skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@ryanwaggoner: Bug report -- the link to Sparkfun is broken
ORM = Object Relational Mapping

Put as simply as I can put it, it's an abstraction layer in front of SQL.

The general logic (which I object to, though I still prefer ORM-based development) is that most of your class Objects relate to how you would store them in a database. Your 'User' object has a first name, a last name, a password, etc., which all map neatly to database records.

So, instead of doing "INSERT INTO users firstname, lastname, password) VALUES ('foo', 'bar', 'baz');", you create a user object:

User.firstname = 'foo'

User.lastname = 'bar'

User.password = 'baz'

User.save()
Exactly. Just because there's a rock next to a window doesn't mean you should throw the rock through the window to prove a point that people shouldn't leave rocks near windows.
Actually, whether or not I broke any laws (in the US) is not clear. I deliberately did not look at anything in their account while I was in it, so privacy was not actually compromised.

The folks I recognized on my way out were people with large profile pictures of their faces. In general, this wasn't the case. I'd have had to do a lot more rifling through accounts to be able to identify someone face-to-face, and would have risked someone having a bad reaction.

So, unlike all the people who have used Firesheep in public to look at peoples' accounts and then not told anyone about it, I notified the users and then told the public about what happened. You're saying that's bad?
What no that's a crazy comment. Expand on your one line with your examples.

History is full of examples of countries with big populations doing big things. And countries with tiny populations achieving less. Of course the number of people makes a difference.
There's no cost to download or play - what's the incentive to play a clone? Especially when all your friends are playing the real one.
Forget the analogy, this ain't Vegas. All you gotta do is remember to pay one bill on time every month and you're a (small-time) winner.

Oh, and you should make sure you never spend more on your credit card than you have in cash to pay it off; but you should have at least several months' expenses sitting around in cash anyway, so this shouldn't be an issue as long as you have good financial habits.

For an average-income person with good financial habits a 1% cashback credit card is a net win of maybe two hundred dollars a year. Not a huge deal, but the best financial habit you can have is not saying no to small savings.
LIFE START FROM DREAM
Another example would be conversion dimensions back and forth between imperial and metric. If you're using floating point carelessly, it can introduce enough distortion to derived calculations (say, volume or material cost per cubic meter) to cause pricing or manufacturing errors.
He's going to sue you? Haha, for $5000? Not going to happen. Just ignore him and move on.

BTW, don't let the word "grand" theft scare you. Any theft exceeding $400 is called "grand".
This a naive question, but what would prevent Google from buying one of the trusted CAs (or fast tracking their own service into most browsers) and knocking the bottom out of the cert market with a free and easy SSL solution?

It doesn't make much business sense, but it fits in with some of Google's more philanthropic initiatives for a healthier net.
Right. It has arbitrary-precision ints, but lossy floats.
no, it's near-impossible to sue unless they have a physical presence in the United States.

Additionally, an American investor can't be an individual investor in an Indian corporation.

If they really wanted to be on the "up-and-up", the American investor would have set up an American company, with the Indian company as a 50% investor. Then, the Indian company would sign a legal document assigning all copyrights to the American company.

Since nothing was on the up-and-up, and nothing was even signed (I hate email/telephone contracts), the American investor has very little leverage. Since he's threatening to sue, I would exploit it.
That's a nice summary!

I still think allowing cookies to span more than one distinct domain was a mistake. If we had avoided that in the beginning, cookie scope implementations would be dead simple and not much functionality would be lost on the server side. Also, JavaScript cookie manipulation is something we could easily lose for the benefit of every user, web developer and server admin. I postulate there are very few legitimate uses for document.cookie
Taiwanese school children do that all the time. What's wrong with crunching it and shaking up the bag to spread the seasonings around? It's basically just over-processed grain + salt.

How is it so different from or more disgusting than western snacks like potato chips?
I have to wonder how many people are clicking (tapping?) on these ads by mistake. When you play Paper Toss, the ad is in a band across the top of the screen and you are moving your finger towards it every time you make a throw. The ads I saw were not very relevant. For example one was for storage rental in California when I live in Ohio.

