin deleting screens, since their absence will now be luxurious...
Might want to simply contribute to this, unless I'm misunderstanding :)
https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway
In this role, it's essentially a directory service. The people you know are in its directory, and are tied to an integrated communications system.

Mind, I don't use FB, or trust it, for this.
You don’t need a growth hacker
Respectfully, I believe your comment is not very open minded. I believe the obvious answer is "Of course there's a use case!", just like there's obviously a use case for RDBMS, NoSQL (Mongo, Cassandra, BigTable, Redis, etc) serves a purpose.

I'll give you a couple examples. Google stores a huge amount of data in BigTable [1] which is fundamental for the operation of Gmail at scale. Another, Facebook initially used Cassandra [2] for it's Inbox search, then migrated to HBase when their needs changed for their new messaging feature.

Do we know if the the underlying data is stored in RDBMS? I'm guessing not at Google, but yes for Facebook/Inbox search. But my point is I'm not ruling it out, I'm open to different options.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra#History
wow readability is about API design like requests vs urllib2: https://gist.github.com/973705

except when APIs get 100x bigger, API design becomes 100x more important. and using a language ecosystem that encourages good API design, over a language that is cobbled together and has no particular opinions about what good API design looks like[1] (or, even, bad opinions[2]), so that less experienced developers end up with decent output, is that much more important than concerns like parens, commas and braces. curly braces never made a project fail. shitty API design does.

[1] javascript!
[2] java!

sheesh. there are bad things about coffeescript, but this stuff hardly matters.
As noted by another post above, take one of these products, bump the specs to something tolerable (say, 16GB instead of 4GB etc.), do some real quality assurance tests/screening, ship it halfway around the world, put a reputable name on it (so customers can trust they're getting something worth getting), add a sensible markup, set up a tech support hotline, and that $45 slate is now $200 - right about where decent tablets are now.

"brand name and nothing more" isn't nothing. It's why people pay Apple $649 for an iPhone 5 consisting of $167.50 in parts - there's more to a product than just parts, there's assuring you'll end up with more than just $167.50 in parts.
Taking all these comments into account, if startups have to prototype quickly while trying to find market fit, does it makes sense to start off using something like mongodb but with the plan ti migrate to another database when you business starts growing? The database space is so confusing right now.
> "Absolutely right however that process takes forever."

I mean this in the least aggressive and judgmental tone I can muster...

... How is this our problem, and how does the fact that feet-on-ground networking takes a lot of effort justify spamming and cold-calling?
I don't have a strong opinion on the article itself (it seems well-reasoned to me, but I don't use CoffeeScript personally so who knows)... but the comments attached to it are hilarious.

I think CoffeeScript has great readability, because I’ve taken the time to learn how it works.

If you have to take the time to learn how to read something, it's not easily readable.

CoffeeScript is only hard to read if you try to read it with a JavaScript mindset.

Yes, why would anyone approach a tool pitched explicitly at JavaScript developers, whose "golden rule" is "it's just JavaScript" (see the top of http://coffeescript.org/), with a "JavaScript mindset"? Truly, it is a mystery.
If I remember correctly, one of the AngelHack winners did shared browsing paired with video chat. http://sharebrowse.com/

Is video something you want to integrate or would you rather keep it to only browsing sessions?
Sorry, but the demo video is almost unwatchable. Very slow paced, and when screenshots are show, they are quickly faded back out to a blue screen with some text. The narration is slow paced and the background music is not necessary.
Both statements do completely different different things, although they look very similar.

This is true for both CoffeeScript examples he gave and their resulting JavaScript.
I've been grinfucked so many times in my life... and I've done it myself just as many. Being confrontational and instructive is hard. Being polite and unopinionated is easy. =(
I haven't used CS as much as yourself, but I don't find anything pretty in "element = =>".
Ulak - lightweight jquery notification bar
What We Read This Weekend
Someone should start a "start-up adoption" program. Facilitate others adopting projects when the owners want to move on, but the viability is still contentious
We may do that in the future, but for now we're concentrated exclusively on screensharing.
Ask HN: Does your company have a software apprenticeship program?
I am giving a talk on introducing an apprenticeship program in your company at Ruby Hoedown this weekend focusing mainly on my experiences. I would love to know if anyone else has had an experience with a successful program or have implemented one in their company. Also, what were the biggest problems you have seen associated with these programs?
If there is a market for this, great. But even though I do user support on a daily basis, I don't see myself using this anytime soon. I rather create screen casts or take screen shots. It's exactly the same thing, but I only have to do it once and then it can be viewed by everyone. I also like to have instructions written down, either in a support forum or in an e-mail. The user can go back and read the instructions again, if he struggles with the same problem the next time. Also, I can write most support e-mails in less then five minutes. Phone calls take way longer most of the times.
> And here too, I’m happy to report that we have just crossed 100,000,000 monthly active users on Google+ (plus.google.com and mobile app)

