skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This. At almost every level of web development, we're working with code that generates some other kind of code. Ruby -> C, Erb/Haml/whatever template => HTML, maybe Coffeescript -> JavaScript, and finally ActiveRecord/any ORM -> SQL strings.

I write Ruby all the time, I don't know a lick of C. I've got a solid understanding of SQL and relational data modeling, but why should I check the generated SQL of _every_ single query?

Furthermore, if you don't use an ORM, your model's methods will contain a lot of similar functionality. Hmm, maybe I should write a module or base class so I don't repeat myself. Eventually you will have written an ORM.
Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?

What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can construct out of quantum materials? And then 10-15 years later we have a functional portal device? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs cars? planes? trains?)

What if we discover a new computing method based on the research started by these particle accelerators, better than quantum computing, that eventually gives us so much computing power that we are capable of developing human-like AI? Or an AI that is many times more powerful than humans? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs to work anymore?)

Who knows what we will be capable of? It's a fucking gamble. As it stands, we don't know. But the potential rewards outweigh the costs so much as to render them ridiculous.
I think it's more a case of buying their own hype. I think they actually thought they were revolutionizing local marketing. They looked at their huge (but unsustainable) growth numbers and thought they could spend their way to a sustainable dominant position.
Startup Quote: Jack Dorsey, Co-founder, Twitter
That seems counter to the basic 'libertarian' idea of minimal government.
Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.

- Jack Dorsey (@jack)

http://startupquote.com/post/9615329871
What city are you in? Bigger cities should have several to many options per day. The top-billed deal is usually meh for me but clicking on All Deals gives me something I want almost every day. I find that with the larger number of deals, I want to buy more often, even if the % of appealing deals is lower. That is for Chicago which is the biggest, oldest, etc market for Groupon.
For #2, couldn't a custom URL protocol launch a program?
Perhaps; the medical industry follows our collective choices.

Say we eat more and grow obese, industry then works hard on maintaining sclerotic, clogged arteries and other over-sizing-related sequelae. Or we choose to have unsafe sex, so we get better at treating STDs.

Ultimately, medical industry expands to support an ever-increasing number of human configurations. Financing this expansion aside, we are witnessing an evolution of the human form.

Nature doesn't provide an unchanging measure by which we can gauge our overall fitness. Luckily, the OP wishes to provide one for us.
:-D

I'm glad you said something about shape. It's something I'm stumbling through right now.
I'm hesitant to give up on Jammit, but asset pipeline looks great.
> Europe explored the universe where America did not

I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station?

The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would have been the first on the chopping block.

America continued exploring the universe just fine--but with a broad approach instead of putting everything toward exploring one narrow area.

We're seeing a repeat of this with the new space telescope, although the outcome may be different this time. The projected costs have grown massively, and the projected launch date has been pushed WAY out. It's been defunded this year, with Congress specifically calling it out by name as to receive no funding. The Congressman who put that language in has said that this is meant to be a warning to the project's managers that they need to get their act together, and then funding can come back.
Haha I was thinking this my entire read down this thread.
So, he's got:

* rapid development tools (at least for him)
* scalable, low-maintenance backend
* affordable infrastructure
* automated deployment
* automated backups

This is almost a Joel Test for web startups.
Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?

That's the wrong question.

"Has blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?"

is a better one and the answer is a most definitive yes, many many many times the amount of money put into it, on the order of trillions of dollars.

Do each and every blue sky pure R&D experiment yield such results? Heck no! Neither does any known investment vehicle.
Haha one of the lineman is me, although I was only 6' 250 lbs at the time. A co-founder also was one. He was about 6'3 280 lbs. The third co-founder was actually a running back and wrestler, so he was only 5'8 165 lbs or so.
Menkes van den Briel did some work on airplane boarding. He has really nice explanations and videos here: http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/vandenbr/projects/boarding...
This is going to be the LTCM of IPOs.
No, it's called "dark matter" because it appears not to interact with electromagnetic radiation but has mass. We can observe it indirectly through its gravitational influence, such as altered galactic rotation curves and weak lensing. (If we hadn't somehow observed it, and we didn't have a theory that predicted it, why would we think it exists at all?)

