skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From where I'm sitting, node.js looks like a great solution for fast, simple, and small web systems, whereas the comparable Erlang systems are more of a pain in the ass to get set up and use. So it is certainly a viable alternative.

Is it the best alternative?

Erlang, as the article states, has some good things going for it; it's better than anything else that I know of for several categories of tasks. The problem is that other things are catching up, and while they may not be "as good", people can and will pick them if they are "good enough" and have other qualities that make them a good choice, such as being easier to learn.

Your comment to me comes across along the same lines of the people thinking digital photography would never surpass the quality of regular film. Maybe node.js won't be the one to catch up and pass Erlang, but my gut feeling is that something will. Scala, maybe?
Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
What promise do you mean? Cocoa has existed for 10 years now. It was never going to go away at any point.

Finder was kept in Carbon as a demonstration that large codebases ported from OS 9 would still be supported (it would take quite some time to rewrite them, after all).

iTunes's lack of a rewrite is probably due to having to run on Windows without having to immediately do the extra work needed to port Safari, but at this point it doesn't really have an excuse. At least it supports background scrolling, so it's still beating Word...
Because they're obvious points to make.

Apple's competitors have been clamoring to put Flash on their mobile devices because it's one more bullet point they can use in their marketing against the iPhone.

Yet it's 2010 and mobile Flash is still nowhere to be found. How is that not Adobe's fault?
Rather, it's about data-mining for advertisers.
Dude, was btilly just hellbanned? That sucks, he is one of my favorite commenters. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=btilly

For those without showdead enabled, he just posted this (which is roughly what I was going to post):

"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."

--

That matches what all my Googler friends have told me: There's a stronger than usual barrier around the company as a whole so that there can be fewer or weaker barriers internally.
Beijing to Impose Encryption Disclosure Rules
This is really cool. Kudos, Microsoft.
He can still refuse to sell them. It's his store...
But not the only thing to consider. The article does mention violations of agreements, and not just the scraping. The argument isn't about scraping alone. I could see their being a contract that limited what the user accounts could be used for, and the possibility that the user accounts were limited to particular individuals and what not, as well as the limitation of their use.

Of course, all of this is speculation. The point is, it's not JUST a scraping case.
It seems that it shouldn't matter if a robots.txt was present or not because logins were required to "scrape" the information and that implies that those accounts that had to login probably had to accept some sort of agreement which probably forbid this in some way.
Yep, most services or search engines choose to respect the convention, but if the article indicates properly, it doesn't sound like the robot in question here was trying to be particularly kind or gentle in its work.
Until there is an authoring tool as strong as Flash for Html + Javascript + css (with regard to animation and design, and the ability to integrate these animations and designs with code) - then flash is still the best game in town for games, animation, and more...

I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on the answer to animation. Sprites are heavy, but are the only other option I can see. Even still, there is no authoring tool better than flash for animation on casual games or the web.
Side point: why is supporting IE6 mandatory? Its been retired since 2005.

We support IE6 wherever reasonable, but if you're building something that needs <canvas>, I'd just do it. What was the feature in this case?
I find this disturbing. Who knows what exactly they're looking for, but it sounds like some form of information gathering, which could potentially be very helpful when trying to break into foreign computer systems.
The point is it will only ever directly effect products made by the same company. A device from HP or Microsoft will never be hurt by an issue with a closed Apple platform.

If there are issues with Flash, it will hurt every company using Flash, and there is nothing those companies can do about it other than bug Adobe to fix it or drop Flash support.
And even if they did, you could still choose to let them shoot you rather than eat Pringles.
Datasets and Data-driven Startups
The more interesting question is does a site's individual policies apply? Does scraping a site constitute acceptance of the site's terms if no compliance is sought before it's use?
Surely Google would be violating millions of such policies.

In this case it sounds like a login was required to access the data, in which case the account holder has probably had to agree to such terms.

As someone starting a business which plans to use web-crawling to a large extent I find the publicly-accessible side of this very interesting.
Unfortunately it's still a very gray area - nobody seems to have an answer for me. The advice seems to be "try it, but you may have to defend it", which means a lot more money than most startups have.
Really? I consider .net a closed platform, as it is controlled by a single vendor, there is no patent guarantee (as Miguel has mentioned) and the alternative implementations (like GNash does with Flash) always lag behind.

(I happen to like .net, by the way, I just think it's closed.)
This is the problem with Jon Stewart's platform. People take it too seriously. Stewart has explicitly said that taking him seriously is a misstep - don't. He is going to say some poignant, legit stuff, but if you take it as a comprehensive take on the news, you're doing him a disservice.
Very interesting write-up. Though without further knowledge of the matter going to have to take some of the points with a pinch of salt. Regardless, there is universal criticism of Canadian VCs by pretty much everyone really. Including the VCs themselves.

