skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting possibility.

Perhaps OWS should buy a debt for $500, and instead of outright forgiving it, sell it back to the debtor for a symbolic amount such as $1. Maybe this will have different tax implications than what the top comment suggests?
The "popular" tv personality Noel Edmunds had a tv show on BBC tv. A small part of that was to prank (willing) viewers by hiding a camera in their TV. They'd watch the show, and suddenly BAMN they'd be on live TV; and then get invited to take part in a quiz or something.
Rolling out your own Fusion Drive with the recovery partition
This article goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.
> This I wonder about: do feminine and masculine (and nueter) pronouns indicate gender when used for non-people beings, or must they match the word of those things?

In french at least, words themselves have gender irrespective of the subject's gender. And pronouns usually match the word's gender. So a tortoise is feminine even if it's a male, so's a sparrow, a mole, a goat or a stork. Then, there may be subsets of the original word for each of the genders (or further differentiations by age). "Goat" in general is feminine but buck ("bouc") is masculine for instance.
Titanium SDK/Studio 3.0.0 Beta Now Available
How is this hosted? Linux + GNUStep? Afaik Apple discontinued their XServe thing.
I know there are quite a few compmgrs that have sync to blank e.g, Compiz, Kwin or Mutter, but they all come with a redicoulus amount of dependencies, which is why I'm avoiding those. I also tried cairo-compmgr but it's really buggy.
Founder here: In the beginning we are hosting on dedicated Mac minis because they are energy efficient. Lets hope that Apple releases Mac Pros soon...
You can just pour water into those and use them to the last drop. The same doesn't apply to ketchup, AFAIK.
Easy CLI JSON Formatting
Whos.amung.us - dashboard » oxu2me1nddg7
There are a few definitions. The FSF has one http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html the OSI has one http://opensource.org/osd-annotated Debian has one http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines They are nearly all extactly the same.

Another defintion is if the code is released under and OSI approved "open source licence" (http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical ) or an FSF approved "free software licence" ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html ). Again AFAIK, nearly exactly the same.
Why not ask the people to make nominal payments, and use those payments to purchase additional discounted debt? This would both solve the IRS problem and potentially make this a self-sustaining venture.
Ask HN: Does alchohol make you a better programmer (more inside)
Here's a bit of my background:

- 9-5 developer at well known IT company
- Work on big projects with success
- High quality along with high productivity

And yet, when I get home and start working on my side project my productivity drops. I get distracted and always feel the need (even to the point of anxiety) to check HN/Reddit/email/Twitter/Facebook etc constantly (at least once every 2-5 minutes).

But I've found a solution to all this. When I have around 3-4 standard drinks, my productivity sky rockets. I feel like I'm in the zone from when I get home to past 2am. I sometimes even forget to eat diner.

Even though I may be way drunk in this coding state, when I look at it the next day or even the next few weeks, it's about the same as how I would have written it sober. It's like alchohol focuses my mind and gets me in the zone.

So I'm just wondering HN - is this just me, do I have a problem, or have I found my anti-kryptonite? Any advice?
The Nuclear Scientist Who Skipped College
PRServe posted a response on their website, http://www.prserve.com
hah weird seeing another UWE person on here. What are you doing now?
That would actually be rather interesting. A significantly more extensive hack though, and maybe not one as "necessary" as there isn't exactly a dearth of male heroes in 3D adventure games.
This idea sounds stupid, but Disney was initially against video tapes for the same reason - you didn't know how many people were watching the tape, and so how could you charge each of them?
Good and evil are arbitrary concepts that are not formally recognized by courts (am I wrong?)

I'm pretty sure court judgements have use moralistic statements and refered to things like "respect" or "evil", "inhuman". Judges are humans, not compilers.

In fact a search of the British court judgements shows many instances of "evil" being referred to in judgements ( http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/sino_search_1.cgi?sort=rank... ).

It's the legal ambiguity that is the problem.
Well, if you had submitted it, I'm sure it would get frontpaged here.

