skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a really good question, and should be referring to all apis and their limits. This was my approach: Create a parser that lives off of apis, just under posted limits. Although we had a few thousand visitors today, there was only one direct line to each data source. There's a viewer server that reaches for data every so often depending on your desired speed (I think it's set to somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds) and broadcasts it. So if the parser goes down, or tags change, or services get mad, you can fix and restart without requiring clients to refresh. I'm still not in love with the solution, but it worked nicely today. Thanks!
Well, it's affordable in Detroit right now.
Now that is insensitive. People have died of heart disease at all ages. It's not a lifestyle choice FFS.
Only to the extent that its over your standard deduction. In my case,about 1/3 of the interest I pay is deductible.
I agree, and was regretting not bringing my handheld on a trip this weekend (although I wasn't traveling in Boston, it reminded me I left it at home).

It requires a little more planning, however, as you have to have a communication protocol established with the parties you want to communicate with (primary and secondary frequencies, and when - i.e. 5 minutes past the hour or something like that). You also are likely going to have to rely on simplex, since repeaters will be jammed or used be ARES/Red Cross/etc during a major disaster or emergency.

Now if only the engineers who design handhelds would learn a thing or two about user interfaces...

73 de KJ6FON
Show HN: Safari extension to make it more obvious a GitHub repo is private
I'd expect an asexual individual would not be "undecided" between the two, but "indifferent", and thus their mouse could be anywhere.
Classily done. It's difficult to balance the want of marketing and yet not whore yourself out based on popular interest during a tragedy, but this helps a lot of people. Hats off.
Because that requires capital, and no one is going to fund interns, skilled though they may be.
In total agreement with the OP.

I think it just goes to the way human beings handle original ideas, first they fight them, then they embrace them, then they take them to ridiculous extremes as they try to substitute rules for common sense in applying them.

You can see it in politics, religion and almost any really popular area of human endeavor.

Testing falls in the same category, I have had interviewers look me in the eye and in all seriousness, declare that developers who don't write tests for their code should be fired, or that their test suites cannot drop below x% of code coverage. Dogma is a horrible thing to afflict software teams, whether it is pair programming, or mandatory code reviews, if there are no exceptions to the rule or situations where you don't have to apply it, its probably a bullshit rule IMO.

Me, I like to ship shit, and I like to look at tests as a way to help me ship shit faster, because the less time I spend fixing regressions the more time I can spend actually getting more code/features out that door.

So my only metric for writing tests is this ... "is this going to help (me or a team member) not break something months from now, when I change code somewhere else".

I honestly don't care about anything else.
Does this mean they are going to start shipping for the glassexplorer program ?
I've been a Google Glass skeptic. But I just got back from Mexico, where I was walking all over waving my phone at various signs so Word Lens could translate them for me... skeptic no more! Word Lens is a killer app for the platform. Except now I see that there's no API to access the camera. Seems like a huge mistake.
Haven't you heard, the mouse & keyboard has been dying for the last forty years. Much the same as it has been "The year of Linux on the desktop" for the last twenty-two.
They also don't throw a fit when the concept of privilege is questioned, but that tends to get lost in the background noise too.
I guess your grandparents are pretty progressive, then?
I'm curious how he's going to backdoor the binaries running on my computer built by the launchpad servers without anyone noticing. Granted, I'm not checking the commit logs every time apt gives me a new version, but all the same.
A few thoughts on Streak...

We quickly adopted Streak to do customer support right when it came out, because we were stoked by the GMail integration.

In the end, we found the canned responses to be no better than GMail canned responses though, and also Streak never seemed to "stick" as part of the support workflow. The support team ended up basically just sending emails, and the dev team didn't end up getting better visibility into issues.

Recently, we switched to using UserVoice to handle support, and it works really well. We were using them for their IdeaForum, but also replaced our wiki/manual with their knowledgebase, and replaced Streak with their helpdesk. UserVoice ends up giving us a lot of data about support, and integrates search/knowledgebase nicely with support. I also like that the UserVoice iOS SDK is open source, and I was able to fix a display issue I noticed, and get a pull request accepted immediately.

I also tried to use Streak to do PR - that might have not worked out because the intern wasn't very into doing PR, but I also felt a little clumsy trying to collaborate with her via Streak.
Because the CVV is used to indicate the "presence" of the customer at a transaction. CVV1 (which is on the magstripe) is used to indicate "card-present" physical transactions, CVV2 (printed on the back) is used for "customer just typed this in" non-physical transactions.
It's not even marketing in my mind but a public obligation. If there is anyone who would be able to provide this service, it's Twilio. Agreed, hats off.
So screen resolution is 640 x 360px. Looks like lot of interesting applications can be build with that real estate! Weather, Maps etc. are some to come to my mind right away.
Show HN: Metro North train activity using websockets
You're right and this is why I intend to build a better rig. More answers in this new vid I just uploaded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLt8HkIOAuY
Ask HN: what are some software technologies which have come and gone away?
I'm trying to list various web/software technologies which have gone extinct over the years (think Microsoft's Clippy, Swatch's .beat time, abusing imagemaps in web design, etc.).

