skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those are awesome suggestions. Thank you! We were actually just approved as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the states, and that will open us up to a lot of funding opportunities. But we love the Costco Model idea!
Working full time for a single company is a huge risk.
List of every 3rd party library used in Facebook iOS v5
I've made just under $1,000 in sales today from HN. 1 in 7 people who have clicked through to the article go to the sales page.

EDIT: I'm sure a few people people are skeptical. Here's a screenshot from ejunkie (and I just crossed over the $1k mark): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2205912/Screen%20Shot%202012-08-23%...
If a wealthy corporation were to buy or even just 'sponsor' twitter, it would probably be worth subsidising just for the good-will effect on their reputation. Especially if they did so as it was being forced into charging.
Glad to hear that.

Maybe I was to brief on my reply, but... What I mean, was more of the know-how generated on Sparrow making its way in to Gmail app.
For getting early warnings and helping your employees debug what went wrong there are several good monitoring tools. They wont magically solve your problems but it will make it much easier for non-database experts to run a database server. For monitoring PostgreSQL I have used the excellent plugins that are shipped with munin.

http://munin-monitoring.org/

EDIT: munin does also ship monitoring plugins for MySQL but since I have never used them I cannot vouch for them. The general health monitoring (disk usage, CPU usage, SMART status, inode usage, ...) of the machines provided by munin is also probably more valuable than the database specific monitoring.
> They subtly update it every couple years to keep the shading and the bevel in line with current trends.

Apparently not. They changed it once in 1999 (after its original in 1998) and again in 2010.[1]

"The logo was the foundation for new icons and hundreds of tiny alterations designed to accommodate and seamlessly integrate the expanded functionality of the left-hand panel."[2]

So they had a legitimate design reason for changing the logo, not based solely on the brand...

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_logo

[2] - http://googleblog.blogspot.ro/2010/05/google-design-turned-u...
> The market wasn't then, and isn't now, zero-sum.

How many desktop operating systems are normal people going to use? Operating systems don't tend to be complementary (people running multiple OSes and desktop VMs are the exception, not the rule... especially back in the 90s).
A 899kb JPEG image (100% quality) compressed at best compression will take file size down to 878kb (but who leaves a JPEG at 100% quality?). While compressing a PNG will yield a file of identical size most times, if not larger.

I built my own archive format years ago, using bzip2 for game programming. When you compress an already compressed file the result is almost always larger, or at smallest is the same size. On top of having to be decompressed twice on the client side, this is a total waste of server resources.
Getting unexpected results.
That's not the issue. The issue is:

Are isolated DNA sequences per se un-patentable?
It is an often-missed subtlety of capitalism that a free market must include the existence of privately controlled economies that act in socialist ways. (Apple exerts tyrannical control over its app economy; Netflix's light users subsidize its heavy users; etc.)

Generally, even the most staunch libertarians are okay with such things because the payments and relationships are voluntary, issues like monopoly and free will notwithstanding.

But Twitter, FaceBook and even Google demand a form of somewhat involuntarily payment: time and attention. For some people, mainly the lucrative few who subsidize everyone else, time is much more scarce than money. These virtual "time-pennies" are sliced away in such negligible chunks that lead us to think we're not getting ripped off, but it's siphoning away an economic scarcity nonetheless, and everyone who participates in social media or any ad-supported services (which is asymptotically approaching everyone) pays the tax.

That's what Twitter's new rules really come down to: they couldn't give two figs about ensuring a consistent experience. It's an unsubtle smokescreen for "don't you dare interfere with our ads; that's our bread and butter you're f&*king with." It wouldn't surprise me if after locking down the client apps, they begin an aggressive cat-and-mouse game with ad-block plugins.

