skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No offense, but this is absolutely bad advice to a newbie programmer. First, mongo_mapper is virtually undocumented, whereas ActiveRecord has oodles of documentation and examples. You'll spend a order of magnitude more time trying to learn to use both MongoDB and mongo_mapper effectively than you will writing a proper set of migrations.

Second, I'm tired of all the NoSQL hype. I've worked on a project with MongoDB and MongoMapper, and the combination caused more problems than it solved. If you want cutting edge and all that comes with that, go with Mongo. Otherwise, if you'd prefer to focus on problems in the domain you're trying to solve and not the technology you're trying to solve it with, go with something relational and tried and true (PostgreSQL, if I were deciding).
Ask HN: Any Need for Office to PDF Conversion API?
For a project I was working on, I needed the ability to convert Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel) into PDF files so that I could work with them more easily. I created a REST API that allows this conversion very easily; POST the Office file, and once the conversion is complete, receive a POST with the converted PDF. I was thinking that this service could be useful for other people's projects. Before I go through the effort of creating a website and documentation, does anyone else have a need for this sort of service?
It looks like all reads and writes for a specific partition must go through the master node for that partition. Is that the case? If so, are there any plans to allow clients to read from the replicas if they are willing to get less fresh data? Another option would be to have Membase return a sequence ID as part of the result of a write to the master. Then a subsequent read request could present that sequence ID to a replica and have it block until either a timeout occurred or it was able to serve data at least as fresh as that sequence ID.
This guy would count the time spent travelling by plane as a cost and ignore the time we would have spent walking to Europe.
Been using Otherinbox.com and think it totally rocks.
I do believe there have been experiments that have successfully transmitted data via quantum entanglement.

I don't really feel like digging up a source at the moment though.
One advantage to learning ruby is that the ruby community tends to be more entrepreneurial than other programming communities I have been involved in. Something awesome about the scrappy freelancers and startup folks I have met at the local RUGs.

If yup do decide to learn ruby, I highly recommend get involved in the community. They'll make great technical resources and business connections.
will the anonymous downvoter please stand up and show some gumption?
Disagree.

The NYT site didn't make it easy, but I just browsed about 12 months worth of this column(?) "Preoccupations."

Female and male profiles were about 50-50, and everybody else seemed pretty average looking.

Less than half the time is it a profile of an individual, the rest of the time it's a profile of a "trend" (This Hashrocket pair programming article that was on HN a while back, is from this same NYT column: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/jobs/20pre.html?)

All the rest of the profiles were equally as interesting-but-not-mind-blowing. (Though I'm less critical than you about the slow-news-day part. That's "slice of life" journalism. It's always like that, heh. In that regard, every day is a slow news day. )

I suggest a study: One where when a post's author/subject is a female, we count how frequently her appearance is brought up when it's not otherwise the topic of the post, versus when it's an average looking guy posting about how he organizes his email folders/ moved to git/ almost took VC.

Does that stuff get called a slow news day?
CiMPLE a Visual Programming Language for programming robotic kits
The learning curve to Sinatra will be light. Sinatra is pretty easy to learn, especially if you already know Rails.
Other than you not liking it, how is it fundamentally different from any other game?
I am a neuropsychologist. Ask me (almost) anything.
This guy seems like a real jackass.
On Facebook, Google, and Our Evolving Social Mores Online
My parents keep a landline phone in addition to cell phones and VOIP service for one simple reason: it works when the power fails. That said, in all but the most dire situations it is a wart on the wall wasting money.

Fax machines are likely to stick around because they have beautifully simple usability: load a document, enter a number, and hit send. Done.
That's true and all, but Rails and Django were built to run on SQL dbs right out of the box. Getting them to work with MongoDB takes some work, and I don't think it's a diversion that someone just starting learning frameworks should try to deal with.

As for migrations, I don't think he's gonna be dealing with anything too complicated schema-wise. Django South will write your migrations for you. Maybe Rails has something like that? But honestly, I'd recommend using SQLite and just starting a new file whenever he really felt the need to alter the schema.
Initially I didn't like the idea of using sqlite for the config, but actually, this makes total sense and I agree with it as long as you don't make it into something Lovecraftian :D
I have to disagree with a few of these, especially #3. Slow code isn't necessarily bad code. In fact, speeding it up may turn it into bad code.
My first job was working in the Pear Sheds... growing up in an agricultural area, the factories that would sort the pears coming off of the orchards would often hire HS students during peak season. Thankfully since I was underage I only had to work 60 hours/week (10 hours/day, 6 days/week), standing since we couldn't sit down, staring at a convener belt of pears going by and throwing the blemished/bad ones onto two other convener belts. F'ing monotonous, 7am to 6pm.
@refugee - My experiences have been quite the opposite. Mongo allows me to focus on the domain. AR forces me to think about fitting the relational model into my problem, which causes a huge impedance mismatch, and causes lots of extra work and performance issues.

