skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like this analogy because it points out the critical factor that the people and the programs at NASA are overall fairly excellent. It's scope creep, being responsible to politics, and the inefficiencies of old, big organizations that's causing all of their problems.

People act like that there is some sort of big populist movement to hate all big government. That's true, but you can be a big fan of NASA, the people who work there, and the stuff they do and still understand they need to shut the doors and turn the lights off. NASA is simply trying to be too much to too many people with too little money. Hell, manned spaceflight is lucky if they have the same mission for ten years in a row. The situation has just spun completely out of control.
UK government awards £500 million of IT services, software development deals
Society is about playing nice. To talk loudly on a cell phone is not nice, jamming isn't either (and illegal besides).
I wonder what kind of ego you need to post a picture like that of yourself and keep a straight face.
Sure. If you’ve agreed a support schedule upfront then by all means you should honour it. I’m not sure though that I’d be bad-mouthing my own products at the same time. Although actually thinking about it, I can’t see why you wouldn’t :)

Still, supporting from Microsoft’s point of view just means providing security fixes; they’re perfectly within their rights to stop making their new sites work with it (as evidenced by the new online Office that doesn’t work with it).
I didn't know that Government gives promotion based on meritocracy. I have been working in US for 5 years now and even in for-profit corporations, seniority (and not meritocracy) plays a big role while deciding who gets promotion and who doesn't.

And I hope you are kidding with your toner cartridge example. I doubt if toner costs more than 0.1% of the total project costs, by reducing toner costs, you have achieved nothing. And if someone does get promoted because of this 'cost cutting' idea, it shows dilbert management and nothing else.
Likewise, I code in Python with mod_wsgi, web.py, SQLAlchemy and a library I've built up of common classes and functions:

* Mod_wsgi - standard (and imho best) way to connect code to a web application.

* web.py - a framework for people who don't like frameworks. It does exactly what you want it to do and then gets out of the way.

* SQLAlchemy - the benefits of a smart ORM, from being able to define a Model in native Python to the baked-in protection against SQL injection attacks, more than justify the cognitive overhead involved in learning it.
I have been using Symfony for about 3-4 years now. I knew I wanted to use a PHP framework when I first started looking into frameworks because it was the language I was already very familiar with.

In decision making there were a number of different aspects I considered first. The two largest were the community and documentation for the framework. Many of the other frameworks lacked documentation or a large supportive, and knowledgeable, community. Symfony is known to have quite a large learning curve, but it offers multiple 24 hour tutorials to get you acquainted with it(Jobeet and Askeet). The IRC and Forums community are very active and more than welcoming to help anyone with questions.

Every framework has a few special features that others do not, however Symfony's plugin base is very large and often helps make the other framework's grass not as green.

If I could start my projects over I would still choose Symfony, however on a couple I might choose to implement them in a different language which is more suited for the project.
The classic, absolutely terrifying example from the Korean peninsula:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark....

I have never seen an image which is so effective at showing the disparity between countries.
Because once you start to allow affiliate spam you might as well open the floodgates. Do you have any idea how fragile the submit page is vs the number of would be spammers that you'd have to defend against if you let it through ?
No offense taken. I've got pretty thick skin! Would removal or shrinking of the banner that explains the site move the screenshots up high enough?

I hope that the submissions will be community moderated soon. Downvoting them "enough" will remove them now. The Bollywood/template/static sites are leftovers from before I added the reputation system.

I would certainly pay for feedback on my sites. I have in fact done so with feedbackarmy in the past but was not impressed by the mechanical turks' responses so I made launchly to get real feedback from real people (like we get on HN). I've also used usertesting.com in the past and they were great but aren't really the same thing (although that's one of the upsells I'm planning to add to launchly eventually).
Cops Use Old Brink's Truck to Shame Suspects
One of my biggest criteria when I was looking at frameworks was how much each one wanted you to "drink the kool-aid." I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have conventions built into the framework to make developers' lives easier, but some frameworks really demand total commitment to their system. Since I was looking to slot the framework into a very large existing PHP codebase, I knew we couldn't immediately start doing everything "The _____ Way (tm)."

Another criteria I used was to just browse through the quickstart and reference documentation and look at code examples. How complete were they? Did the accompanying description make clear what all options were available? Could I imagine adapting this code to work with our system? If the documentation was crappy, I was likely to give it a quick pass. Maybe a bit unfair, but a project that hasn't put in the time to make the docs shine has probably left some rough edges in other, less-obvious places (plus if we adopt it, I have to read that crappy documentation every week of my life).

