skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Special interest groups have stereotypically obtained their goals by lobbying, donations, guaranteed positions, etc.

You mean like AARP?

> When someone talks negatively about special interest groups, it is because typically special interest groups have achieves their goals by disingenuous methods.

Some supporting evidence would be nice.

Here's a question - which side of the obamacare debate was "special interests"?
I'm using both Nginx and Apache, depending on my needs and goals. I still like Apache because of its stability, configurability and awesome collection of plugins available.

Example 1: I once needed to send all logs from all web servers to a central machine. Now I know there's syslog-ng and other stuff like that, but I've had pretty bad experiences with it and in this instance I just configured Apache to pipe the logs to a simple Perl script I wrote (you know, instead of to a file). This was for a website with 10 million of visits per day and this configuration is still in production and worked wonderfully well. Nginx can't do it.

Example 2: if you ever want to develop Python/Django/wsgi apps, one of the best choices you can make is mod_wsgi. mod_wsgi is a self-healing Python/wsgi server that just works and is integrated perfectly within Apache. Ruby's Passenger was inspired by it and there's no mod_wsgi for Nginx (somebody tried porting it, but the results were awful).

Example 3: PHP is bound to Apache and will forever perform at its best as an Apache module. If you try the alternatives, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. Some people are also placing Nginx in front of Apache, but IMHO those are resources that would be better spent on placing Varnish in front (a kick-ass reverse proxy cache that can also do load-balancing).

I do love Nginx though. It is freakishly fast and it uses few resources.
Actually these is quite a big difference.

PUT specifies the resource to be update, whilst POST does not do so. This means that you must (according to RFC 2616) use POST if you want to create a new resource and PUT if you want to change an existing resource or create one that you know "how to name". This disctinction is sometimes necessary, or at least useful (ex: idempotence of PUT).

I don't understand how any even half-competent developer would be unable to understand this difference and act accordingly.
Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood
Dropping names like you're dropping dub plates!
Surely they don't send you your old password, but a freshly generated one? Then they could still be hashing them after emailing you.
If that results page were even close to the average case for Google, I'll agree with you. But it's not, so it doesn't really prove much of anything. Google isn't going to penalize your whole site just because one page out of a million is a little over the line.
In REST there is no need for IDs at all. There is only URLs; the URL of an object is the only way to refer to it.
i can't help but think that this was done by google to hurt flickr/yahoo, since flickr integrated picnik as their web-based photo editing tool. i used it quite a bit to do easy changes like cropping photos.

maybe yahoo should have bought them before google did.
I work in the glass business, though we don't do the low iron glass used by companies like this and I don't know any specifics about Solyndra. That aside, it's entirely possible that custom glass would be useless to anyone else. Especially if it was tempered glass, which cannot be cut after tempering (it shatters when you attempt to cut it). The article also mentions that they tried, but were unable to find a buyer. It's possible that this glass was in a size only they could use and anyone else would have to redo their manufacturing process to use it.

That said, you can recycle broken glass and even get paid for it. I don't know if they're doing this or not, but it's probably more worthwhile than seeing if someone else needs exactly the same custom glass as you do.

Finally, unless that was a some kind of standard stock size (in which case you should be able to sell it directly to other parties), I really don't think the factory would want it back. We do mostly custom-sized lites of glass and when an order is cancelled or returned for whatever reason, it goes into the dumpster and gets recycled. There's almost nothing you can save most of the time and yes, I've searched through orders just to see if there was anything we could salvage. You're not likely to find anything you can save.
Unix passwords are Never safe and never will be.

I don't get you guys...
I regularly get emails from Google's AdSense program encouraging me to add more ad blocks, and as you said, they include a template that encourages you to place those ads high on the page. Got one of these emails just yesterday funnily enough.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3279225
I don't disagree with your viewpoint, but I think there are more ways of looking at it. Taking a systemic view instead of focusing on the specific transaction in question - that is, look at the pirate, not the piracy - might shed some light on why I think that ultimately, piracy is not a destructive force:

There is research showing that pirates, on average, spend more money on the things they pirate than non-pirates. While this may sound counter-intuitive, on reflection it makes sense. There are those who pirate for the sake of pirating, lets call them hoarders. They download everything they can, with no intention to ever pay for any of it. These are not potential customers. The other category of pirates are people who, lets take music for example, who really love music. They spend a lot of money on music each month, but they also have an active network trading music with other enthusiasts. In fact, this trading network is what provides feedback and drives their interest in music to begin with. So the piracy, the downloading of music that they engage in, is the fuel that drives their consumption up beyond that of a regular, law-abiding consumer.

I'm not saying that this is the only truth, but the statistical evidence from several studies done on musical piracy (I recall one in particular done in Holland) supports this view.

