skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can access the PicasaWeb website, but if you have G+ enabled, you won't be able to use the Picasa desktop app to add new PicasaWeb albums, it will now only upload to G+.

Free service, you get what you pay for, etc., but this odd cascading change is the kind of thing that drives my (70+) parents crazy, and they take note of the fact that it was Google that broke the thing they were comfortable using.
It's not dust, it's the emergence. Journalism as an occupation is a required aspect of liberty. Journalism as a business is essentially reactive and has not successfully shifted in monetizing new media. Until it does, it will stay stuck in old patterns.
nonexistent does not necessarily imply invalid. I don't use rails, so take my ignorance into account, but I'd hate to catch exceptions all the time instead of just checking for falsey values.

Ex: "Enter your student ID"

s = Student.find_by_id(params[:id])
if s
# do stuff
else
# do other stuff
end

vs

begin
s = Student.find_by_id(params[:id])
# do stuff
rescue
# do other stuff
end
Rather interesting that S.Korean is colored red as well? Imagine that should be a mistake.
I do it a bit differently:

Read 0 is basically just thumbing through the book and absorbing its "natural structure"

Read 1 is a regular cover to cover but oftentimes I only pick specific chapters that looked interesting from R0. Important: With pencil and marker in hand to highlight interesting stuff. I selectively pick examples and exercises and work through them.
At the same time I start building a mindmap on the topic (I use FreeMind). If the language has a REPL I usually play around a bit and copy/paste interesting building blocks into the map.

"Read" 2 is working through a bigish project I made up+additional internet research. Always growing that mindmap.
In what way does this simplify joining data from multiple APIs?
You certainly can create high quality printable PDF's.

Check out this example:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/94002/postmortem/docs/EmeryRoe/out/...

This was generated using Markdown run through Pandoc (which the OP is using) which was configured to target a LaTeX template which then converts to a very nicely formatted PDF.

The key to moving from Markdown to PDF is to have a nice LaTeX template to format the content generated from Markdown.
Good lord... The companies here are dirty, but lets not forget the EPA for creating the problem in the first place!
No, because this very probably wouldn't increase average happiness:

1. The 1% would be less happy.
2. Lot of the 99% would feel guilty (which lowers happiness).
3. The 1% would probably be less productive than if they were free. So the only benefit for the 99% would be that they consume less.

By the way, this system to a certain extent exist in our society (cheap labour in China for example).
No, just whimsy in this case. I haven't been very enthusiastic or made heavy use of G+, but I've found it gradually becoming useful despite minimizing my time spent on it.
I imagine a "programming opinions" website could, in some ways, be done similarly to Rosetta Code. http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

I imagine it providing a way for people to pose potential problems/questions, and either letting users post their suggestion/opinion of how the problem should be solved. Rosetta Code limits itself to programming problems, but this hypothetical site could allow more general questions/challenges as well.
Are you considering a/b testing your sign up form?

Not too long ago on HN there was an article about how the Obama web team converted their forms into multi-step forms and noticed an increase in conversions.

Maybe add a picture showing what is delivered to your door every month?

Just a thought.

Good luck guys!

http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-...
Ask HN: What book should I read next?
I'm looking for a new book to read. Any genre is OK, but above all I want to read something that will give me a new perspective on an old problem.
I disagree.

Building a community around open-ended questions like this is next to difficult. SE was able to counter this because of the nature of the allowed questions. A website with the premise of "ask programming questions that do not have a specific answer" lacks the specificity to cultivate a community that is connected enough to be lively (based on my small amount of experience with forum management).

SE is in a good position to attempt such a thing because the community already exists.

However, it may still face issues with liveliness.

It may be a better idea to just allow these sorts of questions with a specific tag (and visual indicator on question links).
am i the only one who think the interface is too complicated?
Pretty cool, bookmarked. I always enjoy different forms of presenting the info, playbook was a nice touch :)
What problem did the EPA create exactly? They created a rule that the company disagreed with? That does not give them a right to break it. That's not how the law works.
Are you opposed to cramming altogether or just in this case?

