skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The company was actually founded by the creators of the Scale and Akka programming languages. The Typesafe Stack, which is compatible with Java, combines the Akka middleware framework"

So, TechCrunch, is Akka a programming language or a middleware framework? High-quality reporting as usual from TC.
This news is exciting because it marks the beginning of offline wallet-less transactions. You can go to a store with nothing and end up buying something with your phone number and a pin code.

PayPal retains its crown for convenient payments. Making offline payments with your phone number and a pin code indeed seems like the future.

Its unfortunate however that PayPal is not vendor friendly.
He jumps in and applies star rating problems just to movies, gives an alternative that works only for movies and in the end promotes his own movie site.
Primarily (i believe) because those of us perusing hacker news care about the content with as little fluff or ui distractions. Many of us (grey-beards particularly) are still preferential to old style ansi colour typesets on a plain (non pure-white/non pure-black) background.

The layout makes quick work of scanning for interesting articles, seeing which have a slew of comments and what not. It is and always has been about the content and never about the flashy appearance (lack thereof). It is functional in its simplicity. This is why I still end up using freshnews.org (and have for over 12 years) as a news aggregator site. Simple, Clean, very muted use of colours and shapes. I find what I want quickly because I value my time, even when slacking.
Thanks for this great comment & thanks OP!

Is there some reason not to use 36 as a radix and access the whole lowercase alphabet like

(10).toString(36) // "a"
...
(36).toString(36) // "z"

? I'm curious why you use varied combinations of radixes & base numbers.

EDIT: Friend pointed out that you are only extending the number set out to what's required for that one character. Makes sense now. :)
I assume by complex data type you mean something like (say) complex numbers, IP addresses, etc. The key difference is that the components of a complex data type don't stand on their own, or it's a violation of 1NF. I wouldn't mind storing a complex number in one column instead of two largely because I'd rather math with complex numbers "just work" and I'm unlikely to go updating the database for just the imaginary part. Likewise with IP addresses, it is useful to query them with netmasks and the like, but you're unlikely to query or update some middle component of them.

The interesting thing about arrays is depending on the work you're doing with them, they could either be a violation of 1NF or not. For example, if you're storing vectors in the physics sense, you may not be querying or updating their contents, in which case it's not a violation of 1NF because it's an atomic value. The danger of encouraging people to use Postgres's arrays is a fair number of the people reading are developers and will take this as carte blanch to store repeated values or sets as arrays, and miss out on a bunch of the power and elegance of relational databases (and probably cause themselves a lot of pain dealing with a type that has no direct and helpful JDBC mapping, for example).

> if for no other reason than it could save a lot of space

I discourage people from worrying too much up-front about the space utilization of their database design for several reasons. Intuitions about database storage and performance tend to be incorrect. Indexes usually matter a lot more in terms of disk use than the exact types of the columns. It's also a bad idea to spend a lot of energy optimizing the database before you have a significant amount of real-world data. Query performance alone varies dramatically between fake and real-world data sets, in part because the query planner will choose different strategies based on the sizes of tables and indexes and also because you usually don't know ahead of time what your access patterns will look like.

When it comes to databases, there really aren't very many hard and fast rules compared to rules of thumb. The rule of thumb on arrays is don't use them, and there are good reasons for that. It could be that you see massive performance and disk savings with tags and the loss of relational correctness doesn't bite you in a particular application, but you should investigate before choosing. All optimizations are trading flexibility for performance. You should make sure you don't need the flexibility and you do need the performance before making the trade.
As a guy who recently switched from years of ASP.Net MVC to Rails, I read this post and wanted to shout...

"Watch out everybody, he's hitting the database!!!"

Ruby is a great language that I love, but this is one of those cases where Ruby's conciseness and readability hide a TON of complexity. And complexity in tests is death.

I've seen it for myself -- there's a lot of technical debt interest in those tests. It looks manageable at the beginning, especially within the scope of a blog post, but when the app grows and grows and grows, the tests fail.
Why don't rating systems just give a simple yes/no question to the reader. In the case of rating a movie, just ask "Would you watch this again?" or in the case of purchasing a product from Amazon, "Would you purchase this item again?"

I'd rather a boolean system than one where someone's 4-star rating is different than my 4-star rating. Whenever I see a multi-star rating system, I remember back to a prof I once had that said "The top grade is B+. A's are reserved for God." Albeit disgusting, it taught me that everyone has a different rating scale.
I think that what he is getting at is that you are taking it on faith that the logic is solid behind the theory. One of the things about science is that it is an observation about the reality that we can see.

