skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> i like play more than I like grails tbh, because it doesn't want to be the rails of java. yes people compare it to one another, but that's just the familiarity effect.

My memory might be playing tricks on me, but I remember play developers talking about rails being a huge influence.

If Play isn't rails for Java, how else one does a Rails for Java? The "familiarity effect" is there because Play is modeled after Rails.

> now, where's the computationally intensive stuff? nowhere to be found. it's a web api. where's the computationally intensive stuff in twitter? I don't know, but chances are theres a native extension for that nowadays.

Search, for one is computationally intensive. I am pretty sure there are more which the outside world doesn't know about.

> There actually was a time when you simply could not build a scalable system in ruby without too many hoops,

What scale are we talking about? At Twitter scale, ruby or anything else has to jump hoops. For example, network load from users coming online and offline on FB chat will break out of box solutions.
Thanks, I hadn't seen this. Certainly the case in the last 4 or 5 elections. It's why Obama killed Romney with young voters.

That awkward kiss between Al and Tipper also comes to mind.
What would a million people all jamming together sound like?
Why not?

If you work 9 hours a day, exercise for an hour, commute for an hour, and sleep 8 hours, you're left with 5 hours every day.

Real-world tasks that fill those remaining 5 hours
- Showering and getting dressed
- Working overtime
- Eating meals
- Random errands and appointments
- Shopping for food and preparing meals (could be off-loaded to the weekend)

It seems like you should be able to cram that stuff into 5 hours a day.

I think another factor the OP doesn't factor is time spent with a significant other. This varies from relationship to relationship, or family to family, but the expectations to spend time together can be quite high, and that can cut into personal productivity.
I'm a huge fan of art.sy. Even though I'll never be able to afford most of the art on the site, it is a great way to discover new artists. I also adore the design, they did a fantastic job of making it minimal but still modern (it's tiny stuff like the transition that happens when you click Browse). I like how this flat design aesthetic is evolving. Art.sy's design could be called "Metro", I suppose, but it looks nothing like Microsoft's designs.

If you're looking for JavaScript or Clojure engineers, I'm interested.
Its time someone made a nice javascript chat. Nobody except coders will use irc.
Yeah, just like slabs of thick bedrock in lower New York correlate with Obama votes, since it enabled large highrises to be constructed in a small, densely populated area. How far back are we willing to go to draw these correlations?
> Weed and alcohol are pretty hard to resist... got any tips for that?

Get some self control.
My cheap HTC has a bezel that comes forward at the front, so even if you drop it front-first it's plastic rather than glass that makes contact with the floor. I've dropped it at least five times and it works. So no, a phone that breaks when you drop it really would be a downgrade.
DOM XSS on Google.com Page using DOMinatorPro Fuzzer
I think this is a great answer to people who ask why we still need things like affirmative action. Here you have a continuing demographic phenomenon that can be traced directly back to slave ownership patterns hundreds of years ago. It should be noted also that the black belt is also a terribly poor stretch of the country.

Unfortunately, it appears that socioeconomic patterns are imprinted more deeply than anyone would want, and more deeply than a lot of people would like to admit.
An academic statistician's view on Nate Silver and betting one's predictions
Canada's oil resources are relatively new as well, I think.
Interesting site, but I found it hard to get in to a groove of stuff I found interesting.

The introduction to the site might work better if it followed a model like netflix where they always show new users some very popular stuff in different genres at the start so they can see the value of it.

That holds true for any content website, lead with your best foot to get engagement, and then lead people down the garden paths to see the obscura.
Man discovers $20K-plus in hollowed-out book at my dump
Revving the engine
There's also somebody in this thread (Nursie: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4757840) who's not going to get the Nexus 4 because it's too small. After having gotten used to a 4.7" screen (and loving it), I'm inclined to suspect that if I got used to a 5.5" screen I wouldn't be able to downgrade either...
Also check out http://www.instajams.com

My best friend and I built this in a few months and we're really proud of it. It's still very early but we're adding new features all the time.

