skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One additional point you didn't mention: The US Dollar was, for a long time, the worlds reserve currency. It still is in many ways.

This means that for nearly 100 years the USA has been able to print dollars and have much of the effects of this monetary inflation absorbed by foriegn countries that needed to hold dollar reserves.

Or put another way, there is a massive amount of inflation that has been exported. It will remain overseas so long as the dollar remains the worlds reserve currency.

But as that changes, and the dollar loses credibility due to this "Quantitative Easing" (which is nothing more than a euphemism for monetary inflation) at some point the rate of people switching from dollar reserves to other reserves- gold, yuan, whatever-- will reach a tipping point and as the dollar declines ever faster people will panic to get out of the dollar.

This is like an axe over our heads. We've got hyperinflation built in, because once that turning point happens, the panic will trounce the dollar, and that will imediately force the government to crank up the printing presses even faster- trying to outrun these ramifications, and we'll wake up one morning in Zimbabwe.

And I'm not kidding about it happening "one morning", when this happens it often happens very fast. The Ruble lost half its value between breakfast and lunch when it happened. In argentina it was a matter of weeks.

Neither of those currencies were world currencies.

No way to know when it will happen, or exactly how-- we've been helped by europes problems. Since they've been going down faster they have made the dollar look good in comparison.

We've also been helped by China's dependance on exports- as europe went down and we slowed down, that's hurt china, making them not look as relatively strong compared to us.

Finally we've also been helped with outright manipulation of the market. One of the key indicators is the price of gold (which is really the price of dollars measured in gold.) The FOMC is an entity within the fed whose job is to "stablize prices" which is also known as market manipulation, and it takes big chunks of that QE money and uses it to short gold. Notice how gold was on its way to $2,000 when they killed that momentum and brought it back to $1,500? That helps shore up the percieved value of the dollar.

If this sounds like conspiracy theory, google GATA and read the details-- the FOMC minutes come out eventually and their interventions in the gold market are documented.

I can't say what a fair value for gold is, but it is well north of $2,000. (Say if you compared the monetary inflation in dollars since the last time there was gold peg to the gold price then.... )

But so long as people are made to believe that a currency is stable, they will keep using it and the currency remains stable.

When people realize the currency is worthless paper being pumped out at insane levels, then it will be treated as such and quickly attain that market price.
Maybe part of the problem is that a lot of our tech talent ends up going down to where the money is instead of staying in Canada?
They said exactly how they did it, it's right there in your quote: when someone reloads a page running on their dev server, the server checks if the CS file has been modified and triggers the compilation… So no, it's not a build system feature, it's a server feature.
50-60k in the BAY AREA? Yikes!
I was assuming silicon-on-sapphire soldered to a copper heat spreader. No numbers, but it feels plausible it could scale up.

Wow. I did not know the L3 cache ran so fast.
It is a response to item #6 on that list, so it is already included.
...I figured they just kept them next to the [c]opy command.
Best I found was Shirley Temple @ 3
Patent protection?
The human body is more complex than science can explain?
I tried to explain this in a post a while ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4087686
Justin is a great guy, and NetDNA is an awesome company. Look for more great things to come from them.
The URL can be attacker-controlled
Hi mattyfo, Peldi from balsamiq here. We have not really attacked the commenting feature in myBalsamiq yet, what we have in regards to commenting is really MVP at this point. We'll do it right, stick with us! ;)
Printing unlimited money has a political advantage as well-- not only does the Fed profit from it, but the government, and more specifically, politicians profit from it.

A good example is Obama's "stimulus" which was a big old pork package, underwritten by the Fed that he got to pretend was "taking action" to "improve the economy" / "create jobs".

It was a complete failure by even its own promises, but that has not hurt Obama's re-election chances, because people don't hold politicians accountable for damaging the economy.

