skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fundamentally, what matters is the set of invariants you want to preserve, and it's usually the case that some number can be preserved for you by the database and some can't and have to be dealt with at the application level. So by "consistency" I mean "some invariants that I care about will be preserved," but that doesn't mean all such invariants are.

For example, if I'm writing a process that merely queries a table to pull back the user's account balance in a single query, read committed isolation might be enough for that particular use case to have "consistency:" I know I'm always seeing some consistent balance, even if it might not reflect transactions that are currently in flight (thus giving me a different answer if I run the query it again in 2 seconds). That's still a better consistency guarantee than if I have a read dirty isolation level (or effectively no isolation), so it's still useful.

If I'm doing an actual update to account balances, however, that level of consistency is no longer good enough, obviously: if all updates hit the same rows in the same tables then snapshot isolation level might be good enough to avoid problems. And if that's not good enough, then I can acquire explicit update locks and such, if the conflict has a risk of update locks across different tables. Even in that case, though, I'll need to worry about application-level invariants (like "a person can only withdraw up to $300 per day.").

So my point is that even without serializable isolation the database can still guarantee some invariants for me, even if it can't guarantee all of them, and that the database can never really guarantee preservation of all of the invariants that matter to me no matter how strong it's guarantees, so I always have to think about what I'm going to handle at the application level anyway.

In the case of my company (which makes applications for insurance companies), we do have to think about those sorts of things, but again, we have to think of a ton of things anyway, and the division of labor between the app tier and the database tier is always something we have to worry about. We do things like build optimistic concurrency into our ORM layer to make most common cases easier to think about, and we have pretty well-defined transaction lifecycles, but for the most complicated cases we have to think about what the potential for race conditions in the database would be, just like we have to think about them at the application level, and then we have to decide how to handle them. Again, even a "true" ACID database wouldn't prevent us from having to do that work, because many of the invariants we want to preserve in the data aren't expressable in the database anyway.
Is money an issue for you? if yes then i think the the answer is probably to go with the one that pays. If not then go to the one that you think will benefit you most in the long run, and there are a lot of factors that could play into that decision which i dont think anyone on here could tell you the answer to.

What kind of work do you want to finally end up doing?
How much responsibility will you be given at each?
Will you make better connections at one or the other?
Which work environment do you like more?
Are you passionate on interested in the work they are doing?
Which one will provide you with a better learning experience?

There are so many personal factors that weigh into a decision like this, and money may or may not be a large factor for you. But thats up to you to decide. Ultimately i think it comes down to where you'll be happier, and which will help you the most down the road. Answer those to questions and i think you will probably come to your answer.
Inequality Is Holding Back the Recovery
Anyone who seriously believes that has never heard Imogen Heap.
I'm sorry that's not working for you morpher! We're looking into this crash right now and we'll have a fix out as soon as possible.
California is expensive. A defense contractor where you gain experience in the emerging mobile market sounds like the WAY better option, even if it doesn't impress the opposite sex.
Unfortunately until there exists another good way for people to get their apps onto iOS devices (not counting web apps) Apple will remain the gatekeeper of their garden. Windows Phone Marketplace or Google Play store don't do much good for someone wanting to release an iOS app.
Try the iFunny app, people post nudes of themselves to it every day. They also post Kik Me and other crap. It is supposed to be funny pictures only, but other crap gets through their filters. No removal from the App Store yet.
Thanks for sharing these great tips. I always find it difficult to come up
Agreed. I read the article, expecting some sort of twist at the end, but it never came.
The problem with this question is there is no way to explore a candidate's thought process. They either know it because they just so happen to have needed a sticky footer or they don't. They could guess, but like the author says the intuitive solution isn't going to be right anyway.

Also, obviously this question is biased towards front end developers.
The article says Dell would be valued at $22B such that Microsoft would be a "bit player" with $1-3B. Yet it says Microsoft would "influence the direction of the company" and could "push back against such plans" [to reinvent itself away from being just a PC vendor].

How does a "bit player" with a minority investment influence a company? How does that work, why does the company care what the "bit player" says or wants? It already has the money, where is the leverage?
> "...have been pulled from the Apple App Store due to concerns about nude photos."

Thank god the first-person shooter games are allowed to continue unhindered. We certainly don't want to jeopardize the future of our children by inculcating wrong behaviors.
There used to be these things called small towns. [1]
One wasn't forced to choose between "20 minutes from anything" and "New York City".

Most people talking about the density issue are lamenting the lack of these middle choices. The places where a family would probably still need a car, but it would be conceivable to have a functional bus system to get you from one small town to the next, or into the city. Where you can still own a house with a yard, but walking to corner store wasn't a circuitous two mile hike with intermittent sidewalks.

etc.

