skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
End-users of open-source applications are not "maintainers" but still value readable code.

If your software works so well and is so well documented that end-users never have to look at the code then there is no problem.

I wouldn't recommend writing code to be readable by complete novices, but code that requires less obscure knowledge to read is more valuable.
One of the most important lessons about writing that I ever learned was to make sure people could read what you wrote.

Here is a screenshot of my browser window opened onto the article in question.

http://www.penzba.co.uk/StevenPressfield.jpg

It will be ironic if this is one of those occasions that my ISP fails to serve the page, but if you get a "forbidden" or similar, hit "Reload".

So, for those of you who run web sites - what does your site look like in an older browser, and should you care?

FWIW I could read the article if I selected all text (Ctrl-A).
Cool, I'd love to see what you come up with!
Which Java framework for building social/collaborative app ?
Hi,
First, excuse my english, this is not my native language.
I would like to get your opinion on this topic : I'd like to build some social/collaborative app : not much media sharing, but mainly tagging, collaborative text content (as wikis), user profile, tagging and some points system (digg/hackernews-like ?)

Thank you
It probably will eventually... there are some cultural and linguistic aspects that are slowing down the process. Ruby is also not officially on a distributed SCM yet...
My biggest objection to this piece is the quantification of skill along one axis, "the good scale".

A beat B, B beat C, A loses to C should tell you that there most be something sophisticated going that your model isn't capturing.

American Football fans will surely remember when Vince Young was starting his career with the Titans and all the commentators had this standard line "He just wins games!" because his team was winning despite his terrible numbers.

This analysis doesn't strike me as any more substantial than that ridiculous phrase.
Microsoft Security Essentials is released for free
Geez! Just get another account and have your old email account forward emails to you.
Genius Business Ideas Masquerading as PR Disasters
Well, imagine that the query returns 1000 (or a million or what not) results. You've looped through it once already in the getSnsWithoutIds() to build the $sns array (which you should use $sns[] = $row['aim_sn'], its faster). So, you've looped through everything, which takes some time, and now you have a huge data structure in memory that you may not need.

Then, you loop through it again with the foreach. What if you wanted to paginate those results quickly? What if you only wanted a subset of the whole pie?

This class, as I'll show in a future article, can easily be extended to allow for easy pagination and filtering of your data.
Seam, Tapestry, JSF. Take your pick.
> Yes, I saw all of those before making my comment.

So when you say "it doesn't match my experiences with PHP at all" are you talking about your experience writing planetary simulations in PHP?

> When being presented with data...

You presented opinion not data.

> all the tests that I looked at were massively recursive

Name them.
One obvious problem with the approach taken is that soccer teams are not static. They change from game to game. They can start playing badly and improve during the competition, which could easily explain the observed behavior.

Another problem is that soccer really has a level of randomness that is considered a feature of the sport. We don't really expect that the best team (in technical terms) always win. In Brazil, people commonly say that "soccer is a little box full of surprises".
Brilliance. Sheer, unadulterated brilliance!

-Wile E. Coyote
seems like doing something they are trying to do themselves could be good, perhaps they'll purchase it? that's what they did with summize.com for twitter search... and they have quite a bit more cash now than they did then
Why not just A/B test it? Many tools (like google optimizer) allow you to randomly try both, and then evaluate 1) Your conversion (sign-up) rate with each approach, and 2) How many non-valuable users each approach lets through. (This may take some extra work, just make sure you're saving the entrance route in your database).

It may take a while to get a decent sample size, but at least you'll have an answer that's backed by data.
Why would someone use this over the twitter stream api directly?
It isn't really an anti-sorting stance. If you have worked on appengine and with Google File System you will see that it is fast almost solely because there is no complete dataset. So sorting is really tough on 64K or 64MB chunks spread around many many machines. Google is so fast and scalable exactly because there is no complete dataset easily attainable. GFS works in 1000 item chunks and that is about the best you can get with that setup. Searching, counts/increments and metadata about ALL of your data in the GFS or email in this case, is a tough problem. The same underlying data system is used for gmail, reader, etc.
It works fine for me and is actually quite good.

Just to be sure I checked it in konqueror too (4.2.2) and it works there too.
As is mine.
My project advisor once gave me a piece of advice that changed everything I've written since for the better. After apologizing for the forthcoming crudeness, she passed on this gem:

You're writing "Mary was fucked by John." You /should/ be writing "John fucked Mary."

I can say what I need to say in half the words now.
Previous HN coverage of Vanish at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762631
and
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717736

Not much discussion, unfortunately. There's also a blog post at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ that tells the story in a narrative format.
Doesn't look real!
What's harsh is failing cause you miss the class, come in late, or not do your homework. You don't have to add to that harshness.

Though in the OP's case he did make up for the harshness by allowing some missed homeworks.

Classes are different from meetings. They shouldn't simulate real world meetings. People pay for classes and if they want to come in late, they reap the consequences. Otherwise why pay? When you work for someone it becomes your duty to perform the job, attending meetings on time is one such duty.

That being said there's no need for college professors to try and simulate what you'll face in the real world by being harsh. A little leniency goes a long way and frankly in college people have the understanding that you know how to manage your time and automatically have a good reason for being late.

George bush locks people out of meetings if they're late. I highly doubt Obama does that. So it's not necessarily real life. Some people are understanding in real life too.

There's no reason to propagate harshness.
If that's a reply to me, I'm not sure I understand you. The page does not render in a readable fashion in my (only slightly) elderly browser. I'm not sure what that has to do with email.

Have I missed your point? Could you expand on it a little? Thanks.
Funny. I had started working on something similar as a way to learn Django. Was going to use Netflix as my master data source and dapper to scrape Hulu, XBox 360 (on xbox.com) and various lists of iTunes movies. This was going to be a project over a few weekends.

I'm not sure I see where the business model is. The value zap2it and the actual TV Guide bring to the table are by offering original content, something more like Entertainment Weekly. That doesn't seem to be in the plan for either company.

That leaves the affiliate model he mentions, and I can't imagine Netflix, Apple or Microsoft are offering an affiliate model. Hulu also seems doubtful, as an affiliate program for Hulu would be huge news. Perhaps Amazon? After that, it's all small potatoes.

Anyway, good luck.
You get the answers to the homework in class.

The ones with the solutions in the back are for studying for the exam.

(I do find it annoying when I buy textbooks for my personal use that I don't get the answers for all the questions though. Lazy authors!)
How Tim Schafer Broke Into the Game Industry: A Legendary Cover Letter
I don't think that's Craig Newark's metric for success.
I can read it fine when I highlight the text. And the article is quite good - yes. I've up-mud it.

My point remains.

I'm actually technically fairly competent compared with most of my customers. If either of my companies served a web page like that, half my customers wouldn't be able to read it. Is that my problem?? Or theirs?

It's my problem. If you have a web page, you need to decide where the cut-off is. The author here either doesn't know that his page doesn't render correctly, or doesn't care. Either way, if I were a customer, I'd be less than impressed.

So the question remains: Can your customers read your web page(s)?

(In your specific case, jacquesm, I know the answer is "yes")
How did you structure your pricing? Is it based upon cost or are they random?
I think with bluetooth-style "pairing" (key exchange) this is fine. If you break AES, you can download my music collection -- seems fair to me.
The business model is to position themselves as a media site. With organic growth and tons of good content pages, you can make really good CPMS. So if you have good traffic you can make good money.
Skrpte Lovstvo i lovni turizam - Google pretraživanje
"Have you ever noticed how other people's stuff is shit, and your own shit is stuff?" - George Carlin
Testing out Microsoft Security Essentials
This article is far too long for something that can be summed up in these words: I am an abnormally large user of my email. Google's "buy more space" feature is broken because of a bug. It should be fixed.
Looks very, very useful. I've been looking for something like this.

A few notes on copy:

At https://tweethook.com/th/webhookinfo, under 'POST data arrays', 4th paragraph, you've got "concatinated." That should be "concatenated".

At https://tweethook.com/privacy, you probably mean "Privacy" and "Children Under Age 13". Also, the two links to the TOS point to /privacy, not /terms.

At https://tweethook.com/terms, you've got what is supposed to be a permalink to the Terms under the "Changes to the User Agreement" section. It's not a link and the URI points to something that doesn't exist.

Best of luck sir.
I wonder what happened around 2.4.35.2 and 2.5.39; "shit", "crap", and "penguin" all decreased dramatically, but "fuck" increased.
I'm trying to figure out why this is news.

Does Google's API allow you to get data out of Sharepoint that you couldn't get using the Sharepoint Web Services?
The more I think about this, the more frustrated I get.

Google is completely in the right, legally, but the licensing issue means that I have no way to legally exploit the open source nature of Android while also retaining crucially important applications, like the Android Market, Google Maps, or GMail.

Which, for me, means that I can never truly use my Dev Phone for both development, and as a phone. I have to choose between openness and proprietary software that makes the phone usable as a general device.

Commercial developers, however, through their license agreements with Google, are able to work with both of these components -- the open foundation and the closed applications -- to produce a complete package. I can only provide half of that.

Oh how I wish Google would make their applications otherwise available, as they do for S60 and other platforms. I don't mind being prohibited from redistribution, but give me a way to install those applications on my own.
Good question. Here are some reasons:

-Stream only tracks keyword tokens. TweetHook uses the Twitter Search query syntax.

- Using the stream requires a dedicated server with a dedicated TCP connection resource to consume and parse/handle the data. TweetHook only requires that you have a web server somewhere that can handle POST data. Also TweetHook supports multiple endpoints, whereas the Stream can only terminate in one location.

- Using the stream requires the consumer to multiplex the data and determine what keyword was matched when receiving data. TweetHook provides the actual query that was matched with the POSTed data. No multiplexing required.

- The Stream requires a good bit of technical knowhow to get it running correctly. TweetHook aims to make receiving search data easy and accessible to anyone who has a website and knows some scripting. A Wordpress plugin could be developed, for example, to receive and display tweets relevant to the blog's content. Tweets could then be loaded from a local cache instead of depending on fetching data from the Twitter servers using a javascript widget (which usually delays page loads).

- Currently the Stream and the Twitter Search data have different EULAs/TOS (this could change, of course).

This question is something I have thought quite a bit about as the Streaming API was launched after development on TweetHook had started. Currently I do not point out these differences on the website since I did not want to make it look like I was downplaying the Streaming API, which in itself is actually pretty cool.

Personally, I think that webhooks are more accessible to developers, and eventually to more tech savvy users like some bloggers. That's my $0.02 at least.

[edit] made some grammatical corrections
Does the google api allow you to get data out of Sharepoint that wasn't accessible via the Sharepoint Web Services already?
lol. PHP is one of the best languages to do this.
A month or so [1] after Gmail launched, The Screensavers [2] got a Gmail address and, on the air, invited viewers to send them emails to fill it up and see what happened. Unfortunately, I didn't see the end of the show.

[1]I don't know what took them so long. I know that it wasn't that soon after launch because Gmail came out in April '04, but this show was in May. (I didn't have a television at college, but my parents did). Gmail invites were scarce, but one would think they could've gotten one.

[2]This was on TechTV. It must've been just before TechTV was folded into G4 -- literally the last month of programming.
Convince me to ride roller coasters
Thanks for that-had no idea how GFS worked.

Seems like Google could easily treat it as a searching issue rather than a sorting issue, though. It would be easier than full text searching (which it already does).
It's called "deduplication", and is used in some enterprise networks to free up storage space.
I was also quite inspired by his post. I am teaching precalculus as a grad student and I am absolutely going to try to incorporate the cumulative hw sets. For me, this is his most important discovery.

