skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Understood. I think it is still useful to have a small core base that you can read and understand and adapt if you want to. Don't like the GUI open file dialogs? Someone did a text based interface:

http://nilnor.github.com/textredux/tour.html

No need to sync back upstream.

I agree with you that 'Unparalleled extensibility.' might be a bold and difficult to actually prove claim.
I contemplated Match, but as I understand it, it also synchronizes deletes -- so that doesn't free me from the obligation of having to have space on disk to play them because I can't delete the local files once they're on the cloud, right?
This is a great news, thanks for letting us know. I hope everything will be fine also in the future. Good luck.
Five Unanswered Questions About Crowdfunding - Businessweek
That is a fair point. The statistical data I've come across compares private offices with cubicle farms, and I was more or less automatically combining that with the observation that I personally would have a better chance of getting programming work done even in a cubicle farm than in a war room, but I don't remember offhand having seen actual studies comparing private offices with war rooms.
systematically taking this freedom away, by taking ownership of common design patterns - The "ownership" part is what's important, as Western Civilizations have put private property before just about any other consideration.

I'm coming to believe that "intellectual property" is about unringing the Internet bell, stuffing the genie of everybody publishing, and everybody reading back into the bottle of gatekeeper-enabled censorship.
> They lock us into buying music and videos from iTunes when using iPods, iPhones and iPads.

Um. You do have a choice here, you know. Ranging from choosing products from slightly-less-evil vendors to pulling a Stallman and refusing to even run Firefox or touch a computer whose chip designs aren't open source.

I don't disagree with the gist of your post, but I feel that by making it seem like people are almost forced to buy Apple products, you're undermining your own argument.

As a simple anecdotal example, I don't own a single Apple product, without even trying all too hard, and I'm perfectly happy.
Thanks! I could re-record a version at home and post it.
I can't point you to a screenshot, but scrollbars are easy to hide:

buffer.v_scroll_bar = false
Beautifully written. Almost brought tears to my eyes. The combination of art and technology is what gave Apple, and America the competitive edge for so long.
I guess I'd have to ask what difference that makes? Everyone settling financially is akin to making a patent clearinghouse cartel type of thing, where only really big companies get to play. The end result? A less than free market in practice, but not in name, mercantilist policies about who gets to innovate, and controlled innovation. Do we look back on the 75 years of Bell System with anything other than mild contempt? No? Well, that's the sort of thing a "financial settlement" will lead us to.
Great resource, thanks. I think we need tools like these.

I'm trying to build a service to help devs get paid for their contribution to the Open Source community and to get things done faster and hopefully better by paying for development.
Ask HN: product doing very well but growing technical debt; what to do?
About 4 months ago, I joined a friend of mine as a tech co-founder for a company he had been working on (he's biz, and darn good at it).

He had been contracting out the code for the MVP, and as things were working out, he figured it was time to fully delve into it and bring a full time cofounder on board. The contractor had no interest in doing so, and that's where I came in.

The code has been working well for all intents and purposes, and we have users (in the high 4 digits) who use the product everyday and love it, but it's showing limitations. Here's a quick overview (it's a Django webapp):

a) There are many inefficiencies in the code, and now that our userbase is starting to grow fast, it is causing major slowdowns. My current solution is to throw more dynos at it, which sort of works but is an ugly temporary workaround.

b) The code is more tightly coupled than not, which is making life tough when implementing new features. Many parts could be refactored.

c) There is no unit testing, which makes things harder than they should be when it comes to testing/hunting bugs.

d) Nothing is commented; and even though Python tends to be somewhat self-explanatory, it gets pretty dense when trying to understand what certain things do.

e) The architecture of it all is very monolithic; based on our plans for the future business development, quite a few parts should be decoupled and made more independent of each other.

A full rewrite seems out of the question, as we have many users and we need to keep on moving with bug fixing + shipping new features. For that same reason, it's hard for me to justify blocking 2 weeks to refactor a subpart of the application.

I'm the only engineer right now; we're funded and looking to hire more people, but it's going slowly.

Has anyone been in a similar situation before? Any recommended books/articles? If you're in SF and have relevant experience, I'll gladly buy you lunch in exchange for your thoughts.
I think the point was that the GPL does not allow restrictions on fields of endeavour, and "legal purposes only" is such a restriction. Although GPLv3 restricts DRM.
>> It's not vim. That alone will be a selling point for a vast majority.

> I didn't realize a vast majority were nincompoops.

I am a long time vim user. Where do I get in line for obtaining my free-with-vim pretentiousness and douchbagginess? Or it doesn't come with Vim and it's just you?
It's sad that this isn't terribly surprising at this point.

HN friends, please, please, make sure you opt out of the body scanners. If for nothing else, I can assure you the dude that's feeling your junk is far more embarrassed than you are and if he has to do it often enough, maybe he'll quit.

