skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds absurd, instance variables should (imo) be grouped logically, not sorted by their names which are not very relevant when it comes to which belong together.

Not to mention packing, which if you are compiling with enough warnings turned on, can get annoying. I like to use http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cpplint/cp... on my code, but many of the warnings are more style preferences than anything (like where braces go). Still, I agree with most of their style guidelines, and it's nice having checks for things like unnecessary includes, missing includes and missing idempotency preprocessor guards.

Edit: BTW, yes, I'm talking primarily about C++; haven't done enough ObjC to know about packing there, so YMMV. As for dealloc arguments, again, I don't know how it's done in ObjC, but in C++ I think it's irresponsible these days to not be using something like shared_ptr<> if you are dealing with heap, thereby eliding the need to even handle deallocs.
I think we are talking about two different conditions. Wee!
This is exactly my thought on the matter. It's cool that larger sites will host these scripts for you, but why should I make my site dependent on another just for a negligible improvement in speed / caching efficiency?

My feeling is that if you're going to make your site's uptime dependent on another, at least make it for something worthwhile that you can't host yourself, either because it's too demanding or too proprietary.
Yeah you do in order to use the SaaS, unless you dump the data over USB and process it yourself. Honestly, I have to imagine that the objection to $7/mo is on principle with this crowd, and not a financial issue. This is the same crowd though, who loves to shout "if you're not paying for it, you're the customer" so here we have a situation where you're paying for what you use.

Is the price you're paying set by perception of value, rather than cost of goods sold? Yes, mostly. It is a business. But Bodymedia is aggressive in making their product (both SaaS and armband) better over time, so your subscription fees aren't pure profit.

So if you accept that $7/mo is a negligible cost, and that the price does not need to be simply an invoice of labor and hardware, but an expression of value, then I think this is a no-brainer. This easily delivers $7 of value even without using the API.

A biometric sensor with minute-by-minute granularity of data access for $84/yr plus one-time cost of ~$150? That's very well priced, IMO. It's just the idea of paying twice for a product you already own which hurts -- it's not the easiest pill to swallow, and it kept me from buying one for a while too.
This guy made the critical mistake of treating his customers with respect. I would have turned state's witness, installed the backdoor, and kept cashing the checks. Don Aronow would approve.
Punchfork acquired by Pinterest
This Mobile Charger Keeps You Plugged in During Power Outages
5 tips for content marketing success
Well you're a telling me that is very very expensive in the US and it's very expensive in europe.

Who can afford to potentially lost 10.000euros in a lawsuit ?

And in this thread we are talking about average Joe fighting against expert/rich companies.

Even if average Joe win the first time, the rich company can do another lawsuit right after and do it again and again until average Joe give up.

It's actually what happened to a friend. They don't care they just put you personal bankrupt.
And even if it's not the money, it's a lot of stress and shit like this.
> I'm not even sure if there's anything to stop me reading the "spoiler" forum questions about it first.

There isn't, except your own drive.

> I had thought that the transcripts and certificates offered had some sort of credibility

The certificates as they are now are more for your self as a proof of accomplishment thing. I have heard that they may be moving towards a real closed exam provided by something like Prometric, like any number of IT certifications, that would be something that could be pointed to in a more credible manner.
This is the story of the birth of Rich Kid$ of Twitter
Anybody get the sense that DHH's New Year's resolution was blogging more?
I've just finished Udacity CS101 and am about to finish edX 6.00x (both are intro to cs courses).

I've done a lot of thought and research into MOOCs and normal CS bachelor's programs. Initially I was really excited about getting a CS BS for free, online. The savings would be about $40000 compared with going to my local state school.

But the luster soon dulled once I realized that it will be some time before Universities accept MOOC certificates as credit (or never). So my self-study CS degree is really nothing more than cracking open textbooks and watching youtube videos as far as an employer is concerned.