Based on what Vic said I don't think you would be counted. They don't explicitly say what does and does not count but it
sounds like you would only count when visit G+ and scroll through photos. I personally would count sharing from Reader but but instant upload from the mobile app is passive activity and should not be counted.
“Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Scheme Overly Secret and Unfair, Says Professor
>Everything is licensed. Even bread. //

I'm largely with you WRT philosophy of 'ownership'.

However in the current legal framework this is wrong and I strongly disprove of the thrust by companies to force more sold products to be treated as licensed - thus for example preventing resale, [non-copyright infringing] sharing and the like.

I consume bread I don't give it back in a materially unaltered way.
Benchmarking Parallels, Fusion, and VirtualBox vs Boot Camp - The Mac Observer
Agreed! This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Thanks for the feedback, admittedly we're hardly video experts :). We'll get that sorted out in the next few weeks or so.
> I haven't programmed in Coffeescript, but does it bother anyone else that new variables are introduced without "var"?

Yes. I've come to see it as a mistake in Python and Ruby both, and I'm definitely not pleased by its usage in CS. Even less so as it uses the same rules as Ruby's lambdas without the stops of its methods and global scopes.
I'm not sure why you'd view it this way, at least while still engaging in ANY online activity. The reality of the modern web is that everyone is tracking everything you do with their assets all the time. Even people you might not expect are keeping server logs that, with sufficient massaging, could reveal a lot of data. And Google hardly needs you to TELL them this data. They can determine your existence and search habits and friends simply by examining secondary sources.

It's inevitable. Get over it. Or rather, get empowered by it.

Google's play here is that they have this data for when you click through–and it's been helping them for years–but now they're exposing it to you. So you get the benefits of big data analysis in a context you can understand. Instead of being some sort of back-alley data collection initiative, +1 makes the whole process very much an up-front-and-transparent thing, complete with data export. \

I'm not sure how much more consumer-friendly and empowering a feature can be. Society wants the benefits of big data analysis and so companies have to find ways to make it valuable, transparent, and straightforward. How is this relationship any different from your relationship with Mint.com or Simple?
This is anecdotal, but I can see this highway dividing towns pretty starkly in Menlo Park. The town is divided East/West by US-101. The difference between West Menlo Park and East Menlo Park is stark, West is filled with incredibly wealthy, white people whereas the East is filled with much poorer, mostly latino and black people.
Interesting article. But the link does not (currently) work without the apostrophe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
Ask HN: Is Facebook selling phone number or can it be scraped?
I have a dummy Facebook account, with the name Brooklyn. I added my cell phone number to test some projects.<p>Due to Facebook's security changes, one of the defaults was that the number is public and searchable, which I did not change.<p>Recently I am getting text messages sent to 'Brooklyn'- which would only be from the fake Facebook account I set up.<p>Is Facebook selling my information, or can someone scrape my cell phone information?
Centering a box horizontally is simple. The original comment was referring to centering an element _vertically_, which is a much greater PITA.
The rating (energystar.gov) changes as the federal specification changes, and I cannot quickly find the history of that spec. They do state that its recalculated when a 50% market share of EnergyStar rated products exists.

So it is likely to change over time.
Show HN: Monitoring sleep patterns with myZeo
A js dashboard I made to keep track of my sleep patterns using highcharts and the myZeo json api.
I like how the format forces the papers to be about "big concepts." So many cs papers are about 1% improvements in performance due to esoteric minutiae -- which can't be concisely explained. It biases research towards big picture, heavily-compressible ideas.
. . ."databases are only trivially interchangeable for trivial cases." That has not been my experience: changing out one RDBMS for another is not trivial, but it's easier and more controllable and predictable than changing out application code.

Keeping the punctuation but replacing the words with symbols:

"X." Not X: X, but tangential comparison.

Sounds like you actually agree with me, but don't see that as a reason not to make much hay about disagreeing with me. :)
We got some feedback on our last virtualization benchmark. Lots of people wanted to know how Parallels 7 compared to 8 and Fusion 4 to 5. They were also curious about how well the free VirtualBox performs and how they all stack up to Boot Camp.

