skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fellow Android developers - I need your help
Yesterday my Google Play Developer account was suspended - out of the blue. The only reason given in the email was "Prior violations of the Google Play Developer Policy". We only had a SINGLE violation from an app 1 week ago - which we promptly corrected and re-uploaded as the email suggested we do.

Now, however, without any notice, we have lost our entire account - and with it almost all of our income. We're a small shop with 3 employees, focusing exclusively on Android apps. Having just lost our main income stream instantly - we're in big trouble.

We appealed the ban thinking that there must be some error, but only received a generic reply email denying our appeal.

We have called any and all Google Play/Google Wallet support numbers that we can find and we simply get redirected to random team members who all tell us there is nothing they can do except send us to an online form - the same form that sent us the generic appeal denial.

I feel like if I can get on the phone with the right person for 5 minutes I can have this whole misunderstanding cleared up. So, I ask for your help!

Have any of you had a similar experience? What can I do? Do any of you have a phone number, and email address, or anything that could help me save my business?
Also, instead of just failing to allow the email address, you could warn the user that what they entered doesn't appear to be valid, and that they should double check the address.
So we should be using a recursive descent parser? The email address format is a context-free grammar, so the "regexes" that would work are using features not included in true regular expressions anyway.
Dog bones and/or CVDs don't allow for the hub to be turned 90 degrees. You would need some sort of drives haft like Trancas uses to allow this. Though that complicates things a bit more.
So I guess "Zen" is SF-hipster for "simple" now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_advertising#Targeting_y...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_advertising#Advertiseme...
Maybe it comes from using Python as my go-to language (and that it's my favorite language) but i personally like to avoid non-essential braces and other minutia.

Yes, of course, I know the argument: a one-line bracketless "if" can set-up a future developer for failure if they need to add an item to the conditional block. And if they for some reason decide not to read the actual conditional. And if they don't test it.

And I don't hate code that uses braces even when they're not strictly needed, but I personally prefer to omit them. And my feeling is that the dogma around braceless-ifs is a little overblown.

Of course when working on a team that has adopted a no-braceless-if policy, I conform. Having consistent code is way, way more important than somebodies own favorite bracing style.
If you have 60 servers you are hopefully using some kind of configuration automation, like puppet or chef...?
IOS 7 New Design - "Black, White and Flat All Over"
Anecdotes are fun, but the data suggests over and over again that financially successful parents have more financially successful children.
I don't have any concrete evidence, but my guess is that having the repeating value (the TLD) at the front meant that storing domain names in a hashtable was inefficient. Lookups would be faster if the more-unique part was at the front of the string, since the string comparisons would run faster.
Learning to Code and Speak a New Language Simultaneously
Reporters Getting Sued For 'Hacking' With A Simple Google Search
The fact that most web applications do many I/O operations per request handler and the Blocking API's make it very natural so that "you don't even think about the fact that you're doing I/O" is precisely the problem. I/O is an eternity compared to computing cycles, and to have the entire thread blocked while waiting for I/O to complete means that you can have exactly one concurrent client.

Node can easily degenerate into callback spaghetti, that's true. But I think that has more to do with the paradigm being new to a lot of developers. Using promises and similar constructs are a very natural way to deal with callbacks, and reduce the spaghetti significantly. Unfortunately, they won't be baked into Node's core.

Even for a standard CRUD app, you can get way more performance out of Node than you can out of, say, Rails, precisely because it is highly concurrent.
Recently my company branched off into a product line of creating websites for restaurants, but we quickly learned that restaurant owners neither have the time or resources to create a website.

Instead what we will be doing is a combination of manual data entry/turk to create a menu profile on our website. The hope is that we will successfully menu seo the profile and have the business owner to pay $5/month to maintain the menu profile.

