skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A free web scheduling solution for Ruby, ASP.Net, PHP
Hi HN,

Handling the scheduled tasks was always a headache for us in our startups. There are problems in calculating months, years, minutes, etc. and on the other hand, the web is not made to handle scheduled tasks. Using programming hacks is not the appropriate method to do scheduled tasks. MySql Cron, Windows Scheduled Tasks and .VB files, uptime checkers, on expired events on caching objects, and thousands of other methods are all hacks. They are not made to do this job, they are very, very limited, unreliable and not easy to implement.
We have not any commercial purpose when we created this service(and yet).

We decided to make public this tool for web developers as a freeware:

http://atrigger.com/

We've made 3 libraries for Ruby, .Net and PHP and other languages can use simple HTTP API.

We are curious about your reviews, and your feedback is important to us.

Thanks.
Many people buy cell phones. That doesn't mean the market works. Consumers are gouged every day by unfair practices from cell phone providers.

I'm a bit confused how anyone using a cellphone could chino otherwise.
For other free books of potential interest to hackers, see:

http://csbooks.reddit.com

http://econbooks.reddit.com

http://physicsbooks.reddit.com

http://mathbooks.reddit.com

http://eebooks.reddit.com
> the US healthcare system ... a completely free market

I have read a lot of wrong things on HN, ranging from the merely misinformed to the willfully ignorant, but this might take the cake.
The book still works even if you assume every specific line of lisp in it is hopelessly outdated (I wouldn't know, I'm not a lisp programmer).

Suppose you were looking at lisps and got around to the part where you realize homiconicity makes it possible (and/or sensible) to have language facilities like syntax macros. What would such a facility look like in practice? What would it be used for and how? What could go wrong defining it or using it? That's the sort of thing that's covered in On Lisp and it makes it an interesting read for any sort of programmer, rather than just a lisp one. The book is short, without being incomprehensibly dense, you get easily get a feel for it from just browsing the PDF for a bit. And the concepts being presented are a lot easier to digest than, say, 'what if your language was really good at category theory'.
Because they have no other choice.

We choose between what we have, not what is the best or the right thing to choose.
Police with guns kill innocent civilians all the time, even with tremendous oversight, and witnesses--and yet we still have police and give them guns. People with power will occasionally behave badly. How is this any different?
But that's sort of my point too. There's nothing substantially different about an iPhone or iPad anymore. The PC/Laptop Macs are a little more substantial, but I think that's probably because of HP/Dell/Toshiba etc. commitment to mediocrity more than it is because Apple is special in any huge way. I can definitely imagine

Amazon is even worse in that respect - the store is exactly that, and anyone can sell "stuff". AWS is the same, even if the barriers to entry are a little higher.

Honestly, the only big tech company that I can't imagine life without is Google, simply because my Google account is so pervasive now. Perhaps Facebook, too. Even then, when you break both of those companies down, you find that none of the products are overly unique to the company. Other people do social, other people do search, other people do maps, etc.

It's easy to imagine other companies making any of these things, but when you think about it "other companies" in that thought experiment start to just become another black box with a different logo slapped over the top.
I'll never hear the word 'barcode' the same again.
Ohhhh... GCC warns about trigraphs, so I tend to forget about them, but wow did I fall for that one.

C++ is a wonderful language for people who like puzzles, and it's also good for making fun of know-it-alls.
With respect to O'Connell's highlighting of Borges' apparent anti-woman views, I think that there is an interesting conversation to be had about looking at authors from prior eras with ethical standpoints only developed relatively recently. I recall a professor asking me whether Plato was sexist because there were no women in the academy (a clearer example), and having similar thoughts to those I had when reading that section of this article.
> I don't feel gouged when I buy a television, a cell phone or lumber at Home Depot.

You might if you were carted into a Home Depot unconscious on a gurney, handed a non-returnable light bulb and stuck with a bill for $6,844.
I think people already cross-shop dentists. When I had a root canal done I inquired at two places. And I'm not even very sensitive to it since I have dental insurance.

Good luck with the same at hospitals though...
Military intervention in Syria, post withdrawal status of forces (2011)
In the U.S. treaties do not trump national law. In fact, in the U.S. treaties have no legal effect at all unless they are either 1) implemented by Congressional legislation; or 2) written so it is clear that the intent is for the treaties to be "self-executing" (see Medellin v. Texas, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medell%C3%ADn_v._Texas). And even if a treaty is effective, it has the status of ordinary law. With ordinary law, a subsequent act of Congress that is inconsistent with a prior act is given precedence over that prior act. So if the U.S. passes a treaty saying it won't do X, then Congress passes a law allowing the President to do X, then the law, being latest in time, overrides the treaty.