I ended up going with Zend, and haven't regretted that for a second. It's been quite easy to take the pieces of ZF that are useful to us and use them together or in isolation. The libraries are great, the documentation is (usually) wonderful and complete, and it all just works.
You could, for instance, combine the teaching of physics with calculus, or linear algebra with computer programming, all integrated into one badass class with coordinated assignments.
Hmm, that's not something I've seen happen before. I just tried it on Recipe Puppy and my back button was functioning normally. What browser were you using?
> As a byline, it is posted at recessframework. I did not know about the framework.

Ah thanks for that! I remember the guy posted a link here when Recess was in it's infancy. I gave it a spin but preferred more mature offerings :)

Time to give it another go I think.
I laughed at some of the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" items:

* Forbidden LEGO: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against!

* Hasbro Nerf N-Strike Firefly REV-8

* Balls of Fury (Widescreen Edition)

* Dremel 3956-02 MultiPro Super 1.15 Amp 5,000 to 35,000 RPM Variable Speed Rotary Tool with 77 Accessories

* Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 4,The: Generating All Trees--History of Combinatorial Generation

* (a bunch more programing books)
It's interesting that few of those folks were actually "rebels" in a significant sense.

Einstein is a great example. Apart from the "5000 German scientists" thing, he was well respected from the beginning.

The Beatles are another. They pretty much owned popular music and they're "outsiders"?

Van Gogh, now he was an outsider as was Eugene Von Bruenchenhein http://www.ktfineart.com/past/?object_id=86 .
Why should NASA try to provide jobs? They are funded by taxpayer money (i.e. our money) and we have given them money to do research not to provide jobs.

Even if I were to believe that providing jobs is a worthy goal , there are cheaper ways for government to provide jobs than for NASA to create these jobs out of thin air.

And could you care to explain why you take offense about the 'out of context slide'? What's the missing context which will justify this slide's contents?
Also worth taking a look at json-template: http://code.google.com/p/json-template/
I think it's one of those things were it's not that hard to figure out. If you or I post a link to something with a link in it, it's likely to be as part of something else. I occasionally post a book link, for instance, but it's not something I do often or regularly for the sake of making money. Real spammers are unlikely to really participate in the community enough to not be completely obvious spammers. One glance at frisco's page, for instance, tells you that he's not.

I just don't really see the problem.
The design on Stack Overflow is pretty good: minimal, simple, doesn't get in the way. I believe they hired it out to a 3rd party.

However, the color schemes on all the other sites, just aren't quite as good, superuser being the worst. Amazing what difference just a little bit of color makes. The logo on Superuser looks a little amateur in my opinion too, especially considering the other ones that were submitted.
I usually hit Pandora at the start of the day and leave it on unless I'm in a meeting or working on a really difficult problem.
I don't know much about PCs, but you can buy off the shelf a Mac with 16G RAM and 1T of disk, that's enough for a developer to run a dozen or more VMs... You can to all intents and purposes put a replica of the production environment on every developer's and tester's desktop. That's got to be a big win for productivity.
Nice article, but it still doesn't answer the question I've always had about anonymous functions: why are they more "important" (read: why is everyone making such a big deal about them) than pointers-to-functions in C? I've written C/C++ code that pass functions as arguments to other functions by using pointers. I could just as easily write code that returns a pointer to a function. The only difference I see here is that anonymous functions are, well, anonymous.

So someone clarify for me why this is any better. What am I missing?
big margins look nice; that's why they're "design" people.
My wife studied sociology. She tells me that there was a big push like in the 1970s to let a lot of crazy people out on the streets. It was deemed to be better to have them on the streets than in institutions.

If that's true, I don't think it's worked out very well.
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.
Anonymous first-class functions in PHP? I can't say that was high on my list of things I would classify as necessary to make it usable.
I'd heavily advise ditching CI and hacking around with Kohana Version 3. Despite my misgivings it is super fast, super extensible and extremely powerful.

CI is just not updated enough IMO to form the stable base for an app.

As for taking it beyond blog content - I've created all sorts of complex sites; for example featured realtor website (property search, user management etc.) a wiki/"stackoverflow similar" site and am also working on a twitter "ticket" and marketing site (which is pretty complex). So it is suited to stuff like that.
The relevant point is not what they chose but that a choice exists.

Interestingly at my place we have a choice (Red Hat/CentOS, OS X, Windows XP, Solaris, Windows 7) and people, even full-time Unix sysadmins, are choosing Windows 7. Make of that what you will.
Blocks as Sandboxes in Ruby
I was fascinated to see the bright streak of light tracking the Nile.
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I would go for almost complete removal of the banner.

I would pay too for the right feedback and I would have loved to have feedback at earlier stages of a Project as well:) Are we a market large enough? Other concerns: don't turn launchly.com into a consulting service by crowd voting, it has a larger potential. I am sure if it can attract the right people and traffic the money part can follow (think also advertizing from specialists SEO, usability experts, Coders, VC Funds etc).
Microsoft Research suggests that Gates is perfectly well aware of the value of traditional academia.
Actually, if you look at the German car industry, you'll find more of a stake-holder driven culture rather than a share-holder driven culture as in the US.

I was just reading an economist piece on how the German people actually rate stake-holder interests above share-holder interests.
Why is 'formally specifying current browser behavior' a useful goal? Do you perhaps mean 'formally specifying how the browser interacts with the system'? Why would anyone even remotely think this should fall under the auspices of the HTML specification.
Subscribe to the a-rocket mailing list. There's a renaissance happening in private space travel right now that should bear fruit over the next decade or two.
Fun fact about that picture (if I've identified it correctly): It was taken for Warren Buffett's annual Christmas card. After the photo was taken, the Hooters girls all fawned over Bill Gates, leaving Buffett behind.
Come on guys, it's not all about Mac vs. PC, he was using it to demonstrate a company that lets you choose the hardware you want to work on (powerful w/ 2 screens was what he said). The fact it's a Mac means they trust the developers enough to choose what they want, rather than just buying a high end windows box.
Smart(er) Clients via ReverseHTTP & WebSockets
At worst, it's an aesthetically pleasing Goog, at best it's an aesthetically pleasing search aggregate.

How is that useless and totally suck? What is it you'd actually like to see a search engine do?
Call for a Better Web
It isn't that students aren't ready - the technology isn't good enough.
thanks, we saw that question coming :) We tried to answer in the page about "what is different about wokhei" with the following 4 points:

-BEGIN-

What is different about Wokhei:

Wokhei is not about endless and complicated revision workflows.

Wokhei is about entrusting designers with the power of surpising the customer.

Wokhei is a game of creativity for both the customer who requests the logo and the designer who makes it.

Wokhei is a fresh and experimental approach to logo design!

-END-

maybe it should be more visibile cause there have been already a couple of similar questions. midnightmonster also made a good point above.
Scaling on the cheap:

1. Host all your static files (images,css,js) on Google App Engine

2. Avoid hitting your database. Cache everything possible.
ASP.Net Web Forms... DotNetNuke... VB.net

HA!
Allow me to take this opportunity to shamelessly plug my jQuery templating plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/tempest

It is designed to do a lot less than other JS templating engines. The goal is to force the separation of programming logic and HTML markup.
Ask HN: Great startups with affiliate programs?
We're selling some ads on our blog but we don't want empty slots, so we're going to be using affiliate programs to fill any inventory we don't sell. We want to promote companies we know and trust, so if you have a product you're proud of and an affiliate program, please let us know.

Note: The slots are 125x125, so ideally you either already have banners in that size or don't mind if we create one.
I totally agree with you! the code is definitely more readable. I think the object initalizer (e.g. var o = new MyObject(){ID=123};) was a step in the direction of named parameters.

however, it looks like named parameters will be shipped with .NET 4.0: http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2009/01/22/c-4....
first thing to do, IMO: Add more RAM
End of Civial war, WW I, WW II, and Vietnam.

Most of these represented far larger drops in government employment than the end of .Com.
Hate to be a stickler, but: "He will prepare your logo in 24hrs!" should be "They will prepare your logo in 24hrs!"
Seems that it is probably less to shame and more to threaten the suspects with surveillance of their criminal activities. I don't have any particular issue with it, but I suspect civil libertarians might. (In particular, "We pretend to watch them, to scare them into thinking we really are watching them, and thus to control them without exerting effort" is called the "panopticon" in academic literature, and is widely despised by anybody who has ever said the word "panopticon".)
With all due respect that's an awful idea. Who gets to decide what tier a student is in? A test? How does a student who's in the "slow" tier get into the "bright" tier if they feel they've been miscategorized? You might be surprised, but that's no different than it is now, actually, in the school district that I went to and my brother is now in. If he wants to get into the AP classes in high school, he has to be in the advanced classes in middle school that put him a year ahead over the already slow curriculum. If you don't jump into the right stream of classes early on, you're screwed later if you decide "hey, I think I can work harder and learn more." You'll be a year behind everyone else.

What we need is classes that move quickly, classes that move slowly, and the ability to move /freely/ in between without stigma. That, and higher standards for /everyone/.
Someone should rewrite Perl in Lisp.
Why do you say "mind explosive mix"--it's just Objective-C++ (yes, which includes C and C++ by definition--not a mix), which I find mind-explodingly good for what it is. (Being a grizzled old hacker with Smalltalk & Lisp roots way back.)

The Cocoa Touch libraries are excellent, as far as they go, drawing on a couple of decades of experience with Smalltalk-style UI code (NeXT and Cocoa); and, you're free to innovate on your own UI as far as you want to take it. Nothing in the way.

