skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like I should have stopped reading this missive after the first phrase, which is "The economic crisis in Greece is the most consequential thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars."

The Balkan wars were in 1912-1913. I can think of a few other significant things that happened in Europe since then. This crisis - it is really more of a tantrum than a crisis, since the Greeks know perfectly well they are on the hook for the money they spent on themselves - doesn't even register as a blip. It's not going to collapse the economy of the 400 million people within the EU/eurozone area, and even if it did, it still wouldn't reach the significance of 70 years of revolutions and communism and dictatorships and the freaking Holocaust and a couple of world wars, now would it?

This sort of wild-eyed panic mongering by people who take a bath on their real estate or stock purchase, and think that they are living through the worst crisis in the 7,000 years of recorded history, is beginning to wear thin. It's annoying even as deliberate hyperbole.

On top of this, the economic points made are stale and unconvincing. He talks about low interest rates being appropriate for Germany, but not for Greece. Well, guess what? You don't have to lend at low rates to Greek institutions. You can take a risk premium on top of the basic Euro central bank rates. People weren't doing that because they thought that Greece would catch up economically to the Euro average; it didn't, and the risk premiums went up. Hardly worth killing the Euro zone over this.

EDITED to add: he probably meant the wars in former Yugoslavia, rather than what's actually known as the Balkan wars. OK, but frankly, this is still crap, since clearly the creation of the Euro block itself and the unprecedented economic expansion in its new members is far more significant than a tantrum in 3% of the Eurozone. And the economic points are absolute garbage: yes, Argentina recovered, because it is a mining/exporting country and commodity prices skyrocketed. Not very relevant to Greece.
I think that's kind of the point of the article: When you can afford the worst case, there really isn't any value in certainty.
For me, those documents are but papers that marks the existence of a certain person in the political angle. It seems like papers are more valuable than life. Jose and you deserved recognition by papers. Hopefully, many people like you would support the Dream Act.

Anyways, it's the states policy.
SPB is not a single developer that made this success overnight. it is an established firm that made shells for smartphones for years.
If the US would dump Jose Vargas, I assure you, his home country would gladly accept him and big opportunity awaits him here.

For sure the big papers and TV network here in the Philippines would race to get Jose to join them.

JV, it's time to face another world. We got your back!
I know they are talking about businesses and everything here, but let me throw a wrench into that entire theory.

2010 San Francisco Giants.
Markets are pricing greek debt as defaulted because it's the most rational thing for the greeks to do, and the most rational outcome. Greece holds power over the EU to the degree that its financial insolvency can bring the whole system down. (Technically, it's a power transfer from the EU to US as the fed has already bailed out the EU banks in anticipation of the Greek default)

When you owe the bank $1 million the bank owns you, when you owe the bank $469 billion, you own the bank. The average greek is smart enough to know this and knows that the closer they get to default the better the deal they will get. The banks have two options, get nothing, or get something.

Also, if the Greeks' can't pay at a AAA rating they certainly can't pay at AA rating, nor A, not BB, so the end game for rational thinkers is default because as the rating drops the inability to pay increases. Since Greeks hold EU notes and EU denominated assets they can't even be screwed via an exchange rate mechanism. If Greece defaults Europe basically has to eat it, and it puts Europe in a much worse negotiating position with Spain and Portugal.

Furthermore, with regard to bond pricing there is no such thing as a bad bond, only a bad price, hence they are quickly being priced to zero. It's similar to the whole subprime thing, guys who bought subprime post Aug 2008 actually did alright because the prices were so low that you'd be somewhat likely to get your money back.
OK, then:

1. Given that either will work for this scenario; and

2. Given that JavaScript has every weakness that the other method has; and

3. Given that JavaScript also has weaknesses that the other method does not have; then

Why would you use JavaScript to solve this problem?
Your math implies that all apps are paid and each is developed by different developer. Both are false.

And it is not the same as Android by far.
The reason for this big imbalance is the focus of the German industry on exporting goods.
Every time the Euro is lowered the German exports are heavily increasing what makes the problem even worse.

Different countries with the same currency was a stupid idea to begin with.
I think the author means the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, which have been called the War in the Balkans by some.
Section of Matz's RubyConf X presentation that covers RITE:

http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/rubyconf-2010-keynot...
he is obviously referring to the breakup of Yugoslavia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_Yugoslavia
Appears to be blocked now
Is there any way to make the browser do an Accept: application/csv header on a hyperlink?