And this goes for Bush, Clinton, Bush 1 and Reagan -- all of whom took at least some actions that damaged the economy.
Had trouble finding a way to click through to your main homepage from your blog until I scrolled all the way down adn found a tiny link. I recommend either making the header logo link to your main homepage, or put it somewhere else up top and visible.
Yes.

5) Do some basic validation. If it fails, ask the user: Are you sure this email address is correct? If they say yes, then allow it anyway.

This lets you catch all the typos, without annoying people with more complicated email addresses.
You're able to build a completely unique site from a blank page in scroll kit. You are given a text form in other publishing platforms. Those are pretty different terms.
Let's just say we're paying careful attention for now...
I like it that it partially solves the callback hell problem - at least you don't have to routinely align/indent closing }); }; )}; ); }); etc...

Everything else, like being easier on the eyes, having built-in classes, not having to spell "function" a million times, etc, is a welcome bonus.
Because an accurate summary would actually summarize what they said, not just list their bias. I would summarize it as, "The Dropbox team prefers the readability of Coffeescript, the conversion took one week, they reduced the lines of code in their codebase by 20%, and there was no impact on functionality."
The OS usually ships with it or it can be bootstrapped easily. I don't see the problem.

We deploy 4.0 framework with our desktop software as well. ClickOnce takes care of the installation with the package manifest.

Github also do that with their GitHub for Windows app.
I should have called it Balsamiq Wireframes, but I figured it out when it was too late to change it...oh well. :)
No. Repair estimates are already freely available. Just google the parts you need to replace. The price you see (plus taxes) should be what you pay to your mechanic.

Unless you're getting major work done (i.e., dent removal), a reputable mechanic will only charge for parts, not for labor. If you've never actually had that experience with your mechanic, I suggest you look around b/c you've been getting ripped off.
My previous employer would get interns from the UCB Extension international diploma program. Since the students were not US citizens, the internships were unpaid, by law. But they were mostly placed into PM-type roles and such. The company did once post an unpaid database engineer internship, but I don't believe they ever filled it.
iota is a poor man's solution compared with what real enumerations are

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

As for the other two links Go fanboys like to throw them around to feel happy that they beloved language is comparable to programming languages developed in the 70's.
I may be wrong but I can't help seeing a little anti-Katz bias there.

Beyond this 'cheap' psychological interpretation, I think the merb merge was mainly paying the huge technical debt 'young rails' contracted in its fast growth.

Rails 3 set the ground for the future. All big project go through this teenage phase, and if Rails 4 has so much potential today is because the 'alias_method_chain' and other quick hacks were cleaned out with well thought architectural principals - even though rack and streaming don't play well...

Oh god and I haven't read the whole post yet...
In this specific situation, the conversion was done as part of a Dropbox hackweek.

There are almost certainly other projects they could have worked on for that week that would have resulted in a more tangible business gain for Dropbox as a company, but the point of teamwide hackweeks/hackathons/etc is more employee morale than anything else. It seems to me that it succeeded pretty well at that goal.
Definitely fair point. There are plenty of Canadian entrepreneurs who absolutely crush it, and definitely appreciate "success".

I could have said "Building something great out of nothing and trying to be the best" is very much embedded into American folklore and culture, but not so much in Canadian.

I had a very long conversation about this with 3 generations of Canadian entrepreneurs (none of them tech mind you) and we all had a good laugh about this very topic. Again, sorry if anecdotal evidence doesn't do it for you.
OT: You may want to validate email addresses too during signup (not only password) - this will ensure that visitors can't leave the email field blank by mistake (and will avoid serving them your error page).

Great article btw.
Hey JangoSteve,

Great points man! We definitely should have looked into California LLC practices a bit more, however we just knew it's an $800 filing fee per year here and we'd experience more taxation than in Nevada.

I think I forgot to mention it, but we did set up a Corporate Checking Account and got Credit Cards in the company's name and that's what we purchase everything through.

Great feedback on the title and I'll make sure the next one does better.

