skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'm working on such an app now, and right now the fastest way I can get anything done is writing similar code to what I wrote in 2003. It's not quite as bad, but I continually succumb to doubt."

The biggest objective problem this style has is that it affords everything-injection; cross-site scripting attacks, SQL injection, command injection if you're using shell commands, etc. Every time you bash one string together with another one, you run the serious risk of introducing a security attack, and with this style of programming, you basically have to be thinking about every single string concatenation.

Using a framework that will take some of the cognitive load off can be a net gain. It need not be a Glorious Framework, it just needs to be something that makes doing the right thing easier than doing the wrong thing.

Otherwise, most of the rest of the pain will be felt by you, not your customers, so hey, whatever, go nuts. But this is a legitimate objection to this approach. (And a legitimate objection to every framework that fails to make the right thing easier than the wrong thing, which is still a great deal of them.)
Our production service has always supported UDFs, though the free sandbox service does not.

Unfortunately, Postgres makes it difficult to install extension modules without superuser. That said, we've wanted to support contrib modules for ages. Lately, encouraged by the work Dimitri Fontaine has been doing on extensions, we have a pilot project going which includes support for hstore, pgcrypto, pg_trgm, and of course, postgis. Feel free to contact me at pvh(at)heroku.com if you're interested in taking it for a spin.
Hailstorm: feel the wrath of the yeti (Node Knockout entry)
At the end of the day, making stuff work is all that matters. I would never have considered CFML or IIS or Windows as a webserver, but if it makes your stuff work and helps you make stuff work, why would I laugh at it?
Sure, doesn't sound strange to me at all. Basically a synonym for "determine". (Native English speaker, California)
When I read "forking" and "following" on there, it was a revelations: of course, that's so obvious! Those terms are much friendlier than "replication" or "master-slave". It describes the desired result, instead of the underlying technology.
I'm really glad for James Gosling. It is always sad when you see these brains wandering around and not knowing what to do with their skills.
We love Sequel Pro and would love to see Postgres support. Unfortunately, nobody has stepped forward with a credible claim to do the work and the existing developers are all, for obvious reasons, much more familiar with MySQL. If anyone is interested in working on that patch, I would personally chip in to a promising effort, and I would encourage anyone else interested to do the same.
Young hackers programming contest
to be fair, HN has had the same design for years...
Some holes? It's all holes.

But, I agree that I shouldn't have called it communism. That label doesn't quite fit what the video is advocating. It's still propaganda though, of whatever variety.
Can someone explain to me why dropbox has been so successful? I get that its a good idea but what makes it so valuable?
I read pud's comments as essentially the same thing: he has better things to worry about.

However. A lot of the leeway in technology choice you might have as a lone-wolf entrepreneur fly out the window once you grow beyond that. If you have no intention of growing beyond, go nuts. Use whatever makes you happy. If you do want to grow more, then be prepared for a rewrite.
Just because you have an example of a probably poorly designed, over-engineered system that could be completely replaced with some hand written SQL code, doesn't mean that is the best solution for everything.
Come back when you have an example of a system running on top of 500 tables, doing read-writes in a big iron server, communicating with dozens of other servers, that uses distributed caching to improve performance, and that you can explain how you can replace an ORM with SQL.
I can't find any list of prerequisites for this class, though their FAQ https://www.ai-class.com/registration/faq implies that there are some. Does anyone know if this class is noob friendly? (as in someone with no CS or programming background)
Suffice it to say, any rumours of our demise were greatly exaggerated. So much more to come and yes, we are hiring, including for our Postgres team. (Resumes/github accounts/etc to jobs(at)heroku.com.)
Shut Up
I really love the phrase "not that good at the Internet." I use terms like that in jest. Sometimes I wonder if we're creating a Warhammer 40,000 like world where high priests use incantations passed down for generations on machines so fantastically complex the knowledge of their construction has been lost for a thousand years.

