skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As odd as it may sound, we think this process should work much like online dating: what can you say to pique a stranger's interest and encourage them to meet with you?

We're borrowing from online dating to create a community of professionals open to receiving coffee meeting requests. No one is guaranteeing that they'll meet with other members who reach out to them, or that they'll even respond. But by joining, everyone implicitly communicates an openness to at least receiving meeting requests from people outside their network. This is already proving powerful:

www.treatin.gs
Why should we keep adding more complexity overhead to our languages and toolkits instead of finding people we can trust to do the job right?
Sorry, here it is: http://www.transcend-info.com/Support/DLCenter/dllogin.asp?L...
Why not use Masonry or Isotope?

http://masonry.desandro.com/

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/
Can you name a country that has the system you want, and has it work better and cheaper than most of the western world?

The US is the example of the most privatized health care, and it's almost twice as expensive as the #2 most expensive country. That #2 country has a semi-privatized system.
Their design is just fantastic - especially with the latest update which added better Stations support. When it was first released it was wicked snappy and kind of slowed way down for a while and got annoying - agreed.

In the past month or two, though, it's gotten damn responsive (for me at least). Give it another shot if you haven't used it recently.
What in the world do actors & map/reduce have to do with memory locality?
Another hit piece denouncing cloudflare. The kernel really has a hard on for that company.
I am of the opposite mindset. I think there are just way too many apps out there and apps lack many things that HTML has - discoverability, cross-platform deploys, reusability and other things. HTML is not for every use case, and native is definitely not the hammer for all use cases. Every time I go to a forum and see the giant display to download a whole app just to see their forum, it makes me throw up a little.
https://fedorahosted.org/certmaster It is python, but this is actually really good stuff.
When I buy a ticket to go somewhere it's no one's business to know where I'm going. I don't have the imagination to see how the information can be abused, but the potential is there. If you don't need to know you have no business asking. That's all.
Simpleflake - Distributed ID generation in python for the lazy
I look good but I speak too softly and I don't know how to improvise in conversations. So for a one-to-one technical conversation I have no problem but for casual chats within a group, I just listen and get nervous if the attention is on me. It's due to a lack of experience in talking (and being talked to) combined to perfectionism. The problem is that I need a job soon, not after several years of trying to gain this experience.

I chose to learn programming thinking the job would just be me and a computer, referring to one boss, but there seems to be more meetings and customer interactions than I hoped. Other commenters said that more quiet programming jobs exist so I'll keep sending my resume to companies who build their own softwares instead of agencies. I'm just a bit despaired that no one wants to let me work.

In a more long-term way, I'm trying to create my own business (disrupt Facebook!). If I can't be the employee, I must become the employer.
Uh, that takes much longer.

Blame is useful in more elaborate context but... comments are instant :) And that is important.
This has the additional advantage of separating the specification from the implementation. If e.g. a javadoc comment says "@throws IllegalStateException when foo", then I know if I change the method, I have to preserve that behaviour.
Personally, I like Linus's take on comments:

"Comments are good, but there is also a danger of over-commenting. NEVER try to explain HOW your code works in a comment: it's much better to write the code so that the _working_ is obvious, and it's a waste of time to explain badly written code.

Generally, you want your comments to tell WHAT your code does, not HOW. Also, try to avoid putting comments inside a function body: if the function is so complex that you need to separately comment parts of it, you should probably go back to chapter 6 for a while. You can make small comments to note or warn about something particularly clever (or ugly), but try to avoid excess. Instead, put the comments at the head of the function, telling people what it does, and possibly WHY it does it."

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle (Chapter 8)
I read the second block of code before the first. Just reading the second blob, I had no idea what the code was actually doing. Part of this is because I only have a peephole view into what's going on. I don't know what CalculateResultPairForNextStage() does, for example. My only clue that DMA is even involved in this code is the comment about resetting the source. Perhaps you have a big beautiful block comment in the header that explains what this component does, but just looking at this example things are far from clear.

I'm also wary of the refactoring. The _csHoldoff check and decrement happens every loop in the first block, but only once at the end in the second block. Of course I have no idea what _csHoldoff is or does, nor do I know why there's a "cs" prefix on it. Hungarian notation? Some variables have it, and others, like _centerFrequency, don't.
Learn From the 5 Core Principles of Angel Investors
Most usefully, I'd like to know what the consequences of doing the obvious thing are. Maybe they don't matter any more (high memory usage, cpu use, etc) and we can trim the codebase, or it's still a NEVER CHANGE THIS OR WE LOSE OUR JOBS level issue.

