skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take a look at Ramaze. It's my first choice for doing Ruby Web development and I've found it works really well for projects of any size.

What I especially like is that I can start with a single-page static HTML "app" and evolve it out as needed, and refactoring or moving things about are never an issue.

I don't worry about having to turn stuff off or tripping over someone else's conventions.

(For the latter: I do not like the convention of grouping all models in folder, all views i another, and controllers off some place else. I prefer to treat related MVC components as a "tuple" and keep them together. This is how, for example, it's done with Monkeybars; I find it much more logically coherent, and this is how I organise my Ramaze projects.)
I don't know about proprietary games, but Free Software games commonly make use of very good libraries and APIs, almost all being cross-platform. SDL, Qt, and OpenGL come to mind. Also LUA as embedded language for scripting, and highlevel libraries for various programming languages such as PyGame.
It's easier to break reverse compatibility when your whole language is a 200k DLL and MIT Licensed. If people need to stick with version 4.0, it's realistic to maintain an in-house fork.
While we all love services like Postmark and Mailgun on HN (and they are great services), does anyone know of any easy-to-setup open source projects that offer similar functionality? Traditional MTAs are a pain to setup and outdated to boot for webapps (mail parsing, signature and quote removal, UTF-8 transcoding, automatically updating spam detection, linkage to arbitrary storage handlers like MongoDB, and an HTTP+SSL JSON API should be a minimum).
It's annoying, especially if you switch between languages frequently.

My first task in Lua was to build a solid collections library (modeled after Ruby's), so this issue comes up far more infrequently for me now. (e.g. I use :first(), :last(), :push(), etc instead of [1], [#length], [#length + 1])
> Part of the issue here seems to be the (unreasonable) expectation that one company can fix third-world rural poverty instantly.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. It's easy to hate big corporations, but even if you make the argument that they are exploiting workers, what are the alternatives?

If Americans truly have a moral responsibility to improve Chinese lives, then actually what is necessary is a foreign policy that directly aims to level the playing field between the countries. It might be something effectively akin to an international progressive tax, I don't know what form it would take, but the point is that Americans would never stand for this. People are already complaining daily about losing their jobs to overseas workers, and the entire culture—both cultures I believe—are based on competition. Corporations are just a handy scapegoat to assuage our liberal guilt.
i wouldn't expect less from an economist. just hear his paradoxes:

1st he quotes:
"First of all, even if we could assure the workers in Third World export industries of higher wages and better working conditions, this would do nothing for the peasants, day laborers, scavengers, and so on who make up the bulk of these countries’ populations. "

tl;dr: even if you raise those workers pay, it will do nothing for the other workers in the country

2nd he concludes:
"Wages paid to manufacturing workers in China are not determined by the productivity of those specific workers. They are not determined by US wages, by the profits that Apple makes nor even by the good intentions of the creative types that purchase Apple products. They are determined by the wages paid by other jobs in China and that is itself determined by the average level of productivity across the Chinese economy."

tl;dl: the workers are paid poorly because everyone in the coutry is badly paid.

see what he did there?

he just used the cause of the problem as a consequence and dismissed it!

boycott apple (and others!) so that those specific workers wage will rise to please public opinion, and with that, the wage of everyone else will also rise!
Yeah I believe that to be true but its staggering how success begets success.
I don't think many people are trying to say Apple needs protecting or can do no wrong. What people are saying is that they are being singled out for doing something wrong when in fact, on almost all points presented, the opposite is true.
If they'd innovated when they really were at the peak of photo sharing (2007 maybe), then they could have easily captured those markets. As it is, nothing about flickr has changed in 5 years. That's a generation in internet terms. I couldn't find an exact number, but any user of Facebook knows that they've had at least 3 or 4 major facelifts in that time, along with a number of smaller component changes.

Flickr had the market, but was killed by a lack of innovation. In the vein of many tech acquisitions, it was probably caused by politics.
The Most Incompetent TSA Story Yet?
You should check out http://www.garysguide.com
They have a complete listing of startup and tech events nationwide.
Yes. No. Yes. Due to lack of real proof. If we reacted this way to every aggressive speech, we'd have majority of population in prison for saying they're going to kill someone. (as in - "What did he do? I'm going to kill him!")
use Unity
Google's mission is to "organise the world's information". If that's the case, isn't allowing special interest groups the power to alter what information is presented a violation of that mission?

