skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have to agree with the above. The problem with relational databases isn't the relational model, per se, but the complexity and cost of maintaining a relational database.

Typically, they require specialized database administrators whose primary job is to tune the database and keep it running.

Many businesses, even of moderate size, reach point where they will need to purchase expensive hardware (million dollar RamSans and expensive servers) to optimize the performance of their database because partitioning databases is challenging.

So the overhead of running an Oracle or Sql Server database is quite high.

There is huge room for improvement with these traditional database products. If someone made a good cloud database that supported the same feature set but with lower administration and maintenance costs then that might be a better option.
Copyright Trolls Threaten to Call Neighbors of Accused Porn Pirates
If there was no other way to secure the advantages of this hypothetical big lock, and those advantages were as significant as Bitcoin's, then it wouldn't be a waste of resources.
Where can I find more info about this "spat"?
Why not just have a start/stop toggle and record time segments so you don't have to worry about a "running" timer?
Monsanto Wins Seed Patent Case
Here's hoping Apple buys these guys soon. Is it really just an inspector or can you get your changes to be reflected in the code?
DOM engine and network lag are a much bigger bottle-neck for most mobile apps; where the lack of Nitro really hurts is <canvas>-based games, and specific CPU-heavy tasks (real-time photo effects, etc). For simple stuff like string manipulation, non-Nitro JS is still crazy-fast enough to be negligible in most cases.

However, I can attest that Javascript/browser memory leakage is a very real problem. It's manageable, but also very easy to screw up.
Postgresql has prepared queries - they give you the same type of optimization (skip the query parsing on each execution) with more flexibility and with SQL standard syntax.
Show HN: my iPhone app - Instagram + Quotes = Quotestagram
The maker of Pinstagram brings you Quotestagram - a way to easily turn memorable quotes into beautiful images you can share on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more.

This app is yet another mashup of two ideas - photosharing and quotes. I would really love to get your feedback.
Here it is on the front page of the newspaper. 21 November 2012.

http://en.kiosko.net/se/2012-11-21/np/dagens_nyheter.html

http://i.imgur.com/aKTAc7d.jpg (Image only mirror)
> and more Android users switch to iOS than vice versa

could you provide some source for this? All statistics I've ever seen seem to indicate the opposite is happening.
Hi everyone, OP here. I'm currently at work so I can't respond right now, but I'll reply to you all as soon as I can. I never thought a quick weekend project would be this popular. I can't thank you all enough for your interest in this. In the meantime, I'm @jckmgn on Twitter. Thanks!
How exactly can carriers block a nat daemon and a few iptables entries on my device?
A Go package for A/B testing, gradual feature rollouts, and more...
Can anyone give a Tl;DR about how this works? Don't x and y need to exist beforehand?
I stopped updating the chart in February. As the trend indicates, sales have continued to decline since then. My latest figure is 15k-20k/month.
>They just heard that "tech" has a lot of people who (a) add a lot of value, but (b) are so deficient in social skills and negotiation that it's a cake-walk to take advantage of them.

As someone who struggled to find his place socially throughout school, it's infuriating to see a bunch of ex-high-school-bullies get installed as managers and do nothing but play the political game and push their employees to burn-out levels because they don't care to understand the effort that goes into writing software. All the while they just sit in their fancy offices shmoozing with the other parasites, embarking on shaky "biz-dev" deals that never come to fruition, and generally getting zero work done in exchange for embarrassingly high compensation.
I've done something similar in my form-validation library. I have a function that has three inputs that basically end up behaving like flags. So there are 8 possibilities in total. I ended up creating a function that would return a three-bit binary number based on the inputs, and I also created a jump-table that maps the three-bit binary values to specific handlers.
Would like to see per-capita, or age profile. One hot spot is centered on eastern Iowa/western Illinois. I live there, and am utterly surprised by this. That coincides on a cluster of college campuses; perhaps its careless language by college students?
Thanks, I also added a link in the article for reference
I have no idea what this article is really about. Did FWD.us really pay for the ad in that YouTube video? What are the actual facts that I should know?

Both the article and the top comment on HN seems to be infected with borderline conspiracy theories.
How is a third-party black-box module decoding it to a specific point on the viewport a "world better" than Flash, a third-party black-box module, decoding it to a specific point on the viewpoint?
Which I think raises an interesting point/question. We all know that these 'forums' are essentially echo chambers for all sides of the discussion and are hardly representative of typical use patterns. With that in mind, how much of the market is actually using their device? In my little corner of the world I see them (smartphones) used for photos, IM/SMS, the odd game and Facebook. On occasion the more savvy user has email enabled and may use maps for directions. Is there data out there for this? not that it changes the figures, but it could potentially alter what they mean and therefore have an impact on how we design apps etc.
I think the real win with a technique like this is that, if you store the bindings in a place that is globally accessible, it is open to extension.

