skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To quote Gary McGraw, "All the magic crypto fairy dust in the world won't make you secure."
It's not pretty at the moment (I can design, and I'll make it better this week), but I'm here http://www.jamescleveland.co.uk/
Brandon Mathis: Design Enthusiast: HSLpicker.com Released
I started with rails 3 and I haven't had any major hurdles to overcome. I've been very impressed with Rails. I'm coming from a Python/PHP framework background, and so far rails is my favorite (only done a few apps so far, mind you).
So you never take them out yourself. Use bitcoins to sell something to a friend or someone on the internet, use bitcoins to buy something.
I could never wrap my head around the Rails world. I enjoy the elegance and simplicity of Python/Django. There's a lot less 'holy shit magic' moments.
Indeed. The way that the conclusion was worded would (if I did not know better) have had me believing that C was a relatively new language rather that the common precursor to most modern languages.
I decided I'd mention it if I had occasion to write him about anything else. Surely he's seen it, and I imagine it's just hard for a book to avoid this fate now. It's a pity, though -- I'd rather have an electronic copy (assuming no DRM) than what his publisher put out.
According to http://www.smartmoney.com/invest/stocks/the-bitcoin-triples-... they were making $40,000 a day. That's pretty incredible.
Surely there's some middle ground though, no? At what point do you have a stable core and then you just bolt things on? There's nothing stopping you from using SASS and Coffeescript with Rails 2.3.

I skipped the Rails 3 upgrade just simply because I couldn't justify the time sink. rspec made it ridiculously worse with the difference in Rails support between 1.x and 2.x. I'm guessing with Rails 3.1 coming out I'll have to upgrade just because most of the plugins I use have moved on and don't backport bugfixes.

It'd be nice to evolve an app without having to constantly wasting time on version compatibility. It's an absolute nightmare if you have any non-trivial-sized app.
Am I the only one that doesn't want two column layout to come back, especially on tablets? Two column layout is a relic of a single page layout -- something that seems a bit pointless when you no longer need to be constrained by the page.
the answer is damdollar
IMHO Rails has become the very kind of spaghetti web "muck" it set out to replace 5 years ago. This is my primary reason for switching to Node.js for as much as possible going forward.

What ever happened to the original spirit from 2007 of "build a blog in 10 minutes using Rails"? Good luck doing that now in under an hour!

I think Rails has drifted very far from the "convention over configuation" mentality. It's inevitable that this happens to any awesome software after you let programmer geeks pile on for 5+ years.

Now you'd be lucky to get Bundler working in 10 minutes on your new Rails app.
And then you'd have to visit railswizard.org or find an app generator to handle all of the boilerplate configuration choices you'd need just to get the conventional Rails app running.

And then you'd have to make a million other choices just to build a blog.

Developers are like water, always following the path of least energy, flowing downhill.
The moment any software becomes difficult to use, it's dead, as the zeitgeist shifts.

Right now Node.js feels very similar to the way Rails felt in 2006-7, where you can sense the growing momentum of a large shift in the developer community.
Ask HN: Food Truck fan communities/startups?
I'm in the process of creating Fruckies.com for Food Truck Foodies. I haven't really seen any real activity in this niche market yet. If you love Food Trucks or know of a good local community, please let me know. :)
I agree, it is a sticky problem. Really, it does make sense to have the content areas defined by divs (though what to do if one of them ends up empty?) And once you've done that, where is the content supposed to go? I suppose then it makes sense for it to be in a separate hidden div... What happens to styles put on that div? Will the content div be represented in the DOM? I feel like it makes for some sticky questions.

Before this proposal, you might have attempted to implement these features server side; deciding what parts of which text should end up in each div. It's just unclear to me that having this hidden div is the best way to bring your text up to the browser.
Absolutely, but it's quite likely that it highlights a systemic problem with this type of business which the article discusses. Shadier business owners can abuse it.

Rhymes with Groupon.
There's a law against that: Leaky Abstractions. As soon as you need to do anything interesting or novel all that complexity smacks you somewhere. Languages just make different tradeoffs as to where they smack you.
Did anyone else assume the HN community was made up of people who aren't incompetent until now?

I'm not defending iTunes' current direction, but honestly. The sheer number of people so intimidated by their phones & iTunes that they just bypass the whole mess is very sad. If you can't spend all of 5 minutes figuring out how to sync the device you bought, then I seriously wonder why you are browsing a site like this.

iTunes & the sync model is a little convoluted for your average user, but c'mon guys. Step it up a little. If you can't figure out how to sync your iPhone without wiping it, please close your HN account ASAP.
Node.js isn't required. You can use any of the seven javascript runtimes that the ExecJS gem supports.

https://github.com/sstephenson/execjs
I love Node for many things, but I agree with this sentiment.