The mobile ad space at the moment reminds me of when AdSense came out a few years ago and all these web site were making huge amounts of money. Eventually Google tightened the rules and advertisers got a better handle on the real value of the ads. Now it is much more difficult to make good money unless you have a very high traffic site.
one was sold in a fire sale

the other was shut down

neither did a bankuptcy
I think the point was not that the government is preventing a Wal-Mart-level success story, but that organized crime was preventing a Wal-Mart-level success story.

Say what you want about Wal-Mart (I avoid them like the plague just because I find the shopping experience actively repugnant), but to go from inception to world-dominating monster in ~40 years is impressive.
Adobe was ahead of its time with SVG [2000]
Could you please elaborate on the health cover/travel insurance thing?
Thank you Patrick. I'd like to do more research on the topic and await your blog post. As this topic pertains to eBay, it is extremely interesting.

As you mention some other ways are not impossible, but have serious problems. I agree, but at the very least, I think the status quo is not optimos. If you are starting up an affiliate scheme, it would be interesting to explore all options even ones that seem more complex or unconventional, because frankly, the ultimate black magic is a spontaneous killing of a business with no warning signs or even the converse. Either eBay wins (by getting some extremely high-LVT traffic) or the affiliate wins then loses (by getting killed). There has to be a way to a middleground.
Wow, paris look really nice.
That's fair, and this is the thing I worry about the most with my blog. Part of the problem is that a bunch of my readers aren't technical, so I sometimes wonder how deep I should go on technical posts. As far as HN goes, I submit a lot of the stuff I write, but only because a fairly large percentage seems to find some traction here, so I guess people enjoy it. That's not necessarily proof that it's quality content, but as I've written about in the past, it's really hard for me to gauge whether I'm ultimately creating value through my writing. Popularity isn't really as useful a metric as one might think :)

Anyway, thanks for the comment, and let me know what kinds of posts of mine you've enjoyed, and what I can do to make all my posts more valuable to you.

EDIT: I should add that my recent post on finding a good IDE found little traction, despite being more in-depth and technical. Perhaps it was just a fluke though...

EDIT 2: I've updated the blog post with a more in-depth review of the Arduino and the Sparkfun kit.
"I deliberately did not look at anything in their account while I was in it, so privacy was not actually compromised."

From your blog:
"I opened up his Amazon homepage, identified something he had recently looked at"
Yes; insofar as maximal perf is a desirable default characteristic, `0.2` must continue to be a regular decimal value (technically, a double in Clojure). We've already been down the path of having to extensively hint Clojure code to get the best perf, and we'll likely not revisit that.

That said, the above notation makes advice to those who are having trouble a lot easier.
This is a call for balance. Not testing at all is not a productive use of resources either.
I also disagree. I don't know about everyone, but on my projects (ones I've built by myself, so nothing huge) I can always give a probability of a bug existing in a part of the code. I've frequently written a feature and thought "yeah, this is going to break" only to find that it does in testing.

When I write tests, I don't care (too much) about coverage as about writing good tests. If I'm confident that I've gotten most cases, new features are much easier to add, even if the coverage isn't that great.

Covering a part of the code you know is unlikely to fail isn't a very good use of anyone's time, I think.
That was the single exception, and I agree that that was in a murky area.
Oops, I meant "safe" rather than "save" there. Past the limit to edit.
Zombies Infest Sears
This is great. I will try to implement this in the next release.
I wonder if tomorrow's front page will have:

Happy Birthday SPAM - 1st spam sent Oct 30 1969
I didn't like the fact that the screenshots are deliberately blurred. You should obfuscate the relevant input fields only, or better yet just fill them with non-sensitive data (if that was the reasoning behind the blur). Otherwise, cool app, nice site! :-)
You prefaced this with "I can't document this" but the statement that "[software project failures] never happen when you have high code coverage" seems outlandish, I'm certain there are thousands of projects failing right now with 80%+ code coverage due to requirements documentation that doesn't match the user's expectations and developers writing trivial rather than intelligent unit tests.
FireShepherd
Hi. which 80, 50, or 20%?
I do wish there were a syntax for Decimal literals, e.g. 0.1D (analogous to 100L as long, etc.). Maybe I'll make it my weekend project even if I don't really expect it to be accepted into CPython proper.
Tests are the best way to ensure you actually are improving your product (rather than breaking it or introducing bugs).
How else but for imprecision would you channel the half cents to rip off your soul deadening job?
I want a QPU unit!
I'm not sure why this is being judged bad advice, because this is certainly the path to the least painful solution. If lawyers get involved you're going to burn through any profit you might have had and for what -- to win a moral victory? You need to speak to this person -- face to face ideally, on the phone if not -- and ask what their ideal outcome is. You need to explain, in a reasonable way, what your ideal outcome is. Then you need to talk, and to come to agreement. You might find that he'll settle for 20% of the company and some cash. You might not like it, but that might be a great solution -- 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing. The 80/20 figure is just an example.

When things turn nasty you end up with a zero sum game at best, and quite often you end up lose-lose. You CAN make it win-win again, you just need to detach your emotions and do what's best for you both.
Nobody mentions OCZ?

"And right now, they're also wallet-bustingly expensive, even for enterprise customers."

Check the revodrive - 480GB PCI-E drive, bootable, costs the same amount as a 512GB standard SSD with the SATA bottleneck.
I think he's saying that using Firesheep at all is bad.

Just because it's easy doesn't mean it's ethical.
> which should roughly cancel out the error over time.

To be pedantic, if the errors of size e are as likely to go one way as the other for each of N steps, the expected magnitude of the total error will be sqrt(N)e. It's a random walk.
Smart Grid Deployment and Identity Management
I think his point wasn't that physical products are cool, its that for us web types, they seem preternaturally cool. After a while, one just takes it for granted that bits can be shuffled around a screen. To see a bit flip and actually do something is something altogether different.

To wit: I created (and bombed) an entire startup around a very tiny telephone PBX device and the thing I'm still most jazzed about is this little robot I built for marketing it that you could call up on the phone and drive with the keypad.

Video of robot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMZkd8YMgzw
Not really. Both systems wind up IO-bound very quickly if you're out of memory. NoSQL systems might get to a higher number of requests/second before flatlining, but they're still fundamentally disk bound unless your dataset fits in memory.
Realistic Wall Paintings
Eric Grawe is taking art to a completely new level- painting on the walls of buildings.
People who see this fall into one of two kinds: those who are shocked by this, and those who are shocked by those who are shocked by this.
It could also just be a slow news day - I certainly feel like there it's been pretty light on meaty articles today. Maybe I should try to track that and see if there's some tendency towards different kind of articles on a Friday due to it being the end of the week.
I really don't like the blue arrows... All this does is keep the page from going "below the fold" (a $$ decision?). I use the keyboard to browse, and I expect the down arrow to move the page lower to reveal results 5-10.

* If you are logged in, you can turn these arrows off by disabling Google Instant.

* You can also toggle this functionality by pressing tab
Paul Graham is right (using AVC’s data)
Music Note Tattoos
screen advantages: ships with Mac OS X, and most Linux distros. Can run against a serial port, so you don't need to install a "terminal emulator" program, all of which tend to suck more than screen.

tmux advantages: much better default setup than screen. Ships by default with OpenBSD. Ctrl-B key doesn't conflict with as many default keystrokes as screen's Ctrl-A.
Doh, sorry, obviously.

In which case, I wonder whether he (notch) is going to have trouble with the online performance. I've tried online play briefly and it didn't seem bad, I guess it isn't really twitch based.
I thought this was a good post:

http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/08/why-free-online-education-wo...

