skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not quite true. Identifiers are one thing, but language clarity helps too. For instance, in PHP you might have written:

$recent_joiners = new Array();

foreach ($user in $project.all_users) {
if ($project.join_date($user) > ONE_MONTH_AGO) {
$recent_joiners.push($user);
}
}

That's using fairly clear identifiers, but because of all the boilerplate code noise and the less clear language constructs, it looks less readable. Also, this requires a lot more specific meta-programming (like the ONE_MONTH_AGO constant), whereas the example I pasted uses vanilla Rails.
Well, it seems the author drank a bit too much of the webservices kool-aid.
HTTP is just one protocol amongst many. It was never meant to be "universal". The only reason why it's being abused for even the most unsuitable tasks nowadays is because when all you have is a hammer then everything starts to look like a thumb...

There are many purposes where HTTP is not suitable at all. Realtime audio/video comes to mind - UDP is commonly used here because even the TCP latency is too much. Anything where you need a persistent, bi-directional connection is not a good match either. Anything where you need to push from server to client. In short: Anything that doesn't fit into the request/response paradigm.

In fact, many consider HTTP in its current incarnation to not even be suitable for the interactivity that we expect of modern webapps.

But ofcourse that doesn't stop the truly enlightened.
Hence we got abominations like "Comet", a persistent stream-socket emulated on top of an inherently request/response-based protocol. Or RSS, which is nothing more than Usenet done really, really wrong - all lessons unlearned.

Sorry, got a bit carried away. But you get the idea I guess.
Is it the form or the substance of jrockway's comment that gets it downmoded? (pure curiosity)
FTP is actually a lot older than HTTP and therefore wasn't developed as an alternative. Traditional, multi-socket FTP actually has massive disadvantages in today's firewalled, NATed internet. HTTP is more useful than FTP or most other protocols for transferring individual files these days. I've never worked with WebDAV, but it seems like it would be a preferable alternative almost anywhere you might use FTP.

As an example where HTTP doesn't work so well, is pushing information as opposed to servicing requests. COMET is a hack and requires you to be very careful with clients. (e.g. the 2 connection limit in older browsers) You'd only really want to use it where there's no alternative, like in a browser.

Basically, HTTP is great for servicing individual requests. It can do kind of do persistent connections, but they're more an optimisation than part of the design and therefore optional for the client even if the server suggests them.

If your use case falls outside of the basic request/response premise, you can maybe use it for prototyping for a while, but you should probably switch to something more suitable to your setup after that unless you need to use HTTP for reasons outside of your control.
Agreed. Its a lot easier to make another Google where it reaches billions of people compared to a car manufacturer who only can reach to places he can ship.
Microsoft Uses Wireless Sensors to Track Data Center Temperatures
Microsoft's Global Foundation Services division, which oversees the platform the company uses to provide its online services, is deploying a wireless sensor network intended to bring visibility into the firm's data centers and reduce energy wasted in keeping a large room of IT equipment cooler than necessary. The system, developed by the company's Microsoft Research division, was first tested in 2006 and is now being installed at Microsoft's data centers worldwide.
I don't think it is over, because many organizations are only starting to cut back. Not everybody was hurt initially, but the effects are gradually spreading throughout the economy. It seems likely that this will result in a drop of IT spending.

Certain products may do well, though, if they look likely to save companies money. Maybe that's what happened to Joel.
Didn't it just come out that their product costing was completely off-base and every car was being sold at a loss. This company has never impressed me and they just don't seem to have the leadership to ever become viable. They've already burned through lots of money, promising the whole time that profitability is right around the corner.

This model isn't going to be out until 2011, by then, GM and Toyota will likely have more commercially viable PHEV models available to the public. I just don't see Tesla getting past a niche market. ANd getting past that point should be the expectation given the size of this loan.
So how often does a commit get checked in that causes a test (or tests) to fail?

It just seemed to me like you were bragging that tests get run over and over again. They only need to get run if any new code is committed, of course.

And what kind of commit is being checked in every 9 minutes? How big is the dev team? Seems like an awful lot of commits. Is each one a full-fledged feature / bug fix for the site, or are many 1-line changes to the code?
My untested hypothesis is that your parents and peers expect you to act a certain way (based on your appearance) and many people accept these subtle nudges without resistance. So, it basically becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Unlocked Nokia 5000 Blue 
The nokia 5000 is a stylish candybar phone with features that will keep up with you even when you’re on the move. Most striking about the phone is the way its design. The body is completely white which gives off a calming effect, but there is a green strip of color through the middle to give a bit of artistic flair.
Here in the US I think the blue chip tech firms have to fight for their lives. Infrastructure (Cisco, Intel) and the best positioned for supporting open source (Canonical, Fog Creek), I feel, will survive. I think data supports this.

