skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, books might be a good niche for a product like this. There is a market for software targeting people selling through Amazon who really need just inventory management and not customer lists and the other features mentioned in the original article.
The custom barcode scan stuff is spot on, it would be interesting to have a Android or iPhone application that integrates potentially in real-time with a web app (look at the Roller demo that Google just released to see how simple integration can be) and is used as a barcode scanner. Supporting ISBN, QR, other custom barcode formats could be a valuable feature.
By that same argument we should outlaw alcohol -> http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/613617-Plugging-Alcohol
Neiman Marcus Takes Fight to ‘Intolerable’ Patent Suers
> Last year, Germany’s openly gay foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, called Belarus “the last dictatorship in Europe,” prompting Lukashenko to quip that he’d “rather be a dictator than gay.”

Probably the first and last time I'll ever agree with a dictator.
Well, you only cited Europe, but here in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the best choice would be public libraries or Starbucks.
With some local tips you could also find a mall with a quiet food court with wifi.
An Insider's View of the Myths and Truths of the 3-D Printing 'Phenomenon'
Yes. I wanted to have several titles at hand in a small package. I also use calibre to convert technical pdfs to MOBI. And to manage my ebook library. I don't use amazon, just torrents or sometimes direct purchase from publisher.

I like the readability and form factor of my little black and white kindle.
That's all good but my personal experience about complexity and big code bases sadly don't include functional paradigm.

Note that I'm not taking about complex problem with potentially simple solutions, I'm talking about inherently complex systems, like, say, the HR system of General motors.
Heinz dilemma
You can remove the app. Its not permissions for life.
Sounds like At The Pool -- http://atthepool.com
Well, AFAIK they didn't seize MtGox LLC's money per se, they seized the accounts of Mutum Sigillum, which appears to be a subsidiary company in the USA set up to facilitate transfers through Dwolla which only offers services to US entities.
I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they're boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in minutes rather than months, and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can't afford to pay much for them.
Right, there's not a legal way to subscribe so you're illegally subscribing. For the children, or something.
Babe Ruth and Feature Lists
How to Dominate a Boring Industry with Content Marketing
Because the 'skin' of the base components is not the problem most of these frameworks are trying to solve.

This framework seems to have very little to do with the look and feel you are after. Hence it's light filesize, and it's advocacy for a less opinionated style.

"...provides layout and styling for native HTML elements, plus the most common UI components. It's what you need, without the cruft."

"...minimal styles and encourages you to write your application styles on top of it. It's designed to get out of your way and makes it easy to override styles."

Bootstrap on the other hand, has a fairly opinionated design. That is to say, it does a lot of the 'look and feel' for you, and overriding those styles to create your own skin takes a fair amount of work. Pure seems to aim at making a uniform base of elements, without designing a lot of the skin... encouraging you to extend base classes more than trying to override them. And I applaud these types of frameworks.

Lastly, IMHO the solution for grid systems is different in many of these frameworks, and a lot of it comes down to personal preference and your project's requirements. This is a pretty big differentiation point for some people. Many frameworks have opinionated grid systems -- box-sizing: border-box, fluid vs. adaptive, first/last class names required on columns within a row, etc.
DreamWorks has a lot of nice tech; they released OpenVDB 1.0 which is a voxel library earlier this year which is rather great. They've done a lot of raytracing.

Tintin was raytraced from what I understand, using PentaRay (Weta's own raytracer.)

Pixar waiting this long to incorporate more raytracing probably has little to do with their abilities and more to do with historical reasons. Renderman traditionally did stuff a certain way and it has worked great so far for them. There's algorithms invented by Pixar people in most 3D-apps, so their technological contribution has been huge.

In the end, how you achieve the result is not important. Only the visual results. VFX & animation is all smoke and mirrors :)
This doesn't apply to me, but couldn't this be a catch-22? To get a job/social status where you're making good money, you need to get a suit, but you need the money for a suit in order to get that job.

Also, you could just be averse to a perceived waste of money, even if you could afford it (my case).
There are a lot of things that are great weapons against organized crime, human traffickers, and terrorist groups that are unacceptable as law enforcement techniques. The fact that something is a good weapon against crime is not sufficient justification.

It also needs to be shown that such weapons are not unduly harmful to law-abiding citizens.

Honestly, it's not something I'd thought about much before all the recent government crackdowns on money transmitters. But when I stop to take a look at it, it seems to me that the freedom to exchange money without government interference is close to a fundamental human right.

When I look at it carefully, it seems very very strange that we've accepted that governments have the right to minutely examine what we do with the fruits of our labors.

I get that it's a good tool to stop crime, but so is listening to every phone call. So is recording every move every person makes in public. We're starting to see resistance to movement in those directions, why should our economic actions be subject to the same level of scrutiny?

