skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft's old strategy of surround, starve, and destroy doesn't seem to be working against more aggressive competitors like Apple, Google and even Amazon.

Azure could be a decent server platform, but until Microsoft's intentions for that platform are made more clear, as right now with Ballmer in charge, nothing other than Windows, Windows, Windows is ever a sure thing.

Consider Microsoft's strategy to build the Surface and compete directly with the OEMs they sell through.

It's often hard to tell the difference between being a good friend of Microsoft and their worst enemy.
Google partners with TheFancy to monetize Google+
In the end a judge will make a judgement, which means they can take actual intent of the rules of what makes a company a non-practicing entity into account. Your point about high switching-costs is valid, but the law is not a blind rules engine.
Users can enter scripts. And I believe you can even transfer scripts using the iTunes file transfer functionality. You just can't download them over the internet.
Plans for a manned Mars flyby in 2018 detailed
You are right, but you know what... 99% of the people that are using PCs are using them to consume. Do you really think an average PC user produces anything more then a very rare word document?
You do a pretty good job portraying yourself as an idiot.
It's not new in Rails apps actually; it's only new if you've been reading vocal blog posts (including the ones a few years back bashing design patterns etc).

At least for the apps I've been maintaining as a freelance, quite often they had services of some kind and other classic patterns.

Many Rails developers I know come from a Java and/or .Net background, so this is not really a surprise :-)
China Wants Nuclear Reactors, and Lots of Them
That's why you don't give out the keys to people that know how to act responsible.
Users is a bit of a core table in most applications. If they were using the relational database as it should be used there would be references to the user table elsewhere in the database.

If you tried to delete the table, it would fail stating that a deletion would violate the constraints assuming you didn't have deletions cascade automatically (which would be equally bad).

On the other hand (and it probably happened here) there will be one table with all sorts of data bolted on.

So say you want a user to have multiple pieces of armor (following the spirit of this post). You should have an armor table and a user to armor many to many table. But instead you just add an Armor column to the user record and create a new user record (with a the same username for example but with a different unique artificial key) with the new piece of armor in the armor column. Then to retrieve it you just select armor where username = whatever and iterate through the list. Adds and deletions are just as easy. So, why not? Well, duplication of data, for one thing. And no referential integrity protection for another. Delete a username and everything is deleted. Forget a where clause and you are sunk.
>I was 22 and working at a Social Gaming startup in California.

>Part of my naive testing process involved manually clearing the RAIDS table, to then recreate it programatically.

>Listening to their engineer patiently explain that backups for this MySQL instance had been cancelled over 2 months ago.

"The CEO leaned across the table, got in my face, and said, "this, is a monumental fuck up. You're gonna cost us millions in revenue".

What. The. Fuck.

The LAST person I would blame is the brand new programmer. They don't backup up their production database? If it wasn't this particular incident it would have been someone else, or a hardware failure.
At this point, if the FUD gets the Justice Department and the Administration to actually speak to the issue (really, not just propaganda), I'll have some satisfaction.

In the face of stonewalling, escalating, inflammatory rhetoric (if that's what we have) can serve a useful purpose.
We call those "ambulance chasers" in the US (though the act of actually following ambulances in search of potential clients is barratry and a crime). I had no idea you guys had them.
Hm. Maybe something like a qr-code keyboard that would allow you to scan and enter a code from your monitor into a text field?
This looks very cool. My big worry is the only place I'll be able to get at my spreadsheet is on my iPad. Being able to sync with spreadsheets on Google Drive would be a fantastic step towards interoperability with other people/software.
Agree with the point that humans are fallible. We should always have back ups. A company with 1000s of paying customers should at least take steps to protect itself from this sort of catastrophe.
It's funny how various folk cite Alan Kay's Dynabook "vision" but plenty of people had this "vision" (witness the "prior art" for the iPad in 2001 or Hari Seldon's electronic notepad in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"). Steve Jobs was designing notebooks and tablets on a sketchpad when the Mac was being developed. Bill Atkinson had a similar "vision" which led to his developing HyperCard (because it could be done at the time).
> attr_accessible suffers from context blindness: you’re frequently going to have an end user UI and an admin UI. You want admins to have access to more fields.

This is exactly why edge Rails is moving towards strong_parameters, where these are enforced by the controller rather than the model.
I wonder how effective it would be if every trolling victim filed this motion for sanctions automatically. Of course, that assumes going to court in the first place, which brings us back to the original problem, I guess. Could this be used along with the judge's ruling that the troll is this type of NPE?

As in: You're a troll, pay the defendant, oh and your lawyer pays too?
If Adobe had made a lean, mean, mobile capable player, produced an (understandable) open standard for what Flash is they could've had a shot at being bundled into iOS.

