skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think calling REST a religion is pretty unfair

If "religion" here means what it usually means in tech discussions, namely a rigid attachment to an allegedly "right" way of doing things, then I don't think it's unfair at all. I bought the O'Reilly book on REST expecting to learn a lot about web app design, and was really taken aback to find that it was 80% dogma. Having assumed that REST=good, the authors then praise or reject various designs not for what they actually do, but for how closely they adhere to REST. For example, they criticize delicious and flickr for not being proper REST apps, which is pretty amusing.

Incidentally, I don't think the point here is that RPC is better than REST. There are more than two choices. The point is that conforming to REST for its own sake is an example of dogmatic thinking.
that is what I was talking about, basically
This is great. A lot of big stuff has been merged into trunk recently (filestorage-refactor, singals-refactor, geo-django).

I hope newcomments (django.contrib.comments based on newforms) will make it before the 1.0 release.
This is my favorite version of vim on OS X. It uses Cocoa and is fast. There's a pre-built .app in the tarball on that site and a script to launch macvim from the command line.
A Product Without Competition is a Product You Shouldn’t be Selling
20 digit randomly generated password that gets mailed a month before the election

Shouldn't this help with that?

Also, internet-based voting doesn't have to mean you're using your own machines, just that you're using the internet to tally the vote. This could mean we have 100x the voting locations that we have now - one at every post office, public library, starbucks, what have you.
MapReduce in Erlang
Recipe for a billion-dollar website
Personally I found the ORA REST book did a good job of explaining some of the key problems that using HTTP RESTfully solves and the benefits that brings.

I think one of the key points of the book was that Flickr and Delicious could do better with their implementations of a REST API. Just because something is successful doesn't make it optimal.

I absolutely that adhering to something for it's own sake is stupid and dogmatic, I think that suggesting improvements to an implementation based on known benefits of an architecture is perfectly valid.
...use a closed-source voting system...

Calling it "secret software" might help, as people can understand that (and why it's bad) without explanation.

Public accountability requires no secret software.
How To Pull an All-Nighter
This doesn't make any sense... the information is already out there, and by holding up this ridiculous gag order, they're simply bringing MORE attention to the issues!
Stream Your Music Collection to Your iPhone (App Free for First 100k Users)
Not in terms and conditions of the question, no.
I don't think you addressed his point, which is that you can get the same amount of work done without 32 cores in 4RU by selecting a different, more cost-effective vendor.

Sun does have a slight but well-earned reputation as vanity hardware.
Seems like it. I just typed "vim" at a Terminal prompt in Leopard and was greeted with VIM 7.0.234.

I certainly didn't install that myself -- I use emacs on my local machines, although I admit I've been struggling to learn enough vi to do editing on remote servers.

I guess it's theoretically possible that vim came along with Xcode or MacPorts, but I can't imagine what I might have installed that had vim as a dependency.
What a great idea! I'd much prefer to pay for this badge than on that "Hacker Tested Daily" con badge that appears everywhere. It was smart to include the supposed consumption of browsers as well. Kudos!
T-Mobile Is Dreaming Of Android Riches. And It Might Have To Keep Dreaming.
I know these guys have gotten crucified on Techcrunch and even a little bit on HN, but here's something no one is talking about:

CO2stats has more revenue and more profits than all the other YC Summer 2008 companies combined. It's not even close.

Personally, I feel that regardless of political views: if you want to cut down on something, no matter what it is, you cut down on consumption (e.g. don't give government rebates, cut government spending).

It is truly the classic American view on things: Don't have enough money? Use a credit card. Don't want to exercise? Get liposuction. Why worry about things now when you can worry about them later? Gotta love this country. And of course this isn't how every American thinks, but based on our debt amounts and obesity rates, it's how a lot of Americans act.

Unfortunately, my views on prevention aren't widely adhered to and CO2stats might just work (it already is really), and they can laugh their way straight to the bank.
The earth acts as a block body so it's input energy must approximate its output energy or its temperature changes. So what magnitude change in input energy would equal a change of .7f? Well black body radiation (power out) = (T1^4 - T2^4) [in kelvin] so 1.0057x the power output or .57% but the estimated change in solar output is ~0.1% variation over the last 2,000 years which does not add up.

Granted the global temperature is not uniform and the earth is not a true black body but these numbers are not even close and it would take a huge swing in solar activity to get changes in the 1+ deg range.

PS: La Niña - is the likely culprit.
0. Make sure your HTTP responses return the correct value in the Vary header. Otherwise, everything else will fall apart.

1. Ensure that all your HTTP responses have proper ETags, and make sure you process the If-Match and If-None-Match request headers appropriately to avoid doing unnecessary work.