Then i realize editors are lazy, and move on.
Interesting, since he just joined google 5 months ago... http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20047787-264.html

I wonder if this is in any way related with the ongoing android litigation snafu.
If you had any idea how long it took to get that language right...
Congrats to Dropbox. I have to admit that I still don't see their sustainable advantage but the folks with the money clearly do!
That it is kind of absurd that the lives of Iranian dissidents depend on this relationship between browser developers and incompetent bid dumb organizations asserting trustworthiness and competence, IMO.

Having lots of CAs is commercial pressure, but as log as any can issue for any, it means security is as vulnerable as the weakest company's weakest system or staffer.
"Most techies who have a negative opinion about any technology do it with hearsay and not first hand experience."

You'll find that even when you have first hand experience, you'll often be met with "well, you didn't do it right". Or "you need to do XYZ first - no one ever does foobar with XYZ first - are you stupid?". And so on. Even first hand experience isn't enough for some fanboys when you choose to reject their tools/languages.
I'd like to add that, in practice, socket.io doesn't work well for mobile HTML5 multiplayer games. We found that long-polling requests tend to get dropped without informing the mobile client.

Our solution so far has been to roll our own mobile networking layer, with redundancies and timeouts especially tuned for mobile.
Sad but true! Bluehost should have sorted the issue...
Eero Aarnio Collection by Alessi of Italy
Google+ Poses Corporate IT Security And Compliance Issues
"beautiful" sql is subjective. What does it mean? SQL that looks pretty to the eye (with proper indentation)? Or is it SQL that can run on dozens of different database servers with no modifications? Or is it SQL that can be automatically generated so you don't have to spend any time thinking about it but that runs 5% slower than something you spent 1 hour on?

I would probably go with the two last options.
News of the World Phone-Hacking
I recently left ColdFusion development and I've never been happier. IT has been my anecdotal experience that ColdFusion is an old man's game. They seem to look on newfangled things like Object Oriented programming with mistrust. This guy thinks it almost ruined his business.[1] The 'younger' guys who get into OO, seem to look at Java and think it's a good idea to have three layers of abstraction between their controller and their database wrapper that has four methods on it.[2]

I got out of ColdFusion 8 months ago into PHP, which isn't exactly known as being a hotbed of good code. I feel like just a mediocre programmer at the currently company I'm at would be a way-beyond-stellar ColdFusion developer. Of course this is all anecdotal and hearsay, but my experience is in line with yours.

[1] http://www.advantexllc.com/blog/post.cfm/how-oo-almost-destr...

[2] http://www.remotesynthesis.com/post.cfm/Objects-and-Framewor...
The whole post boils down to what appears to be proud, willful ignorance.

Perhaps, but I kinda liked the contrast to the constant stream of proud, wilful "Clojure/CoffeeScript/CaramelMacciatoScript is the new black" hipster-sounding posts on HN.
Urgh, sign in with facebook? Pretty cool otherwise.
My impressions: CS 221 (AI) is taken mostly by sophomores and juniors who are interested in AI, but come from all areas within CS. CS 229 (ML) is taken mostly by juniors and seniors who are on the AI track. CS 229 has a reputation for being the harder class. I get the idea that people come out of 221 with a knowledge of what techniques are out there so that they can accomplish simple tasks and know where to look when they need to learn more, and that people come out of 229 with a relatively firm foundation to solve ML problems (at least, as firm a foundation as you can get in 3 months in a large and difficult field).
who said tables aren't semantic? Tables say "Hey, I'm going to show you some things with a row column relationship now." Some times table is exactly the semantics you need. It shouldn't be your primary and only tool but if your showing a set of numbers collated and sorted by rows and columns then its pretty much semantically a perfect fit.
Python : Executable Pseudocode
Sounds like this still won't fix the Netflix issues with OpenDNS/Google DNS, since Google doesn't have Amazon on board.
It's similar to Facebook: name recognition, everyone's on it so everyone's on it, etc.