I'm not ready to throw out the whole shebang, but I've started to think there should be some firm limits.
Yes, life and death is sometimes horrific. Makes you appreciate life even more when you contemplate death.
And in MOBI format on Kindle, the content seems to be pretty readable - even for technical books with pictures?
The "using Excel for inventory" seems to contradict what you originally said about customers wanting inventory plus something else. If they are already using Excel (or Access) just for inventory than they are already comfortable having inventory in a silo. You are offering "a fancy Excel sheet on the web" which has been successfully marketed by a number of SaaS companies in other problem domains. (Time and expense tracking for instance.)
Using the Steam DRM is optional for developers. There are DRM free games on Steam, which means that even if Steam is down, they will still work. That said, I've never had problems with DRMed Steam games not working if the internet is down (you just need to make sure you check the "remember my login" thing when authenticating).
Nice article! But I have to disagree with these:

- Minimize the number of arguments

- Avoid output arguments

Basically, you're arguing against some principles of functional programming, advocating the use of state. There's no good or wrong with state, I think, there's only a trade-off. Heavy use of state = easier/faster to code, harder to debug/read.

IMHO these kinds of generalizations are pretty dangerous. We should always try to understand the problems lying underneath in order to correctly assess the trade-offs. A quote from Elon Musk that goes something like "don't rely on analogies, try to understand the problem" popped up on HN some other day, but I'm too lazy to go look for it now. :-)
Well, if you search google for canola unhealthy, you get quite a few results, some of which are fud, and hippy nonsense regarding GMO foods, etc. My larger concerns are saturated vs. unsaturated fats and their effect on the growth of metabolic syndrome in this country from crisco and other transfat introductions to the more recent canola oil.

Most of these products are as far from natural as it gets considering the sheer amount of processing involved when compared to say butter, lard, or fats absorbed from regular food intake (nuts, and meat).

A couple of decent articles related to the issue are as follows (note, this isn't just canola vs. others so much as trans fats (not all canola is hydrogenated) and the use of unsaturated vs. saturated fats (canola is unsaturated).

* http://www.marksdailyapple.com/saturated-fat-healthy/#axzz2U...
* http://www.diabetesincontrol.com/component/content/article/6...
* http://www.menshealth.com/health/saturated-fat

I'm not opposed to GMO, but have been avoiding a lot of different types of fats, and starches for the better part of a year, without reducing my caloric intake, and have done far better with that than the USDA recommendations.
Your counter-argument doesn't rebut jonknee's point. Try to buy $50k of Bitcoin from an exchange--you won't be able to, without going through the same anti money laundering processes, providing your ID, etc.

And, just like Bitcoin, you have alternative illegal ways to obtain cash without going through these AML hassles: trade goods with a individual on the black market.

The point is, cash is comparable to Bitcoin in terms of enabling anonymous transactions. And there are legal as well as illegal ways to obtain both.
They are big enough to pay the money laundering tax.

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/11/hsbc_to_pay_1_9bn_to_settle_...
It's not that I am against signing up with Facebook, it's just that every service I've used with a FB login claims to help make oneself more social; however, that is hardly ever the case.

As for wanting to meet people in my area with similar interests, I'll stick to using Meetup.

Additionally, here is some advice from someone who runs their own Meetup group. My coffee and conversation group is over a month old and has over 50 members. Only about 20% sign up for a Meetup and about 75% actually show. These are rough estimates, but from people I talk to that host events, they have similar results. I think you'll find that once you set up these "meets" with 4 people, usually not all 4 will show up. I guess if you had them prepay, they would be more inclined to...

but anyway, good luck!
I think the OP is spot-on on his takeaways from Clean Code. I work with a number of people who do not have a CS or Software Engineering background but are assigned to the team as "programmers". They can hack together something that will work, but often end up with a convoluted design and an almost guaranteed maintenance nightmare.

Robert ("Uncle Bob") Martin's book has been really useful for us. We have been going through the book section by section and comparing the ideas in "Clean Code" to our implementations. It has been a most effective way of getting the team up to speed.

I would recommend anyone who is getting started on their first software engineering job to go through the book. It is excellent study material for an inexperienced team.
I consider tools/books made explicitly to help with selling, marketing, or coming up with ideas for software products as per the startup-trend of the Lean Startup, etc, as meta-products. This isn't a bad qualifier on its own, mind you, it just means that its a tool to help sell products/bootstrap startups/etc.

I'm not willing to single out specific products (like yours) and criticize/praise them since that is getting into the weeds, I'm just pointing to the larger trend of tons of HN posts where the author tells a story about their failed startup and then you realize, no, they are not just telling a story and sharing their lessons, they are pitching you to buy their (unproven) product so you, humble entrepreneur, can avoid the same tragedy they did.

