skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it is ideological. But you're right, at the end of the day, it's the business that matters. Developers are going to have guiding principles and it's not a bad idea to evaluate them every now and then; I hope my hypothetical at least illustrates why the alternative opinion exists. I quite like your hypothetical situation, it's the best retort, and offers a great motivating example for the rise of NoSQL, where ACID compliance simply doesn't make as much business sense as scalability with less validity.

"I don't believe in hypothetical situations" -- Kenneth the Page, 30 Rock.
60+ comments (posted 2 days earlier): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3962166

also, good comments below original article.
npm is vastly better than the gem package manager imo, making using modules infinitely easier. Furthermore, node modules (the good ones) do one thing and do it right. What I like about node is they give you the core without which you can't live, and you add the layers you want. With RoR you get a huge onion and need to peel a bunch of layers and add others if you want to do things right.
I didn't say node was for beginners though. But say for a programmer with a good theoretical background but no web development experience, node is much more appealing and usable.
Ask HN: Bootstrap for HTML emails?
Constructing a HTML email that works properly in various email clients is tough. The email needs to work in browser based clients as well as native clients such as Microsoft outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and Mac Mail. Anyone who have attempted it before will know the pain.

Is there a library / framework that can create nice HTML email messages which are properly formatted for various email clients?
Wow, Node is being turned away from because it's too new, and Rails is the destination because it's established?

I remember a few years ago Rails using the argument of re-inventing the wheel was the only way because there was presumably no other capable web framework out there.

We all know better now and I hope celebrate choice that's relatively equally capable :)
I thought this was an Onion headline at first. Though if it were, it would probably read: "Company CEO Unaware of Technology Sure to Make His Company Obsolete".

Alas, it seems like Time Warner won't be obsolete very soon. We can only hope.
>if its only function is to send you to some affiliate offer - it's spam //

I don't think this definition is quite right.

A site can be good and still have as its raison d'etre referring you to a product manufacturer. After all any sales website is doing the same thing, there's just a certain distance between affiliate sites and the manufacturer.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of affiliate sites are bogus, unhelpful and given unwarranted prevalence in SERPs; but that doesn't make them all bad. For example in the UK there are sites that offer money back on all purchases - they're affiliate sites that share the affiliate fee with the purchaser.
Anyone have experience with Flask vs. CherryPy? I started using CherryPy a few years ago and really liked it, but recently Flask [which looks conceptually similar to CherryPy] seems to be (amongst minimal Python web frameworks) the more hip and popular choice.
I can't reply to prodigal_erik because the thread is too long, but the definition of diploma mill you provided is refering to non accredited universities.

I am talking about accredited universities, big state schools that are very affordable and provide fairly good educations.

I would rather attend one of those than no school at all.
Mysql performance tips
There is a fine line between visionary and dunce. If he only had this insight about 5 years ago...
I work next to a hub. I want the option to just walk over there and pick it up there rather than wait for hours, refreshing the "track package" page waiting for "delivered" so I can run to the dock only to find it is already being carted around the building looking for my desk. Email me when it arrives at the hub, and I'll pick it up before the truck would have left to haul it around for hours.
I'm also confused. Tornado is definitely a more compelling web framework. Who doesn't want the ability to have tons and tons and tons of long-lived connections?
Kickstarter on xkcd
Q: Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants are wearing Nazi uniforms?

A: Yes

Did I pass the exam?
I live in the UK and I have had things delivered a few times by a company called Hermes, or as I like to call them, Herpes. It is literally a joke that this company is legal, I have complained to every retailer that uses them and often will not purchase from them again if they chose to use Hermes just to save a few pennies. There is no telephone number, parcel tracking is a nice work of fiction, and if you paid extra for next day and they use Hermes expect anything up to 10 days. There should be much more oversight and heavy fines for running shoddy operations like this.
I don't know.. I'd feel a little sleazy sending a referral link to a friend.
While it's easy to make fun of the guy for this, it's also a good indicator of how much work remains for products like AirPlay and Roku. The average consumer just isn't aware of the technology, and it's still relatively difficult to research and setup (compared to just calling your cable company). There's still big opportunity in this space.
Almost 20 years after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Light
I think you hit the nail on the head with this post. Over the past few weeks I have been doing similar research. I have come to the conclusion that there isn't a really great option.

Out of all the frameworks, I am most impressed with Sencha Touch's performance. It was the only one that felt "native" to me.

What I didn't like about Sencha is it doesn't let me use backbone.js, it also looks really difficult to customize the UI if you don't use their "widgets".

Wish there was a better option :(
Recently launched our startup Shopick.com 
Shopick.com is a marketplace to discover "unique" Indian handcrafted/handmade/handpainted products with beautiful designs from designers and creators all over India . We connect designers and artisans to customers all over the world looking for amazing products .
We use wiki from earliest stage as a repository for all sorts of information. We don't go out of our way to get fancy it, though, so we don't need a lot of advanced/refined functionality.

