skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're serious about fundamentals be sure to at least skim Fieldings's PhD thesis[1] which lays the ground work for HTTP, especially the chapter on REST. His ideas are powerful, clear and very influential, but have been misunderstood time and again.

[1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
There are cases where covariant return types are abused, so it's fine that you treat it as a code smell. However, C++ does make them necessary for several valid patterns. This does include alexgartrell's example, but here's a popular one:

I have a polymorphic type that should be copyable. Because of the limitations of C++ copy constructors and operators, my only option is to expose a virtual method (call it "copy"). The non-smelly semantics we want are such that if you call "copy" on an object, you get an identical copy of the same type. So if you call "copy" on a pointer of type A, you get an A. Call it on a B, you get a B.

The contract itself is polymorphic. It doesn't commit to returning any particular flavor of A.

We can implement this method if we return naked pointers. But if we want to be safe and return a smart pointer, we have to introduce dynamic casting or other worse smells.
The top 10 cities in the US by GDP:

* NYC

* LA

* Chicago

* DC

* Houston

* Dallas

* Philly

* SF

* Boston

* Atlanta

Most of these cities have effective public transit. LA is the notable exception (and the one the "auto lobby" narrative seems to pick out).
I have felt this way myself, currently I live in a city with terrible public transportation where you have to drive everywhere, I drive pretty far to and from work and it just wears on me. I'd like to move somewhere where I don't have to drive as much, however I also don't much like living in really high density areas so its a bit of a dilemma.
I think it's really good advice. I was relegated exclusively to the backend for a while and so I had a terrible understanding of some of those concepts. Spending some time on Rails led to inevitable tangential learning of HTTP and REST, which really opened my eyes about the bigger picture.

Same thing about JavaScript, as you said, it's the language of the web and needs to be mastered. I was pretty abstracted from it for the longest time, but just yesterday a website I had to use was misbehaving and I managed to track down the issue right away with the Chrome tools. It's really empowering, although I'm still far from being proficient.
You should look into coworking then. This can help bring just the right amount of balance to fight the isolation problem. Even better, it can bring the employed and self-employed together and provide a fresh perspective when you need one.
2011's biggest stories
Nice! One thing I'd like to see is if it didn't generate a new short URL for the same long URL. For example, both http://qik.im/BV0 and http://qik.im/6Br point to this page (I shortened this page's URL twice).
That Wikipedia article doesn't make that claim, and normalized by GDP actually contradicts it by pointing out that 5 of the top 10 of those cities actually have well-developed rail (I'd add DC and Atlanta to that list, bringing us up to 7 --- in other words, leaving out only LA, Houston, and Dallas).
Thanks for taking the time to explain it!
I'm glad to see this being discussed. As a designer/front-end dev, I find working remotely to be personally rewarding and immensely productive. Going to an office all day is not fun and with all of the distractions, it makes work even more difficult. Being remote removes these barriers. This is great because when you need to get a project done, you can have hours of uninterrupted time and knock stuff out.

There is one major caveat, though, in that IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE. Whether it be that you thrive in a communal environment, work better in teams, or just can't get your work done without being babysat, some people just don't cut it.

For companies, it's an excellent way to diversify your team and build an international presence.

It's 2012. We have the Internet, phones, and airplanes (if an office visit is truly necessary). Get into it.
The letter I received from Atari was:

I am general counsel for Atari Interactive, Inc. (“Atari”), the owner of the copyrights and
trademarks in the United States for the REDACTED computer and video games. We have
recently become aware of REDACTED app “REDACTED” currently accessible on the
iTunes games website at http://itunes.apple.com/us/am;REDACTED.

This unauthorized use of the REDACTED game constitutes copyright infringement in
violation of 17 U.S.C. § 501. This unauthorized use of the REDACTED® mark also violates
the trademark laws, including l5 U.S.C. lll4(1) and ll25(a), by creating a likelihood of
confusion with respect to Atari’s authorization or sponsorship of this iTunes game.

