skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I am curious, under what circumstances would one use this, rather than something like Rescue? And there is so much competition in this space, what

The goal is not to replace the existing queue solutions, but to create a common API, so the rest of the gems can can just treat all of them in a uniform way.

Quoting Jose Valim:

"The point of the Queue is to be small and provide an API that more robust engines like resque and sidekiq can hook in. So you can easily start with an in memory queue (as you can see, the implementation does not even reach 100LOC) which is also easy to test and then easily swap to another one.

Why this is good? By having an unified API, tools like Devise, Action Mailer can simply use Rails.queue.push() instead of worrying with compatibility for different plugins.

So the goal here is provide an API for queueing and with a simple in memory implementation. It is not meant to be a robust queue system. "
Hello Mike!

It's good of you to offer your help to the community, especially as you have a lot of valuable experience to share!

Basically I'm trying to decide on my next project to work on and I would find some constructive criticism on a handful of my ideas very useful!

I'm kind of torn in multiple directions but I would like to make something that actually brings me some revenue!

Most of my other projects have been for the fun of it & not monetized/free to use so far.

I could list my top 5 ideas and you could throw back a hell yes / hell no based on your gut instinct!

Thanks!
Is there an official statement from those companies about whether they support it and why?
Why do you assert that China can't innovate? How do you measure innovation in a massively growing economy?

Stagnant mature economy grows by innovation. How would you seek innovation in an economy that grows everywhere?
They're the two that make the most sense to expose the most, given their mission. I'd be surprised if it didn't also have gcc at a minimum.
Heh, this was the plot of a second-series Tom Swift novel. Ah, childhood.

Anyway, there are a lot of problems with the idea, most having to do with risk and resources required.
Just put in an order for one; looks awesome. Also thanks to Dave for the willingness/flexibility to ship a unit to the EU.
Intel will not switch to ARM, or at least not until it's too late (kind of like Nokia with WP7 or RIM with QNX/BB10).

They won't switch because their cost structure is higher than ARM's cost structure. Their whole company is used to selling expensive chips with a lot higher profit/chip. So they will not know how to sell these chips properly and be just as profitable.

They will also have a conflict of interest with x86. Adopting ARM means admitting defeat for x86, and their x86 business will go down that much faster - unless they intentionally slow down the ARM business, in which case, what's the point of trying to compete with ARM chips anyway?

This is why they failed with the Xscale ARM division, too. Intel can't sell dirt cheap processors that would make them billions per quarter, and they can't do it without hurting their x86 business. Why do you think Atom is their poorest brand ever and has stagnated so much? Because they never wanted it to become good enough for low-end laptops, and they only started working on energy efficiency much harder once they saw the ARM threat.
Anyone find someone particularly angry?
Hmm, that sounds like what Stratolaunch is doing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratolaunch_Systems
Converting a date to a human readable form is hard.

No, converting a date to human readable form is the easy part.

The hard part is converting the number of seconds from some epoch into a date.

The number of seconds from some reference point is not the same as a date.
not strong but somehow it is related
Coupled with that, I would love to see Passenger support background workers with the same lifecycle as front-end workers (but last time I suggested that, it wasn't planned at all if I remember well).
Starting is easy, shipping is hard.

I have a folder on my computer with a number of unfinished/unshipped projects. We created Sink or Ship to address the problem of following though and shipping what you started.

http://imgur.com/BdtwZ
There are other problems with the 2nd plugin you noted (fyneworks.com jquery-star-rating-plugin). It has a lot of unresolved bugs. Check the Google Code Issues page: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-star-rating-plugin/issues/li... (particularly disappointed with Issue #25).
The (e?)Reading Renaissance
I generally don't have time to read enough of the news to find gems like this so I love the fact that I can come to Hacker News and catch a little bit of everything. I know this has been said before and contributes little to the conversation but it's nice to see stories like this along with everything else.
Well this guy makes a much better hero than the fucking ridiculous Kim Dotcom.
Then you should learn about the fragile base class problem,

http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~emil/Publications_files/Mikhajlo...

API design is a very complex issue. Any change in a base class can have unintended consequences.

Specially in components sold as libraries to development companies, where you as a customer don't have access to the source code.

You're right, one of the OOP pillars is extensibility, but inheritance is just one way of doing it.
Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers
Although I think point 1 is valid point 2 seems somewhat hyperbolic. Could you clarify why dynamic languages are more productive than C#?
>Agree with this 100%. I think dynamically typed languages are a transitional technology we'll mostly leave behind as the kinks get worked out of modern type systems.

