skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>In my opinion, it feels like we are fishing with a bigger net, but we aren't fishing any deeper now than we were 3 years ago.

Well, who's fault is that? Pick a perspective and follow it deeply, write about it, and fish deeper. All it requires is commitment.

You could certainly pick a worse position that the OP's! Data is far more important than code - although I fear that this point is obscured by the "web service" trend that tends to spread data across many legal/economic/technical 'zones of control'.

Anyway, I hope that rather than just lament the state of things, that you take action to change it, at least for yourself.
yeah, i was always very curious on the local activity type of businesses, but while i wished more individuals would start offering activities, i guess nobody really felt they were up par with what was expected from someone offering local experiences professionally... so it stuck with professional tour guides and such mostly, i'd assume?

but i believe that these local cooking classes in barcelona and such things are going to take over more and more of vacation planning.
> Clojure does not have these issues: when the macro is called, the symbols are already attributed with the full namespace qualification, and usage of quasi-quote inside of the macro definition will also apply namespace qualification to variables local to the definition of the macro; you have to go out of your way to break this.

Again, not a Clojure expert, but a namespace is coarser-grained than individual local scopes, right? The problem I'm talking about is when you have a local variable inside a nested scope (e.g. inside a `let`). If this is not named by a namespace, then you would still get collisions.

Regardless, Clojure's approach seems to be much closer in spirit to a hygienic macro system: it attempts to get scoping correct by default, and allows you to intentionally capture.

> You should spend more time looking into it before claiming to people that it doesn't work correctly; you could easily have just said "that's a good question, we'll look into that after the talk" rather than telling the person that Clojure wasn't as good.

Fair enough as far as it goes. I did react snappily, but you didn't hear the offline conversation (this whole thing was a dialog at my office with a friend and colleague, incidentally) where I said "I'm not entirely sure, but I believe there are things you just can't express with systems like Clojure's." And we concluded, just as you reprimanded me to do, that we should look into it further when we have time.

Dave
I see a program as a theory, a theory of the problem it solves. You can see how well it generalises, if it is needlessly complicated (Occam)... and in some magical moments, you'll find it predicting phenomena you hadn't explicitly anticipated.

So I think a program's conceptualisation of a problem is the most important thing - more important than data structures or code. Though, data structures are usually closer to it, by representing the concepts you model.

However, it's really hard to get these things right. Linus created both his great successes (linux and git) after experience with similar systems (unix/minix and bitkeeper). Being able to play with an implementation, experience its strengths and weaknesses, gives you a concrete base to use, reason with, push against, and come up with new insights - it's enormously helpful in seeing the problem.

But that's a grand vision - I wonder if Linus is also talking about programming in the small, each step of the way, as a low-level pragmatic guide. I don't like git's interface or docs much, but the concepts are great, it is implemented really well, very few bugs, and even on ancient hardware boy is it fast.
Ugh. I am getting some serious "when I ask for advice I mean tell me how great this will be" vibes from this thread.
Firebird Driver 0.7.2 for Rails 3.x is released
Related: I took a late (~11 pm) transbay bus home a few nights ago (San Francisco to Berkeley), and in between some stops, the bus driver started scream, "Put y' phones up! Put y' phones away! Turn 'em off and put 'em away!" and then repeated that several times.

The passengers and I looked at each other like "WTF?" (Is this a plane now?) but since she seemed rather adamant, and wasn't going to go on to the next stop until we complied, we all put our phones away. Then the driver said, "I'm just trying to warn you here, people outside can see you on y' phones, you has to watch out."

Then, at the stop, some teens got on that looked sort of sketchy, and it occurred to me, "The driver was trying to warn us not to show our smartphones because she thought the people at the next stop would try to steal them."

Of course, I still thought it was overkill because the kids didn't look nearly dangerous enough for me to worry about my safety or possessions (though they did flout the bus rules), and there were enough people on the bus that a criminal wouldn't want to try anything, but it got me to think about a risk that I hadn't before.
I found "The slow student’s despair" truly uplifting. It applies to so much. I'd love to read the original Koan (Koans?) it was modeled after.
Open Source Movie Data API
Well, let's say I decide to have two copies of an important number in my program. Now in various places in code I need to update that number. In every place I now need to do the update twice. Also, some of my code needs to read the number when it changes. I could go ahead and just call all of the routines that need to fire when I change the number.

Or I can decompose my application so that I maintain only one number, and modify the update mechanism to support firing off routines when it updates.

So, we went from two numbers, to one number and a lookup table (the table that tracks which routines need to fire). And the code will be vastly simpler in the second case.

(This is probably not the best example - there are probably some nice database normalization problems that highlight the benefits of good data structures a lot better).
Absolutely spot-on.