American courts are fairly hostile towards treaties (something which I think is under the surface of Medellin). Basically treaties are un-democratic. They are written by unelected diplomats and are necessarily the product of foreign influence. It doesn't help that one of the motivating factors for the treaty provisions of the U.S. Constitution was the status of the U.S. as a precarious winner of the Revolutionary War. One of the conditions of the Treaty of Paris was that debts on both sides would be recognize. Of course, in most cases Americans were the debtors. The British were very concerned about states passing laws to abolish debts owed by their citizens to the British. Hence the provision elevating treaties of the U.S. above state law.
There has been some research done into why this is (I'm citing a personality course I took), and it could be because some people's brains have a lack of stimulation, and others are overstimulated. The people lacking stimulation find it easier to think in noisy environments because they're full of stimuli. This might also explain some of the traits of introverted/extroverted people.
IIRC Peopleware pointed out a study where they compared two groups of programmers, those working in a quiet environment and those working with music. Given identical assignments, both groups completed it in roughly the same (median) amount of time. However, the assignment was such that there was a "shortcut", i.e. if you thought hard enough about the requirements a much easier solution was possible. Only the programmers in the quiet group got this shortcut. Thought this was interesting.
I only have experience with Eastern Canada (aka Southern Ontario, Montreal, and the Maritimes), but the only way that I've seen where you'd get a high salary and low cost of living is if you can get Torontoesque salary with a company based in rural areas (which in IT I've found is anything outside of the GTA, K-W, Ottawa, and Montreal...possibly Halifax). They're incredibly rare (I've found two in the 13 years that I've been in the industry), and if the company does go under you're pretty much forced to move to a place where there's high salaries (because there's high competition for talent, natch), and high cost of living (because everyone's moving there...again, obvious I know), as telecommuting opportunities in Canada are practically non-existent. Usually if a place has a low cost of living/low housing costs/etc...., it's because the unemployment rate is ~15% or so, and the IT work is something around 35-40k a year.

tl;dr If you're looking in Canada, you're looking a LONG time.
no. that was done by people making and selling computers.

cell phones opportunistically exploit that innovation.

the fact that you get great hardware for a tiny monthly cost is just proof that they're over charging most people for something else.
I am also Argentinian and not everybody reads and follows Borges writings in spanish. I will not enter in a "reference game" since is public knowledge here, even if it's not written formally.
SR9009 - A new drug that mimics the beneficial effects of exercise
I have a pair of Denon AH-D2000s and they work pretty well for this purpose. It doesn't do the job perfectly though it cuts out most idle chatter.
Crikey.

SELECT * can be bad for the following reasons:

- returning more data than you need over a network connection can be a bottleneck. The ORM/java prog written by a programmer that doesn't care may only need a few columns. Tables can be very wide, especially when CLOB/BLOBs are involved

- Stored procedures, functions and triggers that use SELECT * may break horribly when columns are added or removed from tables, views or materialised views

- Table types (collection and record types) will break if any column redefinition occurs

- It shows a lack of understanding of the data by the developer. This may, in turn, cause further issues

Proper schema design and understanding of the data involved is key when working with databases. The existence of NoSQL and the general dumbing down of Computer Science degrees, plus the teaching of ORMs has caused endless problems. The need for NoSQL in the first place was possibly caused by the use of high level programming languages where you didn't need to know the data - you just fetch it all, then piss around with it in ruby/whatever, then fetch it again & again until you're done.

Rant over ;)
I wonder if, perhaps, you could provide a counterargument to nikatwork.
As I mentioned in my blog article, my favorite is how Caldera was able to sue MS based on Win95's continued dependence on DOS, which OS/2 never did.
I personally find that I am much more distracted by people who are trying to get my attention than I am by background noise. This article reminds of an anecdote about Poincare that can be found on page 533 of the excellent book "Men of Mathematics"[1]

"...when a distinguished mathematician had come all the way from Finland to Paris to confer with Poincare on scientific matters, Poincare did not leave his study to greet his called when the maid notified him, but continued to pace back and forth - as was his custom when mathematizing - for three solid hours. All this time the diffident caller sat quietly in the adjoining room, barred from the master only by flimsy portieres. At last the drapes parted and Poincare's buffalo head was thrust for an instant into the room. "Vois me derangez beaucoup" (You are disturbing me greatly) the head exploded, and disappeared. The caller departed without an interview..."

[1]http://books.google.com/books?id=BLFL3coT5i4C&q=533#v=snippe...
You are severely misrepresenting that study as it is about the backgrounds of people who say they forgo healthcare on money grounds and pointing out that there are other factors other than whether someone can actually afford healthcare that affect whether people think they can afford healthcare.

It also appears to not look at ethnicity at all in that study.

