skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the point is that comments for that function are bad! They'll rot if you ever change the function or the assumptions at all

Do you leave unused functions in your code when you refactor? No. So refactor your comments, or delete them if they are no longer applicable, when you refactor your code.

I have been saved many times by comments in my own code, because you know I work on a lot of stuff, sometimes coming back to it after years and I hope I have developed as a coder and so my mindset is now different and a lot of the time I do wonder WTF was I doing here!

This is the opposite of your post http://tech.collectedit.com/post/2012/11/12/Comment-your-dam... which I tend to agree with a lot more.

Your code tells me what you did. Your comments tell me what you intended. Help me out. Help your future self out!
How Technology Has Restored the Soul of Politics
The fact that a company isn't more powerful than a nation and that if you want to have German users you must follow Germany's laws?
I like the prominent "vote for features" button. They also have a tab which shows which of these community-driven features have been finished. This isn't a novel idea, but I like they way that they implemented it.
Discovering Hidden Purpose and Meaning in the Work We Do
Proper shutdown policy for the end of the world?
> Now I'm wondering why on earth would I lob files manually around?

I regularly work with, modify, and generate 50+ GB files at home. I doubt that there's any hardware I can purchase that will synchronize my changes quickly enough with "the cloud".
It ought to be near the top of their concerns, though. A lot of celebrities use Instagram, and I'm sure that at least part of it's popularity is directly attributable to that.
I think the lesson of the 21st century is that people don't want reduced work hours. They'll just work as hard as they can for even more utilons/status points/dollars.

I mean, it's not like Paul Graham ever had to work another day after he sold Viaweb. Nevertheless, you see him still working. (And he's not an outlier.)
No; waiting 9 weeks to get it.

And as I read much more when I'm on holiday, and one of the reasons I bought a Kindle in the first place was so I didn't have to carry dozens of books on such a trip, I'm very glad that they were willing to ship it to not only a different address, but a different country.
Sta.li - Statically-linked Linux
How do you figure that G+ has a larger audience? Larger potential audience, sure, given the number of Google users out there. But Instagram posts have engagement (likes and comments) on a level I've never seen on Google+.
Instagram using users pictures in their ads (for Instagram itself) is totally fine (with the appropriate warning in the TOS). Companies do that all the time.

The problem would be Instragram using user pictures for third-party ads, ie. selling user pictures to ad agencies.
So how exactly do you not do business in Germany if you're a website like Facebook? Do you just cancel all the accounts of people who listed their home country as Germany? What about people who were born in Germany but don't live there anymore? If I'm visiting Germany, will Facebook not work for me? And how exactly will Germany's public respond if they simply block them from using their service? I would wager people would be fairly upset.
Maybe because I have friends doing fashion, I know it goes from 500 bucks a pop. A girl with about 100K followers. And she would say something like this:

"Awesome glasses I got them from example.com use code EXAMPLE50 for %50 off on all their inventory"

I wonder if that's still legal. Or maybe Instagram can automate that!
What app am I using that collects all my friend's photos from their Dropboxes, creates a feed out of them and allows me to like and comment on them?
I have no idea who most of the authors of essays submitted to HN are. Sometimes I come to know more about them by reading more of their work, but usually I don't know who they are before then. Same for the vast majority of folks posting comments.

If we are interested only in the opinions of people we already know, how can a site like HN even exist?
What is your biggest prediction for 2013? 
Twitter's IPO, maintaining its share price much better than FB. Yahoo becomes relevant again and engineers start paying attention to it. Apple TV still not relevant.
Dekoratif Çıkartmal
5 Twitter Avatar Styles You Really Don’t Want To Use
I'd say the iPod Nano is the only device Apple has really screwed up in terms of a consistent message. First it has a clickwheel, then it doesn't. Oh look there's a camera, and now it's gone. It's small enough to stick in a watch wristband - but wait, now there's a touchscreen and it sorta looks like it runs apps except it doesn't.

