skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something big is happening with food
1) Nitpick about 11 months vs 12 months. Are you adding any value to the conversation?
2) The author being on Twitter doesn't affect the 31 outstanding pull requests and the 52 issues filed against the GitHub repository. Again, I'm not clear what you're getting at.
I think the debate between flat and skeuomorphic design is a false dichotomy.

Flat de-emphasis everything. You just have to know to click on the light grey text, because obviously it's a slightly different color to the dark grey title text. It's a pain.

Skeuomorphic emphasis everything, even the stuff which is just eye candy. And there's a lot of eye candy. It's both a pain. And it looks trashy (unless it is done really well).

Good design emphasises the stuff you can interact with. It doesn't look quite as classy as flat, and it doesn't "pop" like skeumorphic, but it's a hell of a lot more useful.
Having no side effects doesn't mean it can't do something. Only that it shouldn't do anything unexpected.

storeItem.makeAvailable();

That should only make the store item available. It shouldn't re-enable a sale that was on the storeItem when it was made unavailable.
Patents related to VP8 which Google bought from On2 are freely licensed, see http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/

The list of companies doesn't impress me. Many manufacturers are engaged in patent racket. It's Google refusal to play the same game that caused their ire and fear mongering. As I said, until they actually publish what's supposedly exists in that pool - there is no point to pay any attention to their claims.
well, I guess adding anything to settings.py will get red flags instantly because everyone is sick of settings, that is common knowledge when you follow django-dev and con vids.

my almost first contribution to django was recently hijacked by a better one, bummer :)
As an owner of two spheros, I disagree entirely. This ball is fun for the first 5 minutes, once the honeymoon phase is over, it just sits on the charging station glowing blue, incessantly.

It was nice when my dog liked playing with it and I could entertain him for a few minutes, but seriously, it has caused very little excitement outside of that.
"We as a society" didn't really do this. The banks, however, really like this, because it solidifies their economic position. Imagine how much more money they'd make if everyone is required by law to make all their transactions through them.

Who do you think is trying to convince people that this is the right way to do things? How long have we associated "anonymous transactions" with terrorism etc.?

Only recently, we've developed the idea that something must be wrong with you if you use cash. $100 doesn't even afford a meal for two at a nice restaurant and people look at you like you're a drug dealer if you carry a $100 bill.
Great read, but I believe movie quote is from Bill Dukes, Menace II Society (perhaps Denzel said it too, but Bill made it famous ;) ).
Thanks for your feedback!

1) I've quickly learned this point but for a long time I resisted adding any other "features" to the app. I considered it a waste of time, if I couldn't get more than one person paying for the product, why should I spend even more time building something that may never get used?

Suffice it to say I've changed my tune and building in all of the other modules is just something I'll have to deal with if I want to make any money.

2) The terminology is an antiquated reference to some very old copy. Originally a sheet was like an excel sheet, each one would do something different or track a different location, etc.

After going through a bunch of iterations on the copy, I just started referring to the product as a sheet, as in "inventory sheet". I agree 100% that this is confusing and needs to change.

3) One of the first things I'm going to do for rebuilding this app is charge far more. Businesses that scoff at paying more than $29 per month are probably not the kind of business that should be using the product.

4) I've tried a bunch of different designs and copy for the landing page, including a bunch of screenshots at one time. One big problem I've had is my failure to accurately track what was a success and what wasn't. What you see there is my last attempt before losing interest in the product. (I was going for "hybrid copy" for those of you that read CopyHackers).

5) In my latest iteration on the home page and other parts of the site I tried to go for a more "personal" approach instead of "corporate-y" like my competitors. Like the point above says, though, I have failed to accurately track what works and what doesn't beyond saying this iteration has been my most successful at getting trials.

All in all, great advice. Thanks!
Don’t Pass Null?
This is idiotic if you want performant code and don't want to have to use static empty object constants littered throughout your code.

Null is perfectly fine in place of an object. The author mentions this saves you debugging time. No, it will cause you pain later because you won't see errors that should happen. Instead they are masked by operating on some dummy object that you don't give a rats ass about.
What is a CLA and why would a project want one / not want one? They seem like another hurdle for contributors?
We have no need for 7 billion Einsteins. Humanity is a team project.
note that he is she.
The curious question is why certain projects have significantly lower pull-rates; I doubt the quality of the pull requests vary that widely across projects.

Is it that project leadership has a clear vision for a product and feel pull requests are a distraction? If so, share the vision and enlist willing developers to help achieve that vision.

Is it that project leadership has a high-standard for the codebase? If so, explicitly state the standard and provide constructive feedback to pulls that don't quite measure up.

I guess my point is: project leadership has the ability to leverage a tremendous pool of talent that is interested in their project using the pull request mechanism. It does take effort and planning but the net result is so worth it to all parties involved.
Why don't you trust Google?