And the point is that there is nothing wrong with commercializing your file search system ... once it works, TO THE DEGREE THAT IT WORKS.

If you are only lightly searching local files, then sending the user to a paid ad is bunk. If you know you've heavily searched the local drive and given some easy result too, then adding a paid ad would acceptable, maybe even useful. Look at Google, you've got a good example to follow. People don't hate Google but they'll hate this crap. OK?
Riffwave.js test to create sounds using javascript
A step towards total autopilot
One Week Left in the MIT Challenge
What are you shutting down? Twentypeople.com
Hi thurn, you can absolutely run the same contest. We just had a school contact us about running a contest to fly 50 students across the world; they'll run that themselves. If you have a particularly cool contest, let us know and we can help generate interest and maybe even run it for you as a showcase contest.
I've seen it, but usually they are some brand of crazy.
Weekend Edition: Where do we Go Now? [Announcing the Money Mustache Foundation]
Ask yourself a simple question about web 2.0 engineers. Are gold diggers the paragon of quality motivated engineers.
i find it easier to challenge those with negative opinions and prefer when they take time to follow up. this is by far the most helpful stuff here. i take it from your comment history you're a critical person, which i'd definitely value if you added a tiny bit of what you actually thought about the idea. still curious.
That's supernice!

You may want to fix the links in the readme though.
It looks great, but I noticed that the black outline animation lags heavily behind the rest, which makes the site feel incredibly sluggish, even though it's probably only just the one animation that ruins the perception.

Great job all in all.
There are some easier ways to attain a lot of FF miles. We moving to award flights next, them mileage runs, soon followed by contests to help you earn the most FF miles. Stay tuned.
What's with the `?tag=codihorr-20` at the end of the Amazon link?
I have tried various distro's in past few months. Ubuntu seems to be the only one with some vision. It is not perfect and it is not the best but it does give you sense of using a comprehensive operating system.

Other than that - people just like to hate. There is no solution to it.
Yes, but not until next year some point: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/12/apple-spokesperson-confi...
Does this unit come with the 4 tons of coolant? According to your link, the fluorinert itself is worth over a million dollars already.
Forgive me for being glib, but this seems like a lot of words to simply say "You can't implement it because, well... you just can't!"
I agree with going versionless (though I can see the case for it also depending on how the API is intended to be used).

Get rid of .json? Make it optional sure, but allow it if the client wants to be specific. Seems like a good feature in that sense (optional with a good default).

I agree that search should not be a resource, but perhaps a parameter for filtering in addition to explicitly named param filters.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on it.
Fourth option: Silicon Valley companies are more likely to do thing that have a broad impact.

I've worked with genius level people in environments varying from Welfare departments to IBM to industrial companies. Their genius is a big deal to steel production or food stamp printing, which are important things, but not sexy & important.
Apple's HTTP POST caching is a bug
This is the first time I've clicked on a StackExchange thread and not seen "closed - not a real question".
this is not exactly news... there are fft methods which are even better for very large numbers and karatsuba is adequate for the most common ranges.
By the same principle, you can't laugh about war, criminals, etc.
Of course to really beat all the other people at the price margin and still make plus is a skill not everybody has. cheap is a value like any other, too.

That said, most people do it wrong, when they attempt to do it cheaper. This might make a false impression about that pricing is the problem, were actually the people doing it, are what's wrong.
Yeah, me too with respect to laughter.

On the other hand, the FBI and NSA aren't full of total idiots. They must realize that centralized solutions have these huge problems. Do they believe they can secure against the potential universal data breeches, or do they have some overriding ulterior motive that allows them to accept the risk?
just adding a little comment myself here: the only thing that worries me a bit is the lack of major services offering this already, there probably is a reason... so far, people suggested:

[mingle: close, but not tied to a certain timing/travel aspect]

[vayable: focused on activities, like gidsy]

[gidsy: focused on activities, like vayable]

[letslunch: very close, focused on lunch]

[eatwithalocal.socialgo.com: close, but focused on lunch]
As a new programmer I know I should ship a lot faster than I do, but focussing on data structures makes me really slow. I can usually jump a hurdle with a hack on my extant structures, but this introduces code complexity and leaves me at square one when a similar hurdle appears elsewhere. I try to be disciplined about fixing stuff at a data structure level, but changes there set off change propagations throughout the code. Or I introduce hacks into the data structures, which then become convoluted and start acquiring code of their own.

I find unit testing does help with all this. It forces exposure of the data stuctures, essentially documenting them. And good coverage gives a list of breakages and sometimes helps find elegant repairs. But I also find myself wanting high level-tests, I guess essentially integration tests, that check not components but overall behavior, and I find writing and maintaining these becomes a real problem.

