skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shared scratch databases with no thought to security seem to be the hot new thing these days ;P. CloudMine, Firebase, Parse, StackMob... people seriously seem to think it is perfectly normal to throw their public /and/ private API keys into their projects... I mean, check out this tutorial from StackMob:

https://stackmob.com/platform/help/tutorials/ios_sdk
I wonder if Lubuntu likewise could find a sponsor. I use it exclusively on my systems - ever since Ubuntu went to Unity.
This is the best way to describe it.

I wrote a few tools for my IT team a month or two back. I needed a Quick and Dirty web UI. How do I write some .py files that output HTML, put them in a web directory, then goto http://server/tool.py?

It was just easier to use mod_php and rewrite the simple tools in PHP. Trust me, I REALLY wanted to use Python, but couldn't. To be fair, I didn't have superuser, but I did look for docs on how to do this for Python, and apparently isn't not easy. You have to use WSGI or something? I don't know.

My tool now works well, in PHP.
Yea, that was my first concern as well. Going around the typical models and straight to DB sounds dirty. :) Can't wait til I get home and try it out. Love the synchronous calls and how it synchronizes between screens, wonder how it scales up though.
This[1] was the most fun I've had in ages. MongoDB already exists, but this was just a blast to write and is great to use. I agree with both you and peterforde, you guys are really arguing about orthogonal issues.

[1] https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/goatfish
now let's just wait for the first O'reilly book on DCPU16 programming
I think Microsoft got a good deal when they bought skype.

Looking at Skype (despite it's flaws) it's success was unavoidable. The same way people want an all-in-one device that does everything (like smart phones) over multiple separate solutions (camera, mp3 player, phone, pda), people seem to want one IM client for calling, texting, IMing, voice chat & video chatting. I don't think any other client provides everything wrapped up so well. Yes the UI is horrendous and tedious but its services are well offered and cheap. And with ever increasing globalization those services are vital.

It's just too bad that Microsoft introduced a back door to spy on skype calls. I now trust it about as much as I trust Google Voice + Google Talk.
Show HN: AutoGlance
Is there a built-in way to execute different code on the server, such as proprietary business logic, custom authentication, non-cross-domain APIs, etc?
You mean for people like Losethos?
insert/update/remove are actually just "newbie helper" shortcuts on top of the underlying latency-compensated RPC mechanism (which is documented under 'Meteor.methods'.)

Once the auth branch lands, you'll have two choices.

One options is, you can turn off the shortcuts entirely, and write a method for each scenario where the client would be allowed to write to the database. This gives you the same security model as a REST API.

Or, you can register an authorization-check hook with insert/update/remove, so you can vet each write and decide whether to allow it or reject it. This might work well with an ORM where you've marked some fields as writable, and some as protected.
<trolling>Having such vulnerabilities, it seems Samba was more Windows compatible than it was used to be known </trolling>
My point is that I'm not convinced that the kids are getting less exercise than previous generations. If I had to guess, I would guess they are getting more. Are they watching more TV? You bet. What they don't spend time on so much anymore are hobbies. Sports are the main hobbies of a lot of these kids.

Not for every kid, to be sure. But for a helluva lot of them.
I'll never understand the bytecode zealots and their insistence that browser makers scrap the years of JavaScript optimization they've done and start from scratch on some new format that will likely take another 10 or 15 years to get right.

You have what you want. You don't have to right in JavaScript any more. There are dozens of alternatives, and there are only going to be more. Source maps means you'll never even have to look at JavaScript. Please be happy!
You don't need to try all (or any) programming languages in the world in order to like a single language.

No, but you appear woefully unqualified to put forth any kind of opinion as to why the language you like is a good language if you have no frame of reference.

I know Python, and I really like Python and think it is awesome.