So in this case, your characterisation of the pirate as a leech is not an accurate account. In fact, this pirate is the perfect customer, and it is the piracy that made him.
"HTTP Accept headers (and indeed, use of many fancy headers) are beyond what most client developers will bother with; including the response format in the URL with a ".xml" or ".json" is natural and obvious."

That was in a comment by Alex Payne [1] near the bottom. Obviously it's been quite a few years since he wrote that but it's what I personally think, too. The extent that many blog articles and comments take REST really adds far too much complication. Are client-side developers going to understand how to use your API? Always keep your target market in mind.

Honestly in my mind that's the most important point to take from this article.

[1] http://al3x.net/about.html
Regardless of whether there's an ulterior motive for him writing the piece, I think it's still a good reminder for everyone.

Take the who and the why out of the equation here and you're left with a pretty sobering point - there are bigger problems to solve than figuring out how to make people pay for nonsense in flash games on Facebook (no disrespect to Zynga'ers).
Yes. This is called 'protective coloration.' Ten years ago, it would have been all about national security and about how piracy funnels money to terrorists. Now "jobs" are the political flavor of the month, so anything you want is rapidly reworded to be in terms of jobs.
Apple now worth more than Greece...
Do People Become More Conservative as They Age?
Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.
Science and Engineering Indicators 2012
Sometimes the GPL is a win simply because "otherwise upstream won't have our patches" isn't a high enough short-term cost to overcome the bureaucratic inertia required to release them, but "otherwise we can't use their code at all" makes them compare the cost of license clearance to the cost of reimplementing the GPL'd code.
Quantum Tech Could Secure the Cloud Through 'Blind' Data Processing
You got documentation to start from? Lucky bugger.
Let me get this strait, it's basically (request)>(redirect) for a few MB's of data. That seems like the kind of thing where a single CPU could handle ~100,000 requests per second. I know the Firefox team is not exactly well know for writing fast code, but there must be more to it than that.
Why was my submission killed? --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491539

Edit: incidentally, because this submission was made after my submission, when I saw it I flagged it thinking it was a dupe. Now it seems I've lost the ability to flag entirely. :(
This makes me think of Schemer ?
I wonder if this isn't at least partly a sneaky way to penalize pirate sites without needing to wade into the intractable question of copyright. There seems to be a strong correlation between a site's sketchiness and the likelihood that it will plaster obnoxious ads all over the top of every page, and the timing is weirdly coincidental if not.

(I really hope this doesn't derail one of the few non-SOPA threads. But that's the most relevant motivation I can think of for this change.)
Strange. I was like OP. 11 ads (3 top, 8 side), 9 results, 3 images.
I saw pg's submission first, and it got killed. (Or deleted.)
Yes you're right, I actually didn't see that... What's going on?
Thanks for all the hard work on maintaining and updating Rails Tutorial. As a newbie programmer, the screen cap tutorials have been extremely helpful and I'm looking forward buying the 2nd edition screen caps as well.
Rust 0.1: first alpha version of the Rust programming language
That's one tough to parse headline.
Solving the talent dilution is as simple as paying the talent a ridiculous salary, and/or giving the talent work they enjoy.

Getting by in the US is incredibly easy for a programmer, especially young ones that live off virtually nothing. I can freelance for a week and live a month without a problem. I don't really need more money.

Unfortunately, my work options are usually narrowed down to these:
1. Freelance a little on things I'm not wildly interested in, but save enough money to spend the majority of time working on something I actually like.

2. Spend all my work time on things I'm not wildly interested in and have some more money, but nothing ridiculous.

Maybe I'm weird but given the choice, I'm going with #1 every time.

However, there are two circumstances where I might end up working for someone else:
1. Give me ridiculous compensation
2. Let me work on something I want to work on

Paying a ridiculous salary is easy in a lot of cases, but nobody ever does that (and honestly, I don't know why).

The better option, IMO, is just letting people work on what they want to work on. I don't understand why companies are so awful at describing the positions they have available. If you have positions that are appealing to work on, I'm sure you can find people to do it. If not, whip out the checkbook, or expect poor quality talent.

Having interviewed with Asana for the Product Engineering role, I could say I still have no idea what I would have been building had I gotten the job. This made it impossible for me to be excited, I was running purely off the fact that "product" was in the title. Luckily, they had #1 (private chefs and a normal work day sold me), but I imagine they want people excited about the work too.

Tell me what you're doing, let me understand how I can help, that will make me more excited.
OP cared about that particular domain, so he got better at it whereas he doesn't care about schmoozing with VCs.

Exactly right. I should have been clearer about that.
I remember the text--and the old course--actually spent a good bit of time talking about proper tail calls and "iteration" vs "recursion". We talked about how the code behaves differently--e.g. space usage--and about how to identify the two types.