Adobe's done a pretty good job of sabotaging a good thing.

Maybe they'll make a fully functional JavaScript Flash player to avoid having to use the plug-in in the first place.
To me, one of the nice things about the semantics of real objects is that they are “real computers all the way down (RCATWD)” – this always retains the full ability to represent anything.

I remember 15 years ago when Philip Greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com) first introduced me to the idea that a Web service is like an object -- it may seem obvious today, but at the time it completely changed my Web view:

The challenge is in realizing that the Web service itself is an object. The object has state, typically stored in a relational database management system. The object has methods (the URLs) and arguments to those methods (the inputs of the forms that target the URLs). The engineering challenges of Web development are (a) coming up with the correct data model for the object state, (b) coming up with a correct and maintainable organization of URLs, and (c) defining the semantics of each URL. By the time an individual page is constructed, the engineering challenge is over and it doesn't really matter whether you build that script in a simple language (e.g., Perl or Tcl) or a complex powerful language (e.g., Common Lisp or Java).

http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.htm...

Philip also discusses this idea in chapter 13 of his classic book, "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" (http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/).

But as Alan Kay points out, this RPC-type model still hasn't evolved to a point where you can pass around self-contained objects that are RCATWD.
How PHP's foreach works
Is "Real time spatial database" just a fancy word for another distributed, in-memory datastore? There are many implementations of distributed data structures, and many are used for in-memory analytics. I realize spacebase also minimizes remote lookups/puts in the average case. I just want to understand the "spatial" aspect they try to integrate into their product.
Hands Free MRI Visualization 
Our lab using a depth camera to track the location of hands and tablets to visualize "moving through" an MRI volume.
Unicode in Domain Names is Trivial
> We all mess up, but only the best ones will deal with it professionally and learn from it.

This. I don't regret my life's many failures. I regret the times I've flamed out, blamed others, or ran away.

Doing things means making mistakes. You can spot a professional by how they deal with mistakes.
Y, the google+ article was a little light on details (i.e. what the heck is Crouton?). Found this link with more info: http://datko.net/2013/02/04/ubuntu-is-just-a-keypress-away-w...
Data Management Tools survey
Massively Multiplayer Bomberman Built in HTML5
When you open an entry in KeePassDroid it adds entries to the notification pull down menu to copy either the username or password. I find this works quite well. Browse to the key in keepassdroid, then go to the app you need to login to. Pull down the notification shade and select copy username to clipboard. Paste. Pull the notification shade and select copy password to clipboard. Paste. Done.
TXJS 1997
Google App Engine is a risky bet for the same reason as Azure, and perhaps even more so. Google could decide tomorrow that it's not worth supporting and tank it, or change the pricing model to make it no longer cost effective.

I don't think the same thing can be said for Amazon's AWS or other infrastructure providers like RackSpace where that would be as much as going out of business.

I'm not saying Microsoft doesn't take care of Windows, if anything they support it too much, but anything that's not Windows is just one executive decision away from being shut down.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a Flying Laptop with STEEP Challenges
Really interesting about this to me was the audio sample rate of the original Mac line, and especially the unusual refresh rate — I would have expected a straight 60hz refresh due to US wall current, and 22050Hz audio.
Missing from this reconstructed sound is the satisfying click of the power switch and the brief pre-sound of the circuits springing to life just before the beep (and of course, the quality of the tiny, tinny, speaker itself). Happy memories!
Tough to say since Trader Joe's is renowned for having fairly terrible produce in store.
Twenty years later....

Can we get private enterprise to take this broadband service out of the hands of this stupid, inefficient, underperforming, lowest-bidder government monopoly? Private enterprise can do it so much better! Capitalism! Why do my property taxes keep rising and my broadband isn't getting any faster?!?
To add to other comments, things the author could have expanded upon:

* vararg keyword arguments (kwargs)

* Keyword-only arguments (Python 3)

* help, vars, a few other nice introspective builtins

* Assignment unpacking (multiple names as left-hand side of an assignment)

* The strangest "first blush" difference between Ruby and Python, or at least the one which I found oddest when I first started switching, is that a new Ruby class is defined from the `class {Name}` line, the whole body executes in the context of the already-created class. Not so in Python, the class object will only exist once the body has finished executing.

* No mention of generators? Also outer v inner iteration is a pretty big split between two otherwise similar languages.

Mistake-ish

* obj.__dict__ -> vars(obj)

* obj.__class__ -> type(obj)

* Python's lambdas are not one-line, they're one-expression. The reason you "can't do [this] in Python" is that if:elif:else: is a statement, so doesn't fit in lambdas. But you can have arbitrary complex code in lambdas aside from that, by following http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing. For instance you can (although you should not) write:

map(lambda num:
0 if num % 3 == 0 else
num * 2 if num % 4 == 0 else
num,
range(1, 6))

* Author talks about methods a lot. They're not methods, a method is part of an object. They're functions. Granular functions, inner functions, ...

