skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to add a couple data points:

1) Tons of random indy web crawlers, mail cannons, etc. use Google Public DNS.
2) We actively discourage large machine-based usage of our service.

Even with some aggressive handling of large machine-based users, we still grow at a crazy clip.

Our growth: http://i.imgur.com/znfu9.png
P.S. Yes, "side-along" is a nod to "side-along-apparition" from harry potter
kneejerk reaction: that is one ugly, ugly icon.
Aereo launching streaming broadcast TV service in NYC on March 14th
How do you think science is made? Guesswork, trial and error are inherent instruments of the science - it's called "hypothesis" and "experiment". Only in the case of politics and economics an experiment may cost lives and wrong hypothesis may lead to millions losing their livelihoods and their very lives. I'd rather prefer them doing it with the lab mice than myself.

And the dichotomy is very real - governmental redistribution and social engineering is very different thing from defending people's rights. You can claim the government could do both - though practice suggests it is often contradictory as redistribution and social engineering involves coercion - but it is still very different things and very different approaches. If one subscribes to the "rights" approach, than asking to elect more scientists is the same as asking to elect more plumbers - one would recognize plumbers are extremely helpful in their area of expertise, but what it has to do with the elections?
Typically the people looking "through the source code" are the developers working on the the project. Both occasional contributors who want to fix a bug or add a feature for themselves, or the main developers taking those patches and adding them to the main release branch after reviewing the code.

All those developers use VCS repositories, not the releases distributed through FTP sites and such -- which were the files affected here.
These theories all miss the basic point. Yes, Rails is not a good way for a beginner to learn proper professional programming. The proper way to do that is to write nice, fairly-mathematical code in Scheme or Python until you understand recursion, algorithms, etc.

But learning to become a professional programmer isn't most people's goal. Rails is the fastest way to go from "I want a webapp that..." to "I have a webapp that sorta..." and it is that ability to build useful, visible things very quickly (even if they have lots of bugs and problems) that gets people interested enough in programming to actually sit down and learn the hard parts.
That's assuming the traffic is only 140 characters per tweet. What about html/TCPIP overhead, images, clicking links. I guess you need a LightTwitter application.
> What? Who knows. Nobody knows because you cannot, by definition create _wrong_ HTML 5.

HTML5 defines pretty strict conformance requirements for authors. That's separate thing from defining error recovery mechanisms for UAs.

You can easily learn what is wrong with your code using the W3C Validator.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpornel.net%2F...

which is a big improvement over the old DTD-based one which couldn't verify contents of attributes or structures more than one level deep:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpornel.net%2F...
Ultimately it's hard to beat approval voting, since it's the best simple system. There are many systems that are better overall, but they are too complex for people to understand.

A voting system needs to be so simple that everyone understands and trusts it. Approval voting is a really simple replacement under the single-winner system that everyone can understand.
You don't give this info in the video. What you should do is to do the video using mainly the product that you are going to build and tell everyone how awesome it is. And then in the end you flash the nixie tube version and say: "If you commit $XX you'll get this awesome retro version".

Please know that I'm not saying you're trying to scam people. I'm saying that they will see the video and then feel scammed. You have perfectly noble intentions but as the video is laid out you fail to communicate them.

EDIT, just want this to be perfectly clear: You seem to be an awesome person, you have an awesome product, it is awesome that you use Kickstarter. BUT your video is a turn off. And it is a shame because of all the awesomeness people will miss who only see the video and then hit the back button at the exact moment in the video when you say "Well, I've already started working on a much more affordable production model". You introduce your main product with the absolutely non-sexy word "affordable", after having shown a much more awesome version for a full minute and a half.
In what way is it bad advice? To me it makes complete sense. Much of the time when we feel "hunger" we are really just thirsty, so taking a sip of water can be all it takes to satisfy a craving, and stave off snacking. Likewise fruit and nuts are much more healthy than junkfood. So if eating fruit or nuts prevents him from eating junkfood then it is a benefit.
My body fat % is extremely low, but I can't remember the exact number. When I do those electric handheld fat % tests, they error out. I'm an archetypal tall and skinny nerd, basically.

The system works for me because I end up satisfying the craving on healthy stuff before I can get to the unhealthy a lot of the time. That said, everything I write about is based on personal experience and I just try to distill some of the general tips that anyone could use.
A few questions, then:

1. How much programming had you done before trying it?
2. How complicated was your application?
Haha thanks for the tl;dr, mind if I include that?
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but this has always bugged me.

I wish there were better standardization on CS degrees. Depending on the school, CS can be part of the math department, science department, engineering department, or a liberal arts department.

