skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slim defaults to ugly-mode: https://github.com/stonean/slim/blob/ae14457c596c963144810ce...

Haml uses pretty-mode in development and ugly-mode in production.
If nothing else, AP classes tend to be far more challenging than their regular-track equivalents. I took mostly AP courses in high school but I had a few peeks into the curriculum of the normal courses. I'd have pulled my hair out in boredom if I was in those classes.
I'm not entirely sure if I agree, in my experience. For my courses in AP Chem, Phys, Calc AB, BC, Compsci A, AB, and Stats, my courses in high school were good enough that I understood 90+% of what was learned in the intro classes at my uni to the point where I was easily able to tutor for beer money without issue. The one caveat is that my HS didn't put a serious focus on labs so when I got to uni, I was required to take my intro Chem and Phys labs. It would be nice if labs took a more significant role in AP courses as labs are precisely where we see the experimental justification for the facts that we learned.

For my AP humanities courses (APUSH, WHAP, APEng III, IV, etc), I'd tend to agree with the author in that those courses were largely a hurried survey with lots of busy work and perhaps not on par with what I could have take at my uni. This concern was ancillary to me as I went into university knowing that I wanted to double major in physics and mathematics so being essentially exempt from my humanities core allowed me to take 18 upper division math courses and 19 upper division physics.

I guess my conclusion is that the AP programme is good when used with an ultimately end goal in mind and, in a lot of cases, provides near identical treatment of materials, especially in the hard sciences.
Met een aangepaste voeding kun je pijnlijke aften voorkomen |
Brian Goetz opens JAX London with ‘The Road to Lambda’
True, buts its a good consolidation/confirmation of what public information there is known about Google's datacenters.
There are hacks and then there are crutches.
R at 12,000 Cores: Programming with Big Data in R Project
Hot Deploy Still Hell
High-Speed Trading Executives Shut Firm
It violates the "I don't need to look inside comments for sources of bugs" rule I'm quite fond of.

I've defended PHP for some time now, but this is getting ridiculous.

Isn't PHP embedded inside markup? Wouldn't it be simpler to do something like:

?>
< ... XML GOES HERE ... >
<?php

and not violate any expectations?
Wow, I didn't know about those RFCs to make annotations a part of the language. Thanks for posting.
Again, you're smart enough to know what 'normal' is. 'Normal' is cost of living raises, continued employer provided healthcare (which goes up in price every year), and ~~5% cost inflation for any organization that employs people. States have been cutting relative to that.

The crappy part is that a huge % of the rollover cost is healthcare, so it's not even going to their employees.
RedBull’s Stratos Stunt - Where RedBull failed to Capitalise
A few days before this article, a redditor reported a conversation where Elon Musk tells his friend that Dragon is just an appetizer for what he called "Mars Colonial Transport"... MCT?

http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/11bpvi/elon_musk_just...
Ok, tried it. This DOES NOT trigger blue screen on Windows 8 (64bit) / Visual Studio 2012. I'm pretty sure the author has some other problems in his environment.
> The majority of our applications are written in ruby, based on either Ruby on Rails or Sinatra.

> A few components are written in Scala and built on top of Play 2.0

> We’re running Mapit from MySociety which is built on top of Django

Thank god it is not another Drupal based government site!
Landing page looks great! Let me know if you want to compare notes sometime over coffee (SF or NY). Looking forward to seeing the product. All the best!
Reflection as a tool for generic solutions
Agree. Symfony and Doctrine 2 compile annotation to PHP anyway. I'ts much easier to use annotaions than xml or yamls configurations.
"Asserting that AP classes are not equivalent to classes where he went to school is unhelpful. Mr. Tierney fails to mention that he went to Yale, making this anecdote disingenuous at best."