We're at a strange impasse where MOOCs are free but are limited by the weakness of being no-credit, and Universities are outrageously expensive but provide the value of being for-credit.

Up until a week ago I had signed up for 7 or 8 courses, excited to further my CS education. I've since decided to cancel them all. Coursera's Data Structures course doesn't even give you a certificate! Even if you ace the course you get nada. zip. zilch.

Sorry but that's just too much of a downside for me. If you're going to spend 10 hours a week for 3 months (what's that.. 100-120 hours) you might as well get credit for it. Sad but that's how this world works. Either University prices need to be cut in half or MOOC certificates need to count for something. Something has to give. Until then I will be wary about putting my time into MOOCs.

The good thing is that with the flood of students to MOOC education, employers will soon be forced to take note of the courses these MOOC students have taken. This change in attitude will take some time to effect - 10 years before significant attitude shift and then 20-30 years before a complete attitude shift.

I'd rather not wait that long, but I may not have a choice, like many other people. The strange thing is that it's rational to eschew university and study MOOCs, but it's also rational to bite the high university tuition costs and get the degree. It's a very, very interesting time for education.
I agree. If you have a Windows 8 machine now, you have Amazon, Google, Apple, Windows, and Steam, all competing for you as a user of their "App store."

When I envisioned a future of digital downloads, this is not what I imagined.

Edit: I forgot Mozilla and Facebook.
Hmnn..This is no more on the front page so someone corrected that. Meanwhile I subscribed to your update list.Good luck!
Google and Yahoo Accused of Funding 'Pirate Sites'
Ironically, your presentation about his mobile-unfriendliness gets cut in half when I try to watch it on my iPhone.
Full PDF support is a security nightmare[1], and PDF supports so much more than a simple reading program should need, which results in it being bloated, buggy, and drastically increases the surface area for attacks.

1. http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=pdf
Why Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu on phones will outclass Android
This computer vision stuff is so fascinating. Does anyone know what the career prospects are like if you specialize in this? Is there much consulting demand? What kind of fees do CV consultants charge?
The logical had a response rate of 0%, unless we count the emails calling me
names for spamming them. All were cold emails from account randomnly
selected from the web.

Yes, that's because you were spamming them.
Correct on both counts. One con of hosting multiple dependencies locally could be that parallelization of downloads is reduced. There's always a flipside and each situation warrants analysis!

So many of these discussion points are discussed at https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rtt
I rather liked Puchfork for its integration with DuckDuckGo and overall higher quality of recipes (and better design!) than other recipe websites. Unfortunately, I'm far less likely to go to Pinterest for my recipes now and will probably just continue to search for recipes through DDG and have to sift through the results by hand.
Actually that's sort of the problem. Reflow can fucking destroy technical texts.
I am with you most of the way on this.

However, work is a fact of life. It can be enjoyable, or it can be drudgery. Generally, the more skills you have, the more leverage you have to push it toward the "enjoyable" end of the spectrum. If I'm going to be spending 45 hours, or even 20 hours, per week on something, I'd rather push the situation to one in which I can enjoy that time and have some autonomy. I don't mind working hard, but I don't like being subordinate, and that's what happens when you have no leverage.

Much of what inspires me to study advanced CS at 5:30 am is workplace-agnostic intellectual interest, but part of it is also the intention of qualifying myself for much better work than what I've been doing for the past few years.

I also think that there's an defeatist attitude that a lot of people take that Work Sucks because, in most jobs, it does. It doesn't have to be that way, though, and if the disproportionate leverage held by top-tier technologists continues to grow, we'll be able to build a dramatically better world-- one in which most people will be able to work 500 hours (or less) per year instead of 2000, and have 1500 more to enjoy.

If Work is going to be with us for the near future, we might as well do what we can to improve it.
I don't understand this logic entirely. If your site is unavailable due to normal, unavoidable probabilities in reasonable uptime, why does it matter if the CDN is hosting your scripts or not? Your site isn't going to be around to access them.
I've attempted to read technical PDFs on my Kindle. You either need a magnifying glass (if you try to do it a page at a time) or spend the whole time scrolling. Maybe scrolling isn't a big deal on a Kindle Touch, but it's not fun on a standard Kindle.