Totally incoherent. I loved the first few generations with a clickwheel, they were great to use on the go. I have no idea what the point of the latest model is.
All of them did it. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram.

First they get popular, then when they're big enough having the luxury of lock-in, they turn to fucking the same users that made them popular.

Web 2.0 - taking the milk out of stupid cows that should have known better.
Cloud Postgres (Beta)—PostgreSQL Clustering in the Clouds Made Simple
"you're a web developer and should already be familiar with HAML, SASS, and Coffee"

That's like saying a web developer should be familiar with Ruby.

Unless you've made a conscious decision to use it, there's no reason to assume that you're familiar with the tools in question.

For what it's worth, I can see myself needing Backbone (or something similar) for what I'm working on, but there's no way I'll be using CoffeeScript.
Warned Microsoft Over Windows RT Branding, Claims Dell Executive
Come make an impact. Amicus is hiring Engineers in NYC
Meanwhile just to read this post, I must accept some google+ TOS and create my nth g+ account:

Mobile terms of service

By tapping 'Accept', you agree that Google will use your location in this product and accept the Mobile Terms of Service.
Looks like more than 1 person went out of their way to skip the $13 slot. Are people really so afraid of 13 that they would pay more money for a worse spot just to avoid it?

It jumps from $12 to $14 + $15 + $16 at the time of this comment.
GBD 2010: understanding disease, injury, and risk : The Lancet
How accurate are Americans at estimating calories?
While you're on the subject, perhaps someone could explain why there are separate "\Program Files" and "\Program Files(x86)" directories.
I am puzzled why your immediate response is to blame Python.
link to article on article http://io9.com/5969254/chart-reveals-the-diseases-that-are-m...
It may be against Facebook's TOS to use a fake name but you can definitely get away with it. However, if you are adding friends and family to your list of facebook friends then it might not be hard at all to figure your real name out.
> If you find an ubuntu laptop with build quality equal to a MacBook Air or Pro, I'm all ears.

Ummm... what about Ubuntu on the MacBook Air or Pro?
Hint for Americans -- Europe is not a country and while Facebook does operate in Ireland, that means they are subject to Irish, not German, laws.
You should look at adding examples of the various types of avatars you are suggesting not to use. Visuals would make this article even better! ;)
> This is why you don't negotiate for things like gas, clothes, and milk.

Gas and milk, sure. But lots of people still buy clothes from places where haggling is acceptable.
Kömür Nasıl Oluşur | Soma Kısrakdere Kömürleri
Does anyone else get tired of signing up for betas that never come to fruition?
I must sign up for 10 new accounts online each day... 8 of those 10 are likely some sort of email list for an upcoming beta. I find them on http://betali.st or on HN or just through various tweets. The thing that pisses me off, is I usually look at them and say, "oh cool, someone's finally making an app that does X" or "sweet, I've been wanting to make this app, but I'm glad someone else is"

And then I wait for the beta invite and it never comes. Then I stumble upon the url for the site a bit later and realize they shut it down and it never actually was developed.

Now, I can completely understand how developers can get wide-eyed and excited about an idea and immediately start marketing it as the next big thing, but then that excitement wears off and they drop it.

I guess my biggest question I'd like to pose to the developer community is:

Is it worth the having a notification sign-up for an app you have no intention of having running within the next 6-12 months, or should we focus on having these sign-ups when the finished product is weeks away?
Unfortunately, Sta.li looks like nothing's happened to it since 2010. That's too bad: something like Sta.li could shake up the convergence on the bland and bloated that most "mainstream" Linux distros seem to encounter. Also, we'd get to experience if dynamic or static linking feels faster.
Why Dublin's Tech Scene Is Booming
I like that Perl tends to do what you wanted it to do, rather than what you told it to do. Bugs in other languages are often because of vice-versa.
Exploring the Fiscal Cliff Policies visually
Perl is 25. Python is 21. Lua is 19. Ruby is 17.

