skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When the GAO issues a report saying that your department is ineffective, people listen. They may be bean counters, but they are fairly well respected bean counters. The reports that I have read really help identify problems in government entities.
No Innovation Until We Run Out of Energy
The guys from Envato just released a tutorial marketplace:

http://marketplace.tutsplus.com/
Sometimes I think there's a special place in hell reserved where you are fooled into thinking you can get out if you can add just... one... more... layer... of logging abstraction.

Or maybe this is a development phase all programmers go through where they fixate on the mechanism for finding bugs instead of the bugs.

I mean, sure: logging files and line numbers with messages is useful sometimes. I think we all do it when chasing bugs. But is this really something that needs to be abstracted and pickled for posterity? Imagine looking at dmesg or syslog output and seeing all those source files you'll never read.
Condom Or Android Handset Name?
This is the real beauty of the RasberryPi. I heavily doubt that it will in it's default state convince anyone to start controlling their computer. (I explicitly avoid the phrase "Become a programmer" here because it has all sorts of baggage that shouldn't be there but is. "Programming" is really about controlling computers. To say anything else is misleading.) But the range of environments that it allows hacker-types to build and experiment with will be what spawns the renewed interest in deeper interaction with computing systems. At least I hope so.

It's a cheap, more powerful, streamlined Arduino without a lot of the messy bits that make that product and it's kin what they are. (And make no mistake, those bits are what make the product desirable for it's target market.) The ability to fashion something as simple as a BASIC environment without having to sacrifice an expensive computer to do it is key.

But then, you're a part of that sort of hacker phenotype. How would a person who doesn't have that experience know how to do that for their kid? How would they even know that they should do it in the first place?

Once we can answer those questions in a satisfactory manner the world will be a better place.
Using bare PyMongo, asyncmongo, or some ORM-like solution?

Coincidentally, I'm also working on my own app using Tornado and Backbone and considering the switch to Mongo (currently using the base MySQLdb wrapper included with Tornado) - curious as to how you've found working with whatever Mongo solution you're using.

Edit: Initially forgot to include asyncmongo in that list.
> It wouldn't surprise me if we have Pirate Party MSPs in a few years

The Scottish parliament is one of the legislatures we're targetting -- it is good for us brecause it has a combination of (a) low threshold to get elected, and (b) low amount of money necessary to run an effective campaign.
OK, so let's say you spend $10k of developer time (about 1 month at current salary rates) to optimize your code to save the environment.

You must be saving less than $10k in electricity over the next couple years (otherwise you would have done it already to save money, irrespective of the environment). So let's say you saved $8k in electricity.

But... what is the developer going to spend that $10k on? Well, he'll probably need a car to drive to work. And a nice apartment to go home to (electricity bill there now too!). And probably he eats out at a steakhouse every now and then, and beef is terrible for the environment.

Not every dollar spent is equal in terms of environmental carbon. But whenever you try to analyze something this complex it soon becomes impossible track all of this.

Which is why what's really needed is environmental taxes (or cap and trade) to remove the externality for carbon production in the first place. The controversy is, just how much damage does carbon do to the environment? There's just no indisputable evidence.
The Trouble With Neutrinos That Outpaced Einstein’s Theory
This instead seems to be a rant about... whatever AMIs he has tried to run on a micro and absolutely nothing at all about t1.micros.

There are issues with them, such as the terribly inconsistent latency that i'm not really sure if it is caused by network or just not getting actual CPU time. (e.g. run ping to another instance in the same az, 80% of the pings will be 2ms rest are 40ms)
Help Us Improve Snackr, "The Pandora for Audio News"
It says "Don't have Facebook?". I prefer something like "Sign up with Email". Most of the people that want to use email have FB accounts, they just don't want to use them.
Check the syllabus; you create a Javascript/HTML parser and learn about syntax trees, grammars, etc. So the content will be similar to creating your own programming language.
Thankfully Java 5 added 'import static' which lets you pretend classes are namespaces.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/stat...
The world needs more images like this to inspire the scientists and adventurers of tomorrow.
> From his bio, I would reduce his mile long credentials to the following:

Why did you ignore his time at Bell Labs? Or in the DoD?
Hipmunk [http://www.hipmunk.com/].

This site is by far the best translation of information into a visual format that I've seen. Where most flight search sites present you with hard to interpret text, hipmunk gives you visual clues. For example, it's much easier to find a shorter flight, when the flights are represented by bars (oh, that bar is really long, I don't want to be on airplanes for 5 hours) as opposed to

Additionally, it's very clear that a lot of thought went in to designing the process of revising your search. For example, you select each leg individually, you can open multiple tabs of searches, things load quickly, it's easy to flip between legs, etc.

