skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are a few problems I see with Diaspora (although I may be wrong, feel free to correct me).

1) They propose a mesh network, but haven't addressed scalability. If I have 1000 friends, presumably I'll have to open connections to all 1000 nodes to get updates

2) I don't think they have addressed how you will discover your friends nodes. Facebook makes it easy to find friends. Just import your address book or type a name into search. Either they will have to come up with something similar to an email address (username@domain name of where your node is hosted) or they are going to have to search the mesh network, or someone will have to be in charge of a central directory. All except the central directory are less user friendly than Facebook and the central directory has problems of its own like who do we trust to run it?

3) When privacy is their main motivator, they don't seem to understand the encryption that well. They talk about encrypting your data using AES. So how is a friend going to access your data? You would obviously have to decrypt it when a friend requests it (and probably re-encrypt it with a shared secret key specific to that friend). But then if your node is running on a hosting service (because only uber nerds are going to run their own) you're now just trusting that host with your privacy which isn't any different than how people trusted Facebook.
Valve games include cheat prevention. To properly use cheat prevention, a program has to inventory other running programs and apply heuristics.

It also downloads, executes, and occasionally updates (in the background) files for games you have through Steam.

So, yes, it would need access to do all of these things. It might seem shocking to a Mac user, but us on Windows have programs do this sort of thing all the time (and you don't hear us gassin' on about it (I apologize for the Futurama reference)).

Cue posts about "that's the problem with Windows" or similar, but I honestly don't see any other way to detect cheating automatically. You can manually "spec" players, but any sufficiently advanced aimbot built with stealth in mind won't insta-aim like a bot, and any half-competent cheater (hah!) will not make it obvious he's map hacking.

Sorry Mac users, I have little sympathy. You wanted Steam, but don't like what it does. Uninstall the Mac version if it's bothering you that much, and boot into Windows XP.
100k will give them more time to work on this comfortably after the initial release. It's an ambitious project and 100k is still chump change - they should raise as much as possible now. Maybe they won't need to ever take VC funding later on.
I have to admit that I'm still a little puzzled here. Why does MySQL need to retrieve the actual rows from disk at all? Since the query is just returning count(*), can't it be answered entirely from the index? Does the index not reflect deletions or something like that?
This isn't trivially reproducible.
I'd pick that language that entirely uses whitespace.
"Well, let's not forget that the pay-off for that particular thought experiment was relativity. :)"

I agree :-) . But even Einstein didn't know what he would end up with before the thought experiment.

"I (and possibly others) would probably be a little less cranky about the whole article if he'd followed his steps rigorously and arrived at something interesting."

I agree that the article is completely tangled and confused and not worth the time spent reading it. I was just using the question posed (and ignoring the source and the accompanying article) to do some thinking to see if anything interesting results.
He dismisses C because "You probably already know it." and yet it is a post about a single language to learn. That's cloudy thinking.
That's actually not the case in the US. You don't need a box if your TV has an ATSC tuner. The only reason a lot of people need boxes is that they have old TV's with NTSC tuners.
I'm with you on the "sold, leaked, and linked" bit, but what's the problem with data-mining?
All this proves is that a bunch of nerds got caught up in an open source telethon and gave some money. I highly doubt anyone at Facebook gives a damn... especially if they've watched the "pitch" video in which these guys come off like a bunch of 18 year old goofballs.
It might be because I have a pretty good screen but I had no need to highlight the header. Still it's clever in its informality, not its technical prowess.
Search Generates 21% of Page Views on the Web
P2P networks and routing in the dark
I don't think "git pull" does anything particularly incorrect. Its just that when you have merge issues with a git pull you have to resolve all merge issues at the one time(as in resolve all changes all together).

Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but a "git pull --rebase" will put all your current local commits aside and then pull everything from wherever you are pulling, applies those changes to the tree without your local changes, then applies all your changes in order one by one, until you are current with both the remote and local changes.

If there is a problem with a merge on one of your applied changes, your rebase pauses , you fix the conflict as you would normally and then continue your rebase(as outlined in the article).

Essentially the rebase takes all your changes and applies them in order on top of the changes you are pulling.

Once again, if I made any mistakes in this explanation, someone please correct me.
The Bootstrapper's Manifesto
HTML5 Quick Learning Guide
"We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web — the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time."

So Apple is undermining the advancement of the web by advocating the use of HTML5 over Flash? And how is choosing to not support Flash on their platform undermining the web?

Adobe's rebuttal to Apple on all of this sounds like the movie industry: biding for relevancy when their middle-man is becoming obsolete.
I'm assuming this is the only "Facebook killer" that has been covered in the NYT? There has also been a bit of scrutiny of Facebook in the media.

