skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read this article and immediately jumped into the comments, praying that there would be a comment like this - thank you. Very well put -- details are what separate an amateur from a master.

To add what little I can to this, the reason that drives me to go to these lengths is the craft. Design, like code, is a craft. A good craftsman just does not leave mistakes in their work purposely. Whenever I do this it slowly drives me crazy until I either go back and fix it, or drop the project entirely (if there are a lot of mistakes and/or things I don't really like), usually citing some reason like 'it's too messy' or 'i lost interest'.

For me, design and programming are not all about a/b testing, 100% time efficiency, etc. A lot of it is about art -- making something you know is great and shipping it. When you know something is wrong with your work as an artist, it will bother you until it's fixed.
Apparently some people don't like Rails and love to see an obscure bug that requires the secret session key, therefore they think their cherished and strongly held dislike will finally bask in smug glory.

Edit: I shouldn't have been so harsh since the author is a security researcher and is probably not doing it out of some grudge. But even from a security researcher, saying he has doubts about a software doesn't make something insecure.

If he can prove his statement that he thinks regular user input is insecure (without requiring the secret session key), then I will happily be convinced of his prowess in finding exploits.
Are you asking why I was wrapping the code given the tools I was using at the time, or why I was using those tools at the time?

One can just as easily say, "If you were using CoffeeScript this nonsense could have been avoided" :-)
That was normally done with a hex editor, but yes, that's pretty much how it worked if you didn't have an assembler.
I feel the same way. When you have a designer who strives for perfection, they seem to think of the edge cases. And when they push you for pixel perfection, it only makes you that much better. Makes me remember how it is not to be "the best" or the one who cares the most in the office
The Strangely Underreported Decline in the Incarceration Rate
If we're going for funsies, I wonder if /dev/urandom could be considered gambling software, given the right circumstances? Only kind of kidding.
Not crazy, just deluded.

The 'scaling problem' and 'aspect ratio problem' are both ancient and well solved - I can't take anyone seriously complaining about iPhone form factors - its just a new problem for them because they are utterly inexperienced and new.

What I find interesting is that the example you give has many more ugly design problems than the minuscule changes from compensating for the scaling. Look at how poorly the text is arranged in the buttons for instance... I also hope the colour banding is an image compression artefact and not in the actual app...
>> The higher quality thing is still higher quality, regardless of time or value constraints. If you choose a lower quality path while acknowledging you're balancing time and money, you're still choosing lower quality.

Framed like that I would say "yes, I never want to deliver something of 'lower quality'", but in this case (the two interfaces) one really doesn't qualify as lower quality. We're talking about the difference between "good" and "slightly, almost imperceptibly better". Having said that I'm not a designer and maybe if I were I would have a different opinion about this particular case.

>> But it is important to strive for that high quality as an ideal, even if you can never reach it.

No, I think it's entirely possible to deliver high quality. But we do have to deal with the law of diminishing returns and it's up to us (programmers, designers) to know what's best for our client (or ourselves).
A lot of people use MOOCs at work. Even though some companies offer tuition reimbursement, it's usually partial and very few companies allot working time for coursework, and most working professionals are more time-poor than cash-poor. With MOOCs, people can usually sneak away 1-2+ hours per day on education and no one needs to know.

More: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/moocs-disrupt...
Very much this. Using floating-point types that have different sizes on different platforms without detailed analysis of the algorithm is a recipe for hard-to-diagnose bugs. Use float, or use double, whichever is most appropriate.

There are some subtle historical reasons why CGFloat is defined the way it is; a reasonable argument could be made that it "should have" been double on all platforms with 20/20 hindsight, but it can't be changed now without breaking binary compatibility.
Same here. I usually spend hours going through PSD files and correcting little things like this all the time, and it drives me crazy.
Are ppt + audio more efficient than a 4 lines email ? The author seems to suggest that. I'd like more proof however than a single trial on 28 leads.
I don't know much about the audio situation, but it cannot be more dreadful than appcache.
Yes except that bar cannot be from params since params will never return symbols as keys.

So it is pretty obscure unless you take user input and do something pretty special to make it return symbols and then run find_by_whatever on it.
More generally, I have never understood why people use these third party CDNs for important sites. Don't get me wrong, I understand the bullet points that the Microsoft's and Google's trot out: User more likely to have it cached, more simultaneously open connections since it's a different domain, perhaps less latency etc.