Any thoughts on this?
I used to work at CAA and there are a few agents aware of a bleak future for the agency model but to be honest no one wants to face the music over there. Their investment arm is for tech and entertainment startups, I doubt they would use it for Hulu. A Hulu acquisition would require their Silverlake equivalent, TPG. I'm all for it, but trust me when I tell you that I doubt CAA will put a bid in on this.

They are so far ahead #1 that they can't see it. It's a classic innovators dilemma problem.
Fast on the ground, agile in the air.

It's a radio-controlled helicoupeter!
Great work as usual, Ryan. Glad to see this make it out there!
My buddy had a status update today that I think sums up the feeling:
"Going to Facebook has become the equivalent of opening the fridge & staring inside, even though you're not hungry."
I think one potential positive outcome of all these acquisitions and rumours of acquisitions is that devs are once again seeing Yahoo as an interesting place to work. When you got so many in-shop startups working on interesting stuff, great things can happen beyond figuring out how all the individual acquisitions can fit together. Provided, of course, that Yahoo knows how to properly nurture the startups and their culture.
Actually, I used fmt. Then groff and ghostscript.

The job of fmt could be done with sed, of course. As many of HN'ers know, sed can perform the functions of many other UNIX utils. If used as an "all-purpose" program, perhaps it raises the possibility of the typical mantras about "the right tool for the job". But consider this: editing/transforming text (e.g. output from other programs) as a "job" is somewhat all-encompassing under UNIX. Everything can be a "file" and every file can be represented as "text" (e.g. ASCII, hex). What varies is the context in which you do this job of editing/transforming. It might be preprocessing source code (text) for gcc or maybe it's preprocessing a resume (text) for groff.

"When all you know is a sed, everything is a text." - Unknown
I regularly run into email fields that won't accept +. This is just an extension of that thinking.
Keep your job and do interviews for companies in the $75-90k range.

It won't look so bad as much as you think if you leave after fiding another job. You negotiated badly and they ripped you off... also, a >50% raise should always be a reason to leave your current company, it doesn't matter if you are there for a week or a decade.

You are the "prize", start acting like it and they will treat you like so.
Show HN: A different take on Box-Char Alt Codes
Who says it's not valid?
One does not have to believe that "all of the real computation happens on the server" to not want to use Javascript if one doesn't have to.

Where are these mythical Node.js applications that share so much code with the client though? What functionality is shared and how much time did it save anyone?

Personally, I wouldn't trust one browser-land function or library in my server application without digging through every line of code to make sure it's not going to do some browser-specific hackery. Then what have I saved? I'd rather go get a separate module that was built specifically for Node.js.

Then there's the time I'd save sharing my own code between Node.js and browser - which would be next to nothing because any time I save would be spent having to think about platform differences anyway.
That was my first thought as well. It's too bad it doesn't happen.

It kinda makes me think of the Hovercraft pickup in Carmageddon 3 (and Back to the Future).
It seems you're right. That's pretty bothersome. "The Terminator is written in COBOL" is practically an urban myth at this point. There are a plethora of articles about it.

http://landofthefreeish.com/code/the-terminator-was-written-...
I left, then got an internship in the valley and needed a way to interact with my fellow interns before flying out. So I came crawling back. Everything you've said resonates with me - "not particularly close to" is also a HUGE chunk of my social circle. Makes you think, though, do I really need to keep in touch with these people? If I really needed to, I could find a way (call, SMS, email, etc).
On Crafting Laws Rationally
Seems yahoo and Google are competing to be the ne AOL.
The way he just keeps pushing further and further pleases the hacker inside me. A recommended read for sure.
I don't think braces solve that particular problem:

if (null != foo);
{
bar();
}
I know, that's why I said it's not strictly untrue. Depending on your current state of mind, "style" may mean something different to you. I didn't mean to imply it was untrue, just that it did make me pause for a second and think.

