skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firebase is a revolutionary tool, and this is the last piece that was missing from the big picture. It's hard to imagine a Firebase-driven world today, but in 5 years developers will need to quickly deploy and iterate on real-time applications, for which a system like this is ideal. Lay out your database, set up login and security rules, and deploy your application, all through the same service.

However, the lack of benchmarks is a bit disconcerting. Hosting and SSL are great, but if the page loads are slow I'd rather pay money to host them elsewhere.

Also, there is the single-point-of-failure problem, which materialized yesterday when Firebase went down. Although the outage was only for a couple minutes (a lot faster than it would take me to troubleshoot a downed Rails app), it made me realize the dangers of relying on a single system for all of your web application's needs.

Overall, I think Firebase is just going to get better and better. They still need to integrate payments, file upload, and the ability to make API calls to external services, but by adding hosting they are demonstrating a desire to provide services for the full stack. Also, there is a brilliant team of people behind Firebase, so I'm sure that my ideas for Firebase are only the tip of the iceberg.
I know this won't add much to the discussion, but I really hope he designed his 0wn casket using his signature style—that would be really fun to see and a great way to show one last piece of artwork.
We're building a single page app. Is it possible to use Firebase Hosting only for SSL and static assets and our own servers(exposing REST APIs) for dynamic content?
Can you try out my 3d game?
http://javascriptjamie.weebly.com/my-demos.html

Tell me what you think! Colors too bright? Is it slow? Feedback would be much appreciated!
FWIW, Salon.com these days survives on manufactured outrage and stories built for Facebook shares. You can do a whole lot worse than the NYT.
You know that's opt-in, right? And you can just click the gear or go here https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/settings and click "Disable" and then "Save".
Show HN: look – take a picture, text the link, peek at photos that disappear
On the other hand, Edward Snowden is quite happy about it... at least, happier than seeing what the US has become.
How To Crystalize Your Startup’s Mission
> That assumes these people are employable or want to work.

Do you have any reason to believe that we have a huge population of parents who aren't willing to work to provide for their families? Skills can be a challenge but it almost always comes down to other factors like whether jobs are available in their area, transportation and child care availability, and whether things like public assistance benefits were set up in a way which penalizes anyone who gets a job.
I think this technique is really cool but I thought I should point out that although continuous rAF makes it easy (you can set state directly), on but FF and Chrome on my machine, even when your page appears to be completely static it's consuming 10-20% of CPU constantly.

That's got a couple of issues.

1. It eats my battery

2. It DoSes my machine (10-20% not available for other things)

So, please don't do that. Set a `dirty` flag, call a `setState` or something that requests just 1 rAF or queues a task to re-render or something and then go back to sleep.
> Create new jobs for poor parents while simultaneously improving schools for their children?

Tulsa OK is trying that. Preschool combined with a jobs program.

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/22/304563233/what-exactly-is-high...
At the end of their 12 years of boarding school, is it still fair to say that these are kids from an inner city failed neighborhood? Much of the challenge with education in poor (inner city or rural) communities is that, at the end of the day, the kids still have to navigate the stresses and risks of home life. Eliminating that for all or most of the year (depending on your school calendar) would stack the deck hugely in your favor, and by the end of their high school abroad it would strike me as dishonest to refer to these kids as being "from Newark".

In my limited experience with kids from elite boarding schools (which tend to draw from already wealthy communities), graduates of these programs seem to tend more towards the culture of the school than that of their hometown. I think this effect would be even more pronounced in your proposed system.
For context, 2000 concurrent connections would be quite a large site. If you're hitting 2000 concurrents, $500 probably wouldn't be an issue for you. It's also worth noting that Firebase employs burstable billing at the 95th percentile, so only sustained overuse within the monthly billing period will result in a surcharge.

As for why we charge for connections in general, they do tend to be the most expensive thing to scale.  They're also useful as a proxy of how "big" a site is (in terms of users).  They're kind of the analog to "page views" in today's world of single-page-apps that update in real-time
WebBeak: Finally, a way to find out how many people viewed your Emails
I switched to node.js because it was the trendy new thing and I could charge 3x the rate of boring mainstream programmers to deliver the same product, except worse (because it's node.js).

I need a new thing though, since apparently node.js is getting too mainstream. Maybe if I can convince enough businesses that they NEED clojure, then I can go that route.
I assume that was humorous?

If you're not trying to be funny or follow some left wing variant, but really argue for a fundamentalist sharia state or similar, then I'll say:

"Have fun with tolerated slavery, oppressed women, maiming of thieves and religiously mandated hatreds. Welcome to the light when you leave the dark ages."
Sentient robots Not possible if you do the maths
And there, my friends, is the spin: "Let me poorly reduce someone's well reasoned statement into a biased sentence."
DNS, ELBs, ANAMEs, and TTLs, Oh My
Exactly. And don't get me started on all the buzz-following-I-never-wrote-two-lines-of-code hipsters at this events.

Oh! And also, Lego. I'm a grown man, come on!
Who would you say would be the losers in this scenario?
Were there reasons given for this? Two somewhat reasonable possibilities that immediately come to mind are (1) the difference between anecdotes and solid data; and (2) wanting to have decisions and rationales documented.
Nope, it calls it regardless of state change—that's the point, you eliminate the challenge of determining when state has changed.

To quote TFA:

> A set method to change state could trigger a rerender (React has setState), but there's an even easier way to react to changes: continuously call renderComponent with requestAnimationFrame to repaint the UI, and only change the DOM when the component returns different content.

Edit:

I was mistaken about how Om works. I was under the impression that Om scheduled a rAF every 16ms to check for state change. In fact, it only schedules a rAF once the state changes.

However, this relies on being able to listen for state change from the underlying model data. I was under the impression that one of the benefits of Om/React was that you could use its data bindings with any JavaScript library, even if it hadn't been instrumented for property observation. Instead, it seems that with Om, you are limited to consuming data structures that implement its state change notification interface.
You don't need a lawyer for corporate documents. Legalzoom works fine... California C Corp (if your exit is acquisition and Delaware Corp (if your exit is public). Most VC's have their own army of lawyers and if you need a lawyer when you have a offer in hand, then any will do.

Those two lawyers will be very different. A lawyer familiar with the drug laws will understand a jurisdictions ordinances and the states criminal code. Probably better to get a consultant... give him some equity for subject matter expert.
Microsoft announces Kinect-free Xbox One on sale June 9
omg, that's hilarious!
Which means what? Presumably Snowden would be happy anywhere he isn't being arrested and extradited back to the US.
I would phrase this another way: many things can be attempted. Getting people to actually permanently and radically change their behavior has to be one of the most difficult tasks in the world.
Unfortunately its not a startup topic. Decades ago we used to absolutely dread seeing a non-technical manager walk into a meeting with a copy of PC Magazine or similar, knowing that we're about to be lectured about "how it really is" and "the right way to do everything".
Billing is based on 95th percentile usage, so you wouldn't have to pay overages if you exceed the limits for a couple hours (e.g. you got front-paged on TechCrunch, HN, or Reddit)

From https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html:

> Because we use 95th percentile billing, you won't be charged for your overages 5% of the time (about 1.5 days each month).
"Getting shit done over attending meetings"

And yet I've seen "agile" teams waste more time in "agile" meetings than in anything else... except for PingPong.
Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too
Startup school receives $100 million in funding based on an idea..... and fails? I wonder if it was a mobile social local school like Color?

It seems that perhaps what is needed is a YC of education that provides small grants and helps with follow-on investment once those small bets pay dividends.

Education is fundamentally pretty simple, you need a room, a teacher, and a few dollars worth of paper. Seems like the ideal thing for a startup. Fundamentally once you teach a person basic literacy and basic numeracy they can spend the rest of their life teaching themselves.
I've used the Py2 csv module with csv files containing accented characters and had no issues. Could you post an example?

This works fine, as does the corresponding writer:

reader = csv.reader(open(FILENAME, 'rb'))
for row in reader:
print row

If you want a unicode string it's as simple as:

value = row[0].decode('utf8')

Then before writing:

row[0] = value.encode('utf8')
I'll never suggest that teachers are overpaid, but hyperbole doesn't help. The starting salary for the lowliest teacher in the Newark Unified School District is $54,300/year.

http://nusd.ca.schoolloop.com/file/1229222807370/12292234020...
Actually, if anything, the story is proof that the routers are not backdoored from the start

Let me preface my response by saying I think there are probably more non-malicious (accidental) vulnerabilities than intentional backdoors.

Schneier has seen many of the original documents, and his constant refrain is that NSA programs are robust -- that they have multiple totally unrelated ways to accomplish any one goal. Quoting one of his articles:

"First and foremost, the surveillance state is robust. It is robust politically, legally, and technically. I can name three different NSA programs to collect Gmail user data. These programs are based on three different technical eavesdropping capabilities. They rely on three different legal authorities. They involve collaborations with three different companies. And this is just Gmail. The same is true for cell phone call records, Internet chats, cell-phone location data."

https://www.schneier.com/essay-469.html

The takeaway is that, knowing the NSA has capability A doesn't prove they lack capabilities B, C, D...Z.
In general, yes, although I do have one major exception: paying teachers more would reduce turnover (which is expensive to deal with) and I think there's still plenty of room for improvement in support services: tutors, particularly for non-native speakers, special needs assistance, counseling / mentoring / etc. In many cases simply having a second person in the classroom who could help a kid who's struggling, deal with discipline issues, etc. without disrupting the overall lesson as much would be a worthwhile investment.

This would cost more, although I'd hope we could compensate by having fewer administrators making hard-to-discern contributions at [generally] much higher pay.
A Look at the Windows Phone 8.1 – Developer Preview
The Oatmeal's campaign to raise $8M from Elon Musk to build the Tesla Museum
Don't be fooled. Snowden is not in a free paradise, it's just one place the Obama admin can't touch him.
Check out r/SideProject. It's a subreddit I created to share and get feedback on side projects and startups.

http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject
Sanctions with a country as large as Russia are defiantly a two way street.

Sometimes people appear to forget this during talk about handing them out.
There are some good points in the piece, but aside from "You can easily hire people to work on the latest hot thing" the benefits boil down to some back-end architectural patterns that make good sense, and are achievable on many different stacks. We too build "small modules piped together" however we use python, java, and redis or rabbitMQ for the plumbing. I have some problems with python as an enterprise development language, but many more with JS. Lately my colleagues and I have been talking about Go a bit, so we'll see where that... um... goes.
A quick google gets me this quote:

"Chicago school teachers make a median salary of $71,017. That's a whole lot more than the city's median household income (which can include multiple salaries for households with more than one earner) of $46,877, and greater still than its median per capita income of $27,148"

According to the actual Chicago Public Schools site that average is now $74,839. "Low pay" seems like quite a reach for me, especially for an employee who works only 9 months out of the year.

I agree with your last line very much, but I don't think it hurts to aim some focus towards getting students that extra 14%.
The answer to that is to get people the background to understand a problem.

People go to to med school to become doctors, you don't automatically blacklist everyone of a particular socioeconomic/racial background (NB: there's a word for this..) as being incapable of having the background necessary to be a doctor.
I'm not saying there would be losers. But his scenario proposes, essentially, "I'll bet that if I take a random group of at-risk kids, move them to a system where they spend 100% of their time living, studying, and playing in a well-staffed, well-resourced, safe program, that those kids will perform better than their once-peers."

To which the answer is "Of course."
OpenSees Days Portugal 2014 na Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Ukraine Military Convoy To Send BIG TANK Into Near Slaviansk | 13 May 2014
Ukraine Military Convoy To Send BIG TANK Into Near Slaviansk | 13 May 2014 | RAW VIDEO
You could also suggest using a free service like:

http://wwwizer.com/naked-domain-redirect

It'll 302 redirect naked domains to www.domain, which will resolve to whatever you've configured it for.

This should let you chain A -> 302 redirect -> CNAME and bypass the GitHub DDoS protection.
I thought about that too, but then we would just be encouraging people to watch as the year wraps around at midnight on 1 January. That milestone is usually overshadowed by other things.
Schools like this - proof points that low income students can succeed - already exist today!

For example: Summit Public Schools in California, FirstLine Schools in New Orleans, Excel Academy in Boston - just to name a few I've seen first hand.
Spoken like a true believer.

It depends on what that teacher's other opportunities were.

Based on how some of these teachers taught school some twenty years ago, when I was a student, I'm willing to bet some of them would never be employed in any other career, if they were to lose their jobs.

Teaching is a tough job, but if you see how teaching is done, you can see its not actually being done in the "difficult" way. People are just warming their seat cushions.

Don't muddy the waters with your romantic notions of some hard working hero toiling against the system.

I'm happy to pay more taxes to give new teachers $100,000 a year in pay ... but not these low-quality morons that they stuffed in my school when I was growing up. And certainly not for these armies of unnecessary administrative drones.

Tenure is a stupid f'in concept. I'm not guarded for life in my job. I don't see why a teacher should be.
I'm curious which part of React you consider the hammer and which part you consider the screwdriver.
>"That assumes these people are employable or want to work."

I'd say that seems more reasonable than assuming the opposite, but not at all surprising that you would feel otherwise [1][2].

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700903

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566117
"It came in the form of philanthropic donations, which, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending."

This is why we should raise taxes on Billionaires. A lot of them are willing to give away a lot of their money but, no matter how well intentioned they are, they are not as good at spending money for the public good as the government is.
This is exactly what I had in mind. I'm thinking about the school I'll build when I'll be a billionaire.

And no, it's not an orphanage. These kids are a burden for their poor parents who try to provide for them, and fail, and have their heart torn apart failing that. And the kids see their parents' misery, and have their heart torn apart, too.

It's a convolution of sadness with itself.

I had this exact same plan, starting at the youngest possible age, so they grow with you. The school teaches them everything, so they become normal human beings and not ghetto people. I don't think there's a single parent who'd like his child to grow up in misery, and if there's a way to shield that child from this shit-hole, I think any parent would be willing to do almost anything.
Search Inside Buildings With Google Indoor Maps On Your Android
I wish this model would work, but I don't think it does in practice.

For one thing, it drives the value of the ads you do show way down to commodity prices. Think about it: no advertiser is going to spend big bucks on ads that are literally only shown to the cheapest and least engaged members of your audience.

It also misaligns the incentives. Now the ads function like the "nag screen" on old shareware apps. The site's revenue is tied to the ads being annoying enough that you'll want to get rid of them.
Ohio measles outbreak largest in USA since 1996
The median Chicago teacher's salary is over $70,000. I'm not sure the "advanced degree" is required (the degree you're referring to is a Masters in Education).
I used to be in 'Enterprise' development and I have noticed that a lot of people I knew who were doing PM work have now jumped onto the Agile bandwagon.
Yes. We think our hosting service and realtime backend complement each other nicely for building modern web apps, but you certainly don't have to use both. :-)
I think you're mistaking "common wisdom" for research. A lot of people like to say 7 +/- 2, but as I understand it, that number comes from studies of short-term memory. (It's why phone numbers in the US are 7 digits.) Research of teams (not specific to Agile) puts the maximum effective size closer to 12, and the maximum size of a "tribe" around 150-200.

My own experience is that 12 people works great for an agile team, with 6-8 of them being programmers. If you're not using pair programming, cut those numbers in half.
Tragically opening a call center likely wouldn't help at all. Many people in poverty in the US are actually better off staying unemployed because their entitlements (food stamps, housing assistance, free child care, etc) go down or disappear if they get a job.

Our current setup is severely broken and full of perverse incentives that trap people in poverty. In an effort to prevent abuse we've stripped eligibility for assistance programs to only the near-destitute but then set the payouts at a higher level than many of those people are likely to earn on re-entering the workforce.

Dozens of programs, at both a state and federal level, would need to be overhauled so that the incentives led people out of poverty instead of creating a chasm between government dependence and entry-level labor.
requires an advanced degree

For no reason whatsoever besides credentialism.

very long hours with no flexibility

My dad worked hard as a teacher. But he didn't work 60 hours a week or anything like that. He'd grade papers while the kids were doing homework.

low pay even before you adjust for true hours worked

Two months vacation.

and you are given very little professional discretion.

I agree with you here. The constraints put on teachers and schools by all sorts of outsiders are very limiting.

Most of them are because the people paying the bill want some sort of feedback and control mechanism. Instead, I think teachers should be given great leeway, but also be very easy to hire and fire. If a parent isn't happy with their teacher/school, they shouldn't need to appeal to the schoolboard to place rules on the teachers. Instead they should be able to vote with their feet. Exit beats voice.

To put some facts into the discussion: this assessment by the American Statistical Association found that teachers are responsible for 1 to 14% of student's test score variance

If the theory is that teachers aren't that important, we shouldn't worry so much about who they are, or if we are paying enough to attract quality teachers. NB I am not saying I agree with the antecedent.
Yes, although the real-time database that comes packaged with a paid plan wouldn't be used. If you're looking to fully utilize Firebase you could add a live chat feature or real-time commenting to your existing website, while maintaining your existing API for dynamic content.

You can make everything Firebase-related happen at the JavaScript level (which is why hosting is valuable to Firebase users in the first place).
I would argue that React is closer to a library than a framework. It's a small library with some useful functions for making web components. It helps by removing a bunch of boilerplate code that you would have to re-write with each new app. The thing that it doesn't do is hold you hand and tell you exactly the way things should be done as some of the other frameworks do.
> As a developer, I want to think about code. If I have the choice of learning something new, or digging into a new skillset it is going to be about code- not project management.

Obviously this.

I suppose I might attend an agile conference in the unlikely event my employer desperately wanted to send me to one. Even then I'd probably try to discourage them from the notion in order to get the money spent somewhere more productive (technical conferences, specialized training, etc.)
But, of course, the "if we don't like Node.JS, we just don't understand the true way(tm) of using it" card.

Such narratives usually get louder and louder, until they flip and all the former supporters of X suddenly proclaim "I can't keep quiet anymore, I must speak against X".

I've seen this too many times.

I like Node.JS, it's a good thing it exists, but no technology is perfect and we should be capable of honestly discussing the strengths and weaknesses of a given technology.

No comment on typing, if you can't bother to do basic research over whether what you say makes sense in real projects.

I'll just say that in 2014 proclaiming that your multicore application architecture is spawn() and fork() can only induce laughter in the presence of proven distributed computing algorithms that don't require every developer to use a roll-your-own message passing library and protocols.