I'd much rather see a comment like

/*
* Inputs of integers near INT_MAX cause significant CPU load
* in MYSQL versions 4.2 <= x < 5.8 (latest at time of writing)
* Bug tracker http://mysqlbugtracker/issue/4
*/

Than

lolz_mysql_is_shit(foobar)

As a relevant point, we've got a large comment in our codebase linking to issues and discussions of the problem of excel reading csv files containing £ symbols with particular encodings. If you didn't know the issue, having `format_excel_is_dumb(file)` wouldn't help.

I am happy classifying comments as "you should have a reason to add it and keep it" rather than "bad code, always remove".

Still, I suppose it's hard to generate buzz with an article that says "use your common sense" rather than repeating an old absolutist viewpoint.
Web is more fun
linkbait title. not a very good article. I think most of us here know about the dangers of stale comments, or spammy comments. I also think most of us know that writing good, descriptive, and up-to-date comments is basically essential.
I too made something similar recently. I decided to use dynamic programming. This way it's easy to ensure that you don't end up with a half row at the end. It also doesn't require changes to the ordering of the images.
http://fangel.github.io/packing-images-in-a-grid/
honestly I don't like this approach.

In my mind code is for the "how" to do a thing, comments is for the "why".

While sometimes some bugs in some library / infrastructure element bites you badly, I still think calling a function "do_workaround_XXX_because_YYY_is_shit" it's not a good practice.
And, hey, in comments you can articulate your hate for mysql with more space :D
I think the most likely endgame is that they'll pull a Nokia: either an outright MSFT purchase or becoming a heavily-subsidized client state.

* Microsoft still has plenty of cash, but is facing an existential crisis of losing platform relevance

* Their overall mobile marketshare is so low that they can probably throw that cash around with much antitrust attention

* They've had a hard time attracting hardware makers other than Nokia. If Nokia stumbles further, the whole phone platform could unravel.

* The traditional Blackberry market was enterprises, who probably would be a lot more receptive to the "windows everywhere" story than Nokia's customers ever were. Blackberry's original killer feature was arguably MS Exchange integration.
My plan was to keep it open source, and have free accounts, as far as possible. The monetization could have come from extra storage, like GMail, or custom domains.
Because there is no one we can trust to always do the job right, and so a large code base will accumulate cruft over time. Just how carefully do you search out any possible comment referencing code you change? It's not always going to be adjacent.
As cathartic as it would be, it's not ok.

It would only make you look like you were incompetent at dealing with awkward situations. Not a good result for you after all you have put up with.

While you may have been boiling with anger as they have been testing your patience for some time, it's not a good idea to go from zero to rage in one go.

E-mail the person your colleague reports to (hopefully they will have had first hand experience for the incompetence), explain in confidence you are having a few issues with this colleague of yours, say you're being patient and want to resolve the tension, however there has been a long undocumented string of occasions where you have had to fix their work & pick up the slack. Add that you've attempted to bring this to their attention in a friendly manner but it has not improved the situation.

Explain that you will now re-focus on your own work and that while you will continue to be friendly and supportive you do not have the capacity to assist as you have been doing.

Sign off by telling them that you require their support to rectify this issue, that you will keep them updated and will document any examples of the situation escalating.

Ensure you only ever remind your colleague of errors they need to rectify by e-mail so you can keep responses.

Don't let them drag you down (work wise or emotionally) if you handle this with just the facts, no blame, they are then solely responsible for their own downfall.
If your little small town has a patch site, it's great. They actually have stories about what's happening in the town, not just violent crimes. Stuff that used to be in the local newspaper before they fired all their staff or merged or went out of business. Of course they are generally one person operations, so quality varies I'm sure, but I really like it.
After SOPA support, the sexist superbowl commercials, countless customer support horror stories, etc., would you consider making NameCheap the default registration option rather than GoDaddy?
Don't miss this meteor shower
Ask HN : Would this be better UX than a normal form?
Yahoo is placing a bid.

Sorry, couldn't resist.
Hmm, maybe I'm just assuming Linus Torvalds wrote that - it could be another kernel dev.
Who you want to be
Content Freshness: How Content Freshness can improve SERP
I've been here a year and a half or so. I think it is a pretty recent trend that I've only noticed in the past 6 months or so, but I could be wrong.

My hypothesis is that an isolated post or two really resonated with people and received good responses. People then hope that others will respond similarly to their situation.
I would also recommend checking these slides from Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz fame. http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/making-presentations-bett...
Kernighan does not say "don't comment good code"
"Clarity" is not a substitute for comments. The only thing I've seen that really substitutes for comments is a rich, easy to understand unit test suite. But even that is problematic, as it usually covers a lot of edge and corner case situations that aren't relevant to the end user.
http://www.toastmasters.org/
> And what about the mobile networks, they already track the location of every one of us?

