skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That tagline may explain the benefits of REST, but it doesn't really explain at all which problems REST is well-suited for and which not.

I've found that REST design is great for problems where the most visible abstraction is a document or an object (with operations or functions as secondary). It doesn't really fit problems where the most common abstraction is a function call (with the arguments a secondary concern).
> Airspace under 500' AGL is traditionally considered to be under control of the landowner

Seems like they should have a warrant if they want to operate drones on my property.
Google rallies opposition to UN takeover of Internet governance
On Being a Junior Developer
> And trust the other person(s) to do the same.

And this is where your supposition falls apart in my real world. In all of my encounters by email, people do not spend the time to answer all of your questions in great detail. Most of the time, they will answer one question, and then with only superficial detail. This is what leads to the "one question per email rule" [1], and hours of back and forth which could be resolved with a single phone call lasting only a few minutes.

I think in my time in corporations, I've run into one person capable of maintaining high quality emails where we didn't have to use calls - one out of hundreds. It's the main reason I've had to develop my own interpersonal skills.

I'm always open to the possibility that the problem was on my end, but when I receive one sentence answers routinely from people by email, I don't really think it is.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=one+question+per+email
I guarantee you that people who avoid working hard at their startups will never have any success that tempts them to work harder.
Did really Egypt will cut Ukrainian wheat and goes for the American one in 2013?
Many technical people are uncomfortable with business because it's too organic. It would be really nice if X amount of effort guaranteed Y amount of dollars, but that's only somewhat predictable some of the time.

There's also that whole marketing thing (which I understand the need for, but will never understand the thing itself) that can drive tech people batshit.
NASA admits hiding 'really good' news from Martian soil
pickadate is just as opinionated as jquery ui. why must component writers insist on hard-coded (and non-customisable) use-cases. there's simply no need to mandate an `input` element.
The argument could be made that giving as much of yourself as possible is a crucial ingredient to making the startup worth it. After all if you are holding back the product and business isn't building itself.

Of course it probably isn't healthy to make a business the center of your life, but people who do will likely have a higher chance of success in that business because they are willing to put forth a lot more effort to keep it going than someone who isn't as committed, and therefore not as concerned if the business fails.
I've read it, and it's a great book. Another I just started reading is Safe Patients. Smart Hospitals. by Peter Provonost, who's the guy who actually conceived the idea of hospital checklists that Atul Gawande built upon.
Yeah that's true, the specific application is involved so its not strictly equivalent to a copyright. All in all, I think the pharmaceutical industry is a place where patents themselves seem to work as intended even if manufacturers' legal, sales and marketing departments have been known to take atrocious liberties.
I'm sorry for being negative but I must say this is pretty hard to take.

This narrative is cliche in both in form and content. It's painfully melodramatic and offers almost no insight whatsoever. Yes, major losses in any sphere of life can be poignant (in a way this text surely is not). So what? Where's the value?
I believe that's a form of the correlation proves causation fallacy, probably others as well.
The methane data is disheartening, but I'd love to see what the latest samples are reading.
Profit is every bit as fictional of an ideal as a pageview or user signup. Most business activity do not take into account the externalities (corn is "profitable" but heavily subsidized by the government and most manufactured goods end up in a landfill that's not paid for by the company) that are created but not accounted for in the "Profit and Loss Statement"
Thanks! I completely get what you are talking about re: the merits of meaningful game features vs just a cheap "gamification" job... something we'll have to keep an eye on as we move forward. This is my first company/product (ever) so it's a bit alarming how many things we've already realized we don't know.

Thank you for your comments, I'm definitely going to check out your firm's site and from a business and personal interest standpoint because frankly it seems like you've thought through at least several things we haven't quite gotten to yet. For example, I hadn't realized (although perhaps intuitive in hindsight) that the context of whom you are playing with/against can effectively curb anti-social behavior like cheating.
Three myths about copyright law and where to start fixing it
>By the time you've forked out for the (now suddenly per core rather than CPU[1]!) enterprise license, all the 3rd party backup and restore tools, numerous windows licenses and had your arse audited for license compliance, you're down a lot of cash.

SQL Server licensing is pure madness.

I will never forget sitting across from a cadre of regional level Microsoft folks who had just finished explaining the intricacies of SQL virtualization licensing.

The seemingly straightforward design we envisioned to cost perhaps $120K under any sort of reasonable, logical licensing structure attached to per socket price of SQL would actually run upwards of $1.3M to properly comply with the Microsoft licensing terms.

It wasn't even the absurd total or the ridiculous terms that were so memorable. It was the fact the Microsoft folks seemed to be as shocked at our incredulity as we were at their terms.