I like to think of tests as "you either know it or you don't and if you try to game it you're cheating", but I'm probably just weird that way.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? I can't see the relation between my comment and your response.
Side note, duck typing is not inherently slow. Some people assume since many duck-typed languages are slow that there is some causation going on.

Go is way faster than Ruby and extensively uses duck typing everywhere (but is also statically typed and not interpreted-). My point is duck typing is not the reason Ruby is so slow.
Windows RT*, a little less demanding.
a certain xkcd comes to mind.
It's really depressing to see the "Don't be Evil" company get down in the mud because they're afraid of some fly-by-night swindlers who nobody will remember in five years.

I'm not giving you my name and face, Google, no matter how much I used to love you.
You're missing my point. If the legal exactitude of the name is relevant to some functionality, then yes I do think that most decent engineers will naturally tend to want a reference of some sort. Otherwise, they just change whatever broken thing they did if and when it becomes a problem.

It doesn't make them any less intelligent than the author of this article. The cutesy way that list was written and that comment at the end of the article was what I was responding to earlier, but anyway...what exactly did I say to you or anyone else that was so condescending? I'm not saying that I'm not slightly intense at times, maybe I ask a lot of rhetorical questions... Sorry.
What's the great benefit of these methods? Why not just do find_by("url", x)? I just don't understand the desire to move string parameters into member names.
No! It is a retro-text media social network for rockstar ninja coders.

Facebook is going to buy it for 50 million dollars.
Haxe is very promising in the world of game development. I really like some of the off-soot projects such as Stencyl 3.
Before, 99 % of internet surfers were anonymous. Now, when they browse their facebook intranet, everything they do is logged and recorded. And now, we see the same with Google.
I tried to register a youtube account for my foosball association a few days back. It wouldn't let me use a nickname. It had to be a real name with a gender, a google+ account and a gmail. I ended up using my own youtube account. They've asked me about 15 times if I want to use my real name on youtube, I always say no.
Yeah, exactly, indie games would have been a much better example than Windows 8 in that article.
Asking Jobs is pretty easy. It's getting an answer that's difficult.
Nearly every interesting and popular question on StackExchange gets closed for not following rules. When I see a posted link to a question, I assume it will be closed, and it is.
Slifty:

Here's the thing—everyone, in every enterprise-level business has deadlines. In news media, there is confusion over auteurship and who drives production. It's similar to music business and movies.

As a result, the businesses while have their entire existence dependent upon control of market are very reluctant to disruptively innovate.

I think, if there was a new media professional journalism school or movement, this would be less of an issue. The more I think about it, we're looking at similar to what Hollywood did before the rise of film school directors—personal control requires control of tools.

In media in general, presentation is a necessary part of identity. Branding is key. Therefore, the tools that create that are frightening to distribute. Good tools, as you know are build from the ground up over time, with both en eye towards future development providing foundation and current need and relentless opposition providing shape.

The Times is pretty progressive, but they're in the seat of Microsoft or Apple—the company can create a standard, but there's little pressure to embrace it.
A More Transparent Clipboard Button
People don’t understand how segmentation works
- http://foauth.org
- http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/
To clarify: Ubuntu for phones can run using the android kernel (which is a modified linux kernel). This means that most of the drivers should work out of the box (graphics, wireless, etc) if you use this route. You can also use a normal linux kernel but the driver support could be more problematic in that case.

The difference is that Ubuntu phone has the ubuntu userland (which includes apt) where as a normal android phone has the android userland (dalvik, etc).

The nice thing about the ubuntu userland is that it will most likely allow you to use any compiler that targets ARM. This is interesting because it allows you to make native phone application using python, ruby, haskell, lisp, etc.

Another nice thing about the ubuntu userland is that it includes the gnu programs so it will be much easier to compile and use things like openssh than it is in android.
Yes A/B testing is on our plate for the future. I first heard about it from a patio11 aka Patrick McKenzie podcast.