What do you think were the most interesting technologies or concepts which didn't survive the test of time?

Note: I'm not really interested in hardware related things, so please don't diverge on the topic of typewriters, alarm clocks or pay phones.
I tend to disagree. Why would you ask me about an obscure browser quirk? The interviewer would be much more better off testing my persistent and precise Google and StackOverflow searching skills in this case. Same for optimizations, and usability is quite subjective and truly needs A/B testing and real user feedback to have a conclusive decision. You could test those skills instead of directly asking me to solve one of the problems you cited. Now, writing an algorithm is not something, for the most part, that you would have needed to have memorized in order to answer the question. Developing even a naive algorithmic implementation for a given hairy problem is an actual skill that developers carry with them to be useful anywhere, and in my front end work they have been useful (plus it's so fun when I get to apply them). Granted, I'm currently developing a completely flexible and configurable application, so I tend to get into data structures and algorithms even though my work is exclusively CoffeeScript on the front end.
* I've enjoyed my bouts of unemployment, because I've had the chance to deep dive into new things I never had the chance while working full time, and I've come out of them more employable.*

It follows that staying in one job for a long period would tend to make you less employable... And indeed I've witnessed this very thing.
Global Warming and other Fictions
No, thank you. This is where I do all of my writing, and I appreciate the feedback. One of my coworkers once made a word cloud of all my HN comments, and it was embarrassing (a small galaxy of words relating to argumentativeness) and ever since, I've worried that my lazier writing is easy to spot for how puffy and prolix it is.

Though, for what it's worth: I used "factoid" in the sense of "concept related as a fact that probably isn't a fact".

It was really nice of you to take the time to write that. Thanks again.
I don't think I'd have a preference in roles in a sufficiently good team.
That's a great way to screw up the filesystem on the destination. You'll get mounted fs write combined with low-level block writes, filesystem in a blender.
While he missed this particular one, he's not wrong (and note that he's wrong for social reasons more than technological ones). People generally overestimate how quickly technology will change in the future. In 1998, I was fretting over the 333 MHz processor that had just come out rendering my 300 MHz processor obsolete. Today, I'm happily using a 2010 MacBook Air with a processor that was already almost three years old when the thing was brand new. I don't think I saw that coming in 1998.

What people generally get wrong is the shape of technology curves, which are generally S-shaped rather than exponential. Low-hanging fruit yields exponential growth at first, then advancement becomes difficult and capital-intensive. The amount of capital being spent to e.g. keep up with Moore's low is breathtaking. So if a technology is advancing rapidly now, it probably won't look all that different 30 years from now. It's the unexpected technologies that you have to watch out for.
So he was wrong, no doubt about that. But I'd be interested in an analysis on why he was wrong? What assumptions he made to reach his conclusion proved out to be untrue?
Well I don't exist to facilitate your preferred status quo.

That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.

There's not much controversy there, and like it or not, most people feel the same way.
No camera API access? That's ridiculous! Not only does it restrict about 70% of the possible usefulness of a head-mounted computer (so it's basically just a fancy news-feed display), but it'll allow competitors to move into the arena having a clear advantage. The only reason I see for Google to be doing this is resource allocation, but I feel like image processing could be offloaded to a linked smartphone, if necessary.
If this continues I wonder if we're going to start seeing drones with "Persistent Stare" (24 hour recording of a massive area that creates an enormous video of the entire city) employed over American Cities.

Had one been used already, they would have been able to take the video, slowly reverse it to see who dropped off the package in the dumpster, and then follow that person back to their home or business. Thus finding out who did it.
Thanks I will give it a look.
Don't be silly. No one ever does that in a crisis. They just spout platitudes about 'doing everything possible' and never stop to think about what that actually means.

And if you point out the implications someone will quickly follow up by assuring you that 'no one would ever do that'. Sometimes I think the greatest weakness of policymakers is the delusion that other policymakers believe what they believe, and for the same reasons.
They are a single company operating in a single market... they don't offer to sell me any product and i have no interest in what they have... i and people like me make up the vast vast vast majority of the the internets population.

