skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is incredibly cool. The template syntax you have going is awesome. Reminds me of the natural language of haml/ruby with the handy pipe filter stuff of django/jinja. I can't stand mustache and handlebars.

The UI is great, it's responsive, and well thought out.

Also, the data modeling issue is a great selling point. Right now, MOST all applications are the same. Take this data, validate the person sending you the data is correct, validate the data is correct, and store it. Then apply the same methodology to fetching it, modifying it, or deleting it. I've been a django/python guy for years but after recently diving into Rails, I don't think anyone has done this any better. You can very quickly get things moving in CRUD/REST without much code.

That being said, it all comes back to the modeling. Modeling is relatively simple in Rails. The ORM you get with Django far exceeds ActiveRecord in usability but either way, at some point, a developer needs to sit down and define the data modeling. I realize you're marking this to developers (obviously) but I feel like with your cool UI and mongodb backing, you might even be able to expand this to administrators of the service.

Meaning, I can deliver a pre-configured product to my clients but if they want to add some fields to a product that are searchable/sortable/validatable/etc... they won't need to wait for me to do it. They won't need to wait for me to deploy it. I won't need to run a migration script.

Modern REST frameworks typically work based on a separation of a model and a resource. The model handles data storage and representation, and the resource handles serving it up, controlling access, etc... I think we need to couple these together. One unified object. I can create something, like a `Product`, give it some properties, set validations and permissions for those properties, and boom. Done.

Things like this and Meteor are shining examples of the radical change that we need in this current era of development. Yes, you guys will find faults in that statement. The neckbeards will come out and tell me mongodb does not scale, or node.js async development does not make sense. That is not the point. The point is that we're really not making it much easier on ourselves to build the things we want. Right now it makes more sense for me to pay Parse to handle an iOS back-end. Why? Because for the most part building it is a pain in the ass.

It doesn't need to be. I'm excited about Forward, very excited.
PushMail adds Push to Sparrow, on sale until Apple Keynote + Promo Codes
Agreed. A lot of the points seem to be stressed from the point of explaining how important what he does is.

Bring in the UX designer before you’ve attempted any UI work. I can’t tell you how many times my clients have said “I wish I’d brought you in earlier!” The UI changes are often enough to necessitate technical re-architecture. Starting with a good designer from day one will save you a lot of headaches later on...

If they nailed it on their own, they're not going to bring someone in, but still.
In the Mideast, entrepreneurs flourish
Bypass office and government censorship
Personally, I like the idea of an "HN playground" of some sort: a series of mirrored HN sites, where each attempts to implement and test a different/new community mechanic.

Whether it be having to spend karma in order to post or some other scheme, I think it certainly would be interesting and allow people to tweak and provide feedback at a more massive scale.
Generally, the gigs of data are transmitted just once, during application setup. After that, clients can pick up new blocks are they are generated by the network. There are numerous proposals for generating a "summary block" that would securely allow a snapshot to be generated to avoid the initial download. [1]

There are light-weight clients out there that rely on a web service of some form for keeping track of the whole block chain[2].

In order to issue a new transaction, though, you only need to transmit the transaction itself: a list of signed transactions: "transfer x bitcoins from this address to this address", basically.

[1] Some suggested implementations are listed here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74559.0

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security

(Edit: fixed formatting)
What is the connection?
I absolutely love this - now my new homepage. This is a very pleasant way to present this to my eyes. Even more importantly, it loads 'instantly', which is extremely important for a go-to/default site. In my opinion, drudgereport's popularity owes a lot to this combination of easy to absorb and quick loading times.

If I could make a suggestion - I would be interested in seeing a list of popularity based on clicks/time. To preserve the layout, you could only load it as a side column if the screen was wide enough to display more than 3 columns.

I actually think a site like this could turn into a one-man cash cow if you can get it to be a default site visited multiple times each day.
Cinder block and concrete are worse sound and thermal insulation than a layer of gypsum? Really?
This did it for me. I've been having this exact same thought for the past two weeks. After hitting development bottlenecks on my last project, I committed to learning to code to the point where I could hack together functional prototypes. I've been training by manual, and was just speaking with a friend about how dry it is and the fact that I'd be more fulfilled working on a project and couldn't wait for that.

We have an extremely small, simple project that we've been talking about. Screw it. I'm dumping the book and starting on that as soon as I get home.

Exactly what I needed to read.
There's a minor hack that lets you use your own images. I don't know if it'll work as-is with the new devices, or if it needs to be updated.
Bitcoin replaces that layer. I've personally transacted business in Bitcoin without converting it back to traditional currencies and it works pretty damn well, actually. At the moment the primary reason Bitcoin "needs" to be converted back into traditional currency to be useful to the masses is that they haven't started using it yet.