Exactly. Since top tier universities know that in practice, most of their undergraduate intake will have taken AP classes, it no longer makes sense to give credit for them.
XML Processing In Scala
Somewhat related, I recently made a simple type annotation library and checker for Python 3...

https://github.com/williame/obiwan

Static type checking for Python yeah!
Those questions strike me as very basic knowledge. Why would I need to revise constantly to keep that in mind?

And yes, you are right, you can get away without knowing that stuff, and still do awesome work. And you can know all those things, and never get anything done.
I think that quote was made because the writer was confused about what happens during live operation, and what happens during the time when communication was cut.

The host could potentially sniff the traffic during live operation by sniffing the memory of the vm.

But when the vm's communication is cut, the whole disk is encrypted. I expect this encryption to be done using some sort of public/private key encryption scheme, such that without the private key, you can't actually unencrypt the disk. THis is what is meant by gathering data on the user i suspect.
Content Should Communicate its Purpose
I agree. Was it clever? Yes. Would I at least check the website? Yes, I'm curious. Would I do business with him? Probably not.

If I control a the marketing resources of a high profile brand (He mentions Pepsico, so I'm assuming the target is other large companies), I'm not sure I want to be associated with a business that pulls stunts like that.

Part of it would be avoiding guilt by association for being unprofessional. I also wouldn't want backlash if Virools methods turn out to be complete sleaze and something crazy like getting all of my Facebook likes or youtube views reset (viral equivalent of being Panda'd?)
Many of the OPs complains have the tone of "not my PHP!!!".

If old PHP devs learn to look for annotations, points 2 and 4 no longer apply, and many points in 1 no longer apply either.

It sounds more like a PHP dev grumbling about change... (what else is new)
Function hoisting is a good thing.
(Python 3 has function argument and return annotations too)

I've made a static type checker for Python...

https://github.com/williame/obiwan
How a disfunctional button ended up costing me a lot of money
Not necessarily. Several Symfony components rely on doctrine/common simply for parsing annotations, even if you are not using Doctrine for anything else.
it would be a real sad day when the world regresses to such a state - i mean, why did the free world win WWII for then?
Wizdish May Allow Your Living Room To Become A VR Holodeck
Granted, it is natural to want people to hear what you have to say, but I did not think the reason for posting on HN was so you could try to make it to the front page. The blog post could have been titled "How I'm trying to get my submissions to the front page of HN".
The fact that this story went straight to the top suggests that a meta-post about HN is the way to go.
My interpretation of how this one shot right to the top: Hacker News loves posts about itself. :)

Nice analysis - the user engagement stats were very different from what I was expecting (I think I would have agreed with Jake before I saw the data).
Compact Off-Heap Structures and Tuples In Java
No, it contradicts his own title and facts :
When he was in jail, with its regular routines and meals, Tim usually stabilized. But when he was released (...) he destabilized right away

The "humane reforms" may not have been just for the good.
More details in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4662700
I would imagine given their product they have a very write heavy work load and the read load, while non-zero, isn't a major concern. In typical web app environments however, you can definitely increase your "time to sharding" with read slaves and increased caching.
> I'll take the first one because I have other shit I need to do.

Uhh, what's so hard about making an array?
I don't think git can scale, at least not currently, to the extent perforce can. There's two main problems holding it back:

- Storage of database on local drive - the last time I worked with perforce, HEAD alone was 280GB... where would this fit? (there's a presentation about google's use of perforce where they say the metadata alone for their database is >1TB! - so even storing just metadata might not fly)

- As number of people using database increases, chance of needing to store hand-modified binary files (Office, Photoshop, Maya/Max/XSI/etc.) increases, and advantage to storing non-modified binary files (old builds, tools, etc.) increases. (Storing things in shares on people's PCs, or having two systems, or whatever, just ain't great.) Centralized locking is pretty much essential for such files, but, being centralized, it's hard to support with a distributed system...