I just really wasn't aware of the revert and the git commit message sounded promising. [1]

[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=co...
Quite a recent change then!

Shame, XFCE would be a good default.
I wonder if there's any clever trickery can be done here to let web services get access to iCloud APIs. (I suspect not, due to the authentication nightmare that would be involved)

Apple's apps are at a real unfair advantage, here.
Ok, I accept this. I have experience in refactoring really bad code. Refactoring these always led to smaller code: yes sometimes some of the refactorings increased the code size, but there was enough redundancy because of the bad (or no) abstractions and design mistakes in the original code which compenstated for it.

The bigger the system is, the more probable it is that you can make it better while decreasing the code size. Above 10.000 lines a bad code usually is not DRY enough so much, that it is very easy to decrease its size while increasing its modularity.

Yes, code size is not a perfect indicator of quality. But reducing code size is a very central part of my design philosophy. When you very conciously refactor to smaller code size (using good design patterns) the code and the abstractions in your head can become incredibily clear.

For example I write a software which deals a lot with rectangles. In the beginning my rectangles had four properties: left, right, top, bottom. After a while I've found out that my code gets more and more redundant; I have to find an abstraction which relies on the symmetries in the problems. So now my rectangle has this interface to get and set the 4 sides:

void setSide(bool vert, bool isEnd, int value)

int getSide(bool vert, bool isEnd)

Not only my code size reduced dramatically, but because of this new abstraction I've understood the problem much better!
If FSF had the foresight to trademark Free Software™ and Open Source™ we wouldn't have this sort of confusion.
If you see it as a market, this is a typical market failure (externality and / or information assymmetry).

Since the author has chosen a non-standard license, I doubt government regulation would help (unless that regulation outlawed non-standard FLOSS licenses).

Probably would be better to reduce the information assymmetry. Maybe Github could have warning notifications for custom licenses, for example?
I like the idea a lot actually. Using Apple's frameworks for web apps could indeed be useful. I just wonder to what user numbers such a service would scale, given Apple's limited hardware offerings. Didn't Apple promote using VMware boxes on commodity hardware for some while? Is this possible now with OSX Server licences?
The Teensy has been available for a couple years in this size. Teensy 3 comes with an ARM processor in the same board.

http://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy.html
Founder here: May I ask what you are trying to do exactly? To me it is not clear what exactly this might be...
Yeah you're really quite tied into apple hardware here... I wonder if it would be possible to run mac os x server instances on VMs? Good luck anyway... I often wanted to use cocoa server side since it's such a great platform and xcode's pretty great too.
Do you know your tools?
Just to clarify, it will definetly take me more than a day to write/profile/test the changes (especially since I'll be learning arc in the process).

My hope is that it will only take a day or so to deploy it, once it's ready.
I agree with your parent, and think you're trying to read it in an over-specific way, it's like saying "You can't compare writing and programming, because writing doesn't have comments."

The parent was making the point that, like writing, good and bad coding style is entirely subjective - necessarily so because many parts of it are simply conventional.

There are some specific constructions in programming that can be shown to be better than others through complexity theory, but even the guidelines we have for these aren't global optimums.
I've always considered the one thing that Google Code has over Github is the mandatory selection of a standard license when creating a publicly visible project.

Also, to the point of regulation, the government is by no means the only vector by which it can be delivered. I think if you look through history, some of the most successful regulatory regimes have been separated from the traditional civil government.
> To a project manager, the programmer who hits every deadline (regardless of quality) is a good programmer.

