skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea for a criminal is to mix in with the world not enter in a technological arm wrestling match with a superpower. Their strength is obscurity, not tech muscle - and if they try to fight from that angle then it’s just a matter of time till they lose. The US army cannot hide itself (the pentagon has an address) but it can apply a lot of money in cracking their encryption. Al-Qida cannot invest heavily in R&D but can keep the US army confused by mixing in and out with the general public.

This is why a criminal tries to act and behave just like you, a non-criminal, so they mix in with the crowd and get attention off them so they can engage in what they do best, jumping jacks and monkey bars. ;)
> It's a seriously exciting time to be a developer. Or to be alive in general, really.

I have yet to meet a dead person that's excited to be dead.
Technically you can build basic CRUD stuff using Xcode and Interface Builder on Mac OS X:

1. Design your GUI using Interface Builder
2. Design your Core Data model in Xcode.
3. Connect the two using Bindings in Interface Builder.

It will be very very basic, but you can get something built without writing a single line of code. Ideally find some sort of tutorial that steps you through how to do every step, especially configuring and connecting Bindings. You won't truly understand everything, and the only way to do so will be to take the next step and learn C/Objective-C and the Cocoa API.
The closest thing I've heard of recently would probably be VisualStudio LightSwitch. I've never used it and am pretty skeptical about this sort of thing in general from experience with MDA tools in the past, but it's probably worth a look.

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch/
I have been reading about postgres after your comment but still not able to see how feature rich and less mature postgres would benefit me more?

I haven't used postgres before so I am not the best person to comment on it. Is there any significant advantage of using Postgres of MySql?
Business-oriented databases generally have this kind of feature. I believe both MS Access and FileMaker have drag-and-drop-style form builders allowing a non-programmer to create a purpose-built user interface to query and update the database.
Overstock RecLab Prize ($1MM Prize for Retail Personalization)
Floating cities on Venus
HyperCard was the gold standard for this kind of thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard#Applications
This still applies: http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3

Same story: Porting is proceeding as planned, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, etc are all coming. Django is coming, etc.
This isn't entirely constructive, but I like your design. It's close to some of the stuff I've been building lately, and gives me a few ideas for my next design project.
Pretty lo-tech solution but it worked for many years so why not. What's surprising is that they left behind so many usb flash drives; with them being so cheap why not buy hundreds of low capacity drives and destroying them after each dispatch.
How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost
Somewhat, but easier to use than Access. I was thinking that after learning the tool, the end-user should be able to create a basic CRUD application with one or more workflows/screens in a few hours, tops.

Do you have any information about your framework? I'm interested to know more.
Thanks, I'll pass that on to our designer, @thecropsie.
Have you considered some sort of pay-by-usage (by time, by bandwidth, whatever) plan for people who don't know how often they'll need a VPN?

It's not every month that I'm in a hotel or a coffee shop, so it's hard to justify a monthly subscription.
I've got the last revision before unibody, and god is it a pain to get to. You pretty much have to take apart the entire computer.
Ask PG/YC: Angel Capital Funds?
When it comes to startup financing, my understanding is that VC money is pooled together from various parties.

But where does it actually come from? If it's from institutions, is it college endowments, or financial companies like Goldman Sachs. Or does it come from rich individuals? Perhaps it's a combination of both. Or?

I ask because I came across this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339722

and it left me wondering if there are angel capital (AC?) funds which pool together money from "angels" (I would imagine mostly from rich individuals) to invest in startups with an initial goal of getting acquired or just building a self-sustainable business (for lack of a better term, I suppose you could call it a "lifestyle business").
I know PHP pretty well and enjoy it. I just started learning Ruby on Rails and it is VERY fun. It is simple and with rails it is quick to launch apps. I don't think i'm experienced enough yet to see the downside with RoR...but for now I'm happy with what I see.
Use what you want to use, want to learn Python? Or code that C++ CGI Web App? Go for it...

Wondering what the best language is for you to use? Probably the one you know best. When you out-scale PHP - you'll be on the beach drinking tropical drinks, and likely not care.
If you're in the Windows world, Microsoft Access would really be the best choice for that sort of situation.
If you're going to write a well-designed PHP web application (and that's subjective, but I believe most people would have a similar idea of well-designed,) you're going to end up writing or using a "web wrapper" (or in other words, framework) anyways.
Because the regime would simply drop poisoned food in the same packages.
I'm involved. Follow us on Twitter and ENGAGE! ;-)

@alphagov is us, @nicepaul is me. Read the blog, leave the feedback.
I was down-voted for reporting a bug? wow.
We've heard this from several people and are investigating what a reasonable model would be. (Bandwidth is the key driver of our costs.)