Companies that support smaller tech operations (and hackers have always known are more efficient) should continue to grow. The recession may never happen for some.
"About a third of the people die [during such transplants], so it's just too much of a risk,"

Good Luck
Do you have any examples of Web Forms applications with clean/semantic markup and lightweight AJAX?

From my experience it may be possible but all the purported advantages of ASP.NET - drag and drop development, not having to understand how the web works, rapid development, go out the window if you're trying to achieve clean, lightweight markup, and you spend lots of time trying to work around the framework instead of having it do things for you.

If a framework encourages you to build bloated and ugly web applications (even though it's possible with a lot of effort to build nice ones), it's not a great framework. Just like how McDonalds will make you bloated and slow and sick - it's not great food.

But I can agree that the ASP.NET platform is nice - without web forms.
OK that's shocking but not too surprising. I would expect similar levels of ignorance about most scientific subjects.

What would be worrying would be a similar level of ignorance among the US legislative and executive branches of government. It is at this level that one would hope common sense and a quality education would prevail and ensure that new legislation and research funding reflected a proper grasp of science (and Maths and the Arts too of course).
UDP and TCP aren't comparable to HTTP. HTTP is an application layer protocol, which rides on top of UDP and TCP, which are transport layer protocols.

Be careful when you get carried away.
An utterly hopeless orgchart... now what should I do?
After '89, there were some who said, "Communism didn't fail because this wasn't /really/ Communism." I answered, sorry, but that's how Communism is rendered.

There are those now who are saying, "Laissez Faire Capitalism didn't fail because it wasn't /really/ Laissez Faire Capitalism." I'm answering, sorry, you had your chance. You can argue on blogs all you want. The experiment has failed miserably.

Europe is going to come out of this smelling ok, and with it, Third-way Socialism, where there's a balance between the market and the public interest.
From the article, they're extremely unwilling to call even that one successful patient "cured", as there are other variants of HIV that will latch on to different receptors.

Sounds like this isn't really big news at all - just one experimental cure that perhaps appears to have worked for one guy but will probably never be used in a widespread manner. Or am I too skeptical?
IBM teams up with AWS
Considering that mainstream science rejects Darwin's theory of evolution, this can only be a good thing.
I use the Downloads pepper by Till Krüss - tracks everything I've chucked at it :)
the real irony is, that the heading

Open Source Apps Should Start Innovating - Not Recreating (cli.gs)

also made it to the front page. Charles H. Ferguson has a nice take on this VB/.NET/Java(script)/HTML misery in his book ...not that I agree with him on some issues (like sw patents). But the one who has submitted the original article might know more, since he could have been around there around that time...
Well, depends on your problem. If you have a sensor network that needs to transfer information, but needs to do it in an energy-conscious fashion, HTTP might not be the best choice.

Sensor networks are a bunch of sensors that collect info, then network themselves to transfer what they know, usually to a mothership base station of some sort. Because it's a pain in the ass go out in the field and replace the batteries on these sensors, you have to make their transmissions energy-efficient. There is nothing in the HTTP protocol that takes energy consumption into account. Nor should it. It's not an application layer problem. However, the only reason I mention it, is that I've seen people start mixing the protocol layers together in a single protocol to achieve the energy consumption characteristics they want, which included the application layer.

So hence, that's one instance where HTTP isn't a first choice. As long as you know what HTTP is for, and don't use it blindly, you'll find that it probably suits your needs.
Tech Titans Building Boom: The Data Center Arms Race
Epson's tiny GPS receiver will make everything location aware
To run nimbly on sand, robots learn from nature
Very true. I do have a script to run on each domain separately, but I really should use something more sophisticated :)

Edit: I'll try sharing the script when I head back home
I wonder if you could ionize the debris somehow... the magnetic drag the charged debris would have might be enough to bring it into the atmosphere.
Great List Of Social Networks
Today was I stumbling around and I stumbled across this great list of social networks on Mashable:
Looks very cool...it says it's as fast or faster than PyLucene and Xappy, but it'd be nice to see some concrete benchmarks.
Sketchbook for web designers
You shouldn't make assumptions on what the "consumer" sees. Personally, I have been using open source software for over a decade and can't understand this "open source should innovate" argument.

By it's very nature open source software is innovative. Twenty years ago the concept would have been unheard of (in the broader world than academia). Open source has pushed many boundaries and has also forced closed-source shops to "innovate". Granted, this loses it's influence over time and simply being open-source is not enough to be a unique piece of software.

You are cherry-picking the software to compare. Spend a good amount of time with the latest-and-greatest that's out there and you'll see the innovation. You have to pay attention though. By "pay attention" I don't mean just reading blogs and news aggregators.

