skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is web application development supposed to be this hard?
I would just like to say that web application development. CRUD development with any logic always takes more time than I expect it to. Note: I am not talking about "me/I" personally but in general with the web application development teams I have worked with.

And I am getting better at tracking my hours for most tasks. At a minimum, I think to get a webapp in a production environment takes at least 80-120 hours and 6months to year for larger projects. 2 year projects with not yet in prod deliverable will normally fail and never get used. That is a lot of time considering what web apps normally do.

Why?

Yes, I work with J2EE and very little .NET. But I don't see the Rails/Django apps being any better. They don't even have the basics like a strong security mechanism that includes SAML or authentication frameworks. So, I don't believe the new Web 2.0 frameworks are the answer.

If you really think about a typical sophisticated web app (E.g. bankofamerica online or walmart.com), to get any changes in; there are a lot of components that you interact with. Databases, web services, html code, javascript, business analysts, testing frameworks.

Anyway, that is my rant. I hope it gets better. If
Any why should they pay for a product which uses the same obvious bookshelf metaphor?
That's definitely what he hopes for.
...it is so very cruel to say that maybe it's best that people die to disease and sickness rather than be given a chance to prove themselves.

mberning didn't say that. Just because dying of dysentery is bad, doesn't mean that throwing money at the problem in isolation is necessarily better.
<i>I suspect you will find that if you are not capable of making this a PR issue for Google ... </i>

Although op's PR skills in the social news aggregation space appear to be remarkably good. But the arguments still hold that this stuff is valuable if it has users, not because of the tech.
This is an issue when uninformed persons tried to present a "complete" and fair coverage of an issue th ey k now nothing about.
> This article suggests that perhaps the way to get out of the recession is to force people to accept reality.

In other words, the way to get "out of the recession" is to redefine the current situation as normal, rather than to actually improve it. Well, that would work.
Essentially if they can make the equipment small enough, there could be serious potential for a pure-fusion bomb, which could skirt the test ban treaty as it doesn't fall under the terminology of a nuclear weapon (fissile or fissile and fusion; pure fusion isn't in the CTBT terminology, IIRC).

Although the Ares 1 under development is currently capable of putting 25,000KG into LEO, and the Ares V is expected to be capable of up to 188,000KG. So it's not like the equipment has to be exceptionally small if it's capable of producing pure-fusion, it just has to be slightly smaller than the ISS!
Wrong antecedent - "this" refers to the vaccines, not to taking care of sick people.
I was going to say that it would only be a little awkward, but then I remembered once again that I'm not representative of their target market. It's certainly an issue.
It's "good artists copy, great artists steal":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
The scary part is that once I realized this I was feeling all enlightened. Then I realized it again and then I felt even more enlightened. And then I stopped and asked myself - is my current realization the final one? How deep is the rabbit hole? This is some seriously scary stuff.
Thanks.

Agree about the font and 'free'.

Wanted to have a distinctly different font for the first part of the name which will be a brand/prefix to lot more apps like CRM, HRMS, Creator, etc.,. Open to suggestions for other web-safe fonts, which could address that need.

'Free' because I believed it will help with better adoption rates. The plan is to have it based on 'freemium' model. Free with restrictions on storage, number of mails, etc.,. and with ads. For higher resource requirements or for removing the ads, one can pay a nominal fee.
My guess is that you won't see a camera until the device gets on Verizon LTE and one can do two-way video. AT&T just can't handle the bandwidth.

You seem pretty sure Apple is filled with incompetent idiots that all, en mass, decided not to deploy a camera on the iPad.
Evolution of a Python programmer
I seem to recall that some routers/hubs support schedules. In the personal equipment arena, maybe something that can be flashed with a version of WRT or with Tomato?

E.g. (although it appears to be only controlling the wireless radio as opposed to overall connectivity):

Precise Radio Scheduling with DD WRT

http://markspizz.net/?p=389

Then again, if you have other data (entertainment, Netfix, etc) flowing through the same equipment, this approach may not suit or may need refinement.
It only transfers money to low wage workers if they still have a job.

Fortunately, minimum wage cuts very few jobs; market rate is usually significantly higher than $7.25 an hour. However, when you pass a minimum wage higher than market rate, you do have significant effects. Take American Samoa, for example, which recently lost several thousand tuna canning jobs to the recent minimum wage hike:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Ask-Americ...
>> This also means that a user won't be able to install some software with a single click

>> ... many regular users simply get proper fucked.

My point was to suggest automation of the process. I didn't imply that this would be painless, just less painful than jailbreaks.

If it becomes common, even Steve Jobs will have to give in and have a simple checkbox for allowing scripting apps. (Like different sets of installable applications in Debian/Ubuntu).
You probably mean "iPod" - not "iPhone".

