skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really can't think of a single good addon UI. Every single one I've used (TouchWiz, Blur, Sense) has been slower, uglier, and less functional than vanilla. The only reason why my old ass GSM Hero is still usable is because it's running a vanilla ROM.
Personally, as a Canadian in the consumer-and-internet-software sector ("tech sector" to HN), the constant comparisons to the equivalent U.S. sector appear far more annoying than the state of our sector. Nobody else does it with as much frequency as we seem to. Much of the discussion simply consists of pointing out and explaining in depth differences between the two sectors. It feels worse than the constant internet handwringing in the U.S. about their health care. I am getting attention fatigue. It is what it is. If you're unhappy with the current state and wish to change it, stop talking and start doing. Another post explaining that Canada doesn't have the VC scene or salaries or that Canadians are "nice" and happy with second best won't change these things.
Stop moving to the US because you can make more money there. There, it's fixed.
The boot times is one of the main reasons rails feels like a day job for me. It is there for every rake task, every time I need to generate a migration, every time I need to use the console. All this waiting makes me lose my flow and forget what I was doing.
Yes, so? Early printing press probably was less developed than hand copied books in terms of design, but it evolved, which is what they're proposing we do on the web. I don't get your point.
I don't use Coffeescript
Ask HN: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea in Your Personal life?
Do you have unique, original, and outstanding Orthogonal ideas that drive and motivate your work?
I'd substitute the gradients on your site for solid colors, they're a little too intense. Also the signup password field being in plaintext isn't quite right.

I like what Edit Room tries to do but I think you need to look into finding a UX or UI person that understands web design/development because it is a little too geeky/subtle in implementation for the user that this is targeted for. However, I like how it focuses you in on the content and content-type before you get into designing around it.
I agree, and I'm pretty sure that you can still use parentheses in coffeescript for this very reason.
By that reasoning, it is "better software engineering" to give variables, methods, etc. the shortest names possible.
As someone who only used C for systems work for 15 years, and for the last two years switched exclusively to Go (except in the kernel) I disagree. Go offers everything I want as a C programmer.
And the process for you to stop being such a trolling asshole ... well there is none. You're stuck being an asshole.

You may not think this is an important point, but that doesn't mean that people who actually understand software development do.

See, even those who use it can't actually make a real argument against this other than it was easy for them. Whatever that means ... https://tech.dropbox.com/?p=361
As someone who only used C for systems work for 15 years, and for the last two years switched exclusively to Go (exept in the kernel) I disagree. Go offers everything I want as a C programmer.
You can get a MasterCard debit card while you're a student here as well, which most people get to keep after college.

If you didn't apply or it gets revoked because you were flagged somehow, which happened to me when moving abroad for a year, you end up in the situation I described.

And no, we are still pretty much exclusively ATM based here.
yeah, sorry about that... we'll let the folks at AngelList know. agreed it's kind of non-obvious.
There's definitely improvements to the language in CoffeeScript. It makes sense; it was able to take 10 years of js experience and write a new language. But that doesn't mean CoffeeScript itself is without problems, or that it even improves development time.

There's certainly many different ways to do things in CoffeeScript, like even calling functions (parenthesis is optional). Talk about having to think about syntax! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12077114/coffeescript-syn...

There are other ambiguities too due to the arrow pattern for defining functions. You have to be careful where you place stuff.

CoffeeScript is definitely an improvement in some ways, but please don't market it as superior to javascript (I certainly prefer brackets). It's just different. All of this really doesn't make much difference in how long it takes you to ship products.
> CoffeeScript encourages creating small flexible code blocks, which together make a powerful structure. This all leads to fewer opportunities for bugs to appear.

Personally I find single-line statements that do too much to be difficult to read.

