skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good to hear that compound indexes are forthcoming. When you do have secondary index support, will there be functionality to enforce a "unique" index, or will that have to be handled application-side?

Also, in your API documentation [1], I see there's an `append` function to add a value to an array. Is there an equivalent function to remove a value from an array?

[1] http://www.rethinkdb.com/api/#js
Twitter's API is free for API consumers...
You are too kind! Thanks.
Hi Ninthfrank,
It seems to be an interesting app. Unfortunately I don't have an iPhone. :(
>> Me: Order a margarita. Customer: OK.

I'd say "OK" too. One of my problems going into a restaurant is I don't know what the restaurant is good at making; I used to make the mistake of ordering stuff the restaurant hasn't made in weeks and it tastes horrible.

If the waiter/waitress was going to recommend me something, its unlikely something the restaurant was especially bad at making, and it would solve part of my problem, and so I'll accept his/her recommendation.
Yelp reviews are fascinating for showing how effective these tactics are. I guess Israelis are as scientific about their sales as their martial arts.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/dead-sea-premier-kiosk-san-francisco
"In July 2011 FinCEN revised the definition of money transmission service to mean the acceptance of
currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency from one person and the transmission of currency,
funds or other value to another location or person by any means."

Sounds like if you make a market for gift cards you need to be a licensed money transmitter FYI.
Nonlinear Model Fitting Using Least Squares
Ruby Basics - Variables
I frequent this one http://www.hnshowcase.com/
People receive on average 147 emails a day? 77% wants a newsletter?

Somebody gotta get his facts right.
Side note -- I went to a great talk by the Grey Area (Shadow Cities) guys at GDC, and one of their big takeaways was that you need to enable competition between people who aren't geographically near one another. Otherwise you don't build a critical mass of players.

I can't tell from the available material if Ingress gameplay provides for satisfying solo play, but if it doesn't they're going to hit the same issues Grey Area did originally.
I think the latter approach is actually preferable in all cases in which you want to join the 2 (which is normally the whole point). The reason is that it makes it easy to use equijoin which won't work with arrays. So suppose I have table A and table B and table A-to-B describing their relationships. Table A-to-B has documents that look like:
{a_id: "foo", b_id: "bar"}

I can then say:
table("A-to-B").eq_join("a_id", table("A")).zip().eq_join("b_id", table("B")).zip()

And you'll get a document for each corresponding pair. If the ids are in an array then it's going to be a bit painful to write that query. (Although it can be done I believe).

A future feature will probably be to make eq_join work with arrays of foreign keys.
I used slightly coarser language because I was getting quite angry at the sales pitch.
Your first mistake was to let an Israeli sell to you.

That's where you lost brother. For that matter, I'll expand that to Middle-Eastern. I have a lot of friends from Israel and some from other ME countries. A lot of them tend to be very good at selling. I never got to the bottom of it. Maybe it's something in the water? I don't know.

I've gone on sales calls with Israeli friends (yes, as an engineer I decided I needed sales training from the best when it came time to sell my own products). We used to play this game that we loosely referred to "Shut-up and sell something". The idea was to see how little you could say and still close a deal. In my early days I tended to talk too much. And, as an engineer, I'd get lost in long explorations of features and even stuff we were planning on doing. I'd loose sales right and left. Then came "shut-up and make a sale". It is amazing how sometimes you can say absolutely nothing. Zero. And make a bigger sale than when you start flapping your jaws. The art is in knowing when to speak and when no to.

Hey you! Yes you. The one reading this thinking that it is a pejorative comment. Stop it! It isn't. It's more of a compliment than anything else.
Twitter and developers, a love story
There is also the completely denormalized solution of embedding all children into parents.

