skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You bind scope by setting the variable this to a locally scoped variable before your function call:

var foo = {
'bar': function () {
var that = this;
$(selector).each(function () {
alert(that);
}
}
}

or else in the cases of objects like the above where there is only one instance of the object you can refer to foo by name.

var foo = {
'bar': function () {
$(selector).each(function () {
alert(foo);
}
}
}

Events are a bit trickier as they get set on DOM elements and the variable declared in front of it with local scope cannot be accessed from within.

var foo = {
'bar': function () {
var that = this;
$(selector).click(function () {
alert(that); // doesn't work!
}
}
}

You can get around this by passing a variable into the function called by the event.

var foo = {
'bar': function () {
var that = this;
$(selector).bind('click', {'that': this}, function (e) {
alert(e.data.that); //accessed via e.data
}
}
}
Tick!

"tick the right answer" (in english exams)

may be useful for you!
You want out. That's really understandable. This was a really ambitious project that quite a few companies have failed at... Last year I worked on a startup by for about 6 months and just got fatigued and scrapped it. I know the pain of working on a project when the momentum starts to evaporate. But what really stands out to me from your extended post is that it seems like you've learned a LOT from this whole experience. Succcccesssss!!! :) Best of luck.
Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End fails to thrill
Real men program in C
Suppose you're right and you can only DoS an air traffic control tower once. Does that mean that it's pointless? There are probably scenarios in which paralyzing an airport for a while could be pretty dangerous.

However, what makes you think you're right? It sounds like it would take quite a bit of system re-engineering to stop the DoS and return to normal service: the ATC system has to figure out which flight plans are real and which ones are spurious, and be sure to print out all the real ones.
This is also the approach in ASP.NET. You build the page out of controls, and each control knows how to render itself as HTML.
curate
IRB on Android
Give a shot at release early release often.

Get some users on there using it, breaking it, enthusing about it - and you might feel a bit more attachment :)
Thanks for the notice. Our problem is that I've tried to build lot's of features at the same time. The app became too big, it eats a lot of my time and it's still far from being completed - it's still not ready to be released.
The reason why C is so big in the embedded/realtime world is because there are no 'layers' underneath you that can screw up the timing. Deterministic behaviour is one of the key goals in that sphere. (and it should be in every other but that's not economically feasible it seems).

On the web, where programmer time is expensive and most software is throw-away (sorry, but that's the way I see it even if that is not a popular attitude here) the equation is completely different and skewed towards scripting languages, with 'java' (basically a safer version of C++) taking up a good portion of the compiled segment.

Hardly anybody directly programs their web aware stuff in C.

Most entry level jobs are with companies that do web development, there you learn how to do scripting and quick and dirty development, usually with lots of loose ends in the final product.

When you program in C such undisciplined coding would be punished with lots of segmentation faults and data corruption issues, and before long you'd be a more seasoned - and more careful - programmer.

Even seasoned and careful programmers mess up though, witness the endless stream of buffer overflow exploits.

Another great thing about C is that it is not such a moving target, once you've learned it you're 'current' for the next decade or two or so.

The proliferation of languages and environments is quite bewildering at times. This years hottest technology is next years garbage. In the C world things move at a more relaxed pace and the technology you're interfacing with is generally speaking more mature, it doesn't feel so much like a work in progress.
var boundfunction = function(c) {return function(){ c.doSomething()}}(this);

Learning javascript > learning a js lib.
Yes, Integrity can be compared to DabbleDB, actually we have lot's of potential competitors, you can read the blog below to know more about the market

http://webappsatwork.blogspot.com/
read about DMCA takedowns:

http://pcworld.co.nz/pcworld/pcw.nsf/feature/93FEDCEF6636CF9...

http://www.freelanceswitch.com/freelancing-essentials/what-t...
Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard
HN feature request: a domain ignore list on a per user basis.
Yes, there is an efficiency cost to using high-level languages with array functions (Python with Numpy, Perl with PDL, Octave, R, their proprietary equivalents, and kx's q) but the cost is sometimes small. See http://www.scipy.org/PerformancePython for a pretty clear outline of the available options in the Python case (sadly, it doesn't present results for Fortran to compare with, just C++.)
Its certainly possible. For eg. take a look at what BioPerl has done for bioinformatics & genomics.

http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioPerl
Hardly anybody directly programs their web aware stuff in C.