While my favorite language right now is Haskell due to its sophisticated type system and ambitious design goal of enabling engineers to coral and isolate error-causing code into monads, I have to disagree.

Dynamic languages can be looked at as the next evolution of non-memory-managed -> memory-managed. Next is statically/strongly typed -> dynamically-typed. In both cases you go from manual management of some feature of the language, to having the vm or compiler do it for you, and that increasing abstraction and automation is the story of language development (and technology in general).

Non-memory-managed languages like C, C++, ObjC are still around and are used by highly skilled developers to squeeze the utmost performance out of the system, Chromium/Chrome/V8 being a good everyday example.

But where that kind of optimization is not strictly needed or where the automatic memory management of, say the Hotspot JVM, is sufficient, memory-managed languages will flourish. Further, memory-managed languages benefit from the continuous improvement in vm technology, and over time continue to approach non-managed in many situations.

I expect something similar to happen with type systems. Where a particular project does not need the strict control provided by a type system, dynamically typed languages will flourish (as they are in the startup web space).

Perhaps one day, vm's and dynamic type inference will be so good that neither manual memory-managed languages nor strongly typed ones will be necessary,but given Haskell's design goals and the type of difficult problems it's trying to solve (software assurance, security, etc.) I don't expect that will be anytime soon. They'll all continue to coexist for the foreseeable future.

Having said that, Haskell's type system is a pleasure to use, and imho actually increases productivity by both requiring and helping you think more clearly about the data flowing through your code.
No, that is indeed not Orwellian - are you familiar with what the term means in the context of language? Calling something 'free', the purchase of which is detrimental to the freedom of many human beings by strengthening those who keep them in fetters, is akin to Newspeak from 1984, wherein words and phrases assumed meanings contradictory to their normal denotation. The situation you seem to see, wherein you assume that people use China as a handy stick with which to beat those they dislike for other reasons, has little or nothing to do with this. Words mean things, and we should all do our part to use them meaningfully - George Orwell would approve. :)

Incidentally, I don't know why your recollection of complaints about China's atrocious human rights record skews towards the (rather few) complaints that are on HN about RMS' choice of laptop, or about the Apple/Foxconn dustup (which incidentally caught several other companies to a lesser extent), but it's not really germane to the conversation at hand.
The comments in this post really demonstrate the widespread pain points that everyone has when dealing with CSS sprites, and the existence of 30+ solutions indicates that nobody has really figured out how to fix it yet.

The lack of attention to SVG stacks (http://simurai.com/post/20251013889/svg-stacks) is very curious to me - being a proponent of this method/movement seems analogous to being pro-PNG in the era of GIFs.
Yeah thats actually where I wanna take it. I just thought that 6 is actually a minimum.
Inside VMware - How VMware, VirtualPC and Parallels actually work
The ideal sprite system is one that is automated. A script that grabs all the images in a folder and makes a sprite, recording their position and name and then replacing the Less (or Sass) variable definition for each image with the stored value.

Doing this manually is insane and probably not worth it unless you're fielding requests like Facebook, Google or Amazon and every split second spent loading is lost money.
The outcry we hear over these changes isn't just bored people being picky, it's the sound of a trillion dying neurons in a million interconnected biological systems.

You seem to be suggesting that having to learn something new is like having your brain die. That seems inaccurate. Isn't learning a (not very) different interface more like having to exercise a muscle a little bit that you were hoping not to exercise? I mean, not a cool thing to do to your users if the new interface is worse, but not inherently a bad thing.
Learning Haskell will improve your overall programming skill, it will change your mind. The best tutorial to learn Haskell: http://learnyouahaskell.com/ .And it is the tutorial that I enjoy the most (including tutorials ruby, php, backbone, jquery, etc)
Thanks for accurate title - this is not a full queueing system, but a unified API for hooking in bigger, badder queueing engines like Resque.

The point is to standardize the interface so other plugins/gems can simple make calls to Rails.queue rather than try to accomodate every queueing engine themselves.
Look at Apple's e-mail interfaces for a fine counterpoint. Even their iCloud web client, while kludgey in some respects, is a sight for sore eyes after using Gmail. They use different shades and textures to bring my focus squarely to the most important elements - the e-mail list and the e-mail/draft in focus. They even let you hide the inbox/draft/sent menu for an even more focused view. The Calendar is a similar story - focused and crystal clear where Google's product is a jumble.