This approach could work well when:

- you don't access child documents directly

- you don't update child documents too often

- child documents are usually unique entities

As you can see from the rules above, this would not be a good solution for the Store -> Categories -> Products (contradicts 1. and 3.) But it could work with models like Content -> Votes, Blog -> Comments, etc.
You mean, connected to a constant stream of new addresses. And wouldn't finding such a cluster be NP-complete?
Type-safe linked list using the C preprocessor
I'd rather people not use it because it's ugly, not because it's patented.
>just wrap someone's service in a fancy UI

I thought we got over the "no value in UIs" bias when Apple made more money than some small countries.

>then sell it as your own

1) Tweetro doesn't say "look at this great real-time messaging service we made!" They built a UI. That's their value proposition.

2) Less importantly, Tweetro is free.

>All I see these days is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative.

How is that uniquely "these days"?
Yes, you can do arbitrary slices on an array like in python such as: array[:5]. This is done using the slice command. I believe it's overloaded in python to work with it's native slice syntax.
I do wonder if governments will be forced to stockpile heaps of BTC like they stockpile vaults full of gold, to try and manipulate the exchange rate.
> A future feature will probably be to make eq_join work with arrays of foreign keys.

Nice!!!
I find it interesting that, in contrast to the other things that the article mentions that techniques like this can be used to predict ("We can try this on traffic data to predict the duration of a bus ride, on movie ticket sales, on stock prices, or any other time-varying measurements."), Twitter trends are artificial phenomena, with a very precise definition that was created by Twitter, not some natural emerging thing. The actual tweets are of course a natural phenomenon, but how topics are selected from them as 'trending' is not.

Of course, that's not to say this is not impressive work - predicting what Twitter's proprietary algorithm will select as trending without direct knowledge of the algorithm, before it selects them, and before all the tweets that make them be selected are made is impressive, and no doubt not any easier than predicting more natural phenomena or emergent behaviours.
Contrary to what some of the commenters said about this being non-useful and just novelty, I think this brings forward one of the best features of Google Maps by cutting out a lot of (potentially frustrating) steps in the UX. Here’s the typical flow for finding street view when searching on maps.google.com:

1. Submit search query
2. Review results list
3. Repeat 1-2 in case user did not find their intended target
4a. Drag the street view marker onto the map OR
4b+5. Click “more” from the results list, then Street view

Instant Google Street View reduces this to just one easy step, and makes it much more fun along the way.

I think the benefit of this is similar to the benefit of Google’s instant search results - making the UX fast, efficient, and fun to discover what you’re looking for. The creator of this should definite consider expanding this to also include street view and satellite view (surprised Google hasn’t done this already).

And I wouldn’t be surprised if he got a call from Google soon for an interview… either for a job offer or a acqui-hire.

Cheers, nicely done.
Can someone explain the difference between command-p and command-t?
Unfortunately they don't give you the option to pay to get around it though.
dated:2002 http://www.actionscript.org/showMovie.php?id=459
shout yourself Apple
To start with its ugly.
Also this has been used in Flash since around 2005. It would be a shame if Apple is granted this patent.
I seem to remember Amazon own a patent for just this.

edit: It was Microsoft:
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
I am pretty sure the investors are aware that twitter has taken this approach, and can anticipate that some of the reaction to it will be along these lines, and yet the board decided to go ahead.
A stupid argument. Humanity has only been around for 1/1000th of that time.
> we don't have that information and probably never will

http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/the-big-picture-65-million-...
> If Twitter charged to send tweets (like Facebook is now doing)

How's that working out for Facebook?
heh, I'd rather this particular sales technique died a very quick death.

But back onto topic.

For the dead sea sales folks. People should probably ask if the sales person has ever been to the dead sea, and have they ever seen the effects of stripping the sea of it's mud.
> I'm reading lots of articles lately that misuse statistics, and I don't think this post puts your company in a good light.