Currently we are in what we consider our MVP stage. I would like to see 10 signups before we quit our day jobs. :P

But thank you for the link and advice :)

That article just goes to show that testing and data are king.

I personally don't like multi-step signup forms and that is the only reason it is not one. But soon enough I will start rocking out some A/B testing.

Have you played with https://www.optimizely.com/ by chance?
If so how was your experience?
It's a full Ubuntu Desktop. Dock your phone and run "sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping". Or, alternatively, just open the Software Centre and remove it from there.
Sacha Greif recently shared his thoughts on pricing ebooks in this podcast interview.

There have been a few high-profile designers and developers releasing ebooks, and ebook packages (PDF + videos + resources). The most recent example was Nathan Barry who had 4 packages: $39, $99, $249, $999 http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/

When asked about the criticism Nathan received about his pricing strategy, Sacha had this to say:

"People don't understand how segmentation works. If you want to buy a car, you could buy a Ferrari or a Honda. You know those two cars are for different audiences. No one complains about the price of Ferraris; people understand that they are expensive. It's the same with ebooks; just like you can buy a cheap car or expensive car, you can buy a cheap [ebook] package or expensive package. If you think the expensive package is too expensive, it just means you are not the target audience. People think it's crazy that Nathan Barry is charging $200 for his ebook package; but they're not the target audience. He doesn't want you [the individual] to pay that; but rather the office manager at the big company, who isn't spending his own money."
And what happens when a desktop monitor is connected? Will it give me the same small-screen touch-optimized app or are the apps supposed switch to desktop UI mode? The former would be disastrous, and the latter would be optimal but extremely unlikely (to put it lightly).
It seems half-baked...
Information around the web suggests that it's being tested on the Galaxy Nexus, and that the image for that will be released.
For bikes, I'm sure the metal manufacturing processes invented during the industrial revolution helped. It was probably really hard to produce a metal sprocket and chain before the 1800s.
Do you have any use cases in mind ?

It seems to me that you would mostly act as a proxy between a user and a service, which really doesn't sound too useful unless one actually needs to access dozens of APIs (which doesn't seem to be something that happens often).

Or is your idea really an aggregator (e.g. "find images using such and such keywords" and it returns results from flickr, 500px, ...) ?
What’s Inside America’s Banks?
if you can control session hash it may also be possible to execute arbitrary ruby code. if you take an object from the session hash and call a method on it then depending on the method name it is possible to eval arbitrary ruby code.
Always wanted to try zipcar. The only thing that scared me off was the yearly fee, though I know that's kind of silly.
Books in the age of iPad
I don't see how using google+ to add reviews results in using google plus to post. In other words, this integration might show an increase in ridiculous stats google is posting, but it doesn't really increase amount of time user spends on the actual site (so he doesn't read newsfeed). Thus any comparison with facebook stats is not possible.

Disclaimer: I don't use either social network, but in their stats facebook will consider me an inactive user and google will consider me an active user.
A phone is the thing everyone needs. If it isn't a phone, then you need another phone.
I used to work at ClearChannel, and I worked on sites with lots of video embeds (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, Coast to Coast, etc.).
Does this affect friendly_id?

edit: friendly_id does not use the dynamic find_by_x methods. I guess it should be safe.
Nothing stops you from playing a few seconds with Chrome inspector or Firebug if you really need to see the answer. If I weren't too lazy I would probably make a Greazemonkey script to remove the login overlay, but since I visit that site once our tribe a month I just don't bother.
Check Out What We're Building
Hilarious. Sounds legal and I doubt they would have done it otherwise. Good example of why most regulation is ridiculous because it's generally easy to find and exploit loopholes.
Google blocked and is blocking Rokus official YouTube app, so I don't think Microsoft is fibbing.
75% of web servers run on it, I think thats a pretty solid mark
Hey guys,

CJ here Co-Founder of Simple Coffee Club!

