skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Myself and 2 friends built BreakBase with the goal of making the seemingly simple process of playing a board game on the Internet with friends as easy as it should be. Existing sites on the web are shockingly complex to find a way to play against people you already have means of contacting.

At the time of this writing, we’ve got 5 games: Checkers, Chess, Four-in-a-Row, Reversi and WordBase.

Features:

- Each ‘room’ has a unique url - share it via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google chat, or text message, it makes no difference to us. There’s no need to coordinate navigation to the same server, just to play a game. Just share the url.

- Play anonymously- you can play on our site without registering. If you want to, you can register to keep track of your records, get alerts when it’s your turn or something else interesting happens in your games.

- Real time updates. When your opponent makes a move / chats, you’ll see it right away without refreshing.

- Come back to your game later. If you register for an account, you can resume your game from a different device. Play from your phone, desktop, tablet, whatever. If you don't register, this doesn't work - we can't keep track of your games if we don't know who you are.

- No plugins required. BreakBase works on HTML5 / Javascript. No Flash / Java needed.

- WordBase supports up to 4 players.

- Get smart notifications via email or Twitter, and via the browser. Registered accounts only.

The stack:

- Main web app built on Pylons.

- Our Comet/push layer is built using Node.js, as the glue between ZeroMQ and Socket.io.

- We use MongoDB because it’s web scale.

The future: These are being actively worked on, and will be released in the near future:

- Planning more games. Currently considering Backgammon, War strategy games, or card games. Open (and eager) to suggestions

- Challenges. Challenge someone to a game directly from their profile.

- Mobile support. As of right now, you can make moves on Android / iOS devices by just going to breakbase.com in the browser, but we’d obviously like to provide a tailored experience for smaller screens.

What would it take to get you to use this on a regular basis?
Let's end the A/B vs. MAB pissing contest
Mixpanel introduces People Analytics
So basically he's just putting the controller methods in their own namespace. Which is all well and good, but I don't think anybody argues that all of your business logic has to be in the controller class for it to be considered MVC.
Are there any good free alternatives? I'm a student with a semester long group project on the horizon.
> You do when you're keeping in touch with friends you've made throughout your life and not just your current ones.

Your friends are the current ones. Those other people aren't friends anymore, they're acquaintances, people you used to know but don't see anymore. Friend isn't a permanent status, it's the people you hang out with and see on a regular basis. If your only contact with a person is through facebook, they aren't your friends.
If your controller has too much logic you should really consider putting more of it in your model and view.

Maybe I don't understand MVC, and you all can tell me How Wrong I Am, but here's how I understand MVC at present:

Your Model is a public API, a Service Gateway -- and it should do a couple of things in principle. The first is that it should be able to manage a list of subscribed view/controllers, and push updates out to them -- this was difficult with Web 2.0 but we're now moving to systems where this is considered normal. The second is that it should define a set of API commands which change that state and push out those subscriptions. That second bit is crucial, it's the difference between writing assembly and Python. If you have logic in your controller then it's probably because your model does not expose certain high-level concepts which your controller would use directly, so you're taking data from the model and building a higher-order model in your controller, before you operate on it.

It helps me to remember that in Smalltalk the idea was to always have <view|controller> pairs. They were always the same object split in two; each view had its own controller and vice versa. The controller is supposed to be input-oriented and the view is supposed to be output-oriented; the model says "hey, X changed" and the view updates what X looks like; the user clicks on X and the controller sends a signal to the view to change some more, the user erases X and the controller sends this request to the model, which will update the view when the request is complete.

Viewed this way it's really hard to see what the difference is supposed to be between MVC and MOVE. Clearly the messages in MVC are the Events in MOVE. Most of the controller logic has been pushed into the View, which should now handle input actions. Data cannot be dynamically pushed from the Model to the View because this is of course a Web 2.0 technology (pre-cometcasting, pre-websockets). The Operation sits in a grey area, implementing higher-order abstractions from the lower-order model.

Maybe we could do better with a hybrid, because the idea of decoupling subscriptions from the public API might actually be a good idea, in line with the Clojure philosophy that things should be de-complected into their simplest representations. But if I understand MVC right, then I don't see why you've got all your business logic in your controller. Heck, the View is supposed to be client-side, why isn't your Controller client side? Or if it is, and you have all this business logic in it, why are you trusting the client to do your business logic? Your gripes with MVC don't make sense to me.
That's partially correct. FDR wasn't just trying to buy farmers votes, he really did believe that high prices were good for the economy. He correctly realized that the deflation being experienced in the US was bad, but he thought that artificially increasing prices would fix things, but in reality people didn't have the money to pay the new, higher, prices and all of FDR's efforts to raise the prices of things (the NRA especially) just ended up making the depression worse.

