skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a place in civilized, rational discussion for ranting.

Let's say you're out with two friends discussing the war on drugs, with all kinds of rational, civilized debate on the science, politics, economics, sociology, etc. Suddenly, one friend declares, "Ok, I understand the risks and potential rewards, and I've decided to start dealing coke." Sure, you can try to calmly talk them out of it, and/or you could do some "ranting." Both would be appropriate.

"Hivemind" indeed.
This doesn't bother me.

#1: The protection against data that would require "disproportionate effort" seems like a valid protection of the company. A company the size of Facebook surely has very complex databases, logs, and caches going on, so that if they had to literally fetch all the data they have about a user, I could see this becoming quite a project.

#2: I would consider data models a trade secret. So if the personal data contains information that belies the underlying structure, I'm okay with the data being "scrubbed" clean of anything that would potentially give competitors a peek into the underlying engineering.

Note that I canceled my Facebook account long ago because I think Facebook is a system that is structured so that the users' best interests are not a priority. But this doesn't mean that everything Facebook does is bad or is against users' privacy, so I find this article to be a bit sensationalist.
I have now, and it works well enough for me tentatively to make Chrome my default browser. Thanks!
The interesting thing is that you think this behaviour is evil. From Apple's (or Google's, for that matter) POV, they're streamlining your life and removing some of the pain of shopping by suggesting stores and products that you might like, deals you can benefit from when you're shopping for something specific, and the like. In the case of Google, their ability to target ads to your interests allows them to provide free applications like Search, Maps, GMail, etc. For Apple, although giving customers price relief would be highly out of character, new revenue streams open new possibilities for future devices and services to take the annoyance out of life.

By using these services, we are implicitly (or explicitly) agreeing to hand over our personal information. It might make us uncomfortable that Apple knows our wife's shoe size and favorite brands, but if we happen to be out to lunch next to a shoe store that's having a 40% off sale and our phone lets us know, is it really that bad?

I'm not saying I'm entirely comfortable with the proposition, but I can see why it might end up coming about. It won't be because Apple/Google?Facebook are Evil; it will be because consumers respond to it. For enough people, it will be a worthwhile trade off to forego some privacy in exchange for a useful service.
I assume you're basing this off the screenshot. The "Search source code" input is only available in private repos. Since kneath/resque is a public repo, apparently one benefit of working at Github is getting that input on all repos, whether public or private.
Very interesting story, it's nice to see someone targeting an interesting niche like this and talking about it.

However, Clint, have you worked a lot on your signup page? For example the 'Get Started Today!' CTA button ( btn-activatenow_b.png ) has text that looks like it is not aliased. The list of features right above it is a bit hard to notice. The testimonials that are linked as 60x52 pictures aren't obvious that they can be clicked on or that they contain testimonials. Also the logo ( http://faso.com/static/images/logo3.png 0 has different background color than the header (#000 vs #333) so it stands out. The top right 'Sign Up!' ( http://faso.com/static/images/btn-signup-head.png ) has a bad font so the 'i' letter is rendered bad, and it also does not have transparent corners (again #000 vs #333) and so the corners stand out.

I know I'm nitpicking a bit, but I think a website meant for artists should get these things right :)
I never pay much attention to anything that John Dvorak says. He doesn't seem to have much knowledge or insight into the industry, especially at a technical level. But he sure gets a lot of press when he says anything because he knows how to craft articles that have the sheen of seeming technical cluefulness and sophistication and contain just enough of a troublesome morsel of conflict to raise eyebrows and draw attention. But ultimately it tends to be little more than questionably founded pablum.
Fuck your dad, seriously.

Your parents are probably foreigners who do not understand the concept of pursuing your hobbies and making decisions that make you happy. You seem to be getting no support from anyone around you, and that sucks. I've been through it, and am going through it now.

My father never supported any of my hobbies. In junior high I knew I wanted to get into CS and business. I would watch TechTV on a daily basis, fiddle with my computer, etc. I loved it, but dad didn't give an ounce of fuck, pushed me to pursue a more stable field, and now I'm in grad school with years of work ahead of me that I will likely hate. I'm trying to make the best of it, but it shouldn't have happened. And when it comes to other personal areas of my life, they are still incredibly unsupportive.

So I've learned something that you should too, and it's that you need to only rely on yourself for drive and encouragement. Your parents will die soon and you'll be left alone. Your friends will move away and leave you behind. You'll find yourself relying on yourself to make it, so learn to be self-driven and to not give a single fuck about what your father or friends have to say.

Although you're not getting any support from those immediately around you, know that you've got tons of support here from people who've been and who are where you are now.

