skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a fundamental problem with RIAs; the open web is a much better platform to build applications on. Every day browsers get better and the things you can do with HTML, JavaScript and CSS are for 90% of the applications a good solution. The other 10% of the applications a developer has a choice where RIA might make sense but 5% of those applications are probably better off being a desktop applications.

This leaves 5% of the applications which would benefit from an RIA, these apps are typically internal data entry or dashboard applications which don't get a lot of press.

Over the last 6 years I have worked in the RIA space and it really comes down to a simple question. "Would you want Google to rewrite the Google Analytics or Gmail in Flex/JavaFX/Silverlight?"

For me the answer is NO!. The best applications today are open web with Ajax / Flash enhancements to improve users experience.

Google Analytics uses Flash and Ajax in this exact way; Flash for the charts and the time span widgets but the rest of the application is HTML. Ajax is used for doing sorting and paging of data.

This is why there will never be a killer RIA application.
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Killer robots and a revolution in warfare
You followed the link and clearly I didn't. So this is another joke about twitter lacking depth. How original.

Though I'm glad they included a fart joke in the name.
There are not that many publishers and not all crawlers need access.
My guess would be the publishers gave Google their own license with which a specific crawler could identify itself.
Ever think that it actually slows your learning down? Honestly, you learn code much better if you actually type it yourself. Even if you have a working example, retype it manually, it'll make you appreciate doing proper reuse via function calls much better. Copy and paste is a bad habit, code is not clay, and treating it as such hurts you.
Haven't been to any of the other entrepreneurship week events, then I saw swombat's post and decided to go today, and possibly Friday?

Has anyone been to any of the events (especially cuz everything was sold out?!)? For those of us not there, what did we miss?
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%27%20Pie%2...

It's not the 'solve it all equation', but a pretty general guide, something to start with. Having numbers down is a bit more objective than simply talking about the division which can make it seem ambiguous.
Not Paul Erdős!
"Redfin is trying to rewrite the rules of the real estate industry."

It would be nice if TechCrunch didn't copy the press release verbatim.
an additional thought... then filesystem backups just become a push/pull scenario between different instances. man, i really like this general idea.
I'll argue that their are still killer apps, but just not on the desktop. For instance, video game systems (Wii, Xbox, etc) need to have a killer app when they're first released to drive sales, to encourage more development etc.
I've been to LeWeb and the Web 2.0 Expo both in Europe. It's actually quite nice not to have to leave the country for once. This event was organised by TechCrunch Europe and by no means limited to UK attendees :P
Next thing you know, someone will be comparing hackers to painters.
If you sit a mile from the screen.

(Sorry Daniel, but the font's too big for me to quite read comfortably!)
This issue is usually known as record linkage. Academic research has produced some more sophisticated techniques.
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/31/6/1246
http://www.fcsm.gov/working-papers/foreword.pdf
http://www.census.gov/srd/papers/pdf/rr99-04.pdf
"So, what do you do?"

I've been doing this forever. When someone asks me that potentially conversation-killing, interview-type question, I explain that I am a software developer. That I write software, how I like starting from a blank screen and building something up iteratively, how I like building something people can use and then quickly segue and flip it back to them - what they like to do to be creative, what they like to make, create
Thanks! John was very kind to have written such a glowing comment.
Good point. The terse details are there for two reasons:

* Stakeholders need specifics -- While some managers just need to skim, some peers and deeper stakeholders on the thread require details to validate the points because it impacts them specifically.

* Managers want access to details -- The manager wants to be able to skim, but also have details on a specific item if they choose to dive into it (now or later). It's hard to tell which ones these will be, so providing extra information after the heading allows them to pick and choose without obstructing their quick-skim-ability.
I ♥ wireframes
I guess the next generation of Rails/Django apps are going to have a PostgreSQL backend.
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Yes, but your IT department should not be filled with non-technical people who want to have someone else handle the sharding, replication, etc. That's an "IT Department Fail".
I'm not saying I do this today, I'm saying it was integral to my learning process when I started, years ago. Typing it out doesn't help solve the issues of learning the subtleties of syntax. You need to start with something that works and then start seeing the ways your poor typing breaks the code.
Ask HN: Open Source projects consisting of Beautiful Code to improve hacker skills?
In my ongoing quest to become a better hacker, I'd like to checkout out other's code and not only that but also "beautiful code". With "beautiful" I'm referring to code with great design, interesting concepts, well, really anything that one can learn from.
The implementation language doesn't really matter, I guess there a lessons available regardless of the language.