I'm pretty sure users like their "Download as CSV" links, which I've generally done as /normal/resource/url(.csv)

While this post sets out the ideals, I think there are some cases where for usability, you have to do something less than ideal.
Given the title, not at all what I expected. He keeps hitting home on 'this is just the beginning' and I can't think of a phrase that is more correct for our time. I likewise agree very strongly with prediction as a fools game. Sir Clarke said it long ago and if he couldn't, does anyone really think the folks who have followed could or can? I quote the great Wiki quoting Sir Arthur:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Quitting A Six Figure Job: One Year Later
Google plus - because I hate being put in a box
It is fairly common to describe what Wikipedia calls the Yugoslav Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_wars) as de Balkan War(s) that broke out after Yugoslavia fell apart.

I read it as referring to those conflicts. I think that makes more sense, too, as the target audience wouldn't really know of those earlier wars (I knew, but not even for a monument thought of them when reading this)
The problem with posts like these is that they say things like "THIS IS BAD!!!!!1" without saying why.
How is this not automated ageism?
Genetic Sequencing is “Really simple” when you get right down to it
What if patents granted tax benefits instead of granting a monopoly? Would this work?
You guys must be kidding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5DiTPw3dk
That's not true with this post in particular.

It's not saying various practices are "bad," but that they don't conform to REST or the principles laid out in the HTTP specs.
Yes, I know what it is, but I won't tell :-)

Twenty years ago, I was sitting in front of a 386-SX. Most of the Moore's Law since then has been eaten by the bigger screen and faster net. Isn't it incredible?
When teams gel and you get a synergistic effect, it's an awe-inspiring thing. Humility is often the key ingredient. Contrast the 2011 Mavs with the 2011 Heat. The individual team members must be humble else hubris and competing egos will drag them down.

Hubris leads to overreaching and taking uncalculated risks (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10565), and I believe this is far more common when individuals are part of a team than whey they are working alone because teams provide a safety net and outlet for passing the buck. Individuals working alone don't have these outs, and this helps keep them in check.

Another aspect to this is if an individual has the freedom to flow in any direction and is not bound by constraints imposed by the group, then the individual has the freedom to tap into and include their best ideas in the project without having to pass them by a committee. This reduces context switches, allows them to flow faster and better maximize their potential.

In addition, when a corporation hires someone with a specific task in mind, they may only see a sliver of the individual's potential because the latent parts aren't relevant to the job description. Contrast this to an entrepreneur that puts his heart and soul and every fiber of his being into realizing his vision. This environment is maximizing his potential because he is summoning all his best parts. When all of that energy is harnessed and focused, the individual is much more valuable.
OK, OK, I agree now that that's what he meant. But for me, "the Balkan wars" is standard terminology referring to those wars, which really did involve all of the Balkans, and I thought he was making some kind of a point about a century of history in Europe coming full circle - some people like to do that. And I still think that the article is panic-mongering badly-argued long-winded garbage.
The above quote "THIS IS BAD!!!!!1" was lifted directly from the article.
Please explain why it is rational for Athens and Berlin to not share the same currency, but is rational for NYC and LA to share the same currency. NYC and LA are MUCH further apart than Berlin and Athens. I fear your view of the modern economy is rather mercantilist and zero-sum rather than the capitalist view that the economy grows via increases in productivity. (Personally, I feel we are moving away from the productivity view towards an attention based economy)

Most of the arguments in regard to national economies make little sense in smaller geographic contexts, there is little worry that NYC is 'stealing' jobs from Wichita because of the various subsidies in NYC compared to the idea that China is 'stealing' jobs from the US. No one worries about the trade imbalance between Iowa and Alaska.

Why are we not worried about cheap Kentucky labour spilling into San Francisco? Most of the arguments made with regard to trade policies and imbalances are irrational, especially in light of the reserve currency status of the US dollar.
good point, as long as the browsers don't have convenient way of displaying you the possible displayable mime-types this function isn't very useful to the enduser.
Contract based programming (Python)
I've used counters in Redis for mutex control. If incr returns 1, it means we have succeeded. Otherwise it decrements it and tries again after 1 second until it suceeds.

Here is the code:
https://gist.github.com/1062584
They're ivory tower ideals.

The web has grown organically and it has the warts to prove it. It's useful to think about the spec and to work toward improvements, but if it's real world possible to have your services work well for mobile clients on m.domain.com and real world impractical to do so on your main domain (or any of the other examples regarding actions, languages, versioning, whatever)—then by all means, break the rules.
You can use the Google Docs "importFeed" formula to pull in the RSS feed. Example:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkTPCnq...

Not sure if Excel has anything similar.

Edit: You might also be able to execute some shenanigans using "importHTML", but the default parsing is pretty malformed.
Writing a launcher takes work. I don't think it's ever strange to expect payment in return. Just because Google wrote a launcher at some point in the past doesn't mean that all future programmer's work in that area should be released for free.

