skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So he was wrong then? NS6/firefox seems to be doing alright today...
Rewriting your OWN codebase from scratch certainly makes it get better with each iteration - as long as "from scratch" implies constantly referring to the old code.
Sure, but the media companies don't wax philosophical about how actors and directors are holding back innovation when they insist on getting paid lots of money for their hard work.

It's not the basic transaction that's the problem. Aggregating and distributing other peoples' products is a valuable function. But Amazon doesn't go around complaining that its vendors don't give it all their products for free (so they can turn around and make piles of money reselling them).
I took over a large Groovy codebase that was damn near unreadable since it's controller and service layers heavily abused Groovy 'features': the def keyword (basically never defining intended types at all); not declaring return or argument types; implicit return statements; etc.

My first project was to spend a few days and literally remove all possible occurrences of def and add back in return and parameter types everywhere.

It was possibly the best decision I've made since it didn't involve throwing away any code and made existing code much more readable.

It's just sad that the highly capable developers that wrote the original code base didn't take the extra few seconds to declare their types.
I've noticed that architects, at least below median architects, generally ignore the effect of sunlight on their designs. You'd think their profession would have noticed its importance at some point in the last twenty five centuries, but its apparently beneath them to care. This is a huge problem in many office buildings I've worked in.

Lets align the desks so no one can see anything due to the glare in the afternoon (LOL better yet if no blinds/shades for artistic stylistic reasons)

Hmm, putting a big monitor in the conference room? Eh who cares if no one can see it due to the sun.

It would be like mech eng pretending column buckling doesn't exist, or programmers pretending users never make data entry errors.
I wonder if the differing climates between Las Vegas and London played a part.
I think we've got to decide whether everything that has value should be protectable. To me, this case just highlights the fact that we can't have our cake and eat it too, at least in all cases.

Personally, I land on the side of simply acknowledging that there are intellectual products that require plenty effort to produce and provide plenty of value but just simply shouldn't be protectable in every aspect. Sometimes, like it or not, the product of your hard work is a public good and the rest of us are just free riders. Accept it, be proud of what you did, enjoy your own opportunities to free ride, and find a different way to monetize. In this case, it's track listings, but I think the same should apply to software and UI paradigms.

I, for one, don't want to live in a Balkanized world where every conceivable idea and work is someone's property.
My only idea is a huge pinterest style layout, with horizontal rules, and the ability to give those horizontal breaks big section headings, and then the ability to drag and drop book marks around to different sections.

Every now and then the bookmarks would connect and bring back a favicon and a screen shot thumbnail.
I disagree. Tiananmen Square is a source of shame for the Chinese ruling party, and many of the people there are indeed aware of it -- moreso every day with the coming of the Internet.
Had to think about the same Las Vegas building.

But the Vegas one even has a curve. So there is a potential lethal focal point.

Sensational news item: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-hV_AawLSE
The phrase that comes to mind: Cargo cult security.

There are effective means of security. Perhaps critical to understanding them is that transparency is not anathema to them. Rather, it plays a crucial role.
Ask HN: Self-Hosted Development Team Tools
Assuming that you were to self-host all the tools for your development team (and yes, I know this is a big assumption), what tools would you use? I'm thinking things like a web frontend to source code repositories, issue tracking, continuous integration, IRC, etc.

Following on this, if there was a single package or virtual machine image that would install and setup all these tools up with reasonable defaults (especially integrating with each other), a la MAMP/XAMPP, would you use it?
On one level this is yet another Apple-rejected-my-app story, but I'm more interested in how it illustrates the way the "book" category is blurring.
Uniform model forms and microsimulations
Yeah, it's how I interpreted it, it's how others will likely interpret it. I'm qualified to say this because I'm a designer and marketing professional and have a knack for empathy and understanding how a variety of people will perceive campaigns. Connotations and evoked feelings are a huge part of this, and Google-Kat has achieved those feelings of authenticity here without a doubt. It's a good campaign.
I didn't mean that tokens should be shared across sites; more that a single physical token for a role account (like a backup admin login for an auditor could be escrowed with a CFO (who does not have a login)

You'd still have one hard token per site (in reality, you'd have one or two hard tokens for the most important things, and then use soft tokens for everything else.)
Kodak officially exits bankruptcy, emerges as a commercial printing company
I sure hope so. That's the key tech needed to treat multiple sclerosis, and I have several friends who are sufferers.