I would say that our current (beta) pricing is stake-in-the-ground, so anything you can tell us about how often and how much you'd use this would be very helpful.
Cleaner code, powerful libraries, frameworks with vibrant communities (django/rails), and so you have friends to sit with at lunch. Really, it's a personal preference. If you have existing sites in PHP and you're really comfortable with it, why waste time porting things over? Go create something new in the most efficient way you can!
Microsoft Access is probably the best fit for you.

However, beware the danger of ending up with your business fundamentally built on Access. Many products make it easy to program, there is no product that makes programming easy. Just underneath the candy shell, the horrifying Turing chaos waits for you the same as any "real" programming environment, and many is the person who has inadvertently released an Elder God from his tasty confectionery prison to consume their business whole.

I'm being a bit flowery, but I am serious. It's happened many times and I've seen it myself once. Use the tool responsibly; the poky bits haven't been taken out, just moved around a bit.
I would love to know what the differences are too. Although, to be honest, I have stopped using RailsAdmin mainly because of deprecation issues.

Also, it wasn't as nice as I would have wanted.

But this one looks really nice.
Confessions of a Converted PHP Developer: On Visibility and Privates
Yeah Access was the closest think I could think of. But for what I'm picturing, that's too complicated - I don't want the end-user to see or think about the database at all. The end-user should basically drop and drag things, then click a button that says "create application" and it spits out your app.
In the original post, he used a very specific query and his site was listed 2nd. Naturally the scrapers were also all over that results page, since they were all exact matches to the text. I didn't see anything about him complaining about poor search ranking (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords/thread?tid=0bb...)
One major advantage to using Python especially is the availability of many libraries and apis. I think that the main reason for the growth of PHP (at least in the beginning) was the good interface with SQL (LAMP). Now that there are good alternatives (MongoDB, Riak, Redis, etc.), PHP's SQL support isn't a must. I think that the simple nature of the ruby language is a good thing. The code is easy to understand and the libraries aren't a mess cough cough.

All in all, it comes down to personal preference.

Personal Plug for Python: I have used python for some major statistical analysis (over the web) and Django interfaces well with sciPy and numPy. Python also has much better native access so R works well with it.

AFAIK: Node.js was written for webapps. Also javascript is interoperable in most major browsers so you use the same language on client and server side.

Personal Plug for Node.js: I love node. It is really simple to use especially with coffeescript and express. The tools available are constantly growing and there are so many modules available. Also, node.js moves a lot faster with major releases and updates as well as the availability of any existing javascript library available.
I know Jason from the TechZing Podcast is making a "Do it yourself" app platform. Might be worth signing up here: http://appignite.com
Literal much?

OK, fine, "corporate war."

Happy? You must be great at parties.
For me, I started using Python because I could write the front end (web-facing) and back end code in the same language.

Meaning I can write back end services like mail server and share models and other code across both.

You could argue that you can write back end services in PHP, however, it was no designed with that intention and in my honest opinion it does not translate very well because the infrastructure in terms of open source libraries just don't exist as PHP is primarily a web language.
A nice side-effect is that you'll come out of it knowing another language that is useful for more than just web stuff.
As someone who travels abroad half of the year I was thinking the same thing. I really miss having access to so many great services just because I'm outside the country at that moment in time.

I try to avoid public proxies because they seem so shady, but I would purchase from a reputable company like this if it meant I could explicitly select a center located in the US.
Dude, chill. I have worked on Wall St for over a decade at this point . There is a huge, HUGE diversity. Some use toolsets they are comfortable with, others with what they get interested in ( after it crosses a certain stability threshold ofcourse ). BTW R itself gained mainstream acceptance in 2009+. I can imagine you saying in 2008 no quant in their right minds would use R, its just too new. It was new then, but it's defacto now. That was true of OCaml which Jane St uses almost everywhere now but didn't do so just a few years back. Ofcourse there are quants using C++ for all their risk analytics - 50% of my classmates got hired on that very credential! As to Java, I have personally written trading software for IBs in Java way back in 2002 that used pricing modules for all the instruments also written in Java. Guess how mainstream Java was back then ?
Finally, there are actually fairly decent risk analytics DSLs in Scala out there.

Other than reporting ( you really can't compete with SAP/Crystal Reports on that front), solutions in Scala address the rest of your legitimate concerns using DCOM hooks to pre-existing C libraries & DLLs. Why reinvent the wheel ?

I don't see why you are getting so worked up about my "inexperienced rant". I simply described a real-life situation I encountered which I felt was funny viz. highly risk-taking alpha personalities getting hugely risk-averse when it comes to something quite innocent like language adoption.
Ruby Geocoder Geocoding Toolkit Hits 1.0.0
git is easier to use than CVS and more practical because of its speed and distributed nature. Add the (controversial) topic branches to the mix and you have an easy way to contribute the project or make your own custom fork.