I also suspect people are donating to the money, or the publicity of the donations and not the actual project - if that makes any sense at all.
Open letter to a depressed VC (state of funding)
Or you can go right to the source, Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64B5YX20100513

What's the deal with the article title? "Special Report: Can that guy in Ironman 2 whip IBM in real life?"? Ironically, if not for the little InformationWeek repackaging, I probably wouldn't have read this article at all, because that's a headline I would have just skipped right past.
This reminds me of a political philosophy course I had in college. There were a large number of libertarian-minded students in the class, and there was a lot of vigorous debate and discussion about the proper basis of law, the role of the state, etc.

In one informal discussion session, the instructor introduced his concept of "libertarian socialism", intended to design a political system that maximized individual liberty with constraints designed to mitigate the iniquities that might arise in a system of absolute, inviolate property rights.

The example that he used to justify his constraints on property rights was this: What if X owned and lived happily on his private plot of land, but his enemy, Y, decided to buy up all of the land surrounding X in a 360-degree circle, and then build an impenetrable stone wall, completely sealing X within? X would not be able to leave his own land without violating Mr. Y's property rights, and Y could not be stopped from building a wall on his own land. Y would have effectively imprisoned X, and possibly indirectly cause X's death. Since this is clearly an undesirable result, we are justified in adopting a system of law that allows Y's wall-construction project to be preempted.

Most of the libertarian-minded students began attacking this model by construing Y's wall-building as a violation of X's natural rights, and started constructing a list of explicit abstract rights that could be asserted by X to prevent Y from sealing him behind a stone wall a la Edgar Allen Poe.

But in retrospect, it looks like everyone, the instructor and the students alike, was making the same mistake: in attempting to universalize their model, they take on the challenge of having to accommodate every imaginable contingency.

Perhaps it's not merely the tendency to focus on the worst case at the expense of the general case that causes these problems, but also the tendency we have to think things through in an abstract, categorical way, and rationalize universal solutions instead of defining the particular scope of our solutions from the outset.
I'd say cauterization. Wouldn't it prevent the grass from growing anymore, as well as looking terrible (burnt on top)?
Calculating rate of leak in gulf oil spill proves a difficult task
SANYO CUBE (IPOD DOCKING) ALARM CLOCK (SPY CAMERA) Buy/Rent
That's true. But they would come over a lot more credible (at least to me, that may be different for others). I you've misjudged your initial funding requirement by more than 10:1 you are already showing that you've done something wrong, so since they've received what they said they needed the logical next step would be to put up some proof they can deliver.

Like that expectations stay within the realm of the feasible.

On another note, this funding round is feeding off the facebook name recognition, not on the track record of these people.

Everybody loves an underdog.
That's a good point. Clearly, he shouldn't be there for press conferences. Perhaps I misspoke by implying his 'presence' would be helpful. I was thinking more along the lines of organizing the cleanup. If we have a national catastrophe that will affect the gulf for decades, maybe permanently, I would just think that this is where delegation should be suspended.

Obviously, I care about Obama and, perhaps not obviously, I don't think he's 'sleeping on the job'. It's just that sometimes in emergency situations, if the 'buck stops [with you]', you have to step up and make sure the job gets done as best as possible.

Environmental disasters are extreme circumstances. They call for extreme diligence because our habitat is being irrevocably damaged. It doesn't have to be Obama himself. But a lot can be excused with the rationale of 'real world limitations'.

Clearly, things are getting worse in the gulf. If you're a responsible executive, that's when you step in and manage it yourself. Or at least deputize yourself much more clearly and strongly. Maybe he's doing that behind the scenes. Hopefully.
Mix wave, buzz and blogger, with a HUGE touch of visuals and they may have a winner.

Google sucks at visuals, twitter looks fresh and trendy, buzz looks like shit.

They have the technology and the money, what they need is Apple-like designers.
No, he does eventually get around to eliminating Ruby on those grounds: "So I am eliminating Python and Ruby, primarily for #2". I don't quite understand why you have to read so far into the article to get to that conclusion, though.
how about the people working for the company? Doesn't it make sense for them to have a personal stake? Some of them have been around at the company longer then they have been married.
I never said they were unimportant reasons. I just pointed out that no-one's actually arguing that HTML5 is ready to drop into HULU's business and replace their Flash client today.

The story's hook is the rationale, not the conclusion. You miss the point in discussing whether the conclusion is accurate or not.
> Compare a Macbook Pro to another laptop that is $500 cheaper. I'd argue there is $500 worth of value there.

Curiousity piqued: what makes it worth $500 more?
People are assuming this is all about DRM, but there's a lot more than that. Interactive features, as well as tracking - all very possive with HTML5/JS, just more painful to work with. Not to mention things like fullscreen which are not even supported by the HTML5 side.