People might respond defending your dad, but don't listen to them. Parents often forget about the huge level of influence they have on the development of their children, and the lack of support and encouragement can really fuck with a person's self-esteem and drive. Shitty parents really rub me the wrong way.

For parents reading: encourage and motivate your children.
IPhone carrier plan comparison (US)
Great article, but it raises something I've been ruminating on for awhile.

It's funny that in the IT industry we need to define ourselves or our businesses so that we stand apart from the rest. I rarely see other industries say that Company X is just a lifestyle business or Company B is a startup. No, they are both businesses. Plain and simple.

A great many businesses would never be able to start operations if they had no profit motive, but in the IT industry it is admired and act as inspiration. What Clint shows is that the old, boring[1], and profitable businesses can still get a bit of attention among the new businesses we see on HN.

[1] I'm using the term loosely and without insult here.
> The issue is whether the interfacing technique adds in non-essential coupling. A technique that has at least the constraints of another technique will also have trivially have at least the non-essential coupling of the other technique.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Could you elaborate please?

I'll clarify my view with an analogous example: you can think of a
database as having a set of types - its schema. Think of each of the
applications that use that database as also having its own set of
types - its classes or data structures in general. Now, an example of
the "mechanism" I mean is that SQL provides a way for each app to
translate data in the database's schema into its own data structures.
If its data structures change, the SQL can change to adapt to that;
similarly, if the DB's schema changes, it can also adapt by changing
SQL (or even creating a virtual schema with another layer of SQL - a
view). Of course, this only works if these are only changes of the
representation of the information, and the information content itself
is the same. If the information changes, in a way that the DB or an
app depends on, then there's no avoiding that dependency.

A similar example are JSON/XML API's, where the JSON/XML is like the
DB, and the data binding code is like SQL. The "type" of XML is often
explicitly defined with an "XML Schema" document; JSON doesn't usually
have that, but it is of an implicit expected form - which is still a
type, just informally defined. There are also tools for converting
between XML types - XSLT, and may GUI "XML mappers" that display two
xml schema and let you draw lines between them.

tl;dr These enable "modules" with different types to interoperate
without dependency. Each defines its own types at its own boundary,
and so can be compiled independently. The middleware glue
(SQL/databinder/XSLT/datamapper) facilitates interoperation by
converting between types at the respective boundaries of two modules -
provided those types are equivalent, i.e. contain the same
information, just in a different schema/type.

Does your concept of "non-essential coupling" include the requirement
of precisely identical types at the boundary? If so, by loosening that
to only require the same information, this mechanism avoids that particular kind
of non-essential coupling.
The limit is only for composing a text. You can receive an unlimited number of texts. Did you get the impression that you could send unlimited texts for free? (serious question- it's not our intention at all)
With apologies to jwz:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll hire more engineers." Now they have two problems.
I agree. Also, in the age of the internet, every game with a significant following will be available for free, whether you like it or not. Therefore, you might as well apply the same concepts as freemium apps to games and use the free play as a marketing channel
If that's your concern, then, Settings > Messages > iMessage to [OFF]. Hardly difficult.
That's very normal in the US.
I've never heard of such a practice and it sounds unfathomably strange. Is it just a web development problem?

A couple of my employers have given me a cell phone, but that's no big deal - I just leave it in the office when I go home.
I don't know enough about your domain to make a coherent statement. Maybe the SVN style is superior for it, but I thought we were talking about code, which is why I was talking about build processes.
It happened four years ago...
Isn't that because it's sometimes useful to kill everything? How does that apply to a farm field, where you need the ability to kill specific plants?
LIVE: Web 2.0 Expo Day 3 watch & discuss
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This person is the poster-child for why you get a degree AND and internship / experience in some marketable field.

People all over swear up and down you DON'T need a degree and they are right. But having a degree means that your personal safety net is higher. You don't fall back to square one if life hits you in the face all at once. Stints and Wendy's, Pizza Hut, and Best Buy are long gone. The worst that can happen is I have to go back to a white collar job in tech support. ;)
> regarded as equals in the mind of the average CTO

Your local average is better than my local average
> Distance learning programs will never be a substitute for genuine classroom-based interaction, and under no circumstances should they ever be used to replace skilled teachers.

I have found that distance learning is great. I have watched lectures on the internet, and found the convenience of watching when I want and being able to rewind are some advantages over classroom-based learning.

While it may still be difficult to have questions answered as quickly as they can be answered in a classroom, I disagree that it "will never be a substitute for genuine classroom-based interaction," as technology will hopefully be able to address the current shortcomings.

