skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> oh, so you're implementing schema in your application?

Isn't that where the schema belongs? Each document represents a conceptual whole. It doesn't contain fields which have to be NULL simply because they weren't in previous versions of the schema.

I've been an rdbms guy (datawarehousing/ETL) for a long time now, I've seen a lot of large databases which have been in production for considerable time. They get messy. Really messy. They become basically unmaintainable. Apples, oranges and pears all squashed into a schema the shape of a banana.

It's a pretty elegant solution, and is the problem XML/XSD were designed to solve.

The cleanest solution that I've seen in production used a relational database as a blob storage for XML-serialized entities. Each table defined a basic interface for the models, but each model was free to use its own general schema. After 10 years it contained a set of very clean individual entities which were conceptually correct.

As opposed to the usage as a serialization format for remoting, which has been largely replaced with JSON.
Testing the delivery limits of the US Postal Service (2000)
In Which I Tell You to Stop Whining About CoffeeScript
What's with the downvotes - molsongolden is right - if it's edible, why shouldn't it be available for those who don't care? But obviously, the fact that most people care will drive this company and this type of meat off the market.

I also don't get why people avoid GM crops - just because they were modified by humans doesn't make it worse. After all, we drive cars and use electronics that don't kill us at every move, right?
How to create a Wikipedia Unity lens for Ubuntu
As they say, there's no accounting for taste.
As a little bit of an aside, does anyone else find it infuriating when articles like this are thick with links that don't lead to the destinations you'd expect?

For example, about halfway through this article there's mention of a prize-winning New York Times article that popularized the phrase "pink slime". I'd like to read the article, so I clicked on the link... and got a stock ticker quote for [NYT]. I get that Bloomberg is in the financial news business, but come on! There's no footnote with the actual link and not even a title for me to search with. It's just bizarre.
That hurts a little. Sorry you feel that way. :-/ I particularly enjoy working on the technical challenges, but to each his own. Cheers.
Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea
How do we get it? \O/
But, when I provide the descriptor (embedded video) at the cost of surrounding said video with ads then I am certainly attempting to profit from the inclusion of the video. If said content is copyrighted I can understand the copyright holder being displeased with others trying to profit from my work.

So what? There are already laws to deal with taking care of that at the source. Don't make excuses for the lazy and evil.
This is awesome, and I needed it just yesterday to determine who my local representative is.

You use a nice large font too, but then I'd suggest making the Federal/State/County/Local tabs a bit larger in font, I almost lost them.

All that said, I'm curious where the data comes from. How many different sources are required to determine who are the representatives at any given level of government?

(But you need a better picture of President Obama, come on, let the guy have his chin back.)
They probably haven't subtracted us from the count.
Weekly News: startups in Eastern Europe: Baltic Rim, Russia, Poland and Romania
Care to explain? I believe for Redis, "appendfsync everysec" is the default. The poster's point was that MySQL and Postgres both ship with something like "appendfsync always", and you have to opt-in to the the less safe mode if you want to get more performance. Redis ships with the less safe mode pre-selected, and so has higher performance out-of-the-box.
After downloading it, Flutter appears to only Play & Pause in iTunes and Spotify (on Mac & Windows). I imagine (and hope) that they're working on supporting more gestures and more apps!
This has a lot more to do with the GUI toolkits than the JVM. Python is most often used with bindings for GTK (C), QT (C++) or tk (C). I don't know a lot about .net but I believe it just links to the standard windows gui toolkit probably also written in native code.

For Java the main issue is that Swing/SWT/AWT suck and java is mostly used as a server language so there is little impetus to fix them.

Eclipse is just bloated, that is why its often slow. Android has its own custom JVM (Dalvik) but I imagine the majority of the UI rendering / handling code is native with Java bindings.