The truth is, since I'm programming in Perl most of the time and I'm not restricted much in style (in the paradigm sense), I'm often changing between functional, imperative and OO "styles", so I don't think of "style" as referring to that very much. To be clear, I don't think this is inherently a benefit of Perl, but of the class of languages to which it belongs.
I signed up again, after a 2+ year absence, because I discovered solid proof that I was missing out. People would be surprised not to see me at some event or other, and I would comment that I hadn't been invited, and this would create confusion - "well, let me check facebook, I'm sure I invited you" - "I'm not on Facebook" - "Ohh....."

One of my friends had a special list of half a dozen people he still sent emailed event invitations to. It's extra work, though, and most people stopped bothering. I decided that my hate for Facebook inc. was not strong enough to make me willing to inconvenience my friends, so I signed back up.
That'd be a great feature... Spin the wheels up and turn the props into ducted fans.
I was thinking of an exception but it turns out it was instead a poster they put on the outside of the Yerba Buena Center [http://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/09/yerba-buena-stretched-ic...] - the background was a load of stretched iPhone apps - hinting at them 'stretching' the iPhone to create iPhone 5.
Very interesting point! There is an argument that lines are a unit of human comprehension and complicated expressions should be broken onto different lines already, as a matter of readability. It makes some sense to let the granularity at which you debug reuse the granularity at which you read.
I really don't think so since you're soliciting an email server while a regex is just some code that has to be run, and they are run on a tiny string (a mail is never really long).

Also it's bothering for the user, if you need mail confirmation then do it, but otherwise it should be a RULE OF THUMB to always avoid annoying user. Thus avoid mail confirmation.

This article is actually a really bad advice. I don't know why it's upvoted so much.
That doesn't what he's talking about, though. Your else will run anytime `one` is false, not when `one && two && three && soon` is false.
Does this feel slow to you? https://www.emailitin.com/email_validator

Yes, it did.
Floobits-Vim: Real-time collaboration plugin for Vim
Hulu is only as valuable as it's content deals. They will definitely be written into acquisition deal, no one in there right mind would by them without some assurance from the content owners that said content will continue to come. This is especially true when the content owners own the site!
Think how google has sprinkled G+ across all their properties - I'm guessing Yahoo's next big announcement will be some kind of social layer bringing it all together. I would be most surprised if Yahoo did not already have 1000 monkeys coding away on some secret black ops social product that will launch in some form before the end of the year.
Even Star Trek had phasers. Weapons will exist as long as there is a need for a person to defend themselves against a foe.
They just forget about Python and Ruby half way down...
Samsung Galaxy S4 edges out iPhone 5 in camera test
The new leader of the Android pack nosed ahead of Apple’s flagship smartphone in DxO Labs’ photo and video tests. The Samsung Galaxy S4 has a 13-megapixel camera. (Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET) DxO Labs has named Samsung’s Galaxy S4 a new winner in its mobile-phone camera tests. The French firm, which specializes in camera optics and...
To say being good enough doesn't enter is it just being ignorant of the facts. There's nothing lucky about spending years working hard building a product, finding users, building a team, dealing with problems.

> "while the perfect product when nobody is buying will languish in obscurity"

That's not "unlucky" at all. That's not researching the market properly.
This also makes individual conditions slightly easier to comment out.
From the article's third paragraph:

Yahoo had previously tried to buy a large stake in French video site DailyMotion, but that bid was stymied by the French government.
The K-Pop Plastic Surgery Obsession
> But violence is caused, first and foremost, by people being asshats to each other.

No. Violence is caused, first and foremost, by people being violent. Give them means or tools to be more violent and they'll use them. Thus guns existence are a factor in the violence scale.

Guns aren't tools like the other ones just like the nuclear bomb isn't like any V2.

Moreover many quiet people who aren't asshats have been the victims of asshats, and sometimes only because they precisely aren't asshats.
Collapsed I-5 bridge gone from Google Maps — almost as quickly as it fell
I find this code pleasantly readable.

How about this one? http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f...
I'm bored.