Those companies are registered with the Data Protection people. They specify what data they are collecting, and why, and they are subject to regulations about what they can do with the data and how long they can keep the data.

> What if I want to open a shop and count the pedestrians walking by at a potential location, will police swoop in to throw me in jail?

You can count people. What you can't do is take an identifying piece of information about that person and store it.
I was trying to write good code instead of document a lot. But now I feel that a few comments is necessary, given that you write the stuff that matters. Maybe we should all try to comment as concise as possible, and write it just like SEO.
"Practice is the only way to get comfortable, and practice will make you better."

Totally agree with this.
They (or the company that buys them) should license BB10 to others. Like Microsoft does with windows mobile... It's the only path I can see for the blackberry OS to survive. Otherwise they'll be utterly crushed.
Because those don't horizontally balance.
This article is fantastic and describes the Canonical Right Way to model Twilio call flows which every serious user of Twilio seems to independently rediscover but which no one has covered at this length in a public post before. I strongly, strongly suggest you read it.
Why is it shit? What do you mean by 'stupidly'? Is this something that you intend to fix later when updating the mysql version, or is it something that will always be stupid? What are the performance impacts? Why not search both databases using the stupid method to avoid two codepaths which might diverge?

I prefer to be parsimonious with comments, but strange hacks, workarounds for bugs, and other places where otherwise clean code meets the real world should probably have at least some description of why that particular workaround was chosen, and not some other more obvious option.
Fair point, but I have two counterpoints:

1) Changing version control systems may be an unwinnable corporate political battle, while changing comment style may just be a team decision.

2) Not everyone who may need to understand or modify your code may have access to your repositories. I worked on a program where partner companies were provided source snapshots for developing their own algorithms but were not allowed access to our repositories.
At 5 billion dollars of market cap, the company's worth less than what Microsoft paid for Skype. Frankly, Apple or Google should make this purchase just for their federal salesforce alone -- Blackberry knows how to do something those other companies don't do well and that's sell and entrench inside of Governments. That alone is worth billions. Give the iPhone to a Blackberry federal salesperson, and you've got billions.
I second this. Join your kind. Another option could be academia.
Why do you suppose "initially" for myself? You assume that I have never "picked an instrument and a sequence of notes" (composed music)? You're wrong.
I really hope they'll do a spin-out of QnX and/or open source it under a license that allows forking. That would be a major move.
Practically speaking, most employment at stable companies is stable without requiring a contract.
Does the Blackberry OS need to survive?
Have a google for "hole driven development haskell" for a few possible ideas.
Most of the job offers in Paris seem to come from agencies (for junior developers). I used to avoid sending resumes to agencies but now I'm trying to be less selective.
Hyperloop:  Supersonic Electric Airplane?
Yep, we're (heavy) users of Twilio SMS. Aside from maybe two incidents that I can think of in the last 3 years, they've been rock solid for us. I am struggling to remember any customer complaints from SMSes not being delivered -- while I think our scale guarantees that this has probably happened (yay telephony), it doesn't happen often enough for it to impact customer results for us. (The typical customer will be sending dozens to hundreds of them a week, so one or two going undeliverable do to carrier issues/user error/etc is not the worst thing in the world for us.)
"My comments are so good they don't need code" is usually untrue too...
Ah, of course.

So what you’ve essentially done is to make it so that comparisons and arithmetic use distinct promotion rules; comparisons are done without conversions that change value, whereas conversions are applied for arithmetic?

Transitivity failures that arise from clearly specified conversion rules are at least easy to understand once you encounter them. If I understand correctly, to avoid losing transitivity, you’ve introduced a divergence between how types behave in arithmetic and comparisons, and broken the equivalence between x - y == 0 and x == y. To my mind as a numericist and low-level programmer, that’s much worse; it’s the path that Excel started to follow a long time ago, and it leads to all sorts of maddening details when corner cases collide.

My preferred solution for high-level languages is “promote the operands to a type that can represent both exactly” (for the case of double and int64, this would be a floating-point type with at least 64 bits of significand and 11 exponent bits, like the Intel 80-bit format or quad). For a compute-oriented language, there are good performance reasons to avoid that, but it’s definitely the solution that complies with the principle of least surprise.
For a couple of weeks now, I've been brainstorming about how to create a system like this. I'd very much like to use this sort of setup for my own emails, but it simply doesn't seem to exist, especially not as open source (while lavabit claimed to store your emails encrypted, there was no way for anyone to actually vet their approach).

The most viable option I came up with so far is modding eCryptfs to allow "write only" mounts by supplying it directly with the derived public key for the passphrase instead of the passphrase itself. This would allow you to use vanilla components such as postfix & dovecot instead of having to write a custom application server.