Presents an interesting case against a lot of technical Utopian ideas about tech/ed, highlighted the resistance to change in a lot of entrenched interest groups e.g. parent pressure isn't stressed nearly enough by most. It is a well thought out articulation of an interesting POV.

I really wasn't trying to be content police, just concerned that a post that essentially says "I Bought Something" was the most interesting technical news of the day ;-)
Microsoft makes Azure a lot more like a (Windows) data center
Time Traveler Caught in a 1928 Film?
So if we baked it a birthday cake, it would have just two bytes!
URLs please
We both were working on an ad start-up since last 3 yrs that stopped earlier this year then i was doing a side project which i launched that the side project made 6K in one week
As much as I advocate automated testing, I've seen people waste time with it also by chasing coverage goals.

If you are writing a new class or a new method, by all means, write tests for it. Getting tests around all of your currently existing code, however, is often a waste. You need to test the areas you are changing and the areas which are impacted by the change. In any code base, there are hotspots, places where both change frequency and complexity are high. Tackling those first with automated testing often gives you the best ROI.

Remember, you aren't writing automated tests for existing code to find bugs, you're writing them to characterize the current behavior and get a behavioral invariant so that you can refactor and also so that you can add features with the knowledge that you haven't changed the old behavior in unexpected ways.
Great blog post.

Has anybody benefited from using tmux with emacs? Or, when in emacs, is running tmux too overkill?
I think I have worked out what your app does:

* developer builds an iPhone app

* end-user provides some content for that app

* developer doesn't want the hassle of updating the app

* end user has an online editor to edit the content

- app updates itself

* developer sits on beach sipping daquiris <-- THE BENEFITS

If that is the case then the front-page should show it in the picture:

* a user with their phone

* a developer with the app

* the end-user customer with their CMS editor

If this is a correct description of the app then YOUR CUSTOMER is the developer and the tour page should then heavily feature Daquiris, instead of regular expressions. Getting high from regular expressions is about as lame as smoking dried banana skins :)
You missed the language feature : Zombian (http://www.sears.com/shc/s/dap_10153_12605_DAP_Zombian?adCel...)
Actually there's a third category of us who understand why it happens and understand why others don't understand.
The solution you link to in your post involves using a not-free VPN service. Is there a guide somewhere to setting up a free solution to this problem?
I was specifically replying to the "especially" bit. The net benefit of an SSD is far less pronounced with many NoSQL solutions (in particular document stores) than with relational databases. That's because the former was built and adopted largely to make lemonade out of the I/O problem (particularly on terrible I/O platforms like AWS).
if you're obtaining input from a user, sanitize and validate it. for everything.
No, he's saying that, on a cost-benefit basis, killing a few extra birds to generate electricity is probably no worse a tradeoff than killing tons of extra birds in exchange for the privilege of owning housecats.
lol... I had the exact same thoughts when I got my Arduino a couple months ago. Now time to find a project...
this is very interesting. there is definitely demand for this - our corporate clients are always asking for a way to easily update the iPad apps we create for them. email us: hello - [@] - fiplab . com
There's something great about making something that affects the physical world, isn't there? I've written programs that manage billions of dollars and websites that support millions of users, yet I still get a thrill out of simple stuff like wiring an outlet or building a shelf.
It's most likely one of those (or similar):

http://hearing.siemens.com/sg/10-about-us/01-our-history/mil...
GlaxoSmithKline whistleblower awarded $96m payout
I actually like this behavior.

Sometimes I need text to match size of background-image that is not scaled and has size in pixels (especially important if you use CSS sprites).

In other places I can use `em` to signify that text can be freely enlarged and won't break layout.

iPhone and WP7 IE have -(webkit|ms)-text-size-adjust for this.
Discussed on Richard Wiseman's blog:

http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/chaplin-time-...

Possible (non-time traveller) solutions:

http://www.hearingaidmuseum.com/gallery/Carbon/WesternElectr...

http://www.phisick.com/a7et82lutz.htm
Replace "end user" with "a member of your team that edits the content" and your description is correct.