We therefore demand that you immediately remove the “REDACTED" game from the
iTunes website listed above.

Please acknowledge receipt of our letter. This letter does not purport to be a complete
statement of the facts or the law and is without prejudice to Atari's legal and equitable rights.

------

It was later confirmed that the percieved copyright/trademark infringement was in the app name. The name was the same as an older Atari game. The copyright on the name had expired, so I thought I was ok, but I didn't check trademarks.

For what it's worth Atari was quite reasonable once the communication channel was open.
Stick sucks in stop-and-go traffic. I wouldn't say it's impractical for commute drives (I drove a stick in a daily commute from SF to Santa Clara for a year and a half), but it's not particularly pleasant.
It's Okay If Your First Product Makes Your User's Situation Worse
I don't see it myself, but I just looked at my cell phone bill a few weeks ago, and my sibling (junior to me) had sent some 5,000 text messages that month. Seeing that makes me understand just a little bit better.
I'm 32. I've never been interested in driving; I didn't get a driving license until I was about 28. I used to cycle everywhere in my small town, and take buses after that. For a year, I used to commute by train to college; a distance of about 54 miles took about 1 hour total.

Now that I can drive, I still have no interest in a car. Mind you, I live in London, where driving a car is very expensive; just congestion charges and parking alone would make it more expensive than public transport, never mind fuel costs, insurance and depreciation.

But scooters in the city: that's another game altogether, almost literally. In the UK, filtering / lane splitting is legal, and nowhere is it as gleefully taken advantage of as in London. Getting from A to B is such a joy I frequently go out into the evening rush hour (I work from home) merely to entertain myself, cutting through the traffic.

Two wheels: no congestion charge, much better fuel consumption, significantly cheaper insurance, parking is cheap or usually free outside of Westminster, and the weather is almost always mild. It's very hard to beat. And overall, the cost is less than public transportation if you're not living in central London (where you'll take the hit in rent prices or living circumstances instead).
Yup, and this is exactly why MAFIAAFire got a takedown notice, even though you could "explain to your mom" how to implement a HOSTS file.
If you're not totally against using Emacs: it has Vi(m) emulating modes so you can at least try org-mode out and perhaps port it to vi if you happen to like it.
Do you really think that managers 80 years ago knew more about task X than the people they managed who did task X every day? I think software/info people like to think our situation is different, but I don't suspect it was all that different in the past. What may be different is that today we have the ability to get a lot more information at our disposal about what's going on in a company than people did 100 years ago.
I think the decline of younger Americans driving is because of the overall economic climate in the US, not because it's uncool. Talk to any 18-25 year old and ask if they would like to have a car if they could financially swing it, and the majority of the time they would say yes.

As a young adult myself I'd love to own a car, but it's almost impossible to have enough capital to pay for insurance, maintenance, petrol, the auto, and my student loans. I'd be digging myself into a financial ditch I wouldn't be able to get out for over 20 years.
Kickstarter can also be a good way to get visibility for your app.
The temptation to retouch a book is huge. Even just a small tweak to a few paragraphs is hard to ignore when it's so easy to resubmit the work.
SOPA does not have to pass to achieve the effect I'm suggesting. It will simply open people's eyes to the centralisation that is ongoing. The "single point of failure" will become evident and people will start to think.

No software is needed. Nor is a DNS. All modern PC OS's have the necessary capabilities built-in.

To connect to a website all that is needed is the knowledge of an IP number, a port (almost always 80) and, optionally, a hostname.

Is it really possible to prohibit this knowledge?

Imagine a world where there are "forbidden" phone numbers. However no one is forbidden from dialling them. The sole prohibition is against telling anyone what they are.