Sure, but you have no basis to make a comparison. You just happened to luck out; Python is a great language. PHP is... not.
It's more secure than transmitting the data in the clear, but still not really secure. A MITM could trivially rewrite the form to steal your data when submitted, and the user wouldn't be able to tell unless they inspected the source.
> And, on the flip side, if you want to install configure PHP yourself, it's actually not that easy.

http://www.lifelinux.com/how-to-install-nginx-and-php-fpm-on...

Looks pretty easy to me.

Then again, I compile my own version of Apache with FastCGI and PHP-FPM all the time.
I'm glad you like it, but the "shared-nothing" line is outrageous bunk. Commonly repeated bunk, so I don't blame you, but it's still bunk.

Pretty much every PHP app in the world shares a database. So you've shifted your scaling problems from an area that programmers understand and control to a 1-MLOC mystery.

I bring this up because I have a few friends who make their living saving the asses of PHP programmers who buy the notion that PHP is magically easy to scale. I hear a lot of horror stories from them about the absurd sums of money spent cleaning up the messes.

I do agree that PHP is fine for doing basic web apps. But I don't know anybody doing anything serious with PHP that only uses PHP, because serious web apps eventually need more than you can do in that language. PHP's "shared-nothing" scaling just means that when the going gets tough, some language other than PHP will be doing the work.
Certainly! Take a look at Meteor.methods. That lets you define a method that the client can call without necessarily having the source. (If you give the client the source it will be able to do predictive latency compensation. But you don't have to. Or you can give the client a "stub" implementation that just inserts some placeholder records, while the server goes off and moves the forklifts around your warehouse over CORBA, or whatever.)
I was talking more about the minimalist UI and less about janky behavior. The Windows (and to a lesser extent, OS X) versions seem to have taken their designs from the worst parts of MSN Messenger and AIM.

And call me crazy, but I prefer my chats in separate windows.
But see, the second somebody talked about that the people without pets said "derp, pets.com 2.0" and the people with pets all said, "take my money now!". So, it's really one of those apparently bad ideas that's secretly good, whereas many startups are the opposite: apparently good ideas that are secretly terrible.

I don't care if you're selling whale shit online, if a whole lot of customers line up the second you mention your idea, you're in business whether third parties like it or not.
It's only saving money when you don't count the ongoing opportunity cost of using inferior tools and technologies, but that's a false economy. It's a short-term savings in exchange for lots and lots of serious pain going forward.
Should you wear pyjamas to a business meeting?
Another one on using cool tools like tmux
Why I Hire People, Not Skills by dcancel
Make something in 3D: Good blender tutorial
The chainable API calls looks pretty convenient for bulk uploads. Is there any way of lifting the 5-second restriction? What sort of limits do you foresee in how many key-value pairs can get stored?
i just had time to watch this; it's very nice work.

i guess this is either obvious or wrong, but your async macro reminded me of logic variables (eg in oz) (ie you appear to be rewriting the system so that, effectively, the variables in your dataflow are logic variables, and then adding concurrency to match). that suggests that the debugging issues you have are similar to ones that they have to deal with. i don't know what solutions they have, but if this makes sense, and you haven't talked to van roy et al, it might be worth doing so.

(and i guess other parallel logic program(mer)s too - oz is just what i am most familiar with. mercury?).
You're right that the back-end often gets ported to some other language when a PHP app is scaled-up; this goes with my point that when you move away from spitting out web pages, another language is a better choice.

I'm not sure your point about a database is valid; Python and Ruby and Perl apps are all using a shared database (or newer k-v store) as well.
Ask HN:What kind of diet will you recommend to a late night coder?
Since last month I have changed my working hours due to day time distractions. Now I work from 11:00PM to 5:AM morning.

One thing I noticed that my weight got reduced upto 1Kg. One of the reasons I find that after dinner I don't eat anything for the whole night and then I sleep for 6 hours after 5 AM which makes fasting of around 10 hours.

What kind of meals should I have while working in night?

