skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, I understand your point a bit better now. You're basically talking about writing the backend in almost-pure SQL.

The main drawbacks I can see to that are:

1) Most developers couldn't write enough SQL to escape a paper bag. That's fine; usually, you don't need to escape a paper bag with SQL. The problem is that this only works for people who are very comfortable with SQL. I'm decent with it, and perhaps I'll lean a bit more that way for my next project, but I'm not seeing most people doing this.

It's also not quite as simple as you say, because multiple items are typically combined into one. This is many:many, so you'll need a table to cross-reference them.

So, you'll need to have a transaction table and a subtransaction table. The subtransaction table can match against inventory, and the transaction table can sum the subtransactions to make sure the total is correct. This gets a little hairy around foreign keys, but it's pretty easy to code around.

2) This example is fine, but for any transaction more complex than this, you risk tying yourself to a particular DB backend. That's probably OK, as the DB backend contains most of your app code: it's like tying yourself to Python on the backend. It's just something to be aware of.

3) This is likely to result in a large number of transaction rollbacks, due to price changes and whatnot. This might be OK, or it might trip anti-fraud features on your payment processor.
Ask HN: What is your biggest problem when buying a new device
Hello HN, we are working on a new app, moblivu, which will make information about consumer electronics way easier and elegant.

Basically we are trying to resolve most of the problems surrounding a possible new purchase of a smartphone, tablet or notebook like:

-Confusing specification sheet
-Difficult to navigate website
-Back and forth between listing and product page to discover new products
-Aided comparison and device search based on your needs
-Links to review directly
-Guides about technology (platforms, how to, etc.)
and more

Most of these problems are a bit more for the general consumer, but running around Google, Engadget, Best Buy and YouTube to get information isn't that great even for a geek.

So I am asking you, what annoys you the most when you try to get information about a product or potentially going to buy one?

Thanks!
again, what's with the while()? even if it doesnt cause a segmentation fault, there's a chance it will evaluate to 0.
Let's not get mixed up by calling it the "Game", the right term is the "Rat Race". Comparing ourselves to others excessively is the highway to unhappiness. The secret to the rat race is that you can never win... as the author says, the goalposts keep moving. There is always someone richer, someone more recognized, someone happier.

Do your best at the things you enjoy doing, and make time for the things that are really important you.

Who would have thought a key secret to happiness is found in the 10 commandments: "Thou shall not covet"
Could you explain what you mean in a little more detail? In particular does this problem still persist if you use JQuery templates?
According to the last paragraph on the linked page, vote delegation isn't implemented yet, but that seems to be top of their to-do list now.
Twitter, Jobs, Democracy &amp; The US Elections
They aren't suing him... this is a criminal case:

The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office
It seems to be focused on creating a few applications on its own, which are different somehow. The GNOME project seems to have the goal of usability (easiness etc.) but also has pretty clear criteria (etc. the dictionary doesn't have bookmarks as in Elementary OS) I really like Gnome 3 on Fedora 15 which as always stays close to the upstream. But still more choice of applications running on Linux to choose from is always a good thing :-).
Interviewers who explicitly phrase the 'how would you move Mt. Fuji' or 'here's a development task outside of your stated competencies, how would you do it?' as hypotheticals or thought exercises, could save a lot of heartbreak. I can see the rationale behind those questions, but any experienced interviewer should know how tense people get during an interview: allowing interviewees to perceive those questions as being about the literal answer, rather than about the process, is kind of a jerkface thing to do. Besides, people who can't coherently explain their thought processes are going to bomb on that question anyhow - have some courtesy and give a leg up to people who are merely nervous. I'm grateful to the interviewers I've had in the past who have come out and said "this question is about the process, not about the result".

I think it's very important to reduce the tension level, because if you're asking someone a question intended to show how they think and reason, especially with some level of creativity, you risk getting a useless answer if they're tense and antsy. Nervousness and pressure often kill creative thinking: this is well-established.
Bitcoin is for the distrustful (for those who are more trusting, credit cards are sufficient.)
Casinos require trust.
How to reconcile the two?
Twitter, Tweetbot, tumblr, Instagram, Skype and Wunderlist (my most used apps) all get away with the 5 icons on the bottom. They mostly contain 4 main options, plus another screen with configuration and advanced options.

Tweetbot's fourth button allows you to rapidly change its behavior, it's fast enough and the best UI I've seen so far.
No one is interested in any of these excuses.

It's the new hotness... they might not be around forever, but for now, there's not much competition.

