skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's with all the Rails hate?
I am just curious. I've seen a few posts in the past few days really hating on Rails. It seems some think that it's over for Rails (and even MVC frameworks) and the future of the framework (and in some cases even Ruby?!) looks bleak.

Am I wrong to think that all this hate is (somewhat) unfounded and that Rails will be a fine choice for now and into the future? Sure, maybe Node will win out for some projects, but I feel as if Rails and MVC frameworks do have their own benefits.

What do you think?

For someone who is just starting to get going on a big project and went with Rails... I've now started to second guess myself. No one wants to rewrite code. But better sooner than later if it's inevitable. I feel as if everyone is going overboard. I could be wrong though.
As it exists now, the extension shows what Zaps (web app to web app syncs) you have set up and lets you pause or run them manually. There is a ton more we could build into the extension. Practically our entire site could be run through an extension if you came up with a design which made sense. This is the beauty of an exposed backend API system -- it doesn't care how you represent the data coming out of it and Backbone.js is great lightweight framework for rendering all that data.

Eventually, I think we will have "frontend" views across many devices and machines (alluded to in the article, it's just to easy to create another view). We haven't tested the performance on any mobile clients yet but I would definitely look into a solution like Trigger.io when we get to it.
That was my response as well, so they generate a slightly less ginomous net revenue and that is a problem how exactly.

Looking at worst case numbers it looks like Facebook will be close to 'accumulating cash' mode at the outset. That is a pretty good thing.

Now it would be nice to get some more visibility into their execution against advertising system changes but this reads more like a 'place' piece where the author hopes that if things go good people will forget they ever read it, and if they go really bad he'll be on record early 'predicting' it and will be able to demand huge consulting fees :-)

Of course I have no idea behind the motivations of the author, I just wondered how he can look at $5B in revenue and not be "well ok, their model is working at least."
We, the web kids (Manifesto)
Why is this thread so filled with hate? This all sounds very reasonable to me. They clearly acknowledge that the battery must be maintained properly and they seem to be doing to the right things to minimize the risk. They then show very clearly that the total amount of maintenance is less than that of a gasoline vehicle, w/ oil and scheduled maintenance. There are a bunch of things like breaking your timing belt that will break a gasoline engine. This all sounds very reasonable to me. Why is everyone freaking out?
Good on you! Having spent some time in hospitals with loved ones recently, I think broadcast TV (like cable) will continue to thrive until someone does a fantastic job of making a "channel lineup" application for on-demand media.

I tried to set up Netflix for someone who was bed-ridden and the fact that the nurse has to keep going in and selecting the next movie after the previous one is done is just agonizing. I love Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo but at least for people with accessibility issues, "what's on" is still more convenient than "what do I want to watch".
Spongebob Squarepants, at least early on, had terrific writing.
I'd love to read that letter! Any chance you could scan it or type it up?
Please don't actually buy HD 595s. The audio driver is exactly the same as the one contained within the HD 555s, the only difference besides the price tag and model label is that they just stick an (easily removable) sound dampener inside the 555s. Buy some HD 555s and mod them, you'll save yourself some money on a pair of fantastic cans.

More details on the modification process can be found here: http://mikebeauchamp.com/misc/sennheiser-hd-555-to-hd-595-mo...
I was just reading through the docs and am getting ready to write my first extension and think I'm going to try and get backbone running in the content script where I believe it's state will be persisted through open/close of the popup.

Thanks for your post!
Very well done, it seems I was beat to the punch (updating the article now...).

I'm curious, did you do anything special to work around fresh API hits each time the popup is loaded (ie. LocalStorage)?
Skullcandy? They are exactly that, and they sound terrible. "Really great bass" should have been your second hint.
Is Throttling Smartphones Pointless? Study Suggests So
Good point. I have given a lot of thought to sustainability with Facebook Ads, and my optimism follows the basic data of my experience ever since it opened up.