"Organise the world's information, except where it makes some people butthurt" is a much less attractive proposition.
Scars
that's a dumb argument. apple makes a lot of money and it will happily fork an insignificant portion of it to it's workers, raising the price for every other company to produce in china as well.

remember, everything is connected. one worker will hear about the pay in one factory, and go back to work in the country close to his family instead of being paid way less in another.
Lua has a lot of depth to explore (TCO, coroutines, prototypes, ...), but the language has been carefully designed to only really be like JSON, if that's all you need. The advanced parts stay out of the way.
Amazon pushes for exclusivity in its own ebook contracts, preventing B&N from stocking certain ebooks.

Seems like an appropriate response to me.
This sounds very much like Python's __getattribute__ [0] method. Is there a difference I'm not understanding?

[0] http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#object.__get...
Self-Publishing Your Own Book Is the New Business Card
it's the first icon if you follow the path.

well, i base that on my knowledge that cinematic scenes are the blame of gamers. so a bad way to promote something.
Additionally, it is explicitly a batteries-not-included system. There are lots of libraries for Lua all over the net, but many people stop at "Python's standard library has hundreds of modules including the four I want. Lua's doesn't have the four I want."

Lua's goal is to be no-fat and customizable to only what you need for your unique situation. It's even common practice for systems to cut out stuff like the standard library file I/O module if it's not appropriate for your situation.
Poll: Which stage of hosting do you currently use?
There was an excellent article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3526767) describing different stages of hosting. It would be interesting to see how the HN community is transitioning between different hosting options.<p>Which one do you currently use?
The Monastery
The Dorm Room
The Apartment
The Condo
The Stately Manor
Two or more of the above
Wow! This is a really bold move.

Thank you, Id!
While I can understand not porting e.g. a DirectX game to Linux/OSX or any other program which heavily relies on OS specific libraries/features, I could not yet understand why not to port it when it is possible with little effort. I'd really like to hear an explanation from someone with knowledge in that matter, unfortunately the only example I can come up with at the moment from the top of my head is WoW/Warcraft/Starcraft. It runs on Win/OSX but has no Linux client. I do not understand why Blizzard would not release a Linux client for which no support will be available. A small team could probably achieve a port in reasonable time and create the update infrastructure around it.
I'd found this site a while ago because I won't load my Dropbox in my work laptop but I often wanted to put files in there. I found it a bit fiddly though and the files I wanted to upload weren't already in my email, they were on the web (e.g. PDF books, software installers)

So I built http://urlpipe.com, mostly as a way to play with node.js and Redis. Paste in a URL and it will pipe the file directly into your Dropbox. It's a work in progress but works for me!
I too find it rather annoying. I understand that the OP is one of their employees, but this is all he/she has been posting.
And they are not an order of magnitude different in difficulty. Witness the success of PLoS and the Journal of Machine Learning and (to some extent) arXiv. The journals coordinate peer review and provide aggregation; now that we have the internet, there are better, much cheaper ways to do it.
Having a great delivery rates is actually a lot easier when you are big and famous, have your mail being signed by (and contain links to) a domain with excellent pagerank, have substantiation email volume, long emailing history and so on.

But it gets much harder when you are running with a recently purchased domain on cold IPs or with the spammy subnet neighbors, your subnets are blocked by "know-it-all" small ESP admins.

It is very similar to having a great credit history: you're getting approved for much nicer interest rates, there's no secret. So I don't believe an average person will get 37signals results simply by following Noah's advice.

I work at Mailgun and we help startups and established companies get "37signals level" deliverability :) We also offer quite powerful parsing of incoming email into your app, so check out http://mailgun.net
You can fix that easily with a metatable.

function nilguard(tbl)
tbl = tbl or {}
local mt = {
__index = function(t,k)
error("Invalid key: " .. tostring(tbl) .. "[" .. k .. "]")
end
}
setmetatable(tbl, mt)
return tbl
end

local myObj = nilguard({foo=10})
myObj.crap -- should raise

For undefined global variables, just require("strict")
Wow, the best thing about that article is the reference to http://google.com/ncr (No country redirect) - finally a way to stop Google from re-directing me to whatever country I'm in.
China is undergoing the biggest urbanization in history. More and more people are moving from the country side to the city to find work, make more money and improve their standard of living. As already mentioned in this thread, the jobs available at the likes of Foxconn are better paid, and probably safer than other alternatives available to a semi / unskilled worker.

