skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been surprised with how well I can use my iPad in the car when someone else is driving. Obviously movies and games, but I've also spent a lot of time writing blog posts and planning product features.

Looking forward to when more of my workflow can be done on the iPad.
Frequently. I forward them all to Matt Cutts.
> An app written in PHP by a 8/10 programmer is going to be better than an app written in (sexy other language) by a 7/10 programmer.

Depends entirely on your metric. It's far too easy to introduce subtle bugs, especially security oriented ones, in PHP. If I had a dollar for every XSS, remote file inclusion, CSRF, arbitrary file read, etc vulnerability I found in a "good" PHP app, I'd be a very wealthy man. Some things are mitigated by using a good framework, but in most cases people get them horribly, horribly wrong.
Thanks Seb! If you have any feedback for us, please swing by the site or drop us an email!
Ten Notable Apocalypses That (Obviously) Didn’t Happen
It's like the difference between trespassing vs. breaking and entering. If you have to turn a doorknob, it's trespassing. But picking a lock is breaking and entering. If you can read the plain text in Notepad, I don't think it counts. From http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2009dltr003.h...

The anti-circumvention provisions of §1201 were intended to "encourage[] technological solutions" to piracy by providing legal sanctions against the circumvention of such technology. Realizing that "what may be encrypted or scrambled often may be decrypted or unscrambled," Congress thought it necessary to provide an alternate form of protection to those willing to invest in (and implement) "effective" technological measures. Section 1201 "does not mandate the adoption of any . . . technological protection;" it merely "takes those technological measures that win adoption because of their efficacy and confers [statutory] protection on them." If, as Congress suggested, the circumvention of a technological measure designed to protect a copyrighted work truly is "the electronic equivalent of breaking into a locked room in order to obtain a copy of a book," providing a legal remedy if the lock fails seems entirely reasonable and appropriate.
How to Save Camcorder Video Projects?
Nothing Will Ever Be AAA Again
I fail to see why "my ISP doesn't give me Ruby" --> "Ruby isn't mainstream".

To my downvoter, here's a list of "mainstream" providers, at the Godaddy-level, and language support:

Dreamhost: RoR, PHP, Perl, Python [1]

Godaddy @ $8/month: PHP, Perl, Python, RoR [2]

a2Hosting @ $3/month: PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python

That seems pretty mainstream to me.

[1] http://beta.dreamhost.com/web-hosting/
[2] http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/web-hosting.aspx
[3] http://www.a2hosting.com/services/web-hosting/
My 12-Week 30-Pound Challenge
FIFA bans six soccer match officials for life for match-fixing - Al-Arabiya
Well, who am I to dispute what pg says, but... I think the best approach probably varies by individual, and that - to the extent that there might be an objective truth to this point - the truth probably lies in the middle somewhere. At the very least, I think making a dichotomy between "no planning ahead at all" and "figure everything out in advance" is a false dichotomy. It's a continuum, in my experience.

I personally lean more towards the exploratory programming style, and the "figure it out as I go," but at the same time, two of my favorite programming tools are an artists sketchpad and a set of colored pencils. There's definitely a time and place to sit down and sketch out high level relationships and visualize things to help yourself understand how things will fit together. Well, there is for me.

Again, I think this depends a lot on the individual... and also on the problem domain and the inherent complexity of the program. That is, a simple command-line calculator program (think, "poor man's bc) would probably require less up-front planning than an ERP system for a 30,000 employee company.
I think the original article's headline would have been less provacative if it had read "MIT measures actual ice melt and proves our models of the Earth's climate are still wrong."

And our lack of knowledge here is quite large. So large that the notion of "The real question is what should humans do about it?" is still preposterous. We can't "do something" about something when we don't understand how that something works. It won't stop us of course, barber's tried to 'balance your humors' to correct illness in Medival times, not because it was effective but it met the goal of 'doing something.' Few people have the tolerance to wait until actually understand how Earth's climate is created/changed/affected before they start acting. And like Medival barbers their actions may make things worse just as easily as they may make things better.

I suspect, that you are a 'Climate Fatalist' like I am. I accept that the climate will change and that no matter how much I wish it different, if Yellowstone erupts we're talking ice age baby right then and there. I also accept that it can change quickly without my help so I pursue ways to survive large variations in climates. I've recently been looking at Aquaponics [1] which is a mostly closed loop system for sustainably growing vegetables and protein using a simple eco-system that can be protected from gross changes in the environment. Since it will be impossible (remember I'm a fatalist :-) to get mainstream investment in climate change preparation until rapid climate shifts are upon us, I'm trying to find ways to seed survivability niches.

[1] http://www.aquaponics.com/
Nokia exec: Android and iPhone focus on the app is “outdated”
Wpkiwi – Free Showcase and Corporate WordPress Theme
I submit that PHP's popularity has much more to do with mod_php and its ubiquity across cheap web hosts than any intrinsic merits as a language.