I don't think this is a question of formats; I think it's a question of "How do we show legible code samples on a 7" screen?".
"502 Bad Gateway"

Good enough reason as any to give this idea a miss, the email is a bit too cold if it's dead
I would guess the reason they don't sell in Quebec is because their product is not localized for French speakers. The company I work with is nationwide in Canada except for Quebec because of the legal hassles and logistical troubles of localizing for French speakers as mandated by law in Quebec.
And that's why you have a fallback, to fully mitigate any CDN downtime (how little that it may be). It's like a spare tire in your trunk.
With all the PDF tech books I read on my Kindle, I either have to read through a microscope, scroll the screen from left to right continously or hold the Kindle landscape meaning the buttons are in the wrong place.
Actually Hacker News seems a new external branch.
Teespring: Is This RI Based Startup The Future Of Custom Apparel? (YC13)
This is why proper grammar is important. With the correct capitalization of proper nouns, there is little room for ambiguity. Of course, that doesn't help in speech...
Meet the new boss, same as the old one...
Some of Apple's apps do their layout in code because the necessary features weren't available in Interface Builder yet (think of things like collection views, etc).
The logical subject is spammy, and most users will ignore it because of that.
Yeah, but if you gracefully handle those failures with local fallbacks, then the CDN's downtime is a moot point.
While I can't speak about the native Amazon files, I know that the kindlegen use html under the hood. It outputs (at least the versions I've used) a mobi file, which is just a zip container with some metadata. Inside, you'll find html files. I'm reasonably certain that the native Amazon stuff is just another layer ontop of that.
Reading PDFs on my iPad results in pinching every single page to make the text somewhat readable. It is, frankly, exhausting.
> artificial restrictions

I assume it's nice to be flippant about laws and FCC regulations when you're not legally holding the bag. To be clear I don't know what sorts of things are required of "phones". I do know it was an issue when IP-based phones from cable companies were initially advertised as phones but lacked 911 services. My point is that from the standpoint of near complete ignorance of rules and regulations it's quite easy to bitch about heavily regulated items.
Mark Zuckerberg is coding again
A4 PDFs work fine on a Kindle DX. That's what it was designed for. Regular Kindles are for reading novels.
If Vigil fails to punish a function, does it delete itself?

Or is it a Hobbesian sovereign?
Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format
The organic pattern and light color are somewhat distracting. It also doesn't seem thematically consistant, and sort of belies the idea of a modern site focused on programming.

Most of all, I just get this visceral sense that wood grain is sort of distasteful, and that plain backgrounds are more aesthetically pleasing.

http://cl.ly/image/3R392H2g371t
>"var" is not dynamic typing.

I think most people don't care about dynamic typing that much -- they mostly don't want to have to write types (that, an flexible containers).
Releasing Make Me
I don't understand where people are getting the idea that we are to ignore balance, constraints, and reality in deciding how to complete a project.

Absolutely not the case. We're talking about quality specifically, and why someone might choose to pay attention to finer details versus ignoring them.

Your reasons for ignoring details might be perfectly valid and entirely appropriate. The project may not call for artistry and mastery. All very good points for a different discussion.

Don't think for a moment that those who believe high quality is an important factor are implying that it is absolutely necessary. That is simply a false dilemma.
Does he also not know that the scientific community uses the metric system?
It doesn't matter in those cases; it DOES matter for the 99%+ of the time that both the CDN and your site are working optimally. In theory, the CDN should provide the best all-around experience for users (caching, lower latency, parallel loading, etc.). THIS is why you have the CDN -- not as some fail-safe for when your site goes down.
In my experience, the assumption that "most people won't notice" is usually incorrect.