The former problem could almost certainly be solved. The latter I'm less sure about. Partly for technical reasons, but partly because the idea that binary files shouldn't be version-controlled is, for some people (and I don't know if the git people are of this mind), a point of inviolable principle.
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/streetview/
Dancing with the Spheres
Well, it's the first time that there are photos from inside. There's a bigger gallery here: http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/
I think somehow the MAAFIA is going to manage to get laws passed which will null out any set of words they like in the registry without prior notice. This would mean the end of DNS as we know it i guess. Or stipulate that DNS services reveal those who registered and then can prosecute along those lines.
Low insulin is also a signal.
Keeping Up With the Pregnancy Bell Curve
You don't need to use annotations with Symfony2. You can use yaml or xml configs if you want.

I have a big project written with Symfony2 - not a single annotation to be found.
Two years of Quicklisp
Building your own HTML, CSS, JS Playground
I suspect the NYT/WSJ gap is more a result of WSJ's much more restrictive paywall.
you say the two possible reasons you are not making the front page are: your content is weak, or people's taste's have changed. The fact that the number of submissions has not changed suggest to me a third and more plausible option: The quality of submissions, and therefore the competition for the "front page" has increased.
basically, truly distributed DNS servers, where your domain name->ip maps are shared and voted on iteratively and continuously. Its synonymous with bitcoin in that sense, where the only way to break it is to have control of X% of the computers involved in the entire cluster (and then make X a really high percentage so that it costs prohibitively high to undermine the system).
I know this was tongue in cheek, but:

insulin insensitivity = adult onset diabetes

so be prepared to have some toes or feet amputated (or to maybe just go blind) if you stay up with those donuts.
"Mac application. Please don't make its usage so obvious."

All snarkyness aside, it's interesting how our values shifted from consistency to variety in the last few years.
It kind of depends on which experts position paper you read on it - I point you in the direction of

10.1016/j.actaastro.2012.01.008 (Towards the Artsutanov's dream of the space elevator: The ultimate design of a 35 GPa strong tether thanks to graphene, N.M. Pugno)

For someone that is exploring the materials we will likely use in any attempt at an elevator.

Yes, we can't make the materials today. Like, right now. Or even next month, especially in the quantities needed. But we also can't make the rockets that might make it more accessible. And, more than likely, the first space elevator will be built on the moon, not on earth, which will definitely require heavy lift and would probably be a proving ground for the technology and materials.

So yes, science fiction, but so is pretty much everything else that spaceX wants to do.

They always say the future is just around the corner and in this case they might just be true. Or at least, as you can tell, I hope it to be true.
It's not a terrible analogy. Think if they said that right after the Model T came out.
Run SQL on MongoDB
History of Royal Mail -- interactive experience
Relevance releases Word Magic
If you look at my submission history of my blog then I think it's clear that HN likes things that are original and/or well thought out. My weaker blog posts go nowhere, but ones that are detailed make it. So, if there's a formula for appearing on HN, it's write something original and/or deep.
Article is by a journalist known for trolling and picking viewpoints that provoke people, so this is perhaps par for the course. We are the fools for reading the article and taking the time to respond to it.

If anything, college itself is more of a scam than AP tests, and orders of magnitude more expensive ($89 for an AP test is peanuts). And, statistically speaking, I would be surprised if the author himself was anything better than a mediocre lecturer.
Fair enough. Then it sounds like your problem is really with annotations, and not that much about the in-comment part of this.
Here's a good, valid, technical reason: any meta-programming tool – even a well-designed one – that strips out comments will now change the meaning of your code and silently fail.

If the annotation were instead, say, not inside the comments, then any such tool would either (a) leave the annotation intact, or (b) fail with an error when it encounters the unknown syntax.
I thought maybe incorrectly that a carbon nanotube based material would provide the required strength? But we currently do not have the technology to build it?
7 reasons why Facebook users like a brand
And then hope some people see it before it gets pushed from the "new" page, after which it doesn't matter how original or deep it is.
"Asserting that AP classes are not equivalent to classes where he went to school is unhelpful. Mr. Tierney fails to mention that he went to Yale, making this anecdote disingenuous at best."