Now, FDR did a lot of things and some of them worked pretty well. He'd touched off the fastest industrial expansion in US history a few months before he killed it with the NRA, for example. I'm not aware of any current economic school of thought that would endorse the idea that price supports actually helped with the depression. A Keynesian would say that you have to run a deficit to increase the aggregate demand, a Monetarist would say you need more money to increase aggregate demand, a Supply-Sider would say you can't help, a Socialist would say the state needs to take over the means of production, etc.

Now, I do have friends from states that rely on agricultural subsidies, and their high school history textbooks evidently did wax poetic about how awesome agricultural subsidies were, but that isn't in most American's high school educations.
It seems that Facebook and IRC seem to be well suited for very different kinds of communications. There's no reason that you can't use both.
They want recruit somebody who enjoys gaming to build (or maintain) games.

I think that's a pretty smart and blindingly obvious approach. They'll probably be flooded with applicants hopefully some of them are actually coders.

I do think they'll end up with a majority non-coding turnout though. Is this the first time this kind of thing has been attempted?
Does this happen on android too?
I came here to comment about the how the proj. mgmt. problem has been solved in numerous ways by several companies. How could there by anything left to do?! And yet there are raving fans of this product right here. I guess there's a hundred different niches within the project management domain.
One of the things I like about this declaration compared to other similar ones (Declaration of Independence, UDHR, Stallman) is that it makes no mention of intrinsic rights. It clearly states its objectives as goals to work towards, rather attempting to frame an imaginary natural law by which these conditions already automagically apply to the human animal.

That said, it seems to me that there is a potential conflict between #3 (Openness) and #4 (Innovation). It is the same as the conflict between capitalism and democratic socialism: if you don't allow people a certain amount of economic tyranny in exchange for their work, the work won't happen, and civilization atrophies.

This is intuitive with physical goods: people won't make shoes if someone can just take them, so we back up the concept of ownership with state violence, and that allows people to make a living cobbling. The same phenomenon happens in computing, be it through copyright, vendor lock-in, or walled gardens, and this is always going to create an incentive to block #3 (or, the lack of such incentive will inhibit #4).

While I believe copyright/patent reform is deeply necessary, including the consideration that they might stymie more innovation than they create, this zero-sum conflict should be at the heart of it, and should be kept in mind when pursuing lofty goals of digital justice.
Show HN: Geo bookmarks
Thanks!

I feel I got pretty lucky with marketing. My best guess is that word-of-mouth has played a big part in the app's growth. People love to show off, and it turns out that Tiny Piano is a fun way to show off something cool to friends.

But specifically, I have two Facebook pages where people can like my app/company and get updates:
https://www.facebook.com/squarepoet
https://www.facebook.com/tinypiano

If someone likes my app, it'll show up in their profile. So there's a chance that their friend will also find my app.

I also include an "Email a Friend" button in the app. People use that button to share the app with friends.

As an engineer... I don't enjoy marketing. But I know it's super important, and I'll spend much more time on it going forward.
I just diagnosed and fixed a pausing issue with one of my Firefox extensions. The hard part is getting a reproducible case. But once you do, it's usually just a matter of doing a binary search through extensions, enabling and disabling half the candidates until the culprit is found.

A quick verification can be to start Firefox with the -profilemanager flag and create a new profile, and verify if it does or does not occur in a completely fresh profile.

In my case, pauses came from FoxyProxy regular expression pattern matching on urls where I was using:

(.*\.)*

to match subdomains. The issue went away when I did:

(?:.*\.)?

instead - non-capture, and of course noticing that . matched \. too.
Yes, exactly, this is why I don't use mbed.
I definitely appreciated the story, thanks! Now, having said that, I find the continued overuse of the "homeless people" label somewhat fraught. Not just you I mean, but in general I think it's a particularly lazy figure of speech that does less good than harm to our understanding of the problem.
Try AngularJS, that's MVC done right.
Why I Never Want to Outsource Again
On a corporate environment, all the outbound requests will be from one proxy, which could eat the request/ip rate very easily.
If you live in San Francisco, you are not protected by constitution
The best career choice is a hobby
Windows 8 will come with MSE functionality pre-installed.
A one-second UTC shift seems to be pretty good at totally screwing stuff up already. At least a one-hour shift would happen once every few centuries instead of once every few years.
To the extent that there's a lot of slack in the economy, factories laying idle and so forth, more money will tend to result in more production rather than more inflation. Now there are always some sectors of the economy that aren't idle so more money will always result in at least a little inflation, but in the case of the Great Depression this was very little. And they were experiencing deflation at the time anyways, so more inflation would have gotten them closer to price stability.
New U.S. Patent Office in Silicon Valley
Veritable is in open beta - anyone can make predictions
If management knows he's working for free they probably are vulnerable to all kinds of labor problems.
There is a marketplace (Mozilla Marketplace, http://marketplace.mozilla.org) already in beta. They work just like regular apps -- HTML/etc, with a JSON "manifest" file that contains metadata.
Will this mean more software patents?
> The Supreme Court ruled 5-4

