skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really don't understand how scheduling fixed-time appointments became the natural order. Challenge that assumption and you'll be amazed at how it impacts life for the better.

I'm no historian, but the general gist I got is that with the shift from bespoke to industrial society came a regimenting of schedule. Could have sworn I read about this somewhere ("Peopleware"? "Lies my Teacher Told Me"?), and maybe even caught a synopsis on a book dedicated to the topic, but titles escape me right now. Might be worth looking into.
The apps look great for sure and it seems like the big dogs are prioritizing Android. Many of these examples are in fact on both platforms, and overall they look better on iOS than the android version. On Android they look like a modified, less 'pretty' version of the iOS app- particularly the ones that carry over iOS design patterns.
Thanks, can you help get this question to him when he gets back? At a first glance, it seems that a substantial population of potential entrepreneurs are unable to participate, as the permanent resident/green card process is backlogged by many years. The new JOBS act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups...) might help, but it might require somebody with the clout and resources of YC to push the envelope and unlock a world of possibilities.
Switching Costs as a Sticky Moat
Some extensions like FFAP (file-find-at-point) lookup the word at point in the filesystem, some leverage font and mouse infrastructure to turn text into action.

10$ it's quite easy to do, a generalized *-at-point, the "challenge" is to make it as configurable.
I dont like the name either but at least you got people talking about it and im sure as shit going to remember it, probably for the wrong reasons, but out of all the stupid names people call their apps (mine included) at least i wont forget this one.
Someone ought to try the Allwinner tablets before trashing them. There's nothing wrong with them. At all. That SoC is also powering an enormous number of jumpdrive-sized Android sticks that turn your TV into a big XBMC-capable screen.

It's mesmerizing to take one of these sticks, plug it into a TV and then Airplay/uPnP-play content on it from my mother's phone, or my Dad's desktop/server PC, or my phone/tablet/laptop, and have everyone's phone instantly be a remote for it.
That might be because you have subconsciously (or consciously) installed apps that have similar UIs. Your other comments here indicate that you value consistent UIs strongly, so that's not suprising. The author of this blog is only targeting "beautiful" apps. I personally agree with you, most of my apps are in the ICS style. I find apps that I used to think were attractive (like DoubleTwist and DoubleTwist Alarm) to look dated now and out of place.

However we also know that normal users don't necessarily value consistency as strongly. Many developers have reported that their iOS apps do better with an in-your-face UI.
Patient's Mammogram Shown on Instagram by Employee
(I have used both Acme and Emacs but only a little bit each) I can believe that most of the time it is easier to switch to the mouse to move the cursor where you want if it is no where near your current position. But what about just moving up and down one or two lines? Do you really just use Ctrl-A twice to go up a line? Or do you use the mouse? Or is there some alternative that I haven't heard yet?

http://acme.cat-v.org/keyboard

(oh and I really miss moving back and forth by word and incremental search with keyboard, I have nothing against using mouse for other things though)
Thanks! I'm sure you are right. Factory work would require a strict shift schedule.
I've always thought that American roads suck for exactly this reason.

They're so boring. -__-
Qualcomm offers developers $370,000 in cash and prizes
Thanks rbranson, this comment was very helpful. I also think that the logical fallacy of some of these arguments is that they´re absolutist - it´s better to follow your advice because it´s a very logical progression to start with a SQL database and then move into different things as you grow. Life is a progression and I think your quote about premature optimization is spot on - it IS the root of all evil because it´s absolutist and too rigid to fit the curve of everything that life (and tech, and work) throws at you!
I had a lot of high hopes for G+; I really liked its initial implementation. However the current UI and general feel of the community has totally put me off, and I can't get back into it.

The site UI (not the mobile apps, which are pretty good) is awful, and there's still no posting API as far as I know. And the community is so circlejerky that I can't stand to read through anything. Every photo is amazing, wonderful, and the best thing everyone has ever seen.
Piggyback plug - come meet Brennan (@bdunn) face to face at http://indieconf.com in November. :)
Basically he's saying "ur doing it wrong". You're doing something weird because you're combining things it doesn't make sense to combine.

Not my personal opinion, just a translation of what I think he's saying.

As an aside, there's the famous line from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lilly? :
"I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."
Eh. I think it's pretty silly. It basically boils down to "If you write terrible Coffeescript, it's hard to read". Duh?

Any time you are writing code that is ambiguous, use what you need to in order to clarify it. Don't omit punctuation just because you can if it makes the code less readable.

action(true,
option1: 1
option2: 2
)

Using empty parameters in a function declaration is even funnier; you're adding punctuation that makes the code more vague. Just omit it!

doSomething -> 'hello'
doSomething(-> 'hello')

The third example is totally valid, and one I completely agree with - omitting parentheses on inner nested function calls makes for unreadable code. Don't do it.