This is a project we have been working on for about a month now.

A bit about me, coffee has been a passion of mine for years and years. I have a background in web design, I love long walks..... you get it.

After reading 100s of articles about business, I finally realized to be successful in business you truly have to do what you love.

But to cut to the chase, we are looking for any type of feedback both negative and positive.
Aging brain
This has been discussed in depth in Apple/Android threads.

The point is, you have to get a monopoly first. Google doesn't have one.
Stupid question: Is the source code available yet?
The sunlight! My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
I wonder if the limitations of the HTML5+JavaScript framework for developping apps on Ubuntu will be removed when Firefox OS is released. Why wouldn't Canonical implement the JS APIs that are built for Firefox OS and make Firefox OS apps runs natively on Ubuntu?
Err...the EPA didn't create a law that the company disagreed with. They created a regulation that was designed to incentivise the importation of renewable fuels.

Someone at Bioversal Trading was clever enough to realize that they could make more money gaming this regulation then actually selling their cargo. Therefore, they ran the train back and forth a dozen times and wracked up money from the Government.

Dirty? Yeah. Fraudulent? Potentially, depending on how the regulation was written.

If anything, it speaks to the danger of hidden incentives in otherwise innocent-looking regulations.
The Bill Clinton "is" thing is a bit like the hot coffee lawsuit: When you look at the details, it's quite a bit less silly then the news made it seem

The Paula Jones lawyers deposed Clinton earlier with a ridiculous definition of sexual relations, the judged chopped it down way too far, and Clinton didn't answer one more bit then he had to because they kept leaking shit, and no one answers more than they have to in a deposition.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-105hdoc311/pdf/GPO-CDO... for the grand jury testimony about all this. Look at page 454 by searching to read the start of it.

All that said, yes, there is a point where definition of a word doesn't really matter. So yes, I agree with you, George Bush hiked the taxes on Jan 1 2013 on the upper class due to a expiration clause on a tax bill, and the Republicans opted not to renew the payroll tax holiday Obama got in exchange for a 2 year extention of the Bush Tax Cuts. They did not agree to extend these cuts when he did not agree to continued extensions of the Bush tax cuts for the highest wage income earners.
Open Laundry API: connect your washing machine to the cloud
Do you know how easy it is to port touch-friendly UI frameworks/SDK's such as MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) to Ubuntu? Damn easy.

In fact, its already done: and right now, MOAI - and similar tools, just like it (Love2D, Cocos2D, &etc.) - are already out there, running on the existing OS's, and providing multi-touch interfaces that definitely compete with existing Frameworks/SDK's. There is little that Cocoa does, for the 2D gamer/mobile developer, that MOAI cannot do, also. (Granted: native interfaces are a weakness, but then again: non-native, truly cross-platform UI's are a STRENGTH in the face of the existing market)

By making this move, Canonical has just invalidated all the proprietary bullshit the average Objective-C developer has to contend with, in order to develop an app for the mobile platform. Same with Android - both Objective-C and Android investments have just been bumped down a few tens of points, in my opinion. Why bother learning proprietary locked-in crap, when you can pick a framework that will run easily on all of the platforms, including the up and coming new Ubuntu-Mobile?

Where once we have over-specialization and a slavish devotion to technocratic dogma from an oppressive regime (Apple, and in lesser yet still significant ways, Android too), we now have a real ability to choose our tools and standardize on the ones with which we most feel comfortable.

Make no mistake, this is a genius move. Not only do we have Mobile becoming Desktop becoming the Cloud, finally, but we have it with Open Tools, that no other company has the balls to produce.
So is it going to have two WMs and two versions of every desktop app? One touch optimized and one for the desktop?

It doesn't sound all that wonderful.

Desktop/mobile crossover might be better served with cloud-sync.
> there has to be a way to encode those nuances in legalese.