I don't know if the developer will then be sipping daquiris at the beach if he doesn't have to take care about managing the content himself, but he will have more time for more important work :).
Agree with the easier to entertain part - I don't get excited by games anymore, probably the same reason.

On another note, big biz opportunities often exist in small niches, rather than trying to come up with the next facebook or whatever.
Hey, you kids, get off my lawn! ;-)

I remember enjoying the very early ARPAnet (about 10-15 hosts) when a frosh in 1972 at Harvard (I had talked my way into taking grad courses as a freshman since all the undergrad CS courses were pretty babyish, so had access to the grad computing center--nirvana). Back then, the ARPAnet was completely wide open, had only a few hundred users across those hosts in total, and was an absolute blast.

For example, every system had a well-publicized guest account you could log in with and poke around. Many of the systems were TOPS-10 and TENEX systems (both based on DEC-10 hardware), but some were IBM 360-based, and some were custom hardware-based. The most fun were things like SRI's (Doug Englebart's) NLS system, which was almost useable over the network with a CRT (which were pretty new-fangled themselves back then) and UCSB's symbolic math system (forget its name now). One could learn a lot by just poking around those early systems.

We used to telnet from host to host around the world, to see how many we could hop through before the connection crashed. (Plus, it was danged near impossible to "escape" your way back to any particular host to close the connection, anyway, since you'd have to remember how many escape/quote telnet sequences to send before the "real" escape you wanted to send.)

I was also on the first mailing list on the ARPAnet, hosted at BBN, which was, appropriately meta-ly, about mail software and mailing lists. That was a lot of fun, bikeshedding about header formats, email address canonicalizations, etc. (Back, then addresses were just user@host, no domains; I think mine was 67,377@harv-10. (TOPS-10 systems used octal programmer,project pair codes for login, each 18 bits).

And, back then, mail systems delivered mail by (pre-TCP) ftp'ing into your system and appending to your (world-write) mailbox file in your home directory. One could have lots of fun with that.

I remember sitting by the HARV-IMP (a Honeywell minicomputer with custom hardware, talking to HARV-10 and HARV-1 (a DEC PDP-1 that the first spacewar was written on), and the phone would ring in the middle of the night, asking whoever was around to reboot the IMP because it had crashed and they couldn't remotely reboot it. That IMP had a couple of high-speed 56Kb links to several other nodes, one down Mass Ave at MIT, and one out to the Air Force base out in Lincoln (?) MA. The super-high-speed cross-country links were 256Kb.

Ah well, sic transit gloria mundi.
This is good advice. Any FAQ on the signup page ought to be encouraging actions more than trying to scare them off e.g.
"Can I use my Storageroom account for client projects"
"Can I manage all my webapps under one plan?"

If you are asking questions on browser support I'd think the most important one would be to clarify that it's not iPhone/Android specific

You probably also need to think more about your target audience - is it more of a WordPress for mobile data (in which case the focus should be on ease of use) or a Rails/Django for mobile data (in which case RESTful JSON API probably is a key selling point)? As you're potentially appealing to both groups possibly separate tours for different use cases would work "StorageRoom for Publishers: content creation for non-programmers", "StorageRoom for Developers: develop in your preferred language and we'll handle the backend for you"
I don't consider myself a hacker, so am not best placed to pass judgement, but... it seems like the true hacker ethos is not to swim with the stream, and yet here is pretty clear proof that hnews has formed its own stream. How many hackers here check the list and de-follow anything not in the long tail, fearing getting caught-up in groupthink?

I apologise in advance if this causes offence; stream or not, I still have tremendous respect for this very high calibre community.
Has Singapore changed much in the last seventeen years? I get the feeling that it hasn't (though my one and only visit to Singapore would have been circa 1998).
About postal workers: The King of Queens
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165581/
You don't think it's a bit niche?

I can see a lot of geeks being into the idea but I can't see it being mass market. The question will be will the geeks be willing to pay the premium that would make this workable with a smaller customer base.

I suspect not when there are perfectly good Android phones out there.