Let me put it another way - a child of a worker employed at Foxconn now will have better opportunities in the future (with access to better schooling, more money) than the child of a poor farmer in the country side. I believe a similar sort of change happened in most industrialized countries during periods of rapid industrialization. Perhaps some of the people considering a boycott of Apple's products have a great grandparent who moved to the city and worked long hours for "low pay" about a hundred years ago!
Most (all?) of this has been released in the past. I think the news here is that they're putting the code on github.
[ad] revenue growth.
> Unfortunately, unfamiliarity with the language (vis-a-vis javascript)

Unfortunate especially given that Lua and JavaScript are extremely similar semantically. The difference between {} vs begin/end really does blind people to the all similarities.
You can use OpenGL & Qt for that matter. You can write proprietary software if you purchase a Qt license.
In fact, programming with Qt is usually write once, compile for: Windows, OSX, Linux, Android. Most of the time, you will not need to adjust a single line of code for it to work. Given that you keep the other platforms in mind while designing your e.g. UI.
You can set __index on the global table's metatable. Basically: "run this hook whenever I try to access an undefined field".

setmetatable(_G, {__index=function(global_env, name) print("unknown: " .. name) end})
If you happen to have a spare Fitocracy invite, I'd love to check it out - new years resolution is to get healthier! kit@nocturne.net.nz Cheers :)
Certainly not. All this has been available under GPL for ages, except Doom 3 which has been released under GPL just recently.
Scientists decode brain waves to eavesdrop on what we hear
I was shocked by the name change, but we haven't been impacted. I'm not even sure if my team noticed the change.
Thank you for this description. I've done a bit of Android work, but no iOS work yet. Most of my career I've done web apps, and my recommendation to my company is to do web apps instead of native apps for all of our mobile projects. You've reconfirmed my suspicion that native apps get into a lot of hidden complexity that's not apparent from the "Hello World" tutorials.
That's what he was looking for, a nice snide response.

EDIT - I'm guessing from the downvotes that the Hacker News community finds it acceptable to refer to iOS and WP7 as appliances? I'm sorry but that's BS. Every definition of computer appliance I can find excludes devices that can have programs added after the fact, something that is definitely possible with both operating systems.

EDIT 2 - If people feel so strongly about this I really would appreciate a reply instead of just a downvote. I thought this place was about discussion over simply dismissing?
I meant "the irony of running a status page that's reporting when a platform is down on the platform itself", not the irony that heroku isn't running its status page on itself.
I don't identify as an absolutist and I agree it's not a black-and-white situation. It sucks for the reasons you mention.

But even if it's their legal obligation to follow, I still believe it's morally wrong for them to do so. Their position isn't so weak that they're powerless. As a business their incentives may be really strong, but I don't believe that absolves them of the moral component. Just because taking a hard stance is hard doesn't mean it's OK not to take it. But it is understandable, certainly for a complex, multifaceted organization.

And I agree, it's not just about Google. I think everyone shares at least some responsibility, from the government to the businesses to the citizens. But just because it's practical for Google to censor doesn't mean they are no longer morally responsible for taking part in censorship.

Hopefully Google will at least be active in fighting the laws and maybe that is their full intention.
I can't tell you how many VCs and angels, all of whom should know better, would ask "why did it take so long to build your iPhone app" and "why did it cost so much to build" when they're not including the weeks/months it took to design it, plus build out a very complex backend of servers ingesting licensed data, all the application logic on the backend, all the API calls on the backend and corresponding API connections on the app end, and on and on. It's a big complex project.

The idea that you can whip up a very complex iPhone app "in a weekend or two" is naive and, dare I say, bubblethink.
The AHA is probably exercising risk management. While dietary cholesterol doesn't affect blood cholesterol for most people, for some people (hyper-responders) it does raise blood cholesterol. Which is a bad thing.

So rather than saying "for most people it's OK, but be sure to get some fiddly blood work done a few times!", the AHA just says "don't do it, in case you're a hyper-responder".
Why isn't Lua more widely used?

I think the major, overwhelming reason is because it has no standard library, much less a package-ecosystem such as RubyGems or Python eggs.
That is interesting, its the first time I've heard that. I've been using Photoshop on Windows since at least 1999 and can not imagine life without it. It never crashes (everything else I use does.)
Nerd Discovers Exactly Which Day was Ice Cube's Good Day
Looks like you can't give all your money to them though. You can only control the ratio between tip/developers/charity. Which means you'll end up giving half your money to Child's Play, even if you go full charity.
How do you compare them? Gratefully, if you're the parent of a worker lucky enough to be employed at the far left end of the danger bell curve.
You can do that trivially with __*attr__ methods in Python. If you want something more structured, you can easily do it with a metaclass.
Donate your old travel pictures to charity. Save the oceans
Well, I prefer to work in vim, so the speed with which my VCS does things is pretty important. Other than that, screw it, I just switched back to bzr. Both hg and bzr have very good git interoperability, so now I can use whichever of the three VCSes I like, even for the same working tree (I can have .git, .hg and .bzr in the same working tree, all updated, and push whichever I like).