Is your view based on a negative experience you had with online learning?
Am I the only one that would prefer cooler, quieter CPUs rather than 8-way monstrosities with big fans and creating lots of heat?

I have 2 systems running in my room, a 2-core desktop, and a 2 CPU quad-core system that I run virtualization on. This system replaced about 4 other towers that I had running, each doing various things like running web server, dns, etc, but basically just sitting idle and sucking up electricity.

I want to upgrade to a newer desktop, but I really don't want this thing to generate more heat, use more electricity and have a loud fan. Before, I wanted to upgrade my video card but couldn't find a reasonable graphics card that didn't have a fan.
We considered it, since Numpy was already a dependency, but it was even slower than the current code.
But performance means different things to different people.

If you're writing code where dot products are not something you do a lot of, then keeping a clean, idiomatic functional implementation is probably fine.

If you're writing code where dot products happen a lot, such as on real-time three-dimensional games (which happens to by my oeuvre), then the performance increase of having specific, unrolled implementations is huge.
If we can quit the absurd analogies all over this thread for a minute, can you point me to why Monsanto is so evil in your eyes? Other than a Vanity piece, it seems everyone has come to a preconcluded fact that Monsanto is "evil" somehow.

Cloudant is a business, and this is great for their financials, as well as for furthering the research in their tech stack. From reading it, I'm sure many on Hacker News use similar tools that will benefit from the research done by Cloudant.
As a follow-on, Paul, based on your standards, "everybody" accepts money from anybody even if they're evil. This is also a policy that YCombinator apparently supports?? I would have preferred to be voting up a post about "Why Cloudera turned down Monsanto's business" to illustrate the fact that they have ethical standards and believe that those are important in business.
I'd be curious to see this laid against population.. The numbers might be affected quite literally by survivorship bias.
Nationwide review found that Monsanto has filed 90 lawsuits targeting 147 farmers & 39 small businesses since '97. Article from '05, assuming research was done up until then.

Probably the sole one to go to trial & get significant bouts of attention.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-01-14/news/050114025...

Here's a farmer that won though:
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/ :)
Dive into GLKit by building a 2d game engine from scratch
maybe releasing some data will allow for reverse engineering of sorts, if telling you that will reveal something about how they collect, or store or analyze the data...
1.85合击sf
I agree with skyo and aphexairlines. I've found Amazon a fantastic place to work and am, frankly, baffled by the flak it's taking here in the comments. My experience at Amazon has been fun and rewarding, and I'm thrilled to be a coder at such an awesome company.

I guess your mileage may vary, but I've found AMZN to be an awesome place to be a programmer.
According to "Showstopper!", Microsoft would allow developers to go MIA for a bit after completing a tough project. That seems like a fair policy if you have a mature set of developers who deliver on their commitments.
Not when their common thread is a single feature, voice.

Like red trucks? Here's a red bicycle.
Sony to recall 1.6 million Bravia HDTVs due to possibility of fire
Social Media Evangelist Praises 21 Ways
Wait a minute. He's 20?! Christ. What kind of plan did you / do you have? You say you like art, why not get in school full time? Fill out the fafsa, get financial aid, live on campus instead of driving to that little community college, and go broaden yourself for a few years!

If you need help navigating the financial aid system and seeing just exactly what you quality for then shoot me an email @ gmail. I'm a master at it.
It's gotta be a slow day on hacker news when this is at the top page. (Or, is this being upvoted because it is Cringely.)

An entire article about web development past, present, and future without a single mention of PHP....

All snark aside, I strongly disagree with several things in this article.

Java never left, so it can hardly arrive again. Anyone that has ever worked in a corporate environment problably knows what I am talking about. Java dominates the Enterprise landscape.

Disk speed limitations on database access times can be and has already been overcome by in-memory caching. This is not new. Advancing SSD tech will not suddenly lead to Java's total ascendance as a web development platform.

The characterization of dynamic languages as "easy to program for a broader, younger, and maybe less experienced crowd of developers" is a rather unfortunate blanket generalization. This is especially the case because most people that I know that use dynamic languages usually have some experience in things like Java, C, C++ that Cringlely seems to hold in high regard.

And finally:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

The real problem that the vast majority of web developers face is not trying to cope with overwhleming amounts of daily traffic. The real problem is how do you build a product that is compelling enough to get signups, and how do you continue to develop this product to attract new signups.

Java is fast, and that is lovely. However, speed of execution does not matter when your development speed drags. When you are developing a product, you need to be able to move fast. If you get substantial traffic, then you can always rewrite backend services in Java (or whatever floats your boat) at that time.