Think about it: if 1% of people are using Bitcoin then that means there's only a 1 in 100 chance that any given transaction you make can be made with Bitcoins. That's an admittedly low degree of usefulness. If you can get 2% of the people to start using Bitcoin it just became twice as useful and half as many transactions will now require you to convert funds back to traditional currencies. At some "critical mass" adoption level, Bitcoin becomes just as useful as any other currency without such a constant need to move in or out of traditional currencies.

It's called the Network Effect and it's a hell of a market force.

Also your argument is invalid because you could say the exact same thing about holding a bank balance in USD while living in Europe: "But I have to exchange these dollars for Euros in order to even use them at all, man this U.S. Dollar is just completely worthless and unnecessarily complex because no one around me will accept it."
Thanks, and thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure how to get it to work when dragging from the doc but I'd like to. A "never close" group is next on my todo list :) And it does in fact use the MIT license: https://github.com/flyingmachine/foreman/blob/master/LICENSE
Influence is not the same thing as imitation.
I find it extremely funny how any small of hint of criticism of Groklaw's 'analysis' or the sacred PJ was met with instant whiting out of the comment, but now that Groklaw took Google's side against Apple, comments, critical of Groklaw comments get a bunch of upvotes or at least are not flagged to death.

General rules I have noticed even after points stopped being show are (mostly regardless of the actual facts):

Take Apple's side(except if it's against Google) = upvotes

Take Google's side(except if it's against Apple) = upvotes

Take an anti-MS stance = upvotes

Take a non anti-MS stance: downvotes or no upvotes

I bet you can literally farm karma by following the above rules, based on seeing some posters' karma.
That isn't what I asked. Either you think he's lying and need to call it out directly and state your reasons why, or you don't.

Difficulty: "Because he didn't provide evidence" is not proof of deception. Either what he's saying did happen, or it did not. Dismissing something as anecdotal only matters in scientific discussions about statistics, notsomuch real life. If we followed such rigorous rules for everyday discussion, nothing would ever be talked about.
Using metrics to build communities
As others said. That's not from his own site.
The blockchain concept is used kind of as a distributed timestamp system.

Say you send out the same coins to two different people at once, in a centralised system, that would be detected at the centralised server and the second transaction would fail. With the distributed system that's not possible, so the block chain serves as a timestamp. Whichever transaction gets into the blockchain first is the successful transaction.

However, generating the blockchain requires a lot of processing power, and therefore needs to be subsidized. Initially that is done by rewarding those who generate blocks with coins (i.e. mining). However, as the number of generated coins falls, transaction fees should make up the short-fall.
Bugsense supports students
The layout is great, very clean, great job.

That said, how do you deal with transactions? It was my impression that MongoDB doesn't really support ACID transactions. Did you find a workaround?

I know from prior experience working on a major eCommerce store that there can be really taxing loads on the database server, right around Black Friday, and having inconsistent writes could really be disastrous. Have you tested your transactions for consistency under load?
FBI launches $1 billion face recognition project
Yeah, it's a difficult line to walk between teaching what is comprehensible and enabling people, with magic, to do something concrete, even if they know nothing about how anything works. The former bores people because it's too abstract, and the latter...well, I feel there's the risk that when there's too much magic involved, the students feel as if being a "wizard" is an inherent trait, rather than something you eventually build towards after plugging away at the fundamentals.

I've toyed with teaching a workshop that entails: teach enough programming to turn a non-flat-file dataset (maybe a json of their tweets) into a decent visualization (by plugging into Google Charts, perhaps) and uploading a static page, with Twitter Bootstrap, onto a free hosting service, or even a blog service such as Wordpress.

But even that is a lot to teach in a day:

1. Command line and file system basics
2. Fundamentals of programming (enough to open a JSON file, parse and aggregate it on some conditions, and spit out HTML)
3. Basic HTML and DOM, including what you need to know to
4. Basic webserver/uploading stuff

Most workshops struggle with getting 3 and 4 done. #2 is not easily achievable over even several days.
This is an issue for me as well. Ideally, I'd like to be able to command-click five or ten articles, then get through them one by one, rather than having to return to SkimLinks after I read each one.
> I wonder if there isn't an alternative explanation, that the placebo effect may be an elaboration of the human social instinct.

You read my mind. We're social animals. Hamsters may respond to sunlight, human beings respond to communal support. We have plentiful food stores when we are supported by our community and have none when we are abandoned. We're not hamsters.

Somebody bothering to place you in a study, ask you dozens of questions, then give you medicine ... at no cost to you ... doesn't that scream social support?
You have a good point. We'll write a lot more technical detail over the coming weeks on our blog. I'm also writing a guest post (technical) for the MongoDB blog, so expect a lot more to come out soon.