All that said, the full JVM (both openJDK and sun's) have multiple garbage collectors and many tuning options. This creates flexibility to tune the GC for particular work loads but also makes them complicated to work with. It doesn't help that the default GC/memory settings in the JVM are a bit...off, and use the high throughput GC vs the low pause collectors.
> Other folks have already pointed out that using a library does not constitute a derivative work, so the author's point is irrelevant anyway.

Using a library (from a program) is actually a prime example of how GPL copyleft spreads from the GPL library into the program.
I made almost nothing and I was living on my savings for a year. I learned more and felt more alive than when I made $80K/year working for someone. It's never really been about the money for me..it's about the freedom. Money just happens to be required for that freedom.
/**
* Auto-generated, do not edit!
*/
function add(x, y) {
/* test 1 */
if (x == 2 && y == 2) {
return 4;
}
/* test 2 */
if (x == 1 && y == -1) {
return 0;
}
}
Great redesign. Now they should just add skip/forward/back + voice recognition, charge $5 for it and be happy :)
The tabs need more visual weight. I was unimpressed at first until I noticed that I could dig into the meaty information at county and state level.
I don't know what Google sees, but I have a hard time imagining anyone honestly thinks the future is going to be built entirely in one language. That's the fantasy Sun had with Java. Now Java is this awkward thing that lives on top of the OS which lives on top of a hypervisor in a typical cloud setup.

It looks like we are headed toward a future with many more languages, not fewer.
AFAIK Code Bubbles is now Debugger Canvas
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/debuggercanvas
What an awesome time in computing history. I sometimes find myself judging other IT guys by whether or not they have ever used a BBS.
The fact is that there is currently no actual health or safety concern about this "pink slime", and the only reason for the outcry is an emotional reaction to what it looks like before it's mixed with the ground beef.

I would wager that many of them would have an equally emotionally charged reaction to seeing the butchering and separation process for the rest of the beef they eat, but would forego campaigning against it because it's the same beef they've always eaten, and that makes it more "real" or "authentic".

When it comes down to it, any process for turning an animal into edible meat is gross and offensive.
Meta note: while usually it's considered good practice to leave the title of the article, when the title of the original article is extremely opinionated without direct explanation (this specific article is about Facebook supporting CISPA, not CISPA being bad), I would consider it good practice to rewrite the title to moderate the language.
43 Upcoming Hackathons: Science, Post-PC Apocalypse, CleanWeb and Cereal?
New York Designer Putting Together Unofficial Spotify iPad App
Let's assume the ECPA already allows all the information sharing and immunity from liability and disclosure that this bill allows.

1) This bill still says what it says, even if it is redundant.

2) Why is Facebook supporting this bill if it does nothing? They like risking social capital for a no-op?
It's all well and good until the poor kid's teacher thinks it's Windows-1252 and the whole class laughs at him.
The gophers remind me of Dwarf Fortress. Moving stuff around in piles and doing it in an efficient manner so your fortress has no bottlenecks.

So for a good lesson in concurrency and parallelism, play Dwarf Fortress.
I probably have dozens of languages under my belt (not keeping count) so learning a new language isn't a problem. As they say: "'been there, 'done that".

In other words, I am not the kind that will stay away from a product just because the language is new to me or I don't have a ton of experience using it. In the end, if you've been around programming for a while there really aren't very many new concepts that one couldn't pick-up quickly enough.

The first time I had to implement a genetic solver in Objective-C I was new to the language. Sure, it took a little longer to optimize it, but I knew what I had to do and it was just a matter of fitting it to the language. No big deal. At least that's how I think, valid or not.

Good books are the key. I've had "Javascript: The Good Parts" on my list for a while. Pulling the trigger today. I did go through the Sitepoint books about a year ago.