But I really, really wish I had better tools / procedures for thinking through the problems and designing a proper data model for solving them.
Expanding the final example: say I currently give 20 students As, 15 of them score me at 1.05, 5 of them are so happy to get As they score me at 1.65. I give my 80 other students Fs, and they score me at 1.0. Then on average my A students will score me at 1.2, and my F students will score me at 1.0, and my score for the whole class will be 1.04. But suppose I were to give 10 more F students As, and they would also be so happy that they'd also score me at 1.65. By doing so, I'd increase my average score from 1.04 to 1.105---for all we've been told, that may be several standard deviations across other teachers, and may translate to substantially higher salary and job security for me.
Chicago Fed Study Blasts the Lid Off of High Frequency Trading
Yes. See "The Athens Affair": http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair

Also note the persitent rumors that the FBI's own DCS-3000/DCS-6000 gets 0wned all the time, and used for nefarious/hilarious purposes.
This is quite funny geeky trick, but with no real use. Except spamming google analytics users.
CL procedure auditing: The work I did was as an oversight tool internal to UHN -- we implemented a handheld tool to allow roaming nurses to audit practice adherence for many high infection risk procedures, including those related to central line insertion and maintenance. Our work was based on the guidelines set by http://www.saferhealthcarenow.ca/EN/Interventions/CLI/Pages/... . I left the group while the intervention was in progress, so I'm not aware of any specific publications.

Hand washing: I didn't work in this area directly -- many of my colleagues did, however. The principal output of their work was the Human Factors Hand Hygiene Toolkit at http://www.handhygiene.ca/English/Tools/Pages/Human-Factors-...

Positive patient ID: The PPID work that I've been exposed to was targeted at in-hospital evaluations of various vendor systems; I'm not aware of it having been published externally. If you're interested I can follow up with members of the team who worked on this to see if anything public came out of it.

Medication errors:
Lots of work here. Presented link-list style:
http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=20724398
http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=22103759
http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=20427310
http://www.patientsafetyinstitute.ca/English/research/cpsiRe...
don't worry - apple can't fundamentally change the industry... i think the precedents they are setting are mostly worthless and the fact that they are allowed to get away with this kind of behaviour is only temporary. people are both smart and intolerant - it won't be tolerated for too long before apple find themselves being punished for being dicks about this...
I don't know whether Verizon has confirmed this will not happen with the iPhone5, but as one report I read described, they have in the past shipped unlocked handsets that were subsequently locked down by an update. (Sorry, I don't recall the details and don't have the URL at hand.)

So... I'd confirm that the unlocked GSM setting will persist, before committing my money on the basis of its being present.
> I took a look at the code of reddit, which (even though I’m not a python developer) struck me with some really odd stuff (won’t go into details).

Please, please go into details on this because it is actually a code base that we can all look at and review.
#iLost
> And I lost iPhoto. Because suddenly my Macbook Air stopped being eligible for free iPhoto.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2604

iPhoto is part of the iLife package, a paid product. It is not part of OS X, but when you get a new Mac the latest version is thrown in for free.

Maybe I've gone through too many OS X installations in my time but this neither surprises nor frustrates me in any way...
don't work really - some guidance on use might be acceptable. does it need to be a whole program? my snippets give confusing errors about variable identifiers not being types o_0
if you have a billion dollar idea or even a million dollar idea, you shouldn't worry about "burning" contacts. You'll have plenty of other people to test with.

If people have enough of a pain point, they'll happily use a google doc. Look at Craigslist. It's god-farking-awful (worse than a google doc), but people still use it to find apartments...

Let me ask you a question. What is the number one thing you need to test to prove the viability of this idea?
I agree with most of your points. You might reconsider your idea about open source = $0, though. You don't want code, you want your computers to do something that adds value to your company. So beside the code, you still need people who understand the code and who understand the problem. And you need to configure the software to mathc your context. That doesn't come for free. It's actually so expensive that a lot of companies rather bet on closed source products with support then on open source + learning it themself, and they are right to do so. That's why most open source products actually have companies around them that sell just the know how and support.

The lesson here can be even taken further. Most things that look like $0 actually have hidden costs. Nothing's free in this world.
Fokus - new UI concept that emphasizes text-selection
The big differences I've seen between Google and iOS Maps are in the data-cleanup aspect, not the technical aspect. That doesn't take top tech talent, it just takes a lot of man hours (or truly spectacular tech talent to come up with algorithms that don't need the cleanup, but Google isn't there yet themselves).
So this is like serendipitous-travel-networking.

This seems like a small market to me. Even if you got it off the ground it would be difficult to charge for it.