Lots of people recommend rackspace or fastmail for email. I still use Gmail but have plans to build something on top of dropbox when I get some spare time.
I'm still here! HN is throttling my comment submission rate though, so I can't reply to very quickly right now.

I agree, this advice is priceless.
Searching for "sign cla", it appears to be a Contributor's License Agreement.
Netflix is ok with you travelling to another country and use their service from there, but they warn you that content will be different.

So switching DNS is kinda like travelling fast...

If Netflix and the content provider decides that I'm a horrible person and don't want my money, they can cancel my account, maybe I'll start considering torrent'ing then.
The lack of compression has a huge effect on working set size, especially as the BSON representation doesn't really save space just CPU.

Mongo's behaviour when the working set exceed memory size used to be pretty terrible. (I moved on from the relevant project so I don't know how much of an issue it still is.) https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-574 - essentialy what happens is that Mongo keeps trying to execute queries rather than throttling to let existing ones finish which causes even more thrashing and longer query times.

Reducing the memory consumption would curtail the onset of that.
Hey Thanks all! In touch with 500.co - and they are on the case. @DotSauce - thanks for letting us know! -Lori.co
Objective C, C#, or C++? (I'm guessing Objective C ... Ios_)? C is a great language, especially coming from Ruby. It's more structured than Ruby, which is closer to Perl. C is more lenient than Java, but still a heck of a lot of fun.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=code+CLA
a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless

Changing a massive medical system from paper-based to digital is "simple"?
No state there, just keeping functions relatively simple in terms of their inputs.

Yes, yes! I definitely agree but what I meant is "principles of functional programming outside functional languages". When you understand the trade-offs that these principles bring to the table, you can apply them in OO languages -- in some cases. But here he's banning it for good with that statement!
Yeah, it was a long shot. I thought maybe the fact that it was entirely optional and not on by default might help my case, but the reasons for it being turned down were totally reasonable and consistent with the project & python idioms.

Still, I ended up building our own shell command that included the change because fuck typing that much.
Google adds in-app payments to the latest Chrome build
> one nitpick: next time rotate the diagrams +90' please :)

What? No. The x-axis is the independent variable and the y-axis is the dependent variable.
I'm confused. Isn't it perfectly legal for the institution to search your e-mail records? I know when you work at a company generally the company can monitor everything you do (including e-mail).
This is really a classic criticism of capitalism clothed in a Dropbox t-shirt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism#Ineffic...
It's a contributor license agreement. "Contributor Licence Agreements (CLAs) can be used to enable vendors to easily pursue legal resolution in the case of copyright disputes"[1].

Licensing/copyright can be a messy thing - especially with multiple authors involved. I assume the legal clarity it provides is seen as worthy of the extra hurdle to some of the more risky and/or cautious projects. Plus, depending on the agreement, it allows more freedom for change of license terms without getting all existing contributors to agree - the agreements I've signed have often contained a clause declaring implicit permission (or waiving rights completely).

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
tell that to my neck.
> If you follow Martin’s advice enough, you will end up with lots of very short methods on lots of very small objects—and have a hard time understanding just how your program fits together.

I have never found this to be the case. Quite the contrary, in fact. Far too many objects that do way to much, or functions that do X and Y.

Indeed, I'm puzzled by your statement:

> Yes, it’s good to have short, readable, meaningful methods. Reducing method size too much...

Which directly contracts this:

> If you follow Martin’s advice

I guess the key word is 'enough', which is really just bad wording. "If you don't follow Martin's advice" is better. The qualifier here is you don't make short methods for the sake of having short methods. You make methods as short as they need to be to do that thing they promise to do.

So then we come to it: either you support having your methods do more than they should, doing more than one thing and having side effects, or you support Martin's suggestions. And yes, it really is that black and white. Sure, you could suggest that following his advice "enough" leads you to nothing but one line methods, but that would be silly.
“This week marks the beginning of my 4th year at Facebook”
Here is an interesting article talking about the $2 Trillion underground economy of people using cash to avoid paying taxes as part of the economic recovery.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/05/12/2-tr...
Namespace support is being added to Sass
It's so much better to send these sorts of proposal via e-mail. It's much easier to review the patches via e-mail, and everyone on the development community can make suggestions. Even so, it's not uncommon for patches to require three or four versions, and not just by first-time contributors. There are patches written by folks who have been working on ext4 for many years which still require three or four or more revisions after being subjected to multiple rounds of peer review.

If you show me a git project where most of the pull requests are accepted, I'll show you a git project whose quality assurance is probably completely out of control.
It seems natural that methods of exchanging money are constrained by methods of property preservation.