I doubt it would be sufficient in itself to reduce sleep needs, however. Our bodies are practically speaking modal organisms, and there's a lot we only do when sleeping.
I can't imagine anyone using OS X by choice, but I know that I can't know the motivation of every person, so I respect their choice as a safe default.
I'm sure he had no idea.
What are they doing just hanging around frying an egg? They're going to get skin cancer or something.
But don't you have to hold your head in a smallish area for all the spherical harmonics to add up properly?
Technically wonderful but man do we have to have achievements all over the place? What is moving your mouse pointer and clicking an achievement now?
It's a great thing to be using this in India especially with the craze people have for cricket. Brilliant stuff!
(y)
So, so many reasons, too many to comprehensively cover, but I'll try:

- The 80/20 rule. 80% of the messages go to 20% of the users, usually be attractiveness. This is true for both genders, but since Western society in general has men pursuing women, this means the most attractive women get tons of messages, while even the most attractive men get a smattering in comparison.

- This causes an overwhelming number of messages to flood into one segment of your population, causing them to stop using the service. Far from having their pick of the litter, their inbox simply fills. It's literally more messages than they have time to read. The most attractive segment of your population shuts down.

- In this environment, with no gatekeeping, spam-filtering, or any such mechanism, the optimal male strategy is to spam, and spam a lot. So they do, this is why you see a lot of "hey horny wanna fuck" - because it's really not worth spending more effort on a message that's going into a black hole anyways. This is also why you see a lot of copy/pasting, as well as a lot of "internet trapeze artists" - guys who have some schtick of a message they send over and over again (see: profiles where someone pretends to be a deranged killer, an anthropomorphic cat, or whatever insanity gets them noticed). Signal to noise ratio drops through the floor.

- To make an analogy to the greater web. This is like online advertising. There are so many ads out there that you're not going to click on anyways that the optimal strategy isn't to create well-produced advertisements, it's to shove popups and popunders at your browser so fast until finally scoring a click (either by accident or otherwise).

So yeah, engagement with women is hard.
I know they would disagree. That said, you've listed 5 people out of, probably, millions that did the same and didn't make it.
In a pre pip/rubygem auto-installer world, this would have been one package that had the 26 dependencies embedded as modules inside it. You wouldn't have known they were unless you looked at the source code. You also wouldn't be able to update them independently, you'd get updates when a new release of the original thing was available that included embedded updates.

Would this make you feel more like you knew what was installed on your system? Would you have felt the need to look at the source code, including the source code for any embedded dependencies, in, say, a 'vendor' or 'lib/dist' directory or something?

What are the plusses and minuses of each approach? There are some plusses and some minuses either way. After considering them, do you still have a problem with the 'new way' of doing things, where a program might install along with explicit dependencies via pip (or rubygems in ruby) separated out in a different place in the file system, vs. embedded/bundled dependencies?
Nokia Mentions Visualized (Virality)
Bank of America's "Suggestion Box"
Academic Study - Call to web API client developers
Disclaimer: First and foremost, I apologize if HackerNews is against this kind of posts. However, this is the perfect forum to bring my question to so I decided to try my luck anyway. If there is a policy against my post, please feel free to delete it.

I'm a Ph.D student at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and recently we performed an academic study regarding the pains web API client developers face while integrating and maintaining this integration with web APIs.

In this study, of which a technical report is available online (here:http://swerl.tudelft.nl/twiki/pub/Main/TechnicalReports/TUD-SERG-2013-012.pdf), we used software metrics to try to quantify how these forced evolution steps taken by API providers affect the client developers.

What we would like to ask you, as a client developer for such web APIs, is whether you would be available for a Skype interview on your experience in dealing with these software evolution tasks. This would take at most one hour and it would add invaluable insight to our research.

To show our appreciation for your time and effort, we are raffling away one Amazon voucher in the value of $50.
View. It was a system where the teacher would export things from their personal machine and it would dump a bunch of files into their ~/public_html.
The thing is light is a huge part of architecture. The idea that an architect didn't account for this possibility is insane.
I tend to spend a lot of time planning (almost as much as coding). I do tend to notice big changes over a period of 2-3 years but areas where I can notice improvements in say six months.
You could have just given actual name , google might have indexed it through this back link ;)
wow thats a really interesting set of slides.
Hmm, I don't agree with your ranking. Each sense has a range of tasks that it covers, and although there's some overlap, each sense covers things that simply can't be replaced by the others. Therefore they are all dependent.

Sight allows highly detailed sensing of the nearby environment.
Smell gives a longer range detection, plus sensitivity to chemical differences which sight lacks.
Taste gives a more specific chemical test to things we're about to eat.
Touch provides some sensory information about the environment, but mostly it's a control for our manipulation of the world. It facilitates tool-building.
Hearing facilitates high-bandwidth information transfer (language) as well as covering some mid-range distance sensing duties for cases where our smell and sight are lacking.

I think ranking these is futile, since they all cover such manifestly different use-cases.
Very visual, but might get hard to use with many bookmarks
Honestly, I caught myself using "he" several times writing this response but went back and "refactored" my response.