The fourth example - complaining that inconsistent indentation produces inconsistent results - is just incomprehensible to me. When you're using a whitespace-delimited language, you'd best pay attention to your whitespace.

Ambiguities with optional curly braces are certainly nothing new to Ruby developers. Convention is that only the last hash in an argument list may have its braces omitted (or more stringently, a hash may only have its braces omitted if it is the last parameter in the list). Makes for finely readable code. Don't write unreadable code.

One of the fundamental rules you should follow when working in any language is "don't be clever". Optional parentheses can make for very clean code, but if you try to get "clever" with them, you end up with ambiguous code. List comprehensions are awesome but if you use them when there's a simpler construct you can use, you're doing it wrong.

You can write bad, unreadable code in any language. Part of maturation as a developer is learning to write readable code, not just working code. A bad workman blames his tools.
Google’s Spanner: A database that knows what time it is
In his defense, it looks like julien_c is actually French... but the logo is what got me!
Programming is more like fashion than science in this regard. Every decade or so something truly new happens in the software world. All the rest is mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing. If you're young or new to programming it's easy to mistake the buzz around things like NoSQL for innovation when they are usually re-discoveries of old (and often discarded or obsolete) ideas dressed up in new clothes.

There's also the tendency to favor new shiny things and reject old crufty (but proven) things, to want to be part of what seems like the leading edge, to be that guy in the cube farm who is playing with the cool new stuff.

I have been programming longer than RDBMSs have been available, so I know from experience what it's like to manage large databases in application code, and how hard it can be to maintain consistency or do accurate queries and aggregation with half-baked tools. It's frustrating to see a new generation of programmers go through this, but it's human nature to ignore the past.

My fourteen year old son wears his pants pulled down below his waist, Vans shoes, hoodies, lots of hair. He looks pretty much like I did when I was fourteen back in the 1970s. The underlying technologies are the same: pants, shirt, shoes, sweater, hair. The only differences are superficial. To him that style is edgy and contemporary and something his parents don't get. NoSQL is the gangster fashion of programming right now.
Look at it this way. Is it easier in general to read JavaScript on a large project over time or CoffeeScript? Sure, with either one there are things that could be annoying, just like with any language, but overall I would want to rely more on CoffeeScript than JavaScript. The reason being that for junior developers and other people that contribute to your codebase, CoffeeScript forces them to adhere to certain conventions that normal JavaScript does not have. Sure, if you have a great team that does everything perfect, well formed JavaScript can be easier to read and maintain, but that is not the normal case.
A $45 knock off tablet, bought in China miles from the manufacturer doesn't equate to a $45 price tag in the USA. Put a brand name on it (and some quality control), put in the 8 or 16gb the market requires (this tablet was 4gb) and shipping and import fees, and you're easily up to the $200 we're paying today.

This is a non-story.
Sure, it's not perfect, but a factor of 70?

Also, if you're going to include links from other properties you have to factor in (for example) that iOS has Twitter sign-in built in, so Twitter is also greatly underrepresented...
I hope the products aren't discountinued. I use silver effex quite often, it's the best back and white converter I've tried yet.
It would be possible to come at it from the other direction though.

Let's say Apple decided to buy up some big content producer or network. Let's say HBO because that's the one everybody seems to talk about.

They could now make that content exclusive to their devices, or perhaps even models of their devices. Say you want to watch "game of thrones" you have to buy the 16GB instead of the 8GB one of whatever. Despite the fact that there is no technical reason for this to be required, you can then charge much more money for the 16GB one, an order of magnitude more than the extra flash storage is worth.
Some really quick landing page experiments..
2 cents: After the hardware break even point how does a hardware manufacturer gain an advantage in such a market? Add malware to the build.

The manufacturers are faceless, nameless and blameless. There's no way for a bad sale to really hurt them. Hence, no market incentive to keep it clean.

Expect these to go lower still, but personally I would stick to branded tablets for anything requiring a secure login.
Job Search Tips For Seniors | Senior Jobs Memos
Because MongoDB mmap(2)s its backing stores into its process memory space. It's a naive approach to persistence - it's very fast and simple, but if you overcommit (i.e. you store more in the database than you have memory available), page-thrashing results.