At work, every time we undertake a project in Node, it just doesn't work at scale, and it has to get re-implemented in Erlang.

A lot of this is for personnel reasons. To all of us Node is a neat new toy, where a few engineers are Erlang wizards. If Node crashes we don't have any experience debugging it. If it locks up there's little intuition why.

Can people point to examples of large production Node deployments?
Neither do iOS users. What is your point?
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=69487
Microsoft objects to Nortel patent sale terms
Which perhaps says something about the book.
Among my users, the iPhone 4 accounts for 61% of all iPhone devices active in the last 30 days. iPhone 3gs is 31%.
(1) Because you do not know who you are sending it to.

(2) I don't know, never tried to answer that question.
Security - Stupid Is As Stupid Does
IMO, ASP.NET is a mediocre to poor framework get's by because it uses an above average language (C#) and a vary good editor (Visual Studio). Still it all comes down to the types of applications your creating. If your building yet another internal CRUD app go with ASP.NET. If you want to build the next hipmunk then Rails is probably a better option.
Had this one on my ideas list for a long while now :) Good luck!

Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned from what worked and didn't work on rulesofthumb.org?
I think the author is conflating two issues - (1) learning Rails and (2) keeping up with the latest developments in Rails.

I agree with the author that (2) is getting harder - but this is the price you pay for improvement.

I disagree that (1) is getting to be overly difficult. By and large, the changes to Rails 3 and Rails 3.1 make it easier for developers to do more advanced things with Rails. If you just look at the simple tutorial applications that newcomers to Rails are starting out with, I don't think their complexity has increased very much from Rails 2 to 3 to 3.1. Yes, they are different from version to version, but this doesn't matter to the newcomer.

TL;DR - the framework has more functionality, which makes it more difficult to learn the entire framework, but it is not significantly more difficult to learn how to accomplish any given task.
Over time, Rails changes to make it easier to deal with the complex needs of web applications.

Part of that is changing things to make things more orderly, so you can actually find your way around a complex application without too much wasted effort. That places demands on developers, especially when migrating, but makes it easier in the future.

The amount of power you can weld in the present is dependent on how much capability you acquired in the past. You can always enter a battle with your bare fists and no learning curve, but if someone gives you a free sword, learning to use it before the battle is more likely to lead to victory.

This is not learning for the sake of learning. But even learning for the sake of learning grows your ability to learn.
Libyan rebels hack a truck into a tank
Mastery is a strange term. For example, most people would recognize that to be a professional athlete you must have mastered that sport. Yet, at the same time, within that professional level there are often a select few all-stars or champions that stand out amongst the field.

So, Steve Jobs in charge during the Mac era vs Steve Jobs as CEO of Pixar vs Steve Jobs CEO of Next vs. Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple during the iMac/iPod/iPhone era is certainly different levels of mastery. At what point did Steve Jobs "master" the art of running a company? You can certainly look back a decade or more and see him doing much the same things then as he is now. Yet, he clearly is a more successful CEO now than 10 or 20 years ago.

Perhaps mastery would be better defined as attaining a level of capability in all the required skills required of a particular job/skillset. Mastery is often the point of diminishing returns where you spend minimal time learning new skills and most of your time refining your skills and methods further.
One of alan's points is that it is incorrect to assign behaviors of "older Stackoverflow users" to the universe of "older developers".

The population of "older Stackoverflow users" is not randomly drawn from the population of "older developers", and nothing is put forward to claim that the former is representative of the latter, so you cannot make this assumption.
I'll admit to being in a slightly bad mood, but there are literally multitudes of blogs dedicated to news about Google and preaching its praises.

I don't particularly consider this kind of endless, banal content centered around a handful of behemoth companies and trendy news topics interesting, especially with legitimately insightful articles buried in the new queue and receiving hardly a click (example: https://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/06/09/09climatewire-this-... ).

If I tire day in, day out of reading the same rhetoric on Hacker News that I can find covered on the BBC (e.g. the ~5 articles they currently have dedicated to LulzSec on their technology home page, kids finding SQL injections really classifies as content for a boutique technical news site?), and can't respond with a little sarcasm, then perhaps HN isn't worth my time.
I'm not sure what you mean by saying that "Two column layout is a relic of a single page layout". Columns have a long history (newspapers come to mind) that does not seem to be tied to single page layout.

The most important thing that columns preserve is readable line lengths. If you want to maintain good, readable line lengths on the web, you are going to end up with a relatively thin column and a lot of scrolling. Multiple columns allow us to more efficiently use the visible on screen space while maintaining readability. That seems pretty valuable to me.
Life is too short to wait. Users of Selfey can buy and sell spots in line
The "Big Content" problem is a classic example of the short term thinking that is inevitably brought about when human ambition meets current methods of compensation (i.e. pay).

