skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No rant on the Indian Railway system is complete without mentioning the disaster that is the 'Thatkal' quota booking at 8 in the morning.

Years ago when I was one of the few people among friends and family that had good internet and a credit card, I used to book a lot of tickets for others. Out of frustration, I wrote a simple python script that automated the process of booking tickets at 8 in the morning.

It would log you in, fill in the passenger details, payment mode etc.. and boot you into a browser for the final bank transaction screen. It was fast because it wouldn't actually wait to download the html screens before submitting the data. It would scrape the main page's date and sync itself with it to submit the booking exactly at 8am. I was able to finish a booking in less than 30sec.

After spending a few days prodding their system to make this hack work, I learned just what a mess their backend was.

They have a form variable called 'clickCount' which they increment and pass around on every page. This is how they 'detect' that you clicked a link twice and helpfully log you out.

Their validation and actual processing of passenger genders is case-insensitive - they accept either 'M' or 'm'. However the final ticket printout you get will show all passengers as female unless the gender you sent in was in upper case (curiously though the actual official print out pasted on the train when travelling contains correct genders - I have no idea why).

I presume many people had similar scripts to what I had and so eventually in an attempt to circumvent it, they introduced captchas. Turns out the captchas didn't actually work.

I know this because my script continued to work for a long time and only a few months after they introduced captchas (when I visited the website the normal way to make a booking) did I even know they introduced it. I can only presume that if you didn't actually submit the 'captcha' form variable then they didn't bother to validate it. So the irony was that the people booking tickets the normal way suffered while the rest of us working around the system were rewarded.

Finally they realized this at some point and threw in the towel and just banned quick booking altogether from 8-9 because they couldn't figure out any other way to actually solve this problem. So yeah, I'm probably part of the reason that happened (though by no means the only one who did this type of hackery,I'm sure).
I think things have changed a lot since then (it has been half a decade), but it's still mostly right.

Better to be Heroku.com than Cloudhosting.com then and now. But I wouldn't want to be launching Del.icio.us or Flickr.com in 2011.

These days I think you're far better off with simple/short/spellable domains like: Fab.com, Batch.com, Groupon.com, Mint.com, Dropbox.com, Airtime.com, Oink.com.

For consumer-facing web companies these strike the right balance of credibility and hipness. You won't find domains like these unregistered. You'll have to buy them off someone.

For business-to-business companies domains are somewhat less important, names like: Mixpanel.com, KISSmetrics.com, Mixrank.com, Olark.com, Heroku.com will do the job perfectly fine.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
NameError: name 'smu' is not defined
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You make good points, they're not blunt. I've just read the same basic blog post many times complaining that there's no SciPy in Ruby. Again, I'm not in the sciences so I'm out of my element talking about it. I'm just trying to make the simple point that there does seem to be people out there wanting science libraries for Ruby
The site was taking a while to load for me, so I went ahead and put it up on a PDF if anyone needs it: http://sumukh.me/MWZc+
Interesting idea, I think you need two things though:

1) Better copy. I (and others here I'd imagine) have no idea what exactly your site is. A short blurb that's a couple of sentences long that explains what is helps greatly.

2) Post this as its own post instead of a comment in another post. This way it looks a little spammy (which I understand is not your intention). Make sure you mention how it's built in Arc in your title, and post a story on http://arclanguage.org as well (if you haven't already). Beware that new accounts posting links often get marked as spam, that's why pg recommends you have an account for a few weeks before doing a Show HN post, which would be the type of post you'd do in your case.

Good luck!
The Wrong Inequality
Agreed, I thought the same thing. It seems kind of strange to use median income to find the "1%".

I guess it all depends on the point this is trying to make, which I'm a little unclear on. It seems perhaps useful (it's data, after all), but if the intent was to tie it to the "occupy" movement, then I missed that connection.
The point I was trying to make is that CoL should not be a factor.
The PS3 and Home Cinema Explained
Excellent advice. You simply have to understand JS scope rules, and the Crockford post lays it out compactly. It's an idiosyncratic language.
Nope, but perhaps the "raw" view will help: https://raw.github.com/gist/1329619/6739dd2eb9f1cf91ecca27aa...
Link: http://7billionactions.org/data
The TED talk on surviving a nuclear blast: http://www.ted.com/talks/irwin_redlener_warns_of_nuclear_ter...