I think religion is about the reality that we can't. It's not about explaining away something, but trying to put a boundary on what we do and don't understand. I think the biggest downfall of religion is when we (religious folks) try to make observations about the world with our feelings. That doesn't work. I can't feel a desk with my "heart" any more than I can feel radio waves with my hands.

I think what is irrational is that science feels that it can explain everything all the way, but I'm of the opinion that the further we dig the deeper it will go. We used to believe the proton, neutron, and electron were the smallest form of matter. What will be next? I have "faith" that something new will be discovered, which is where we step into an irrational realm.

Faith in anything is irrational. Succinctly, To believe in that which is outside of your own thoughts is irrational, but we do and we must to survive.
Isn't this a chromebook?
So what exactly is Branch? And what's Medium?
Apple Granted Patent for Ad-Skipping Technology
Glad to see this. As a longtime Java developer I've found Scala has made coding for the JVM fun again.
...at some point you are going to have to take something on faith...

At some point you are going to have to believe that someone else is giving you accurate, verifiable information, and you're going to have to trust them because you don't have the time to actually verify it.
It seems to me like "rewatchability" isn't really a useful metric when I am looking for a new-to-me movie to watch.

And when I am looking at user rankings for a movie, almost by definition I am only concerned with rankings for movies I haven't yet seen, since I already have an internal self-ranking for a movie I've seen already.

Histograms are extremely useful for knowing the spread of rankings, which the scatter plot also illuminates.
Who is this we you speak of? You can drop support for IE8 any time you want. I'd rather not drop support for the latest version of Opera though, which I've had to do simple because it doesn't have flexbox.
The most important question a startup can ask
Life Lessons from the Mosh Pit
US seizes Android app piracy sites in copyright crackdown
Yeah, if an IT department messed up, call the helpdesk and complain. The setting will either be fixed or support should be able to get you through the menus to correct the setting on your own.
Do the sites in question even have Flemish interfaces?
I applaud this author for having an open mind on this topic.

I think often times in science there is an ego that we can and we will uncover all the secrets of the universe, but that in an of itself is something taken on faith.

It is actually something irrationally taken on faith, if experience and data counts for anything, then the only logical theory to this argument is that we can't and won't ever find an end to discovery. Why? Because as we uncover the mysteries of the universe an exponential number of mysteries open up to us.

But then again, I'm taking that all on faith :-)
AFAIK, McDonald's and Walmart take Discover; McDonald's alone has more locations than Starbucks.

That said, I can't remember the last time I've seen anyone use Discover anywhere. Starbucks has far better visibility; they still likely have the marketing advantage.
This will probably improve Clojure adoption in the long run. It's much easier to go from learning 1 to 2 functional programming languages than it is to go from 0 to 1.
I read this as a pretty clear indicator of what the funding environment is starting to look like.
The use of tables has no impact that I can see on the appearance of the site, unless you view the site over, say, telnet.

And I for one do not find the site ugly. I find most other sites ugly. :-)
haha whats next? "Turn off your virus check, it's a false positive!!!!"
Is it a prototype, yes. Is it fake, no.
http://mashable.com/2012/08/20/aerofex-hover-vehicle/
The problem is people do not take the time to rate products (movies in this case) unless they are notably good or notably bad. I believe Rotten Tomatoes has the most realistically accurate system for rating movies. Either you think someone should see the movie, or shouldn't. If the majority of people are on the fence, then it will get a rating around 50%.
Offshore companies moving call centers back to the States
More or less, except 3000 years ago travel was far more of an issue. But, somewhere in the ~2,500-30,000 years it's probably true.

Also, with a population of 1 million people a female line 'wining' is much more likely than with a ~6 billion people population that probably will not happen again for a vary long time without some awesome mutation.
Could have a fluid layout covering the full screen. Better typography, The gray background for the complete page and not for a patch on the screen. No orange and a lot more simple changes like that can make it look beautiful
Re: Your watchmen quote

I think Amazon's "Was this rating helpful (Yes/No)?" provides a good filter for ratings. A lot of mindlessly negative reviews get filtered out by the users who come along afterwards and rate the rating in their own self-interest.
Celebrate the Farmer
CloudFlare's ScrapeShield spots single line of text copy/pasted from my blog
God of the gaps.
That's where we find ourselves currently: constructing 3-4 levels out due to Law of Demeter violations, and it becomes incredibly brittle when seemingly unrelated classes change.

