skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"let is crash" is critical to the erlang approach. erlang's approach to concurrency fails without it.

I recommend reading Joe Armstrong's thesis: http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

Your comparison of erlang and node.js is a reasonable exercise. However, I think the most valuable thing to get out of the exercise is that node is not really in competition with erlang. I think its more interesting to look at how node can be used to handle non-blocking http requests (and compare that to rails/django) and write your server code in the same language as your client side code.
What's unnecessary? I mean, we could all be wearing identical grey jumpsuits that fulfill the requirements of modesty and environmental protection, but we don't.

The most any advertiser can say to anyone is "this might give you pleasure, here's how to try it". The rest is up to you.
Proprietary on the web affects everyone, proprietary on the iPhone affects only the iPhone.
Of course they can, and of course they will, if a better technology and design environment appears, but that shift is going to be much slower than that of good web programmers.
He did throw up this little Tweet a couple nights ago: http://twitter.com/gruber/status/12988151829
While concurrency is a strong feature of Erlang, Erlang's _killer_ feature is fault tolerance. For any language to be able to be sufficiently compared to Erlang, it must provide fault tolerance support (either through the language or through a standard library).

I know node.js isn't "gunning" for Erlang but for any language out there: Spend some quality time integrating fault tolerance deep within the language and you'll give Erlang a run for its money. Other than this, there isn't too much that makes Erlang special (sure fast message passing, fast process creation, etc. but the fault tolerance is whats really special)
The coming melt-down in higher education
I think it is a valid question, not because it is valid in a strict physical sense, but because a lot of people can have the same doubts.

Carl Sagan would have provided an interesting anecdote or analogy to explain the answer instead of ridiculing whoever ask this.

Sadly, my writing skills are way lesser than those of Sagan.
We're arguing for Apple to make the web app store.

Clearly the current situation of open standards apps not being monetizable is not the best of both worlds.
Its been live for me on all no-ad videos for about a month+
im a firm believer in avoiding to provid any content on your profile that may be easy to datamine, therefore no comma separated interests. i usually just ask people to ask me if they really wanna know.
This is really a war between Robots and people. Would there be a case if someone had flipped every page of the paper catalog and entered the information into a database? I doubt it.
That's the saddest thing I've read in a while: a depressing combination of the mundane, touching and tragic. It's like Hemingway's 6 word story, there's so much drama packed into some of those phrases.

I wonder why many of the quotes have expletives masked as #, but then there's this one stuck in there: "That’s all guys! Fuck!"
> Ok great, so Flash is also "open enough": fully published specs, anyone is allowed to use the format (creating, playing) without royalties. SWF is more open than h264.

But does anyone do this? I see no usable reimplementations of Flash Player, and the spec cannot possibly be complete.
H.264 is a real standard with a conformance suite and bit-accuracy, and no scripting languages or multiple versions with different bugs to reimplement.

Flash also includes VP6 and RTMPE, which are proprietary and must be reverse-engineered.
There are no guarantees in life: neither through shrewd guesswork nor the illusion of control.
Can't say I agree with this either.
Safari on Mac OS X (or Windows) doesn't carry that much weight. Its global market share is half that of Chrome, and roughly the same as Opera. Even in its best market (North America) it's going to be rapidly overtaken by Chrome in the next month or so. There's also at least 3 good cross-platform alternatives for people to use.

Safari on iPhone and iPod isn't too great an obstacle either despite their mobile mindshare because they only support H.264 baseline and that (combined with their mobile nature) means a separate video file is probably recommended anyway.

And on the Microsoft side only IE9 is announced as supporting HTML5 video (with H.264 amongst a few other codecs), and no-one knows when it's coming out, probably some point in 2011 and not for Windows XP. Plus since Microsoft's VC-1 died off they don't really have a dog in this fight. They'd have to balance the minor benefit of H.264 patents being a hindrance to open source rivals (but not Apple or Google) against falling behind web standards if everyone else goes VP8.