For example, if a JSON library author implemented an encode(object) function using a dispatch table holding a set of object-type/JSON-encoding-function pairs, a client could extend the encode function by registering additional object-type/JSON-encoding-function pairs in the dispatch table.

Edit:

Furthermore, I believe this is how clojure protocols work - when a new type participates in a protocol, the type-specific function implementation gets added to a dispatch table keyed on the datatype's java Class. Then, anytime you invoke the function, the class of the first argument is identified and the corresponding type-specific function is pulled out of the dispatch table based on the class.
That's a little unfair.

Zuckerberg did win a lottery, quite right. If there was a room of 10,000 entreprenuers flipping coins, he flipped heads 100 times.

But it is not a fair toss - after the first few rounds those still in the game are a self-selecting group of people whose own biases more accurately match the new world than the average.

So when Zuckerberg and many of those who are still tossing, makes a new bet, a new toss, the odds he is choosing a path that will prove solid in the future is better than even.

One day his biases will lead him astray, afterall, there is no rational way to predict the future accurately. But if the bet is on "technology leadership" his biases so far are useful.

This is not to say his biases apply in DC, or that his biases are already out of date, but still, if technology leadership is finding a trail through the wilderness, his biases have at least lead through a thicket and found water at least once.

Of course the guy leading the Donner Party probably could say the same thing too.

Anyway, point is, his technology bet is "America needs immigrants". His political bet is "everyone will forgive me if I fix that". He may be right on technology, and wrong on politics - which I think is the main complaint. Does not make his technology bet wrong.

(personally I think its foolish to fix immigration for that reason - most people want to stay where they are and still work for facebook. And that is not an immigration problem)
ABC to Live-Stream Its Shows via App
It seems like the give-up on clarity of code isn't worth of it for most of this, but the tail call optimization is a nifty little feature to have.
As soon as the operator hung up without verifying the number I was expecting a "World War III phone" style punchline to this.
This whole library is flat-out fascinating. I'm looking forward to trying it out. Macros? The PINQ stuff?
I don't see a scale anywhere; am I just missing it?

It makes a big difference if red is 4-5 tweets (per what time period), or 4-5 thousand.
Because it's hideous?
Android is 75% of shipping smartphones now. I don't think anyone could argue it isn't the most popular OS now. It's winning in tablets now too, although just barely.
While the specific feature is fun to see in python, I'm much more impressed by the fact that MacroPy enables you to do AST transformations from python modules on the fly. This allows for developing DSLs like they show with PINQ (a LINQ "clone").
Quit worrying about attracting a crowd
Popularity is more nuanced than a simple number. Android phones cover a much broader price range than iOS or Windows phones so people who might otherwise have chosen an iPhone are forced to choose a cheaper Android phone, which doesn't really count as a "vote" for Android. Choice of phone also depends on a person's cell phone provider. For a long time iPhones weren't available on networks other than AT&T's.
Considering previous crews, it's (sadly) pretty unlikely. He's been exceptional. Also, http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/03/22/the-end-o...

> Effective immediately, all education and public outreach activities should be suspended, pending further review. In terms of scope, this includes all public engagement and outreach events, programs, activities, and products developed and implemented by Headquarters, Mission Directorates, and Centers across the Agency, including all education and public outreach efforts conducted by programs and projects.
Path Product Management Director Dylan Casey Departs for Yahoo
"before it had any meaningful impact"

That part is blatantly untrue. The amount of paperwork and information forwarded (including lists of people) to the IRS was a meaningful impact and the delay causes had election effects.
You can make it work, I can even have good animation performance with css3 on the iphone 3gs. Animating one or 2 items works well,

Things you need to be careful is too much animations at the same time & accessing and modifying the DOM while you animate, you need to "block access", something IOS does natively it seems.

But for Android that's another story, one device it's goint to be pretty good, on another it's complete crap and you need to deactivate animations all together.
For some reason it reminded me of "The Electronic Money Mill". Original site is gone but The Internet Archive has a copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20080412233535/http://www.msen.co...

Fun (semi-fictional) read about Electronic Funds Transfer, crypto and the FBI.
How do you get an app into the "Top New apps" in the first place? I wouldn't have a clue how to stand out from the saturated mass of apps out there.
Should also include, at minimum, the percentage of Tweets that were racist / sexist / whatever. We need to know the total volume of tweets before we can tell if it's higher or lower than just "average" racism.
There was a recent car commercial, where they rapidly flashed scenes of the process of car design, with a voice-over reading "Bring out the designers. Bring out the mechanics. Bring out the nerds." Each sentence would show a stereotypical example of each. The designers were in a bright Apple-store-like office, wearing fashionable glasses. The mechanic was a long-haired guy holding a wrench.