The fact of the matter is that people usually do notice, if only subconsciously. If you show someone a clip from a Disney movie and a clip from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, they will be able to tell that the animation quality is much crappier in the latter. They won't be able to tell you why, but on a visceral level they will be able to feel the difference. [1]

This visceral feeling of "quality" is what gives Apple's brand such cachet. Sure, their skeumorphism can be tacky, but it's never slapdash. Their apps always run at the highest framerates, and their touch interactions and animations have always been tweaked to a level that their competitors can't match.

Now, if you asked someone what the difference was between Mobile Safari on an iPad Mini and Chrome on a Nexus 7, no one would say "the scrolling is much smoother on the iPad, and the variance in framerate is much lower as well, which contributes to a feeling of responsiveness and playfulness", but those features still contribute dramatically to the "feeling" you get when using one of the two devices.

Now, sometimes it really doesn't matter. The example in the OP seems particularly silly. However, don't underestimate the value of "bumping the lamp" when it comes to design or interaction development. People will notice.

[1] The answer to the "why" has many parts, but mostly involves the fact that Disney animation runs at 24fps while HB cartoons ran at 12fps or even 6fps. Disney animation involves characters that are carefully articulated and that move realistically and with a sense of weight behind them. Also, the general quality of animation and camera work was just better -- look, there are a lot of reasons. They all add up to the difference between Scooby Doo and The Little Mermaid.
"How do we show legible code samples on a 7" screen?"

I'd love a 10" kindle for reading technical books, can't see it happening though.
It doesn't, but that was never the point of the CDN.....
Source control allows one to bypass the moral purity of Vigil by recovering arbitrary sinful code from the past. Moral purity can not be advanced while the sins of the past remain with us forever, uncleansed. One can only properly use Vigil without any sort of source control. Even copying files before the compiler tries to run it is an attempt to cheat the system; for that, Vigil would be justified in deleting your entire code base and all the copies it could find.

Or perhaps justified in deleting you instead, as it is you who has sinned, not the source code.

...

Certainly this approach leads to a more pure universe, but, I suspect, a rather sparsely populated one.

(Eliezer, do me a favor and keep munificent away from AI development....)
Apple must plant its flag in living room
Well I should apologize, i didn't realize the comments were from a seasoned security researcher. I don't know the first thing about vulnerability testing, I just make reasonable precautions in code that I write. If you and others have spent time doing actual vulnerability testing, then I have to defer.
> There's a fantastic WWDC 2012 session that covers how the iPhoto UI is put together in more detail).

Do you happen to know the session name or number?
Switch the screen to landscape mode and do fit-to-width. This way, a typical PDF will only need 3 "next page" pressess per page, without you having to scroll sideways.
I use ezPDF Reader[0] on my Transformer Prime. Just double tap for intelligent zoom. This is not an intractable problem.

0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=udk.android.re...
No offense but the idiom you talked about sounds like "clever code" (in the bad way). One shouldn't have to be guessing what a sequence of semicolons and parentheses are for. There are perfectly self-explanatory language constructs to deal w/ post-file-concatenation code integrity (e.g. "new function" is just one character longer, and if you really want to be explicit and/or pedantic, there's "void function() {}()", which is not that much longer.
I like PDF's on my nexus 7.
This is fantastic! Kudos for coming up with this amazing service. We just launched our software for Mac and putting the screenshot of the app in a Macbook makes it so much more beautiful!

If you can also add some Windows monitors and desktops on transparent background then other non Apple folks would also be able to use it. :)
> My feeling is that if you're going to make your site's uptime dependent on another

That's a terrible idea, and of course you shouldn't do that.

You provide a fallback for the CDN...
A manager that handles FB and Twitter authentication across iOS5 and iOS6.
I remember when we would just use "the web" as a source of apps we could download (although we called them "programs" back then). Everyone knew about "the web" and it was easily searchable using search engines such as Google.
I don't think the OP is necessarily talking about reading PDF's on the Kindle, just that Kindle's themselves suck for tech books.

