skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Better to prototype and iterate.

Agreed. Version 1.0 is a glorified prototype anyway. Nothing about writing a spec prevents you from prototyping and iterating, though. These are not competing ideas.

Of course you won't get everything right in the first draft of the spec. You won't get everything right in the first release of your software either. That's not an excuse to stop trying.

Let's suppose you write a spec, then go on to write some code. For each design problem that makes you break from your original plans, one of two things is true:

(1) Someone noticed a problem while writing or reviewing the spec, and changed the design. You've saved a ton of time over implementing the wrong thing and then changing it later.

(2) You didn't notice the problem until implementation. It still takes just as long to fix as it would have if you hadn't bothered writing a spec first.

If #1 is common enough, writing the spec saves you time. At worst, #1 never happens and you're out the time it took to write the spec. But how long does that take? In my experience, it takes a lot less time to write a spec than to actually implement it.

There's a lot of potential upside and little potential downside.

I don't advocate Epic Design Up Front—at some point, it's time to stop planning and start doing. But I do advocate Some Design Up Front, as opposed to Let's Wing It And Hope For The Best.

> Software should be the spec.

Software is not a spec. It's written in computerspeak so only the programmers can read it, and sometimes they're not even completely sure what's going on. Without a spec, QA has nothing to test against, so you get into arguments about how things should work because there's no record of any decision on the matter. There's nothing to write documentation against, so the documentation ends up worthless. Sales and marketing make up all sorts of neat features you get to implement whether they make sense or not because they've already been sold, and you can't really say they should've known better because you never bothered to write down what they should know in the first place.

If all you have is code, you don't have a spec. Code is not a spec.
Are you sure about number (4)? The link you supplied seems to say something different I think.
"I would not crash it."

I don't think you're meant to.
Counter point.

When I was at Google, the opinion among some of the SREs I knew was that Java there was better than elsewhere so you actually did get reasonable debugging stack traces, but the C++ libraries there were still significantly easier to debug problems in than the Java ones.

Yes, I know that those AbstractFactoryFactories let you produce convenient higher order abstractions, but when things go pear shaped, they can make it really hard to figure out what was supposed to be happening, let alone where it went wrong.
Maybe some awful programmers do advocate for it, but that doesn't really change my overall point. There is no serious argument in the community, at least, over whether code should be readable. The argument is merely about how to make it readable, and this story does not argue for any particular approach there.
I suppose it's too easy to game :(
Heroin treatment to be trialled on gamblers
No particular reason, just because it's rails default. You can easily switch up and use Node.js if you like
Comparing Skype with Facebook is comparing apples with oranges.

Google plus and Twitter are closer, but a Twitter handle is not drop in replacement for Facebook group. That just leaves Google plus.

And Google plus has around 0.5% of the German population as users.

0.5% vs 30%... not a replacement exactly. almost like saying that AOL search is a replacement for Google search. However, I think the ad networks do not agree with that.
Not has hard as you think really. Have you tried to buy more than one box of cold medicine that contains certain elements used in cooking meth? Buy too many and you get flagged. Maybe that isn't the policy everywhere, but it could be.
I know that, and that's why I'd likely make a terrible entrepreneur. Businesses have to take every advantage they can, because their competition will.

People and businesses don't leave a country because "they feel the value proposition is insufficient". They leave because they've already used all the resources and infrastructure the country has to offer, and now it's payback time. Only problem is, payback time is voluntary, so of course most of them go elsewhere.

I don't know enough about the difference in tax rates between Belgium and France, but somehow I doubt that Belgium is some sort of tax free haven where public utilities are made with fairy dust and bunny kisses. Public service costs money, and sure there is much waste in most systems and there are differences, but in the end it will cost.
> I've always wondered how one would disrupt the ISP market.

Wireless is within shooting distance. There's some issues to be worked out tho.
JavaScript Modules at HubSpot
I like that, but for two reasons, first, I'm broke, second, I'm flat broke, and second, I'd see way too much IE traffic, Jones. Sincerely, Smith
I don't how relevant this strategy will be in an age of under $1000 desktop manufacturers coming up in a decade or two. They'll be able to do generic strong metal shapes, and after that the cat is out of the bag. Guns are really simple devices that haven't been subject to fundamental innovations since WWI.

The only thing left to regulate would be smokeless powder, and gangs are pretty good at importing various powders with impunity as the drug war has shown us.
I've always heard that British people were basically not allowed to own guns. I've never heard that people could own rifles for hobbies, such as hunting and range shooting.