And the nerds were astronauts, in launch suits, presumably walking towards a space launch.
A couple quotes from Hadfield's Reddit account:

We are trained to be able to do everything onboard - we have to be. It takes many years.

To be an astronaut who orbits earth and stays for a while, it needs to become your main life's work. It takes: physical fitness to the highest standard, an advanced technical degree, and a proven ability to make good decisions when consequences matter. Then apply to the Space Agency of your country, and compete with the thousands who also want to fly in space.

Sources:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18pik4/i_am_astronaut_...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18pik4/i_am_astronaut_...
99% of "design" blog articles on the web are embarrassing, and this "flat design" nonsense is really making it show.

Definitely something to be said about a proper design education vs loud mouthed Photoshop tutorial monkeys ramblings.
I was wondering that myself. I assume they have some anti-counterfeiting tech in there? Though that seems tough if the machine is built for so many different currencies.
"Between 2010 and 2012, applications doubled in volume. A large part of that increase was Tea Party groups."

Really? Do you have a source for that? I'm having a hard time finding a list of all these types of groups. There are some listed on wikipedia, everything from the Colbert SuperPAC to the Washington Science Fiction Association, so what constitutes "social welfare" seems to be pretty loosely evaluated.
I love how he has managed to capture the interest of young people. 14 year olds are loving his adventures in space and that´s a good thing.

How many kids do you think this man has inspired to pursue a career in an engineering related field?
I'm sure there must be competitors where this is not happening.
I think the benefit is primarily a simpler API and nicer syntax for most of the things you'd want to do.

For instance with Q.all, you'd do with:

return Q.all([
eventualAdd(2, 2),
eventualAdd(10, 20)
]).then(function(values) {
console.log(values[0], values[1]);
});

can instead be

eventualAdd(2, 2).
and(eventualAdd(10,20)).
then(function(a, b) {
console.log(a, b);
});

which I feel reads nicer and gives you the results in a more usable form (something that would require another call, Q.spread, in Q). This also allows complex composition. Say you want to run 4 functions A, B, C and D, such that A and B are called together, C is called when A returns, then D is called when B and C both return. This is clumsy to do on Q, requiring packing promises into an array, etc.

The other big thing is error handling. In Q, if you forget to set an error handler at the end of the chain or explicitly set the default handler with .done(), errors go unhandled. This is clumsy; in fact the Q documentation says:

"This is a stopgap. We are exploring ways to make unhandled errors visible without any explicit handling."

We've implemented this in andthen. If there's no error handler and execution reached the end of the chain, it will be thrown so Node or the browser will print it.

There's fulfilment as well, but I get your point about putting this better in the README.
Show HN: Funnel Visualization in HTML/CSS/D3.js
Okay, but that's not the whole story.

> The scope encompasses, but is not limited to:

> ...

> - Web and social media sites in development (excludes operational sites).*

So nothing is stopping an astronaut or kosmonaut with a Twitter and youtube account from talking to us down here, except maybe a scarcity of free time.
Good point, looks like they tried to support multiple color formats http://rgb.to/about-help but that seems like sthg they should support too.
Is watching porn still a big deal?
"To produce the map all tweets containing each 'hate word' were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county."

Emphasis mine.
It's hard to give a TL;DR on the whole library, but case classes can be used with for example pattern matching (https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy#pattern-matching).

The following code:

with patterns:
Foo(x, Bar(3, z)) << Foo(4, Bar(3, 8))

The constructor after the << will be matched with the part before <<. It will only match if the first argument of "Bar" is 3. If that's the case, x and z will be bound to 4 and 8.

Does this help? :)
Yeah, if he almost got fired for it, how was even able to find out? Were they like "Well, it's the President's bomb-shelter, but we were almost going to fire you for asking us about that!"
I was on the Eurostar back from Paris two weeks ago when a guy pulls out his phone with an android app telling us how fast we are going. I'd say this isn't so awful. Not everybody drives a car.
I believe this one works best when the page itself is moving (e.g. by scrolling).
Exactly my thought, it all looks like someone is just trying too hard.

See: http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/545-Sta...

