skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my experience working with PHP for over 13 years (since PHP 3 was new), I can say your article is mostly true, and I have definitely seen the invisible-image-as-a-poor-mans-cron trick in production a time or two. The only nitpick is that I have really only seen stuff like this on small sites that don't have enough traffic for it to ever matter, so it's generally a temporary issue or a stop-gap measure, not common practice as was implied.

That said, there's nothing stopping people from just throwing a task in Redis from their PHP frontend and using node.js or Python, or Ruby to manage the queue. This is what Flickr did (http://code.flickr.net/2012/12/12/highly-available-real-time...), and it seems to work well for them. People just have to keep in mind what each language excels at and know the drawbacks. Articles like yours help, so thanks for the good read.
so sorry that we didn't get to it yet. Hoodie is certainly not OS X exclusive, we just have some DNS magic that helps developing locally, that's Mac only at the moment.

Hoodie is just Node.js & CouchDB, you should be able to run it without too much trouble. Try to follow the instructions here: https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie-app/issues/35 Were happy to help
No, I'm not talking about coal mines at all. I'm talking about oil. Read the thread. You mentioned coal mines, you keep referencing coal mines, incorrectly assuming that is what I was referring to in my comment, which I then clarified as being about oil. Your comment about mines though was wrong anyway. She didn't sell off coal mines. You're just wrong about that. She just shut them down, for a whole bunch of reasons. You appear so eager to argue the thread that you're not actually reading what's been said.
You can take a brand down-market, but it's very, very difficult to take it up-market.

JCP stands a better shot at dominating the "discount" market, which everyone associates it with, than combating half a century of marketing.
http://mondrian.pentaho.com/ Is one I have used in the past
I wonder how many minutes of my life I've wasted looking at the little "Starting" blurb only to be thwarted by "Updating".
TELEMEDICINE - THE NEW FRONTIER FOR ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE AND COST-CONTAINMENT
I'd say that a lot of Johnson's strategy addressed many of your concerns.

Personally, I shopped more at JCP over the past 8 months than the previous 15 years. There was an appealing mix of brands, quality, and fair prices that struck a chord with me. Unfortunately, it clearly didn't work for the majority of the mall-shopping public that has been trained to only buy when there's a sale or coupon.
While a bitcoin may be worth $nnn, is that the case for 0.0005 bitcoin? It could develop that the little pieces are seen to be a liability, and people might decide they're worth less than 0.0005 * $nnn. Which creates the 'risk' you're looking for.

If John's $45,000 house and Jane's $4.5M mansion are built in the same year and equally subjected to wear/tear, 20 years the value of John's house is probably less than 1 percent of Jane's mansion.
I once worked on a project that had large hardware and software components. The project was clearly lead by the hardware team - historically the company was a hardware company. At weekly status meetings we would spend 55 minutes talking about the hardware, then there would be 5 minutes for the software.

I don't believe that this has to be inevitable, but I do believe that you can tell whether this is happening by simply using a product.
The problem was not that people like discounts more than low prices. It was that the company never got rid of discounts. They advertised new low prices and no discounts and then still had discount racks all over the store, leading customers to recalibrate the goods in their minds as being less expensive (and possibly "cheaper") then before while still allowing them to wait for discounts.

The company also introduced a lot of product lines that were supposed to be specialty brands which led to entire stores looking like disjointed flea markets. There was no way to tell what was unique or special because everything was branded as unique and special.
Why not just buy a regular computer monitor then ? The lack of large screen sizes ? This I can understand.
> Utterly untrue. You have no idea what you're talking about.

It took ten (1998-2008) years before the US minimum wage went up.

That's 10 years without a pay rise for the unskilled worker of America.