My school grouped it in science/engineering and required a bunch of math, and quite a few science classes. I've met people with the same degree from other schools who think it's crazy I took so much science and are surprised I had so few liberal arts classes.

It'd be nice if everybody were on the same page.
I see your point. My question: Who in the cloud space is doing more innovative work that is targeted to consumers?
As a n00b trying to learn how to program, I completely agree with your points about Ruby on Rails. After getting in over my head going through a few rails tutorials, I took a step back and realized that while I could create really basic web apps and go through the keystrokes to write code and commit to Git, I didn't understand what the hell I was doing from a conceptual level. It was rote code copying from a tutorial or a book while leaving out the layer of actually understanding what and how the program works. It felt hollow.

I then took a step back and went to MIT's OCW courses that use Python to teach the basics of CS. None of the lectures introduced Django or other web frameworks, rather, they used Python as a means to teach core CS concepts. From there, I used the basics of what I learned to create simple scripts and conceptually understand what I was coding.

Then, I slowly ventured into Django tutorials. But even with the Django tutorials, I'm taking a step back because I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around databases, structuring data models, and basically, learning how to PLAN an app before I write code.

At the end of the day, I think it is really difficult to learn how to code on your own because it is so much more than learning syntax. This is where mentors and the community comes in. Mentors matter a whole lot more than great tutorials and working on a real project with other, more seasoned developers (basically, an apprenticeship) completes the circle of going from complete newbie to "entry level programmer".
>you're done developing phones forever

There are dozens of different form-factors. Take a look at the diversity of the Android or even the WP7 market. Landscape sliders, portrait sliders, 4.3", 3.7", 5", 3", some with dual core, some with quad core, some with AMOLED screens, some with SAMOLED screens, some LCD screens. Some with removable SD cards, various amounts of storage, various price points of the market.

>Even the iPhone 4 and iPhone 1 look approximately the same

That's because Apple designed them all the same. The way Apple designs their products does not have any relation to the amount of possible designs.

>Android devices are even simpler because they only need a power button.

Android phones are supposed to have four face buttons. This is not strictly required (allowing for variation), but the phones expect you to have four buttons. Windows has three. Apple has one.

>you're stuck with whatever you get from your carrier

Except there is a huge amount of variation in the custom ROM world, which many Android devices allow.

>Phones are all software these days

A common misconception that will at some point pave the way for true innovation in hardware like we've seen in the past when the smartphone market stagnated (then the iPhone was released and it was exciting again).
What is The Future of Android Smart Phones
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer but much of what you say is completely inaccurate, some of it factually, the rest logistically.

First, scholarships aren't guaranteed. They are only for 1 year and renewed at the team's discretion. A team can cut you if you get permanently injured. They typically don't because that would look bad to future recruits but if you can't continue with school they aren't going to keep you on scholarship. They can move you to a medical scholarship but that happens less often than you'd think.

Second, I don't think you realize the amount of time it takes to play a college sport. There's a reason a lot of athletes take something like General Studies, and it's not because they are all 'dumb jocks'. The college and university will be accommodating but the fact is that there's a lot of practice time (4+ hours a day) and travel. The football season is longer than most, even longer if the team is good (bowl games). Any hard science that has a lab or field work is probably out.

I just don't think you are realistically looking at what your brother is getting himself into and your expectations seem way off. He'd have to be one of those rare individuals to get a high-end degree and play a scholarship sport. Choosing to be a scholarship athlete is choosing to work on a sport instead of working on a degree of 'substance'.
Illiteracy would seem to be the first problem to solve in many of these areas, not a lack of laptops.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5251340

One library (card) per child might be a better goal.
Thanks! NYC is coming up - no worries.
Entire generations are going to prettify the sub-$300 goal. Ala carte TV shows and not going to see the best to see here. This should define a non-client, self-sponsored study showed that it's been wired, by hand.
Occupy’s amazing Volcker Rule letter
I don't think so. Every patented invention is also an instance of a broader, unpatentable class. Patent a novel electric motor that gets better efficiency than anything ever made before? Well, obviously the examiners don't know what they're doing, because you just patented an electric motor.

See what I mean?
Everyone seems to want the get-rick-quick idea. What I've learned over the last couple of years is that to be successful, you need to keep evolving your idea(s) with your customers/users until you have something of value.

This also involves failing. You need to push something out there to see if it's what people want and you can't be married to any one idea. Some people get really lucky and hit on everything in the first pass, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

mixergy.com is also a great place to see examples of this. I'm not affiliated with the site, but I'm a huge fan.
I would never recommend Rails as a project for beginning programmers. Having to juggle syntax, convention, and well, everything backend related, is not something that will ever be beginner level.

