skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The recommendations of this document are definitely at odds with the design of the API my team is currently working on.

We are trying to build a data access API that can provide a functional and flexible view into data where we know some of the requirements and expectations of the initial users, but we don't know how it will be extended and transformed in the future.

If we don't provide things such as customization of the returned fields, desired date ranges, and ordering, then I believe we would have to rely on waiting for feedback from users/devs that we did not satisfy and attempt to build new end-points to correct that deficiency. That seems to be almost guaranteed to get us off to the wrong start for a large portion of users and they might just decide it isn't worth asking us to make changes since we didn't appear to be catering to them in the first place. I understand that we can't meet all the unknown needs, but if we can build features into the API to meet general classes of needs, that seems better than ignoring them until the specifics become known and then supplying further endpoints that answer only those specifics.

How would you extend this philosophy to a large data portal such as data.gov?

Even in the FBI example, if there is no extensibility or transform-ability in the API, how are the unmet needs of users handled? Do you have a system that gathers complaints from users about the data they suspect is possible but not available and then build new endpoints for each distinct need? Do you just ignore the potential transformative uses that aren't directly applicable to the needs of the customers to which you are paying attention?
Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?
The cost of living in SF proper is ridiculous, but living in Oakland or Daly City ain't too bad and you're pretty much right there anyway. My Midwestern sensibilities have a quarrel with the cost to rent in the city –– but then again, if you're making good money and able to invest for retirement, then it's not a big deal. I've seen so many people fritter away their dough. It's an arms race to consume.
@siromoney Great start, keep going.

I just wanna tell you that, pushing code to Github repo doesn't mean it's Open source.

* Select a Opensource License
* Keep a License file in the root directory of project
* Add link to License file from README.
Ask HN: I get GAE and django. I don't really get RoR. What am I doing wrong?
I've been a programmer for a while (embedded, backend daemon, etc), though not much web stuff.

GAE/DJ seems more natural and intuitive for me but I have to keep saying what was that now? from my notes.

What am I doing wrong?
You already took the first step. Now take step 2 and call someone who can help you. You can get through this.
Hello, my name is Czech Republic
Why is this even a news story? Surely if anything we should be praising the use of a new and arguably beneficial image format rather than complaining about some users incompetence to grab a view to open it on their computer.

It really seems such a bizarre thing to be complaining about. Facebook could make it a little easier by having a download as jpeg image option as well.

The world is always moving forward, why don't we just go back to bitmaps!
Yes, we've received a few inquiries about that.
I had the chance to set it up last night, and one very noticeable change is the speed of the UI. It is remarkably faster on my netbook. Congratulations are of the order.
Thank you Canonical and the open source community.
You may want to disable NoScript.
Time to evolve those mesh networks!
I like the idea of something simpler than IPv6 that wouldn't simply amount to encapsulation, I just don't know that would look like.
Neat! How long have you been going on and how do you get so much content?
Try saying that to a conservative. You'll be branded a commie, as if being one is shameful or anything.
"Only 500K installs". How many app developers would kill for 500K installs. Its a good number for what it is - letting Facebook take over your home screen.
This is too hacky and too complex. It creates another level of cruft where we already have too many of those.

Serving images according to pixel densities should be handled completely on the server side. This can be done based on HTTP headers and in border cases with a cookie denoting increased pixel density (i.e. N phyiscal pixels are 1 "HTML" pixel in width/height attributes), which can be set using JS. Ideally, we'd have a HTTP request header for this (Accept-*).

For now, you can still get good results with higher resolution images where maximum detail is desired (browsers scale images down nicely nowdays and users actually appreciate being able to save higher-resolution versions) and lower/normal where loading times are important (i.e. everywhere else).
Is this the museum that is opening on "mission accomplished" day? (seriously)

Sounds like it's right up there with the creationst museum for fantasy.

Will it explain why in the living heck we invaded Iraq but North Korea actually had nuclear weapons?

BTW they spent half a billion dollars on this museum. Really. What recession?
Yeah, I think there's a misunderstanding somewhere. Some people think I believe a $5 computer could handle amazon.com's traffic, which is clearly preposterous.

I know that almost all of my downtime comes from when I overengineer things. And I don't need to "patch my kernel" because my OS doesn't have kernel holes once a week. Linux isn't the only Unix OS out there.

Today, a lot of sysadmins believe that "LAMP" is a synonym for webserver, and consequently there are a bunch of webservers serving static content on a machine with way too many moving parts. Complexity is bad.

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." -- Albert Einstein
Between Firefox OS devices and Jolla (http://jolla.com/) Sailfish OS ones, the next months will be pretty interesting.

Can't wait to play with both of them.

