skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been writing PHP for the best part of 10 years and have started getting into RoR in the last year or so. It's hard, because I'm not a competent programmer. I wouldn't say I have much natural ability or spare time to learn new things as I have a full time job, run my own business and have a young family that demand my attention.

Luckily, my colleagues at the day job are supportive and through them, I'm slowly getting my head round Ruby, but only as much as the front-end stuff goes - starting a Rails project on my own would be a massive undertaking for me.

Given the choice, I'll do things in PHP because it's quicker and I have more experience on it. Jumping ship would be like abandoning 10 years of experience so I can start from scratch - I don't have the time to do that.
This really sucks if you have an old phone on a crappy connection.
Touchscreen alternative uses a depth camera and thumb gestures
LulzSec leader "Sabu" worked with FBI since last summer
That is a bit sad. In most every case applications can easily shrink in size. On my ipad the other day I noticed I had several games (little more than flash junk, not massive 3d assets) that were 300+MB in size with one at 600MB. When your silly game is using almost 1/10 of the space on my device something is wrong. Compare this to Google books which is 3MB! Props to that group for doing it right. Large downloads can mean download errors, users can cancel the download, users that forget about the app and never run it... And even 50MB assumes that they have a reasonable connection, imaging most of the world that doesn't have 3G trying to download several GB. Maybe their shouldn't be a limit, but apps should be some sort of incentive system (rewarded for small downloads and penalized otherwise?)

Edit: with 4GB I could release apps that include my backups...
There isn't a difference in performance. It's a price difference because you're guaranteeing Amazon that you will use the instance (and pay for it even if you aren't using it).

With light utilization, you could pay the up-front fee and then never turn on the instance. Yes, Amazon gets your reservation fee, but gets no hourly usage money from you. By choosing heavy utilization, you are saying "Amazon, I'm going to guarantee you that I will pay you $X for this instance over the next (1|3) years." In response, Amazon says "well, if you'll guarantee me that you aren't going to up and move to Linode or shut down for the next (1|3) years, I will give you a discount."

Amazon needs to make sure that it has enough capacity that when a random person wants to launch an instance, there's a machine with the capacity to handle it. That means that Amazon needs to keep a lot of unused capacity around. If you're willing to say, "I guarantee that I will pay for every hour over the next three years" Amazon can give you a discount.

Think of it like a CD at a bank. You're telling the bank, "you don't have to worry about your reserves when it comes to this account since I'm committing to not withdrawing this money for a year." That has advantages to the bank because they don't have to include that account in their planning of how much excess money (capacity) they need to keep around for when people want to withdraw.

Amazon can plan their capacity differently (and more cheaply to them) when you will guarantee that you will keep using/paying for an instance. As such, they're passing the savings on to you. This is a great benefit to a company who has a web server or two and knows that they won't be eliminating their presence. It's also a help to someone like Heroku. While the elastic nature of EC2 allows Heroku to always meet demand for dynos, Heroku could probably plan that they would need at least X instances and then just pay for on-demand instances for spikes in usage.

Heroku is actually a wonderful case for how it helps Amazon. Let's say that Heroku uses 5,000 instances. That's decently sizable. If Heroku left Amazon for whatever reason, Amazon could find itself with hundreds of boxes of excess capacity that they were planning would be used by Heroku. By committing to "heavy utilization", Heroku is telling Amazon "don't worry. We will be on EC2 for the next (1|3) years. When you calculate how many instances might be created/destroyed, those 5,000 instances are safe for the next (1|3) years since we've committed to paying the hourly fee on all of them for that period of time."
Deutsche Telecom sets new data transfer record 400Gbps
Forget chocolate on Valentine’s Day, try semen
Unfortunately the common argument is not always true. To be honest at this point in time I would say PHP is actually the hardest to find hosting for. I'm a long time PHP developer and just recently tried Heroku out -- its like magic.

Best for generating web pages is a meaningless metric, and...