It that's not an example of worker exploitation I don't know what is?
Reminds me of early 'smart' phones.
Nick Wooster was doing a supreme job at bringing high quality clothing "to the masses"
There's both:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Assembly-HOWTO/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/pdf/Assembly-HOWTO.pdf
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/text/Assembly-HOWTO
> This is the opposite of what happens with fiat currencies as I highlighted with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009[1] government spending and lending can have a positive impact on the economy in particular through kick-starting the multiplier effect.

Fiscal stimulus like ARRA isn't impossible in a Bitcoin economy. Monetary stimulus such as that practiced by the Fed (QE, QE2) might be impossible in a pure Bitcoin economy, but fiscal and monetary stimulus aren't the same thing.

(Actually, I think that monetary stimulus is possible in a Bitcoin economy via a sufficient subset of the network reaching consensus on evolving the protocol. Sure, the entity making the decision would be a different coalition of bankers than those running an existing government central bank, but it wouldn't be all that different fundamentally, still filtered by wealth and involvement in the financial system, but even less accountable than government central bankers are now. But much of the premise on which Bitcoin is sold is that such a consensus to alter the money supply would never actually occur.)
Unlike a lot of comments here, I don't need to be sold on the concept. As luck would have it, I am actively building an app that runs mostly in the browser using CouchDB, Kanso, and PouchDB. It's a pretty amazing tech stack; I get a local DB in the browser, which I can sync with the main DB in the cloud the client is connected. Plus I get some nice APIs for stuff like sessions, registering users, security, validation, etc.

I see you've already mentioned switching to PouchDB on your backend, and you're already using CouchDB for the cloud, so it seems like you're basically competing straight up against Kanso. So.... How is what you're doing different from what Kanso does? Why should I use Hoodie over Kanso?

I see this code in your docs:

hoodie.account.signUp('joe@example.com', 'secret')
hoodie.account.signIn('joe@example.com', 'secret')

Very nice. But Kanso has:

users.create('testuser', 'testing', {roles: ['example']}, function (err){});
session.login('testuser', 'testing', function (err, response){}});

Seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other. What's your killer feature? Kanso has shaky documentation and is currently more aimed at couchapps (they strongly assume that you'll serve your frontend code from CouchDB), but I'm not sure how that really differs from Hoodie. :)

If we take the overall architecture as a given (browser based app, PouchDB or equivalent for local storage, syncing with CouchDB in the cloud, and node workers handling the backend work), what's the focus of Hoodie that sets it apart from Kanso?

(In any case, nice stuff. I think the concept is great, and there's definitely room for several competing frameworks in this space.)
I’m a Unix dev too, check out my beard in the linked video :D

Like mentioned elsewhere in this thread, other *nixen support is in the works. Hoodie core is platform agnostic, we just chose Mac as the dev environment because we figured that was what most people use. We are definitely not exclusive and would love to see any help towards getting it run on other systems :)
Wow... that sounds like wayyyyy too much effort...
Eh, I prefer the updates than suffering through bugs that never get fixed because console developers traditionally put at a final release and that was it.

I do agree that in terms of the OS, you get mostly pointless updates there, probably mostly playing a cat and mouse game with people jailbreaking the console. It would be fine except it demands the latest OS version to play a game online.
I have often said that wholesale website redesigns are a bad idea because they alienate the hardcore fans while swapping one set of problems for a different set of problems. I hadn't, before this, realized that the same might hold true for department stores.
Is the distance between him and your team really going to be that disruptive if he/she needed to work from another country?

Seriously people; this is Hacker News. We build things on The Internet. Since when is distance an acceptable excuse of a limitation for team members?
How A Biz Dev CEO Is Learning Design And UX On His Own
Tony Blair was another 3-termer who lost it completely, again elected not because he was the best candidate but simply because the opposition weren't credible.

I completely agree with a two term limit, would be a great thing to have here although somehow someone would find a way around it.
There is a bigger chance of getting fired for ordering 10x the amount of food for the team, while they are crunching...
Maybe I'm weird, but 'smart' to me implies "uses zero energy when not in use".
As far as I can tell, this change doesn't apply to images, and probably shouldn't apply to user-generated content (i.e., you shouldn't be letting users write/embed arbitrary CSS, JS, plugins, fonts, frames, etc...)
I totally agree that much of the time, it's just people wanting to work on something they find familiar, being incapable of maintaining code other than their own.

