skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice. We've gone from "but other people have already done so much with it" to "you don't know how to use it." Who cares -- my claim was that it's designed poorly.

I did, after all, say that I haven't used it in years in a nearby post -- I will gladly admit that I don't know much about the recent developments of a POS ecosystem like PHP. I also told you that none of this is related to my point, but hey, have fun using Blub, I never said you can't be very productive and perhaps even successful with it.

You're just not going to change any reasonable minds about whether or not PHP is well-designed, which is why your argument is basically of the form of "but it's already there!" and not "but it's so good!"
Yes I thought it was pretty snarky of Canonical to release that figure and I thought it cast them and their platform in a worse light than SMB. That info release more than anything in that incident would put me off working with Canonical and the Ubuntu App Store.
I haven't touched a Windows 8 machine, but the TV commercials make Windows 8 look foreign and unlike anything I already know how to use.

I view it as a Windows 8 ninja rapidly switching between all sorts of tasks I vaguely understand, and the relationship between the gesture and the computer's response seems hard to follow.

Maybe the OS is really easy to use, but their marketing would make me think twice before buying a Windows 8 machine.
I've been trying to avoid moaning about win8 too because I came pretty late to the party and I get the feeling it's talked out. But like you, I get more annoyed the more I use it . The start screen is tolerable (though I never use it), but I find the "swipe" gesturing and charms bar very irritating. And more irritating still, I find the fact that there's no obvious way to turn them off just obnoxious.
Enjoy? Sublime Text 2.

Use most of the time? IntelliJ Idea.
Not 100% true - there is cell coverage in a few stations if you have AT&T, and WiFi at a couple as well (mostly along the L line).
And not one of those limits prohibits the NSA from copying all electronic communications that enter or leave the United States and reading through them all. Actually none of them prohibit the NSA from even reading wholly domestic communications.

Nor do the limits themselves have any effect whatsoever, since there is no oversight whatsoever to verify they are being followed and Congress has vowed to immunize from liability everyone who violates them.

Americans: your government is reading your email. There are no qualifications on that statement. Most especially if you are a dissident of any sort.

Just as a reminder, FISA was passed because in the early 1970's, a Senatorial investigation showed that the FBI and NSA were illegally wiretapping the fuck out of law-abiding peace groups and civil rights organizations. It is certain that this is occurring today, again.
Thank you for you comment. This kind of comments I was looking for.

What I've been looking into this today...It seems that it's not really worth it, as you said. I would kind of want it to worth it, maybe some day it will be.
That's why I said one or two children are enough for me, not 8 or more.

Yes, it's selfish. So is living at all. If you are so concerned, why not commit suicide and donate the resources you would have consumed in the rest of your life to other people and their children?
I'm not sure about your point on schemas. When using relational database you must have your schema in two places: 1. database and 2. ORM - the second one is enough to avoid most of problems.

What's the point of having schema in database then?
App integration and default apps are the only two things that are worth anything in the list IMO. However, combined with the fact that iOS app ecosystem is still quite superior to Androids more than makes up for the difference.
I didn't say that is not sad. Or rather, that in itself wouldn't be sad, it would only be sad if they then also would be unhappy about having children.

Also, I'd say not having kids is missing some kind of experience you can not have otherwise, whereas having kids doesn't really make you miss out on things you could not have otherwise (unless you count stuff like "partying hard for ten years of my life instead of just 3 years"). In that sense I'd say it is sad. Of course it is not the only sad thing in the world.
How can you have a project without models and models without schema? And so you have to change a schema; is there usually much difficulty? More than supporting multiple schema across a single set?

Even if DBs were still bad at migrating a schema (eg. table locking horrors), the problem usually only presents with millions of rows, which one presumably doesn't have in the early stage of a project -- "start[ing] a project." Nonetheless, even with millions of rows, there have been solutions for all the major RDB since before MongoDB.
I avoid SQL not for the notions, or concepts behind SQL Databases, but for the SQL itself; the LANGUAGE of it all (specifically the syntax).

Nowadays I work with things like ActiveRecord and Mongoid, which add an abstraction layer on top of the literal interface language. However, at the very beginning of my intro to databases (quite recent, last 6 months), the prospect of learning a new language just to talk to databases was off putting. The notion of documents and fields made more sense to me, as it was more comparable to a file system. SQL tables, rows, and columns were daunting and seemed like a relic of paper spreadsheets.

The ecosystem around SQL solutions if clearly far more developed though, however I don't think we should avoid non-SQL solutions for that reason.

Give the alternatives a chance to develop.

Don't look at MongoDB through SQL tinted lenses.
Copywriting for Geeks
I still like GridFS for simple distributed file systems and Redis for N-length lists of string and/or binary content. That said I have to agree with the author whole heartedly.
1. Your ORM can derive it's schema from the database's.