I also find nested functions really difficult to read in CS. From a coffee mug I own:

coffee.height drink coffee, e.angle

That's only 2 functions, it gets much more confusing when it's 3 or 4 which multiple parameters. Before you say "don't nest functions that way", I agree completely, however a large part of the appeal of CS is reducing LOC and these one-liners, so in real world code I've come across this often.
If they like Python, maybe they should have tried LiveScript (http://gkz.github.com/LiveScript/) - a descendent of CoffeeScript.

Unlike CoffeeScript, but like Python, it has proper list comprehensions `["#x#y" for x in [\a \b] for y in [1 2]]` which I think is very important to any Python fan, dict comprehensions, and (more minor) you can use `is not`, like in Python, instead of `isnt`. (Along with many other features.)
Sounds like the author got banned for excessive complaining on Quora and is exceptionally butthurt.

I'm a hard core Quora addict and have never encountered most of the things in this post. He's way off about the "elite". Yes there are people who get tons of upvotes and have huge followings but in every case I've seen it's because they are well known off of Quora or they give consistently amazing answers, often both.

It's not like Digg was where some random anonymous person has all this power. Quora power users don't even really have any power beyond knowing lots of people will read their answers, even then those answers still must be good to get upvotes.
Where I work, we moved the project I work on to CoffeeScript about a year ago, and I've been using it ever since.

Putting syntactic sugar aside, while some things are very welcome (list comprehensions, ===, ?), there are two main reasons why I would be wary of using CoffeeScript again:

1. Complete lack of documentation for syntax. Because there are basically no more braces and parentheses, CoffeeScript just tries to guess what you're doing, as far as I can tell, based on a bunch of internal heuristics. Unfortunately, there's no way for me to learn how to write parseable code without constantly pasting into the coffeescript.org site, and seeing if CoffeeScript understands it or not. This is the first language I've ever used where the syntax rules are essentially unknowable, and a lot of time gets wasted trying to discover them through trial and error.

2. Unexpected side effects. For example, functions return the last evaluated value by default. If you're using $.each(), and your function's last line is something that returns false (like a separate function you call), then your $.each() loop will terminate unexpectedly early, since jQuery does that when it receives a false. So CoffeeScript isn't just a wrapper around JavaScript, but it really changes its behavior. Another example: CoffeeScript gets rid of function hoisting. A significant JavaScript feature, completely gone.

I personally am slower to code in CoffeeScript, because I know JavaScript 100% inside and out, but with CoffeeScript that isn't really possible, because so much of its implementation is undocumented. I mean, many times you're forced to end a line with a backslash in order to continue it, and even the existence of that necessary feature isn't mentioned once in the docs.

But a lot of people seem to love the syntax, and that seems to outweigh the negatives for them. I personally don't find JavaScript that ugly, but coding in a language I can't ever fully understand gives me a huge headache.
I'm going to have to play with this just to see if I would like writing iOS apps in java or not. I have really gotten use to Objective-C and I really do like it, seriously. The issues with a translator is that anytime you want to fix a performance issue or tweak the translated code, you now start coding yourself into a painful place. It gets harder and harder to maintain. But, I cannot poo-poo it until I have tried. One of the reasons I jumped into iOS was to get out of java land for a while since it has been my primary source of income for 13 years. I hope to hear some other opinions on the subject.
You should check out Zeus (https://github.com/burke/zeus). "Boot any rails app in under a second". It'll use more memory, unless you want to GC-patch your ruby (instructions in the repo).
"How does the police department owning a armored personnel carrier help a patrol officer at a traffic stop?"

And how does the USN carrying nuclear weapons help you check passes at the gate?