2. Put a simple caching reverse proxy (e.g. Squid, Varnish, mod_disk_cache) in front of your application. Then, tune the cache-control directives to allow the cache to return cached responses without hitting the back end. For this to work for HTTPS responses, you need to put a HTTP-to-HTTPS proxy in front of the caching proxy.

3. Add a system like the one described in the article, that immediately purges entries from the cache when they are updated in the back-end.

4. Purchase a caching, SSL-enabled, load-balancer appliance (e.g. Big-IP) that is built to do all of the above nearly automatically.

Most people never need to go beyond step #2.
Y'know, I hate to come to your country and tell you how to run your elections, but I really think the best way to do it is the way we do it in Australia.

You go to the ballot box, and you get a pencil, and a printed ballot sheet with a standardised design nationwide. You write little numbers (we have preferential voting) in little boxes, and stick it in a box. No hacking, no tampering, no confusion, no breakdowns, and no lining up for more than a couple of minutes.
Executing Our Ideas: It’s In the Details
Don't be afraid of change
If you have owned a car for 3 years or more and if your answer to all the above questions is "No', then you are a person who is afraid of change and you are someone who is content with status quo. I might sound highly judgmental but auto insurance companies are looking just looking for such people because if they manage to lock on to you
Friday Night Lights Episodes
Are you tired of missing episodes of your favorite TV show Friday Night Lights? Don't you think that the DVD's are way too expensive? Would you like to enjoy all your favorite Friday Night Lights Episodes at the comfort of your own home? Imagine how easier and cheaper it would ...
It is the future of space-based weaponry.
It's not clear from the video, but the utility power number probably includes environmental stuff like cooling and lights. Just dividing one number by the other isn't going to give you the size of the power supply for each machine.
Fedora is very good about free software, no doubt about that - they deserve a lot of credit for sticking to their guns on that issue. My point was merely that Fedora is sort of where Redhat tests things out, the "real product" is still Redhat Linux. Ubuntu is Ubuntu for everyone though.

Also... I'm biased: I've been using Debian since 1996, so it's what I know best.
Can any of the physics gurus here offer an explanation of how sunspot activity is related to heat output? It doesn't really explain that in the article. Less heat output means less fusion reaction, means less magnetic activity, means lack of sunspots, I presume?
It's a class action suit with about 10,000 potential class members, so the punitive damages could be substantial.
Is it possible that the disappearance of sun spots for the first time since the "little ice age" indicates a huge swing in solar activity?
Also, the statement "That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700" is inaccurate. Actually, the period from 1650 to 1700 is not for the little ice age, but for the Maunder Minimum, the previous period when there were few sunspots. The little ice age has no sharp beginning, and is variously said to start almost anywhere after the medieval warm period - say anywhere from mid-14th century to the mid-17th century. The little ice age ended with the beginning of global warming in the mid-19th century.
Symbolics Lisp Machine Documents
I know. Without even speculation on how they are related except some temporal correlation, I am inclined to discount this as idle fearmongering
What is the point of having a huge house that is mostly empty? Space is very expensive, even when it isn't filled up.
RMS interviewed on Radio NZ
[KH] If economic gains are not guaranteed by private software rights, would
that not lead to less innovation on the part of computer companies, software
companies.

[RMS] I don't know, and I don't care.

[KH] Well, that's an interesting response. Why don't you care?

[RMS] Because I want freedom more than I want innovation.
No worries. Helps keep me in check.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_ice_age
It's interesting, because there's evidence that that's what we as humans do. The subconscious decides something, then we make up a story when asked why we did X.
From the wikipedia article on sunspots:

Since sunspots are darker than the surrounding photosphere it might be expected that more sunspots would lead to less solar radiation and a decreased solar constant. However, the surrounding margins of sunspots are hotter than the average, and so are brighter; overall, more sunspots increase the sun's solar constant or brightness.
Netflix’s Product is Bloated & Outdated… Attention iPhone App Gallery
And then somebody could extort you to vote in certain way and remain at your side to make sure you comply... or steal your mail and vote for you.
Global warming + Miniature ice age = There is a God!
Why not both? Install one of them as the base, grab something like VirtualBox[1], and install both of them in virtual machines. Take a week or so, then pick your favorite. As a bonus, once you've picked, you can mimic having a production server on that machine with a Linux VM with just the basics (Apache/lighttpd + interpreter).

I'm actually in a similar boat. I'll be building a dual-core box (intel barebones + cheap processor + 4 GB for <$300) to use as a dev machine in addition to my Mac.

[1] = VirtualBox doesn't support multiprocessors for hosts. You may want another solution, but I haven't investigated the free Linux virtualization market at all (I think VMWare has a free Linux server, but I have no idea of its features). Paravirtualization is another option for a Linux-on-Linux solution, but I think it's too complex for this.
And this is why open source is doomed to fail in practically any commercial setting. Industry requires innovation, and paying costumers demand it.
Barcamp is this weekend! Be there or be square.
What's wrong with creating a subscription object and letting people manipulate it the usual REST way via /subscription/<id>?