2. I think the main point of the post was that you can run ad-hoc SQL queries no matter how much you've denormalized. You can't necessarily do that with a NoSQL database.
I don't think I saw The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte (available at http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Inform... ) on the list. The Boston Globe's review is 100% correct: it's a visual Strunk and White.
I'm still 24 and I have no intention of ever having a kid, but one year ago, I thought I would never want a girlfriend again either.
I still don't want a girlfriend, but my best friends started some really serious relationship and they can't be with me all the time anymore, so I had to start thinking about dating again.
Maybe some day something will happen and I will need to think about having children too.
I'm not sure it works like this. Keep in mind that most states don't have a tax system like prop 13. Texas actually has fairy high property taxes...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/11leonhardt-avgpr...

So consider a 65 year old who purchased a house in San Francisco in the early 70s for $50,000. This house is now most likely worth about a million now. However, it is taxed at a far lower rate.

They can sell and repurchase in California and keep their old taxes provided that they don't purchase a more expensive house (this is limited to people over 55 and is a one time thing)

http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/faqs/caproptaxprop.htm

There is also one other major exemption - heirs to a property can keep the old property tax rate! I've always been amazed that California is essentially creating a low tax aristocracy based on inherited titles to land, but that is exactly what we have done.

Now, I suppose the retiree could sell the house and move to Texas, but now you're going to be paying a much higher tax rate. If you're a true prop 13 aristocrat, you'd probably have to buy a house that is worth no more than 20% of your current house's value to come out ahead, and you'd need to uproot to texas to do it.

If you're a young family looking to buy for the first time, or looking to trade up (triggering a reassessment of your property taxes), then it does make economic sense to move to Texas. Your prop taxes will be high, but you won't face California's income tax, and you also won't have to subsidize the low tax rates for the titled, landed aristocrats next door.

As for the young tech workers... well, the SF Bay Area is incredibly well positioned for high tech. It has an incumbent advantage and Berkeley, Stanford, and UCSF all within a stone's throw of each other. I think that our regulatory environment is a disadvantage, but clearly not enough to offset. I remember PG mentioning during an interview at the Hoover Institute that bad as things are, things would have to get incredibly bad to drive high tech out of California (I recall him joking "don't tell them").
Usually it's a matter of keeping secrets from their competitors. If you know that a device due to be released next year will be running FreeBSD, it could help you figure out what components are going to be in it, for example (probably parts which FreeBSD can already run on), which might tell you something about its performance.
It may not be needed. The author may just have done it because they could, and thought it was neat.

But the potential reasons for wanting it is that now the runtime is the JVM, MRI (Matz's Ruby interpreter). JRuby accomplishes using the JVM as the runtime for Ruby by reimplementing the Ruby runtime in Java. This is a different approach, one in which Ruby code is compiled to Java code, rather than using Java runtime interpret Ruby code.
This is such a personal spin kind of thing. I've noted in the past that people with more money can develop a sense of fearlessness in their actions, with the levels being

Paid off the house - So housing expense consists of property taxes, insurance, and utilities.

Saved enough for kids to attend college - So you know that if you die tomorrow your kids will at least have had the chance to get through school without crushing student loan debt. Note that this has shades from 'can go to some college', to 'can go to any college they get into'

Have enough such that spending 4% of it per year is enough to pay your basic bills (those property taxes, insurance, and utilities we mentioned earlier, and food to eat)

At each stage your tolerance for risk at what you are doing failing, goes up. So if you are at level 3 and the company your at explodes or your startup has to roll up. Its sad but its not like you're out hustling for the next job, you can reflect on what went right and what didn't and plan your next one with that in mind.

Of course there is completely different kind of 'Getting Rich' and it is most closely associated with people whose goal is "to be rich" rather than "to cure malaria" or "to feed the homeless" or "create the next parallel processing language at scale." I saw a number of those folks growing up in Las Vegas where you could go from having $1,000 in the bank to having a million dollars, in the clink of a slot machine's wheels. Lotto winners can be these people too.

Those people freak out. They try to "live like rich people" do, which is usually some weird mash-up of the Beverly Hillbillies, 90210, and Dallas. They buy a really fancy car, and a flashy house, they add huge on-going costs into their lives (pool maintenance, vehicle maintenance, catering services). They have no idea what managing a chunk of cash like that entails so they dump it all in their local bank's "wealth management" group. They insist on getting check writing (or worse debit card) access to it so they can pay for something whenever they need to, completely unaware of the tax consequences of having to sell securities to cover the cash demands. Surprisingly or not, they give a lot of gifts to people. Including people they probably shouldn't.