To be honest my main issue with PHP relates to the defense that "PHP is not as bad as people like to say.". I mean, really - its true. PHP5 is significantly better language than the previous versions, and people always over-exaggerate how bad it is. The problem is that PHP is not a good language.

Whenever I develop in Python/Ruby I actually enjoy the 'feel' of the language, and I'm often impressed by the power it has to do really complicated things in simple concise instructions. Most of the time when I'm working with PHP the feeling is very different. I can perform the same operations but generally theres far more cruft, and a couple manual lookups to see why functions behave differently when hashes ("arrays") have numeric indices (I'm looking at you array_merge!)
I wonder if for elementary schools dividing up classes into kids born from January to June and July to December birth dates would help at all.
Bizarre story, but interesting implication
They've sold 2 million of them, and all reports are that they've seen great sales: I doubt they're disappointed. And while it is indeed a niche, but a very lucrative one. Further Samsung had no other new releases around the time of the Superbowl -- had the GS III been ready, I have no doubt they would have led with that.

It's a feature of a product. A feature that appeals to some, turns off others. That's how the whole choice thing works.
Evolving Blogging
LulzSec leader Sabu turns FBI snitch, reportedly gives up five top hackers
Just because unlucky/stupid/lazy criminals are getting caught doesn't mean lucky/smart/cautious criminals are not already at work.
This is unbelievable. With all of these studies showing up that employers/schools use public social media channels to make a decision on applicants, this is way over the top.

Hopefully this ends fast.
GREAT poll topic, was considering doing something similar to get some data for my startup FitBolt (fitbolt.com), which helps to address this sedentary computer lifestyle.

Me personally, 8-10 hrs a day for my fulltime job, usually take ~4 hrs off for super/gym/etc, then back on the computer until 2-4am. So ~14 hrs a day on weekdays. I try to stay off the computer as much as possible on the weekends to reset myself, but that doesn't always happen..
Yeah, you could buy a Mac and be happy. I just bought a System76, and while the jury is still out they came highly reviewed and first impressions with the machine are positive. You do have options other than "build" and "buy a Mac."
Tom's Hardware does regular roundup articles for building gaming PCs in a certain price bracket. I use those as a starting point. I've always built my own systems and in the past couple of years it really has become just plug and play. If you are looking to build a linux box the only caveat is that nvidia and intel video cards are generally better supported.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-overclock-perfor...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-overclock-crossfire-s...
CouchDB installed onto the iPhone/iPad?
Have you considered the cost of my time? My 4.7 GHz i5 desktop with a good SSD is probably at least 3 times faster to compile my project than a Mac Mini would be (even with an SSD). It's now fast enough that I don't get the urge to switch to Hacker News while waiting. If I had to pay $100 per month for electricity for it, I wouldn't care.

And I doubt that the electricity difference is major. My i5 spends most of it's time at 1.2 GHz, and I'm using an efficient power supply. So when running at full-tilt it uses a lot more power, but when just running Emacs it's basically idle.

And yes, a modern Linux desktop does hibernate properly, although sleep is a little more problematic. It also boots in about 5 seconds (although most modern PCs have horrible BIOSes that add about 15 seconds).
The payday loans are only that high because the associated risks are immense. And this is precisely why you need to have ML experts working on this problem.
AIDE - An IDE That Lets You Write And Compile Apps On Your Android Device
Welcome to the end of the www as we know it. Where you request permission to follow an interesting sounding link on HN by logging in to Google.
I've been using PhoneGap and JqTouch. I tried using JqueryMobile, but I had trouble getting some things working, and found that jqTouch just worked easier and faster for what I was trying to do.

But then I found that I'm kinda having to roll a lot of my own UI elements, using old school CSS and Javascript. I'm combining iScroll (a javascript scroller for touch drag scrolling). It's all very interesting and exciting, but it certainly feels like more of a "Research" project and less of a "Development" project, because there are no real models of how things are done to look at. I feel like I'm constantly blazing a trail of semi-undiscovered country.

