skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author came to this Ruby on Rails dichotomy for the very same reason other frameworks/languages are doing so:

1) To cash in on Rails's good rep and outstanding efforts in the field in the past 10 years or so.

2) Because the author knows that people are fiddle and that new fashions are made and destroyed every other day, so why not scare people a little if that can help Meteor get off the ground, eh?

3) Because shitting on Rails is trendy these days and it's always very easy to precisely target the relative weaknesses of a framework whilst pretending to ignore its strengths. Anybody with half a brain can play that game.

That being said, it doesn't diminish Meteor's merits in any way and I really hope its community thrives and grows in the next few years. The first few years are always the best ones :)
This has been live for at least 3 years and probably longer. The exception, I think, was YouTube, which remained independent until 2011. It's simple user convenience: nobody wants to have to type their username and password 10 times to access 10 services they use on a daily basis.
Yes, I remember rifling through a Thomas Guide on a trip up the California coast back in the day and suddenly realizing I had changed lanes. Luckily there was no one next to me at the time…
Well, I did say 'some' :)

The people with no interest in Humanities will not take humanities anyway. That the interest in humanities is decreasing points directly to the fact that people who actually _like_ humanities are disenchanted with it. That is who my comment is referring to. There is a whole literature in sociology dealing with relationship between humanities and colonialism[1].

But I suppose people downvoting me have really got no interest in humanities :) Apparently, anything that makes it look like it might have a value must be bad.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism
Amanda Palmer: How to drink with your fans (on crowdfunding)
JAX London rocks
I'm torn between the two sides of this coin.

As both a US citizen and world citizen (how can we who've grown up in the Internet age not feel a little more worldly?) it feels violating to know this has been going on, and that it likely effects me.

On the other side, it has forever been, and continues to be, in a physical-boundary-defined nation's best interest to know things about every other nation, in order to compete within international relationships. I would be surprised to find a major international player that didn't have a clandestine agent group or groups like the CIA or NSA.

It's a very tough and frustrating topic. Spying always feels disrespectful and arrogant to the spied upon. But should we implicitly assert that this isn't done by the rest[0] of the intelligence agencies around the world?

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies
The vanity urls really annoy me too. They just don't feel appropriate for these large social networks.

I prefered the unique-ids. Which url does John Smith get? Does he get +JohnSmith, and what about the other JohnSmiths? Will they have to put up with +JohnSmith2 and so on? This becomes a little silly and doesn't really bring anything.

Are these urls user definable (outside of picking your original name)? Can they be changed at a later date?

It just gets silly, and doesn't really bring anything. Who'll write them in manually too? I prefer something more ambiguous. Perhaps a search for: 'John Smith, Manhattan', or 'John Smith foobar inc'.

What happens if you get married and change your name? What happens to previous urls without the vanity name?

Can I roll back if I don't like it? If I don't select my vanity url, will someone else get it?
There is a plan for one user at $24/mo.

"We also offer a Solo Plan for 1 user and 1 repo, for $24/month. (Does not include Security Monitor and Trends)"
Having to use "def" isn't the end of the world. You often end up naming your lambdas in a let in scheme anyway.
They are all better at both than JavaScript. There is no feature that JavaScript has that the other languages don't, often in very similar shapes. The reverse is mostly not true.
black status bar text on dark red background, this needs to change.
But a very neat idea! Already found some people to chat with in Tokyo
Good analogy. And the funniest part is when people say it should spread from client ("body") to server ("brain").
I've yet to see entire JavaScript applications written in a functional style. Just because "map" is used more often than Python doesn't make it functional.
I'm currently using variations of the 7-minute workout (7-min.com) + some minor weight lifting.
True. Regardless of how disturbing I find it, Perl does qualify.
Why Home Inspectors Need Errors and Omissions Insurance - JUGOmoney
9:25 BST: I'm on Virgin Media (UK) and it looks like their DNS still wants packets to go to 184.172.10.74 (i.e. through Comcast) to reach HN, but as soon as they get to Comcast, they disappear. Switched to Google DNS which points to 198.41.190.47, and all is well.
For me this looks like this: "I've hit the snooze five times, it must be 8:50, oh hey it's actually only 8:47. I SHALL SNOOZE ONE MORE TIME!"
Paid and free MOOC do not differ much, but they have can significant advantages over a book, especially for subjects where you do not have already domain expertise:

1. Exercises

2. Community/forums/meetups

3. Exams (with prestigious names behind it)
Differential looks like a small designer shop which does small UX-centric web apps. If they will be doing any serious server-side development in future they will have to hire guys who know serious non-script languages. But for now Meteor looks like a good fit for their needs. And of course they want some cheap PR, so it's good to over-generalize to make Rails developers pissed (for no good reason).
For young and uninsured, Obamacare impact sets in
it would be great to see closest online person to chat if there is no one in 1-mile. (Of course chat will be inactivated with that person)
It will be a real deluge.
Actually I haven't seen it on gmail until this week... Maybe I was just the last to get it somehow
For whitespace fixes (making a mix of tabs vs spaces consistent), I agree with you.

For "I wrapped these 5 lines in a conditional and adjusted the indentation per code standard" in a language like C# I disagree with you, the first commit is ugly and leaves the codebase (temporarily) out of sync with codebase style, which may fail the build or fail to submit in the first place if you enforce such things via precommit hook or build process.

For the same operation in python, where semantics changes are attached to indentation level changes, the first commit is BROKEN, WRONG, AND BAD. The build not failing the first commit reflects poorly on the unit tests.

Increasing the readability of a diff is a noble goal. Splitting the diff in 'twain can help, but it's not a full answer. Neither is keeping commits as small as possible: simple renames can easily touch 30 files at a time, to say nothing of adding parameters or more complicated refactorings which must be committed together or leaves the codebase in a broken state.

Other tools include highlighting difference within a line instead of merely at a per-line level. Ignoring whitespace changes in languages which aren't whitespace sensitive can also help: I personally find the two highlighted lines of an if statement and it's end more informative than the seven highlighted lines which include it's functionally unchanged body that's merely changed scope.
BTW hipsters using Ruby/Meteor in SF does not mean it replaces something in the whole global industry :).
Any philosopher, ideologist or politicians you might think of will elicit exactly the opposite reactions of what you want from a substantial percentage of people who would otherwise like the idea.
This is a discussion about a javascript framework. Meteor relys on javascript on the client and the server so how should it work with noscript?

If you want to use a javascript tool you´ll have to add an exception for this tool.
On Life Without Owning A Car
Living in Germany shaved heads are unfortunately also a right-wing political statement. Neo-nazis are using shaved heads for recognition and are known as "Glatzen" (skinheads). Which I think is one reason that you see only very few other people here doing that. Might be good reason for more people shaving their head so the nazis start to lose this symbol, but that takes some self-confidence.
A really interesting case is Urdu. In Nastaliq script, the Urdu language word-wise goes right-to-left... diagonally. Here's a picture: http://i.imgur.com/nIHmZJc.png
See how every next letter is just a little bit lower than the one preceding it? That's Nastaliq script, it goes left-down-ward.

As you could imagine, it's a special hell supporting this language. What's happened now is... a compromise has basically been made. Nastaliq is how Urdu had predominantly been written for years and years... but with growing usage of computers, even native Urdu speakers are abandoning it, because there's such poor support for it.

This article talks a little more about this: https://medium.com/stories-that-matter/9ce935435d90
Was the HN SSL CA change deliberate?
Issuing CA for news.ycombinator.com public SSL cert has changed two years prior to expiry date.