Interesting how I consider Perl an 'old' language, and the others new languages. I guess it says more about how revolutionary Perl was at the time and how quickly it became widespread. The only other language I know of that went from 0 to everywhere in under 5 years was Javascript.
This is about GPU performance, though, and specifically regarding OUYA, I think that matters and will be visible in games.
Great to see Postgres starting to take off in the cloud- I far prefer it over MySQL, but stuff like Amazon RDS has made MySQL more usable.
The copyright issue can be a bit tricky. Assuming that Instagram goes on and sells users' pictures - who's liable if somebody uploads a picture which he/she doesn't own, and then Instagram goes on and sells that to a third party?
Raw power and efficiency are not unrelated. The key gain available today, other than process node shrinks, is being faster at the race to idle. If the CPU uses 1W at 100% and 10mw idle, then the quicker you complete your processing task the better.

There are some decent options for low power; the new A7 is basically a lower power/multicore A8 (found in SGS1 gen devices). But anything close to 1/6 is not happening, unless you get an E-ink display, possibly.
Cool! This reminds me of Shirt.Woot so much. I like the subscription idea mostly because I like to get things without realizing I'm getting them.
Yes, it won't scale just as easily.

However e-mail providers seem to manage quite nicely.

There's also no need to push it "everywhere": There's no reason why a decentralized solution can not have actors that act as hubs either for end users, or for smaller hubs, and get their margins either by reducing the fan-out or by being able to get sufficient size to benefit from peering arrangements to bring costs down.

Even a system that somehow mandated such an arrangement and where it was impossible to be part of the "inner circle" without a very substantial number of users in order to keep the message fan-out in check would still be a vast improvement over having "just Facebook".

The most important aspect from a user point of view is to have the option of moving elsewhere, not whether or not it is cost effective for a user to host everything themselves.

(And there's no need to instantly push out every image and have all the servers store each image - push links, and have the clients cache and/or archive based on criteria they care about).
There’s little or no link between video games and gun murders
You can also look at some curriculums from these rails shops. I think Rails is a good choice because ruby is a very productive language, there's a pretty proactive and helpful community, and it doesn't seem too difficult to get an entry level Rails job.

http://www.appacademy.io/curriculum
http://prework.flatironschool.com
The Tegra 3 had this feature and appears to work relatively well according to http://www.anandtech.com/show/5779/htc-one-x-for-att-review/...
That may be an incorrect name, but it such courts do exist.
I use FB mainly for information distribution and conversation. It means that I interact with friends of friends, and with people who "are going" to my event (and I'm not knowing them in person). (And yes, I add Internet-only acquaintances, but not guys I don't know.)

Some of my personal experience says that (usually, not always) people under names don't troll that much.

Of course, the situation is different for small communities, or skill-driven communities, but (usually) not for open ones. (E.g. on HN anonymity works well.)

I don't say that I agree with FB's rules (personally I prefer "real names encouraged, but not required" policy on such "for everyone" sites). I'm just saying that there are pros and cons, both for FB and for its users.
Swedish teens riot over Instagram account that identified students as 'sluts'
Php.net is down.
Corollary to that: the more legitimate an account looks, the more free stuff a scammer can get by pretending to be that account holder.
I just don't see the imbalance. There are many happy people out there who don't have Facebook and live a happy, fulfilled life.

The argument in this instance is "many people like your free product and don't agree with the way you make money".
Wi-Fi Enabled Video Doorbell - DoorBot
I respect Perl and people who use it, but this is a telling cultural artifact: http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/

I am not posting this to bag on Perl, but just to show its fingerprint. If you find that periodic table to be funny or cool then you are a lot more likely to be happy with Perl than if it makes you shudder.
[ Function ] PHP Options and Information - CEH - Saher Team
Would it be viable to let users opt-in to selling their photos, with users and Instagram splitting the money? That seems to be a system that would appeal to both sides.
There's a world of difference between not jumping to conclusions based on partial facts, and making conclusions based on known facts.
At a minimum I would like to see a clear statement of what hypothesis is being examined.
Let me tell you the reason: No laptop.

