skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Linus Torvalds: Make 2560x1600 the new standard laptop resolution
Because software development is not the 100 metres. You could spend weeks on a particularly elusive and obscure bug and change one line of code. While you were doing that, your colleague built 2 new 'oh wow' features, banging out hundreds of lines. There is no standardised measurement for 'performance' that can rank those two achievements objectively, so to assess performance, it comes down to the subjective opinion, motivations and political goals of the 'assessor'.

More to the point, if the subjective performance metric rewards the latter and punishes the former, the net result is more features AND more bugs.

In other words, it's crap wherever it occurs.
Mmmm.... "What would be your dream setup?
I dream of a ARM-based netbook with exceptionally good battery life, an E-ink display, and fully open and non-proprietary hardware. I've put off upgrading for years since this seems such an obvious thing for the market to produce, but the market is fascinated with locked-down tablets instead."
Oh, the irony. Interesting they didn't move to Azure though.
I used to think this too. I was the guy that thought DVDs were unnecessary and that VHS was fine. But then I got a DVD player and of course there was no going back after that. Likewise, when I caved and bought an Air, there was no going back.

I'm not trying to compare Apple products to DVDs (except that I am) but this whole obsession with thinness is another great example of Apple giving us something we didn't know we wanted.

And on another note, which I have zero evidence to support, I'm sure there's a psychological effect of thinner feeling "faster."
Agreed.
I find yahoo especially very noisy, entirely too much going on.
Its not ideal being that finding something specific on the yahoo homepage requires some ctrl+f for the unfamiliar user, but as you said it is functional enough for "parents" to use.
Well not really. I had a vague sense that there are extensions that add typing, but not more. My experiences with Lisp are mostly limited to SICP. Thanks for the link.
Haha. First you have numerous "how I hacked YC application" submissions when there wasn't absolutely any hacking going on there. And now you have responses how you someone doesn't want to hack it.

There's no any kind of hacking going on there, people.

At least this one isn't a shameless plug.
On current consumer devies, performance would be acceptable (30 fps, decent input lag) as long as you used only black and white. Grayscale takes significantly longer to display, though future devices may fix that.
You can actually use these electrical signatures to make meditation a trackable, quantifiable "exercise activity". Just like you log running miles with, say, RunKeeper. Really cool to see more people getting excited about it the science! Disclaimer: cofounder at a startup doing this.
There are also clojure and scala with java integration which are cross platform.
'Starbucks has paid no corporation tax in Britain for the last 3 years'
That's right, I've changed my comment to be more relevant reply, sorry for confusion.

> If you see the compiler forcing you to always use Maybe as an advantage, good for you. Personally, I don't see it as a big deal.

One of reasons I like Maybe is I can accidentally put null somewhere I know I should not; Haskell's type system will prevent me from that. I wouldn't use Maybe unless I really need to - whereas in languages with less strict type systems, almost everything is a 'Maybe'. Besides, it seems it's easier to build some layer on abstraction on it, which you can reuse and save some time (for example, you have monad instance for it - however I don't think I've ever used it).
From the article:
Four US companies – Amazon, Facebook, Google and Starbucks – have paid just £30m tax on sales of £3.1bn over the last four years, according to a Guardian analysis. Apple is estimated to have avoided over £550m in tax on more than £2bn worth of sales in Britain by channelling business through Ireland, while Starbucks has paid no corporation tax in Britain for the last three years.

Shameless and shocking. They should be boycotted by UK citizens until they pay fair taxes.
Miraestedocumental - Home
I made a mistake in referring to a bricks-and-morter store. I should have asked how mail-order catalog companies survived and thrived for decades under the same laws that Zappos and seemingly also you find sufficiently worrisome as to require a special contract in order to avoid.

I recognize the legal principles which you listed, but is it realistic for this case? That is, of the over 100 years of mail-order catalogs in the US, how many such "expensive and uncertain" trials have occurred, how many were won or lost by the company, and what was the overall business cost?

I say this because I believe that the laws are already, and in general, in favor of the company over the consumer.

Let's take this specific lawsuit as the most relevant case. It wasn't, as you wrote, a case of ill-fitting shoes. It was a data security breech where personal information from some 24 million Zappos customers was copied. A customer claims that Zappos did not follow "federal consumer credit laws by failing to protect her personal information." If that was the case, should that customer not have the right to sue?

Note that as this is a federal law, it does not fall under your #2 point, that "Different states have different degrees of legal protection for businesses."

Should it be so easy for a company and customer to enter into a contract via a TOS which waives those federal protections? If so, should we extend that flexibility to other companies? I think the answers are "no" and "no."