Regardless, the point I was getting at is that confirming or denying the existence of the Higgs boson would have little or no direct impact on our understanding of dark matter. (I'm not a physicist, but this is my layman's understanding of the situation, and I haven't heard any physicists claiming otherwise.)
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I thank you for your point about advances made from pure scientific research before. However, I think in many of these cases some applications of the pure research were hypothesized as well, long before the pure research was actually completed. I worry that we are simply picking examples of blue sky research that ended up being practical, and ignoring examples that were not because they are less available. (Which makes sense, since research that had no practical use would probably not come to mind when you try to think of examples where research ended up having a practical use.)

Of course, even such a conclusion would not suggest that we should cease all blue sky research. Obviously that would be very silly. But it might make sense to think about whether it is possible to guess ahead of time what research is likely to have practical benefits and what research is not. This way we can spend more money on research likely to have benefits and less on research that is probably useless except for the knowledge's own sake.
Generally people interested in buying something from you will take some time to fully understand what they are purchasing. You don't offer $6 billion for a company without taking a peak at their books.
IT WAS SAID THAT ALL WHO SIGNED UP WOULD GET AN EMAIL TODAY AND THATS NOT TRUE.I CALLED AN SPOKE WITH A PERSON AND GAVE MY INFORMATION BUT DID NOT RECIEVE AN ALERT TODAY.
Yes, I am very excited. I should have released during business hours with announcements prepared and whatnot, but I really wanted this code in people's hands. I hope that everyone enjoys this release!
I disagree about netflix. Reason being is they don't have the same caliber movies as spotify has songs. The Amazon Prime Instant Movies is getting close, but someone has to lock down a deal already!

Awesome post with the techcrunch article :) I guess if spotify can make deals with major music labels, the same or similar applies to movie studios.
A gravitational anomaly has been observed, but the source of this anomaly is not just invisible to the visible wavelengths but from all wavelengths we can measure. "Dark matter" sounded a bit better than "unicorn turds" I guess, but at the moment each is equally likely.
The only thing I read which made sense was that the acquisition offer could have included performance requirements that the Groupon team knew they couldn't meet.

Google's not stupid and wouldn't spend $6bln on something as risky as Groupon without some safety nets.
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You could call it division of labor. The US will obviously benefit from any discoveries the LHC makes, Europe will also benefit from the ISS.
"Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?"

Might also be a good time to point out that the Internet did not fulfill it's intended goals either -- a communications network resistant to withstanding the loss of huge chunks of it's infrastructure most likely caused by large scale nuclear bombardment by the Soviets.
That's an utterly misleading headline. The Higgs boson is not excluded in the mass range 115-145 GeV, and there won't be enough evidence for a null result (or discovery) until at least November.

More context here:

http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/08/higgs-wont-come-out-...
The value is not really in the finding, but more in the seeking. It's the surprise discoveries that happen along the way that have huge practical applications, not just what we thought we were looking for.

You have to seek to find. Even if they are on the wrong track it's better to seek than not.
In that case, pretty much all luxury goods are destroying some wealth, every time they're purchased. Which, I suppose I wouldn't argue with. But, I'm not sure that I buy that it's "sad" when luxury goods are produced or purchased.

Maybe it is, though.
> That's the wrong question.

I asked the question I meant to ask. The point is not that we should stop doing blue sky research if examples exist where it has produced no benefit. It is quite obvious that blue sky research has been useful to us over the course of time. That fact does not give anything called blue sky research carte blanche to spend taxpayer money.

The point is to weigh the likely benefits of all the various types of blue sky research available to us at any given time and try to spend more on research that is likely to be useful.

> Neither does any known investment vehicle.

And like any investment vehicle, I ask that we consider whether any given piece of blue sky research is likely to appreciate or be a money sink. This was, if you'll read back, my original query. I don't understand why the people in this forum consider this question so outrageous.
Editor-in-Chief of Majirox News
Catherine Makino is an American journalist living and working in Japan. She has an extensive writing portfolio consisting of an array of publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Inter Press Service, Women's eNews, Voice of America Radio, Asia Times, American Chamber of Commerce and Asian Wall Street Journal.

She was president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan from 2008-2009.

She is currently Edit-in-Chief of Majirox News.
I question the accuracy of these numbers. Hitwise, Quantcast, Comscore, etc, all use sample data and extrapolate their numbers based on these figures. Often the data is gathered using toolbars that are installed as part of another software package.

I work in search marketing and I can't tell you how many times Comscore or Hitwise has said a clients web traffic has taken a dive, even though the real on-page analytics are reporting the opposite. It's very frustrating that people take these numbers at face value.
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tenderlove, I don't know you and probably never will -- but thanks for all your hard work. Seriously.
It was, especially considering what that program was cut for - the International Space Station!
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Thanks for yours and everyone else's hard work. This release looks great. Been developing on the RCs the past month or so and appreciate the improvements.
"there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC."

