skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well you're only 25. I strongly recommend you to try something that might interest you. If you never try, you will never know. Good luck!
The relational query model (it's operators and set algebra) is a poor fit for common business inquiries. I view SQL as a practical syntax for encoding relational queries; SQL has deviated from the pure model when the model failed to address a real world business problems. I see SQL as a success, in that it works and applies the relational model to real world concerns.

What is intuitive to users is the idea of related files/tables, and this really doesn't have much to do with the relational algebra. While we have implemented HTSQL using SQL, this is an implementation choice -- our experiment is syntax/semantics, we didn't want to be in the business of data storage and query optimization, and, we use (the incredibly awesome) PostgreSQL. HTSQL's logical query model depends upon is a tabular based abstract storage.
"Hardly, you have to consider the additional cost of attempting to support that additional 2%"

That's certainly not how I calculate revenue...
Misread as "Gene Therapy Finally Makes Patient Come Back After Death" o_O
Why Response Design is a Waste of Time
Argh! Someone remove this from the front page?
This is a pretty bad article. Sure judgement is important, very important but sometimes using a new better set of technologies is the better judgement. That doesn't make things inherently un-maintainable just because it's new. That's where the judgement part comes in, knowing which new technologies to use in order to build a better/more maintainable system. This smacks too much of the author saying this is what I know so it's the best and everything else is crap.
I don't understand your reply. It is quite possible that somebody doesn't know that the Cocoa wrapper is a part of upstream emacs, which is why I asked.
Thing is, Apple got a great OS and a great CEO. WTF did MS get that is at all comparable?
I think the enduring popularity of Monopoly etc is the nostaglia factor and the ease of inter-generational play... it's quite ubiquitous and perhaps only behind Trival Pursuit in terms of "family" games.
Conversely I once genuinely heard this streaked by someone to the kids they were herding around a supermarket: "if you two want to run around and make noise, go do it in the car park". Perhaps she was too far the other way...
Mosh (mobile shell)
If you're happy, keep on truckin'.

But to answer your question. This has been said a million times, but here's another angle. In a recent talk, Rich Hickey was talking about the design of electronic music modules:

> In other words, there's a human interface and a machine interface to the same
> things. And the machine interfaces were there all the time — in fact, they were
> first. And then the human interfaces come. We have to remember that as a
> design thing. What's wrong with SQL? What's wrong with SQL is there's no
> machine interface to SQL. They only designed a human interface to SQL, and
> we've suffered ever since, cause we have to send these strings around. You can
> always build a human interface on top of a machine interface, but the other is
> often disgusting.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor... (at about 41:00)

Emacs is built on a machine interface first (elisp). Even the mouse actions in emacs are processed with elisp. So the human interface is not hard-wired. That's why hackers like it.
Converting a static file to a h264/mp4 stream produces sped up video
In India online banking is awesome:

1) Most (all?) banks have net banking which is a feature to pay money directly from your bank account (and not via credit card) to online merchants those who integrate it (most of them do).

2) Many banks provide utilities payment (electricity/phone/cable ETC) feature which can be set to autopay.

3) there's a three factor authentication system – username and password to login and look around, transaction password to pay to your registered billers and finally for online shopping (net banking), you are asked to input 3 random numbers from the grid printed at the back of your debit card in addition to login and transaction password.

4) For any decent amount of payment received / paid (I think Rs. 5000 or above), you get an sms briefing the transaction.

5) Auto deduct feature – there's an ECS form you can sign and give it to businesses which can then automatically deduct money monthly from your bank account. Good for auto mortgage payments et al.

Checks have almost disappeared from internet savvy people's lives – I have hardly used them in years.
Pretenders
Intermedia Shared Mail Hosting Outage
Mail sending and receiving down since at least 7:00 AM EST. Network page status also down: http://www.intermedia.net/support/currentnetworkstatus
I wish this worked the other way around as well. I'd love to get a discounted price on the hardcover versions of my Kindle books.
congrats simon et al.
Are you planning an Android app?
AR Drone Refresh
Thank you! I think I was lucky, being bulgarian and knowing how most of slavanian languages sound like. Also I can very easily distinguish between non-slavanian west-european ones (french, german, italian, spanish, portuguese).

My only advice is to avoid having the same language, or at least same wave file being played twice in a row (It happened few times with me, and I've played it for 5 times in a row).

Also maybe introduce something like in the TV shows, where you can get use "jokers" (hints) such as - remove half of the languages that are not (when there are more than 4 or 5 I guess), etc.

Or maybe let the player risk, by asking for more languages even on lower levels, but for more points.

It's entertaining :) I was actually thinking if you are in the car, and listening to this as a game how would one be able to answer (google glass with eye tracking?), or maybe that's just bad idea for driving.
Hi, I work on the cloudfiles team. I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN. Currently, the minimum that it can be is 15 minutes. We partner with Akamai for the CDN functionality, so while we get all the benefits of the Akamai network, we also have to work within the parameters of their systems. Would you mind sharing more about your use case for needing shorter TTLs?
No, the parent comment is correct.