* We generally don't say Python values "evaluate to False", we say they're falsy: they're never equal to False (outside of False and — for historical reasons — 0), they're just equivalent when evaluated in a boolean context (or passed to `bool()`). Also, the list is way incomplete: any Python type defines its own "falsiness" by implementing __bool__ (or __nonzero__ in Python 2)

* Python's reflection and metaprogramming are roughly on par with Ruby's, their lack of use is more of a cultural artefact (possibly historically motivated) than a technical one. Consider adding methods to existing types for instance. You can do it in Python (on python-defined types), you just very rarely do, it's not in the culture to do something like that. Same with using metaclasses, it's done but it generally isn't the first thing a Python developer will reach for, aside from things like registering classes on the fly/on definition

Odd comments:

* Ruby mixins, as far as I know, work by injecting the module in the inheritance chain somewhere above the new class. MI is clearer and just as powerful.
IIRC STEPS includes compilers and optimizers that are written in fairly few lines of code using stacks of DSLs.
10% may seem fair when the company is small but it will cause trouble later. What if the company becomes Facebook? Will future hires be angry that a short-time contributor gets 50x their equity upside? Will investors not balk at paying $500k for 10%, when someone else gets 10% common for having done a logo?

Imho, the correct way to compensate not-really-founders is with a convertible note for the market value of their services times an appropriate risk multiple, or, if you can afford it, cash. (I have actually done this.)
The problem identified by the document I saw was the vagueness of this description and also its history in discrimination. It was suggested that very specific terms be used such as "ability to write detailed and understandable reports" if that is a job requirement.
This brings to mind on of my common responses: if it's not important enough to back up - it's not important!

It may be expensive, either in complexity, costs of storage/services, etc, but it's a necessity.

I'm curious about many of the comments in this thread - why are people logging in as table owners? It's not too difficult (for talented data-driven companies) to create roles or accounts that, while powerful, still make it difficult to drop a table and such.
You don't have to give up anything. These "stored procedures" are not what you think they are, and neither is the database. The idea is that the db and the application become one - not that you have to program in plsql or something. You could continue to use python or ruby.

And yes, the performance gains are amazing.
This is slightly offtopic, but (in the typical case) does the employer or the employee pay the health insurance? I guess this depends a lot on the workplace, but I wonder how this factors into the incomes reported by Americans. For example, if someone's income is $60k per year, the real income would be $52k with an expensive $700/month insurance.
Not for everyone, but for those judged to be non-practicing entities.
A more official looking source for the same information:

http://techblogs.mit.edu/news/2013/02/letter-from-israel-rui...
What do you mean by "no migrations"?
I badly need something like this right now. As I understand it, brokers rule this segment. This would essentially be an online broker. My current broker sends me pdf brochures on request which I think is a pretty bad experience, so this would be a welcomed change for me. On the other hand, sometimes I also like to have a single point of contact. If my broker had access to using this platform, that would be an ideal scenario. It could allow me to research and compare at my leisure, but have a strong contact point when I need it.
When I was your niece's age, RPG Maker, FKiSS and LEGO Mindstorms were all plenty of fun, and very accessible. I think a big part of the problem is that many adults aren't aware of all the options, or they turn up their noses at certain kinds of programming. Like it's somehow less valuable if the language learned is domain-specific or visual.
I created a similar survey for a Meetup group I attend, and thought it might be interesting to see what a wider audience says.

I am not a vendor, marketer, or researcher - this is out of personal interest. The results are visible at the end of the survey, and if you optionally send me email address to "survey at hybriddba dot com", I will forward the final results.

Edit: removed email address field from survey to avoid publishing addresses for all to see
Personally, I think it is a PR stunt. Zynga's looking like it is about to die, Pincus' character is perceived in a legendarily bad light - I think that this is a shilling attempt to make him look good/softer so he can move on to other things soon without such a 100% negative rap.

I don't foresee this working out though...
How would Mutations compare with Concerns, which seems to be DHH's preferred method?
The shell would have to post a bond when it is deemed to be a non-practising entity, i.e. not subsection (d) compliant.

"Any party that fails to meet a condition under subsection (a)(3) shall be required to post a bond in an amount determined by the court to cover the recovery of full costs." [1]

The subsection (a)(3) reference points to the subsection (d) exemptions for original inventors, parties which have made "substantial investment" in exploiting the patent through "production or sale of an item covered by the patent", universities, and technology transfer organisations "whose primary purpose is to facilitate the commercialisation of technology developed by one or more institutions of higher education".