Of course it depends on the problem, but working with hashes and arrays is simpler than the relational model, no?

I do concede the vast swaths of docs for AR, however AR is pretty complicated and issues arise that aren't well documented.
The games are designed to be addictive, not fun in the long term. You could argue the same about WoW but at least in that case there is a lot to do over a long period before you truly get into the addictive repetition phase. Something like farmville is pretty much that from the start.
currently reads/writes are to one master with load spread across the cluster. The hashing algorithm used for placement should statistically balance key activity across nodes. Thus, unless you have an extremely hot key(s) then you should see balanced utilization across available resources.

Having said that, there are cases where subsets of the keyspace get disproportionately "hot" and where load balancing reads would make sense. The vBucket mapping mechanism in membase was explicitly architected to support multi-read support in the future. But our focus initially was on providing a CA database that was immediately, versus eventually, consistent. We'll relax that constraint in the future. Did I say relax!? : )
I only use mine because I got it free through my former job - definitely not worth the $750 to buy. I've used it for cooking, reading in bed, and a replacement for my Macbook Pro which is being repaired right now... and for the first two tasks my iPhone is fine, and for the latter, the iPad isn't good enough to replace the laptop.

Not to mention, it seems all the freakin apps cost $10, due to all the developers who heard how well the iPhone apps were doing and jacked up the price of the iPad apps.

Macbook Pro + iPhone are a good enough combo, an iPad doesn't add anything new. Perhaps if you didn't already have the first two.
I've seen this done (and used on a few occasions) as a standalone service for end users. Usually this is ad supported. I can think of a few applications I might use this for, such as accepting school assignments without having to trust all of the students to submit proper file types. Outside of advertising, how might you monetize such a service? Or would it be a public service?
The Pentagon Code
From the Guidelines:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Tesla planting electric engines into two Toyota prototype bodies
I don't get it. Why not just 'print' to pdf with Adobe's driver?
not complaining. just asking "why" ?

i hope that is considered fair. if not, then god help HN the day i get downvoting privileges.

edit:

being downvoted for a comment like this i understand and agree to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504855

but being downvoted without a reply for what i wrote to this thread's parent... simply makes no sense!
People change over time, and people are not always infallible judges of character. You have no way of guaranteeing that the person you marry is actually totally committed to you and you have no way of guaranteeing that that won't change over time.

Seeking protection from unforeseen changes is a prudent thing to do.
@grasshopper - That makes sense. Mongo is certainly new tech, so it would be more work right now with Rails.

With Sinatra, I'm finding it to be less work.

I would probably stick with relational tech if starting off with Rails, but keep your eye open toward alternative store, such as document databases and key/value stores.
22, played Tetris and variants on older machines when younger. I felt obligated to comment to contradict your "nobody"claim.
could someone explan why the downvotes?
Well, of course. There's a Pepsi bottling plant in Buffalo. I'm sure Coke outsells Pepsi by an obscene margin in Atlanta.
Do remember that people tend to describe themselves as they would like to be, not as they are. I'm sure all of us have some point in the day we would like to be at the gym -- whether we get there is another issue. I don't know a lot of hyper-fit developers in my area.
Care to expand? I'm not especially familiar with them other than they make some casual games.
I know I am dealing with a client that wants to turn web pages into good looking PDFs ready to print and ready for review by a boss.
To be fair, divorce is the most likely reason the average person will have for winding up in expensive litigation and people are more likely to pursue it to the point of ruin because of the emotions involved.

Also bear in mind the fact that husbands can frequently be held accountable for their spouse's legal fees and you have a situation which creates a perverse incentive for litigation to continue.
Can't speak for Soviet era, but in Tsarist Russia, French was the status language of the upper classes.

The allusions to French influence are everywhere in "Fathers and Sons". The novel itself is a meditation on Russian society at the time, specially the two leading intellectual camps, the established landed gentry and the young nihilists who rejected the status quo. Turgenev subtly highlights their shared francophile elements, both types usually educated in France or French schools, or taught themselves French to absorb Western culture for subversive reasons.
How is

"By Gingerbread (Android 3.0) they intend to squeeze out all vendor-specific add ons, like Motorola Blur or HTC Sense. This is a big mistake that will end in a lose-lose situation."

the opposite of

"Personally, the first thing I'd do with Android is revamp the market and distribution model to standardize the OS across platforms and vendors, so that an Android works the same no matter where you got it. Vendors can add in custom content (wallpapers, extra apps, ringtones, etc), but the interface (icons, look-and-feel) needs to be the same." ?
Anyone who has this kind of attitude is going to bring out the worst in both the selection process for his team and the quality output of that team. It is little wonder that his experience has been so poor, I don't know a good developer that would work for something like this.
& the incandescent bulb should be extinct
Because you can't do that programmatically from a system that isn't running windows, like a linux web server processing files for display.
I used to work on Google's applicant tracking system. We used some software that did that to convert all the resumes. It didn't work very well for formatting.
That's the issue that many countries deal with, do you purchase a sub standard product from a local vendor to keep money in the local economy or do you go for the most effective product anywhere.

