skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe ORMs want to save you from writing tons of repetitive queries, not to save you from ever having to touch a line of SQL.

At least that is what I believe, I have never seen an ORM advertising itself with "NEVER WRITE ANOTHER LINE OF SQL AGAIN".
MacBook (Model 2007) for charity
I'm looking for someone who needs a 'new' computer. I've a MacBook (model 2007) collecting dust and I've been wanting to give it away to someone who really needs it. For example; you can't code due to yours is broken or stolen and you can't buy a new one because, simply put, you don't have the money.

I've always been wanting to give this MacBook away for free. This post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3007650) made me realize this could be right place.

If there are many people needing it, I'll randomly pick someone Sunday 23:00 GMT +1

So are you a programmer who desperately needs a new mac for programming? Leave a response :)

PS. The battery is broken, you'll have to leave it connected to a wall socket.
I've made a new post about this. Please see here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3008136
Internet innovation failing in Africa, Europe, and here’s why.
Meh. It's pretty clear to me that with the mobile push low latency isn't happening. I suspect it's more likely that we'll encounter latency hiding techniques.
Really cool idea! Great way to receive feedback for new concepts/designs. I look forward to using it!

The direct link to the submission is also a great feature: http://karmurl.com/give?s=47msbc5r9kl7mx2l
These charts seems highly misleading. Why not list Safari instead of iPhone and iPod Touch, no reference to iPad either.

As they list Opera as one, which includes hundreds of devices, while Safari is split up? Even though the iPod Touch and iPhone is so much more similar than most devices running Opera are.
Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate: http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...

"The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch..."
No, the idea behind an ORM is to make the common case easy and safe.
Sometimes enthusiasm can be infectious and can motivate people. Sometimes the leader will be the one person in the room who doesn't get excited. It's good to learn both how to have a wide emotional range AND to keep yourself under control.

Age helps with self control. I improved my emotional range by taking acting lessons in the Meisner technique.

My natural voice used to be flat and emotionless. It might have had something to do with my family life or with how I adapted to getting picked on in elementary school.

I've learned to put more range in my voice and I think it helps everywhere from work to flirting (I can't say dating since I'm a family man.) I used to be terrified of job interviews and now I'm not. It's opened up a whole new world for me.
This. CQRS is the place ORMs truly shine.
9 hours of sleep followed by 18 hours of being awake (instead of 8 + 16) is comfortable for me. Unfortunately, it means your personal day keeps shifting relative to most other people's.
I'm in desperate need of a laptop to do my development on. I do algorithms in C and C++ for the next International Olympiad in Informatics and my laptop (an el-cheapo ~220EUR I bought 4 years before) is completely broken down, The keys merely work, the screen is touchpad doesn't really work as well. Linux won't work on this thing so I have to use Windows XP and putty to do my job and this sucks.

I need to speed up the development process and get up an running with a machine that will always work. I'm not asking directly for your machine, it's just that I'd like to have it, and by that I mean that it would certainly help me but I'm pretty sure people out there need it more deeply.

What I do is here: https://github.com/karantias/training

--gtklocker
I'd love to code for the web and the mobile web. And I chose my weapons: RoR, HTML5 and JavaScript. When it comes to learning I'd love to be prototype/side-project proficient, so than I can quickly code an idea and show it to people and iterate from there.
Finalists of Innotribe Start-Up Challenge unveiled
Why does this old junk keep getting reposted? Is someones boss making them use an orm against their will? Go work somewhere else and stop dumping on our tools.
Sounds so much like child abuse I couldn't get very far.
Find a language - start learning a language. Have a project you want to build. Then start learning a framework. Python -> Django, Ruby -> Rails.

Practice. You'll think you understand something, to only realize a few weeks later you don't. Just gotta keep practicing until you really get it - it takes a few 'Oh i think i got it..nevermind's

When you get stuck, try to answer it for a while, but if you are truly stuck - raise your hand and ask for help. Ask friends, or Stackoverflow.

The great thing about Stackoverflow is that explaining why you are stuck will help you better understand the problem. As you get better, you'll notice your questions get better.
Ask HN: Would you find this kind of reporting useful?
I've finally decided to finish up reporting library I've been using for years at http://templater.info
The idea is to use word or excel template and replace tags with data in it.
It supports some complex scenarios like: expanding tables, cloning entire document and defining data format in template.