In thinking about it it seems like the most sensible bit of advice is to let Meteor mature before jumping in. I think I am going to stick with the existing game-plan until then. There will be plenty of front-end Javascript/JQuery/Backbone to write. This should pave the way to considering Meteor later on.
I'm always hearing about how Boston or SF or any number of other places are great for startups and tech jobs, it's nice to know I don't have to move :)
Hey,
by reading all the bad things seems that OrientDB would fit better than MongoDB for them:

- Non-counting B-Trees: OrientDB uses MVRB-Tree that has the counter. size() requires 0ns

- Poor Memory Management: OrientDB uses MMAP too but with many settings to optimize it usage

- Uncompressed field names: the same as OrientDB

- Global write lock: this kills your concurrency! OrientDB handles read/write locks at segment level so it's really multi-thread under the hood

- Safe off by default: the same as OrientDB (turn on synch to stay safe or use good HW/multiple servers)

- Offline table compaction: OrientDB compacts at each update/delete so the underlying segments are always well defragmented

- Secondaries do not keep hot data in RAM: totally different because OrientDB is multi-master

Furthermore you have Transactions, SQL and support for Graphs. Maybe they could avoid to use a RDBMS for some tasks using OrientDB for all.

My 0,02.
Hey, thanks everyone for the comments and suggestions! We're a small team right now (actually, I'm the lone dev for the site), but we definitely want to integrate a lot of these suggestions -- especially info on campaign contributions and local legislative data.

We're looking to add another developer to the team, so please get in touch with us if you or someone you know is interested. Here's a small article about us and our story: http://govfresh.com/2012/04/for-govhub-all-politics-is-perso...
Meh, if your other option is to use PostgreSQL and get row level locks, a db level lock is still a fail.
When I read "Jonathan [has] a fiancé", I have to ask myself whether:

1. Jonathan is gay, or
2. the author can't spell.
The factory farming debate is finally entering the mainstream mindset. It's a pandoras box of ugly truths that no one will be comfortable seeing inside.

I spent two years looking to find ways to innovate away from factory farming, and every solution seems to revolve around major market forces and changing consumer habits.

Disruption in this market looks to be, bottom up, coming from cottage/micro producers, and thus, slow. If someone can efficiently disrupt distribution away from grocery chains you'll see a major change in food consumption, in the success of more small, high quality producers. Look at high end wine as an indicator.

As a restaurateur/chef for many years this is a passion, but I can't see it getting fixed anytime soon, even with the gastro-activism we're starting to see now.

Any of you smart app builders looking to disrupt something mind crushingly difficult, look at food.
Interesting. I hope we see something happen to change course away from the very real internal threats to our country but at the same time I have a hard to seeing it happen. Its as if we are committed to our own downfall, which tends to happen at the end of empires.
Your mention of .frx files just gave me a potent flashback, complete with psychosomatic hives.
Am I missing something here? My understanding is that when you use GPL software in your product, you are not required to GPL your own code unless your code and the GPL code are compiled into the same executable that is distributed to the user. Looking at the Meteor website's front page, I don't see anything that suggests it compiles your code and its own coffee into a single executable, so I don't think that using it would require you to GPL anything except possibly any customizations that you make to Meteor itself.

Obviously this is not legal advice, and may in fact be the delusional ramblings of someone who has no understanding of the GPL. But please enlighten me if I'm wrong.
All of the "if you're not happy and you know it, quit your job! clap clap" blog posts that make it onto Hacker News these days seem to whitewash or ignore some unpleasant realities.

I gave notice at my job of ten years last week, and I'm about as unexcited about the future as you can get. I've accumulated years of skill rot, self doubt, health problems, and straight up depression. I live in a part of the country with almost nothing in the way of a tech industry, so finding a better job will probably require moving to a strange new place. Despite having two years' gross in the bank and no debt, I constantly worry about ending up broke and on the street.

Going from "miserably employed" to "somewhat less miserably unemployed" to "happily employed" takes significantly more work than just walking away from a job, but talking about that isn't the sort of material that gets the pageviews.
This mindset, very common on HN, confuses me. It says, in effect, that it's more important for us to pick sides and cheer on our teams than to understand what is actually happening. If I said that about a Javascript library, I'd be run off the site on a rail. But when I suggest people actually read the bills they're yelling about, the opposite happens.