If something doesn't provide value and people stop buying it, that doesn't mean the (hypothetical) snake oil salesman doesn't make off with a mint before people realize the fact that it's smoke and mirrors and didn't provide any actual value. It doesn't even have to be malicious, it could just be someone making promises they end up being unable to keep and people giving them money in the hopes of those problems being solved. Everyone has the urge to try something for a few months to see if it works if they are struggling. Why should I trust any fresh-on-the-scene meta-product with even my time (nevermind my money) other than the ones that come from a credible source: someone who built and used it to launch a separate non-meta product.

(The problem, of course, is if someone really has a compelling solution to a problem that provides a competitive advantage, they are disincentivized from selling it!)
UAB research finds new channels to trigger mobile malware
Authored by Carl Bass, president and CEO of Autodesk. I don't trust him as impartial on this subject.
I use a 4096 bit length rsa key with a 200 something bit password. Am I safe?
Why would an academic employment contract be more lenient than the Constitution? The Constitution is a floor, not a bar to reach for. It's a mistake to read modern libertarian (little "l") ideas into the Constitution. While there has been a change through history in which of the federal versus state governments has exercised the police power, the Constitution has always served as a check on an otherwise expansive power. It's easy to forget that all the founders' talk of "limited government" was aimed at the states, not citizens, and referred to the federal government specifically, not the federal, state, and local governments together. The states were conceived of as inheriting the nearly unlimited powers of the British Parliament. The innovation of the U.S. was not to dramatically limit the state, but to put a powerful state under majoritarian control, with a limited set of protections from abuse.

The circle back on topic: there is nothing within the worldview of the Constitution that is inconsistent with a certain activities being allowed of the government that are outside the powers of an individual. You can argue about which entity is the right one to exercise it, but the government is supposed to have more expansive powers than any person.
Your rite small business needs a complete package not focusing on automating one part of their business. I developed a crm/erp for the small business, covering from attendance, payroll, followups, lead management, production, vendor management, accounting, competitor analysis and many more feature that's is not avaliable in current crm/erp industry. www.bizsol.co and I'm from India
"Wall Street" is large enough that it effects the regulatory system that effects it. Think of big finance and government as a binary star system each orbiting and effecting the other. Tiny objects simply get sucked in by virtue of their puny size.

Above street level, all justice is politics.
" I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush "

What is a catholic brush?
All of this moralizing and "solve big problems" talk is really getting old. On average, chances are pretty low that a particular individual will ever solve a big problem, so stop worrying about it! It's not for others to say how you "should" spend your energy anyway. The moralistic fluff is unnecessary. Those who aren't motivated will ignore it, those who are motivated don't need to be reminded, and the moralizers will use it to beat the rest of the would-be entrepreneurs into a perpetual state of indecision.

Condense the article down and you're left with this nugget of advice: You'll have a better chance of success if you target unsaturated, boring markets.
Man, is there anything that Ryan Gordon doesn't port?
> And you should still be using bcrypt. (Or PKBDF2, or scrypt, whatever. Just not something where a "pepper" actually ends up mattering.)

As I said, you can't use any of these on Google App Engine. They're not provided by the platform, and you can't upload them yourself because they use C.
All the technology in the world won't make those veterans' benefit claims go through any faster. The problem there isn't the technology (it's not all that hard of a problem) but getting it into the right place, past all the gatekeepers who want to keep it out.

It's not that nobody is building the technology because they're concentrating on other things, but rather nobody is building it because they know it won't sell, because it would have to go sixteen thousand layers of red tape and many tours through Congress before anything got done.

I think there's probably a lot of scope for solving problems with fairly simple apps, but this example seems like a terrible one.
Make sure you go to a tailor before (to get measurements) and after (to make alterations). A nice fitted suit makes all the difference. Also, different brands have different cuts and so try on a couple of different brands of the same size.
> Except China -- Mostly Unfree. And Brazil -- Mostly Unfree. And Argentina -- don't you know it's Repressed, of all things, according to Heritage's bullshit, yet still a G-15. And Russia -- Mostly Unfree.

They are all approximately prosperous relative to their economic freedom. Your list here isn't very helpful, because rather than comparing two contries and their relative economic freedom in the historical context, you're just saying "Mostly Unfree." That's like saying, "That country gets a 20," without specifying any meaningful scale.

> You know, I just cannot fathom how someone could seriously say Bahrein is more free than Argentina, for any meaningful sense of the term. I mean, in Bahrein atheists are put to death, FFS.

First, I didn't say that. "Economic prosperity" != "One rich group of families and everyone else is poor." Also, religious freedom != economic freedom.

So, yeah, you're just making a mockery of what I said.

> I get you're a budding capitalist and all that, but you could at least read the philosophy of your enemies to criticize them. And stop victimizing yourself, while you're at it.

