skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly, safety concerns are not a concern of advertisers or the CFO.
Remember this story when someone goes on and tells you that something can't be done.
I had a similar experience a few months ago, myself, with a huge, very poorly written PHP app. I lasted three weeks; three weeks in which I didn't sleep and felt constantly agitated while I spent nearly every waking moment at the computer trying to be productive amidst an ocean of stress. My whole family suffered from this project, because I became very difficult to live with.
These are valid points. But there are myriad ways to blog anonymously. If Facebook wants to be a place where people are known by their real names, then that's their business.
The early firmwares were buggy as hell, it would crash from time to time. Heck it was imposible to type with keyboard lag that could be as bad as 10 SECONDS.

My first tweet ever was abot how firmware 2.1 fixed many of this issues, mind you this was 4 years ago
nice!

Another great take on an HTML5 flocking implementation is Alex Cruikshank's "birds on a line" demo, in which the birds also "land" on wires. I really like how Alex handles 3-dimensionality by adjusting the darkness of the birds so that the further "back" they are, the lighter they appear.

demo: http://carbonfive.github.com/html5-playground/birds-on-a-lin...
source: https://github.com/acruikshank/html5-playground/blob/gh-page...
Isn't a start-up that's bootstrapped and designed with a clear path to monetization desirable anymore? You can obviously design something to grow quickly, but doesn't that also increase the risk of it being a flash-in-the-pan?
Disturbing password rule: No left/right carets. (HTML?)
"Please correct the following: Password must be between 6 and 15 characters and may not contain < or >"

Local pizza delivery ordering site. Actual site is stephanies.co, but ordering is through "letsget.net".
If Silicon Valley Stocks Are Down, Why Are Home Prices Up?
By curiosity, what features? I have "Google Play Books" but haven't used it much.
I do this constantly, even if my explorations never get beyond surface exploration of new things. My career has moved from electrical engineer->(non-IT) systems engineer->real-time algorithms software engineer (C)->non-real-time algorithms software engineer (Java). Over this course (so far) I have worked in a dozen languages, and may have a dozen more in the next decade. I also try to keep myself astride the hardware-software boundary as best I can.

My most frustrating professional experience so far was working in a sequestered program in my prior company where almost everyone in engineering leadership positions had been doing the same damn thing for 20+ years and could not understand why anyone would want to keep learning and trying out new technologies. In fact, showing too much interest in technologies unrelated to the program could be interpreted negatively.[1] I'm both amazed and horrified that such an attitude could persist in this day and age in such a company, but I guess that comes from the program's somewhat unique situation.

[1] The old guard on this program had the attitude that you could spend your entire career on it and its derivatives, so there was no reason to want to leave unless you were unhappy, in which case there must be something wrong with you.
Yes, _ indicating that a parameter is not relevant is how it's used in Haskell.

Though I do feel obligated to point out that, being lazy-evaluated, even if you do give a parameter a name it still won't be evaluated until you actually use it.
This reminds me of that Chinese guy who built stairs up and down a mountain for his wife. Dedication, true dedication.
One Humble Idea to Get our Economy Moving Again
I am 36, and I know that I am not old, but sometimes I feel old here.
Making Flickr awesome again (or at least the Android part)
Yeah, it's unfortunate that Firefly never got the chance to deliver there. That said, if you pit the first season of Firefly against just the first quarter of Citizen Kane, which is really more fair in some ways, I'd go with Firefly any day.
If only my high school and college teachers had given advice like this. Instead, we were forced to follow the Edwardian rules of Strunk & White and teachers generally looked down upon any non-standard form of literature, including the science fiction I was reading at the time -- books by Wolfe, Delany, LeGuin and Gibson (this was in the late '80s).

As for the suggestion in the article to follow the voice in your head, I learned to do this by writing extensive travel journals in the 1990s and further developed it through blogging.

I also wonder how the introduction of email has impacted writing. I believe email helped develop my own voice and editing skills -- when I first started using it in the mid-90s, it probably increased my monthly written output as much as 10x (I had written letters in longhand before then). It also exposed me to the written "voices" of friends, colleagues and strangers.
An intro to RequireJS at CinciJS [video]
Incredible stat:

"Facebook is one of the greatest consumer Internet companies of our generation, but for the time being the company is trading at half its IPO price. Groupon and Zynga, also titans of the industry, have been in free-fall since their last earnings call, now down more than 80 percent from their peak. $76 billion in wealth disappeared from those three companies alone — enough to buy every home that sold in Silicon Valley this year nine times over."
I'm sorry, but special casing a variable name like this seems to be something that, in the long term, leads to a messy, overly complex, language and lots of traps for newcomers.