Why do I care whether Facebook supports the bill?
More annoyingly, they even disguise the referrer for SSL sites, where it wouldn't be sent to anyone intercepting the connection.
Well, these parents should avoid ice cream also.

// ice cream plants are not the safest work site
The ASCII art caught my eye too. I can't help but think about all of the fun I had with ANSI art using TheDraw. Ahh, the good 'ol days!
I agree with the other commenters that this should work "from me, out", meaning show me the most local, then state, then federal.

Also, please include a note on each page indicating where biographical data comes from. I was (1) surprised to see so much detail on Portland Commissioner Randy Leonard http://www.govhub.org/officials/37457/randy-leonard/info and (2) surprised that there is a "religion" field. That's not really part of governance, so who cares?
Thanks for the kind words.

The data on officials is coming from Project Vote Smart (votesmart.org), but the challenge is relating it to the different map shapes. We built a tool to convert the U.S. Census shapes to KML format (available on github.com/GovHub), and we then matched Votesmart's governments to these shapefiles.
Not for lack of trying. We might not understand them, however.

My fear is one day we're going to realize some machines are intelligent, and then deny them their rights anyway.
AJAX is where you click on something and then the page updates. Comet is where the page updates without the user having to initiate anything.
(Okay this is my wishlist feature: I type in the address of some random government agency, and you tell me what elected officials are most responsible for that agency's operation and oversight.)
Glad to see Startup Weekend companies coming to fruition. Good work guys.
Something similar is in the works!
Microsoft AOL Patent Theater
How are you planning to deal with pull requests? i.e. will you require signing CLA (like dojo does http://dojofoundation.org/about/cla )? I assume you are not going to keep commercial and GPL codebases separate, so you need some kind of permission from the contributors that you can re-license/sell their code?
If this showed up as a Kickstarter project, I'd put $100 behind it right now.

The bickering over KS/YC or product/business is zero-sum. I just want to use this, and I'm prepared to put my money where my mouth is to see Chris Granger working on it full-time.
“BPI’s product is no more or less safe than other parts of hamburger,” Marler said. “There’s a lot of scraps that get put into hamburger because that’s what the hell hamburger is.”

Um, no. A hamburger is ground beef underbelly or chuck. You can add lots of stuff - pink slime, soy protein, corn syrup, dried onion powder, MSG - but that stuff isn't hamburger, it's just what you've added.
Duly noted! We'll make sure the meat is more easily accessible.
Could someone please explain: How does this compare to Meteor?
The US Trade Representative is infamous, among other things, for leading the way on ACTA.

If he says something, you can safely assume the exact opposite is right.
It is quoted in various places eg http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/characters.html although some sources eg http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lxndiWaFMvMC&pg=PA65&... says that IE does not do this. Still looking for original spec though.
Query Planners vs Compilers
Hopefully you'll consider switching to Titanium Desktop.

There are many reasons, but the most important one is supporting Linux, since Adobe killed Air for Linux.
I have noticed that accessibility features often help usability even if not strictly needed, just like in your argument.

For example for restrooms, instead of a dime-sized button for soap, there can be an accessible button big as a palm that is easy to hit and light to push.
OK, I've been gawking the cool filtered photos my friends were posting on FB, so I installed it on my Droid X as soon as I saw the app became available for Android. The UI is cool but I don't know what to do. There are a few filters but none is giving me those cool effects. I am totally underwhelmed by the unengaging app; maybe my expectations were too high due to all the hype.

It seems I am in the very very rare minority among the installers, though.
Meteor's Impact: Changing How to What
There are plenty of GPL projects with robust communities though. (Albeit not in the web development space). The same kind of thing was argued c. 1998 when the "Open Source" branding movement started and all the cool projects went with permissive licenses. And it really wasn't correct. GPL projects continue to be very successful a decade and a half later. The apocalypse never came.