Originally, low CPC's were quite commonplace. I could advertise something and get a pretty good rate - $0.10 or so - and make some really good money. Over time, the base CPC has risen across the world. Right now, you're looking at $1.20 or so just to hit the US untargeted (this isn't the suggested bid, this is actually running all-US ads).

What is really telling however is CPC's on very tight interest groups. Let's say I target a set of interests in a city that gets me about ~2k people in the profile. It used to be, even a year ago, that I'd pay about $0.80 per click. Today, you'll be lucky to find $1.30 on the low end. As niches get narrower and people get better at mining interest, the CPC climbs. Long term, sustained CPC trends are clear indicators of increasing demand and the ROI to sustain them.

Why this isn't talked about so much has to do with barriers to entry. I'm telling everyone here a lot about what I do without revealing the finer details. Also, I would say that as with any venue, some products do better than others. You can sell big-ticket stuff on FB, you just have to go about it much differently. You can lose a lot of money on Facebook quite easily, so how you approach the market is a big factor.

That said, the secrecy surrounding the success FB advertisers like myself are having is a much stronger indicator than anything that is said publicly. Will it keep FB from missing earnings targets? Probably not, but I remain very bullish on where they are going and what they have to offer.
Just look at it! LOOK AT IT! It is beautiful. Clearly. http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/popset-a...
Well, Python is perfectly capable of producing a modern website.

Hell, even Go is (even used for some Google end-user visible web stuff).

So the only point in your snark comment was "you will also need javascript". Well, duh. But that's in the client code, no reason to have it in the backend.

Plus, you could even code your javascript in Python, with Pyjamas ;-P
> Crowdfunding demonstrates that if we completely remove copyright laws: art will survive.

Yes, though I think all that was sufficient to reach that conclusion was all the art that lived long before copyright laws ever existed in the first place.

(And I hope copyright lovers admit that Shakespeare, if there was copyright in his day, would have probably created fewer works, not more. In fact it's possible he and others produced so many works precisely because there was no copy protection!)
We'll do other articles and comparisons in the future - we haven't yet had a chance to benchmark against Appcelerator.

Anecdotally we think a performance comparison of the bridge would be favorable, but actually the main reason people use us over other frameworks is that our development process is designed for web devs.

So with us, you don't need to do local compiles or use a particular IDE, and we have a much faster build / test cycle.
Is that really the main difference?

It seems, from what I can tell, users must go through Trigger.io to do a build to get their app in the store. Their code isn't portable to a non-trigger.io platform, either (mobile web, etc.), and the built binary contains closed-source code (Trigger.io platform stuff).

You can run a PhoneGap build locally without going thru the PhoneGap build service. And you get complete and unrestricted access to the source code.

If your service disappears or starts charging exorbitant amounts of money, users are SOL.

Trigger.io is a commercial entity that is in the business of locking customers into a platform and exploiting it. PhoneGap is the opposite. I place no value judgements on this (I use plenty of licensed code on a daily basis and I work for a commercial entity doing something similar); that may or may not matter to a person, but to me - that seems to be the main difference.
It is refreshing to see this from Microsoft, but the comparison is inevitably going to be made with Apple.

And that's not a bad thing.

Mail, Contacts, Messages, iTunes, iPhoto, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. Yeah, there's a little bit of branding in there but the "spade is a spade" argument still stands.

Microsoft is making the right call here.
Forget DDE, we're on to OLE now. Forget OLE, it's COM. You added a DispInterface to COM? Let's call it ActiveX, even though it has nothing to do with DirectX or any other -X. No, wait, let's put the X on the other end! XBox. Sweet. Windows CE makes too much sense, let's call it Windows Mobile, no wait, Windows Phone (so, no tablet vision?). Let's call it Outlook Express, even though it has no relationship to Outlook whatsoever. No wait, Outlook Express is dead. Oh, actually, it's now Windows Live Mail.