[1] Before they were largely converted to glorified open-air-malls for the cul-de-sac dwellers to drive to on the weekends.
Sometimes the journey is more valuable than the destination.
Nice, I'm also looking for a clean list of shortcuts
Thanks! That one file is really instructive.
The limited reading I've done on this subject has come from the published works of Christopher Alexander[1]. In short, he espouses a process of letting living spaces unfold (or evolve, or develop, if you like) in a way that mimics nature. He applies this living process from the rug on the floor, to the location of the doorway in the wall, to the layout of the city. I think The Nature of Order series is especially profound.

Read these:
* The Timeless Way of Building (1979)
* A Pattern Language (1977)
* The Nature of Order (vols 1-4, 2002-2005)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander#Published...
keep in mind that on a closed platform you need an approved app to access the web. If a closed platform like iOS would reach a dominant market share then the web would be an easy target (and a natural competitor)
Only some open access publishers work that way. Some charge no fees. Some --- including the best known open access publisher, the Public Library of Science --- will waive their fee upon request. I am told by people who've used the waiver that it went ahead with no questions asked; they simply indicated that they were not in a position to pay.
TL;DR: Reactive Programming ≈ Sequence Comprehensions + Futures.

This looks pretty similar to a .NET library called Rx (Reactive Extensions). We're using it in a MonoTouch iOS app and I found it to solve some problems in a very convenient way. If you used functional style in your code, you know it shines in mapping/filtering/aggregating/reducing sequences of data. In .NET LINQ sequences have type of IEnumerable. You can think of Rx's IObservable as of IEnumerable's odd twin brother. The main difference is you IEnumerable is “cold” by its nature: it produces new items when you ask for them by calling MoveNext(). It doesn't do anything by its own. It's also synchronous.

IObservables, however, can both be cold and hot, i.e. they can yield items without being asked to. It's like IEnumerable but with “don't call me—I'll call you” approach. Because of this, it doesn't have to be synchronous. Long processes that emit one item at a time, which may later be transformed, processed in batches, throttled, etc, benefit from being expressed via IObservable. The benefit I found is you can easily switch between different asynchronous data source implementations.

For example, it's trivial to write an IObservable wrapper around iOS Photo Library that will yield one item at a time. Then you can write a function that compares cached items in array with new items that arrive from photo library, and return IObservable of “differences” between cached and new data. Then you group those differences using built-in methods into batches—and feed them to UICollectionView so it can animate the updates as the application receives them from system API.

Then you just write another IObservable implementation for getting photos from Facebook, and wrap it in a function that will pre-fetch their thumbnails before yielding them. It is also an IObservable. You already implemented updating collection view, so you just plug in your new asynchronous data source and that's it.

Need to implement a Dropbox file picker? You already implemented collection view logic, diff logic and prefetching images, so you just need to wrap Dropbox folder fetch API in an IObservable, and merge IObservable-s from nested folders.

On top of that, you can add some caching, and magically it will work for any data source.
Drop them off at a local school/library/hackerspace/cool thingy?
The Case for Augmenting Apple's Product Line
This seems to be a fairly common problem amongst developers and designers.

The first problem is actually shipping something that customers can buy. I'll skip over this because both Nathan and Amy have certainly been able to do that. So the next step, the 'white whale' project is the infamous second project.

The advice out there suggests either:

1) Outsource Development (it certainly helps if you're a developer)

or

2) Learn it the hard way and do everything yourself

Rob Walling has certainly had fantastic success himself - all by outsourcing. In fact, if I remember correctly, Rob struggled to successfully launch countless products before he chose a different route. Rob chose to purchase existing businesses (HitTail, Beach Towels etc.) and then started marketing them . I don't believe he had any success before that.

Amy Hoy has had great success with building everything herself - Freckle being a great example. However, Amy has also failed with Charm: "It ended up with me spending 2 years and $200k on something I had to shut down."

It seems like it's not just as simple as choosing either option 1 or option 2. There are examples and counter-examples to both options.
People misunderstand things anyway. There is a reason why alternative medicine is huge (even though most of it doesn't work). People believe what they want to believe, fueled by confirmation bias.

Journalists suffer from the same problems, as well as the need to write something eye catching. But they already write about diet fads and other non-scientific health claims (and people believe in it), so I don't see how it could get any worse by having more trial data public.
Because unfortunately, the shifting sand is made of gold :(
It's worth reading Testing Treatments, also funded by the James Lind Initiative. It's available for free at: http://www.testingtreatments.org/ . It's not the most exciting read, but it gives a good overview of uncertainty in medicine and the problems facing medical research.