That aside, yes, my suggestion was that the police are more likely to need the firepower than you were, and were more likely to have to get by on their own for longer before support turned up.
It's possible in any language to write incomprehensible code. I wish that for single lines like the OP's example, the parentheses were required, but I can see how in CS making them optional for multi-lines is kind of necessary. Like when the last argument is passing in a multiline ->
>The Spiral of Silence

I like the theory described by the spiral of silence and it somehow seems relevant to the continuing discussion about HNs apparent demise (in the eyes of some). it seems like quora successfully implemented a system, that leaves a community largely true to it's original state, by giving dominant admins/moderators the tools to block unwanted content and to promote their own views. left aside whether this fosters better or worse answers, it apparently doesn't help growing a noticeable community and I'm glad that HN didn't go that same way.
The consensus seems to be gravitating towards

(@_update_status_position e, files)

among CoffeeScript coders whenever there's a need for disambiguation. Also, it really depends. I bet that print statements don't look weird to you even though in most languages they don't use parens.
I took out the line about the number of characters.

Number of SLOC corresponding to defect count is not something you dispute is it?
An amusing illustration of the last heading in the post.
we usually prefer you have:
1) a functional prototype
1.1) or you've built products w/ previous traction
2) a team which includes one engineer at a minimum
2.1) ideally + designer + cust acquisition), and
3) some # of users (not your mom or your friends)
3.1) ideally some revenue too
4) have a business model / revenue model
4.1) or, shitloads of traction if not
5) some moxie.
Maybe I just live in a good school district. One day my son came home from either 1st grade and asked what a square root was. I can't remember if he knew multiplication already, but after I explained it didn't seem like it got very much of it. The next day he asked me what a cube root was. At this point, I had to find out what was driving these questions. It turns out there were a bunch of them on the playground trying to impress each other with their math knowledge. He begged me to teach him more math. Btw, these kids doing this on the playground, none of them would be considered nerds. They were all pretty physically able and most of the games they played were the typical variety.

I believe it's all about expectations and tone. If you fear math you can pass that anxiety on to your kids. I wasn't in my kid's 1st grade class, but I'm guessing they made it fun and not very intimidating. At home, even before he was school age, we would do math problems, so that he was comfortable with it.
Show HN: the US Government's entire open-source activity on one page
I think it's more the backlight is power hungry, not the display itself. Direct projected light into the eyes seems to have the risk of probably causing vision problems.
The scope is much smaller, but the problems are still the same, namely introducing new bugs to working production code and surrendering ground to competitors.
Another project that focuses on Java to Objective-C is http://xmlvm.org.

XMLVM also offers an Android compatibility layer, including some UI support.
The thing that will really bite you is when you call a function:

some_function arg_a

And then later on, decide it doesn't need an argument after all, and simply delete it:

some_function

And then discover it doesn't work, because you have to remember to add the parentheses back in:

some_function()

It's the little inconsistencies like that which keep driving you nuts... :)
Google releases a Java to Objective-C Translator
Here's how I convert those two formats to English:

Update the status position with e and files.
Update the status position, e. Files.

It parses better with single argument functions (do_something arg), but as soon as you throw that comma in there, things get confusing.
>1. Your taxes must go up. This isn't a political thing so much as bottom line math thing. The more they take in revenue from you, the less they have to borrow or print and the longer this whole system keeps going. They can tax the rich at 100% and still not have nearly enough money to service their current debt, let alone the constantly increasing spend.

---

What's a Laffer curve?
I started reading with that feeling of dread that this was going to be another indictment of tech conference misogyny that would make me feel sad for the world, my daughters, and our profession. How delightful to hear this inspirational response to a tech conference experience!
I'm just saying... Good developers concentrate on building things. Bad developers concentrate on how much they like their tools.

You see it in everything in life though. The best way to become a fantastic cyclist say, isn't to buy the best bike out there. It's to buy a crappy cheap bike, and learn how to get the most out of it.
Remember to mark the emails as spam.
Great job Justin, you have to work on the Marketing Dashboard next ;)
CS fan here. As a rule of thumb I often include outermost parens only in my CS code for this reason. All situation dependent and readability comes first of course.
The situation where it matters is with a trailing function argument, i.e.