As someone who made a good living for many years by building stuff with PHP... I couldn't get away from it fast enough. Rails+Heroku is the new PHP, if you want a batteries-included web framework and easy hosting.

Not rhetorical: does anyone here use PHP for starting new projects?
Many APIs call it a client key or a client ID. That makes a lot more sense than secret.

I suggest that Proximo change it in their API and in their docs.
Good point, haha ... I find bugs each time I dig into my code, nothing major but enough to warrant a quick fix.

Thank you.
Something like that. You're not the billionth person who's asked or anything.
He actually stated in the above referenced post that it was related to the traffic spike.
Maybe you're looking more for a tutorial, and not a reference? I've always found the online Python docs excellent, and provided me with exactly the information I need.
What really hooked me on destructuring and argument pattern matching was a sophomore year lecture on red black trees in ML. The rotation function was implemented multiple times with different patterns matching the different local tree structures that needed rotating. Much much more elegant than any other implementation of that they I've ever seen.
Depends on your definition of 'clean'. I think Django found a very solid way to handle raw SQL statements[0].

[0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/
>Either you like both or you don’t like either, there is no claim you can make about PHP that can’t be made about C as well

Except that PHP is terrible for systems programming?
Reddit, the price of freedom
First, do not look at the video if you haven't an hard stomach.

http://www.reddit.com/r/beatingwomen/comments/isrdn/lesson/

There is a subreddit for everything. Literally. From funny kittens to dead people kids. This is called "free of speech", everyone can show/talk about whatever they want.

Today that link hitted the reddit homepage so everyone saw it. I want your opinion HN, do you think that having no censoship is worth giving this people a place to talk about this... shit?(sorry i can't find a better term)
Lawyers sue their alma mater for lying to prospective students
Before there were lots of easy-to-use self-publishing apps, it made sense to install your own on a $5/month host. Most people nowadays use Wordpress, the service, not Wordpress the PHP package.
Where did he state it, I can't seem to find it?
I think it should be more obvious that you can change your name without actually signing up for anything.
>We have evidence that that the environment as it exists now, is a relatively stable regime.

Umm.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth ?!
Dennis Crowley (foursquare cofounder) is holding Office Hours
hehe thanks. Unfortunately most of my work lately has been on scaling and keeping the service running smoothly. One day I'll get back to adding features and smartening things up :)

Good luck to envolve BTW, they have a good product I think, hopefully the're ready for the inevitable growing pains, attacks, etc etc
Your scripts will load from local urls. More details on this can be found in the docs:
https://www.proxino.com/docs/getting_started
I assume you're referring to the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). DLR does nothing even close to invokedynamic for optimization.

The best you can do with DLR is regenerate little dispatch stubs at each dynamic call site, to at least avoid the overhead of re-searching the class hierarchy. These stubs are then reinserted at the dispatch point and used to make the call.

Unfortunately, since all current CLR implementations do not optimize code at runtime, these newly-created stubs can't be optimized with the rest of the code. So you get a call from the code to the stub, a few guards, and another dispatch from the stub to the target. Those three pieces never optimize together.

invokedynamic is also very useful for optimizing things other than method dispatch. In JRuby master, we're using invokedynamic for constant lookup (as illustrated in this post) and for lazily creating literal values. In both cases, it reduces the access to a single memory hit, much faster than what JRuby 1.6 or any DLR languages can do.

tl;dr: DLR is the best you can do for dynamic dispatch optimization at an API level atop current CLR impls and subject to limitations therein. invokedynamic brings true end-to-end dynamic dispatch support to the JVM.
This makes API management a breeze for developers and non-developers alike. Reminds me of AWS, in terms of internal innovation turning into major benefits for the developer community. Except it's open source, so even better.
OpenTable doesn't really have an official API. Urbanspoon has been touting Rez as an alternative but same story there. Will definitely let you know when we're ready for primetime.
The Smart Appear to Be Getting Smarter
The product itself is generally used with our API so login is automated by the site owner. On our own site we use it in its default mode where login can be done through FB or Twitter (or as a guest or our own account system)
The big takeaway for me from this article is "treat your employees well". It may be that some devs prefer sitting in a beanbag chair with a 13" laptop. Do you think Fog Creek is going to say no? Heck no. They're going to do whatever it takes to keep your developers (and all employees) happy. We are at work a huge percentage of our lives. Not being happy at work is depressing, particularly when the employing company can take steps like this to make the environment welcoming and positive.

I think that from an employer perspective, sometimes it's the "little" things that pile up and really make a difference. For example, how much does having bagels, cream cheese, coffee, and fresh fruit available every morning really cost a company? In the grand scheme of things, probably not very much. But for those people who need something to kickstart their day, offering this sort of freebie is going to make them happy.