So the one Google really want to convince is Adobe Flash. If they're on board you get effective 100% uptake within a year of release across all desktops (XP, Windows 7, Mac OS X) and all browsers (inc. Safari and IE 6, 7 and 8) and that's the kind of leverage you need to get Microsoft and Apple to follow domino style. And similarly to Microsoft they gain no real business benefit from H.264 files that can just as easily be served outside Flash.
The scheduler and awareness of its importance is not something you can slap on to any old language and its runtime, IMO. I mean, you could build one into another language, but the mentality of keeping the core system non-blocking is very central to Erlang.
Bonanzle to Expand Online Marketplace in Unusual Angel-VC Deal
needs a html page
Also, if your car isn't serviced, in the event of a crash you die due to airbag failure.
I think you're reading too much into this. Many flash experiences do rely on rollovers for discovery. Obviously, not all of them do. Some of them do, but have sort-of-workarounds that are not so great. I mean, check out some of the most popular uses of flash, and note that they DO use pointer rollovers (say high to the newest youtube player).

He's making a very reasonable point: Lots of web UI decisions have to be re-evaluated within the scope of touch-based interfaces. Since we're rewriting, why use flash when open standards exist?

I feel like this is the #1 argument that flash-defenders dance around. What justification does Flash, as it stands currently, have to exist on the web in the face of HTML5? What does it bring to the table that HTML5 isn't busy providing a more compatible and open implementation for?
Fault tolerance and declarative programming. It's easier to write code that clearly expresses your intent when you don't need to clutter it with error-handling code.

Likewise, pattern matching completely eliminates complex layering of nested 'if' statements, and is an alternative solution to the kinds of problems typically solved with polymorphic dispatch in OO languages.
I think the article is trying to point out that for simpler problems you no longer have to immediately reach for something as robust as Erlang, Node.js might do.

In my mind this is a good thing because more people will realize some problems are too painful to solve in Node.js and they will take a hard look at Erlang. Or they'll get sick of the convoluted syntax hoop-jumping and they'll take a hard look at a Lisp.

I find JavaScript beautiful in a sense because in a very roundabout way it's pulling people towards more advanced PLs.

Pushing a simple solution to its limits is how people evolve to the next thing.
parent is referring to this: http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/01/analysis-the-personhood-of...

which was generally interpreted to mean the SCOTUS decided corporations are people.
I upvoted you, but your penultimate sentence is not true. Advertisers employ the most sophisticated psychological techniques that remain legal.
From what I've seen, it's mandatory in that you are no longer able to edit your 'Info' page without linking everything on it to pages.

Also, it seems this is being rolled out to different people at different times -- I saw it a couple days ago, but other people still haven't gotten it.
There are areas where they clearly don't compete at all (phone switches come to mind), but I think that for many web/networking type things, they do compete.
This blog of anonymous IT staffers' actual stories is quite illuminating:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/sharky
If you haven't seen the prompt yet, had a lot of stuff on your profile, and want a majority of it deleted: facebook doesn't provide an "uncheck all" button.

When I saw it, it was in its own window, not a modal - so I don't know if this will work or not. Feel free to try. But this'll uncheck all of them for you so you can selectively choose which ones to make public (instead of which ones to delete):

javascript:(function(){var c = document.getElementsByTagName("input"); for(var i = 0; i < c.length; i++) { if(c[i].checked) { c[i].checked = false; } } })();
I thought it was going to be something like or about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243159, but rather it seems that the "scraping" was much more malicious and underhanded when you look at the details such as multiple logins to avoid detection and so much load was put on the server[s] that the website went down.

This is a hell of a lot more than just scraping a website like a search engine.
Thought:

Proprietary isn't bad. Open isn't great.
Proprietary vs. open is bad.
Proprietary + open is great.