Is there any reason while the Ruby 1.8 behaviour that duplicate variable names are allowed was changed? This seems a much cleaner way of allowing this construct.
It's a neat bit of coding, but is it really easier than just snapping a screenshot and attaching it to an email? I know what I think.....
Agreed but there might be some things that people are free to publish in papers and journals only after the patent is filed.

The trade of still isn't worth it in our industry at least but the secondary benefits should still be considered in weighing the balance (there are some real benefits of patents along with the considerable costs).
Amazon, Ubuntu One Music Web Apps to Come Pre-Installed in Ubuntu 12.10
Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call them “zombie nouns” because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings.

\o/
relevant: http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/09/21/how-are-finnish-star...
I think that programmers frequently adopt a new product, see it is a mess, and burn-out trying to clean up the mess on the first pass.

I think you should start figuring out where it forked from the original code base & generate a diff from that. Then throw a bunch of tools, from Cacti to Xdebug/APC's control panel, to get a good handling of the current benchmarks. Get the code into a SCM (probably git), then start tackling current bugs & feature-requests - BEFORE you start tearing down to the baseboards.

After a month or two of that, you'll see the first pain points. Going after the pain points one at a time, rather than all at once, will keep your client happy and you sane.
No offense, but you hardly sound like an expert to me too. Given your defensive position on fb, I'm going to go ahead and assume you own a few shares of fb (or you are contemplating buying) and it pisses you off to see anyone say anything negative about your psychological position.

Think real hard about why it bothers you when a stranger says negative things about fb. Be careful about closing yourself off to those who take opposing positions. Egos will want to remain consistent with past choices, but the world evolves and changes constantly.

Shut off the ego and shut off the emotions. Listen to others opinions then go and do what you feel is right. Opinions are water under the bridge.

You shouldn't be tiring of any opinions if you are a serious investor. Many analysts have fb pegged at near $15. If they are all wrong, then you don't have to try to convince others that everyone is wrong, just go into the market and buy as much stock as possible and just wait for the efficiency of the market to catch up. FREE MONEY...if you're right :)
So everybody agreed this was a good idea and that the road was necessary, yet nobody bothered to help this guy? He's a very self-driven guy.
It also happens to be considered lower in the general public than the numbers actually demonstrate: out of only hundreds of millions of total devices sold, there are tens of millions out there that are jailbroken.

Even then, you may consider that a "low percentage, certainly nowhere near a majority", but that is still "a lot of people": no one is claiming most people want it different (although if it were easy? dunno).
Using lambdas in Java 8 looks pretty much exactly like your example.

The line you quote from the article is about a proposed way of declaring lambda types, where instead of

private Foo MyMethod(string str, Func<Bar, string, int> func) {
//...
}

you could write something like

private Foo MyMethod(string str, (string,int)->Bar func) {
//...
}
BS maps issue? It's comforting to know that the fundamental uselessness of this app to me is, apparently, just a figment of my imagination.

This whole thing pisses me off. People can't just be content to say that it works for them. They have to declare that the problem doesn't even exist, and all of us who are actually experiencing it are somehow wrong. How do you even get the idea to do that?
Marijuana Can Prevent the Spread of Cancer, Researchers Discover
AeroFS - Dropbox, but without the cloud. It's all kept locally.
Yes, why old news make front page? I guess not everyone is aware of it yet.
The eclosion of an IaaS CSB “cool vendor” – A Tapp update
She said that the publisher did the right thing.
The eclosion of an IaaS CSB "cool vendor" - A Tapp update
Just out of curiosity, why do you think checked exceptions are bad?
Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I had a hacked FTP client a few months ago, and it compromised all my sites. I thought I fixed it, but sometimes it it adds something in the header.

I don't see it on my end for now, but let's try figuring this out.
The trouble here is that, from a user's perspective, this isn't a launch. It's version 6.0 of a product, by which we expect the kinks to be thoroughly worked out.

By replacing Maps with something new that was presented as just an upgrade, they put themselves in a really tough spot that they don't normally do.
does Google have customer service?
My ex goes under 3 first names. Her legal name is an African name that few people in the UK can pronounce. Two largely non-overlapping sets of her friends call her by two different English names that are "close" to her legal name. Only some people in her family usually call her by her legal name.

Which is her "real" name? Most people use one of the English names. She responds the same to all three.

If she had to use her legal name everywhere, most of her friends would be unable to find her, as few of them even know her legal name. What makes her legal name more or less "real" than the others (which are used more, by more people)? Why?
So it is. Doh, I just spent 15 minutes tracking it down (and I didn't quite get it right - there's another cutting through the same ridge a bit south west which I guess is newer). Here [1] is a 3D diagram in a video (not English) about it, with the nearest town labelled Vazirganj. It's Wazirganj on Google maps, south of the cutting, so Gahlour must be the small village to the north west.