Microsoft should just give up on their perpetual rebranding and do some real work. I still can't put my HID Bluetooth device into park or sniff (low-power) mode because their Bluetooth stack still sucks, but they've managed three or four rebranding efforts since Bluetooth hit the scene a decade ago. All of their rebranding efforts are just snapshots in time. They should just stick with naming things by year (or half decade), since that's really what it boils down to.
Bit like Black Perl written (supposedly!) by Larry Wall - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl

Perlmonks has a list of Perl Poetry (http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=Perl%20Poetry). Also on Perlmonks there is a perl5 update of Black Perl (http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=237465)
> If I could get new foam pads for it I would do so in a heartbeat.

That shouldn't be too hard, unless you have a very rare model:

http://www.custom-cable.co.uk/headphone-spares/sennheiser-en...
AKG K701s are not difficult to drive - 64 ohm is not that much - but they leak sound so bad, I don't think I'd ever recommend anyone using those in an office (unless you want to hear everything around you or listen to music at deafening volume in which case everyone around you is forced to listen to it as well).
Since there's no such thing as bad publicity, even (not) describing their problems benefits them.
Sneak Peek at Isis Mobile Wallet
Another fact not mentioned, is that Argentina's government pressured McDonalds to lie on the price of the Big Mac as to appear lower on the chart of the Economist's Big Mac Index (http://www.economist.com/node/21542808).

The Big Mac combo in Argentina is AR$21.50 (approx USD$4.90) and the next cheapest combo is around USD$8.50.
It sounds like you want to use backbone in the background then. It could also be used in the contentscript, but that would be specific to a particular tab and you'd have to send a message from the background (preferred) or popup to request that data to make it accessible to the popup.
I got a pair of Fostex T50RP headphones. Very balanced, extremely durable, mostly closed $80-100 and if your willing to modify them, they can create very good sound. Out of the box they are fairly decent too.
I don't have my full array of dictionaries at hand, but the Oxford Latin dictionary (the only one worth considering in my opinion if you want a serious discussion) gives the etymology of scio (the root verb) as possibly related to Sanskrit chyati and Greek schizo (as in schizo-phrenia, actually), both meaning to separate. I can't say for the Germanic connection to shit and friends, but it's not impossible, although I'm not sure where the l comes from.

I'm not entirely sure which root the Sanskrit form should be but it might be chid-, which fits with the Greek. In that case, I'd wager an Indo-European root along the lines of skedH-, with palatal k and laryngeal (IIRC, it's the laryngeal that gives the Greek z).

As for the derivation of the meaning, I think the notion of "separating right from wrong" is reasonable, but these things are often notoriously hard to pin down.
Viewers and Online Videos
tvbythenumbers had a link to an analysis somewhere about a year ago (sorry for no source, I was interested but not interested enough to bookmark it or email it to anyone--I think it was adweek) that concluded that in aggregate advertisers pay something like $25/month per viewer.
I don't think you can simulate your own future, even if you accept #3.

Either #3 is false (and there are no simulations) or #3 is true (and the vast majority of sentient beings live in simulations, which means those running the simulation are probably simulations themselves.)

Yes a computer can run a simulation of an alternate version of itself, but then the speed must necessarily decrease as you go down the hierarchy (as you will see if you try to run one vmware vm inside another.) Or the simulated universe must lag behind the one containing the more powerful (thanks to Moore's law) host computer.