I use Songbird when I'm not streaming directly from someone's own player (like last.fm, etc.). I have used iTunes in the past. Other than a similar presentation structure it's not similar to iTunes. I don't even see how iTunes has innovated outside of tying the consumer in to the iTunes store. Not really something I like either, hence one reason I don't use that product.
Who are you replying to? Certainly not to me. My words you've picked for quotation do not correlate to your responses at all.

I didn't say people with ideas shouldn't be writing and having blogs. I simply said they aren't journalists and they can't replace a group of professionals, i.e. folks who're doing it full time and have certain resources unavailable to a guy with a laptop.

Moreover, I didn't say a word about "formal training". BTW not all professional journalists have a formal training.

Don't try read between the lines and don't argue with imaginary opponent please. Besides, how exactly do you picture the world without "traditional" media? Links to what you're going to be posting to HN or reddit or digg then?
"Isn't seigniorage a type of tax?"

Yes, but it's not a tax on the people, it's a tax on dollar holders.
Sounds like this isn't really big news at all ... Or am I too skeptical?

It does seem harder to trust a news source these days for accurate news, but as far as one thing that worked once being news or not: isn't that one definition of what "news" used to be? The discovery of the first _____.
Linus Torvalds: 25 things about me
Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down
iBetaTest.com

http://ibetatest.com/iphone/controllers/welcome/

New community to link beta testers with iPhone developers. I have not checked it out yet but bookmarked it.

"You can easily download an ADC import file of all of your approved testers - so you do not have to enter them one by one into the Provisioning System."

Via: http://www.mobileorchard.com/iphone-app-beta-testing-communi...
With Android, there are no barriers at all to setting up the SDK, creating an application, and installing the application on your own phone via USB. You can even go so far as to build and distribute the .apk packages to let anyone in the world install your application on their own Android phone. In fact, if you don't care about the Market at all, you can simply release, distribute, or even sell your application on your own to customers, and they have the ability to get your app onto their phone as easily as downloading it through their Android Browser.

The only barrier comes when you want to start putting your apps on the Android Market, at which point you must become a registered Android Developer, for the cost of a whopping $25, which then allows you the ability to publish apps to the Market.
I've been evaluating advancedwebranking.com, so far it performs well and does everything I need, I'll probably go for it after my trial.

It also prints lots of nice reports and things that can be exported in a number of formats depending on the version you get.
Moreover lets not forget XSS as well. Need to be careful.

Think if you're going to post an image URL, server will need to do some validation that its an actual image and then spit it inline
Read my sentence again, I wrote: UDP is commonly used here because even the TCP latency is too much.

I meant to say: They not only avoid HTTP - they even avoid TCP, too.

Well, the phrasing was not ideal, I'll give you that.
MIT Team Creates Shock That Recharges Your Car
Yes, but the more useful options that rsync supports, such as all the file manipulation gear won't work via http so you'll end up with a subset of the functionality.

interesting development:

http://zsync.moria.org.uk/paper/
"Simple" is right...if the cipher is subject to frequency analysis, the encryption is along the lines of the daily paper cryptogram. They could have at least made it find the cleartext automatically...
OTOH, there are several things HTTP does ridiculously badly.
It all depends on what you're building. Evaluate the case, and sure, if you need a more specific protocol, design one yourself. It's simple to layer on encryption, compression if you need those.

Also the argument slightly reeks of the same "Everything knows how to deal with it!" that caused some people to use XML for everything regardless of how well it fit the job.
To be honest, I'm not really interested in the subject matter, but the article is worth it for the section "Note: On Java Verbosity" and below (including the comments (so far at least)).
Interesting idea but it's still basically grid paper and I have a beef with those types of journals - the ink color for the grids is too dark and overpowers whatever you're trying to sketch.

I used to buy "ghost grid" notebooks from Edward Tufte's site to get around this and just yesterday ordered something that looks even more promising - a dot matrix grid that gets rid of the lines completely:

http://www.creativesoutfitter.com/Products/Dot-Grid-Book/9
I disagree. At least if you consider spent satellites to be "junk".

There's a lot of junk floating around, that is tracked, that precludes the use of certain orbits. Some of those orbits are valuable and clearing them would provide an ideal location for new satellites.

In particular, there are a limited number of geosynchronous slots -- especially those that are located over large (wealthy) landmasses. These slots are incredibly valuable.

I believe that the "good behaviour" requires satellites which inhabit these slots to retain enough fuel towards the end of their lives to move out of the slot so it can be used for a successor. However, only about a third of them do so:

http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive03/cnesarch_120103.htm...