I hope Apple stays competitive/serious about iCloud - they clearly have a few things to teach Google (and vice versa, of course).
All presentations from Cassandra EU
It's incorrect, until enough folks start using it, then the Oxford Dictionary gets an update :)
Does the application have to be a fully-native one? I think an interpreted app would be possible, but distributing it would need distribution of a runtime.

Perhaps if the idea of developing apps on the device turns out to be of strategic importance for the platform, the main mobile OS makers would add some sort of compilation service to the OS. If this is true it would still need a killer-app to prove it.
GitHub to Evernote - GitHub and Evernote, together at last
TicketLeap Launches First Ever DIY Seating Chart Builder
As swGooF said: Write a blog.

I Googled your name and found quite a lot of your books for download, but not much more info (did not search very long).

If you want to become a "name" in some area, you must talk about what's happening now. If any possible, become a (leading) member of some important OSS project. (As an example take Yehuda Katz, his blog and books are very well known in the community)
JQuery File Upload for CakePHP 2.1.x
I imagine the moon will be given something like the Antarctic Treaty System declaring it for research, at-least for the next 50 - 100 years (possibly longer but I feel as if space exploration...or rather mining...will 'take off' within it's first 25 - 50 years).

In terms of the asteroids, I'm expecting massive government intervention (interference) on which asteroids they can mine, where, when, and what. I'm not familiar enough with current mining laws / regulations to speculate whether any of those will be applicable in a space-mining environment.

On another note, imagine the fun in dealing with unions in 50 - 150 years. All I can think about is one of the opening scenes from Titan A.E.
Next week from the Cool Stuff ported to Lame Platforms department: Node.js on OS/2
Right. Like when you want some maintenance task to run once per month; you can just ignore the calendar and do simple arithmetic.
If u enjoi English misue, plese follw me on Twitter!!!1

http://twitter.com/#!/_0_
You still need to refine it to within the specs of something the ISS can accept. Your water might also be radioactive after having stayed millions of years in space.
> The would turn me down because I am concerned about my financial transactions?

No, they would turn you down because you cannot present to them their risk guarantee criteria that enable their low prices.
Facebook Shuts Down Mom Who Posts Photos of Her Son at Special Olympics
DB table "pending_emails" with a time field...

cronjob removes them based on time entered, and sends them.

shrug
This looks super awesome. I can't wait to see it in action and see if my startup can't partner with you. I work at Panjiva and our mission is to help people find people they can trust and do business with across borders. Get in touch. andrew (at) panjiva (dot) com, or afarrell (at) mit (dot) edu.
I'm at this point right now - what are the best static languages with type inference for the dynamic language crowd? Haskell? Scala? Go? Rust? Something I haven't heard of? All of the above?
Here's the dirty little secret: A sheepskin from either place will work.

The magic ingredient is you--what are your interests, goals? What is your personal culture like (SysV vs BSD)? Do you like snow, cold and nor'easters; or, warm, sunny and quakes?

Figure out yourself, and the school you want will be obvious.
You're right, it wasn't like most RTS games we know today. Herzog Zwei had little bases scattered through the map that could be thought of as territories, and you'd have to capture them with troops(both the player and AI would compete for these as it allowed further expansion, healing, etc.). You could order up defensive / offensive units as "credits" trickled in over time at a fixed rate(I don't think there was any way to speed it up), and the ultimate goal was to send your assisting units to attack the enemy's single fortress.

I absolutely loved that game, though!

I don't really recall it having any story, though.
It's desktop chips that are high profit margin not x86. As long as Amdahl's law is in effect there will always be a market for single core power. Because, for a wide range of cases 4 core at x really does beat 4,000 cores at 3/4 x. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law)

PS: I don't think Intel can maintain that advantage indefinitely, eventually when chips are designed by arranging individual atoms everyone will be on an even playing field. But, we are a long way from that point.
Bummer, looks like the post got killed. Why?
Out of acqui-hire stage
The trouble with Javascript
Azure's Node.js experience feels a lot closer to a PaaS like Heroku than that of AWS. And for that experience, see my Azure-Heroku comparisons in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899159
I've been thinking about this recently as well. I wrote a simple JSON logger for Perl recently. It will probably be on CPAN this weekend. Until then you can see it on prepan and github.

prepan
http://prepan.org/module/3Yz7PYrBSd

github
https://github.com/kablamo/Log-JSON
The whole thing reminds me of the Spanish in the New World. They spent a lot of time and effort mining silver, the price crashed to 20% of what it had been, and as a country they were outcompeted badly by the Netherlands, their former possession (and somewhere that had few resources and little manufacturing). Good for the world as a whole, but not so good for Spain.
Not surprised to see Amash on the No vote. (He is voluntarily leading a drive to increase Congress transparency by explaining every vote on Facebook/Twitter. https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash) Regarding CISPA he said: "I voted 'no' on CISPA. The bill passed 248-168, but my amendment to protect library, tax, gun, educational, and medical records also passed 415-0."