Imagine that you just dock your phone into a screen when you want to work and that you don't have to haul a laptop around with you anymore. To get there, we need the machine-power-per-square-inch to shrink further and this is what drives that.
Physicians Turning To Social Media To Share And Exchange Information
Latency isnt going down.
I max out my 1 GB of RAM on my S3 easily when switching between Spotify, Whats app and Chrome with 10 Tabs open.
Why do I open 10 tabs on my cell phone? My subway ride to work is about 35 minutes and the timeframe where I have HDSPA is 5 minutes after that no more mobile internet until I get back overground. It's enough for exchanging a few Whats app messages though.
Technology Will Disrupt the Retail Industry in 2013
It's not a moral question because it's the buyer who determines what something is worth, not the seller. The seller just sets the price. If the buyer thinks something is worth more than the price, then they'll buy it. Otherwise they'll walk away. The seller isn't taking their money, the buyer is either giving it or not.
Instagram doesn't need to be a public utility: it needs to figure out a way to make its profits without trying to pull sneaky, unethical stunts like these which confuse, mislead and exploit its users.
Battery? It just disables all the excess cores when it doesn't need them. Your bank account is a different matter though.
Solar panels, sublevel required under toilets, multiple tanks, electrodes.. It will need to be simplified and miniaturized dramatically to be viable - but it seems possible.

It sounds like the solar panels are oversized, and mounting it on a motor is particularly gratuitous. They mentioned batteries, but I don't know why they would be necessary. Couldn't the waste be queued up until daylight to be processed?

However, it's clear they're simply proving the technology. The question is, can it be manufactured and packaged efficiently and compactly.
It's not new, it's in tegra3 also. I never saw real profiling data/usage report regarding how effective this "+1" core is in saving power. But I did saw anecdotal report that the "+1" core often times works at the wrong time that hurts performance... (e.g. still used despite of heavy load, etc. )
Unlike other consoles, nothing is stopping ouya from adopting yearly or at least 18 month releases and I certainly hope they do.

Realistically,its probably already a challenge to ship the console with existing hardware, so it makes sense
Hack Jersey: Coders and journalists, together (Jan. 25-27)
Boyfriends/girlfriends turned stalker. Having others add you to groups without permissions. Hacked accounts.
Should you stick with Windows 7, at least for now?
Would you mind elaborating on how his grasp on what they're doing is plain wrong ?

Specifically, how is his example of a celebrity's silly picture being used by Instagram to advertise a silly product plain wrong ?

I also fail to see how he comes across as entitled in his post. He's merely expressing a concern, one that, at face value, seems to be pretty valid.
Newbies writing code for things like (say) fiddling with directory trees should absolutely be writing unit tests, using VMs, etc. so that the worst outcome is that they waste time. Which isn't necessary if they devote some attention to properly learning the language.
Just as we have a "do not track" option for our webbrowsing habits, we're going to need to have something similar for other aspects of our increasingly-digital lives:

Sounds like the EU's Data Protection law. Making it illegal to store personal information about people unless they have opted in, etc.
Changes in the rules of the [startup] game
There is no consensus in Europe that the role of government includes protecting us against our own deliberate choices. Particularly not against choices that we can reverse any time we want. And the law we're talking about is not a European law. It's a German law.

I'm glad we do have a European law that mandates websites to delete personal data at the request of users. That gives us the freedom to leave if we no longer agree with the rules a website makes.

I actually deleted my Facebook account partly because they asked "friends" to report "friends" who didn't use their real name. I also don't like to be mislead and spied upon in the most egregious ways possible.