I got the impression they weren't used to providing more than "It's cheaper than Oracle" as justification to receive millions of dollars.
hi daleroberts, i'd love to chat with you about this. since i responded to your post i decided i am interested in crafting a short ebook in this vein and would love to chat with you. ezl@rocketlease.com, if you're open to discussing.
It's an interesting project. Some friends have been toying with a twitter version of Cash Cab (a trivia show) for a while. The time limit really makes it interesting
"Airspace under 500' AGL is traditionally considered to be under control of the landowner"

Sorry, but this is not true. Airspace above private property is considered public right of way, in the same way that a sidewalk in your front lawn is public right of way. The ceiling of what belongs to the landowner is a gray area of law, but is generally considered to be the space that is actively used. If you have a trampoline, for example, then your active usage is slightly higher than that of your neighbor without a trampoline.

The FAA operates under a white-list. Everything is illegal until a regulation is made to make something legal. Radio-controlled aircraft have an exemption for recreational flight. Unmanned aircraft operated for recreation fall under that same exemption. For commercial, or civil usage, a certificate of authority (COA) is required on a per-case basis since no blanket regulations exist yet.

"That poses the question whether we are within our property rights to shoot down any drone flying around inside it?"

No. If someone drives an R/C car along the sidewalk in your front yard, you are not entitled to shoot it because of your property rights. At best, you could try to prosecute for trespass. Same with a flying vehicle, but unless the flying vehicle is under 20ft or so, the odds are not in your favor.
I would call Django everything but low-level. Tornado, Twisted.Web and (possibly) CherryPy are low-level, Flask, Bottle, Web.py and other micro-frameworks I consider mid-level and Django, Pyramid and other "full-stack" frameworks are definitely high-level.

And Django's complexity is really good in it's class. "Complex is better than complicated" - and Django tries hard not to be the latter :)
That European average is for the whole of the geographical entity known as Europe, so I'm not sure how fair the comparison is. The population of Europe as a whole is 2.3 times that of the US. Also the US is a single political entity, with (for the most part) ons set of laws. Many of the Eastern European countries do not fall within a similarly consistent legal framework.

If remove Eastern Europe, then the homicide rates for the rest of Europe are:

Northern Europe	1.5

Southern Europe	1.4

Western Europe	1.0

Conversely, including other parts of the Americas (ie Canada and Central America) massively increases the average homicide rate - Central America's rate is a truly shocking 28.5
It's always nice to know that you're not the only one who felt this way.
Really good post, can't believe I'm the first one upvoting that submission after all this time. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316831
Looking at that chart one might be forgiven for thinking that Win32 desktop apps couldn't call WinRT APIs and vice-versa.

I don't recall where, but I've seen a good blog post explaining the errors and variations on that diagram. DrPizza maybe?
Using Geek Principles to Revolutionise Science
Watching any live TV in the UK, even when avoiding all BBC channels, is subject to this mandatory payment. Hence it is, by any reasonable definition, a tax.
I am a co-founder and when I bootstrapped my company we made a pact to make sure the startup had to support its own weight. It had to pay its own bills. It had to grow its own customer base. It was a person.

Everything we did, everything we made, everything we said, everything we coded, made the startup stand on its own feet. Granted, things change after series A but I say this because if you find yourself using your own credit cards, your own savings, then you need to think different.
I completely agree! It should be a fiduciary duty.
The problem is not that you're negative, it's that you're unwilling to see the potential of learning from other people's mistakes. Just shutting yourself off from the prospect and consequences of failure does not automatically make you immune to those mistakes. Smart people fail every day, and sometimes those failures are personal disasters. It's a good idea to remind yourself what's at stake sometimes.

Winning the startup lottery is also a cliche, but I don't see anyone complaining when random successful people relate their accounts (some of which could not possibly translate to anyone else).
Gboom: CLI Gist gem
A bit off topic here, but I feel that this is a terrible metric.

The reason it's impossible to find answers for how to fix problem X in Windows (besides it being terribly designed) is that there are a ton of users who are trying to be helpful and providing bad advice.

Googling for solutions to an Ubuntu problem is starting to look grim too. Read some bug reports on Launchpad and then read some on the Debian bug tracker; there's a clear difference in signal/noise.

Circling back to the original point: if a web framework is simple, you can figure out the problem by just reading the code rather than looking online for solutions (many of which are in the form "oh, framework Y automatically does Z for you so you have to...").
It depends. There's working 'hard' (maximum hours, maximum effort, maximum stress, etc.) and there's working smart.