At the end, there's a "things you can do" section, including:

> Agree to participate in a clinical trial only on condition (i) that the study protocol has been registered and made publicly available (ii) that the protocol refers to systematic reviews of existing evidence showing that the trial is justified; and (iii) that you receive a written assurance that the full study results will be published, and sent to all participants who indicate that they wish to receive them.

http://www.testingtreatments.org/tt-main-text/research-for-t...
So anyone can use the web browser on their iOS device to view nude photos on the 500px website, but they can't download the app and view them via that? It's a bit ridiculous really. Are they going to start blocking websites they dont approve of as well?
Won't argue about Eclipse performance. Sometime it depends on the characteristic of the project.

Some of the projects that I worked on, albeit huge, Eclipse still performs pretty nice. While in other instances I do notice issues with the performance.

Tomcat and Jetty make a lot of sense if you use it with Maven. The ability to compile, deploy and bring up your App Server is something that you don't get for free in .NET

http://mojo.codehaus.org/tomcat-maven-plugin/deployment.html

mvn clean install && mvn tomcat:deploy <-- win

NuGET only deals with dependencies but doesn't deal with packaging, running unit-tests, running integration-tests, running PMD/CheckStyle/FindBugs as part of your build.

All of these things are important for CI/Continuous Delivery.

Oh almost forgot this one: JavaFX 2 may be way behind of .NET WPF but JavaFX 2 comes with a tool that can generate installer for OSX App Store (will bundle JRE automagically), Windows, and other platforms. WiX can't do that.

I may be ignorant of some of the .NET stuff but as of 2010 - 2012, the last time I used .NET, .NET is still lagging behind Java when it comes to tooling.
It looks like events from newly added controls are captured here using asEventStream with jquery's event delegation.

More about event delegation here: http://api.jquery.com/on/

$('#container').asEventStream('click', '.someclass')

If an element with someclass is ever added as a child of #container, clicks on it will fire events. This is true even if the someclass element is added after the asEventStream call.
And for the worker to work at less than a living wage is a net loss to them.
I guess the most easily accessible info is Ben Goldacre's TED talks, based on his books "Bad Pharma" and "Bad Science":

http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_kno...

http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.h...
85 year old UK woman addicted to PS3 gaming
France Looks At Possibility Of Taxing Internet Companies For Data Mining
Agreed with siblings stating that the question is arcane, Googleable best practices knowledge. Any time I want to find the answer to something like this, I Google it.

The author should ask themselves honestly if they ask this question just so they can quickly say, "Nope, wrong! Your answer doesn't cover [X number of unstated assumptions]." While I understand things are complex, my first answer would have been something along the lines of position: fixed; bottom: 0;. If that makes me wrong because it doesn't work on [Y smartphone] or [Z tablet], then two things need to be done to make this question worthwhile:

1. State your assumptions and intended audience up-front.

2. Allow the candidate to Google.

If the candidate is allowed to research and put together a comprehensive answer based on the knowledge they've gathered, that turns this question into a much more insightful one.
It's not about keeping the device "pure". It about not putting things in the App Store they don't like. https://xkcd.com/1150/
Here is some of my code to parse html:

tstamp <- this ! "data-timestamp" >>> arr parseTime -< el
(path, score) <- css "td[class~=score-time] a" >>>
(this ! "href") &&& (getAllText >>> arr parseScore) -< el

So yes, you do have to learn about arrow syntax in order to use HXT efficiently. For most newbies it is not an easy concept to grasp, not helped by the fact that HXT isn't a very well documented library.
I don't really care, to be honest. I don't think "free as in speech" needs to be "free as in beer." I don't have a problem with a modest charge for PACER documents, just as I don't have a problem with a modest charge for using the subway. If someone wants to make it their mission, I don't object.

But Mr. Foster's email was not about whether, in principle, PACER documents should be free. It was an uneducated attack on Lexis and West, claiming that they were engaged in "rent seeking."

Wikipedia: "In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. One example is spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created."

The implication was that Lexis and West were colluding with the courts to make Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw a for-profit gateway to public domain documents.
European settlement patterns are basically a continuation of medieval patterns. In the US, especially in the West we have a continuation of the westward expansion. There are plenty of examples of very livable, older towns all over the US and there are plenty of examples of suburban sprawl outside of the US.

I think the main problem is that too many affluent families actually prefer a minivan-based lifestyle and the growth of online commerce and culture is going to make it even more enjoyable.