Instructions start at around minute 18.
Buy new iPad2 for only $78.86 from http://www.ezy-bid.com
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Ask HN: Is there any interest in a blog that discusses futuristic products?
I am thinking about starting up a blog to exercise my writing ability as well as learn some marketing hands on. I was searching for a topic and realized that as a longtime sci-fi nerd I have always been fascinated by new and interesting products/services that do awesome things. Would anybody be interested in reading this?

Examples of topics that would be discussed are:

-Companies creating new and interesting services (with a focus more on those like dropbox or skype as opposed to a metrics recorder or photo sharing app)

-New research that pushes the bounds of human knowledge and provides information that is understandable and practical

-Products that alter the way we interact with the world

[EDIT: Added examples]
Hmm. There are a few aspects of the FSF's strategies that I have never quite been a fan of, but I must say that Stallman has, in general, been much more effective at promoting free software than almost anyone else I can think of. Look at the GNU project, at Emacs, at GCC, look at how widespread the GPL is. Look at how many people know and care about what free software is, and what qualifies as free software (and despite the different name and different reasons given, the term "open source" is seen as meaning pretty much the same thing). That seems pretty effective to me.

What do you think he could do that would make him more effective? Compromise his position, say that maybe, sometimes, it might be OK to recommend non-free software? What value would he be providing then? While using a fully free software stack may not be for everyone today, the fact that he has pushed hard enough that it is possible is inspiring, and created benefits for people beyond just those who use entirely free software.
I believe the captcha was introduced because travel agents were using VB based software to automatically book tickets at 8 am using IRCTC.

For the life of me I don't get why IRCTC doesn't use some good load balancing and improve performance of their mainframe.
With Ruby, the flexibility of being able to do things in more than one way makes it necessary to learn conventions rather than just the language spec. Sometimes breaking those conventions can have a tremendous upside. Some people find that upside worthwhile and others don't.
Screams lack of testing. Speaking of which, did you know your site design breaks when viewed on an iPad?
I use jshint in vim as well: https://github.com/wookiehangover/jshint.vim
Chinese market has tongues wagging | ZDNet
Are you saying that the definition of an adequate test setup is one that will necessarily catch any possible race conditions?

That sounds like a necessary idea if you're building real-time embedded systems for aircraft operation or something, but for a lot of applications, developing a test harness to that standard would take considerably more time and effort than building out the actual product.
Republic Wireless to launch $19 unlimited voice, SMS & data service
Steve Jobs' Last Words
Well, it depends on what you mean by "accept." He acknowledges that Android is a step in the right direction, being much more free software than iOS, and restricting what software end users can run less. But it's not something that he considers acceptable; he would never own an Android phone, unless it were running something like Replicant and the radio firmware were replaced by free software or locked in place (so that it acted more as hardware than as software).
I'd be offended if it wasn't for the fact that your original accusation appears to be that I had had a happy childhood. I'll take that one on the chin.

As for the rest... well, I don't understand where you're going with it. Pop psychology aside, are you really suggesting that you write utterly seamless code every single time? You've never done a build and then realised that you made an error somewhere along the way, gone back and fixed it? You act as if my mistake had the potential to ruin a business. Of course it didn't- I picked up on it before the code had even been pushed to the remote repository.

You can live in a world where everyone does everything perfectly, every time (and pay the price when you inevitably don't) or you can set up systems with unit testing, user testing, and- yes- developer testing that results in bugs being dealt with in a timely manner before a single end-user sees anything.

But hey, each to their own. Whatever works for you. If you get it right first time, every time, then you are a better programmer than I, and I congratulate you on it.
Javascript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov is another great primer on JS best practices. Above all, if you're not delinting and using strict, you're dead in the water.
> can't stomach learning the existing scientific tools [I assume you mean R, Fortran, Matlab]

The sum of anecdotes is not data, but

It might be the opposite: people who know the pain to work with this tools move to Python for complex projects if they can.
Don't be so literal. I'm saying hardware and software are more interchangeable than people realize.
The Sayings of John McCarthy
8-9 Tatkal booking is not allowed in irctc also.
Why the unnecessary use of "startup bros"?
A lot of this is the result of the confusion in the community, there is the CouchDB Apache project, then the CouchBase work and their own "Single Server" releases that don't necessarily map 1:1 to the Apache versions.

Then there is the CouchBase "Couch Server" offering which, from what little I can tell, is membase + CouchDB and their CouchDB build, according to their docs, isn't 100% 1:1 with the Apache CouchDB builds (some differences about protocol or something).

Then you have no officially maintained libraries for the different platforms which was a turn off to me the first time I cracked that egg open.