And their stuff just works really well. They're also slowly cultivating a third party integrated apps ecosystem.
Cue another 10,000 or so dropbox imitations.
Taking a shot at this -

a good idea - 1 point.
executed really, really well - 100 points.
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You're looking at their revenue and valuation in absolute terms, as a snapshot. Look at it in relativity, like a movie not a photograph. They are on an upward trajectory, what was 13000% last year, is 1330% this year, and might be 800% next year.
Ascii cocks, yay. >.>
"most college students".... as defined by the outcome of a 30 student sample at one university.
Yes it is, there is a maximum radius but the max should encompass most cities
Presumably, the author meant that the two most likely nations to birth the 7 billionth human are China and India. I doubt the intended comparison was between the set {x ∈ nations : x = China or x = India} and its complement {x ∈ nations : x != China and x != India}.
The US government is doing a lot to fund renewable energy R&D since the creation of ARPA-E in 2009: http://arpa-e.energy.gov/ I suspect, but do not know for sure, that China is doing more of this sort of investment, particularly in wind.

If I were John Boehner (leader of the US opposition), I'd take money from corn and oil subsidies and use it to fund more R&D, but I'm not (or at least I won't admit to being him in this public forum).
According to the main page, Bellstrike will receive 9.5% of the total amount that people donate through the site. The TOS does, however, list a different commission; "As the sole consideration for Zekten's provision of the Service, each Client Nonprofit agrees to pay Zekten a transaction fee of 6% for each donation made to the Client Nonprofit using the Service, with a minimum transaction fee of $1.50."

Which one is it?
isn't is nearly the whole point of socket.io to use the optimal available transport? so if it's using long-polling, it would seem sockets are not available on that platform.

if that's the case, what is the method of communication for your networking layer?
Their defensible advantage is two-fold:

1) they developed a technology that in theory should be easy to duplicate, but in practice is extremely hard. Large teams always mess this up (even world-class teams, e.g. at Microsoft, which has had several stabs at this), and small teams often don't have the skills to work with so many orthogonal elements at the high competence level required.

2) They have supportive users signed up on yearly contracts. That makes them very resistant to competition.

A Dropbox competitor would ahve to be 10x better for people to switch. That's hard to achieve.
Offer a public bounty ? Just the basic support for viewing data would be really helpful.

This is my biggest pain point while working with heroku.
Zynga debuts new Facebook game: Adventure world
I'm sure nontechnical people use the term "exponential" loosely, but this being HN, I think clarification is in order.

Consider the function

f(x) = x ^ 2

(where the caret stands for exponentiation, of course). This is called a quadratic function. Here are some example values:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0 1 4 9 16 25 36 49 64 81

This is the kind of relationship you have described: when x is doubled, f(x) is quadrupled.

Now consider this function:

f(x) = 2 ^ x

This is an example of a function that is properly called exponential. Here are some example values:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512

Here, every time x increases by 1, the value is doubled. See how much faster it grows?

In very practical terms, the difference between a "power law", as functions of the form x ^ k are called, and an exponential, of the form k ^ x, is massive. I grant that the terminology may be a little confusing, but this is not a pedantic distinction!
I just realised that Heroku have a problem: when I looked at the page, and looked at the subdomain URL, I couldn't tell if this was a real offering or a fake app put up by someone else.
This was my reservation as well. I'm pretty stingy about who I give Facebook access to.
Have you heard of the term "confirmation bias" before?
It would still be radically net positive. Oil is a stonking great deal; you put in one joule and get something like 10 to 30 back. (Note how I phrased that in energy terms this time, that's an important point.) You can't actually subsidize something of that size to profitability, because the energy industry is on of the bases of the economy; if oil is a net loss, the whole edifice comes crumbling down regardless of what you do. You can't subsidize the oil industry into net energy profitability with wealth taxed away from dry cleaners and accountants, and it doesn't matter what games you play with dollars if you aren't making a true net energy profit at the base of the economic structure.