The big problem for them will be that it's fine to give all these people OpenOffice but they have the extra effort of also saving it into an Office format most times they have to interact with people outside there business. Then there could be translation problems.
I was thinking a Twilio style model. Sign up, account gets charged with a few dollars for testing. Then there would be a small fee per file, I was thinking $0.05 to $0.10 per file, or a penny a page.

Haven't really gotten that far with it.

Edit: I should have also mentioned that I don't think this could be ad supported because the end user will likely never see anything but the output file, as it's an API and not a user facing service.
Interesting. I was able to solve the quality issues that plague many of the other solutions for this problem. Do they still use something like that?
Once, when leaving my girlfriend's apartment after a marathon Halo 2 session, I heard a sound in the distance. Wanting to see what happened, I tried to "zoom in." My right thumb even moved to where "B" would have been if I were holding an Xbox controller.

edit: I've also, of course, tried to Ctrl-Z when writing on paper... many times...
The typewriter could perhaps be the most productive device on that list. I mean it's more productive than say, WriteRoom with fullscreen distraction mode. Perhaps its existence could be justified because it really forces one to choose their words carefully, no backspace right.

Hmm, maybe I should find a typewriter and hack it to post to my posterous.
Is this becoming a meme?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504712

2 hours apart.
I disagree with turntables being on the list.
Is this really true? If so, why would it be? Ive had friends say that, but Ive only had Coke from glass that was from Mexico/Europe and hence had real sugar, which is obviously better for a completely different reason.
Numpy is pumpy!!!
"I was here working until 4am"

This happens. Sometimes we get urgent (or unreasonable) requests for features and not enough time to implement them. I'd much rather be doing /anything/ else at the time usually. Like sleeping for instance.

"It is the server or bandwidth"

To be fair, sometimes it's both.

"With the product debugged, we need to go back into the code and speed it up"

I'd much rather get to a solid and tested implementation that we can revise to improve performance than never get anything working at all.
OOo, umm, still sucks. I don't know about Koffice, and I really love Gnumeric. It is more that the government is in world of not very savvy users (ahem), and getting out of sync with one's colleagues/ customers/ etc would be a huge productivity hit, even though personal productivity alone on projects would be fine.
I really wish I had enough karma to downvote this article. I've certainly heard such lies from bad developers before, but the author frames some of the lies as if all developers tell them. As a developer myself, I found the article to be snide and insulting.
watch world cup Final Spain VS Netherlands live on your pc 
World cup Final Match.
Fifa World Cup South Africa 2010
Date and Time :11-07-2010 from 18:30 until 22:00

Watch this football action live from various web site on Net
Oh boo fucking hoo! It's called dedication to a field of study. Yes it requires some serious time to be put in.

The reason why people need a masters today is due to the sliding standards of obtaining a BS.
Paper medical records.
Some people choose to eat artificially-produced cheese substitute, but despite the ads you see on TV, not everyone does.

I never said that all American whatever was industrial artificial crap. However, there is a lot of it here, with less of the good stuff (and cultural awareness of it) as a counteracting force. Good beer is a revival, as are lots of other foodie things in the US.

And the coffee grinder I started with only cost $11.
The admin will definitely be extremely helpful to someone who is new to databases.
I think this article may be focusing on the wrong meaning of the word "free."

The Internet should remain "free" in that the routers that comprise it are content agnostic and allow the free flow of information between parties, not that we don't have to pay for movies, music and reading material (which is hardly a revolutionary change).
coldfusion has that pretty much built in...
I've felt this when starting on challenging programming tasks. "I WILL DO THIS" usually ends up with procrastination, or no real solutions coming to mind. Gently nudging my mind into wondering about the problem, poking it, thinking of ways to do it, thinking of ways to get out of doing it, then finally a tipping point is reached and I hold on for the motivational ride. It helps when you work for a company tolerant of this creative cycle, where motivation for a particular problem or project may come from nowhere.
dude please check it out. http://prernagupta.com/
its nor functionally oriented nor asthetically oriented nor minimalistic.

Its a wordpress blog with different pages done by making them categories, the top menu bar gives it a feel of the website.