So, which open source code do you think is beautiful?
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I've been tackling the same problem (in a similar architecture recently (though more real-time oriented)). Some other suggestions:

1. Hash the names (with something like Text::DoubleMetaphone) and select from this list rather than trolling the whole database.
2. Check out POE (great for distributed parallel processing)
3. Consider how you will handle null fields (a lack of information is not the same as badly matching information).
4. Consider the uniqueness of the data values themselves (Ebenezer Rumpelstilzchen is more unique than John Smith), but you have to watch out for foreign names (which seem unique but aren't).
5. Matching on multiple fields seems multiplicative, not additive.
I'm always a little bit amazed at peoples expectations of a "beta" product or service.

I know that the term beta has been somewhat warped to try to mean something more like "not quite complete release seeking attention" lately, but people really shouldn't get that up in arms if a beta (from Twitter no less!) isn't the most stable thing...
Interesting question that I've been wondering too. I had a prototype of something similar running in 2006, built on top of git.
Adderall? How about Provigil.

From what I understand the Navy uses Provigil for long-flight pilots to be able to stay awake and alert without clouded judgement.

So, what if there were no discernible side effects? What if it was a just that just helped you stay focused and alert for longer hours?
"This article makes me feel tired."

I know something you could take for that...
Totoot: The Todo app just for Twitter
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> If they're meant as instructions for a post-apocalypse society, presumably the other 5.5B would already have been wiped out.

What if they haven't?

Also, it's unclear why survivors would take such writings seriously. After all, they were a product of a society that failed massively.

More important, what are the odds that the survivors would be receptive to such teachings?

The "survivability" of different value systems depends on context. And, in the event of a rapid collapse, the folks who are most likely to survive are outliers. I'd expect farmers and ranchers to be far more likely to survive than urbanists. (Yes, some of the REI crowd will do okay.)

As a crude measure, rural counties will do much better than urban ones. Notice which are red and which are blue.
If one had a database of code snippets, then, given a specific code snippet it would be possible to find "similar" code in the database: code that had been changed or improved from some original version. One could even create an evolutionary tree for each snippet, if one were so inclined.

The pertinent algorithms are already in heavy use in bioinformatics.
Sure sounds a lot like premature optimization.
"It's his funeral" is absolutely right.

Hmm, wonder what the name of people who are BOTH wanna be hackers and wanna be suits is?

Need that one nowadays.
But sometimes I need to use code that I couldn't write myself.

An example: you can send an XmlHttpRequest to a different port on the same domain in Firefox, but only if first you add the line

document.domain = document.domain;

Now, I wouldn't expect to be able to figure that out myself. So I just copy and paste, add a comment saying that this is a bit of magic that makes cross-port xhr's work in firefox, and add the url I got it from in the comment. Doesn't that seem reasonable?
Lesson 1 of blog design: you can't please everyone!! :-P
Git and Darcs have very different underlying models. Most importantly, Git is content-centric (diffs are generated only as byproducts) while Darcs is patch-centric (any given "version" is just a sum of all the patches that produce it). Linus, for one, feels strongly that this is an important distinction.
Dynamic Content Injection with HTML5 Canvas and Video
Oracle may have the tool edge in some scenarios, such as replication and monitoring. However, so many of the DBAs I work with need something like TOAD http://www.toadsoft.com/ alongside SQLPlus- and they make TOAD for MySQL.
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"I don't understand why 'SQL caching' means bypassing Rails."

Log all SQL queries carried out by a RoR-powered site for a few page refreshes...
I worked for Oracle for a couple years. The trend toward IE-dependency is (largely) because of time invested in a lot of in-house solutions where ActiveX was employed as part of the web app architecture.

There may be other reasons, but I think the main one is definitely all the different apps they have (including some acquisitions, i.e. Siebel) which depend on IE. If they start to move away from IE dependency, it will probably be a long, slow transition.
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Whoever downvoted me has definitely not taken the time to figure it out.
I'll be there with a desktop CNC miller and maybe a diy 3d printer.

Anyone else going? I'd love to meet up with other tech hackers while I'm in the San Francisco area.

ps - I'm currently looking for couch space, social events (I'll cook dinner if you can supply the kitchen and guests) and pickup frisbee.
the last posts are like a month old...
What a great happening :)

I am just reading Bill Buxton's book called Sketching the User Experience again and I am on the Sketching chapter!

