skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Strangely though, in these experiments, people tend to readily and accurately agree on who the worst performers are, while failing to recognize the best performers."

So we know incompetence even if we don't recognize competence. This appears to be good enough for government work.
Education 2.0 - the Business Model
Ask HN: How would you grow and monetize a free image hosting site?
Greetings Hackers! I'm about to inherit a free image hosting site from a friend (like TinyPic). Traffic is in the 120K visits per day range. I'm wondering what your ideas would be for growing and monetizing such a site? Right now, it's slowly growing organically and monetization happens through a few AdSense units on the site as well as 'Premium' accounts which give the user more bandwidth and space.

Given that there are hundreds of competitors in this space, is that the best approach to hope for? I've thought about trying GumGum but worry about losing traffic to the competition. I'm looking for other creative ideas or tips. Thanks!
I don't think "find" is what you want there either.

The params passed in is auto-deserialized and thus can be a list or a hash with query options instead of your expected "id" value.
>Democracy is also the only way to effectively stop armed revolutions.

You phrase that as a positive, but it could also be phrased as a negative: Democracy allows evil people to rise to power without having to fight anyone to do it. Hitler was elected democratically.
What's Wrong with Amazon's DynamoDB Pricing?
lucky you.. you don't have to support anything below ie9. Not everyone has that luxury.
Some nice abstractions. I would like more information on how they are using it within Twilio, though.
Full disclosure: I'm the man behind Gate One and Liftoff Software. I'll be watching this thread to answer anyone's questions.
Zynga shares lose altitude on downgrade
> I spent some of this weekend playing with IndexedDB, its very hard to get into at the moment, mostly due to the different implementations across mozilla / chrome, but there is some complexity that doesnt look easily solved by a wrapper, just understanding what is meant by onupgradeneeded / setversion seems needlessly complex.

This is definitely an annoyance but it is pretty easy to overcome:

const DB_VERSION = 1;

req.onupgradeneeded = function(e)...

req.onsuccess = function(e) {
var db = e.target.result;
if(db.setVersion && Number(db.version) !== DB_VERSION) {
var dbReq = db.setVersion(DB_VERSION);
dbReq.onsuccess = function(e) {
req.onupgradeneeded(e);
req.onsuccess(e);
};

return;
}

// You can use db now.
};

> Other problems include "Indexed DB is not available in private browsing mode", how are people supposed to build offline webapps when the applications can easily be prevented from accessing their own data?

Good point, are there any queues to the developer that the browser is running in private mode? If so I think we just need to inform the user.

> IndexedDB is nice, but its quite opinionated and complex, I think browser vendors needs to think about what lower level constructs can be given to developers in order to create their own databases, and as much as I dislike the thought of SQL client side, I think it was probably a mistake to shoot websql so early on, sqlite is the standard of embedded databases.

There are going to be a lot of IndexedDB libraries once it becomes supported (in the modern spec) by all browsers. There will be libraries that give you a simple key/value store like localStorage does today (I'm working on one of these), there will be libraries that let you write SQL, and probably every other paradigm that people enjoy.
I'd imagine Twitter's serving `Cache-Control: public` where appropriate.
I looks like most of the inline JavaScript is there to handle DOM abstraction and events. Every click essentially needs to be able to build a part of the page client-side.
Please take note that I am looking for productivity/gtd app startups... Thanks :-)
That may have been the intent but the reality is that the poor stay poor and the rich now dominate resulting in a government that is increasingly dominant and intrusive.

Consequently, you lose unless you happen to be one of the few in charge.
> I'd like to know how its model of transaction isolation works given that reads and writes are claimed to be independent.

Any MVCC-style model allows full concurrency between readers and writers. The bigger problem is managing concurrency between conflicting writers in what amounts to a distributed database system. None of the material on Datomic's website explains how they intend to tackle that issue, which seems especially tricky with their model of distributed peers. All they say is that the Transactor is responsible for globally linearizing transactions and that this is better than existing models. However, if there is a genuine conflict, the loose coupling among peers seems to make the problem much worse than existing models, not better.

I'd love to know more details.
It's not only worse, it's poorly scheduled. There are many times hand-coding assembly will do far better than a compiler (often an order of magnitude). This isn't one.

If you write straight-line asm code where every output is immediately consumed in the next 2-3 instructions, you'll find it runs exactly the same speed as the compiler's output. Probably worse, because the compiler would at least attempt this. This is where a human can do better than the compiler, but this isn't an example of it.
Cash prizes for technological innvoation: A 400-year history
I only just read this today. Thank you, very VERY much, for responding with fuller notes and reflections!
The PRC is democratic. They filter for eligibility to vote based on your membership standing in The Party.
I don't have a fancy liberal arts education so perhaps I'm misunderstanding the finer points of anarchism. As I understand it, the concept involves rejecting authority and hierarchy and neither of these is true of the scene.