It would be even more awesome if they strongly cooperated somehow, though.
If you're hiring someone because of their gender, race, etc., that's discriminatory.

However, you're also going to be judged by the statistics, which is to say, if you don't discriminate, you're going to be seen as discriminatory.

Someone write Congress and have them fix this please :)

As far as solutions, recognize that there's a reason most businesses like to hire people they know. They already know the people are capable and will fit in with the team, rather than "rolling the dice" with an unknown who might be perfectly competent but impossible to work with.

What that means is that you have a networking problem. You need to meet enough people so that if you decide to hire someone for a position, you immediately know some candidates. This means that some of them will be women.

I recommend going to the professors, campus organizations, or other authority figures that people already trust. This enables you to meet people without the somewhat creepy idea of showing up and trying to "recruit women" with some weird geek stunt.

Even better, consider your existing network: your employees. Have a dinner or drinks session where you encourage every employee to bring a friend "who might someday want to come on board."

I can't help you with the inherent paradox of being discriminatory in order to avoid being seen as discriminatory. But with more people on your mental rolodex, you'll have a better choice of finding someone who's a fit, and more of those will be women and other protected groups.
Do you have an explicit reason or it's just the suicidal thoughts?
Family and Clients Are Not The Same
Really? Can a Linux process spawn 1m threads?

I didn't work on the design. If I made a mistake that's my fault. The people that did design Go and implement the runtime know what they're doing. You didn't respond to my other points, either.
I agree webapis need to be less fragile but I definitely would n't advocate following this approach. To be honest I'm actually surprised how well the original followed good REST principles. Hateoas is a good way to make your api less fragile to change btw.
He's easily Googleable and you can find his real name and address and pictures using his HN username. Same guy.
Seems like a great argument for more transparency. This guy wasted a lot of time trying to guess what they had done. Given that publishing all the supporting materials is approximately free, perhaps journals could start requiring a git link that contains data, code, and paper drafts.
"But how is that not discrimination masked in sheep's clothing?"

That's what it is. The inconsistency in the law has created a niche market, and people are taking advantage of it. That's why groups like "Women Who Code" exist; show up here to get a job.
Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis
No documents is a flaw, discrepancy check the empty desk
Thanks amarsahinovic for sharing this here. This is a brief blog entry with some observations about Round 3 of our web frameworks benchmark project. The community contributions continue unabated and I think the impressively long charts demonstrate just how much the community has given us. Thank you to everyone who has participated and we are looking forward to Round 4 already!

Please reply to let us know if you have any comments, questions, or criticisms. We'd love to hear your feedback.
DIY Search:Using Google Effectively Requires Skill, eh
Hey, maybe Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the current supreme Court ruling on whether abortion is a constitutional right, will be overturned. The each state could regulate abortion in its own way and there would be places for pro-lifers to move to. Though I doubt that will happen.
This seems orthogonal to FxOS vs. Android, though. If somebody figures out how to ship cheap phones in broken economies, why not ship phones that can run apps?
The biggest issues I have with AIT are as follows:

1) How much longer they make security lines due to how much slower they are, and having to funnel two metal detector lines into a single AIT machine.

2) How much more expensive they are than metal detectors.

3) How they don’t actually work any better than the cheaper metal detectors.

4) How those longer waits and compressed lines actually make a much more dangerous “soft target” outside of the screening areas. When you pack so many more people into a security situation and take longer to screen them, you have a lot of innocent people at risk.

The privacy concerns are less of an issue to me, as I choose to opt-out every time I fly (which is rather frequently, and unavoidable.) But given the overall cost, ineffectiveness, increased wait times, and increased risk as a passenger, AIT is a completely unacceptable solution.
Thanks! More than a month now. Content from a group of mostly known folks right now although some new folks have started participating as well.
It's an interesting observation that everyone assumes (although probably rightly) he means he's suicidal based on four words. That says something.

My initial impression was that he was a hacker wanting to beat a terminal disease.
Czech Republic is a real place, filled with nice people. They don't deserve to be threatened by ignorant Americans who probably can't even find Rhode Island on a map.
If you get the basics of assembly programming, and read any periferal's datasheet (get a simple one), you'll notice that there is protocol for accessing the periferal. If you can understand that protocol and know how you can write C code that conforms to it, you know "microprocessor programming".

If not, well, you may need to learn assembly, C, or something else entirely (but probably not EE), and the experiment will help you discover what exactly you need.
Suppose I have a c++ file I want to compile. I've assumed you couldn't do that on a chromebook directly, but would need to open a terminal on some system that does run a compiler. So does developing on a chromebook require that you also have an account on some remote computer and you're using the chromebook in various ways to remote to that other development system? I.E. does most of your chromebook development come down to using it as a smart terminal?
Don't assume parents need to buy this for kids who need it for their current classes. Plenty of parents want to encourage their kids to be doctors. Facebook might be able to target this, but I'm not a marketing guy, just spitballing.