Hulu could easily implement an HTML5 player if they wanted - their catalog is already in H264. But the experience would suffer, and as such, they're just not doing it instead of jumping on a bandwagon that's poised for a trainwreck.
Pull with rebase essentially takes all of your local commits and applies each one in turn to the remote head as if each one was a patch. Plain "git pull" doesn't do anything wrong at all, rebase is just a different style. It lets you deal with conflicts one by one, in the context of the original commit.

I actually disagree with Yehuda on this one. I like pull-with-rebase in the case where there are no conflicts, but if there are conflicts, I'd rather have a record of the original work, plus a special commit that shows the work done to reconcile in the case of a conflict. But that's really a matter of taste.
Oh, come on.. this site is becoming an Apple news site more and more.. does it have to be another apple praising blog post?

I really wish to see more non-apple news on the site. It's ok to have a (read: one) news link when apple releases new hardware. Last weeks have been links from everyones oppinion on Steve's thoughts or Apples actions, almost philosophical posts about where/when/why/if apple is great, yada yada yada...
Pixels, a 2.5 minute short film depicting the results of careless programming
Is anyone else mildly depressed by the inequality between money raised and reality here?

It's great that these guys are raising money, I'm all for it. They should take what they can get. But, what about all the brilliant open source projects out there, that people are actually enjoying and using today, not sponsored by large organizations that accept donations from the community. I'm willing to bet that _none_ of them have raised even close to this much money. It saddens me that society is more willing to financially support a statement than something actually useful and real.

Perhaps this turn of events was destined to happen eventually and these lucky guys hit the media jackpot. I still can't be happy about it.
Since you're looking as a purely software developer, what higher level language(s) have you been learning?

How's your C++?
Section 101 of the Copyright Laws defines a “work made for hire” as:

1. a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or ...

So, what's an employee? Startups, and developers working for startups, should read about a recent case that tilts in the startup's favor:

http://www.sonnenschein.com/pubs/clientalerts/JustMed_Inc_v_...

// Submitted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1344996
Basically, as of today, HTML5 video isn't ready. We all knew that.

The guy goes on to say that technology moves at a fast pace and they haven't ruled out HTML5.

Google's rumored VP8 release at I/O will help catapult it into prime time.

DRM is pointless imo, the sooner the networks realize that, the better.
Not all embedded programming really requires you to do hardware stuff. My current position is described as "embedded" programming since the code I write runs on Linux in a device we manufacture. However, the most hardware thing I've done to date is doing some ioctls to read/write to a register.

It may be worthwhile for you to explore in more depth what exactly these embedded programming positions require.

Also where are you located?
The Exadata stuff is really good. It's to data processing what a GPU is to graphics. Think compiling SQL and running it on the storage controller. It's not a matter of the database finding the right blocks on the disk any more - the database doesn't even see the blocks that don't match the SELECT.
I was personally going to donate to this project, but unfortunately, there seems to be little evidence that these guys actually are competent coders (not even code samples from their uni). So I fear that people are paying money simply because they hate Facebook, and that it may be mostly wasted.

I'd love to see this happen, but I do feel that there is a high risk that the end product may be garbage. So I urge people who want to donate to learn more about the boys first (a computer science degree doesn't necessarily guarantee that they even know basics such as proper multithreading or have ever touched sockets).
Enough people are pledging different stuff besides just money to give them a serious amount of resources to use, all it takes is for one or two experienced systems architects from the big G, skype or some other project to hop on board and they're going to get a lot more legs. Diasporas biggest negative asset at this point is the egos of the founders, judging by their videos. But then again, who wasn't cocky at 18.

They're by no means a contender right now in the eyes of the tech world, but if I were Zuckerberg I'd take notice of what happens when you fuck people over often enough and what kind of grass roots resistance can materialize out of thin air.

There seems to be a limit to consumer patience when it comes to things like this and that makes me happy.

All FB has to do to take the wind out of diaspora's sails is to announce they got the message and that they'll default all privacy settings to 'opt-in' from now on and apologize.

I doubt that will happen though.
I kinda take this as him calling someone who would enter their SSN into the primitive Facebook's profile a "dumb fuck" in which case he's correct.
Startups and PR Firms - The Gross Disconnect
Totally agree...I'm pretty floored that this art app is generating $40k a month. Would not have guessed that. Congrats man. That's newsworthy.
I can't comment on the motivations of the maintainers, but in my experience normal merges can handle more conflicts cases smoothly than rebase. Rebase is also controversial because technically it's rewriting history. I think for the special case of pulling from remote, though, that the tradeoffs are often worth it, but nevertheless, merge is the safer default.
and one-punch KO Facebook

Wha?