The architecture: A very small PHP MVC framework (5% or so the size of Zend Framework last I checked). I started developing the earliest version of it ~6 years ago, around the time Rails picked up steam. I loved Rails and Ruby, but with so much invested in PHP (10 years back then) I decided to implement Rails-like patterns instead. Those patterns have matured a lot, but I stick to idea that the framework should be very light itself. Happy to answer more specific questions.

Also, I'm really excited about the idea of porting the framework/platform to languages like Python and Ruby. I think it's possible because it's so light weight, but time will tell. People might call me crazy for that one, but I've been dreaming about a multi-language platform for years.
I think the slight difference is that, in the case of cable TV you have to endure the commercials until they finish to access the content that interests you. In this particular case of the Kindle, ads are only on the lock screen and you simply need to unlock the device to access the content. Not as intrusive or dominating, a bit more tolerable. Of course, having the option to turn them off permanently is always nice.
Unicode TLDs.

Obviously only individual languages are whitelisted, as others have pointed out. I wasn't thinking fully.
Buy and sell ads/ad-space using bitcoins
I experienced that too!

The worst OpenReach experience I've had was when the line was working in a degraded fashion, the OpenReach engineer turned up and actually broke it entirely. The guy literally got up and made a break for it out of the door.

I chased the bastard up the road to his van. It was like a cheesy Benny Hill sketch.
Thank you for your substantive reply. Sure enough, your reply illustrates that each reader of HN sees a different nonexhaustive subset of all threads here, and perhaps perceives a different consensus.

- Macbooks are the best laptops

It's interesting to me that you mention this, because it has been several years since I have owned a current laptop computer, and I have utterly no opinion about which brand of laptop is the best. I guess I almost never read threads on HN that even bring up the issue.

- iOS is preferred over Android (both in use and development)

I sure don't read these threads exhaustively either. I own an Android phone, since a bit more than a year ago, and I try to figure out the user experience in the Android ecosystem, which I have found annoying with my mobile service provider's default installation.

- PHP is terrible

My perception is that the consensus here is "PHP is a kludge language, but very useful for applications all the same," but I could be mistaken.

- Facebook is the devil

The consensus I perceive on that issue (I could be wrong) is "Facebook is a company that has overreached often in its attempts to monetize, but it offers great opportunities for some advertisers who use its platform." I have no experience with Facebook except as a daily user. I have predicted "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." I could be wrong, but that's my sense of where Facebook is in the market.

A few common debates here are:
- Ruby vs. Python

It's interesting to someone who started posting webpages as long ago as I did that Perl isn't mentioned in this context anymore.

- Rails vs. Django

That one does seem to be balanced pretty well between the two sides, with no clear HN consensus.

- Google (whether they are evil or helpful)

My impression, by contrast, is that most HN users think Google is helpful in many of its business activities.

- Whether or not we are in a startup bubble

Yes, this general issue is debated, as is the valuation of particular companies.
The Experience beyond the Product: An Intro to Customer Lifecycle Management
Sad pie. The DX is better for reading technical books, where things like code listings look better if they're not line-wrapped to hell and back.
I don't know why you were downvoted but there is definitely something to be said for what you argue.
Apple in talks to create custom Net music service
>>In addition to scanning mugshots for a match, FBI officials have indicated that they are keen to track a suspect by picking out their face in a crowd.

Reminds me of that one scene from Minority Report where Tom Cruise boards a tram, only to have the cameras scan and identify his face and alert the authorities.
We didn't have large coastal cities with millions of inhabitants then.
I'm not sure you're following what I'm saying. That's probably my fault, for being terse. Even if the negotiating positions are "entirely one-sided" right now, that position leaves the door open for a competitor to capture market share by offering accounts without personal credit attachments. And yet nobody does that. That suggests one of two things: either (i) you can't capture much market share by offering easy terms for a merchant account (unlikely, to my mind) or (ii) you can't stay in business offering those terms.
>Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go.

If there was a list of software projects somewhere, ordered by difficulty, with tips on how to get started and how to extend it later, I would be very interested.

I can code (somewhat), but I find that any time I have an itch to scratch, it's much easier to google it and solve it through existing software and configuration changes. Every time I've had a project in mind, I'm quickly in over my head. I'd like to move beyond scripting and actually build self contained software I can post on Github and give to my friends, but I guess I don't know where is a reasonable place to start.
Been trying this out, seems like a cool use for bitcoins: you can buy and sell ads for tiny fractions of a cent, and get paid out pretty much immediately even on $0.10 earnings, something not really possible with conventional currency ad-brokers.