Facebook is only a monopoly if all my friends decide to enforce it by keeping me out of the loop if I'm not on Facebook. Real friends don't do that.
YouTube Rewind 2012
No. But their "Hey Jude" diagram is worth a watch! https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/examples/flowchart_software
I couldn't help but think many of the downsides for the candle (sticky mess, unsafe, respiratory aggravation, dangerous) applied to electronics manufacture. But out of sight, out of mind.
Heck, this happens at my company, and we're 2 co-founders and a CSR. This was literally one of the first things we built - as I imagine it must be for any biz that ships products to customers.
How are we going to deal with this?

EU law deals with it. It's illegal (and has been for decades) to store personal information about someone unless you have a legitimate, proportionate reasons etc. etc.
> so very very many things changed in backwards incompatible ways

jQuery has always made feature changes/additions on .x releases. We're saving the 2.0 moniker for removing oldIE because that is a much more significant change than these API cleanups.

At this point the jQuery installed base is so big that any change, however innocuous, is a breaking change for someone. Even fixing bugs, conforming to W3C standards, or making API return values consistent can cause trouble because someone depends on the old way of doing things. We try to be respectful of people's existing work but also want to make forward progress.

Like the intro at the top of the upgrade guide page says, this list seems a lot more scary than it really is. We're just trying to call out every change that we think may cause issues, so people can assess and address them in advance.

The jQuery Migrate plugin is designed to make it easier to find any compatibility problems, and can be included with jQuery versions as old as 1.6. Add the plugin to your current code, run it, and view the console to see if there are warnings.
Wasn't Instagram written in Python?
If i'm not mistaken, that review is for One X for att, which doesn't have Tegra 3 in it. It does have data for Tegra 3 (One X international version), but it doesn't seem to support the claim that Tegra 3 is more power efficient because of the +1 core.
The state has monopoly on the use of violence, among other things. Just because leadership may change does not alter this fact. Would you deny the fact of a corporate monopoly simply because their leadership may change?
Put Chubby Models on a Diet with Concerns
I worked with a guy who had worked in Zurich, NYC, London, and eventually decided to move back to Louisville from Columbus.

As far as Indianapolis goes, at least it's not Cleveland or Buffalo...
So what, in his grasp, was wrong? I'm curious. He says "Instagram is now going to use photos taken by its users in advertising, and they may or may not disclose to viewers when the advertising is happening" -- is that incorrect? That's pretty much the only assertion he makes that could be factually wrong. Everything else in there is his opinion, which isn't "plain wrong"; it's just his opinion, just as it is yours that he's "your typical self-proclaimed geek these days" and "shoots from the hip at anything that might trounce his sense of entitlement."
The landlord and tenant relationship is another example, where courts in many jurisdictions will simply strike out many types of clause, whether they were entered into knowingly/willing or not.
Why is Twitter letting us export?
Intern Holiday Bonus
Prove yourself right.
Sites that try to trap you on their site by redirecting when trying to use the Back button is tied for the most annoying thing on the web of all time. It is tied with using an confirmation box when leaving. I'm starting to think that having a 10+ history list of the same page you visited once might actually be worse than confirming you want to leave.
That reminds me of a site that, in protest to arguments made for criminal hacking charges in the "MySpace suicide" case, changed its TOS to ban people named "Steve" from visiting at all.

I hope that we make more headway, in the legal and popular understanding, that website TOSs currently seem to amount to nothing more binding than "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" signs.
Speech recognition is done on device in android jelly bean. It takes about 1 second per word but it is very accurate in my experience.
So your server returns an HTTP 200 with an empty response, and you process the `null` in your success handler? Do you really want a `null` returned? Is this a server you control, or is it some third-party service? Just curious about the use case and how widespread it might be.
Autodesk Developing CAD Software to Design, 3-D Print Living Tissue
Why 84% of Kickstarter's top projects shipped late
I'm currently a dev writing C# desktop applications for financial services companies... we are working on a cloud-based solution, however.
This is an interesting idea, but if you need an extremely terse DSL which doesn't look anything like Python and has to be learned anew,
why not just use Perl directly? Maybe for environments where you can't install Perl?