That's a very narrow victory though.
I'd love to have this discussion move toward the topics of indie development and marketing. As a solo developer, I find it difficult to do good marketing.

I might try doing some giveaways (contests) on my FB page. I find that giveaways on sites like engadget tend to generate a lot of traffic.
Lol. It's always a smart move to call your users dumb when they don't appreciate a move your company has made.

What is this, strike 17 against them?
I don't think you need to go through all of this to weed out gamers. I'm sure P[enjoys games | is a programmer] is pretty high.
Well managed and secured Windows 7 is actually probably more secure than any other major desktop OS right now (iOS blows it out of the water of course). OSX is more secure out of the box for a single user deployment perhaps (largely due to being less of a target), but in a corporate environment, it's harder to really lock down OSX than anything else. Sadly.
One Way David Cameron Can Become More Popular
He is using a Motorola Xoom and not a iPad.
Surprising lack of information about the company, or the job.

Sounds cool, but they should really have limited it to people who realistically would re-locate to Israel and have experience. Otherwise, it's just a PR stunt.
Well, LinkedIn already has the professional identity market locked down, so an entrant would probably want to focus on personal/private identity.

One approach would be something targeted at dating and meeting people who share your preferred activities, while letting you manage how much of your real identity you want to reveal. Think Second Life meets FourSquare, with avatars, pseudonyms and various exaggerated expressions of individuality.

Another approach would be something for sharing information privately with a group of existing friends, building group identity. Think private clubhouse.
That's fantastic news. I've been very impressed with the amount of improvements Firefox has been undergoing recently.
Although we all want to avoid unnecessary code, etc, I think you need to do what best serves the user experience and still satisfies your aesthetic for the site. I'm in a similar situation. I want to follow good practices, but ultimately I want the UX to be optimal for the user's device/browser-proportions.

So I'm currently planning on several designs targeted to specific devices optimizing the experience for each. So, we'd have a small device design (phones), a larger mobile design (tablets/small-desktops), and even larger (desktops). Within each, we have to accommodate for a range of resolutions/orientations, but overall we want to provide the experience that's best for how the user is visiting our site.
Interesting article, but its only skin deep... The larger issues are down the road, it's where the engineers and the sophomore programmers are separated.
San Francisco, CA (Union Square) Fulltime. H1Bs are gone for 2012...but if you're good we'll work to figure out something.

Justin.tv's TwitchTV is the largest video game broadcasting site in the world and growing FAST. We are adding over a million users a month, and are looking for talented engineers looking to tackle challenging technical problems at SCALE.

Not only have we been growing exponentially (6 million unique visitors in June 2011 to 19 million in June 2012) our engagement has been growing even faster. Each unique visitor now spends over 75 minutes on average on TwitchTV.

You can check out our jobs at twitch.tv/jobs which will give you an idea of the problems we're tackling, but in the end we are just looking for great engineers who we think will increase the quality of our technical discussions and work well with us.

Feel free to email me directly if you'd like to set up a time to chat and learn more. brooke@twitch.tv
Same here. It occurred to me at some point that while I had a fairly large group of "friends" on Facebook, there were only 10-15 people that I really actually cared about.

And those are people that I communicate with on a regular basis outside of Facebook, either by hanging out with them in person, or phone/email for the ones who have moved away. So there's no love lost with them by ditching Facebook.

That leaves the group of people that I knew from college and high school, but had nothing else in common so we lost touch until Facebook came around. I graduated from college 5 years before joining Facebook, and looking back I don't feel like my life was any worse off in those intervening years because I didn't have those people on an e-friends list.
I love the last bunch with Ioke, Factor.
I agree that the controller abstraction is a bit ambiguous, certainly to the degree that MVC means different things to different people. I thought that the article would be pure flamebait, but actually it does seem to be more precise in its terminology, and captures more closely how I generally design software systems.
I'm not too interested in ad hominem attacks. Can you cite any specific examples? Would it contribute to the overall discussion if we debated them here?
Large Hadron Collider Suffers Interference From Lunar Gravity | TPM Idea Lab
Sadly, even those these people are outliers, they still exist. One need only visit the topix message boards or the anonymous comments section of a national web site to see it.