It's in the interest of all kinds of managers to drive up favourable results in the short term so that they can achieve their next promotion and/or receive benefits from any stock options they hold (which typically vest on very short-term timescales compared to, say, the length of technological cycles).

Inevitably this leads to those managers seeking local maxima (i.e. sub-optimal tactical revenue generation) rather than more global maxima (i.e. more optimal structural changes to bring about increased revenue generation in the long term) which will take longer to become profitable than the individual is in their post to receive the credit for those decisions.

The problem is apparent in almost all forms of human interaction, to the extent that it is probably deeply-rooted in our fundamental psychology. We all prefer the quick wins to the bigger wins that can be achieved by deferring immediate gratification. (There's a relatively famous study which shows that unattended children will often eat a cookie even when they know they will get two cookies if they leave the cookie alone until the researcher returns in a few minutes.)

So I guess it's important that we realise that this is a deep problem and think about what (if anything) could be done to solve it. I suspect that it's actually near-impossible to change the behaviour of powerful individuals within an organisation in any meaningful way, and that having an external entity usurp the established order is about the best solution that can be achieved. (I assert that this is true on an individual level within organisations and also when considering organisations as a whole.)

It may turn out that this is (in general) a more efficient way to seek global maxima than to wait for a particular entity to alter its behaviour. It would certainly seem that competing entities with different strategies would be so numerous that better strategies are more likely to come from without than within...
I wanted to learn how to drive a car, so I bought this F-1 race car and had trouble learning how to drive.

I decided that to make things easier, I'd put more padding on the seat, and ask for people in the stands to give me directions.
I stay caught up on everything in railsland just by watching Railscasts. I can't deny that it's chaotic right now but I'm enjoying the rapid progress. I like the little things, like js and css moving from public to app.

Also, I think the switch from prototype to jQuery will help beginners.
It feels like Rails is slowly dying. It doesn't have the broad penetration of PHP, and most folks taking up a scripting language today choose Python.
I'm also a big fan of ragel, and have used it for various protocol implementations. One of the really nice features is that you can have it output graphviz dot files, to get an actual visualisation of your state machine, so you know where you've missed a transition, or how you've accidentally hit a state explosion with a bad rule.
Like in BASIC and SQL.
For what it's worth, we're actively discussing this proposal in the CSS WG. There are several of us who would prefer an approach (anonymous ::slot pseudos or some such) which would allow for Zen Garden-like change of region styling without requiring the content to change.
So whilst it doesn't work yet, I actually will support type switches as well ...
Thank you so much! Sounds like a good ad.

It sounds like they're describing the concept in the same way that we do.

Shame that they're squeezing their branding into the revolution. Glad it was just one shot of that.
Bit more pricy than the other paid alternatives, but perhaps the speed and simplicity is worth it.
Yeah, his description qualifies as money laundering; it's not any different than running the money through multiple proxies (fake businesses, escrow services, etc) in real life. And if a guy gets brought down after using this kind of thing he'll still get stuck with a money laundering charge; it doesn't become legal magically just because it's done with btc.
Nitrogen is well equipped web framework http://nitrogenproject.com/

You have mochiweb ( https://github.com/mochi/mochiweb ) and misultin ( https://github.com/ostinelli/misultin ) if you want something a bit more like node
What about developers that don't spend much time online? Or that don't find much personal joy in answering the questions of strangers?

Just because Stack Overflow might be one of the best places to get a sampling online doesn't mean it is actually a correct sampling of the population of software developers.
Catalyst is the main web framework for Perl, and it's always been of this design. No opinions, craft every little component exactly to your own specifications. No default ORM, no default Javascript helpers, no default form builder, no default templating library. Bring Your Own (or download from CPAN).

Back in the day, I remember writing reddit comments and blog posts to explain the relative popularity of Rails over Catalyst. It was usually along the lines of, "people want to be told what to do. given a screw, they would rather bash it in with a hammer than to read about what a screwdriver is." Posts like this reinforce that point: people don't use Rails because they want to use Rails, people use it because they're afraid of anything else. Rails gave them everything that they thought they needed, and no easy way to back out of the defaults. It was a comfortable world where you could never do something wrong. Now that Rails is becoming a meta-framework like Catalyst, people are being driven away because they have to think before they program, and they have to customize Rails into the framework they want instead of just using the framework that dhh wants.

You can even see this in the Perl community; people are switching away from Catalyst in favor of mini-frameworks that barely meet their needs, just because they feel like the framework author has thought of everything and they will never write a line of boring code again.

If only.
Are you talking about MVC or WebForms? If you're thinking of the framework where you lay out controls on a designer, you're fighting the wrong framework.
Naming products and Trademark checks
I'm an independent app developer. I picked a name for my app that I've been using through beta and just discovered that the name of my app is in name of another software company. If Foobar was my app name, they are Foobar software. We are in a different field altogether - I'm a consumer mac app, they're an IT / business integration tool set. It's a pretty generic word.