It looks like Sencha is taking a different approach, and implementing some of these UI elements in native code, with different implementations on different platforms, rather than it being just a traditional DOM app?
I remember yourname.seework.com from a previous job. As a result, all of the project managers called it Seework, not Basecamp.
Barbie “Dream Closet” Comes to Life for NYFW
I agree with you that are some skeptics who will continue to move the goalposts. I also think that the tool itself won't change any minds.

My hope is that it can help early adopters get over the initial debugging barrier, which, despite the hype, is a legitimate concern. The tool can also be an aid for advocates in teaching coffeescript.
The cause of the instability appears to be the box-shadow (or possibly the -webkit-transform) on all 151 slides. I've disabled those features for iOS now, and it appears to be stable.
Just because they might have a team working in a free version of Basecamp doesn't mean that they're pulling in money.
>>>> "Also, when people access a site, they either type in a domain from a physical source, or more often they search or follow links."

>> Where are you getting this from?

See here http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login
> PHP is actually the hardest to find hosting for.

What? No. Do you have any proof of this? I have yet to come across a "normal" shared/dedicated hosting service that doesn't support PHP. That is an insane statement.
Apple, Google to Meet with Senator Over Mobile Privacy Concerns
Apparently he's Puerto Rican but lives in NY (at least according to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/06/lulzsec-sab...).
What about those of us who have no Facebook account?
Anyone here who has used both PhoneGap and ST? How do they compare?
Video: Chris Dodd/Others Discuss Copyright Infringement on College Campus
Absolutely there are competent programmers with no hobby code out there. I know, I was one of them when I applied for my current gig.

But if a candidate with the skills for the job really wants it very much, then merely not having any dusty code laying around readily at had should do absolutely nothing to prevent them from being able to deliver a sample, given a few days' notice.

For my part, when they asked for sample code, I said, "Hey, I usually leave my work at work, but if you give me a day I can whip something up for you." And I spent the evening grinding out code, and was able to deliver a tarball the next day.
Great, now I have to go unfriend everybody who might be willing to hand over their access since they would otherwise allow others to see what I have written.
Pretty much. Anyone who singles out Fox as any worse than any other media outlet is just showing their own ignorance.
Well you won't be friend-ed by me.

But you can always create a phony one.
I didn't think I would like this. I'm a nuts and bolts kind of person and I like to try to understand from the ground up if I can.

However, this is a pretty good narrative, and is filling in some blanks for me. For instance, the git whatchanged command was new to me.
I see the FBI is still using typewriters.
What’s Your Escape Plan?
MailCatcher
Deploy a new app on PHP Fog - get $29 Credit
I've noticed a lot of people on Facebook who use nicknames or "first name plus some other word" instead of their real names. I imagine this is intended to keep anyone from searching their real name with Google or Facebook and finding that profile. But it's a short step from that, to having two or more Facebook accounts, one to be the person's "public face" and the rest for the actual things people do on Facebook.
I'm a LastPass fan myself. https://lastpass.com/

Works on every platform imaginable. And it does so flawlessly.
The site needs a revamp but is there in concept. It'd only take about a days worth of time to give the site a facelift. You're missing basic things like completion of the additional instructions page.
Do keep in mind that the U.S. isn't just "another country", it is the center of most big entertainment businesses, and its government is highly, perhaps uniquely, influenced by corporate agendas.
I'm kinda finance geek, but I know nothing about this field programmatically. This looks amazing. Anyone have any other links worth looking at?
True, but it is more a matter of where you choose to invest your time. Hosting and sysadmin work have nothing to do with my startup's value add, and I personally can't add much value by doing it myself.
The difference w/ terrorism is that it intentionally targets civilians. It is always odious. The ends do not justify the means.