But then again, sometimes, the problem is just that the legacy code is shit. In a project last year, for instance, I had to rewrite every class I touched; the whole thing was so fragile that it was impossible to change anything without the rest breaking. So, I did this “incrementally” rather than all at once, and factored this into the cost of the features I was implementing for the client.
I've just read through the McConnell post and the comment stream, and your comment that "McConnell confirms Bossavit's claims about every citation" baffles me :-)

"Curtis 1986. ... Bossavit says the paper “offers no support for the ‘10x’ claim.” But the first paragraph in section II.A. of the paper (p. 1093) summarizes 4 studies with the overall gist of the studies being that there are very large differences in productivity among programmers. The specific numbers cited are 28:1 and 23:1 differences."

I don't see how that can be described as McConnell confirming Bossavit's claims?
It's interesting how Sony seems to be finally "getting it" with regard to attracting developers. I just read about how they interviewed software developers from a bunch of different companies when designing the PS4 architecture, rather than making it a hardware-led project a la PS1/2/3. That would explain why it's a less "innovative", but perhaps much saner system than previous generations.
>If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others.

I don't see how he can be wrong. The point he made wasn't that the things they did in the 70s were better than today's web or UIs. Just that people (and companies) should have invested in THAT line of work, and building on THOSE principles, instead of making a mess with reinventing the wheel, competing on BS differentiators and cutting off research.

I'd take my OS X or an Ubuntu desktop over any Xerox guy of the time, any day of the week. But I'd take the volume of research, innovation, insights and coherence that they had at the time over today's ho-hum idea of development too.

Despite having all those things 30 years ago, it took 30 years for them to become mainstream -- and far fewer stuff emerged since. And not for lack of CPU resources. Even something like BeOS could offer a 2005 desktop experience in 1996.

The most wide innovation mover in the 00's was Apple. And even they, they mostly worked on market innovation (ie. repackage older niche stuff in a way that finally makes people want to use them, instead of a jumbled mess), not on research innovation.
I've looked at PetaPoco and Massive as a replacement for Linq2Sql, etc but don't know what experience others have had with it. We're mostly a MSSQL shop, but are seeing more Oracle projects. And now that PostGres is becoming stable in our GIS environment I'd like to know how people are dealing with multiple DB backends. Have you built anything in production with PetaPoco?
It's fun looking at unintended tack-on effects of decisions like this.

For example, requiring SSL for all assets served on SSL pages is going to make the profits of CloudFlare, and other CDN providers with their same business model, spike precipitously. You have to have a paying plan ($20/mo to start) to get SSL CDNing support, which basically means CloudFlare's free plan is now useless to anyone who enforces HSTS.
Edit:

His strategy seems to be based at copying what worked with Apple. Reducing product lines, making things upscale, removing sales, etc. I don't think how anyone who actually knew JCPenney would have thought that was a good idea. Their brand was already ruined.

Its not the general public at fault. Past JCPenney management ruined the brand by going coupon crazy. To the point that my wife only shops there when there is some stupid take 15% off, then add and additional 12% off of you buy another coupon. Otherwise, she thinks its too expensive (which I do think is right) for a department store.

This is the same kind of scenario that happens to businesses that became Groupon addicted. People stopped buying when no Groupon was available.
Why not just write a ruby to JS transpiler? I imagine the yacc grammar could be translated to jison (http://zaach.github.io/jison/) , and it's really easy to grab those script tags (e.g. https://github.com/Niggler/scriptify.js/blob/master/scriptif...)
Or creating a new up-market brand, like Lexus or Banana Republic.
Our company is staffing up a full IT department right now. We don't even look at the education section.

