skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Sinatra vs Rails is like a house with one big empty space vs a house with predefined rooms ready to decorate. With Sinatra, you need to be much more of an "architect" than you need to be with Rails. "

That's why Ramaze has hit the sweet spot for me. Hyper-fast and feature complete.
Cuiler
Anyone have ideas as to how I might go about thinking of a project that would sound promising and be helpful to the Ruby community? I'd certainly consider myself a proficient Ruby developer, but I'm not nearly as familiar with the development of these project and what they're lacking. Where might I start?
Ada Lovelace Day - Inteview with Movavi's Natalie Khudyakova
Congrats Gabriel! Shouldn't be too long until the acquisition chatter starts, but maybe it's more fun to have your own search engine...
Well, you have to admit that google's investors have a notion of how well it will be able to transfer its business to developing markets... and so with all its advantages if google can't take first place in china, what does that say about its fundamental ability in non-us markets?

I'd say that the perception that google will dominate search in worldwide markets is worth about $200 per share right now.
NH is pretty big compared to the effective range of a nuke. A typical nuke in the middle of NYC wouldn't even destroy all of Manhattan, let alone kill everyone in NY. It would take a lot of nukes to carpet-bomb all of NH.
I'm very impressed with Google's willingness to back up "Do No Evil" with hard action. For a while, I was wondering if the initial incident from last month was going to fade into obscurity, but the news from this week shows that Google is willing to walk the walk so to speak, and show it really isn't willing to sacrifice its ideals for the sake of a quarterly. Laudable.

That said, I think Brin and much of the commenting is missing a great deal of nuance. I rarely, if ever, see anyone who actually talks extensively with Chinese international students or who does business in China claim that the level of totalitarianism in the PRC actually causes anyone to live in constant fear of the government. Most likely this is a combination of regular Chinese citizens not caring and the government not being the evil empire some commentators appear to think it is.

I agree China needs to open up more both because of basic human rights principles and also because well-executed democracy is an excellent guard against government corruption, but I'm rather frustrated by the lack of attempts to understand the motivations and viewpoints of the PRC.

At its core, can you really blame the PRC for putting social stability first when it's at the head of a country that's seen constant civil war, invasion, and been on the wrong end of Imperialism since the end of the Qing Dynasty? Sure, the societal training wheels need to come off and people need to stop getting thrown in jail for bad reasons, but at least acknowledge that the PRC's actions are not pure black.
Just because you can pound a screw into the wall with a hammer doesn't mean it solves the same problem as a screwdriver.
You'll have a hard time hacking past an air gap.
Bring on the computer science barbie (barf)

I'd be more interested to see how cultural encouragement of women to be anti-intellectual is tied to their disinterest in computer science. Not to mention that this stereotypical work environment description is NOT what I've encountered (for the most part) as a woman who is surrounded by "nerds" all the time (married to one, startup employee)
This sounds very interesting, but since it is a SaaS model and you are relying on their infrastructure, what exactly are they looking at as their business model? Freemium? Any idea of pricing?

It is something I could use in an app I'm working on right now, but I'm just building a simple free tool and would be interested what their plan is for the service before I get myself tied to it.
Army officials get VIP tour of Apple, talk mobile tech
Record caching is intrinsic to DNS. Negative cache times being ignored is not usual in my experience; but then when you're at Wikipedia's scale minority cases are large enough that they are worth compensating for.
I challenge that assertion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1217082
No, I don't think so. Not at all.
Listia (YC S09) is hiring a talented Rails developer! http://www.listia.com/jobs
Hopefully a yeti...

See http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_d... for an anthropologist's take on it.
Pro: TC covered it.

Con: MG Siegler covered it. As expected, devoid of depth.
I'm seeing you pop up all over the place on HN with these, frankly, bad comments. You're currently at -7 karma.

Lurk more, or do whatever you have to do to increase the quality of your comments.
Rsyncrypto (http://rsyncrypto.lingnu.com/index.php/Home_Page) offers a partial solution to the "is the remote side secure?" problem (it weakens the cryptosystem used to allow rsync to mostly transfer changes).

As for trust, rsync.net is well established, is run by and for people like us, and seems to do a good job.
This is why I was pretty content with Google's original China stance; censor, but make the censoring obvious, arguably still adding net good for the average mainlander using its services.