Obviously not true, unless your project manager is a complete idiot.
Say I wanted to replicate Apple's Notes app: I can write iPad, iPhone and Mac apps that all share the same storage (and update in the background without the app running). But there's no way for me to create an equivalent of icloud.com that lets users edit their notes on the web.
Xfce not default in future release of Debian
llvmpipe in case VMware doesn't do 3D accelleration.
it currently builds on mono and javascript (websharper) for cross-platform.
I think they 'd be great if you are willing to acquire the biological background. Due to its descriptive nature, that could be easy-peasy.
Surely there are some old xserve's knocking about on ebay?
Arduino Nano in stock: http://www.miniinthebox.com/pt/eletronica-diy-arduino-v3-0-n..., http://www.gravitech.us/arna30wiatp.html

There's also Tinyduino on the making: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kenburns/tinyduino-the-t...
You found your ballmer peak: http://xkcd.com/323/
Doug Crockford: The JSON Saga [video]
The advantage you named is no advantage: the mouse could store its configuration on the mouse, just like other gaming mice do.
i wonder if xmonad's Config.Gnome will get ported away from the fallback mode (if this is possible).
There's plenty of possible problems, but I think Microsoft regards it as a nice way to keep developers developing using their tools, similar to how Adobe takes a pretty hands off approach on piracy of Photoshop.
No, in the programming world there are projects that met the revolving door of mediocre programmers that no one is proud of, no one understands how it works or wants to, everyone just finds a place they think will have the effect their being driven to make and takes a shot.
Xamarin are booming (they are a cross-platform, open-source-based development tools company who are big contributors to mono). 190,000 developers and 10,000 customers already http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/11/08/xamarin-evolve-2013-our-f...

So mono's future is secured - Android, iPhone, iOS, OS X, linux, windows 8, ... no other high-level-to-native tools get this reach and none based on a language as c# (so much better than java). F# looks like nice added sauce to this.
My concern is that by using Mono you make the .NET runtime more popular and Windows more valuable. Since Microsoft has a long history of hostility towards software freedom (despite several open-source software they publish themselves), I don't think it's wise to further empower them.
The bandwidth pricing is way off. With the 99$/month plan, you only have 35 GB of traffic included, and each subsequent GB costs three dollars! Madness.
Relevant: http://bues.ch/cms/hacking/razercfg.html
You will be able to do that with Objective Cloud. We will have a distributed storage service that you can use. You will be using Core Data like you are used to.
Looks like "bottom-up" as a metaphor tends to offend some people...
More seriously it's a great product offering the real ability to zoom precisely on what matters to anyone. Good job!
I think that you may be jittery/distracted because you NEED a drink, the way smokers need a cigarette and once you've had your hit you feel more relaxed.
My 2c
I find hipmunk better for optimizing schedule, kayak for optimizing price.
Exactly.

The more people use Mono, the more valuable the .NET runtime, and Windows itself, becomes.
Same here, the video just get stuck.. the whole video html element freezes...
See above - Xamarin are big contributors to mono. They have 190,000 developers and 10,000 customers already http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/11/08/xamarin-evolve-2013-our-f...

so mono's future looks secure now
I would also quite like to see this happen.
We are thinking about the pricing constantly. The problem ist that we cannot predict how people might use their access to Objective Cloud. These prices are very conservatively and might go down quickly.
Ahh.. a mac mini server farm.
But most companies aren't going to have "the right hands". Many wouldn't want them even if they could get them because they want programmers they can replace easily.
ChromiumOS for Ubuntu
good stuff. would be cool to use objc for web apps
some examples on http://fsharp.org
I'm a big fan of skyscanner. Being able to ask questions like 'what are the cheapest flight from my local airport over this weekend' make for fun trip planning.
That's quite sad.

I remember a while back somebody posting on blogs.perl about how bad it was there. We all talked about it at a Perl Mongers meeting a while back. People (smart people) were thinking of applying and moving countries but that post really convinced people to stay.

I've also seen it posted on LinkedIn a number of times (from needing 40 people to 25 people), but since it looks like they are having trouble finding good Perl people then the OP's post kind of explains it.

The Perl world is quiet small where everyone knows everyone (literally). Treat people this way and word gets around. IOW, karma's a bitch.

Edit: I just re-read the date on OP's post. It's actually the same post I cited.
Something similar I've been using: http://webappkit.org
"WebAppKit is a BSD-licensed framework for creating web applications using Cocoa and Objective-C, running on Mac OS X."