How are gun collectors handled in Britain? Some people collect them like stamps or Facebook likes, and become very attached to their collections. Would collectors be required to show most of their guns to be non-functional? Would there be a limit on the number of guns a collector could own?
Facebook Prepares to Bring Video Ads to News Feed, Aims for TV Dollars
This is extremely short-sighted. While the person themselves may not directly benefit from those services, they benefit from the fact that those around them do. For example, if we assume that the $600k is an employer (pretty common), then having employees who have received good public education is good for their business.
That sounds like the kind of gray area lawyers love. In the years it takes for the court dust to settle, though, you may want to avoid having your picture taken.
I like it, are you building the marketplace?
Sharing Content Across Online Services
Actually educators have salaries, the author of the post tries to automate and gamify some aspects of education, and posts report on how successful it is.
As you pointed out, time is part of a deal - and so Instagram could easily have said 'we close in a week with FB, offer more than their billion and liquidity in that time with a high penalty fee or forever hold your peace'. They didn't.
If it's (3) saying in _zero_ harm then it's almost certantly a lie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model), if it's a (3) saying the harm is very low and so it wins on cost benefit — well, that is possible but it seems really unlikely considering how insanely low the base rate of terrorism is, much less the subset of attacks which the scanners actually prevent (vs just shuffling around the attack mechanisms).
Object-Oriented Programming in JavaScript (beta)
Perhaps those professionals should contact Instagram about the valuable service they provide and how much they can pay for this service that promotes their business.

I'm shocked, shocked to find out that Instagram plans to monetize their service via advertising.
Don't know if this is your opinion or if you're just stating a fact about others, but that is some selfish social pariah thinking right there. "Fuck you, I've got mine". Unfortunately, that's what seems to go through many rich people's minds.
I didn't realize that Montessori is considered a generic term and not trademarked [1]. Since people buy apps before they try them, the name is probably a big driver of the app's success.

Similarly, the guy who generated 800,000 books uses "Websters" in the book titles for his best selling books, which is also not trademarked [2] and can be used freely.

[1] American Montessori Society, Inc. v. Association Montessori Internationale, 155 U.S.P.Q. 591, 592 (1967), referenced in the Montessori Education Wikipedia article.

[2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websters_Dictionary
I'll post the marketplace and plugin names upon request. I don't want this to seem as self-advertising.

Consider this a request :).
It would seem to me that when you make 600k a year, paying more taxes isn't as painful either.
Why a Feature of Our Website Stopped Working for Norway
You see right through me!
You cannot seriously be inferring that women in technology deserve such light treatment that an extremely light pun made via a framework reference is the same as painting the entire tech industry as having a "NO FATTIES" attitude.

The tech industry was borne of "geeks" and "nerds" and other such social outcasts. These groups of people were and are still being maligned as "virgins" and "having no friends" and "living in their mom's basement", etc. These tropes are only the more popular the larger and more dense the Internet becomes. But where is the outrage for the maltreatment of these individuals, who make up a now large segment of society (with the growth of the technology sector)?

Nobody cares, because you either identify positively with that characterization (I'm a real geek!), or there is such cultural inertia that the phrases have become no longer harmful (read: the euphemism treadmill).

Regardless, it's BS to suddenly jump to the aid of an extremely narrow segment of society because of a simple pun. I mean, honestly, despite our society having a real problem with female body issues, does anyone really feel badly for female fashion models? And can you demonstrate a similar defense for another segment of society that you actually identify with and feel needs protection? Because if you can't, then (like the phrase or not), you're just being a white knight because it makes you feel good about yourself.
Anyone have other recommendations for HTML5 game tutorials? There's a simple card game I'd like to make so I've been itching to learn.
First Volt owner has driven 12K miles in 2 years, burned 26 gallons of gas
You will find no understanding in the grown trees-- by definition, they're each seeing a different angle of the data, and each node a different subset of available features.

You can, however, calculate importance scores for the features used. Brennan's original paper gives a good algorithm for doing this (in short: for each tree, permuting the data along some feature for an out of bag sample and seeing how much worse it does.)
This is a great update and really opens it up for a hackathon project that I wanted to extend after the event, but the security issues had meant that it was better to wait until now.

Well done James T. and the rest of the Firebase team.
Everything About eBooks & eReaders, Pt 5: Google Nexus 10
American's aren't patriotic about paying taxes because it doesn't feel like we're getting anything back for them.

Let this be a marketing lesson, I suppose. I know that I'm getting things for my tax dollars, but I don't see them.

For instance, I want to go to Mexico right now, and getting a passport is ~$130.

Why? Why am I paying money for something that feels like a "government thing that I have to have". Isn't this what taxes are for?

--

We have public schools, sure, but they're awful.

We have police...but the majority of people I know see them as predators, not protectors.

We have awesome national forests, and state parks...but you have to pay every time you want to use them. Some of them are just plain closed.

etc.