SourceForge is doing good as well. There's room for options.
Well, me too. I paid for the NASL stream and couldn't watch it. Surely, you can understand that throwing $25 away without getting the service kind of sucks. To contrast it against an HD stream from gomtv, these GSL games stream/re-play archives beautifully without any stutters.

So I want to be a fan, a paying fan, but it's kind of a bummer that I can't.
Id Software's John Carmack sticks up for Call of Duty
> As discrimination trends towards zero -- which I believe it is -- it's hard not to feel frustrated that cheer leading (pun not intended) is acceptable on one side but not the other.

I guess our fundamental difference is how much discrimination we believe remains. You seem to think the disparity is small, justifying your frustration with female solidarity. I think the it is still very large.

Most areas where men are at a broad disadvantage are caused by male tendencies acting against themselves, not by other groups discriminating against men (e.g. the violent crime issue, which is not caused by discrimination but by male violent tendencies). Fundamentally, I don't care as much when people are hoist on their own petard as when they hoist others on the same.

In the areas where men are being discriminated against, the discrimination can be very strong (e.g. custody battles). But these contexts are far narrower than the contexts in which women face discrimination, which are more easily described by listing out the few places women are safe from it. I surely agree that we should work to end discrimination against males where it exists, but I also think as a society it makes sense to address problems in the order of their magnitude (or perhaps, with effort proportional to magnitude).

I agree that compared to historical norms we are doing quite well, but we are far from the point where solidarity is not an important asset to females.
Apple loses against Kodak as it gets initial win against HTC
Bringing Scala to .Net and Mono
Very nice work by a high school student! However, the hypothesis that AMPK can protect cells from cisplatin-induced cytotoxicity has been around for about four years:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1582-4934.2009....

http://www.jbc.org/content/283/7/3731.short
There are plenty of programs that make 'GUI widgets' available for composition. They are all variations on the well known 'Microsoft Visio'-style interface that allows the drag'n drop creation of streams and networks of components, for various specific purposes. For instance, anyone graduating in physics doing an experiment that requires some electrical devices wired to up to each-other will be familiar with one such program (whose name escapes me at the moment).

As soon as you become a power user, using the underlying language or something similar to a CLI beats using the GUI. Distinguishing 'GUI widgets' and the ways in which you can wire them together and then actually wiring them together takes more time than doing the same thing in a CLI, for experienced users. I don't see this ever being solved.
yes, but you still managed to get it from the link didn't you?

I did, and it looks awesome, much better than Facebook. Really!
Creative piracy: the movies are free, it's the DVD cases that cost money
no life changing advice survives any form of analysis.
What's the backstory there?
We have 100 invites to Spotify, and we’re giving them away right now
TLDR: Vote delegation. Not quite implemented yet, but in progress.

TSDG (Too Short, Don't Grok): "Even as simple as Hyperarchy makes voting, no one has time to share their opinion on every question. So Hyperarchy recasts representative democracy as networked democracy. Instead of electing a Senator you've never met to represent you on everything, you elect individuals you trust personally to represent you on specific issues. I can give my girlfriend power to vote on my behalf for questions about health and nutrition, while delegating to my coworker for questions concerning programming languages or digital privacy. So when my girlfriend votes about health or my coworker votes on technology, they vote for me as well.

But the real power is when influence flows through multiple connections in the social network. Suppose I delegate to my girlfriend on questions about nutrition, but she in turn delegates her vote to an expert like Michael Pollan. Then he inherits not only her vote, but mine as well. This transitive nature of delegation allows power to flow to individuals with expertise. By gaining the trust of a few influential people, Michael Pollan can emerge as a super-representative, voting on behalf of a huge number of followers. But you can change your delegation at any time, so Pollan would keep that power only as long as he deserved it."
It seems to be based out of the UK and New Zealand. (The phone number is UK, but the domain is registered in NZ).
BitCoin already is already targeted by officials. I think the spread of Bitcoin to a potentially gigantic market helps the project much more than a minuscule additional illegal usage harms Bitcoin.
Seconded. The design is just great.

I also tried drag and drop. Both between today and tomorrow and a way to change the ordering. It'd be great to see that functionality.

Really nice work, guys!
What does Dreppered mean?
That doesn’t make much sense. iPod touch owners can still download the app, they just won’t be able to install it. Many of them will be pretty annoyed by that and leave angry reviews. iTunes doesn’t even prompt me about the lacking device support (I don’t have an iPhone, only an iPod touch), it just downloads.

To date the Google+ app has seven reviews in the US app store. Five short five-star ones, two one-star reviews: one complaining about the lacking iOS5 Beta support (incredibly stupid but people apparently write stuff like that) and one complaining about the lacking support for iPod touches.