I did my first two at a community college. While I don't doubt that you can find some high school courses equivalent to or superior to their college analogues, this is not the prevailing reality.

But such positive outliers have little to nothing to do with the AP brand, and much more to do with the course's teacher. They certainly have nothing to do with AP testing for equivalency credit, which occurs after the fact. AP testing is a shoddy placement tool which frequently and provably tends to overstate students' preparedness for advanced studies.

In STEM fields, anyway. Freshmen distribution survey courses don't do much to prepare you for anything particular, even at Yale.
Ways to Decompose Fat ActiveRecord Models
Horror of typos and Copy-Paste
I fail to see how an array makes debugging say a routing directive easier. The issue is generally incorrect names or values which will not be aided by a backtrace or a var_dump - you know the value in either scenario. You will still have to dive into the parser and understand what it's looking for to resolve your problem or delve into XDebug.

In the situations when knowing the value of something does not help, I do not see why annotations wouldn't be superior.
The story of Taiwan's last sword maker
He even adds human bone to the blade...
I am the author of this piece. I used the same techniques that I talk about in this post until today---but without the slaps. The power is in the pair, having an accountability partner is important. One good tactic is to have two friends plan out joint Pomodoro sessions --- sit down, set a timer for 25 minutes, and ask each other how you did.
I once worked out there were 100:1 visitors to voters for a link.

Most of the people I know who peruse HN regularly are not registered users. They are happy to let others do the commenting (which they read).

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddi...

It was super-surprising to see my own blog getting an average of 55pts on HN; I hadn't wondered about that before.
That article misses the point:

PHP OO is a HORRIBLE IDEA.
if you're doing OO PHP, shoot your other foot right now and go learn PHP before using it java-style.

Why is it that every time somebody on HN explains that a technology is not suitable for a use case, it gets downvoted by fans of said technology ?
I don't understand how. It's a static property because it applies to all object of the class, not an individual object (i.e. an individual object shouldn't be able to change it).

And how is making the property public a bad idea? The configuration system that parses it will need to read the property, no? And a method like getUsername() should be reserved for actually getting the value of that field, not its config.
It's actually not that hard to meet girls, even for nerds. But you need some practice.
I use a combo of recurring reminders, Trello, Evernote, iPhone "Notes", and a text file
> 1. Border router handling inbound traffic, connecting via encrypted VPN to their load balancer in a different country.

To reduce cost this "border router" is probably also running an in-memory cache such as memcached or varnish. So they simply re-created what SuprNova.org did in 2003.

9 years ago this was really novel. SuprNova was the first to introduce a load balancer for both HTML and .torrent hosting.
Very useful analysis. After running Hacker Newsletter for the past 2+ years I have seen basically this. However, the analysis seems to miss looking at things on a smaller scale like the day and time you post it which has proven to be a big factor [1]. I know even on a weekly basis (which is what I do for the newsletter), it seems some weeks have an abundance of high quality articles compared to others.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3251877
My problem with Dart is that it's just not that interesting from a language perspective. TypeScript is somewhat interesting in that it has a very low learning curve for JS devs, so that you can go straight to using ES6 maximally minimal classes and type annotations. The ability to jump straight in makes it worth a look. But Dart... Dart is a different (by similar) language that, therefore, has to be learned like any other language. And I simply have no desire to learn another traditional object oriented language that has all of the same features as other object oriented languages but with a "we do this one small thing better" proposition.