I do. :-)

Even seasoned and careful programmers mess up though, witness the endless stream of buffer overflow exploits.

I'd dispute that. There were lots of buffer overflow vulnerabilities five years ago; but I can't remember seeing any buffer overflows in the past few years which weren't either (a) written by novices, or (b) in code which was written 5+ years ago but sufficiently obscure that nobody looked at it until recently.

I'd say that, especially given the proliferation of automated analysis tools, buffer overflows are pretty much a solved problem where seasoned and careful programmers are concerned.
Interesting! What is it that you do in C that talks to the web ?

I'm serving up a very large amount of jpegs as image streams to a piece of javascript and found that the only way to get enough performance was to code a multi-threaded special purpose webserver (I call it yawwws, yet another www server) in C. That's been going for a decade or so now, possibly if I had to do it today I'd use some other technology.
I can't remember seeing any buffer overflows in the past few years which weren't either (a) written by novices, or (b) in code which was written 5+ years ago but sufficiently obscure that nobody looked at it until recently.

Which category is the iPhone SMS vulnerability?
Adding to your “no 'layers' underneath you that can screw up the timing” it is also valuable that if there is a performance problem in your application, you can address it.

You won’t ever end up having to just blame it on the garbage collector, the string buffer implementation, or even the memory allocator. For software which works with huge quantities of data or is interactive, every microsecond often counts.

That said, C++ offer the same advantage, and I am surprised that it doesn’t see more use. Maybe C programmers think like Linus Torvards: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...
Pizza Hut’s Delicious iPhone App Tops 100,000 Downloads In Two Weeks
Games of No Chance
There are two extreme approaches to "Real programmers do X".

One approach is rooted in electrical engineering, and declares that real programmers are the ones who get as close as possible to the hardware.

The other approach is rooted in mathematics, and declares that real programmers are the ones who get as close as possible to formal models of computation.

Both are narrow-minded and flat-out wrong. Real programmers understand that context is king, and that everything they will do is a trade-off decided by some factor of the project they're working on.
(..as a user of GMail) What's that "spam" thing I keep hearing about?

I really wish Google could share their spam filters with the rest of the world. I hardly see any spam.
Wordoid.com is a webapp that helps you come up with a catchy name for your product, company or domain.

It makes up new words that are unlikely to appear in a dictionary.
It knows how to create words in several languages: English, Spanish, French and Italian at the moment.
It is even able to create words in imaginary "languages", constructed by blending two or more real languages together.

I would appreciate your feedback!

P.S. This is the second time I would like to ask you to review wordoid.com here at HN.

The first review, located at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=621855,
gave me lots of ideas and suggestions, that I believe made the webapp a little better:

1) The user interface got an overhaul and became much more user-friendly.

2) Domain availability checks are more precise now, and .net domain check is added.

3) The webapp works faster now.

Thanks go to JunkDNA, matt1, nwjsmith, oskarpearson, pierrefar, philh, papa, yummyfajitas,and all the other guys who posted their comments.
Maybe you should list those implemented ideas if you honestly want them reviewed?
Which category is the iPhone SMS vulnerability?

I don't know -- I haven't seen any concrete details about what the bug was.
I found Rainbows End mindlessly boring; most of the technologies are obvious extrapolations from today, with nothing exciting or surprising about the consequences. It's sort of like a fiction writer realizing his character could have a PC with 1T of RAM.

Great science fiction is about ideas, not technology per se.