Is there anything wrong with any of this? Not inherently. But I'd much rather pay into a semi-socialist freemium service than one where my precious attention is sold to the highest bidder. (Dear App.net: go free-for-most with a paid tier, and you just might take over the world.)
The Professional Employer
Surely the wealth problem of the middle class has nothing to with the purchase of overpriced homes on large margin...
Flask support in PyCharm 2.6 EAP
Could be because they dropped support for 32-bit kernels in 10.8, and generally pretty much everything apart from public libraries are 64-bit only.
There was no attempt made to use Ruby idioms in the article. I think you're missing the point. It was merely an example how one can use alternate build tools, while extending their JavaScript or Cordova based app using Ruby over Objective-C. Not everyone is a fan of Xcode nor Obj-C. Lots of education about the tools was included to help one get on their way; the intention was not to be craft a reason as to why Ruby idioms can make a developer more productive.

RubyMotion does make sense here, if your goals are as described in the article.
There are benefits to keeping your routing in your app. Using different route sets based on environment variables, specifically migrating from one version of an api to another is not possible or easy with a purely htaccess router.

But I agree that in some cases the fastest you can do is an htaccess route.
Using Prolog in Windows NT Network Configuration
Agreed! The update loop is going to be really big for us. We are also considering some other features that would add to the gamification of the site (karma points for donating/sharing, becoming an ambassador for a particular profile, etc.) but those are still all in the brainstorming phase.

Like I said above, transparency is the single most important thing to us, and we spent more than a year establishing our partnerships. If you have any specific questions about transparency and accountability, I am more than happy to field them here. We also have a ton of info on our FAQ: http://watsi.org/faq
How Hacker News Completely Changed My Life
I can remember when IE was the best browser around as well. Sadly they capitalized on it's success in the worst possible way for the open web and it eventually cost them in certain courts of opinion. But they definitely pushed the web farther than any other browser at the time.
I guess #6 (locatr) hasn't heard about http://www.loc8tor.com/ :-)

I actually have a loc8tor unit and a bunch of fobs and they really do let you find things easily. Perhaps the coolest thing just just being able to answer the question 'is it in this room?' quickly and accurately.
That's a very open-ended question. What do you wish to hack?

When I started, I was advised to learn C. This has served me well, though I don't actually do much with C any more. I was also advised to learn Lisp. This was a very enlightening experience, but I don't actually do much with Lisp any more. I mostly write code in Python.

I have long had an interest in artificial intelligence, a classic hacker topic. I still do. But I eventually discovered that even more than waxing eloquent about theories of cognition, I enjoyed building applications that people actually benefited from. I learned a lot from Philip Greenspun's books and classes on web/database programming. Even when not doing web/database work, I believe what I learned there was helped me to become a better software engineer.

But software engineering is not necessarily hacking. Hackers need not produce anything that is useful to non-hackers. Hacking is often driven more by curiosity, enjoyment, and personal delight than helping non-hackers to accomplish things with a computer.

Or is it? The very definition of the word hacker is almost too ambiguous to be useful.

Lots of folks here recoil in hatred at the mention of ESR, but I found this interesting: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
I've gotten to know John a little bit, and I have to say it's a strange feeling to have a conversation with a person of his off-the-charts intelligence. I consider myself to be pretty smart-- was known as "the math whiz" in high school, went to top engineering universities and did very well there, have a couple of (minor) entrepreneurial accomplishments, etc. And yet talking to Carmack I feel like I'm talking to someone who is a full two standard deviations beyond me in raw intelligence horsepower. It's a pretty sobering and humbling experience.

Part of it is that he really does spend 8+ hours per day coding, every weekday, and has done so for 20 years. You'd think his experience level there is about as high as you can get, so it's always cool to hear him talk about the new things he's still learning at his work. I have to wonder if there's anyone else in the world that has both his raw ability and all those man-years of programming experience. It seems like most successful technical people end up doing management and business.

There's a couple of things people probably don't know about Carmack. For one, he can talk intelligently on a lot of different topics. A lot of nitty-gritty aerospace engineering, as well as the history of the space program and NASA for example. He's also up to speed on the latest across a wide range of technology, including things like cleantech.