Previously an Entrust cert with serial 4C:1A:C7:90 issued to news.ycombinator.com, now a PositiveSSL / Comodo cert with serial 1D:9B:1D:4D:32:6C:01:B6:AC:23:61:14:BB:6D:6C:89 issued to *.ycombinator.com

Can't locate any revocation.
You don't need the "minus one" circuit. Just always store the previous minute value whenever the minute is incremented, and then latch that value when the alarm goes off.
8 Ways You Can Incorporate Lavender Essential Oil Into Your Life
One way to make the humanities more attractive might be to dissolve the link between learning to express oneself in words and studying literature. To quote pg, "students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens." [1]

While in high school I gutted it out in English so I could make it to my next math class, as I grow older I've found myself increasingly drawn to reading and writing. The power and precision of the right word at the right moment can be intoxicating.

Perhaps if college and high school students were given the chance to peek into the whole world of opportunity in written expression, the humanities would see a resurgence.

1 - http://paulgraham.com/essay.html. "Moneyball" is one of my favorites and I've read an awful lot of thoughtful food-focused essays in the last few years, but does anyone have a good one on the role of color in fashion? The cerulean rant in "Devil Wears Prada?"
Sorry, that's the funniest thing I've read all week.

An American president with a moral backbone?

Give me a break.

That's like expecting it to rain candyfloss.

The presidency is a hollow man, a figurehead - it's all just a show to make you think you have a democracy. The tail wags the dog, and entrenched non-elected interests run the show, through corruption, lobbying (corruption), and special interests (corruption).
Yeah, but US citizens vote for their government, so are therefore accountable. I don't see you out in the streets with pitchforks, so you're as culpable as the primary perpetrators.
Nokia pursues HTC sales ban in UK after patent victory
In my world, almost everyone cares about consuming content (maybe not movies) on their smartphones, heck they use their smartphone more than their PC/TV.
Awesome guide, this is a pretty good guide to docker+rails! Just read through it and it's answered a couple of my questions even about why someone would bother to use docker for development
Steve Jobs' reading list
I'm not really disagreeing with your substantive points but wanted to clear up a misunderstanding.

The MPEG-LA does not enforce anything. Companies with patents in the pool can enforce them (they can also license them outside the pool).

Companies (that aren't Lodsys like trolls) aren't likely to bring action where there isn't significant revenue to obtain unless there is a strategic threat to them.

I would also like to pick up your language. The MPEG codecs are open although they are not free, Free or Libre.
Retire.js - identify JS libraries with known vulnerabilities in your application
Yes, you're right, it's racist to oppose NSA spycraft.

> They can start by asking nicely.

"Can you please kindly, stop perpetuating your morally bankrupt spy-state?"

Gosh. That achieved a lot.
> What? Some clocks do count that way.

Lots of stuff used to... The realtime clock in the C64 (almost nevery used) worked in that way too. (it was one of a handful of things that depended on AC; you could power the machine off a 9V battery if you were ok with certain minor functionality not working)
From the same article:

> Ensign Connan Ingham said that no non-disclosure agreements had been signed but that some local agency officials "have been asked by the owner not to talk about it."

Which is it? :/
The only reason internet surveillance is a problem is that it's easy to automate and doesn't leave evidence that's easy to spot.

Metadata on a physical letter is easy to collect without evidence of tampering, and the USPS takes photos of letters to make delivery easy. They supposedly delete the images. I assume they share the images with the NSA.

The contents of a letter in an envelope are harder to spy on, because it's a manual process and you leave evidence of tampering unless you're really good and careful. But really good and careful takes even longer.

If you're a specific target, then they'll get what they want. But if you're an average unsuspected person, a letter is just too much trouble to spy on, and I think they probably don't do mass surveillance on the inside of enveloped letters.
I remember Rob making a comment that .Net is his most popular topic.

From a dotnet point of view, it is much easier for many programmers to watch videos instead of reading a book. For one, language is not as big a barrier because you have a visual example to go along with his narrative.

The biggest problem I personally have with dotnet is the necessity to know all the nuances of whichever stack you are developing on.