It is one of the less useful aspects of the Internet that it amplifies the small crazy voices along with the small useful ones.
Google Offers Concessions in E.U. Antitrust Case
> in fact, the wikipedia article on MVC is slightly off on the subject, assuming one accepts the original Xerox description as a source.

People complaining about factual inaccuracies on Wikipedia annoy me. It's Wikipedia. The entire point and purpose of it is to fix what you know is wrong.

For once, I'd like to see, "I just touched up the Wikipedia article on this subject to explain it a bit more accurately."
Have you considered HaXe? (Also similar to ActionScript 3)
DynamoDB is awesome, but...
Can you share the presentation? I'd love to see some code samples.
how is that link relevant?

the supreme court (led by scalia) has said that "heat-sensor" searches of homes are illegal. it's true there's a diminished expectation of privacy in vehicles, but i'd be very surprised if the x-ray vans withstood a legal challenge.

just recently, there was also a unanimous opinion also that held that warrantless gps tracking is unconstitutional.
I feel that this is one of those "great for data miners, terrifying for consumers" moments.
Oh! I'm sorry, it occurs to me that my comment can indeed be read that way, and that's not what I intended.

I mean it as "they attract these people", not "they are mostly these people:" the tiny percentage of society which is A is much more likely to be L, but that does not mean that most L's are A. So for example I would guess that most programmers are pretty sociable people, but we have a nasty reputation as highly antisocial because we attract people who prefer programming to partying. The Catholic church can tell you all about their difficulties with this type of thing.
We should chat about that. We take it super seriously. Would love your feedback.
Haiku to get QR code generation in KDL
Appreciate the skepticism here, but this seems like an exceptionally well worded pledge. Right now, it's the usual suspects (including Y Combinator and a number of other important advocates for a better internet) that have signed on, but it's early and hopefully this will become more main-stream.

An ideal outcome would probably require this to become a political lobbying tool, similar to Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform "Taxpayer Protection Pledge". It's nearly impossible to win a Republican election these days unless you sign-on: 96% of all Republicans in Congress have signed the pledge to never increase taxes[0].

To address a few detractors in this thread, please don't be confused when the word "free" is used. It's in reference to freedom, not cost. However, cost is specifically addressed:

Access:
Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Taxpay...
The Most Important Predictor of Sales Success - HBR
This is revolutionary and really closes the collect data -> analyze -> act feedback loop. Come to think of it, it really minds me of a DMP. If I were building a consumer app today, MP would be a big part of my growth strategy.
Acunote is free for <= 5 users
>An awful lot of finance (that used to run in Excel) is just side-effect free, compute-centric transformations over data

true dat.
For example, in Excel, checkout PV ( Click on Formulas->Financial->PV )
Given a $1K@par 10Y bond paying $50 annual coupon at 2% interest, Excel says the Present Value (PV) of the bond must be $1269.48

scala> (0.0 /: (1 to 10).map(x => 50/math.pow(1.02, x)))(_+_) + 1000/math.pow(1.02, 10)
scala> 1269.477

Getting rid of the fold produces the list of discounted coupons and the discounted principal...just a trivial teaser example, but most quants look at that & go, wow if you could do all that in 1 line, imagine the possibilities if you are pricing a mortgage with tranches...you could get rid of 4 page spreadsheets & replace with a paragraph of straight math & it would just work...and they'd be right, too.
Facebook messaging has group conversations that can mostly be used like IRC channels. I expect the primary reason that IRC is used is that Facebook's IM service was completely unable to reliably deliver messages for most of 2011.
Google Glasses Keynote Stunt - Behind the Scenes with Sergey Brin
What does a growth team work on day-to-day
Naturally, I meant nothing personal to you. Would a bug report suffice? ;)
Yeah, nope, not glaringly obvious, to me at least. Thanks for the clarification.

I guess I can see your point, but I think, in general, lobbyists are thought of as external to the congressional establishment, despite the similarity in possible roles, such as you point out... well, at least that's the way it works in my head, fwiw.
Of course we can agree that it's not a step in the right direction. I said pretty explicitly that blame falls on both sides here.
I'm pretty sure the company is doing this mainly for publicity among gamers. I wonder though: will they actually be able to find a good developer to hire.
What do you have to say to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188882 ?
The style is a good change of pace from reddit, but I think RES (http://redditenhancementsuite.com/) can pretty replicate the functionality (infinite scrolling, showing top comments, etc.) Nice work though.