Certainly things are not organised as rigidly as a government or traditional business, but neither does the scene resemble a collectivist commune. There are authority figures and hierarchies everywhere. The fact that there are quality standards for releases, that all groups (of any note) adhere to, and which are actively enforced throughout the community, should be indicative of that.

Let me spell this out for you a little further: everything from groups, to sites to individuals have their place in a pecking order. Each group for example is its own mini fiefdom; usually ran by a single leader or a council of elders. They decide what releases the group will target, what site affils to chase, what resources are required and so on. You march to their tune or leave. Initial (and often continued) membership is based on performance: if you impress with your chops, you're in. Drop the ball too many times and you're out. Always the objective is to be the best.
If you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family it's still a crime.

Regardless of whether or not you think what he did was justified it's still illegal. And there's very few serious crimes for which "publicity stunt" will generally be regarded as a good reason.
If you would like to think so, let me give you a reason to do so: http://www.2ality.com/2012/02/twitter-pushstate.html
The Mole v0.3 Released : Automatic SQL Injection Exploitation Tool
Microsoft poised for tablet resurgence
Open Source Rules of Engagement
Google cache copy:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kdVysoZ...
Darpa shows off running “cheetah” robot
Hello, #World - dynamic Twitter background
An experiment between Twitter and Yahoo! Weather APIs.
New software responds to students’ emotions, boredom
Interesting new technology, which redefines human-computer interaction.
I think that every competent dev knows that something like update_attributes is inherently dangerous. So they probably keep it for backend import/maintenance tasks. At some point, someone copies the code/wrapper-function into the front-end.

The status quo of Rails is that everything is sanitized if you use the helpers. And validators on the models only look at data integrity. So all this protection, at least for me, kind of lulls you into feeling secure, because SQL inject is generally the typical, awful-case scenario.

update_attributes is not really a SQL inject attack vector (since the actual values are sanitized)...it's partially a social engineering scheme.
The FAQ says that writes favour consistency over availability, so I guess that means synchronous calls to the transactor.
DarkShikari (x264) on attracting and keeping Japanese open source contributors
Bruce Dawson: Tricks With the Floating-Point Format
How to Build the muscle of change
Amazon affiliate links.

Aren't those free ebooks easy enough to find directly on Amazon?
Hacker School: Why I'm learning to code
Consider the course of governments dedicated to "the poor" and you may see the problem.

I'd also point out that the intrusions of our current government aren't motivated by their advantages for the rich.
When data is immutable, append-only, and tagged by timestamp, there is no conflict. Rather, there are facts on the same entity that are asserted at different times. In this case where changes come in at two times (which are subject to all the raciness of the real world that exists regardless), one will win.
You might be surprised how "modern" BBC Basic is, even today.
I mean the raspberry pi thing. The SSL is presumably to stop a MITM switching the JS for something malicious.
GTA clone in HTML5
Is this the same guy that was going to be executed for writing an image uploader last month? If not, what came of that case? Did they end up going through with the execution?
Microsoft poised for tablet resurgence
Curious to see how MS shakes up the tablet world this year.
Yes. I was hoping someone would find out the pricing but I guess it's safe to assume that it's outrageous.
Actually, I do use update_attributes for public-facing interfaces. But only with attr_accessible. (I never use attr_protected, since blacklists are a disaster waiting to happen.)
This looks awesome! It's important they get this kind of product right on the first release -- because small business owners can't tolerate 'beta' for something so critical as their cash register.

Case in point: One of my favorite restaurants in Seattle was using iPads for registers (not using Square's product). I came back a few months later and they had switched to a 'normal' POS system. "What happened to the iPads?" I asked. "There were too many issues and they crashed way too often." It was a case of a restaurant that wanted to be on the cutting edge -- but in the end it didn't work out, so they went with a standard solution that worked well.

I don't doubt that square can execute -- they have already shipped some great products. I just want to point out that it's not as simple as some people might imagine.
Stop and think about this for a moment.

Given the number of potential updates that may require a reboot to a system that is regularly maintained (for security and/or other reasons) shaving seconds off the boot process can really add up.

The number of seconds that a system isn't available to serve requests can mean the difference between six nines and three nines of availability easily over the course of a year.

It has nothing to do with "how fast I can boot", it's strictly about the amount of time the system is available to perform its expected operations.

No one cares if you can't serve requests because it was rebooting or some other reason, the availability of the system's desired functionality is all that counts.
Yes, we are planning a verification system for lawyers' profiles, although you can already tell a lot by looking at their profile information (website, twitter, etc)
>Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."