But I could still see it being something for programmers trying out web-app development. It's convention and opinions is kind of helpful in showing how things could be organized.
Meetings are important - but they need to be correctly organized, led and moderated are very beneficial.

Not having meetings for things you should have a meeting is very dangerous - and making some stupid rules like no chairs or lock the doors is also dangerous. You see, you need these stupid things because people organizing meetings don't know how to organize, prepare, led and moderate a meeting: spend some time coaching younger employee to learn how to do that (ha coaching ... that is something we really forget to do because it is not writing code)

In other words, meetings are not bad: people organizing, preparing, leading, and moderating meetings are bad.

The hardest meeting to lead are "brainstorming meetings" and I was lucky that my EVP was master of them: many interesting and break-thru algorithm happend there.
To clarify, I am not a big fan of wind power :)
Why are cloud and consumers criteria at all? That's why this list feels like such an odd mix - there shouldn't have to be anyone from the cloud, if they don't make the cut weighed against everything else in the entire world then do a separate list on innovation in the cloud where they can be recognized for their achievements without compromise.
IDEA: A chmod777 jar. Every time you have to run that command...
...you put a quarter in the jar.
I agree. Although I enjoyed and got some value from the article once I puzzled through the naming, it would not have killed the author to use more descriptive names, and it would have made the code much more beautiful, at least to me. As it is, it seems needlessly opaque. Clean code communicates intent, and this code made that intent more difficult to puzzle out than it needed to be.

I'm not saying I don't ever use one and two-letter variables names; they're useful where their meaning is unambiguous, as with small inner loops. But when your goal is to educate others, better to err on the side of verbosity. That to me is more literate than the alternative.
Any idea on the limit for "large" machine based usage?

For examples, I use it with a PHP script that hits it a few hundred times and have not yet had a problem. Should I be expecting one?
My daughter plays the same games (e.g. Minecraft) as the boys. She plays with the same Lego bricks as the boys. It's not that she doesn't see the differences, especially at school - it's that we don't make the differences seem like anything to worry about at this point.

By the time those differences matter more, I hope to have her self-confidence to the point where she'll kick those boys' butts.
What time-frame to give between different levels of the hierarchy? One of the reasons sweet/fatty foods are so tasty is because they make us feel full fast - I'd imagine to be super effective you'd need to have some preset length of time between different foods?

Irrespective, it's a great idea - starting with water is really good too, as we're a bit rubbish (technically speaking) at differentiating between thirst and hunger.
Microsoft working to add 3D features to upcoming Xbox
Web development in general has too many pre-requisites for the average joe.
> ...to mentally active (reading), to mentally passive (videogames, movies)

I'm sorry, since when did playing video games become "mentally passive"? (I say that somewhat half-jokingly.)

While reading I'm sure is much more healthy than playing video games, I don't think you can put video games -- for the most part -- in the same "mental" classification as watching a movie. Most video games require thinking and coordination.

Movies, on the other hand, barely require thought, zero coordination, and free your hands up to stuffing your face with processed goodies.
CEOs With Shake Weights?
CoffeeScript has to bend over backwards to allow this, but it does...

foods = ['bacon', 'eggs', 'toast']

new Breakfast foods...
> And because of this woeful state of our public markets

Wait, what? He spends a couple of paragraphs decrying liquidity in markets, and then calls this a bad thing.
I've been on Rails for close to 15 months, before that about 10 years on PHP. It took me a little bit to grok Rails, but it was mainly about trying to understand where Ruby ends and Rails begins.

I had done a ton of OO PHP and MVC stuff on Zend Framework, so I quickly grasped the questions around what code goes where.

The hardest parts for me to understand was the ways you could redefine classes on the fly, modules, blocks and closures. For a self-taught programmer coming form PHP-land those are all new concepts.

(Though I had a smidgen of experience with closures via JavaScript, I don't recall any tutorials making a direct comparison. It was only later one that I saw the similarities.)
I think part of the problem for beginners is that both the breadth and depth of the skills required for web development have increased so much. This post focuses on the depth required to learn Rails properly: you must understand Ruby (which is much more sophisticated than, say, PHP 3) as well as MVC, REST, and so on.

But at the same time, you are expected to develop for multiple platforms (desktops, mobile devices), to understand how to integrate with a wide variety of other services and APIs (Facebook, Twitter, S3, payment gateways), to know how to measure and optimize performance and other factors like conversion rates, and to understand SEO (which, just on its own, has a much larger learning curve than it did a few years ago), and that's just a limited selection.