Note: there is a lot of grey in the world, but intentionally targeting the innocent is black & white.
Your error is assuming there is groupthink.
What is up with the use of the font "klavika-web-1" on their site for <h2> styling? It renders pretty ugly in Chrome.
I'm the exact opposite. I used custom built Linux desktops for years. Switched to a Linux laptop and never looked back.
I'm not a professional programmer either, so that makes us two already. For what it's worth, I think you should just come, and it will be what you make it to be (you know what I mean?).
I think it's less a problem of bias but more a problem of continued bad journalism practices (tabloid-like mistakes). Many others are also guilty of bad journalism regardless of their political bias. But Fox News has it up to a level that it's hard to believe anything they publish without first looking for a second source.
This annoyed me recently as I was attempting to test a daemon that was running on IPv6 only. Ended up using some netcat magic to bounce it from IPv4 to IPv6...
They don't really want "a stylus". They say they want one, but as you pointed out, there are dozens of options out there for $5 and up.

What they're really pining for is "a stylus that doesn't suck". Or rather, the experience of pen on paper using an iPad. Apple hasn't figured out how to do this well, so they haven't done it yet.
I forgot to include both weights of the Yanone Kaffeesatz web font (400 and 700), which was causing rendering problems on some browsers. Try it again now? Sorry for the inconvenience.
Plus, takeout for the guys working the case.
The Pirate Bay, Physibles And What It All Means
Why did you apply in the first place? Is there a particular reason why you can't just get a tourist visa & cross the border every few months?
Am I the only one here who thinks they've actually done a good job with this transition? I've been a long-time (paying) user of Basecamp and the entire 37 Signals suite, and I think Basecamp needed to be revamped long ago.

I actually like that they've created a brand new experience/product, and have given everyone ample time (90 days) to evaluate whether or not they like it. I also thought the FAQ was clear, and the transition process was well explained.

As for the loss of time tracking that a few people have complained about... If you're really that serious about time tracking, you shouldn't be using the extremely limited time tracking capabilities of Basecamp Classic anyway. We use Harvest and integrate it with our Basecamp account, and it's a perfect setup for us. I always thought time tracking seemed like a "nice to have" feature of Classic.
Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages
Driverless cars vs carless people
Yes.

Reddit's spam filter is completely broken with no apparent activity from the current group of admins towards fixing it.

It seems that generally if you submit something to reddit, it will get caught in the spam filter, then you have to message a moderator to request that it get approved.

[Again, it seems] that you're not so much voting on an assortment of links, you're voting on an assortment of links that moderators have deemed worthy.
Building my own is something I would have done a decade ago, but I've since lost track of what all of the hardware lingo means, or which companies are making decent components.

Desktop hardware hasn't changed much, so if you built a system ten years ago, you'll come up to speed pretty quickly. The main pieces are the same; they just have different features, performance characteristics, and different rules for figuring out which components interoperate. If you want a complete list of parts that will work together, Ars Technica still publishes their system guides regularly.

Compatibility between different parts can seem complicated, but it's simple once you figure out the rules. To be extra safe and avoid accidental incompatibilities between components that should, by spec, be compatible, I always pick components that are popular with builders (measured by the number of reviews on NewEgg) and search the web for mentions of incompatibility between them.
Hosting isn't a very good metric in the first place. In a time where PaaS is going crazy and IaaS is crazy easy to find from tons of vendors, shared hosting is an out dated model that is only marginally a better option.

Although, it is way, way cheaper.
Lulzsec leader was FBI mole
Why did you do a full rewrite?
Stanford's NLP course starting on March 12
They're not mutually exclusive.

I've used Sencha Touch before to provide a nice fat-finger-friendly version of Sencha's Ext-JS user interfaces on the iPad and it's a nice framework for providing rich UI components and also helps you segregate your UI itself into models, views and controllers.

I've used PhoneGap to wrap web-based projects for native device access to APIs you can't get a hold of using plain javascript or that wouldn't be exposed via Sencha Touch - PhoneGap provides an app shell, a UIWebView to execute your web app inside and a lot of nicely wrapped device level APIs accessible to your javascript code.