This issue deals with risk management, I know. There are other solutions to risk management. For example, data breeches are a known risk, and can be planned for by designing the system to reduce the impact of the risk, by setting aside funds in order to handle litigation which might arise, and by purchasing insurance coverage should those funds prove insufficient. These make operations more expensive for the company, certainly, while a TOS which waives federal data protections is cheap. There should be no way that exorbitant claims - if unfounded! - based on data security issues should have a severe impact on Zappos.

I'm certain that some restaurants would like customers to waive food protection laws in the interests of cheaper food. Is that acceptable via a TOS-like contract agreement between the restaurant owner and the customer? Why should it be common for an online company, like Zappos, to have a TOS which waives certain customer rights?
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> "do you agree with the statement: "If someone remade vim so that you can have variable fonts and some more gui goodness, that would be a good thing"?"

I don't think I would use it. But I'm curious by nature and I would probably try it out anyway, just like I did with all the ST2/Coda/Espresso/Vico/Chocolat/HappyEdit/Whatever that popped up in the last 2 to 3 years.

At some point in the past, I felt limited as a TextMate user and I "needed" a change which I happily found in Vim. The benefits, for me, were/are absolutely huge, but I would switch again if the benefits were comparable. Cosmetic changes are not enough for me obviously and, IMO, the things you propose would a) not provide any noticeable benefit and b) work only in GVim/MacVim which makes no sense at all considering Vim's philosophy.

But putting all of your ideas into a new project… I'd say "Go for it!". Keep in mind, though, that for a lot of Vim users the ability to run Vim in a terminal is absolutely mandatory. A shiny new GUI would be worse than useless.

The "optional" part of your comment is actually very important. Adding all those things as options would take a lot of time and effort and probably a lot of rewriting for… almost nothing.

> "But I think it's odd that you literally find nothing wrong with vim or nothing that can be improved."

I think that the problems you point out are not problems at all and thus, that they don't need fixing. Vim has a bunch of low-level limitations/problems that I would like to see fixed before making it prettier: archaic keypress handling, lack of multithreading, limited RTL support, dumb terminal in the GUI version, wonky and slow syntax engine, poor external interface…

These things are way more important, IMO, than changing the color of the bike shed.

I hated every second I spent in ST2, even more with vintage mode enabled and vintageEx installed. I really don't want Vim to go that direction and, I believe, its author doesn't want that either.
Show HN: The simplest way to archive files forever
Most code is static, but dynamic runtimes make a bunch of things fairly easy that are either hard or impossible with static ones, like introspection and serialization (you can do serialization in a static language, but you can't just slap in a call to JSON.load on a file with complex structure and then access the result the same way as native types), proxy/remote objects, monkey patching (in various forms - raw monkey patching is bad style anyway, but even things like random global callbacks are hard or bad style in most static languages), objects that pretend to be A but are really B (perhaps to avoid changing existing code; perhaps to implement things like "pseudo-string that's an infinite series of As" or "rope" or "list that loads the relevant data from a file when an item is accessed" without having to change all the code to make "string" and "list" typeclasses/interfaces; perhaps for mocking during testing), dynamic loading, REPL (in running code, that gives you the flexibility to change anything you want), ...

The benefits of that kind of stuff are arguable, but I think the net effect is that static languages, even when they save you from having to write out a lot of types, encourage a fairly different style from dynamic languages, which I prefer.

p.s.: you don't need a static type system to use an option type. :)
Oh, you magnificent eejits http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/diesel-bucket-brigade-mai...
Because you can do a local search offline. (at least on the Android version)
If we some how view a "3D Spectrogram of Gamma waves" of people across the globe, then it will have peaks (like Himalayas) in and around Tibet. Everywhere else, there will be Troughs/Valleys.
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Ah, powerpoint presentations where the truth is somewhere between the bullet points. I would have preferred a blog post which gives the author enough breathing space to justify his claims.

Haskell's single biggest problem is that it looks unfamiliar to programmers who are trained in traditional imperative languages. Due to its minimal syntax, its error messages can be confusing to a learner. New languages like Scala and Clojure are packaging many of Haskell's concepts in a more familiar syntax. They are gaining popularity since they actually solve hard problems like concurrency.

In my opinion, startups prefer Ruby because they prefer to start solving the problem right away without worrying too much about its correctness. A classic case of "Worse is better" works for most web applications. Whereas, Haskell requires some thinking into how to best model the solution before you start implementing it. This often leads to more 'correct' code.
Growth and user acquisition
This is my collection of blogs and articles on growth and early stage user acquisition.
It's already the next MySpace...
> isn't any different from checking from nulls everywhere

You would only check for nulls "everywhere" if all functions could potentially return null. Then, indeed, there is no difference. But (hopefully) not all functions will return null, so you'll probably have at most a single-digit percentage of functions that do.

The point is that by using Option, you are explicitly stating "This function can return null", making it impossible for the caller to ignore. If you write it somewhere into the docs, it is indeed easy to overlook.