But you didn't use the word she in any of your response, so how could have you have needed to refactor anything from he? You might make at least some effort to keep your story straight from one sentence to the next. Honestly.

Also, you have a sexist learned behaviour as part of your language, you know about this and can decide yourself if it is worth giving a shit about. Learning the behaviour doesn't make you sexist, but not giving a shit about it might.
Give it a try. Go ahead and create your sports persona and tell us what you feel about it! :)
@Prashant: I added in the actual domain name, hopefully Google picks it up. :) Good idea!
Call me paranoid but I've always assumed Tor was a honeypot.
Looks like a clone of a project I did in xul a while back. http://nochrome.tp23.org/
Got stacked tabs. And comes as expanded hackable js. Good to see movement in the browser space.
Same thing happens also for the GSK building near London. ( http://goo.gl/p8UCit )
Well the middle ground (and what the U.S. does) is to publish the general standards and practices specifying what the government is to do in law, and then leaving the how secret.

E.g. the FBI is given authority to wiretap with a warrant, telecom providers are ordered to make it possible to comply with such warrants, but it's left up to the FBI and telecom providers to figure out the actual operational details.

This is, after all, why people were protesting against PATRIOT ACT, FISA Amendments Act, etc., was because they were worded to permit activities much like (if not exactly like) were revealed by Snowden.

For the non-foreign surveillance things (like DEA's "SOD") I'm not so sure they're fully legal, but if they are illegal they'd still be just as illegal under a general law as they would be under detailed S&P.
Once upon a time, I had sent an email to an org with criticism of their web site and how it's hurting their image, only to find out that they gave the web dev opportunity to a high school kid in the area who really wanted the experience. The org was completely legit, and IMO they did a good thing by giving some kid a chance. If the org's product is not the web site, then I don't see why they should waste money/time on an amazing designer/developer when that money could ease operational needs elsewhere.
> @"^[^@]{1,}[@]{1}[^@]{1,}\.{1}[^@]{1,}$"

Is not

> [string]@[string].[string]

It's mere ^.+@.+\..+ (in both POSIX extended and PCRE dialects) that properly represents the latter.

And even such regexp filters out many technically-valid but obscure cases of RFC-compliant email addresses (for example ai, io, kh and ws TLDs have MX records, and supposedly hostmaster@io should be a valid email address).
That makes no sense - it's like saying SELinux is compromised because it was developed by the NSA. They use these tools internally.
This article has been posted around 3-4 times this year alone. Most people should already be well aware of the cost of a full rewrite due to all the horror stories. Yet, sometimes the best software has come from a full rewrite.
50"-60" has been "mainstream" for years, in the sense that they take up a substantial percentage of floor space in most TV stores.

Apparently it's expected the average for new shipments may exceed 40" this year (late 2012 it was around 37")
No, it is a systemic problem. If a civil engineer routinely designed building that bits fell off and destroyed parked cars, he'd lose his license to practice! Where's the Guild of Architects when you need them?
The 27" 2560x1440 models are going strong recently. I got one off the ebay resellers, and its gorgeous.
If email has to be short in your company, then why don't you just use twitter. Those 140 character limit should clearly help you and your employees to express better.

In the meantime, please leave alone people that use email to actually write something and go back to twitter and the likes.
Definitely. I'll let you know :) Cheers!
Haha, that would be amazingly hilarious if it didn't involve property destruction and waste.
Seems to me that a lot of what Joel was complaining about could be mitigated by some well-placed comments in the code. "This function is 2 pages long! Oh, this part does that, and THIS part does THAT. I see what's going on. This is all good."

This seems to be something people don't even bother to argue about any more. Everyone's given up! I don't do much myself, but no one I have worked with over the past 20 years has done ANY. Scary. I've only recently moved out of engineering to a "real" coding firm, but I'm still not seeing it.

I guess coders, in general, either think that everyone should immediately understand WHY code should be doing what it's doing, or be fired, or they think it's job security to not share these details.
Came across this one yesterday, slightly paraphrased:

boolean updateMsg(boolean pPassed) {
if (pPassed) {
incrMsgCounter();
logger.info("Message sent");
} else {
logger.info("Failed to send");
return false;
}
return true;
}

Yes, the calling code actually checked the return value. The code is full of stuff like this. Somehow I've got a morbid fascination and can't stop marvelling at how grotesque it is. It even overpowers the urge to read HN.
This is bad architecture, plain and simple. They are paid to account for everything because buildings can't be moved or updated easily without major headaches and expense. The idea that it was an oversight is ridiculous. Not accounting for sunlight in architecture? Unbelievable.
I hate that Google "created" a youtube account for me, just because I use Gmail doesn't mean I want a youtube account (I don't). One day I forget to sign out of Gmail, I browse to Youtube, and bam, now I have a Youtube account, I'm signed in, and my video history is tracked, and I have to manually turn that off. I didn't ask for that.
As a former Civil Engineer, I can say that software is not anything like Civil Engineering. The consequences of software failure are (usually) significantly less and oddly you can't practice Civil Engineering in the US without a license.

