skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see your point and certainly I've seen code as you have described. However, just because the model lives on a server doesn't mean that you can't have a model class on the client. If that were true, then we would not be able to have model classes tied to databases. But that's fairly common, even if it does add a level of abstraction.

The big mistake that folks make is not that they use MVC on the client but that they use MVC on the server side in this scenario. You'd get better bang for your buck if you used MVC on the client and accessed RESTful resources via a model class, and treated the server like a filesystem for loading controller and view classes that were handled exclusively by the client.
Over the last hundred years the probability most assign to the existence of an omnipotent god has decreased dramatically. Most rational people will come to the conclusion that there is such a vanishingly small chance of a god existing that there is no point believing. That's thanks to science.
I'm not going to comment on the site itself, but I've read through the comments here and would like to put something forward: You aren't focusing enough on making this a win for your customer.

I'm a potential customer. Right now, I see a process that limits my input to next to nothing, won't allow me to make revisions, and after all that, I don't even own the thing.

As a comparison, for $50 more I can get 4 concepts, two revision rounds and actual ownership at Logoworks. To me, the choice is clear.

I don't want or mean to disparage you but that is the current mindset of your potential customer. All I see are wins for you, but not many for them. I think you need to fix that ratio if you are to be successful.

Good luck to you!
It is in fact illegal to use a gun to interrupt cell phone conversations.
And what subjects would those be?
This should be a big help in writing clean server-side sorts by an arbitrary column in tabular data.

Previously we've had to do some rather ugly things with "create_function" and lots of escaping in order to make arbitrary sort comparator functions.

An example of the old style:

private function makeCompare($field, $desc) {
return create_function('$a,$b', "
\$r = strcasecmp(\$a['$field'], \$b['$field']);
return " . ($desc ? '-1' : '1') . " * \$r;");
}

Not my proudest moment, to be sure.
"I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that Intuit doesn't get the web when their TurboTax web app is pretty good. Then again I didn't work there so maybe their tax software was handled by a different division than their Quicken products."

I based my statements on (a) what I saw within Intuit about how the webapp is made/maintained (b) the customer complaint calls I heard (c) knowledge of the expected and actual revenue from the web app (the desktop app was acquired btw, the webapp built inhouse) and (d) the "strategy" meetings I attended. No "disengunous"ness intended.

For more than a decade INTU was a desktop company and that mindset pervades the company including their technical people. The web is deeply disconcerting to Intuit and their nightmare is that two guys in a garage will come up with something that takes their cash cows away. It maybe an unsual idea for people outside Intuit, but the top management is not laughing. (I guess something to this effect was what PG meant by "Intuit seems ripe for picking off". I agree. They are. Very.)

Another thing they haven't got a grip on is the success of the IPhone. There are a bunch of people who have been working for the last two years on getting native IPhone versions of various Intuit apps to work. they aren't having much success. Again I know this from working there, attending very high level strategy meetings and so on.

My post above was(is) just my opinion, worth exactly what anonymous opinions on the web are worth. It was an off the cuff post posted while my code was building and deploying, which I thought might be of interest to people on this forum. I don't want to get into a debate on the merits of TT or Intuit.

Pax.
Right, I'm not arguing that anonymous first-class functions are useful, I'm just saying that I think there are so many other things that are seriously broken with PHP as to make this akin to worrying about having enough clean forks for a dinner party while your house is on fire.

I'm not just PHP-trolling here, either. There is a history in the PHP project of adding features to the language without any reference to how they will be made "safe". The PHP interpreter is notoriously unhelpful at catching even the simplest of bugs. This just seems like another ad-hoc feature added to the list of things that are likely to introduce subtle bugs that are undetectable until they are running on a production system somewhere.
This is ridiculous. The financial crisis was not a "black swan." Many people saw it coming and prepared accordingly. It was only groupthink and willful ignorance which kept most people from doing so.
You're right in that creating a a form in Wufoo is only the beginning. At that point, you can start sharing the link to the form or embedding it on a web page to start collecting data, leads or even payments. You can do all this from our Code Manager: http://wufoo.com/docs/code-manager/

Built into every form is also the ability to subscribe to the incoming data in real time to your email inbox, mobile device via SMS or your RSS Newsreader.

We also have a robust report building feature that can help you visualize and export your data so you can better understand the information you've collected.

You can learn more about all these different steps in our other video tutorials at http://wufoo.com/docs/getting-started/
A large number of people signed up for each of those conflicts and where let go. Granted, there were also a large number of conscripts, but even ignoring conscripts they were huge reductions in the government workforce.