Excluding the iPod touch may make some sense for apps that fly under the radar – but for something that gets as much exposure as Google+? I doubt it.
"While people are still going to assume that Call of Duty fans are having some kind of fake fun just to spite everyone else, can we give the hate a rest, just for a bit? We're all in this hobby to have fun and play games, and spending money to get more of what you like doesn't make anyone a sucker."
> In the first step of Delft University's new technical approach, the human waste will be dried. Then the waste will be gasified using plasma, which is created by microwaves in tailor-made equipment. (etc)

Really?

The brother of my grandfather lived on a farm for all of his life; there was never any kind of toilets on the farm. While there always was access to clean water from a well (which may not be the case in the poorer parts of the world), running water was installed inside the "house" only in the early sixties. "House" is between quotes because it looked more like "the part of the stable to be used by humans".

We used to go there often during the summer. We did our business behind the house, like everyone. We loved everything there.

And what about health? My grandfather's brother died past 80; when he died his wife moved to the "city" where she lived to see her 94th birthday.

They would've had a hard time believing people would ever want to gasify their poo with "plasma created by microwaves".

In fact, so do I.
Not even the direct link works for me :(
Main discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781615
Wow, really? I wonder why people don't update then.
Mythbusting: Organic Farming
It doesn't exist yet. But Google's history of trying to adopt federation and with open source in general give me hope that that's part of the plan.

I guess it seems to me like, from their perspective, their previous two attempts, Wave and Buzz, failed at a user experience level, and so never achieved wide adoption. With +, it looks like they're trying to really nail the user experience first. Which strikes me as a plausible strategy.
"anthropormphized" --> "anthropomorphi[zs]ed", from anthropos = "human" + morphe = "form" + ize/ise = "make", i.e. "make the form of a human".
Wow. Just wow. When I clicked the link on HN I never expected something that good. I was especially amused at the login/signup trick. Frankly, the whole thing caught me off guard.

Hats-off to you sir.
§ 103. Subject matter of copyright: Compilations and derivative works

(a) The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.

(b) The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#103
In a VPS environment, however, setting up PHP doesn't require anything - it works right out of the box

Well, you do need to install the AMP part. Since you're installing and configuring three components, why not install and configure different ones? It's not more or less work either way.

If you're talking about AMI/StackScript-style pre-built VPSes, there are plenty for various Ruby, Python, and Node stacks as well as PHP.
Mcrsft's Vuln Research team keeps busy finding bugs in other vendors' products
Right now you just call and it puts you into my demo story. I have an sms menu (and some other features) on my current work branch but I have not pushed it yet.

I'm toying with the idea of creating a web view for the stories as well. As of now, the 'story builder' is not open to the public but my next release may allow for that.
I agree about how it's unclear, and I wondered the same thing.

I've experienced this from the other end, though, so I know what actually happens: nothing. I have a couple of friends who included me in huddles days and days ago on their Android devices. It wasn't until today that I knew about them: they were all there for me to read after I installed the app on my iPhone.
Awesome. One minor complaint: I added some tasks, thought, "man this is cool", and signed up--at which point you erased my tasks. Not a huge complaint, but they really should be transfered over to your newly-created account.
Good points, but I disagree. Mark Zuckerberg is the exception, and not the rule. People were founding and running businesses long before Facebook, at much older ages, which is why Facebook is such an incredible story in the first place.

I do agree that his lore is almost entirely due to his age, and that VC's would have had a harder time investing in a social network that was intended for college audiences were the founder well out of college. However, that is something that I think is limited to social networks, and not more common, dare I say, relevant businesses.

Whatever your age, calm down, enjoy your life, and realize that we humans suck at predicting. Do what makes you happy and ignore the outside pressures.
What's the best fitness advice HN has?
Management told me that ;)

Our IT is some low paid people answering the phones in a foreign land. They don't much care if I complain. The IT managers higher up who make the decisions aren't any better at listening to employee complaints. Their motivation appears to be save as much money (that they decide to count) as possible. Their impact to costs outside of the IT budget aren't high on their priority list.

My laptop gets locked in a cabinet at night, I just suspend it and everything appears to be off. If you have a desktop, that's not necessarily possible, and the Dell's we have usually have some blink'en lights still going when the machine is asleep.

BIOSes are generally locked down so employees can't change them. Laptops have mandated full disk encryption that uses the MBR in special ways, so dual booting is not possible.

I actually was told once that I had left my 21" CRT on overnight. The little stand-by light was still on when I left one day. That's a big no-no. There's somewhat random checks for these types of things. Fun, eh?