Don't forget about the classic Slashdot commentary...

>>No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257#to...
A CEO friend of mine in the local tech industry took his own life the day before Dan in Sept.I had never talked to Dan, but enjoyed his posts on Hacker News. I had talked to my friend at length a few days before he died. I had no idea he was depressed. I read your posts and felt - what was going on? Was this some kind of psychic fallout of the economic depression? Or perhaps just circumstance. It made me slow down, focus on my loved ones. At the funeral, the priest said "Look at the hearse outside. It won't be followed by an armored truck and a UHaul, it will be followed by all of you (2000 of us)." That comment echoed in my head then, and it still does today. Thank you for your considerate writing and comforting thoughts.
My first job paid me $4 per hour, plus tips. That was 16 years ago and I was overpaid. However, that's what my labor was worth to my superiors, and they knew their business better than did the USG.

You make two assumptions with your comment. One is that everybody making minimum wage is supporting a family of four. I have sympathy for those people. Pricing them out of a job, however, is simply cruel. They need to increase the value of their skill with experience or education. And what better way to do that than to make less than they want for a period of time so that they can build up one or both of those.

Which brings me to your other assumption -- people who make a low wage will always make a low wage. I now make many times over that $4 per hour. That job enabled me to get another job which enabled me to get another job, etc. I wasn't doing what I do now, but every job had in common the attribute that I had to make myself worth what I was being paid, whether that's $4 per hour or $100. Every day I use experience gained at each of those jobs, even the most miserable ones.

There was a story on HN a while ago about a guy with an MBA who now works at Publix. He had been laid off and claimed that he wanted to teach his sons that work was dignified no matter the job. I believe he was being paid $8/hour or so. Publix has no choice but to pay him $8/hour because he likely can't do a much better job at bagging groceries than the 16 year-old next to him whose labor has been assigned that value by politicians who have never run a grocery store. If Publix wasn't forced to pay the teenager a higher wage than he's likely worth, Publix could either hire more teenagers and reduce everyone's workload and provide the customer a better experience, or they could pay the teen $4/hr and the father $12/hr.

That may enable the father to work there a little longer only to discover he is next in line for management because of his experience. His wife is thrilled that he's not traveling the world anymore eating out. And who better to run the store than someone who has been at the lowest level? Is the teen a slave at $4/hr? No, because he can walk next door to Kroger and see what they pay. Maybe it's $4.10. He decides to stay at Publix because he's already decorated his locker and made friends with the older guy who has great stories about traveling the world.

Businesses will determine quite well what their labor is worth and doesn't need USG to do it. Workers will determine quite well what corners they are willing to cut when times get hard. The latter may find that getting out of bed for a crappy, low-paying job enabled them to find a better opportunity.
Look, friend, I was in the same umbrella as you. I used to like wearing black t-shirts telling people how conformist they were and how much better me and my friends were. Then I got older than sixteen and realized what I was missing in the world.

What the fuck is this "technology game" you're talking about? I've made one web site. It got lots of attention and registered ten thousand users in a month. That's as much of a technology game as I play, and I play it well. Am I losing the game of getting drivers to work on my Linux box? Yeah, but I don't lose any sleep over it.

The people driving technological innovation right now are frequently the people developing for the iPhone. The iPad's going to spark an entirely new wave of programmers that are slightly less pathetic. If we want to be juvenile and pretend there's a game here, my side's not the one that lost Wednesday. But there is no game, and you're free to continue staring ar your stupid little screen, and I'm free to continue telling you I think you're acting like I'm a dumb jock and you're the clever geek. That you continue to hold that delusions says more than anything I could say in response.
Food, shelter, medicine, education, jobs and energy.

We should be investing in all of them. But as you say, corruption gets in the way of good will.
That's not true. Lamport clocks work across any number of nodes/processes. The figures in Lamport's paper all show examples using three processes:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:IJxXjuFmdHEJ:c...
There's a reason you'll never see that.

The problem is that there's no scientific evidence for the causation for the same reason that there's no scientific evidence that smoking causing various cancers as in either case it would be unconscionable to conduct a trial to see if it truly is possible to induce autism with a vaccine or induce cancer via smoking.

That's why the strongest statements you'll ever see from health organizations (who usually care about things like scientific rigor) is that there is "no known link".

Which obviously is totally uncompelling to a lay person and taken advantage of by the conspiracy theorists much like the tobacco companies continued to use the "no scientific evidence" line until the landmark settlement of 1998.