If you just want the web app stuff, Sencha Touch is really nice but a little heavy compared to options like jQuery Mobile so I'd use it in future for things that are very custom-component heavy like grids and complex forms, and for bigger applications where compartmentalisation is more important - whereas I'd stick to something like jQuery Mobile for just mobile-friendly UI elements like buttons and basic form controls or for a more simple app.

Sencha Touch has a bit of a learning curve compared to typical web app work, as the entire interface is typically declared within Sencha and UI elements instantiated and passed around, whereas with jQuery Mobile or the likes you can get away with just making it up mostly in HTML and throwing in JS components as and when you need them. To me, Sencha Touch is a slightly bigger all-or-nothing approach.

PhoneGap I would use in general any time I had to get access to device level APIs that ST v2.0 hasn't provided or anything else in bespoke native code that can't be done within a web app.
Pod, a port of the Rack Specification to PHP.
This exact question would literally keep me up at night when I was a child. Now I just avoid thinking about it.

However, this response from the thread apparently sums it up nicely:

Just as on a sphere where latitude needs to be taken into account when determining distance between two points because as latitude increases (up to 90) the distance between those points increase, in our universe time needs to be taken into account when measuring the distance between two points because as time increases (or moves forward) the distance between two points also increases?
As in, "the universe is expanding" is not saying that a balloon is necessarily expanding, but rather by moving forward in time, the distance between two points simply increases?
Ban on handheld cellphone use by California drivers reduced road deaths
Thunderbolt pretty much gives you the best possible compromise these days. Granted, no laptop will give you the power of a desktop, but if you can get by with less power, Thunderbolt lets turn your MBP or Air into a high screen real-estate workstation with mouse/keyboard/speakers/fast storage by plugging a single cable.

To me the ability to pull up my laptop and go work somewhere else for a few hours, or have my main workstation with me at conferences, etc is well worth sacrificing some power. Sure I can make use of multiple large displays, but I can do a lot of work without them without losing much efficiency. For stuff like design where I really need it, I can wait til I get home.
Meh, I was born in December, and I was one of the oldest in the class. I think the age you start a grade varies state to state.
They're different products for different purposes. Using Sencha Touch and PhoneGap together works really well. You can develop your app in a browser using the Sencha Touch framework then simply drop your code into a PhoneGap Xcode or Eclipse project and your pretty much ready to submit to the relevant app stores.
Great.

Based on that, what would be even more useful still is a way to browse my code from a within the editor itself. Something with say line numbers on some left pane synchronized with the corresponding file section on the right pane.

Some editors already provide a similar feature using line numbers from compilers ; that's usefull to fix syntax errors typically.
Aldous Huxley's letter to Orwell on "1984."
I wonder if anyone with a child born in December can simply delay the enrollment until next year? Do schools have issues with that?
It is costly and only works a few times. Investors will also be (rightfully) nervous of any possibility that you may not be able to stay in the country.
For a group, that would take lots of discipline. Not impossible, but not very likely. Even Feds, Chinese and Israeli "teams" suffer unwanted leaks --and these are trained people. People who go thru psychological profiling, shaping, and get reminded by the bureaucracy probably on a frequent basis.

It's hard for me to imagine a loose-knit group being able to pull this disciple off long-term.
I lived through it too.

I fundamentally believe that it is NOT and should not be the task of the government to "create" jobs.

We should toughen up benefits, which the current government is already doing, to ensure people out of work don't just sit on their arses all day.

You cannot do what the past socialist governments have done - create tons of unnecessary public sector jobs paid for by debt. That is unfair to everyone and just has to be paid for later.
I would laugh in their faces so hard, and just turn around and walk away. I am neither handing over, nor logging in for my bosses to see.

I've had a post that I accidentally made public on my Facebook come back to bite me in the ass, and it won't happen ever again.