skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Maybe I'm just so used to the quirks that I don't see them as a problem any more.

To jog your memory, here's a list of questionable design decisions I can think of off the top of my head:

Automatic semicolon insertion and a broken == operator

A language shouldn't try to guess the programmer's intention, but rather fail cleanly on ambiguous cases.

Function scope and global by default

Frankly, I'm appalled by how many dynamic languages get it wrong. Lexical block scoping with mandatory declarations are by far the most sane approach I've come accross, and the only P-language (Perl, Python, PHP with Ruby and Javascript as honorary members) that gets it right is (strict-mode) Perl.

Weird object system

While actually protypal, the constructor-with-prototype-property semantics add a pseudo-class based overlay without an obvious mechanism for object extension and code reuse.
One suggestion: handle excess indentation. If I copy code from something and it's been indented 3-4 levels, it's pushed almost all the way (if not all the way) off the picture.

Love the support for Solarized, by far my favorite color scheme!
You are multitasking in an open-plan office because you have two jobs that are often at odds. One is being productive. The other is appearing productive as part of what actually matters at work: managing your own social status within the group.

Even if you're not aware of it, your brain is dedicating resources to the latter of these jobs. Over 9 hours, that wears you down. You may not notice it. You may attribute your end-of-day fatigue and digestive problems to aging even though you're not actually old.
Each bus, trolley and tram has a GPS device. The data seems to be refreshed after ~10 second intervals. Not sure if an API exists to create other apps based on the data.
Indeed they are:

The Future of Torque 2D is Open Source - http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/22065
Samsung Galaxy Express:new 4G LTE smartphope
Indeed - market making deals like this are how GS makes money. On an individual deal, GS may make or lose money. But in aggregate, GS is only after the aforementioned 5% - the goal here is to sell liquidity for 5% and close the position as fast as possible.

Further, the fact that a GS analyst said something is irrelevant. The analyst is an independent adviser to GS's brokerage clients, and is not informed what the prop trading dept is doing. In fact, it would be illegal for the prop traders to tell Bill Shoppe what they are doing, or for him to give them advance notice of his analysis.
How to upgrade to Rails 4 without invalidating existing sessions.
It's funny because C++ is used a lot and everyone bitches about it.
You should perhaps focus on adding value to the discussion, than going on about people you hardly know anything about.

JS and Python offer comparable expressiveness for most programming tasks: basic imperative language features, first class functions, closures etc. If you miss list comprehensions, a better syntax for lambdas or classes, go ahead and use the favorite JS shorthand - coffeescript. It _really_ is JS. Even if you don't use coffee, having first class functions would let you write some of those missing features in a library (albeit with a slightly clunkier syntax).

Sure there are nuances, like scoping rules. On the plus side, having a single programming language on the server and client saves some time. Also, most of the libraries being async in nature helps in typical I/O heavy apps.

I draw these inferences from a medium sized JS project I have going on at http://www.poe3.com (source: https://github.com/jeswin/poetry-source). I am fairly convinced that JS did save me a lot of time. Interested in seeing how you came to your conclusions.
It is all personal taste I guess. Mine was about half that price for the 1000M. Their value is in the beautiful cases and bracelets, all CNC cut from a hunk of stainless steel. They are among the most waterproof watches on the market. I'll never actually dive 1000 meters, so I realize that is like people who never drive their SUV on a dirt road.

I prefer my watches to be kind of minimalist, so I like the design. It has no cachet in that no one has heard of UTS, and nobody comments on it. But it makes me happy to have a unique thing of beauty, so that works for me. I view it as much more special than a fairly common watch like the Omega Speedmaster, say.
This isn't a bug ... you really need to understand how floating point numbers work if you're going to do ANYTHING with them.

At one point, I wrote an entire single-precision IEEE compliant floating point library in assembly language and while that product failed (an embedded system), it's been invaluable in the 20 years since that project. When working with higher level languages, I completely understand how my numbers will be rounded, precision truncated, etc.

Casting back and forth to integers is often problematic, but even more telling is that the programs that have to be very precise generally use fixed-point integers. Banking and accounting don't tend to like single "pixel" rounding errors!
I'm sure they gave the client a discount to reflect that. 2,083% does seem a little low. I started out in a consultancy that did the same sort of things. There's only so many times you can bill more than your annual salary every month and be told there's no money for raises (or in one memorable case, a laptop).
There's no way that Amazon heard Azure's announcement and shipped this within two weeks from scratch.
I heard Cem Kaner say once that software has the "cat food problem." The people buying it don't consume it, so the quality is low.

I think that sums up the enterprise space well. It's all bought by people who are not using it and want to be as hands off as possible. That is the core problem - you have to look good on paper (read: big feature list) to get attention. It's a space for heavily-bankrolled startups or people who are creatively repurposing existing software. Mostly the latter.
> JavaScript is also much more performant than Python

This is not true. Some Javascript _implementations_ are definitely faster than some Python _implementations_, but nothing about either language makes one inherently faster than the other.

And in the Brython case, the Python is being translated to Javascript, so it is getting the same benefits out of a fast, JIT-compiled implementation that Javascript normally gets.
Rest assured that my tutorials have been tried-and-tested by many under- and post-grads over the years. They've been included in college & university syllabi and I've get a lot of positive feedback from postgrads who've opted for the LaTeX route rather than word processors.
>If ST becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with ST, especially those coming from a vim/emacs background.

And it makes ST another bloody Open Source project, designed by a community, to fall by the wayside and stagnate like Gnome, Emacs, Vim etc...
O_o have you ever tried programming something for torque 3d?

It's not fun.
Yes, but these are government laws, not a expression of the special interests of a private company.
I have an idea of a project involving Machine Learning, applied to the game of chess:

You would need a large database of chess games and a program that can detect some features in a position (for example: "white are a pawn up", "black pawn structure is better", "black king is not safe", etc.).

The idea would be to see if some features in a position are making one side more likely to win. For example, we might find that being a piece up makes one side more likely to win, since the largest majority of the cases when one side had a piece up, it ended up winning.

But that's not an interesting result. What I would like to see if it's possible to discover features that are good for one side, and which we didn't know about.

I didn't have time to start anything about it, though.
Everything that counts are infrastructure. If you're providing a service that other developers build on you're going to compete with Amazon in the future.
Is Jony Ive killing the Mac?
Because CNN doesn't write link-bait articles when clients make money.
given that sites tend to only encode to a few formats, and given decoding is cheap cpu wise: couldn't you pipe the output of the ffmpeg decoder into a hardware encoder and get the best of both worlds?
I love ST, but VIM is free.
It will probably be in the Software Center once it gets out of beta.
Stupid Password Rules
Great advice, there are thousands of problems to solve, and so much money to be made.

But it's hard. And it ain't fun.
>The flip side is, for long term adoption, it pretty much has to open source itself.

Really? I don't see IntelliJ Idea suffering much from NOT being Open Source. Or even TextMate for that matter, which still has friends even while being mediocre at launch and 7 years late to show any improvement.

>TextMate was suffering from not being open sourced, and hadn't shown any improvement in 7 years. So he open sourced it, and it is now actively developed by the community.

I follow the repo but I don't see any exciting action. Maybe in a few more years (which is my definition of stagnating).

>IntelliJ CE has been open source for quite some time now.

Yes, but that's just a gimmick. All the interesting stuff is in the commercial edition, and it's not like IDEA is managed like an Open Source project, it's just released as one (like Oracle's MySQL).
I love this email example :)
http://screenhero.com/img/email.png
To be honest - it is actually somewhat important for racist people to be able to communicate in the open like that. You don't want to sweep your problems under the carpet and pretend they don't exist. Facebook has shown a lot of people just how far from dead racism really is.

I don't use FB at all anymore, I have a deactivated account that I will log into once every year and a half or so when I need somebody's phone number and I don't have their email address. There really is a lot of value in how connected the network is, but to be honest I find my life to be infinitely more satisfying when I'm not spending most of it comparing myself to others. If I want to communicate, I like to maximize bandwidth, and use phone if I can't video chat or be in person. I hate texting because of how little communication happens compared with a phone call. So many misunderstandings happen when you strip out the vocal layer and limit the text length so drastically.
In Russia's case there's no real anomaly: it's one of the most populous countries in the world anyway and has a lot of ex-USSR family and historic ties to the surrounding countries. Throw in the sort of political problems and business opportunities on both sides of the borders that might further incentivise migration.

