skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
REST is a great starting point for an API, but generic REST interfaces (in Rails, Django, or any other framework) are relied on too heavily. I'm especially interested in mobile APIs, which have very specific considerations that REST doesn't answer well.

Building a generic data back-end for mobile is very hot right now, with lots of funded startups in the space. Some of them are just offering a REST API, which frankly any Rails or Django developer could produce in about 10 minutes. Mobile APIs need to be different, mostly due to slow or non-existent connections, and require additional thinking. More details here:
http://ow.ly/9YMrM

Anybody know of any mobile back-end providers that are thinking innovatively about this? I've consulted a few of these startups and they all seem hesitant to make any choices that go beyond REST...but as far as I'm concerned, offering a generic solution for something that mobile devs have to develop every time they create an API would be well worth it. A simple example is to accept a guid for every created object and return that guid in the response. It's something you have to do to know that the object has been sent successfully to the server, so why make the developer code it every time?
This feels a bit like my "9 million hits per day" article from a while back: http://tumbledry.org/2011/08/31/9_million_hits_day_with_120 & http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2945185

Now, with 11% more hits! :)
Awesome, Wordpress promotes bad practices in multiple spaces now. Horrible PHP habits formed from green developers learning on the "platform" and now basic server architecture is going to crap for those poor newbies. Thanks Wordpress...
For the record, OkCupid doesn't do anything even remotely like this. It's strictly the purview of assholes.

Riley Goodside, Yield Optimizer, OkCupid
In the operating system I'm running, there's no "Save" any more..
I'm 22 and remember floppy disks...
Nice to see they're going to support SPARQL:

"O3.1. Develop and prepare a SPARQL endpoint to the data. Even though a full-fledged SPARQL endpoint to the data will likely be impossible, we can provide a SPARQL endpoints that allows certain patterns of queries depending on the expressivity supported by the back end."

I see the semantic web slowly realizing its actual purpose (which is not related to semantic natural language processing but rather linking data).
That would have to be Credit Suisse.
Yeah, thought this was some kind of joke question, and I'm only 29 ;)

I used 360k 5.25 floppies when I was a kid...
Change happens. When I got my first real job in IT, one of our tasks was moving data from 8-inch to 5-inch floppy.

I hasten to add this was not - for the junior guys - real hard. Walk by the machine every so often, switch out the disks, hit [return], come back in a few hours.
There's no way I'd put Python 3 and Perl 6 in the same sentence.

Also, IMO there's no chance of Perl 6 being successful in time (which makes me sad, because 10 years ago or so I was really hopeful about it).
Shipped does not always equal sold. They could be devices sitting on a palette in the back of some warehouse.
I thought even Samsung was confused - Is it a Phone, or is it a Tablet?
When they are used for more than 1 method implementations, well ... they shouldn't be inner classes.

Why not? Very often, a class will have some data members which are pretty much meaningless elsewhere. Why should the class used to represent that data be exposed elsewhere?
Many bioinformaticians come from either biology or CS so this is a common question. In general if you are from CS you have to learn the biology, and if you are from biology you will have to learn to program. Both types will also usually have to learn some statistics as this is important for research.

You mention that you enjoy the field which is perhaps the most important thing. I recommend finding a good masters degree in bioinformatics which should introduce you to many of the basic topics. A bioinformatics masters degree will also make you more competitive than with a degree alone. You'll need a PhD if you want to stay and go further in Academia.
Did anyone figure out what is the company behind it?
Just change it to "The moment the work is displayed, published, performed, or otherwise exhibited in a public venue under authorization from the creator" or whatever the equivalent legalese is.
I'd be shocked if that happens. QNX has a pretty good business outside of Blackberry, their auto products are pretty sweet. I suspect if RIM does go the Windows Phone route (which I think makes perfect sense) that QNX will get spun out or sold again.
How about this guy: http://www.computing.dcu.ie/people/michael-scott
Apple Employees Like Tim Cook a Little Better than Steve Jobs
If only there was some way of teaching people new skills

It's the other way around. If those farmboys you postulate don't have the initiative and aptitude to take up hacking, they're unlikely to be a great addition to a software team. The last thing you need is someone passively waiting to be told what to do and taught how to do it.

It would be great to be proven wrong about this, but I've seen lots of examples of it being a problem and not one counterexample.

If mainstream culture changes to one in which the idea of doing this work and being excited by it and making things with it becomes widespread, then one might see significant growth in the talent pool. If more creative sparks are flying around, the chance of one of your farmboys catching fire is greater. But that's a longer-term process. To become good at this stuff, people don't need training - they need inspiration.
Kudos on a great site.

