skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A conversation with my wife would probably go like this:

Wife: Who is "Roy Fielding"?

Me: Some guy. He’s smart.

Wife: Oh? What did he do?

Me: He helped write the first web servers and then did a ton of research explaining why the web works the way it does. His name is on the specification for the protocol that is used to get pages from servers to your browser.

Wife: Oh, sorry, I thought he was in that movie with Jennifer Aniston.

Me: The web is pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.

Wife: Can you please stop it. I've been trying to catch the finale of ER for the longest time.

Me: But HTTP is really simple to explain.

Wife: Some other time honey, not now.
'Orthogonal' is the strong claim I'm disputing; other WP process does not create the same problem. For example, editing someone's contribution to improve its voice/NPOV or suggest verification can encourage casual contributors; it's positive attention. "I got something started, others are paying attention, progress is occurring. Fun!"

Deletionism -- whether the judgment that something should be deleted or following through with deletion -- is negative attention. It uniquely discourages contributors and often destroys content of small-but-positive value. (For example, it destroys the important 'first drafts' of topics that will someday easily pass 'notability'.)

Deletionism also shrinks the territory on which collaboration can occur. A deleted article can be neither corrected nor improved; it is a void. Perhaps there is someone somewhere who could add the citations... justify the importance... benefit from the partial information -- but deletion forecloses that possibility, even though cheap storage and cheap search means incomplete scraps of information can better find their audience/editors than ever before.
Before you write your first line of code.
I think both of these articles are wrong. This theme has occured in several posts here in the last few days, so I'll state my "grand theory". There are several types of programming: applications development, systems programming and algorithm/data structure development.

I'm a systems programmer who is trying to pick up a greater deal of algorithm and data structure knowledge. I view applications as moving to the web but for web application to become efficient, scalable and allow for the same rich UI as a desktop application a great deal of difficult systems engineering and algorithm development had to happen first. More so than for a desktop application.

Desktop applications typically store individual user data: you could easily use an O(N) lookup structure to store it and then use just write() to write it out to disk as a C struct. Web applications are multi-tenant. For the largest web applications, even a relational database (an incredibly complex system: transaction protocols, b+trees for storage) can't scale.

Before any reputable company puts their name on application, the application has to be load balanced. Yet, this is transparent to the user. Do typical desktop applications require a shared nothing distributed architecture?

Now on the other hand, web developers don't think about these issues and write in powerful, high-level languages using frameworks and DSLs which often times don't even require writing SQL code. Yet, they aren't doing in this in vacuum.

So really the case here is that web application development appears, on the surface, to be less challenging than desktop application development. Yet the amount of systems programming that had to happen to allow that is immense.

Am I now saying that systems programming is more challenging than applications development? No, the challenges are different. I don't have nearly the sort of patience and attention to detail that UI development requires. The process (gathering user requirements, presenting mockups) is actually more complex.

If you're looking to do lower-level work, or more algorithm/data structure development because that's what you find challenging than don't be an applications developer (whether desktop or web). On the other hand, be aware that the demand for systems programmers isn't always as high (and getting the job is a lot more difficult in terms of complexity of even the interview and the experience/education level required).

On the other hand, before web developers bash statically typed languages (especially C/C++), bash CS curiculla that stress algorithms and data structures or wonder why interviewers at Google/Yahoo/Facebook ask about Binary Trees, they should be aware just how much of C/C++ code was written for them to be able to do even the simplest of SELECT statements (and if you don't know what data structures might have been traversed when you issued that statement, I won't hire you).
Time to rejoice? Valuations inch up at startup companies
I don't agree. First of all, the analogy with Costco is false. Data is free to copy (esp. govt data which should not be subject to copyright) and very cheap to store and transport. So no it is not at all analogous to crates of toilet paper or tubs of mayonnaise.

Secondly, if we adopt the proposed solution we get a situation very ripe for corruption and rent seeking. What you will get is the government creating data in some bizarre and byzantine format which only one or two companies can decipher, and those companies will sell better organized data at very high prices and in very limited way.

This is already happening now, btw. All laws and published court decisions are supposed to be public knowledge and available for free. But the government does not have an efficient system to publish them. Therefore, two companies (Lexis and Westlaw) publish these on-line and charge people enormous amounts of money so that they can merely find out what the laws of their own country are.

Simialar things are happening in other spheres, where people are paying a lot of money for supposedly public information.

So, no, the government should try to make public information accessible to all citizens. Of course it should also provide data in bulk to anyone that wants it, but that does not release them from their duty to make the information accessible to the average citizen.
For text I can live with light on dark... as long as I can reverse when needed.