I don't usually bother to criticise stuff I don't like, but I loved his two previous books (Deepness in the Sky, and Fire upon the Deep, and before them, True Names). Those seem like labours of love; whereas this one feels like it was to pay the bills. I don't know what's up with Mr Vinge (except he retired from his comp sci academic position...); I would just love to have some more of his old output. Not all such wishes can be granted, of course, nor are necessarily even possible.
What is it that you do in C that talks to the web ?

I've written lots of client side code (a command-line pipelined HTTP client; library code for callback-driven HTTP for the benefit of web services). On the server side, the tarsnap website is a combination of static HTML and CGI programs written in C.
Weapons 8% of US exports of durable goods, up from 3% in 2000
You said
---
Thank you for the link.
I challenge the accuracy of the statement
"Time needed to reach a standard equivalent to A-level[4]"
---

Two questions:

1.- Did you have access to the whole study? Can you precise the method, results, etc.?

2.- What about the other thirteen statements? Don't they seem to indicate that Esperanto should be a lot easier than English?
I'm a mathematician, yet I'm still part of the do-most-things-in-C camp. I don't think this contradicts your point, though -- I find that C provides a far more well-defined model of computation than scripting languages like perl.

I use C more because I want to know what my code is going to do than because I want to know how it is going to do it.
Added a short list of major improvements. Thanks!
There's a pretty large number of credible competitors in the smart-phone market - RIM, Palm, Nokia, Google, Microsoft and probably a few others. Also, there are other carriers than just AT&T.

So at this point I fail to see what's the issue other than some disappointed iPhone users. Maybe there's a legal problem. We will see.
Good thought practise. So much noise in this ethical discussion.
"Quiche-like phrase"? I couldn't read any further.
Very cool idea. It's the mental equivalent of cross training for an MMA match! I'd like to give this a go tomorrow, but we have to come up with something a bit more memorable than "The ljolel Method". Any suggestions? ;)
He gives them three notes, they figure out the other two and extend the scale across two octaves. For a room full of laypeople watching a guy jump back and forth, that's remarkable.

Now, in this day and age, anybody who hasn't been raised by wolves has had the pentatonic scale drilled into them from the day they were born. Also, it's not an arbitrary bunch of notes. It's derived from simple harmonic principles.

Still, I would not have guessed that this stunt would be possible.
(I know this kind of feature would probably be a pain to implement)

On the front-page I see wordoid called "tradio" (it's number 15 for me, maybe it's different for others) -- I think it would be cool if the web app was able to recognise that wordoids like that end in a TLD (trad.io, in this case) and check the availability of that domain as well.

Apart from that, looks pretty cool.
Ask HN: Mobile Broadband sateside
Hopefully you can figure out a bit of a conundrum for me :)

Im coming to the mighty US for a holiday later this month. As it's 3 a week trip roaming new england etc. Im taking my Netbook so I can keep up with emails and book hotels etc.

Problem is that my mobile broadband costs a fortune there: it's a blooming monopoly. ALL UK providers are charging about £6 per MB. Fair enough I expected some premium.. but in the UK they charge that for about a GB!

So. What are my options.

Mostly I want to rely on free/cheap wifi - the mobile is just contingency.

How much cheap wifi is there kicking around over there? NY I assume wont be a problem but we are going round New England and inland a bit (Boston, Niagra, Chicago, Washington possibly).

Secondly what are the chances of me popping into a phone shop in NY when I land and picking up a cheap pasy as you go dongle? A traveller to the UK probably couldn't do it because they do credit checks and want you to be a resident etc.

Any ideas gratefully appreciated - staying online for the 3 weeks will make things soooo much easier :)

EDIT: I know this is a bit off topic for HN - but your about the biggest US community I hang out at :)
Yes, of course. But it was clearly meant as an analogy.

The elements of good coding style that apply when writing a program in C don't necessarily apply to a compiler when it compiles a higher level language down to C.