So we don't even get an opportunity to play chicken... google and netflix will break the net and shove this shit down our throat regardless. Why should we the vast majority of the Internet give a shit about their precious hollywood contracts?
We can put an ICBM on someone's doorstep ~8000km away in just over half of an hour. Putting a package ~4500km away in 15 may be doable. You just better be ready to catch it at a couple miles per second.
Last four digits of CC#s are often used to identify them to users ("Visa ending in 1234"), and are specifically OK to store in cleartext. So that's not necessarily a big deal.
I have lived in the US for my whole life, and there definitely is an Exceptionalist doctrine, particularly among the Republican party. However, the ideas of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny go back much farther than WWII, all the way to the Puritan ideas of "civilizing" Native Americans to "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!" to Roosevelt's imperialism and on. It's so ingrained in our national history that it's barely even questioned (any surprise why there has never truly been a viable Socialist movement in America?).

Your point about immigrants is interesting, though I'm not really in a position to comment on it. I can tell you, though, that a good portion of the US is very hostile to immigrants, and we have had a history of hostility (take a look at the Chinese Exclusion Act, for an extreme example). Our current political discourse is also very anti-immigrant, too, and the path to citizenship is very lengthy and difficult.
Trends in property law and home ownership in urban areas seem to indicate that as rules and safeguards are developed for sharing more effectively, the rate of sharing increases dramatically.

Condominiums, for instance, seem like a crazy type of building if your system of land ownership is feudal, but they're a practical necessity if property value skyrockets and more population housing is needed in a dense area.

One of the main shifts in social structure occurred around the 1890s to 1920s, and was largely predicated on the difficulty associated with sharing issues in urban life, and the lack of rules to mediate that type of space sharing. Debates at the time about how to accommodate these issues were rather fierce, but mostly forgotten now. Our current laws regarding nuisance and abuse of rights are both hacks of the property system to make urban life work. Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation is a fantastic book which recounts the shift, if anyone is interested.

I'm interested in seeing what types of norms and rules would need to exist in order to fulfill the infrastructure requirement that you mention. Additionally, I wonder if certain areas of the world are already normatively primed for sharing, and whether or not they could become springboards for a more global shift.
> My experience is that you can write an essay like this about any development practice

Right, but in this case, he's writing about testing. One would argue that relevant now because the foolishness around how to test and how often has reached ridiculously dogmatic levels.

> What is the reproducible, objective process or behaviour this essay is advocating?

Why does it have to have one? There are many articles that make it to HN that call out software practices that are just ridiculous and help spark a discussion about them, why can't this be one of those? why can't it be the article that makes a young developer who's slowly turning into a TDD zombie "must ... test ... everything ... all ... the ... time" pause for a second and go "hmmmm"?
How To Recover From Mistakeningly Emailing A Million People
Stuttering is, by definition, a hindrance to speaking. Being a woman isn't.
| "infiltrating and influencing revolutionary
| groups"

This happens in the US now, but usually the undercover official isn't attempting to convince them not to do something bad. They are either encouraged to do something bad, or allowed to, so that they can be caught in the act and everyone can get a good pat on the back for a job well-done in capturing the 'bad guys.'
Applets.

Shockwave.

jQuery made low-level DOM manipulation more or less obsolete.

So much of server side Java has been abandon for more lightweight alternatives that don't suffer from XMLitis and layers and layers of abstraction.
On the other side:

Today I was working with a new library. I wrote a 30 line sample program just to make sure I understood the library semantics, and that it would at least do what I thought in a situation similar to the actual code base.

I called over another developer to sanity check my thinking, and he spent 10 minutes going on how I should have just written tests for it in our codebase instead.

He would not take any of these as valid discussion points:

* I spent nearly 7 minutes on my sample code, writing tests including the appropriate mocks for our codebase would have taken 70.

* I didn't even know we would be moving forward with that library, why start integrating it into our infrastructure?

* I'll write tests of our code using the library, when we figure out what the thing we're building actually does.

* I would have to write that same sample program before I can even write tests, to know how to use the library.

I do know now not to include that guy in my thinking process ever again, if tests aren't perfect, I will lose any time including someone might gain by dealing with his TDD is my holy saviour rants about how I should learn.

Worst part: this guy takes days to write "tested" code that still doesn't actually do what it is supposed to.
cracked and work's out of the box are two different things... practically and legally.

i dont care about netflix... like the vast majority of the internet, they dont even operate in my market. yet their greed is going to fragment the internet that i make a living from... all they are doing is ramming a new version of shitty proprietary plugins/binary blobs down our throats.
I think his predictions were consciously pessimistic, designed to underline the title of the article Why most economists' predictions are wrong.