Before hipmunk, finding a fight was a pain, since I like things laid out visually and am usually more sensitive to price than to departure and arrival times (but still want to take them in to account). I would say that I have an emotional attachment to this website. It has truly solved some of my problems.
Note that by being the most net friendly party, the Pirates are the ones you should be voting for if you are part of a startup.
They presumably weren't always above the law and, one would hope, remember the pains of the TSA.
Blame the victim much? Its a lot more malicious than you think. The countries aren't doing anything that makes them deserving of being exploited. http://www.johnperkins.org/
I've been playing around with backbone.js and it's really promising, because the server acts only as a REST api.

It was a paradigm shift for me. You should try it.
Galaxies are not evenly distributed. But for all I know this is an unusually sparsely populated part of the sky. Still, your number could shift in either direction by quite a lot.
Thanks for starting this effort. But we need a better language that rationalizes the petition. I'm sure Nasa must have presented their data points on how more budget would be helpful and what projects would get derailed if there were budget cuts. You should consider spending time on researching these data points. Simply saying that govt has lots of money and so it should give it to Nasa doesn't justify much of the anything.

You also want to gather references on expert opinions on why govt should continue invest on space program (as opposed to only hoping private sector do things). My personal opinion on this is that private sector is driven by profits and space is more of a scientific/academic research innately driven by our need to explore. There would be several areas left untouched and/or won't be attempted if govt pulls out its effort (such as private sector would have little or no interest on doing Hubble telescope or probing in to deep space or measure background uwave radiation with high precision). This is very similar to what's happening in several other areas like medicine research where private companies are folding research which is otherwise pure scientific curiosity or only has long term perspective but have no direct profitable opportunities in short term.

Again, these are not the data points you need to invent. I'm sure these are well documented by expert on this subject. The petition's task should be to gather them at one place and bring public support for it. Without doing this home work, this petition is pretty juvenile and does not have much of a backbone.
Thanks for that info. Anyone know if C# has something similar?

From the linked docs: So when should you use static import? Very sparingly!

To me, it sort of confirms the point that these inelegant features are necessary because the language doesn't support fundamental primitives like plain functions and named constants without a superfluous object definition.
Interestingly we don't actually know how big our Universe is, perhaps even within a great many orders of magnitude. This is because the visible Universe has expanded at sub-light speeds over its history, but in the very, very early Universe there was a period called inflation in which space-time expanded at speeds much faster than light.
Be careful! Ur upsetting teh hackka police! (aka neckbeards with too much time on their hands)
Unbelievable Comparison from Quantum Foam to the Universe
Awesome. Mobile really needs something like this.
Politics in the general sense of politics of power and social activism (not all politics need to involve governments). I didn't read the NYT article but I've probably read enough snippets online to get the gist of it. I guess I'm more skeptical of dramatic stage readings (which this was) more than the average guy on teh street. Also I have no doubts (probably can't prove) that Sedaris makes up stuff that never actually happened for the sake of drama and comedy. Non-fiction just isn't that funny (here is one link I found related to the topic http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/20...)
Looks like the image has been added to zoom.it. You can browse the full resolution image without downloading all of it:
http://zoom.it/VGFr
Haha this is hilarious. Also love the idea of using the British Royal Family... though... I hope to be knighted one day.
First things first, congratulations.

Do you guys on either side of it want to get into the terms of acquisition a bit more, just for curiosity's sake?

I suspect that it is not a spectacular return for the seed investors. Forrst guys get jobs and some nominal signing bonuses as they're likely running low on funds, having closed a $204K seed a year ago. See compete:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/forrst.com/
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dribbble.com/

It makes a lot more sense for COLOURlovers to acquire the team and the community to strengthen themselves, being an ultra-huge design community. I'm happy that they are keeping Forrst around. CL is also hiring recently, so this gives them a staff boost of good designers/developers with startup mentalities.
There are still _tons_ of opportunities for web developers...
You sir are brilliant. Would you like to advise our financing efforts?
Big Data Trends in 2012
Check out http://zoom.it/VGFr
I'm sure there is a market for this, but that saddens the non-consumer in me (that someone would feel as though they can't wear the same piece of clothing more than once).
I stopped reading when he made the claim that Google+ is not the success that "Google obviously intended it to be". Because at that point, you either need to claim that Google is incompetent from an engineering standpoint or that they were flat-out lying when they said their scaling up had been outpaced by the adoption rate several times. Instead of addressing this, the author seems to have gone with a pseudo-intellectual squintiness that sounds more like an attempt to mentor Vic Gundotra than analyse the product itself.
I think the point is that if you are documenting the structure of URIs you are focusing on the wrong thing - a RESTful interface documentation should mostly be about the hypermedia (HTML, XML, JSON,...) that the URIs are embedded in - a particular server should really have the freedom to construct the URIs in any way it wants and still have clients that understand the API work.