[1] http://youtu.be/3E84EIKlY4g?t=3m8s
Comparing Haskell Templating Languages: Heist and Hamlet
This is one of the major reason for mandatory wealth redistribution (= taxes etc.). It makes poor people significantly better at the expense of making rich people slightly worse off. The society as a whole benefits from this.
What the hell... I'll never use Ubuntu again. Or well, at least not for a while, even after it's removed. They call this "free software"?
you are doomed. flee.
Time to call it: Jumped the shark.

Is there anything more "anti-social" they could have done? Betrayal. Or... maybe they're just trying to make it more realistically social?

Seriously, it's another instance of not listening to your users. Strong-arming only works as long as you are strong...
>Why is mobile monetization so difficult? Seems like a company that can monetize the desktop experience can do mobile too.

From the article: The paradigm shift to the app model is unequivocally bad for Facebook, [...] Facebook is designed to be open all the time, to be visited in the gaps of the day or as a platform in its own right, bridging to a variety of activities related to the social network. [...] Why use Facebook to play a game, read an article, manage your photos, stream music, or shop, [...] when you can select a specialized app directly.
O Cmn...just take some money instead. I can shell out a few dollars.
I would start by spending a week or two wrapping the application in Acceptance tests (cucumber/capybara) just so when you do make a change you are able to quickly find out to a semi decent level of confidence things are ok.

I would also recommend Working Effectively with Legacy Code By Robert C. Martin.

Good luck!
An astoundingly high percentage of people would be unable to snap a screenshot and attach it. Let alone highlight the issue and black out anything sensitive.

Doing it within the app also gives you a lot more detail (who the user is, where they were accessing, what browser they were using, their OS, any client side exceptions, their exact actions, etc etc) without needing to rely on the user to provide it.
+1 for this. The first job is to stabilise the system by fixing critical bugs.

As you're doing so, move all those queries into one big fat DB class, and when you spot groups of related queries, split them out into their own classes.

The next priority should be to get rid of the PHP from the DB - if need be create another huge class with a zillion if-else statements.

You need to modify the code to simplify it. You don't need to improve the design, you just need to dumb it down until you can understand where all the parts are. Stabilise, simplify, then refactor.
First, shame on you and yours for asking people to rat on other people. Do you understand what could happen in the real world?

Next, I am a little sick of this "real name" business since Facebook and Google get it so wrong. I will give a couple of examples.

I grew up on a reservation in the US. Several of my friends have been given "Indian Names". Is that their real name or would Google / Facebook say that it's not valid because it is not a state issued ID. Is Google/Facebook combing the cultures of the world to pick out what they believe?

I do sysadmin work. Several people are named the same as parents / grandparents, but are known by other names. I use what people call them for their accounts not their official id. I would say I am right and have a better grasp of what their name is then someone who only uses official ID. Heck, would Google/Facebook take a tribal ID?

The cases of people trying to get away from a bad situation where Facebook / Google basically provides a target, not a safe place, are too numerous to iterate.

It isn't about the people using Facebook / Google. It is about your customers: the advertisers.
The idea is that if you reuse a formal parameter name and have not used _, then you more than likely introduced a subtle bug. For example x and y can look similar enough next to each other, so missing that you instead wrote `x, x` might take you way longer than necessary.
Looks more like a tax on the average user. Apparently they are trivial to remove:

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
Khan Academy-style intro videos on Machine Learning
A noble sentiment, but until it can be proven with solid evidence that such a thing is possible, it would be dangerous and irresponsible to force such an experiment upon people.

History is rife with examples of people imposing what they just KNEW was right upon others, with disastrous consequences.
Are you kidding me? It's SO much easier and captures far more useful debugging data. How many typical computer users do you know who can submit as detailed of a bug report without Google Feedback vs. with it?

Hint: if you think a "typical computer user" knows how to take a screenshot without looking it up, you're ridiculously out-of-touch.
Still on 10.04, suppose I'll stay here a while.

ps- Aadvertising Aardvark? Commercial Coelacanth?
Do you currently? Because I think there are already (12.04) some links to Amazon Instant videos in Unity by default.
So the cold reality for this client is that the codebase will have to be replaced over time. You are not trying to escape legacy simply for the lure of something new, you are trying to escape insanity.

I would talk to the client about focusing your effort on helping them transition--a small piece at time--to a sane architecture. If they aren't open to that, they aren't your client. I've been a business leader in a position where we had to make really tough and painful decisions about coding projects gone awry. I don't envy their position, but continuing forward with this monster does not seem to be in the long-term interests of the company.
Do things become more real if you say real in capital letters?
Your comment has made me wonder: does learning how to manipulate better require (or help you to) learn how to empathise better, strange as that may sound? Are better manipulators also good empathisers? I'd never thought about that possible connection before.
The laws about these things are there because at least some employers do want to find out these things. Some of those employers would love a more innocent-sounding way of finding out those details exactly to reduce the chance that the candidate will think they have grounds to sue.
I can't believe it... At last! I was dreaming about something like this for so long! Hm, probably since the time I played Planescape: Torment and fell in love with Annah, but it's possible it's even older dream of mine :)

I don't particularly like the design but hey, it can only get better! :D
Here's a discussion about how the screenshot functionality works (which is the part that I think everyone here is impressed with).