Last time I flew, I got a new guy. It was his first time and one of the veteran BT's had to coach him through it. He seemed mortified and I think that might have been his last day on the job.
I don't know what shardling intended, but here's my take on it: the kind of estimate you want depends on the question you want to answer. I live in California, so the analysis I'm doing on the rockets coming out of Gaza is likely very different from the one being performed by the people living in Tel Aviv. And both of those analyses are different from the ones being performed by Hamas. So there is no such thing as a reliable "estimate of the region in which bombs are likely to fall" independent of the particular question you want to answer.

Another example, from the original article:

"a weather forecaster is good if it rains 95 percent of the times he says there is a 95 percent chance of rain"

It's not clear whether or not there's something special about the number 95, or whether the intent is that a forecaster is good if it rains X% of the time he says there's an X% chance of rain for any X. So consider a 100 day period during which it rains 10 days, and a forecaster who every day predicts a 10% chance of rain. Is that a "good" forecast? If you're a farmer, it might be. If you're planning a picnic, not so much.
How to summon a nerd
I feel a

$('#if-you-read-this-you-should-follow-me-on-twitter').remove()

would be appropriate for this blog post. In any case - good to see the HN community really coming through in a time of need.
That's cute, but also pretty clear that every category you've assigned here is inaccurate in any realistic sense.
I can find no followup at all to that news story -- almost every article about it was published within a few days of each other, and no news in the last year.

Pakistan blocked youtube more recently, and I can see several folk suggesting that using the https site as a workaround for that block. That loophole was closed later, but it seems unlikely to me they actually went ahead with the blanket block on encryption.

e: There seem to be two points of origin for this story. First, in July, this tweet by "privacy international".

https://twitter.com/privacyint/status/96852484936564736

There's not really any source given there. Then, in late August, the following story that cites an unnamed source in an ISP.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/240736/virtual-watchdog-internet...

The stories are at least consistent, but Pakistan never made an open declaration of their intent to block https or VPNs, and probably abandoned it as unworkable. I'd assume that it'll play out much the same in Russia.
> No need to sync back upstream.

The canon doesn't need my changes but I need the canon changes. If I change the core, I will have to selectively merge whenever updates happen. It's great that core is small and can directly be changed, but I think that should be advertised as the last resort.
Darn. Some counter examples would have been interesting.

I was more or less automatically combining that with the observation that I personally would have a better chance of getting programming work done even in a cubicle farm than in a war room

Out of curiosity - have you ever spent any significant time (more than a couple of works) working in one?

I ask because that was exactly what I thought I would be like. Instead I found it to be very productive and enjoyable. It also seems to be a common reaction from developers who've not tried it. It's mentioned in one of the papers:

"Although the teammates were not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time they realized the benefits of having people at hand, both for coordination, problem solving and learning." - http://possibility.com/Misc/p339-teasley.pdf
Human After All: Why Nate Silver’s Math Revolution Won’t Kill The Pundits
Great news! Thanks for letting us know.

I'm sure I speak for many here when I say that your and swombat's combined reputation is definitely enough to be able to make such requests, even without details, whenever you need.
b,c,d and sometimes even e,a are normal, I would say, normal, every company has them, because we can always do better but we have always too little time. If you are making any money try to hire someone to give you some help.
Pretty much my sole use for Yahoo Pipes these days is filtering out any mentions of "episode" or "podcast" from tech RSS feeds. Why does anyone spend 30+ minutes listening to a) recaps of a previous episode, b) padding and filler, just to get c) the bad delivery of a central idea that takes 4x as long as reading it?

If these things had the production values or compelling continuous narratives of something like This American Life, I could see the point. But every time I listen to one, it's a blog post plus inane comments section, being read out by people with voices for typing. Such a waste of time when there is a sea of quality radio out there.
and PyQuery. Shameless plug: http://doda.co/7-python-libraries-you-should-know-about
The Goal of Bayesian Inference: Quantify and manipulate your degrees of beliefs. In other words, Bayesian inference is the Analysis of Beliefs.

Bayesian inference is no more about beliefs than logic is (or any scientific inference, really). "M(G) AND C(M) => C(G)" can be rendered as "If you believe that glass is a metal, and you believe that metals are good conductors, then you should also believe that glass is a good conductor". Scientists omit the "if you believe" out of conciseness.

Some subjective Bayesians will tell you that their job is to produce the above. Then they're done. "You said you believe that glass is a metal, so I put that into my Bayesian inference procedure, and it says that you should also believe that glass is a good conductor."

But this is not what science is about! Obviously, "glass is a conductor" strongly contradicts empirical data. We have to challenge every assumption, and possibly change models!