I've been through this cycle a few times, this time we are using MediaWiki. I don't remember what we used last time, I think it was a Drupal-based wiki.

None of them made a whole lot of impression on me either good or bad.

I agree w/the other posters that this is a pretty ambitious goal ("better wiki") - I'm like a lot of other folks in that what is out there is more than enough and we probably don't even exercise 10% of the features.

I also agree w/the other poster that said "people don't bother". Very true, stuff usually doesn't end up in wiki unless I put it there or I ask somebody else to do so. Very few people will do this habitually without a lot of strong and recurring encouragement.
Twitter Launches Stories Email Digest That Mimics Look Of Discover Tab
Seed Investment Bubble: Seed Capital as Training Grounds
And it's generally nowhere near 54 hours... more like 42. We nominally started at 6pm on Friday night, but teams weren't formed until 9-10pm. Pitches were demoed Sunday afternoon, and 48 hours from the start on Friday - Sunday at 6pm, it was all over. I've no clue why they SW fixates on the "54 hours" number. 42 would be far closer to the truth, but perhaps more intimidating for people?
Really cool concept, good business model, well made app. Definitely recommended for any geeky parent with kids who wants to bring the modernity of 21st century technology into the multi-millenia old act of telling stories to the younger generation before the night falls.

That being said, their massive amount of content is produced by underpaying recent grads from top art schools (my girlfriend did some work for them). That way, they get extremely high quality illustration skills for an extremely low price.

I hope that situation will change soon— children oriented iPad apps are taking off, and high quality illustrations have a big role to play in that— I think parents appreciate the value in a finely drawn story. But yet illustrators are still very much underpaid, especially in contrast to the developers of these apps.
XBoard: A Recordable, Video-Like, HTML5 Canvas Whiteboard
Actually it does take this into account (in a roundabout way). After two hits on the last ship it does know orientation of the ship. It gets this information by applying a massive weighting to the locations where the ship could be that pass through this location.

"and so hit squares are treated as unvisited space squares for deciding if a ship 'could' pass through this square, and then a heavy score weighting is granted to possible locations that pass through a point we know already know contains a hit."

You'll notice that as soon as it wings the ship and knows the orientation that it continues in that direction.

(I concede your point, however, that without this weighting the probability density would be the superposition of all possible locations of the ship independant of other information - that would be a much more complex calculation).

As to how best to place the ships, there is no correct answer, as those who study game theory will tell you. If you had a strategy, then if the opponent knew that there was this strategy, then he could foil you be firing into these locations first, but if you knew that he knew ... etc.

See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
That would awesome. Have no idea how to do it, but if it's possible, I'll try to figure it out :)

Thanks!
NYC offering a free, 3 day event to woo LatAm startups to “be a part of it”
Huh? It's right there. Quote:

The Russian-language pages were licensed to the Russian company SUP media, founded
by US entrepreneur Andrew Paulson and a Russian banker thought to be close to the
Kremlin, Alexander Mamut. Just over a year later, SUP bought LiveJournal.
Cubes - Python Lightweight OLAP - 0.9 released
Interesting, what is the name of this 3rd party?
Far more likely that Duritz is naive about BitTorrent than that he's right about its role in his industry.

People listen to songs on the radio and then buy the recording so that they can play higher-quality versions of their preferred songs on demand.

Nobody rationally torrents a CD rip and then goes to the store to buy the real version.

Further evidence of Duritz naivete: they're releasing a 4-song teaser of their new album on BitTorrent. Exactly what is the advantage of holding back tracks in their official release? It is utterly, absolutely inevitable that high-fidelity versions of all their tracks will be on BitTorrent moments after they become available in any form. Partial teaser releases are a pantomimed form of control and a waste of time. If you believe P2P sharing is a real business benefit, you embrace it for real.
The problem here is that there is very little, if anything, as complicated as software. Preventing leaks like in the example is not that difficult -- you put in pipes that can handle a lot more than the required load, because it is unacceptably expensive to have them burst and the better pipes are not that much more expensive (putting them in is).
Why We Built "The Architecture of Open Source Applications"
This was done for a school project. I don't know of any similar projects online. If anyone knows of any, I'd love to hear about it.
No blog post, but I've learned most concepts from https://github.com/addyosmani/backbone-fundamentals
The article is very outdated (02/29/12)
Looks really cool. Will definitely try this out.
Thanks. that was one of my hopes actually - that someone would see git-playback and think 'wouldn't it be cool if <insert-tool-name-here> could do something like this?'
Thanks for the reply! And the link. Good point about booking years of surplus units.
That's a largely theoretical advantage for radio.