Great post.
Most of the TechCrunch "UK" events have a decent pan-european crew around. Basically all of the European TechCrunch events (I've been to them in Prague, Berlin and London) are run out of TechCrunch UK. Despite us being based in Berlin, I'd have been at Geeknrolla if we hadn't had conflicting plans.
See the front page of any local newspaper in the world
Ask HN: Best slider?  (Javascript/AJAX, PHP)
I have a PHP-based web site and on a particular form, I would like users to be able to click-drag a horizontal slider to enter a value (among others) on the form. For instance: How much do you like this photo, on a scale of 1-10 ? It would be nice if the value gets displayed beside the slider, in addition to the position of the slider.

I want something that is simple to implement (including some control over appearance/colour), but also compatible with most current browsers.

What do you recommend? What do you use on your own sites? (I did some Googling, but came across quite a bit of junk out there.)
I'm thinking about it. We already have an office and aren't interested in investors at this time, so I'm not sure what else we can get out of this. Anybody from BootUpNYC care to respond?
Come on, can we please stop using the high school test comparison or explain why there are such dramatic differences. The countries listed higher on there tend to have draconian centrally-run school systems which only allow certain portions of the population into public high schools, while the remainder of the population attends vocational schools. Thus, we're comparing the future college graduates of other countries against the entire population of the US.

And our system is quite to our benefit. Most all of the US hacker community, who slacked off in middle school and only really got interested in the tough math of high school and college, would never have been allowed to take those classes in most other countries. They'd have been marked as low-achievers early on.
Not sure why this iphone app brochure site is on HN. Perhaps the OP could explain?

That said, the site did have an entertaining video, even if the app looks like it would make me feel really stupid for bothering to even try it.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage_problem and http://www.fcsm.gov/working-papers/RLT_1997.html
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Thanks for the pointers -- looks like exactly what I'm looking for.
Maybe you're right; I'm thinking there are some fundamental priciples which can increase your chances of success. I'm not just sure what they are yet.

Thanks for the response.
http://jqueryui.com/demos/slider/
Yes I do. I'd say causality, while not a term of art, still is valid. "Commutative" on the hand is plain wrong, thanks for the correction.
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Running git on top file based storage would also be an interesting project. There is a proprietary commercial implementation of a similar idea from Caringo called CFS http://www.caringo.com/products_cfs.html. An opensource version based on git would be nice.
A tweet from the 20th century
"It's unclear why survivors would take such writings seriously. After all, they were a product of a society that failed massively."

Take a look at http://downlode.org/Etext/WIPP/. It contains proposals for a universal way of saying "Danger! Don't dig / enter here!" to inhabitants of the future without relying on language. Such markers would be used to warn against entering contaminated sites like the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility, etc.

Here's what I'd surmise if I encountered a monument of this magnitude in post-apocalyptic Georgia circa 10000 AD:

1) Unlike some of the proposed designs given for the WIPP above, the monument does not contain jutting spikes or other hostile/inflammatory looking structures or colors. This suggests that it is somewhat safe to be near and I would not be in any immediate danger.

2) Even though I'm not an engineer, I could at gather that the construction of the monument employed sufficiently advanced technology--technology that probably doesn't exist anymore, along with said knowledge--in its construction. The thing is made of multi-ton slabs of granite that are cut at precise angles. It obviously took a certain degree of sophistication to build.

3) Assuming I cannot read any of the languages on the monument itself, I could at least deduce that the markings on the slabs are representative of different languages based on the regularity and placement of the symbols. Since the creator took the pains of inscribing some message all over the surface of the slabs, it must have some importance.

Just because the intended audience may not understand the exact content of the message, it would at least suggest an air of importance about it, and in time, push for actual study of it.
I've considered building something like this for awhile, I'm curious as to the electronics required in the probe itself.

I'm sure a "medical grade" version would be quite expensive but I can see a "baby-monitor"-class device as being a huge hit with consumers.
Because a positive attitude -- not lying to yourself -- gives you a reason to try, to create the environment in which good things will happen to you. (Working up the nerve to say hi to a stranger, volunteering at a charity, throwing away the sugar in the house.)
Of course. If it seems like a huge waste of time to you, then is must be the same for everyone else as well.

First, Sanborn didn't create a random encoding. He worked with a renowned CIA cryptologist to come up with this, so there's a rhyme and reason.

Second, it's the idea of it all, the effort it takes to break a code and figure out its innards. To me, that counts as one of the perfect examples of hackerdom.
It bears mentioning that you've created this account for the specific purpose of writing this comment, perhaps you are the author the blog post in question?

I don't dispute that I make an appeal to authority in the hopes of diffusing a debate that I've already had and don't care to have again. You would be ill-advised to premise your argument on the supposition that I'm bluffing, however, as I am not.