IMO, DHH (and others) argue too hard against core OO principles (like SRP and LoD) that have the possibility of helping out when the domain model becomes more complex. "Just use Rails" is fine when spinning up, but as the app grows, it becomes increasingly less pleasant. Coupling increases in the name of less code.

Ideas like hexagonal architecture look nice, but I'm left wondering how to implement them when the framework insists on infecting core domain classes (AR::Base).
Are we sure abiogenesis only happened once? Given how quickly life appeared once the conditions were right, it doesn't seem too implausible that the lightning strike might have happened in two different tidal pools on opposite sides of the planet, and it seems just vaguely plausible that there would be (bacterial) descendants of each that have no interbreeding in their ancestry.
From what I've seen - a lot. You can lose a leading client (or cause huge bump on the road), your marketing plan can fall apart.

It's about finishing stuff today, so tomorrow you can do more important strategical stuff.

Start-up contrary to some of beliefs is not one big effort to reach the summit. It's a series of small wins (and loses) that accumulate. And you need to be accumulating them faster than your money runs out or competition takes the space, etc.
Startups Must Balance Social Media Costs vs Value
Ask HN: Best mobile app development framework
I'm interested in doing some development for Android and iOS and would be interested in people's opinions of frameworks like Corona Mobile, Moai, ...

What have people used? Are they all focussed on game development, or are there some that could give me access to, say, the devices camera?
I personally use the "HackerNew" extension on Google Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lgoghlndihpmbbgmbp...

it makes the layout/styles a lot nicer and adds some useful features such as:

- Improved readability design

- Super fast inline replies

- Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames

- Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user

- Endless scrolling

- Collapsible comment threads

- Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer
Agree 100%. Moreover, any scientific theory is an open challenge. If you can create a reproducible experiment that disproves a theory, then we must throw it away.
The important part is that the article - and ultimately, the funding - are because of 9gag users uploading stuff they find on r/pics and r/funny, even though they'd never admit that (much like most Redditors would never admit the majority of Reddit's memes either originated from or are directly from 4chan).
Same thing I'm saying. Just provinding the examples of how the Desktop is still moving forward :P
You can only angel invest (right now) if you're an accredited investor which is a non-trivial barrier for a freelancing engineer to overcome.
Your Smart House in the Cloud
There will always be something in the global namespace under current JS environments (in the browser anyway). As long as people are aware of what that means it's very rarely an actual problem.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415798
We can detect Higgs boson in principle (and may have recently). Religion on the other hand remains ramblings of bronze age goat herders who "knew" the secrets of the universe because a burning bush revealed it to them. We now have ample evidence that theistic gods are man made inventions. For those of us who care about what is true, this is enough to discard religion as a pure lie, which is not even a force for the good in the world (child raping, crusades, inquisitions, suicide bombers, jihads, Armageddons and end of times. These people just can't wait to die or if they can't live forever, kill everyone else as well with them).

Science on the other hand is not a belief system. Evidence based reasoning doesn't work that way. It strikes me as odd that someone who is presumably a trained scientist hasn't even understood that basic charge theists put forward repeatedly (it boils down to "it takes equal amount of faith not to believe in god as it does to believe in god" applied to all kinds of things in this case science based on empirical evidence. As if there is even a trace of credible evidence for god. In fact when you start poking around various deities it gets incredibly uncomfortable for the religious because of how little evidence there is for historicity of say Jesus let alone his presumed divinity.).

Awe and amazement is not exclusive to religion you know. Just like how religion has hijacked morals and now boldly claims you can't be a moral person without some kind of delusion in sky god (it doesn't even have to be their brand of delusion, anything is better than atheism or secularism). These people fail to understand that morals like language are also products of our wills and minds and therefore also a technology. We can decide slavery is not a good idea (despite endorsement from Yahweh). We can decide that fairly applied laws, rather than nepotistic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions, products of our minds, as much as lightbulbs and telegraphs are. People who insist on absolute biblical morality are really insisting on using bronze age technology absolutely. Time and time again, religion is proving itself incapable of catching up with the achievements of secular society, which is not surprising really, religion is now a branch of human ignorance. It was our first approximation of science, first explanation for everything primitive mind feared but could not explain, but it failed to evolve and improve because of its insistence on supernatural and supernatural explanations, which simply are not supported by evidence.