Those folks burn through the windfall faster than a fire at a month old Christmas tree lot. When they run out, they usually declare personal bankruptcy, try to get people sued for putting them into the poor house, often ask for gifts they gave to be given back, and sometimes never recover their balance. For them, "Getting Rich" was the worst thing that ever happened to them.

Then there is "rich" where you have 100MM+ in the bank to draw on. Note that 4% of 100M is 4M$/year or 300K/month. If you have that level of stability then you can actually sustain a lot of the stuff that the crazy people burn out on. You can own a jet with a pilot to fly you around, and the parties and gifts can go on for essentially forever. You also need to hire security to protect your family from being kidnapped, etc etc but that isn't a very common level of 'rich.'
Which NP-complete problems are actually easy?
"Gasoline powered cars don't have either of these problems, which suggests that electric cars will remain a small market unless the price of gas goes up sharply."

or battery technology improves substantially which seems likely either in capacity or price, but probably both.
Thing that Android can't do:
Be an iPhone.
Poor Charlie's Almanack, gave me a whole new framework to look at work and life.
Oh, wow - I had no idea! Thanks for pointing this out.

The scientific experiments with him are published now.

Kox et al, 2011
The Influence of Concentration/Meditation on Autonomic Nervous System Activity and the Innate Immune Response: A Case Study
in Psychosomatic Medicine

http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/content/74/5/489.short
Innovator's Dilemma gave me the "super-power" of identifying what kind of businesses will succeed or fail in the tech industry, much earlier than most people (or even big companies' CEO's). I think others who have read it and understood it will feel the same way.

I'd also recommend his sequel Innovator's Solution, which also has a few different and good insights in it. Blue Ocean Strategy is also pretty similar to the idea of "disruptive innovation", but in other non-tech industries.

These books can also be extremely helpful in identifying if you have a "good business idea" or not, and in choosing one with a high chance of success. But of course business ideas can only help you so much. In the end execution will matter a lot.

A very good complementary book to go with these, and about market dynamics and market development, is Chasm Companion. It includes all the theories from Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, etc, and is more like a handbook with actionable advice, too.
Fantastic read. Long, but well worth it. Maybe if we had taken note of this decades ago, we wouldn't be seeing the "no" revolution now. It's ok to say no sometimes, it doesn't make you a bad person.

Thanks for sharing this, OP.
The paper is VERY good actually, and is very much on par with OWASP publications (which it references). I personally like how the paper treats root causes and best practices.
It's not about defending PHP. PHP is an ugly, inconsistent language. It's a matter of pointing out why certain tools are used in certain environments.
For some money is a 'score' which they use to compare whether or not they are winning or losing.
"He Said, She Said by Deborah Tannen is a layperson's guide to gender communications."

I would actually recommend "You Just Don't Understand" by the same author about how men and women talk to each other. Valuable in ways you cannot imagine.
GitHub Has Big Dreams for Open-Source Software, and More
If you don't like raising the kid, you could look into boarding school or adoption. Admittedly that's more expensive than killing a dog, but still.

Also we were talking about maintaining a dog, not getting rid of it.
There's a joke in there somewhere about shorting and waiting for the drop.
> I'm seeing lots of complaints about the PIs dac. How bad is it?

It doesn't really have a DAC at all - it has two PWM peripherals and a filter wired up to the audio jack to generate stereo audio.
If you read the annual compilations of mountaineering accidents in North America you'll notice a few trends, generally people being under prepared and having insufficient basic equipment like lights, warm clothing, or rain gear. A common theme is people getting lost or poorly estimating time or getting caught by weather and then being forced to spend a night out on a mountain when they hadn't planned to. Generally, just being more knowledgeable and trained can help though also making sure you always bring those "ten essentials" also helps a great deal and they don't add much weight or hassle if you do it right.
Absolutely hands down this: http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Book-Classic-Improving-School/d...

Within a day I was memorizing lists of 75 items forwards AND backwards. Completely random items as well.

It makes remembering names a joke, you will remember them for years.

I gave the book to my 15 year old brother and explained to him how much the book meant to me and that it was a very quick read (most of the good stuff is in the first 2 chapters anyway)

Keep in mind hes 15.. 24 hours later he comes back to me with a list of 100 items (to outdo me).. lists them forwards and backwards. That's my boy.

I distinctly remember going to a salon one time and they had tons and tons and tons of bottles of gel, shampoo, hair products lined up in a styled fashion along the middle of the wall going across the wall. by the time my haircut was done I turned around and listed off every shampoo bottle in order and the hair stylist was just like "WTF!!". She probably felt like i was a freak, but I felt really good.

Trust me, its great going to the grocery store and not needing a list, and coming up with all 35 items... makes you feel like a boss.
I use FB only for groups.