The end result of this is that companies looking for serious investment go down south.

It's unfortunate, but necessary. And honestly, our financial climate mirrors that of our actual climate. It's colder and harsher, but if you can persevere and survive you come out a lot stronger for it. Those that want warmer weather (easier funding) go down south.

Interestingly the startup landscape in Canada is looking a lot stronger relative to how it did, relative to the US. There's a big trend nowadays to bootstrapping and a focus on revenue generation - which is precisely what Canadian startups have had to be doing this entire time.
Senator Dodd Reform Bill Could Ruin Angel Investing
1. Open -- We're the freetards now. Booyah.

2. Full Web -- You don't really want Flash.

3. R,S,P -- Flash is some buggy shit.

4. Battery -- Forcing you not to use Flash saves your batteries! Aren't we nice?

5. Touch -- Multi-touch fail. We can't hover like a mouse.

6. We're saving the developers from themselves. The morons.
I don't mean to be rude, but could you expound upon this a bit? What was the feature, and why was supporting IE6 critical to moving forward with it?

I'm not in any way arguing that IE6 isn't a PITA. I suppose its the "holding back" part of it that I don't understand.
Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera
So you posit a universe of an infinite number of dimensions? That's nonsense. Just because there's nothing in dimension n+1 doesn't mean it's not part of the universe. It would also allow expansion of the n-dimension brane.

Do you know of cosmological models proposing an infinite number of spatial dimensions?

EDIT: Note that the "expansion of the universe" is really only "expansion we observe through telescopes." I've never heard anything about astronomical observations concerning dimensions S, 6, or others. 3D space can easily expand without the need for anything outside the universe, in a universe of more than 3 dimensions.
You had me at "eat".
The post should really be titled "How to Win the Hearts of Investors Named Steve Welch". From what I've seen, angels tend to be a pretty diverse bunch in terms of what they are looking for (aside from a positive ROI- that's pretty much the only universal).
The Android handset market seems to heavily saturated at this point. I think HP was probably wise to go in a different direction and do something unique with potential for a bigger splash in the market than just another Android handset with an HP logo on it would.
Huh? First off, I'm not really into Malcolm Gladwell. Second, what are you replying to anyway? The general point that anything one does matters?
My start up was founded by 3 core people, myself and 2 sales guys. People always remarked that I was the brains, but I gave them lots of credit. They went out to the shows, met the people, worked the sales. They brought in the people to use the technology I spent time building. I loved that i didn't have to handle the day to day business stuff or run out after people.

They loved that they could leave the tech stuff in my hands. It also helped that they could put me in front of potential clients and I could actually sell the product as well. And, as the tech guy, a lot of the prospects assumed I wasn't gonna try to sell them. I never lied, but damn, I was able to soothe any tech concerns with relative ease.
Whoa whoa, when you say: "the production of an anti-particle in a particle accelerator (e.g a positron) is really just a particle (electron) travelling back in time to the production point." Do you mean the particle actually traveled back in time, or that you are able to create a model with bi-directional time, and the model's calculations work with the observed results in the accelerator, or is this the type of question I'm not allowed to ask?
I do understand your point about using the right tool for the right job, however Apple is arguing both sides. Either cross platform standards are a good thing, or platform specific features are a good thing.

While web applications and native applications are different domains, they are not different enough to mean different reasoning can be used. An end user doesn't really care if something is built using HTML5, flash, or compiled natively. They just care that it looks cool and does cool things.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/gala/

'Welcome to the Flash Player preview release, code-named “Gala,” which introduces support for H.264 video hardware decoding on Mac OS X 10.6.3, the most recent release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard... The hardware acceleration functionality in the Gala preview release of Flash Player is expected to be included in an update following the release of Flash Player 10.1.'
What was that like?
The Best Business Book You’re Ever Going To Read
And he did it at 9:42pm, iPhone's preferred (evening) time. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250125)
The five stages of data-loss grief
Skyfire enables (some) Flash video on Android, right now.
theFWA.com is a perfect example of Flash being a disaster. The entire site is Flash (completely unnecessarily).
Nerds on hackernews not familiar with tools for digging infantry trenches!

Hope nobody ever posts a fashion/haircare/style video.
I agree with everything you say but question "it simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence". It's not like we are house flies with a day to find a mate. I think maybe the problem is intelligence (and other characteristics) are often hard to evaluate. Added to this, the intelligent meek geek isn't getting the girl because he isn't bold, but cognitive dissonance convinces him that there must be something wrong with the selection process, not himself.
This instantly reminded me of BillMeBob.com

However, BillmeBob does nothing but create an invoice. You beat them here by integrating with paypal, but why pay you AND paypal to get paid?