...which is the joy (on my aging PowerBook at least) of cmd-opt-cntl-8 -- also a real treat to scare a noob relative into thinking I've destroyed their Mac ;)
For me when I first encountered this particular post on REST a couple of years ago it was like an ah ha moment. SOAP is just one complex layer. Struts is another, actually a container in a container. Having messed around in J2ee land for while this article made me realize that most folks didn't know or didn't care what a stock J2ee container could do if one started thinking RESTfully.

Then we built a whole enterprise web application using just a stock J2ee container and RESTful style thinking. How much simpler! No extra frameworks to learn. The UI became completely decoupled from the services. The services are completely decoupled from the J2ee container, naturally. All the container does is resolve the nouns to a service name and give a call back to the appropriate verb method, doGet, doPut, doDelete.

In fairness we are not 100% RESTful there is some legacy stuff that relies on the session. However having done a few SOAP/WSDL services and tons of Struts actions or Spring "injections" I must say that REST is in my opinion a much cleaner way to code for web apps. Whenever I hear about some implementation needing a SOAP/WSDL service I run the other way as fast as possible. I won't even debate folks about it anymore, I just refuse to work on all that complexity.

As an aside I have seen here and there some frameworks the purport to use REST. I don't really get this. Why would somebody need and additional framework to make something RESTful? I have done it with J2ee and just plain Apache. I believe the web itself to be the framework, I could be way off in my thinking though, it wouldn't be the first time. Anybody have any clues about what a RESTful framework is for?
This one, perhaps?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=588139
I showed this to a lawyer friend of mine who also has a background in technology. While he thought it was a nice tool for preliminary or casual research, he said that ultimately he will still need to go and purchase the documents so that he is absolutely certain they are the originals since there doesn't seem to be a publicly available way to verify them.

A possible solution to this would be a published hash value from the original source.
Having lived in the Bay Area and Italy, I'd give the win to Italy's public transportation hands down. Trains aren't great, and are sometimes late, but there are enough of them that unless there's a major problem, you don't have to worry too much about missing one because another will come along soon.

Also, the system is somewhat rational: trains for longer distance trips, busses for cities, and around the countryside. The train station and bus stations are always connected so that even in a city you don't know, it doesn't take long to figure things out and get where you need to go. The Bay Area is a complete mish-mash of systems. The first thing that comes to everyone's mind when they see it is "why doesn't BART go all around the bay?!".
Trick optics or a flexible display might make it sexy enough. "Look, there's no seam!"

But also running with your idea -- what if the unit contains an ultra-thin detachable wireless keyboard, achieving surface-angle diversity even better than a hinge?
My dad grew up in a communist country, and always pointed out the rare case on TV where a newswoman would wear a crucifix necklace. His point was both that this was very explicitly suppressed when he was growing up, and that it was implicitly suppressed here.
The Myth of Valley Wages
I have to say, I love this. I'm a typography enthusiast with horrible, horrible handwriting, and an even worse signature.

What I'm worried about though, is dropping $30 on a signature and possibly not liking your 3 options, or even worse, falling in love with one of them and not being able to reproduce it.
It sounds like the source control you are using has too much friction, setting up a Git repo and keeping it up to date is quick and easy so there is no reason not to do it right away.
I believe, and I might be wrong, that Blizzard were on the brink of serious financial woes before world of Warcraft came out.
Most web applications will never be "rooted". Many web applications will have SQL Injection vulnerabilities, even in modern frameworks.
I can't believe a comment that essentially consists of irrelevant objections to the article is sitting at the top. Please don't upvote emotional rants masquerading as arguments.

The bottom line - an American economist supporting Hugo Chávez

The author's political views do not automatically make his arguments valid.

Yes indeed Germans have up to 12 weeks in paid vacation. The question is who is paying for this? You can look at the taxes Germans pay and understand the German government is subsidizing it.

First, while the German government might subsidize a lot of things, I doubt that it pays employers for the vacation time taken by employees (except in special cases like childbirth). Even if this were true, since the subsidies would come out of taxes, it would be economically the same as a person choosing to take a pay cut for working less hours.

I agree here in US healthcare payment via insurance is not the best solution. From other side in Germany (I know Germany best) the government is subsidizing it. Guess who is paying this?

I don't recall the author claiming anywhere that healthcare is magically paid for in Europe. His point was that per capita it costs half has much and provides better outcomes.

"...the French could not afford their welfare state..." Again - who is paying the bills. Somebody has to pay the bills.

I don't get this rhetorical technique of asking who is paying the bills. Not only is it a bad argument, it is poor rhetoric.

Increased leisure time? So what is the point?

May I point out that almost all art, science and human culture originally came out of leisure time.