This is what SOPA blacklisting purports to achieve.
The Power of Kindness (and its paradox)
I've done and learned a lot this year but I've never been much of a books and paper reader. Perhaps you've done more constructive things than just eating Cheetos behind the TV? (And even if not, I hope you at least enjoyed it?)
Pretty sweet! Can't wait for the details
It was a series of posts, but you're right this was the wrong way to vent. This also wasn't passive aggressive it was aggressive aggressive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_aggressive
As much as I appreciate the look of muscle cars, I can't imagine myself driving an impractical gas guzzling behemoth. So I settle for an occasional econobox groceries run on the weekend, which still feels somewhat unnecessary, and a subway pass for the work week.

Nowdays we are all too aware of environmental impact of cars, so the whole concept beyond basic utilitarian use is a whole lot less appealing.
I would definitely focus on your happiest customer. And its not like they will ever go away.

The backlash from people saying "Hmmm it seemed like a good idea at the time but I really dont want to pay $20 bucks for a bunch of my 3 line posts" could be considerable.

Also just targetting one market well is a lot of work for a startup.

Anyway best of luck - its great to see you have deeply engaged customers - that to my mind is the holy grail of an early stage startup.

Best of luck.
Would Amtrak be cost effective if Congress didn't force it to run lots of unprofitable routes that it was desperately trying to shed? This is a fun game! Congress forces Amtrak to lose money and then lambastes it for not being profitable.
This is an unpopular opinion, but I completely disagree.

Great people + perceived activity + being there + lines of code + check marks + social skills = happy customers (usually).

Mediocre people + perceived activity + being there + lines of code + check marks + social skills = waste of time/money (usually).

Great people - (perceived activity + being there + lines of code + check marks + social skills) = happy customers => unicorn scenario (usually).

In an ideal world your great people give you acceptable deadlines and consistently deliver high quality software on time. Then you can ignore subjective metrics like time in office, perceived activity, etc. and everyone is happy. This happens once in a blue moon.

Most of the time when great things happen people happen to be in office, they look like they're working, and they produce a ton of code. Of course correlation is not causation, so forcing people to produce lots of code and be in the office won't necessarily get you good results.

Engineering management is really hard. Please don't trivialize it with feel-good nonsense.
>The GOP wants to zero out Amtrak because it isn't cost-effective; it would have been bankrupt but for tens of billions of subsidies.

Do you think that toll roads wouldn't go bankrupt, if not for the gas tax subsidy that they receive? It's a false equivalence because one subsidy is directly authorized by congress and is a political football that each side uses for fundraising, while the other (the gas tax) can't be used as a political football because voters would revolt.

Also, The jury is still out on your basic assertation that Amtrak is not cost effective.

David C. of the blog GreaterGreaterWashington published a classic in this genre late last month. "When indirect subsidies are considered, Amtrak's total subsidy comes out to a little less than 44¢ ppm," he argues. "Motoring's subsidy rises up to almost 45¢ ppm."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/11/road-v-rail
Keynes Was Right
Government Opened Data via APIs in 2011
The question is: Would he still be working at one of those 'big banks' if he was never laid off?
If an IP hosts multiple sites, you'd need to figure out the correct http HOST header to send it, unless you're use a static IP for every site. Most web hosts are using name-based virtualhosts: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/

We implement both name- and ip-based vhosts, but only for sites with dedicated IPs (read: sites that need a dedicated IP for SSL.) You can do SSL on a shared IP, but it gets more complicated. Cloudflare does it by using a cert with multiple "certificate subject alt names", but security / site spoofing would still be an issue if you're ditching SSL at the same time (which would be a good idea).