So I guess I'm saying that I understand that argument, but I don't buy it. Which side of the argument you land on tends to be colored mostly by your emotional feelings about the GPL (I find as I age that I'm becoming more and more a pinko commie copyleft fanboi, for example), and not really well grounded in practice.
Why does the whole world have to be built that way? If, the next time you do a new project start on a web app, your web app were built this way, then you would see the advantages of this approach in your web app.

If there are equivalent ways of designing for concurrency in Java or C# (or those ways are added to the language in the future), then you may be able to restructure existing Java and C# code bases to take advantage of this approach.

If you have 20 million lines of Cobol transaction processing code and there's no practical way of migrating your code base to use this methodology, then your 20 million lines of Cobol will keep running the same way they always have.

Unless I'm missing a point you're trying to make (certainly possible) there's no reason to think that this is an all or nothing approach.
Local-level data is definitely one of our main hurdles. I just had an interesting phone conversation this morning where I learned that in the EU, there is a mandated XML standard in which governments must release contact information for public works departments in.

How cool would it be if we had a standard for tax dollar allocation so that this data could be easily aggregated?

In the meantime, we're toying with ways to accumulate this data, crowdsourcing, scraping other sources, etc.
Flash and Java to be click-to-play in future Firefox
Politely: I won't install an Adobe Air app unless forced to by me employer. Maybe that's how this will work, but Air is always a drag in my personal experience.
this is quite cool, I'm not much of an IDE person, I like to stick with good old vim, but this sparks my interest. If it's open source then I might seriously consider it, even contribute some vi keybindings. I just hope it goes more in the way of building upon vi/emacs and modernizing it rather than stripping down an IDE and modernizing it.
yeah sorry about that. I wish I could forget about *.frx and regsvr32 and VSS.
Is it just me, or this guy should do this for a living? Like, we make sucky homepages, he improves, we never even need to talk to him.

Just take my money! (I'm kidding, I have no money)
Wow, good enough to give me flashbacks to my old days as SysOp. Needs more door games. LORD and Tradewars anyone?
Apple’s New Patent Could Make iOS App Development Easy
I would say its more similar to a magic spell that conjurs up the book.
The Apple II was colour, and that thing came out in the late 70s.
I opted for a hercules monochrome that was higher resolution than the color alternatives.
Hyperlinked HTML version: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6540
Duck duck go beats google in this case: https://img.skitch.com/20120413-gs9cnmdrcnfgcx3idct62xp35y.j...
Keep on truckin'. The situation is not necessarily hopeless, it just takes time to resolve. For example, see: http://halvm.org/wiki/

It may be a long time but there will someday be a world not built on C or C++. Probably within my lifetime. (Probably.)
So is a gaming platform the big Apple announcement Phillipe Starck hinted at for the fall?
This line was in an episode of Boardwalk Empire Season 2 that just finished airing.
Since when have FOIA requests to the NSA ever produced anything interesting within 50 years?
As others have said, starting off with local is better than with federal.

Others may disagree with me, but seeing the Supreme Court listed as my representatives made my eyes roll a bit. Those are appointed positions and in particular, positions designed to be unswayed by the electorate. It's useful information, I guess, but to give them equal placement with all the other elected representatives implies a naivete about our political structure.

Your app says there are 3 council members who represent me...I don't know if that's a problem in the geocoding or if that really is the case. But I can't find out because the app doesn't show where their offices are located. Instead of making me click through to each councilmember's page to find out who actually represents me, show this information in the table view.

And, when clicking through to a specific representative's page:
http://www.govhub.org/officials/36678/g-koppell/info

I'm betting almost all of your users will not think to look at the far bottom right to see the contact info. If anything, this contact info should be the first thing users see.
Sometimes the medium is (part of) the message. It's a serious topic and I think it warrant serious discussion. I would like for him to cover the matter in a serious manner rather than what would appear to me as some kind of promotional stunt.