Dating sites fascinate me in a 'customer retention' sense- once someone ends up in a relationship, surely they stop using the site altogether? An interesting challenge. I used to work for a housemate matching site that faced similar challenges, but at least apartments are usually based around 12 month leases. If only relationships were...
Ask HN: Any interest in an HN Meetup in Skåne, Sweden?
I have the opportunity to host a meetup in Lund, (Skåne,) Sweden for about up to 40 people.

Even meeting up with 5-10 people I think would be really fun, I could probably arrange to have something to drink and eat for a small fee or just meet up and chat entirely free.

I created a mailing list where you can sign up if you're interested: http://eepurl.com/kvnWX

If I get around 10 people on the list I'll try to set a date (or set up a doodle link for setting a date) and send out an email.
RIM's q4 weak results and outlook and brutally-honest CEO commentary
Broccoli and Bad Faith
Interesting... so they're making the calculations internally but not telling you how they got there then, right? So you really can't use wolfram alpha as a reliable source for anything?
Agreed, it's not an overreaction. As an auto enthusiast and someone who has a large group of friends that are also auto enthusiasts we are acutely aware of the issues our non-enthusiast friends have with the auto industry.

We're aware because they come to us with their problems and seek advice. Everything from helping to buy a new car to trying to understand what the mechanic was telling them is wrong with their car.

When I was younger I worked at the front desk of a reputable auto shop. It was very common for customers to mistrust us, and they had good reason to feel that way, too. Not because our particular shop was bad - it wasn't - but because many others are.

The auto industry is huge and has many huge segments that can be targeted. There is room for many companies to grow into significant players.
Seriously!

I remember buying my first box of ten 3.5" floppies, which stored 1.44MB of data EACH, after years of using the older 360KB 5.25" disks, and marveling how much storage I was carrying in that little box...

Kids today, with their USB sticks and DVD drives and Internets. Grumble grumble. Get off my lawn!
Watch out for the dark UX pattern on the page. There are 2 ways to buy the book from Amazon.

The first button is $39.99 + $5 shipping.

The second button is $26.40 + free shipping.

Here's an image to show you which link does what: https://img.skitch.com/20120330-bumpat24ar3dg3um252k59ndfd.p...
It jumps really high!
In short, it sounds like you could have a car with solar panels on the roof, and they could drive the creation of liquid fuel that could then be used to power the car’s engine.

Sure. Leave your car in the sun for a week and you can drive it three miles.

People need to get how diffuse solar energy is.

(Oh, and could someone fix the title? "Bacteria" is plural.)
That's probably what sets you apart.

I think another problem is that I have met people with previous experience in engineering who aren't as "consultative" as they could be.

Most recruiters hide behind the infamous line of "well, it's what my client wants and they pay the bills." Just because they pay your salary doesn't mean they are always right. If your client has the hiring expertise and time themselves, why are they hiring you? I'm not saying to completely ignore their needs, though. I am saying that the recuriter has to be more than a paper pusher and just simply tick boxes.
I think this product will compete with dropbox more than gmail.
Hit a Home Run (VBPbilal178)
to play free online baseball games! Stick Sports is the home of flash game favourites Stick Cricket, Stick Football and Stick Tennis. [URL]http://j.gs/916651/stick[URL]
If you are looking to be a CS graduate entry at a fortune 100 company you are already FSCKED.

Unless you were in the right fraternity at Harvard Bis School you aren't going to climb up the ranks anymore. If you are a non-specialist techie you are going to be outsourced to India, replaced by an H1B, or wherever.

If you are a top school grad you will be snapped up by Google/MSFT/etc. The interesting small companies and startups are looking for either top school grads who don't want to be employee badge #100,000 at Google OR people who have learnt the stuff themselves and done interesting work.

Neither fortune 100 nor startups want people clutching their new degree from the sort of places mentioned in the article
I agree with the "it's just a tool" sentiment in general, but what other great alternatives are there? I haven't had a favorable experience with SOAP, so I can understand why people think REST The Best Thing Evar. This is based on my own experiences, so I may have used SOAP wrong, misunderstood its intentions, etc. Do you have any examples of when SOAP (or another technology) is preferable to REST?
Jordan Mechner, Creator Of Prince Of Persia, Finds Original Source Code
ow.ly/9YMrM -> http://www.annacallahan.com/blog/2011/06/24/mobile-api-desig...
I used tapes until I was around 12 years old. Around then my transition away from tapes into floppies was pretty much at the point I never used them again (except for music, until CDs took over).
Not to mention that HIV/AIDs is no longer the death sentence that it used to be. So even among those who are cognizant of what it was like in the 80s, they also know that it isn't like that anymore.
Artist launches "Corruption Tour" in Czech Republic
Sony Signs Death Warrant For The Dash
The hallmark of Wordpress is ease of use. That's why you can spin up a blog right on their site, and they have a backend designed by Happy Cog. Wordpress is blog software for the technically illiterate.

And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this.