Similarly, the best practices for writing HTML by hand don't necessarily apply to a program that generates HTML from a higher level abstraction.
Thank you, Scott, this is a great idea! I like it, and I'm going to think on it.
24 Reasons to Do Your Workout Today
that's the risk you take for using a community (ish) / volunteer developed OS.

I always recommend Fedora - because they have Red Hat upstream so it's enterprisey but still the same sort of community :)
I tried following some links and ended up ping-ponging between the two sites. I guess it's a reciprocal arrangement.
I think that a big part of it is that C is simple. The thread of execution is dead obvious, it is almost - but not quite - like looking at assembler. In C++ you have more options to create interesting bugs, every operator has a potential side effect depending on the context.

Sure that can be done in C too, but you have to work a little harder for that.

When reliability - or lives - are at stake and plenty of systems software written in C controls mission critical stuff it helps to see what is actually going on.

By sticking to a very simple subset you make it easier to find problems before they cause nasty accidents.

I know of plenty of situations where even an OS would be a detriment, these run on totally stripped down kernels that probably the majority of programmers would no longer recognize as an operating system proper but would instead call a loader or something to that effect.

C++ offers the same advantages that C does but it also offers a single disadvantage that C does not have, it's more expressive. In other words you can make your C code do lots of stuff but you will not be able to say it in roughly more than one way.

In C++ there are endless ways to do the same thing. That means there is more to remember and that in turn means that programmer expertise is a much bigger factor in quality. I think systems level guys have learned the hard way that the KISS principle is the most important programming guideline there is.
Well, I know a person who uses Tor for even regular web surfing and finds it good enough.
I've used both, and didn't notice any difference with either. That's not to say there was no difference though.
Wandering if its one of many possibly dangerous start-ups. Few weeks ago i read about Copenhagen rocket science engineers, with great plans for future (moon landing was in their aims). What with bioengineering start-ups?

It's off topic, but do you know some of this groups? And what don't you think that freedom in such fields can jeopardise large population?
Release early, release often. Once you have some users, they will be the best to guide you to what is working, whats not working and what needs adding. If you specify its beta then they can hardly complaing (espically if you offer some beta testers a discounted rate after release, positive motivation on both sides wont hurt)
Software : Lyrics Plugin for Winamp 1.0  Free Download
> There are no 'layers' underneath you that can screw up the timing

Well, there are, but they're also written in C. You still can have stuff that trips you up from your libc implementation or the syscall implementations in the kernel, but if you're working on an OSS OS and are familiar with low-level stuff anyway, you can just keep debugging all the way down to the hardware.
I’d like the ability to filter the TLD(s) I am interested in; for example I may only want to buy a domain if it ends in .com, so all the available .net wordoids are of no use to me.
Like I'm gonna read 10 pages of rants. I'll bet that guy lisps.
Thanks for your suggestion, Dave!
> Hardly anybody directly programs their web aware stuff in C.

More than you might think. Especially a lot of Fortune 500 companies tend to have their own frameworks programmed in C. They're generally not interested in rapid prototyping, but rather in performance, tools and most of all code stability (i.e. you don't want your website to depend on the security/updates of an interpreter). Gradually this is moving to Java (and .NET) for the reasons you mentioned, but it's a slow process.
> Tables for layout didn't really take off until the late 90's

Which was coincidentally when websites started having sidebars. Are you arguing in favor of pre-1995 web design? Are you arguing that there is a more natural way than tables to express site layouts with sidebars?

When I say "prior to CSS" I mean "prior to wide CSS adoption and browser support". Yes, CSS1 was released in 1996, but it didn't really catch on among web authors for a few years (and wasn't really practical to use anyway due to limited browser support). In that intervening time, websites started sprouting sidebars, and basically all the sites that used sidebars did so with HTML tables.