Oh? You went to school for 4 years for CS? Good for you. Show me what you've built/what you've done. Anyone can get a degree; doers build.
People don't buy discounted items just because the price is low.

We buy discounted items because discounts tell us which items to buy.

For a given product, there are usually several competing choices, and most people don't have enough time to evaluate whether each one is a good deal for the price it's offered at. So the easiest way to select is to just pick the one that's on sale--or if they're all on sale, pick the one that appears to have the biggest discount relative to the MSRP.

The discount also tells us "you should buy this now, because if you buy it later, the price may go up."

Without this important signal, customers don't really know which one to buy, plus there's no urgency to buy the item now, because it's always that price.

So, while Johnson's approach may have "made sense," and may have worked for Apple products because their market position and product lifecycle makes discounts unnecessary, this strategy really didn't play to consumer psychology, at least in the apparel space.
I use gitk and tig from cygwin, osx (on osx actually GitX) and linux. But mainly the command-line.

Tried TortoiseGit, GitHub app and SourceTree - but use them rarely. Mostly if I want to get a good overview, they are bit easier to get into.
On the main point of the article, I do agree that a lot of ideas fly higher in San Francisco than other parts of North America. I see "Highlight" as a good example of this where an app finds a lot of early adopters in a small area but it becomes harder for that kind of ubiquity to happen somewhere people aren't as fascinated by new technology like people outside of the valley are.

I believe that a number of communities like this end up being "geek ghettos" on account of this.
Straight Talk definitely does, they just don't tell you very clearly what it is. Do some searching, and you'll find quite a few reports of people who get cut off for downloading more data than Straight Talk expects. They also very specifically prohibit video and audio streaming, and several other high-bandwidth activities.
People still disable Javascript in their browser. We aren't there yet. I'd like to see native haml, coffeescript and sass support in the browser, that seems to me a more realistic dream in the short term.
Spot on! We stole a lot of ideas from the whole CouchDB application space. @caolan, the Kan.so dev is currently looking into Hoodie as well.

As far as originality, we choose a different design approach. We want to cater to people who barely get jQuery and give them a tool to build larger apps. We are building the technology downwards from that idea towards the bits and pieces we have.

One of the fun things about Hoodie is that there is nothing technically new in it. Existing ideas and tools are just put together a different way.
> While a bitcoin may be worth $nnn, is that the case for 0.0005 bitcoin? It could develop that the little pieces are seen to be a liability, and people might decide they're worth less than 0.0005 * $nnn. Which creates the 'risk' you're looking for.

I'm not looking for risk. I'm pointing out that a currency that appreciates in value when you stuff it in your mattress makes you far less likely to lend it out to someone and assume the risk of default, especially at interest rates that will be attractive to someone who is going to be uncomfortable paying it off even without interest, since just paying of the original loan value (denominated in the appreciating currency) without interest will mean paying over time many times the value (in purchasing power) of the original loan over its life.
defn is quite right - Murdoch famously threatened a politician with "a headline a day or a bucket of shit a day" - a clear "abuse" of journalistic power in exchange for political influence. Horror.

Whether or not that actual threat occurred, the press, lead by the Murdoch press, have used their considerable power to threaten, bully and cajole politicians, police and others into doing what they the newspapers wanted.

(infamously the phone hacking scandal in the UK, where the CEO of murdochs empire, and the prime ministers press head honcho have both been charged with a range of such crimes, and Murdoch only avoided it because no one found the emaisl or phone conversations where he was told where his newspapers were getting good stories from.) I am a little bit bitter about "freedom of the press" being seen as a right without duties.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/07/24/geoffrey-ro...
He's a one trick pony and clearly out of touch. He doesn't really seem to have any grasp of the market JC Penny was actually in or that discount cheap clothes is a pretty radically different market then high end premium electronics. (further whereas Apple was the sole supplier/manufacturer, JC Penny was just reseller of various brands they picked). Then he executed the one strategy he know that apparently just luckily worked for him at Apple. Sadly, based deeply outside of reality it epically failed to execute as hoped here and JC Penny lost half their market.

