skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't like it when people treat #1 as an unbreakable rule. Sometimes it takes more than 25 lines of code for a function to complete it's one task. The book "Code Complete" talks about this and has studies to back it up.

Here's the quote from the book:

From time to time, a complex algorithm will lead to a longer routine, and in those circumstances, the routine should be allowed to grow organically up to 100-200 lines. (A line is a noncomment, nonblank line of source code.) Decades of evidence say that routines of such length are no more error prone than shorter routines. Let issues such as depth of nesting, number of variables, and other complexity-related considerations dictate the length of the routine rather than imposing a length restriction per se.

If you want to write routines longer than about 200 lines, be careful. None of the studies that reported decreased cost, decreased error rates, or both with larger routines distinguished among sizes larger than 200 lines, and you’re bound to run into an upper limit of understandability as you pass 200 lines of code.
PHP has session variables to put state objects into which are persisted between requests. Right?
Group theory is some of the most beautiful mathematics I've ever had the pleasure of studying.
Amazon CloudFront vs. Rackspace Cloud Files CDN Performance | Chris Meller
All I can say is that that is a good point.
A little while ago I had a similarly silly bug in Mibbit.

The advertising is specifically setup to refresh every few minutes with new adverts relevant to the discussion.

Only problem is, I had typo'd:

setTimeout instead of setInterval = only one refresh!

Bugs like that and patio's are a little hard to spot, since everything is still working, money is still being made, just not as well as it should be :)
Might want to check out this
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899133
Oh dear god, that nonsense again. That might be true when you write boring, straightforward business code. But when you implement a complex algorithm, that's just silly.

It's also silly if, for example, you need to do "clever" things for performance reasons. Any comment that explains the why behind your code is a good comment.
"building everything as a bunch of micro and aggregate services that you may or may not actually make use of in the future"

I wanted to touch on this real quick, The point of letting the client deal with it's concern, is that you can prototype and user acceptance test you application before you ever write a service. Then you only have to build what you need to support your UI and what ever batch processing you need. It is a far more agile process. Not only do you have a working UI but you have a service inventory of functionality that need to be implemented to support you UI. From there you can build out your service tier and if you so chose look at the next likely UI and do some due diligence to see if you are going to need more micro services to support you next endeavor. You may not chose to build them but you can at least architect the solution with the next endeavor in mind.
Yep there is one step of byte code enhancement, during the compilation phase. But as the compilation phase itself it totally transparent, you can't call that a 'preprocessing step'.
Yeah. Its like filling a bucket with a hole in it -- the water level is still rising, so you don't notice that you're losing half of what you're putting in.

Except in my case, the bucket was used to stop a shotgun blast and then I started filling it from a fire hydrant.
Ask HN: Determining DB in use from HTTP?
Is there a simple way to determine what database is in use behind a website from an external HTTP request? i.e., I make an HTTP request, get back whatever data is going to come from the webserver - can I inspect any of that and reliably determine that DB in use? I am thinking not, but figured I would ask this group.
BSD's and Linux tend to share a decent amount of user-space applications and library code. See GCC, OpenSSH, Gnome, et al.
Although I think that the built-in template system is very very nice, it would be really easy to write a play module that provide any template engine you want.
I am not so keen on "absolutes". There is no right or wrong way, there is what works for you in a specific context. I find that most people who deal with "strict rules" haven't spent enough time writing code to have an opinion about it.
While this seems to be an almost constant (and needless) discussion on this site for the last few months, I wonder how presence of LFSP on the JVM/CLR (Scala/F# for ML-style programming, Clojure for Lisp-style programming) going to change the picture)?
One of the nicest looking webapps I've seen in awhile, although the hashing over the demo screenshots is a little confusing. Also the colors of the title bar in the screenshots.

One issue I forsee, is how does it integrate with other HR tools? If I already have a database of employees, is there some way to automatically import that, or tie into that database? Is there some way to provide SQL queries to pull people's names, start dates, etc? (Maybe none of that is really relevant for smaller businesses anyway.) Finally, is there a way to define leave policy by years of employment? So employees are under one policy the first year, another policy up to 5 years, etc.
You're either setting the bar way too high for 'a good dev', or you're just unaware of how painful and bizarre IE6 bugs can be. Honestly, why would web devs just arbitrarily hate IE6 if it only took an hour to fix all the bugs for an entire website? You're positing a level of laziness and spite on the part of web devs which is just absurd.
Nice collection of web tools. Especially ready made libraries for validation, captcha etc and a built-in template engine.