If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx, configuring PHP, and doing automated load testing, maybe you should also consider rolling your own software or using a different package that isn't supremely bloated.
TAS WANITA Guess (TWG-01N) - Aneka-Dompet.com.
TAS WANITA Guess (TWG-01N) - Warna : Pink Include : Tali Panjang Harga : Rp. 300.000,- Toko Dompet Wanita | Toko Tas Wanita | Toko Aksesoris Wanita - Aneka-Dompet.com
Ask HN: Aside from parallelism, what applications are there for concurency?
There's a clear difference between concurrency and parallelism but it seems to me that the chief source of interest in the one is as a means of achieving the other. It seems to me that most applications of concurrency that don't necessarily involve parallelism, such as simulations, would be simpler to write and maintain and arguably more performant using an old-style master loop rather than using threads or other concurrent programming technique. Am I correct, or is a master loop just a low-tech form of concurrency? Can anyone point to an application for concurrent programming that isn't ultimately ultimately attempting to achieve parallelism?
Managerial advice to understand developers (hint: dwarves, elves, wizards)
Several years would still give you nine or ten under copyright.

Anyways, if you can't move product in a few years, you should be trying something new.
You're pretty hard on the OP - they didn't mention cure, or obesity, or humans. You read that into it.
I understand why that isn't RESTfull, but why is it more complex?

"customers" are used to thinking in terms of actions. You hit this little button here for payment, you hit this other little button here for shipment. And for developers, these are like methods containing business logic belonging to an object.

So where's the problem?
You can argue that NYC is a better place to meet women than SF, but is it really because there's slightly more women than men in the general population? I think it's due to a variety of other factors:

Different mindset of people in NYC than in SF (compare NYC's finance and fashion industries to SF's technology industry)...

Better logistics in NYC than in SF (in NYC: 24/7 public transport, plenty of taxis, no car culture, and apartments nearby; in SF: BART isn't 24/7, taxis scarcer, many have their own vehicles, and people live farther)...

What else?
Rocket Science is the Easy Part: How Government has Grounded Space Propulsion
@Riley Have you guys ever had a problem with someone scraping public OkCupid profiles?
downvoted probably for people that use Ad for living...you all guys are shit, not entrepreneurs. Think hard (maybe this will be hard) and you will realize that you are destroying Internet.
Brain wiring a no-brainer?
I agree. It may be in a legal gray area.

Even if it was legal, I would run as fast as I could in the other direction. Think of it this way: what happens if you start the job and come to find out the company is into some shady business and you wanted to quit?
Questions I've received from the newer guys getting into IT.

"Why did people have computers with no internet? What did you do with it?"

"What is a BBS?"

"How did you know what to type at a command line?"
Apple rejecting apps for using UDID without user permission (screenshot)
> POST /orders/42/payment

> POST /orders/42/shipment

Fixed?
How about 20 years after publication? That would give Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone another 5 years. I'm sure JKR could live with that. CJR Tolkien would have to live off the savings of the Tolkien estate, and takings from his own works (The Silmarillion, which he finished off and published over 20 years ago, and some other more recent publications based on JRR's unfinished work).

Less popular authors wouldn't make enough, but they don't make enough regardless. There's very few books which make any real money 20 years after publication, as the chart shows.

The downside would be the moral rights of authors. Some authors are a bit tetchy about their characters being used by other authors. JKR is reputedly pretty cool with fan fiction (she knows her fans will just buy more of her stuff), but some authors would be a bit offended at their characters being used in slashfic, or whatever other weird use people could think of.

On the upside, educators could use it. Sure, there's "fair use", but it's too badly defined to get a definite sense of what "fair" is (for good reasons - a narrow definition would encourage people to abuse it). Teachers and textbook publishers are too stingy to hire copyright lawyers or buy rights, so they just use stuff that's clearly in the public domain. Want to know why textbooks are boring? The lack of public domain materials is one reason (others are listed here: http://www.edutopia.org/textbook-publishing-controversy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak

I can even anticipate your response:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
would you care to explain why this is not enough? You can pass them around, invoke them, get their properties.

The interface may be bad but I'm not sure what is missing.
Choosing Java for everyday projects is a long term disaster?

What about Android apps?

What about solid back-end?

What about Google AppEngine-Java?

People are still using Java for everyday projects and I don't see a disaster coming anytime soon.
If you are going to host it for a long duration, you can reserve a heavy utilization micro instance and end up with an instance cost of less than $6.50 per month (with a three year reserved instance).

As long as you aren't serving lots of images, this will keep you well below $20/month - even with large amounts of traffic.