I might try assigning the next section reading before class to see how they respond. I don't think they will read ahead...
You can write PHP that's comparable to Ruby & Python in size

Not if you want to maintain it.
The prices are based on cost. I spent a lot of time determining price points based on bandwidth, resource usage, etc. Compared to other data providers like this, I have found these price points to be much less expensive.
I wonder how difficult it would be for them to create a metadata file per account that would only contain things like sent from, sent to, size, subject, date sent (standard email metadata). Then if someone wants to go digging around, send the metadata down as JSON and let the sorting happen client side and let the client return the order the messages should render.
It's even better when they provide QR codes so you can just take a picture with your phone and voila
This is profoundly silly, only very intelligent people can be this silly.

Q.

What makes you confident that land and a good charter are all it takes?

His answer is long but it boils down to Because!

My god, if only it were that easy to create competition among governments, if only it were that easy to create the peace and stability necessary for economic growth.

If only you could just convince Mugabe or Kim Jong Il to give a chunk of land and let you administer it for everybody's benefit.

This is a variation on the underpants gnomes' strategy. But instead of step 2, step 1 is missing.

Step 1. ????

Step 2. A safe piece of land with attractive legal and/or physical infrastructure.

Step 3. Profit.
ducd, that's the point. By only giving you half the answers, they provide enough material to learn from and test yourself against. Instructor's manual has all of the answers, so its up to the teacher to provide them.
It is an interesting app and I think a lot of twitter developers will find it useful.

On the UI side you need to rethink things. Twitter apps tend to be on the really well polished side, and your site is lacking here. There are lots of different fonts and effects, alignment issues, things like that. Maybe hire a designer? Or if you want to do it yourself, really simplify things.
Look at item 4 in the set of ideas that I tried. I asked a lot of questions, and did it in such a way that everyone figured out the answer before someone was asked to say it.

The method that I used wouldn't scale to a large class. Your psychology professor's piece of software would.
Off the top of my head:

1) What if the disk your canonical copy is on dies?

2) You just introduced a dependency for cross-account reference counting (Alice and Bob share CryptoBible.doc attachment, Alice deletes the message it is attached to, Bob better still be able to access it). Your programmers will love you for that one. Don't forget all sorts of fun edge cases like "Does a suspended account peg an attachment on disk for forever, on the theory they could be unsuspended?"

3) Define "identical newsletter". No, really, pretend this is a job interview question. waits Did you take into account the headers? waits How about the salutation (Dear $FIRST $LAST,)? waits How about the tracking pixels and unsubscribe links, which are by necessity personalized?

4) What is the performance impact of the algorithm to determine "identical", with respect to your kinda-sorta-not-really "identical" developed in question #3? Can it classify billions of messages in realtime to make nigh-instantaneous retain-or-delete-and-add-pointer decisions?

5) Does this algorithm introduce multiple single-points-of-failure into Gmail to save a fraction of a sliver of the costs of running the service?
Please, let us know your thoughts about Budgteler.com
Should You Give to Harvard? - The Moral of the Story Blog
All fixed. Thank you very much for catching those.
Hacker's Corollary:

"The Most Important Programming Lesson I Ever Learned"

Nobody wants to run your shit.

Make it simple. Make it easy. Make it fun (to the extent that you can). Make it intuitive. Make it do exactly what needs to be done.

Your user is too busy for anything else.
This is actually an excelent answer.
If you can't dig it, you can't dig what the game is all about.
I just want to say that Google has some brilliant marketing people. I submitted for an invitation a while back, and now I feel like I have a lottery ticket - and tomorrow I'll just have to keep checking to see if they call my number.

Has anyone documented, in detail, the buzz-process Google used up to this looming release of Wave on the world?
How much does a gorilla cost? Like, a real one?