It doesn't have the graphic design and branding of jamwithchrome, but you can start creating music really quickly.

Also, if you sign up for free, you can create and loop clips and jam with yourself if you like.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Best
Not sure what you'd 'save' - any major carrier you want to use with a data plan doesn't offer any (at all?) savings on monthly service plans. Prepaid pricing sucks for data.

Do you want to pay $199 plus $90 month for airtime and data? Or $299 for an unlocked phone and... $90/month for airtime and data?
Sorry that would be Harvard.
Thanks for the input! After reading here and some other reviews, I think I'm going to pull the trigger on it. Although, I'm sure a 32gb version will probably be available at $350 in 6 months :P
The Razr I (or Razr M, depending where you are) is worth a look if form factor is an issue. The Intel processor in the Razr I isn't high-end, but I've not had any compatibility issues and games (Minecraft, GTA III, World of Goo) run fine - not to mention great battery life. Although I would personally go for the Nexus 4 if I hadn't already bought one of these - simply because it has great specs, is "pure Google" and is so darn cheap.
Thank you so much! To enable I needed to change 'Sorting' to 'Manually' in Task Manager Settings.
This is why I read comments before clicking on articles.
These points have already been addressed by others but I'll elaborate further.

This is simply a different culture and perspective. I know that in business we primarily tend to think of things in terms of the value they provide. The motivation behind OSS projects rarely has anything to do with personal profit. They tend to happen because someone is trying to address a personal need and decides to share their solution with the world, or they just want to create something cool for the sake of it or they're trying to learn a new technology and need something to practice on. It's like charity - you don't advertise the fact that you do it, you just help out and hope that it makes a difference. Personally, I think that people only really try to sell things when there is an expectation of exchange - when something is being given away for free, what is the motivation for marketing it? Why would you waste time talking about the result of doing the things you love to do instead of doing them?

I think that this is where the notion of marketing being a force of evil comes from - if something is being sold, it's because someone is trying to convince you to give up something you have. It is inherently selfish. OSS is the opposite - it's selfless - you give without the expectation of getting (yet in real terms you get many orders of magnitude more than you put in - something which just doesn't happen in the business world). It's like a pyramid scheme which actually works.
Or MATE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_%28desktop_environment%29) which is basically Gnome 2.
I've never been so conflicted between the choice of two phones before: Nexus 4 or Galaxy Note II. Although, I tend to trust AndroidPolice more than most other outlets in terms of Android expertise, and I'm comforted more by their assessment of the Nexus 4's battery.
i will re-quote from earlier in this thread.

"People congregate around narcissists. The more epic the narcissism, the more epic the congregation. And it goes in the other direction too: epic congregation implies epic narcissism."
How is this Obama's 'secret weapon'? There is an electoral college, and he lost these states by a landslide.
More http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OsnGvxxQ54&feature=relmf...
I'm in your exact position. Aging Nexus One that I plan on replacing, using t-mobile. LTE isn't an issue for me for a while, as I don't plan on giving my money to either Verizon or AT&T in the near future. My storage concerns were cleared up when I realized I have ~5gb free on my current 16gb sd card. Would both of those things be nice? Sure, but I doubt I will actually miss them.
User interfaces - Skeu you
Some years ago (in 2005 or 2006) I always ran the latest E17 builds as my primary desktop environment. I really liked it! Some things about it were awesome, but OTOH it always was a little bit incomplete. It just took too long, because in 2006 I bought a mac and moved away from Linux.

On my current laptop I had Linux installed for a couple of months, but I didn't try E17 anymore. It just was too late, I didn't want to go through the checkout/build/install stuff again. And now I have removed Linux completely (again), because an Ubuntu update took four days, and after that my mouse didn't work anymore.