That way you can list your subscriptions, modify, delete in a very consistent way, without a need for "POST /actions/modify_subscription" and such.
Custom events as API end points for key bindings and more
But if this were the cause, wouldn't sunspots put our global temperature in constant flux as the spots themselves migrate and as we orbit and move toward/away from them?
Legal Milestone for Open Source Licenses
I don't get it... so many articles explaining how to do something so simple - so long as you're not doing something you absolutely despise or is terribly boring, it's just a matter of making a conscious decision to remain awake despite the time....

Many times I find my alarm clock ringing its wake-up call while I'm still hunched over my PC churning out the code, because I'm in love with what I'm doing and couldn't let it go just so I can sleep.
Hopefully never.

If there is a powerful force that can infiltrate the counting process we need to have it open to the public.
The biggest issue with ASP.NET for me is that it ignores the underlying protocol. The writer tries explaining this away, saying that you can get at the raw http components if you want, but I don't think that matters much when the default use of ASP.NET is via the web forms model.

Once you're in web forms, you have to pretend like you're not on the web at all. I cannot apply all the knowledge I've learned from perl, php, java(jsp/servlet), and ruby on rails.

Basically, it's just not very easy to transfer knowledge of the web over to the ASP.NET framework. You have to relearn how to do basic tasks, and do it the microsoft way.
From the Deafness and Accessibility to Modular Innovation
That's funny! Care to point out where it's been failing lately? Or some signs of possible failure?

Paying customers will pay for things if they are worth the value. Open source developers are the only ones forcing their prices down to $0.
I try to be at least slightly better than mediocre, but fail frequently.

Humility leads to the highest distinction, because it leads to self-improvement.

- Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie
Five risks of solo programming
I'm not going to hit the down arrow, but your comment needs more depth to it. Open source is very much used in tons of commercial settings. Maybe what you're getting at is that cutting edge stuff is likely to remain proprietary?

One of the strengths of open source is that people can pay for innovation, not innovation + a whole heap of stuff that's not really that interesting. With open source, you can build up a huge amount of infrastructure and concentrate on your cutting edge secret sauce type of stuff to make money on.

Of course, RMS wouldn't be ok with that, but... well, "I don't care", to borrow his words. I'm glad he's around to frame the conversation though, he makes me look like a moderate.
Total Immersion- Alstom Train
Thanks for the info. I thought ubuntu is built on debian. Also, redhat and ubuntu are the two linux versions that are being most widely used. So far, i have never tried debian, Let me try this time.
Environmental control is one of the largest power sucks of a data center. It's part of why data center space is so expensive per square foot.
Erlang is not a new language, but its ability to do share-nothing distributed computation has only been really useful and topical for the last few years as computing power and network presence become increasingly commoditized.

If you're a software engineer who works below the UI layer and you don't know Erlang yet, odds are you're cheating yourself and doing a lot more work than you have to for the same distributed effects.

What's also very refreshing about learning Erlang is that it is already very mature and reliability is a feature built into the runtime over years of practical experience. Unlike switching to a language based around convenience or readability (e.g., Ruby and Python respectively), Erlang's implementation is so solid that you can give it the kind of trust you give–say–your C++ compiler (which is not absolute, but definitely higher than you'd assign to the ruby or python interpreters).

If we as software engineers are lucky, Erlang will become as common as C++ is now over the next 10 years.
The ability to not adhere to accepted practices can sometimes be a big advantage. Sometimes there is a better way to do something, and working alone can give you the freedom to find it.
They disappear every ~11 years and have been for a while but the next cycle has not started yet so some people think it might be while. Anyway, check: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation)

Edit: If you graphed solar radiation received at the outer surface of Earth's atmosphere you would see solar output over the last 100 years as a long line of 1,366w/m with some peaks at 1,367w/m and a possible drop into 1,365 territory.
If it was a "talent acquisition," why'd they pledge to limit the service only for a limited time, and to add a slew of wonderful features?
It's not as dramatic as the article makes it seem.

XML is and was a great solution far a huge number of things. Overexcited developers were tad too eager to put it to use for things outside its true scope (regardless of what it was marketed as), and now they're realizing that there are better alternatives for those particular applications.