Quite neat to use Obj-C and all the great frameworks on the web as well.

The big problem with using Objective-C for stuff like this is that you almost have to host it on Apple Hardware, which is quite expensive and hard to do by your self in a cloud-like fashion. With the Objective-C in the cloud service you move the hosting to them of course, but it is still a problem lurking when (and if) they are going to scale it really big.
Would you meet halfway on this? How about a box on the ballot marked "I choose not to vote in this election"?
UK Space spending to be increased by £60m a year
Easily accessible gpl code leads to bad IT professionals just like cheap bricks lead to badly build houses. We need to raise brick prices or else anyone can built their poor quality houses.
Thanks. I am sure that it is possible to do the same thing we do by running OS X in a virtual machine. We decided not to do it like this. Let's see how it works out.
It's actually more than 10 years now. The first binaries of Phoenix were available in September 2002.

I don't remember when I exactly switched. But I remember that Mozilla was a huge pile of bloat, Galeon had some internal trouble, and Konqueror/KHTML had problems with several websites (mostly JS stuff IIRC).

Firefox is still my favorite browser!
Hmm, I was reading that the aging process makes it lose the active ingredient? But it still seemed to work really well for you?
Toward a Design for Ruby - Brian Ford - Ruby Conference 2012
I am no lover of Linux (BSD for me) and I am no lover of the GPL (MIT or 3BSD for me) but I have no idea what this article is actually trying to say.

The proliferation of user space apps doesn't kill an OS. You could argue the GPL helps it but again, that's not the OS. Windows also has many duplicate apps that are not very good. No GPL there.

The ".. pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT 'professionals' who wouldn't recognise sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it.." is true in all spheres and isn't fostered by the GPL.

Am I missing something?
Argumentum ad Monsantium
Someone should start an open source project called EvilJSON which reimplements it but flips the good and evil in the licence so you can't use it for good.
lol.

I've experimented with this. 1 shot of gin is nothing. 2 shots and I'm still normal. 5 and I feel like sleeping. Yet 3 seems to increase performance?
The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA
What could it be if Google wanted to buy your startup?
If you don't like his license, don't use it. Drop the packages out of the system, kill PHP and YUI and jQuery and anything else that's decided they're okay with the licensing specifying that it shouldn't be used for evil and taking a slight poke at how restrictive a non-restrictive license can be. In the end the morals survive but the platform suffers. Or approach him and ask him to relicense, or create a derivative or one of the other options.

Blog post reads more like the author has a specific problem with Crockford and is doing this in public to try make him seem foolish.
I have a feeling it will be to do with you needing a drink - that's what makes you distracted - I have dealt with something similar and all I can say is, don't fall into the trap.
Writing OpenSource software used to be a real of real amateurs, people who do it because they love to do that stuff and derive fun out of it. Now, it seems, the license has become the most important aspect in this.

IMHO, this is a most unfortunate development, sadly driven by license fundamentalists like Debian. It is high time that someone like Crockford throws a fistful of sand in those gears and causes butthurt. Maybe this will cause at least some people to start thinking again instead blindly following the perceived neccessities of some special OSS project.

And yes, if the Debian folk are this worried, it should be a matter of days to invent "GNU JSON (now with a proper LICENSE so we can kiss more enterprise ass)"
Not at all. During work hours I'm pretty focused and don't do any talking or surfing. Plus I've never even drank coffee so I don't think it can be the jitters.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but you could argue that by granting it to some 'evil' clients, that he is invalidating his statement, proving that it is just a joke, and just laughing at everyone that asks for a special licence.
Furthermore, has Douglas any intention to take someone to court over this? I don't know much about him, but I highly doubt it.
Like I said to @barking I don't think I'm an alchoholic. But I will keep this in check. Thanks.
Yeah, Linux is just dying. Absolutely no one uses it any more. Android doesn't exist. Ignorance is strength.
Ryanair CEO: "Seatbelts On Airplanes Are Pointless"
Pretty much, always a bit puzzled when people assume that Microsoft will throw the toys out of the pram at some stage. It's a net benefit for them if more people are using the language, rather than shifting to C or C++ and sticking with that instead.
Ask HN: Rewrite outsourced code or refactor it?
Alright, so I'm in a unique mess. Joined a startup, found out that their entire codebase was built by an outsourcing shop (who didn't care much for code quality) and am wondering how to proceed. The startup is about 1 year old. Their codebase is in PHP. There's no in-house team at the moment but we're working on that.