Anyway, congrats to the E17 team! I still think you have a great piece of software there.
I taught myself programming last year (starting with Python from Google's course) and am incredibly jealous of this. I'd have killed for someone to explain what on earth Object Oriented Programming was in the context of the project I was working on. It simply did not make sense to me for a very long time.
Tumblr for iPhone is now 100% native
> Funny, because I see OS X as an example of how an OS can become simpler by removing the advanced options that power users and technical users require.

What kind of advanced options is OS X lacking?
One trick I've always tried to maintain is daily releases, namely that I'll always check in code at the end of the day so that it can run in the smoke tests overnight.

Running stats on our version control, I do about 4000 checkins a year, the next highest is 1000, and most team members average about 300.

That being said, my focus is horrible. Using the pomodoro technique has helped me in the past, there's something about not being allowed to multitask that means you can avoid context switching off of a difficult task to something easier (eg: the coding equivalent to cleaning off your desk).

My other problem is a willingness to work overtime. It's one thing to do it for deadlines, but because I internalize monthly deadlines I always have something that I think is so important that it Has To Be Done Now.
IT was more than a correlation. He traced the connection. What has bedrock to do with New York voters? I'd be interested to hear that story.
Having lived in the North for most of my life (or at least above the Mason-Dixon) and having lived an extensive stint in the South, nowadays the Northern cities seem far more segregated. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that there was not forced integration there in the 60's. Look at a city like Chicago or New York where some of the largest population areas are almost entirely black. Check out Kozol's book Savage Inequalities, it's pretty shocking if you didn't grow up in a large northern city. If you did, then well, you know all about what I'm talking about.

There's a lot of elitism from the Northern states still about how they are so progressive but I saw way less racial hostility and more interracial interaction on a daily basis in New Orleans or Atlanta than I do in cities like Chicago or even Saint Louis, a lower midwest town where you can cut the racial tension with a knife.
Yesterday I launched my iOS receipt management app, Simple Receipts. My goal was to make the absolute simplest app possible, as all of the (many) existing ones were complex.

By default it simply saves your receipt images to your camera roll. If you link with Dropbox, it will upload them there.

As of today it's $0.99 in the App Store. You can find it here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simple-receipts/id509966025?...
That's pretty great for streaming music since music can easily be streamed over 3G level speeds. Of course, video is a completely different ball game.
Bounce ball camera to help first responders
Part of the problem I have with Dustin's article are the examples. I think some are ridiculous.

I spent about 10 minutes picking out flatware at the store 10 years ago and haven't thought about it since. The stuff looks the same as it did back then, still weighs the same, and still produces the same functionality.

If my alternative was to spend days researching designs, purchasing 20 different sets so I can test them at home, and finally picking one for the sake of "having something my whole life", I would have felt like I wasted time and money that could have been spent on much better things than flatware. I see no reason why my current flatware would become less usable than the kind Dustin is advocating, and if it does, it would take me all of 2 minutes to buy a new set on Amazon. I guess I'm just not seeing the reward for the resources exhausted.
I find it pretty funny that it sounds like the author's implying black people will vote for Obama.

Then again, he did win somewhere from 90% to 98% of their vote [1], so the assumption is based in truth somewhere.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2229225/Presidential...
One issue that I have seen is that many people will confuse anything more than slapping together code and checking it in as "premature optimization." Many of the same people believe that the value of their code scales proportionately with its size. More code is always better, right?