MySQL's InnoDB table engine, on the other hand, uses direct I/O (in the recommended scenario) and manages the buffer pool independently of the kernel. Its buffer pool manager is specifically designed for the typical workloads MySQL is used for (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-buffer-pool.ht...) - as opposed to the naive LRU that most OSes employ for their filessytem buffers.
People make the same arguments about Perl, but CoffeeScript doesn't have CPAN.

> Optional parentheses can make for very clean code, but if you try to get "clever" with them, you end up with ambiguous code.

Seriously? Using extra parenthesis to add clarity is being clever? I always thought it was being safe.
Absolutely right however that process takes forever. I gained most of my clients through those methods but some potential clients aren't always available through those methods.
You probably still underpriced yourself! Remember: clients are almost never spending their own money. Budget money is monopoly money to IT decision makers. If you're over and that's the reason you're going to lose the gig, usually the client will tell you so. (On the other hand, savvy clients will "tell you so" no matter what).
Seems like there are two types of developers: those who don't want even to hear about CoffeeScript and trying hard to find deficiencies in it and those who embraced it and feel unhappy every time they are forced to work with vanilla javascript again.
I think he has it backwards. Hardware is getting cheaper, making it easier to sell products that used to be too expensive. The cheap labor in China is fairly accessible to everyone.

This is an opportunity, not a death blow.

$0.99 Apps didn't 'Kill' software for the same reason.
Almost all of my fellow developers (my dev circle is about 85 people) use it, i also follow quite a few of interesting product pages, also some of my friends use it - so def. there are people using it. My circles are carefully crafted so i dont see facebook like usless stuff.
Emacs buffers ergonomy is quite low. I found some elisp to transpose buffers layout (pretty awesome). Some maximize / shadow code would be handy. It would be great to have one layout lib included in standard distro.
That's the sales pitch of +1, but I see no value, and purposefully avoid it. That's just me. And I'd much rather have a "-1" button.
There is no way I would ever use this project at work or even for home projects because at some point, someone somewhere will have to read its name, or hear it in a conversation. Which will be some combination of embarrassing or insulting for everyone involved.

This is the biggest naming fail I have ever seen in the industry.
Velocity vs. Quality
If the market follows the iPod model then consumers on a whole will prefer the Apple models over the "cheap" alternatives. This will continue until the market is superseded by another market.

If the market follows the PC model then Apple's share will collapse to a modest percentage, but will still control the profit share.

In either case Apple wins.
Could someone who understands them explain the screenshots to me like I was 5? I'm familiar with ruby, internet explorer, and virtual machines, but I can not make any sense of these images.
Put Your Bricks-and-mortar Business On The Internet | BPWrap
More referring to the general trend, even among commenters.

This is not a perfect example, since you can make the argument that the audience is other investors who want to some trend forecasting and have a generally conservative mindset.

But it does bring up another possible reason for this behaviour: for those with a stake in maintaining the status quo it now makes sense to attempt to fight commoditization through marketing/lobbying disguised as journalism now that ethics in journalism is ebbing and the cost to publish a blog is low.

I personally think it's a result of the success so many brands have had in tying brand choice to personal identity and tribal affiliation, but that doesn't apply to the writer of this piece obviously.
Tablets : http://www.dealextreme.com/c/tablets-1409

Thermostats. Most houses have "3 wire" or "5 wire" layouts with standard colors. http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-thermostat3.htm. Its pretty easy to call for heat or cool. Get a temperature sensor for your beaglebone from sparkfun: https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=temperature+sen...

I replied further down on how the garage door worked out.
RecorderJS: Export Web Audio API output as WAV files
No, sorry, omitting parentheses (because they're optional) can be "too clever". I love optional parentheses, but I feel like a lot of people omit them because they feel that they're supposed to, at the cost of code clarity. I'm arguing that you should omit them when doing so doesn't make the code ambiguous, but if you ever need them to improve code clarity, that you should use them.

The OP had a fine example of "doing it wrong", with the nested inner function call without parentheses. While technically valid, it's bad code because it's difficult to read, even for someone accustomed to optional parentheses. Such a construct is "clever" when it shouldn't be.
I didn't claim RDBMSs are interchangeable or that there are no differences. I disputed the statement that "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.

I also disputed the notion that reading a book first would enable someone to choose the right tool the first time. There's no substitute for experience and real expertise, and you only get that by trying things and making mistakes, or at least learning from other people's mistakes.
So not to be that dude, but ...

"The King is dead, long live the King." refers to the accession of a new monarch. It implies in the language an immediate, uninterrupted rule of the line.

It should not be used when something has died, and it's just dead and there is no implied line of succession.