XML was and still remains an excellent solution for the problem it originally solved: a joint human and machine readable markup language.
The chicken/egg problem could be solved by simply supplying a few apps & features of the first phone that everyone wants. If you can hook consumers with one or two apps, then you will attract developers. More openness will also attract developers.
Anybody have audio link? I'd love to listen to this on my drive home this evening.
Thanks. This is something my friend also suggested. We want to get started quickly and the amount of time we have is minimal. The only concern I had was if ubuntu can be used as a server platform. Most of the review talks about ubuntu being a desktop OS. Can I use ubuntu for a server grade system?
From what I hear, American elections involve many more votes than most other nations. At my local polls, the semiannual elections contain ballots for 5 or six different districts (federal, state, county, town, school district, fire district, police district) as well as referendums on several tax proposals and even things like road improvement projects. There are votes to sustain the currently elected Judges in my court district, and votes for positions like tax assessors. I'm sure I'm missing a few. Seriously, it's a lot of votes.

My voting district uses Scantron ballots which are nice because you do fill out a paper form, which is tallied on the spot. You get the paper trail of a paper ballot, with the speed of an electronic system.
ActiveRecord - Can haz namespaces?
Depicts the current state of namespacing support with Rails' ActiveRecord.
Is your ISP messing with your Internet traffic?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a free software tool to check your connection for ISP’s bad behavior. It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets.
Dreamhost? Really?

Maybe its because the site is so simple, but I would find it hard to believe ANY successful startup could be ran on shared hosting, never mind Dreamhost.

But a nice performance boost from shared hosting would be a 256 VPS from Slicehost ($20/mo), then you can scale up to more ram/CPU as you need it... :)
Actually i bought a desktop with quad core and 6GB RAM. This should be a good candidate for server. Let me ask a simple question, is virtual box a free ware or i need to buy the software?. Also, iam planning to install CVS and mail server on the same box.
I'm waiting for the followup article, "How to Eat a Sandwich"

Actually, it was kind of a neat post.
Why aren't high security requirements apps deployed on hardware that's completely incapable of modifying its own code? There's no reason why you have to have the dev environment on the target machine. It might be more convenient, but for high security, it just doesn't seem like a good idea.

One possible answer: general purpose architectures are cheaper due to economies of scale.
By this I meant putting philosophy in front of practicality. 99% (or some other arbitrary percentage) of users want just that... to use software X to do Y. For them, software is a tool, not an end in it self. People care as much about the source code as they do about the plans to their cars engine... they just want it to work without giving them any problems.
This is why Windows or OSX beat Linux on the desktop. Practicality beats philosophy. There's also another consideration, incentives. Compare Apples incentives with, say, Red Hats.

Apple makes money selling overpriced hardware with extremely user friendly software. If the software causes problems, if it doesn't make their life easier, users won't pay the premium for the hardware, Apple has every incentive to invest heavily on GUI-candy and ease of use in general.

RH makes money providing support for their software. If the software is too easy to use, nobody will by the support. They have every incentive to keep a certain level of complexity.
Introducing Cryptanalysis
XML is an embarrassment. It solves no problem: not even the problem of agreeing on how to represent data. The only thing it does is give programmers something recognizable to fiddle with, however irrelevant to the problem it may be.

Most religious wars in computer science hinge on matters of taste. If you prefer emacs to vi, maybe that's just your style. If you prefer PHP to Ruby, there may be several good reasons why.

There is no such ambiguity in the case of XML. If you prefer XML to anything but XML, you don't know what you're talking about. You should have no say in anything that affects other programmers.

We're in this mess because of the unforeseen popularity of the web. When the web was created, its designers chose a simple and not particularly good markup language. Then the web grew, and instead of everybody recognizing the language as bad and replacing it, we turned a blind eye to its faults and kept it around.

The immense popularity of the web has glossed over all the deficiencies present in markup languages. People can't imagine that anything that built the internet might have something wrong with it. The internet is good, so anything that built the internet must be good as well.

Markup language was ill-conceived. Generalizing it into XML was folly.

How can you possibly take XML seriously? How do you squeeze an entire blog post out of it? Have you never bothered to look at the technology? The author is obviously capable of writing a coherent, well-thought out essay. Did he never stop and look at what he was doing and go, "This is a whole lot of shit!"
I'm sad to have not been involved in such awesome experiments.
I could see how it's easier to learn user simple preferences from their voting history, but it's shortsighted to say "all meta data is useless".

What about deriving statistical information from scripts, reviews, or online forums?
In competitive academic debate, we've long been reading evidence that we're 'due' for a new period of global cooling and so all the global warming activity is good because it's helping stave off the next ice age.
What Comes After the Windows Era?
Indeed, in the 1970s the "green" movement was very worried about a new ice age, and the solutions they proposed to global cooling were, strangely, almost the same solutions now proposed to combat global warming.
Or Haskell...
I guess it depends more on the person then. I was in a similar situation when I moved to Boston and we've gotten more work done in two months than our competitors have in two years. And, most importantly, we're happy.

When I was a financial analyst I had tons of "stuff" and really it just caused me stress and worry. I liked the idea of having stuff instead of the "stuff itself". I think that's a PG quote. To each his own though.
Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web