What happened to file type associations? Even with the Adobe Reader plugin disabled, my browser gets enough information from the OS to offer me the choice of saving a PDF or opening it in the standalone Adobe Reader. Why can't that work for OneNote files?
> 1. There is no magical flag that allows all mail sent by anyone at Microsoft to hit your Hotmail inbox: that could easily be abused, and for many users it would defy their expectations. I've sent your post along to the people responsible for spam filtering in Hotmail, though, to take a look at.

Magical flag? No. S/MIME certificate? Yes. They already sign their apps and have UAC verify those signatures; why not their email?
Neither collider has enough data in those mass ranges to give any useful result. That's WHY the LHC got built.
When you open Office documents from SkyDrive or Sharepoint, the goal is to open the remote copy, not to download it. This enables such niceties as letting multiple people edit the document at the same time, etc. while still using the full Office clients.
Well, most libertarian government structures call for precisely that. A police to enforce the law, a court system to provide fair rule and a small military intended for defense.

[edit: Should add that although there are certainly disputes to how to fund said services, to the best of my knowledge it's largely agreed that some court system is required.]
The Black Hole of 9/11
Will that get people to cooperate or will it just get them to trample each other? I'd be worried people would just hear "free drinks if you get on the plane quickly" and ignore the part where it needs to be everyone.

Or you might just get a teetotaler blocking the aisle.
See http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/08/higgs-wont-come-out-... for discussion. Basically, it's possible, but requires physics beyond the Standard Model.
The first generation PS3 is a noisy energy hog.

I picked up an AppleTV 2nd gen for Netflix and streaming media because it runs silently at 6W, compared to the fat PS3's 170-200W. Depending on how much you watch, the AppleTV might pay for itself in energy savings alone in 12-18 months.
Wow. I was one of them. That's hilarious.
They only calculated one side of the equation. What would have been the long-term effect if the Manhattan Project experiments had produced negative results and falsified the quantum mechanical models of the time? You can't just ignore that possibility and still have a valid expectation.
I'm a big fan of DBVisualizer (http://www.dbvis.com/), and have used it almost daily for ~6 years now on OSX. It's not a perfect OSX app (it's cross platform Java, but quite good looking for what that normally implies). Lots of power, doesn't crash, decent looking, and it works for pretty much every relational database out there (including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle).

I own a SequelPro license (as well as licenses for a couple of other non-free tools, RazorSQL and Querious) and I always come back to DBVisualizer.
Seriously...? Not "all", but in general, "blue sky research" does deliver massive benefits (just look at what is in front of your face right now! It would not be there without quantum physics.).

Also, take a look at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind96/chap_8.pdf, table 8.1, for estimates of rates of return on scientific research.
Maybe its irrational, but kind of hope they don't find it. It's almost gratifying, definitely exhilarating, to know that particle physics is still a fresh frontier with plenty of territory to be discovered. Supersymmetric particles seem to be unlikely too. It seems like we're almost back at the drawing board.

So if it turns out that it doesn't exist, where do we go from here? What are the alternative theories? It's been a while since I went into particle physics at all deeply, so I don't know all the leading theories and their pros and cons.
That branch/port of Tornado is https://github.com/fiorix/cyclone and it's pretty nice. I greatly prefer it to t.web or nevow, which I used to use.

The tornado and cyclone APIs are closer to what I am thinking about as a web developer. Virtually never do I make an object and then think about how I'd like to adapt it to return an HTML view or programmatically add it under a parent object.
No, thank you ( and richard and mohammed )

You have no idea how helpful you guys are.
Yes, but in this case (at least for IE) the plugin has been installed all the way back since Office 2003. The custom protocol handler would only work in newer versions of Office.

As always, tradeoffs abound.
As well they should. It's one thing to use your leet skillz on some bigco with the vague self-important notion that the man is oppressing the peepz, but how often do they get to go up against real, genuine Bad with a big b.

Anonymous has got some work to do.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting indrax's comment, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't meant to be a jab at the United States. He was stating that while America chose to focus its exploration on the cosmos, Europe's exploration endeavors focus on the sub atomic level.