See: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...
VIM for (PHP) Programmers
Right, so this is where the admin interface comes in, allowing you to lock the schema down and setup validation.
Flutter (YC W12): The Startup That Wants To Put The World’s Webcams To Good Use
Bash Tips: Passing Passwords
For example, with furniture you buy a new couch or a bed and then you have one, you don’t need another one or a different one two weeks later. Not so with dresses or shoes.

'need' is an interesting word to use in this context.
Why is Schneier presumed to be the most effective critic of the TSA?

Who is presuming that?
I was toying with a similar idea though it's more akin to the Netflix model for clothes.

You'd basically pay an up front cost, say $XXX and then you would be able to order a week's worth of clothes. Then you'd mail the clothes back for laundering before being sent out again.

It is really a half-baked idea and requires a sizable amount of logistics, etc. But it was an interesting concept to toss around.
Awesome work! Let's get together when you're up in SF. :D Congrats!
I think when you type in that sort of stuff in to Google they should offer advertisements for magic beans.
| 2) Not currently.

Shouldnt you be able to create your own index.html and then be fine as long as you dont hit Backbone.sync ?
For me, this fails the non-obvious criterion. Even a tiny bit of user testing would show people trying to scroll past the current limit to see if there's anything new. That behavior is so common that the Unix pager less has had the equivalent feature for years and years.
Kudos to my brother for sending me this - haven't seen many of these since the 90s! Definitely today's lol!
I think it's supposed to be a shift from backend/frontend to frontend only, in the same way that Heroku was a shift from building your own infrastructure to just building a backend/frontend. By reducing the surface area, you can reduce the required tools and platform knowledge and reduce the development friction, in theory.

There are plenty of unanswered questions, but I can totally foresee this sort of thing as a viable development platform for some projects in the future.
This is fantastic. Beautiful presentation and beautiful code.

Thanks!
Homophone nazi reporting for duty!

"offer a peak" -> "offer a peek" in the bottom (dark) section.
Seems pretty awesome if you have actually taken care of all of the backbone sync backend, so you can just use all of the collection create, update, findAll and everything and it just reads from or updates the database?

How do you handle a situation with relationships where you need to specify "give me all of the objects from collection X where parentId is YYYYY"?

Also how do you handle sort of arbitrary queries?

I was thinking about making a service like this because everyone wants to use Backbone.js.
How do I make sure my wife never finds out about this?
A short lesson in perspective
The point is that the code is hard to understand. In this case it's a bracket misplaced, so the compiler will pick it up immediately, but if it's a misplaced +1 or index then you won't notice until you get hacked with a buffer overflow.

Now if you put each argument on it's own line, or use reasonable variable names - something that C programmers seem to fight against - neither of those bugs happen, because you can just look at the code and see the problem straight away.
This was a great post, thank you. Chock full of relevant figures, thanks for being so open about your stats.

This mirrors quite closely my own appstore experience, I'm looking forward to reading through the various post mortems you mentioned.

To keep this comment from just being a "thank you", a few stats of my own:

When reducing an app from $9.99 to $.99, downloads go up 10x. When reducing an app from $.99 to free, downloads go up ~10x-20x.

Being featured increases downloads by ~30x.
Also: lovely idea, attractively clean design. Congrats on shipping!
By the way, do they realize that their ask people to apply through their Facebook accounts?
My mind boggles at the sheer size of 8M RAM in minecraft...
If they're both in the same Congressional hearing, Bruce can ask them pointed questions which they would be compelled to answer. This means he could theoretically ask them questions that pertain to the lawsuit that they would then have to respond to, without the benefit of counsel, as they say.

I still think it blows ass, and it's a cheap maneuver to keep the mongoose out of the snake pit.
The only significantly sub-optimal example is the first one, which is labeled as such. And it isn't particularly unintuitive that computing the upper bound of the loop on each iteration is going to slow down the computation.

Also, none of the methods are actually wrong. These are code optimizations. You can find tricky little code optimizations in any language. And in compiled languages you also have compiler optimizations that you can apply if you really need to squeeze out more performance. It's not fair to say that it's a pitfall of the language that this is possible.