Also, it's the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; naturally, the first bit talks about how programs look (structure), but the second bit (mainly chapters 4 and 5, if I remember correctly) talks about exactly that: how to execute code on the machine. The last chapter, in fact, introduces a register-based language not unlike assembly.
The Best Marketing Advice: It's Your Product Stupid
Sorry, I completely forgot about that. It's amazing how different everything looks with it off. I think I'm going to keep it on.
that's alright, but don't whine when your car breaks down in the middle of a desert or you find out you're below poverty when retired.
I'm okay with this instance but I really don't want to see a habit of linking directly to images. I assume we did this time because this image was an update to an existing post already on HN (front page yesterday) [http://maddox.xmission.com/]
For one, using iTunes U on Linux is difficult, for no good reason.
I hope whatever kills hollywood also kills distribution by regions. In the third world we are people too.
Hackers and Masturbation
Last night - during a happy hour with a few friends in NYC we got into a discussion which deviated towards the conclusion that hackers tend to masturbate more. Well, rather than guessing, we decided to find out, right here. So, I have set up a poll below. You can view the results as well. Let's find out.

Link: http://poll.fm/3hmvf
No, no.

The point is that REST uses Hypertext as the Engine of Application State. You might have heard of this as HATEOAS.

Ideally, your API is discoverable given the initial URL. If you return IDs, I have to construct URLs based on information I already have. If you return URLs, I just have to make an HTTP request.
Eh. I already have two ctrl keys, and use escape far more often then either of them. Ctrl-z is the only common thing I do with control, and I don't need that to be easily done from the home row.
More Bomb Blasts In Northern Nigeria
HN isn't special.
Here it is, the next SOPA, made by no other than Lamar Smith - PCIP Act (Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act), or H.R.1981 - a bill much more dangerous than SOPA 1.0, and very hard to attack because of its name and "intent":

http://gcn.com/articles/2011/08/05/protecting-children-bill-...

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/old7e/sopa_is_ba...
Take the who and the why out of the equation

I actually disagree. Imagine someone saying "you suck as a human if you are working on _______". This piece is basically a softer version of that statement. Immediately, it makes you ask: who the heck are you to be saying this and what have you done?
"The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise."

This seems hypocritical considering YC's funding of companies like Cloudant that go on to work with companies (Monsanto) actively engaged in the worst kind of subversive geopolitical work. Compared to Monsanto, Hollywood is a shinning beacon of freedom and peace.

Of course, going on to read the rest of the article it sounds as though YC is more interested in the financial interests of killing Hollywood than the potential political impacts.
Hollywood and the MPAA isn't about making movies.

Rather, it's about maintaining a distribution chokehold on mass produced popular entertainment. This in turn means controlling what goes into the pipeline, and how the output from the pipeline is delivered to the consumers, and how the MPPE is marketed -- for example, the whole star system, Oscars night hype, and so on.

What is needed is a better distribution channel, and that's why they keep trying to kill anything that looks like it might become one. The solution is thus going to start with (a) invent something, and (b) lawyer up, a long way prior to public launch.
Same story, same paper, different writer, and now it's "engineering" and not the more generic "science." I have to admit I'm a little surprised at the NYT running pretty much the same story just 11 weeks apart.

Here's the link to the NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien...

And here's the HN discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377
When I took CS61A over 8 years ago with Prof. Hilfinger, one of the revelations was how few primitives you need to make a powerful language. Using define, cons, cond, and a couple other functions (but no loops and no assignment), you can write an evaluator for Scheme that can interpret any other Scheme program (excluding I/O, strings). I learned how powerful a first-class function is from that class.

Python has a wealth of syntax and data structures that make it great for real programs but is perhaps not as good at building abstractions from the ground up.
URLs, and links. And, more precisely, an URL is the only way to refer to a resource. There may be multiple URLs pointing to the same.

Aside what appared to be a fundamental misunderstanding on the GP's part, there is the legitimate concern that an individual resource shouldn't need to know its own URL. In the article, that was just glossed over, though.

One could, for example, have a book by ID 1 trickle the ID up the application call path, and at a higher level, a complete URL is generated. In fact, the application could simply be a module inside yet another one that wants to add its own ‘namespace’.

What the URL is and how it's generated doesn't matter. All that does is that the URL is made available (discoverable), and that it goes to the right resource, however that happens.
Tell HN - App store data hackathon Jan 27-28 in Palo Alto
Do you like large amounts of data? Want to get your hands dirty with data from app stores? Have you wondered what you could learn if you had full access to all the data for an app store? Have you wondered how rankings correlate with reviews? Ever thought there might be a better way to expose which apps are most interesting? How much does having a good icon really matter to an app's success?

Come to a hackathon focused on diving into the contents of mobile app markets on January 27-28, sponsored by appbackr and AppMonsta. We'll provide you with tons and tons of data we've collected from both the iTunes and Google Android app stores. You provide the curiosity and drive to learn interesting new insights and build interesting tools on top of the data.

The hackathon starts Friday January 27 at 7pm, and run through Saturday January 28 at 4pm, at appbackr's offices in downtown Palo Alto. We'll take care of food and drinks.

RSVP at http://on.fb.me/wiAcSg to stay up to date.
Since when did Google become the Internet police? Seriously, I don't think it's their role to penalize anything you find annoying online.
I've had a bunch of random stuff killed recently too. It's so fast it has to be an automated thing.
> commonly held up as exemplary REST

Not by people who know what they're talking about.

> This makes so much more sense because then you can use ?command= and have any command you want and not have people confused about what it means.

That's textbook RPC. It's a pattern that works well for many things, but it's definitely not REST.
Incidentally, Paul Buchheit deserves all the credit for this idea. The YC partners were having lunch yesterday and he suggested posting this RFS. Whereupon we all turned to Jessica, who is usually the one who talks us out of doing crazy things. I was kind of surprised she didn't try to talk us out of it.
At least to me, the most important part of trying to make a current media killer is remembering that storytelling is still a fundamental part of society, and not all forms of entertainment (including a subset of video games) do not scratch that itch. To truly replace Hollywood I think you need to come up with new ways of filling that need.

Since books obviously don't quite do it (need for visual/audio component for some people, perhaps?) something else will need to do it.

Perhaps focus on interactivity with real story behind it in games and taking that to the next level? Lots of potential, but have to keep in mind what niche they're filling.
Or the Radiolab short recently about how Marvel Comics went to the Supreme Court to prove that X-Men are not human.
HN comments on that link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3337357

IMHO, we'll end up with something equivalent to relational algebra. It's the same problem: providing different representations of one data model (e.g. how far to expand links is an instance of denormalizing a flat list).
But it won't happen til providing different representations becomes critical.
Or the Radiolab short recently about how Marvel Comics went to the Supreme Court to prove that X-Men are not human.

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/dec/22/muta...
A better alternative (also from Berkeley): http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61as.

It's the self-paced, Scheme-based version of the course. The website is currently for last semester; I have some friends working on it and they promise the next iteration (should be up soon) is going to be really awesome. I believe them.

Also, since it's a self-paced course, it's probably a much better option if you want to work along on your own in your free time. I think some other institutions might be using the materials from this class as well, but am not sure about that.

Here are the rather insightful thoughts about using Scheme vs Python for this course from its old professor (who was really awesome): http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html
Where is the Twitter API held up as "exemplary REST"? I've usually seen Twilio's API as being the de-facto REST API. Not perfect, but pretty close.
I am Whatever you say I am
If the API entry point is subject to change then the very ability to access the service is in trouble, isn't it?

In particular, my doubts about IDs vs URLs is the ability to store those pieces of data in the client (or intermediate caches) - if the service URLs or namespaces change, the client-side URLs become useless even after the client updates the service entry point. With IDs, that information would still be usable.

I'm absolutely no expert on this so I'm probably in the "HTTP API, not REST API" side of the problem.
Clickable: http://poll.fm/3hmvf
Apple: Galaxy Nexus infringes "slide-to-unlock" paten
This RFS makes a lot of assumptions, some through analogies, that are all predicated on some level of rational thought. And ultimately, I think that's where this is flawed. Hollywood may be dying -- I don't really know. But the fact they're going after pirates or filesharers or whatever could just be a principled stand for them. I've certainly wasted time and money trying to rectify things that are wrong in my eyes, even if it's not exactly rational or in the best interests of the bottom line. But, to me, it's a matter of principle. And I think for some of these distribution folks, they very much believe it's a principled stand for them as well shrug
Personally, I think self-help and self-improvement are great things. If there is something you want to do, something that has value to you, or if you are unhappy because of something, you should absolutely pursue improvement in that area, even if you have no natural proclivity.

The problem is that there is too much thinking along the lines of, "weaknesses are flaws which must be fixed." Personally, while I think it's a good idea to be aware of weaknesses and know how to accommodate them, it's better to focus energy on areas of strength than to expend it trying to 'fix' weaknesses.

(BTW I'm not saying this is necessarily what the blog post was about, though I do think an awful lot of his stuff falls into this category)
Lamar Smith's next bill - H.R.1981 - is much more dangerous than SOPA
Command and Conquer in HTML5 is now open source
Show HN: Moodstir - Twitter for emotion
I'm a Dreamhost customer and haven't received any emails regarding this yet.
If you can get the artists on your side, you can kill hollywood.