Short answer: Boot camp is the champ (obviously) and Parallels 8 is second. Fusion is third, but not by much, and VirtualBox is a distant fourth ("you get what you pay for").
That's a great point, we're thinking about allowing you to record sessions down the line and re-use them. For many companies screensharing is an integral part of the support process already, it's just slow and requires downloads. We're solving that problem for them.

There are definitely many companies that don't need this. E-commerce companies for example tend to get support requests that don't require screensharing e.g. "Can I get free shipping?" That reality is totally fine with us, because it allows us to concentrate our efforts on a small group of companies that really need this.

Thanks for the feedback!
I concur with the author. When I write CoffeeScript I often use a more explicit or more c-like style for things I find ridiculously ambiguous or hard to parse when reading quickly.

Particularly, if one line has lots of commas, I put parens all over the place because no matter what I do, having to manually parse the comma arrangements and figure out what's nested and what's a function does not go quickly. I also find myself writing explicit returns somewhat frequently just so it's much more clear what's being returned.

The overarching issue is that the syntax blurs rather than pops -- there are too many instances where things that are significantly different in function look nearly the same.
Looking for a Freelance Programmer
Looking for a freelance computer programmer to do the programming for the websites we design.

Skills needed:

HTML / XHTML
CSS
JavaScript
WordPress and similar templates/CMS sites
php and asp a plus

Able to work in Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, ImageReady, Illustrator

Email mfarmer@boomkin.com with resume and hourly rate if interested.
The secret to understanding HN is that it's not actually a site for hackers. The word "Hacker" in the title bar is written on a board that was nailed up over the word "Startup".
I think it depends on what you are used to. I find "var" to be noise.
> Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured out what G+ is, why search for it?

Same applies to Twitter, so the comparison is fair.
But surely for a language that is almost purely designed to make syntactic improvements, the designer could have taken a stronger stance on syntax. I wish he could have at least decided on semicolons. The beauty of Python is that it is actually hard to write unclear code that does what you think it does. I'd love to see a PEP-8 for CoffeeScript or some kind fo built in linter.
Show HN: Staying fit with Nike+ Dashboard
A js dashboard I made using highcharts and the Nike+ api to keep track of my workout activities.
> If you have to take the time to learn how to read something, it's not easily readable.

I don't think that's completely true. If you're used to algol or C-style, Lisps tend to be hard to read. Concatenative languages even more so. Not necessarily because they're hard to read in and of themselves, but because the "shape" of the code is "all wrong" compared what you're used to, and your usual anchors (keywords, binary operators, infix assingment, ...) are nowhere to be found.

I mean Arabic or Korean are not necessarily harder to read than English, but you've got to know them and how they work before you even recognize patterns in the squiggly lines and little squares.
The thing that I find amusing is that as a kid I would typically pull out my gameboy whenever possible to pass the time. Now as an adult I seem to have gotten over that and I rarely reach for my phone unless I am expecting a long wait such as at the doctor or the mechanic.
>I'd love to see a fork of CoffeeScript that forces syntax.

A compiler option that enforces syntax would be nice.
There are some pretty gaping holes in the compatibility library. Luckily the most important of these (ActionBar support) is covered by a great 3rd party library (ActionBarSherlock).

If anything, I think the existence of the compatibility library and ABS show that Google is dropping the ball a bit on the core Android framework. Why even have these be extra (and in one case 3rd party) libraries? Where possible why not just write the core SDK in a way such that it can fall back to 1.6 or 2.2 without having to worry about fiddling with compatibility libraries?
> but I see no value, and purposefully avoid it.

Allow me to give you concrete cases. I was looking for a good raspberry pi breakout board so I can use the GPIO without concern that a bad soldering job would lead to a dead board. I type this in and I see those little people and +1 notifications for some products and blog posts and not others. I also see promoted images from a friend who just installed one.

I have a fairly good idea about the authenticity and trustworthiness of these people, and so the search results have helpfully incorporated this data and helped shape my purchasing process.

Now, I have made it a point to cultivate relationships with people in this space that are also G+ users, so it isn't "free", but it pays off pretty handsomely in cases like this.

Is that not a clear enough value proposition?
as i've been talking more and more to developers, i keep hearing these same complaints about recruiters. I'm finally trying to make a difference by launching matchist.com, which will be a different kind of recruiting. we'll be catering to freelance developers by vetting projects they want to work on. we think the process is simple: tell us what projects you want to work on, what kinds of clients you'd like, and we'll send them your way.
We get around that by opening the dishwasher a few inches as soon as it's finished its cycle. That way the steam escapes, and the heat in the unit finishes drying the dishes. Most of the water you see on the contents is steam that has re-condensed onto everything.

