skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just wanted to point out how poisonous our community is. It's something that I've been struggling with for a long time, and trying to slowly change.

The fact that people read this article, and don't feel the need to mention his fear of releasing software just shows how broken things are. It shouldn't be an accepted fact of open source that if you release new code that might be backwards incompatible, you get vitriol for it.

His quote:

... but I too cowardly to release it and make it mainstream, as Im afraid it'll destroy whatever good will for open source I have left when the flood of support questions inevitably comes in, followed by all the people who are unhappy with what I've built and feel obliged to tell me how bad I am at software.
Ask HN: What is the best language for learning to build an Android app?
I want to get in the app business, for androids but have no idea on which coding language to learn. What is the best one to use/easiest?
>I am just waiting for a more powerful entity like Google or Facebook to take on Ad-block, that's when it'll get really interesting.

https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

Tl;dr: Google pays Adblock Plus to mark Google ads "acceptable". Google ads are whitelisted from adblocking.
Lee, we use Capistrano at Scribd for our main Rails app, QA servers and countless other Ruby/Java services. In a world of complaints, we haven't had a single complaint about Capistrano. Thank you.
It depends, when I worked at a big company that produced a CAS (computer algebra system) they had an entire team for building graph theory ideas into the software. When I worked at a startup working on urban traffic congestion, there was just one guy who had done some surface-level reading one weekend on max-flow-min-cut and some basic algorithms. Knowing graph theory definitely helped me get that startup job (and take over as "the graph theory guy")
Football Cartoon
Color Matrix Filters Using the HTML5 Canvas API
I used to agree with you. Why would you take a 20 or 30 percent performance hit when you are busy shelling out tens of thousands for hardware load balancers.

Then one day a rare instruction set on our colocated server (so not something super standard like linode) was specified during the compilation step of ruby and (due to an extremely subtle co-bug between ruby and the compiler). It took us fucking weeks to find this hisenbug that was somehow causing workers to drop, but only during times of very high load.

Probably lost $500k worth of customers, dev time, and company moral.

Now I have a different view. Keep things as simple and as "normal" as possible. That way you can always upgrade to the next version, you don't hit weird bugs when you libraries assume that Time.now is second-accurate, instead of sub-second accurate (MRI vs Enterprise Ruby).

RVM is made for production (http://stackoverflow.com/a/6282260/384700) and it saves a lot of headaches to just go with the flow. As for mac dev, I agree that it is a waste of time compared to working out of Ubuntu, but designers like photoshop and Vagrant is non-trivial for them to set up, especially for people that work on multiple projects.
Actually, now that I think about it, I am giving you quite a microcosmic example. I agree that coming across graph theory jobs is tough, but its still worth knowing, at least at a surface level.
Those are very different questions. Do you already know a language? Is it Java (the closest thing to "native" Android seems to have)? If not, is it Java-like, or is the toolchain available for Android (e.g. Python)?

I don't think there's an easy, one-size-fits-all answer to this question.
I stumbled onto this article a couple of days ago when I was trying to find a library to integrate sqlite with a cloud service like dropbox. Does anyone know of one that has:

* Read

* Write

* Callback (to sort out paradoxes when two or more devices update the store independently offline and need to merge)

It's possible to do this with CoreData, but poorly, with a high burden on the developer to learn the entirety of Apple's APIs and no way to alert the user as to what it is doing under the hood, which causes the app to hang for minutes or even forever until the managed object context says it's ready.
Some US scientists consider moving overseas to continue their research
I'm not calling this license free. I'm just pointing out that the FSF's definition of free is a very specific one of many.
You could go down the path most traveled and learn Java - this is preferred, because the Android developer site has all its documentation in Java. However, if you're averse to Java, you can also use C# (xamarin.com)
This is South Park material. I would love to see an episode with ManBearPig, Al Gore and the crying meteorologist.
Don't know any languages, was learning html5 a bit but i just wanted to know which would be the best option for an android app
I feel a little apprehensive about sharing my code online, Im not sure if its an ego thing or from seeing some of the rude comments people have made over twitter about X pull request being made on github. Am I just being silly about this?
Also, charge for support. List supported platforms and charge for support for strange configurations.
In some sense, though, most of these situations do see the founders learning management on someone else's dime.

It's just a segmented capital super-structure, rather than a traditional corporate system.
If you "just get a dog," are you assuming everybody has innate knowledge on how to raise and train a dog?

It takes—looping back to the main point here—education to know the best ways to take care of a dog. Sure, you can just practice by trial and error for a while, or you could use knowledge from people who have done The Right Thing for years and get ahead of many common mistakes you would have made out of "intuition."
I agree that the vast majority of cannabis users don't live under the bogus assumption that every bong hit will be their last.

But here's my anecdota to counter the others appearing.