Then you have CouchBase wanting to focus Couch on the mobile-cloud story since they are the only NoSQL solution doing that , with native builds for some of the mobile platforms.

Then you have BigCouch and IrisCouch and a slew of other things I can't figure out where they fit in.

Ultimately when you enter the eco system and start digging, it is hard to figure out exactly what "CouchDB" is, where to grab binaries for your platform from and drivers for your platform.

As wavephorm pointed out, you can figure it all out with some reading and digging, but you have to persist.

It's not like Mongo, you don't just head to the official site, grab the official binary and install the official driver.

I'd also point out that CouchDB's biggest feature, the must-have feature no other NoSQL repo besides RavenDB replicates, is the master-master replication. If you don't need that, your barrier to entry with the other NoSQL solutions is much easier/straight forward.

I hope at some point the CouchDB community focuses their efforts on barriers to entries and figures out a common message for beginners they can communicate, and from there introduce the customizations for the people that need them (mobile Couch, BigCouch, etc.)
Why Are We Bullies and Trolls Online?
Yes, this is what I ended up doing and reading it in my editor.
Who Will Win The TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Startup Battlefield?
The hottest new Internet companies are growing up outside the U.S.
Cinema on the PS3- Find out what you need to know
If you own "shirts.com" then you definitely ought to make a website out of it. You have a huge advantage, and you should use it.

But if you were making a website to sell shirts, you might reasonably ask whether it's worth it to spend the money to buy shirts.com or to pick a more affordable name and save your money for other things. If you're a startup and shirts.com is in your reach, then you have a surprising amount of capital for a startup that hasn't launched -- why do you even have that much?

I think that's the issue at hand.
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Daily1nov11
Should I Pursue a Coop Education?
Coax Cables – Selecting the Right Ones Based on Their Different Types
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Sorry to hear that. Saw you present at the Twilio conference. I think you've got potential. Keep at it.
I will suggest http://notemoz.com
ok nice looking and all but still not API T_T
IPod fathers unveil their next project, the Nest Learning Thermostat
Why cant they hire ONE decent programmer who can come up with a good design !!
Site seems to be down. Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:messyma...
Thanks for the encouragement, we are going to keep on going with this project.
Thank you, it would not load for me at all. Did you re-format the content like that? If so, what did you use?
Google trends is not the sole decided of popularity.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby+on+rails%2C+django&c...

Do you really think that ruby on rails has been declining in popularity since 2006?
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ok granted for current and future research but what about what's been done in the past that they won't share? i, personally, hold a beef against ACM for doing that.
Yep, I can confirm dealing with these issues for years myself as well.

As soon as iCloud was released, I happily ported over my contacts. It's been a much better experience so far (I can finally use large contact photos!).
Those are a great asset that can be taken advantage of by the owner. SEO is almost a cake walk. I know of HN user haploid for example who owns and runs ties.com and scarves.com for several years now. They might comment better on this matter than I can.
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Couldn't agree more. Having said that I feel these are taken way too seriously/emotionally and it is important to understand that you can build your own startup to product/market fit, revenue and profitability whether or not you get into YCombinator or other incubators. YC and other incubators are a great help, but should not be considered a ticket to (possible) success.
I can't stand this new UI. It's slower, took away screen real estate, and I don't see where they put my unshared notes. Blah!
I agree, I think in the next few years something will be able to fill this gap. And maybe the problem is adoption right now.

Anything we're not really excited about and is based on ancient paradigms (email is exactly what you would think electronic version of regular mail would be like) seems ripe for replacement, although getting people to jump from something so deeply engrained into a lifestyle is difficult.
Sparrow, the popular GMail desktop client, is said to be coming to iOS too.
Space leaks, stack overflows (foldl vs. foldl'), failed pattern matches (head []), etc. There are tons of bugs lurking in well-formed Haskell programs.
From a rubyist's perspective, CouchDB was a major catalyst in reigniting interest in non-SQL databases—a long-standing cyclical occurrence—this time in the realm of web development.

CouchDB caused a lot of web developers to question what they really needed out of their data store, driving a lot of early popularity, but it turns out that it's not precisely what most web apps need. MongoDB seems to be designed much more to answer this question directly, rather than solving the interesting but perhaps slightly more esoteric problems that CouchDB addresses.
Wow, thanks for sharing!