Using the maildir format, incoming mails could be written to the write-only mount without having to read any files from the mount. On IMAP login, the mail daemon would use a passphrase derived from the login password to mount the maildir as read-write, using unshare to ensure that the mount is visible to that process alone, and automatically unmounting it when the IMAP user logs out.

Thoughts and ideas are welcome :)
"Attention is scarce. Information is not. Do the math." - Nina Paley

Just because something makes it to the frontpage of HN doesn't automatically make it worthy of further investigation. Granted, one shouldn't just fling things aside because they have no immediately apparent utility, but just from the difference in the submitted headline and the first line of the linked to page, this smells a bit of coder-drama.
Social Influence Bias
How is 1000s of writes a second fast? Especially for a key/value store? Also, why is it returning redundant information?

$ curl -L http://127.0.0.1:4002/v1/keys/foo
{"action":"GET","key":"/foo","value":"bar","index":5}

You already know the action and the key; all it needs to return is "bar" and the index, though even the index might be unnecessary. While i'm at it, why is 'curl' returning JSON? I don't know a lot of Unix commands that take JSON input.

While i'm throwing around my valueless opinions, this thing is wholly uncomfortable and over-engineered for its supposed purpose. Further complications from unnecessary requirements like the Raft protocol (what the fuck does autonomous distribution of resource management have to do with sharing configuration?!? s'like building X.509 into Telnet) make this thing's hinges groan from feature bloat.

Yet more blather: Why do you have to configure each host's address and a unique port? Isn't etcd supposed to support automatic service discovery? Zeroconf (among many, many others) has had this working for years and it's not hard to use the existing open-source implementations. And why is HTTPS an advanced use?
#1 is above my head as a layman but #2 is right on.
Indeed, slide transitions are an important polish
The problem with this is that he assumes the context will always be known to the reader.

I find that many assumptions about what is obvious in code have to do with the context the code is in. That context may be closely surrounding the code block, or with may extend to many lines before and after. If you have not been working on that entire section for a time, the context is not present (or only partially present), and as such all your thoughts on what is obvious may be subtly wrong.

This is analogous to program state. The farther you explore in either direction of the target code, the more of the possible state you can infer. Comments help is make these inferences without having to explore as much. Without comments we are forced to explore more of the program to build a better mental model of the possible states. Comments help us by providing hints as to the context (state).
I predict blackberry drops the hardware side and moves to a services company supporting Android and iOS.
I was playing this over the weekend. Without revealing any spoilers, there are many different endings based upon what ethos you use to approach your job and on-the-job decisions.

Like all time management games, you must make critical decisions under pressure. I find that the ambiguity and real consequences of the game's decisions make it a ton of fun. An instant classic.
What's a reasonable place to put up a development blog for a side project, if I want to spent as close to zero time as possible messing with configuration?

Don't say "install this blog software on your web server"; my side project doesn't need a side project, thanks. :)
Also makes it more difficult for the competition and market analysts to gauge the company's activities.
This isnt necessarily true, even with telephony pretty much all the API's have implications, existing standards and/or prior art outside of the mobile.

All of the API's are available via Gecko, the same Gecko that is used for desktop and android firefox, a lot of them already work on desktop (I have installed a few apps build for firefox os on my desktop).
You didn't even get the point of my comment, which is that she (Payne) is not not famous because she is a woman. There are lots of other reasons that affect fame. A catchy name is just one example.

This whole thing is completely ridiculous, because lets face it, nobody cares about physicists. You think people on the street, or feminists, care about physicists? The ones that are known, like Einstein or Newton or Galileo, are all known for the narrative around it (Newton has the falling Apple, Galileo the burning, Einstein the tongue picture and the "bad in maths" legend). To claim that some physicist is not known because she is a woman is just ridiculous.

I dare you to walk out of your house or office and ask people on the street what "Marie Curie" means to them, and if they know her Polish name, too. For more fun, ask "who discovered radioactivity" without mentioning the name. Perhaps they know Curie because they worry about radioactivity, but that's probably about it (what was her other Nobel for anyway?). The consistency of stars doesn't worry people so much, so they don't know Payne - simple as that.

Anyway, the name was not even the point. But since you are apparently somewhat illiterate, of course you didn't realize that.

Btw I think your replies are very rude. Would you talk the same if you had any identifiable information on your profile? I would surely blacklist you for life according to your behavior. Not that I'd ever run into you (I think you live in the US), but still.

Edit: also I am not actually a native speaker of English.
Edit 2: for more fun, try to hum the Kraftwerk song "Radioactivity" using Curie's full name.
NullReferences in C# (and lots of other languages).
Senator Blumenthal and FISA
Even CVS has an annotate / blame / praise command as well, as do, for example, commercial systems like Clearcase and MKS source integrity.