This may not be as relevant when you are only working with your own code, but I find this (and static typing in general) most helpful when dealing with code from someone else, including the libraries one uses.
Agreed, and I noticed it too, but I'm on the fence on that one.

Given the attention to detail in the design phase, I'd argue the apparent thinness was part of the spec, and since component space leads to a bump, the resulting angle value towards the bump comes from the design+engineering following the spec. From there, the marketing shots could very well follow the actual design and showcase what you will feel of the device most of the time. That is design => marketing, not marketing => design.

Where they dropped the ball is that they could really have put a nice side shot in the gallery. That's where I really expected to find one, and it's not like the thing is thick either so I fail to see the harm.
If a service one once used is retired, open sourcing it is of course the very best outcome. Thanks for that!!!

However (regarding AppEngine based solutions), as far as I know, if AppEngine goes down, there is no way to have any backup, is it? Only google can host AppEngine apps.
And Ubuntu server 12.04 seems to enable this by default without access limit -

sudo a2dismod status

helps to disable it.
If you really want AXFR check out Route53d http://code.google.com/p/route53d/. Acts as an AXFR to route53 API proxy. The route 53 sample code also has import/export to bind zone file format.
To me it seems that the point on serialization is completely moot in languages like Haskell(what we are talking about), serialization may be hard(er) to do in a language like Java or C++ where we have a rooted type hierarchy and we can't easily add new functionality, or do type based dispatch. Haskell's type classes allow us the freedom to define new kinds of functionality on top of existing types easily. You can look at libraries like Aeson, which allows serialization and deserialization from JSON with just a few lines of code. The biggest problem is that people's view is strapped to this old dynamic Lisp vs. C kind of paradigm that doesn't exist in modern functional languages.
"if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO."

I disagree. I just joined recently and that is exactly how I've used SO and in every instane I've gotten an answer to my question - and fast. Very fast.
Kickstarter launches in the UK with hundreds of new projects ready for funding
Why traditional marketing is failing
you have to say the whole line (including the 'if a woodchuck could chuck would' piece)
I like dynamic typing for short scripts, but after working in Fortune 500 projects, I got to love static typing.

Projects with 50+ developers using dynamic languages become unmanageable after a few months of development time, even with unit tests.

Nowadays I rather advocate static typing languages with type inference. Most use cases where dynamic behavior is handy can be handled with reflection or meta-programming.
There are some interesting statistics on the Wikipedia page [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa
Man, I thought I clicked on the contemporary HN titled "The Web is a Mess". Web development needs a real framework so badly right now.
Hence my analogy to a winter coat. During summer in many parts of the world, one does not need clothing as protection against the elements. As the most obvious example, people at a nudist beach survive the entire day without clothing.

It's only when the weather is bad where one needs clothing as protection.

Under this analogy, are business conditions in the US so bad that online stores need "clothing", in the form of special TOS which waive certain consumer protections otherwise available to customers of physical or mail-order stores?

If so, why haven't these considerations become these become part of the law? Otherwise it represents a barrier to entry, since every new online business must remember to set up those TOS correctly. The linked-to article shows that doing so is hard enough that a large, highly successful company makes mistakes. Why not just incorporate the needed changes as part of the UCC and not worry about it?
Unlike their other products trello isn't .Net based. It runs on a node.js/mongoDB/Redis (and I'm guessing Linux) stack . My understanding was that they're using Trello as a test platform for playing with and evaluating different new technologies.
The quality of the service, in the point of view of help to solve a problem we are encountering has significantly dropped. This is partly due to policy and partly due to the much lower quality and pertinence of the answers.

Contributors are there to earn points and just try whatever answer comes to their mind even if it's so vague or approximate that it is useless. Just trying, nothing to loose.

I guess the experts went away from it because the initial thrill has gone (sign of smartness) and they have better things to do then stare at a browser to catch new questions for no other rewards then getting points.

My impression is that stackoverflow was initially in a virtuous circle and now it's in a vicious circle.

I now have questions like how EXT4 files with holes impacts performance of an mmap ? Should I force a prior full fill of the file with dd before mmap ? I'll certainly get crap answers and I really don't know where to ask this to get a valuable answer. So I'll end up doing a benchmark, which has probably already been done many time or people knowing how EXT4 works could answer straight out of the book.
Wow. I haven't tested IOS6 with SIRI, but when it was Google Voice v/s Siri on IOS 5.1.1 - there was no comparison. Google voice won hands down. Even in a noisy environment.
I've just bought a second hand iPhone 4s that will be upgraded to IOS6 so I can compare for myself. Until a month ago, Google was easily king of the hill.
This is different, because NGEN can only be used with strong name assemblies that get deployed to the GAC.