I think the reason people are not moving off of FB to G+ is because of the groups. These secret/closed groups are heavily organized and ingrained and it is practically impossible for people to make a move to anywhere else. These FB groups are like Yahoogroups (the old fashioned email listserv) which are still going strong as far as I know.
The thing I noticed about NoSQL is that, at least with Mongo, you just end up putting your schema in your app. You probably do it by saying a particular class has a bunch of fields or instance variables that you expect to be a certain type.

I wrote a portion of an app that relies on Redis, and despite the fact that it's really nice to work with, especially in Ruby (that practically mimics Redis' native API), it was incredibly difficult to remember the structure. What keys do I need? What type are they? Oh I'll have to do `KEYS *` and look I guess. Then I'll remember to document it (and thus create the schema).

Of course, the problem on my part was, in part, that I probably didn't need to use Redis. And when I needed to use Mongo, well, I wasn't storing things that look like documents. I think this is an easy mistake to make, but one you learn from quite easily once you've experienced it yourself.
For one, your DB schema can define constraints or procedures that are triggered inline to the work being done. If building those into the application layer -- not including a middleware -- you are going to pay in network IO and probably wire protocols to guarantee constraints or execute procedures. A middleware could reduce some of the costs, but then you are again moving some logic outside of your local model.
This is fantastic. I studied rhetoric and persuasion in university for a couple years. I think copywriters should too! There are so many old theories that are relevant online. Some of them were covered here.

Thanks for sharing.
The Internet Archive has put up a number of issues of Creative Computing (http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Acreativecom...) but it looks like the first 2 years aren't there. If you'd consider sending them to the Internet Archive I strongly suspect they'd scan and host them.

re: copyright expiration - Absolutely.
>I view it as a Windows 8 ninja rapidly switching between all sorts of tasks I vaguely understand, and the relationship between the gesture and the computer's response seems hard to follow.

I find this aspect of Win8 (switching between Modern UI mode and desktop mode) bafflingly, appallingly bad. It's one of the shortcoming that personally affects me the least (because I never find myself needing to use Modern UI mode), but it is undoubtedly one of the most egregious design decisions.

In a recent conversation with my dad, the archetypal non-computer-guy, he said he wanted a computer with "idiot mode". The problem with win8 is that, while it has the simplified modern UI mode, I can't see it being comprehensive enough for really anyone's computing needs. So you end up switching back and forth between regular and modUI, which for a user like my dad is just a usability nightmare. Switching between both modes is vastly more complex than using either mode exclusively, but you're virtually forced into switching, at least occasionally. I mean, having chrome and IE installed on the same machine is a bit of a stretch to begin with, but when you have two versions of each browser, it's break-down-in-tears laughably bad.

I'm reminded of Larry Tesler's famous "no modes" activism [1] which I first heard about in Bret Victor's truly excellent "Inventing on Principle" presentation. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler

[2] http://vimeo.com/36579366
Why CrossFit is the Workout of Choice for Entrepreneurs
Dear Blogger - We Need to Talk About Brevity.
Which is why they should be used sparingly, if at all. I'm not advocating we go out and start making every class a singleton, just explaining how they do serve a purpose in PHP/WordPress development.
At every US school I've interacted with, it's the other way around. The research grants get used to subsidize teaching.

At the University of Washington, for 2013, tuition (after substantial tuition hikes) is expected to net 44% as much money as the university will bring in from research.

http://opb.washington.edu/sites/default/files/opb/Budget/Tab...
Could you give examples? I'm working at a company where Mongo is being used because.
I hate headlines like these associated with library stories. Seeing that it is a debate at NYTimes, makes me cringe more that they chose to headline with the question (I see this as: Do we need debate page at NYT?).

Civilized human beings need libraries.
Sure, and thus the rise of the developer-product manager. I'd consider myself to be one and I know plenty of others out there. My primary focus is to make sure what we build is what the clients want but when communicating with the developer, I will talk in terms of primary key and other technical concepts.

The same terminology would no make sense to the client and a client's terminology("I just want feature x") leaves out bunch of implementation details which a good product person should be able to clarify and fill in instead of leaving it up to the developer to guess.
If I remember correctly, in Worgl they basically issued some currency and dumped it on the population, that is, they gave money to everybody. I don't think the experiment was run long enough to conclude that it was actually the demurring aspect of the currency that did the trick.

I'm too lazy to look it up atm (did it some years ago), but if my memory was wrong, perhaps I'll look it up again. I do remember thinking back then that there were other aspects besides the demurring to consider in Worgl.

Edit: I just read on Wikipedia, so the city didn't have any more money and they printed their own money which they used to pay people. I don't see the conclusive evidence that Freigeld was the important aspect of it.
So, widgets and NFC, then? I love Android as much as the next guy, but most of this is just grasping at straws for something to hate on the iPhone.