Second, he has a pretty good sense of humor and can be quite funny. Which is surprising I think just because he spends so little time (effectively zero) out being traditionally social, which you'd think would be necessary to getting good at making people laugh. But in conversation he has a pretty sense of comedy and timing.

An example from his twitter feed that I clipped a while back:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/167739644853747712
"Adding film grain, chromatic aberration, and rendering at 24 hz for film look is like putting horse shit in a car for the buggy experience."
Fantastic work!

Wish Instagram had offered this option from their launch. Imagine how many great photos we would now have in the commons .
Google would probably consider that if the price were right. They can afford to run Twitter for a while at break-even or a loss, like they did with Gmail or Youtube. It may not be as good a business as Youtube, but for them it would be a nice-to-have like Gmail.
You have to press (not just tap) the touchpad. It will wake up much faster.
FireEye confuses Kaspersky honeypot for Gauss C&C server
I don't understand why anyone, least of all a developer, would use Safari.
My eyes trick me into reading that as:

What Jamie did Wrong at Khan Academy
Buying a One-Way Ticket out of Corporate Drudgery
Ah! You are totally right. We will get on that. Thank you!
Well, to be completely fair MS Labs made it, not the office team, and there is no indication that they made it because it was so hard to use. If that was the case surely then Office would actually ship with Ribbon Hero, instead of having it as an unmaintained experiment you can download from their website if you happen to have heard of it?

IIRC, it was an experiment in gameification and Office and the ribbon was the thing that was new at the time, and it made sense to write it on top of teaching users the new UI.

While we're throwing around anecdotes on how incomprehensible ribbon is, I know plenty of people who are totally fine with it. I don't really use any MS products (and so never encounter it) and don't have an opinion on it, but I think phrases like "no-one likes it, so they shoehorn it into more places" are neither true nor even potentially valid (no one likes it so they use it more because... they're evil? They want you to hate them?)
how do I tie a username into an account that already has the social accounts plugged in? :)
i tried to do that a while back, but it just created an orphan account!
Yes, it is. We need to change this. We just added those social features last night, and we still have some work to do.
This is the kind of craziness you run into when the absurd oxymoron that is "intellectual property" collides with the real world.
In what parallel universe has Apple embraced the web to a greater degree than Microsoft?
Well said. That's probably the defining characteristic of a hacker. An unlimited curiosity, desire to learn, explore, tinker, etc. And a willingness to experiment, fail, succeed, and learn by doing. The "hands on imperative" as they say.
Could you offer some form of explanation as to why you find conditional includes so odious?
> I'm thinking an Android app that the locals could use

I have no data to back me up here but I'm not sure whether people in countries like Ethiopia (just an example 'cause it was on the OPs front page) are rich enough to possess the necessary hardware to run Android apps.
Based on a conversation with someone who worked on the UIWebView-based Facebook app, there were no real productivity gain either. The web app inside the native wrapper was an insane byzantine mess, as is often the case with this sort of app.
Modulo the aforementioned issues, I think that the user experience is far superior to Chrome. Here are a couple examples:

* iOS-like pinch/zoom
* Quick access to bookmark bar bookmarks with Cmd-[0-9]
* iCloud tabs (w/ Mobile Safari)
* Reader
* Better feedback on page back/forward gestures
I meant more that they're very unbalanced. As one commenter noted you can get a crazily good railgun very early and be invincible. Equally you can pick up a weapon with random aiming and then have a very very hard time progressing at all.
All in all this is a really great idea! Keep going and keep improving!
"Cache utilization" refers to the amount of space the database is using in memory compared to the amount of total cache available on the dedicated Heroku database instance (as seen on their pricing page).