The UK has strong historic connections with the rest of the world that are reflected in relatively generous reciprocal visa arrangements, strong family ties and dreams to move here. Europeans can easily move backwards and forwards as job opportunities come and go, and usually speak good English these days. People from South Asian and Caribbean have strong family connections as well as economic incentives to migrate here.
On the other hand, we have a strong economic incentive to take higher paying jobs in Australia (with young people getting automatic work visas for a year in advance of any attempts to secure a job) or the US, which is probably a little less unsympathetic towards Anglophone countries and qualifications when it comes to handing the visas out.
Venezuelan assembly rep. claims "Free Software is the dictatorship of a system"
I guess Apple has decided to no longer make it easy to own "the best" of any given Apple device for more than a few months. I don't really see a problem with this (although maybe it will hurt the generally-strong resale value, although that will put less expensive but still great devices into the secondary market faster).
Sadly my site went down very early, only 150 visits showing up in my analytics. Now my site is back up...barely...and my post is #89 on HN. My five minutes of fame are gone. Sigh.
One more reason not to put money in the hands of politicians.

People that lose their own money on these scams can't expect sympathy for being greedy from me.
Simulated Pickett N4-ES Slide Rule
The biggest problem I have with JS is the multitude of libraries you need in order to make it usable.

These libraries all seem to use and encourage different patterns and trying to use 2 together often leads to confusion.

Switching to a project that uses something different, say prototype instead of jQuery feels like learning from scratch again.
I suppose people using JavaScript instead of C++, PHP or Java is probably an improvement. It's still sad that the improvement is so terrible.
1, privacy - they would have to send you a copy of someone's video for that. 2, I expect the end user bandwidth is worth more than the CPU time you'd provide, so the credits they could give wouldn't be worth it to you.
I have not seen any stats behind this, but I have noticed an increase in the number of suits against Goldman in the past year - either its a fallout of the recession, or a meme now popular in the media, or frankly GS are very bad boys.

Is the apparent increase in lawsuits real ?
Amazon should complement this new transcoding service and their existing media streaming (via Cloudfront) with a full media server, along the lines of Red5 or Wowza or Adobe Media Server, that would allow you to do more advanced stuff, such as capturing video from users, hosting video chatrooms etc.

You can already run Wowza instances on EC2 but the premium on top of standard AWS prices is too high, if this functionality can be commoditized there will be an explosion of innovative new uses.
Hit a Piñata with a robot arm live - from The Sun
I just checked their AUP, and it doesn't seem to say that [1]. This makes sense since AWS is pretty much a content agnostic system that you pay for by the hour and otherwise have no interaction with amazon staff.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/aup/
Two bits of advice I've found helpful.

1) Don't write the whole book before you write it, just focus on small steps, pick up a pen, find some paper, etc.

2) Practice, push yourself, like lifting weights, or anything else, you'll get better at it.
Some time ago I tried to distill what I had learnt about writing into a blog post: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/07/some-things-ive-learnt-about-wri...
Install Google App Engine on Ubuntu 12.10
ST2 has been in the Debian repo's for a loong time. I assume others have packaged it for the rest of the *buntu's and whatnot.
That's true, and definitely worth pointing out. I've used them a fair bit, and while they provide exellent power, they are slightly cumbersome to use compared to Python's pervasive "overloadability" (for the lack of a better word). But I would give them a chance to grow on me before passing any further judgement.
So true - but it's not just the end products of enterprise software development that are basket cases in the big orgs: on my previous project, literally every piece of (client supplied and mandated) software we had to use - CASE tool, document management system, release management and test / fault tracker - was a multimillion pound pile of shit for which Google would turn up a dozen superior free replacements. Funny old world.
It's more implicit due to the underlying economics than explicitly so. As long as Zencoder runs on AWS, barring some magic encoding technology, it can never be cheaper than Amazon could theoretically go. This assumes that transcoding services are competitive primarily along price (which may be an incorrect assumption - I'm not in the business). The bottom limit of the price Amazon can charge is a function of their dominant (but admittedly not monopolistic) position in the cloud computing market.
I am more on the theory that storage will be a selling point on the surface pro since it has the 128GB option, and Apple's reaction to that.
> "The problem this has is that the number 4 might be stored as 3.999999992 and if you cast that to an int naively you could end up with the integer value being 3 rather than 4. "

No it might not. The author completely misunderstands FP.
Oh thank you! I hope I'll be able to maintain the current setup as it is perfect for me, my family, and Redis, but well I'm prepared to changes if it they'll be needed. Cheers
Do you necessarily need "the best" of any given Apple device?

It's probably a smart practise though, if they can make those with a serious Apple product addiction shell out multiple times a year whilst still being able to sell perfectly useful devices to everyone else.
Banking and accounting don't tend to like single "pixel" rounding errors!

Working in the field, I was actually shocked by how much people freely round up a million here and a million there, more often than not in official reports for the board and/or financial authorities. You wouldn't believe how many times I had to show floating-point "errors" in Excel, leaving young accountants close to tears.