Poor code leads to technical debt, startup or not. Like all debts, if you don't bite the bullet and repay it, you will eventually be consumed by it.
The WebSocket Protocol as a Transport for the Message Session Relay
AbiWord was fairly close to this, and I believe it was part of Gnome Office at one point (along with Gnumeric, which was a pretty good spreadsheet app for a while).
All the smartphones I've owned (T-mobile G1, Nokia N900, Samsung Galaxy S2) have been dropped repeatedly onto floors, concrete, and down stairs. None had cases, and none were affected in their functionality by this treatment (even the slider G1!). The SGS2 is a bit dented on all four corners and the back and corners are scratched up, but it's never had a problem working. I'm glad I've had the good luck to buy durable phones.
Venture Capital Firm Sponsors 22 Startup Weekends Across Canada
Fact-checkers: Talking crap in Holland v America
I'm curious as to see how much he charged for the lessons.
Add your own subject in Flipboard
Show HN: A Twitter Account Scraper
My Favorite 3 Ruby Methods and How They Work
A Word on Wired and Presentation
I rarely visit Wired anymore, but when I do, it's to take a quick look at some interesting photos.

Here's today's example: http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/11/robert-burley-disappearance-of-darkness/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Top+Stories%29

The experience is always the same. I view the first image, click to go to the next image and CLANG! ZING! HISS... The entire page refreshes (slowly) to display the next image. This process continues with every image. I don't remember the last time I looked through an entire set of images on their site because of this. Incidentally, this happens with their textual content, too.

Until now, I've made a mental note to try to avoid their site in the future. However, after reliving this experience again today, I thought I'd mention it here to make a brief statement about presentation.

To all you aspiring developers who share your work here on HN, use the constructive feedback you receive to your advantage. If a visitor tells you that your site locks up their browser or that something isn't displaying correctly, don't take it as an insult; no matter how much work you've put into it.

It doesn't matter how great your content or how useful your product, if you don't pay attention to your presentation, you are wasting your time and, more importantly, my time.
You are being royally ripped off if you buy a SIM-only contract for $90 pcm. In the UK, such a contract ought to cost you more like $16-20
That's why I follow sites like uncrate.com & Minimalissimo.com and buy my furniture from Stickley, etc. - find a few sources recommending high quality stuff and choose from there; I know it may not be "perfect" and know it will be expensive, but it will be good and I'll be happy with it.
Awesome! Just proof that it's a needed service/feature.
I'm racking my brain and can't think of any significant changes I'd make to the latest version of Finder (referring to Mountain Lion, 10.8 here). It looks great and does everything I want it to do with a minimum of fuss.

The version of Nautilus shipping with GNOME 3 is obviously very heavily inspired by this version of Finder.
Side Projects: Why You Should Care and How to Rock Them (Sacha Greif)
Hey, author here. I'm going to transgress my no-HN rule this one time because I did in fact look at HN Pickup very closely and I already have a follow-up post planned in which I was going to mention it.

Now the difference between my post and HN Pickup is it's a prediction tool, so it's trying to pin-point precise moments when it's best to post, whereas I'm analyzing past data.

So in my post today I talked about the best time to post on average. But, I can also look at my data and say, for example, last Monday from 10 to 11 AM, 30% of submissions reached the frontpage and so it was, in effect, a great time to post.

And with that I could look at HN Pickup's past predictions and tell you how accurate they were, ie. at a time when HN Pickup was telling you it's a "very good time to submit a story", what percentage of stories actually made it?

It so happens that I've actually been able to do that. HN Pickup's creator was kind enough to provide me with a history of predictions for every 15 minutes of a whole week, and after comparing it to observed pickup percentages I found a rather weak correlation (0.25). So it would seem HN Pickup isn't a very effective tool.

Also its goal is only to look at frontpage pickups, it doesn't account for the duration of the stay on the frontpage or HN's traffic at the time, which I do in my analysis.
Isn't there some famous quote about premature optimisation? :-)
This an ignorant comment plain and simple. You are implying that because someone is conservative in the south, their ancestors owned slaves? And even if they did, that their views should be discounted because of the fact someone they had positively no effect on made a mistake 150 years ago? I find this highly offensive.
The real answer, as anyone who reads HN knows, is "a few hours after an already high ranking post, on the same controversial subject, but taking the opposite stand" :)
I've researched this topic while setting up a site on RedHat OpenShift that gives HTTPS enabled subdomains to users (*.rhcloud.com addresses). It turned out the OpenShift crew was not aware of the problem, but fortunately they are now added to the Mozilla Public Suffix List (https://openshift.redhat.com/community/forums/openshift/rhcl...)
The Google Authorship Process: Clear as Mud
So your conclusion is that advertising works ? Well, I can see why you'd be concerned about pissing people on HN off.