I use mostly C# so it's only for .NET currently.
Do you think it would be useful to you? Would you buy it if there was a JVM version?
Since you made a new item for it, I'll reupload my kind of egoistic comment here:
I'm in desperate need of a laptop to do my development on. I do algorithms in C and C++ for the next International Olympiad in Informatics and my laptop (an el-cheapo ~220EUR I bought 4 years before) is completely broken down, The keys merely work, the touchpad doesn't really work as well. Linux won't work on this thing so I have to use Windows XP and putty (and it's really laggy) to do my job and this sucks.

I need to speed up the development process and get up an running with a machine that will always work. I'm not asking directly for your machine, it's just that I'd like to have it, and by that I mean that it would certainly help me but I'm pretty sure people out there need it more deeply.

What I do is here: https://github.com/karantias/training

Also, I'm 15 years old and believe me I'm completely broke. :)

--gtklocker

karantiaskostis[at]gmail[dot]com
29 and the same here. If wake up after 8 I will just be in zombie mode for an hour.
You're paying at least $109 a month right? That's kinda shocking that it's down all the time.

How many hits are we talking about? Like 50k? More?
If you stretch that slightly into 9+19 you can get 6x28 hour days in a week. That way you can have your weekends in sync all the time.
Why do you say that? The kids had a rough few weeks, it might of been hard, but there are a lot of things that are hard in life. I wouldn't call a tough time in school 'child abuse'.
Wait, are you kidding? It looks a hell of a lot less convincing than, say, jim: https://github.com/misfo/jim

edit: For example, 'A' doesn't work.
If you interpret the graph as a pissing match, then it is unfair that they've split up Safari. However I do find the information on how many iOS users have iPods vs. iPhones interesting, so I'm glad they did it.

Opera ought to be split up into Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, since they're different renderers on different types of devices.
"together with South (a database schema migration tool) it makes schema management a breeze."

Thanks for mentioning this. I'm just learning Django, mainly for using its admin interface to avoid a lot of CRUD, and South seems just what I need to evolve my schema while I go along.
This release did include some major features, such as the Web Audio API and support for NaCl in extensions. There are a number of other features and improvements as well, but just those two are pretty big.

As for the double standard you're claiming, people made a lot of noise when Chrome started the six week release process over a year ago. However, it's died down now that people are used to the release pacing. Firefox just started their rapid releases, so I'd expect any negative commentary to trail off in the same way.
In I believe 1975 I moved across the campus from 8 years of fines arts study to the nascent computer department (actually math department---wouldn't become computer department until long after I left) sat down in front of a model 29 keypunch machine took a summer course in a pseudo language modeled on IBM 360 assembler. It was made up of macros and was enough to show the basics of programming if not language. Shortly after that I was handed my professors old copy of Susan Stern's book on IBM BAL. For those who have never had the pleasure, it is (was?) very near a high level language even if it had a low level implementation. My first observation was that there was very little difference (meta) from planning a piece of sculpture to planning a program. As I joked, the biggest difference was clean-up; with code, you just turn things off, with sculpture you spend a fair amount of time with physical work. My first significant project was building a concordance generator---a key words in context generator from a given corpus. This meant not only the usual trapping of text in, new text out with no library to aid, but taking quick-sort apart and writing it in assembler. Looking back it was one of the harder things I've ever done; but that said, also one of the most enjoyable. There after I began the usual progression, skipped PL1, took FORTRAN etc. I was introduced to C at the New Jersey Computer Faire by Scott Guthrie who was selling a version of Small C, enough to get a leg up. Then BDS C on my 8085. Looking back, I've loon since adopted an approach of 'What have I lost, what have I gained' with regards to the language and syntax. Programming itself remains the same, although some things are easier to express in some languages versus others (Noam Chomsky and 'Language conditions thought' seems to apply to computer languages in my opinion.) Over the years, it is the usual 'Wash, rinse, repeat' with regard to language with the selection dependent on what the client wants or provides.
"TPP is being negotiated between nine countries that border the Pacific: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States of America, and Vietnam. While the official text is being kept secret, a leaked draft and other reports indicate that the United States intends to use TPP as another opportunity to spread its draconian copyright and patent laws around the world."

Here we go, again. As far as I'm concerned, if there's no transparency, there's no legitimacy. I understand not everything government does is publicized, but the base motivation for this seems manipulative and undemocratic. (It's not a warhead design; it's a economic negotiation about who gets what.)
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One amazing thing about the 2nd photo: The self-preservation instinct of the audience still hasn't kicked in. Spectators are craning their necks to see what's happening, and photography dude is just manning the camera.
Please let me know if there any people I should add, edit, or remove. Either comment here or directly on the blog post itself. Thanks!
Gartner: Gmail Owns Half of the Market for Enterprise Cloud E-mail
Laurie, this is a good restatement of the age-old problem of Object/Relational impedance, the perennial bugaboo of many an architect, developer, and DBA. It's true that ORMs are merely bandaids on what is essentially an intractable set-theoretical problem, but we've learned over the years that in the right hands an ORM is a tremendous productivity boost, provided the team is aware of the limitations. In fact Martin Fowler's original definition of the ActiveRecord pattern in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture describes some of these limitations from the very beginning.