If it wasn't for the cyber attacks, I'd agree that this was still the best and most balanced course to take since, as I said, it was still a net good for the average user. The attempts to extract human rights activist information from Google services did change my perception though; if working within the system is setting up scenarios like that one where activists' information can be compromised by attacks, then re-evaluation of the situation was in order. Though, good arguments can still be made in the other direction I think.
Panama and Hong Kong have several ISPs that are outside U.S. influence. You never know really. Use Tor to upload it to Youtube. See if Google helps out.
There's definitely some cool applications for this that I hope you get into. For instance, providing format templates, i.e.:

- encode multiple resolutions for silverlight's smoothhd streaming and generate the metadata file (http://www.cmstream.net/ used to provide an opensource way to do this but they pulled the src for some reason -- I have a src snapshot if you want)

- encode mp4/ogv for use with html5 video players like sublime (http://jilion.com/sublime/video)

- support mp3/ogg for html5 audio

- support imaging (like autorotating batches of images based on exif)

Pricing does seem a tad expensive. 6cents/minute versus ~9cents/hour for EC2. I'd probably be more likely to build my own solution just because it's cheaper.
How Smartphones and Handheld Computers Are Bringing on an Educational Revolution
And just because you've got a clever saying doesn't mean we aren't just dealing the two different kinds of screw drivers. That's the whole point here.
It would require a massive infrastructure project to build up an area that big and dense, so let's assume transportation is part of the plan. A mesh of rail lines could be put in with high speed rail with a few stops at the coarsest level of the grid, moderate speed rail with more stops in the middle, and the equivalent of the NYC subway system at the finest level of the grid. The system could be planned out so that no two points are more than a few train changes and an hour or two apart. That's much better than our current national transportation system.

Shipping could have a parallel system at the high speed and moderate speed, using shipping containers and (while we're at it) automated transfer systems for the containers. Maybe the whole place could be rigged up like a giant FedEx shipping center, with hundred-mile-long conveyor belts.
I compared the Adobe CS image with what I could get from resynthesizer on GIMP, http://imgur.com/W8k1B. GIMP is the top one, I just cut off the stuff outside the selection line and ran it.
Great opportunity for the right people! One of the few funded and small early stage groups in SF right now...
I got an email from Google's Recruiters, and went through a similar process, unfortunately I did not make it to the in person interview at the Google campus.

I did have 5 different phone interviews for three different positions. With questions ranging from software engineering, to system administrator.

I was really nervous, especially since I am just out of college and that may have led to my downfall. On my second phone interview the interviewer was hard to understand, lot of line noise, and he seemed to not understand me. I got all the different programming languages I know mixed up together into a bad psuedo code. This was my first over the phone programming questions.

My second phone interview that contained programming went really well, the interviewer had done some reading on what I was into and helped me calm down and feel at ease. I got my programming right, got what I needed down on paper (Google Docs), and thought I did pretty well.

Emailed both interviewers afterwards to thank them for their time, the guy from the second phone interview, which also happened to be my last, got back to me hoping that I would get to work together with him.
Who goes bankrupt with 9 bil in the bank?
Andrew: you're not a hopester. But what you need to do: really push harder to get your guests to cough up their secrets. You do try. But too many of them end up getting away with answering key questions with vague answers. "Oh, well, we just kept trying and somehow managed to build an customer base." Stuff like that. HOW did that happen? Accident? Happenstance? The guy from Aptimize got away with skimming right past the most important question he could answer: how the hell did he manage to build a business with little or no marketing? His answer was "oh, some SEO and stuff" -- not good enough, not if I'm trying to learn from his experience. The wu-themes guy -- same thing. He "built a community" and then starts charging $100 per theme. Little or no detail about how exactly he built a community -- what specific steps he took -- and what exactly he said and did to get people to cough up $100 for a wordpress theme.

That's been my frustration. It's good to hear these people explain their success, but if you managed to squeeze a bit more detail out of them, I would even consider becoming a Mixergy subscriber.
I'm wondering what this is built upon. Someone mentioned Yahoo! BOSS, which if true would be scary because the lifespan of that product is unknown (given Yahoo's move to Bing search technology).

Anyone know the true skinny here?
Let's hope it can withstand the onslaught of popularity.
I've been living in China for 10 years. I'm trying to think of what these extra freedoms Westerners living here are supposed have. Can you give specific examples?
Diagnosis for 2 is wrong. The shell won't be scheduled to truncate the file after the shell is scheduled to fork/exec cat. The shell is not multithreaded.
I live in a dense part of NJ, around 7000 inh/mi2. But I've got a single family home with a nice yard, and many of my neighbors have even more space than I do. We've got lots of trees and open spaces too. At this density we'd need 5 New Hampshires, but that's still not much and it would provide a much higher quality of life than packing in at 35000 inh/mi2.
Christine Jones, the general counsel for GoDaddy — one of the net’s largest issuers of SSL certificates — says her company has never gotten such a request from a government in her eight years at the company.

Wouldn't she be required by U.S. law to say this if that's what the government told her to say?

[Edit: Seems I'm out of date; the gag-order provisions I was thinking about were ruled unconstitutional a couple of years ago: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/court-rules-patriot-ac...]