Edit: unless you have an infinitely-powerful computer like in that story. But then you could argue that every theoretically-possible simulation must be being run by someone somewhere. Good for us even if our society never discovers the infinitely-powerful quantum computer (at least we don't need to worry about being switched off, even if our creators die or their universe collapses.)
BerlIOS moves download of software to SourceForge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Safety_requ...
It's just a motivator to "correct" their skills and enter real ones. Who wants to say they "love IE6"? Hah, I like it.
Yep. Yet until fairly recently, many people were still distrustful of STL due to the various implementations and the godawful compiler errors. As for Boost, at my last company, I had to stage a long battle in order to get even a minimal portion of Boost into our product.
Facebook isn't a public company though. They're pre-IPO. They need to look like a no-risk growth shot, not "just another successful tech company". If you want one of those, go buy GOOG or AAPL.
Personally I use a pair of Shure SE-215-K in-ear monitors with the "Shure CBL-M+-K" cable that includes in-cord mic and volume adjustment. That cord will work with any in-ear monitor in the Shure SE line. I highly recommend this route if you're looking to spend within in the $150 to $500 range.
There's quite a bit truth about your comment but I think it is somewhat simplistic. To better analyze your objection, let us remove the taxpayer part first: Should art projects be funded (by whatever means) that the general public sees no value in, i.e. this is how I parsed your "no one would pay for". This goes into deep discussions about "what is art", "how do you define the value of an art object" etc. Without going into detail, let us observe that in almost all art fields it frequently happens that even the educated public's taste lags the appreciation. I don't know much about painting/sculpture etc. but examples abound in literature (one of the most famous is The Great Gatsby) and film.

So, the mechanism here is very much similar to entrepreneurship: an artist producing work of dubious value asks for support, there's considerable risk in this, i.e. the work is most probably is junk but you might as well have discovered the new Warhol or Banksy. Therefore, it's not a case of funding works "no one would pay for" but how to manage the risk.

The bigger question is: should the state be in this business, with its clueless, bloated and generally ineffective machinery? Again, avoiding the long discussions about how controlling government should be I propose (the obvious but somewhat naive) solution: government should fund some reasonable amount but the works so funded should be under joint ownership of the artist and the public, i.e. the artist should own it but the public should have perpetual view rights, at least from a web site. Continuing the NEA example I gave above, the text of those translations should be available from the NEA site. The public should get value in return, other than the moral feelgood effect of supporting artists.
Such condition would be tempting to abuse. Warranty expires in 6 months--drive to 0%, wait a month and call dealer.

Instead manufacturer could make it very clear in on webpages, in owner manuals, PR materials etc. the importance of keeping batteries charged. Make it common knowledge. Then they would be morally right to treat bricked batteries same as running with no oil or with flat tires.
What about a DBA who used to write client side code? What about a developer who is putting proof-of-concept stuff in a dev environment?

As you said, this just adds JS as yet another language to write stored procedures for PostgreSQL. There's no real need to disparage choice.
Not that I'd recommend it, but it would be possible using Pyjamas, which compiles Python to JavaScript code.
When your P/E is greater than 100, people are expecting mad growth in the future. Growth slowing already? That's bad news for people looking at investing.
Sponsored stories are coming to mobile soon, and from what I can tell actual mobile ads are following on their heels.
Is there a market for your startup-to-be?
No, Hulu doesn't have limits, but some other web TV archives do have daily limits.
Wait, what? You use four different editors? How can you stand that? How could you be good at any of them? I can barely type into a text field on a web page without pasting from emacs.
So all I'm seeing is complaints about inflexible URI routing, and excessively opinionated model classes. This stuff is basically solved in at least one other "rails style" framework (https://metacpan.org/module/Catalyst::Runtime). Web controllers are a rat's nest anyway, the whole thing is basically broken, and the only sane thing to do is to seek for an acceptable comprimise.
"so the trick is to make the non-pirate experience better and the piracy problem goes away. The only people pirating are the ones who would not buy your software/game anyway, so free advertisement/word of mouth should be welcome anyway."

There are a couple of problems with this line of thinking.

First, the Louis CK $5 comedy show is a good example of this not working. Even though it has no protection and is very cheap, it's all over the torrent sites. Why would piracy continue in such massive numbers of the end user is getting everything they could possibly want?

Second, Yes, those people may not purchase your stuff. But, the bigger problem is that if everyone knows they can just download your stuff for free (and you don't care and there are basically no consequences), they will not pay you. They will get it from their friends or download it for free. I've seen this happen time and time again. Since software isn't a physical good, its value is almost like currency: it's only what people are willing to pay.