But the simple fact of the matter is if the CDN goes down, your site essentially goes down. Everything else might be up and working great, but how well will the UI function if the user can't pull in jQuery? I just don't see any value in taking a dependency on these third parties for hosting JS libs and the like.
Jack Daniels is famously distilled in a dry county where its sale would be illegal.
Excellent question, it would be wonderful to have a world dictionary of words in usage with standards on how to add or remove words in a democratic way. For now an example would be to pick the 5 most used dictionaries in that language. I agree that it should include all languages, perhaps a database would need to be created of forbidden words that could be easily searched. I certainly haven't worked out all the details, but if it were implemented then these problems could be solved.
Also perhaps they should stop copy/pasting code from websites.
Hey, if you ever come back to this comment thread, I've got a great conversation to add to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002037
Cool you liked it!
I recently made a service named Docverter[1] that attacks this from the other end, where you write your book in Markdown or various other markup formats and produce ebook files via pandoc and calibre. It's way more do-it-yourself, but it could be a useful backend for this or other services.

[1]: http://www.docverter.com
"Isn't that a MASSIVE red flag that you are dealing with unscrupulous people?"

I used to think so, but there are legitimate and perfectly legal businesses that only accept cash or teller's checks. I recently dealt with a car shipping service that demanded cash (I was suspicious too, but my car is fine and the service was prompt). Some people don't trust banks; some come from countries where banks cannot be trusted.

There is no upper bound on legal cash transactions. We have cash for a reason, and people who pay in cash (even large sums of money) should not be assumed to be criminals (despite what tyrannical forces like the DEA tell you).
Why IT Consulting in NYC is Essential to Serious Businesses
> At the time of the raid, Stuart had about 20 clients, all of them outside the U.S. in Costa Rica, Panama, Australia, Jamaica, the UK, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Now he’s down to 10 clients.

Maybe this was the goal all along. Simply targeting this individual is enough to permanently damage his business. It might even cause others to have second thoughts about developing gambling software. Even if this doesn't end in a conviction the landscape of online gambling software will be altered.
Maybe I misread the article but I didn't get the sense that the $2.3M was in the last year. If the company has been operating for just over a dozen years that could be total revenue which given the type of software really isn't all that alarming.
CDN, with local fallback:

<script src="//ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.x.x.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.jQuery || document.write(unescape('%3Cscript src="/scripts/jquery-1.x.x.min.js"%3E%3C/script%3E'))
</script>
"The casinos in Vegas are primed for this by making it relatively likely you’ll win something early on" seems like mushy thinking. Perhaps they make it relatively likely you win at any time, but there's no difference between "early on" and any other time.
MassChallenge Looking to Expand Team with Technical Lead
Is the DA going after Cisco, Dell, Microsoft and NY ISPs? The software runs on or through those systems. They are part of the conspiracy.
The fact of the matter is people don't know enough about Rails to know what this means and like to go with the easier to spread story: "Rails vulnerability found in all versions related to user input"

Sounds much more sexy and they can do more Rails bashing that way. The fact is true as you and the article says, it's pretty obscure. In addition to being obscure, you need the secret session key.
I think more that the bug is in the code that's doing the wrapping, and therefore the fix should also be in the code doing the wrapping, and not in the code being wrapped.
I have worked with designers who thought sending me a 500px wide background for an iPhone app was just fine, and I should just scale it on my own.
Slightly off topic - sorry.

Whoever coined the acronym MOOC is clearly not from the NYC area or has not heard the term "mook", which is all I see when I read this article.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mook

This is an acronym that should be killed quickly.

Maybe something like MMOE (Massive Multiuser Online Education)? Or MOOE (Massive Open Online Education) or OEOE (Open Enrollment Online Education)....
Can't wait to see how this goes. I can't imagine why MS hasn't bought them yet. Seems like the perfect fit for Win8.
Yeah, I know - but why bother? Just host the libs yourself and be done with it. Plus that way you can bundle them with your other scripts and save a request.

Edit: To clarify - the reason I don't like the above solution is because if the CDN is slow to respond for some reason, you've just wasted a bunch of your user's time before loading your self hosted version.
Updated Omnigraffle Stencil for Bootstrap v2.2
Outsource Magazine Issue 30
Check us out!
Traditional Jewish sources would translate that as 25%. It does say one-fifth, but it's a fifth in the sense that you pay 125%, and 25% is one fifth of what you pay. There have been shifts in a lot of mathematical concepts over time and that's just one example. For instance, at some points in history people did use fractions, but favored using one in the numerator - 3/5 would have been expressed as 1/2 plus 1/10.
I wasn't asking you directly, the question was kind of rhetorical. The reason is that boilerplate code like that, should be abstracted away from the actual code that we write and I was kind of hoping to see that mentioned when I saw the jQuery boilerplate.
'Logical' may indeed be an insufficient description given that it lacks any inherent substance (logic can demonstrate something which is true or false).

Personally I generally organize by kind: model (including state), and then interface (views, etc), and then controllers (including helpers).
Property Law and Outer Space
Hubbub - London or Remote - Full time

Hubbub is saving independent food shops by letting people order online when they can't get to the shops themselves. We mask the complexity of ordering from lots of separate shops and allow customers to place a single order online and receive all their weekly shopping in one go. It's good for the shops because it lets them reach a wider audience, and it's good for our busy customers because it allows them to support their local community.