In my opinion, the desk setup as described above would make me FAR happier than free breakfast. Knowing that a company does this for their employees would certainly push that company to the top of the list of companies to work for.
IIRC/IANAL, violating the copyright without commercial intent (you are not selling it) is still a civil law violation although DMCA takedown provisions still apply. Breaking DRM elevates it to a criminal charge.

I think that is the case, but correct me if I am wrong, it has been awhile since I studied this.
Absolutely no risk of price falling closer to its intrinsic value either...
We have a static analyzer that runs when we submit a diff yes or try to commit, but in our "require_module" we also check for circular dependencies at run time. If you create one you get the module stack dumped into your log and promptly exited with an error message.
I'm a UM grad and I live in downtown Detroit. It's amazing: great culture, music, food, night-life, and I feel safe. I took our entire office to my place before a Tiger's game last week and now multiple people are looking into moving downtown and others are interested after that graduate.
Because once you've programmed on a 30" monitor, you'll never go back to programming on a laptop.

Total sidebar, but I actually have found 30" to be too big. I could not get my neck to stop hurting from trying to use the whole screen, and wound up using the innermost 23-24". So I ditched it for a 23" monitor.

Was I doing something wrong? I really wanted to like the 30", but I just couldn't get it to work without putting it too far away from me to see normal sized fonts. Anyone else run into this problem?
So no prize?
It's pretty common, but credible authors don't do it (at least not without making it reasonably obvious that they're getting paid). So you have to consider the source when you're reading something. But then again, blind recommendations were never worth much.
Frankly, no. Just no.

The REASON PHP needs a page per function is the sheer number of poorly handled edge cases, version incompatibilities, and gotchas.
Gotta love these "My tool is bigger than yours" discussions...
I'm going to take the contrarian viewpoint on his article, as it seems the author didn't try to find a PC solution:

>I wouldn’t have been able to easily find a good app to do this without being bombarded with spam in my Google search. (And many of them would be Windows-only.)

found in a second:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

>When I did finally find an app that looked reasonable, I wouldn’t have been able to find any trustworthy reviews, being bombarded instead by more search spam.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

>When I went to buy it, it probably would have cost more.

It's free

>I wouldn’t have trusted it comfortably enough to install it on my computer.

The fact that I can apt-get install sweethome3d makes it seem as trustworthy as being on the app store.

>If it did work, I’d probably need longer to figure out its learning curve, and navigating wouldn’t be as easy or fast with a keyboard and trackpad.

Possible - I don't own an iPad so I can't compare. I find it hard to believe though that a tablet content creator would be faster to navigate than a keyboard/mouse (or even trackpad) combo.
Took me about a minute to learn sweethome3d.

>Taking out the laptop in the car, and passing around a laptop to show the final product, would feel much clunkier than using the iPad.

I'll give the author this. I'd rather be able to create the content on a regular computer though.
It doesn't really support webkit either. It also rejects my Android cellphone's browser, which is 100% webkit-based.
Do people really sit for 10 hours? I can't stop myself from getting up to walk around every half hour or so.
Using adjectives as adverbs is incorrect in British English, but extremely common in American English. For example:

"I'm doing good" instead of "I'm doing well"
"He eats real fast" instead of "He eats really quickly"

If enough people speak that way, I don't think you can call it "wrong" so much as a dialect in its own right.
Show HN: Note app took me from academic probation to honor roll in one semester
Eventually it dawned on me that I needed to take better notes that I could also reference and search through later.

I built GPASpike: http://gpaspike.com

Download link: http://gpaspike.com/download

I created my first version over Christmas break last year, and got a 4.0 in the spring.

I started to notice that all my classes very heavily built upon each other and I needed a way to keep those class notes very accessible. Since all of my classes by that point were economics based, I also needed something that could easily allow for math symbols and graphs, so I built something I could draw on.

This will be ported to a webapp soon also.

Also - I just realized how tiny the video is. I am working on making a new that one is larger.
Site: http://gpaspike.com

Download link: http://gpaspike.com/download
iPhone 5 Website leaked
I've lived in the Metro Detroit suburbs, and downtown Detroit is the spot right now. The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality. Walking to Tigers games, enjoying the nightlife, eating at amazing restaurants, and enjoying the city are a regular part of life.

I live in downtown Detroit. I do not want to live in the suburbs.
* Fewer
Google & Sixpoint's CrowdSourced Beer (and more)
Physics of economic growth
Physical (i.e. energy) limitations of exponential economic growth
This is how they referred to themselves originally. Maybe he's just being anachronistic.

Or maybe he thinks they suck balls.
original source sans "Reason"'s idiotic commentary [1]: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/are-smart-people-g...

[1] Up to half the people alive in 1930, to use Kovács' insensitive phraseology, were mentally retarded? Really? That might help explain the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
I have no reason not to believe you, especially when you add in the fact that Mr. Stark is getting a free coffee for every 15 purchased on his card.