Neither money nor property exist without government. Sure, you can say that bottle caps and a fence might do the trick, but those don't have the same force.
Now you can tilt the other way --> :)
It's very buggy. Great concept though. The video on the homepage is not working. Could you please give a better explanation video?
That's known, but Theora never could compete with H.264 in quality. It was proposed simply because it was the best available open coded at that time. When VP8 arrived it replaced Theora for that role.
That reminds me of DonorsChoose, which connects elementary teachers with people looking to donate. It's unfortunate that many states don't properly fund things like school supplies, but it's a great service nonetheless.
As another UW Math/CS Alumni. I think one of the reasons the Combinatorics and Optimization department is so strong is because mathematicians like Dr. Tutte laid down the foundations so very well in the early days.
What tech stack is Rakasheets built on?
> The curious question is why certain projects have significantly lower pull-rates; I doubt the quality of the pull requests vary that widely across projects.

The reverse is more prevalent. The quality of projects varies wildly. The higher quality the project, the less likely that you can accept a pull request as-is.

> Is it that project leadership has a clear vision for a product and feel pull requests are a distraction? If so, share the vision and enlist willing developers to help achieve that vision.

Most developers seem to expect to throw code over the wall in a pull request, and do not follow up to requests for improvement to meet the project's requirements, eg:

- Testing requirements

- Documentation requirements

- Code style

- Ensuring that the implementation fits into the broader project road map

- Code quality

- Avoiding code duplication

- Avoiding code-to-the-goal solutions (see also: project road map).

In my experience, most pull requests take more time to review and correct than it would take to write the code in question from scratch.

> It does take effort and planning but the net result is so worth it to all parties involved.

I don't think the economy is there, actually. Either people are going to read your contribution guidelines and provide quality material, or they're not. Most of the time they're not.

Given my (15 years of) experience in open-source, I'm highly suspect of code quality those projects that have acceptance rates above 50% from people other than core developers.
>it was cheaper than other options

What if the only reason it was cheaper for legal uses is that they were being subsidized by the illegal uses? What if the pricing LD offered would not have been a workable business model if they hadn't allowed money laundering?

(I don't know the facts here. I'm just offering a possibility.)
I have btrfs on my systems, but gave up and got new SSDs with ext4. The copy on write approach is terrible for Mongo's database performance. btrfs doesn't have tools that tell you what the compression ratios etc are so you can't know unless you fill up storage. It is possible to turn off data copy on write, but that also turns off compression! Also MongoDB likes to use lots of 2GB files instead of a single file for the database which makes this sort of stuff even harder to apply.
You're referring to the 'midcore' market.
Why in the world would they use gstreamer on Mac?
The Weakest Link in the Modern Developer's Toolbox
HSBC got away with paying a fee of under $2 billion for not monitoring $60 trillion worth of wire transfers. They made a profit of something like $15 billion during that year, so their fines barely even touched their profits.

The moral of the story here is if you're going to launder money, you should launder a whole shitload of it. Because then you only have to pay a tiny percentage worth in fees. If you don't launder enough, you'll end up broke and in prison.

Imagine if this kind of logic applied to other crimes. You could have a sex slave operation with one prostitute and get caught and go to jail for the rest of your life. But if you run a massive sex-slave industry with tens of thousands of slaves (children for the hell of it), and made $10 billion a year, you'd occasionally get a fine of 10% of your profits that year and be allowed to continue on as if nothing happened...?
Check the timestamps on those tickets, comment history, votes etc. They aren't some obscure corner!
Well, a lot of places that are "doing Agile" (whatever that means) are really just doing waterfall with some different rituals and labels. E.g., the 30-minute standing status meeting, which has nothing in common with the Extreme Programming stand-up meeting except that people are standing. (Sometimes. I've seen places where they do the daily "stand-up" sitting down.)

If you're working in a place with a screwed-up culture, a daily stand-up will make a number of the dysfunctions obvious. Removing the meetings doesn't make things better, it just makes the problems subtler, and therefore harder to fix.

Anyhow, I also see plenty of places that make this work well.
Does this hold true for you on smaller projects too? Ruby gems, for instance...?

I personally strongly prefer to see a diff via Github, especially for smaller features on a small library / gem -- although on larger & more popular projects (lots of pull requests) it definitely makes some sense that you'd prefer to have a 'heads up' of sorts via email first to confirm that it's even a desirable feature.

Really just wondering here, I recently started semi-blindly submitting pull requests with feature additions or small bug fixes (with very verbose pull request messages + solid but concise commit messages) to various library-type projects so I'm legitimately curious as far as how far to take this logic...
Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?
It seems to me like a hybrid of python with perl. It does a ton of things and from what I've heard, it's slow as molasses because of all of the metaprogramming syntax that's built in. RubyMotion allows you to build iOS apps in Ruby. It doesn't seem like other languages get the attention that ruby does. It feels like a scripting language but gets the attention of a compiled one, I don't get it. Is it becoming the first programming language that some people learn? It's actually about the only language I don't know (and I know x86 asm, C, PHP, ObjC++, Python, Perl, C#, you name it.) Thanks in advance.
> Other init systems are just as bad.