Yet its just a wordpress blog.
I have seen much better cheap templates for wordpres.
Have it, love it, would buy again. On it all the time.
I did something similar to this some time ago. There is software that will convert from html to postscript (html2ps), and then there is the ps2pdf project which will convert the postscript to a pdf file.

I had success with this approach, though I had to tune my html and a number of ghostscript settings to get it to produce exactly the output that I wanted.
There's some info here: http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2010/05/25/django-technica...

Question: What are the plans for python 3?

We haven’t made any plans for 2017 yet. We’re slowly dropping older releases. Probably python 2.4 sticks around in django 1.3, though. There has been work done on a python 3 port. Apparently the tests already run, though only 60% succeed. He considered 50% already a huge success, so they (=students at a canadian university, if I heard correcly) did a good job. Python 3 support will depend on an influx of new developers.

(I’d guess this doesn’t seriously mean that a Py3k port won’t be done until 2017.)
Let me be devil's advocate:

1. I could do that in a weekend

This is a figure of speech. It's not literally true, it just serves to reinforce a point. It means that they can do X in a relatively short period of time.

2. It's completely modular

It's perfectly possible to write modular code. It's also perfectly possible to take non-modular code and make it modular. I've done both.

3. With the product debugged, we need to go back into the code and speed it up.

Performance issues are bugs just like anything else. They must be triaged. If it's major, then you can't just leave it in. If it's minor, then maybe you can. Whether the fix could cause more bugs is irrelevant: there's always this risk when changing any code (no matter how large or small the fix).

7. It is the server or bandwidth

It's not unusual for resources or bandwidth to be an issue. You can't always blame it on the code.
Even then they're still screwed- you're talking about two features, Apple is marketing an experience.

"We let you root your phone" is not a marketing strategy, and that's the base of Android so far. They let you customize, Apple gives you something kick ass that just works.
Not really, the UI works exactly like the thing it models. Bank the plane to the left, the horizon moves to the right. And so does the artificial horizon.

I think people get confused when they see the marking representing the planes wings not moving relative to the console, but they see the blue-and-red thing inside the instrument moving. So they assume that their control inputs are causing the artificial horizon to move, when in reality, they are moving the plane and the artificial horizon is remaining still, just like the real horizon would.

Presumably there is some sort of mental issue with the "size" of the horizon -- when you look out the window, it's really big, so of course you're not moving it. Newer cockpits make the artificial horizon bigger, perhaps to compensate for this effect: http://www.cockpitgps.com/VOR_magnetic_variation/G1000CBEAV-...

I know that as long as I remember "fly the little airplane, not the horizon", it's not a problem. And as the comment below mentions, you also have a turn indicator, which clearly shows "R" when you're turning right and "L" when you're turning left: http://www.unitedinst.com/images/TurnSlip9500Series.gif
Los Horcones
If you can afford it, take a look at Prince XML.
If marriage is silly, are contracts between employers and employees and between founders and investors also silly?

If your employment contract commits your entire lifetime to the company, then yes, it is silly, and will be deemed unenforceable in any court in the civilized world.
That's how I felt, as a guy who feels pretty "meh" about lolcats, when I was working at Cheezburger Network.

Even now, I know that software that I wrote is helping to make literally millions of people happy every day. That feels a hell of a lot better than helping a big cable company with video DRM, that's for sure.
Sure you can! Webkit html to pdf: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
This is actually the only reason we're still running a ColdFusion server. About once every 6 months I look at the options out there, but until the FSF gets the momentum going behind GNU PDF (http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/), I think CFM'll still rule the roost.

We also rely on pieces like OOONinja's ODF converter to cope with .docx files (http://katana.oooninja.com/w/odf-converter-integrator).
I haven't gone into SuperLaserWeapon territory, but I try to have a little (appropriate) fun with naming.
The article says something about social graph but that doesn't make sense. Gmail basically rules the world when it comes to email so they already have a lot of social graph information just from email correspondences. There must be some other strategy they are pursuing.
Grand Theft Auto has created a similar experience for me. Every once in a while, I will legitimately feel the instinct to force my vehicle in between other cars or knock them out of the way. After a split second I realize that it's insane, but the feeling is still deeply ingrained in my perception of traffic negotiation.
Cheezburger Network is an honorable career. Nothing makes me as primally delighted as seeing a really cute lolcat. To be able to do that for tens of millions of people is more than most people accomplish in their lives.
Hi,

I am developing an ASP.NET MVC application using NoRM, Mongo DB, and Spark View Engine. So far the test deployment has been quite easy, and the development server has been relatively stable.
Also with roller coasters.
The real science gap
I don't know, I worked on that in 2005 and have since left Google. But I'd imagine a lot of large companies do something similar with resumes.