It's win-win-win.
Any indication of what you get out of this service? I know the fundamentals, but the site's sneak-peek content consists of a TextMate screenshot and documentation. That's all push - what's the pull?
It doesn't stop the hordes of programmers on HN talking about Ror and Django and Cherry pi as an alternative to PHP.
The more people say this, the more true it becomes.
I guess saying "main point" was an unnecessary value statement. Different applications will find different aspects of loaders useful.

I should have said that discussion missed the point(s) of script loaders...
Of course it is impossible to do dynamic web pages without mixing code and markup, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's just that in PHP it is possible to one single file that is both code and markup combined, whereas other languages require a separate logic file that sends data to templates.
We can't "do something" about something when we don't understand how that something works.

Yes, we can.

We don't know what the outputs of the system will be for all inputs, but we know that the key input is greenhouse gases. We can reduce that input if we choose, and our fundamental lack of knowledge about what the outputs might be means that is almost certainly a good idea.

There is a developing literature on such fundamental uncertainty ('ambiguity') in policy problems of this sort. E.g. See here: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5454
The best Captcha IMO is just to write up a set of questions about the article. Actually reading the whole article and absorbing the details is a reasonably good predictor of comment quality.
The place that I worked that had such nice equipment basically did exactly that: you were given your standard issue equipment with virtually zero flexibility

This sounds to me like a place that grabbed the "what" and missed the "why". The two questions I would want any company I work for to ask are, "Why would our developers want to be productive for us?" and then, "What do they need to be most productive?" in that order. Give me a reason to be productive and then make sure my equipment doesn't hold me back.

The problem is a lot of people skip the first question and jump straight to the second. I personally believe they do that because the second question is quantifiable. The article is called "The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One" and it gives a price at the bottom. There is something a manager can put in Excel and show to superiors.

However, the "why" is more nebulous and harder to enact. Change company culture? Might take months, or years if it's even possible. But I can order $6,174 worth of equipment in an afternoon.

And this isn't just a problem in IT or even in business. There is a ton of information out there about how to lose weight. The "what" is easy to find. But people (including myself) are still overweight because they have no compelling "why".

So when I read this article, I read as a description of "what". And I think there needs to be articles about the "what" just like there needs to be information about how to lose weight. However, I am going to try to not let myself be enamored by it when deciding on a new job. I'm looking for the "why" as well.
If you gain a reputation, people will come to you.
These experts seem to be missing fundamental: You dont do huge amounts of budget slashing in the middle of a recession. We dont need hundreds of thousands added to the unemployed. Sure, we can trade priorities like trading wars for infrastructure, but wholesale slashing just courts a depression. The solution is to get the country back on its feet, and cut out the wasteful wars. Then close the tax loopholes and get rid of the Bush tax cuts. At that point we can tackle the debt reduction with a vengeance. Backloading the cuts isnt just politics, it's also sound economics.
Lodsys Flags Another Android Developer - Bithack, The Creator Of Apparatus
It looks like the same thing that happened this time. Someone posted an article of his to HN, then he created an account here to comment.
Its funny that in 2008 - we see posts like "RIP Good Times" - http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/06/r-i-p-good-times-one-year-l.... - and yet nothing - fundamentally - came of it.

I want you to be right, but didn't something come of it? Didn't we have a huge recession whose impact is still being felt by all of us? Don't we have a nearly 10% unemployment rate, nearer to 16% if you include people who've just given up?
Yes, when I write a web app, I don't want to be stuck with extra code that abstracts away the database into a less-efficient object/class and forces me to break the convention of the framework to write the code that I need.

I suppose it's fine when many of then newer programmers don't even know or understand what's going on underneath anyway...
How tech helped co-ordinate clean-up in London
Social networks very amenable to "key influencer effects". Good curation also a must.
Could the higher IQ scores be a result of the popularization of the internet in the last couple decades? Moving from a platform that spoon-feeds you information to a platform which encourages the user to actively seek out the information they need/want, from a passive experience to an active one, surely contributed to better problem solving skills.
TSA Closes Terminal Over Science Project
no, it wouldn't. It would be a horrible fit, imo.
You don't need versioning info for logging, and the extra compacting of the database is another aspect, since with logging heavy applications you will write all the time...

I love CouchDB but i definitely wouldn't use it for logging.
Court rules that sending too many emails = illegal
In usual Slashdot style, the headline there is a tad misleading, but the ruling comes down to the fact that flooding someone's inbox violates the computer fraud and abuse act.

Can we go after spammers next?
Nope. I wasn't paying attention and did not realise that there was a new website. :)
http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ is pretty good

Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig, 2002. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall. ISBN: 0137903952.
Someone please build this keyboard prototype -- it flips open for easy cleaning