I've met some people who have had considerable trouble stopping using cannabis, and who felt that cannabis was addictive.

(but I'm still in favour of legalising drugs)
I appreciate the article and the point of view but I have to disagree completely with his recommendation that you spend your years working for someone else before you launch your own business.

He talks about working for a company after finishing college to learn about how they operate and do business. You know what I learned in the five years after college I worked for a company as a dev? A whole lot about software development. Nothing about hiring (beyond what I gleaned while interviewing), basics of management and nothing about marketing or sales. You know what I learned in the first few months of trying and failing to launch a business? A heck of a lot about everything, including a lot more about software development.

Working in my trade for a few years out of school made me very good at what I do but it certainly did not make me a very good entrepreneur.
> Be selfish. It's your project so if you think v3 is the way to go forward, go with it and who cares what the "community" thinks.

Or call the community's bluff. "I think v3 is the way forward, so that's what I'm going to be working on. If you want to stick with v2, you maintain it."
Not "silly" per se, but I think that concern is overblown. I write bad code and release all of it that I can, because we don't get better in a vacuum. Also, what's terrible code to you is likely highly useful to somebody else.
Betz law
...Says the man who went to school when the opportunity cost wasn't a decade in debt (at the very least).

I got a great college education and graduated with a level of debt that I paid off in less than a year, through a mix of need-based grants, merit-based scholarships, working 15 hrs/wk, and a lower overall tuition because it was a public school. (There's also the growing trend of 2&2 programs, which in retrospect seems like an even better choice.)

I'm not necessarily arguing that the value of college outweighs its costs (for me, though, it certainly did), but to say that the opportunity cost is at least a decade in debt is invalid.
Lee, why not try the sidekiq way? A capistrano pro, and a hosted managed version or maintenance fee...
How I use TeamChat - Archiving and Accessing Data for Work and Home Use
I've worked under multiple managers who: gave no positive feedback, set no expectations, and provided no treats.

That's really the minimum you should do with dogs or people.
It's sad to see when an open source project becomes overwhelming. On one hand the project is open source, so hopefully, someone else can pick up the torch. We saw this happen in the node.js community and node's been moving along. On the other hand, based on what Lee is saying, it looks like situation is pretty bleak. I'm not a Rails user, but I feel like most of the "hot-startups" in San Francisco run a Ruby stack. From an observer looking into the community and platform though this post, I never realized how many challenges there were in that development environment.
the solution to this sort of thing is to always wrap yourself in a limited company...

company formation in the UK costs around £20 and then you're personally immune to this sort of legal bullying
regarding email address guessing, rapportive turned out to be quite useful at this (xobni's smartr perhaps as well).
I feel Python apps is quite a pain to install. I had to deal with a Graphite installation, and it consists of 50% packages from apt-get and 50% of packages from easy_install.

https://gist.github.com/kaspergrubbe/5792356

Is this an issue with Graphite? Because I feel this setup is quite elaborate compared to using Rubygems and bundler.
woah now, libertarians are very much against wealth redistribution which is what this is.
A citizen of the EU can get a registration certificate if (s)he [1]:

> is in paid employment

> is self-employed

> provides services in Denmark

> is a retired worker, retired self-employed person or retired service provider

> has been seconded

> is a student at an educational institution accredited or financed by public authorities, and s/he is able to support him/herself during the period of residence in Denmark or

> disposes of such sufficient income or means so that s/he is presumed not to become a burden on the public authorities

There is also a family reunification clause, which I've been told is very rarely granted. As for the registration certificate, it gives you a social security number, without which you are a non-person in Denmark.

In general, the previous Conservative, extreme right-wing supported government toughened the laws on immigration.

1: http://www.nyidanmark.dk/en-us/coming_to_dk/eu_and_nordic_ci...
I hate to say this, but the Guardian is now split in two. The UK half is subject to a D-Notice and is under the threat of contempt of court should it publish anything in the UK Guardian newspaper that discusses Snowden and the GCHQ link.

The US part of the Guardian is now the primary reporting mechanism for all of the NSA stories.

Whilst Britain has somewhat a "free and independent press", it is not independent enough to act as a viable 4th estate. Most newspapers are owned by large conglomerates in the UK. These people are very powerful and very rich. They have the power to sway elections. They have done so, and will continue doing so. They also have a shrinking market and profit margin, as online publishing continues to chew into their traditional printed newspaper business. They also have a swathe of new media comapnies who saw the opportunity online way before they did, and as a result they are playing catch up.

On the other side you have the government (of the day) who find it in their interests to maintain the status quo. The relationship between politics and press might be a love-hate one, but above all in Whitehall it is a cosy one.

Cosy relationships are not what the British public (or any real democracy) need (in my humble opinion). They need people like Greenwald, who stick out their necks because they believe in what is right and what is wrong. Above all they believe in liberty. Ironically, they have a mixed relationship to privacy, but in this particular case privacy is being protected rather than being abused.