There are some similarities as they both are designing a building stuff.
Software is significantly easier to test however.
Why Google Rank Shoots up with WordPress?
Yeah I know, I noticed that yesterday and was impressed that they went through lengths to make it work on browsers that have no javascript
Yeah, I didn't mean to sound so derogatory, but out of non-formally-trained developer co-workers I've ever had only a handful didn't create work for everyone.

The two most common issues are inability to create sanely defined and decomposed schemas and clearly written queries, and poor ability to structure code in an organized way.

That said, I have known a couple very good coders without any kind of formal education. They just seem to be outliers.

When dealing with formally trained developers I've certainly encountered the incompetent also, but I'd say at an easy majority of trained coders I've worked with are competent enough to not be hard to work with.

Mind I you I do not claim to be a "superstar developer" or anything. The state of the art tends to change just a bit faster than I can keep up with these days.
Is there any blog or article by the authors with a behind the scenes description of the game? (team or solo, artist, technologies, infrastructure, ...)

The game is nice but I prefer reading about those as I see a lot going on the tech side.
Ask HN: What do you dislike/like about programming?
4 things I like about programming
Solving algorithmic problems
Solving mathematical problems
The creativity of coding/building
Well documented api’s and libraries

4 things I dislike about programming
Setting up tools and environments
Poorly documented api’s libraries, and frameworks
Configuration coding (e.g. setting up and connecting databases)
UI design/programming

what about you?
So this is basically speed dating for job interviews ! This is how most speed dating events work (atleast in London) - you indicate your interest in the other person anonymously and if they 'like' you back, the system sends out an email to both.

This kinda breaks when someone ends up clicking 'like' for everyone they met at the event ! This someone in your case will be recruiters who'll use the information to hunt probable passive candidates.

So in search for discreteness, the job-seeker would end up falling prey to the game of head hunters.
I might use one if it was inside a building and associated(/partnered?) with a business within that building. The main reason for this is I'd perceive them to be more invested in maintaining the freshness of the fruits more than some outside company (you don't ever want your employees/customers/yourself to have to deal with smelling or looking at spoiled fruit while working).

I think the only real markets I can personally see for this are within schools (more college and university level), within businesses, and maybe some malls appealing to the organic crowd.
I would like to add the following:

1. Most people are alright, but avoid the few who aren't like the plague.

I've always had the fortune to not lose my trust in people, but I've found that it took me a significant time in my twenties to learn how to filter out the bad people (perhaps because of this). Especially bad partners.

The converse can also be true. I know people who seem to have based their entire outlook on a few shitty people in their lives (sadly, parents are often the culprits), and miss out on connections, and opportunities, because they assume the worst.

Finding a balance in this regard, I believe, has been one of the things that most increased my general quality of life, and (moderate) success.

2. Lots of people are lonely

Perhaps this mostly applicable to post-college life, but I've been shocked to find out how many people around me feel isolated and lonely. Knowing this, however, helped in gaining the courage to approach others, knowing that they are just as willing to make new friends as I am.
- Is that a serious question?

- Have you ever been part of a group that made a (complicated) mistake?

You gain nothing by deluding yourself about the intelligence of an imaginary person (there is no "you")

Try being less negative.
1) Mootness: see Roe v. Wade. A decent breakdown on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mootness#Capable_of_repetition....

2) The TSA doesn't get to "direct" a state agency to violate state law unless they are empowered to do so by law. There is no basis in law for the TSA's assertion that lying is required. A Glomar response would have protected their interests, but they lied to avoid having to admit to having embarrassing footage.
Ok, let me play the devils advocate here.

We get the point, I guess. People will feel less "desperate" in the eyes of the contractor, since they obviously also showed their interest. But at the end of the day, and this is why I will keep my skepticism for now, the contractor has many many more seekers out there who are willing to do the job, than the other way around.

Honestly, in a competitive market, this feel too weak from the contracter's point of view. I you want a job, show it properly that you can do the job well, not bitch around playing some sort of social game, trying to play hard to get or whatever. Tl;Dr: There's no time for this shit.

On the other hand: Great! Like a "Bang with friends" for job hunting! You get matched with whoever is looking for similar talents/positions, and then you evaluate the other part, whereafter you either secretly show your interest or not.

If the normal way is the hard way, this is the curling way where it doesn't hurt as much to get dissed, because maybe they just didn't notice you, right? But hey, you'll never know because you're too much of a pussy to find out.

My two cents.