You are basically a "value add provider" so make sure your pricing points are right. The "Project Bubble" page does a better job of pricing comparisons.

To me, both "Project" and "Bubble" are offputting. When it comes to getting paid, people may not want to use a product called "Project" as it could convey unreliability. You obviously have some affinity for the word "Bubble," so maybe try to find another phrase that more accurately describes your business and is catchy.

Otherwise great work on the software, look, and feel!

Maybe "PayBubble" or something?
Maybe this explains why PGP CTO Jon Callas got a new job last week. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/22/jon_callas_joins_app...
SciDB - A Science-Oriented DBMS at 100 Petabytes
It might be just me, but a veteran blogger blogging about blogging on a new blog just doesn't tip the news-o-meter for me.
I just explained the workings of the analogy. I think you're parroting those words without completely understanding my comment or the words themselves.

(Note, if all matter is n-dimensional, then expansion of the n-dimension space into dimension n+1 wouldn't be expansion of the Universe into anything. It would be the expansion of an n-dimension subset into an n+1 dimension universe.)
I've had my iPhone for a couple years and I've never missed flash. I just don't need it.
It is true that some of these links are from evangelists. But we're not saying Steve Jobs is neutral are we?

Battery Life: It's a bit of hyperbole. We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. Would it matter if Flash could play videos for 11 hours? It is a misdirection or a sidestep of an original claim that Flash would kill the iPhone inside of 2 hours.

Touch/Scroll: Another sidestep. A Flash issue? With that I answer: a:hover {}

I just don't get this argument from Apple. Steve Jobs pioneered high usability mobile UI because Apple took the reigns. Now we have Android UI taking a cue from Apple and "unlocking the mobile market"

Flash and HTML5 have a similar relationship. HTML5 opens it up a bit. That's great. But what about HTML6? Flash is Area51 for implementation study.

We don't need to implement a marquee tag and then take it away once we realize it sucks. How could we market test video conf. or canvas-based visuals if we had no way to benchmark them? Flash is good. The VS. argument is a misnomer.
I agree, but a hell of a lot of people are missing these obvious points, though. Most people with an opinion on Apple are.
yeah, I'm on it right now, and it should be live next week. Thanks
I disagree.

Not caring about ideology over technology is what got us Chrome.

The Embrace, Extend, Extinguish destructive MS ideology is what got us into the IE6 mess.
the arguments against Adobe flash is quite thought provoking.
From Apple's point of view - yes.
Avatar DVDs with Copy Protection Punish Paying Customers
"Also, from this perspective, MonoTouch and Unity might be in the clear too as they are not cross-platform toolkits reducing themselves to the least common denominator."

Hell yeah! Let's pray. I'm not interested in using MonoTouch because I want to make a cross-platform App that also runs on iPhone/iPad. I'm interested in using MonoTouch because I prefer C# to Objective-C, if only because that's where the bulk of my experience is.
What I'm arguing for is not technology (which already exists), but technology support in the form of official frameworks, which subverts the "3rd party middleware" argument, and for equal access to distribution and payment channels. I have no motivation to create iPhone web apps if I can't easily get them in front of iPhone users monetize them.

A few other points:

- MobileSafari already has access to many hardware functions: gps, accelerometer, maybe compass? There are some great iTunes U videos on this if you're a member of the iPhone dev program. Obviously it would be good to have access to all the hardware features.

- Every time I hear about the App Store being "curated" for "high quality" I choke a little (iFart?). There's no reason why html5 apps in the app store wouldn't go through the same review process.

- The Google results for "congress" have no relationship whatsoever to "congress" in the App Store. Web pages != web applications.

"I don't understand why some enterprising YC person doesn't simply start making a web App Store app for the iPhone that allows people to sell web applications to iPhone users, handle fulfillment just like the App Store does, and handle curation, just like the App Store does."

Not a bad idea, in fact. A few big hurdles, though: 1) you can't install apps on the iPhone except via the App Store (or asking a mobilesafari user to create a home screen icon themselves) 2) payment system inertia-- who's going to sign up for another micropayment account when they're already set up with Apple?

EDIT: while I was writing this, nailer said it better and more succinctly.
Why Do We Dream?
It wont need to;
There will be an unchangeable default admin password of "password"

Updating to the next version will automatically decrypt all your data.

The say the disk is encrypted but it turns out that it just XORs 'symantec' with every byte.
Does Happiness Lead to Success?
I was referring to how Microsoft's own flagship sites has scripting errors in IE. I'm sure some part of MS still deals with IE6, and I understand why. Of course they encourage people to upgrade to IE8 when they can.

And actually... yes, I would prefer if some nimrod who is trying to install a copy of XP from 6 years ago has problems with it and understands that they need to run modern software to access the modern internet.