One niche might be immigrant communities and developing world middle class families in places like south asia. It might be relatively cheap to get an advertisement in an immigrant newspaper, even if you have to pay to have it translated.

You could also see about bundling with other complimentary educational offerings, and combining advertising dollars.

In any case, I think you have a good product that most people currently never hear about. That seems a shame, and free lance, funding, or whatever I hope you succeed. Please post again in 6 months with an update.
"journals could start requiring a git link that contains data, code, and paper drafts."

But when the goal is to create a result rather than report it, transparency is the enemy
Non-profit wants to clone the world's oldest trees to reforest the planet
Richard Stallman: Please let's not talk about "clouds"
Well, we're not so lucky in Backnang. It's the year 2013 and still, my connection keeps randomly dropping as if it's making a tribute to the dial-up days (tried many adsl providers; no luck. I haven't tried Kabel BW though.) I guess the situation is similar in many other small German cities?
So, the incidence rate for accidental overdose is something like .048 per hundred thousand persons, compared to murder which is 4.7 per hundred thousand persons. You are 100 times more likely to be murdered than accidentally overdose on Tylenol. I'm not sure why there is so much concern over this?
I'm only getting someone from Korea... is that him?
Honest benchmarks. Open and gracious group of developers behind it.
Disclaimer - I'm married to one of these guys. I'm not a programmer, but I can see how hard this group has worked to provide something useful to the community and I've enjoyed watching it grow.
They already do by default, but they are doing a pretty bad job. Unless you specifically set it to do so, you only get updates from the people Facebook considers you are interested in.
Confusing Standards for Censorship--Chopra Edition
Does this mean that it's now safe for folks to write their own versions of the data structures that tokutek has patents on? They hold patents on some of the more natural choices In cache oblivious b trees (admittedly they also invented those retrospectively natural choices).
> But when the goal is to create a result rather than report it, providing data, transparency is the enemy

I strongly believe that errors are a much more pervasive problem in science and related fields than malice is.
This is a great story. But perhaps a story of survivorship bias as well?

It would be interesting to know if this happened 3 months, 6 months, or several years after TACODA was working on their product.

According to this Rho ventures article, TACODA was founded in 2001. http://www.rhoventures.com/new-media-Tacoda-case-sudy.htm They raised 12M from Union Square in 2006. Fred Wilson states he was an early angel investor, and that this conversation occurred early.

My question is - Did they pivot because they raised a lot of money and were under pressure from investors? Or was it the right thing to do?

They certainly had a successful exit by selling to AOL a year later for a good chunk. Hard to argue with that.

But, then AOL shuttered it, and there's not much data on why (other than the "AOL are incompetent" trope)

So, did they sell AOL a time bomb? Or did AOL screw it up?
I think it depends on why you are making the API.

If the intent is to publicize your business by letting other programmers integrate their app/website with your service then I agree with designing an "API" that way. Because you don't want people to do with your API things you didn't intend them to do.

If the intent is to give other programmers the ability to work with your data and create their own thing using your service then the API need to be more flexible and be able to give more freedom possible to the users.
Lol. They ARE that easy to write.

Debugging, by the other side...
Well ... I think it's actually pretty good bug reporting habit. Was it text/plain or unstyled text/html? Was the body an error message but a styled header and footer present? You might want to copy and paste the text as well, to aid future copy and paste efforts, but it's surprisingly frequently useful to have a screenshot.
Traffic in bulk is cheap as fuck. The new tariffs don't reflect the real market prices but are just another way of ripping off existing customers with a functionally defective product.
Psst: wanna eavesdrop on my research?
Right. How much you track and what you track is extremely important. For example, I was massively more motivated to exercise after I started actually tracking my performance. I'm a skinny nerd and my goal was to gain muscle mass, and on previous attempts I'd given up in frustration after I didn't gain any weight over several weeks. Rationally I knew the exercise had to be having an effect but it was still demotivating.

But when I started tracking I found that while my overall weight wasn't changing, my percentage of body fat was dropping, indicating that I was in fact gaining muscle. It's not like this was technically new information, but seeing the numbers triggered some sort of response in me which made it very easy to keep going to the gym.
Thanks for your comments! The step bar at the bottom is definitely sub-par, but wanted to have it so quickly hacked it in there :)
> I think that is your own projection

It's not. Regardless, everything else you say ignores the fact that you are bringing the woman in specifically because you think she'll be better at hiring women. It's a strategy.

She's in there not because she's a great engineer, but because she is a woman who happens to be a great engineer.
As someone who is finally starting to get out of being depressed don't do it. The important thing here is to tell yourself it will get better. There are 2 things that really helped me.