We are measuring it by issuing a `hr pg:info -asendhug` command which includes a field called "Data Size".

e.g.:

=== HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_GOLD (DATABASE_URL)
Plan: Ika
Status: available
Data Size: 2.00 GB
Tables: 76
PG Version: 9.1.4
Fork/Follow: Available
Created: 2012-08-16 04:09 UTC
Followers: HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_TANGERINE
Maintenance: not required

As for whether this is the "working set/cache", it is not clear where the "Data Size" number comes from. This is an interesting question, I'll ask Heroku for more information and report back.
In my opinion, as a a worker from home now for several years it is the best thing ever.

BUT, it is a skill that you have to learn. I had to read and watch-attend many productivity programs for "getting it".

Probably I will get a job teaching people how to do it in the future, because as networking speeds increase to Gygabits/second (thing google fiber in every house ten years from now), having instant hidef video would mean even more jobs would be possible from home.
And then somebody tries to run your app in nginx.

Tying your app to a particular server is a design choice. Some people like it, some people don't.
The argument that "wages aren't growing therefore workers are being taken advantage of" does not reconcile with this chart: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRNFB

Benefits are also a large part of compensation.
> yes it[they] is[are] bad

That was mind-breaking. My brain processed it as, "yes it they is er, what are aaaaah bad".
You guys are fantastic! Thank you for finding a way to save those that are sometimes overlooked!
If you look into their tech blog post about the update, they use HTML5 as a fallback render for new stuff. They then create the native renderer for the widget and push it with the new update a few weeks/months later. So they can still A/B test as quickly as they want.
You could even make a slider with an animation that displays the percent which goes to each part of your business - so 10% or 15% of the donation could goto administration.

This is a great idea. Check the Humble Bundle's (http://www.humblebundle.com/) sliders at the bottom of the page to see how they handle their "Humble Tip", maybe you guys can do something similar.
Interesting approach, and it makes a lot of sense. It would be interesting to see the algorithm behind it.

That said... every time I try out a new virtual keyboard, even for a few days, the more I yearn for a physical keyboard on a phone I actually want. The current options in the market for phone's with physical keyboards isn't great.

My passwords all contain plenty of special characters, and it requires many more keystrokes to enter in my password on a virtual keyboard vs a physical one. At least give me a shift key.
Facebook gives me a feeling quite like the one I feel I would have observing off-white eggshell paint dry or maybe munching on a packing peanut.
Yeah, my comment only makes sense if you can actually find the devs to do the work ;)
common knowledge

I've known for a long time that you were restricted to certain APIs when making a Metro app. I had no idea that you could link dlls that had special exceptions, and that there was no way to get these exceptions for your own language runtime.
But I thought trickle-down economics worked...
Actually, I'd argue they optimized for Accessibility, which is arguably the most important aspect of any mass online experience.
esr is a controversial character (as is Stallman) but he is worth reading, IMO. His work has been very influential on a lot of hackers and is worth at least some passing familiarity.
Totally! We need to get a few big names to help jump start our growth. We're going to start reaching out to people today. We'd love to fund all these treatments our first day live!
Just got an email - "Thanks to you, Sushil's medical treatment has been funded!"

Now that's CRM! I can't think of a single possible better way of making a customer happy. I'm telling everybody I know about this.

The payment process was seamless, the design is lovely and the cause, well, of course.

You guys are amazing.
Technology Attacks for 70 Years: Manufacturing Employment Negative Growth
I'm typically against organizations that need to live off donations. I think it's an impractical and unsustainable model. Your cause is very close to my heart and I would love to support it, but I'm a creature of convenience. I could make one donation now, but would fail to continue making donations. The two solutions I have seen that are successful at solving this problem are:

1) Automation. E.g. in the movie Office Space they take shavings off transactions (amounting to a few cents or less at a time) and pool them together. Another example: Auto-rounding up my grocery receipt, etc.

2) Recycling funds. I don't see how this would work in a donation based system where cash-flow is one directional, but it works really well for something like Kiva where funds are returned and the option to recycle is extremely easy.

