skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Twitter is still developing and working on useful features

None of which are supported by the official mobile and desktop clients, if they're available through the API at all. Most of Twitter's extended functionality has come from third party developer involvement.

And what happens when all the developers stop using Twitter and all the Twitter Clients stop working? Twitter doesn't seem interested in keeping their own clients up to date, so where will people go?

Twitter is popular because the developers have made it convenient. When the convenience starts to wain, that 99% will start to drop.

> No one seems to mind that Google searches contain more ads today than ever before

Google's ads are not thrown into the middle of the content. On search results they are displayed above and on the side. In GMail they are displayed on a small bar above the main content region. YouTube ads appear before the main feature or as a dismissible popup along the bottom.

What Twitter is doing is more akin to Google inserting an advertisement into the middle of your emails, or pausing a video to randomly throw up a full size banner that can't be dismissed. You bet your ass people would bitch about that!
Having moved from rails to django development the thing I am missing the most is the wide range of mature testing tools in the ruby ecosystem. Django's testing tools feel very primitive comparatively and there's no clear separation of unit, functional and integration tests.
I'd agree that in general the python community feels more professional and that the quality of documentation is typically better.
Haha, You totally missed the point of this post.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but it's my understanding that NaCl whitelists native instructions, whereas ActiveX is pure native that didn't run through any security hoops. Implication: NaCl is supposedly more secure.
The title says "I Haven't Quit Twitter", what's misleading about that?
> "it's much better to have a community where people are occasionally assholes"

The guidelines [0] disagree with you. "Be civil" is followed by a period, not by a list of exceptions for when it's OK to be an asshole. Likewise, "please respond to the argument instead of calling names" is followed by an example, not by exceptions.

When people give wrong advice, counter it, but do so without the name-calling.

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not so sure the addition one isn't actually also applicable to javascript automatic semicolon insertion. The google js style guide (publicly available) says that all lines must end in an infix operator, opening bracket or semicolon to always avoid accidental semicolon insertion.

Though the switch one seems surprising (read: a flaw) since it is usually safe to end a line with a comma in vanilla js.
IPopper
Some would argue for a consumer oriented company selling expensive goods to be profitable, a marketing company is the only kind of company it can be.

Marketing means understanding your users, and if you don't understand your users how do you convince them to give you the money? Users are not like government officials or company executives where you can convince them by a slideshow or a list of bullet points about why the product is great; the product itself needs to be great because consumers are the ones using it.

And "great" depends on your user's perspective.
Did you read the article? A lot of that week was spent testing that there were no regressions in the code, and not actually rewriting.

I'd be comfortable that no new attack vectors were opened.
well, sometimes there are second order effects... The Fed is committing to lower rates to boost the economy... traders say, I think they're going to succeed in boosting the economy...that means some rates should go up! Paradoxically, if people decide that the economy is going to do better, and then they invest and spend more and long rates go up, the Fed thinks 'mission accomplished'.

Neverthless, as a first order approximation I would stand by the notion that buying bonds makes their prices go up, rates go down.

But yeah, if the policy is successful it will steepen the yield curve.
Is this sarcasm? You clicked "Allow"; what would you expect of an application to which you granted access to your keychain, other than for that application to thereby gain access to your keychain?
Piecemeal compilation:

// beginning of file
Coffeescript = require('coffee-script');

// compilation
Coffeescript.compile(line, {bare: true});

e.g.

var f = eval(Coffeescript.compile("(x) -> x + 1", {bare: true}));
f(1) // ==> true
Fun fact ceramic used in spark plugs for ex. is so hard, a small piece of it thrown against a car window will destroy that window.

Mythbusters clip: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a5d_1257946254
You don't need a password to press 'allow'. It is still very much a security concern.
You can even use sexpy syntax if you want to confuse people:

(coffee.height (drink coffee, e.angle))
What do you mean by "orthogonal" in this context?
Sounds like Digg but also like Stackexchange. The inmates are running the asylum. :-) I don't mind any of the sites, but that's just because I understand their limitations.

I can definitely understand being frustrated however if I wanted to contribute and felt like I was being continuously rebuffed for not being an 'insider'. That's pretty annoying.
We think that good file handling is important for the future of the web. When we first started, we weren't planning and didn't want to build a company.

However, as we went on, we kept needing server side components to make things work smoothly. For instance, we handle large files upload by chunking them up and reassembling them, retrying parts as needed. Image conversion baked in and other components in the pipeline that we want to build also require servers, something that you can't do with a plugin.

We fully support plugin developments and we fix bugs or add features as we see them.

When we first launched, we had people emailing us asking to pay and we've been growing week on week so the developer need is there. Part of me is just as surprised as you are, until I write some code dealing when multipart form uploads or box's inconsistent error codes. Then I remember.
Supposedly most cops will go through their careers never drawing their weapons on duty. Don't know if it's true, but I've read it.