Sure if you look just at the source code, I agree that the one for OpenBSD looks better than the one for Linux.
The fact that you don't see any plan doesn't mean there isn't one.
Using euphoria[1]?

[1] http://www.eurephia.net
For all the cheering about Bin Laden's demise, its this trove of information that people really should be cheering about. It sounds like they basically got a full snapshot of the Al Quada organization at the time of the raid. Intelligence analysts right now must be the having the most thrilling yet most critically intense time of their careers.
Selling to Sociopaths
To really answer your question you pretty much have to write your own Django/Rails app. Why don't you give it a try in a new project?
You can use whatever you like on your backend. This /is/ just a straight-forward CSS/HTML/JS frontend, however the theme's author has helpfully (un- in your case) provided the theme's basic structure a set of PHP files such that you can use it as a template without breaking it apart yourself.
You don't need Cygwin to "install" CoffeeScript. You can even run it in your browser:

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#installation

And Node.js can also be run natively:

https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Building-node.js-on-ming...
We did, but only got as far as what is today known as South Korea before being blocked by China and USSR. A lot of US soldiers died in that effort.

Perhaps you should check history before being sarcastic next time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War
We rolled our own actually.
As I've painfully discovered myself, being humorous, especially sarcastic or filled with dry humor often attracts downvotes too, no matter how funny you thought the joke was.
TIL about http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Main_Pag...

I cant help but think that a wiki isnt the best platform for this. It needs something more analogous to pen-and-paper proofs. ie. discrete steps with the possibility to fork any step and combine identities...
Good luck applying your PHP knowledge outside of the tiny sliver of software engineering domain that is web apps. Learning Python and arguably Ruby (now with JRuby out there) is a wiser long-term investment if you want to be able to use your skills towards solving other types of problems.
IMO, a language derives the most of its real-world utility from (good, updated, relevant) supporting libraries. This is a great reason to learn python AND ruby.

(Personally, I have a project where I'm debating the two. I've decided Ruby for now but may move to Python. I hope I never do PHP again.)
Nothing makes my MacBook sound more like an aircraft during takeoff than a WebGL/HTML5 experiment.
I like to think I have a decent computer (MacBook Pro Gen 5) but it couldn't handle this. I suspect my slow internet connection might be another possible reason.
Why should they destroyed them? I think they wanted to keep them.
Most LPs are other funds (e.g. pension funds, university endowments) or rich families. As far as I know, companies like Goldman don't invest in VC funds because that sort of investment is too long term for them. (LPs in a venture fund might not get money back for 10 years.)

There would be nothing distinctive about pooling money from rich individuals because that's what a lot of LPs already are.

As of now, essentially zero investors want to fund "lifestyle companies" (= companies that remain independent but never grow to the point where there is a market in their stock) because there is no way to get one's capital back.

(I say essentially zero because apparently Bezos invested in 37signals in return for dividends, but that sort of arrangement is as of now vanishingly rare.)
002 RR Virtual Machines, Concurrency, and the Future of Ruby
Obama seeks to extend FBI Director past legal term limit
This is the same advantage as Ruby - the community for both languages has been more vibrant and interesting than PHP for years.
Snow Leopard has included built-in VPN support (IPsec and L2TP, no OpenVPN). And it is very easy to configure, admins can export VPN configuration to a file and distribute it to end users. Install the VPN profile is just a double click away. After configured there is a icon in the menubar to connect/disconnect, very much like your app.

I used it to connect to my university's VPN server (a Cisco Concentrator 3000). Works even better than the proprietary Cisco client.
Man, I hope this doesn't lead to him seeking to be elected for life and raising a clone army.
MasterCard transactions to be mined for CO2 data
I get your site #1 for that search. I suspect the scrapers are ranking above your site only when you search due to personalization (you've clicked on them in the past.) Try adding &pws=0 to your search to see if they still rank higher and I'll debug further.

This is a quite common problem actually when webmasters have reason to hate certain sites. They click on those sites in search results a lot and often see them promoted above their own, even though they're the only one who sees them promoted.
Is Google stupid enough to be damned by forgetting history? This all sounds too much like Microsoft in the Antitrust era.

It's a freaking location database. You don't risk bad PR and anti competitive label for WiFi location data. All phones pretty much can do cell tower based or proper AGPS based location.
Yes, I've used this stuff before. It's great. It's also not specifically tied to a scalable service, or directly integrated with billing and quota management, etc. We think there's room for both things depending on circumstance.
There is no benefit.

PHP is great for doing rapid prototyping for web applications, and will suffice even for the final version in most cases.