Edit: The Works Progress Administration (WPA) is another example which was closed down by Congress and the war boom in 1943 and provided almost 8 million jobs between 1935 and 1943. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration) After employing 8 million people.
Ask HN: A better metric than lines of code
People often compare programming languages by lines of code. The problem is that a more verbose language usually requires less thought per line than a terser language.
Maybe a better metric of a programming language's complexity could be had by measuring the size of a compressed source-code file rather than line's of code.

Anybody disagree and think the opposite is true;
that a simpler syntax usually means more thought?

Anybody here ever heard of somebody doing something like that?
We'd be into 3 and 6. (Some of the others are fine ideas, but depend on doing deals with other parties.)
Doug Engelbart on Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Special Topics - Web 2.0
Wow, that's a fantastic analogy.

Kudos to him (or her) for placing a real, reasoned response on a gaming blog as well.
If I build it will HN implement it? I rather suspect not.
There's plenty of study on relationships between people of opposite sex. I don't even know how you could say this.
I'd like to see Gates U. really be "Informal U." Experts in various areas organize little seminars of variable lengths and talk about whatever they want to talk about. Students find people who know what they want to learn, and ask them to teach it.

Each professor publicizes the list of reading you need to really understand before you can work with them - and informally organize a discussion group for the students they know are working through it. So you're forced to plan in advance, you spend time reading the fundamentals of a field, discuss it with people, and perhaps write something to show you know what you're doing, before the prof. lets you in on his project.

You plan your sequence of projects in order to get a) recommendations from interesting people and b) an interesting sequence of reading and work that fits together well. All the project work is either a) commissioned by industry or b) destined for direct publication. Ideally, most students do a bit of both.

This is College by UROP - you work with a few professors every year on projects, and you need their recommendation to progress into the following year. In your final year, you do a serious piece of independent work, perhaps with others. The referees you've had form a committee who judge your work. Quite simply, it needs to be published in a quality journal, or sold to industry, in order for you to graduate (i.e. you actually have to do something useful for somebody)

(edit: I just noticed this is basically just graduate school. Sooo, yeah ... Gates U. should be grad school for undergrads.)
Thanks for the feedback. We are still working on the explore our site. It's still pointing to the homepage for now.
They try to provide jobs because they are funded by taxpayer money. Their primary stakeholder is the American public; it is their job to benefit their stakeholders

Let me get this straight. You want government to take money from people (by taxing them), creating organizations like NASA and give money to people (by providing jobs). My questions to you is, why go through all the trouble? Why not reduce taxes and let people keep their money thereby eliminating waste.
The use syntax is a little weird at first but it turns out to be straightforward to understand. In fact, being explicit about what is being closed over makes the function itself easier to understand.

PHP, being the quirky language that it is, needs the use syntax to enable closures for cases where there are dynamic variable references. This is a bad example but illustrates the problem:

$foo = 'bar';
$fun = function() use ($foo) { $var = 'foo'; echo ${$var}; };
$fun(); // output 'bar'

$fun = function() { $var = 'foo'; echo ${$var}; };
$fun(); // fails

Sure, you could close over the entire local namespace but that's an efficiency nightmare and leads to unpredictable code.
That is a good point. Thanks. I will change the pop up to lightbox for more uniform looks.
Here's the discussion when it was released: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538389
I'd like to remind everyone of a rule related to this: please don't submit your YC application to HN. The reason is simply that if everyone did this, they'd drown out the ordinary content: if you divide the number of applications we get by the number of days between now and Oct 26, the result is many per day.

I left this one alive because it's arguably just over the line. It's really more of an essay that mentions they're applying for winter 2010. But I took the ref to YC out of the title.
A trusting lot you are.
Getting in the zone helps lead to a meaningful life
First one is a gray area, second one is a spammer. This is why we have human moderators and the flag button.

Anyway, it's sort of a moot point, as it's not really possible to automate elimination of those sorts of links.
Cool. I'll give it a look. Thanks so much for the reply.
Woody Allen is a hacker. Look at his innovations in cinema - Annie Hall was dated by the time I finally saw it but still pulled some awesome quirks. In Without Feathers, from which this story is taken, one of the plays is incredibly recursive and meta. I still want to perform it.

That's not defending this story, though. Just expressing a little love for Woody.
If the founder/ceo has been in his industry for a while yet all the people working with him at the startup have never worked with him before. Huge red flag. Ask yourself: why can't this guy attract people from his network? Why don't they want to work with him ever again?
What are the effective strategies to use when the bottleneck is disk I/O? We have memcached to cache data that is frequently accessed. However our usage pattern is such that repeated access of data in a short span of time is rare.
Design it well in the first place!