[1] http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/SHIELD... § 285 subsection (b)
You're missing ten thousand spaceships. He's gained performance by not returning a resultset for something that is just going to get written back to the database anyway.

Normally, if you are writing a program, you get all the data from the database, then do some logic on it to determine what's going to happen. Say for example you store everything it the database regarding a million objects, and you want to have the ability for them to collide with each other. You'd get those million objects, then in your app layer, check if they are close enough to collide. What he's doing is using the database to determine if they are close enough, and then calculating the collisions in the database itself. I think if you just used the database to determine how close things are, and then switched to the app layer to do the appropriate collision calculations, you'd have a more configurable app. 10fps for 10k spaceships interacting with each other is not too shabby for a database. I'd rather not have so many updates in my database though, and I'd be okay with the fact that if my app crashed, the battles would have to start over again about 5 minutes in the past.

However, you aren't writing games in Django's ORM that need realtime updates, so in your use case, it wouldn't make sense.
It creates a lot of extra DOM nodes, not that great to be honest for this effect.
Learning the educated insights from the brilliant minds in history is not 'fanism', it's benefiting and building off their experiences and is what Alan refers to when he says: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points"

In his talk he uses Leonardo Da Vinci who despite being one of the smartest people in existence wasn't able to invent a motor for any of his machines, a feat accomplished by a less capable Mr Ford who did it en-masse.

Not learning from history is one of the reasons why the state of the industry is where it's at today.
Turning off the wrong-server is a thing that bit me before I installed molly-guard. These days that, and similar, is a tweak I apply to all hosts I control.

(molly-guard makes you type in the hostname before a halt/shutdown/reboot command.)
That's exactly the analogy I was going for. You don't want your general ruby code to be typed-checked, but it's actually fairly important to make sure your user inputs are checked, especially until Rails battens down its hatches.
I've opened the site, searched for Dropbox, didn't find it, and closed tab.

Sorry for harsh feedback, and feel free to disregard it if Dropbox users are not a significant portion of your target market.
Responsive, but my cpu usage was at 30%
Article claims that this implementation provides something like the "Pascal or Python" with statement. But its nothing like Python's "with" statement (PEP-343), which is a tool for encapsulating initialization, exception handling, and cleanup logic, not a tool to avoid identifying the object on method calls.

It'd be pretty easy to do something like Python's "with" statement as a library method in Ruby, but this isn't it.
I'm not certain what you mean, but I'll point out that regardless of length of incarceration, a felony conviction has severe and long-standing repercussions. Many employment avenues are closed (maybe not a primary concern to Swarz). Want to travel abroad? Or, relocate. Sorry: Many places won't take you. (More of a concern to Swartz, perhaps.) Even domestically and outside of employment, there may be places you want to go and things you want to do that are simply no longer open to you. In some states, that includes voting.

"Felony" is a whole nother level of escalation.
Some Interesting Facts About Hadoop MapReduce [pdf]
What are other approaches/patterns to more SOA to manage more complex code bases with Rails?
Crouton: Chromium OS Ubuntu Chroot Environment
The support for this is questionable. It's barely acceptable in Chrome and even in Chrome it falls really short.

The timing is awful in a lot of cases which makes it pretty much unusable for anything but maybe background tracks. I've had audio clips that had to be played in a 50ms time frame fail to play back a third of the time on occasion.

I'd rather have no sound than buggy sound.
1) Good solid advice
2) C) I'm there now and it asks for # of employees, not names

Decent interface, as anything, always room for improvement.
Black holes have only a handful of properties compared to, say, a star -- they have mass, electrical charge, and spin (spin angular momentum).

More detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_black_hole#Types_of_bl...

The reason black holes possess spin is because spin angular momentum is conserved, and the masses that fall into the BH each have spin angular momentum. The black hole's spin angular momentum is therefore the sum (so to speak) of the constituent masses that make it up.
Yes, let's base our business model on a niche fad diet.
"It's not a game" - no, but for the people calling in hoaxes, it can very well be. The administration can't choose to stop responding. But the cost of committing such a hoax is effectively zero - what's to stop the hoaxer from calling in each day?

How do other police handle high volumes of hoax calls that aren't traceable (i.e., aren't 911)?
Generally the employer pays for the cost of the HMO plan and then if you want a more expensive PPO plan, they take the difference from your paycheck pretax. The main difference between the 2 plans is that PPO allows you to see pretty much any doctor or specialist anytime, while HMO, you have an assigned doctor and need a referral from that doctor to see anyone else.
I agree that the whole situation with C based python packages on Windows is really quite broken, but until they get around to actually fixing the situation every python programmer who has to touch windows should have http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ bookmarked.