Actually I didn't even see any inferential statistics in the post. He just reported observed values and drew his conclusions. At least running something like a chi-squared test could give me an idea of how unlikely it would be to observe those different proportions among the different groups just by pure chance.
An Embeddable PHP Bytecode Interpreter
Check out Show HN filter on hnapp.com: http://hnapp.com/filter/9205b686fc8b9b396a0d40e43663116f
This sounds more like a weapon than a method of travel.
Very beautiful. What API does it use for getting tv series info?
If you want information from a salesperson about a product or service without getting into their "selling" mode. Just come up to them and say, right off the bat, "I'm not considering a purchase of this kind for at least 1/3/6 months, but I have a couple of questions about your product."

If it's a bad product or bad salesperson, they'll probably end the conversation quickly, because their whole premise is to catch you off guard and convince you to buy something that you never would if you had 30 seconds to search the internet for reviews.

If it's a good product and a good salesperson, they'll gladly answer your questions and give you a business card. Then you can verify their claims later, and you have a somewhat-trusted contact that you can go back to.

It's a quick way to filter, even if you know you may end up purchasing the product within a couple of days.

This tactic is also a way to quickly stop a potential email conversation with a recruiter, while still being able to have them as a connection. "I'm sorry but I'm definitely not changing jobs for at least 6 months, but thank you for reaching out to me," is enough to do this.
Something in my written application or video -- since they didn't try the beta site we've built
Isn't Apple moving away from skeumorphism anyway? Do you think they just patented it for protection from lawsuits if someone else were to be granted the patent?
I thought it was going to tell me the cost of clicking unsubscribe, followed by the forgot my password dance to log in to my "subscription preferences" to turn off the emails being sent to me.

Or having to fill out the email address that received the email (change back to my email client, check the headers), something that they could fill in for me.

Or having to figure out that the unsubscribe link is two shades of grey darker than the rest of the email and is almost unnoticeable...

Or even worse, the unsubscribe link is only in the HTML portion of the email, but not in the text portion of the email.

Other times the unsubscribe button is an image ... and if you don't download images willy-nilly from random servers when you get email you can't see it, and thus have no idea there is a way to unsubscribe.

I could go on, email is starting to get more and more frustrating and I have gotten to a point that I simply don't care anymore. I will press the junk button in Google Mail or in my mail client, and in the future I will not receive messages from that company. Does stuff get caught because of that, which shouldn't get caught? Sure, stuff like password reset emails, or billing renewal reminders, but overall I am sick and tired of every little thing I do online causing me to receive an email.
Yeah, I'm getting the impression it's usually a more casual deal or something you grow into after 'proving' yourself at your current work-from-office position.

Perhaps it's a niche for a jobs board? If you try and search for remote/telecommute jobs at the moment all you seem to get is spam.
Sure, but surely the block chain doesn't contain Source IP Address fields.
Cute, apart from the part where ... sigh. The more software stops being stupid about what gender mixes you should have in relationships, the more it annoys me that nobody ever considers that not everybody is (or wants to be) part of a simple pair bond.

Facebook hasn't figured this one out either; you'll find most poly/etc. people on there either have their status set to "single" or "it's complicated" (there was a fantastically funny day some years ago where all such people I know deleted our relationship statuses simultaneously, causing mass confusion to the people only casually following our existences).

I feel like this isn't really useful feedback on a toy app but ... it would be nice if people wouldn't cast monogamous pairbonding as the only relationship type that "really" exists. I don't feel discriminated against, as such, but I do sometimes feel a little omitted :)
Interesting observation, but do you see the irony in your claim considering that you wrote "citation needed" earlier?

I actually don't think a "citation" is what is needed in either case, though it would probably be a good idea to provide a little more discussion of a potentially controversial statement.
How a protest boosted our startups weekly sales by 500%
As a fellow Canadian the last thing I want to do is start a protest in the United States. After all, I have nothing to complain about living in such a great, startup-friendly country. That is what I thought until last week when the marketing geniuses at our startup VIRURL decided that a protest was the best way to get attention at ad:tech, the world’s largest advertising technology conference, after finding out that an insert in the ad:tech welcome baggie was $4,000.