Here's something I recently wrote about speed and web apps: http://bens.me.uk/2009/fast-web-applications
"However, I make a big distinction between organizational and technical deficiencies."

I make that distinction too. One of my previous employers scored a 4 or 5 on the Joel test, but the work was extremely interesting, the technical staff was top notch and we actually had power to change things. My last employer in contrast probably scores more like a 9 or 10. The management was just mind bogglingly incompetent.
(Reminder: I think seshagiric is wrong, as I state below/above, but not wrong in such a way as to merit lots of downvoting. Save that for the egregious abusers/flamers/other nasties)
http://quantlib.org/index.shtml
Uh, have you ever actually tried? Because I have, and neither of those numbers are anywhere close to what I experienced. It's probably true that a plurality of the messages are standard Outlook autoresponders, but not "most" -- and definitely not 99.9%. And a very large number of MTAs are either misconfigured or intentional subvert the standard in order to confuse spammers.

These days there are thousands of "So and So doesn't work here any more" messages that have to be removed from the list by hand, then the people using Lotus Notes, Eudora, and god knows what else. Also non-standard Outlook messages and Outlook messages in different languages. Worst is those whitelist anti-spam challenges that require you to fill out a CAPTCHA (or pay the spam filtering company a bribe!) for each message you want to send to a subscriber.

We do comb through the replies because email is an important aspect of our business, but it's a lot more work than you make it out to be. If you're just a small company sending out a monthly newsletter, I'd probably say don't bother.
They make 6-6.5 sound like a short amount of sleep...I generally sleep between 4-5 and if I get 6 I'm feeling like I really slept in.

Of course, I might benefit if I slept more...I just have too much on my mind or to do most of the time.
Who are "civil libertarians"? People who value their civil liberties? People who are willing to do something to protect them? Whatever they are, you say you're not one. Interesting.
Quantifying the Economic Impact of the Internet.
OK, a huge one for me is "No serious technical questions in the interview." Seriously - if you don't show me code in the interview (preferably code from your products), then I don't really want to work for you. If we don't have at least one good argument about why language X is better than Y, I don't really want to work for you. Or, at the very least, if you don't stress to me at least one difficult technical problem that I'll face, I don't really want to work for you. Why? Because if you don't ask me these things, you've told me that my job is going to be deadly boring, and honestly I'd prefer minimum wage to a boring job.
I appreciate your attitude. But which part do you disagree with?

I'm guessing that most people are reacting against my implication that Apple is primarily profit-driven rather than design-driven. I suppose this might be true (and probably is true of some pieces of the company), but I have trouble believing that their financial success is just a happy accident that follows naturally from their focus on design.

Or is there a different part you disagree with?
I believe compressed source code size is one of the metrics available on the "Computer Language Benchmark Game":

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

I feel relatively strongly that LoC is almost entirely worthless as a metric. Even compressed source code size makes me uneasy. Shameless self promotion: I wrote a blog post which appeared on HN just the other day about better ways of comparing programming languages.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766841

In short, I disagree that there is almost any relationship between mental effort and verbosity.
We are attacking the messenger when we should be attacking the problem.

Forget the messenger for a moment, if he is good or not for funding, if he has writing problems, or if he is dumb or retard.

Lets focus on the problem please, can we provide solutions?

Even solutions on how to fix proposed solutions that don't work?
There is an urgent need for an international cyber response force
If you find it difficult to scale up databases, try looking at CouchDB instead http://couchdb.apache.org/index.html
Ask HN: What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)?
Hello, I found out a couple days ago that my mothers small business's site was recently wiped out due to her hosts bankruptcy. No notice, no backup, and the custom CMS she was using is gone.

I offered to set her up with a new site, and after looking at a feature comparison of the python CMSs I think FeinCMS over Django-CMS-2 is the right choice, for the in-place editing. I chose python, because I have recently learned the basics, and I would like to learn Django and PostgreSQL for a project I've been interested in forever.

While I have tentatively chosen my tools, I do not know which host to choose. Dreamhost looks like a good choice for her low bandwidth site. They seem like jokers, but it's almost endearing. The only negative I see is I would need a dedicated server if I want to install PostgreSQL.

Are there any other hosts I should consider?

(I don't think this should go to the front page, but the discussions about Dreamhost look outdated or of questionable experience. I'm pretty sure I'm ignorant of something important, hoping to learn about it.)
For now (just released the first beta) we only have a slideshow on the home page - we're working on a gallery though as it's definitely needed.