I performed a search at http://tess2.uspto.gov/ and of all the marks, the Goods and Services were always clearly different from my Goods and Services.

I'm not looking to file a trademark or hire a lawyer, or even be 100% sure, I just want to be sure I'm not obviously shooting myself in the foot.

What process do you go through when naming your app?
US facing legal challenge to domain name seizures
Sideline topic: Yeah, I can't handle these types of crowds, even though I really need to find a co-founder. I can't go to these specifically because of all the talking of sh__ that goes on. I'm afraid many people in the startup scene may think they will be the next best CEO in the world, so they go to these events and typically spend the entire time droning on with enough business/tech-laced hot air you could fill a balloon with it big enough to have saved the Titanic from sinking. But, when it comes to rolling up sleeves and getting things done...well...crickets.
Streaming EEG using websockets and the emokit library (just POC, rate is very low so all data are essentially noise): http://makemyactionschainreactions.net/eeg/
Depending on how you are going about it, Google App Engine may suit you the best..uses java, python, or go

One huge advantage - its free till 5,000,000 hits or some given # of cpu cycles

That said, you would need to carefully evaluate your requirements first. App engine uses Big Table for database, and they recommend it for apps that have a lot more reads than writes. Google it!
You are not forced to use SASS and Coffeescript. You can just switch them off. You can also switch off the asset pipeline.
Yes - median is a far better method to use in a situation like this, especially when what is being measured (reputation) has a bounded minimum and an unbounded maximum, and double especially when the sample size in each age bucket is relatively small.
Since when is the syntax the "hard" part of C programming? This guy doesn't have a clue.
If you were like me and wondered why they had to go back six after going forward five, it's because they counted wrong.

They go forward six and a half turns, and go back six and three quarters.
Agreed. The column and optimal line length conventions of print weren't arrived at through whimsy, but rather a centuries of experimentation in improving readability. Obviously screen is a very different medium, with it's own unique considerations but optimal line length is just as important a readability issue as ever.
Prolog Definite Clause Grammars for Clojure
NodeJS is great for applications with a lot of clients, but not for CPU intensive apps.

Well, you do with node what you do with anything: if you have 4 CPU cores, run 4 copies of your app. Problem solved.
Ask HN: Anyone with a limited budget need a quick (one-off) web app?
I've recently changed jobs (Rails dev), and have a few days of downtime to kill. If anyone with a small budget (>$1000) needs a quick site done, I'm up for it!

I do full stack Rails development professionally -- primarily sns/mobile games.
At least we know it wasn't LulzSec.
So you think there's no place for a solution that doesn't require JavaScript?
I should probably look around for a new name then, I'm DanishBacon on twitter, which puts me in the danger area for being deleted outright and replaced by a bacon marketing scheme..
I looked through your shared/util.js and, while I don't want to take anything away from your project, it doesn't seem to me that there is much of a case for significant and useful code sharing in Node. When I think of code sharing, I expect something like Luna, from Asana http://asana.com/luna/

Instead, the examples of shared code in Node are always simple utility functions, validators and the like. While it helps not to have to rewrite those, it's not groundbreaking. Facilitating the sharing of state between client and server -- hopefully irrespective of the server-side language -- would be a much better goal, IMO.
File First, Invent Later?
I think it's quite telling that DHH frequently tweets his opposition to aspects of what is happening with Rails, and that Yehuda quit the core team.

In a world where some time on the core team can land someone $300K per year in salary + speaking + book deals, there is bound to be this sort of chaos. I view the push toward agnosticism as a misguided attempt to be the "one true framework" and also to salve the egos of those whose decisions and work are being undone.
I disagree. With the proliferation of new tutorial books and screencasts in addition to more and more web developers choosing Rails, it's far from dying, it's actually in growing at rapid rate.
From an App. You have no option to remove such stories that Facebook generates itself, without any apps.
re: UPDATE: apparently the entire concept of their app is a direct rip-off of mine, not just the name. I guess that makes the legal issues more interesting?

It might. Don't go on a spending spree yet. Let a competent lawyer look it over. My guess at a glance -- and I'm not a lawyer, just stewed in IP issues -- would be you'll have a hard time getting anything out of their theft of your concept, short of owning a patent. Copyright could give you some relief if they directly ripped your code off and you can prove they decompiled and/or used something from that. Your best bet again is probably trademark infringement against your mark which had prior use. (That also depends on if Facebook themselves haven't trademarked the word "Like" the way they've trademarked "Book".)

Other than a lawyer, your only bet is to raise an unholy racket here and in the blogosphere and make sure everyone knows you did it first. Which I fully support.
Maybe, but good programming is not the same thing as good gameplay design.