$ ->
# do something on document ready
$.ajax('path', options, (data) ->
# do something with the results

Instead of

$(->
# do something on document ready
$.ajax('path', options, (data) ->
# do something with the data
)
)

Those trailing parens are ugly, and they're very common if you do event-oriented javascript via closures.
Anonymous releases credit cards for 13 FBI agents
My biggest hope is that the projects take off. I've wanted POV liferecording cameras (just for the hell of it) for a while, but I don't want to be the one assaulted in a French fast-food joint because of them.
I have an Erdös number of the first kind of 2, and an Erdös number of the second kind of at most 3. I'm working on my Bacon number. So far I've appeared on television with: Carol Vorderman, Gareth Jones, Angela Rippon, Fred Dineage, and several others that I need to track down, but are even less well known.

My challenge is working out who I have been with that might have been in a film.
just how much more cognitive effort is used in parsing and debugging the syntax of CS

Have you tried CS? It's far more readable, by virtue of not having "function() {}" splattered all over the page. I don't care/worry about keystroke reductions, I care about readable code. The lack of curly brackets and addition of significant whitespace absolutely does make for more readable code.
Blaming the tools is completely reasonable if your problems can be solved by better or more appropriate tools. If I need to drill a hole precisely and accurately and the team or management has standardized on hand drills, it's entirely appropriate to bemoan the use of hand drills versus a proper drill press with an appropriate jig.
At least 20% of that are sales taxes. The rest covers import duties, local logistics and distribution, local marketing and other local costs and taxes.
The scope is so small that it's on par with any other feature.
Django code that grows: Use real polymorphism
#1 I agree, making stuff optional was a bad design decision. It encourages people to write code in different ways and makes for unreadable messes if coworkers aren't religious about how they format things or they do things differently than you do.

#2 has definitely bitten me, but I see that less of a failure of CS and more of a failure of the design of $.each(). The case is pretty well documented in CS though... the last code line is 'return'ed... if your code unexpectedly returns false, then really you are just bitten by the design of $.each().
never say never.

Technology evolves and in time hardware improves to a point where the performance difference between native code and something that runs through an intermediate layer is not noticeable in a user interface (although there will always be a difference, it just wont be be relevant any more).
I had been a big Balsamiq fan, especially because of the low fidelity, but have since moved to Mock Flow which seems to work better for teams and multi-page designs.
Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown arrested in Dallas
iPhone 5 won't support simultaneous voice and data on Verizon or Sprint
yeah already saw it, but why are these hacks needed in first place?
I am pretty sure there's a good way to fix rails to load faster in a reasonable amount of time (again, I am talking about big projects).
Pardon? The coffeescript site has pretty comprehensive info that describes the syntax. If you don't find a specific example on the site, "it's just Javascript" has rung true for me in almost every case.

Yes, there is a learning curve and it does things slightly differently. The implicit return value is just something you read once and then integrate. True, function hoisting is lost in cs, but that has never been a problem for me.
I'm not really sure why your comment was down voted, it seems like a reasonable question to me. Just because something is open source doesn't automatically make it better (or worse) than a proprietary (in the sense of closed source) solution [1].

But if it isn't adopted by all of the __other__ browsers, then you're back to the same situation of having a fragmented browser experience, reminiscent of the "best viewed in Browser X" issues, some of which continue to plague developers today.

I think it's legitimate, at least for some concerns, to compare NaCL to ActiveX, and be mindful of these concerns so that NaCL does not repeat some of the mistakes of ActiveX.

[1] An older HN thread brought up some of these concerns: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876282 with naclbox.com.
I had a go at going X-less when KVM started working properly. I came to the conclusion that no matter how many neat workarounds exist for graphics on FB, it's still awkward; not worth the resource savings.
It's harsh to suggest that marketing is just BS. It is what it is.
Iphone5 çılgınlığı ve mürit olma üzerine
I do too, through actually appearing on film, even.