This is the /real/ web 2.0...maybe even web 3.0: peer-to-peer hosting without ICANN or Verisign and co. We can do it, and people are working on building it right now. Reddit has Meshnet and NameCoin seems like a good idea. Now we just need a similar solution for SSL and a good way to host/update things. The future looks bleak for ISPs, CAs, registrars, and non-free countries.
For me, the luster is lost because driving is typically high stress. Having to drive a manual would only increase the number of things I need to concern myself with and make it more stressful. I realize I'm probably in the minority. Particularly because about the only place I don't mind driving is on the highway, probably because I usually just cruise in one lane without having to make many decisions except when I need to exit or the occasional lane change.
Who are you arguing with? Me? I like the Acela, and wish we had one running STL->Chi->Memphis. I could care less about the availability of a 2-day sleeper car route from Chicago to the west coast.
I wrote some similar code in python recently -- I think color visualizations like this are both fun and potentially useful for certain image manipulations.

This includes a readable 36-line implementation of k-means clustering that could be shorter if one wanted to play some code golf :) I used a pie chart layout, with pie slices proportional to their corresponding cluster sizes.

Code:
https://github.com/tylerneylon/imghist/blob/master/imghist.p...

Sample images:
http://blog.zillabyte.com/post/11193458776/color-as-data
http://blog.zillabyte.com/post/13141231882/hue-histograms

If anyone else is interested in this stuff, Austin A made a great suggestion on the original post to use the Lab colorspace.
Last time i checked, it was against visa's agreement to store all that.

But i was in another country then
get a car that's fun to drive

I have my fingers crossed for the new Subaru model. We're starting to run out of options.
"In some sense, the market for them has been disappearing."

Agreed! That's what I thought the keynote would be about before I began watching. Users cared about general purpose computers before, because the only way you could accomplish a task was to run it on your own computer. Now, the thin clients are essentially here, and the ability to run an arbitrary program is not very important to many people.

Or so they think, anyway. I'm worried about the point where devices at home are not Turing-complete, and they just connect to authorized services. Only certain companies would really have the ability to program anything at all (because they'd be the only ones with real computers), and it would be easy for the government to step in and control them.
You should prevent propagation of up/down arrow key events in the game canvas, which (I believe) cause the browser window to scroll up/down.
I am 26, and when I was living in Europe (Poland) I didn't even bother to get a driver's license - getting around by public transportation was cheaper and faster (especially if you take in account the time you need to find a parking spot and walk from it to your destination). However, moving to the Bay Area made me reconsider. Not being able to drive is a serious handicap. Not only there's no public transportation, but also everything seems to be optimized for cars (no sidewalks in some places, traffic lights giving a low priority to pedestrians, highways all over the place). I tried biking, but the cars seem unfriendly in a way that scares me.
In most of the US, building densely is illegal. We have massive public subsidies and implicit taxes to support car ownership (in the form of mandatory parking requirements and absurdly underpriced municipal parking just for starters). Public transportation cost effectiveness is highly dependent on density which we've outlawed.
good sw engineers are rare and in demand
plus, we have many tools and telecommunication technologies which let us communicate and work remotely. Some people have learned that traditional corporate offices are full of things that make them less happy or less productive. Distracting sights, noises, interruptions, makework, politics, inability to say what you really think, having to act and dress artificially, inability to say take a nap when you feel you need it, arbitrary arrival times, hampered ability to switch over to non-employed tasks when needed (family things, a FOSS project, another contract gig, etc). Some find it patronizing as well. There's also the notion of maximizing for happiness rather than purely money. Also a smart actor in any economy will use whatever leverage he has to maximize his own interests. If the demand/supply balance happens to favor sw engineers right now they would be wise to take advantage of it. Businesses and governments do it too. Also, some individuals are broadly talented, beyond just being a programmer, and it's much easier for those folks to exercise and monetize a broader range and depth of their skills if they aren't kept in the narrow straigtjacket of a specific employer's job role, and place and time of business. Being a remote worker makes it much easier to lead a hybrid life where you spend some time on entrepreneurial side projects since less time wasted on commutes and you can handle interrupts from those side projects without political shit from your "day job". You can make $100k/year as a FT programmer, a good life to be sure, but the most likely path to making millions is by starting a business. And that path is easier to try if you're a remote worker or contractor.