Piracy is also much worse than theft because if a TV is stolen, you just lose that TV. Over time, piracy can ruin an entire product line. Not just that one copy.

"The industry's problem is that it's hard to make a better experience, existing cash cows being existing cash cows and all. It's easier to protect them than to innovate."

Piracy has actually stifled innovation. Under normal circumstances, if I'm losing money, I'm going to figure out why, which will result in a better customer experience and product. Instead, since there is mass piracy, I'm just going to try to stop that first (Since it's obvious people like the product, they just aren't paying for it).
The problem is that usually in arts the public taste may lag the true appreciation sometimes by centuries, so a greedy algorithm will end up not funding some of the great works of art that are considered worthless in their time.
Now that you mention it, I've probably seen a couple of 'bricked' laptop batteries. At the time I didn't realize that was an issue inherent in the technology, but looking back that's probably what killed those batteries.

Well at least this whole saga has taught me more about Li-ION batteries. I feel like this information is something that should be more generally known amongst the population, not just for cars but for all the products we use with Li-ION.
You worked with bond math -- that's what goes on the resume. It doesn't matter a lot whether it was a custom DSL or a custom library in a common language. Nobody trusts your resume anyway. It just has to start the conversation in the right direction.

Whether it's good for the organization is situational. Wherever you go, new hires have to learn the codebase before they can be really effective. It helps if it uses common tools and languages, but it also helps if it is well-factored. If using a custom DSL results in much better-factored code, it can be a net win.

There are so many languages out there. It's hard to get a job by leveraging your skill in the small subset you know without passing up a lot of opportunities involving the ones you don't.
One tried-and-true solution is to use it on "non-enterprise" projects (small, invisible, failure-tolerant) within your enterprise, then mention that you've used it, then use it on something slightly less obscure and mention it again ... worked for Linux in the '90's.
7. html5 or mozilla gecko type of app stores? or any other alternatives?
Xkcd: Business Plan
Thanks for posting this, and thanks everyone for upvoting it. It's even better the 4th time it's made it to #1 on hacker news. I gained some new insight into how TV sucks and the Internet is awesome.
Broken for whom?

Beatrix isn't the customer. She's the product being sold. TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things.

Hopefully young Beatrix is an outlier like her parents and she'll never get hooked. But it could be that, like most adults, she'll get used to sitting there through the commercials, wasting 8 minutes of her life to get 22 minutes of entertainment. Plus, of course, whatever she wastes on buying things that she doesn't need.
I disagree. You buy a car that only needs maintenance once a year, but you have to plug it in at least once every few weeks. They are willing to go well above and beyond what most would expect in order to remind you of that. I think that's a pretty good deal.

Responsible owners do not let the battery charge reach zero. The consequences are serious enough that owners with unusual usage patterns that make this difficult will go out of their way to make sure it doesn't happen. There is a strong negative financial incentive for owners to do a simple thing like plugging in the car.

Modifying the warranty means Tesla accepts financial accountability for owners' (in)actions that are beyond Tesla's control. That's a bad deal for Tesla. It could mean financial ruin if there are too many irresponsible owners.

This thing is so blown out of proportion. When I first read the blog article I was thinking it was pretty bad. Once I had some time to think about it I realized there isn't anything unreasonable about this except the price of a new battery, but that's the cost of being an early adopter.

If you let a high end sports car sit in a garage for months with a tank full of gas and then go drive it fast you are going to wreck it. It's going to be expensive to fix. That's if you can even get it to start in the first place. A responsible owner starts the car every couple weeks or has someone else do it while they are out of town. What's the difference in effort between that and plugging in a Tesla? The only difference with the Tesla is the cost of the repair.

I think this is a case of some people being ignorant of their responsibilities as owners and failing to properly maintain their cars.