What happens far more often is that the big labels that are paying (directly or indirectly) get to decide what gets played. And listeners are forced to choose between a handful of intentionally-overlapping stations, each of which is pushing, primarily, an unfortunately small number of "hits".

While bittorrent itself is not a medium that lends itself to discovery, it does at least serve any non-trivial subset of taste and isn't as easily gamed as radio play and shelf space.
Mailchimp gives away templates that are tested for the most part. You don't even have to be a customer, but I'm sure they'd love it if you were.

http://mailchimp.com/resources/html-email-templates/
I've used both Flask and Django for apps that are both simple and complex. What I have discovered, is that if I use Flask for a complex app, I need to organize my code in clean components that end up looking like Django. Yes, I can do this more-or-less in a freeform manner with Flask, and even use the "one file for everything" method, but for a complex app, I wouldn't want to. It's too hard to manage.

So, in the end, I end up mimicking the basic structure of a Django project: Models, Views, Forms, Utilities, etc. Yes, different ORM, different Form library, WSGI middleware instead of context processors, etc., but all-in-all, no less complex than had I used Django. It's really to the point that I find it hardly any faster to code in Flask for all but the most basic sites.

I still use Flask for super simple projects that require no Admin interface, such as Personalized URL sites for ad campaigns. So it certainly has it's place.
This reads like my life story. Falling in love with a new technology, trying to use it in production, only to find out that it just isn't there yet :)

Node.js will become a great option for web development, but I don't think that node, at this moment, is ready for "mainstream" use.
Meh this is not news. Unless you actively look for this you would not know it was there. Who cares.
Actually, in real clothes it would be difficult to turn it inside out through a small tear

Topologically possible, but with a physical constraint (or more likely, you increase the tear trying to do it)
Recently launched our startup Shopick.com 
We would love to have your feedback/Suggestions on our website .
Late reply:

The difference is that having an application available through the App Store is pretty valuable on its own. It gets you access to Apple's QA, processing, and fulfillment services, as well as a seriously HUGE customer base.

By contrast, a .secure domain doesn't appear to give you much besides the name. All of the actual security is still your responsibility.
Wasn't there an ssh client extension already? How did it work if raw sockets weren't available?
Sorry. Yahoo! provided an embeddable widget for weather forecasts that was used pretty commonplace on the internet. Today, all requests to that widget just forward to the weather.yahoo.com homepage, thus breaking any websites using the widget. I had to go through clients' websites and prepend a uk. to the weather subdomain to get it to work.
Ah yes, didn't read that far into it yet, but of course an explanation of the author about his own intentions is always a good place to start for answers ;)

Interesting link to the Screwtape Letters. I never heard of that before, so I'll be sure to check that out. Thanks for the tip!
Can a Better Vibrator [and Design] Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?
Presumably the extension would use XHR polling or websockets to relay input and display to the browser. That's how it works with other web SSH clients.

Edit: ajaxterm
I think that quantom mechanics makes us think differently about probability and determinism by giving the mathematical (human created) concept of probability a physical meaning. Similar to the example in intuition 2, a coin toss could be considered determinstic even if we do not try to predict the result. It is pre-determined that given a large enough number of coin tosses, very close to 50% of them would come out heads. Qunatom mechanics makes us consider probability as a physical property inherent in all physical objects. This way of thinking helps reasoning about genetic predisposition as well (which is always probabilistic). Just like any coin is "free" to make a choice, and yet it is certain that they would (almost) precisely split down the middle, so too can genetic predisposition can be said to be both constraining and not constraining at all at the same time.
Since our stack involved MongoDB, it only made sense to live in a JS only environment.

I've never used MongoDB; can someone explain to me why this would seem like an advantage, and/or what it has to do with MongoDB?

Is the MongoDB API simply JavaScript?
You can use both of them on the same project. The reason is that CherryPy is primarily a web application server, and Flask is primarily a web framework.

(I'm not sure why you would want to do that, because Flask comes with Werkzeug, which is better integrated and I trust its author a bit more.)

Also, I've never seen a better documentation than Flask's.
Perhaps. But if that firm just so happens to be named "Thiel Capital", I think it's fair to assume that Thiel has some responsibility, wouldn't you agree?
This is sort of what I do, but the problem for me right now is keeping the machines up to date. Because I sometimes don't use a specific stack for awhile it becomes stagnant and I end up just rebuilding the image. Other than ssh keys nothing really transfers over well between configurations. That said what would be nice is if I had a way to setup a 'beacon' on each machine so that I could write a fab script (or something) that when I type fab deploy -django it would find y newly created django ready VM or whatever.
Scanning the exam's questions, I really can't see them as "hard" in the conventional sense.