"It was bad because it was a new operating system." -- it was already bad in the pre-OSX Mac era (mostly due to low marketshare).

"And it wasn't just printers but everything. Drivers, applications, utilities. They all took years to move to OSX." -- for applications and most other things Apple had migration alternatives (Carbon APIs for pre-OSX Mac apps, the Classic environment for emulation of pre-OSX and even Rosetta for emulating PowerPC on Intel).

For the case of printers, they really just dropped whatever they had and went with the Linux solution.
Definitely not enough, maybe only 2-3 hours per work which includes responding to potential clients by e-mail, blogging and refining the copy on my landing page.
The guidelines say that downvoting to show disagreement is wrong.
To print the contents of a file onscreen....
If you want to do it in 1 line of code: bash
If you want to do it in 5: Python
If you want to do it in 30: C
Nokia does not have a net debt position. They have about €2 billion of net cash. After the Microsoft acquisition, €7 billion.
> I took a nontechnical friend of mine to Maker Faire in NYC a couple years ago and for the first 20 minutes or so all she could ask was "why?" As in, I know it's possible to make a robot that paints weird pictures or a flowerpot that sings or a giant, iron propane-flame-breathing dinosaur, but why would you? What purpose does it serve? Who's paying for this stuff anyway?

I get really sad when I hear this question, because it is like this fundamental question people have and it lies at the heart of why some people appreciate art and some simply cannot.

But yeah. I got this from a relative and asked, "Why do you go out drinking and dancing?"
Minor point. I think the article is incorrect regarding long press being absent on iOS. I think it's been available for some time as UILongPressGestureRecognizer.
Definitely don't quit right away unless you have the bank account to do so. I'd first find someone that is doing what you think you want to do and get their advice. Beyond that, spend any free time you have trying to "meet people and create things." If this becomes infinitely better than find any job that recreates that, even if it means less wages. Start from the bottom, work hard and get to the top.
He wants the page not to change under him when he hasn't hit refresh. Personally, race conditions between user and UI drive me crazy.
The most important thing I want from API documentation is that every method should have a minimal working code example.

Minimal - the example should be focused on demonstrating how to call that specific method, with as little other code as possible. That way I don't have to puzzle which parts are essential and which are arbitrary.

Working - if I paste the example code into a separate file and run it, it should work. Surprisingly many attempts at documentation fail this test.

When we're faced with an unfamiliar problem and an unfamiliar API that can solve that problem, the quickest way of programming is copy-paste programming. The documentation should make copy-paste programming as easy as possible. Understanding comes after imitation.
The lies entrepreneurs tell themselves
"I suppose I'm just confused at your anger"

Oh I'm not angry, that's just my way of talking. You should meet me in person some time, it's fun, really ;)

"over the suggestion that you use p for paragraphs, actually add labels to forms, use em for emphasis, section for sections and h1-h6 for headings. Is it really that hard?"

Oh no it's not, and everybody should do it. That's not what the 'semantic web' or 'semantic html' is though. But if he's going to talk about grandiose subjects like 'semantic html', then the discussion is about that, and 'semantic html' is dead and buried. If he just wants to say 'use p/label/em/hx appropriately', then just say so, don't bury it under pseudo-philosophical waxing (but then again, his post wouldn't have made HN, so as it is, mission accomplished, right?)
This is a trivial, verging on meaningless, distinction. Comparing web applications and web sites is like comparing houses with their physical settings.
The Brilliance of Nokia's Hardware Design
I was not trying to convince you: if you are happy with Sublime, use it.
Squirrels hell-bent on destruction of American electric infrastructure
I'd bet that much of the issue stems from the decline in birth rates among middle/upper middle class parents relative to the days of yore. When you only manage to pop out one or two kids, at great career sacrifice and monetary expense, each one seems to matter more than they did back in the day.

Also, paradoxically, the safer things get the more people worry about the dangers that remain. This is rational. Say doing this or that during pregnancy results in 1 in 10,000 women dying during child birth. If 1 in 100 women die during child birth anyway, it's not a big deal. But if improvements in medical technology gets the base rate down to 1 in 10,000, then suddenly you're talking about doubling your risk.
Listen to the why's, and not the what's, and you'll hear judgement.

In my experience this is very ill-advised. The answer to "why" questions varies so dramatically that it's extremely difficult to get an unbiased, realistic answer to those questions. I normally ask a bunch of "how" questions and eventually you unravel the "why".

The questions presented sound good on paper but don't matriculate that way in person. For example:

What's your least favorite part of Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework, and why?

Tell me about the last time you used an interesting bit of technology, and what you learned from it.