If you are serving lots of images, or worried about excessive bandwidth: Linode gives you 20GB/200GB (storage/bandwidth) on a 512MB server for $20, and MediaTemple gives you a 512MB server with 20GB/350GB for $30 (a little cheaper if you are going to be in the 300GB range when you consider Linodes .10/GB for overages).
You need to click on the different days in the calendar to view the "remarks" for that day, and then scroll down past the synopsis of each person's remarks, and the moderator's remarks, to get to the actual arguments.
Israeli-American Accelerator UpWest Labs Graduates Its First Batch Of Startups
If it was that simple, it would already have been solved. The problem is that relations are for any data point and they can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many; and mixes metadata with data seamlessly. It's a hard problem, make no mistake, but completely solvable. I have an approach I'm working on that I'll email you, if you're interested.
giggles

I love it when a plan comes together.
Just out of curiosity, which part of the Midwest do you live in?
"I wonder why anyone should do this" - Because you're setting this up for a "technically illiterate" client?
I love New York, and it definitely feels like the startup community is growing here. My only thought is that the startups in NYC may be a bit more "big payoff" driven than "creating value" driven. I honestly can't say for sure though because I haven't spent any amount of time in the Valley.

Being totally self-promotional here, but I just made a video about moving to New York for a startup. Please don't take it seriously.

http://blog.kevinroseeffect.com/post/20127362923
A lifestyle change - or a body reconditioning. Changing your body chemistry through diet and exercise may in fact change the very areas of the brain the article mentions. The end result may be exactly the same. You may prefer or enjoy exercise; others certainly don't. And if they have different phobias about methods of intervening (be it exercise or brain chemistry), they may legitimately come to a different conclusion.
I agree with the format. While great in theory, it was poor in execution. It didn't help that the submitter linked to the "end" of the debate either.

Having said that, I actually had to click on "How an Economist debate works" link, which is directly under the timeline. Some work on said timeline would help tremendously in this particular format.
Which is a good explanation for why tying copyright to the life of the author at all is extremely stupid. Why not just make it 30 years?
It's a racist policy. Common white names are accepted. Certain categories of "ethnic" (non-white) names are not. We also know it's intentional. Google has no intention to change. Draw your own conclusions from this. Case closed.
Unique Collections Of Advertising Ideas
Coffee – Weight Loss Aid or Obstacle?
<devils advocate > A faked teck demo's basically count as fiction which does not count as prior art for a normal patent case, but it does for a design patent. Unfortunately for Samsung while elements of the iPad design shows up the Galaxy pad is a lot closer to the iPad than any of the other designs. For design patents to be meaningful they must prevent such overt imitation and force competitors to do more than copy good design.</devils advocate>

Realistically, I suspect Apple would drop the case if they did not think the minimal costs of perusing it was not worth it and their return is not limited to this case. What I think most people miss is by taking it to this level the force other companies to consider how much close they can get before Apple makes an example of them.
Pitching Enterprises vs. Pitching Small Businesses and Freelancers
Honestly, how many people would that be? How many great works were produced by old folks starting for the first time?
I think this is a fair point. REST is all about resources and representations, which makes modeling simple CRUD actions on domain objects very easy. However, modeling application processes effectively is harder and requires deeper thought and a more thorough understanding of REST.

I've always thought the key to understanding REST is understanding idempotence. Is HTTP request to mark an order as paid idempotent? If so, a PUT/PATCH should be fine. If not (say, you're actually transferring funds) then a POST should be used. This key principle will help make your URL design choices much easier. In your example, the PATCH API appears idempotent, making the suggested POST replacement sort of confusing to me.

When it comes to modeling application processes using HTTP, understanding which requests are repeatable without consequence and which aren't is very important. It's hard to talk about modeling processes RESTfully without talking about idempotence. It's at the heart of the protocol's design.

RESTful thinking needn't be harmful for application processes as long as you do it effectively.
Misogyni and Hackers
I disagree that nothing will change because of this debate.

It's slight, but now there is now a larger crop of people who understand two viewpoints on an important issue and are armed with better rhetoric for the view they espouse. That's a win.
Drive needs: 1) increased storage space for a fee and 2) the ability to grab files from an FTP server somehow. I'm in for sure then.
RIM are major contributors to the WebKit project. If they switched to Windows Phone, it would likely be a major initiative to build a WebKit browser on that platform (would likely require a special build of the OS to bake it completely in. Or they could get rid of some of their most talented people. Neither seems very likely to me.

RIM is still known for making attractive hardware. Their best bet is trying to accelerate the Web as the application platform. Joining in with Mozilla's WebAPI initiative would be wise.
So it's true what they say about the fabric of the mind. Consider mine blown!
Objective-C supports GC. You can choose to use it or not in OS X. In iOS, there's ARC.
To me the infringement isn't that big of a deal. Infringement happens. What would be interesting is NBC's position on enforcement.

Although I honestly expect that given NBC's interest here they would be willing to have their webpage completely come down, while they fixed the infringement if they thought that it would illustrate to everyone how infringement should be handled.

I think this is much ado about nothing given that it's just about the infringement and not so much about the enforcement.