There's no point working hard if you're not working smart; if your priorities are wrong, you're trying to do too much, or ultimately, you're pouring your heart and soul into a business that just isn't viable.
re: Only Curiosity pretty much cannot find life

What? A martian running in front of the camera would work. A rover not sent by earth. A little house on the... sand. Big ol skeleton of a unicorn... Seriously, you have no imagination.
Unless there's missing information, this sounds like a non-story. It seems like the San Diego PD looked at a quote that was sent to a different police department and never bought anything. They didn't respond to the FOIA request because they hadn't bought anything. Am I missing something?
How HP lost 8 billion dollars
> when they get to such a size where keeping the status quo would help them more than reforming patent law would that they'd drop their ideology and start throwing patent suits around like everybody else? I do. Because I would.

I wouldn't. For many of the "I shall take advantage of this system" person/company out there, there are thankfully examples to the contrary. Redhat. Google. Sun Microsystems (RIP).

I'm convinced that the reason this issue is being aired more often now, is because the greedy kind (the trolls and unscrupulous management of product/service companies) have overplayed their hand. They have gone a bit too far with all this aggression, and I for one am very glad to see people respond in kind.
+1 for teaching. I find that explaining deep technical problems to people who are smart, but otherwise clueless about technology, forces me to understand the issue myself at a much deeper level. My girlfriend is the best rubber ducky debugging buddy ever.
From $50 to $20 Million. Lessons from a man with Attitude.
I would really like to believe this. But the US is killing its own citizens without due process, according to secret lists. The emails, IMs, and whatever else that we send are being stored at the NSA facility in Utah. These are just bits that need to be flipped back the other way? What greater contradiction to the original ideas of the US could you imagine, and what progress do you see to correct them?
there is a big difference between bootstrapping a business and going for VC as a start up.

It's great to be either but please dont ridicule one or the other because you prefer one type yourself.

ps. I have a bootstrapped business like you talked about so I know what you mean. It is weird to hear from my friends that work at funded start ups about the crazy money being spent. But we need to realise they have to build scale extremely fast.
Yes, there should be a WSDL for REST APIs.
Yeah, I'm sure your paychecks don't reflect that.
That just shows it's HTTPful, not RESTful. In this case, that protocol involves being told how to construct a URI rather than it being presented from a menu of choices discovered by following URIs in the API.

I agree that it's much more convenient to have well-defined fill-in-the-blank. I disagree that it matches the requirements of REST, whose proponents always tell me "If you document the URIs or how to build them, you're doing it wrong."

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1164154/is-that-rest-api-...
Most of my most time consuming django hours involve forms or admin. it's not that there is a bug in my code, it's just very twisted and thick in there.

Eg. Form classes are created dynamically per request and then instantiated. Lots of currying, many places that params can be specified.
Freezes up Chrome 23, Firefox 16.0.2 (shows "stop this script?" box) and Safari 6.0. Opera does not freeze, but the UI is very slow, suggesting something is still wrong.
I find this story extremely tragic -- not because this man's company, his dreams, failed so tremendously, but that he allowed two fundamental aspects of his adult life to fail with it.

Is it the prevailing opinion in the startup community these days that building up personal debt and letting your relationships fail are worthwhile parts of starting a company, or is this, as I suspect, just a sad story about misaligned priorities?

I don't mean to attack any premise of the story; I'm honestly curious what startup founders think of this article. I personally have no goals of huge buy-outs nor IPOs, but I would like to start my own business some day. I can't imagine being willing to give up my significant other to focus on the business, and I would hope that about the time I start thinking about using personal credit cards to finance the company I also stop and realize that the company is dead already.

I sincerely don't know what I'm suppose to take from this article, but I have the feeling based on some of the comments in this thread that the parts I find important are not the same parts that others find important.
Besides tailored customer support interactions, this is useful for characterizing cohorts. You would use aggregates to identify customer groups and interesting business insights -- 'one geographic region produces more order completions than another' or 'low purchase price customers initiate more support interactions' -- and then use something like this activity feed to discover the narrative behind samples from those clusters. The aggregate stats give you the high-level business logic, while this use-case view tells the story behind how those overall traits arise from single user actions.
Many of the quotes on that page were reasonable questions and statements. Adding a picture of a van with more tailfins than a 1950s roadster doesn't change that.
Github is retiring Impact Graphs
Without copyright protection, there would be less incentive to interfere with any of the freedoms. Imagining a lack of copyright on software, the two reasons I can think of to eschew sharing are to keep for oneself/one's group an advantage provided by the program (whether that be a better search algorithm or a better nuclear weapon simulator) or to prevent exposure of assumptions made by the software to a competitor/adversary (e.g., avoid illegitimate SEO, security through obscurity).

The advantages of sharing would remain: everyone with more access, a larger number of people to help improve the software.

The pro-copyright claim is that the current system provides incentives for more software to be built than the absence of copyright would; but that's an economic model without experimental validation and not even as reliable as tested economic models (e.g., Keynesian stimulation/damping).
> Sadly, Weev's nature is that of a rattlesnake, and he's basically burned every bridge he could on his way here. Thus, the EFF will have nothing to do with him.