America is an awesome, awesome place. But we're bad at marketing to our members.
this is fantastic, good job!
The regulator was actually saying that the goal of his move is to have it challenged in court. He wants to either establish to have a saying over Facebook, or, I guess, put some pressure on politics.
This is also a great example of what happens during acquisitions.

Space Cadet was developed by Cinematronics (apparently no connection to the classic arcade game manufacturer) and published by Maxis. Maxis eventually bought Cinematronics. Then (according to Wikipedia) "The studio was closed and the employees were laid off when Maxis was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997."

So someone out there knows how to fix it. I bet Microsoft called EA looking for a quick/free fix, EA called the employee (or lost track of them, more likely), and the employee told them to stick it.
Why is the burden on Facebook to provide anonymity and not the providers of essential services to provide alternative means of registration?
High-Profile Studies Overrate Going to College and Picking the Right Major.
He is buying out potentially great ideas for cheap. Smart man.
There is no reason not to "be clever with your language", as long as you separate the "cleverness" behind a clear interface.
There are some readability problems that stem from a lack of comments, and there are other readability problems that stem from exceedingly poorly-written code.

Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector!

This sentence tells me that the big problem here comes from the latter, much worse, source of of readability problems. The fact that they couldn't find the collision detector implies that the code had no class named CollisionDetector, no procedure named DetectCollisions, nothing of the sort. Which implies (if not conclusively) that there was a whole lot spaghetti code floating around in there. Or at least a whole lot of very poorly-factored code.

I do think that comments are an important part of making code readable and maintainable. But comments are there to handle less drastic readability concerns. Documenting what units a parameter should be in, for example, or saying, "The following code implements X algorithm with Y and Z optimizations applied." Comments should never just be a substitute for using language-level code organizational and structuring constructs to organize and structure one's code.
La Educacion Prohibida (spanish)
La escuela ha cumplido ya más de 200 años de existencia y es aun considerada la principal forma de acceso a la educación. Hoy en día, la escuela y la educación son conceptos ampliamente discutidos en foros académicos, políticas públicas, instituciones educativas, medios de comunicación y espacios de la sociedad civil.Desde su origen, la institución escolar ha estado caracterizada por estructuras y prácticas que hoy se consideran mayormente obsoletas y anacrónicas. Decimos que no acompañan las necesidades del Siglo XXI. Su principal falencia se encuentra en un diseño que no considera la naturaleza del aprendizaje, la libertad de elección o la importancia que tienen el amor y los vínculos humanos en el desarrollo individual y colectivo.

A partir de estas reflexiones críticas han surgido, a lo largo de los años, propuestas y prácticas que pensaron y piensan la educación de una forma diferente. “La Educación Prohibida” es una película documental que propone recuperar muchas de ellas, explorar sus ideas y visibilizar aquellas experiencias que se han atrevido a cambiar las estructuras del modelo educativo de la escuela tradicional.

Más de 90 entrevistas a educadores, académicos, profesionales, autores, madres y padres; un recorrido por 8 países de Iberoamérica pasando por 45 experiencias educativas no convencionales; más de 25.000 seguidores en las redes sociales antes de su estreno y un total de 704 coproductores que participaron en su financiación colectiva, convirtieron a “La Educación Prohibida” en un fenómeno único. Un proyecto totalmente independiente de una magnitud inédita, que da cuenta de la necesidad latente del crecimiento y surgimiento de nuevas formas de educación.
don't worry Montessori is used extensively in the App Store since 2 years. On my side, I've got a friend who is montessori teacher, and he test all my apps and give me feedback. There is a lot of discussion in the Montessori world about the good/bad usage of screens
CSS3 Image Filters
Well, there are other objects and substances which are illegal to make/possess, despite the fact that most anyone can make them from legal materials, so the situation you describe wouldn't be anything new.
An Apple-Foursquare partnership would make sense
I've been waiting for something like this for YEARS... can't wait to try it out.
YES! Finally someone did this!!! This is awesome!
Sesame Street - Designing Touch  Tablet Experiences for Preschoolers [pdf]
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/collection-of-examp...
Slides about Tuple MapReduce at IEEE ICDM 2012
I prefer it when the OP comes to defend him/herself. You learn more from two sided debate than from one sided.
I think the NHS gives free mental health counseling.
4 Instagram Alternatives
Yea, the US needs to work on curbing demand for guns on the street or theyll keep having these problems. This is a big social justice problem more than solvable with simple prohibitions
Just remember: If you don't pay for a product... you are the product.
Ask HN: I want to leave Instagram, what are the best options?
With the recent TOS update and my general fear of them being assimilated in to the Facebook borg, I hoped for some guidance on which apps are the best out there.

If you own an app, feel free to share it and why I and others reading should use it. There are a lot of frustrated people that need an option.
I would suspect the programmer was lazy or rushed, and wasn't considering shareholder value.
Australian ISP iiNet Refuses To Act As Copyright Police
Established vs. developing cities is a false dichotomy.