I've had 'most' cops beat by the time I was 21 and I wasn't even trying.
Sure dude, email's in my profile. I love Australians!
I agree but I think I would have stated it more politely (even though the OP was a bit impolite).

As you note, the article was obviously well-researched.
His 1-3 were complaining about undocumented syntax, and the rest about the actual syntax itself. Not that your response is wrong, just that might help you understand what he was saying.
As interesting it may ever sound, i still can't think about good use-cases for those kinds of translation tools. I have been fiddling around a bit with XMLVM (which gives really has a nice generic approach) but the point that you basically can't use any libraries leads quickly to a dead-end. Also i'm not convinced that any automatic translation of plain business-logic could compensate the sacrifice of Obj-C features.
Hey man, I've been there. People can give you all sorts of advice here like exercise, heavy drinking, or whatever. But you really should see a professional psychiatrist, someone who knows about this stuff. A good one won't just give you happy pills, they will determine if you need them. And there's nothing wrong with needing them if you do! We live in the future, where sicknesses can be healed. Having your brain have irrational thoughts of guilt and suicide is a sickness. One that can be treated. So go schedule an appointment now.
Live Feed: Unexpected Hazardous Asteroid 2012 QG42 Passing by Earth
The beauty is - it doesn't _matter_.

It could be a linked list that links back to it's own head. It could be a network stream, or a series of events from an input device. The program doesn't have to care.
Jose Valim heard about people avoiding Rails thanks to it not having a Sinatra-like routing syntax, and he just decided to code one up:

https://gist.github.com/3717973
Note that this article uses the term startup for any small company under one year old.

Also the underlying paper is pretty weak. The first thing the institute should have done is look at the breakdown of new companies by industry/location and see how that's change. Without doing that the claims blaming "outsourcing" and "occupational licensing" are pretty unscientific.
That's never how I understood that idiom. I've always assumed that "since sliced bread" was a different way to say "ever".

So, "the best foo since sliced bread" reads as "the best foo ever".
Relentless refactoring.
Why isn't this $9 cardboard bike on Kickstarter?
Fed Announces Open Ended QE3
This can be done in Sinatra: http://www.sinatrarb.com/faq.html#auto_escape_html
>For the record: as someone who started in the early '90s in C, I hate hate hate the Go declaration syntax.

Why hate something trivial that takes 2 minutes to adjust to and has benefits without any drawbacks whatsoever?
The One Big Problem With QE To Infinity
I'm wary of doing this because, I suspect I'll be forever polishing the code. It's addictive to always try to find a new, better way of accomplishing the same thing.
The article was clearly well-researched so doesn't seem like a simple reaction to a bad experience. And I can attest to some of the experiences expressed in the article. There's a pretty bizarre ritual going on over at Quora that it's hard to pin down but I think the author did a reasonably good job.

That said, Quora has obviously cracked a nut whereby it is getting very high quality/value content from well-placed individuals.
Addendum: Don't fall into the Linux trap. Don't start off being "great on old hardware!" but eventually grow so huge as to need the same specs as modern Windows (my i7 laptop with 4 GB of RAM runs like crap, thanks Debian). Do things in a straightforward way, but in such a way that you can expand without tacking on loads of extra code.
The life of a developer goes through several phases, generally over-engineering is one of them, then generally comes clever, many times developers never get past clever and start to confuse it with elegance, but clever code is not by itself elegant, the mark of elegance is simplicity, when code is simple it becomes elegant, when it is simple and clever it is elegant. But if you have to choose between one or the other choose simplicity. Code that even a novice can see the beauty in the simplicity of it (and understand it) is where true elegance lies. It takes a true craftsman to take something complex and make it simple. That it what we do every day, we take complex processes and simplify them via automation and association. When one realizes the same principle applies to the development of their code, they then start down the path of writing truly elegant code.

Simple code is decoupled, simple code does not have tight dependencies, simple code is well organized and simple code does not rely on too much abstraction. If you strive to achieve those few things you will be a better developer than a significant portion of your peers.

decoupling code allows you the ability to extend the system without having to go back and modify existing code.

Avoiding as many tight dependencies as possible allows you to change portions of the code base without having the ramifications of those changes leak out into other areas.

Well organized code allows new developers to find what they are looking for, it helps document itself. Part of good organization is adhering to standards and best practices.