Europe's exploration of the universe has a different focus, not a better one.
The app at chao.heroku.com is not the copy.
a)It takes a lot of time and technical skill to clone a good iOS app..and even if you are successful you have to go through the Apple Developer Program(which is annoying but it helps) and there are legal implications.

b) yeah fart apps are easy to make...but try cloning a good app like angry birds or talking tom cat!

c) if you really wanna clone and make money your best bet would be to clone as fast as possible and clone a lot of apps.You'd much rather just stick to rails apps (heroku ftw!)

d) and lastly there are people who can clone even the best iOS apps very quickly...but with that kind of technical skill also comes creativity and integrity!
We even ate pizza and beer after the interview. Haha.
and she’s got a strong case…

Uh, no she doesn't. Buying a working laptop for $60 is going to easily constitute knowing the laptop was being sold for less than true value. Sorry, I don't have the link, but this whole receiving stolen goods knowingly thing was explained fairly well on HN in some comments a couple months back.
Not I. I have debated starting up a blog a few times but lack of time is one issue, and I'm also not sure anyone really cares to hear what I have to say :)
> You have to seek to find. Even if they are on the wrong track it's better to seek than not.

I guess this sentiment, which is seen throughout this thread, is my main objection to the whole thing. This is spiritualism, pure and simple. Science, no matter about what, is good, because it's science. We know this because of our history, and we embrace it like a totem.

What I wish is that we had a scientific mindset about our science, about determining what science is most useful, etc., but all I can see here are variations on the assumption that, if it's an expensive science project, it must be useful somewhere down the line.
To reiterate what everyone is saying: thank you very much for all of your dedication and hard work.

Let me know if you ever make it around to Liberty or Poppy, I feel like I owe you at least a couple drinks.
Instagram Founders Debunk 8 startups myth [video]
But it's kinda kickstarter in reverse since you have people wanting to give money but no one picked to do the work. It's a bounty.

I worked on and almost launched an open source bounty site a couple years ago. But the closer I got to launch the more I realized that I hadn't adequately solved all of the hard UX problems (mostly around a: picking who's going to work on it, trying to avoid both having two people separately do it due to know central coordination and having one person say "yeah, I'm going to do this!" and then not get around to it and hold the project back, and b: how to handle it when someone does technically address the bounty, but in a way that is unsatisfactory either because bounty-placers did not perfectly state their needs or because of poor quality.
Credit cards are only part of the problem. If your site can be hacked, then the hackers can:

1) upload scripts to send unsolicited email, getting your IP address banned.

2) upload scripts to scan the internet for other targets (most common---an SSH scanner)

3) modify the HTML output to leak Google Page Rank to questionable sites, which risks your Google Page Rank.

4) passwords of users, who typically use the same password on other sites.

5) setup an illegal file trading section, hidden from most users (anything from music and films to kiddie porn (saw this first hand, and what once was seen can never be unseen---shudder))

6) IRC clients to control botnets.

I've seen all of these first hand working at several web hosting companies. It's more than just "credit cards."
Maybe you should stop using the Internet, since it seems to have failed, in your opinion.
I believe jerf's point was that you have to be careful that your stated reasons couldn't be used to justify any research at any cost.
Thanks for the feedback. Syntax highlighting is on my list and I know of a JavaScript library to do it. I hadn't considered autoindent; that one should be interesting.
Great point. DARPA thought they were going to get a unified military communications system. Instead, they enabled a cultural revolution that has proven to be far better at fighting totalitarianism and promoting democracy than anything the military tried to invent.
I'm not clear on exactly what design philosophy the Ruby ecosystem is supposed to embody. I guess it's something to do with the way everything modifies and uses everything else, but it doesn't coalesce into a single idea in my mind. Maybe it's just a matter of my not having much experience with it.
6'5 dude. And in 2005... yeah I was easily still pushing 275. :)
The only problem with boarding last is that there may not be any space to store your baggage, and you'll have to check it.
It depends on the type of laptop. Today, a brand new laptop can be had for $350. If this was, say, a 4-year old model with a lot of wear and tear on the surface (possibly, since it was a laptop that was loaned to people), then it's possible that it appeared worth under $100.
Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?
If the design turns out to be a Microsoft blunder, it just opens the door for someone to build a better file explorer. The ability to do this has led to many great products in the past. The file explorer in Windows is optional. It's there. It's free. Use it. Or don't.
So just download the equivalent of a bittorrent tracker file, containing all the information necessary for the standalone client to connect. Sure, it adds another filetype to the association database, but that's not a very big price to pay.
To save anyone else from my mistake, this is about baseball, not the game Go. :)