TIA
Mini review on Mosh
> Facebook, baffles me. I think most people hate to admit that they like them :). Almost all use it, and it's not "bad" in the sense that is always up, pictures aren't lost and so on.

Doesn't baffle me - Facebook and the dangers it poses to your career and/or children is a common media topic.
My solution so far is:

cat /dev/urandom|base64|tr -d '/+'|head -c10

Nearly every site supports a-z,A-Z,0-9 at 10 characters
YouTube enables pay-per-view for live feeds
>They'll raise the fear flag whenever they find an opportunity for more pageviews.

Or worse, (and some of the more level headed community here is guilty of this too), the "zOMG GOOGLE IS NOW EVIL" flag. If I had a nickel for every time some random blogger decided that somehow advertising in a slightly different way was an affront to truth, justice, and the American way....
Consider my mind blown. This is awesome.
Getting things delivered to the Republic of Ireland is a major pain because of this. I've had deliveries delayed because the company in question doesn't believe my address is real or correct. It doesn't contain numbers, the word 'street' or a postcode. Some sites also flag your order if you put 0000 in as a postcode for example. Some enterprising guys have created an unofficial "Location Code"[1] for Ireland to help solve some of these problems but it all comes back to faulty assumptions.

[1] http://www.myloc8ion.com/
Airbnb for Dogs: easily find a dog-sitter
Some problems:

I mistyped a phone number and I cant remove it.

There are people in my family circle which have the same last name but are not in my family and I cant edit the circle.

I cant delete a circle....

ARGH I think I just sent "Sam loves this" to a bunch of people! WTF.

I am deleting this until this crap is fixed.
Yes, the user is prompted on install. This is actually one of the permissions I look for when I'm installing new apps, given how often it's abused.
My biggest pet peeve is how no one explains their password constraints until you break one of them.
Was going to say the same, yum makes it very easy.

What we need is a Douglas Crockford for PHP.

A “PHP: the good parts” and a good PHPlint would do wonders to the language and community.
It really sucks to hear that. I really enjoyed all of your reports. Good luck with your future endeavors and keep us all notified!
PHP sucks, but it will get better over time. Maybe they'll try to do a big leap like Python 2 to Python 3, which would be great.

I'm not a big fan, but I like the fact the developers seem to be trying to improve it.
Resonate – Platform for Art and Technology
The 5 second restriction is only on our Custom NodeJS service - that doesn't apply to the Chain Server. For the custom service that can be increased if needed, we just want to try to limit any runaway processes.

The DB backend (Object Database) has a limit of ~240 key value pairs (attributes) per item, but with the Chain Server you could effectively "link" multiple objects together to go beyond that if you wanted.

Note that all our media services allow you to save arbitrary data with each media item as well, so you can store your meta data with your media item and not have to create a separate entry in the object database to store that.

Hope this helps!
This is great. I love how:

thisisastrongpasswor
should take 20 hours to crack.

But just add a 'd' to the end, and crack time drops to:
"instant"

Magnificent!
Robertson screws are nearly impossible to strip? Since when? They're just as easy to strip as Phillips screws. I've done it plenty of times. It's not fun seeing a round slot where a square slot used to be, let me tell you.
Is Anti-Virus Really Dead?
Being anti-google does indeed seem to be the hipster position at the moment. $5 says it'll soon be, 'I'm too cool even for Apple, I use Windows mobile'.

Not that there's anything wrong with windows mobile, it's quite nice. I can see it having a bit of the perception of the phone your parents would carry. Though, and that'll feed perfectly into hipsterism.
I've also seen it called a "ninjaban".
Rust's Object System
Neat. Sounds a bit like Asana's Luna: http://asana.com/luna/
I keep picturing HackerNews being rewritten with Meteor so I can watch up-votes in realtime.

Seriously though, Meteor looks incredible and I can't wait to mess around with it! Awesome work.
It seems like standard operating procedure for web apps has been to immediately throw out the user account system of whatever data store is being used and use one account with full CRUD access (or worse), with a (mediocre to disastrous) home-grown permissions system shoehorned into the controller layer.