P.S. God, I hate this copy/paste Read More crap.
The giant "1, 2, 3" is an attempt to add Rock amongst a slew of talk.
a partial solution to the "is the remote side secure?" problem

No. Not at all. Reusing CBC IVs is not a solution to anything.
Get an explicit written contract from your employer that your side projects are yours and yours alone (a nihil obstat), and then stop worrying about the small stuff like this.
Rails and the Enterprise
There are civic groups in China, many in fact. The government has even been tolerant, to a degree, to advocacy groups.

I think for a smooth transition, China needs to uplift its rural population. The urbanites are largely ready for democracy, but outside of a handful of cities the rest of the country simply do not have the institutions, social experience, etc to support a working transparent free-market democracy.
This is the most convenient solution.
"sponge reads standard input and writes it out to the specified file. Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before opening the output file. This allows for constructing pipelines that read from and write to the same file."

I remember writing a script that did the same thing (in Perl or maybe it was Bash).
We're Hiring Developers (we are very open to remote work, as we are all working 'remotely'):

Project: Something disruptive that will change the way software is developed.

Tech: We are developing with Python & Google App Engine.

Team background: Founding investor, Napster; pioneer in social networking (from 2001); previously raised almost $4MM for past startup

Project status: already in private beta

Reqs: Python/GAE experience not necessary if you learn quickly and can show past projects. Especially interested in folks with 1 or more of the following:

- Excellent math/algorithmic abilities

- Excellent sense for consumer Internet usability

- Solid productive programming chops

- Orientation towards A/B (/multivariate) testing

- Customer Development Process experience

- Experience in social media development

We are looking to add team members who can rapidly become seriously productive and want to create applications for use by tens and hundreds of millions of users.

We currently have team members in North American and Indian timezones.

We will be raising funding from our personal network of successful tech entrepreneurs soon.
For the record, anything I own is "for sale" at the right price. (And no, I don't consider that I "own" my wife or daughter :-))
Congratulations. You have now reached the required seven mentions for me to develop curiosity. Duck Duck Go is now my default search engine - and so far I am liking it.

Though I can understand why you wouldn't, I would love a "try Google" link on every page instead of only those with few results. Every now and then I need it and it just takes a few too many keystrokes to switch..
If it weren't so funny I'd almost feel bad for Cuil.

Although it's a little disingenuous, because Cuil's pitch was that their display of results was radically different. That and that they indexed a lot.
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced" -the contrapositive
I love hearing the why behind decisions other developers make. I wonder what others in the app store are doing.
Five Rules for Competing with Giants | Kellblog
Facebook + Googlemaps + ChatRoulette = FaceRoulette.net 
New version.

Simple concept:
1. Facebook: integration to avoid perverts, you only share your firstname/gender/location. You can easily share your profile if you like someone.
2. Googlemaps: integration to show partner location on city level (instead of pretending that people are anonymous, see chatroulettemap.com, we used it as a feature!) You will hop around the world, a whole new experience!

It's pretty new so at this moment almost nobody knows it exists, everything has a start. Let's try to get the buzz on, try it and if you like it spread the word!
What could stop China from setting up their own root dns servers and issuing only the domains they want and rerouting queries to IANA and ICANN root dns server to their own?
Even if every word you say is true, I honestly don't care. I don't give any credit to Google for agreeing to censor on behalf of the Chinese government, and every second they continued I count as a complicity with a regime that has no respect for human rights. Even if the deal didn't change one iota, it was a shitty deal and they should have pulled out sooner.
Clever. :)

Out of curiosity, how does duckduckgo make money? I _never_ see ads (a good thing, but I'd love for the service to continue, so hoping that you're making money somehow!)
Why would anyone use Duck Duck Go when you have Google? Someone break it down for me, please.
New version.

Simple concept:
1. Facebook: integration to avoid perverts, you only share your firstname/gender/location. You can easily share your profile if you like someone.
2. Googlemaps: integration to show partner location on city level (instead of pretending that people are anonymous, see chatroulettemap.com, we used it as a feature!) You will hop around the world, a whole new experience!

It's pretty new so at this moment almost nobody knows it exists, everything has a start... Try it and if you like the concept spread the word! Any comments, harsh critics and any other feedback are more than welcome.
There's a difference between fighting court orders and ignoring court orders.
It's a work in progress, but the about page is dedicated to answering this question: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
This is certainly not the popular conventional view.

For the most part, the CCP and their decisions have been largely credited for China's stellar growth.

If you've ever been to China you'll quickly see why. If the government wants something done, its done. Case in point: 2008 Olympics, special economic zones, foreign exchange rate policies, etc.

Before kaifang (opening), China was ass-backwards. The CCP's sole claim to legitimacy is a bizzare positive-negative re-enforcement of two points:

1. Negative: China has been bullied by the world until the CCP came in
2. Positive: China is now an economic power because of CCP policies

The CPP uses these two points to bolster each other in linking CCP directly with nationalism so that pro-China = pro-ccp.
Something in France ?
Regarding making the backups read-only after they are made, but still allowing new backups to be made:

Why not use the snapshot facility of LVM?

Once you are done with a backup, create a snapshot and make it read-only. You can always mount the snapshot to see your data at that point in time and you dont need to worry about the data being erased in the live partition.
It's a complicated mashup of my index/crawler, structured crawls/dumps from crowd-source sites, live vertical APIs, and highly modified BOSS (edited, re-ranked, merged, omitted, etc.). The BOSS piece already uses Bing as a backup and could easily use Ask as well.
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4793.pdf

Interesting similar findings that men take more risks when playing women in chess (when looking at ~1.4 million games):

For male players the probability of choosing a solid strategy is about 1.3 percent lower when facing a female opponent compared to a male opponent

Additionally, women chess players appear to be more risk averse in general.
Yes, very clever! Is there any chance you would offer 2 or 3 different themes? I recognize that some users may like the look of the site but how about an option to select another theme for those of us who enjoy the quality of the search results but can't stand the range of colors and font style?
Ah just saw you're in Valley Forge.. I'm usually there every week or two.
Because I've watched Gabriel think through his business here on HN, seeing him get recognition and having his work complimented makes feel pretty freakin' proud.
Google voice denied and Line2 accepted? Interesting steve...
How to feed the world ?
Frankly, it seems hard to imagine NOT needing search beyond email. I really only user a handful of web services (I'm sure that number is only increasing) and I can barely remember whether I sent something in an email, as a facebook message, saved it to delicious, etc.

I started creating Nutmeg Search just so that I could find my own stuff, but the idea seemed useful so I'm trying to make it available to the world.
what i find surprising is that only those users with high karma points can downvote.

excluding those who've racked up points through submissions, the theory goes that high karma points = thoughtful poster.

thoughtful posters should thus realize that China is a country of 1.3 billion people, which highly highly complicates EVERYTHING.

Frankly, compared to the other 1 bln + country, I think China has done a remarkable job. Even if you just focus on the HR record, China is comparable to India, if not exceeding it.
a well-documented effect

I just did some of the obvious Google Scholar searches on some of the issues you mention, but I'm not seeing clear statements of these findings being well documented in a publication that is not behind a paywall for me. Do you have citations at hand?
What are some examples in peer-reviewed literature for which you have citations at hand?
Searching for "hamburger" made my day.
I think you're offering a bit of a straw-man here. There's a vast difference between truthful documentation of past misdeeds and disclosing information that could in the future be used to cause great harm -- the difference between, "Regime X has used chemical weapons on its own people," and, "Here's how you make mustard gas."
I liked the pictures better than the article.
H&R Block's online version.

The initial page actually did say that to import the info required an upgrade, but it was poorly worded, and the lack of a confirmation or undo option was frustrating. I put in a complaint to their customer service guys, who said that the only way to go back to the free version is to register a new account.

Like I said, had I not actually planned to upgrade to the paid version partway through the process, I'd have been extremely angry and probably gone to one of their competitors.
It's not atomic at all although you're unlikely to notice in most situations. Not what I would use in a script, though.
I’m very happy about that: Cheaper and better iPads for everyone.
Have you considered marketing yourself in China? You'll have a good year or two before being censored.
I think the CCP is very long-term oriented.

The majority of their policies I think would support this. If anything, the CCP is willing to give short-term concessions if it will guarantee long-term success.

This is not so-much the case now as China has more to bring to the bargaining table. But if you look at China's trade policies in the 80s and 90s they were very accommodating to western demands, even if it put China in a weaker position.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2155544/ipad-as-programmi...
The point is that if filename and newFile are the same file, then this will overwrite the contents before they are read in by cat.
Cool, you should join this YC meetup group I started: http://www.groupomatic.com/haqsm3vj
The iPhone's screen is 3.5" ... where exactly do we draw the line between "phone" and "tablet"?

Sorry, but I'd almost put this in "no man's land" ... too big for a phone in my pocket, too small to be useful as anything else.
Ask HN: What should I write my thesis on?
For my senior year of undergraduate studies in economics I'm required to write a thesis. Part of the qualifying exam (taken junior year to see if I qualify to write said thesis) is the submission of three potential thesis topics.

I'm interested in doing some analysis concerning software and its role in markets. For example, analyzing labor markets for open source software. I'm still looking for compelling ideas, but also for compelling data. Is there anything you've wanted analyzed concerning software's role in the larger economy? I'd like to analyze it.
Duly noted. I've been adding lots of settings, and you can already change the font face & size: http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html
... content-aware fill, or MAGIC?