If any non-profit is to be sustainable, they must put in a HUGE amount of effort to obtain large enough recurring funds or make it really easy to provide funds. Since you are targeting individuals, it's going to be difficult to do the former. The latter will take a little more thought.

All this said, I wish you the best of luck.
The problem is display:fixed. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4889601/css-position-fixe... has a good overview of why it happens.
Being able to walk away from that company no strings attached mitigates that risk.
Being financially liable should the company go under is why co-owners share in the profits beyond salary/hourly wages.

ETA: moral/ethical "liability" included.
Nice! Totally awesome that you might literally save lives. I agree with the others that the transparency thing is the most important.
Keeping routing in-app lets you 'reverse route' (generate a route for a resource) without violating DRY.
Thank You mindcrime! Out of everything you suggested i have done 2 things so far.
1. I run linux.
2. I have read all of Paul Graham's essays which was what caused my interest in hacking.
I will definitely take your advice seriously. Thanks again.
you already have a username, you just may not know it (if you signed up long ago it was automatically set to your twitter handle). Email feedback@getprismatic.com with account details and we'll help you out.
There are two parts to the proposed solution:
- Brain computer interactions: this would be a way to control your devices without doing any muscle movement. This is in line with what Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University) and others are researching.
- A.I.: could act to predict controls based on inputs from brainwaves, biofeedback, usage patterns, etc.
Have we led our children astray?
My present employer did offer stock as an incentive. It was a great program.

Past tense: FASB changed the rules, the discount changed, employee participation (naturally) dropped, it stopped being cost effective to offer this plan.
In case anyone couldn't get to the site for a bit, our hosting provider Heroku was seeing some issues with apex/naked domains: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/421 Hopefully it's resolved now. I cranked up another dyno just in case.

Thanks for all the love!
Prismatic for iPhone is now a featured app in the App Store.
"workers made enough money to be able to buy Ford's cars, and this made Ford more successful."

So, I assume today's middle class have to afford MORE than a 50 inch TV, a Macbook, an iPhone, an overpriced house, a wedding ring, and a iPad?
So you've made around 3 sales per hour since you've submitted it.

Assuming 3 sales/hr directly from HN, that is encouraging.

I don't know how anyone can verify 3 sales/hr from HN only from that screenshot, however. Sorry my thirst is unquenched, it's just this whole deal reminds me of ClickBank sales where fudging screenshots and hyping and bullshitting others is fairly commonplace.

I would believe 1 in 7 overall users click through, but I'm still curious who is doing it because I am a jaded, jaded marketer.
> They switched to HTML due to internal organizational politics.

Sorry, but how do you know this? Also, politics in of itself is rarely the real reason why decisions are made. Someone who seeks to gain benefit by making decision (which is deemed therefore political) can certainly be a reason. So, I'd be curious as to what benefit some individual or individuals sought to gain by making this decision.
What does the "mixed nuts" example at the bottom have to do with this phenomenon?
Free Living Arrangements Offered to Startup Founders in Kansas City
There's always the argument of abstraction vs simplicity. I appreciate both and I didn't used to like using routers. But I do use it these days for most of my work.

Apps often don't have a physical URL that you could map to in .htaccess like /foo/bar.php. There's only index.php and the appropriate controller/method is executed based on the URL. Of course you could just map .htaccess to something like /index.php?method=foobar instead. But then you're still dealing with a router in your index.php, perhaps a simple switch statement or something. It wouldn't bother me to see this kind of setup but I think having a router is just a bit cleaner.

You can also abstract retrieving values from the URL like /account/1234 (obtaining "1234") so that the router does all the parsing and the controller isn't aware of the URL implementation. Perhaps useful for altering URLs later without affecting the controller code. Keeping things separate also can make unit testing somewhat easier as you can substitute the router with a mock object and get your controller to respond to all the variations of user input.
It's certainly possible to use C++ in native iOS apps. I'd forgotten about HipHop, so that makes a lot of sense.
Haha. Thank you~!