Edit: When I say Java, I refer to the language - just as Cringely does in this article.

Of course a number of excellent languages have developed that combine the advantages of the JVM with the benefits of a more powerful language. (My personal favorite being Clojure.)
Please don't take what Cringely has to say as an accurate barometer of the Ruby community.

While I'll freely admit that Rails (and web applications in general) is an enormous part of what people are using Ruby for, it's used for many non-web things as well (although perhaps not to the same degree as Python)

Ever seen one of those satellite maps of the US at night that NOAA produces? That was made with Ruby. Just another off-the-cuff example: JRuby powers the HBase console.
Maybe I'm getting old, but could the numbers in that new nav bar be any smaller?

I used to be able to tell how many open issues there were without squinting.
Is Steve Yegge Google's new secret recruiter agent? :)

A few weeks ago he publicly quit his "cat pictures" project (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8) to pursue more noble a quest in data mining. I loved what he said, and at first glance this seemed like a jab at the newly released Google+. But it's actually a bigger knock on Facebook since the "cat pictures" app is Facebook's primary gig, and so far it's only a side gig at Google. I wonder how many FB peeps started to wonder if there really is any meaning in cat pictures.

Now it's Amazon -- "Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right", except for 3 things, one being "platforms." But his Amazon jabs are not as subtle as the cat pictures one -- "Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras."

Maybe Steve is Google's new unofficial recruiting agent. He makes reference to it here, "I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it."

When you think about it, he's the perfect person to have run a psyop designed to get the Facebookers and Amazonians to lay down their cat pictures and join the Googlers building the next generation platform, while partaking in all of their perks. Google can just play it off as, "oh, that's just crazy uncle Steve on one of his rants again". I don't know what it is, but I think it's great on multiple levels :)
I am a current Start-Up Chile participant (see also: http://www.startupchile.org/press/alum-participates-in-excit...), and I too would encourage everyone to apply. The opportunity to meet, work with, and play with the other entrepreneurs in the program has been totally awesome. Chile is a beautiful country, and the locals have been really welcoming and supportive. I've even hired a Chilean with wonderful results.

Every part of the application is required and important. Treat them as such.

True, the reimbursement process is fair (10% founder contribution), but a complete pain in the ass. Those people who will do best in this program are those who with a "roll with it, make the best of it" kind of attitude.
What struck me most is Jeff's disregard for potential patent threats. Perhaps inadvertent, but he also makes a strong case for why such "business method" patents hinder innovation rather than promote it.
Onemission Dog Directory
The second coming of Java isn't Java, it's the JVM. Look at the rise of Clojure, Scala, and other JVM-based languages.
This is the same argument made when claiming that JS will catch up with native app development.

It's a flawed argument: any solution that relies on 'hardware will get faster' will only ever be able to catch up to yesterday's state of the art.

Meanwhile, the state of the art will move forward as it takes advantage of increased resources or lower operational costs.
"As part of that promotion, Allergan provided kickbacks to doctors in the form of cash, travel, and meals and held seminars instructing physicians on how to bill Medicare for off-label procedures. "

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2010/september/settlement-in...
Personally, I am very anti-Monsanto.

However, I'm a bit surprised at the sentiment expressed here. Monsanto may be a pretty shitty company, but they are not satan. More so, I'm not convinced that Monsanto's actions are so exceptionally egregious compared to so many others.

What about Cisco getting into bed with China and other oppressive regimes in helping to track down dissidents? What about companies filtering and censoring content (twitter's hash-tag policing, for example)? Or ISPs and hosting companies rolling over with zero effort when presented with take-down notices or requests for customer information (even without a subpoena)?
I explained in my reply that my solution is a fairly middle-ground endeavor: if you can avoid giving your money to The Problem, then do so. Notice I didn't say radically change your life.

The Civil Rights movement was monumental but it didn't eradicate racism, the strong correlation between race and class, the achievement gap, or any number of equity issues. It caused us to shift what we consider to be normal and acceptable. Another component was people ditching the prejudices of their forefathers and doing something differently than before. Protest was complemented by action, which has been slowly changing the dynamics I described.

Our exchange has helped me realize that I should frame my solution as a complement to the protests. Protests, by themselves, can be ignored, spun, and crushed under rubber soles. Action in the form of starving the machine you're protesting against complements this and shows that you are listening. It combines the "We're mad as hell" with the "we're not going to take it anymore."

OWS is definitely galvanizing us to come up with a solution, but I don't think it is one on its own.
Perhaps something like this: http://davidcann.com/github-edited.png