Relying too much on abstraction means that you can't see a complete picture of the code without understanding multiple layers. Abstraction, when used properly, allows you to reuse code which is a good thing, but it comes at a cost, it sacrifices conceptualization. Too much abstraction and the system or a portion of it cannot be easily conceptualized in the mind. It also creates tight dependency among components that sit on top of abstracted layers. It should not be avoided, but no problem can be abstracted away, if the code in question cannot be reused there is no reason to abstract it, rather componentize it into discreet blocks, so that it can be conceptualized as a black box.
but your bias is that you see religion as nothing but a brainwashing and control mechanism for the weak-minded

Actually I see it as a brainwashing and control mechanism for almost everyone. If I were accusing 90% of people in all walks of life of being "weak-minded" you'd have a good point. Instead, my experience is that intelligence is almost completely orthogonal to religiosity.

It seems clear that both theistic religions and human personality cults take advantage of a bug in our mental OS that shuts down our critical faculties in the presence of authority figures who adopt a certain psycholinguistic posture.

The religion bug was undoubtedly a useful feature at one time. ("Hey, dumbass. Refrigeration won't be invented for another 2,000 years. Don't eat shrimp or pork." "Uh, why not?" "Well, because, um, because God said he will kill you if you do.") However, it now serves only as a root exploit for use by hackers with less-than-honest motivations. We still have the bug in the code base because of how important it was to our survival in the distant past. It must be 'fixed' at a conscious level, because it isn't going to be deselected by evolutionary forces anytime soon.

This all seems so obvious to me that I believe (there's that word again!) that the burden of proof lies with anyone who disagrees with me. Maybe I have a similar bug, myself. :)
I hereby invoke Betteridge's Law.
Fragmentation Comes to iOS
The answer is yes. The research suggests that the rate of development and the error rate are both linearly correlated with length of code rather than how much the program does, and this rate seems fairly consistent across a range of languages. I believe that Code Complete makes reference to this fact.

From a random Google search, http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/HumanErr/ would seem like a promising online resource to try to find some of the literature on error rates.
>>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.

This happens to me very regularly on Google Maps. I'll enter an address like "45 Tree Lane" and at worst it will take me to another state, and at best it will ask "did you mean 45 Tree Lane in California, or 45 Tree Lane in New York". I am located in California, you silly thing. Why would I need 45 Tree Lane, New York?
Racetams have proven effects on healthy adults. [Do you want to know more?]. There's a scaled effect which is notable, but most adults over 30 will benefit from them (i.e. the 'smarter / less damaged your systems are' the less benefit you get).

Do you really not have access to common papers? This might be a question of me assuming common access to information where there is none.

Or, think of it this way ~ unless you're living in a pristine environment (which most of you aren't), then they'll help you. Most humans are swimming in a whole sea of chemicals [airborne, ingested] and bacterial processes that you're not aware of. Heck, every human being's weight is 1Kg (ish) of non-human DNA and complex ecosystems.

Yep, that's right: you're a huge ecosystem of your own, revel in it. So take off 1kg off the scale, that's other beasties at play.

Ye Gods, most of you are firing off megadeath levels of antibacterials, chromosome damaging chemicals, metal-based-nasties and so forth just by getting ready in the morning.[1] Your brain chemistry is a whole lot more complex ~ and although we're getting there on understanding it, we've a while to go.

But, the Racetams have so far proven <b>entirely</b> benign, and helpful. They should be given to everyone by deafult, if we're in the realms of fluoridating water supplies.

[1] No, I like science. I love science. We all love it. Still doesn't change the fact that processes like decaffeinated coffee production had stupidly large amounts of cancer producing drugs in them until recently. Or DDT.
You can't start small companies without personal wealth or available credit.
I took a break from my startup and PhD in EE at Stanford as well as 6 years of work at Apple to do hacker school. It has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life and I would do it again if I could. There were people with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences during my batch--from programmers who learned how to code before they could speak :) to a baker who had only started programming a month before the beginning of the batch. The only requirement is that you enjoy it so I encourage anyone who wants to grow as a programmer to apply.
I would so fund this if it were. Hope this goes smoothly for him.
Stop sending template engines to the browser. How to make 6-10x faster templates
Spork's a fine notion, but it's no panacea. Pretty regularly we would be running down some weird bug only to discover that we had to restart. It doesn't take a lot of 10-minute debugging excursions to eat up all the time that Spork saves on starting tests.
I run as a non-admin user on Mountain Lion (stops the kids messing stuff up) and it sometimes has unexpected benefits - like in this case, when I run security dump-keychain -d ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain in terminal the output is most definitely not plain text even after I press 'Allow' - see http://pastebin.com/TH63R9sM for a sample
Twitter(.com) for minimalists
Sinatra-like routes in Rails
>Your schtick [1][2][3][4] is predictable.