I figure he scored 2/5 (The American triumphalism lasted until 2001, and the raw-material crunch happened multiple times).
Aware Y Combinator does not hold stock in Watsi.
Placing a DIV's Content within Another DIV's Content
What is the point in beating a dead horse ?

Krugman is often wrong. He got a nobel prize, good for him, but we should not take his opinions - or the opinion of any nobel prize or other authority figures - as words from the gods.

Remember, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results - and this is as good as an example as it gets.

At least I reckon he made a testable prediction this time.

We are all human and faillible. What authority figures may provide is better calibration - ie not being humble or arrogant, but say how good their prediction is, and not be wrong too often (http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical).

At least, we should hold them to that standard since their past declarations are available to the public and can be tested against current results.
Boundless Opportunities
Urgent Boston accommodations
"One of those, a person in whom there is some interest, is
a young person who was here on a student visa,"
"Being aggressively questioned now."

I hope this is just NBC News being over the top.
Do you think you could perhaps make it faster by doing computer vision and making the mechanism go up-down only and not waiting for the sensor, and then checking the photo while it moves?
It's not specific, it's just my recent experience. Hadley released his bigvis package a few weeks ago, and it contains the beginnings of a weighted average routine I sure can use.

mmap is a package that let me create a fast db from scratch in a day. ggplot, lattice and all the charting routines are a joy to work with.

I'm interested in random forests today, and I bet there's a package that links to the standard libraries whatever they are. This is also probably true for python, but Julia you'd have to build the API.
My general rule:

If you are planning on some sort of reuse (API, library, protocol, etc) a test spec is a very good idea if only to hash out practical use of the interface and identify caveats in the interface spec. Once released, the test spec is great for answering the question "did I accidentally break something that used to work?" thus vastly speeding up the bug-fix process for underlying components or widely used components.

If you are writing an end-user app, or a service that will be used non-programmatically (such as a GUI or web app), then a test spec is not required and probably a waste of time as things will likely change too quickly.
I am a customer too, and I wield no torch or pitchfork, but I grow increasingly frustrated at the lack of response from Linode.

I understand your point about the idea that they may be unable to speak to the issue due to law enforcement efforts, but for the moment, acknowledgement would be satisfactory. I would be happy with, "We're aware of the rumors regarding the intrusion at Linode this past week. We are working with law enforcement and cannot comment on details at this time. However, we will provide a full postmortem once we are able to do so."

The problem is when the explanation never comes. It's OK if it's not this second, but tell us it's coming, and then follow through. Complete silence is frustrating.
I've been to a few interviews recently for web stuff. I don't consider myself a developer, but I do know some programming. I think telling companies what they should or should not do is fruitless unless you know the background.

First thing is that many of these companies want something cheap, so they call around and get something built locally for under 10k or call India. The site, that should have taken 6 months to build, is still being worked on after 2+ years. The company finally realized they got screw-balled and now they want to post about as much as they could for insurance.

The other issue that this article ignores is that many times these half-assed dev houses actually do create a quagmire of development technologies that run the mill from WordPress / Magento / Ruby / and every new javascript framework that comes around, and yes, even a mix of HTML, XHTML, and HTML5. Companies could also be asking for this list of products because they want someone with experience. Someone that has been around the block will have programmed in HTML4.1 at some point.

The real problem isn't the customer. They shouldn't know about, or have to care about, technology any more than you should care about, or have expert knowledge, of your lymphatic system. You pay good money to doctors who know this stuff, and unlike the average mill web house, the doctor is actually educated and knowledgeable of the field.

The problem isn't the customer, the problem is that web development is a world of slick-tongued sales people and charlatans. Most of these morons can't code at all and they basically take the money and run. They run into edge-cases and they just pile poo on top of poo, or they just abandon the job when the going gets tough. Companies create these ads because they want to defend themselves from getting screwed over again, and they are hedging their bets the best they could. It's a sad state of affairs, but the web world sort of brought this on itself.
What does it even mean to hold stock in an organization like Watsi?
Sexism's Double Standard: Where is the Outrage?
Ahh, but is it not dogmatic to assert a statement is always true for one class of situation? Accepting imperfection, are we not pragmatists? 道可道非常道 (The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao) 名可名非常名 (The name that can be named is not the eternal name.)
Man, no offense, but you seem extremely short-sighted here. So when you and a couple coworkers are architecting a system, deciding what the pipeline of information flow is going to be, where the security holes may be, stopping any latency or unnecessary operations, and making sure the user knows how to use the damn thing on top of that - and you aren't writing code, but instead communicating with your coworkers - you don't think that's work? How could it not be?
WordPress : A Java Fanboys Red Pill
@djinteractive was actually kind enough to submit a pull request with a calmer red. Looks much improved.