Hope this helps. IIRC I saw an article on Popular Mechanics about this a few years ago and tried it and it works.
Yes, Energy Star rated. I literally got money from the water and power company for buying it.
Look, there are some places where document DB's solve problems easier/better than SQL, other places kind of suck. For example, plain old object mapping is easier with a document DB. Relational DB's tend to make your code look/feel/act more relational and less object oriented. Your object model tends to look just like your table structure. This can be good or bad depending on your viewpoint.

There are some approaches to solve some of the author's problems that end up making the Mongo system look and feel a lot more like a SQL system because sometimes data is actually related.

The author could have also taken a different approach to his data schema that would have fit more of a non-relational worldview.

Software development and architecture is about making choices and working with and around the limitations of your tools. It doesn't matter if PostgreSQL or MongoDB are "better". It's about solving a problem using a set of tools you are comfortable with.
One possible (but not great) excuse is that there is a perverse incentive going on if the employee has any say over potential hires. If I get 20k every time one of my friends gets hired (and "lose" 20k each time a normal candidate gets hired) I have a huge incentive to not give a fully honest opinion about how good someone was during an interview.

Big companies can use their size as a workaround (ie, only let you refer candidates to other departments), but in startup land this incentive will probably be very real.
Glad to see this article is up on the front page. I submitted it two days ago and it never got traction.

Question about article submissions - in the past when I've submitted a duplicate article it takes me to that HN posting instead. What are the edge cases where identical articles get posted separately on HN?
I wrote "I don't know if there's a use case. I have never had one come up in my own projects." I don't work for Facebook or Google, perhaps they have a use case. I guess I could assume there's a use case because the tools exist and people use them, but in my experience I have not had a need for Mongo or any NoSQL database.

I'm not dismissing the tools out of hand -- I haven't used them except to play around with tutorials. I am pretty sure a lot of people start out with Mongo or whatever without having a use case defined and without having good reasons to eliminate the tried-and-true RDBMS solutions. "Use something cool and new" is not a use case. "I've read on slashdot that SQL databases don't scale" is not a use case.
Help fellow hackers bring BubbleSorter & GridSorter to life on Kickstarter
Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say
Bottom line: Recruiters will piss of a lot of people in the process of cold-calling but the absolute reality is that they will place more candidates in 1 month of cold-calling than they would in 6 months of networking. Unfortunately, it really is a numbers game.

You can build a decent business through better methods such as networking and building a reputation for yourself (my chosen method when I was in the business) however some of my colleagues who wouldn't know a tech meet-up if it slapped them in the face were making twice the bonus I made exclusively through cold calling.
It's not necessarily all or nothing - I have worked on several projects now each using multiple database-type options: mongodb for read-intensive, loose-schema type stuff where the growth is generally predictable (e.g. products, suppliers, logs), postgres for relational-type stuff (orders) and solr for searching (I know solr isn't a database but people seem hung up on whether mongodb supports case-insensitive searching - hint: don't use any database for search).

I doubt that, unless it's extremely simple, any set of requirements are an exact match to only one of these technologies... mix and match is the future :P
WhoisUP - Is it your host up or down?
Firefly: Screen Sharing For Customer Service
Off-topic question for the author:

How do you use custom styles on Authpad?
Acme does have incremental search via the right mouse click: http://acme.cat-v.org/mouse
I saw your post. I am looking for a freelance computer programmer to do the programming for the websites we design.

Skills needed:

HTML / XHTML
CSS
JavaScript
WordPress and similar templates/CMS sites
php and asp a plus

Able to work in Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, ImageReady, Illustrator

If you are interested please email me at mfarmer@boomkin.com with your resume or work samples and hourly rate.

Best of luck to you.
GarageGames to Release T3D as Open Source
There are 3 reasons I have gone running and screaming from and RDBMS.
1. Software gets large / complex to get meaning full work done. I am all about data consistency but at some point it is time to break things up into services and not have a single database.
2. If the software is popular enough everyone is running to use NoSQL (cache is NoSQL).
3. Clearly it is not a good storage solution either because for example in an address book nested list greatly simplifies everything. (right tool for the job)

I spent many years hammering away with RDBMS and by and large it was great until it wasn't. I try to look at data storage more holistically now based on best guess of the problem. I have tried to convert an application from Postgresql to MongoDB and it failed but that wasn't MongoDB's falt it was because I didn't change the data model to fit a document storage system. I have also tried to use PostgreSQL for a realtime reporting system and failed horrifically and that was not Postgesql fault it was mine. Amazing what happens when you stop pushing a chain and start pull it!