skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even a decent ORM will only partially solve the problem.

For example, if you have an :active named_scope in rails that respects an object's active state, you still need to remember to do MyObject.active.find everywhere you want to exclude inactive results (meaning it's still just as easy to forget it). This got a little bit better with default_scope, but now you have the problem of trying to jump through hoops in the 1 or 2 cases where you do want to bring back inactive objects -- which, in my opinion, still imposes some sort of tax (albeit a slightly more readable one).

Granted, I'm still fairly new to rails, so if there really is a way to just be able to do MyObject.find in all cases where I want to ignore inactive records and MyObject.include_inactive.find in the 1 or 2 edge cases where its needed, then I will readily concede the absence of said tax.
Disclaimer: I'm an amateur in every sense of the word but eager to learn. A Craigslist API could make for some really cool mashups but many of those could probably also be created using the RSS feeds they provide. Do you see any substantial advantage to a distinct Craigslist API?
Can't you do that already with a simple scrape?
You seem to think I'm arguing that Apple's approach is better than Microsoft's. I'm not at all, just pointing out that there's internally-consistent reasons behind Apple's culture of preferring tightly-controlled, closed systems. The lesson learned from that brush with bankruptcy was that the cloned-hardware approach degraded the user experience.

Steve seems to think that the benefits of closed systems (standardised UI, fewer crashes) outweigh the costs (more expensive, less software). I don't have to agree to recognize that he's making a rational trade-off.
Thanks! It first occurred to me when we were trying to figure out why our most popular game, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, was our most popular game. I realized that it's essentially an "almost" generator; the game is always teasing you with cool possibilities (you'll jump your vehicle off a cliff and almost hit a raptor, and then later realize you can actually do this and the game will reward you for it). "Almost" is a pretty common trait in fun/addictive designs if you start looking for it...
I'm sure Google will get there eventually, as they're doing with all industries that traditionally make information inaccessible. Google just enhanced Google Scholar to be a major competitor to Westlaw, which should make a lot of frugal lawyers happy.
Well... Asimov and Clarke pretty much did run out of steam. Too bad - I think we could simulate them at 10% real-time in a couple decades, had they resisted, but there are some folks writing pretty relevant (and inspiring) sci-fi today.

And at least one of them is known for hanging around HN.
You'll notice that I acknowledge that an 8-9 year spread is admittedly a somewhat narrow range in which to back up my statement?

Now, do you think the statement, that personality and group chemistry outweighs age difference, should be refuted, or are you merely make a snark?
MyFantasyLeague.com has a read/write API: http://football.myfantasyleague.com/2009/export
I don't think he should've used the word sociopath. It already has a popularly accepted definition, and the concept that he's trying to represent doesn't fit well with it. If you want to read about real sociopaths, go somewhere else.
scrape != API
Phusion Passenger for Python?
You'll probably need quite a bit of money backing your startup if you're going to be handling enterprise data to let them know you'll be around years from now. Enterprises need that assurance before they'll even deal with you.
I'm loving it, but I do get your point. This particular posting, however, is especially relevant to me, as I had been noting with dismay, the silence of the mainstream media on this. To have the WSJ acknowledging the event (which I didn't know before this post) is reassuring.
"scrape != API"

No kidding. He's looking to get "comments for a given thread, score of posts and comments, and user information", which you can use an HTML parser (like Hpricot if you're using Rails) to retrieve any info you need.
Charlie Stross anticipated this news story about a simulated brain about as complex as a cat's with his Aineko character in Accelerondo, suggesting to me, that no, SciFi has not fallen behind actual tech advances.

http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_13809715
Of course it hasn't. The problem is that science fiction split into two factions. The people who thought sci-fi was about the pulp stories went on to write pulp stories. The people who understood the real idea behind science fiction became more commonly accepted as literature and get ignored by the so-called science fiction elite.

Science fiction's not about the technology. It's about creating a hypothetical situation and using it to examine ourselves. In good sci-fi, the only technology that exists is there to mirror us. Look at Dune, the greatest sci-fi I've ever read, for the ultimate example: It deals with ecological scarcity, religious fanaticism, chemical addiction, and a plethora of other topics, and merges them all together to create the core universe in which it takes place. What makes it good is how every bit of information about the universe is relevant both to the plot and to the social issues it talks about.

We still have that today. The problem is it's been co-opted by "serious" writers who include Herbert and Dick as literary canon. Doris Lessing, Michael Cunningham, a slew more whose work is science fiction but for the fact that it bears about it the pretenses of more literate fiction, so that it's ignored by people looking for the low-fi attitude of earlier science fiction, before it was commonplace.
It's not ugly. It's hideous. I use Stata (commercial) and R (free), and both have a much better language.

The only reason why people I know use SAS is to deal with very-big datasets directly, instead of having to partition the data by hand.
What word do you think he should have used instead?
Try Photos8 for public domain photos
Joe Haldeman: "Science fiction isn't about the future; it's about the present."
There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing

So is their real competition Hadoop and the other Map/Reduce frameworks?
His flagship heart hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery.

At only $2000 (or even $5000), and with better outcomes, I'm not sure why anyone who needs open-heart surgery isn't heading to this facility. Even factoring in transit costs, and paying out of one's own pocket, it's probably less than a 10% or 20% copay on a $50,000 open-heart surgury done locally.

It does sound as if real competition is finally coming to surgical medicine.
Local movie times. It's stupid this isn't available from someone. The only thing it's going to do is increase the number of people going to see a movie.

Maybe there's one now but 3 years ago there wasn't one and I had to build a scraper for Yahoo movies to build the product I wanted.
Ask HN: What did google do with my search results?
When I google docley my web application site's description comes up, but it points to a different domain with different
content (qdb.taranen.co.uk).

I am hosted with slicehost and asked them about this. Their reply:

174.143.153.245 is a Slicehost IP, but I see nothing in their account or records that I can find that would indicate they are pointing any DNS at your IP (which is how I suspect Google would have indexed that way). You may want to contact Google to see how they've come upon this index record for your site as I'm unsure of the specifics, but again, based on what I'm able to see I see no reason why this would be happening. They're not pointing any DNS records at your Slice IP so they're not (as far as I know) sending any traffic to your site via a URL you're unaware of.

I am not sure what to do or how to resolve this.
"SPSS, a maker of predictive modeling software"

AFAIK, SPSS mostly runs regressions.. linear, logit, clusters.. and same for SAS. Calling them "Business Intelligence" appears to me as some BS name to sound more impressive to mgmt in big firms.
Sorely needed. I can imagine pretty amazing mashups that revolved around your local community if Craigslist had an API. I'd imagine there would be a much bigger developer community than Twitter's because of the usefulness of their data and how important they are to local businesses
Direct link to Search Results:

http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=docley&b...
If you look at Google's cached page, it looks like they fetched http://qdb.taranen.co.uk/ at 2009-11-06 07:47:43 and your page came back.

When did you acquire your current IP address? If it was some time around that point, my guess is that they had your IP address before you did, and thir DNS (or google's cache of it) was out of date.

I am not sure what to do or how to resolve this.

I don't think there's anything you can do aside from waiting for Google to re-crawl. For future reference, though, this is a good reason to only serve up your site in response to HTTP queries which come with the right Host: header.
brain.pickle()
Well, frankly, I think it's obnoxious.

I wouldn't mind if it had anything to do with actual science, but this is just political fluff to make people feel good about their preconceived notions. HN's front page got spammed with it because it appeals to the political groupthink here, and the scientifically-illiterate mainstream media talking it up is only going to create more drama and less insight.

But I guess being more interested in science than ideology puts me in the minority around here, so whatever. Time to collect more downvotes, I suppose.
I'm a little confused by the quote from Dalton's admissions director: "[Test prep] is unethical. It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school."

If success on their test has a correlation of x with future success in school, a few hours of test prep shouldn't be able to wreck that correlation — assuming the test is good.

That said, I'm with her that unprepped/underprepped students are probably at a disadvantage. But that's a problem with standardized tests in general, and it's an extremely tough one to fix.
I noticed that too. I have had this IP for about a month now.

It's still pretty annoying and I don't really know what I can do about it.
For future reference, though, this is a good reason to only serve up your site in response to HTTP queries which come with the right Host: header.

Or add a <link rel="canonical"> tag, see:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...
doWhatIMean("parse a bunch of names and sort")

This is from the same framework that has winTheGame() and doMyHomework()
Care to explain why I'm being downvoted?

EDIT: If you're going to downvote, please leave an explanation to teach me what I'm missing. I'd sincerely appreciate that. Thank you.
Very interesting tool, the different skins and the freedom of defining action are lightspots.
Have you signed up for Google's Webmaster Tools? It gives you access to see crawl stats and errors.

They have to crawl your site to establish domain ownership, doing so may or may not speed up the re-indexing process.
College class schedules (as well as registration schedules). Currently, even the best are buggy, slow and cumbersome. I have to take certain classes at different schools in order to fulfill my degree requirements and keep working full time. So, I often need to search for a single class across multiple institutions for the time that fits.
Google Ad Planner has much better site traffic stats
My favorite part is when Boahen says of binary computing, "It was so brute force." I hadn't thought of it like that before, but it makes sense, and highlights how the perspectives of different people can shed light on a problem.
I just did that today.
He could have made one up, or portmanteau-ed something. That's what language is supposed to do when it fails to describe a concept.
Professional Hacks: Tricks of the Trade
Hunt down Matt Cutts or another Googleite and ask them to check it out. Such appeals have worked in the past.
I would be interested in discussing, offline (email in my profile) your actual knowledge of this issue.

The men and women that post and comment here are, in my opinion, among the best and the brightest. To dismiss the opinions of some significant proportion of them as "political groupthink" seems strange. Anyway, email me if you wish, so as not to pollute your 97 day experience with HN by continuing this subject here.
> if the ACM wants to start putting those papers up in HTML

ACM just set up a "trial deal" for access for programmers at my (largish) company. It's extremely expensive from what I've heard, so I don't think they're just going to throw them up on the web any time soon.

ACM's web presence == shit.
Hollywood: Les Miles help Alabama beat LSU
On a semi-related note that mail from slicehost is excellent customer service. A lot of companies could learn from that - right now they're getting valuable free marketing on HN.
This seems important because WSJ reporting on it, which will give the story exposure to all the talk radio stations and fox news who will probably cause some political ruckus over the next week, especially given the upcoming copenhagen conference.
I agree that this was great support.

This was the entire email:

Hey David,

When I do a dig on the URL in question, it comes back with the following information:

dig qdb.taranen.co.uk

; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> qdb.taranen.co.uk

;; global options: +cmd

;; Got answer:

;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 21877

;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;qdb.taranen.co.uk. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:

qdb.taranen.co.uk. 257 IN A 174.143.153.245

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:

taranen.co.uk. 172800 IN NS ns.123-reg.co.uk.

taranen.co.uk. 172800 IN NS ns2.123-reg.co.uk.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:

ns.123-reg.co.uk. 2320 IN A 212.67.202.2

ns2.123-reg.co.uk. 2320 IN A 92.51.159.40

;; Query time: 218 msec

;; SERVER: 10.6.24.4#53(10.6.24.4)

;; WHEN: Wed Nov 18 13:10:06 2009

;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 126

174.143.153.245 is a Slicehost IP, but I see nothing in their account or records that I can find that would indicate they are pointing any DNS at your IP (which is how I suspect Google would have indexed that way). You may want to contact Google to see how they've come upon this index record for your site as I'm unsure of the specifics, but again, based on what I'm able to see I see no reason why this would be happening. They're not pointing any DNS records at your Slice IP so they're not (as far as I know) sending any traffic to your site via a URL you're unaware of.

If it turns out that they are pointing DNS at your slice IP you would want to send them (or their DNS provider, which is not Slicehost) a notice asking that they stop pointing the name at your IP. According to the whois records, their name servers are set with:

Name servers:

ns.123-reg.co.uk

ns2.123-reg.co.uk

Let me know if there is anything else we can help you with.

Cheers.

--
Ben H - Slicehost
Join the Slicehost community!
Notices and Alerts
Follow us on twitter: @slicehoststatus @slicehost
Ender's Game is the best science fiction story (or story in general) I've ever read, and much of what makes it science fiction fades into the background as you read. The important thing when I read is the character, whom I can relate to, not the technology itself, which I can't.
Apple Exec's Backyard Is Designed for Barfing
Pretty slick. Wish it worked better in TextMate though. I'll keep this in my toolbox, but for now I think it's better to think outside the box with something like HAML which can capture these shortcuts in your actual code, so its easier to traverse. HTML has a ton of useless information, seems better to strip all that out and only focus on the underlying content and structure.
I think
brain.serialize()

would be pretty cool...
I am rather amused at the juxtaposition of a steam-era metaphor when discussing internet-age science fiction. It's rather akin to complaining about the quality of today's race horses when everybody else's checking out NASCAR.

Meanwhile, I'll be (metaphorically) hanging out with the likes of Stross, Scalzi and Banks. Scifi hasn't died - it never needed reviving. It's just that it's harder and harder every year to distinguish it from reality...
The Beagle Board is probably the closest thing there is to a desktop MB that uses the Cortex chips.
You need to get into more sci-fi and more literature. Ender's Game is just intro-level. It's got a plethora of problems, too: The more you read it, the more you realize what a deeply sick worldview it and its author have. I can still read some of the later books in the series, but Ender's Game nauseates me a little more every time I try.

That said: Orson Scott Card is an excellent teacher, and his story collection Maps In A Mirror unveils a lot of his tips for writing well.
have you heard of http://www.pachube.com?
I'd like an API that had a function similar to this:

make_this_many_dollars_magically_appear_in_my_bank_account(1000000000);
Or, even better, have a check to see if they're on the right host, and redirect them if not (that way you get the SEO+ from the other url).
Read it, and every essay Rao wrote before this. One of the few bloggers I know who are consistently interesting.
"Not perfect" is good enough for me. There's a whole class of applications where being able to take a photo of some words and have at least a few of them understood would be useful. I'd like to be able to index against the words that can be understood, and present the original image as the search result.
I had the same problem, worked over-time (startup life), and took classes at two institutions as a way around the bureaucracy for pre-reqs. I ended up automating the class look up process using selenium on Firefox. But then they called me in because my account was making requests every second, and were worried more students would try what I was doing and crash the system. (The DID tell me to keep checking for open spots, they never said to not use scripts)

This was the only way I could get the classes I needed to graduate on time
thoughts are to writing as data structures are to serialization stream
I read this article and the entire time I was thinking how easy this problem is solved with a good ORM, like in Django.

All I do is setup two managers, one the default so in the admin I can browse my records without any filtering and then a second one which I use exclusively in my views that simply adds .filter(hidden=False) to the get_query_set method. So simple, and have never ran into any problems.
Centralized Spam filter API with an access to Gmail spam filter, Yahoo Mail spam filter, etc. to report spam and check emails for spam.
While I haven't read Maps In A Mirror, I did read Card's Characters and Viewpoint, and found it rather lackluster in its advice compared to Stephen King's memoir. Considering that I like Ender's Game more than most of King's work, I thought that was a bit odd.

In response to your edit: sick in what way? I never got that sense.
Freebase? It has data on most movies in IMDB. And an open API.
I agree. Both HAML and SASS are a great way of getting rid of all the useless information.
Disclaimer: I'm not quantum-anything researcher. But: Based on the description of how "quantum encryption" works, I prefer to call it "quantum intrusion detection". It allows you to verify that the channel is free of eavesdroppers and get a stream of random bits that are guaranteed to only be agreed upon by the two ends of the connection, which can then be used for any other purpose that a stream of random bits only known by two parties can be used for. Using it for a one-time pad is the easiest thing from a theoretical point of view, but you can use it to feed a conventional encryption algorithm, too.

The real key isn't the "random", which is easily obtained from a wide variety of other sources, including fully unpredictable ones like decay sources, nor is it the "encryption" which is merely one application (though easily the "killer app") of the system. The real key is the part where you can detect any intrusion into the connection.

(Obviously, you, enki, know this, well, unless I'm wrong. I'm just elaborating.)
There was a mashup that did something with Craigslist and photos, but Craigslist shut them down. I think it allowed you to view the listing with the photos in it (rather than needing to click on each listing to see the photos).
Along the same lines, I like:

Whether good or evil, the morality of a sociopath is something he or she takes responsibility for.

Then later:

More people taking individual moral responsibility is a good thing.
Why centralized? Why not just make it decentralized with peering?
Sure. http://www.xmlteam.com

We offer stuff ranging from simple on-demand calls to our web service (you purchase credits, docs cost you X credits per access) to a Perl-based app that captures an XML feed and parses and inserts the data into a DB for you to use as you will at your end, usually MySQL but we support MS-SQL too.

We've got some pretty big clients: ESPN, USA Today are amongst them. We supplied Google with Olympic content during the Beijing Olympics.
I'm thinking that an electronic interface could greatly increase transfer speeds though.
Anyway, email me if you wish, so as not to pollute your 97 day experience with HN by continuing this subject here.

Your condescension is duly noted. Regretfully, I think I must decline your offer of a "discussion".
Are Advertisements True? New Lawsuits Are Asking for Proof
Ball gravy?
Science fiction's not about the technology.

Well, except that some of it is. I get the impression that what you're calling pulp includes all the sensawunda, which is all that really separates science fiction from other genres (since other than that, most science fiction is in another genre... fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, etc -- including Dune, actually).
I like ball gravy.
> Yeah, HTML scraping ESPN.com is not very hard.

I've seen a few people respond with this "you can just html scrape that." Sure you can HTML-scrape for the information, but the topic of this "Ask HN" is about what APIs you would like to see. Maybe he already HTML-scrapes ESPN.com, but would prefer that there was an official API for it, no?