I applaud Geeenwald and I applaud the Guardian. Without people like these to ask questions and publish the truth we would be in a worse state than we are today.
Thanks! I'm building an app where I might need to implement this type of syncing paradigm.
What does this list prove exactly and how? Why are these deaths attributed to the government, and not higher levels of crime in Russia? Do you know something that everyone else doesn't or you just like this idea?
Also, why do you refer to the second part of the list? Or those killed when "Friend Boris" was in power don't count?
If you have code and it kind of runs, it's ready for public exposure. You never know when somebody will make a suggestion, give you a pointer to improve your code, or even send in a patch.
Yes, this would be a really good article if it made a completely different point.
> but I've never known any pothead to keep saying "this will be my last hit" - quite the opposite

This is my experience too.
I'm confused.

Simple and normal, to me, means "use packaged Ruby." Chasing the bleeding edge and compiling the interpreter at every release is exactly the sort of practice that introduces edge-case heisenbugs.

If you need a nonstandard compile-time option you go to work on the package source, make the change, put your custom package up in your private apt/yum repo, and leave things alone until the next security update comes down the pike.

Me, I consider hosting to be entirely fungible. I'd rather change vendors than mess about with custom packaging big chunks of the stack to work around weirdness.

Wherever I have encountered Phusion's REE I have ripped it out, with good results.
Launch A Website In Less Than 3 Seconds
Yup! That is what I finally fell back to. At first I was worrying about all the stuff that I will miss but realized that as long as I was worrying I will never stop using Facebook.

Btw, do you still use Facebook?
I'm sure you're right about the motivations of many of the people within Google being essentially, 'to build a better platform'.

I don't believe the idea that this was an entirely altruistic goal.

I don't think what you are saying contradicts the overall idea that the underlying reason for Google to invest in Android was to protect it's access to data about users against other corporations.

I.e. Many people at Google were motivated to create a good platform. But the reason for creating a platform at all was fundamentally to make sure that it was Google's good platform. The fact that Google requires access data about customer behavior for it's business model can't just be washed away by pointing at the motivations of the people tasked with making Android successful - a lower level goal.
Thanks for the explanation. I honestly did not get it.
Exoplanet astonomers seek new meeting venue as US restrictions tighten
Show HN: Reportr - Your life's personal dashboard
Ask HN: Startup idea or just a fun project? (Hardware hacking startup)
Hi HN,

Me and some friends in college are working on a large project of ours that we think might make a good startup. However, we're honestly a bit unsure whether we're simply solving a problem only we and a few other people have (which isn't a bad thing, of course), or whether there would be significant demand for our project.

Put somewhat simply, we're working on building the 'reddit of hardware hacking': a site where people can share their projects with the world, people can upvote these projects, follow people working on these projects, and so forth. The entire system is about gaining points by building things people like.

Not to be overly ambitious (starting small is generally a Good Idea(TM)), but some of our side-projects currently include online blueprinting and circuit testing, all of which should of course become shareable with other people. We're also working on a sort of marketplace where people can buy and sell these hacks, but that's still in the not-sure-how-feasible-it-is phase[1].

Do you think this could make a good startup, or whether we should simply slow down and keep working on this as a 'fun project' kind of thing?

[1] Mainly because of quality assurance, liability and price control. If you have any suggestions, they're very welcome!
Life Is Short – Our Time on Earth Visualized In Jelly Beans
I can't comment on the poisonous nature of the community but what I have noticed is that at some point its taken for granted that the open source solution will be very stable and solid.

It seems (and this is just entirely my opinion) that it is forgotten that people are doing this out of their own goodwill and are not necessarily being paid for it and really have no contractual obligation to keep doing what they are doing.

It's almost the worst of both worlds. You get all the responsibility for having your open source project be considered at the same level as a commercial solution but without it actually being a commercial solution.
Are you looking for feedback on this? Is this your project?
> some javascript runtime environment isn't found

This is a very familiar pain point for me. IMHO many problems with RoR deployment stem from the fact that Ruby depends on so many native code extensions. It's pathetically easy to break things like therubyracer or nokogiri because some .so file was updated or is not installed. I'm guessing that this is done for performance issues with the Ruby interpreter, but wow, it really makes for portability nightmares. Add RVM on top of this and it's just insane.

As someone coming from Java (I largely switched from Java to Rails about a year ago) I find this tendency toward native code deps incredibly painful. Turns out there's a really good reason to demand "100% pure Java" libraries. One can always throw rocks at Maven or CLASSPATH hell, but I find that Ruby deploys tend to be much more problematic than Java.