Carbon emissions - this was invented by Europeans academics to get more grants for research

Carbon emissions are real. They are byproducts of combustion. It is their trading that was invented. Consuming less energy reduces real world emissions, and increases the tradable commodity.
The drive is fine, but it's not like anyone actually gets in the water once they get there. It's far too cold.
You're right, but (I know I'm repeating myself) you don't even have to concede that for bcrypt to be a win. You can make hashes take sub-user-visible time and still make dictionary attacks totally infeasible. SHA1 is extremely fast. Even "just not extremely fast" is a win.
Yup.

$ mkdir newproject
$ cd newproject
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/mbrubeck/newproject/.git/
If finding the "right" or "wrong" people were so easy, you could go to the circus and find an amazing hacker community. The reason people go to Defcon etc is to be in an environment where the chances of running into the right people are higher. Everyone has a limited amount of time to expend, so they choose the environment which facilitates what they wish to seek out. Saying that he was hanging with the wrong people was glib and not helpful.
What a "Facebook Browser" Means For the Web
did Apple give you a reason for the rejections, or did they just not write back? making noise on blogs about this kind of thing has helped others in this situation.
I'm confused. You say you support reforming healthcare by reducing the role of government, but what exactly do you mean by this? Reducing medicare? medicaid (although that is more of a state run program)?

Perhaps you could enlighten me by specifying what exactly you'd like to reduce, and what you hope to achieve? (Note: statements such as "reduce government involvement" are soundbites, not answers).
They pay about $2.50 per CPU at 100% per month. A fraction of the cost of electricity, but lucrative for Digsby.
I grew up here and moved back after college in CA, so I'm a little biased. It's a great place to live. The tech scene is really inviting and impressively sophisticated as others have mentioned. The Ruby group where that calagator app was developed is superb, as is DorkbotPDX. I find it substantially cheaper and easier to get around here than LA/SF since it's not that big of a city (strict urban growth boundaries), it's reasonably dense and it's public transportation is well above average.

While it's easy to find people who are passionate about technology and building things, I don't feel it has the culture of ambition that's so prevalent in CA. Maybe it's because people are happy to be doing things that don't cost anything, like enjoying the outdoors or local music scene, and are less self conscious about what they drive.
If you're using an analytics package that let's you send custom events, you could use something like this to find out how your page performs in the wild. With things like YSlow, you're only getting data for your location and your browser.
Interesting.

I pointed my iPhone 3GS at my (pretty neat) digital watch and tapped the shutter release the instant I saw the seconds display change. I did this 5 times. Each time, the seconds display in the photo was from just before it changed, and definitely before I tapped the button.

This is a great idea, but it's a little strange that the photo that got stored was consistently from just before I had actually tapped the button rather than just as I tapped it. Either there's a hard-coded time compensation that's too generous (in this case longer than my hand-eye reaction time), or there's some logic at work that tries to intelligently weed out significant visual changes that occur at roughly the same instant that the shutter is released.
Yesterday.

If your version control system has so much overhead that putting code under VC is a chore or something to be put off and planned for, then it has a problem - and you need a new VCS, or at the very least, a new set of tools and workflows.
Nearly half of Twitter messages are 'pointless babble'
Am I the only here who is interested in subject but is uncomfortable about both sides in the argument? You know, sort of like seeing Mussolini and Pol Pot discussing human rights.

While I get and can easily relate to the OP's point about web programming, neither UML, sequence diagrams (yes I actually done them), .NET sandbox or the three-languages-clumped-in-ugly-one (C++) gives me any excitement. Bare mention of "business logic" gives me nausea, and I want to unlearn all I knew about CIM.

I guess some stuff is just boring crap to work on and some isn't. Not a terribly useful or novel conclusion, and probably would never make as controversial and hot topics as those two blogposts...
So, here we have a model where the product is available for free while the creators somehow earn a living (probably by being domain experts or by knowing how to apply their "product" in the context of something more specifically revenue generating).

Journals are not free at all. While many get access to literature through JSTOR, or some similar service, just for being affiliated with a research institution in one form or another, it's not cheap for those outside of the system or for those providing you access to JSTOR. My point is that the "industry" of academic research is not giving anything away for free. It's a business just like any other business.
Gamecock acquisition goes south - vendors accuse SouthPeak of not paying up
aranganath strikes me as a reasonable and mature person. But none of the parties involved owe you or HN anything. The issue is between them. If they choose to air their dirty laundry, so be it. But it's not an obligation.
My guess is that this conversation happened entirely in his head. His wife was in the room nodding and mumbling "uh huh" while he rattled off hacker-speak for way too long. He left off his wife's last line of: "Sorry, did you say something?"
Do you also hyphenate email?
But if you clearly don't have the domain knowledge required to make those judgements it really can be helpful.