Good luck with your logo! :)
Thank you for your suggestions, they do make sense. The only thing is that this is not a proposal, it's simply an article (but still, you are right)
Everyone's defense of NASA is that they have generated a lot of knowledge. The question no one is asking is that what's the cost for generating that knowledge? Wikipedia suggests that NASA has spent 418 billion dollars from 1958 to 2008. Do you really think we got our money's worth?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget

Could you name few inventions derived from NASA's knowledge which have helped us tremendously? Compare this to the research/inventions done by private corporations.

And as I pointed out in my other reply, why should Government take money from people, give it to NASA and NASA will return that money back to people by providing jobs? Why not reduce taxes so that we can eliminate waste by having NASA as the middleman?
Apple beats H-P, Dell in customer satisfaction
My high school was one funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and we tried to limit tracking as much as possible. For the first two years, there is absolutely no tracking. The idea is that the faster learners will help their slower peers who benefit from more interaction with their friends. Anecdotally, it seemed to work rather well but required students to initially be motivated to learn. My school never really had a problem with that because students applied to the school and could opt out of the application process without their parents knowing.
Completely Javascript reliant and (for me) painfully slow (the site loads, then the content flickers into view. A good half second I guess) if I enable it. Opera 10 beta on Linux.

edit: Actually it takes 4 seconds for the content to appear. And it borks my navigation-back. I have to press back at least 2 times to actually get back.

Without Javascript, this is your site:
http://s1.image.gd/o/84/84730e851a4074e1040dcbe659d8f929989a...
Number 5 High Turnover can work in reverse as well, especially in software development. If all the staff have been there for a long time they may have gotten too comfortable with their jobs and no longer keep their skills up to date.
point taken - that is a common pain point. thanks for the honesty
"I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past, so most people haven't gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought." (Alan Kay on Doug Engelbart)

Thank you jaquesm! I'm looking forward to watching this while supping.
Fair enough, I'm just saying that maybe the fact that he's a UI designer is what caused him to approach it in a way that most people don't. I've seen people who know less-than-nothing about interfaces (aka, your average person) get it without any help... And I'd say that is evidenced on a larger scale by the positive reviews and general success of the product.
Government CCTVs everywhere, now! Deterrence, hooray!

The Armadillo is somehow less offensive as its range is lower and it operates in a lower density area. On the flip side, the SkyTowers don't target anyone whereas the Armadillo is very targeted. Is it fair to publicly shame a person or group of people for a crime they are still presumed innocent of? What about mistakes? What about the police chief's daughter's boyfriend?
a system you would put your stuff on. You would then be able to authorize (think OAuth) people, websites, organizations and services to access subsets of your data.

A system for personal data... why does that sound familiar? I think it's the word personal...OH! I know! Personal Computers! Remember those silly things where you could own your data and run whatever the fuck you wanted and weren't a slave to random updates made on some remote server?
The long tale (not a typo)
I find this amusing, because I've said the same phrase about Windows before, as a parody of the Ad Council's famous anti-drunk-driving commercial that they did for the US DOT.

The IE6 version of the phrase, to my ears, sounds like "friends don't let friends keep our impressive browser market-share fragmented into three largely incompatible versions".
Custom Greeting Cards
It's the same text like on StackOverflow.

I too do not see any "super" difference in the content.
More than 900 people have been followed and filmed by Greater Manchester Police as part of a pilot project to prevent crime.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/8164697.stm

They can arrest you before you've even THOUGHT of committing a crime.

Not as a 'civil libitarian' but as an ordinary human I find this disturbing.

I don't know how you solve the problem of these mostly 'low level' criminal activities, but maybe they should park those trucks on the doorstep of some major international banks. Isn't this where the real harm to society is being done?
Scott Ambler on the World of Agile Development
Can't someone be smart and innovative without necessarily being a "hacker"?
Normal people don't care about a lot of stuff, but this doesn't stop research and development. The world would be a really boring place if we had to think solutions targeted at the "average Joe". I do care about this and if someone offered me a solution for these issues I'd buy it right away.

In regards to 2., you are right but today the same risk is multiplied on dozens of websites that I know basically nothing about. I don't know how they store and backup my stuff and I don't know how they deal it.

As per 4. OpenID and OAuth DO work (I use them a lot), what I tried to say is that they do not solve the underlying issue.
could you define your parameters for "cheap" and "host"?

my cheap host is a slice from slicehost.
While an interesting find, this looks like basically like a slower-moving, less insightful (no/hobbled comment system) version of HN.
Give me a link from Microsoft that shows this. Last I heard, they want to continue support through 2014.