Hardly. Other init systems don't bolt together everything from a (mandatory) syslog replacement to an NFS automounter to a kernel module loader.
Costa Rica is a foreign country, why should it not try to work round US laws? It has no responsibility to the US taxpayer or government. I don't understand how the US legal system has an jurisdiction there at all.

OK, I assume that they would be leant on and "persuaded" to give this thing up, but that just big bully boy tactics. Not a moral or legal thing.
Beyond Puppet and Chef: Managing PostgreSQL with Ansible
For Facebook or Hacker News: Yes, most users want to avoid the need for a physical artefact to log in.

For a bank website: No, most users are happy to require a physical artefact because they recognise that it helps protect their money. If your phone dies then you are simply be unable to access your bank account until you recharge it.
I don't care for it either but I've been assuming that a lot of the time, people do this so as not to having to develop their own login system.
I just find that minimizing parameters makes a mess with tons of side effects. When I see nothing but 0 and 1 parameter functions, the code is typically doing the logical equivalent of refactoring `add(a,b);` into `push(a);push(b);add();` which makes a mess when there is more than the trivial case.

jQuery.ajax is a 33 parameter function. No one complains, and it is nice that it doesn't have side effects.
Just because you didn't do anything illegal doesn't mean you deserve to keep your post as a leader of an institution after you've lost a large part of the organization's trust.
Is it possible to switch the axis and set the maxima at 100%? I have to re-calibrate for each graph, or 30% almost looks like 50%. And it's hard to read the rotated labels, but the percent on the horizontal axis would not need to be rotated.
>I still miss games like Thief

To that list i'll add system shock 2 and Dues Ex 1
I'm about to use it for documentation and reference purposes.

It feels like a great tool for that
AngularJS's Javascript Projects CRUD sample implemented with Restangular.
From what I understand of Veteran's Affairs, the technology has been built, and it does sell. The only problem is that the government's being fleeced for all its got by the vendors in question.

VA's got no end of computer systems, where its staff hand-enter information in one system, print out its report, only to scan it, fax it across the country, where someone else will hand-enter it into... A different system.

Engineers, consultants, and Serious Business Contracts were involved in the construction of this abomination - and while they were all in compliance of the standards that the government expects from its vendors, none of them delivered a good product.
A couple of throughts from someone who recently moved from C (plain vanilla) to Ruby:

1] O'Reilly has a sale on C e-books on that expires today - have a look at them (http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/c-owo.do?code=WKCPRG)

2] Your biggest hurdles will be going from object coding to procedural coding, and going from dynamically typed to statically typed variables. Focus on these topics.

3] Once you have the basics of C, start focusing on dynamic memory usage (pointers, etc) as soon as possible. It's one of the most difficult topics (especially for someone that's only used managed languages), but also one of the most useful and powerful features in the language (and also the source of much pain if not done properly).

4] A possible way to start coding immediately, is programming C plugins for Ruby. MRI is very well suited to this, and will cover quite a bit of ground from points 2 and 3 above. There are heaps of tutorials available too.

5] As far as online tutorials go, there are many, and most tend to cover the same ground. Find one that you're comfortable with, and just do it. For the moment, focus on syntax and language elements, but DO NOT neglect to look into the fundamentals of how C actually works at compiler level at some point. It's an amazingly internally consistent design, and will make understanding and using some features a lot easier.

Good luck - hope this helps :)
Can you take this comment a step further and attempt an explanation for why a gargantuan pile of paperwork does exist despite such excellent software?
The cynic in me would suggest that Wall Street pays its dues in donations.
aaaaaand it's fixed.
Bing? Really? Come on, a rebranding doesn't make something new.
Welcome to HN, where showing your work gets you a "fuck off", "scumbag", and "scum of the earth", all without an iota of positive feedback or constructive criticism!

What a brilliant community, indeed!
Regarding the first point, not that I don't believe you, but do you have a cite?
It's pretty clear the OP is asking about learning C, not any of the higher level derivative languages you mentioned.

To the OP: while I sadly don't have any resources to recommend I do applaud you for tackling a lower level language like C, I think you'll get a lot out of it. Best of luck!
Firefox OS Keon phone unboxed
What would increase the accept rate greatly would be if there was a function to accept-pull-into-new-branch, which creates a new branch and applies. The maintainer can then apply the necessary changes/corrections/documentation updates, get the branch tested, then merge it back if all goes OK.