"Unfortunately, these advantages disappear as the project increases in complexity: the abstraction breaks down, forcing the dev to use and understand SQL"

"Forced" to use and understand SQL? I think you have a basic misunderstanding of the purpose of ORMs, Laurie. The developer who can't use and understand SQL really has no business going near the ORM. They probably need to stay somewhere near the front-end doing design, layout and UI-centric work.

The purpose of an ORM, properly used, is not at all to completely remove SQL from the developer's toolkit, but to help developers who fully understand SQL and Objects eliminate boilerplate SQL. This has a huge dual benefit of productivity boost plus elimination of bugs by the reduction of code/SQL duplication.

If an ORM developer is not aware of SQL (i.e., watching their rails log for odd queries/joins) and the natural problems that arise, such as n+1, etc. then they probably shouldn't be writing data-layer concerns. ORMs are for experienced developers who know how to use things like the ActiveRecord or DataMapper DSLs when appropriate, and can also drop into straight SQL when appropriate. ORMs are power tools for serious developers who can use them for what they do well, and know how to avoid their weaknesses, which you outline well here.

Because of their benefit and the cumulative experience we've had in the last 10 years or so getting to know how to use ORMs effectively, they're not going away any time soon. However, they certainly have their pitfalls and it's important that we have posts like these every few years or so to remind us what those pitfalls are. So thanks!
It really depends on the person. I find I'm not able to absorb more than 1-3 hours of new stuff each day. It's also a lot easier for me to commit 1-3 hours every day. There's an idea that you need to learn a lot up front, and then you're a "programmer". Doing 1-3 hours of learning a day, gets you in the habit of ALWAYS learning. You never know enough, so it's not a 3-4 month process where you come out at the other end and you're done. I think 1-3 hours a day is manageable by everyone, and you don't ever run into diminishing returns for the day.

That doesn't apply to actually programming. If you're building something, and you have the time, more hours in the day is generally better. If the focus is on learning, 1-3 hours is probably good for most people, and something that's easy to keep up with for years.
Make it sink or swim. Force yourself to learn or perish...you'll learn.

To echo what others have said, having a problem you need to solve is paramount to succeeding. If you're just reading a programming book, being introduced to totally foreign concepts that you never put into practice, you won't get anywhere.

Based on your background (looks like design and electrical engineering), I think you'll do fine.

Some of my first projects were:
- A directory (basically just listings on a map)
- A customer survey
- A todo manager
- A wordpress plugin

All simple projects, but all things I was able to use. When you first start, sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel a bit just to get some practice (it's not like any of the aforementioned haven't been done a thousand times). What you're looking to develop are fundamental skills:

- How to design a relational database
- How to design a non-relational database
- How to query said database
- How to work with strings (splitting, imploding, etc.)
- How to work with arrays and loops
- How to work with objects
etc. etc. etc.

As you keep adding new tools to your arsenal, you'll wake up one day and be really surprised with what you know.

...And as a few others also said - stay humble. You can be proud of the things you create - but just look around every once in a while and find someone better than you. You won't have to look very hard.
As a 6 year old Dutch boy I was dumped in a British classroom. I survived am lots of years later live to tell the tale. To be honest, international schools are not always a great alternative: it's very much like living in two worlds.
i think the problem is people find it hard to adjust to other people's different excitement baselines. if you are less excitable or more excitable it shouldn't really matter because people should be able to adjust in the long term to take more notice or less notice. i'd be more suspicious of people who have high excitement baselines because it seems like it might be more beneficial to have high excitement than low excitement.
As a Russian immigrant to the US, I went through something very similar, but in reverse. A few thoughts:

* I am very glad I came from Russia (well, USSR at that time) to the accepting, everyone-is-a-winner US and not the other way around. It would have been much harder for me the other way around, especially if I had to attend public school.

* I really appreciate the forging of one's sense of self that such an experience brings. I vividly remember going back and forth between viewing myself as an American and as a Russian during my teen years. I believe my identity eventually transcended either American or Russian; I view myself as an Earthian, a world citizen now, one who can become more Russian or more American depending on the circumstances.
He may save your life or, better yet, keep you well informed with useless facts before you are burnt to a crisp.