I happen to think this particular launcher is a gimmick, but it's clear that they put work into it and that it's very different than what Google ships.
>it is really more of a tantrum than a crisis, since the Greeks know perfectly well they are on the hook for the money they spent on themselves

The Greeks didn't know the gov was in debt because Goldman Sachs colluded with corrupt government officials to hide the debt[1]. They have ample reason for a "tantrum" against their corrupt government.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00....

Goldman Sachs has made a good business out of contributing to, and capitalizing on the, collapse of countries by corrupting their officials (Greece, Russia, the US). In my opinion, they should be treated like a dangerous cult (which is how they operate).
I've personally given up trying to save the term REST. It was hijacked and will never recover completely at this point. What I've been looking for is a good alternative name. Sometimes I'll write out representational state transfer which is clever enough to get past most REST pretenders but I have yet to find something short.
Before he even discusses his individual points the author gives his definition of "bad," and the reason the other approaches are "bad." From the introduction:

> Let's talk about a few cases where either REST or HTTP (which is clearly RESTful in its design) solves a common web development problem.

> so they make up a partial solution that solves their given case but doesn't jive well with the way that everything else works
Amazing. I was familiar with Fomenko as a mathematician, but I had no idea he was into this stuff. Thanks for the link.

BTW, much of Fomenko's mathematical work is quite accessible -- lots of pretty pictures. Also, whatever one might say about this history stuff, his math is not at all crackpot-ish.
the 2010 SF Giants had some of the most individually talented pitchers in the game.
Another good example!
I was thinking what you suggest in your edit, though it seems weird to say "the Balkan wars" (plural) if you're referring to what is sometimes (and only sometimes) called the "third Balkan war".

If that is what he meant, then I think it's hard to debate what is "more significant", a change in the continent's politics with economic impact, or hundreds of thousands of lives ended and ruined, albeit in only a limited region of the continent. I wouldn't really know where to come down on that fence.

On the other hand - my history is very rough, but I do believe there is at least a case for claiming that the first two Balkan Wars had a hand in leading to the first world war, which in turn lay the foundation for the second world war... if you make that logic stick, then suddenly they were crazily important to the entire continent/world.
I believe I read that the S II had entirely open source drivers, which suggested to me than the Cyanogoen folk might have an easier time with long term support. (I believe they also sent phones to several such developers). And given the high sales, I was certain it would be well supported by the community. Sad to see they've hit a stumbling block, this could certainly sway my intended purchase to a rival device.
You mean "who worked on Google+," not "who works on Google+." I was all excited to read a story about double agents!
If you do use content type negotation, you are best off giving each type a different url (with the conneg doing a redirect) if the representations are usefully different ie you might want to bookmark one or the other.

In practise no one does use it, so just forget about it.
Very good read, and thorough. I particularly like the transaction example. It seems like a common idiom that trips people up with REST.

However, I do have a problem with REST that I've been dealing with lately. Specifically, the question of web-hooks. Many services today allow you to pass a URL that they will hit with a POST request whenever something happens. A good example is the GitHub post-receive hook (http://help.github.com/post-receive-hooks/). So, to be a good student of REST, I create an /update resource for the POST (similar to the /transaction example from the article). However, /updates might come in a variety of formats. Not just JSON vs XML, but GitHub vs Gitorious vs Beanstalk vs etc.

So, how do I handle these "formats". Presumably the "Accept" header is out of the question (unless the provider happened to know about MIME's vendor extensions and used them). So then is it acceptable to add a parameter? Use "/update?from=GitHub" for example? Or, is it appropriate to use an extra path element like "/update/GitHub", since the resource really is a "GitHub update", not just a vanilla "update"?
If you are developing, `gcc -g` while compiling(or CFLAGS += g), and loading the core with gdb does give a very good idea of what went wrong.
Yes, matching regular expressions is easy, if you don't care about speed or features. Like, being able to match a literal dot or asterisk. Or char classes, or getting case insensitivity right (like the German ß that matches SS, so case folding needs not to preserve string length).

Still nice to see that it can be done in so few lines.
The problem is if you don't follow those constraints, but still call your system REST. The meaning of the concept is rendered useless by so many people abusing it without understanding what it means.
My issue wasn't with the "retarded" line, actually; I was more concerned by this:

"If someone says something negative about your project in an unreasonable way, don’t take it to heart. There’s something good in every project (it’s open source, it already has one thing going for it), no single project is complete crap, keep the good things and learn from the criticism.

All this boils down to basically 'surround yourself with good people.'"