I think we've all been there. Some more than others. The only cure for boredom that I know of, is to go find something new. Maybe it's a cooking class, learning to paint, or making music. Puzzle/game/trivia nights. Auto racing. Wine tasting. Beer making. Book clubs. I can go on just listing random things, but you get the idea.

Once you invest your time in these things for long enough, you may find yourself thinking, "how can I make X better?" You'll probably start with solutions using tech, and branch out from there. Soon you're using your creative brain to solve problems that matter to you.

Passion, creativity, and persistence are things that can give you everything you need to get going. Everything after that is business execution, which I cannot help with.
Thank you all for working on this and making my webdev life and that of many others a lot easier.
But it's still not the equivalent of: if (one && two && three && soon) {stuff} else {stuff}
which I assume the GP meant.
Spot on. Money is a conflation of two social processes or decisions:

a. Who gets to have private jets and get into hot nightclubs.
b. Who gets to build things of importance to the world.

Most of us are smart enough to have limited interest in (a)-- if that's what you're into, you'll never have enough-- but have an obsessive, sometimes anger-inducing and debilitating, focus on (b).
> Constants are especially interesting because they can be injected into the .config function of a module. No other provider can be injected for the very good reason that .config cannot inject transitive dependencies.

It should be noted than you can inject providers themselves in .config. Most users do this with built-in $routeProvider (which provides $route).

It's not mentioned in the post but he could pass "awesomeProvider" into module.config and (if it was more interesting than just a $get method) do something with it during the config phase.

With $routeProvider you would use the .when method to configure angular routing. It's .$get method returns the $route instance.
In 2007, danah boyd posited that teens don't get stuck to social networks. The theory was that they didn't need to maintain a giant extended network, because they saw their friends every day anyway. Besides they are shifting friend groups constantly, so rebuilding a profile is like spring cleaning.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/01/01/ephemer...

She later argues that Facebook became the network of choice among college-bound kids. Maybe that sort of person does want to maintain an extended network (dkulchenko's example is about internships, for instance).

So was is it true that teens are more able to switch, or not? Was it always wrong? Has it changed as Facebook ate the entire social networking universe? I would appreciate it if younger HN'ers weighed in.
The content deals they currently have in place are so one-sided that there little to be gained by owning Hulu. Their contracts are basically, you get a license to the content, but 95% of any revenues you generate must be given to the content partners.

The whole point of Hulu was to stop piracy and return any cash generated to the content providers, not to be a profitable ongoing business. I don't even know what it means to buy a company that must funnel all revenues to content providers. It seems like Yahoo is bidding on something they won't actually control.
You might think of this as a "second wave" patent where people have begun patenting applications (or even implications) of previously invented technology.

This project (and thousands of others like it) have just recently been made possible by three things.

1) Small, high powered brushless motors reaching hobbyist level prices because of neodymium magnets and manufacturing techniques.

2) Control circuits becoming possible at this level as well thanks to the microcontrollers and sensors reaching the market that brought us things like arduino. (10 years ago a micro with 256k of onboard flash and a 3 axis gyro was the size of ham sandwich and cost as much as your car)

3) Cheap but very high power density lithium polymer batteries becoming available.

We're now at the point where we can make just about any little toy fly by festooning it with little propellers. So you can head down to the patent office every time you think of a new place to stick one. It will seem novel because even a few years ago, the "real" technologies that provided you with those little propellers didn't exist.

This toy is still as cool as all get-out. I just think he's wasting time if he goes any further than "pending" before he gets millions of $ in sales.
Totally agree, lots of great points there. I had much the same experience (except for the college experience) and hope to take it into account. I love the last bit about how children watch what you do, not what you say. Completely agree.
Watch a brain surgery over Twitter, Instagram, and Vine
UCLA Health welcomed the world to watch a brain surgery through live Vine videos and Instagram photos posted on Twitter. The brain surgery patient undergoes testing. (Credit: UCLA Health) UCLA Health isn’t the first hospital to live-tweet a brain surgery, but it may be the first to employ 6-second video medium Vine as part of …
> The Terminator ran COBOL? The screenshot clearly shows 6502 assembly language

Yeah, but that's because the Terminator thinks in 6502 assembly.