I did not refuse to substantiate my claim, I merely indicated that said claim has been substantiated in excruciating detail (by myself and others) elsewhere, ad nauseam. If your legitimate interest is to have access to that information, and not to take cheap psuedo-textual pot shots at my well-intentioned comments then I will gladly reprise them for you, at any level of detail you desire. You've made no such request (as someone interested in defending Perl, or rather attacking its attackers, you most likely have all of that information already).

True syntactic abstraction can take multiple forms, but basically it means CL-style macros. It means the ability to introduce arbitrary language constructs indistinguishable from built-in ones. Perl advocates claim that Perl 5's glaring deficiencies are not a problem because there are CPAN libraries that address them, providing things like try/catch blocks. This (and other similar band aids for things like object-orientation) are frequently implemented using Perl's relatively weak support for syntactic abstraction (using subroutine prototypes, but then again, you already knew that).

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a weak debater and an even weaker writer. But my intentions in writing that comment were entirely sincere, and I am in fact capable of backing it up. You on the other hand are attempting to use your superior dialectic to attack the weakness of my writing, asking questions you already know the answer to, in the hopes that any passers-by can be confused into missing the forest for the trees.

It is profoundly ironic that your predictable decision to bring out the old chestnut (ad-hominem) was in a parenthesis that begins "I could...". It is even more ironic that you wind up by blasting me as "inspecific, unsupported advocacy" given that you are coming to the de facto defense of an article which is a battle cry for just that!

What is going on here?
CSS did help prevent casual piracy. Before DeCSS was released, it was very effective. Immediately after DeCSS was released, it was still pretty inconvenient to pirate a DVD, even for somebody that knew what to look for. Even now most people wouldn't be able to rip a DVD.

CSS doesn't have anything to do with the popularity of bittorrent. CDs (which have no DRM) are extremely popular on bittorrent as well.

Also, you should blame your Linux vendor for making it hard to watch DVDs. I have used many Linux-based products that have licensed CSS and have built-in DVD support from the start. Windows and Mac OS X also have no problem with DVDs. If your vendor isn't giving you DVD support then switch to a different vendor.
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This is very true. The thing that improved my (mathematical english) writing the most is trying to write papers the way I write code/code documentation.
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I have often heard of people putting their /etc in cvs/svn, but I never bothered due to having to setup a repo. That is until I had git at which point it became just a git init.
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Being in beta doesn't preclude good communication. Facebook takes a public speakers approach to beta features - they tell you what they're gonna change, change it, and then tell you what they changed. Things still break -all the time-, but they rapidly and openly communicate through blog posts, forum posts, bug tracker entries, and more. They set developer expectations and predictably respond to issues that come up.
What is the reason for 1.9 not supporting AST introspection? I mean, it's supposed to be the evolution of the current language, so this lack of support is a bit confusing.
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I agree that ideally good communication is a big part of the beta. But I don't think Twitter has set much of a precedent for good communication, as ironic as that is.

I just don't think that a beta service from Twitter being down with no status info is all that much of a story.

The shock and outrage around this are a little surprising. If my website were my lifeblood right now you can be damn sure I wouldn't bank on a beta feature from Twitter being a cornerstone of my existaece.
I've been following Aptera for awhile and they are one of the very few companies looking at the electric car as a clean-slate design. I can appreciate the benefits of taking our current idea of "a car" and swapping out the traditional powerplant for an electric one, but we won't see the true potential of electric drive until we abandon our preconceived notions of what a car is and design one from the ground up using parameters established by this drivetrain.

Aerodynamics and style aside, the construction techniques used in the Aptera have been proven in both aircraft and automobiles (at the racetrack) and, while new to production automobiles, have a proven history and a lot of engineering behind them. These vehicles have the potential to not only meet the performance and safety requirements of existing automobiles but exceed them.

I applaud the effort of every manufacturer (honestly) attempting to bring an electric car to market but I hold a special respect for those willing to take the risk of re-imagining the American automobile.

My only regret is their focus on "fair-weather" states, if they ever come to Wisconsin, I'll be the first in line.
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Thanks for pointing those things out. I'll update the chart.
We do have this: TipJoy.
It is good to see that MySQL is getting some improvements. It is a decent database, but they really need to fix replication and a number of other critical issues. Hopefully the different release cycle will help them target the issues better.
This reminds me of the PG essay "Stuff": http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

That essay changed the way I think about "things", and since reading it a few years ago I've sold, donated, or thrown away a lot of things that were simply taking up shelf space. It really does help free your mind from the clutter.
Appears that some people agree with me here. Email me if you ever want to discuss more.
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