Ok, videotape. I was in a videotaped school play with someone who according to Oracle of Bacon has a Bacon number of 3. (Google doesn't work since he's pretty obscure, Oracle of Bacon uses all of IMDB I guess.)

Now I just need to find out if I can get an Erdos number out of any of my advisors.
I really can't emphasize enough how awesome Hacker School is. I was in the last batch.

If spending three months working on open source projects, developing & stretching your coding skills, meeting awesome people, & living in NYC sound awesome, then you should apply.
This article is false. (Regardless of whether Quora will or will not grow.)

Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't slow the spread of Facebook. In fact, it was likely a main driver of growth in the world's most popular website. It's not surprising Quora has been modeled after Facebook since Quora is made up of early Facebook alumni.

Many of the rest of the arguments apply to discussion websites in general. If you consider Wikipedia, for instance, scaling doesn't seem to be a problem. Taking Wikipedia is a good idea, since, despite what's been said, Quora is or should be a direct competitor to Wikipedia.

At a descriptive level, Quora isn't represented accurately.

Judging from the slant of the article, it seems the author is reacting to a bad experience on the site.
> "there's still 2 years in which a competitor can come out and take the market before they do"

Like someone else has brought up already, the existing applications we've seen of Glass are all fairly obvious from years of sci-fi.

The real magic sauce is execution.

More than that, the number of people who can pull off Glass in this world, other than Google, is close to zero. Nobody has the combination of hardware expertise, UX expertise (questionable in this respect, perhaps), and sheer big-data chops.

> "Someone like Apple could probably do it if they really wanted to take on Google in this market."

I don't think so. In fact I think Google is already outrunning Apple in many ways. Look at Google Now that ships with the latest Android, predictive tasking where your phone realizes what you want without you having to go get it.

While Apple is running around with the voice-recognition toy known as Siri. Heck, I'm a loyal iOS user and I never use Siri. It's a gimmick to demo to your friends, it's not smart or wide enough for any real practical use.

See also the looming, gigantic failure of iOS6 maps - a horrifically broken data set and search tech wrapped in excellent UX.

Or, if you're an iOS dev, take a look at iCloud, whose API is still horrifically broken a year after launch and notoriously difficult to work with.

I think Apple has more than amply proven that, when it comes to big data, machine learning, and AI, they have nothing on Google.

Fun anecdote: I was standing in Manhattan today and typed in "24 Orchard" (expecting to call up the address at 24 Orchard St) on iOS6 Maps. It took me to another state. This is asinine behavior I've never experienced with Google on any platform.

IMO the only company that stands a real chance at tackling Glass is Facebook. They're the only ones with the proven big data expertise, but they are also dramatically lacking in building devices and associated software.
Ascii Camera in Html5
An Ascii Camera made entirely with Html5. Captures the user webcam and presents the stream as Ascii art. This is an excercise on getUserMedia API and canvas.
"We’ve heard many arguments for and against debuggability, and in the end, we convinced ourselves that it’s easy only after jumping in and trying it."

So, in other words, you have only your own opinion and at best one (1) anecdotal experience. Congratulations! You've failed to prove your point from a logical perspective, let alone anything more!
I agree. I'd add that on the iOS platform, there are significantly better transit apps than the maps app for the bigger European cities like London etc.
Escaping everything by default to avoid XSS attacks. that's a nice feature to have.
There have been plenty of successes, although they have mostly been swallowed by multinationals. Many, however, still maintain a physical presence in Canada:

Cognos (IBM), Changepoint (Compuware), Workbrain (Infor), Flickr (Yahoo!), Dundas (Microsoft), Opalis (Microsoft), Kobo (Rakuten), Alias (Autodesk)... etc, etc.

And then there's also the likes of 500px, Cirba, etc.
I didn't come away with that impression - what sections of the article made you lean that way?
Google closes Motorola Spain and 30 other subsidiaries in order to fight iPhone
Clojure Connect Four - Part 1: Checking For A Winner