This feature on the other hand, means that you already get a native compiled executable, compiled with much better optimization algorithms than what NGEN offers.
NYC’s PLAN to alert citizens to danger during Hurricane Sandy
You don't have to handle it everywhere explicitly. This is where Functor, Applicative, Alternative, Monoid and Monad are for. They will do the plumbing for you. Eventually you will unpack the values, but this is only necessary if you change environment.

Say we have a failing computation:
failComp = Nothing

and a couple of succeeding computations:
sucComp = Just 1
sucComp2 = Just 2

We can use the typeclasses to avoid explicit unpacking:

-- Monad result: Just 3

add = do
x <- sucComp2
y <- sucComp
return $ x + y

Applicative result: Just 3

-- the <#> should be the applicative operator.
addapp = (+) <$> sucComp <#> sucComp2

Alternative: result (Just 1)

val = failComp <|> sucComp

Monoid: result (Just 2)

mon = failComp <> sucComp2

Functor result (Just 6)

-- # should be multiply operator

func = fmap (#3) sucComp2
I have been waiting for a good Pixel Qi device (in any form factor, really, although a 13" ultrabook or 7" tablet or 4" phone is ideal) to emerge for several years, as it seems a good compromise between utility and readability, although E-Ink appears much better to my eye.

As we've seen with the GS3, though, what people really want are bright and oversaturated displays for occasional media use, rather than the 99%-of-use task of monochrome reading and browsing.
I enyoyed reading your article and bookmarked some links. But even using iStock for landing pages can get you in murky waters. Just ask twitter (they used a birdy from istock. After they became successful this was easily copied by copycats with almost the same url. The birdy can still be used today as it's royaltyfree). If you're going for stockart at least use it as a base for your design, not as the design.
TBH sthe idea off turning such important (both for potential new citizens and country) process seems very inappropriate to me. I'm aware that it seems time- and cost-effective but is disgusting anyway.
I'm just guessing here, but maybe he is not talking as much about the language itself but about the (default) VM? AFAIK, the VM of Ruby (but also Python and node.js) do not support parallel execution of threads (which is usually solved by starting multiple VMs and using an extra cache).

Compared to the VMs of Haskell, Erlang or the JVM one might call this primitive.

(I definitely wouldn't call it amazingly primitive and I am aware there is JRuby / Jython)
Sorry if others don't like this but can you elaborate either by pointing me at your startup, with more science or both? I'm going to go on a Google spree but I'm curious about your take.

This is completely foreign to me, it fails my bs test but to hear not just the words scientific, but quantifiable, piques my interest.
I would say that money can buy them maybe time (multiple workers = more hours on a project) and maybe some advertisement. But I think they cannot really buy a product. Not literally, but I mean that because they have more money doesn't mean that their product will be for sure better than one created with less money. If you create a product that people will like more than your competitor you might relay on the word of mouth to spread, which is the most powerful marketing tool. Find their weakness, what their product is missing that their audience wants and possible wanted for a long time, and give it to them.
This was exactly my experience. My iPhone struggled to understand me at times (albeit only 2 out of 20 times) - but the Nexus S (a fairly old phone) understood me 20 out of 20 times. It really whipped the pants off Apple - I was quite surprised.
To see so many posts above say that Google Voice was far below par of Apple was a surprise to me.
Note: I haven't tested IOS6 yet, so things may be different.
I too find that design decision perplexing. Personally, it is ongoing choices like these which have pretty much made me decide to build a hackintosh instead and in the long run move away from Apple to Linux (only Photoshop holding me back now Adobe!). I have been using Apple computers for more than a decade so it has not been an easy choice. If I continue to stick with Apple however my hardware choices are:

1. Mac Pro - gouging prices, several generation old tech.
2. iMac - a Macbook Air in a monitor, practically zero expansion options.
3. Mac Mini - poor expansion options, poor graphics, expensive once you start adding the ram you need etc.

Seem to me Apple is now almost entirely focused on iOS and iDevices, which is understandable as that's where the money is. I don't see them investing anything much into the desktop computer line at all going forward. Time to move on.
Dynamically typed languages are used everyday to write robust software (erlang, lisp, etc...).

You're making a common mistake, which is to reason about static typing advantages everything else being equal. Sure, if static typing had no drawbacks, it would be insane for any language not to be statically typed, for some of the reasons you're giving (and others). But everything is not equal. Static typing is a tradeoff, and lots of its advantages are often caused by something else (or in combination with something else). Don't get me wrong, Haskell is an impressive feat (just starting learning it), but in haskell, typing is associated to advanced type inference, purity, etc...

In my experience being paid to to write python, a lots of NoneType, attribute errors, etc... often have a deeper underlying reason linked to bad architecture, and bad programming practices. I am not convinced typing would make improving those projects easier (certainly, a primitive typing system ala c/c++/java does not in my experience).