Would love to see this kind of thing disrupt Adsense in some far off future :)
Progress is achieved by unreasonable people. If all programmers had never "disobeyed" their managers, we'd be probably still writing accounting software in COBOL.
> It'd be unethical if you knew $500 was undervalued and you thought Ferrari didn't

No, that's called business.
If we are to believe that triggering the full-force of the immune system is some sort of switch, then perhaps it would be possible to synthesize a drug to do this directly?
I doubt it's the main driving force, but the revelation that the new Kindles are ad-supported. It could be consumers have more faith in the Nexus 7 overtaking the Kindle Fire going forward. And at the same time, excitement for Amazon's new products.
The install code toggles are a really nice UI feature.
The main purpose of mining is to secure the block chain. The reward is a the incentive for miners to exist.

Each block that gets mined means that in order to undo a transaction that was previously in the block chain, an attacker would have to mine a block before the network produced another block on the main chain.

So if your transaction was in block 33123, and the chain looks like

block 41873 : [ parent : ... ]
block 33123 : [ parent : block 41873 ]
block 71282 : [ parent : block 33123 ]

then in order to undo block 33123, an attacker would have to produce three blocks:

block 41234 : [ parent : block 41873 ]
block 39834 : [ parent : block 41234 ]
block 58762 : [ parent : block 39834 ]

before the network produced a new block on the main block chain. So the attacker would have to have 3x the computing power of the remainder of the network.
You said it earlier: requiring a personal guarantee is indeed the equivalent of denying the account to the corporation. I'm not sure what else there is to talk about, unless you think contracts for merchant accounts should be compulsory.
I just checked mine ... 1337 days seems like a good number :)
My guess is Amazon will later offer an option to remove the ads. Amazon will gladly trade $40 in cash today to lose $30 in future ad revenue and satisfy a customer's wishes. They just didn't announce this upfront because they want the headline price be $199, rather than have the media say stuff like it is $240 compared to the $199 google tablet.
Each block validates the block behind it, so if you've got 0 confirmations it means your transaction hasn't made it into a block yet. If you've got 1 confirmation it means your transaction is in the most recent block. If you've got 2 transactions it means that after your transaction made it into a block, another block was found that signed off on the block containing your transaction. At 3 transactions, the most recent block has signed off on the block before it, which in turn has signed off on the block before it, which contains your transaction and so on.

This is important because once a newer block has signed off on the block before it, you can't change that old block without invalidating every block after it. If I want to rewrite the most recent block it's astronomically difficult, but still technically possible, to do so. The deeper each block is buried in the chain, the more blocks I would have to rewrite history on to undo transactions in that block.

To my knowledge no one has ever successfully re-written history and the amount of processing power required to do so is beyond astronomical at this point. This is also why the standard client does not consider transactions to be "confirmed" until it's 6 blocks deep - that's the point at which the likelihood of rewriting history becomes so low that it's effectively zero.
Apple granted patent which can remotely disable protestors's phone cameras
Foxconn intern stole this iPad mini shell and sold it for $6k
Agreed. I am largely self taught as well, and have found a lot of value in reading texts on CS / programming fundamentals :

* Computer Architecture
* Operating Systems
* Algorithms
* Data Structures
* Database Fundamentals
* etc.

In addition, more seminal-yet-not-directly-practical books such as SICP are quite valuable. I've been meaning to read TECS (a copy of which is staring at me as we speak), however I have not had the time to devote to its projects yet.

Edited to add :

In addition, reading up on web application architecture was quite helpful. This is increasingly important as modern frameworks may otherwise abstract away concepts to the point of making them very black-boxy.

That said, my goal was not to rush towards an MVP or prototype. I intend to be a competent developer first, and a founder second. If these were reversed, I might well have adopted the OP's approach instead.
This is an important effort with a powerful effect on the Boston tech scene. This and similar outreach efforts (like the Python workshops) have increased diversity not just in the Python and Ruby groups, but more broadly in all tech groups. This was most noticeable at BarCamp Boston 2012, which had a lot more women participants than the previous 6 years. It's great to know that the tech community can be welcoming to all sorts of people.
http://mindprod.com/project/projects.html
The true test of manhood: the strength of your sperm
What the fuck? Are you joking? We now live in a world where developers bust their asses to deliver 99 cent applications. It's fucked. Slowly, here and there, we're beginning to see a shift. People will pay for a great product, especially if it makes your job as a hacker/developer easier.

Play with the demo for 60 seconds. How long would it take you to build that? How much do you charge per hour? I built a lightweight ORM for pymongo/mongodb last weekend from an empty .py file. It was fun, but it was challenging and took pretty much the entire weekend. And it's basic. You can find, find_by_id, find_one, and a few other things. What these guys have done is tremendously impressive and difficult to do. They deserve every right to ask for money and that will only fuel further development.

Everyone has to keep the lights on at some point.