So no, there continues to be no evidence that vaccines cause autism. And people still remain unconvinced until they hear something stronger.
Don't you think whistle blowing needs a meta-layer? Say I'm some guy in some room and on my desktop sits a very nasty excel about illegal or unethical party payments. What do I do? I can send them to a newspaper, which may not publish them (for a long list of reasons). I may send them to several newspapers, in which case there is a better chance that they will be published. But then I have a pretty big chance of being found - several emails to several people, at least some not prepared to deal with confidential information. The more sensitive my documents are, the more risky it is.

Whistle blowing is often a very grey business. My actions may be somewhat but obviously illegal, and the bag guys may not be very but not so obviously so. It can backfire.

This is why the meta-layer is important. I just send one email, and I'm pretty secure that my actions are confidential. Worst case scenario is they decide not to publish it, in which case i'm not really worse of. If I want, I can try again with a classic news outlet.
I saw a study a few years ago across athletes in school, correlating cross-country running with a higher average GPA. In fact, cross-country was the only sport with a GPA higher than the student body as a whole. I realize this isn't exactly the same as "geeks," and I apologize for the lack of specifics, but yes, there is evidence for some sort of link.
I think you're confusing the ideas of what work is worth and how much money people ought to get. As most people use the word "worth," it means the amount of wealth something embodies (one good measure of which is the market price).

The distinction becomes particularly clear when you consider societies of one-- e.g. a castaway. If he wasn't industrious enough, a castaway could clearly work in a way that wouldn't guarantee sufficient food and shelter. Ergo it is possible for work to generate less wealth (= be worth less) than would guarantee food and shelter.

I think what you mean to say is that if people can't generate enough wealth to cover certain minimum requirements, the rest of us should make up the difference. And I don't think anyone would argue with that general principle.
I responded to that in the other thread about this article. It's a damn shame.

Can you make one that downloads to the iPhone/iPad and run natively? There's nothing in an RTE that needs to access Internet files, right? So theoretically you could program it in its entirety and have people download that.

I'm sorry I didn't know that when I wrote the article, though; certainly it throws a nasty complication into the works.
Google wants to see client addresses in DNS queries
To be fair the iPod wasn't very good when it first came out. Criticism was warranted. Yes, it evolved to dominate the market, but that doesn't mean every new product that Apple comes out with will follow the exact same path of success.
Uberblic.org - Integrating the Web of Data
True, sadly. Headline-writing seems to be its own domain - and one charged primarily to be effective baiters (i.e., marketing specialists).

So those who care enough about the impact of news-reporting have to develop some of the same (marketing) skills. The OP here seems to have done a good job with it (i.e., "Damning verdict...")

Similarly, for a truth-supporting effect, "Obama is not a Muslim" might have to be rewritten something like, "Media distortions conceal Obama's Christianity" - but rather more clever than I can pen.
Hm that's unfortunate. For myself, I watch the list, the commits, and blogs to keep up. In general, there's not a whole lot of information available at this point outside the codebase and what myself and a few others have mined out of that.

I doubt many people on rails-talk know a whole lot about Rails 3; if you think you've found a bug, I'd suggest maybe posting on rails-core or in the Lighthouse.
You might be unaware of how much his foundation has given towards micro-lending and education in poor countries. This vaccine initiative just happens to be the largest of its kind ever.

Also, it should be noted that the foundation (according to Wikipedia) specifically targets problems "ignored by governments and other organizations".
Your don't trade in your phone to buy an iPad.

i.e. devices aren't social, their use is. And their use doesn't preclude the use of other devices. Ergo not every device needs to be useful for everything.

e.g. the iPod functionality of the iPad is technically terrible. Does Apple expect you'll carry that thing around to listen to music? But therein lies the rub: you don't. You have an iPod for that.

My guess is that the camera feature in the iPad SDK has more to do with a bluetooth interaction between mobile OS X devices than future iPad hardware plans.
Census of Files Available via BitTorrent
The web designer and windows programmer snippets are brilliant.
Just in case you fall out of a plane without your 'chute
So we should let people die because it's better in this calculation? Out of all the ways of solving such problems isn't letting people die one of the least desirable?
I have dabbled in all of the above and I noticed that I spend a lot of time up front lost in the framework. In fact the only framework that I have found useful out of the 4 you mentioned is Django. I think that is because it doesn't force you to use the framework shortcuts, they are there for more experienced users, but when starting out you can use more standard logic.
That's the one I was looking for. Thanks!
WORLD'S SECOND PREGNANT MAN
1. Most users use the same email/userid and same password across variety of sites. A compromise of your site should not automatically compromise all other sites.

2. Backups have tendency to leak more so than the server security itself.
Lamport's logical clocks work across multiple nodes, but they can lose information about causality.