For those of us who prefer denser, walkable neighborhoods there are plenty of options but job choice may have to take a back seat to livability. I can see a renewed interest in that type of lifestyle but in the US the trend is driven primarily by younger people and will take some time to show results.
in my experience, ruby has a lot of small improvements over perl and python that add up into a far nicer programming experience. it's subjective, perhaps, but i've used a lot of languages and i find that ruby hits the sweet spot for developer productivity.
IPhone eye examiner gets medical approval
This article made me feel like a crotchety old programmer for the first time in my career as I cringed at the use of the phrase "great engineer" to describe someone capable of discussing a markup/stylesheet problem during an interview. It's all relative, I guess.
This question/post highlights one of the reasons the "no karma score" here at HN is not so great (or perhaps could be improved). We, the HN community, might vote a particular answer to the top but OP/author will not necessarily know that this comment is at the top of the page for any particular reason.

In other words, let's say that @gfodor's comment ("This has to be one of the worst interview questions I've ever heard.") gets 500 upvotes. It will then get ranked first, meaning that it will be the first comment shown when the page is loaded. But that is not obvious - there are no other visual cues that confirm this information. The only way to know this is to have either looked through the source code, or to have been around and seen this question asked/answered.

So this valuable info (that 500 other HNers also thought this was a terrible question) is 100% lost to everyone. No one knows how popular it is. The OP cannot learn that his opinion is thought to be a terrible interview question.

I wish we had a better way of doing this... Maybe OP can see comment scores but no one else can? Dunno...
The Muse (YC W12) Career Site Raises $1.2M
Microsoft fired the guy who created Windows 8. That doesn't strike me as a positive move.
I don't think that analogy works very well. If anything, the App Store is more comparable to Facebook: despite all of its pitfalls and drawbacks, everyone is already so invested that switching seems impossible. Developers will go where the money is, and as long as Apple continues to sell millions of iDevices, most developers won't abandon a profitable platform.
Unfortunately your only options are to file a FOIA request with the FDA or else rely on clinicaltrials.gov. Neither are great options for various reasons. But there have been a bunch of studies that compare all clinical trials with all published trials, and the results are pretty shocking. E.g. the reason why many people mistakenly believe that SSRIs are effective for moderate and severe depression (as opposed to not effective for any type of depression) is because the study that found that made the mistake of relying only on published research. (Which the authors of that study apparently acknowledged later on.)

In Irvin Kirsch's book The Emperor's New Drugs he goes over this at length.
Sinatra -> JAX-RS (of JEE 6)

Rails -> Spring MVC (albeit we still don't have a mature ActiveRecord but I concur that the Java world prefers the Repository pattern a'la DataMapper/Merb)

The whole Rails ecosystems is pretty much:

1) Spring MVC

2) ORM (Hibernate/JPA2 or one of the newest tool is Spring-Data)

3) Maven == bundler + rake + gem

4) JUnit

5) Some sane folder structure
That's because violence is not relateable. When people see violence, they don't think, "Hey, I want to do that!" But when they see sex, they do.
Or, really, people build on this pile of sand because it's more valuable than not doing so. There is enough money to be had in the iOS ecosystem that even when you take into account the risk of being dinged for something stupid like this, it's still an expected net gain for many people to release an iOS app.
Just to be clear, I was wondering about some other circumstance -- perhaps naively -- because I thought Apple had seen the error in this sort of nonsense, so I wondered if there was some other explanation or consideration.

If Apple is indeed getting back into the game of selective, uneven enforcement of their guidelines, it's a monumental fuck-up.
If you sleep naked, you are probably in favor of marijuana legalization
Closing Issues via Commit Messages
That's my point. You're talking about jumping around from language to language, but Functional Programming techniques tend to be applicable across all of them. My personal angle is that Haskell puts up less bullshit in your path while you're learning stuff about type based reasoning at the cost of being much less like things you may have seen before.

Regardless of that, going from Haskell to Scala to ML to Clojure ad naseum isn't going to get you any deeper understanding of techniques. At most you'll understand how some very basic concepts work in different languages.
A marriage is a private contract between consenting parties just like any other. The state should not get involved.
The layout is nice and simple. My biggest complaints:

- can't add to playlists

- can't subscribe

- can't browse through a channel's playlists
"a monumental fuck-up." - no pun intended, I'm sure ;-)
There's a great interview with the founder of 'words with friends' who says this is the exact intention behind the site (more or less).

Interview here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFFZpF7Y_8k
LA is hardly representative of the driving experience in the USA.
I found this section of the article of particular interest:

"A code narrative is an episodic memory aid that helps a developer recall contextual details and the history of programming activity."

I created Labradoc (http://labradoc.com/) to encourage a form of manual "code narrative" (e.g. a form of development journal).

Here's an example from one of my personal projects: http://www.labradoc.com/i/follower/p/android-arduino-handbag

I find it really valuable for context-switching between projects.