Wind and solar both generally barely break even or barely above if you take a full accounting of their energy inputs and costs, biofuels are often a net loss (depends on the crop, but I think the balance of the argument has corn ethanol as a net loss, cane sugar seems to be a net gain, but...), and the problem is they're competing with things that easily get tens of times of returns on energy expended with the fossil fuels and nuclear power.

One of the things you rarely see correctly computed is what it would truly take to power our entire society with renewable energy, including the sudden new energy expenditures necessary to keep our purely-renewable infrastructure maintained with replacement gear. As the net energy benefit of the average piece of gear approaches 1x, the necessary expenditures approach infinity. Replacing 10-25x sources with 1.5-3x sources requires yet again far more resources than the naive multiplications and divisions would imply, if you don't make the mistake of assuming free infrastructure that never decays, or one-time-cost infrastructure that never decays.

(Incidentally, this is why cheap solar, in the sense of truly cheaper without government subsidy solar, is exciting. A solar panel that can make back 5-10x the expenditure to make and install it, and isn't a massive expenditure of metal and glass and silicon is a big deal, it makes things practical that weren't before. Or a solar installation consisting of lots of cheap reflectors concentrating the energy on a centralized station. I still think we might be able to go both net positive and practical on solar. Wind I'm less optimistic about, it's difficult to see what we can cut out of our wind generators and still have wind generators the way we can cut down on the mass/energy footprint of a solar installation with clever engineering. In the limiting case, a reflector is a sheet of foil and an amortized central station; a wind generator is an entire wind generator.)
For those of you that were not around during the dot.com implosion in 2000-2001, pud (the author of this blog post) ran the notorious site http://www.fuckedcompany.com which gave an awesome view into companies that were going down the tubes during that time.

good times... good times..
You can also "Google" the url and view the cached version.
Show HN: City Chat - mobile web chat (HTML5)
I would say that at this point you're right, we're probably not right yet for companies subject to HIPAA or PCI regulation.

The advanced Postgres datatypes are pretty much my favorite thing in the world. We use HStore internally all over the place, as well as some more exciting projects that we haven't said too much about yet. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, if you're interested in trying out some of those extensions, contact me directly.
That would make sense if we were talking about Git/Mercurial/Darcs/Bazaar opposite SVN, but in the context of SVN and Git, not so much. SVN is much, much closer to CVS than to Git.
Check out the extremely cool HTSQL from Clark Evans!
I suppose the sort of person who always makes sure everyone can easily notice they are presently reading Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest won't quite welcome the Kindle with open arms.
I've been wracking my brain on this one and have yet to come up with a theory that doesn't end in: that place is on fire. I think WebOS is wonderful, and wished HP had stuck to its guns, but this is just strange. It reeks of internal anarchy.
Yeah, I think we actually agree. :) I have known preachers, and you're right that there is a big difference between them and engineers that just want to find the best tool for the job.
Does anyone here think HN's markup is meant at all to be inspirational?

Yes, it's one of the most usable and beautiful sites on Internet.
If I were a single founder...
I'm uncomfortable with the notion that there is a "proper" way to use a search engine. It seems like we should design search engines based upon our audience's behavior.
I know what Mailchimp, Django and OAuth2 are, but I'm struggling to understand the purpose of this library. Can you shed a bit of light on how or where this might be used?
For exactly the reason you pointed out.

The GPL guarantees that the code will forever be open due to the requirement that derivative works are released open and under the GPL.

What this complete 'code availability' freedom limits is what you can do with the code. For example, people are perpetually free to get that source but, you aren't free to incorporate it into proprietary software.