This is why smart Bayesians check the fit of their model, and I would strongly recommend Gelman's Induction and Deduction in Bayesian Data Analysis to any statistician interested in that perspective. It places Bayesianism squarely in the paradigm of traditional scientific analysis.

http://www.rmm-journal.de/downloads/Article_Gelman.pdf
I get where you're coming from, but I really think most people just would never think of that kind of thing in a situation like this. There might even be people who want updates from jacques after this post, and appreciate that link being there.
I think he did it pretty fast actually. Think about it. In 1996 Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy and around 15 years later, it is the most valuable tech company ever? How many CEOs can guide their companies so?
Ironically, I actually just started listening to Build and Analyze a few episodes ago, because I was like "wow, this is lots of great details about iOS app development and design!"

One person's trash...
I'll admit I haven't. Are you saying you found it sucked for the first couple of weeks but after that you adapted to it?

Of course this kind of thing is also complicated by reactions varying greatly with where you are on the introversion-extroversion axis; programmers are on average more introverted than the general population, but still vary all over the scale.
Isn't it more about shifting what constitutes the CPI? In other words, before computes, 0% of the CPI was from computers. However now, every year going forward, computers become more and more important as a constituent of the CPI. On the flip side, computers tend to get cheaper. Don't you see potential for creative CPI engineering here? Now don't get be wrong: computers are like food today--quite fundamental. So I understand why they do it. I'm just pointing out that this can lead to the CPI being out of sync with things like food prices. No big deal, it can be so.
Great argument. This whole "fanboy" retort is total BS. That's my logic and my preference for or against Apple has nothing to do with it. Calling someone a fanboy is not an argument and no one can take you seriously once you say it. That's a conversation stopper. You can't prove or disprove it and all intelligent discourse goes out the window once it's been said. You could have used any number of arguments to try to persuade me the other way or prove me wrong but instead you used the conversional equivalent of "oh yeah, well you're a homo".
While my comment was a bit flip and I'm not saying it was a money based, I do think there may be a bit of truth to it. Arment makes it clear he is still going to podcast, so clearly he thinks that it is the format of Build & Analyze that was growing stale, not his voice/ideas or the medium. If the problem didn't lay in the format, he could easy just make the necessary adjustments within the current podcast and avoid having to rebuild an audience. Considering the format of B&A is essentially the 5by5 standard, I imagine he is going to be jumping ship (in a much less controversial way) and wouldn't be surprised if he emulates Gruber. Or make something called The Podcast and have it be an offshoot of The Magazine.

Of course, this is all blind speculation.
It seems that with the success of The Magazine there's more than ever to talk about on B&A, but I'm guessing he's wanting to do something closer to what Gruber is doing: rotate authors through as co-hosts every week and have them discuss their articles and the latest Apple news. And I suppose this format is incompatible with the current way the show is structured with Dan.
Better debugging is one of those things that helps one group of developers solve problems they couldn't otherwise solve. Unfortunately, it also allows another group of developers to make a bigger mess before failing under their technical debt.

I have definitely noticed a correlation between developer debugging skills and clean code practices. Obviously, this doesn't mean one is causing the other, but I would love if there was any research looking into this.

It does make me wonder if our time would be better spent finding ways to improve consistency and professionalism in our practices, rather than another new tool to get you out of the mud.
Linux on the SD is an $8 extra.
All business people chase unrealistic dreams since most will fail. Providing the best services and products you can only improves their odds. The mining supply company that gets a great bulk deal on high quality pickaxes and sells them for a modest profit is doing a good thing.
IPad Hacking Case Underway, Ruling Could Address Ancient Computer Abuse Law
I'm sure that's a static footer.
Don’t do it – The gimmicks developers use to make their apps stickier
My Github Game Off Submission
That's not correct. The clones targeted existing users rather than expanding the market because Apple would not let them expand the market. The cloner license agreement required them to use Apple-approved designs for major components such as the motherboard. The net result was that all the cloners were actually allowed to do was build machines that functionally fit exactly the same niches Apple machines fit, but with more variation in case design. All that left for them to compete on was offering more options, such as more RAM, faster processors, and the like at a lower price.

Power Computing wanted to expand the market. They built prototypes that went beyond just putting Apple designs in a new case, and showed them at trade shows, and publicly begged Apple to let them sell them.
That depends whether the first statement is meant to be a restriction on use or just a disclaimer about the tool's intended purpose.
Some relevant links I did find:

"The Function Pointer Tutorials":
http://www.newty.de/fpt/index.html

"Functional C"
http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/1077/

"The C Language is Purely Functional" - a satirical, but also, thoughtful post that I don't think has been submitted to HN before (or the search system is rubbish):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4800922 or:
http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio...
I have limited knowledge of Python / Django, but I have quite a lot of experience dealing with large projects in PHP and many of the frameworks and applications built with it.