How about: more than 50% of your employees are lawyers, or the lawyers in your organization make more than 50% of the money (to prevent a few lawyers from "hiring" a dozen or so highschoolers at minimum wage.

Patents should protect engineers, not lawyers.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think it's "bundling" when you add features to your product. The contention in the Microsoft case was that they forced OEMs to "bundle" IE and block Netscape.

There is also the small matter of Google being free, and the lack of any meaningful lock-ins (this being the web and all) and the matter of Facebook being the leading social network, and other such subtleties that make these cases very dissimilar.

There is also the discussion of whether or not the DOJ was wise in pursuing that case which they subsequently lost, seeing as last I checked IE still ships with Windows.
How to take the perfect pictures?
Now, I would like to ask you, would you want to understand how you can make the perfect photo, you always wanted to? You will be able to make very amazing pictures with incredible effects. Check some of those cool pictures...
NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into moon's orbit
Some queues offer "at-least-once" delivery (such as SQS) meaning even if you do ack/delete the message, you can still get it again. IronMQ will not deliver a message again if it's been acked/deleted.

And yes, work should be idempotent, as is the case with any queue you use.
There is slight benefit in readability for cases like find_by_name_and_role("Jack", "admin"), but other than that, no benefit whatsoever.

In Rails 4.0, most dynamic finders are deprecated and removed from the source into a separate gem.
Totally fair question.

I personally prefer not to use ORMs for this specific reason: they are typically way too complicated to be able to plow through the code in any reasonable way. It's also generally not that hard to design your application in such a way that using a minimalist "ORM-ish" layer of your own making isn't exactly a waste of time. I've also found that they rarely follow these best practices (it's maddening).

I have, however, had to make use of Hibernate, SQL Alchemy and Django's ORM on projects where I didn't make the calls. I'm pretty sure Hibernate uses parametric, prepared statements. I believe SQLAlchemy and Django ORM do not, but use their own escaping mechanism internally. In addition, I don't know about Hibernate and SQLA, but I'm pretty sure that Django's ORM API does make it possible to cause the framework to generate SQL using user-provided data for column/table names in a manner similar to ActiveRecord.

By way of contradicting myself, I do believe that ORMs are great for writing internal use-utilities that are one-offs or quick-and-dirty tools. In general, those cases preclude the use of autonomously provided user data for query building. For world-facing code, ORMs are risky unless you've got someone on the team who knows it and has the ability to ensure it doesn't suffer from these types of design flaws.
Hear, hear! Plus Zipcar's rates included gas and insurance (they also quote all taxes and fees in their 'estimated rate').
If you want an exception, there is a banged version:

# note the exclamation mark
User.find_by_id!(id) # => raises exception when nothing is found
While I sort of agree with your argument, I question whether or not it's our responsibility to protect the world from the 21-day "hacker college" crowd. I would welcome throwing an error instead however.

There needs to be some sort of expertise cutoff and I think it's reasonable to expect in a web framework that it's user's are informed enough to avoid these sort of mistakes.

Eventually the scissors become so safe that you can't cut anything with them.
There is absolutely nothing stopping us developers from sensing when it occurs and switching accordingly. This is really the point: we can choose to scale from Desktop to Mobile UI's, sanely, without having the market separation enforced upon us by those who would control the industry.
Great, feasible idea, but not until BATTERIES GET BETTER! We need better batteries! It's the largest roadblock to a 1,000 innovations.
The tech that just made LCD obsolete (EWD) (electrowetting)
I've used Retargeter in the past, but at a $500 per month flat fee, it's not always going to win over our customers. They prefer the smaller, weekly billing based on usage model.
Hackernews is slowly becoming MarketingNews or GrowthHackerNews or FakeNewsTargetedAdvertisingNews ...
Deploying websites with Git
Great conversation. Our best info is that Google is committed to GAE and so are we. AppScale can be the "on-ramp" to GAE and also your insurance policy if "lock-in" is a concern. Run AppScale on top of EC2 or Eucalyptus (or others) for portability across clouds.