Removing the other 60-70% of them would open up valuable slots.
Why the H-1B visa has got to go
Solar firm announces big contract
Isn't this one of those "tragedy of the commons" problems, if you go up and clean it and the US gov't pays you for it, what happens when any one of the Russians, the EU, or the Chinese put a satellite in that orbit without helping pay for it?
That "fundamentally bad concept" is unfortunately a popular one with creationists: they claim that mutations always destroy "information" and never create it, or that there's a "law of conservation of information" that says information can't ever be created other than by intelligent agents -- and they are always curiously reluctant to say exactly what they mean by "information".

Norvig's little experiment shows (crudely and unreliably, to be sure) that, with the usual mathematical definition of "information", mutations typically increase information. Of course this is old news, and won't be any use in dealing with creationists because they aren't using the usual mathematical definition of "information" in the first place. Or any particular definition, for that matter.

With that definition, there's nothing at all wrong with the fact that a string of 2N random bits contains more "information" than the human genome with N base-pairs. There's redundancy and repetitive (so far as we can tell) junk in the human genome, and that reduces the amount of "information" it contains.

A maximally concise version of any substantial body of text, or genome, or software, or whatever, "looks" random almost everywhere according to almost any simple test; because if it didn't, we could use the fact to compress it further. This being HN, I'll add that this is one reason why I am skeptical of Paul Graham's claim that "conciseness is power" in programming languages; a really maximally concise language would also be maximally incomprehensible.
$X to make website match a given layout/image in FF and IE, where X is based on your approximation of difficulty after reviewing the provided material. $Y/hour for each modification after the initial layout is complete, where $Y is 2 or 3 times what seems a reasonable rate to you.

This will do a few things:
1) Cause the customer to get their act together up front, because they would rather only pay $X.
2) Minimize your annoyance at the back and forth, because you are making what you feel like is a lot.

Mostly you want to avoid getting into the $Y/hour area, because it just sucks, mostly. Don't be afraid to set $Y to $50 or $75. You -want- it to be a deterent as much as a way of making money. Also, if you don't set that rate high, they won't value your work. If you are willing to do it for $10/hour, you are barely a step above a fast food worker, and will be treated as such. By setting a high rate, you say:
1) You know you have skills that not everyone does.
2) You value your time, which implies you will value theirs.
3) They better take requests seriously, or they will pay for it.

If you really want to work for $10 an hour, go ahead, but you are undervaluing your work, and it won't be maintainable.

(Note: My comment takes into account the current $10-$30 range the poster mentions in a comment below.)
Here is a free one. It works really well.
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/
There are more advanced ones out there but, they are more costly. This is by far the best free tool.
Cash4Gold’s Public Relations Company Attorney Accuses Me of Defamation
While the cipher was simple, the visual approach to breaking it is fascinating, at least to someone with no experience in cryptography.

The important thing to take away from this is that even if you think you're secure, if you're righting your own algorithms for cryptography you're probably very vulnerable. Its really nice to see the proof backing that up though.
I think it's big news. (Possibly) curing HIV in one patient is better than zero patients, so it's a step forward. Given that this line of attack has been shown to work, follow on research might develop something less risky like a gene therapy or something (IANAD, so what I said might sound extremely stupid to those who are).
This story has been on HN before ~3 months (of course it is still news that the patient is well and without any trace of HIV):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=357144

Also see an earlier speculation by a HN reader that such a cure for HIV would be possible:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47746
The lawyers and insurance companies would stop you.

This isn't a new idea, and the early satellites used a lot of gold in them. However, all those satellites have an owner, and those owners are not willing to let you take the satellites away for "recycling" without getting a profit-eliminating payment.

Before satellite removal could become a viable business, one would have to change the Outer Space Treaties in order to make it work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
Is It Time for a Postal Service 2.0?
I think that is a form of operant conditioning [1] mostly through subtle cues and social pressure.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
The main point seemed to be that you wouldn't need to layer much, if anything, onto HTTP. That is not necessarily that much of an advantage, depending on your environment, but should be worth considering.
How to automate followups for job hunting
Fred Wilson wants a Last.fm for blogs
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2329/does-the-koran...

But you're right, that was a bit lame of me to reach for.

A martyr complex is simply a psychological need to suffer for a cause. If I'm wrong about that, let me know why, seriously.
I will add a quote from Arrested Development made by Buster:

Michael: Buster? The guy who thought that the blue on the map was land?

Lucille: He's had business classes.

Buster: W-w-w-wait. Eighteenth-century agrarian business. But I guess it's all the same principles. Lemme ask you: Are you at all concerned about an uprising?
Two satellites collide 500 miles over Siberia
"It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward." - Old Chinese Proverb