Here's a novel idea: how about dealing with the argument I presented?
Very important graf at the end:

The only thing I can think of here is that for all that we think of startups as being largely high-tech things, in reality a huge number of them are in the construction industry, in one way or another. In a word, subcontractors. And no one’s starting new granite-countertop installation companies right now. But still, startups are a decent proxy for the dynamism of an economy. And these charts don’t bode at all well, on that front.
Take a look at the list here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...
I think this much drama on HN deserves its own entry, as well as a day counter reset.
So we are to believe that startups are not magically shielded from the massive worldwide economic downturn in progress right now? Why is this news?
Maybe, but there is such a thing as the "perfect compromise", since you obviously cannot offer a different screen size for every hand size.
At first, I thought this was relating to Lower Dens (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyxzjF8IjE8)
Apple wins injunction against Motorola in Germany over 'rubber-banding' patent
Yeah, the underlying paper is by the Hudson Institute, which is a right-wing think tank. Any place with a political axe to grind will bend facts to suit their hypothesis.

In any case, Felix Salmon makes this statement which struck me as odd:

> Intuitively, if people can’t find work for an existing company, they should be more likely, not less likely, to go out and found a new company themselves, instead.

Why is this intuitive..?
I think we can agree to disagree here.

What about a language like Perl, where any reference (not just a reference to a hash) can be blessed and be used to dispatch methods? Would you say OO Perl is not OO?

(I think you could argue either way).

Personally I think CLOS is a very interesting mode of doing OO. You could always define define multimethods based only on the first argument. Some parts of CLOS (method interceptors) have also made it to Java in forms of AOP (and in fact the author of AspectJ is one of the authors of CLOS) -- which provides "magic" for Java frameworks such as Guice.

While I also hate to Biblethump, but Alan Kay has also spoken very favourably of CLOS despite CLOS not being message passing. If you prefer, you can think of CLOS as a "meta OO" which lets you implement different OO behaviour including message passing.

Back to Clojure deftype and defrecord do provide encapsulation, by the way: in types with :mutable-unsyncyronized fields can only be accessed via self/this pointer.

I do agree that Clojure's protocols/multimethods aren't a full blown CLOS, but they could (sensibly) be called a form of OO (even if it's a form OO that differs greatly from Java and C++)
Why is someone who is not you logged in using your account with the ability to click that button in the first place?

Layering security on the user account after login tends to annoy the hell out of people. Ask any users you know what they think of Windows 7/Vista's UAC.
My most ambitious idea is to leave this planet in a better place than what I found it. Not for my child, but for all. I don't even want to be in the history books. Just knowing that I made a differecne is more than enough.
Ahmadinejad is 5 https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=Bacon+...
Is the tech sector producing more startups than other areas?
As a 19 year old who reads HackerNews, it can feel overwhelming to read about all the startups that are being founded in the tech sector.

I'm wondering if this is just an effect of the HN echo chamber, or whether other industries are just as actively producing startups.

When I read about all the startups being founded in tech, I just start thinking "How am I supposed to start anything that competes with all these other people?"

I'm pretty sure this is an effect of the HN echo chamber, but it would be helpful if more educated people could tell me whether the tech sector produces a disproportionate number of startups, or whether it's this way in other areas too.
If you're curious how this handles memory management--the largest impedance mismatch between Java and Objective-C--see http://code.google.com/p/j2objc/wiki/MemoryManagement.

The preferred method, for iOS apps at least, seems to be use reference counting. This implies that any objects with cyclical references will not be released. Thus, the semantics of this approach will be subtly different than that all JVMs, which have GCs which can detect cyclical references. Thus, the documentation suggests using "runtime and tool support to detect memory leaks".
Why and how could function hoisting be useful?

(Genuine question, not an snarky comment)

Edit: Huh! I thought you meant "variable hoisting", which is the most evil language feature that's ever bitten me!

This is an introduction to "function hoisting": http://elegantcode.com/2011/03/24/basic-javascript-part-12-f... - Very very interesting.
Why so few enterprise start ups?
The app store is a much bigger thing to happen to the iPhone than this.
>Because any device but has to be sold to hundrends of millions people

And kill economies of scale, fragment their device ecosystem, present people with superfluous insignificant "choice" when one reasonably sized model can fit most needs perfectly fine, etc. Yes, very clever.

>Of course everyone else except Apple has already figured that out.

And how is that working for them?
You need a password to be able to press allow.
Interesting story, but the "I am not taking sides" is a plain lie.
Could you point out a few? Somehow I doubt Google is taking cues from badly designed carrier overlays.
The notion of "creating job" is absurd.

Think about it, you are creating work that someone has to do so they can get paid. If that's the goal, why don't we just pay people without having to go through the hassle of creating job?

Heck, we have so much machinery and automation that feeding the population is no longer a problem, shelter might be slightly trickier, but in a simplistic view, if it takes 1% of the population to create the basic essentials(food,shelter) for everyone, why can't we just give those to citizens and let them do things they may actually enjoy?