Most here are concerned with producing something of value, so if it's easier to do in PHP, then do it! Your final product on the web will speak for itself, no matter what framework it was written in.
IANAL, but although you may not be able to tell the customers, you could chase up other legal avenues to contest the court order - even though you'd probably lose in the end (according to this doc at least) - and that's what the FBI is trying to avoid. Hence, they reassure the companies involved of complete confidentiality regarding their involvement to make the case go smoother.

Scummy, innit?
Hiding in plain sight has a lot of different meanings. Cryptography stands out a lot more than bickering among old men. Besides, which tools to trust? The PRC clearly distrusts many western crypto systems, why would AQ feel any differently?
A Deathbed Lament
That's a great question and something I plan on writing a full blog post about. But, from a high level, here are the projet goals we've been working with:

1. An administration interface must be good looking and easy to use. The interface is not for developers who understand the underlying data model, rather for operations staff who need to do their job and service our customers.

2. Administration of a production application is way more complex than a simple CRUD of database tables. Although editing data is necessary, most of the time operations staff are finding a resource and performing an action on it or looking up historical data.

3. An administration framework must be highly customizable. Active Admin makes it easy to add controller actions, sidebar elements, action buttons, dashboard widgets, custom forms, show screens and hook in to all resources via plugins.
On startup culture
One thing I've noticed is when running a WebGL demo in Chrome on a Mac, if another window partially overlaps the WebGL animation it freezes up the entire system.

It's obviously still a work in progress, but I think it will be fantastic when all the kinks are worked out.
Right now it looks* like rails_admin is a bit more feature complete as far as CRUD administration goes (+ history of edits). While ActiveRails has feature like comments which may be more relevant to less technical users.

* Disclaimer: I'm more familiar (and probably biased) with rails_admin
Just saw this + thought it was more awesome than Avatar (the one with the blue people). It felt like a virtual vacation.... Or maybe I've been working too hard...
ActiveRecord 3.1 - Mass-Assignment Roles
I just don't use twitter, facebook, etc. So I'm not in habit of answering a bunch of BS notifications all day.
>In Asia only Japan has decent well run prisons, but their prisons are harsh while still having a high success rate.

just to clarify for others. The high conviction success rate in japan has to do with at least two things:

1. Only cases which have high chances of success are pursued (so you get cases where "people fell down a staircase".

2. Detainees have little expectation of talking to an attorney any time soon. Confessions, co-erced or otherwise, are sought after with vigor by the police. From Wikipedia "Confessions are often obtained after long periods of questioning by police. This can, at times, take weeks or months during which time the suspect is in detention and can be prevented from contacting a lawyer or family.[2] Thus, since the suspect is put through prolonged strain, stress and pressure, the reliability of such confessions can be questioned. To Japanese citizens and police, however, the arrest itself already creates the presumption of guilt which needs only to be verified via a confession.[2] The interrogation reports prepared by police and prosecutors and submitted to the trial courts often constitute the central evidence considered when weighing the guilt or innocence of the suspect.[3]"
It seems to me that the largest problem with this type of service, however it's dressed up, is on the VPN endpoint. We could argue forever about which transport is easier/has more security/etc - but if the VPN endpoint is not extremely secure, resistant to subpoena, etc - then it's not all that useful over a regular homebrew vpn.
I am very glad that you replied. What ever you have explained above sounds to be really good to start with. Thank you. I will try my best.
Tiny Iron Spheres Are Oldest Fossilized Space Dust
Yet several had the expertise to fly commercial airliners. A number of top Al Qaeda leaders went to college in the U.S. It wouldn't be implausible for some terrorists to take courses in computer science.
At a certain level, dividends seem like they could be pretty valuable.

Is such an arrangement rare because the amount of dividends in this type of situation is just too small?

I'm curious if an alternative (and effective) use of one's capital would be to invest in these other types of businesses. Or even buying them outright.
Improve your taxonomy management using the W3C SKOS standard
That was so anti-climactic. I was expecting something a bit more sophisticated after all the hype at the beginning of the article. ROT13 at least...
My HTC phone does that for contacts; not sure whether that's Android or HTC Sense.
There's also a Ruby wrapper for CoffeeScript, and several projects aimed at Windows that use Java or .NET. A good round-up is at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3175561/coffeescript-on-w...
You can do all that they did AND add encryption on top.
It depends on your needs. If you have the tools and skillset to set up and maintain your own endpoint, and you're willing to spend the time to do so (or you believe you can only trust it if you do so) then no VPN provider like us makes sense. We think there are a lot of people who don't fit into this category.

(Also: it's on our roadmap to let users create arbitrary secure networks with Cloak [aka connect multiple clients together rather than run through our endpoint.] It's not exactly the first thing on our roadmap, but we'll get there ;-)