skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He has a user on his forum threatening legal action because the user feels like he is being extorted to pay the $699 source code fee to get the latest version with no licensing activation.

He should offer a free upgrade to v4.1 so all the users can still use the software once the company closes down their activation servers. Maybe not a free source code version, but a free upgrade to v4.1 would be in order.

All of the older version users have to activate their version of the software and it will be useless once the activation servers go offline.
I think you'll be surprised at how fast you can get something up. Just keep it really basic. Figure out the simplest thing you can do that will get people to sign up, build that, and then keep building more. Even if you build at an extremely slow rate, you can have something up relatively soon.

Start with a page that tells users what the site will do and collect email addresses while building the second part.

I coded in high school in 2003-2004 and stopped for 5 years or so. I came back and it took me about 1.5-2 months to build a full website that guides hs athletes through the recruitment process and builds them a profile. It took a lot of learning through errors and hours of trying to determine what was wrong only to find I was missing a semi-colon. Build with jquery & php. Now I feel as if the same project would only take me two weeks.

The more you code, the quicker it will become to build anything.

I built another website that helps you share what you're wearing and buy clothes through shopping api's. The core functions were built in about a week and a half and the rest of the time was spent perfecting the ui and building the graphic design.
If you're looking for mobile app developers try http://taptapjobs.com
Instead of {x -> x + 1} you could always run clojure on your existing production JVM and write #(+ % 1) to get the same effect.
Hi, this is Nicole from vWorker (formerly known as Rentacoder). Why not put your project on vWorker? Some of the benefits of using our service include the following:

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"But what if you want to be cutting edge, or do something that isn't expected? Then you need to communicate how you have changed expectations."

If it's a change worth making, you shouldn't have to communicate it.

Your users shouldn't say, how does this work? They should say, this is how it should have worked all along.
Ask HN: What are some recommended tech podcasts?
What are some tech recommended podcasts? I travel quite a bit and spend tons of time driving, sitting in airports etc. Any recommendations?
That other 90% doesn't drop off the planet. It goes to a company that splits it into profit and expense. Both are spent by different people, but all the cash goes back into the economy.

The profits might be spent on luxuries, the costs on materials. Once again it split up. Every time a small fraction goes to the government, or to Henry Ford.

His point is that he wants all business in America to be vibrant, not just his own (because his businesses would die if it weren't part of an ecosystem)
Which NoSQL Platform is Right For You?
I had never really heard of these guys before. But, I'm a huge fan of .Net and wish they could keep going. Open sourcing it would be great but I know I would have a hard time letting it go. I wonder if this thing could have worked in Azure as an in memory DB. You could use it as an interesting type of mem cache.
I know as a fact that this not entirely true. For one, the Kin definitely supported MMS. I used its MMS functionality extensively as part of a project I have been working on.

EDIT: I also can confirm that the Kin does store media on its internal storage. it is not uploaded to msft servers.
I have been an actual user of VistaDB for almost 4 years now. Jason who is deciding to close down the company had bought it from the original owners a few years back.

It is really good software, especially if you are a .Net programmer needing a simple database for installation on a customer's computer.

It's a shame how he is handling this.
Summary + meta-summary from watching the Arduino community for a few years:

Because it's cheap, and because it's awesomely simple to use. It's a hobbyist's dream come true.

If you're interested in some of its uses, just look back through Make magazine's site. Loads and loads and loads of projects appear there.
The eBay of Electricity - Power 2.0 (Video)
They marketed it as a way to keep tabs on "your people" 24/7. Not sure that many people are that hyper-social, no matter how hip.
> Isn't it irritating how people will write, "MongoDB lost my data" or "CouchDB is really slow" and provide no specifics?

He did go into several specifics as to why MongoDB might lose your data. Nice jab at CouchDB though!
I rarely have something positive to say about Microsoft. I was a customer until the early 90s when I decided the Open Systems world was more appealing. My disgust only increased over the years as it became well-nigh impossible to navigate a Microsoft-free career path in the shadow of the behemoth.

Oddly, though, I found myself realizing just today that when Kinect comes out that I want to buy an Xbox 360 (which are finally quiet enough thanks to a 45nm process) just to play EA Sports Active 2.0. It's crazy how things change.
What would be the point of this?

I think many seasoned programmers forget that for the non-programmer, syntax is a sizeable impediment to getting a working program and so I'd imagine removing syntax as a source of errors would open up programming to more people.

Sure, you can come up with a more general purpose visual esolang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language) but how would this match the efficiency of programming in, say, C?

I don't think this comparison makes sense — how can you compare the efficiency of a programming environment to that of a programming language?
Designing for Performance on Wall Street
EU call for 'X Files' archive of UFO sightings
You disagree with the teaching methodology, but I think for a 101 course on web development the syllabus is very good.

I guess we could debate if fundamentals first or later is a good idea, but in general most teaching is done with fundamentals being first. You don't fight on the UFC before earning a white belt.