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4912092/using-html5-canva...

tl;dr JavaScript can read the DOM and render a fairly accurate representation of that using canvas
"I am conjecturing that there are minimal benefits to an exchange to having more than one Market maker at a given stock within a given price range."

Could you perhaps explain the downside of having multiple market makers per stock? It seems trivial to state that competition in providing liquidity alters the cost of said liquidity and disprove your contention - but why bother to make that argument when there can't really be additional costs by multiple parties competing to offer a service?
Used car dealers presumably have that reputation because they still manage to fool people, otherwise the immoral ones would quickly go out of business. Part of the skill is to manage to convince people that things are different with you and them.
Something being open != you cannot make money with it. This notion is stupid, false and dishonest.

Besides, I don't think companies have a "right to make money", anyways. That
would lead to government enforced business models and the utter insanity to which
this leads can currently be observed in the copyright industries and their
ongoing fight against free speech.
It might be easier for you, and for lots of other HN readers too, but what about all the other people in the world? People who when they hear the word "code" think vertically scrolling green letters on the screen.
It will be interesting to know why Amazon was the choice.
جلبريك 6
Fedora is looking pretty tasty right now
But what do you have to do with that? Is it maintenance? Do you need to fix bugs?

If it's maintenance/bug fix, I'd suggest starting by writing tests and fixing things on a day to day basis.

So, for all small tasks that you'll have to do with the code base, just analyse the safest way to tweak it. Most often than not, you'll see that it's just changing a couple lines. If you need to add new features, just code them correctly in another part of the program.

And before you know, you'll understand the code-base. But, tests are really the most important thing here. Don't try to refactor if you can't make sure you're not breaking everything.
Perhaps even applaud "slow" in the sense of longterm as a movement. It applies to not only "startups."

Joel Spolsky wrote a great article about this in 2009 that also had an active discussion here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920668

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-...
Walks And Walking - The Wales Coast Path With Saga Walking Holidays
CANT MAKE MONEY ON FREE AS IN 0$ PEOPLE...the lights don't keep themselves on (at least not yet).
I can live with this (or uninstall it) but will they fix my audio? It had been fine after about 8.04, but has been broken by every update that included Unity by default.
>Antenna gate wasn't real? I can reproduce the antenna fault with a significant drop in signal strength with one pinkie.
I classify that as a major fault. For a premium product, that's unacceptable.

Really? Because tens (hundreds) of millions of people found it _totally acceptable_ and made that phone the top selling phone.

Not to mention that they found that the "issue" was a non issue in practice.
Honestly, if Ubuntu dropped their ridiculous, underdeveloped, undersupported Ubuntu One services and partnered with Amazon to integrate theirs (Cloud Player/Cloud Drive/etc), that would be a MAJOR improvement for both them and the end-user. Excellent cross-platform cloud services and marketplaces integrated with the OS would be great for bringing less-technical users to the platform in the wake of the proposed "Windows 8 exodus" (if it actually happens).

Instead, they're using... basically affiliate links. Instead of a real monetization strategy involving a real partnership, they're using the "blogger who just realized he could make money off of this thing" strategy.
Or you can just

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

It's that easy.
It's so beefy...
agreed - wish someone would have built a public works project around him, and built that road in a year instead of his entire life...
Couldn't agree more. PG's definition of "startup" aside, there are plenty of high growth businesses that started at a measured pace, with little or no outside capital, found a market sweet spot, then scaled rapidly (usually with later stage capital)... Maybe they're not startups, but they are highly successful businesses with high impact and wealthy founders. Not easy to do, but perhaps at least as likely to succeed as a classically defined startup (whether tech or non-tech).
What is most important is what are you trying to achieve. Are you trying to make the system as stable as possible at the lowest cost to the client or are you trying to bring this system into a future proof state and the client is willing to pay for that?

Personally if I were in your position I would explain to the client that I'm happy to temporarily fix some bugs but long term the system needs to be rewritten. 700k lines of code is a lot, but the way you've described it I get the feeling most of that code is needless. Depending on what the system actually does you could conceivably rebuild in a few months.
Hawking Proposes Lunar Super Computer
Show HN: Web client for WhatsApp
What Can You Learn from Churn
P/E ratio is never irrelevant. I said soon after the IPO that FB will go down to $10 and I have not seen anything yet to change my mind.