> And even when they did take off, tables were still burdened with the sorts of quirks and browser incompatibilities people complain about with CSS

Quirks or no, HTML-based tables are more fit for describing layouts than CSS ever will be until web authors can use "display: table" or something like that. With HTML-based tables, you're working around browser quirks (which really aren't as bad as you make them out to be). With CSS, you're working with a language that is too weak (even if implemented perfectly) to express what you're trying to say. With CSS, a three-column layout (something that many, many sites want) is considered a "holy grail" (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail/).

CSS (pre-"display:table") doesn't have the right abstractions for achieving designers' demonstrated needs. Why do you live in denial of this fact?
Congrats on the launch. As a passionate sports follower I would love to use fanchatter for my fav sports- F1 and Football.
I was very disappointed with Rainbow's End. Even the politics bothered me. Judging from the prominent role terrorism and the Department of Homeland Security play in the book, Vinge has abandoned the libertarianism of his earlier books and become a dyed-in-the-wool Bushie.
number of reasons make it much harder to advertise to the app store.

there's so many steps. you go from your marketing iPhone site, to the app store page of you app, and then you have the chance to buy it. thats at least one, if not two more steps. why can't you have a nice big "buy now" button on your website?

it's a black box. you can't see what works, you have no way of knowing if 75% of your tweets convert into a sale, and only 10% via fusionads.net - its not possible to tell.

iTunes or iPhone only. Good luck buying an app if you're at work, or on any computer where you don't have your iPhone set up on. Instantly preventing a) apps over 10MB from being installed, b) the casual news browsing "oh that looks like a cool app" you do whilst at work.

no refunds or trials. it prevents users from downloading ~$5 applications just because - you're not allowed to make apps that "explode" after 30 days. If you give away free trial apps thats fine, but a ton more work for the developer.

and lets ignore the fact you might get your application held up for weeks after you've been told it'll launch 1st August - after you've got all your press ready and such, they might just decide to not release it then. no reason why.

note: we're launching an iPhone app, and i agree with you - its all about the marketing, and thats why I've switched from dev to marketing for the next ~2 months before launch to get our iPhone app rocking.
One thing that is puzzling me for some time is why vegetarians think it's more moral/nice/whatever to eat plants and not animals. They too are living creatures and most of the times you are killing a being in order to consume it for your personal gain. I'll skip the analogy between fruits and their mamal equivelant, but you get the idea..

Thing is, survival is a really competitive process and unless you want to get off sooner, you have to take things away from other organisms, human or otherwise. We, as a civilisation, may have raised it to a more noble, according to our perception, level but fundamentally it's still the same.
Ethos is mostly the refined version of pack rules evolved to make sure an individual doesn't hurt the well being of the group. It's a human fabrication.

With that said I agree with the author's view, try to do as much good as you possibly can, while realising that just by living you are causing harm to someone/something else.
I usually use the distinction of "programmers" and "engineers" between people who know how to use a programming language and people who know how to build a computer system.
That graph shows a %age change, not absolute numbers. Linkbait...
When the Government Knows Who Calls Who
Doesn't work in Konqueror 4.
Long long ago I worked for a bank, we had essentially two classes of programmers, Application level programmers and Systems level programmers, the barrier between them was pretty formidable.

These days the lines are much more blurred, and that's why this argument is even possible. The 'real men' of old were the systems programmers, they used to use assembly.

I remember reading something similar in dr dobbs years ago that had exactly the same argument going, 'real men' write assembly, everybody else uses C (which was still considered to be a high level language at the time).

Our definition of 'high level' is shifting, and apparently so is what we consider to be 'real programming'.

C is more like (old style) lego, the bricks are small and simple but you can build very complex stuff out of it once you master the principle. It will do very little 'out of the box' but once you get it your limits are your fantasy, there are no 'domain specific' bricks.

I wonder how much of the reasons for these preferences can be traced back to what you were playing with as a kid!
Why the downvotes? Estonia generally ranks highly on most metrics for freedom, and came top of the State of World Liberty Index: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_World_Liberty_Index