It is basically saying that it isn't enough to make healthcare available, you also have to get people to use the service in other ways than mere affordability as even if something is affordable a lot of people will still not bother and claim that they think it will be unaffordable.

Results: After making adjustments for numerous individual socio-economic and health characteristics, we observed a higher occurrence of reported forgone healthcare among people who have had financial worries during adulthood, a life-course experience of physical, sexual or psychological abuse; who have experienced childhood difficulties; who have expressed a low degree of sickness orientation, a high worry/concern about and a low self-esteem
Many people think "free markets" when they should think "competitive markets".
This isn't about Asimov, but purposely introducing noise showed up on HN earlier this year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325012
True - you can also disable the globalAgent or change the number of pooled connections. Connection pooling was generally a bad idea (tm) in Node and afaik will be removed in the near future.
Reducing the situation so ends up sounding disturbingly capricious, where favors are granted to the politically powerful and oppression is handed out to the politically weak by defining their actions as abusive.

I feel Google abuses its search monopoly to shove Chrome down my throat. I feel Youtube abuses its web video monopoly to force me into using Google+. I feel just about every company is shoving their cloud services and making management and control of local resources frustratingly limited by comparison.

But do I want any government to step in and assist me? No, thank you very much.

I feel I'd be happier with technology today--perhaps only slightly, mind you, but happier--had Microsoft been left alone in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Can you use jQuery with Firefox OS, yes or no?. The answer is yes. The Firefox OS devs even provided the author with a version of jQuery that works as-is. Thus the title is misleading. Maybe it should say it is not compatible with jQuery Mobile, which would be less surprising, because it is a giant everything and the kitchen sink of a library that more closely resembles jQuery UI than jQuery. I've had trouble with jQuery Mobile and Android in the past.
I have a problem with spoken words, not 'noise'.

I'm quickly removed from 'The Zone' when my brain starts to unconsciously process speech. Indistinct chatter, environmental noise, loud instrumental music, etc aren't bothersome. In fact my best sessions occur in bars, on public transit, or outside.
Omate's android smartwatch
Algorithmic Tradeoffs (examples in Scala)
In a way I agree with you. The U.S. generally should not enter into treaties. Treaties are tools you use when you don't have the leverage of force. The U.S. will never take any action that's not in its interest, regardless of what a treaty says, so it should avoid being duplicitous and just not sign on to treaties. But whenever who do that (re: Kyoto, ICC, etc), the left throws a huge fit. So duplicity it is.

More generally, I think the U.N. serves a valuable humanitarian purpose. It serves as a great vehicle for coordinating international efforts. I think it's a total failure as a political organization. I'd have no problem disbanding the General Assembly and just preserving the useful agencies (UNICEF, ICAO, WHO, etc). It's unfortunately not politically practical in the U.S., because a certain segment of the country fetishizes world government.
"For every e-mail we show you where we have found it - this way you can check if this is good contact or not."

Adding a comma after "For every e-mail" will make this sentence much more clear.
Why Your Airplane Ticket Is So Expensive
I would be pretty happy if pension funds would stop buying mortgages in an expectation of being paid back from underwater. Don't contribute to the problem and you won't get bitten.
You're absolutely right about the comparison. My bad.
If you watch jobs unveil the iPhone, there is a moment, when speaking of three new revolutionary devices being released that day (http://youtu.be/0KfrSzyXmiw?t=1m5s), he says "the first one is wide screen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.", repeats the line, and then chuckles as everyone realizes that they're all one device... I remember streaming that live and thinking: "Holy crap, phones don't suck anymore". If Balmer watched that and laughed at it, I'm going to be hard on him. He had the chance to react and he let Jobs walk away with it. So many people, including me, we're just waiting for a cell phone that didn't suck.
This is excellent! The Internet actually was supposed to be one InterNetwork of many. How is this different than a LAN though?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_%28United_States%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipaa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordab...

This is kind of like condescendingly asking someone to provide a counterargument to a proposition that the Earth is completely dry land.
s/proves/shows/
One of the reasons I dislike Persona and believe it's a step in a wrong direction, is that after so many problems we had with various authentication/identity systems it make you lease your own identity from some third party you're forced to trust.

Some say that I can set up my own Persona server, but my problem is that I think one can't really own a domain, only temporarily lease it from a registrar, so it's still the same. In contrast, one can posess a keypair without the necessity of any third parties (and third parties still may confirm the identity).
Node.io is pretty much dead.
The Internet is an inter-network of many.