You might say that this is the point, but I have to ask why they didn't just fully commit to GWT instead. If the point is to attract Java developers, that seems like the more logical way to go.
Just make it so, that's it's trivial to get around. (Like the /etc/hosts thing.) Then you instead of spending time thinking of how to get around, you will have to admit what you are doing.
How to Get a VC Meeting – the flowchart
I don't believe this kind of reaction can be solely attributed to socialism. It's endemic among "entitlement" oriented individuals. But the real failure here has little to do with what is fair. The thinking here is badly flawed at many levels.
Computer Viruses Are "Rampant" on Medical Devices in Hospitals
I'd hazard a guess that this was because regular garbage gets incinerated so if someone doesn't shred something sensitive it gets thrown in with the "yucky" garbage and then goes and gets burned instead of being in a bag of nice clean paper.
I graduated from high school in 2004, I took every AP course that my school offered. As an IT major, the English AP courses I took in high school were the most challenging liberal arts courses I have ever taken. Reading 30+ books over the course of the school year and deconstructing numerous schools of thought on all things literature has enabled me to think in ways my university couldn't. I have a better understanding of creativity, communication, and academic work ethic because of those AP courses than I ever could have had without them.
Workforce Considerations for Planning a Cloud Migration
It's all about the illiquid karma ;). No worries.
My guess, and I'm sure someone more knowledgable will chime in, would be efficiencibutton a larger rocket/lift capability-
Defintely with the current 'throwaway' model, where whole rocket costs are ~95%+ cf. fuel; but I believe even with re-usable rockets (as they are aiming for) you have significant cost advantage per kg (or pound if you prefer) from a larger rocket.

So, as I see it, less cost, less launches, less messy construction (larger modules/however the beast turns out)
The fact that it took 3 months to find a place to put 40,000 recycling bins is kind of ridiculous. You'd think they would be made out of a recyclable thermoplastic that could just be shredded and used in another process, but the article makes it sound like they were reused instead of recycled. I wonder what the cost savings (both in dollars and carbon units) is compared to just shredding the things?
Braintree raises a $35M series B
Oh okay. I'd never noticed that because I've always got doctrine in use anyway.
/me wanders off to look more closely at the components.
wordpress this time
I'm surprised to see this in the Atlantic. I expected more from them.
Ask HN: Help Desk outsourcing for small co?
We manage it in-house now and have for years. It works well but there are times when it doesn't work so well. A specific example is when a customer is browsing our site on a Friday afternoon and they want to call/email/chat. When the last person leaves the office, it might be 12-24 hours until someone gets back with the user. We'd like to improve upon this reaction speed without having to hire another employee.

Ideally I'd like something that has chat, phone, and email (tickets) support.

Any suggestions?
The retention rate actually seems relatively low as an absolute percentage, though the way it plateaus is interesting. I did an analysis of the retention of the oldest Slashdot users (http://www.kmjn.org/notes/early_slashdot_users.html), and it was much higher: about 70% after 2 years, rather than 30%. Took about 10 years to drop to 30%. Granted, that's for the earliest users, so retention rates are probably (much?) lower among later signups.
To be fair, Drupal et al. are great for throwing at non-technical users and letting them create their own content.
Long interview with the VC who invested in Deezer, Dailymotion, Clear2Pay,...
Should I be using Slim in all new projects at this point? Or are there any reasons for sticking with Haml?
Data-based posts about how to get to the front page, sure.

But otherwise, I'm not sure it really pays off.
I am not opposed to change--in fact, I welcome it, especially with regard to PHP. Rather, I'm criticizing the use of annotations based on the argument that it is bad application design.
From this student's point of view, pretty much all high school classes (and grade school classes, for that matter) involved some degree of "rigid stultification -- a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry."

When you take a high school class - any high school class - you are required to learn what the teacher wants you to learn the way s/he wants you to learn it. You're giving up "creativity and free inquiry" in both cases. Letting some random teacher rather than the AP board set the curriculum might be a good idea if you've got an unusually good teacher, but it would be a bad idea if you don't. (In fact, if you've got a teacher that good, maybe you should make his curriculum what the AP board test on so more students can benefit from it!)

Caveat: I only took STEM-type AP classes - math/physics/biology/compsci. No humanities.
Fear and Loneliness in China
Hidden "Block" Feature Discovered on Pinterest