I don't know anything about wine, and I really appreciate being told, "this is made my ____, they are super famous for ____".

then I can judge if I like it or not, regardless of how famous/old it is.

I also really like hearing other people's opinions and interacting with their excitement over "their thing" so ... to each their own I suppose.
Mob violence and various laws, actually. More than once mobs in the Northwest rounded up Asians and marched them to the docks.
Coding without source control is like using an editor without undo.

Use source control from the very start. Git is pleasant to use.
"A possible solution to this would be a published hash value from the original source."

If you get the government to agree to that, I think it would be trivial to get them to agree to release the documents themselves...
IMO the simplest resolution of things like the grandfather paradox are obtained by including quantum mechanics in the equation.

Usually in quantum mechanics we find that waves are quantized because they must be periodic over very tiny reaches of space, and the quantization comes about because only certain frequencies of wave can meet themselves over these distances.

But if we have time loops, it's pretty much the same thing, except the consistency conditions can be experienced on arbitrarily large scales - the quantum state where I kill my own grandfather is not a self-consistent loop, and won't exist as a solution to the wave equations. In essence, the "wave" that describes me killing my grandfather will interfere with itself over the time loop, and will eventually (hopefully? I don't have a proof...) converge on a wave that does reinforce itself, and ends up consistent. This may require a pretty serious divergence from what we'd usually assume about classical physics, even at the macroscopic scale.

So quantization is the real reason we shouldn't worry about the grandfather paradox; any solution to the equations of QM will have to be self consistent over a closed timelike loop, even if the results are ridiculous as far as classical mechanics is concerned.
I was thinking exactly the same thing, how much fun it would be to have this particular startup to run with for, say, Chicago. =)
Fully agreed!

Well, I didn't hate Primer, but genuinely thought Timecrimes was way superior. Plus the latter scared the shite outta me :-)
I am getting tired of all these articles analyzing twitter's userbase and the nature of tweets. Yes, there are a lot of spammers and "marketing gurus" on twitter. Yes, people tweet about nauseatingly stupid shit.

Use twitter how you want to use it, and how you get the most value out of it. Follow people whose tweets you enjoy reading. Can't we just leave it at that? Leave the rest of the twitter over-analyzing to TC, they certainly do enough of it.
Mostly a "RESTful framework" just allows you to easily map verb/noun combinations to functions. You create a noun (an object) with the standard verbs as methods, and it does the other stuff. Pretty basic, but it makes life easier.
That's just one protocol over HTTP, there are tons of others that are indeed useful and well written.
My library offers full-text search for the Trib's archives back to the 1890's, and so I searched for my home address to see if, you know, anyone had ever died in my house (answer: two people have! Jackpot!).

What I learned in the process of doing that search was how unbelievably biased the newspapers were at the turn of the century. There was minute up-to-the-minute reporting on every conceivable detail of the city, but it was laced with political agenda. You were getting a whole lot of information, but it was no more trustworthy than a blog post.
Not necessarily, since the problem is mostly bandwidth and distribution.
FTA: "When burned, a gallon of gasoline creates roughly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide"

Doesn't gasoline weigh around 6 lbs per gallon? How can that turn into 20? oh wait, oxygen from the air maybe?
H1N1: Vaccines for the young or old?
Same here. I thought it was pretty significant. Here I'm sitting at a big corporation, hating my life and counting down hours until the weekend... but maybe I should use the arrow keys and control the guy myself. He's not going to go anywhere until I start hitting those keys.
Is there actually a rape victim on display? I mean the naked woman laying on the sidewalk? That's awful.
Well, Putin is, similar to Bush, above the law.
I'm sorry, but you don't really understand REST. Structured URIs (like '/transfer/${id}/approval') are nice, but are completely unrelated to REST. In the real world they are often used in an anti-REST way, specified in advance instead of linked via hypermedia.

A design that uses only opaque UUIDs as names for resources and reveals them to the client via links in the responses is perfect REST. Clean-looking URIs are a distraction, except that they tend to be easier to preserve across software rewrites.
I'm probably not the only person on here who keeps any notes and planning documents for projects under version control. I also regularly import research notes into comments before I write the code in question, but I'm weird and I've been told I do too much design up front.
This just sounds like nitpicking, its like saying that open source authors are not really giving anything away for free because the person downloading the code is getting charged by his ISP for the broadband access.

Sure there is a business of distribution, of getting the product to you, but this has nothing to do with either the creation or the inherent value of the product itself.

For example, lets say you pay $10 or whatever to purchase via IEEE a pdf of a paper that details a new way of solving a specific problem with patch antennas. How does the value of those findings correlate with that $10?