Whatever you decide on I hope you get some relief. FWIW I have benefited greatly from your work on Capistrano, and sincerely appreciate your efforts.
Also, isn't it customary to put "(audio)" in links that play sound when you open them? I just put my baby to bed!
... which is actually an argument for staying in school in the first place. Once you're out, the realities of life make it very difficult to go back.
How do you know if someone uses Arch Linux?

Don't worry... they'll tell you! (BTW I use Arch)
New people are convinced of its truth or severity every day. As usual, there's an xkcd for it: http://xkcd.com/1053/
Hi! Five years as an undergrad! No debt!
Thank you so much for Capistrano. We use it on a daily basis (several times) and built http://capo.io to make it easier to re-use deploy scripts.

I'm going to take a closer look into the source code and try to help out with issues. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while so I hope I can at least help out a little bit here
Go's static binaries are pretty fantastic- though there are other details that you may care about more.
Do you have any evidence for what you're saying or is it just ideology speaking? Being on bistand does not mean having the week off. It means regular meetings in the job centre, a fixed quota of job applications to submit and often forced activation involving CV writing courses and other drudgery. It is not fun. I really don't know what you have against unemployed people, but try and remember that you could be in their situation if you are unlucky in the job market when you graduate. Best of luck with your career.
"GM foods are and will continue to be a great leap forward in sustainable, scalable agriculture."

I see a lot of data that contradicts that statement, time and again. Is that a general feeling you have on the subject and/or does that get backed up by published numbers ?
The quality of life
Certainly agree, but depending upon your market it can be very difficult to...
"Find companies that fit the bill"
...especially when you're more going for B2C or B2SmallerWebsites. Really for me that's the challenge that brings out the need for advertising and such - to even find these customers.
I don’t know who would type in 30,000 notes. That’s a lot of typing.

Maybe on a touchscreen keyboard, or in an app limited to that; it would behoove the OP to consider cross-platform possibilities and very long timeframes, or even look to use cases in similar systems. In org-mode (which I've got on my phone and desktop), I've got tens of thousands of lines, and could easily see keeping 30k notes. Granted, it's different, there's more than purely human entered data, but as the OP sagely observes, there may be automated systems inputting to Vesper someday.
crowdTOD (www.crowdtod.com) is a community driven platform for web developers to request a micro web tutorials. Requested tutorials are written by a crowdTOD registered experts who have needed skillsets. Experts can write tutorial and for an individual tutorial can earn 65% from the funded campaign.

Can you write test tutorial on any web development languages/frameworks? For example building minimal reddit in Django/Ruby on Rails/PHP? Or you can decide your own topic. Please no more then 3-5 pages.

We need test tutorials in order to validate our idea. If you are interested please contact us at crowdtod@gmail.com. Obvious question is what you will get for writing tutorial? We promise that first 100 experts who help us in writing test tutorial will secure 90% earning on any tutorial he/she writes in the future. Moreover, for 10 selected experts we will give 0.5% stake of our company.
I’m not afraid of Symfony 2 performances
We're like the vegans of the linux world.
therubyrhino and nokogiri provide pure Java backends on JRuby, FYI
php is really simple to deploy, you know ;)
> I just wanted to point out how poisonous our community is. It's something that I've been struggling with for a long time, and trying to slowly change (from inside the python community).

Do you mean to say that the Python community is poisonous? Or that the Ruby community is poisonous from the perspective of a Python community member?
This is good advice, because the right sort of person to be a Thiel fellow would read this and scoff anyway.
In mature production environments, sometimes you do need more than one Ruby environment on a host. I've seen this case where multiple programs must be deployed on a host, one of which was built a long time ago (i.e. legacy). (This applies not only to Ruby, BTW.)

Maybe rvm/rbenv is not the best solution, but some solution is needed. You can either invent one yourself, or adapt something that's already been built. We're using rvm, and while I'm not a huge fan of it and would rather switch to rbenv, I've managed to tame it so that it's not such a huge beast, using various wrappers so that non-interactive Ruby programs work start up in the correct environment.
I use Verizon and they are always more than happy to activate my CDMA capable phone for use on the Verizon network - which I have been using for a very long time and live contract free this way. I also use a very old completely Unlimited plan, so buying a phone from Verizon would cancel this plan and force me on a new contract.

Anyhow my point is I have no problems adding a personal device to my plan anytime - many times.
You want to bet there isn't a credit union in the entire city? That entire category had much fewer problems because they didn't write bad-to-fraudulent loans during the derivative party era and the recurring theme throughout this story is that Richmond has been unable to otherwise motivate the big banks to do their jobs – something which would not be true for a local/regional bank which wasn't grossly irresponsible.
> Chasing the bleeding edge and compiling the interpreter at every release is exactly the sort of practice that introduces edge-case heisenbugs.

I think most people that uses rbenv or RVM in production is only compiling new versions if the specified version isn't there already.