And yes, I know there are positives and advantages to office life as well, please no need to chime in and enlighten me there. been there, have the t-shirt, but there are lots of other t-shirts. :)
At least the people paying gas tax are the people using the roads. I never use Amtrak, yet I still pay for it.
This is also on Github: https://github.com/TamerRizk/desopa
A four paragraph blog post hardly needs summarization.
Some of it has to do with the sheer size and low population density of most of the United States. Oregon (a medium-sized western state) is larger than the UK. Texas is larger than France. Alaska is larger than all of Western Europe. You mention South Korea. It's slightly larger than Indiana, but has close to 49 million people, while Indiana has only about 6.5 million. Overall, the population density of the United States is 1/7 that of Germany and 1/15 that of South Korea.

Canada is in a similar situation, only more so. Lots of land, not many people living on it. Just as in the U.S., you find public transit in large, dense cities like Toronto, not so much in the smaller and more rural areas. Same with Russia -- good subways in Moscow, etc. by all reports, but you aren't going to find subways or buses in the middle of Siberia.
The cohesiveness of a team has little to do with the number of hours they spend in the same room. It's much more related to the composition of the team and how much they share/agree on the purpose of what they are doing.

If you have a bullshit product, no amount of duct tape will hold the team together. On the other hand, a great, world-changing idea is enough to drive the team, keep it cohesive and push its members to levels they wouldn't normally reach.

DHH and his team have a world-changing idea to play with, one that has legs of its own.
As soon as I saw this, I pinged the author to get it on Github. He did so like 9 days ago: https://github.com/TamerRizk/desopa

Also this is a repost:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3374282
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3382439
They are thinking, "if you insist on using Visa, you're going to pay Visa's cut."

Verizon can take have 2-3% more money by convincing people to pay by check/ACH rather than eating the unnecessary cost of credit card processors. Probably would have been far less backlash if they stopped accepting credit cards altogether.
If passengers had to pay fares commensurate with the true cost of the service, it would not be competitive.

The same can be said about driving. I read a few months ago that all 50 states now receive more in highway funding than they pay out in user fees/taxes.
Indeed, they do not currently support DNSSEC.

According to their forums, this is a feature they're currently developing.
I think its for two reasons - cars are way more expensive and less exciting. Growing up I knew two kids with paper routes that bought Corvettes by their 18th birthday. Try spend six years working at the mall and doing that today.

My first car in college a '69 Mustang fastback is by far the most exciting ride I've ever had.

http://carphotos.cardomain.com/ride_images/4/282/941/3820297...

Cars under $50K today are mostly boring. Most of my younger friends see cars as transportation and nothing more.
II think it's actually pretty easy to understand just by comparing the US to a country with a useful passenger rail system. I'll use Germany because I've spent some time there and taken a few trips by train.

Two things are required for a regional or national train service to be useful enough that it can be self-sustaining: population density and local public transportation. Local public transportation also requires population density to be effective; someone considering taking a train to Tallahassee FL might decide to drive instead after looking up the bus schedules online. Busses run about once an hour during the hours people normally commute to day jobs and do not go to many useful locations, like the airport.

Germany has a population of about 80 million people. Germany is smaller than Montana. The US as a whole has 26 times the land area but less than 4 times the population.

There are useful train services in population-dense areas of the US such as the SF bay area and the NYC/northern New Jersey region. The population density of these areas is such that it's often easier to travel by train, subway and bus than by car.

The same is not true of Billings, MT, the largest city in a state bigger than Germany. The population of Billings is about 100,000, and the closest city in the state with a population over 10,000 is Bozeman, about 150 miles away. The population of the whole state is about the same as the city I live in, Jacksonville FL, and that city can barely sustain a barely useful bus system.

If the US is to have a decent nationwide public transportation system, it needs about a billion more people. I'm not sure we actually want that.
Can whoever is downvoting take half a second and tell me what I'm missing here? Please?