Much appreciated for your time and insights!
Jon
Yep. Need to have x00K in the bank to legally work for my own company.
So you're not saying that everyone was wrong when they claimed they were more productive in C++/Java/Scala than in C/C++/Java?

We're using modern languages to build things that were difficult/impossible in older languages. Sure, the 1998 PHP world looks primitive, and the actual code may be bad, but I think it was miles ahead of the 1988 COBOL world.

I would have thought that each language brought more suitable tools to the jobs at the time, and people were more productive. I feel more productive in Go now than I ever have. It's not a factor of 10, but it's noticeable. Yes it may be that it's new and I enjoy it so I'm more productive, but given the language's designers' rock-hard stance on introducing complexity, I am confident in a frustration-reduced experience in Go for the foreseeable future.

Also, if this increase in productivity is just due to learning a new language, I think that's as good a reason as any to learn it :)
'We can read Arabic too' US embassy tells Egypt's Brotherhood
As a first step, the next big feature on our list is to make the Symbol Libraries on https://mockupstogo.mybalsamiq.com/projects easy to import from within the editor. It should help some, then we'll see. Mobile widgets have been changing very rapidly, I hesitate baking in any set as part of the default ones.
Congress report warns: drones will track faces from the sky
}); is not a line of code. Please stop counting it as such. Here's a good rule of thumb:

"If it can be moved to the line above, without any other changes, it's not its own line of code."

The argument that CoffeeScript saves countless }); }); } } is invalid, IMO. I would even argue that function definitions are not lines of code. Example: (ruby)

def foo
end

0 lines of code.

BTW, I'm not a CoffeeScript hater, just trying to level the playing field.
I didn't get the CTA at the end. Join... what? I'm totally unclear about what I'm joining. I like the sentiment of the project: "back to DIY, one-off, unique pages- like in magazines!" but I don't understand how signing up for... something (?) will help me do this.

Throw me a bone: show me a bit -at least a video- of what you're offering before asking me to sign up.
I understand what you're saying, but do know that psychological addiction isn't something one can ``just give up''.
Node is no panacea, but that's not quite true about stable APIs. npm is great about maintaining separately versioned libraries and reducing conflicts.

In your package.json can specify what version of a library to use and npm mostly figures it out for you. For instance, I'm still intentionally using an older version of Express (2.5.9 instead of 3.0.x) and npm hasn't had a problem figuring out deps.

Part of the reason this works is that the npms you install are kept in the local folder, not stored globally as many other package managers do, so some other random app on you box won't trample your delicate library configuration.
It's also possible that the email server is down at the moment, but will come back up later.
Wow the original title for this submission, "How to Recruit Women into Tech: A Madison Ruby case study", completely missed the mark and I am glad it was changed.
Working on it, we have a native iPad app currently in private alpha. We're experimenting different things, we want it to be "just right". :)
Anonymous’s Barrett Brown Arrested for Threatening FBI Agent
There is a good reason: If they offered
me a job and it was in JS I wouldn't take it.
If they offered it in CoffeeScript: I would probably say yes.
Your original point was that we might not need server-side languages or frameworks at all. "The grid" is still a server - it's just not one you control directly. I don't think we'll ever get away from servers because there are definite advantages available by having computation centralized - you can have more powerful hardware available, you don't need to worry about outdated versions of code running, etc.

More broadly, though - there's nothing specific to a language that allows or disallows communication with a database. That's really the realm of a library or a driver to interact with the database (an external service) through some established protocol. People have written databases with JS hooks before, but it's just not common, likely because of the security problem.
Hey Mustpax,

Agreed...It was done with a friend who didn't have much time to spare, but it was better than what I could produce on my own.

Definitely agree with you on not focusing on us(company) and more on the product. Funny how it's a no-brainer when you look back at it, but during the filming we just simply forgot.

We'll focus on a top-notch video on the next project we work on.