Are much more naturally spoken as:

How do you feel about your least favorite parts of Rails?

How have you benefited from an interesting bit of tech?

It's amazing how much more human responses become when you use the words "how" and "feel".
Instead of average-case, here's a funny analysis of an extreme case, the shortest possible game:

http://scatter.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/the-shortest-possibl...
No need to use xemacs, "standard" emacs has also a gui, file browser, etc etc. I use evil in emacs to have some of vims keybindings, btw
iTerm supports using just one option key as meta. But in general I prefer using a build of emacs with Cocoa support enabled (you can get them at http://emacsformacosx.com/)

That lets you set up things like you want with M-x customize-group ns

I'm using CMD as meta there and CTRL as control, option stays option.
Love tools like this, some quick feedback:

At least on Chrome, the contrast is really low, so much so that it looks hazy, almost as if something is still loading. The light pink background on white is pretty strenuous.

Is it possible to export the mock data, to a CSV or something? Most of the time when I use tools like this I'm just using it to seed a database or something in a toy app I'm playing with, so the ability to just grab a quick and dirty export of some mock data would be useful.
I read the first few sentences of the post, saw what it was about (okay, fine), and then searched the page for "homeopath" to see if he actually referred to homeopathy at all.

How do you apply homeopathic concepts to web development?

Superstitious coding is one thing, programming by "random changes until it works" is another, but none of them approach the illogic of homeopathy (find a poison that mimics the symptoms you want to cure, then dilute it in water so much that there's very likely no actual poison molecules left in your sample, then consume that).

I'm unable to conceive of a development equivalent. That's the main reason I clicked on the article.
That's pretty impressive. I wrote one of the better selling Ruby books on Amazon and it would take over a year to make 5k for sure.
> "...I think Microsoft ought to abandon Windows Phone. The war is over, and iOS and Android won."

Wow, its times like this when its appropriate to trot out Michael Dell's famous apple quote.

> When asked what he'd do with Apple if he were in Jobs' shoes, Dell said:

>> What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
The quality of an implementation is rarely tied to the tools except in extreme cases. A good Developer in general builds good solutions no matter the toolset. A good python developer is likely to become a good Objective-C developer if they invest the time to learn and because they understand the need for clean modular code the iOS code is likely to turn out pretty well.
I disagree strongly with the premiss. HTML and CSS are designed to make this easy. It only gets complicated if you don't quite understand the concepts and hardcode lots of stuff.
I meant that I found it humorous that Cocoa (chocolate) was being described as "vanilla" on the platform. Purely language, not anything to do with the wrapper.
How to Plan a Sabbatical-Style Career Break
Apple2e-audio-transport: transmit binary to Apple II by sound
Oh, the relational query model based on relational algebra! I thought you wrote "relational model".

For what it's worth, a join is indeed part of relational algebra - it's a composition of binary relations.
This might help: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-...

EDIT: Also, this is a mapping of AWS resources to Rackspace resources: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/mapping-of...
Bosnian was certainly the tricky one for me: is it really the same clip every time? The first time I missed it, I thought I heard "bagus" so I guessed Malay. The second time I missed it I guess I really have no excuse! Still I got 600, and I don't feel bad for not being able to distinguish Gujarati from Punjabi from Urdu. It's been some time since I heard any of those languages spoken.
Amazon accidentally reveals new Kindle Paperwhite
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=typing+special+characters+into+emacs ;-)

I've used Option as Meta for years (been using Emacs since (gulp) 1977 on ITS/TOPS-20) and never had any trouble. You can use the M-x insert-char (M-x ucs-insert) and type in the code point or Unicode name of any character.
I'd have to see that reference...pg has said from time to time that he does that himself.
CTRL+F "vim"
The Innovator’s Dilemma in content distribution strategies
We don't currently support hard limits, but we've partnered with Cloudability, which lets you set budget alerts: https://cloudability.com/rackspace/
Using Chrome's developer tools shows the form submits your email address when it checks your username. It's possible it's going into Marketo and then you are getting emailed automatically when the record doesn't end up updating. It could be intentional, or it could be accidentally mixed with other site behaviors. I'll check on it for you and figure out what's going on. Regardless, I agree with you assertion you shouldn't be emailed if you didn't click submit.

Thanks for mentioning it!
Hacker news commentary options on coding advice:
1. Spin the advice to make it sound like the advice is bad
2. Turn the advice around to make the author look bad
3. Criticize technology choices ( promoting your own choices of course )
4. Some variant of "duh" or "don't reinvent the wheel"
5. Lament the sad realistic state of the programming world
6. Cast the author and others into various categories ( such as what I'm doing now )
That was at the end of June.

In August, they spent about €2.2 billion buying out Siemens' stake in Nokia Siemens Networks. This could very well have caused some short-term cash flow issues. Which also explains Microsoft's offer to finance Nokia at extremely low interest bonds.