> But I guess my main point is, congratulations, you took the noble, if largely unrealized, principles of the European forefathers, passed down since the Athenians through Robespierre, Paine, Marat, Jefferson, Bakunin, even Lenin... and then turned them in for the petty ideals of a shopkeeper.

You've stooped to the level of doling out personal insults. I don't get why you would do this. Does it help your argument? No. Does it provide intellectual stimulation? No. Is it within the ethics of this community? No.
Bill Karwin's "SQL Anti-Patterns Strike Back" presentation on Slideshare.com presentation is worth checking out -- it's 250 slides long, covers 4 kinds of anti-patterns (in queries, DB creation and the design of both DBs and applications). And he goes through actual code examples.

Check it out here:

http://www.slideshare.net/billkarwin/sql-antipatterns-strike...
See that's the kind of sentence that should be on the homepage!
Some fun facts about Belarus:

- 51.2% of Belarusians are employed by state-controlled companies.

- Political opponents have been violently suppressed

- Per capita income $6.8k

- A fifth of Belarusian land (principally farmland and forests in the southeastern provinces) continues to be affected by radiation fallout from Chernobyl
> I don't see how this isn't a solution for transactions that desire last-writer-wins semantics. If, as in the examples I listed, writes commute, then a blocked write shouldn't stall others.

Doesn't writes that commute mean that there was no contention to begin with? Ideally, if I have a balance of $100 in my account and try to spend $60 in two different transactions, one should come back as failed before the purchases are complete.

> If you want to prevent Lost Update or Write Skew anomalies (i.e., concurrent update), then you'll have to give up availability and/or block.

There is a difference between giving up read and write availability. My ideal database should be read-available at all times, but guarantee that writes are atomic and durable (and give up availability for this guarantee).

On the whole, this looks pretty neat. I like the idea of the client being responsible for the writes being committed on the servers. The client is then free to choose how to implement the IO, but ultimately, if a single client experiences a failure and a single write doesn't go through, it is usually a better outcome than a write going through and then replication between two servers breaking.

What are your thoughts on quorum-based voting in distributed systems? E.g.: your protocol but with the requirement that a write is considered stable if only most (vs all) of the servers involved have it marked as "good".
And also this:

- Comments are fails

Sometimes you rewrite code for performance, making it fast but awful to understand. Comments are very useful in this case.
"catholic : comprehensive, universal; especially : broad in sympathies, tastes, or interests <a catholic taste in music>"

Note that he didn't capitalise the word.

Edit: sorry, I don't tend to read the article's author's name -- bad on my part. Sorry about that.
Show HN: MusicMap, a way to selectively proccess your music
I've played 5 of these:

Dear Esther is a first person explorer that plays with narrative in an interesting way.

Thomas Was Alone is a platformer about a rectangle named Thomas and his quadrilateral friends. They become self aware. Story narrated in a great British accent. Lovely short-form game.

Proteus is a first person explorer where the soundtrack mirrors the landscape. It has a lo fi beauty.

Hotline Miami is a very violent, very tightly designed kill em up. It is the meatiest of the five I've played.

Little Inferno is a graphically beautiful comment on skinner boxes and recent trends in game design.
Why do something complex when you can do something simple?
The VA has the largest, best-maintained electronic medical records system in the country. It is open-source and available to the public.

The problem with vets is not the absence of software. I am rather tired of seeing this particular horse beaten.
This might not be of any use to anybody but me, but it's worth putting it out there.

Basically I got tired of clicking buttons when I wanted to go through my music library and move some older music somewhere else.
I would mourn the loss of Wonder Pets and Avatar is actually a great shoe for adults even. At least there is Phineas and Ferb (funnier than most sit-coms).

Odd taste aside there are so many streaming services now with so many different licenses it is becoming hard to find one with my favourite shows. And I still have a hard time getting the best BBC shows in a timely manner (Sherlock, Doctor Who, etc...)
I was running with the shantytown line just to be a pain.

I dont hate the idea. I actually think it would be cool if you changed the "DIY/bring your own shelter" to a rehab existing structure and used the program as part of a city program to clean up decrepit neighborhoods.
Now You Can Control Someone Else's Arm Over The Internet
I got to talk to Dan during his beta testing phase of Clarity. He's passion and knowledge really shines through.
I live in Australia, same deal.

Using a proxy is just a feel-good venture rather than making the use of it legal.
The thing is that the competition is fierce in this field. To see that, just look at the number of mergers: Nokia and Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent etc.

The chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE lowered the margins and really shook the market some years ago.

Personally, I don't imagine a bright future for those companies. So I'm with the selling strategy. I worked at a competitor of those companies based in Brazil. The scenario wasn't pretty when I left.
How to move a cursor