The whole thing is a little sad. Thankfully he's gone and maybe for the company's sake they can pull out of his tailspin. If not oh well, that's also what you get for not vetting people and just buying into their PR and dropping a rockstar into the driver seat and giving him the keys without vetting him.
If you want to have a local DB in the browser, and a remote DB in the cloud, your choices are basically CouchDB or a ton of pain reinventing the wheel. Replication and syncing are hard.

In other words, for the very specific problem they're trying to solve, I don't think there ARE a lot of alternatives except "abandon local storage, and work directly against a DB in the cloud".
Well, if you double-click on a html file on your computer, it will open that in your browser using file://. If you use the short `//example.com/foo.bar`, it is quite problematic.

`//fonts.googleapis.com/css` becomes `file://fonts.googleapis.com/css` → doesn't work

Additionally, JavaScript files might not load or work due to browsers' (security) limitations. Not sure about the exact details here.
H1B is not designed to bring in affordable workers, but to bring in workers that USA doesn't have.

If you can only afford to pay $40.000, and no americans want to do that job at that price, then tough luck, you need to pay more to motivate people to train and learn the many years needed for your profession X; instead of bringing in workers at wages that demotivate americans to train for profession X, damaging the skilled labor supply for the future years.

Or you can hire a beginner with potential and train him yourself - that result would also further the goals of H1B program by getting more people with those qualifications.

But if you really, really need that unicorn-rarity specialist NOW, then you can pay for that; and $100k salaries (and much larger) are actually paid for top-rated designers, craftsmen, artists and actors.
I heartily agree, personally.

But people often like games because of the hoops they have to jump through, not in spite of them.

Shopping is a game to many people. You can't "win" unless you get a lower price than other people.
Why would anyone need a "smart TV"? I can use the internet better with my laptop. Everyone already has a personal computer, whether it's a laptop or a tablet. The usability is always worse. The only way it's useful to show the internet through a television is to transmit the image from a computer to the television. That's what I and my friends do.
Those things are hilarious. I've never used a clunkier, slower video interface than on a SmartTV.
Parallel Software Development Trends for Dummies
Hoodie comes with a backend that does all that stuff that
can only be sensibly done server-side for you.

wibble? I run your client and your server and talk to the stubs both ways? Why? Sounds like Microsoft.

Edit: I take back the MS jab - unnecessary when simply trying to understand something. My apologies
I like your suggestion, though there is a small problem with it. It is hard to find a 100k job if you just got out of the school.
MIT's Dynamic Languages Wizards series from 2001 is pretty informative.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agw-wlHGi0E (features pg)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7viw2KXak
It seems obvious that Broadwell will probably have more PCIe bandwidth so that it can feed Thunderbolt 2.0 plus some other stuff.
Eh, I was just trying my friend's apple tv with my macbook pro and was quite disappointed with the lag and sheer poor quality of the experience combined with the remote intermittently working with the tv and/or the macbook pro. Personally, I think the x360 nailed it with its simplicity of accessing netflix youtube in decent speed. Though I would complain about the controller input when it comes down to typing any phrase, the interface for that is awfully slow. Other then that, perfect IMO.
Ahh, Thanks.
Which would be an extraordinarily expensive and risky marketing effort, but perhaps one of only a handful of possible ways to save the company at this point.
They missed the chance to name this language buby (browser-ruby).
If I remember correctly, an earlier version of Appcelerator's Titanium let you do that. But they killed it along the way, I believe.
Wow. Lost my keys at Universal Studios once and it was just a very long, very expensive night (given my budgetary realities at the time).
That problem has been fixed! I made an error in configuring nginx for memcached and it ended up treating certain pages as static (which prevents them from getting POST requests).
It's fully up and running again after hours of putting out fires :)