I'm already enjoying bzr again, though. I also would like to learn git, but I have a startup to launch, and I don't think git is worth the (pretty big) effort at this stage.
Hunger In L.A. Immerses Viewers In An Interactive Journalism Experience
Interesting technology. But my biggest complaint is the font. I absolutely hated the font of the blog post, and it made it almost unreadable for me. Maybe I'm too old school, but the weird T's and the too-small-and-narrow fonts made my head hurt. I forced myself to read the entire blog post so that I could have legitimacy in writing this comment, but otherwise I would have just closed my window.
Exploring Hypothesis 1: “Next” web architecture = Hypernet + Hyperweb
Help set up Coder Dojos
Is there a way to interpret this as a smart decision? When your disadvantage is having less selection at higher prices and less convenience, artificially excluding a publisher from your selection seems like it only exacerbates the problem. Imagine that you're one of the people that still drives out to a bookstore to get the latest novel from your favorite author, and when you get there, you learn that your brick and mortar retailer has refused to sell it. That sounds like a terrible customer experience.

And even if they don't want to sell Amazon's books, publicly announcing that fact seems unlikely to achieve anything.
Looks like their hosting account got suspended. Here's a Google cache link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...
Dorm Room - having defaulted to thrustvps from "hazenet" takeover!
The studies regarding eggs and cholesterol compare the effects of eating one or two eggs per day to the effects of eating none. There is not much difference between the two diets being compared. There are no studies that compare the effects of an egg free diet to the effects of eating 6-12 eggs per day. If you are eating a bodybuilder diet it's worth getting a metabolic panel to get an idea of what's happening inside.
One of the commentators on bloomberg (who asserted he always believed that the IPO size would be around $5B, on the lower end of the range) said he thought facebook credits would be a suprisingly large percent of total revenue and ad revenue would be lower than expected.

Reading between the lines: it may net to what everyone expects but the composition is important. It may suggest that Zynga is a good barometer for how facebook itself will fare.
Buy new Acer Home Theatre Projector for only $81.48 from www.ezy-bid.com
Don't miss out!,, Buy new Acer Home Theatre Projector for only $81.48 from www.ezy-bid.com EZY-BID auctions online for cheapest iPhone...Hooray!!!
I think Clojure is the closest thing to what you are looking for but the sad part is that it is due to Java giving it a standard library with documentation. While I am by no means a Lisp expert, I have a little experience with Racket and am now doing some stuff (past couple of weeks) in Clojure, I do have to say the Java library documentation is a life saver when you are actually trying to get real work done. I think the fact that Lisp is the king of theoretical CS type development is also it's Achilles heel. In Lisp and academia (which make up a lot of Lisp users), a lot of people do want to reinvent the wheel, as such some get board half way through and leave an undocumented half implemented project in the wild. Discerning quality of third party code is difficult and no one really wants to standardize. I would really like to embrace CL, but it's just too much patching things of unknown quality together in a commercial environment. I think Clojure with it's ability to access Java libs is the best compromise for my ambitions.
The most economical way of storing electrical energy on-site is probably the lead-acid battery. Enough lead-acid batteries to store 100 car recharges would be 1200 cubic meters. I found estimates from $0.17 to $0.50 per watt hour which would put the cost at over $1M to handle 100 car recharges. Charging that up continuously would put the energy requirements at 440kW assuming 80% round-trip efficiency.
the idea is to change European city every year to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to attend. We started with London because it's always a safe bet (and I'm based here, making it easier to organise it properly).
I don't know if it provides precisely the functionality you're seeking, but Lamson was designed to address the need for an easier to setup, but still programmable and powerful mail system. It's designed to be able to use ORMs, databases, and data stores instead of text files as well.

http://lamsonproject.org/

Example list of supported backends:

Django's ORM
web.py's simple database library
Tokyo Tyrant
Raw SQLite3
SQLObject
CouchDB
Mongo DB
SQLAlchemy

Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that in most minds, the modern MTA is qmail or postfix which is in my view just sendmail++.

Let me know if this helps you, if not, tell me why so I can try to figure something out.
And where is the money for "everyone else" going to come from?
How ironic that Blizzard, by far the brightest star in releasing simultaneous Mac AAA titles, is being singled out here.

I'm going to pull a justification out of my ass: if you support things halfway and do things halfway the brand suffers. Before they'd make a linux client they'd do X-Box then PS3 then Wii for sheer ROI reasons. They aren't doing those either though even with larger consumer bases.
Before Valve and Gabe-mania my first dev crush was John Carmack. His postings and .plan files where were not only shockingly open and honest, but, I guess, genuine... it was apparent that here was a very successful man that was like me...an unrepentant nerd and geek! It is nice to know that that attribute of the company in general has not changed.