skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's great to see someone make a run at a more decoupled ruby web app approach. I hope it succeeds.

In my experience working on Obvious (http://obvious.retromocha.com) it is hard to get Ruby developers behind decoupled architectures because the large majority aren't Ruby devs, they are Rails devs and Rails happens to be in Ruby.

Also, the larger group of developers doesn't like the idea of an app being a giant collection of very small objects. It's like there is a gravity to the notion of objects where we think of an object as something akin to a car, not the thousands of parts that make up a car.

Last, I think the idea of MVC doesn't place the appropriate number of objects for the different roles in normal request processing. At a reasonable point of complexity really end up with routes, controllers, entities, data access objects or repositories/adaptors, presenters, views, templates, helpers, utilities/libs, and probably some other bits of random code in there somehow. That doesn't fit the 3 role view of the world that is MVC.

Lotus does a better job than most of addressing such things, but I think the MVC approach in general falls flat.

That lack of appropriate roles means that as programmers we invent a lot of names, patterns, roles, etc. to fit what our code actually ends up doing. That's why you see a lot of service patterns, presenter patterns, etc. being attached to Rails. Everybody is duct taping their approach to the notion of MVC, but very few are saying "what if we didn't see request processing as only having 3 roles?"

MVC is better and cleaner than writing a page as one giant PHP file maybe, but I've seen it fall down so many times that I no longer trust it as a useful pattern or abstraction for expressing request processing and HTML string manipulation in code.

In fact, if we were building command line apps and writing to files, I don't think we would use MVC at all. But, since we're writing strings of HTML, it's totally different right?
We don't have "loads" of top-skill talent to begin with.

The pool of top-skill-talent-with-a-self-esteem-problem is rapidly diminishing.
Doom as a System Administration tool (1999)
The notion of "possession" plays a very strong role. As noted by other people on this thread, there is strategy in sitting on the ball once you pull ahead. In the light of the simple model above, this can be seen as controlling "N", the number of possessions, rather than any single Ci (goal). The model above does not allow for such an "N" (i.e., where "N" is a function of the partial sum C1 + ... + CM). It basically assumes possession trades back and forth a significant number of times, independently of other stuff.

"team of random people...so false it's laughable..." -- Absolutely true. This fallacy is implicit in some of the language in the OP, which, incidentally, seems chosen to goad fans.

But I don't think it's a problem for the model. Basically, there are two per-possession goal probabilities when team A plays team B (call them G_AB and G_BA; they are between 0 and 1).

These numbers are a function of both A and B, because if Team A is really bad, and B is good, then G_AB ("chance A scores on B") will be really low. But if C is just as bad as A, than G_AC will be moderate.

The expected points scored by A is N * G_AB, and by B, N * G_BA. The model allows G_AB << G_BA, and indeed G_BA ~= 1, so then it predicts B will almost always win the game.

Note that the Poisson limit will not apply if G is not pretty low (say, less than 0.1), and you need N moderately high (say, bigger than 10) so that N * G will itself be moderate.

*

The issue (not well articulated in TFA) is that when both Poisson variables are expected to have low counts, it's difficult to distinguish slightly-different per-possession probabilities.
> A complete web framework has client-side components that facilitate two-way communication to/from the server, data binding, HTML5 history state-based page/view swapping, etc. In other words, the type of stuff being addressed by Angular, etc. <

What you describe sounds very much like Plato's shadows (search for "Allegory of the Cave") when compared to a native application.

Web browsers aren't operating systems. They weren't and still aren't designed to be general application execution environments.
Dead Peasants Insurance. The name says it all really. Banned in most countries, for good reason.

Edit: The downvotes are interesting. People don't being reminded it is banned for good reason, or object to the well-known industry-wide perjorative name for the said insurance? Wikipedia covers the reason for the name well enough - look it up!
No, if I choose Sequel (http://sequel.jeremyevans.net) I want to use all the power it gives me, not some lowest common denominator.. Also not all projects needs models, you know, there's other data access patterns..
Things more 'physical' than apps have been made and distributed in an attempt to solve a problem the wrong way, or even the wrong problem entirely. History is littered with examples of great aspirations and benign intent that either failed catastrophically or caused more harm than good, or frequently, both.

A somewhat recent example that pops into mind is this PRI story about the Soccket...

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-04-08/impoverished-kids-love...
Also relevant:

Doom as an Interface for Process Management:
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

Doom SysAdmin Tool:
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_SysAdmin_Tool

More: https://www.google.com/search?q=doom+system+administration
In late 2011, when I won a fitbit in a white elephant party, I came to the awful realization I only walked 4,000 steps per day. Over the next 2 months, I gradually upped my steps to 20,000 steps a day and lost 13 pounds.

I am now known as the fitbit fascist by my friends because whenever someone kvetches about their weight, I offer to buy them a fitbit. I have followed through on this twice. In both cases, the victims wore their fitbits for several months and then gave up on increasing their daily step count, removing their fitbit so they'd stop being reminded that they were only walking 2,000-3,000 steps per day rather than do something about that.

Figure out why that happens and I think you'd drastically increase how to increase the mass market appeal of quantified self wearables like this.
I wonder if folks would be less cynical about this if they gave it a name other than 'the Wolfram Language'

That's a non-starter. Have you ever seen a copy of A New Kind of Science? Stephen figured out how to get his full name printed on every single page. That was no accident.
I think the point is that smart money / people are not being given the funding they ought to be in the world, when our wonderful market driven economy prioritises crap like Yo app.

Mis-allocation of resources thanks to market forces. Though I am guessing the pro capitalist people on here won't like that and try to justify it.
Have a MacBook Air You Don't Want? Microsoft Will Buy It For $650
Domain name registrar like Hover, NameCheap, NameBright and NameSilo still do not yet support DNSSEC (nor have an ETA for it!). Here is a list of DNSSEC supporting registrars: https://www.icann.org/en/news/in-focus/dnssec/deployment

Based on pricing ($9.99/.com) and a growing irritation with GoDaddy, I finally moved my domains to Dynadot:

https://www.dynadot.com/

They have a (custom) 2FA app and 2FA SMS. BTW this friend referral https://www.dynadot.com/?s9N6j7d9G8B07i73 gives you & me $5 after purchase.
One thing I don't quite understand - wouldn't it be possible to unravel a botnet? If you acquire one of the infected machines, a bit of reverse engineering (or perhaps just monitoring its network traffic) should presumably be able to reveal where it gets instructions from. It would probably take the cooperation of law enforcement, but assuming that, wouldn't it be possible - even practical - to do?
These days not having gapps will break a surprising number of apps. I know this because I run cyanogenmod without gapps.
EBS-SSD Boot AMIs For Ubuntu On Amazon EC2
Nikki, I just sent you a request for an interview on Mixergy. This is a courageous post.
In my opinion, timing attacks are a major issue with cryptographic schemes written in Haskell. Perhaps there is some way to leverage the type system to create provably constant run times for particular chunks of code. I'm not sure how far this idea could be extended - perhaps it could even be implemented as a GHC extension, so that regions of compiled code contain cache timing attack mitigation.

Essentially, the problem here is that any decision based on secret information must act exactly the same regardless of the result, e.g. a secure string comparison should examine the entire string before concluding that the strings are different. Additionally, any decision based on another decision involving secret information must also follow the same rule - secret information contaminates regular information. So perhaps the solution is to give secret information its own type, incompatible with regular information, unless explicitly interacted with using a special interface.
Every time I read about Rust I have to fight the urge to drop everything and just chase it. So much awesome going on over there.
Sure about that? Try browsing http://forum.dlang.org/

Especially if you're in Europe (I get a ping time of 24 msec from Switzerland), the pages load nearly instantly. It's actually the sort of thing that you notice and go "whoa" it's so fast.

Yet there's nothing special about it. It's just a regular web server, written in D, that serves pages really fast (probably out of cache).

If you use HTTP caching and compression appropriately, and keep your design light, there's no particular reason you need to use Javascript to speed things up.
> This is such an important point, and why free markets work best.

Free markets don't work best, popularity is not best; free markets cater to what people want, not what they need and certainly not what's best. Absolute belief in the free market is a religion, not a fact supported by history.

Market driven economies are wonderful for producing loads of crap and me too-ware and woefully inadequate for solving really hard and necessary yet not immediately profitable problems. Quite simply, market driven economies optimize the making of money, not the solving of problems in the best way.
How War Can Bring Peace
There is is a windows version too: https://github.com/artygus/ios-webkit-debug-proxy-win32
And yet we still have successful socialism-based projects in the US. The reality is that capitalism isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to solving all problems. We can stand outside of economic systems as moral beings and decide what ends we want to accomplish as a society, and find the best means to get to those ends.

To sacrifice the role of morals and ethics in forming societies at the altar of capitalism denies us one of the things that makes us human. If capitalism gives us "Yo's", then we may want to question why, not defer the morality of "Yo's" to capitalism and shut our brains off.

(And no, I am not making a moral statement about economic systems. I'm capitalist as fuck, but even I think if the Yo story is what it seems to be on the surface, something seems wrong.)
Sometimes people need to be reminded that there is a lot happening in the world outside of the sphere of influence that they exist in. As a global society we are leaving segments of our population behind and it is unnecessary and cruel. Do we really need more distractions and toys if we can't fulfill basic needs like food and water? Put yourself in the shoes of someone that experiences real needs (not wants) for a while before you judge the author's criticisms of our self indulgent society.
He hasn't given a chosen cause. Just says that Yo is trivial crap.
If you have a Rails App, you should consider Ninefold.com. You deploy direct from Github (or your Git Repo) and can have a VPS in the same security group if you need a utility box.
Building a nuclear power plant solves a lot of energy problems. Getting a permit to build one is more challenging than assembling the engineers to do it.

Innovating on the hospital is not even legal. You don't need to ask permission to develop an app (unless you count Apple's process as permission).
I think we'll figure out how to make an intelligent being before we're able to figure out how to make an intelligent being that also harbors the subtle contradictions that make us human.
A Window into Airbnb’s hidden impact on S.F.
Louis, Son, Is that you?
> The problems facing us - energy, food, water, health, education - require big solutions and we are just starting to see some of these solutions come out of a new wave of startup businesses. For me, innovation and invention doesn't come from the top, but it comes from the bottom. It comes from disruptive startup businesses who dare to try something new, who dare to think a bit differently.

Do you know anyone who writes about these sorts of things? I.e. innovative technologies that ultimately aspires to improve the world around it a little bit (and not just in the stereotypical SC sales-pitch way ;) ), and not just the bottom line? I would like to read about stuff like that, either people who are doing it or just ideas.
Stack Overflow Inspired Scientific Discourse?
I'll probably still have to scale myself...

This sounds painful.

Dokku is only a single VM solution though, right? Flynn (http://flynn.io), the all grown up Dokku, isn't production ready yet.

I'd love to hear that I'm wrong and that scaling up with Dokku is a piece of cake. If so, please correct me!
It turns out that others have noticed the Poissonian characteristics of soccer scores, and taken the idea farther. See:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.0797.pdf

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
I didn't mean it absolutely even though I wrote it that way, obviously there are many other factors and exceptions, but this is one factor that would work against a person.

As for indicators, I think that people who have worked together for a shorter amount of time are more likely to break up. This is because fights and disagreements between co-founders are inevitable, and in startups they are more intense compared to regular business working relationships. When you have history with your cofounder, then you've likely survived those fights and are more likely to get through the ones coming.

Of course, this is simply one of many factors.
"I therefore find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving these problems, instead put their efforts into something like Yo."

Since when is this stuff zero-sum? Yo allegedly took 8 hours to build. Sure, during those 8 hours, Moshe Hogeg wasn't out solving the "big" problems, but in that day alone, he had 16 other hours, to do things the OP might deem worthy of his time.
Scrolling is completely broken for me on ios devices (both an ipad and an iphone 5c). Why is there so much temptation to mess with how the user scrolls?
As a very wise man once said[1]

"It ain't about hard you hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. Now if you know what you're worth, now go out and get what you're worth".

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z5OookwOoY
This is the purpose of marketing, and advertising in particular: informing your (unaware) market that you exist. Lots of marketing and advertising 101 texts out there.

Find places where your target market congregates, and find ways to target them individually.

I'd imagine your target market is generally deal-savvy. I also assume you've done research and determined that there's a portion of the market that is deal-savvy but doesn't like the "hunt" or the "chase" of tracking down the best deal themselves, and that that segment was worth making a product for. I'd advertise on sites which attract deal-savvy shoppers, like Woot and Slickdeals, both of which have their own advertising offerings and don't just use AdWords/DoubleClick.

You can't find a person when they're in the mood to go electronics shopping, but you can find the product they're looking for. I'd take out Google Adwords ads for brand names, product names and model numbers. Amazon and eBay affiliates do this in bulk already. Maybe don't choose the best sellers in a category, since those might be expensive spots, but maybe the second-tier products to start?
Minecraft mods are implemented in java, not in minecraft itself. I guess you could make a case that any game with a level editor is a platform. However, no level editor I have seen comes close to what SL does. All these concepts are blurry, its like debating how to classify a piece of music.
Telling other people what to do?
What kind of habit is that that I am suddenly seeing all over? People telling others what to do.

Right now, on the Hacker News Frontpage:
* We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7934177

It goes on to rant about how people waste time and money building something like Yo.

Then today, I was at a place meeting some people, and we came to talk about what I am doing in the moment. I go on and answer: "I am working on a web-platform right now, for some startup-idea". Then the some person starts going on: "Well, you should always be pitching your idea, don't just say 'some web-platform', blablablabla". Well at that time I guess I wasn't in the mood talking about it in detail. But anyways it is the same pattern, people feel like telling others what to do. It feels kind of rude to me, and makes me feel uncomfortable.

Then, the other day, I was listing in on a conversation in a cafe, (I was sharing a table, so I kind of could not avoid hearing everything the said). So, they are talking about picking up girls, so one guy says to the other: "If you like that girl, you should go and chat her up." And the other answers that he does not feel comfortable about it, so he won't do it. Which of course gives the other person the opportunity to go into a lengthy tirade, about what "shy guy" should do, and how he should do this and that, and push himself, and be more outgoing, and talk to her, and blablabla, ... I will spare you the details.

In the end, this habit of conversion makes people feel uncomfortable, and above all, people don't change their behavior anyways. The only thing it achieves is making the "advice giver" feel better, because he shared his pearl of wisdom with a "lesser" peasant.

For me as an outsider though, I see the person as a bully and a jerk, someone I'd rather not spend time with.
PsySh
Speaking as an industry outsider, I don't agree with the assumption that fresh-faced app programmers have the capability to solve any real world problems.

Why ignore the possibility that writing apps, new web frameworks, and "pivoting" is in fact the best possible use of this talent?
There was (and still is) a need for seamlessly storing one's documents in a secure safe, somewhere, where durability is guaranteed, and sync them between one's devices. Dropbox stepped in with a solution to this problem, and someone here on HN dismissed it with "it's just a glorified FTP".

It turns out that Dropbox has set the standard for how to store files on the cloud and sync them for the masses. My gut tells me they're losing grounds to the GDrive/OneDrive/iCloud et al but it's still a default option for many people. In that sense, they have "won" this domain.

Now, don't mistake me: Dropbox and the likes have created a huge problem with data privacy. But as FOSS developers, we must not think that somehow Dropbox doesn't exist or doesn't solve a problem; if we want a better, FOSS alternative, we must set the bar at least as high, and not blind ourselves.
There will be "playgrounds" that demonstrate different features and domains for you to live-code in your browser, and those will be AFAIK signup free, but that feature isn't quite ready yet.
Buffett said it himself in couple of his annual reports although I cannot remember right now which one.

I will reply tomorrow if I can remember till then you can read what Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathway's VP) has to say on this

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/38_Munger_0.... ( Page 3)

and check out Alice Schroeder's comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnTm2F6kiRQ&feature=youtu.be...
>If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.

20th century was spent exploring the alternatives to such a decider. As the result we do know that "making money" is the most efficient and effective decider that humanity has so far been able to come up with. Basically the humanity is just too stupid to use anything else at the moment.
There's also a "market" of ideas and opinions. The OP expressed one.

The OP isn't a jack-booted right-thinking enforcer. The OP isn't even a "moral crusader", as you put it. In a free society, it is perfectly reasonable to gently mock people you believe are engaging in stupid and/or pointless pursuits. As the OP did. Of course the people doing the dumb stuff are free to scoff and ignore them. As you are.

Anyway, I think the OP has a perfectly valid point. Just because there is some market demand for an app like Yo, doesn't mean that we are predestined to make building it our life's mission. Some of us, if we slow down and reflect, might opt to be remembered for doing something other than: "Invented an app that no consumer was willing to pay for, and which solved no meaningful problems for anyone, but which some investment bankers managed to persuade some big company had strategory value. RIP".

That's fine if all y'all want that on your tombstone (the other kind of tombstone), but it's also fine to at least reflect on whether that's really what you want.
To do something off hours implies a self-esteem problem? That is absurd. People do stuff off hours in return for something, which might be compensatory "time off", additional pay or bonuses, etc.
While I have some sympathy for your point of view (after all the guy is free to say what he wants) I still think the argument is facile. A few thoughts:

- As others have pointed out, talent is not fungible. Just because you can program Yo, doesn't mean to can solve other issues.
- If everyone is so convinced that Yo is such a dumb idea, do you really want the founder who's "capable" of doing something so stupid working on serious issues?

- What is worthwhile? If you view Yo as art (in the modern sense) it's pretty effective! Seems to have made the entire tech community collectively think. That's a hard thing to do. We don't mock the choices made by Banksy (who on the surface is a vandal)... Perhaps Yo will be a godsend to folks with severe disabilities, allowing them to simply communicate with others nearby easily and effectively. Or perhaps it's just fun. Why is that bad?

- Or maybe the whole thing fails and that's OK. Far more 'worthwhile' companies have failed.
Yahoo Aviate
Slightly OT, but as a mobile guy who occasionally toys with server-side programming, authentication is always where I get stuck. I'd like to see some examples of how to implement authentication and sessions cleanly without too much framework magic. Any pointers?
If you were Google, would you want to support/build on/integrate GoDaddy's existing systems, or would you prefer to go for a clean start?
I'm surprised by the number of comments criticizing this post. Yo really is utterly pointless. Sure, they have every right to exist, and might even make some money. But it's still a joke. It is a parody of the efforts being made every day to improve the world with technology.
As a seasoned engineer, I could not agree more with the justifications you provide.

As a business owner who's customers are actively engaged with my staff who need servers and resources to be available during the day when, you know, my CUSTOMERS are awake, your recommendation for outage windows would be completely ignored.

You schedule outages around the people who pay the bills, not the people who don't.