Long-term, NSN is generating positive cash flow and ought to be able to pay for itself.
"It's not hard to make good quality, semantic html."

:-O

Seriously? Please show me the site that does so, and still looks OK (or even OK-ish) by moderns standards?

"Sometimes needs-must and we have to throw in divs and poor-quality markup (mostly thanks to old IE)"

Look, I take it you are a web dev, am I right? If so, how can you say something like this? Please link me to the last 5 or so sites you made, and tell me which div's and span's you only put in to support old IE versions. Every real site out there today uses div's and span's in non-semantic ways. That was the whole point of my post - :before and :after don't cut it. CSS just isn't powerful enough to make real semantic html happen. It's not a value judgement, it's just stating the blindingly obvious. The fact that the GP's blog post, complaining about this, starts with not one, not two, but five non-semantic div's is a painful manifestation of this.
If you get banned, the worst thing you can do is overreact and make it public like this. Read/follow the guidelines[1], and remember to be patient and respectful.

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to
ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain
about moderation). If you want to say something to us,
please send it to info@ycombinator.com.

1: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There seems to be a self-imagined divide between these two "camps" of developer. We see:

1. Hipsters that throw tools at a problem, and are eager to know as many different languages/frameworks/tools as possible, to stay ahead of the curve.

2. Developers that have picked a framework, and stick with it for life. They learn when necessary, but their framework can handle most problems thrown at it.

I would consider myself a part of both camps. I read Hacker News because people talk about these tools in use, and I love sitting down at home and toying around with new JavaScript frameworks, and different environments/tools. However, I have a job where I use a proven framework, a solid language, and a role where I model problems with a team of like-minded developers.

Now, imagine the scenario. I toy around with a new framework and absolutely love it for some use case. I decide to write a tool using Node.js, I use Bootstrap, and then I post it on my blog, Twitter, and on Hacker News. Some will check my work out and think it's cool, and others will look at it and will vomit at the very thought of JavaScript running on a server when another server-side language/framework would be far more suited to the problem at hand.

The point I'm trying to make is that developers are so keen to slate projects/code that was written for fun. My Node.js application isn't very good. Hell, I can probably write it a million times better in the language I actually use day-to-day in my job. I just wanted to release it so others can learn from it, and to show that I'm capable of keeping up with everyone else that is releasing apps-a-plenty in all these crazy new languages I see every day.

I agree with the general idea of the article, but only because developers are starting to embody these camps. I see entry-level/junior developers that apply for jobs with CV's that list every language they've touched for at least half an hour, and I see battle-hardened developers complaining about people trying to legitimise new tools because they're "not as good" as the tools that everyone else uses.
> The words "legal" and "international law" make your argument sound more reasonable, but only because the reader assumes they mean something like a codification of moral or social principles.

I think the assumption that laws actually correspond to widespread morals and social principles is the fundamental problem here. It's not a valid assumption. I think it's actually immoral to believe that because something is lawful it must be good. In other words, if somebody actually does have "legal justification" to kill someone else (no greater authority will stop them), that doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, e.g. in the case of capital punishment in the US, or in the case of using chemical weapons in Syria absent some kind of foreign intervention, or in the case of the US bombing Syria.

Morals are relative, and not everyone will agree with a law. Illegal things can be moral, immoral things can be legal. In the best case everyone's morals contribute to the law, in the worst case it's only the lawmaker's morals that truly matter. None of that changes the fact that for something to be a law there has to be a punishment for breaking the law, and that punishment for doing something makes it into a de facto law. It's unpalatable but there it is.

I'm a pacifist too, for what it's worth; I believe violence is only a good idea when it prevents even greater violence, I believe it's a good thing for power to be concentrated by governments, and I don't like the current state of international relations where rich countries tell poor countries what to do. But, I'm not an anarcho-pacifist.
Not quite yet, but we’re definitely considering it. Windows Phone is also an option.
I think there's a huge difference between "be careful" and "don't do that". The former is just reminding the child to be mindful of their actions, which is a good thing. The latter is saying to avoid anything that could get you hurt even a little bit, which is very much not.
>Finally I'd like to add that the author didn't say this was a "maintenance nightmare", he did however say the solution was elegant, scalable and totally unmaintainable.

Which is impossible, right? If it's elegant, it's maintainable. That's part of the definition of elegant software. A on liner that does amazing things, that very few people understand is not elegant. The same thought scales up to a whole solution IMO.
I use cmd for meta, there is an option for that:

(setq mac-option-modifier nil
mac-command-modifier 'meta)
Right! If nothing else this is a couple of hours of fun mucking around with optics and chemicals. What's not to like?
This is the kind of stuff I would have loved to try when I was a kid.
Even now, if I had the ingredients lying around I'd probably give it a shot, who cares if the results are rubbish?