We're looking for two developers, who will double the size of our current team, to work on our Rails based website and supporting applications. Ruby experience is a plus, but we're very happy to take on people without direct experience if they know how to learn - our second developer hadn't written any Ruby before starting with us.

More details, including how to apply, are at http://developers.hubbub.co.uk/
At least six.
For my parents' generation, the way you showed ambition and competence at work was, after you finished your assigned stuff, to go to your boss and ask for more. If you were good, you were always asking for more things to do. This was inefficient, because it usually meant you were putting 100% CPU into grunt work for 4 years, and if the company turned on you and fired you mid-climb, you would have gained no real skills in that time.

Ambitious people don't do that anymore. They don't give their surplus time back to the boss and ask for more work. It's the mediocre, clueless ones who do that. The ambitious people use surplus time to learn the skills that will help them advance. Having a Library of Alexandria at every desk means that ambitious people can get a high-quality education and no one has to know.

I don't believe that MOOCs will obsolete the traditional liberal arts education, which is about a lot more than lecture, but MOOCs are another step, and a powerful one, in bringing through this transition in the workplace. More on this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/moocs-disrupt...
KaoruAoiShiho, I'm really liking the look of this Firebase. Are you yourself set on Angular as the client? I feel inclined towards your opinions: a man who comes from Drupal, uses Meteor, with an eye on Angular, obviously knows what he's talking about ;)
We love you too :)
Could you list out or elaborate on the other packaging projects being developed? I'm very interested in getting involved with Python packaging.

Thanks.
The BBC BASIC interpreter (present in ROM on all these machines) included a pretty good assembler. There may have been issues putting together a 22kb program with it -- probably had to be assembled in several chunks -- but no need to use a hex editor.
Apple, Waze, and the expectation of rumors
I wasn't disagreeing with the poster above, I was adding additional insight into what it takes to initially commercialize a product (assuming the initial research was publicly funded).

Before a decision to produce can begin, there is additional R&D into:
- scale production design and cost analysis
- analysis of potential market size
- risks and boundaries of treatment identified via clinical trials

If the potential market size and production costs work out to be marginally profitable (to be an attractive investment):
- initial outlay of prototype production facilities
- scale production and distribution processes (some drugs have limited shelf life or require special handling)
- market building (disseminating information about the treatment to health providers, and tracking market penetration) to make sure the market potential is fully used

Production of generics is "efficient" because by the time generic production gets underway (at patent expiration), they can sell as an alternative to a pre-built market with processes already proven by years of practice.
Maybe. If so, it's only slightly more bearable than the attitude of many observers towards what or how they think "the Ruby community" collectively believe, do, or act.

There's no singular Ruby community anymore than there's a C, PHP or "Linux community" whose behavior can be collectively judged.
Also: Bill Shakespeare didn't write novels. Just sayin'.
New Year’s Resolutions for the Java Developer
Who else but the politicians and their servants? We can let them erode our position further and further and further, or we could also finally start putting a stop to that. As all of us know, respect is ultimately based on the fear for reprisals. Where is the respect?
Quantifying gains is beside the point. I don't think anyone became a great designer or a great programmer by only ever striving for "good enough". Yes, at the end of the day you are worthless if you don't ship, but you are half-worthless if everything you do is a hack.

Maybe for this case in isolation going the extra mile to this level of perfection is not justifiable, but if the designer is doing good work and meeting deadlines then you should keep your bean-counting micro-managers far far away. To attempt to quantify everything (even in programming) is to take the human element out of creation, and that runs a severe risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Twitter could be worth $11bn as it prepares to go public in 2014
Plus, if you want an unrealistic but legal way to end Federal Congressional gerrymandering, a solution exists: proportional representation.
New Year Cleanse
You raise an interesting point about boundaries in the internet age. The comparison is unfair, but I do think it's perfectly relevant that it went overseas as it's not up to the software developer to also make sure that the sites are prohibiting American users, he's simply making a tool that's been using for the purpose it wasn't sold for.
Le premier trimestre de 2013 va t-il être satisfaisant pour Apple?
This leaves us with assuming that remotely triggered bugs can be exploited until proven otherwise, the way a sane person would.
> bundle them with your other scripts and save a request

There's huge merit in that IMO for single-page type applications that have many lib dependencies.