It's these small things to remember that can save a lot of debugging time down the road. Will remember to "use strict" when I use nodeJS again.
Can Mozilla and Microsoft Be Allies Against Google?
There is no dilemma, it is your fiduciary duty to your shareholders to protect and maximize your future revenue by any (legal) means necessary.
Back up (I hope). Really sorry about that!
Valid point, but the Django comparison is a red herring as most of those searches have nothing to do with the framework.
I guess you haven't used the Android one then.
Totally agree, very classy. And that Why Not link is great. Best rejection I've ever gotten
Why is this guy getting downvoted? People using the V arrow for disagree?

Premise: RMS is an odious $pejorative

.. I gotta agree with that. The man has done and continues to do good work, but he's still a complete unreasonable nutter. Being a nice likeable guy who accomplishes nothing or being a complete wad of dick who does all the things doesn't negate the other side of that balance.
And then you find out that they've managed to get an entire network of cat food distributors on board, and are currently pulling down $50,000 in revenue after having launched the third version of their site a week before applying. Oh, and one of the founders used to be the editor of Cat Fancy.

Sure, some mistakes will get made - but a company's success factors are rarely as simple as their three-word description.
> Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go.

That relativist thinking is not appropriate. If everything is a matter of personal taste, then constructive discussions are not possible anymore, and become as interesting as small-talks about the weather. It is the end of thinking.
Steve Yeggae's js2-mode highlights globals during editing, and it's saved me a good many times.

http://code.google.com/p/js2-mode/

Mind you it won't catch globals declared in chained assignments

eg

var x = y = 0; // y is defined globally
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I don't know whether that qualifies as number crunching, but I am using Ruby for computer vision.

http://www.wedesoft.demon.co.uk/hornetseye-api/
Background checks
Background checks are a very difficult component in hiring. When it comes from backgroundfinder in your business, you can afford to make a poor hiring decision.
I'm curious: how can this be from 2006 when Stack Overflow was (according to Wikipedia at least) launched in 2008?

I checked because it didn't feel that old.
Page seems to be taking a while to load. Give it a bit and it comes in.
This whole problem would be solved if .com's cost $100+ per year to register. Don't have that kind of money? Get a different TLD. I'm tired of having every single name I can think of -- even bad ones -- already registered and unused.
I think the main thing missing with Node is best practices. We use jslint with node. And we run tests in parallel, to flush out any dependencies. We had to wrap callbacks in a sequencing library to get good stack traces, though.
Node.js also integrates with the Chrome V8 source level debugger, for real debugging!

Also, C++ can also take down your site with a single character typo that the compiler may not catch, so even static typing can't save against everything! (I actually like C++, too, so no hate there)
Having worked with neither of them my perception is that MongoDB has "better performance". While I would never rely on that for making decisions about which to use, I'm sure that has some real consequences, particularly where search popularity is concerned.
They don't exist?
one word: jslint
Oh, note the parts in brackets are my interjections (from our now internet-decades of hindsight).
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Fab.com, Batch.com, Groupon.com, Mint.com, Dropbox.com, Airtime.com, Oink.com

With the possible exception of groupon and dropbox, all of those names would very expensive to acquire. The problem is that a startup typically has to pick a name before they have $50000+ to drop on a domain.
Looks like they read the big yellow disclaimer:

Your account is managed by ____.com. Your administrator can access, modify or delete your data at any time without your permission. -Learn more-
One of the things discussed here that isn't as frankly discussed in detail is the diminishing value of a one-word name. A startup such as "color" has little value in selecting such a name, at least comparative to the value the name has itself. As Graham discusses, a little iteration, many beers and constant thinking could probably create a name that would only be slightly less effective.

Wufoo is such an example. Both are short but with both, I literally have no idea what they do at first mention. But they're both memorable and fit generally good brand rules - while Wufoo, undoubtedly, was a much cheaper domain.

But the one-word benefit is strong, and tangible, with a domain such as "shirts.com". Here, there is real and significant SEO benefit, as well as potential branding benefit when posited correctly. When not attached to the physical product - or at least without significant "what the hell this does" connotation - the value of a one-word domain is really not that significant comparative to the perceived mass market value of many of these domains.
I just got to Austin, and may be leaving at the beginning of the year, but as a city, the place is unreal. It's now bigger than San Francisco, but still feels like a town, which I prefer... Nothing like the Valley, but they say 2011 was kind of a watershed moment for the Austin tech scene with three web-based companies going public (shift away from enterprise tech). We'll see how that goes back into the ecosystem...
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Empower Network Review? 3 Reasons Not To Buy Empower Network