This is the kind of thinking that lets people write bad code. "Unreasonable" is subjective here and lets people be very thin-skinned and defensive about their code. There is code which is complete crap and serves only as a warning to others to pay heed, lest they write code just as bad. (Feel free to consider that hyperbolic and point out that "complete" and "serves only as" are contradictory.)

It's fine to surround yourself with "good people," who I presume are people that are Good-aligned, but that's never going to reveal systemic weaknesses or flaws in your code; you're just going to end up as another group of people that relies on black hats to point out where your code was flawed.

In other words, this entire post feels like thinly veiled positive thinking in excess. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo for a much better summary of the problem.
Come on, have you actually read the article that you quoted? It says that GS helped Greece borrow an additional $1 billion in 2002 by having it assume unrealistic exchange rates. Assuming for the sake of argument that this is completely true, this sum barely passes the threshold of significance in the mismanagement of Greece. The Greeks ran a corrupt, overspending government all by themselves, and they have themselves to blame. Maybe GS evaded half the Greek taxpayers' taxes for them, too?
Hmm, at first glance, his rating is pretty low. But he made a total of $124. I am guessing this is because he was an early adopter of topcoder and they gave out prizes easier back then. I think this probably is the real Zuckerberg because of the usage was so long ago (2002).

I have not looked further at his code for more clues, but it would probably be interesting to delve deeper.
Using the Star Schema Benchmark
I guess I should clarify my statement. The article is right on the dot. The point here is that arguments like this really need a new label. That's all I'll say.
Assholes in open source != condemnation of the person. Most of us remember when we were young newbies, just getting started writing code. The problem is that people cannot take criticism well because they are thin-skinned and used to people praising them.
The Eurozone could go belly up because of a cascading failure. The US may default because conservative politicians think it is "not that big of a deal." China is scared of an economic slowdown and inflation. And everyone thinks we're in a bubble and we're about to hit a point of irrational exuberance.

Interesting times.
That's what I thought he was going for - some kind of a history-comes-full-circle argument involving the Balkans. Also, please note that I did not say that I think that economics is more important than the wars in (former) Yugoslavia. I don't know how to compare that, either. What I said is that there were more significant events since the wars in FY, and this seems clearly true to me, even just sticking to the economy.
That's not my argument at all. My argument is that the probability of a well-designed site having XSS (p1) is much less than that of a user's machine being infested (p2). When you start using both, as you say, we end up with compound probability of a breach p1+p2, which is strictly worse than p2, but if p1<<p2 we are not losing much to begin with, and it maybe justified if we're gaining as much or more elsewhere.

In other words, global optimization may require local pessimization.

E.g. if we gave the user ability to store secret data without the key ever leaving his possession, he might be more likely to use the service and stop storing his secrets in a notepad file. However if we don't guarantee that the key will not leave the user's possession, the user may decide not to use the service.
"Please explain why it is rational for Athens and Berlin to not share the same currency, but is rational for NYC and LA to share the same currency."

The problem is that you cannot have monetary union without political union.

EU rules notwithstanding, Germany and Greece are run by different governments, with different laws, constituencies, and operational capabilities (or lack thereof, in Greece's case).
There's no right answer, but it's helpful to think about it from a data modeling point of view.

If where the update comes from would be stored as an attribute (i.e. column in the table), use the parameter option (/update?from=GitHub). If, however, they'd be separate types of updates (i.e. separate tables), use the separate URIs (/update/github or /github_update).

This is an analogy, of course, as there's no need for a 1-to-1 resource-persistance mapping, but it's a useful way of thinking about it, I think.
A beautiful thing, opinions. Everyone can have one of their own.
Odesk sort of does this with feedback ratings:
https://www.odesk.com/
I'm sure there are other freelance sites that do as well.
Thanks for your argument. Case closed.

you see now too -- the alloy is not the problem.
A bit OT and not sure if you will see this.

Seeing that you are the guy(or onof the guys) behind redis which is written in C, do you have any recommendations for generic data structures and operations on them?

I personally have a trivial vector implementation which resizes when full, and a red-black tree implementation for associative arrays. Both of them work fine for my purpose - does the job, good locality of reference, generic over void*.

I have seen glib but largely neglected it because I only need a very small part of it.
The article defines "making history" as simply existing. That's why they can conclude that disproportionate chunks of history were formed during more recent time periods: human population growth, like that of any other bacteria, is exponential.

It's an interesting perspective. Even if your definition of who "makes history" is more narrow, their results are still accurate if you assume that the history-makers have made up a consistent percentage of the human population throughout history.
A List Of Google+ Fails