Given that it's probably a gray market at best, I'd guess that one or two particularly impressive ones have traded for $8 million. To Kim Jong Il or somebody. Seems reasonable, right?
I'd be interested in joining such a circle.

I'm jdhuntington at google's mail service.
"Kids just make such great entrepreneurs," he said. "They're not beaten down yet by all the other obligations and everything else."

That's a good lesson for the rest of us.
Love 'em or hate 'em, I initially heard about Dropbox on Techcrunch.com. I immediately signed up for the free 2Gb account (as I usually sign up for almost anything free).

I think it was a couple of weeks later before I ever got around to installing it on a second PC and actually using the sync functionality across boxes, and probably a day or so after that their usability and overall perfection convinced me to buy.
Complete Set of Founder Friendly Legal Docs...

...After you spend 20 minutes "creating an account", getting the verification email, following the link, then logging in. At least they let you see the docs in a flash viewer in advance. So you need flash installed to preview it, an (throwaway) email account to DL it, and an office app to open it. This is so much easier than just presenting the text in HTML?

Perhaps worth it in this case, but I've come to loathe this kind of hoop jumping in principle.
agreed -- anybody who has spare invites, feel free to send one over to david -@- weebly.com
It looks more like a reply to the guy who ran out of space in his gmail account. How did it get here?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850827
Passive vs active voice is certainly useful, but it's only one of many, many bits of writing craft.

If you want a whole lot more of those, I suggest Strunk & White: http://www.bartleby.com/141/
Training Twits: Web App for Twitter to track your running/biking/swimming
Think about the truly important changes in political systems. Back in the middle ages, suppose that someone described a legal system that enforced rules and contracts that everyone had to obey, even the country’s leaders. What would informed opinion of the day have been? Great idea, but it will never happen. No question it was hard to pull off, but it did happen.

The shadows of Thucydides, Aristotle and Polybius (among others) may question the quality of the "informed opinion" ...
I'd like to try this out as well. brwong [AT] g mail
Why did someone just downvote everyone who made a request?
The World A La Carte With Yuan Yao & Jan Gerber, Founders of A La Carte Maps
I think the main reason is simply that 1.8.6 has been "good enough" for most people. It reminds me a lot of Apache 1.3 vs. Apache 2.0.

For a long while, there were also no debuggers for 1.9.1, which is a big deal for some people. Mark Moseley has done a lot of work to get them working on 1.9.1 so luckily this isn't really a concern any more.

http://github.com/mark-moseley

I made Ruby 1.9 my default Ruby using Macports (using the +nosuffix variant) a few months ago. Other than finding a few trivial bugs in my code and some other people's, it's been painless; though of course your mileage may vary.
I doubt the use case in the US is to link every major city. The air network does this far more efficiently. Places in the US are way too far apart.

High-speed trains would do well where conventional trains are too slow and regional jets are too expensive. (Example, Chicago-Madison).

I also see high-speed trains as being useful for city/airport links. Oslo has a high speed train between its central station and the airport, which effectively abstracts away the fact that the airport is in the Middle Of Fucking Nowhere. (Tokyo suffers from this problem, as well. While flying from HKG to NRT recently, the thought crossed my mind that landing in KIX and taking the train to downtown Tokyo might actually be faster...)

Even in cities like Chicago where the airport is close to downtown, conventional trains are too slow. (It takes me at least 45 minutes to get from Clark/Lake to O'Hare. A high-speed train could do that in 6 minutes! I would gladly pay a premium for this convenience.)

Finally, cost is not an issue as infrastructure is never profitable. The interstate system is not making money, the airlines are not making money, and conventional trains are not making money. Society needs the infrastructure regardless, which is why we pay taxes.
"messianic tone"? It read like a very levelheaded factual recount of his experience. His students seemed to learn the material well.

The system would be improved if all such positive classroom teaching experiences were recorded, distributed, tested, etc.
Unless you're going to build a music store yourself from scratch, Amazon is the obvious choice.
Username/pass doesn't seem to work.