That may be because of programmer laziness or because of some sort of inherent impedance mismatch between web-scale apps and the user account system of most DBMSes, but it seems like a bad way of doing things.

I think it's high time we had a web-scale data store that actually had decent per-user access control baked into it right at the model level, to the point where a sane person could trust it to live on the open internet. It seems both possible and desirable, but maybe I'm missing something.
Try some of Reinhold's Diceware phrases. They hold up quite well with this.
Intention to make startup
I'm not familiar with Losethos...mind explaining? A particularly egregious user?
Self Storage in the cloud is the best method of backing up your documents
That would work, but if you want to share with the same people again, you have to retype their addresses, at least with a copy and paste. With a good mobile platform it streamlines the process and can make sharing a much more spontaneous action, and with the concept of a personalized "circle", you also get a more intimate feel than an email thread :)
Does this work with something like Plates or Weld.js, or does it replace them, or does it shun that approach altogether?
No, but the design docs are still out there if you contact the former engineers. I would distribute them if I had permission.
Speeding up R code using a just-in-time (JIT) compiler
Lots of smart design choices. I have equivalent bits and pieces scattered all over the place that I've been meaning to put together to get the "wow" that this package delivers. Kudos for actually making it happen.
This looks extremely interesting, and reminds me a bit of Lunascript (http://asana.com/luna/). I'm very interested in who is paying for the development? I notice that there's no big tech company behind this and from the contact page I can see Meteor Development Group has an office in downtown San Francisco. So do you have any info on what the plan is regarding monetization?
Is mustache.github.com not good enough as a universal templating language?

I don't agree with ever design decision made for the syntax, and I've not used jinja, but it has the universal part handled quite well.

The idea of a roasted PHP is interesting. It's not a no brainer in the way CoffeeScript is though. There's no real choice of language in the client-side, but there is on the server side.

Server side devs can just learn ruby/python/.NET/Scala. Client side devs are probs best switching to JavaScript or something very similar.
What? What's the backdoor?
Thanks for the feedback about the beginning of the demo. We had a really tough time with the site and the video because the people who are interested in frameworks like Meteor come from a lot of different backgrounds. Some people have written half a dozen Backbone applications and have written their own highly scalable node.js cache invalidation servers, while other people have suggested that we take the word "REST" off the homepage because it's confusing to new developers.

It's tough to find a pace that holds the attention of the experienced people while not losing the people that are new to web development.
Thanks for the pointer! My first language was Scheme and I always kind of joke around about eventually learning Haskell. I think I might actually start doing it though.
But what's so surprising is that I don't remember the Windows client to be nearly as bad as the one for Mac. I guess they are made by two completely different teams with no coordination on UI issues.
What It Really Means to Be Captain of Your Soul
I thought so too, one of the founders was an employee of Asana.
This feels to me a lot like how Rails felt back in 2005. A fundamental leap forward and an understanding of where web technology is going.

I haven't felt that way about Node.js or even its higher-level frameworks like Express or Batman. This feels like "The One", even though I've been absorbing the docs and screencasts only for the last 20 minutes.
Great. I'm sure realtime web frameworks will be the future of node.js and the entiry web itself. However, I do have some concerns. Opening my Databse via the web? Neeh, this is one thing not clear in the video.

P.S.: You should provide your cli via npm. Go and register the name before someone else do. (It's not taken currently http://search.npmjs.org/#/meteor)
The announcement - http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-to-be-sponsored-by-blue-...
Yes, I would love some help in documenting or testing.

The idea is to have a public repo of python modules, where you can directly import from, so, you won't need to download and mantain local modules.
Now, it only has the standard python modules that GAE provides, but, my idea is to populate the service with all kind of python modules, so you can just forget and import anything from this thing.