But I am not convinced with 'on the fly' compilation because most editors already do a better job there and refreshing the web page to look for compilation errors does not look productive.
PHP's sessions are stored in files by default, not persisted in memory.
Yes, but most people who make serious use of them hook up a custom session handler that writes session information out to the database (the default implementation that ships with PHP uses the file system). Sessions that are stored in memory by the application server instantly prevent you from load balancing requests across multiple servers and hence kill your scalability - unless you implement sticky sessions which adds yet more complexity. Personally I try to avoid using session storage whenever possible - I've recently started using signed cookies in their place.
I thought it would be pretty interesting to view the listings without numerical rankings, so I whipped up a script which removed the rankings.

As of now, I haven't really noticed much impact on the way I use HN, but maybe it's going to take more time. I think it would make a more positive impact if the points score was removed for the titles.

The greasemonkey script is at: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/60421
the article is written with bias
Rackspace Cloud Files CDN is powered by Limelight, which is a big player in the CDN market. Limelight has a much bigger footprint, so it is likelier that there will be an edge server closer to the end user (or Pingdom's servers).
Treasure hunting
Language round-up covering the past, present, and future
Not to mention the side effects of breaking code you don't understand at random points.
Not directly, anyway. But some languages will leave a signature in the headers of the web server.

If you see the server is IIS then you can take an educated guess that the DB is microsoft SQL server.

Another way of doing it is searching for the name of the website and the name of various popular database engines, with a bit of luck you might find a blog posting by a technie or a question in some support forum by someone working for company X.
Yeah. Sometimes per-request page performance is less important than overall throughput, though.
It is often said that there is no such thing as an "Emergency Takeoff"
They'll get Dalvik to JIT the bytecode eventually when they need it. I wouldn't worry about that.

About the major break: what's funny is that Android is probably the first Linux that is both a viable platform and that also isn't GNU/Linux. So strong is the grip of FSF...

By the way, Android is more than JavaME -- underneath the Java level Google has their own system libraries, such as Bionic-the-libc-replacement. It's really a new Linux userspace that runs the high-level Java stuff.
Or use the <button> element with the text-indent background image trick. That works in IE6.
I've reproduced your crash. The issue is that you're using define within a nested REPL, which isn't supported [1].

However, a segfault is really not acceptable. I'll file a report for this.

[1] http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/doc/gambit-c.html#Debugg...

Relevant section: "Note that some special forms (define in particular) can only be evaluated in the global interaction environment."
Please.......

If you are computer savvy enough to be irate about not having a browser ballot on your fresh Windows 7 install, I think you can manage the pain of typing getfirefox.com into IE.
Not sure if Deskpins is genuinely useful, but I wrote a tiny utility myself that does the "pin on top" as well as adjustable window transparency.

http://www.google.com/search?q=vitrite

[I would consider this a plug were it not that I don't actually make any money from it.]
I don't expect anything to change quickly.

The US federal government is a long way from a true crisis and without that impetus it's far easier for politicians to keep spending silly amounts of money. However, when looking at budget projections you need to realize there is no mandatory spending. “Fixing” SS seems like a deal breaker but we have already increased retirement age with few real grumbles. In the past we drastically cut defense spending with few problems. And despite all the fear pulling out of Vietnam was hardly the end of the free world.

So, yes, I think we will pull out of the middle east within 10 years but a few trillion her or there is not going to break the US economy assuming the government can keep paying such low interest rates. The important thing is adjusting future spending so we can keep those low interest rates.
To be fair: the license text at http://netkas.org/?p=62 doesn't look like "open source" to me. It's a non-commercial-use-only thing that quite clearly doesn't meet the standards of the open source definition.

Doesn't mean that Psystar has the right to use it, of course. Just that it doesn't look particularly valuable to the community either. The author is cheesed because he/she isn't being paid, not because Psystar isn't being a good member of the open source community.

We don't normally get fired up over copyright infringement issues between close source distributors, so I'm not quite understanding the outrage. Let them sort it out in the courts.
If you use a Java IDE you will of course see compilation errors before trying the app in the browser. So it is not a problem.
Why, when every Windows machine includes includes msconfig? And there's also regedit.
Sorry I misspoke, the Mighty Mouse was the one that got clogged.
He says that the NEW license prohibits commercial use, but what about the original license? If it allowed comemrcial use, then they've done nothing wrong and he'll have to live with regreting the choice he made when he published it.
The Mathmo Test
> If a new link isn't given one or two upvotes within a few minutes of being submitted (so that it appears on the front page), it has forever lost any hope of getting the votes it deserves.

This has been a real problem, and the last two weeks it has gotten very bad indeed.

The 'new' page doesn't scale.

A good indicator of how big the problem is at the moment is the 'age' of the oldest item on the new page. That used to be 2 to 4 hours, now even on a 'quiet' time of the day it is only 1 hour.

