skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It Depends. I wasn't trying to lobby for or against different granularities of asynchrony or where you chose to branch the execution path, but was merely trying to point out that asynchrony is still involved.

One of the more confusing things that I've experienced recently is that some programmers get a little fuzzy when you ask if an HTTP request is synchronous. That is, is the body of an HTTP response considered synchronous communication with the client. In my view of the system, HTTP (sans keep-alive) supports a single synchronous message and response, whereas some people try to assert that the response happens after the completion of the request is sent, so the communication is actually asynchronous.

From that point of view, I can see how the terminology is vague. However, if we are talking about program control flow and say that blocking on a function call is synchronous and various other forms of deferred evaluation are asynchronous, then the HTTP lifecycle starts to fit the "synchronous" model more closely (note that I'm not talking about http client libraries here.)

Anyway, this does lead into one of my favorite interview questions: "Is JavaScript multithreaded?" Many people get hung up on AJAX and setTimeout... but these are the same people that don't really get the tech at a fundamental level.
And recently Mozilla released Fennec for Maemo. :-)
> But for a lot of people out there, the experience on the net is full of suckiness, because they don't have all the knowledge that you do.

That's not my experience with regular-users, and I've been around such people a lot.

The experience when dealing with a computer in general is full of "suckiness" ... I saw people that can't use GMail because the left-menu which contains "inbox" and "sent" plus the top search-bar is somehow counterintuitive to them. So the IPhone/IPad experience can't change that with flashy buttons / pinch to zoom, although it is somewhat an improvement to regular interfaces (for phones at least, I have yet to see a study which argues that the iPhone interface is more intuitive or productive that your average Windows PC).

But other than that, the Internet experience is as good as possible ... when searching on Google for a definition, more often than not the first result is from Wikipedia (which contains articles edited by many regular non-tech users).

When wanting to contact old friends, I see many people not having trouble with Facebook. Surely some may be mislead by "the Facebook of Sex" by ending up in the wrong place, but I never see people stupid enough to not figure out something's different and that's not Facebook.

When wanting to read online newspapers, I never see people wondering were to find the desired newspaper, or how to click on a story-link. Surely, there are lots of wannabes out there, that's why as an online newspaper you still need marketing to grow your brand.

Email / IM are also 2 services that are used a lot. I don't see people having trouble using Yahoo's IM (and in my country, everybody with an Internet connection and his dog has a YIM account). Email is kind of tricky in a way ... to send emails to multiple people, they never use the BCC field, and that's a PITA sometimes, but it's not like their end-goal isn't reached.

So, when making such assertions, please provide references to studies ;)
Stuff which is sufficiently interesting and important I remember automatically; the rest I forget. Presumably that's the case with most people.

So, rather than enjoining them to memorise stuff which I find interesting, I'm better off enthusing about it and showing how interesting it is.
Glitch by TinySpeck. Flickr founder's gaming startup.
In depth with Tiny Speck's Glitch
This. I work on Java in Eclipse every day; it actually won me over from years of Emacs. But heavy-duty code navigation tools just manage the pain of bad abstraction, they're no substitute for a DRY language in which the work remains clear and concise enough that you can just sit down and read it.
Americans can (and do) travel abroad without having a passport, because their nation enjoys an extraordinarily close relationship with its two geographic neighbors.

There are about a hundred thousand French in America in the workforce. Most are married to Americans. There are about a hundred thousand Americans in France. It is one of the top ten destinations for Americans abroad. Intermarriage is pretty common in the United States. A very short list would include the mother of the President, the brother of the last President (who is a permanent candidate for next Republican nominee), and the last unsuccessful Democratic nominee.

America is by any objective measurement one of the most tolerant countries on the planet. The only reason it does not roflstomp to the top of the lists maintained by NGOs for it is that, curiously for organizations theoretically dedicated to tolerance of cultures not their own, they dock America points for having so many religious people. (No, really. http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/printerfriendly...)

Returning you now to your regularly scheduled depictions of the United States as a closeminded society.
Why two free stamps per month? If someone uses your free service for three months, or six, or twelve, what are the chances that they will upgrade to a paid service? Why would this be more profitable than a plain pay-as-you-go plan with no free stamps, or one or two initial trial stamps? If I choose to sign up with one of your monthly plans, will you offer me a refund of my unused credit if I decide not to use it?
Please stop mincing words; you know as well as I do what the phrase "free and compulsory education" refers to. Yes, it's tax-funded. No, taxes do not constitute enslavement. (And before you mention that you said "payment or enslavement of others", let's both agree to admit that you included the word "enslavement" solely for dramatic effect.)

I'm not going to play the "human rights" game, because you have no rights [1]. I'm going to say that providing education to everyone has been proven time and again to be good for society [2]. The attitude of "oh well it's not a right" is perhaps the greatest piece of sophistry I've been subjected to in some time, in that the definition of a "right" is entirely subjective and consequently useless. It is a right as much as the freedom of speech, in that it's provision helps to provide a basic framework that is necessary for a free society. An uneducated populace cannot perform simple democratic tasks, like, say, voting.

Speaking of which, why is voting a right? Doesn't counting several million ballots require "significant effort"? I certainly couldn't do it in an afternoon! Are you "enslaved" by having to pay for people to count ballots?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWiBt-pqp0E#t=4m0s

[2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/want-a-stronger...
In my opinion, we males have a tendency to think that the important part of the message is the logic part, the "what we say", in this case being "I would never buy my wife-to-be a diamond". Women have the tendency to look more at the emotional side, the "how do you say that".

It is interesting how you do remember the what but not the how. They are going to wonder why do you say that, if that is an excuse for not doing something...

I have seen real master in action, that no matter what they say to girls is going to work. The secret? The how.
s/great/well-designed\ and\ properly-tested/; s/good/feature-complete/; (Am I getting this right? My perl is rusty.)

It's hard to disagree with this guy. What's the point of a 5 megapixel camera if it can't focus properly?
so true. The original GMail launched with no "save" feature for drafts and it was a major inconvenience but my friends and I still loved it to death.
This was great - well written, quality advice, an area not overly covered. Thanks!
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That wasn't entirely clear: "experience of working in" is a little imprecise.

Was it full time work? That's very different from part time with other work supporting your speculative startup work.

You sound like you want to escape the corporate world, but have doubts about the startup opportunity you have on offer.
Visual Studio 2010 RC is available
Once again, Google and Apple get it, the rest of us don't. The revolution will not be televised. If you can solve a major problem I have, I don't care whether you try and solve all my other problems.
I think the answer is that we can worry about those problems once we solve the problem of not accidentally destroying humanity.
"I'm in a situation that is hard to decline it..." -- make sure you say "yes" for the right reasons.
Thanks for the link. I'm still trying to understand how it works. From what I understood so far, it emulates a keyboard and emits keystroke. How would this protect against a keylogger ? Same password everywhere ? Symmetric key encryption ? Did I miss something ? It doesn't look very attractive so far. The security principle is quite obscure and makes it look as another snake oil security product.
Good article and the core idea is so spot on that I did not mind it riding the iPad publicity wave...

This made me chuckle:

"""For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability."""
I wonder if this game will turn into a photo sharing site, like the first one?
I think the world's best accountant would enjoy accounting. I don't see why it would necessarily be more boring than many other jobs, and by and large only people who love their job invest enough time to be the best. (We're not talking "pretty good" here, after all.)
Yeah, sure. While we're doing this so-called "quality control", let's create App Stores for Linux and Windows as well, and make it impossible for people to install anything which doesn't go through a review process by clerks who probably have no idea about software development. That would awesome, right? No more malware!

Sheesh.
he is not dead
Rubber Washers, Rubber Bellows, Oil Seals, Guide way wipers manufacturers India
Esskay Polymers is a manufacturer of moulded and extruded rubber products such as O-rings, rubber washers, rubber oil seals, rubber bellows, rubber coupling & guide way wipers.
From the looks of the teaser, looks like it could be similar to Little Big Planet, which has been a hit on the PS3.
I think what is meant by that statement is that in an ideal scenario, the money supply would expand annually to the exact same degree as the net growth of the value of goods and services in the economy. Inflation is the degree to which growth in the monetary base outpaces economic growth, at least in the short term.

That definition obviously carries many assumptions about net investment flows, savings rates, market efficiency, etc., but I think it's what is meant by "faster than they should."
It's more likely that this might have morphed from game never ending.
I figure this is natural. I figure it would have been the same way in video games, if it wasn't for:

1: twitch reflexes are important

2: the cost of practice is zero- no risk, no $$$- so kids with lots of time can log massive playtime. Traditionally being older meant more experience, but now because of the growth rate of games, a young kid has more experience with modern fps's than an older player

3: there's no physical risk to the player. I feel this changes the landscape a lot; in the real world, say in the army for example, the chance of death changes everything.
Thanks! I made a comment about people nitpicking over spellings on online forums, including HN, a few weeks back, and someone replied saying they'd never seen it happen here. Example duly noted :-)
This is kind of like saying Obama is the the new Hitler but we mean the popular, democratically elected Hitler of 1934 not the genocidal maniac he became later.
Well, the alternative isn't that great either. At Berkeley, many undergrad business students had the option of taking an intro CS course (symbolic programming with Scheme; awesome course) or an interdisciplinary course called "introduction to computers." The latter was pretty much a joke; I remember helping some business friends with their projects, and it involved making HTML pages with frames and figuring out how to FTP files onto some servers. Pretty lackluster.
Tom Szaky: From Princeton to TerraCycle
Thats what I thought as well. I dont really get why they coloured them. The destroyer with the stripes seems to be quite camouflaged in black and white, it disrupts its shape. I understand that camouflage colours wouldn't work all the time, but orange and purple?!
The funny thing is, at least at Stanford, the students are warned at the beginning of the course that their assignments are automatically compared against all other submissions including those of previous years, and that the the comparison tool is quite smart; simple modifications like changing variable names will not fool it. It's a bit surprising the number of students who get caught anyway. Perhaps they think it is a bluff, or perhaps they get so caught up in meeting the deadline they forget all about it.
Nokia 5800 Themes : Avatar
I'd like to ask, maybe in everybody's name, what you mean by "dashboard", in practical terms.
On a tangent, I wonder why lots of people call it something other than "phc". I said phc a lot, its on the website as phc, but I've heard phpc, phpcompiler, and tons of variations. I'm curious why.
WTF?!?!

Hmmm interesting. The real story here seems to be that Taiwan is now part of China (or is it Russia)?

"Shanghai Jiaotong University took first place followed by Moscow State University. Third place went to National Taiwan University, and Taras Shevchenko Kiev National University finished fourth. The only non-Chinese or non-Russian team in the top ten was the University of Warsaw in eighth place."

Or could it be that Americans know or care nothing about anything that doesn't occur outside their own country?
I object to the formulation of the question.
Domain Experience gives Entrepreneurs an Unfair Advantage
> And rewriting a negative comment on your blog? That's just not done. Delete it, but don't rewrite it ever.

Why not? Its my blog. Its not like I hid it. Ultimately, to cultivate a good community, you have to have strict rules. Now I'm not exactly curating a massive community here, but it seems like an effective way of discouraging the kind of dickheadedness that was his original comment.
Mr Snake-Oil and Mr Know-It-All
Tory MP trials herbal Viagra live on TV
"...and its great that Google used this opportunity to illustrate the importance of search privacy to one of the world's largest audiences." I do not agree with this. I don't think that Google wanted to show us this, it rather is a negative side effect of this touching ad.
Well, stumm's response to my nit-pick is a better example of that.
I'd say that in the business product space, this concept still applies. However, the lack of features becomes a marketing problem to be solved (hopefully not by adding more features).
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I live in Toronto, and my understanding is that Mississauga's budget surplus is largely due to lot levies paid by property developers. Building a new house means paying around $20k in infrastructure fees (for new roads, sewers, etc.)

Most of the development of Mississauga happened from the 1970s onwards, so they are still in the honeymoon. I've talked to urban planning students about this, and the general consensus seems to be that they are going to be fucked when the time comes to start maintaining and replacing the infrastructure.

It's not quite as bad as some of the urban sprawl in the USA (I've seen Cleveland), but still a textbook example of short-term planning and unsustainable development.
Are people actually designing for Webkit mobile? I thought the big breakthrough with Mobile Safari was that basically every website on the web just works.

Okay I have to turn the phone sideways to read Hacker News comfortably, but apart from that it generally just works. Mobile enhanced sites are nice but if we had to rely on them then we wouldn't be getting any mobile web at all.

If the other phones can't render that non-iPhone optimised sites then they've got bigger problems than not being able to see the iPhone version, because only some vanishingly tiny percentage of the web is available in that format.

(I believe Opera's command of the market on lower end phones was partly due to very smart reformatting of standard webpages (done both server- and client-side.)
We actually got to put that in practice when we moved our servers to a new data center, although we used a uhaul. ~60tb in 1.5 hrs.
> iPhone was the first mobile phone which made ordinary web usable on mobile device for me ...

... while the rest of us did fine with Opera Mini on whatever "dumb phone" we owned. Try out Opera on one of Nokia's high-end Symbian phones one day (the N95 comes to mind). You'll be pleasantly surprised :)
I can only tell you that SMS is big in India. And when I say "big", I mean so mind-bogglingly, utterly huge that you're going to have to grow an extra brain just to imagine the sheer volume of SMSs Indians send each day.
Dashboard is a term of art in metrics-focused organizations, made by analogy to the dashboard of a car, which is the part that has the spedometer and other statistical displays that tell are designed to convey a lot of information at a glance while you're doing more important things (i.e. getting where you're going without killing any little old ladies with your car).

Anyhow, the actual implementation is just a web page (or similar) which has stats, graphs, etc for whatever metrics you want to display, designed to be quickly comprehensible.

If you give me a few hours to get back to my apartment (and Paint.NET) I'll screenshot mine, block out the private customer data, and show you.
>Boeing says the 747-8 will have 16 percent more cargo capacity, 17 percent lower fuel costs and 16 percent lower operating costs than the 747-400.

How do you think this is calculated? Does fuel costs get included in operating cost? Is the 17% lower fuel costs absolute or per unit?
Oops. Nit-pick got nit-picked :-)

I am Indian and English is not my first language, it's third after my local language and official/national language Hindi.

Thanks. Will try to improve.
It's your blog, but it's not your comment.
raises hand
No word from them yet. They normally strip query arguments. Hopefully they'll make an exception for versioning.
Toyota Prius software glitch forces global recall
In case anyone else was intrigued by this comment, I found some brief details of why convoys work against U-Boats on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convoy#Analysis
To me it sounds like you already know you don't want to do it and are looking to be convinced otherwise. I would go with your gut and keep your current job.
SMS:ing is bigger than (mobile) phone calls in Sweden, especially among young people — all they do is text each other, back and forth, even when calling might be cheaper. It's been this way for years.

Key reasons: receiving an SMS is free (I believe this to be true of most countries except the US).

Sending SMS as well as making calls is much much cheaper.

SMS are usually delivered the moment they are sent.
Firefox doesn't do that, your NSAPI plugins do: on Linux there are plugins that wrap mplayer, vlc, or totem supporting the quicktime API in widespread use. Unfortunately all of them suck terribly -- seeking is always broken, they always find a way to do the wrong thing wrt progressive download, weirdass YUV->RGB artifacts after dropped keyframes, etc.

You could write a new NSAPI plugin using ffmpeg that provides the <video> API but proxied through <object>, and package it in an XPI along with some greasemonkey-style extension code to rewrite the tags and provide the default playback UI.
Or focus on the practical, and use python (or some other nice language) to process screen scrapes, serve web pages, or something else fun.

You could write an application to scan your twitter feed for keywords, then take some action (send you an email?) if the keywords match.

You could process a whole stack of (say) project gutenberg books, looking for how word use changes with time.

Then you could try it with different data structures, and see which is faster (guess what - lists take longer than dictionaries for certain tasks!).
Actually it's not. At least not directly.

I think this is the post you're referring to: http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-become-rich-even-if-nobody-is...
The Danger of Crocodile Sales
Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder's gaming start-up
The apps I usually see frequent updates are apps where there's a lot of bugfixing or innovation going on, nothing wrong with frequent updates there.

I also think fake updates will tend to backfire on abusers, because users are presented with two options: upgrade, or uninstall.
That's an interesting perspective. Does the poster "own" the comment on my blog? Do I? Since he has no control over it, is it mine? Is it still his if he posted anonymously? Does the fact that he put my email instead of his in the email box hand control over to me?

All interesting philosophical questions. However, since I have editorial control, and determined that he was acting anti-socially, it seems perfectly fine to me to scribble over it (though I could see a problem if I wasn't transparent about it).
> And rewriting a negative comment on your blog? That's just not done. Delete it, but don't rewrite it ever.

I guess I should point out that it wasn't so much negative as a complete adhominem, name-calling, attack. I wouldn't have scribbled over a simple negative comment.
> If you give me a few hours to get back to my apartment (and Paint.NET) I'll screenshot mine,
> block out the private customer data, and show you.

I'm not the one you replied to, but: Will be interesting, thanks in advance!
This does not sound like the makings of a good opportunity.

The only really good bit you posted is the 45% equity, and that seems unrealistic to maintain over the long term. The company would most likely remain private, who would you ever sell this 45% stake to if you wanted to cash out?
Spider Man Movie
I kind of agree.

I hated History all through school but I found a copy of Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" I all of a sudden found myself engrossed by it. It was a bit above my level when I first picked it up but I kept going back to it.
Ask HN: Please review my startup for bicyclists
I didn't think of that. You're right -- knowing your users' background and knowledge is very important.

However, there are things that I believe simply shouldn't be carried over from desktop to web.

Even in desktop, modal dialogs reek of "I don't know or care how to do it better". Double clicks have a similar feel to me. And neither is much present on the web (1.0 and 2.0).

Even GDocs don't rely on double clicking (though they try to mimic the Office behaviour in other ways).

But sure, if the users never really used the web and are used to desktop tools, it would be easier for them if this program mimicked that.