To me that looks like some disgruntled redditors who can't take the fact that Morgan Freeman is just too tired of PR to scan and type on IAmA himself. So the most plausible explanation that he's just resting on the couch while some agent is typing has to be debunked by means of pseudo-hackish image forensics which don't prove anything after all.
Some of these words can also have other meanings. For example "fag" is english slang for cigarette and "chink" obviously has other meanings. I also know gay people who prefer the term 'queer' in describing themselves. I guess you could get a lot of "nigger" too by retweeting hip hop lyrics..
Show HN: I'm 36 years old and this iPhone app took me forever
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quotestagram/id592666165?ls=1&mt=8

Quotestagram is an iphone app that let's you easily turn memorable quotes into beautiful images to share on popular social networks. From concept to launch this app took 5 months. It was fraught with difficulties. I didn't know iOS programming. But the app is finally out and I would really love the community's feedback.
In the "about this map" popup, it says the data was collected from June 2012-April 2013 and contains about 150,000 tweets total.
Segment.io is awesome and I highly recommend them. As for the actual analytics use GA + somethings else. Check out HeapAnalytics they have a pretty awesome tool.
Was my initial thought too, but it seems this is already implemented. From the page:
To protect privacy, actual tweet locations have been
aggregated to the county level and normalized by number
of tweets.

I don't understand how normalization is supposed to protect privacy though.
There are few things as modal as a modern cell phone/tablet. You know, the bleeding edge of modern UI. To think that it is a few folks preference for older editors that does this, is just shallow.

What does this is an explosion of possibilities with limited input capabilities. This is a dual with the other rule of "do not overload users." To fix the car example, dedicated bass controls can be used. Of course, most folks don't want that control. It "confuses" them. So... what do you do?
That's why they relied on humans to determine whether each tweet was negative.
NodeStrap: NodeJS + MongoDB + AngularJS Web App Template
...seriously?

You do understand that this choice that you speak of is simply a strength of the Android platform? You can't just push that aside just to maintain your own world view. Android is the most popular mobile operating system right now - it might or might not be the best or most valuable, but it IS the most popular.
Off-topic, but can anyone name the file browser app he's using? It looks way nicer than the couple I've tried.
From the opening paragraph of the readme.md

> MacroPy provides a mechanism for user-defined functions (macros) to perform transformations on the abstract syntax tree(AST) of Python code at module import time

Basically it rewrites the code before it's compiled, so no, x and y don't need to exist (compilation hasn't finished when the macro runs)
Mustache templates in Java
Getting started with Handlebars.java
There's a difference between investigating people based on their political activities and investigating people because their comments indicate a likelihood of criminal activity.

To take an extreme case: If I travel around the US and tell everybody I encounter that I think the White House should be blown up, I think it would be entirely reasonable for the Secret Service to investigate. I might make such proclamations out of abstract personal convictions, or I might make them because I'm the sort of crazy person who would actually try to blow up the White House; the whole point of investigation is to determine which.
Nearly all questions answered in the "about map" link:

=========================================

The data behind this map is based on every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 - April 2013 containing one of the 'hate words'. This equated to over 150,000 tweets and was drawn from the DOLLY project based at the University of Kentucky. Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing 'hate words' as "negative," this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To produce the map all tweets containing each 'hate word' were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county. Counties were reduced to their centroids and assigned a weight derived from this normalization process. This was used to generate a heat map that demonstrates the variability in the frequency of hateful tweets relative to all tweets over space. Where there is a larger proportion of negative tweets referencing a particular 'hate word' the region appears red on the map, where the proportion is moderate, the word was used less (although still more than the national average) and appears a pale blue on the map. Areas without shading indicate places that have a lower proportion of negative tweets relative to the national average.

The numbers that appear in the map during a mouse hover indicate the total number of hateful tweets and number of unique users sending them in each county.

==========================================

EDIT: The mouse overs don't appear to work very well in Chrome or Firefox, but from the one or two times I was able to see some numbers it appears that each red circle may be a dozen or less tweets. Also, the hot zones dissipate significantly the further you zoom in, so without any statistics or numbers it's difficult to draw conclusions.

A very interesting experiment, but given that the data is only normalized by Twitter traffic (non-response bias) this is in no way indicative of the actual distribution of racism.
From the 'Details about this map' popup:

Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing 'hate words' as "negative," this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.
> It takes many years.

One hell of an understatement: Hadfield was accepted as a trainee astronaut in 1992 and first flew in 2001. For the ISS alone, he got his slot in 2010 and trained until December 2012.
Don't disagree with any of this. Acqui-hire isn't ideal, but it's better than the alternative, which is starting over.
State senators and representatives actually do get lobbied quite a bit.
Remember when Flash was becoming ubiquitous?

Here's a primary concern of mine: Many people think this means Netflix will continue to be DRM-ed, YouTube will gain DRM-ed for-pay channels, etc. AKA premium video. (Oh, and audio -- nearly forgot that.)

Once the tool is available, baked in, I fear a wholesale run to DRM-ed content. This will certainly be at least tried as the solution to the revenue problem.

I'll add that, aside from the implications for an "open Net", I also worry about the security implications: We'll be forced to take without inspection whatever an encrypted provider sees fit to deliver or falls prey to. No, thanks.