The reason why there is a cut-off at 210 elements for the 'new', 'saved' and 'news' pages is that this will reduce some performance bottlenecks. They're slowly getting shorter.

It's a real pity, especially for the 'saved' page because that is one use of HN, as a bookmarking service.
Came to say the same thing. Even better is just leaving out the background-image/text-indent trick altogether, and using the image's alt tag:

<button><img src="/img/sign_up_button.png" alt="Sign Up" /></button>

The versatility of the <button> element is really remarkable, and it works fine in all browsers. I highly recommend anyone currently using <input type="submit"> to change to <button type="submit">
Nokia Lawsuit Could Cost Apple $1 Billion
You are not taking into account, distributed development teams or completely outsourced development of certain portions of the overall solution In which you have no control over the skill level of the developers.

As well, I am not proposing anything any more non standard than say JSP or Struts and Tiles. Their are plenty of AJAX frameworks that provide all of the bolts to erect this style of system without building and in-house system. Further, JSP is only standard for web development it does not take into account the variety of UI possibilities and that is the point of the matter. The UI much like the database is only a portion of an overall system. Just as you would not write you data-storage in your logic tier you should not be coupling the UI tier to your business logic.

There are plenty of sites that use this development methodology. Pick almost any mature "Web 2.0" site and they will be somewhere along in this evolution. Google, Amazon, Yahoo et. al.

I apologize in advance for being vague, but I would prefer to not loose my anonymity on this site and referencing my work would do so.
Way more people watch tv than use Twitter, facebook, or even all of the Internet. Heck more people use facebook than twitter. If anything, facebook is more cutting edge than tv, but no, it's not.
To protect your privacy, hand over your data
The question I always ask before writing a comment is: will it contain the word "because?" If so, there is probably a need for a comment. If not, I will try hard to make the code more readable before breaking down and adding the comment.
Ask HN: Where do you look for code examples?
Especially for a library you don't know well.
And often a single routine is a sequence of--very many--but linear steps, one after another.

Splitting the routine into 20 functions, one for each step, doesn't necessarily make it any more understandable: it reminds me of a DailyWTF in which a programmer was told to split a large routine into functions and just did something like this:

doPart1()
doPart2()
doPart3()
...

It's just as effective, if not better, to comment what each section of the large routine does. One advantage of keeping it in one routine is if there are dozens of values which are global to the routine and are not changed throughout it: it would create an ugly mess to pass those all around to each of the subroutines.
Ask HN:  Does society benefit from age-related brain decline?
One could argue that brain decline forces people to change the way they work -- taking advantage of their experience while avoiding analytical problem solving.

In other words, it's a path to management.

Without brain decline, you would have people in management positions who would rather be doing something else.
I've had these crashes, and I can tell you exactly what it is that is causing it...

You're not at the top level of the repl, for some reason, defining things at a lower nesting level of the repl sometimes produces crashes, it's annoying yes, but it's not a huge disaster :)

if you use ",t" to get back to the top level after an error, you shouldn't see those crashes.
Your website says "Error establishing a database connection" when people visit it?
Only Hire A+ People Who Punch Above Their Weight Class [Startup HR]
Well Michigan vs Texas, which one is closer to california? Texas is hot like California, and it's economy is better than michigan's. I said it's the closest I've been, and I also didn't mean physically either.
Ask HN: Are you going to Startup School?
Irrational Decisions - Anchoring and Arbitrary Coherence
I'm fairly sure that the nested repl 'define' being allowed at all is a fairly recent change, I seem to recall just getting an error when trying to define in a nested repl in 4.4.x.
Wireless Power Is Still Pretty Useless
EPT Warsaw: Mozdzen with the most at day two close ...
I thought it was interesting that the reporter downplayed Lewis' focus on Barry Zito. That was the only real name I remember from the book, aside from Beane. IIRC, Zito got a good deal of coverage in Moneyball.
Not bad.

I just gave it a shot - 3 things occured to me.

Firstly despite their claims it is fairly similar to PHPMyAdmin but with some Ajaxy stuff and a different layout (not a bad thing - though it is not as "friendly" feeling at times).

Secondly I dont like the login with DB details thing; anyone sensible has long, secure, passwords and I certainly cant recall all my database IP addresses :P

Thirdly I dont like the idea of installing it directly into a website subdirectory like that. Having MySQL administration accessible from my hosts control panel (i.e. unrelated to my domain) feels safer. I can see this becoming a decent alternative to PHPMyAdmin if hosts pick it up as an option!

I have to admit I LOVE the simplicity of the install. Kudos for that - it was as simple as they promise.
"You seem to be expecting these new developers who are just learning HTML to know how to build complex pages using aggregate web service calls via JS, based on a non-standard in-house system."