Thank you for you time and feedback man! Every little bit helps. -Jon
"Sloth: The lazy shall languish in obscurity. Toilers triumph."

As far as I can tell this mainly applies to marketing. Haven't seen startup founders being lazy about anything more than they are about marketing – procrastinating here will kill you.
Rules about whitespace seem like an awfully superficial reason to dismiss an entire language. Do the other benefits not outweigh that?
It can and does. Coffeescript will never write:

["dog","cat"].forEach(function(animal){ console.log(animal) });

Which will run just fine on your development browser, but will break for real customers.

FYI, I don't use coffeescript, but I am at least aware of some problems with Javascript.
Thanks, you're right and I changed it above. For those curious, the Taylor Rule is more accurately a method for optimizing along the Phillips Curve.
I read this article a few weeks ago as a result of Tony writing "debunking the Node.js gish gallop" in response to my "Rails, Node, and the web apps of today" blog post.

I have a response coming in the next week/2 weeks, so I won't go into much here, but I will say that Tony's efforts to defend Rails are admirable; despite some snarkiness and elements of being reactionary, he raises good points in his posts.

One quick question. Tony, what are your thoughts on Elixir?
Check out LiveScript's implicit switch syntax:

http://gkz.github.com/LiveScript/#switch
And affiliate links where you can buy.
You need to write a book or something, your A Basic Timeline post (http://writersdrano.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/a-basic-timelin...) gets crazy, like if Ready Player One had 30 sequels. I was glued to it.
YourMechanic hasn't magically replaced the trust system. It's simply another competitor offering its services...if you trust them. It only takes one bad mechanic to poison the well with customers.

YourMechanic hasn't reduced the time it takes to perform basic repairs. The only practical difference is where the repair takes place and that you can schedule it over the web instead of over the phone. Existing mechanics already offer at-home repairs (albeit, at significantly higher rates than in-shop repairs) so YourMechanic's "innovation" is really just offering existing concierge mechanic services for a lower price.

Here's the thing: any mechanic worth his oil doesn't have the free time to drive to customers to perform repairs. He may have employees drive out to customers to pick up cars on his behalf, but he will remain back at the shop. Thus, YourMechanic will ultimately attract the types of mechanics who don't have the skills to set up their own fixed locations, i.e., mechanics who are mostly definitely not the cream of the crop.
Announcing the Foursquare Global Hackathon: Powered by Hacker League
Parent's reduce() example is harder to read than the original, and about the same length. If CoffeeScript had dictionary comprehensions like Python 2.7 / 3.x, we could make the code shorter while preserving and easier to comprehend:

@originalStyle = {k : @element.style[k] for k in ['top', 'left', 'width', 'height'}

Unfortunately this syntax was proposed and rejected [1]. But with a simple to_hash library function, you can achieve something similar [2]:

to_hash = (pairs) ->
hash = {}
hash[key] = value for [key, value] in pairs
hash

@originalStyle = to_hash ([k, @element.style[k]]
for k in ['top', 'left', 'width', 'height'])

[1] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/467

[2] https://gist.github.com/2271874
I, too, was skipping out on the technical panel and was in the room when Wendy's name was called. It was quite humorous to see her realize it was her name that was called. She said "that's me", got up and ran out of the room in excitement yelling “WAAAAIT!"

I'm happy to have that memory and to have this blog post to remind me of one of the many great parts of the Madison ruby conference. I am definitely returning next year! Maybe I will win the gift certificate this time...
Day after iPhone 5 - volcano erupts in Guatamala
One suggestion I would add: Let them in right now, and confirm later. Sites that require you to wait for an email, click a validation link etc... have a higher barrier to entry. Sometimes email is slow, sometimes it ends up in spam, etc...