Hence Mattern's extensions to Lamport's work, which introduce the idea of vector clocks.
Using h.264 is a win for bandwidth only if you know what you're doing. Most encoders out there (see the x264 site for details) are run with poorly tuned settings and generally do a poor job. And yet ... no one care, they do it anyway. The idea that marginal 20% or so bandwidth costs are expensive is mostly a red herring.

Frankly if Safari and IE were to suddenly support Theora (or Firefox and IE to suddently support h.264), this argument would be over. No one cares about the technical details. Any codec that works pervasively will win.
I personally need a maximum of 2 screens for working, 1 screen for social networking, 1 screen for procrastination and from time to time the 5th screen would do nicely for porn.

I seriously would not know what to do with the 6th. I can't use it for social networking or procrastination as I waste enough time already, and 2 screens for porn is just creepy. I mean everyone has their needs, but 2 screens is beyond need.

That 6th monitor is going to be creepy, no one will know what to do with it. It's just going to be blank and staring at you, making you feel shameful that you can't give it a dedicated task it can call its own!
Some input on your homepage:

Every database application I create is already online. A more descriptive headline would help.

Listing each cloud's contents in a vertical list will make them easier to read/digest.

It's nice that it's made for App Engine, but that doesn't deserve more prominence than your walk-through link.
Clean energy is important and the US government is already spending tons of money on clean energy research. We need people like Bill who will put his money on those who are more unfortunate just because they are born in a wrong place at the wrong time. He is addressing a very important problem. Drug companies don't usually develop drugs for diseases prevalent in developing countries. This problem needs to be solved. You talking about improving economies is too ideal and vague. On come on, give Bill a break. Can't we just simply applaud Bill's great effort to save millions of lives? I am disappointed that people's first reaction is not praise but criticisms (though maybe constructive). Let's just praise this man for his great endeavor for a minute first, ok?
Where is the startup folder located in Windows 7 for user and all users
Over the past few months there have been a couple of times I wanted to post something in remembrance but I never really knew quite what to say or how to say it. I never knew Dan. In fact, when he died in September and the HN colors changed for a weekend, I still didn't know who he was. At the time, though, I was knee-deep in learning Django and I had actually come across his blog a number of times - always helpful! In reading through the threads at the time, I felt like I sort of got to know him.

I think sometimes that the internet is always moving forward and despite the huge outpouring of support from this community, it can feel like you're the only one who remembers after a couple of weeks.

My point is this: despite never knowing Dan, I can tell from what you've written, what this community had to say about him, and from his writing, that he was a great founder, a great friend, and a great guy. And I want you to know that you are not the only one poorer for the loss, that even a random guy on the internet that you don't even know remembers and appreciates him.
> Once you understand the science you can see why its obviously true.

Sorry, this is my hang up. I understand the science - but the data and methodologies that we know about dont quite follow through for me (sometimes anyway)
One of the big Rails philosophies that could help any platform is DRY: don't repeat yourself! ActiveRecord et al attempt to give you the reusable building blocks that will be required in most sites. And in that regard, I think it really does reduce developer time. There are also drop-in basics for user authentication, etc. A well-designed extension should be mostly portable to other apps. For example, while I don't know of a SAML plugin off the top of my head, building it once could get you to 90% for future cases. The sophistication seems less daunting when you work iteratively, tackling small chunks of functionality.

Having worked on both the J2EE and Rails stacks, I find Rails to be way more productive. But that productivity can be costly: many things feel like magic if you don't understand what the framework is doing. Looking back, J2EE development seems to require too much ceremony for too little reward.

The goal for web development should be to spend time on the application's unique properties, rather than on the generic ones that everyone must build. A framework like Rails attempts to get every project on the same page for component interaction, but allows you to step outside the mold if necessary.
Here's another important function of universities: they don't merely provide a good environment for but legitimize taking 4 years out of the workforce and immersing oneself in philosophy, English, mathematics, alcohol, or whatnot. This is probably due to things like the prestige of getting into various schools in the first place, the perception that going away to school makes you more responsible, that it provides a better learning environment than studying at home by yourself, and that you're forced to work at some minimal pace.

Arguably, self-study of undergraduate materials might become the new norm, but until it's feasible for students to really immerse themselves in scholarship over a long period and come out with comparable results to Ivy schools, these institutions don't need to change regardless of progress in the quality of online learning materials and networks. This is really just another form of 'credentialism': until you can actually get an online certification from MIT, not just taking their courses, society (including employers and financiers) won't be very accepting of this. And, of course, given the way the job market is heading for those without university degrees, one would be wise to try borrowing against the cost of a 'good' education rather than trying to work part-time and study over a longer period.

So we are still stuck with the 'credentialism' problem until a new MIT appears and starts administering really tough exams, free of courses ... or something ...