If Toyota was going to upgrade my car for free, as every browser is available for free, why would I have a problem with that?
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى والمنصورة
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى والمنصورة
I don't go out of my way to support IE6, only obvious things where it's an extra line of CSS or whatever.

Canvas was to replace a timeline view of comments on blog posts, felt that not enough users would be able to see it to include it on the design.

I'd guess that worldwide there are plenty of neat little things that could be used that aren't because of trying to support IE.
Does anyone know how to get my facebook page for the Happy Hour Finder to be the default for people who like happy hours?
The underlying situation here is that the runtime should be an open standard. Adobe's insistence that everyone should be dependent on them is absurd seeing as they have little market power to make such demands.

There is a huge need for a solid authoring tool for the canvas and Adobe is the right company to build such a tool.

Adobe has been whining for far too long about its inability to lock people into a proprietary runtime with poor performance.

Hardware and OS makers should have the ability to implement the runtime in ways that improve the experience. Apple is correct in insisting on such. This won't just be good for Apple, it'll be good for the entire industry.
hmm certainly.. thats def the idea behind it
Two big reasons to not upgrade - if you are on any hardware other than Intel graphics, then your experience is screwed (since opensource nvidia driver is enabled by default, for getting KMS and Plymouth to work). The problems include bad graphics, no resume after suspend, etc.

Two: 2.6.32 lucid kernel has huge backported patches (especially the DRM code). IMHO, the better kernel is going to be 2.6.33 and later (what with Linus fixing really quirky issues http://lwn.net/Articles/383162/)
A true open market is far more messy and painful, at least in the short term, then Apple seems to want for its app store apps. As the device and app experiences are tightly coupled in the user's mind, every high-quality app is an asset to Apple and every low-quality app is a liability.

Not saying that I think it's the best way to go, but it's worth understanding the intention.

I like using app store apps the same way I've come to prefer console gaming over PC gaming. There's at least supposed to be a minimum quality bar that things have to pass, and I can experiment with things without worrying that they'll muck up my whole system. I've never had an iPad game require me to download and install beta-quality video card driver software in order to be playable, and for that, I'm thankful.
Keep Your Revenue Drivers On The Grid
This is seriously right. A website was directed somewhere else for short period so we should... fuck this guy's whole life for it? I can't believe 3X as many people voted to convict this guys, it just confirms my opinion of human nature. We should show this guy some compassion and redirect our resources to the thousands of rapes and murders that get cold cased after a week due to lack of funds to continue. Our whole system is basically fucked, it's time for a rewrite.
As a survivor of a many startups you do start to get the default position that any law/deal/environment that VCs object to is automatically a 'good thing'.
I don't disagree that Flash has the potential to create issues.

The argument just suffers from the fallacy of composition. The standoff motif is getting old. We're talking about software, not cold war against another country.

Apple doesn't want you to notice Steve behind the curtain. With Adobe we tend to pick and choose what we agree with and ignore the points that don't support our bias.
LinkedIn becomes a little more like Facebook. Good or bad?
Presentation Hacks: Additional Tips
This article doesn't really clarify things for me. I agree that not many APIs in the wild right now are truly RESTful, but this has been stated for years. We know this. The article then posits that true REST is too hard. This is simply not true when you look at the bigger picture. Yes, it may be easier in the moment to cowboy it up and reinvent the wheel, but when it comes to maintaining your service and integrating it with others, you pay the price for lack of foresight.

The questions that need to be answered are how would true REST be different, and why would I want to spend my precious time learning about it and implementing it?

This is a pretty good one stop shop for the first question:
http://www.nordsc.com/ext/classification_of_http_based_apis....

Martin Fowler's article on the subject is good too:
http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm...

And this article shows a basic "hello world" implementation of REST, and explains the benefits:
http://www.infoq.com/articles/subbu-allamaraju-rest

I appreciate the author's enthusiasm towards REST, but I would prefer to discuss the technical merits rather than engage in justification and categorization of what's out there right now. Yeah, it's not REST, and yeah people are going to call it REST anyway in certain contexts. But in the context of architectural design we have clear definitions about what REST is, and there's no need to muddy the waters.
Wordpress Plugins Hijacking Facebook Pages
True. Good point. I suppose my main disappointment is in the fact that he has generally had a good track record of distilling complicated things down to common sense "no-duhs". But he's failed at this in this case, to me at least.
I would bet that when they introduced new policies they made you agree in some way that they applied retroactively if you continued to use the site.
Find your own ocean
You could wear your ring "a la Frodo", you know?
I'd be kind of cool, not wearing it on your finger, because of the effect it may have on your personality; but a ring-bearer you're non the less.
Pressure to perform is not the biggest problem. Peer pressure is much worse. This child committed suicide after her classmates voted for her suspension.