Hard would be a question in math, physics or some other field which has a very difficult to discover objective answer. There's no limit to hard here but these essay questions are different. "Should wealth be inheritable?" just doesn't have an objective answer and one's answer could only be judged based on whatever the exam grader thinks is a good answer (well written, clever, whatever). In fact, considering one can choose three out of twenty seven, the exam doesn't seem much harder than some essay exams I've taken that were supposed to be extremely easy (CBest, for example). Some of the essays would be require to marshal facts in a given field (classics or economics) but we can hope the writers have some expertise in something.

I think the only way the questions could be considered hard would be if someone taking it thought they needed to settle one or another of these debatable questions. There you have might the situation where geeks and humanities majors each think the other has "really hard exams"...

Edit: And that's "are there objective probabilities" - an English major could take half an hour to answer without worrying about whether they'd really objectively established their answer. We geeks will stop and aim for an "objective" answer. But while one can establish whatever model one wants in the realm of math, one isn't going to pin down the concept of "objective" and "probability" as used by English speaking humans today.
Managers pay quite a bit to get "unknown artists" airtime on radio stations.

Smaller bands advertising via internet route still have YouTube, Soundcloud, etc. I've bought a few albums as a result.

Also, with the proliferation of smartphones, a significant group choose to listen off their own devices rather than slog through yet another pop song + advertising.
It's interesting that both this and raspberry pi's intent are to be educational in nature. And fun at that.
Stephen Wolfram IAmA On Reddit (3pm EST)
Senate panel eyes Windows RT browser restrictions
I believe that human consciousness is entirely manifest in the brain (and, of course, it's effected by other nerves elsewhere in the body). But moreover, I believe that brain is performing "normal computation," by which I mean Turing complete computation. Because of that, there is no real reason why the same computation responsible for human consciousness couldn't run equivalently on other Turing complete hardware.
This would be a really useful feature. Good commit messages often help me to better understand big changes to something.
The wiki we have now (mediawiki) isn't easy enough for the layman, and isn't integrated enough for them to be comfortable with it.

Internally, the dev teams and the IT staff use the wiki, but externally everyone uses Microsoft OneNote and there is no way for us to possibly convince them that a wiki would ever be better.

OneNote seems sort of like a wiki for the masses, and I think if you could create wiki software that is as easy for lay people to use as OneNote, you would have yourself a marketable product.
Thanks for all the links guys, I'm going to give Cloudfoundary and OpenShift a shot, OS looks a bit more feature filled but some of the blogs I've read say OS is all marketing. I'll give both a shot and write a blog post which you'll see soon here on HN (hopefully).
Disrupt NYC Finals Judges
What I mean by "how to think" is developing organized thought processes for solving (seemingly) hard problems. For example, breaking a large problem into smaller ones, solving the smaller ones, then assembling the solution into a larger one. When faced with a problem, determining what you know and don't know about it. An organized methodology for distinguishing facts from baloney.

All these skills are developed in the process of STEM training. I know I got an awful lot better at it after 4 years of that, and I can see the deficits in those abilities in people who have not undergone such.

For example, given someone debugging their program - I see many programmers who will just try guessing things randomly. If they get lucky with this approach, they often have little idea of why their change made it work. (Often, nor do they care.) But they do spend an awful lot of time with this method, compared with someone who sets about finding the problem in an organized fashion.
The article itself says, "While this HOWTO tries to give an overview of Python in the web, it cannot always be as up to date as desired. Web development in Python is rapidly moving forward, so the wiki page on Web Programming [1] may be more in sync with recent development."

So it may not have been the best resource to present on HN in the first place.

[1] http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebProgramming
How to play Dungeons & Dragons Online in our Macs
MVC is a local maxima we found to build complex apps. Complex app will always require complex structure no matter the environment.

I don't want to disagree on something I don't have much experience with, but at the same time, I'd like to hear more about how you build your projects.

(In addition, considering there are two viable options for plug-and-play Flask admin interfaces, I don't know why you made it sound difficult.)
I just got a parcel from Yodell for the first time the other day, are these the same guys as Hermes? The driver was the same and the service was piss-poor (missed first delivery despite being in at the time, was left a blank card, phoned premium rate phone number which was automated saying minimum 10 minute wait, instead opting not to pay went online and re-scheduled delivery which was not honoured, parcel finally arrived randomly at 9 o'clock at night driver just chucked in the porch and drove off).
How is it different from xmlrpclib?

http://docs.python.org/library/xmlrpclib.html#example-of-cli...
I really doubt modifying a GET URL would be considered criminal in any court. It's far too easily accessible to everyone. It's two physical actions, a click and a keypress.
Maybe not buy a CD for themselves. On the other hand..

I have bought and given away music that I've only listened to pirated (more than once).

I also most likely wouldn't have been to two Bob Dylan and two PJ Harvey concerts if it hadn't been for Napster and BitTorrent.