One entities freedoms can be a limit to another's freedoms.
Hi, I'm the founder of Bellstrike. The actual fee is 9.5% with no minimum transaction. We include the credit card transaction fees (WePay charges 3.5%) in the 9.5% fee. We originally were going to separate the two fees out but decided to include everything in one fee. Thanks for pointing out the type - we thought that had been corrected. We'll make the change.
The website of the project generating these results: http://www.erialproject.org/

The main takeaway should be "students have a hard time finding good sources because researchers hide their articles behind layers of unintuitive interfaces that finally bring you to a broken link."
The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers
The problem with this idea is that for the majority of users "taste" is the last thing on their mind. Functionality and ease of use are the only things that matter. Having common functions up front in your face is in fact easier to use than having them hidden away.

It takes a certain level of skill using a system before you're capable of appreciating higher level constructs such as "beauty". As an analogy, we all have seen poor coders whose code is poorly formatted, sloppy looking, and just plain ugly. But when you ask them they're just not capable of noticing this. Its that their minds have not elevated past the details to see the big picture. It's the same way with most computer users.
I wonder how Google feels about this leak.
www.adhdinc.com shows up as black text on a black background for me (firefox 3.6 windows 7).

Using IE, it's black text on a very dark gray background. I can read it, but just barely.
Did HP accidentally just find the best way to break into the tablet market?

Sell hardware at a loss and make it up on software. Console makers have been doing it for some time now.
We are unlikely to offer MySQL at any point in the near future. We feel that across the board, Postgres has the best data robustness guarantees, the most powerful query optimizer, the strongest replication solutions, the most useful datatypes, and the greatest community driving, developing and supporting it.

We hear you on the cheaper plan; watch this space.

Last, there is no restriction on creating only one database of each size.
Layers, automatic vectors, pressure sensitive tips... not really stuff that you can trivially replicate with just paper/pen.
And climbers. Nothing like wading through a gibbering horde of prana wearing gumbies topropting with their $350 shiny new 70 meter bicolor ropes first thing in the morning at the crag.

And kayakers. I've lost count of the number of times I've had someone's shiny new boat (closely followed by an expanding slick of random gear) float past me on class III+ runs.

And hikers. Ever see a day hiker doing a mile and a half loop trail wearing a $350 hydration pack, $150 trail shoes clad head to toe in North Face gear?

And blacksmiths. Endless are the rants on why a $800 Beverly throatless shear is infinitely superior to an identical model from Harbor Freight that costs a mere $90.

And car enthusiasts. Ever see a $90,000 sportscar dinking around in traffic on a Saturday afternoon?

See a pattern forming? People (mistakenly or otherwise) attach prestige to the latest expensive gear, regardless of the activity in question.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=For+Google+CEO+Larry+Pag...

Actual Google search link that will work when clicking through to WSJ.
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Wow, did you actually assemble all that data, we've been looking for an affordable database which has all this for over a year. Thanks!
Doubt it's going to be too hard but maybe not noob friendly. The "basic" level of the class at least should be accessible for the most part. It will cover some probability theory in the beginning so if you have a grasp of that already but forgot it this will help. It looks like machine learning is going to be a larger focus than in the AI class I took so you will need to know linear algebra as well.

Here: http://robots.stanford.edu/cs221/ is the outline with the prereqs and the schedule of topics.
The flip side of this is that without the Kindle, it would have been "I may go pick up a copy from the public library, if I find myself visiting it soon and remember this thread when I'm there."

He's a lot more likely to actually get around to reading it when it's instantly and freely available. Hurrah for the public domain.
Sure. Say you're building an app that leverages MailChimp's platform for sending emails. Someone that uses MailChimp could come sign up for your app using their MailChimp account, which would be validated through this library and the OAuth2 provider (MailChimp) and you'd know they were a real user and you'd have API keys to make calls on their behalf.

So now they can use their account and your app and everything is hunky dory.

I know that's pretty general and all, but that's how you'd use it. MailChimp is trying to move away from API keys and all that 'messy' authentication and toward OAuth2.
We're running user-defined functions on Heroku right now (using a functional index on a custom hash function to get fast space-efficient queries on a string column of a large table).