However, I am rather surprised to Issa on the Aye vote. He was one of the few members that actively worked against SOPA while it was still in committee. His Twitter bio (@darrellissa) says he enjoys "an #OPEN, accessible & uncensored internet."
I love spritifying and existing site and watching the load times drop in usage reports.

Here's a great idea that I would like to see implemented concerning css sprites and the rails asset pipeline:

In your .erb.css file you could include each background image individually, when you reference it in the css you would flag it as "spritable". Then when assets:precompile is ran some magic piece of code would build a single sprite image from all your background images and fill in the background-position. Automating the whole process.

Like most things I don't have the time/skill to do with, but nice idea nonetheless.
I love the idea and the execution! Well done. It's more of a novelty than a business but still very impressive.
Instagram: Fun but No Threat to the Art World
I created a twitter list with all of the blogs in the list (which had twitter accounts that I could find) at https://twitter.com/#!/jasonkolb/data-science if anyone finds it useful.
HNpod #2 - Google Drive and Working Hours
I've got great news then: you can make the jump to RoR today! :)

This news isn't about Rails implementing its own background queue, but rather creating a unified API for interacting with background queuing systems; of which there are many. Resque (crafted at GitHub [1]) is probably the most popular: https://github.com/defunkt/resque.

1: https://github.com/blog/542-introducing-resque
Why Google Is Focusing on Site Quality
7. You need to achieve revenue at some point. No one can afford millions of "loss" forever.

If they succeed, this will be one of the longest market bet in a long while. Longer term than financing land caravans to India to buy spice, clipper to china for tea, or caravels to the americas.
So, someone who loves C# loves Windows Azure. I'm not surprised and as noted by many other posters, this article hardly has a genuine ring to it. Nice try Microsoft.
Justin Bieber School Of Management
Yup, flux is great, under appreciated stuff. First you apply the flux to the area you'll be soldering, then you put just enough solder onto your iron and drag it along the pins. The evaporating flux will pull the solder onto the pads. The hard part is in judging the right amount of solder to use.
Pentest Magazine Web App Pentesting New April 2012 Issue
I love it, I used to be on the fence until I discovered the magical ALT key
What's silly about running .NET on Linux? If C# is a decent language on its own, and Mono is a decent way to run it (neither of which I'm completely sure of, but I think that's the case) then it seems like it could be a fine choice.
And I think he's asking you: what should he do then since you're judging that the work he's doing isn't valuable? Impact and importance are judgement calls.

You're already making the judgement that the work he's doing isn't valuable, finish it up and judge what he should do.
The German government is a good defensor of Internet freedoms, along with the Netherlands and Scandinavian contries.
> It's just not "cool".

What a completely misunderstood view. Microsoft has earned the distrust of many many a coder through their cut-throat business tactics and complete disregard/disdain for other operating systems and platforms.

Wake me up when I can run a MS stack for near-free in perpetuity... because that's what Microsoft is competing against in the startup world. Do you think Instagram or Twitter's architecture would have been possible without OSS?
The Repulsive Power of Free
When discussing structural issues, like routing, code samples will be either deceiving or extremely verbose, because the ideas like that involve interaction of multiple components that simply doesn't happen in "hello world" examples.
i have their 10 euro plan for running tamahatta.com, dont have any traffic but the site has'nt gone down for the last 2 and a half mth. ( which is when i took it)
So how much of the total tablet market?

This sounds like comparing the difference between the marketshares of non-IE browsers back in the day of Microsoft's dominance... pointless to ignore the 600-lb gorilla.
Yeah I'm talking about fully native apps.

Imagine if you could only write apps for your laptop on a mainframe. That's how writing mobile apps on laptops feels like to me.
July might have spiked at 800 at some point, but average is around 300 for progamers (http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Actions_per_Minute).
Redis 2.6.0 RC1 Released
Is the font on this page really hard on the eyes or is it just me?