There is, of course, one standard way to gain all of this knowledge: go and get a formal education in the field. But if you want to just dive in without that, these days that approach requires remarkable dedication and discipline, even if years ago it was a reasonable approach to learning.
Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob)'s Clean Code is a great read and discusses good naming in exhaustive and occasionally alarming depth.

http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman...
MIT Level Introductory Physics - Free Online Course Starts March 1st
Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle
There was great competition between browsers through the 1990s. Unfortunately, they were competing through 'value add' proprietary extensions and browser lock-in, which is orthogonal to the issue of whether HTML parsing should be more permissive or more draconian.
Async JavaScript book
While those points all matter, don't think of this as an open source issue. This can happen to any software provider, and often does.
We had a 500 cluster web crawler using us. Probably doing about a billion queries a day. They had the option to pay us or switch to Google Public DNS. Guess which they did? :-)

A few hundred, even if a few hundred per minute, is not a problem.
A mobile app love story - Gmail on iOS
Jihadi Information Warfare: The Next Wave
kernel.org, vsftpd, unrealircd, who will fall next?
Wasn't there a serious backdoor situation with some Linux distros (Ubuntu?) last year? Some guy came out detailing a 10 year contract of silence or something...
I'm the author, ask me anything.

A sample chapter on Promises, focusing on their implementation in jQuery (1.5+), is available now: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/869786663/async-javascri...
I'm not talking about 'professional programming', really—I'm talking about being able to achieve a reasonable outcome in a reasonable amount of time.

I'm not even interested in people becoming good programmers. My point is that people who will spend the time to learn the hard parts will benefit more from learning from the lowest level that makes sense to them, rather than trying to learn Ruby and the CLI alongside Rails as they muddle through an app. We'll see better conversion rates if we encourage beginners to start from the beginning, and to spend even a modicum of time learning those technologies.
Ahh, ok. I'm not sure you get the more average university experience then. I spent 5 years at a fairly large research state university without ever having a class from the department head, despite the fact that his main focus was also AI. I've even had a few lower-level undergrad classes taught by under-qualified first year PhD students.
Yeah, culture matters. So if Ubuntu (or anybody else) wants to make a clean break from Unix they'll have to recruit or train non-Unix people.
In high school (where it's mandatory to attend), I would consider this unacceptable. The law dictates that you are there unless you specifically drop out. If the teacher locked me out for being two minutes late, I would be in the vice principal's office two minutes after that.

In college I would find this more acceptable, the professor can set any classroom rules he wants regarding attendance.

In the workplace, a real, office-style workplace, I would hope the person who locked the door would be quickly reprimanded. Why did you invite the person (and take their precious time) if you obviously don't want them there?
Here's the danger of making assumptions about people you don't know on the internet. As it happens, I not only read the manifesto, I was born and raised in the country that had the study of the discipline of "Scientific communism" a requirement for getting any higher education:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_communism
So I have a very good reason to assume that my background in both theory and practice of Marxist regimes is no less than yours.
While one could have legitimate differences on the merits of teaching of Marx, it is obvious to any informed person that they were presented as the scientific basis for building new kind of society both in theory and in practice. Even if the theory was false and the practice made it degrade into dogmatic repetition of meaningless drivel, it was still presented as the scientific approach and meant to be so.
Chinese Hackers Suspected in 10 year Nortel Breach
Cue HOA backlash in 3.. 2.. 1...
I think the ideal person who starts learning Rails from scratch is somebody who already has a strong familiarity with concepts of database design and object-oriented programming but is not necessarily greatly experienced in setting up web applications.

Rails takes the underlying concepts of database design and the client/server relationship and makes them very easy to implement. That should not be confused with making the process of learning how to program very easy. For now, there really aren't any shortcuts to learning the old-fashioned way.
It was released Today.
how about a library with a price list:

* { chmod777.jar: 25c }
* { chown-R-me.jar: 75c }
* { rm-rf-star.jar: 1 dollar }
* { rm-rf-/.jar: monthly salary }
...

ultimate way to beef up savings
Maybe, the only sad part is that creativity toys like Lego have somehow stopped being gender neutral. Have you seen the latest sets?
Well, you're never going to deeply understand everything in a subject in only one or even several passes over the material, but there's no reason you can't concurrently treat analysis both formally and informally, with lots of concrete examples and intuition to go along with abstract definitions and proofs.
I would love to chat about this if you could spare me a few minutes. Can you email me at ryan@dailypath.com?
I suppose if I could minimize it from a task bar or alt+rightclick it would be acceptable.
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These video tutorials are quite good:
http://marakana.com/techtv/android_bootcamp_screencast_serie...
As I recall, numerous developers and security experts tore through the relevant code there, and they didn't find anything.
For those of you who got sucked into this conversation. Use whatever OS you want and then use vagrant for your development OS. http://vagrantup.com/ I promised myself to never use Windows again. I'm happy with my 27 inch iMac and my two laptops running Linux. Life is good :)