A bunch of geeks living in the echo chamber are pissed about a privacy issue, so they all cruise over to a geeky website, and toss in $20 of their geek-inflated disposable income, to a vaporware project whose popularity is mostly due to politics. Meanwhile, in the time it took me to write this, ten million people logged in to Facebook.

Methinks a little perspective is in order here.
Um, yeah. If you're not handing over money to someone, you're not a customer -- you're a user. An important population, but customers will almost always trump users if there's differing interests.
I've worked with it, I hate it. I hate strong typing, after ten years in the corporate life I learned to hate java, c#, etc.

Thanks, but I am more than happy with JS as it is.

And node.js is coming along sweet on the server.
When I was a kid one of my teachers asked me if I'd gotten a boo-boo. "No," I told her, "It's an injury."

My parents always spoke to me as an adult. I'll leave it to you to judge how well it turned out.
Startups are built with both Undone and Unsung Engineering
I also like LaTeX Lab: http://docs.latexlab.org/
Too much hype and money can be dangerous. It reminds me of Cuil...
> “Great, but we’re having a bit of a problem getting traction.” (Anytime I hear an entrepreneur talking in euphemisms, I get nervous.)

Haha, I love that line. It's so true
TEDxCambridge launches in 3 days. :)
http://www.tedxcambridge.com/blog/
The Eight Belts of Information Ninja-hood
I am no expert on Network Programming but someone I know who is a network programming expert (Anand Babu http://www.gluster.com/company/management.php) said to me once "First work through Richard Stevens's books, doing all the exercises, then come back to me and I will tell you what to do next". I never got into Network programming (focused on Machine Learning and related things instead) but sounds like good (and actionable) advice to me.
The dark side of the internet
It seems like it would be an easy fix for Kickstarter to just let users implement a voluntary cap on total donated money.
With 10K , we hope to see something, with 100K, we expect to see something, with 1M, we better damn well get something.
Hey, I do remember as a kid being frustrated when people would dumb down when talking to you. Also, when they refused to talk to me about things because "I was too young to be concerned about these things." Pissed me right off. I always liked the adults who took me seriously.
Adobe takes case against Apple to 'Net with ad, open letter
"Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money."

Or consider that they don't want to have anything to do with the transaction anymore. If someone is trying to throw up all over you, you don't stick around and wait to see if he succeeds.
I really doubt it would be that easy to KO Facebook. Remember Orkut? Google is great at a lot of things, but building online communities is not one of them. Also, as has been pointed out in other discussions: most Facebook users don't care and aren't going to leave unless there's a compelling reason. A lot of their photos are already locked into Facebook -- it's going to take a lot to show them a greener pasture, and I doubt "better privacy" is going to be one of them.
This is the problem with internet culture. Why should we pick sides? Neither side is absolutely right about anything. Why would a complicated dispute between 2 companies be able to come down to a choice between one or the other? It's not even clear what they're talking about — which side is right about what?

The media today pressures us to think in terms of black and white, forming factions on one side or the other on issues, when this is the most unhelpful way to think about things. Your opinion can span both sides — even if you end up behind one side or the other, the most important thing is that you understand what's going on, not which side is winning.
"This, to me, is the fundamental flaw. By now we should be able to have a single encoding that takes up as little space as possible while supporting every known character, and leaving room for more."

That's pretty much UTF-8. If you're going to stuff everything into one encoding, you are going to have to make tradeoffs.

See also UCS-4, which is simply "throw 32 bits at every character". Nobody uses it because it makes everything pretty big. (At least a 3-byte CJK character tends to mean more on average than a single English character.)

If you haven't already, take some time to read over the Unicode standards. It is very enlightening. This is especially true if you want to make the "one true encoding"; gotta know what the bar is to beat, right? There's way more to Unicode than just "Here's a catalog of all possible characters and here's numbers for them all", and there are reasons why there's way more than that.
I'll be interested to see if, by the end of the summer, they have a working project and the turn-key hosting solution.

If they get this working, it'll be interesting to see what the adoption rates are. There might be some people with cash interested in using software such as this, but it still doesn't seem to have a draw beyond those with a deep knowledge of tech.

For instance, I'd wager that most Facebook users don't know what GPG is or care if it is being used or not.
Is that necessarily the case though? I'm hoping to see a lot more open source projects popping up on Kickstarter. While I'm not donating to Diaspora* (yet) I think I would be happy to donate to plenty of open source projects and Kickstarter seems to be a great platform for collecting those donations.
But why? It seems to be well known that touch interfaces are uncomfortable for prolonged interaction: your hand overlaps the display, gets tired, etc.

Maybe it's beneficial to have touch as additional input method, but it's not obvious to me.