Just let the users in at first to poke around before forcing them to validate their email. After a day or two (or maybe to access certain features) remind them they need to confirm that email they got if they haven't already. Yes, some people may try your product and you won't have their real email address, the the ROI on spamming these people later is probably not worth the initial friction.
But how many are the reverse? I'd wager a lot, given the number of people out there that code in JS vs CS.
I lifted it from a tweet describing the article from a third party but, you're right.
This article makes Quora sound almost like Digg back in the day, with a select few users who work together to ensure they control most of the content on the site.
Can you Mozilla guys focus on making it so that HTML5 apps can install from web pages with an Install button and then show up on the home screen like a normal app? Please. So that HTML5 developers don't have to rely on people creating bookmarks or typing web addresses and can give users a similar experience as native.
Please share with us your calculations to determine the intrinsic value of gold.

I don't think you can do it, which is why I don't have an opinion about its intrinsic value.

But if you look at the price of gold as actually the price of dollars measured in gold, then things look much different.

By that measure, taking monetary inflation into account over the past 100 years, gold is historically cheap.
I'm totally stoked for the iPad mini. I've got an iPad 2 and the new iPad, and I bought a Nexus 7 for testing.

I'm not crazy about the Nexus 7 software and browser, but I love the weight! The screen size is "good enough" and definitely worth making smaller to get the weight down.

Anyway, I agree that's why they did separate the events. The iPad mini is going to sell like crazy.
Why is it worrying? Competition is a good thing, I don't want one company to "own" the space. If I recall, Oakley is also doing something similar and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon come out with wearable computing devices.
This tech has existed in scifi for decades. It's all going to be in the execution.
Keep in mind they probably interview a bunch of people and only show the most ridiculous responses.
Orbotix Dangles A Month Of Bacon For Sphero Videos
It's nice to see some more prominent companies using CoffeeScript that people could point to if they ever wanted to convince their boss.

Did any of the other Dropbox employees have a hard lead-in time getting used to the syntax in CoffeeScript? Would you say you run into a lot fewer syntax errors when running validation now?
Using semicolons or not in javascript is just another holy war a la vim vs. emacs, apple vs. google, etc. You'll find people who are passionate on both sides of the fence.
But jQuery can. Which was the argument.
J2objc - A Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime
The argument that CoffeeScript saves countless }); }); } } is invalid, IMO.

I agree that counting }); as a line isn't necessary, but CoffeeScript saving you doing any of that is a very valid benefit. It cleans up code dramatically- ignore line numbers and just think about all the extra stuff that ends up surrounding multiple function calls.
No, mobile mechanics exist in the U.S. However, the service providers are either (1) very expensive, top-of-the-line, and operate on the concierge model, or (2) not worth the gas they spent getting to you or whose skillsets are limited to very basic repairs.

Type 1 will not use YourMechanic because it will cut into their profit margins significantly and they don't need a 3rd party middle-man to get business.

Type 2 will use YourMechanic. They can handle simple stuff, i.e., the stuff that will take a shop 10-15 minutes to repair. For anything more complicated, your SOL.
The video does look a bit rough, but that's neither final code nor final hardware. For what it's worth, actually touching one of the Firefox OS dev phones is pretty impressive: it feels much smoother than it looks on that video.

It's not quite up to iOS or Android 4.1 performance, but it's running on far less powerful hardware. It definitely feels better than the initial releases of Android in terms of responsiveness.

> Give me an example of one app out there that's in the same ballpark of quality as the stuff you can find on iOS or even Android.

The HTML5 version of Cut the Rope works pretty great on Firefox OS; the experience is effectively identical to Android and iOS.
InstaLogo iOS App to be Acquired for $35,000
I don't think JS ever registered in my mind as most ridiculed at all. If it was, it was just by folks that didn't know better.
the video is right above the join button.
US only? I sure would like to get on the radar of companies hiring in Australia/New Zealand. Any chance you'd be able to expand down that way?
Because he's replacing someone who built the value of the company to obscene levels through showmanship (among other things)? There is a direct comparison, they have the same job at the same company.