Sorry I missed hitting on this one. I do not expect a designer to be doing service calls that is the point. You can write a JavaScript controller that grabs reference to any UI components that it needs, you do not write JavaScript in the HTML, the designer is then working in pure HTML CSS. The JavaScript developer is the one orchestrating the work-flow logic in a code-behind manner. Each person has their domain and once a developer feels comfortable they can graduate to the next domain. Just as I don't expect a HTML designer to have to know Java constructs I don't expect a Objective-C developer to know HTML constructs. It's not about constraining people, it's about re-usability of reusable components and isolating non-reusable components.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring?
[Re: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896600]
Well, both systems are basically diametrical opposites. StringTemplates is very strong on MVC separation whereas the play templates feature a fully-fledged programming language.

I'll have to dive deeper into play to see how much more I would have to do in the Controller part to prepare the output for the template...
The threats to computing science (Dijkstra circa 1984)
Interestingly, this is almost identical to our language decisions. Our engine is C++, the webservices are a wrapper in Java and the stuff on the fringes is a mix of scripting languages. Instead of OCaml, I've been eyeing Scala as the thing I might use to rip out the Java.

Before doing our webservices in Java, I'd never done much of it and assumed it to be a closer cousin to C++. Using it at length, at a time when I find myself frustrated with some of the lack of abstractions in C++ (notably missing lambda), it's whetted my appetite to drop in a slicker language at the medium level of our stack.
The article references this survey at digg:

http://blog.digg.com/?p=878

"This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason. Giving them a message saying, 'Hey! Upgrade!' in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic."
That his players had unimpressive careers is to be expected. IIRC, it was recognized in the book that any player the A's could get for cheap was by definition dysfunctional. The point wasn't that these players would become great, it was that they were a little bit better in specific ways than their salaries reflected.

But certainly Jeremy Brown was a bad example, and his 10 at bats say it all. He shouldn't have been held up as a successful acquisition.
How about this 4-letter acronym: NSQL (Native Storage Query Language)?
I actually liked that it was similar to PHPMyAdmin. I was looking for an alternative because I was tired of how heavy it was and came upon this. I was also tired of constantly refreshing PHPMyAdmin which, due to its heft, took quite awhile. SQLBuddy had neither of those issues.
Defense is the new one in baseball - it's very hard to quantify and it's been historically neglected. So there's been lots of big money contracts to all offense, no defense players.

The Seattle Mariners were an absolutely terrible baseball team in 2008. Their front office had made a lot of bad decisions, so the new regime in 2009 didn't have much in the way of money or other resources to build their team. They focused on getting a lot of defense-first players, and turned in a very respectable season.

Also, Oakland was thought to be a contender this year before injuries hit. That's why Beane traded for Matt Holiday before the season started. Then a ton of injuries hit the A's and they went nowhere. But they were definitely in the mix.

Finally, the Yankees are always going to look good the year they sign the top three free agents in the market for a combined half-billion dollars. Those contracts are going to look pretty awful in five years though, thus leading to the recurring, "How the hell are the Yankees not winning with twice the payroll of everyone else?" in the following years.
Yeh - I didnt mean it as a totally bad thing.. I was just put off slightly about their claims to be so different when it's not :P
There are some people who are in management for itself.
sorry guys the website can't handle the amount of traffic, am fixing this!
New Facebook is flying, I think this is the Python (Tornado)!.
We should be very happy that somebody invented the "NoSQL" name. Once things have a name people can start to talk about this things, and the ideas will move faster.

This recent hype about the NoSQL stuff was only possible because there was a name :)
> You need to use comments to explain the code – Code should be able to explain itself and should be in a format that is easily readable.

No thanks. Has this author ever written any algorithm more complicated than a basic CRUD app? I'd like to see him read some kind of well written complicated graphics algorithm without any comments. The "why" is often really really important, and you can't read that from the instructions.
Fair enough, I was quick to respond.

I didn't mean to comment directly to the author but make a general statement of the current state of the art in CSS: to achieve an effect use the craziest hacks one can find. As you said, patio probably just found that code on the web and used it.
Yes, it seems to me that the lesson of this article is that the author still does not understand statistics, even though he has read a famous book-length Michael Lewis treatise on the subject.

Sabermetrics isn't clairvoyance. No matter how good your data, you still have to play the game.

Meanwhile, while we're playing the anecdotal-data game, those of us in Boston are pretty happy with Billy Beane and company's predictions about Kevin Youkilis.
tail -f production.log

edit: it looks like it's fixed
Pretty impressed by the number of reader-only having an account.