For content-based pages (dunno what to call them, whatever the opposite of single page apps are) the benefits stated by Google/others are more apparent with the CDN with local fallback approach.
This is what we had, but it wasn't responding quickly enough, so the site was hanging despite the fallback.
"Details are what separate an amateur from a master." -- even more well put! Thanks.
Microsoft Acquires Home Entertainment And Automation Company R2 Studios
I wish ruby had named the Hash class properly. It makes reading the article slightly confusing. Hash != Hashtable
Great Expectations for Linux in 2013
Very good point, thanks! That is one of the little joys of CoffeeScript, many of the "defensive" coding practices don't exist. Fortunately, the book isn't just about avoiding problems but also about positive, productive idioms and practices.

I think I picked this example in a bootless attempt to humblebrag by pointing out something I'd been cargo culting.
If a game can give way to win back small amounts frequently, but still lose on the long-game, it can trigger this effect.

You're still likely to lose in the long game, but get small wins frequently enough to keep you from quitting.
It was also emailed to the Rails Core mailing list, thats where I read about it first.
Why Mindshare Matters More Than Time Share
Let's not think about patent/trademark issue for a second.

It's ludicrous why Amazon would name its store to something already similar. Whether or not Apple 'owns' the name, App Store, why would a huge company, with a clear brand, names its store that will only lead to customer confusion.

Are they trying to prove a point? Google's Google Play gives it a clear distinction, it even adds it's own name to the name. Why doesn't Amazon do this?

Short of trying to prove a point and sticking it to Apple, I don't see any merit for Amazon (not to mention it came after Apple's App Store) in naming its store Appstore. (or maybe they lack creative marketers to come up with a clever name?)
I'm of the "do both" camp. Personally, I like starting out the interface in .xib because of the wysiwyg style - I've been an Illustrator and Photoshop design guy for much longer than I've worn my iOS Dev Hat. By laying out areas of apps in subviews of the main view, then manipulating those in code, I get very easy content sizing (3.5" vs 4" screen) without using the springs/struts and the terrible iOS6 autosizing constraints, and animations couldn't be easier.

Just looking through my open projects right now, all of my ViewControllers have a buildUI method right under ViewDidLoad.
Well I've added CDN failure contingency to my todo list for the site I'm currently running. The lack of communication from Microsoft is annoying, even a tweet acknowledging the issue would be something.
Top JavaCodeGeeks posts for 2012
Visionary Images: The Lost Fractals of Benoît Mandelbrot
Half of Andromeda’s satellite galaxies orbit in a mysterious disk
The example about Google engineers "thinking like designers" is actually an example of "engineers thinking like engineers thinking about engineering a color choice" which the author is calling design. This is embarrassing. Engineers shouldn't think about design. Remember Douglas Bowman? http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

People want to use things - i.e. products, digital or otherwise - with style and performance. People, real people, don't give a rats ass about computer science or design - they just want the product to do something for them and they want to look cool doing it. With their expectations of performance aside for the moment, there is nothing cool about engineers "optimizing" style.
The http://hnhiring.me/ site makes the whole thing a lot more useful
Related: I also wrote a little script that uses the API to save data as YAML files: http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2012/09/16/backing-up-fitbit-data...

It isn't as detailed (e.g. distribution over time) as the website, but it still gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling to have at least part of the data in machine-readable files :)
I'm a full time rails developer and member of the "ruby community" and have nothing against rails. I am also strongly inclined to take tptacek at his word when he speaks on issues of security, even if he's light on the details. It's quite literally free consulting.

EDIT in response to upsteam edit: He did imply that you should wait for the upcoming Rails advisory, so you'll get your proof then.
Fun fact: the ubiquitous term STEM started out as SMET. Nobody liked saying "SMET" though, so they changed it to a real word.
Great read. I especially liked this line: "The road to programming hell is paved with 'best practices' applied too early."

I'm not a programmer, but I found the entire post (not just that quote) really applicable to other fields as well.
In ye olde days, machine language and assembler/assembly language were often referred to as the same thing although of course they are different. Assembly language is translated to machine language by the assembler. I believe (but may be wrong) that Elite was written in assembly language as one would have to be a masochist to write directly in machine language.
This just seems like an ad for the bContext app. There's a link to an article about cold-emailing prospects that had a lot more meat, imo.
http://life-longlearner.com/how-to-cold-email-prospects/
I really hope MS will not buy them - it would be a real pity to have this new technology limited to Windows
Redditors Revolt After CEO Yishan Wong Posts Link to 9gag
It's not weak at all. I don't know about you, but I'm surrounded by decimal measure systems and I find other old/weird legacy systems brain-damaging (please don't bother mentioning exceptions, I'm aware of their existence even in the metric system territory). I prefer the centigrade over something else anytime. The fact that Celsius have chosen 0 and 100 for for freezing and respective for boiling normal water in normal atmospheric pressure outweighs any other possible reference in regard to its relevance to a human.

I'll sum up for you: normal water, normal pressure, normal reference-peeking, and normal and logical 100-sized interval reference.

EDIT: fixed a typo