I presume he meant just using a bog standard computer/laptop but I could be wrong...
I understand there are some formatting issues, but PDF's dont work well on smaller devices. In fact, I find they don't even work well on Laptops, since you need to scroll down each time to the bottom of a page. EBooks formats are better for both, they just require some formatting work before being published.
(pf is actually taken from openbsd and ported to freebsd every few release cycles, so pf/pfsync/carp is an openbsd-ism made available to others by the generosity of using the BSD license.)
So if we do not need a self contained file, is html5 the answer?
Groklaw - Motorola and Microsoft Debate the Scope of Google's MPEG-LA License
He has admitted all these posts have been triggered by the ruby rogues podcast private mailing list where heated discussion is going on currently.
But this leads to stasis if you are given unlimited time and money. That is, if you did have your ideal constraints, would anything ever be produced?

I read some short story (that I wish I remembered the title of) when I was a kid about the idea that achieving immortality on earth had caused people to stop producing anything useful in their quest for perfection.
Well, he didn't say "Details are necessary and sufficient to separate an amateur from a master," now did he?
Is it no better in landscape mode? (I don't own any tablet or reader, so just asking)
Yeah that's a good point, the # of those users is going to be high in that user sampling (black hats), but very low for most of the rest of the world. I think I used an anonymous proxy back in '02 to get around a forum ban or something.
I went from SmallTalk to Java/C/C++ in the mid-nineties. Obj-C is both a relief and a constant source of frustration.
> Same with merge conflicts on .pbxproj files - these files weren’t checked into source control. Instead, there’s a Google open-source tool called GYP that generates your Xcode project from a JSON recipe and recursively searching the folders for source files.

Wow. That sounds crazy. I feel that there's an opportunity here to make a merge tool that would know how to handle .pbxproj files. The most common scenario I've encountered is when multiple people add files to the project - they get appended to a section of the .pbxproj file and consequently result in a (easily-solvable) conflict.

Part of me wonders why nobody at Apple has just gotten fed up with merge conflicts and solved the problem already.
Microsoft snaps up Slingbox mastermind's home control biz for Xbox
Actually this is a common problem caused by the large publishers. They don't seem to do much market research other than every once in a while they throw a bunch of small budget stuff out there and whatever genre sells decently gets spammed to hell and back. The other genres are essentially ignored until the selling genre is played out. Then we get the small projects again to repeat the process.

It's an old argument: publishers say "we won't make that game because it won't sell" and the market says "we can't buy that game because you won't make it".

But it's understandable, most of these companies have to show quarterly profits so they are adverse to risk. Creating a game that will cost millions of dollars and years to make for a genre that has stagnated, for whatever reason, is a huge risk.

The small developers are the key to filling this niche. Things like the recent indie resurgence and Kickstarter have made this more evident. The problem is often the large publishers buy these small developers and then proceed to destroy what made them special.

A few space sims, so to speak since SPAZ and FTL aren't quite the same, are out now and there are a few with big names attached in development by independents. If these have decent returns, on small developer terms at least, then I expect the large publishers to follow along spamming the genre.

But only if they can figure out how to get them to be fun on consoles. Which is another side of the problem of stagnating genres but that's a different discussion.
There is something very interesting to me about the rise of these courses. Everyone I've heard is expecting the jobs of the future to require higher order thinking skills: creativity, analytics, etc. Another way to put it would be thing that are on the higher end of [Bloom's Taxonomy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blooms_Taxonomy)

On the other hand, these courses are aimed at the opposite end of the taxonomy: remembering, recalling, etc. There are a few conclusions I can draw from this:

1) There is an upper limit on the possible effectiveness of purely technology driven education.

2) That ceiling will remain in place until there is an proven method of scaling up assessment of creativity and other higher order skills.

3) If you can solve 2, you're going to be very, very rich.