You are likely to die of smoke inhalation before being burnt to a crisp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_inhalation

D'oh, N.A.D.D. for life!
Learn Colors in Spanish
> That said, their definition of optimal is big-O,

There are balanced search trees with shorter maximum height, but they often take asymptotically longer for local operations (finger update and finger search).

> which is unimpressive

What do you mean?

> I believe also reached without any balancing

I don't know what this means in context. Treaps are randomly balanced, making them have height O(lg n) with high probability.

> provided the input has no duplicates.

Duplicate keys are handled properly. The problem of duplicate priorities is discussed in the paper.
SQLAlchemy at PyGotham - my talk about ORMs, "abstraction" and Automation
I wrote this http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ and http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/ and am now working on this http://c.learncodethehardway.org/ so I'll give you advice that fits with what I've been doing to teach people:

1. Do every exercise, type in every bit of code, DO NOT COPY-PASTE.

2. Make the code run, fix all the bugs.

3. Repeat until you are done. Do it 1-3 hours a night.

That's it. It's an old method: repetition and practice to build base fundamentals so you can apply them to more complex problems. For the very beginner this works better because the topics are incredibly simple, but their experience and understanding needs work. By making them just type it in, then explain it, I get them experienced and bust through a lot of fears about learning something new.

Hope that helps.
Show HN: My project helps you create kick ass mobile sites
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The drift velocity isn't important. The velocity under an EMF (aka, a signal) is much closer to the speed of light. An individual electron doesn't move far, the first will displace another, so on to the other end of the conductor, but the electrons are moving very fast when a signal is imposed.

ADDED: It occurred to me that I better point out that "drift velocity" is the normal movement of electrons in a conductor without an imposed voltage, that is when the wire is just sitting there.
If the requirements change outside of the scope of the ORM you can always write SQL to do the query or guide the ORM.

If the requirement change requires a different backend using an ORM is actually easier, faster and less error prone.

So yes.
Is Neil Gaiman really that wealthy? I mean, obviously he's well off because his book sell so well, but even Obama didn't make 19 million off his books.
If disadvantaged homes can't afford ebook readers they will read on computers. They will go to the library and get online there and read millions, billions of free things on line, far, far in excess of what is available in a city's second-hand stores. Much is dreck, sure, but those who really hunger for knowledge can find it beyond what a room full of books can offer.

The selection can't be quite as grand as what will be available to people able to pay for ebooks, but the same is true of the author of this piece and being limited to second-hand, very affordable books.
You'll probably get enough developers involved. So I'm offering my availability to provide help with inbound marketing (blogging, social media, SEO, A/B testing, etc).
WikiLeaks offers Assange's stuffs for sale on eBay: Parda Phash
I had a similar idea. I even offered to help like two non-profits I knew personally. They did not take me up on my offer. I guess building a website was the last thing on they wanted to worry about.
ISP's alleged throttling of BitTorrent and Skype Violates CFAA
That's really cool, thanks for posting. What's it using to serve the pages though, it looks like the django test server? Btw, not a ror dev (at all) but what does that typically use as a web server and how is heroku doing it? (not apache?)
I had seen a few projects like GiveCamp that try to do this for nonprofits. They would get together on a weekend and hack on database/web projects, and then turn it over to the organizations.

It seems like a great improvement on this would be an organizational structure like the author suggests. Such a group can do more planning/design and provide ongoing support for the client non-profit. I also agree with the idea of doing this at some minor fee, nothing to break the bank for the client. But there is certainly some sort of price you can charge that can help keep expectations realistic so no client takes unfair advantage of the group's generosity.

I was hesitant to participate at my local GiveCamp event though because of the lack of future support for the organization. At the end of the event the maintenance responsibility is handed off to the nonprofit. That's completely fair to the developer that there be no expectation to do any more work on it.

But that non-profit didn't have the ability to get that software developed, so how could they maintain it either? It's great that they get donated a free copy of Visual Studio and some books from the GiveCamp sponsors, but if they could use that to maintain software, they could've written it themselves in the first place. What if some bug emerges a week after delivery and they can't even use that app at all? All that effort's been wasted and the charity could be stuck with broken software.
Another young fellow here.
I had an older Macbook which recently died. I had programmed in Objective-C (for both Mac and iOS) but can't resume it as I don't have the money for another Mac so your old one could get me back on track again.

_Johan
@Josso000
Thank you so much Mike! I'll dig into your suggestions!