It feels good to say that effective guerilla marketing is not dead – in the last week Forbes, Adotas and Businessweek have featured us. We spent just under $2,000 to pull off the stunt and increased our sales by 500% compared to the previous week (mostly due) to the press we got.

Full blog post here:

http://blog.virurl.com/2012/11/16/protestguerillamarketing/
Even the Classics app did it on iOS before Apple.
>You are right that standards going forward may be able to rewrite the conditions BUT they cannot set the license prices themselves that would be anti-competitive against the patent holders*

I'm not going to pretend to know the antitrust laws in any given jurisdiction, but do you see what I mean by inscrutable? It's fine (and indeed mandatory) to require "fair and reasonable non-discriminatory" terms, but nailing down an upper bound on what that actually means as a number is anti-competitive? It doesn't make any sense because it can't. Patents and antitrust are diametrically opposed things that happen to overlap one another.
That must've taken some courage to play the message in front of both the manager and the salesman. Obviously the salesman should be called out, but that's no easy task.
I don't think rolling your own, or hosting your own is a feasible option for indie mobile and social game developers in the current climate short development cycles and small budgets.
I think of it as being similar to the right to reverse engineer which you get for hardware in some jurisdictions.

I feel as a user as though I should be allowed to automate my use of Internet services. I should be able to use improved clients for any service as and when I like, to get improved user experience, and to integrate them with other services.

I can imagine a law that allows this. Entirely to encourage innovation and competition.

Remember - it's the early days of the web. It took about a century after the printing press before the consequent law changes (such as invention of copyright) settled down.

I expect it to take a century on the Internet as well. Everyone should plan for the future assuming our laws from previous centuries will be found by society to be unsuitable, and will change.
One of these again. Right.

>even though Node.js is the fastest app server there is.

Nope, not in any metric. Maybe the author is a Rails programmer?

That squid sucks is no surprise.

This is a pretty unsurprising static files based test, but it's flawed enough to make it mostly a waste of time.

The lack of GWAN and Cherokee in this comparison is a huge oversight.
Leap motion controller used to control a quadcopter
Don't roll your own crypto. Just don't. It's a bad idea. It's close to impossible to do it correctly even if you're an expert.

Just store the passwords in a file and use a well-tested and well-reviewed crypto package to encrypt it.
I couldn't care less what unsubscribes are costing retailers. Obviously it's not enough. The better question is what are subscribes costing consumers? How much of our time is wasted sifting through spam marketing emails?
Corporate governance in Japan: Olympian depths
Hah - years ago, my aunt was stopped in a mall by a young Israeli guy selling these products. She mentioned that she'd been to the Dead Sea on a trip to Jordan and seen them selling similar products for a fraction of the price.

The salesman, unfazed, asked her if she was perhaps mistaken and thinking of the 'Red Sea, because the Dead Sea is in in Israel[1]'.

Thankfully, my aunt taught history, so she knew her geography well enough to know that he was just trying to pull the wool over her eyes.

[1] Which is technically true, since it sits on the border. But I wouldn't tell a Canadian that they were mistaken, because 'Niagara Falls is in the US'.
Twitter would blacklist the IP(s).
pls change the contrast..its still very hard to read..I dont know how you have been reading it
Ah, I was just amused by the thought of someone saying "perhaps you would like to borrow a measuring device maybe, if and when I felt like lending it to you. Maybe".
Ask HN: Educat.me - Ultimate Test platform
OK, here is the thing...I have been working on this education platform (Well, it is mainly a Test platform) for some time now: http://educat.me/

I want to make it the main destination for people, who want to practice their knowledge on practically anything.

And since I am the only one working on it, I need a second eye to look at the platform and give me some feedback.

Alright, HN community, show your love (or hate) with some useful feedback, it is really appreciated.

Also, if you are interested in education and would like to contribute to this project, please let me know ( ucar@stanford.edu ) and we can talk.