No. Democracy is the best form of government discovered so far because it allows voters to remove incompetent leaders and bad policies without violence.

However competent a king or dictator is, most of his competence will be directed towards remaining in power through military force, rather than addressing his country's real problems. He cannot be removed without risking civil war, which is the worst kind.

However incompetent a prime minister or president turns out to be, and however dull voters are, incompetence is easier to recognise than competence.

Besides, one doesn't necessarily need to personally recognise it: one can be persuaded by other people. It's easier to reach agreement about things that aren't working.
Tinker — Social Code Collaboration
I studied programming in college...and while I liked the assembly-code + controller projects, I wish there was more focus on web development...because the one thing that has gotten me excited about programming is the potential to share (i.e. brag) about my work.

Making clever paint/tic-tac-toe/sudoku programs in Java/C++ are good exercises...but I lost interest in programming when I couldn't see it being used for more day-to-day practical tasks.

One specific topic I wish had been taught was regular expressions. In my first year of comsci classes, regexes were in the optional chapters of the book. Knowing about them would've led me to do more data-processing/information-gathering type programming, which is the track I am on now.

Plus, they're just damn plain useful in every coding context, even for project code-search-and-replace.
Fantastic idea, but as a lawyer, it makes me a bit nervous for those who would rely solely on the documents available.

Even if those documents are flawless and cover exactly what someone needs (incredibly unlikely), in many areas the documents themselves aren't necessarily the problem: it's knowing what documents, in combination, you need.

For example, if I want to make a real estate secured loan to someone, what do I need? If you're fairly sophisticated, you might say a Note and a Deed of Trust. Great, but what if that someone is a business or a single asset entity? Should you make the loan? Should you get a guaranty from the principals? Would that guaranty even be enforceable? In many cases, just having access to the documents really isn't enough. There's a reason attorneys are the only profession that get paid to research the very subject they're supposed to be experts in. This stuff is complicated.

I like the idea though, and if you could fill some of those knowledge gaps, this could be really valuable.
Hmm... Looking at CRM Anaylyst and CRM Administrators on Salary.com seems like 65-105 are the norm (median 82k) Maybe I'm asking for too little for wearing all these hats.
> The simple argument is that Iranian leaders supposedly don’t think like the rest of us: they are religious fanatics [...]

Cannot deny the truth, can you?

Also, HN is no place for politics, but I cannot downvote (yet).
This seems like an intentional oversimplification. Having mass-assignment on by default and therefore requiring the developer to create a whitelist of attributes for each of their models has a complexity cost associated with it. Failing to mention this at all shows a lack of objectivity.

I happen to believe it's worth it for the increased security, however I'm not going to pretend that there isn't an associated cost.
Not just rails, same for django (https://github.com/search?q=SECRET_KEY&repo=&langOve...) and I imagine any framework with this sort of thing in their default project skeleton
I thought this way as well, but professional sports leagues argue that their efforts generate the data, so they own it (i.e. without their venues, players, coaches and additional resources, those numbers wouldn't exist). They will allow you to consume that data in approved ways, such as going to see a game or watching it on TV, but they do not allow you to record and use that data for profit without permission. The companies who provide sports data feeds have jumped through a lot of hoops and pay significant fees to license that data. The companies that use those feeds do, too (e.g. fantasy sports league manager services, sports reporting services, sports betting services, etc.)
Nodeguide.com: a victory and an extrapolation
Kottke.org redesigns using private beta of Hoefler & Frere-Jones webfont service
This was the dominant form of voting in most democracies until about 100 years ago. E.g. in the UK, only men who owned property could vote (can't let the common man vote!). This didn't always produce a good democracy.
You can also play user-agent games to get the Android version in your browser. I prefer the regular mobile edition, but it's interesting to poke around; I've found three separate versions of the site just by faking out my user agent.
Sounds very interesting but I think the site is down. All I get is:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /blog/ on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Really? Are there no actual programmers out there anymore?

Is this the future? Kids with huge inflated egos, showing off their "look how fast my (RAM|Network) is" micro-benchmarks and spouting off FUD on twitter.
تردد قناة زووم سبورت الجديدة
Interesting. Got a link?
your logo looks very similar to my friends record label - http://www.velocityrecords.com/
No, that was Saeed Malekpour, and the discussion is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3599396

Also, I just realized that Amir Mirzai Hekmati was a game programmer, not a web programmer, and will edit the title accordingly.
Do you think people that fly on private jets go through the same process that most people do while flying commercial?
This is not a new idea, it's why almost nobody took Democracy seriously before the U.S. I like Jefferson's answer to this problem:

"if we think [the people] not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." --Thomas Jefferson

Democracy is really the only reason that we have universal education in the first place. If the elite are forced to allow the people to make decisions, then they're going to make sure the people are educated enough not to do anything too dumb.
It's easy enough to find free ebooks on Amazon, but on Amazon you can't sort them by how recently they were made free. So you can't tell which ones are free since yesterday. That's what this site does.
Not when they are clicking on a link in email or other page.