1. Is changing your perspective. You don't care about life anymore? What an absolutely fantastic opportunity to break every single societal norm and do the things you've always dreamed of doing but were too scared to. Go skydiving, get a classic car, whatever. Make the kind of fun/dumb decisions that people do when they're in high school. Wear your depression like a coat of armor to do whatever the fuck you want.

2. Exercise and sunlight. I'm serious man, I was (still am obese), but working out, eating right, and getting outside has effectively cured me. Especially the sunlight thing. Vitamin D deficiency can cause depression. Want some statistics to back it up? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... Look at the countries near the bottom of the list. Sunshine. They're all in the Middle East or the Caribbean. Getting outdoors can do wonders.

Those are the 2 things that helped me, but there's many more ways to get better. Talk to someone, a therapist, a friend, whatever. The fact that you're reaching out right now tells me you probably have doubts about what you're thinking about doing. There really is so much to live for. The fact that a stranger took the time to type up their experience and share it with you should be proof of that. Besides, you obviously haven't always felt like this. You can get back to the way you were. There is hope, it's just hard to see right now.

P.S. don't drink. I made that mistake and drowned myself in whiskey for a couple of months. It will make it worse not better. Trust me.
Its fascinating that part of the problem in the Reinhart and Rogoff paper comes down to an Excel formula error http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/grad-student-wh...
Maybe like Ray Kurzweil you want to pursue technologies that promise to extend your life indefinitely? So far I'm not sure any of us have determined what you intended with your question. Would you like to clarify?
To the kid who tried to defraud me today
Today, I received two consecutive emails about a "weird" charge in NC via walmart.com. I live in NJ and rarely travel out of state. One of the emails was from walmart confirming two orders totaling more than $600 and another from my bank asking me to look into the suspicious activity. One of the charges was for a God of War package (awesome game but >$300?!) and a samsung galaxy note (also > $300).

I'm not mad or frustrated or worried (maybe I should be?). I was able to have my bank take care of it within 10 minutes and sent walmart.com an email as a heads up and took off all of my personal info from that account.

I'm a web developer and an avid HN reader so I should have known better than to have left a merchant account with a credit card attached on such a weak password (for shame!). It is my responsibility to make sure that such an important item (credit card number) is always looked after.

Tonight, I'm going to audit every merchant account I ever could have possible had a transaction with and close all of them or at the very least remove all credit card info.

And to the kid/guy who tried to make those charges -
You have good taste. God of War is an awesome game and I've been thinking of buying the galaxy Note myself. I'm waiting for christmas to get an Xbox too. We probably would get along if it wasn't for the fact that you chose to steal.
To be honest, it's not dystopian at all. This is EXACTLY how crossing the boarder to Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Ukraine or Russia looked like just 20 years ago, and probably still looks similar today. The only thing missing from the game is people trying to bribe the guards, as that was a bread and butter of their existence. Having crossed these borders hundreds of times I know that border guards would hold you off for days even, if you didn't bring a "gift". Russian guards told me to fuck off and wait in the car since they were playing football and were busy. When I complained the guy took out his pistol and threatened to shoot me if I don't get back to the car. I watched the entire playthrough of this game on Giant Bomb and it did strike some familiar vibes.
Great Software is an Act of Empathy.  Do you love your Users Enough?
Any details about shipping costs? And will non-EU countries also have to pay the VAT fee? (Hosting companies do not charge VAT for non-EU customers.) 91 euros seems to be too tempting. :)
This is total BS. How is posting a few screen-grabs from their publicly available video a violation of their copyright? Isn't it considered fair use? I was expecting more on the lines of "we are sorry for the whole fiasco, our legal team acts independently whenever it feels like there is a violation", instead of him defending the DMCA. They used DMCA to try and censor a debate about their lies. Talking about DMCA, is it just me, or does anybody else think that government is always eager to pass copyright protection (aka censorship) laws, rather than passing laws to protect the citizens from corporate greed?
You mean this: http://joingrouper.com ?
I can't help but think that this announcement is 5 years too late. 5 years ago the field for write-optimized database was wide open and obviously there was a lot of demand for such a product or otherwise companies like facebook and Powerset wouldn't have had to write their own versions.

But since there was no open source software available for this usecase back then, they did write their own, which became Cassandra and HBase. And now these SSTable type of solutions have become the de facto standard for write-optimized databases.

If Tokutek had open sourced TokuDB from the very beginning things could have turned out very differently. TofuDB had an huge advantage over Cassandra/HBase in being SQL-oriented and based on MySQL, whereas Cassandra/HBase required a much steeper learning curve. But since TokuDB was proprietary, it never really gained much traction.