+: Here are some tests to test your programming knowledge: http://educat.me/tests?category_id=8&filter=all

Take some tests and see if you have a good standing among other HN users :)

++: It does not hurt to follow/like the project

here : https://www.facebook.com/educatme

And here: http://twitter.com/educatme
Less coding, more awesome - web development with meteor.js
As someone who has had his house invaded by box elder bugs, there's at least one type of tree I consider to be over-abundant :)
Local Video News Aggregator, Launches Out Of Beta With A Bang
> He lost his job that day.

How do you know that? I think it's silly to go back there just because of a voice mail...
It's not useful to compare 65 million years of data + huge error bars with 1000 years + medium error bars with 100 years + tiny error bars. The uncertainty of what was happening 50000 years ago may very well be greater than the changes we are worrying about in the past century (I don't know this for sure, I can't find error estimates in your link).
I don't think I agree with that. Every home I've lived in has had a GFCI outlet within four feet. (Usually on the side of the sink, next to the mirror. Also usually adjacent to the toilet.)
If having a national defense and an infrastructure that has enabled a person to build that kind of income

I don't understand this argument. The infrastructure benefits everyone. The opportunity to succeed from that infrastructure is available to everyone. The road that leads to the grocery store benefits the grocer and the countless consumers who use it. Who gets the better side of the bargain and how do you determine the magnitude of that inequality?

If anything, public infrastructure tends to help the little guy. Historically, when public services weren't provided, the rich paid for their own needed infrastructure, protective services, etc. Those services were geared exclusively to help the wealthy land owners. If you got protection from the watch patrolling the nearby keep, you were lucky because they weren't really there for you.
This sounds somewhat bizarre. For physical goods it made sense as you had to build big expensive distribution centres. This means big fixed costs and low variable costs.

For streaming video delivery the fixed costs are almost zero while the variable costs are proportional to the amount of video watched.

The article that the deals Netflix and Amazon do with the content providers are fixed cost deals - ie pay a certain amount of money no matter how many or how few customers watch the content. If they are variable costs deals (per view) then it would be mostly insane doing them for more revenue that you get from the viewers.

Does anyone know how these content deals are structured in terms of fixed amounts versus per view amounts?
I work from home for a company that is 100% remote (even the local guy) with all of its 60+ employees (almost entirely developers).

We basically just work regular hours like any normal job, except no commute. Seems to work very well (at least for me).
On my nearly-vanilla install, cmd-t doesn't do anything.
Wow, it's not every day that someone can get personal sales lessons from a potential spy! ;-)
That'll work fine, until someone comes up with product 70% as food as yours, but with a good salesman pushing it.
Maybe on OS X, on Linux I always end up rolling my own ...
It's a design patent, not an utility patent.
They have a nice guide how to set it up too: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html The one-step setup is:

ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl
72-year-old grandfather models women's clothes, sales quintuple
YC became a very good brand that attracts best startups all over the world. I believe, you could make good make good portfolio from rejected companies. It could be good market for crowdfunding.

Problem is that not many investors have sellection skill and experience that YC or some other industry leaders have. That's why investors prefer to follow, 'lemming role' is safer and psychologically more comfortable. Difficult to fing reason to be the first investor in the pool.

What would help for everybody in ecosystem - more transparency in YCombinator selection process. Min Scoretable - team score, market score, product score, stage.
Startups could opt-out from public scoretable while applying.

This will become point of reference for other investors and crowdfunding platforms and valuable feedback for entrepreneurs.
YC as industry leader could bring this public good to the table.
Quick feedback:

- Raise your prices or you won't survive the CAC reality

- Invest in webdesign

- Too much scrolling on your example tutorial

- I'm not convinced it's a better solution that screencasts

Good luck with your startup!
Facebook shuts down Albania Pirate Group, after stolen passwords shared
Traditionally, command-P prints and command-t opens a new tab.