And this brings me to a larger point, why do we even have religion today? Precisely because believing is lot easier than thinking. It takes time and effort to acquire knowledge but any fool can acquire faith instantly and effortlessly. If it took any effort most people would not bother with it. And the biggest problem with all of this is this love affair with ignorance is made into a virtue by religion.
Thanx for the explanation, however Bash is slowly losing fight with ever more popular ZSH (and oh-my-zsh on top of it)
As with many new technology advances in the finance sector, I predict this to be use for crime.

Right now it's easy for criminals to get money into paypal accounts, but difficult to get money in their hands, because it often requires steps that involve tying a transaction to a bank account or something traceable.

If someone can just walk into a store and type a couple of numbers into a keypad and walk out with items worth cash, it gives the criminals an easy gateway to spend their ill-gotten funds.
October 2009 iPhone 4 Prototype Shows Up on eBay
Works just fine for us, even our college sophomore intern had no trouble figuring it out.
I wonder if charging $5 for the game would lead to a massive increase in the % that pay. Steam did a lot of testing around this, hence having F2P (TF2) and $20 games with discounts (L4D etc)
Newry couple launch dance academy 'Shall We Dance?'
I checked both this article and the articles referenced in it and could not find a single place where they back that number up with any hard research. Willing to bet there wasn't any.
Science doesn't require you to take anything on faith

But it does, in a sense. See, for example, The Problem of Induction[1].

for every theory and result it states it gives you the tools and methods to go away and verify it for yourself.

The scientific method is certainly my preferred choice for developing new knowledge, and it appears to be better than any other system developed to date (certainly better than accepting weird folklore from ancient books). But, in a manner of speaking, there is a certain sort of "faith" involved with science as well.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
I am going to be provocative and say that there are scientists that actively try to expand into the other realm. After all philosophy and religion are products of the human brain activity, which is composed of cells, so why can't these functions be approached in a scientific way? To say that we will have to stop inquiring about it would be lazy
I'm not sure why I would care about the "rewatchable" metric. I only look at reviews for a movie I haven't seen. If I've seen it I can decide myself if I'd enjoy watching again. So subtracting that you are left with the normal star system rating.
AFAIK all known life shares common ancestry. That doesn't mean life couldn't have arisen twice, but if it did, and if its descendants still exist, we haven't found them.
And yet the 95% enjoy a far higher quality product than the 5% that actually pay, when it comes to Ubisoft games.
Science is our best effort attempt to describe the world around us. Science can't go beyond that.

All models are wrong but some models are more useful than others. It is unlikely that our models fit the data perfectly. Indeed we cannot know if we even have all the data in the first place. We should not mistake science for the real world, or the model for the data.

Naturalists would say that there's nothing beyond that, nothing beyond the world around us as described by science. They have no rational reason to assert such a position. They have no philosophical or scientific tools to make such a claim. Indeed the scientific method was never intended to be used towards that end. Philosophy is similarly ill-suited.

The mistake of naturalists is to conflate science with atheism and to confuse "faith" (conviction established by reason) with "blind faith" (unfounded conviction), two separate concepts. For example, "I have a degree of faith in you based on past performance" vs "I have a degree of faith in you based on whimsy".

On the other hand, the supernaturalist believes there's something beyond the world around us. Likewise, the supernaturalist has no tools (philosophy, science) to assert such a position. Both the naturalist (represented by atheism) and the supernaturalist (represented by blind faith) are indefensible positions.

Therefore there is no ground on which to outright reject or accept the possibility of miracles.

This leaves the middle ground (represented by agnosticism). Here the position is such that we can't reach out and describe the existence or non-existence of the supernatural, unless it were to reach out and describe itself to us in a way that would clearly be supernatural. This would mean that we could only ever confirm the existence of the supernatural but never deny it. For that task, we would need to look to history, using the tools of historical inquiry, if indeed there is anything supernatural yet to be found in history.

The claim of Christ, of the life and death and resurrection of Christ in history would be one such claim to examine:

"I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw him. For I am the least of all the apostles. In fact, I'm not even worthy to be called an apostle after the way I persecuted God's church." - Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians
I don't think this is going to kill off PopCap, and I agree that layoffs are a part of business. My point was that, for every PopCap laying off some employees, there are 10 sub-par studios going to be forced to downsize or close due to the same market conditions.

Then again, I don't think anyone who followed this space closely didn't see this coming. The industry is maturing. If it frees up some developers to do (in my opinion) better work, that's a "good thing".
I really don't believe that number. Even when i was a poor pupil and student and pirated stuff, never ever was my games collection 95% pirated. And that was when most games weren't bound to having an internet connection or used multiplayer on the internet.