The app isn't super complex (yet) because they were waiting to add most of the complexity once they could get a proper dev team. The code is a mess though, here are some things:

- Inline SQL statements

- Inline PHP inside of on-page javascript

- Pages aren't even W3C validated (or even close!)

- No tests at all

- No data modeling whatsoever

- Tons of PHP related inconsistencies in the data int 0 is false - obviously.

- And much more!

Our choices are:

- Continue in PHP and try to refactor

- Switch to python with Django or something and do a full rewrite.

Underlying db is MySQL. Currently, I'm the only developer but we're looking for more. However, if we do decide to rewrite I'd look for the python variety - otherwise I'd go down the PHP road. (I'm comfortable in both, worked with both in production)

HN Gurus, what are your opinions on refactoring vs. rewriting such a code base ? Everywhere I look people say "Do not rewrite, you'll kill yourself" but almost every time the condition of the code doesn't seem quite like this.. at-least not in the way it's described.
Anyone got a good summary of the back story?
Kirk Wylie - My First Startup Was A Failure
A Turner Broadcasting exec called skipping commercials via PVR theft. http://slashdot.org/story/02/05/02/0550214/Turner-CEO-PVR-Us...

So this thing could stop play if you leave the room, including during commercials.

"You! Winston Smith! Come out of the bathroom!"
Couple dozen other ways to do it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/352098/how-to-pretty-prin...
Many technological advances happen like this, where the first few to use get an edge, then everyone else uses as it becomes a requirement rather than an edge--and the situation is then irreversible because anyone trying to opt out of the trend would be at great disadvantage (unless some really clever marketing and rationale is employed, of course).

But if somehow everyone opted out together they would be better off for it (sometimes even consumers, though arguably not in this case). It's commonly referred to as "smart for one, dumb for all."
IIRC, if your debt is being sold to a broker at pennies on the dollar -which is pretty much the only way OWS can get its hands on it- the bank has already long since given up on getting you to pay, and the credit bureaus have long since been informed. In other words, the damage to your credit is mostly already done; an actual bankruptcy would hurt worse, but you're still in for a world of pain.
I read it.. I still don't actually see any argument that the GPL is causing a problem?
Is Facebook down or acting slow lately?
I find Facebook down intermittently for last 2 hours or so. Facebook API's don't load on my website. I also find Google, Appengine and even HN a bit slow and sometimes down in the last two months? Do others see the same problem from India or elsewhere? What's the reason for the frequent outages?
I have a feeling the Duggers aren't going to like this...
For those who don't know, it's possible to remove an autocomplete suggestion by highlighting it and pressing the delete key. This works for HTML form fields and address/search bar suggestions.
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=co...

Here is a summary of the changes:

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=sum...

And this as well:

http://www.neowin.net/news/debian-drops-gnome-chooses-xfce-a...

Basically a while back, Joey Hess changed Debian to XFCE from Gnome. Someone else has just changed it back. But looks like it's probably temporary. We'll see.
Ok, what about more frequent autosaves?
That's interesting, but thankfully they only had 395 tweets so I wonder if you can get something really meaningful with a set of data so small. Looks like there's some correlation with Rommey's voting states though.
To be fair...Android is not desktop linux.
The OSI tried and failed to trademark "Open Source". It failed because it was too generic IIRC.

Trademark law isn't needed. There isn't really any disagreements over the terms "Free (as in freedom) Software" or "Open Source".
Working with Multi-column Layout in CSS3