They only care about numbers "looking the same" and being able to justify most discrepancies.
The fact that JetBrains is written in Java would mean they'd most likely port the Sublime engine to it. And that would leave the original version in a very bad situation.

Anyway, this is all speculation.
Automatically Turning Your Monitor On And Off Using Facial Detection
The major barrier in penetrating the corporate world is that the decision makers (the customers) don’t accept this fact: ”their software tool is a product of a software engineering process.” You cannot believe how many proprietary software tools I have seen in corporates which are developed by mechanical, and electrical engineers. So, they lose thousands of hours of work every year due to problems with their software tools. But, nobody cares, simply because the lost money is shareholders money and is attributed to production costs. Another reason that decision makers don’t care is that they only see themselves in that position for a short period of time (max 5 years) and they move on to another corporate. So, they only try to keep things look good during that period.

To sell to corporates you should find close friends among those decision makers.
نتيجة الشهادة الاعدادية محافظة القاهرة 2013
Apple Announces 128GB iPad
I believe one of you is writing about the psychology of the buyer, and the other it writing about the sociology of market penetration, or the sociology of corporate decisioning.
"The first time, to hate it. The second time, to start appreciating it. The third time, to understand it and get shit actually done."

Not unlike the process of becoming addicted to heroin.
The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?

Src: Eben Moglen
Fixing the National Weather Service's Computer Gap
When the alternative is something as stupid as PHP, sure. But there are much better languages out there that would entirely eclipse JavaScript, if it wasn't the only thing that can reasonably be used in browser.
- Add semicolons, if that's what you prefer.
- If you needed type checking, use ===.
- Function scope and object system, what's wrong with it?

These things don't matter in practice, although we could go on arguing about them. If a language has basic hygiene like first class functions I can build apps with it.
This is a paradigm shift. Apple is embracing three numeral technology while their competitors are stuck in the two numeral age. Apple's ability to increase numerals a full fifty percent when pundits were expecting a mere incremental refresh is perhaps the most amazing news of 2013.
Good find :) I've actually thought about that but haven't been able to work out a way to do it unobtrusively. Any thoughts?
How do save food wastage around you?
Since childhood we are taught not to waste food. Take only that much that you can eat but when I see food wastage around me, feel really sad about the needy who remain deprive of this fundamental requirement. Food wastage occurs both from the cook as well as from the consumer side. Being an operations engineer I always look for some feasible and optimum solution to stop this food wastage at least in my workplace. I'll appreciate if people around can share their experience if anyone has contributed in food saving at their workplace.
I like the simple approach you take to solve the original problem, it has a huge potential, there is a way to fine tune the results (say, hide a list of pages of dbpedia) ?
Show HN: What Does a Medical Assistant Do?
I never suggested this was a bug in how floating point works. I only meant I had a bug and it was due to my use of floats and how it bit me in the ass :)

I am still a little surprised (but not that surprised) that essentially 4.0 * 0.1 (and then later) / 0.1 didn't end up with a value that cast to int as 4. Sure I shouldn't make such presumptions, but if you wrote

float floaty_var = 4.f;
int inty_var = floaty_var;

You would generally expect that inty_var would equal 4 and not 3. I have no idea if the IEEE standards mean that it will or it probably will or it very well might not. In my experience it always has, which is quite different from any certainty that 0.4 / 0.1 will cast to an int value of 4, but that's what happened when I tested with variables in a simple function, just not in the situation that led to my issue.

Either way I'm well aware it was a PEBCAK, even if my semi-pun blog post title might have suggested otherwise ;)
I don't see what is wrong with that justification. Unless you are saying that he/she is incorrect I don't see why you wouldn't opt for that productivity increase, as long as (salary * perf_increase) > total cost.

If you are saying there are efficiencies elsewhere for which that formula yields a higher number then you should do those as well.
OpenTable to Acquire Foodspotting for $10 Million
Thanks, that'll be very useful. I can quite blatantly do with learning more.
So the security is essentially as strong as the Confluence User security?

As an aside, are you aware of what progress has or has not been made in GPG as part of a browser API? I am not sure if thats your area

cheers
Man uses GitHub as a bug tracker for his house
For example, the "autosave" can be pretty handy. You enter some text into a tab, close sublime. You have no annoying dialogs asking you to save the file etc and the comtent is saved so that it is available in the same state when you reopen.

If not for the save your ass by not losing work bit, I like it for not being annoying.