How about removing the travel aspect, and just start a serendipitous-networking service? People sign up with their LinkedIn's and/or Facebooks, and you connect people who would benefit from knowing each other.

This seems like a better idea, but still not a great one. Monetization will likely be difficult.
He's dissing OO there.
Spotlight is not local search only, including links to Wikipedia and for web searches (and even recently viewed pages).
Governments are the equilibrium that comes from the reality that people will do anything, including violence, to get what they want and everyone will always have unmet desires. Wars are a disturbance in that equilibrium. I think what will eventually make governments behave better is a free market in governments and ease of movement. You basically want the entire world to be so interdependent on each other that the incentive for war is far worse than the incentive for business. It would be horrible for China to attack the USA at this point for example.

You point out yourself that the US government is a vote collecting machine, which is how the incentive system was created in the first place. The entire money system is a social contact that organizes human behavior for example. Creating social contacts that people will follow to organize humanity is very difficult.
Note that open-source isn't always a shoo-in for the lowest cost solution.

For any significant software investment the total cost involves: initial purchase price; hardware; installation and (data) migration; integration with existing (or new) systems; ongoing support and maintenance; training and retraining.

In a lot of cases the latter dominate the initial cost.
The whole structure behind a lot of companies that he criticizes is that there's a small team building big stuff. In that environment, developers need to take on multiple roles and work on projects unlike anything they've worked on in the past. So I think you're absolutely correct, the first facebook api was not written by someone who had done a lot of api design. And I'd bet a lot of these other cases are similar. The best devs will still struggle a bit with projects that are unlike anything they've ever done before.

I'd also say that having the best technical talent is not a prerequisite for building the coolest or most popular stuff. The author assumes it is, which is a major flaw. There are a ton of other factors that leave you with a successful product.

That being said, leaving passwords in plain text is just plain stupid.
wow, thanks for looking it up. so, in a nutshell: i hate how recruiters make 5 grand a hire and employers constantly struggle to find talent. so i built a site that focused on being hired/hire through your skill graph. i hate job boards, i hate monster, i hate recruiter fees - guess what, after a while, i had to add a job board, and i offered recruiting services and i made 5k a pop. the site itself produced over 2k active users, but that was it. companies asked me to charge for job board listings, not for my self-recruiting credits.

i just couldn't disrupt an industry that keeps using advertising little entries in long lists and making lots of cash with it. as well as recruiters, like real estate agents, another industry that needs to be redone on the social web better.

i started fruij.com as a side/weekend project and people came in from everywhere, i had no plan, no direction, no marketing, but it kept making me money. people just bought pro accounts without me telling them why it's important to have one. they just flocked to it. so that was a bit of an eye opener.
Yes, it's unreasonable. Asking to make a TCP/IP/SMTP communication traceable in the same sense as a land-line is traceable ignores the underlying technology. It's like trying to schedule automobile rides the same way that steam-engine trains got scheduled in 1905. I suppose that a very powerful, very organized agency could accomplish such scheduling, but at a very large cost, and by making automobile rides far less convenient and efficient.
A speaker at a Founders Institute event, his name escapes me, spoke about his experience starting this very business. The problem he encountered was that at events, or any social gathering, there was typically a small percentage of people in attendance, call them the stars, that everyone else wanted to meet. But the stars only wanted to meet other stars, meaning the demand is not evenly distributed across would-be users. So, if you are to go ahead with it, I suggest you consider how to overcome this issue.
As pissed off as I am about Apple right now, I am going off topic in another direction:

I understand that the USA is a huge market, but it seems like the rest of the world is catching up in a lot of ways (centers of excellence in science and R&D in the Orient, India, and Europe; also: so-called 3rd world countries getting larger highly educated and motivated workers; growing affluence in previously 3rd world countries == they become better customers).

Apple has not been doing as well patent trolling outside of the USA.

When I explain the Apple patent problem to non-technical family and friends I usually couch it by describing how we in the USA are losing our tech edge and Apple's behavior will help speed up our decline relative to the rest of the world. In other words, don't be proud of Apple as a USA company, but rather understand how their actions will hurt our country.

On a more positive note: I now view myself more as a citizen of the world rather than a citizen particular tax jurisdiction, like the USA. I believe that open source technology and products based on open source and open standards will eventually win out. The world should be a level playing field, and people and companies should prosper based on the quality of their work, skills, and general productivity. A lot of people I know believe that our world history has entered a phase of continuous, never ending series of wars that make the world's elite even wealthier. Contrary to that, I believe/hope that there will be enough people (and yes, even corporations) that do the right thing and probably things will turn out well for more people around the world.

Sorry for the off topic rant.