The cities everywhere else in the world where you get 10 or 100 or 1Gb to the home are all established. None of them has only "recently installed pipes". They just upgrade things regularly, unlike the US.
I can't agree with you emphatically enough about this. Cargo cult commenting is one of the easiest ways to damage the readability of a codebase.

Comments should be an edge-case solution for explaining unusual quirks, not the go-to approach for explaining the entire codebase. Using comments to explain what the code is up to is like using exceptions for flow of control. A large proportion of the comments I see should actually be function or method names for a more well factored version of the block of code that follows.
> anywhere in the US outside of the densest metro areas

NYC is as dense they come in the US. And there is no actual competition where I live.
If the table's inaccurate I suggest contacting its author. The information I found seems to agree with the information in the table, so if the game has actually shipped then the table's author is probably unaware.

If the final product has not shipped yet, though, it does belong in the "Where is it" bucket. Everything else on the table has delivered.

A mistake in one field in the table hardly invalidates the whole article, which I think you should probably read rather than jumping to invalidate the whole thing.
The Need for More Domain Experts in the API Space
Step 1: Learn to read Greek.
One guy I worked with would do it to protect his bailiwick. He was intensely territorial, and knew that writing code so ugly that nobody wanted to even look at it, much less take the time to understand it, was an effective way to make sure that nobody else on the team would ever touch anything he wrote.
In 1996 Australia experienced is largest "mass shooting" - 35 people were killed in Port Arthur, Tasmania.[1]

The Australian people agreed this was unacceptable and needed to be prevented in the future. Fully automatic weapons have always been illegal. After this shooting, semi-automatics were also made illegal (we had to hand ours in - the government bought it off us) and handguns were also effectively impossible to own in your own home.

Now all guns are extremely hard to own - it sounds like Britain where you must go through extensive paperwork and testing, and prove a genuine need for a weapon (hunting, skeet shooting, etc.).

I was shocked when I moved to California and people had stories about going to parties where people were shot. Also, police in the subways of NYC with assault rifles is a scary thing.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_%28Austral...

Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia
Pierre, thanks for sharing this information. It's nice to see a post on HN that does not talk about making hundreds of thousands of dollars after throwing something together over a weekend. The vast majority of successful business ventures --of any kind-- take time. Generally years.

It's also nice to see an example of a lifestyle business rather than a mega-million-dollar exit startup that so often dominates the headlines in these communities. Quite a few developers would be more than happy to earn a third of what you have earned on a regular basis. And that would be considered to be an absolute success.

I too am delving into the educational-app-for-kids market inspired by my own kids. I'd enjoy the opportunity to get some feedback from you if you are open to it. My email address is in my profile.
Here's a little secret. The security rules you, as a Firebase developer, write for your Firebase, are actually server-side validation code. It just doesn't look like typical code, and we've carefully designed them to have a lot of good properties regarding performance, correctness, and analyzability. And we (Firebase) take care of enforcing them for you.

But it /is/ server-side validation, that you as a developer get to specify.

(That said, we're definitely happy to get feedback on our approach from any security experts out there that want to take a look!)
It's a bit like if I have commissioned a study on whether or not my new startup is awesome. It could be good if I wanted to find out the truth, but it's worthless if I am ordering one of those for external consumption. He who pays the money orders the music.
Scala has much worse tooling (SBT is an oxymoron), and it's much harder to read than Java.

Conceding that it's more fun to write, I think 'harder to read' is more important. Scaling refers to team size and amount of functionality in addition to requests per second.
Just tried deleting a photo, and it looks like they remove the image straight away in that case: http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2010/10/08/92944289...

Hopefully it just takes a little time when deleting the account to go through and delete the individual photos, but I'll be deleting the individual photos before I delete my account to be safe.
Capitalism is the answer to DRM.

If the games put out by bloated clueless bigcorps are filled with draconian DRM, then their lunch should be eaten by agile indie startups that know better.

If you buy video games, take note: Minimize or boycott entirely games that have DRM. Reallocate that part of your video game budget to buy DRM-free games. Use Gamersgate and Good Old Games; avoid Steam.

If you make video games, take note: There's at least some subset of people who hate DRM, and they'll presumably be attracted if you use the words "DRM-free" somewhere in your website/app description/marketing.
This is why I prefer bridge loans for seed phase startup funding (project funding, like kickstarter is completely different). With convertible notes, the early owners retain control and there's less risk for the investor. If everything goes well, the early investors get in on a "proven" success. If things go sour, there's still some chance of debt being repaid in a bankruptcy. Also, there's less pressure all around, as early investors can opt to just have their debt paid off, so they aren't anxiously waiting for the next round of funding or a liquidity event.