In learning MVC, Rob goes over every single issue a programmer may have in creating a web site, circumventing those moments where you get stuck trying to find out how to change how routing works. He also goes over a token based login that completely throws out the default dotnet implementation.

In addition, he goes over creating a support site, dependency injection, and lots of other things that you would have to be an active member of the MVC community to even know it existed.

He even posts his code to github. Basically, Rob acts as a mediator between the dotnet world and the open source linuxy way of doing things. Many of his comparisons are with Ruby on Rails. When I talk with people I know who code in C#, they hardly spend time reading about new trends in HTML and javascript and prefer to get the easy way by learning the dotnet way of doing things.

As a dotnet developer, you (and me too) put yourself into a position of ignorance. Then you wait for someone more senior to come out with a simple method that you could use for rapid prototyping. You rely on that senior person not because you can't code but because you really don't know the nuances of the framework you are leaning on. This refusal to learn the bare bones of HTML and adopt some micro framework creates the phenomenon where you are kind of hosed into grabbing the quickest path to productivity.

Edit: I edited quite a few things for clarity. Probably shouldn't submit so fast.
Yes, they do synchronize and yes, the number of cycles averaged over a day cycle is kept close to constant but: the frequency still floats. In fact, it floats enough to produce a unique "background hum fingerprint" which can be used to verify authenticity of audio recordings: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20629671
I think that the greatest barrier will be Exchange and other corporate email servers software. Without corporate buy-in, this will never take off.

Corps "need" to have an overview of the messages unsecured. There is no such thing as personal privacy in the corporate world, only corporate privacy.
That does not explain anything though, it just moves the problem. As the article also points out, what was the original "random reason"?
They also gave the NSA and co. front-door access, and probably knew about the back-door access, but couldn't do anything about it.
See https://www.google.com/patents/US7525207 and https://www.google.com/patents/US20090295167 ("Water-based data center"). Assigned to google employees.
No U.S. Action, So States Move on Privacy Law
AMDs APUs are the cheapest way to built a complete system with a decent GPU right now, they perform extremely well for their price.
Medium Maker
There has been a single sign on for most services for a long time (although the login page was different in some cases depending on which service you were accessing).

The difference now is that they re designed the log in interface to be the same across services and I have also only noticed the new design in the past week or so.
Grunt Montage: Generating CSS Sprites
Interesting! I hadn't considered that connotation of git.

To Euro-English speakers, 'git' is a rather coarse pejorative term for a person:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=git

It's fairly vulgar, of a similar coarseness to calling someone a 'stupid fucker' in US terms.

The in-joke being that Mr Torvalds chose the name specifically to cause offense.
What is MEAN? It's particularly hard to Google, even with additional keywords.
Did all of that as well. Stopped smoking (over half a decade ago, so that was around your age I guess), reduced drinking (~1 glas of wine per week), I always did excercises (just have to do it far more seriously now the older I get as I no longer build muscles that easy) and eating far more healthy by now (although somewhat more since I stopped smoking as that had replaced my breakfasts back then). Less general movement due to working from home since a few years (no more walking to a job... that makes some difference, but I still walking a lot as I live without a car).

It all helps - really does. Just doesn't stop aging :-)
This app clearly reminds me of the device John McAfee promised us: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/30/4786008/john-mcafee-d-cent...

"the device [...] has a range of around three blocks. Everyone in those three blocks can then communicate with each other and that will obviously change as users move in and out of a local area."