However, if there were no advertising anywhere, how would we know what products to buy ? Mainstream advertising channels make users extremely susceptible to 'banner blindness', 'channel flipping', etc.

Of course, the more sensitive users on HN would question your motivations. It's because advertising is becoming so insidious these days that you can never be sure whether an 'expert' is just talking out of his hat or actually giving 'expert advice'.

In this case, since your product is yourself, I'd still give you the benefit of the doubt. Anyone getting annoyed at that needs to think about what's being sold and why :)

I don't know how it's elsewhere but in India lawyers and chartered accountants aren't allowed to advertise their services. They can have only a small board (very discreet) outside their workplace saying who they are and what they do. I wonder if programmers are ever going to go the same way :O
Well he does say himself in the article that the headline is nothing more than linkbait, not to be taken seriously.
And if it didn't, I'd have never known about it. I just learned this today.
This article seems to skip on one of the most important aspects of Ubuntu One for me: syncing my /Home folder.

I've been keeping my photos/documents synced across platforms for years with Dropbox. Ubuntu Ones service is significantly slower at this procedure... BUT, Dropbox doesn't give me the flexibility to sync my config files (or if it does, I have no idea how.)

Keeping my config files synced is immeasurably more valuable for me across my Ubuntu machines and makes a re-install much more pleasurable. I no longer need to spend the hour or so I used to setting up my software the way I like it... it just works.
It's mostly because he didn't title it "A Good One That You Like a Lot (or Maybe Just Enough)". So people that bought durable flatware that they never think about are induced to compare it to flatware that is presented as being The Best (even though the author would likely not spend time or energy trying to convince them they made the wrong choice).

This sort of minimalism is also quite post-materialistic, in that it depends on materialism (for example, a materialistic society is a pretty great way to end up with dozens of types of flatware to choose from).
I'll try this after they fix Chrome to stop kernel-crashing my Macbook Pro 2012.
Growing like bamboo
For me at least, the nexus brand's long OS support time is more than enough to pull me in. The fact that nexus S got Jelly Bean sounds a very good reason to go for Nexus.
There are prepaid options for data from StraightTalk and T Mobile, below $50 for "unlimited", which seems like at least 2GB.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/10/31/thinking-of-leaving-...
I feel that the article and all of the comments missed an important point.

As a designer, taking this approach of investing effort into learning about an item enough that he can pick out the best example of it isn't just a form of mental masturbation.

Because his passion is design, he is exercising his passion and also building up the depth and breadth of his knowledge of design.

Analogies would be a musician wanting to learn how to identify the best songs (even in different genres of music compared to what he writes), an author wanting to read the best books, etc.

I think Dustin made a mistake in saying insinuating this approach would be good for everyone, because he doesn't identify that as a designer he his getting all kinds of benefits from this approach that a non-designer would not get.

I think he gets a lot more out of this than a fancy set of steak knives.
Not a single mention of how it compares to an iPhone. I know it's androidpolice.com, but it's weird to have such a long review without making ANY comparisons to the most-popular phone in the world....
Although I agree with you, I get the impression that someone who doesn't think affirmative action should exist even after learning about the gang violence, intense poverty, substance abuse, neglect, and trauma that surrounds children growing up in housing projects and "bad neighborhoods" -- even after all of that, if someone still says no, then you could probably trace this back to the Big Bang and they'll still say no.
Am I the only one who has seen this article before?

Maybe it was a draft or not public (doubtful, because Dustin isn't close to me), but I'm sure I've read it or a similar version about a year ago.