Thankfully, the work I'm doing is interesting and the pay's good. The politics and budget antics are rather annoying but I get the impression that's the way the world works at large companies. Maybe I'm wrong?
Google Disables URL Removals After Bug Allows Anyone To Remove Any Site
IGoogle gmail widget "updated"
>What Aaron did sounds seriously sketchy (sneaking into MIT wiring closets, trying to download the entire database, etc.),

reminded me about ancient IP infringement case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus
StrikeSapphire SA is incorporated in Costa Rica, and complies with all relevant gaming laws there and elsewhere.

Edit: Again, the site is NOT taking bets from the US. American players can sign up for playcash, but that's it, and you'll have a very hard time going further from that toward depositing or withdrawing. There's a warning on the signup page that says we can't take cash from US players, and I mean it.
It happens all the time, although I think it's now more typical for successful YC startups to bring the founders of less-successful YC startups on board as early employees. Scribd was apparently formed from the merger (and reshuffling) of 3 YC startups. Slinkset merged into Posterous. I was just talking a couple months ago with a former YC founder I knew from Google about founding another startup, but he ended up signing on with an existing YC company as an early employee instead.
wow - good find, they actually have a few more classifications lower on the page (developers). I wonder what the difference between responses of the workers versus management under what category they find themselves.

They make it equally difficult to figure the plumber and other vocational professions. The initial pages seems to bunch a varying groups together. ick

defs:
Computer software engineers design and develop software

omputer programmers write programs. After computer software engineers and systems analysts design software programs, the programmer converts that design into a logical series of instructions that the computer can follow (A section on computer systems analysts appears elsewhere in the Handbook.)
Webdis is definitely a great project. I'd say it mostly depends on your personal preference and feature requirements. Webdis also has a larger and more complex codebase, which has its pros and cons.
I really need to ditch the blackberry and get an iphone.
Composting toilets have been around for decades. They achieve the very same goals. Bill is wasting his money on this one.
There are in fact more books focused on Rails compared to Django, and this logically reflects the inferior documentation of Rails compared to Django, necessitating and creating a greater market for additional documentation. This market doesn't exist so much for Django not because of the lack of interest in learning Django, but because the documentation is so good. End of that story.

As for the greater perceived online presence of the Rails community, I think this reflects two things:

1) Greater confusion among Rails users, who as a general group seem less technically inclined "on the whole" (there are obviously a ton of brilliant Rails developers as well). In general, Rails users want things to be pre-configured for them, and therefore never really learn how things work under the hood, and are thus ill-equipped to make simple changes to their own apps.

2) Greater Apple-like fanboy-ism among Rails users, which takes on a religious fervor with people thinking they have met salvation, and it makes them feel special. They love to evangalize about it, and this personality trait in part the perceived greater popularity of Rails.

That said, both frameworks are obviously still very popular and effective at building web applications. Try both and go with whichever one you like better, and stop fretting about whether you've made the "right" decision.
Ask HN: Do you need to be a "jerk" to get a complex project done?
You have the task of managing and completing a very complex consumer project (think iPhone) that hasn't been done before.

The product is basically tasked with making something that is super complex, super simple. It will be pretty obvious to you and basically the below-average Joe if you failed in your task. It probably won't be obvious to anyone who loves working on complex things.

You have a fair size crew with some of the best and brightest geeks around. With that, comes the good and the bad. Everyone of them has an option on how it should be done and everyone of them likes doing their own thing in their own world and everyone of them can quit for another job somewhere else.

Failure is not an option. This product must be done and the product must be finished and the product must be perfect.

Is there a way to get this done by being very "nice" to them or do you need to implement some qualities which will cause your crew to think of you as a "jerk" or an "idiot"?
I've been loving Rdio for the last few months. I've pretty much stopped buying music.
In practical terms, does this differ significantly from killing the process and leaving a coredump?
Dear PG
Frequently while reading one of your essays, I will read the footnote immediately after finishing the paragraph to understand the context of the footnote. But near the footnote there is no link back to the corresponding paragraph.
So the footnote is often followed by a horrifying scrolling period leading back to the paragraph which is disorienting and detracts from the essay.

I don't know if this is just me, but I'm sure if I've experienced it others likely have also.

If you could kindly add the extra links in future essays, that would be aces. I'm sure an intern or anyone really would be more than willing to add them retroactively also. I think it would improve the reading experience (and one of the few advantages reading on a computer has over conventional novels).

Now I'm going to casually slide back into the darkness of Hacker News.

Kind Regards,

Your friendly neighbourhood Sohum
You're right, thanks. Replace suing by charging and strike make them a little richer and. The rest of the point still stands.