The OpenGL implementation (hardware itself & the software interface) is excellent, and just got much better with the 3GS.

Seems like they're moving from strength to strength, and I'm pretty cynical about these things.
Please review my web app
It's a photo journal or micro diary. Somewhere in between twitter and blogs. - www.lifeentry.com
Social Javascript (cross-site ajax)
So they shame people before they've proven they've committed a crime?

They are putting the neighborhood under surveillance?

I appreciate the ingenuity, but this is big brother-ish.
Isn't this getting more political than hacker-ical?
Ok, what's your call on these then:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ravindra1982

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=insomniamedia

From a low wage country it doesn't take much to get someone to spend a few minutes / day to 'participate', and then to drop the 'payload'.
Well, in our case (indie iPhone developer), I wouldn't touch the combinatorial explosion of testing on random hardware with random features with a 1000' pole.

Also, I hate Java--though it has GC, it's still basically a static language, and horribly verbose to boot.
Because I wrote it.
I'm okay with pretty much everything he wrote except:

"An adopted baby is not the biological offspring of her mother."

What does that mean? The kid is the offspring of the biological mother, obviously. I don't get it?
Sony’s RED Agrees to Price Music Reasonably: 15 Cents and Up
Fortunately, while all the research I've seen has suggested that it is critical to have different "tracks" for different students, it has also suggested that there is no need for the teachers/administrators to decide what track each student goes in. The results are actually better if you let the students and parents decide.
I don't think tutorials are a good idea. Let the user figure it out by themselves so they develop some basic intellectual curiosity to learn on their own. It's not like there are millions of confused iPhone owners out there completely baffled by the iPhone UI. It's pretty obvious stuff. Basic "learn by mistake" experience exposes all the less obvious iPhone UI features after a few hours of use.
I agree with this list (though yes, it is much like the Joel test). However, I make a big distinction between organizational and technical deficiencies.

A lack of source control, build tools, unit testing, and so forth is much more forgivable to me than bad working conditions for developers, provided that the organization is committed to change.

Suppose a hiring manager said to you: "we want to be a great place for developers to work. We'll give dev's autonomy, latitude, a quiet work environment with offices. Unfortunately, our tech abilities are pretty poor right now. Most of our coding has been done badly up to know, and we know it. We're trying to hire the sort of people who can get this done right. Unit testing, source control, automated builds, we know we're screwed without them... you're a good developer and we know you make make this happen for us. It's your show if you want to join on."

Well, there are still reasons to avoid a place like that, and it may be a challenge, but I wouldn't necessarily run.

Whereas if they said "here's your cubicle, we expect you to be here from 9 to 5, managers will be watching you from their corner offices..." well then, of course, the finger goes up.
The companies no longer have that ability, even though the individuals do.

Don't get me wrong; I think "keep doing something and stay in touch" is an excellent piece of advice for someone doing something difficult where failure is strongly correlated with losing motivation.

But I wonder whether you're overestimating the causal role of demotivation here. Toy model: a startup has some kind of "health score" which varies according to exogenous events; "motivation" is some function of health and d(health)/dt, which is small when the startup is unhealthy and getting healthier; the startup dies if its health goes negative. In this model, motivation has no causal role, it's a pure epiphenomenon; but I bet you'll find that startups that die typically have very poor motivation shortly before their demise, and that poor motivation is a good short-term predictor of failure.

Of course, this is only a ridiculous toy model; in reality motivation clearly does have causal effects of its own, but it's also clearly affected by outside causes that themselves have an effect on the success of a startup. An observed correlation between demotivation and death is only weak evidence that demotivation is the underlying problem more than it's a symptom of having no customers, no money, technical problems you can't solve, etc.

(Doubtless you have more evidence than that correlation, having seen lots of startups succeed and fail.)
Designing Interactions
s/in Lisp//
Pure MVC isn't possible for most Javascript apps, because the Model lives on the server. Now we're talking something like MMVC (Model-server, model-client, view, controller). Oh, and the controller isn't just controlling the view, it eventually has to feedback to the actual server model, so it's more like MMVCC. Oh, and if you want the page to load concrete HTML for the initial view of the data (for speed, since dynamically constructing it client side may be slow), then we've got MMVVCC.

Now, I know some sites don't have that last one, but MMVCC is pretty common.

Now that following MMVVCC has mucked up your code beyond belief, maybe you should reconsider whether it actually bought you anything.

Upshot: The MVC abstraction just doesn't make sense in this context. It cuts the wrong way for a client-server application, and if you're just forcing your code into MVC's structure because there's this dogma floating around that it's a good idea... don't do that! There are far better ways to structure your JS. In fact, almost anything is a better way to structure your JS.