Are you using Git for your source control? If so, you may want to start a new branch and work in it before doing any major re-factoring.

To start, I would try to find a small part of the application that you feel would be possible to re-factor in an hour or so. Before changing anything, I would load up the app locally in your browser and navigate to the portion that is dependent upon the code you're going to re-factor. Then I would re-factor things in as small a chunk as possible, constantly checking in the browser to make sure things still work properly. This is a rather bastardized approach to test driven development, but it can be quick and effective.

> The architecture of it all is very monolithic; based on our plans for the future business development, quite a few parts should be decoupled and made more independent of each other.

As a side note.. This type of thing I have seen way too much of in my time in the industry. It's very easy to get carried away and over-engineer a solution. I've found it's best to create a solution that solves only the problems you currently need solved. It's always easier to go back and extend while re-factoring than it is to try to re-factor a giant-freakin'-thing after the fact.
You might have a heart attack when you see the file picker ;)
... actually my last comment isn't true, thinking back, yes I did work in a war room setup for a couple of summers back in the eighties, though it wasn't called by any particular name back then, nor had I started thinking about working environments as a topic at all, so I hadn't really connected it with this discussion. It was suboptimal but tolerable because I was a teenager with lots of energy to spare, and honestly the code I was writing was bread-and-butter stuff that was far enough within my capabilities that it didn't need absolute concentration.
There are some good insights wrt iOS app development given on B&A that are elicited through the conversation that the hosts have.
I tried f.lux and do not like it at all; I don't think color temperature is the problem and my MacBook Air seems cheapened when it has a 1970s red tint to the display.

Since using Hacker Vision, I notice that I can turn my display brightness down to 2-3(again, a MacBook Air) which has the added benefit of giving me an extra ~40 minutes of battery life - very cool!
Signal generation, from Python to bare silicon
Does the "toggle block comment" option actually work (Ctrl+/)? Tried it with python (file saved with .py ext and syntax highlighting even showed up), but couldn't comment with that keybinding...

edit: block commenting didn't even work when selecting it from the Edit menu.
I'm going to assume that the $200k number mentioned in the article refers to lost opportunity cost (compared to having a normal software job), and not that they actually spent $200k in a two year timespan when they had no other income.
> there are apps with Types of Knots that has in access of Millions of downloads (Which I am sure had pretty good return).

And there is even a niche inside the Knots niche. The sad truth is people are searching for specific things 'how to tie my tie' not mediocre social media/game/productivity apps.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.artelplus....

"INSTALLS:
5,000,000 - 10,000,000

Ratings:
1/2

(114,872)"
Sublime 2 theme
Cyberwar and Industrial Controls: A conversation with Ralph Langner
In addition to how error prone that would be (we'd see at least occasional weird title glitches) combined with how titles sometimes are actually changed by moderators in the other direction (as in, away from the real title, as I noticed with the recently posted article about someone just discovering malloc's overcommit behavior), a few days ago pg explicitly stated that this belief was not true (but seemed to think the idea that people thought the human moderators were so fast and accurate so as to be mistaken for computers worthy of note).
Well, that is non-news, trivial and not interesting.
Correct. Also, this wasn't meant to be a blog post to begin with but HN didn't accept the text as it was and I don't have time to re-write it keeping the essence but making it much shorter.
Can someone explain how these Indian bogus prosecutions work? Is it something the government does?
You forgot to properly markup the link to HN, it is just text at the moment.
PPA for Netflix Desktop App
Odd that he wasnt able to explain his way out of it. That's what makes it such a nightmare. Getting pulled aside and questioned is one thing, actually getting arrested seems like Idiocracy is coming true.
I think it's this: "Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software". http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762035
Whenever I see speed-up factors of the order of 100x, all I can think of "the original implementation must have been trivially superslow".
اسامه هوسآوي ما بين الاتحاد او الاهلي
Windows 1 does not remotely qualify as "catching up" with the Mac.

And no one, not Jobs or anyone else, is defending those 13 years, so no excuse is necessary. Jobs came back to a shell of a nearly bankrupt company and turned it into the most successful company in the world. It was a remarkable feat.
Using Just 10% of Your Brain? Think Again
I feel postscripts like that are not appropriate in general. I think it's the "should" that grates me most. It sounds arrogant to me. I know they do it to get a following. But please just let your content do the talking. And then give your readers the option to read more without being so pushy.
You're still playing with words. You're redefining what a founder is by saying that unless you have x% equity state, you're not. You're a founder if you're 'given' (or you take) the title of a founder, usually, but not always, at the inception (incorporation) of company. Yes this is a bit of a grey area, however if an individual uses that title in dealing with the press, investors and business, how do you go and say he's not?
The British Ruby Conference has been cancelled