EDIT: misread your comment. Thought you were talking about mobile apps.

Also, I would not call their mobile site 'very lean'. Just got a single twit page on iPhone: 817Kb.
Isaacs on "Trying to be less sexist"
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kdVysoZ...
Is the solution given in the article any different than using this?

config.active_record.whitelist_attributes = true

Also, this isn't the first time someone's been bit by this:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned...
It's a lot easier to have a united democracy when you start with a unified populace culled of undesirables, yeah?

Sure, stacking the deck, but it can be made to work.
It was just a dns pre-fetch. (I never expected Thunderbird to do that.)

I disabled preFetch in the config editor and my ship's running dry again.
> In this case where changes come in at two times (which are subject to all the raciness of the real world that exists regardless), one will win.

That describes many methods of optimistic concurrency control, but it doesn't answer my question of how this supposed to work in practice with high write contention, the higher latency of a distributed peer model, the long-running transactions the video mentions (or maybe that remark only applied to long-running queries), etc. My point being, if the distributed transaction problem was easily solved by sprinkling on optimistic multi-versioning concurrency control, it would have been solved a long time ago. There must be some special sauce they're not mentioning.
I'm not a big fan of the "this is documented" defense.

If Microsoft left a network accessible default passworded Admin account in Windows Server but documented it and told people to change it, would that be okay simply because it was documented? Documentation is no panacea for bad defaults.

Part of the OP's point (and he's absolutely right) is that this incident proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that just warning about the issue is clearly not enough. If the GitHub team screwed this up, what hope do the majority of the unwashed masses of Rails developers have, warning or no warning?
since PostgreSQL as an org wasn't going to be there and
generally when PostgreSQL is going to be at a conference,
we have tended to volunteer at their booth

This is an interesting tactic. Normally I'd think the BDFL of each project would want to preapprove someone speaking on his team's behalf, but open source isn't necessarily like that. Feels like this could be quite the marketing exploit if leveraged in the right way. Support the project and draft on its fame behind it.
Really? Because when I go to a Twitter link on my phone it redirects me to the mobile site, irrespective of the original domain.
I won first place in Massachusetts in a grade 4-6 art poster drawing contest promoting US Savings Bonds ran by the US Treasury in the 90's, and met the Lt. Governor as well as receiving a $1,000 Savings Bond (the 2nd and 3rd places in each state also won $500 or $200, respectively). In contrast, state winners of the Google contest win a paid trip to New York City (presumably with a guardian) and get to meet other winners, and do not win money unless they are top three in the nation.

Another difference is that the judging criteria for my contest was split up in percentages, one of the largest being originality. My design was original in many ways, probably helped by the fact that I had just moved to the United States a year prior and avoided stereotypical patriotic symbols like the statue of liberty, the liberty bell, and eagles. However, the the 2nd place national winner (the top three got to visit Washington D.C. as well as winning an additional $5,000, $2,000, or $1,000) was simply a giant eagle perched on a tree branch, and even the first place winner the prior year was a drawing of the statue of liberty (both at the skill level of a middle-school student.)

It appeared that the national judges did not familiarize themselves with the judging criteria as much as the state judges. First of all, the theme was "Invest in your future today", so what a painting of an eagle perched on a branch had to do with originality or theme is very vague, and the art wasn't anything special, so I don't see how it could have even been in the top except for the patriotic angle, considering that those three factors was supposed to make up the majority of the judging criteria.

In contrast, I notice that the judging criteria for the Google contest is delegated to the bottom of the FAQ page instead of having its own section. Additionally, it doesn't list the relative importance of each of them (artistic merit, creativity of the use of google logo, how well the theme is expressed, and an essay).

All in all, while I'm happy there is a replacement for the Savings Bonds contest (which ceased in the early 2000's due to a combination of budget cuts and controversy over judging), and that it's a great way for Google to get brand recognition as an important company with the K-12 crowd, it would be nice for Google to 1) provide more specific criteria and 2) stick to it, since lots of children will be spending a month or more on the poster (about how long I spent, for example) with little chance of actually getting recognition or an award.
That is not entirely true. If you are authenticated your home_timeline is embedded in the page for instant rendering. Once Twitter moves away from #!'s individual tweets will be embedded as well.
The Enterprise Model: Build or Buy?