skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, this is basically Olark (a YC company). We use Olark and are happy with them.
The first heading: "_bear_ with us".
The next time you see the moon like that, turn your head sideways: It won't be so big anymore.

The psychological effect depends on the horizon. Tilting your head to the side alters the horizon's alignment, so the moon next to "some straight, vertical line" doesn't appear as big.
I'm learning C# so I've got a little bias but the author says that C# never really took off? He doesn't even list it as failing one of his criteria. He says in the comments later he bases it off of it's listing here http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index..... Baloney I say.
I'm a little confused as to what has actually changed here. Did they just stop running things off their own machines and start paying someone else to host the site?
Web Comics
I think you making a totally fair point about the symmetry of the situation. However, I think his attitude (and by symmetry probably hers too) is an unhealthy one. He can always think, "were it not for her attitude I, errr we, could be more successful". This is quite a negative thought to hold in your head with someone that you should have an amicable rapport with.

>You should not think about someone's happiness, that does not also think about your own.

I guess you can live by that, but I certainly don't like the dynamics of this towards the limit. If somebody is hurting I don't mind trying to say something. Suffering isn't cool.
Consultants Don't Pivot, Founders Do
That's fine. Much better for carriers to tell you how much data you can use and otherwise stay out of your business, than to claim "unlimited" data and then impose usage restrictions that barely let you do anything other than email and web.
Well, they've proved they understand the marketing part of it :)

Edit: that wasn't meant as snark. Marketing and mindshare are important in launching a new enterprise, especially one that sets out to bust an existing paradigm. The Diaspora team have done an excellent job in presenting their project, and taught me a valuable lesson. In the process, they've also created useful publicity for Kickstarter as a launchpad.
Dictionary definition of 'siphon' has been wrong for nearly a century
Said this on the other post about this. I find it suspicious that this IM conversation that took place over 6 years ago and hasn't been mentioned before, suddenly "surfaces" when Facebook is facing questions about privacy.
You're supposed to try putting your head between your legs to look at the regular moon upside down to get the same effect (I'm not kidding).
Most product managers don't pivot either, unfortunately. Pivoting is even harder than keeping things simple (which most product managers can't do, either).
Er, first, if you'd like to call me stupid, please do so openly.

Personally, I like safety-features on tools. You know that feature that stops rotating blades when they come into contact with fingers? Would "just don't touch the blade" have been an equal solution to you?
We know of Olark and it's a great tool. No doubt.

But this would really focus on customer development. So apart from chat one can expect more tools geared towards measuring user sentiment.
Too wordy; I like the idea of status updates (in this case powered by Twitter) on the page though. Neat.
Why Coworking makes sense for small biz
Way more people than I would have thought, actually. They really upsell their hosting and other addons when you buy a domain, even if you are an existing customer. Unfortunately this results in a large number of non-technically oriented people as their clients, who wind up needing the most help when things go wrong.
Firing salespeople that don't make their quarterly projections is fairly common afaik.
And for more reasons not to use GoDaddy - http://nodaddy.com

I moved all of my domains (60+) from them to namecheap after they killed off Fydoor's seclists.org domain without any warning.

Before that I had sampled their virtual domain hosting accounts, and unfailingly found their tech support to be clueless.
I find the phrase 'Bear with us' and a reference to a panda being with them at the company office to be clever.

I find the slightly hard to see 'That's what she said' text tha following 'Going down for a bit' clever; but chidlish.

I see the text at the bottom of the page that references the panda being named a 'cute overload'-quality name ('Pickles') as being clever.
"Furthermore, Adobe's entire argument that developers and consumers should shun Apple's lock-in for Adobe's lock-in is absolutely absurd!"

I don't have a problem with blocking the Flash plug-in. What I have a problem with is blocking native iPhone apps that were developed in Flash (even if they pass the review process).

But, I totally agree with the "write once, develop anywhere" danger. IMO, this is the real reason Apple is blocking all types of Flash content. Sounds great to a developer but it would completely change the uniqueness of the App store.
if (you_have_to_learn_one_language) {
make_highly_subjective_claims();
eliminate_good_candidates_for_specious_reasons();
arrive_at_questionable_conclusion();
} else {
broaden_your_understanding_of_programming();
be_able_to_evaluate_multiple_solutions_for_problem();
}

The underlying premise is flawed. No one has to learn just one language and anyone who stops at one is limiting themselves to being a journeyman programmer for the rest of their career. At that point they should be asking "do I really like programming?" and if not, move along to something else.

A much better question is "If you have to start with just one programming language...".
It's buried halfway down the page, but the author states:

Using the word "faith" is an instant turn-off for most geeks, but you can replace it with "passion". It's the same thing.

Well, no, it's not. They're not synonyms and they refer to two very different concepts. Any discussion on this article will likely be as muddled as the article itself, since some will be discussing passion and some faith, both using the same word.
I'm an atheist ex-catholic and I don't get the joke. Why would you downvote me for a legitimate question?
Tell me more about how your tool focuses on customer development? I'm very interested.
This is probably why most businesses offering proxies, newsgroup access, etc. have very shady looking websites :)

That's the problem with such a business. You can't advertise "get Hulu from outside the US". You can only advertise "fast proxy servers", which only the technically inclined people will now what to do with.
"What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web"

Wow, Adobe's got quite the overgrown sense of entitlement there.

Translation: We wanna co-opt the web and someone's making browsers without our proprietary plugin, waaah!

Some cheese to go with that whine?
Study: Many Mistakenly Think They Are Allergic to Food
Nassim the Dream Top Tics It
Might as well give all those high paid lawyers something to do.
You may not need or want one. I think the bigger point is our ideas about portability are evolving. In the late 80s people who wanted a portable computer were happy with 10-15lbs machines that were basically portable desktops. Throughout the 90s we started to get something that looked like a modern laptop but still too heavy an expensive for most people to carry around. In the mid-00s we get the modern version of a laptop. ~5-8lbs, wireless connectivity, fairly inexpensive. In the last few years we're seeing the shift towards even smaller machines. Inexpensive <5lbs net books with wireless connectivity standard. So maybe the next step is <2lbs tablets. The trend of evolution is pretty clear: Smaller, more connected, lighter, cheaper, better battery life. For lots of people a MacBook Pro is no longer the ideal of portability. It's a heavy integrated desktop that has to be plugged in every 3 or 4 hours to keep working.
To get a better feel for it, could you populate it with actual date (even if you just copy&paste it)?
To get a better feel for it, could you populate it with actual data (even if you just copy&paste it)?
Ask HN: When is crowdsourced funding viable?
Diasopra has raised more than $100,000 with crowdsourced funding. Is it just that all the stars aligned for them and that caused the outpouring of donations or is it possible to reliably fund projects this way?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr
Follow this author's advice unless you need a job.
IDEO: Design through Biomimicry
Tips n’ tricks – rank on changes (postgresql - window functions)
In my case, I was caught in the flood of Nashville and lost all my electronics. The next day I bought an ipad to do email, get on the internet, play a few games and read whatever books I had saved in dropbox or my work computer. I even was able to find some youtube videos on how to (try) and repair some of my stuff. Still couldn't save my motorcycle, though. The ipad has been fantastic and only $500.

There is the argument of "Why not just buy a netbook for $200?" To that question, I suggest you go try out an ipad and remember that you aren't going to do any coding on it. It's a pretty fantastic machine.

That being said, I am a computer programmer in a Vanderbilt research department. At some point I will have to pick up a laptop just to do some real coding work (and SC2 when it drops). For everything else, I love my ipad.
That is hilarious. I just checked the dictionary at my desk (American Heritage Dictionary I got from a used bookstore) and it's wrong also.
it's still pretty much static (although its a django app), still working out the arquitecture/features
I bet it's higher than 70%...
I would believe its open if a third-party flash player could be used with Hulu.
I think they lack competencies to fix the bug.
Paraphrased from a non-technical user I talked to recently:

"I can browse & evaluate services on the web more effectively and at leisure as there is no implicit pressure from a salesperson."

I predict it would lead to a lot of swift customer exits.
Review our game: Pixza - a real-time game built using JS and Erlang
We have been building a browser-based mutli-player strategy game called Pixza using Javascript for the front end, and Erlang/OTP with Mnesia DB as the backend. Pixza's gameplay revolves around pixels as the basic objects. In a nutshell, the live real-time action takes place on a grid board on which two teams race to fill their respective designated areas hidden from each other, with pixels. The team which fills its area first wins.

We are using Facebook Connect, and frankly part of the motivation in building Pixza was the lack of any quality multi-player game on Facebook. Those farming, fishing and mobbing types of games which claim to be "multi-player" are in fact asynchronous games, while in Pixza you play with your team mates in real time, synchronously. And did we mention we don't use Adobe Flash? Pixza works on just HTTP and COMET techniques and so with a few minor UI tweaks, Pixza should work on the iPad and iPhone too.

Game link: http://pixza.com

We have also made a screen capture of an actual game here (speeded up): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKMDitT_uwc&NR=1

(Clickable links in the comments)

We are basically a team of two college students from India, who worked on this part time for the past year or so, and we have been beta testing the game with all our friends. We are now ready to bootstrap and publicise it, and we want your views on Pixza.

Thanks a lot!
Congrats!

Which suggestions did you implement? Were those decisions right, in retrospect? Likewise, which did you consider implementing but ignore? Any regrets?
Why calling NoSQL "Not Only SQL" is lame (includes pie chart)
OneSocialWeb, Diaspora et all are solving the wrong problem but are getting attention because of the general grumblings about Facebook. The issue causing the most Facebook user dissent is privacy. Open protocols do little to address this; having your whole social graph (think embarrassing pics) sitting on any server out of your control, whoever the owner, is the problem.

What is needed is a system that guarantees privacy by storing your social graph is such a way that it cannot be data-mined, sold, leaked, or linked by other websites. One way to do this is to have all data on the server be encrypted where the key only resides on the client side.

OneSocialWeb does nothing to solve the privacy problem.
There are a lot of ideas, a few of them being:

- When you release a new feature/service/product, you'll get the possibility to open a thread in which you can store conversations/feedback/poll-results/usage data on that particular feature.

- The ability to rate conversations on a positive/negative scale so you can quantify user sentiment. (Only interesting with large customer development groups).

- Analytics integration so you can put the quantitative data and the qualitative data together.

I'm not sure if this is a good idea. But I do know that I'm personally still looking for something really simple to make customer development a breeze. This might be an interesting direction to start with.

Cheers,
E.
Andrew Viterbi, invented Viterbi algorithm, co-founded Qualcomm
Clickable links:

http://pixza.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKMDitT_uwc&NR=1
I like the nearly-hidden "That's what she said." Perhaps not the most appropriate, but still funny.
Rather, Hulu isn't ready for HTML5.
The Great Google Job Experiment
$100,383 @ 10:02 AM PST.
The Kingfisher Calendar 2010
It would seem odd to me, though, for them to not have any Mac awards this year and then bring them back next year. Why do that? Unless they have something really big planned for Mac OS between now and then. (Though even if they do, how many great apps to take advantage of it will be out within one year?)

Or to apply his statement that this year primarily focuses on iPhone OS and maybe next year will be mostly about the Mac: maybe next year there won't be any iPhone OS awards and they'll all be for Mac. Ummm, sorta doubt it. :)
Dlvr.it is now fully PuSH enabled
All the points are good, but it always sounds a little weird to me when people say things like "LaTeX is great because it handles hyphenation." The hyphenation support is part of TeX, which is the programming language, not LaTeX, which is a library built on the TeX language. It's kind of like saying that Rails is great because it supports regular expressions.

Not that this distinction really matters when you use it, but it at least gives credit where it's due (in this case, to Donald Knuth rather than Leslie Lamport for the hyphenation algorithm, which is indeed a brilliant algorithm).
"Help me beat Oracle" blogs James Gosling who apparently doesn't like Oracle salesdroids much.

http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/forgerock
I absolutely love this. I also applaud them for making sure they only zap the evil mosquitoes and not other friendly bugs, such as moths, who are not trying to suck my blood in exchange for a nasty, itchy welt.
Is there a way yet to lock down the source file with HTML5 video in the same way that, say, Typekit locks down font files?
I doubt this will hurt Facebook. I don't believe regular users on the whole care about privacy. Especially if you compare the value of Facebook (all my friends, photos, events, chat) vs privacy cost.

One interesting implementation they could strive for is rather than expecting users to host their own server, ask them for an AWS key and use that - that way Amazon handles all billing, uptime, etc.

Also the name blows, and they're self professed nerds - generally terrible at making a user experience for regular users.
Well of course Tony Stark can do everything better.
3rd European Lisp Symposium, day 1
Another concurrence, also about the Courier. I don't like typing on a touchscreen, and I actually enjoy handwriting - I think people underrate the degree to which it aids information retention and clear writing.
The blog post itself seems to have been pulled, but here's a cached version: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fblog.hulu.com%...
They just don't care and love to have fun, and I love them for it.

My roommate, out of undying love for them, sent their team a case of Brooklyn lager just because. They responded with a full video of someone dressed as a shark as a thank you, and he just got an awesome Grooveshark t-shirt in the mail yesterday. This is how you build cult followers.

http://help.grooveshark.com/a-special-grooveshark-thanks-to-...
Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency
You are absolutely right. How long did has the UNIX community had a substandard, or non-existent flash player? Flash 10 still crashes alsa on my Gentoo systems. It seems petty that they can't open source the player. The community will fix it for free! And then they have the nerve to criticize Apple, which is clearly looking out for it's own best interest(Which I don't support, I haven't bought any Apple products). This is blatant hypocrisy.
Uh, yeah, funny, but how can they trust a quote someone could have made up? Here, let me check my IM history...

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever want those Death Star plans

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 9,000 blueprints, pictures, charts

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: Some Princess just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: She "trusts me"

Zuck: Dumb fuck.
Yep. I can't seem to edit it now, but the first sentence definitely meant have "protects" not "projects."
tl;dr Sucks to get hacked, GoDaddy is about to lose a customer.

I got hit this morning with the exact exploit mentioned here, I was able to clean out the codebase and get a half-working site back up just so I could close it out properly. I felt awful, I was keeping everything up to date, following security best practices, I couldn't figure out what had went wrong. This article is making me completely rethink GoDaddy as a host, namecheap will probably be getting my business pretty soon.

What's even more disheartening is that until this point I have never really had a reason to dig into the WordPress code, when I did I found ridiculous "easter eggs" that to my well trained PHP eyes looked like malicious code. It wasn't until I verified that it was release code and was meant to look that way did I realize it wasn't part of the exploit. Take a look at wp-admin/revisions-js.php and tell me it doesn't look like some dirty exploit is hiding in there.
Source for "and all of Kickstarter's records" bit:

http://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/13922920432
Interesting indeed. Would the disadvantages, especially in early startups that have no traction yet anyway, outweigh the benefits? That is: being able to go through the customer development cycle quicker, so you can pivot faster.
Hey,

That's an important point, thank you. I definitely have had the experience of wondering, "Is this something LaTeX provides, or is it from Memoir?" I guess I should also have been asking myself what comes from LaTeX and what is already part of TeX.

Your Rails analogy is apt, I definitely remember being a Rails n00b and not knowing what was part of Ruby's standard library and what was provided by ActiveSupport.

Cheers,
Alex
... then learn the one that everyone around you uses. This often extends to entire fields (genetics, etc).

Of course, it's never true that you have to learn just one language, and you're handicapping yourself if you arbitrarily do.
In git, it means "checking out the current branch version of a file" or "checking out an entire branch". Pulling all the patches from another resource also makes sense.

Think of checkout as a local thing to do, and pull/fetch as a remote action.

It can make sense if you do not have prior associations. It is not as if the English language is not terribly abused and ambiguous in our languages. What does "cancel" mean? In linux with CUPS, it cancels a print job. To cancel a process, you have to kill it, but you cannot kill print jobs. Shocking.

What is OOP? How does that definition change between C++, Java, Smalltalk, Lisp/CLOS, and vimscript? How about MVC? What about the differences in GUI lingo between Object Windows, McClim, Gtk, and qt? In other words, you have to learn the language of each different tool you use, and it is unreasonable to expect that it is the same as your other tools.

Aside from that, it is terribly unfair to try to compare svn to git in any meaningful architectural sense; they are completely different creatures that accomplish some of the same goals. git does it better. And it uses different language to describe its new approach.

I have not had a difficult time switching between using svn and git after using both for a long time, except for missing nice features like "git log -p" and "git add -p" when I work with svn. It seems petty to me to quibble over command names.
Hulu is an established platform, HTML5 is an upcoming spec that doesn't do what Hulu would need it to do. As cute as your post sounds (and we all love a pithy inversion), it's just wrong.
Yes, I don't understand, that's why I asked :-) The article mentioned begging friends and family for money (and this concept has come up in other fundraising situations), so I assumed there were certain loopholes for "personal" types of investment, and I wondered if this was codified, perhaps, or just an informal workaround.

Is the difference, perhaps, that you don't necessarily give family investors official shares but just offer to pay back the money personally, etc?
While I haven't followed this story all that closely, what makes people so confident that this particular project will have legs?

From a quick glance at the description of their effort, I wonder whether this will really be viable. My mom doesn't use FB for any other reason than that it's the most convenient way to send messages and pictures to friends. For her to move to anything else, it has to be easier. Try explaining to your mother-in-law that she needs to install a node.
This is called "hacking" in Latvia
Depending on
1) The storage engine you're using, and,
2) What other queries you run against this table

You could cluster the table on the 'time' column. That would store the data in the table in the same order as it appears in the index, and make time-based range queries a lot faster.
> See: EU countries' national health-care systems versus our Medicaid+Medicare+SCHIP+etc.

You're assuming that the US govt can efficiently provide services. (Its payment systems can cut a check cheaply, which is what the "Medicare overhead" numbers measure, but can be susceptible to fraud. Note that despite rampant fraud, it's harder to win a dispute with Medicare than it is with private insurers.)

The US govt currently spends more per resident than EU countries do on healthcare yet manages to cover a much smaller fraction of the population.

That's why I wanted to give Obama free rein over existing govt healthcare, including all govt employees (state and local too), and maybe even employees of companies that get >80% of their revenues from govt contracts.

That works out to well over twice EU spending (per capita) on covered folk. Since the promise of govt healthcare is cheaper and better, in years 2-4, we cut the per-capita budget by 5% (which is a bit over 20%, or less than the 30% savings promised by single payer advocates). At the end of that time, we'll know whether the US govt can provide healthcare.

After all, it doesn't matter whether other contries can do it, it matters whether the US govt can do it.
From the fortune files:

When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what
I wish done," give him a lollipop.
I guess your professor didn't have a web page, since that would have involved programming HTML?
thanks for the explanation of what thats what she said, meant.
Hulu's video player is rock-solid. If they say HTML5 isn't good enough, I am inclined to take what they say seriously.