Proprietary implementations are a (sometimes) necessary interstitial step towards great open implementations. Save the "VS." narrative for Street Fighter II.
I worry that they are just retargeting Flash to HTML5/canvas instead of redeveloping/expanding the Flash production environment as a true standards-based authoring tool. It makes me think of exporting HTML documents from Word (or to be kinder, OpenOffice). Yeah technically it is [HTML5/Canvas/CSS3/whatever] but it's still the step-child, and will be treated as such. Given the HTML & CSS that Dreamweaver coughs up at the moment, my hopes are not high.

I'm also concerned about their choice to introduce FXG for web use instead of using SVG. The Wikipedia article on FXG links to a blog post by Mark Anders where he contrasts the role of the format vs SVG by saying "FXG was designed as an exchange format between tools that understand graphics, like Photoshop, Illustrator, or other 3rd party ones, and tools that understand Flex and MXML." Right. So why are they now introducing it as a format for the web (via JS/canvas)?
This kind of thing should be very actively encouraged.

Clearly there is spin in the post - but it is at least reasoned and tries to present a cohesive argument/point of view. More of that from every company please.

I think that even if you don't fully support or agree with the arguments (some of them have been debunked or much discussed after all) I think we can support this idea of company CEO's/management writing about their thought process in complicated or controversial decisions.

EDIT: Uh? I made the same point many others have.. is there any reason I've got the wrong idea?
Google is much more "Big Brother" then Apple. WHY?

Because if you don't use Apple products, Apple doesn't care. They don't track you and they don't store your information.

Google however is a different case. Even if I don't intend to use Google's products, I don't search from their site, and I am not a customer of any of their products, they STILL track me through javascript files linked to or embedded by other websites I do visit.

I can choose not to be tracked by Apple, but unless I take extreme measures, like blocking google domains in my HOSTS file, which I do, I can still be tracked by them -- against my explicit consent, which is exactly what Big Brother did.
I think it's sad that people are so afraid of trying new languages and investing a bit of their time diversifying that Node.js looks like a viable alternative to Erlang, ever.

It's the ultimate example of the “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” phenomenon.
That's what I'm trying to say - he wouldn't disclose the OSX AppStore either if it were true.
"There's a very low chance that the developer API will change anyway."

If you include server-side developers, then part of the developer API (the protocol) has already changed compared to Chrome's implementation.
You are aware that Jon Stewart is a comedian, with a comedy show on a channel devoted to comedy right? The only place the news and facts come in is when they are the basis for a joke.
It would be cool, but surely allowing those would only serve to accelerate the eventual ROTM?!
4.7 trillion reasons for well-designed copyright
And the iPad, then other mainstream consumption devices. This argument doesn't live in 2010.
So long, euro?
The point is that pretty much everyone at Google knows a lot of secrets about a lot of things. At Sun secrets were known by someone, but not widely disseminated internally.

It reflects very different corporate cultures.
Also, a URL for the root of your service should be sufficient to find every resource that the service provides access to, and every method that can be used with those resources. The example is a website; from the home page of a website you can reach every other page of the website by navigating through hyperlinks and form submissions.

Another example drawn from the article: if the blog posting service provides each post under a uri like /posts/{post-id}, the client of the service shouldn't have to know the uri structure. Instead, /posts/ should be a resource, and it should contain hyperlinks to all of the /posts/{post-id} uris that are available. There would probably be some metadata about each one as well, such as a title, to enable clients to figure out which one they want to follow.
The biggest benefit for me is that it connects to WiFi several times faster after resume from standby (thanks to the new HAL-less device management).
> I think you shouldn't write TL;DR comments here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210126

Thanks for the reply. Perhaps it boils down to confusion over what TL;DR actually means in different contexts.

My take from that thread was that it's discouraged to post a comment saying you didn't read an article because it was too long. This only makes sense: such a comment is necessarily devoid of informed content, as the person writing it chose not to read the source material before commenting.

In this case, I was indicating that I read the piece and was posting a brief summary that captured what I believe to be the salient message - i.e. that Tim Bray knows a lot of secrets about Google but isn't allowed to talk about them publicly.
funniest thing I've read all week - thanks
I don't deny it, but no-one points a gun at your head and says "eat these Pringles".
I know what you mean, but consider the psychological tactics at work in the following industries: Fashion, Diet and Anti-Aging, just for starters.
Happily ever after... an idea to love: figuring out which startup idea to pursue
"I don't see any positive outcomes from that which would offset resources wasted prosecuting."

Positive outcome: to set a good precedent for "don't do stupid shit like that mindlessly or you'll pay dearly if you get caught".
- "First, there’s “Open”."

SWF is open (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/). ActionScript 3 is open (http://www.ecmascript.org/docs.php, http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/). Want the Flex SDK? Here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Get+Source+... Want a non-Adobe compiler? http://haxe.org

Adobe still has closed projects like Flash Builder 4 and Flash CS5. But saying that, "Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary" is false. FUD.

- "Second, there’s the “full web”."

h.264 is more modern than Flash's support for...? Oh, right. Flash has supported h.264 for over 2 years. FUD.

- "Third, there’s reliability, security and performance."

Pardon me while I go name a WAP "at&t wireless." Yes, Flash has security issues. Google mobile Safari 0day. FUD.

- "Fourth, there’s battery life."

As mentioned above, h.264 was adopted by Adobe years ago. FUD.

- "Fifth, there’s Touch."

I wrote a multi-touch Flash API for custom hardware shortly after Flash 9's release. Multi-touch works fine in Flash. Rewire some events and it's seamless. FUD.

- "Sixth, the most important reason."

Has Steve Jobs actually ever used Xcode? Beyond the native, crappy tools that Apple offers, some of us developers prefer to choose the tools we like to use when we write software. We like to use various languages based on what works best for us.

Apple is screwing over developers and they are using Microsoft level FUD to convince us its for our own good.
> They don't care about open standards - that they would is, on the face of it, absurd.

They really do care about open standards. There is no reason why WebKit and several other projects have to be run in the open, after they stopped releasing several parts of Darwin, but they are.

At worst, this is because there is more than one person at Apple, and the people who want things to be proprietary don't care about this and have left it to the people who like open standards to deal with.
I am a professional web developer. IE6 is one of the many platforms I have to support. Between the different versions of Firefox, Safari, IE, Chrome, and Opera its about 10 browsers that reasonably should be tested for a given site.

I guess what I was saying is give developers some credit. We've been working around a lot tougher issues than IE6 for a long time. Its a hurdle, not a brick wall.
Maybe im nitpicking, but mxmlc compiles apps written using the flex sdk to flash bytecode. The flex sdk is open source yes, but the flash runtime certainly is not.
Try editing your profile if you don't think it's mandatory.
GnuPG no longer integrates with Mail as of 10.6; do you have a better solution?
I would have expected some more press about it.
I only found this article from yesterday: http://geeksmack.net/internet/1316-youtube-goes-minimalistic
They do provide an uncheck all button. Check the "check all" checkbox, then uncheck it. That checkbox drives all the others.
You can also serve the content locally so you don't need to have a network connection.
The shovel is pretty cool, but I kept on marveling at just how fast the soldiers work when a propaganda video is being made.
As robots.txt is entirely optional (there's not even an RFC governing it), what it says or doesn't say isn't even technically violated in any way here, let alone legally.

(I apologize, I don't know how to do proper citations on here but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt provides more details.)
Ever website I've ever made has had to avoid new features due to IE incompatibilities. CSS transitions and canvas are obvious examples.
I am a little upset about this whole thing, on one hand I am very happy with my ps3 I bought it when it was cheaper than a blu ray player and the ability to play pretty games was a nice bonus. On the other hand even though I never used the Other OS functionality the fact that Sony removed it with the only option of keeping it being a limited and potentially broken system (when you take into account not being able to play new blu ray discs) makes me a bit angry.

Removing functionality seems so counterintuitive even if you want to stop your system from being exploited, but to be honest I upgraded as I was never going to use Other OS.
Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
I'm interested to hear Tim's take on it because I remember when he wrote the employee blogging guidelines for Sun Microsystems[1][2]. He was a pretty big force in convincing Sun to talk more candidly in public - up to the CEO himself - so I'm curious to see how his views evolve in the very different environment at Google.

[1]: http://blogs.sun.com/lskrocki/entry/sun_s_revised_blogging_p...

[2]: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy
Rightly said. If we (can) budget out the development cycle a huge chunk goes into ulterior CSS hacks (JS is handled indirectly by jQuery/<x> fmwk) and an unnecessary manual test cycle dedicated to IE6. It's not without a reason Microsoft sent a bouquet to IE6's funeral!
Uniform methods are an important aspect of a RESTful system, just as important as Uniform Resource Identifiers. The client of the system has to know what the methods are, so if you define your own methods you put a burden on clients to implement those methods in order to use your service. HTTP provides a set of methods that are sufficient for most RESTful services, and the methods in HTTP are widely implemented in existing libraries. Base your service on HTTP's methods and you've enabled a huge number of clients to use your service.
But it is the convention that is widely accepted.
I would dare say that other ways to get apps on the phone without the app store is even better for developers.
Ways to do these things have been around for decades, but it's not in the interest of the producers of homes and employers to do them.

Look into some of the inventions by R. Buckminster Fuller. He invented a house that cost thousands, easily transported, made of aluminum, and sturdy, but it never caught on. Probably because he didn't spend time marketing it, but the mobile home and large home manufacturing companies did.

Evolution contradicts the desire for smaller. Consider Peacock tails, the longer they are and the fuller they are, the more likely they are to mate, because peahens like them -- even though rationally, they increase the likelihood of death to predator. Turns out the offspring are in fact stronger, because it takes a lot of strength to maintain those long tails.

Similarly, it takes a lot of "strength" to maintain a large expensive home and accumulate a lot of unnecessary stuff and the chicks dig it. A guy with a fast car, excessive spending, and flashy clothes will go home from the bar with a girl before the geek with meek clothes and spending way below his means -- even if he is 1000x smarter than the flashy guy.

It simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence and that increased time to analyze the male by the female means the males could die.

Thus, it is a mathematical certainty that the world will continue towards excessive shows of strength rather than the rational conservative opinion that leads to storage of wealth -- which usually only happens after a mate is found.

tl;dr -- The world will continue getting dumber.
Not really. People get arrested for old oustanding warrants all the time, search warrant backlogs are pretty common. In fact, in general it is a good idea to back off a bit. It creates a false sense of security in the suspect, allowing better effectiveness when warrants are served, due to suprise. I know there is a "but they will destroy the evidence" protest, but in most cases, by the time a warrant is available the evidence will either be long gone, or completely overlooked (the stupid factor), this is one of those cases, he had plenty of time to wipe relevant drives between the announcement of a police investigation and the warrant serving.

The use of a raid force on a person who is not known to be violent and/or uncooperative is just excessive.
IMHO the best reason is faster boot and perhaps LTS.
-Ubuntu One is nice, but not a must.
-The new Light theme is just the default theme and it can be changed, so not a reason to upgrade.
-The inclusion of Quickly and Acire on the repositories is fine if you're programming with Python...
-I'm not that into FB, Twitter, etc so that's not a plus for me
-I see KDE as bloated, I do prefer something more lightweight like Lxde or Xfce
Actually... the article mentioned that the scrapers also violated the T&C of the site. Without knowing the details here, it could very well be that the use of the service be limited to only people, and not robots, or other such limits (like only the person associated with a user account allowed access and sharing is not allowed). This gets even stickier since it seems like the scrapers got the accounts from a company that probably signed some form of agreement with the database company.
So why do we need apps anyway?