A terrible but relevant example would be "the iPhone is dead, long live the iPhone.", implying that the 4s is dead and 5 now reigns.
A lot of the times, the first step in the right direction is really hard. The kind of hard that makes projects not happen, deals not get signed, relationships not get built, etc.

But every step after the first in the right direction gets easier.
In iOS the 'back' button is always on the same location AND tells you where you're going back to.

Yes, that is true, but only for a screen with a back button, otherwise that spot on the screen is probably an "edit" or something else you don't want to do. And after you realize its not "back", you're off hunting around the rest of the screen for the "done" or "cancel" button. Unless of course, you came from a different screen on the same logical "level", where to go back to the screen you came from means picking from one of the row of tabs at the bottom of the screen. Unless you're in an app with a row of tabs at both the top and the bottom of the screen. In that case, the tabs at the top might belong to the page selected at the bottom, or the tabs at the bottom might belong to the page selected at the top, hopefully the UI has been designed with a visual afforance to give you a hint.

Disclaimer: I've been using an iPhone for about 2 months after 2 years of android ownership. They both have their own way of doing things that you can get used to one and think the other feels foreign. FWIW, After time and familiarity, you forget to look at it critically; iOS UI is clunky and unintuitive, its just that us iOS owners have been tossing eachother off about just how great iPhones are for years. And you can't pretend like this isn't true, now that I'm in the club, iDevice owners try to get me to join in some collective pursuance-rationalization quite frequently.
This is the first link on the iPhone page:

http://www.apple.com/apple-events/september-2012/

There is no <video> tag, there is a "Get Quicktime" button, no video plays in my Chrome browser, and here's a screenshot of the network tab showing it downloaded a .MOV file with content-type movie/quicktime, not h.264: http://i.imgur.com/h8dO8.png
> like the big dogs are prioritizing Android

Who are those big dogs? Google? :)
Microsoft? :))
Apple? :)))
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528211
More explanation here:
http://www.ehackingnews.com/2012/09/new-zero-day-ie-exploit-...
Your pricing page has an issue with IE8. I cannot see the text "Click Here to get started" on the button unless i do mouse over.
Show ROI, demonstrate how what you produce will be more beneficial to their bottom line than what your competitors can produce.
I get it now, thanks!
* I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc*

And every day hundreds of millions of people waste some of their time and intelligence making sense of said inconsistent designs.

This is why Safari's reader and Readability are so popular.
Most of the bad code examples in this post are taken from the CoffeeScript compiler itself. For that I have to say "mea culpa". There's a lot of overly clever and dense bits that have accrued in the compiler over time -- sometimes due to the tangly nature of the codebase, but also sometimes because we tend to use the self-hosted compiler as a test bed for edge cases of combining different language features together.

If you're looking for more regular style, this style guide is a better place to start:

https://github.com/polarmobile/coffeescript-style-guide
This is a list of apps that in no way use the android default widgets. So yes, it can be beautiful when you do all the hard work yourself.

(and yes, these apps look fantastic)
How to Use Testimonials in Your Marketing
This reminds me of Ursus Wehrli's work.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ursus_wehrli_tidies_up_art.html
There's a horizontal scrollbar per photoset just below the photo's.

I'm guessing this was designed by someone with a multitouch trackpad. I know I tend to forget not everyone else has 2 finger scroll at their fingertips, I've had to get into a habit of having a test run using a mouse when I put together pages.
I myself enjoy using CoffeeScript, but I understand it might not be for everyone.

It's always good to look at the pro/cons before choosing a language, so I think discussions like this is good.

That being said, some of the problems this article points out can be addressed by going back to more JS style.

e.g. Not relying on implicit parentheses/commas/braces

I like the "Fancy" for loop because it's closer to what I do in Python (yes I know they are not exactly the same). Same thing with the "Tricky" if statements.

Also the redefinition shortcuts provided in CoffeeScript is pretty much what I do in plain JS anyway.

e.g.

JS:
foo = foo || 'bar';

CS:

foo or= 'bar'
Real world levitation improves pharmaceuticals
The market is the best way to gauge how useful people find things. The fact that they can't make a profit within the market is a sign that they're spending more wealth than they are creating.
In my reading, his usage fits your description.
> The kind of problems that the article points out are easy to spot. If small syntax changes yield significant output code, that will be immediately reflect in the program execution.

> Plus, a decent code base will have unit testing in place, which should catch more intricate, harder to catch, unwanted code flavors.

That's rather optimistic.
Men refuse to ask for directions out of 'blind panic'
import hooks leave crap in your global state. this only modifies sys.modules, which is probably a much better option.
The PDF files are part of the joke. They were probably produced with LaTeX too, just like in mainstream academic publications.