I'm planning to make another flavor, a private repo, where you can login and have your own modules, but, the main reason of this project is the public repo idea.
Cool stuff! Really like the template handler that "notices" which attributes you're interested in and registers listeners for you. Is that implemented with a proxy "this?" or with actual Javascript parsing? gulp

Any reason the GitHub link isn't above the fold? That's the first thing I looked for...

I'd also be curious to know if any of the live reloading stuff was inspired by Brett Victor's "Inventing on Principle?" Something about tools that let you create "live" seems to be in the air.
My 5cents on that (recently published issues):

<? if ('9223372036854775807' == '9223372036854775808') { echo "I can not count!\n"; } ?>
(see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=54547)

or

built-in PHP web server dies with a large Content-Length header value:
The value of the Content-Length header is passed directly to a pemalloc() call in sapi/cli/php_cli_server.c on line 1538. The inline function defined within Zend/zend_alloc.h for malloc() will fail, and will terminate the process with the error message "Out of memory".
(see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=61461)

Luckily we are getting Javascript ready to replace all PHP on the server sooner or later ;-)
As far as I'm concerned, (Linux) Skype should die. It's the worst thing running on my PC right now, and I really hate running it (it's not set to autostart). It will usually hang insidiously every few minutes, and it's not even obvious. Everything continues to work, but messages won't get delivered, calls won't get answered and there's no notification of incoming calls.

The only way for me to notice that my Skype has frozen is to notice the 100% CPU usage on the task manager. I would love something better coming along, I look forward to the day when I never have to use Skype again.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...

This was a similar issue with the CarrierIQ thing. Apps have to explicitly request this permission, and it's a strange one that should raise red flags unless it is explicitly intended for such a purpose.

Indeed, the app that the author links to - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nolanlawso... - under permission there's the READ SYSTEM LOGS.

Sadly a ridiculous number of apps demand it for questionable reasons (for instance https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sirma.mobi... -> Why does a Bible need to read from system logs?)
Sweet! This looks really useful. Hope to see support for Canada!
Wasn't there a Backend-as-a-Service platform released recently for use with Backbone.js? Does anyone remember what that was? Seems like we're seeing a new wave of "front-end only" application frameworks coming out...

EDIT: oh yeah, Backlift! (http://www.backlift.com) This is definitely an interesting trend.
The live demo is here: http://colors.meteor.com/

Seems to have a minor glitch with unicode characters? When you do Colors.remove() everything goes away, but the entries with unicode all come back? Somewhat strange...

Interesting tech, but db access from the client scares me to no end, call me a curmudgeon I guess.
Wow! This is amazing. Though not entirely new, I love the idea of syncing database content with web content. They seem to have gotten it right!
I use a password locker. The only downside is that it makes setting up new accounts or changing passwords on an existing account slightly harder, which decrease usability and security a bit respectively.

Someone should RFC a common password API, so password lockers can query the password rules and set up a new account or change the password on an existing account in the background while I browse.

You might worry that this would increase the attack surface, or push people towards a single point of failure, but I think ending password reuse and simple passwords could make for a healthy net gain if you carefully designed the protocol with security in mind. (Throttling and preventing account enumeration would be two key issues, but they could be overcome.)
You may also be interested in implementing Scheme in Haskell:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...
Is GPL really viable for a web framework? The Free Software Foundation has consistently held that linking to GPL code (not LGPL) is derived work.
JSON will let you do that just as well. Or, if you must, there's ast.literal_eval which will only allow Python literals.
Parse makes an effort to get security right. You don't use your private API keys in the client. Instead, there is an access key specific to the mobile client, and its access is restricted in several ways.

See https://parse.com/docs/data#security for more details.
The Beal Conjecture
Also zip (postal code) information is not in the public domain in the UK. It is a commercial database which you can licence from the RoyalMail or probably a reseller.
IO monad realized in 1965
Take a look at his comment history (turn showdead on first)[1]. He's a somewhat eccentric character.

[1]:http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos