skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not an iPhone developer, so let me know if this does not make any sense.

Is the Facebook public key hardcoded on the app? Since presumably the app needs Facebook to run, they need to be connected to the internet, so maybe there could've been some phone home page where the app gets the key (caches it for some amount of time) and uses that -- it won't fix the issue of Facebook revoking keys, but at least if it gets fixed (with Facebook) you don't have to resubmit an app and wait for Apple.
I see your point but Minchin has retired and the opposition that the Libs have isn't ideological - it's largely "it won't work". My concern is that their opposition is simply because "we have to oppose them".

Hockey's comments are refreshing but my experience is that he plays populist/party-line politics so it has little bearing on how he would actually vote at the time.

I guess the upcoming election will probably decide how this plays down anyway.
City of Diamond Bar Gives Secure, Reliable Access to Applications with F5
It should also have a non-solid color fallback for browsers that do support image gradients as well. Something like:

background-color: white;
background-image: url(/public/images/sky_gradient_fallback.png);
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #fff, #e3f0f9);
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#fff), to(#e3f0f9));}
I might have to downgrade my Github account and move my private repositories over to Assembla.
Does "In the Zone" programming actually provide quality and no-bug benefits comparable to pair programming? I suppose you could suggest that you would follow it up with a code review, but when you sum all the reviewing process to the coding process, does an organization end up spending more time coding/reviewing/fixing this portion of the codebase after either technique?
Can anyone summarize how Guile is supposed to interpret/interact-with other languages? I thought Guile was just the GNU Scheme interpreter (now bytecode vm, I guess), but it seems lately that it's turning into something like Parrot. Is that the case?
I got a screen protector for my iphone not to protect the screen from scratches, but to matte the display and prevent fingerprints.
You should post that on Twitter, so your insight will be available to future generations.
Ask HN: What are the Pros vs. Cons of MySQL Stored Procedures/Functions?
I have seen a lot of online discussion for and against the use of stored procedures in MySQL and other SQL languages. Some programmers I know seem to really like stored procedures and functions while others do not.

Personally I have never had to use a stored procedure in any of my web apps, but I'm wondering if I am perhaps missing out on something. Do you use stored procedures in your database applications? Or do you avoid them?

I'm looking for an objective analysis of the pros and cons.
Are you using a blackberry? We have been tracking this bug for a while now, and it appears to be a bug in the Blackberry email application from what we can tell. Newer Blackberries don't seem to give this message. It happens when the email client tries to convert the HTML email to text, instead of just using the text version of the email. Viewing the email with a different email client with solve this problem.
It would be helpful to know how much the iPad subscription costs in relation to the print ($120/yr)* and web ($103/yr)* subscriptions. I don't have or plan on installing iTunes so looking at the AppStore is not exactly feasible. I read $3.99/wk ($207.78/yr) from some other article found on Google for the iPad subscription.

* Prices probably vary greatly.
The ISP position is brain-dead. They say that services like Youtube are unfairly saturating their pipes and not compensating them.

Nevermind that access to things like Youtube is exactly what CREATES demand for internet service. You think people are paying for broadband so they can send emails faster??

What they're saying to Google is "if you don't stop creating so much demand for our connections, we're going to go out of business!" Which can be simplified to, "we don't charge enough to cover our costs!"

Which is either false (likely) or indicates that they're incompetent. But it's nobody else's fault, least of all the fault of services that ISP customers are paying to access.
Better article from Failure Magazine:
http://failuremag.com/index.php/feature/article/cool_custome...
I think this is happening because there are so many powerful Java libs that are more useful once wrapped in a lispy/clojure-y wrapper, plus the fact the community always seems willing to work together to help people get past the sticky parts, so the whole can be more productive.

I can't comment on the scala community by comparison, but the environment around Clojure simply seems to make people more productive quickly once they are willing to ask questions and read lots of code to learn. Mind getting to that point can be hard.
While I agree with much of the article, one note I find important from my pair programming exercises is that pointing out typos is nit-picking and slows the whole process down. It interrupts the flow of the programmer and doesn't contribute anything useful, since the compiler will point out all typos in due time. (All things in moderation: if it's the sort of typo the compiler won't catch and will cause unexpected behavior, then point it out by all means).

This sort of mentality is important to consider on higher levels as well. We need to find what actually improves the development process and focus on doing those things while at the same time refraining from doing things that slow down the process.
Your comment about taking a quick nap is really insightful. I have a little experience with this. From my parents, I acquired the habit of taking small naps. Riding as passenger in a car puts me instantly to sleep (luckily, the same does not apply to driving). I also do this as a general thing--my sleep is more polyphasic and irregular than most people I know. I may be awake at virtually any point in the 24-hour cycle, but not necessarily at the same points each day. Overall, I find that I get about the same amount of sleep, but the odd hours allow me more concentration on work.
Why Verizon’s Skype client forces Android Wi-Fi shutdown
Does anyone have a summary of the most important changes?
47% Of Americans Don't Pay Income Tax, 45% Think The Tax System Is Just Fine
I disagree. This article isn't really about the IPad, more about how desktop computers have been pretty much the same for a while. The IPad only comes up as a counter-example, though he doesn't spend much time talking about it.
Yes, as of version 10.50: http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/1050/
For simple things like adding tables or adding columms, just do it. Add the column/table, then release new app code relying on it.

For more complex things (changing the name of an existing column, or breaking a table into two parts, etc.) you need to write a compatibility mode into the application code. New writes go to the new column/table name, reads go to both places. Once that's released, migrate all the data as slowly as you like behind the scenes. When you're done, you can drop the old column or table.
Tapeart or what to do with your old tapes
How interesting is it that they announced that on Facebook?
It goes both ways, you have to regulate the supply and the demand, ignore either and nothing changes.
I wonder how the content and quality of discourse on Twitter would have differed if its users had known all along that their posts would be archived for posterity by the LoC. This has been like an Ender's Game for hyperbanality!
You don't have to buy, but if you want what they are freely offering quite frankly I don't see where Apple (I'm using Apple as example, I mean Apple et al) is wrong.

Apple should under no circumstances be held accountable for China's inability (or unwillingness) to regulate its economy.

And yes, you absolutely have to regulate both the supply and the demand, it's just WHO has to be doing the regulating. China is no fool: if they regulated their GDP would plummet and their ridiculous 9% year on year growth would finally stop.
Unfuddle does a lot of things really well. $9/mo or $24/mo isn't going to break the bank.
Paul Biggar launched NewsTilt yesterday; today he got his PhD
who do they pass the buck to to lift themselves out of these conditions?

To whoever has the best comparative advantage, as economics has always worked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
At least it's not difficult to convert any format out there into ogg or flac.
The 300k figure was sales as of the first day, including three weeks of pre-orders. They did not drop from 300k/day to 37k/day, because there was never a single day that they sold 300k. They sold ~14k/day over the three weeks.

The 500k figure listed here is delivered. There is currently a 5-7 day delay, which suggests there are a few hundred thousand orders not being counted in that figure.
It's a lot of data, but not THAT much data. Nothing that a small amazon cluster Hadooping it couldn't do in just an hour or so. If anything, the bottleneck would probably be the URL shorting services themselves.
The rules are not explained in advance to the users, that would make the system too easy to game, particularly if you were very specific.

If the content fails the validation this is the default message that is returned:

Correct capitalization and punctuation are required. (ie: All sentences should begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark, etc.)

Most people seem to understand and simply clean up their sentence structure a bit. People that have written their entire comment in block caps tend to simply give up.
Yes. Some other parts did not give this impression, that's true, but the flippant, sarcastic expression that I quoted didn't help him appear "fair and balanced" in the same sense that someone saying "people get murdered all the time, what's the big deal" wouldn't.
How Adobe might take on Apple in the courts
"Although I have a high degree of respect for people that can make things in factories...it would be a shame to lose this skill set to robots."

Broadly speaking, "making things in factories" is not a skill. "Being able to set up efficient factory lines" is, but having robots instead of humans is just another variable in a long list of variables.

I say "broadly speaking" because I'm sure there are exceptions, but I am also sure they are exceptions.
We did offer free services for about 3 years. Then we had to reduce the free services because of rising hosting costs. No repositories were made public. We maintained private service for everyone for four months, and then restricted usage to read-only, for the people that didn't subscribe. So, no repositories were made public, people got three years plus another four months of free service, and the average charge for people that did subscribe was about $12 per month. If you can't afford that, you don't have a serious projects.

In this round, we have made substantial changes to the business model. Only the repository is free, so we can sell our premium ticketing, collaboration, and management tools. And, we have hosting affiliates that pay us for leads. Plus, the underlying service is profitable and supports the level of admin quality that is required.
Great post. The idea is very clearly explained in a few paragraphs; It is very complete since several variations are considered such as clustering, bookmarks, schema changes. Everything just makes a lot of sense.
I've got a pretty good setup going, most of the changes do not require any downtime at all. Adding a table or column rarely requires any downtime (the existing code knows nothing about the table/column and continues on it's way) -- push the DB change first then the code. Removing a table or column can work as well, push the code change first and then remove them.

For more grueling changes (those that require data conversion), I still take down the site. I script the changes and then take the site down, convert, deploy, bring the site back up. Smaller changes take only a few minutes, longer changes can take hours. However, the length of the downtime is inversely proportional to how frequently you need to do it.

Sometimes taking the site down is appropriate. For really big changes, users simply cannot continue to use the site and be unaffected.
Pandora. I think that's it right now.
Ask YC Archive
There's a good bit of metadata (about another 300 characters or so on average) attached to each tweet that makes it useful. Not a huge amount more, but considering the growth curve... yea 20TB is about right.
The problem with most research supporting the use of TDD is that it compares TDD with a base line of no unit testing at all, without controlling for adding unit tests either first or last but without the test-driven aspects.

There seems to be a fairly strong case for adopting unit tests in typical commercial development processes, and some interesting debate regarding whether it is more effective by various metrics to write the tests before or after the development, but there isn't much evidence that I've seen for going the extra way to a fully test-driven process.
Depends on what scale you're dealing with. If you have a high traffic site, the db should be sharded so if you do a manual switch master-slave, only a small piece would be affected at a given time.

But I'm guessing you're dealing with a single M-S setup. I've asked around and it seems the standard practice for that type of a setup is to create a second table for each one you are attempting to modify, 'insert into table2 select * from table 1;', modify table2, rename table 1, rename table 2 to table 1. Then, script or manually cope with any 'leftovers' in table 1 that didn't get ported to table 2.

Would be interesting to have an in-memory (but written to disk) NoSQL layer sandwiched between MySQL and the user. Then, you can change schema all you want or switch in/out DB servers without any visible impact. Might be a leaky abstraction though. Not like I tried that out.
This is a very unfair title. They're unhappy about the news, not necessarily unhappy about the death rate. If it's restated more honestly, it's much easier to guess: who is unhappy that it's widely known that X is less of a problem than before? Anyone who wants to solve X.
I run Assembla, but I will say that Github is a good service, and they do a better job with code sharing and individual repositories. Assembla is more oriented toward managing teams. This is not a move to go against Github. We still offer Github as a repository tool. You can use Assembla ticketing / collaboration / team management tools, and link them to code commits on github.
How does this algorithm perform when processor cache is considered?

Upon first glance it seems that it might perform really well with N = cache_line_size / sizeof(T) so perhaps N = 16 for sorting ints?

What size array would be optimal for N = 16?
How Twitter should think about addon companies
i just got a free repository at assembla. they try to sell you a server at rackspace. if they can make some money doing that, more power to them. it's not presented in an obtrusive way. maybe that's how they will pay for free
I doubt either facebook or developers would be willing to expose their developer credentials / keys on a (mostly) publicly readable page. Embedding it into the app itself seems like the most reasonable solution.
The public and private keys are stored in the app. Pulling them down the pipe is a bad idea, IMO.
I'm sure I've read that the 40 hour week was created because someone did some measurements and realized that if you worked people for longer than that on a regular basis, then they got tired and started messing up. That is, the limit is for the benefit of the business, not the employee.
I'd say the eventual purpose, rather than the first purpose, but otherwise agree.
I'm a member of ArchiveTeam (http://www.archiveteam.org/). One of our current projects is to archive all the URL shorteners we can find. We're going to make the full dataset available for public download.
Those scheming women's groups -- they'll stoop to any level to promote their cause. It's almost as if they were fighting for peoples' lives!
I have the same concern. At Assembla, we feel that we need to work on being best of breed for repositories, and ticketing / issue management. Some of the collaboration features are not at the level of single-purpose providers, but we include them and incrementally enhance them because we think it is important to get project IP in one place. So, that is the focus that we have chosen. I am sure that we can be more focused. Please send us a note if you have specific areas of concern.
"A capitalist country's inhabitants, who belong to a system driven only by output and profit,"

You seem to be confused about "capitalism". In a capitalist system, workers are in a market as well and negotiate wages with the employers. Aggregate market behavior emerges from the individual behavior of who works for what. Individual employers may make "take it or leave it" offers, but they are embedded in a larger market and if enough people don't "take it", they have to raise their offer. Complaining about labor practices isn't weird, it's a bargaining chip.

It's the totalitarian systems where complaining about labor practices makes no "sense". They work under a de facto oligarchy or even flat-out monopoly in terms of where they can work, and when you have that, you no longer have capitalism. Hint: If you don't see a market, you're not talking about capitalism.
Additionally; what's the solution? Stop all these kids working? What are they going to do? Really, seriously?

Umm... I don't know, maybe go to school and get an education like the kids in Europe and the US do, so they can get a better job than this?
VC Office Hours - What Sings and What Croaks?
Tudor had ice in his veins!

This guy reminds me of Donald Trump. After sinking deep into debt you query your investors with the assumption, "the only way you're gonna get your cash back is if you invest in me again."

Throwback to old VC mantra: Invest in the entrepreneur, not the idea!
This has been confirmed on the Library of Congress blog: http://www.loc.gov/tweet/how-tweet-it-is.html

It is not a fake or a late April Fool joke, despite the fact that the original post is from facebook.
I used Bundlebox's "Buy it for me" service as I don't have a US card. Therefore, I paid up front for the iPad and their service fee for that. That's the £390 I mention.

The £120 part was the delivery plus the VAT on the purchase value and the delivery. So I think about £40 delivery and £80 VAT or something like that. No other fees were due, as the iPad attracts no duty.
Ask HN: Best place to hire Web Contractors?
At work, we are looking for a few contractors to help get a few things done with the site. They have just been sitting on the shelf too long.

Where is the best place to find web contractors?

Right now we are looking for a PHPBB3 theme expert.

* elance ?
Most of these (rather good) suggestions revolve around learning the theory of representing data. But how does one practically accomplish these visualization tasks?

I have been delving in this area for the past couple months, and even though I am still learning, I will give my practical suggestions to the programmer:

1) First accept that there is no silver bullet to data visualization. You pick the tool that makes the most sense. Sometimes you have to write a Java program, sometimes a Python program, and yes, even sometimes an Excel spreadsheet. Don't be picky--just get it done.

2) Programmatically speaking, there are ways to represent truly massive terabyte datasets.

- You can learn Processing (used by Ben Fry in Visualizing Data) which is based on Java and pretty simple to learn. My caveat is that you can't run these scripts server-side, that is, it doesn't generate jpgs or pngs on demand due to headless mode constraints.

- You can use Beautiful Soup in Python to easily modify XML data for SVG graphics. Check out this: http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...

- You can learn Java's image library (I haven't done this so I can't really give any advice, but this is what Processing simplifies I think)

- You can use Excel to easily pump out bar/pie/line graphs

- You can use the Google Chart API

- You can use Flash. Check out AmCharts for that Mint-y goodness.

3) Learn statistics. Browse the Netflix Prize forums. Struggle with MatLab or R or Octave. You need to learn how to efficiently handle large datasets in memory to better sift through the essential information you need. For very very large sets that absolutely cannot be handled in memory, you'll want to check out Hadoop + MapReduce. Check out Cloudera's distribution for Hadoop. Handling data is every bit as important as visualizing it.
This is a rather misleading headline.

The title suggests that that people are unhappy with a falling maternal death rate.

Yet, the column just talks about womens' health advocates who are concerned that publicizing these numbers (without additional studies) may result in funding cuts.

One can make a case that the advocates were wrong to ask for a delay. One can also make a case that it is wrong to cut funding from a program that is working or that funding cuts shouldn't happen until additional studies are completed.

Yet, none of this suggests that the women's health advocates were unhappy about the falling death rate
I'd pay more for equipment that was stamped with some Humane Threshold level, like food passes an organic or biodynamic level.

It should be easier as PDAs and mobile devices obtain barcode or QR scanners: scan an item at a shop, then see if it is approved. You don't need manufacturer cooperation, who would only participate if there was a mass boycott of their goods, which won't happen so long as prices are so low. But once consumers start checking on their own, they might opt-in.

Bottom-up change.
As long as the cat's nails have a lower Mohs hardness [1], they won't scratch the screen. In this case, glass has a mohs hardness of about 5.5, and karatin (what nails are made out of) is about 2.5.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale_of_mineral_hardness
Heh, see there is the cultural differences right there.

An industrial job has little stigma in some parts of the world. Indeed in certain situations it is a big step up from the jobs your parents do. For some those wages are the "better" job (again, not ideal, but you have to consider that as the context).

It's not an ideal situation, certainly, and it should be a moral imperative to offer those less well off chances at the same comforts we enjoy. But I dislike the idea of judging the situation based on the rules of our society, that's all.
Put adsense in wordpress without plugin and knowledge of programming
Add these to your list:

* odesk

* rent-a-coder

* craigslist

* referrals aka friends-of-friends
I "complained" on their blog and got a fair response from their team. Here's what they said: http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/12217/...

To summarize: they didn't have a sustainable business plan and when the costs got too bit they canceled free service. They say now that they're better prepared.

Maybe they're worth giving another try?
I hear you on the cell phones and even talking part.

But music, man... nothing makes it easier to slog through repetitive tasks like being able to toss on the headphones and block out everything outside my little bubble.

Luckily my work life has progressed past that stage, but in crappy college jobs, yeah...
this article makes no sense. is there another one reporting on the same news?
Gamestop stores have a policy of making their employees turn out their pockets and show their socks to a supervisor every time they leave the store.

What shocked me more about this was the worker who was fined for losing his finger.
Um, did you all not get that the reference to developing a mailing list and a wiki was tongue-in-cheek? I know coders are often literal, but come on, y'all are supposed to be smart in these parts.