Will definitively try to maybe see people from HN in Paris.
VMception?
Anyone with the right knowledge and right equipment can do basically anything that's possible with that knowledge and equipment. Why be impressed by anything anyone does?
In the olden days, our clocks were analogue/mechanical. Even the ones showing digits.
Tweeting Bad: A Breaking Bad Twitter analysis
one could always hope they are a precursor to offshore data centers, in particular residing in international waters.
The cynic in me thinks that this worry is because of the threatened profit margins. Giving a humanities education is a lot cheaper to a student than giving solid engineering one. If you charge similar tuition the margins on the former are much higher.
Stay Awhile and Listen
The app on my phone makes me add two two digit numbers together before it switches off. It gives me just enough time to engage my brain to calculate how many more snoozes I can get away with.
"The power and precision of the right word at the right moment can be intoxicating"

Not only intoxicating but immensely powerful - we live in an age where politics is dominated by form rather than content, "spin" and being "on message" are more important that policies. Orwell, Koestler and others who were directly familiar with the totalitarian regimes understood the power of language and idea to shape and control people.

Think of how important Goebbels was to the Nazis or how important the arts (or at least his control of the arts) were to Stalin - those are direct indicators of important these topics are.

I'm rather amused that Orwell's essay on Politics and the English Language is features on HN's front page at the same time as this discussion.

Edit: From 1984

'He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.'
Rackspace Heat - Autoscale and Orchestration
This would be a better link: http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/openstack-heat-orchestration-coming-to-rackspace.html
How about a 1 mile (square) zone, rather than 1 mile away from you? So you just cut everything up into mile-square slices, and you can talk with everyone in your slice... Concept is basically the same, but should overcome that issue.
Of course they would, i know alot of software engineers that initially studied something different that also involved coding to some extent who are now full blown software engineers. After a few years your experience and your skills matter, not the name of your degree (as long as you have one).
Doing It Wrong (web scraping HN with Rebol)
Interesting... 2.1 quadrillion satoshis divided by 20 trillion dollars is about 100, so eventually there will be about the same number of satoshis as there are normal money cents in the world. Very nice symmetry!
> I'm resisting the temptation to put my PGP private key on my iPhone

S/MIME doesn't use PGP keys, it uses X509 certificates. You can quite easily deploy multiple certificates, one for each communication partner or channel.

So for example your mail sent to / from your iPhone would be encrypted with one cert, whereas from your desktop for Super Secret Stuff you'd use another.
Totally agree, dark mail feels too threatening.
خلطات ممتازه للقضاء على دهون البطن والارداف والكرش | مجلة استراحة
No answers yet, so I will guess this is CloudFlare related.
> For those who don't know, never ever use floats for things like money.

This is normally a very good rule to follow. The reason is that floating point is binary, whereas cash is decimal, so even an innocent number like 0.4 has no exact representation in binary (it's actually an infinite tail: 0.011001100110011...).

Here, however, I'm using floats NOT to store decimals; every single value that I store is an integer. There is absolutely no danger in using floating point numbers to store relatively small integers like 1253251126; the issue only arises in the context of very large numbers (specifically, those above 2^53) and decimals. If anyone can come up with a remotely realistic series of integer manipulations that will cause an inaccuracy in Javascript where all values always stay below 2^50.9, I will certainly abandon my choice of moving to integers at once; otherwise, I see no problem.
D.T. Suzuki, Zen and the Nazis  鈴木大拙　禅　ナチス　（上）
Is seeing the bottom of the page flash before the page is loaded when clicking a page intended? It's not very good either way. Especially for a blog.
Well I seem to remember when they were giving computers the ability to interpret speech they were pretty limited in what they could do. Even training your own machine with available software at the time required you to go through sequences.

So I see this implementation as the same, its part of the long road. First, start with the basics. Prove the machine can recognize what you intend. Then step it up. From there you can broaden it other dialects and what not.

Still you cannot help but cheer them on
Personally this is my favorite work on compiler theory. While dragon book is definitely more comprehensive, Let's Build a Compiler is far more approachable (so approachable that I worked through it when I was only 14).

I haven't gone to the bare metal level since (as well as using parser generators), but it's a great piece of work that gives you a slight understanding of what YACC+family do under the covers (even though they are different types of parsers). I continually recommend it as a starting point for anyone who wants to learn how to write parsers.