Could you expand on that? Why doesn't the EFF want to help him?
One of the best decisions I ever made was to admit failure early when I saw it coming. It wasn't ambiguous or one of those "if I try hard enough, I can turn this ship around" situations. It was clear that my idea, project, marketing efforts -- all of it -- was essentially going down the tubes. The cash in my savings account burnt off like fog on the Golden Gate. These are standard pressures, but there were some systemic things that keyed me off to how clearly it had failed.

For one, my heart wasn't in it. It was like I had spent months crafting an idea that I thought an audience of customers would receive happily - only to realize I wouldn't use it or care about it myself. It also had become a business proposition I couldn't succeed at myself. I needed more help than ever.

So I packed up my stuff and killed it. It was painful, but I am glad I had the ability to see the truth before getting so bad as to be like the scene painted in this post. That said, it's not always obvious like it was in my case; I have tremendous respect for folks that go through this and fight to the bitter end.
> And this is where your supposition falls apart in my real world.

I know this. And I suffer from this. It seems like the problem is not with you at all - it's what I wrote many times already: people generally loose ability to read and write.

These days I exchange emails with very few people - probably four, maybe the fifth one appears sometimes. I had a possibility to place myself in such a position that all of them I chose myself. They are all capable of good written communication. It took me many years and hundreds, if not thousands, of tries to do that.

The fact that fewer and fewer people are able to write coherently and understand what they read is maddeningly sad. I can't do anything about it. I can only distance myself from it, as far as my current position allows. I can't do this to an extent that the OP can and I have very different reasons, but I do my best.
I interned at IBM/Lotus in 2006, when I was still in college. I don't know much about its history pre-Notes, which is mostly what the article is focused on. But I liked the place, and I appreciated my time there. It had a lot of history.

Notes is a fascinating example of the power and danger of a large legacy customer base. Their UI predated Windows, and any change they made risked to either the look and feel or the backend data model risked alienating their already dwindling list of customers, many of whom were looking for an excuse to leave anyway. Nonetheless, those users kept them afloat for years, and still do.

It's easy to forget that the power of the platform is not in the email, which sucked; it handled authentication, security, and replication for a wide array of largely drag-and-drop business applications. If you're an enterprise, and what you basically need to automate your workflow is a form and a little bit of glue code, there's a lot to be said for that system; old companies that claw their way out of it find themselves now saddled to shaky, expensive bespoke web applications that don't work offline. Because of this, it was a devil to migrate off of; even IBM tried, and failed, to rewrite it, in the form of Lotus Workplace. Talk about lock-in.

Still, I'll miss the name.
I don't care how simple a framework is. There are always dusty corners that are hard to understand. There will always be bugs. And the ability to get help from fellow users when you hit those is, in my experience, crucial.
Looks like site is getting killed by all the load... not loading for me
The CFAA does not in practice prevent search engines from scraping pages. In order to be charged under the CFAA, you must willfully access specific information on a website in furtherance of a fraudulent scheme, which in turn means you must be making specific representations as to your identity or actions that a website could reasonably rely on in order to trick that website into doing something it wouldn't have done otherwise. In CFAA cases, the prosecution must prove not only unauthorized access (which is easy) but also fraud (which is not as easy).
I don't really care for this. The promise of web technologies, which has finally become reality over he past few hears, is obviating the need for client libraries. This benefits. Oth providers and consumers alike. The benefits cited by the OP are not that compelling. Most (all?) other APIs allow/encourage direct access so for a large number of developers, that's a strong preference.
There is an old Proverb, "Only Our Enemies Truly Know How Many Plots We Foiled."

I hate TSA as much as the next guy, but their presence and efforts could have deterred and foiled thousands of plots you and I would never hear about because they don't even know about them.

Denying the reality of the potential danger airplanes can cause to major population centers, like we saw on 9/11 is foolish.
Airport Security May Suck. But, It May Be Saving More Lives Than It's Killing Indirectly.
I'm from Singapore, I've never been to the US and I've lived in the UK for 6 years previously.

Remember we're talking about accepting payments here, not opening a bank account. And if free online transfers are so viable for this, why do hardly any UK online merchants accept it as a form of payment and almost all accept the usual credit cards and Paypal? My guess: fraud /risk management and scale.
Same here. I tried valiantly to do some class based views the other day and my spidey sense started going off. Maybe I'll find time later to get those the way I want them but I suspect they will suck up more time than they will save.

It's a general problem with hierarchies of inheritance. Too many separate places where the actual functionality is, so you have to learn all of them and hold them in your head to understand the few pithy lines of code in front of you.

And that's the issue with the admin and forms. Hard to keep track