Also the "L" in LAN, stands for "Local".
We should definitely do this in america, God we need this!
Apparently the same was true for John von Neumann. Wikipedia says he

> did some of his best work blazingly fast in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its TV playing loudly.
I can't edit my (old) post, I meant non-US-countries as the OP was implying. Does the current German Republic carry kill-lists? Nope.
That's probably the same rendering engine as wkhtmltopdf; the wk stands for webkit.
He also got very little sleep apparently (This is according to Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson), which we also know to cause a drop in productivity/thinking skills for most people.
It is even worse than that. Lets say you want to open a medical facility that will lower costs. This will end up taking away business from other facilities where patients don't find the higher costs to provide value. In a free market, the new facility goes up, existing facilities have to compete, and consumers benefit.

In 35 states you can't do that. Existing facilities are protected, and you'll need to establish a certificate of need[1] showing that business won't be taken away from existing facilities. The somewhat tortured logic is that they would then have to charge remaining patients more which would raise costs for everyone so this is a cost saving measure.

Like many parts of US business it is good old fashioned protectionism, and not free markets.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need
You are selectively re-arranging my words to create a different meaning. At no point did I say the US healthcare system was completely free.
How is that any different from the current system, where your email address is your identity, and Gmail probably owns it?
Noise is a big deal for some people. It's one of the reasons why I dropped out of Columbia a few years ago. Not something I regret, but I can't help but wonder if quiet, still places are a cornerstone of the most innovative societies. A cornerstone of successful lives. Not quiet all the time. Not faccistic silence. Gentle, comfortable, quiet places to come to for a few hours a day to help cultivate peace in the mind. For if we see everything through a filter, as many of us claim, I think noise, disturbance disrupts the milieu our through which our senses travel.
... when I pay $11/month for a similar cray in a developing nation.

You are getting fleeced!
Is your attorney really yours if you've not paid a fee or retainer?
This seems something like the Serval Project (http://www.servalproject.org/). Difference being that Serval is for mobile telecommunications meshes, rather than fixed(-ish) data connections.
Is this the article you refer to?

"How the medical supply industry blocks device startups from selling to hospitals"

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.blake.ht...
My thought (ha!) is that as one ages, there's just more context to swap into to think about something. Kids can flit about because everything around them doesn't overwhelm with context, whereas the elderly have experienced enough that any context switch carries a burdensome overhead. (That's what I meant by weighty thoughts.)

I don't think intelligence has too much to do with it, except perhaps in overall speed in coping / filtering. (But here I'm just arguing about the number of teeth in a horse; the empiricist in me would like to be able to spend a few weeks with an academic article subscription to just survey the experiments that have been done. I bet there are lots!)
I read about some interview with people from before cars were common. They liked how much cleaner and quieter (!) the streets were with cars than with horses.
Dallas to rewrite limo regulations in effort to calm cabbies unhappy with Uber
How was it a shortcut if both groups completed it at the same time?
"If I have not programmed before, can I still take the course?"

"Probably not."

much appreciated (I can code, but I was hunting around for some coding courseras for a friend who has expressed interest in learning)
There probably is or was.

There was a surge in people doing wifi WAN style networks across whole cities, back when internet speeds were slow+expensive, and decent directional wifi antennas were available fairly inexpensively.

I think low-cost high-speed internet largely killed the need for it: perhaps Prism has given us a nudge to start again?
PhantomJS + CasperJS is definitely the way to go when scraping data from complex pages. It's also great for circumventing bot detection. :)
I hope they do. There is an obscene amount of integral parts in automobiles that are made out of poorly formed plastics. Not only do a higher number of parts fail, the manufactures making replacements often follow the same flawed construction.

No 1940s vehicles didn't come with ABS, front and side panel air bags. But linkage in the suspension was at least metal, and wasn't known to fatigue every five years. If I were so inclined I could bring my hick mechanic in here and he would have volumes of corner cuts to cite that have resulted in unnecessary deaths over the years.

Some advancements have been great but overall legacy parts don't engulf vehicles in flames. Hodge-podge workarounds do[1].

[1] http://townhall-talk.edmunds.com/direct/view/.f0e40ac
I would agree, but the article spends a lot of time in the past too. Cities weren't quiet in the olden days, and even the countryside is remarkably noisy with life. 'Course, nothin' beats the distraction potential of the modern Internet (as my reply is demonstrating), so I can't fully discount it.
Oh, okay, I just figured it out.

http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_spaces_mac_os_...

That was completely non-discoverable though.
>Wouldn't any algorithmic queries ultimately also be initiated by a human?

Not necessarily; assume you have a flow that comes in - it will be parsed for innumerable phrases phonemes etc - and in the case of voice it will be transcribed to text and stored, which will also be parsed for triggers.

Thus, it is conceivable that every single ingress communications flow to the NSA is evaluated algorithmically - and not necessarily viewed/read/heard by a human.

So while their statement of some N # of erroneous searches may happen - it is irreverent as 100% of all ingress comms are already being parsed at some level.