Completely different issue. ;)
I abhor deep indents, and when I have deeply nested loops that just serve to trivially enumerate things, in C I sometimes add a helper function for the iteration.

e.g. instead of:

for(int i=0;i<N;i++){
for(int j=0;j<K;j++){
for(int k=0;k<L;k++){
...

it might become

i=j=k=0;
while(all_frob_indices(&i,&j,&k)){
....

with all_frob_indices() doing the i++; if(i>N){ i=0; j++ }...

This makes code look more similar to e.g. itertools-constructs in python where you can easily make products, zips, ... from iterables.
We can go deeper...

if(
b != nil &&
b->qid.type == a->qid.type &&
b->qid.path == a->qid.path &&
b->qid.vers == a->qid.vers &&
b->dev == a->dev &&
b->type == a->type
) {
fprint(2, "cp: %s and %s are the same file\n", an, bn);
ret = 1;
}

(Lined up the "a"s to make it obvious that they're all the same.)
C does support eval. C calls it "trying to copy strings".
I refuse to care since the same political correctness that won't allow them to report this is in fact a Muslim riot... got them into this situation in the first place.
> The failed founders are adults who walk into the project with risks understood.

Most of the YC founders are barely out of college.

> However the ones who fail wind up with invaluable experience, an excellent item on the resume, and a network of connections to help them either try again or get a job.

I'm curious, have you looked into "where are they now" for YC startups? eg, http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/27/y-combinator-demo-day-marc...

You're really just pushing the startup religion; that somehow inexperienced people who failed at getting traction now have a resume bullet point and a great network?

If that's true, then it just lends credence to the original article's point that we've replaced quantifiable quality with politics.
You responded to someone who said "I disagree that it's expressive in comparison to other modern languages."

Why would a person of that opinion value a small amount of code sharing over language expressiveness? So, there's your answer as to what they're imagining.

Regarding code sharing - maybe you can answer another post in this thread which I ask, "Where are these mythical Node.js applications that share so much code with the client...?"
I agree. This is we do

if (null != foo) bar();

or

if (null != foo) {
bar();
}
Results of the survey: Why don’t we have textbooks with source code in them?
* citation needed

I can see how this is true when you compare poor vs. non-poor families. But the article is about staying middle class vs. pursuing riches by founding a successful company. It's probably true that the children of millionaires will be financially better off than children of middle class families, but that leads back to the point of the article: Will that affluence make them happy and more fulfilled?
I understand the philosophy of keeping URLs active, but this is taking it to a new extreme. How about changing URLs every... 5 years or something ridiculous. I mean, they allow me to delete my account and that would kill URLs, so if it's between deletion or changing, what is the difference?
I grew up in an area that frequently had thunderstorms. I witnessed many strikes in my yard, including my house while I was in it, and investigated many in my neighborhood. Much of what the OP said was bullshit. If it were true, the lightning rods that attracted and diverted many strikes wouldn't need to be place high.

The strikes always hit taller object like houses and trees and I never ever saw a strike or evidence of one in the middle of a field.
Very insightful reply, I do need to think a bit harder next time, I believe I left my zen out.
I got a response in 55ms. We must have different definitions of 'slow'.
What? Not for me, not with cindent on. It indents each if statement by one level, just like it "should". How would it somehow know to not indent them?
How to make clients love you: an interview with Trevor McKendrick
Display your own GIF or artwork on your bike wheels
The prospect of a good exit, or a successful company which would basically allow you to be "set for life" would do this. Being able to select freely where to live, what schools to go to, and what colleges to have as options will greatly affect the education prospects of your children.