Some better examples of javascript having unintuitive pitfalls would involve things like triple equals, for...in and hasOwnProperty, or semi-colon insertion, or function scope (as opposed to block scope) or .... well there are a lot. But most of the time the reason they are unintuitive is because the intuition we are relying on comes from other languages. They are not javascript. If you take the time to actually learn javascript as its own language it turns out to be a pretty decent language to work with.
I'm so glad they invented this website! It is so infuriating when women think it is OK to just wear the same thing twice!

all kidding aside, I bet women are going to love this.
Startup struggle, Crashing a party to get into 500 Startups
Isn't half the thrill in "not wearing anything twice" that you're always wearing something new?
It'd be a bit drab to wear something another person has maybe stained or worn in. A good part of the appeal is the "new clothes" feeling, right?
Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy
Agreed, it definitely seemed weird to me. I got the humor, but the average passersby who don't know the movie or bilingual families might not.
Sizes are never standard--you really have to try something on to know if it fits. How have you solved this problem?
According to NASA the Minecraft world is pretty big:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html

[NB It's just to the left of Neptune]
Not seeing that here?

http://www.schneier.com/about.html

Although now I see it on this page:

http://www.schneier.com/news-096.html

"My first job after college was with the Department of Defense. Years later, I was laid off from AT&T Bell Labs"

The DOD job was out of college. "laid off" from Bell Labs doesn't offer a time line.

But most importantly it doesn't appear on his own "about" page so for whatever reason while he is highlighting other things he is not drawing attention to that.
Just to be precise, I have submitted the link but I'm not the author.
How ironic would it be if Apple couldn't implement something because of a ridiculous patent?
AIDE runs on android tablets. Perhaps not as easy as App Inventor but no other computer needed. But I don't think I would recommend Android for someone in a country in which they can't access the Market/Play/whatever-they-call-it-next-month.
Don't we already have console.trace?
Indeed, it looks like they're even using requestAnimationFrame.
It's still really slow on Firefox, which I've found to be one of the worst offenders when making canvas games.
The problem here might be fixed by splitting the physics loop from the animation loop.
I think it's doing all the calculations as fast as it draws.
Aren't most amateur hackers retirees in nursing homes with a lot of time on their hands? Nice to see an application aimed at a different audience (young women).
Would you rather her buy new dresses? I definitely think this is a much better proposition
Comic-Con Episode IV
Comic-Con Episode IV
What started as a fringe comic book convention for 500 fans has grown into the pop culture
True, but this site will actually help on that front. The site is a used clothing store that's trying to bypass the stigma attached to used clothes. They're harnessing consumers into a recycling program.
All of it true. The good, the bad, the ugly of learning how to build a company, take risk, and make things happen.
we have / do it when it makes sense (heavy client). Either way we require much more infrastructure for "real" apps than some black-box backend, zmq clusters for computation etc.. I guess this might be an ok playground for some trivial apps
I would have a check box next to the add comment button that says "this is a nice comment" and if someone posts without ticking that box, redirect them to a page on civility.

If nothing else it'd be interesting to see if people tick it and still comment mean spirited things, this way they actually have to acknowledge they are flying in the face of Hacker News every time they comment.
Rob, I hope in a year or so you will write an update and this will be as exciting as current one!
While I sympathize with your point, I feel like it's a mistake to assume that just because one point in the post is wrong, no part of the article may be insightful.
Columbia University J-School Considers Online Courses, Degrees
There is no good that can come of government regulation of search engines, regardless of which nation's government we're speaking.
Yeah that's why i kind of rolled my eyes when i read this:

> I can sense Net-heads all over the world rolling their eyes and shaking their heads: “Nope, I gotta have flat-rate data”

In my experience the usage based billing is the norm everywhere (i generally buy a sim card for data everywhere i go).
What power do you think Bruce has to compel them to answer questions?

It's up to Congress whether the TSA is forced to answer a question, and Bruce Schneier is not a member of Congress, he was just going to testify before them. He has no special power over the TSA.
:) please do. It was. It was always a bit limited but there used to be a decent set of controls. Filter by gender, age, likes, institution, even dating status I believe. Now practically nothing. I think name and possibly sub filter by group. That's it. It's pathetic, and pretty much useless for anything other then finding people in your list by name faster than scrolling down the page.
Why it's over
Nothing creepy about that (!)
http://www.renttherunway.com/ has been doing something similar (high-fashion dress rentals) for a few years now. Of course, Rent The Runway is more centralized - it's more analogous to a hotel, while 99 Dresses is more AirBnB.
Very few countries in the world have more then a few national networks.
Keeping Northern Iraq's ancient Nineveh alive and well in NZ
Persona [http://www.grooovy.me/persona]

A bit of shameless plug, but I really do sincerely think we've outdone ourselves this time. It's fun even for us after playing it a hundred times. We've tried to really push the limit for interaction while keeping it relevant to our site by turning our homepage into a game.