IMHO, college is for learning the fundamentals, not gaining 1-on-1 market skills. Because the best JS framework changes every couple years, but DNS? Not so much.
Not sure how conclusive or infallibly accurate this is, but it seems a lot more credible than the rumors people have been floating lately: http://pocketnow.com/rumor/actually-kin-sold-more-than-503-d...
It's the best general-purpose algorithms textbook I've seen. There are lots of other books which go more in-depth into specific areas, but you need to cover the basics first.
Good pickup.
Ubuntu running on a Nexus One
I ordered a sanguino kit and learned to solder at the same time :)

If you're interested in learning the whole parts procurement process, you can also buy a PCB of pretty much any arduino-based board with no components, then pick out the components you want yourself and solder away.
Check out TechZing (www.techzinglive.com). It covers the same kind of topics discussed on HN - bootstrapping, NoSQL, HTML5, iPhone dev, machine learning, etc. Plus, I co-host it! ;)
I heard from a couple reliable sources that 1,000 < KINs sold < 10,000, too.
Isn't it obvious since 2003?
"This is because you assume you'll run it on single server. MongoDB's documentation clearly, repeatedly, and earnestly tells people to run MongoDB on multiple servers."

Err, what?

I'm using MongoDB in production and I've looked at your documentation a bunch. After spending days with your docs open in a browser tab I can't say that it was especially clear on this point.

Perhaps I'm particularly ignorant, but I'd wager that not many other developers know that multiple MongoDB servers are currently required to achieve reasonably acceptable durability.
With you being a fan of .Net, do you have any recommendations for a simple database to use with .Net that can easily be installed onto a customer's computer.

VistaDB was very simple to install. You only had to copy the .dll to the installation directory and it worked.
Visual programming languages are great as a teaching tool, but I fail to see how they would be useful as a general purpose programming language. There is no need to be filled.
I agree with what you say, but a part of having a vision also means looking beyond your own accomplishments. I have noticed something in how I think/do things everything feeds to the next thing. Unrelated things become connected somehow and just continue some undefinable chain. 'What's next?' is really the question they can't seem to answer.

Maybe, the problem over here is that the dreamers have stopped dreaming and they're now concentrating on spreadsheets?

Look at Elon Musk after he exited PayPal he could have coasted in that paradigm. Done incrementally better things, or just continued looking after it. He didn't do that. Instead, he asked himself what's next for me, and put his money where his mind was. In a lot of ways to me that defines a vision.

Or, we could take the perennial example, Steve Jobs, Apple could have coasted after the iPod, or the iPhone but they somehow keep on pushing on and they've started creating an ecosystem where all the other products feed into one another. It is true that his dictatorial style helps him, but someone had to see this possibility to work towards it, and that's where the challenge lies in my opinion.
Because they're awful?

The author doesn't mention LabVIEW, perhaps because he is not a scientist. LabVIEW is a visual programming language -- you construct software by connecting little icons together with wires.

LabVIEW has been around for decades and is a big success. Lots of science labs use LabVIEW, because (a) it's a National Instruments product and interfaces perfectly with National Instruments interface cards -- which have been the industry leaders for years; (b) it has drivers for every instrument ever; (c) the visual paradigm does work great for GUI design and layout. (Which shouldn't surprise anyone who has used XCode or Visual Studio.) Scientists love the ability to throw together a chart recorder application in ten minutes, and then wire it up to everything else in the lab, and LabVIEW works great for that particular use case.

Unfortunately, as you go beyond the most basic of computations or out of the environment's sweet spot -- in other words, as you try to use it as a general-purpose programming language -- LabVIEW just gets more and more painful. It has its own special vocabulary, semantics, and design patterns that are unlike everything else you've seen. Every time you want to define a subroutine you need to create a little icon for it, and define its arguments in terms of little panes on the icon. That's slow and painful and limiting; it makes writing Java in Notepad feel like luxury. But you have to stay disciplined and keep defining those subroutines, or your code will literally turn into spaghetti. Oh, the horrors I have seen. It's particularly awful if the code sprawls over more than one screen.

You can't effectively print out the code. It's hard to blog and hard to quote snippets from. To refactor you have to manually rearrange icons; there's a lot of time wasted laying things out. There's no way to use version control or create a patch. There's no search-and-replace.

Think of emacs. Now think of Notepad. Now think of something that is less useful than Notepad, to the same degree that Notepad is less useful than emacs. That's a visual programming language.
The SQLite bindings for .NET are excellent. When I need a lightweight database under .NET (or Ruby or Python or C++) that's the first tool I consider.
AjaxCrypt - Secure Javascript encryption
I have developed a browser based Javascript encryption method and system that is
100% secure (resists MITM, DNS spoofing etc.). The server side load is the same
as HTTP (with no h/w devices etc.)

The fundamental idea is to transmit encrypted content to a hidden HTTP iframe.
Which then sends it to a HTTPS iframe using window.postMessage() (in HTML5) or
via cookies. Since the HTTPS iframe is secure it cannot be tampered with, it
also contains the decryption keys. The HTTPS iframe then proceeds to decrypt the
message and renders it on the page.

Please read (before you dismiss it is impossible!):
http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~ashwink/ajaxcrypt/

I am looking for help from Javascript and HTML experts to convert it into a library
(LGPL).
Philip Zimbardo on "The Secret Powers of Time"
Great to see! Along the same lines, can anyone shed any light on why Gnome's settings for padding around UI elements is set to such a high value? (compare to OS X, which has very minimal padding around most UI elements).
Designing for the Web
Google is probably past an inflection point, they've still got plenty of upward momentum and almost certainly won't peak for many, many years. However, Google seems to have empire-itis just like any other big company. Eventually they'll start believing their own BS more than they will external truths, they'll become process bound and bureaucracy bound, they'll start to saddle themselves with more and more strategy taxes until they become increasingly like any other big company.

There's still time for that not to happen, but all the signs are pointing that way.
Cameron Herold:  Let's Raise Kids to be Entrepreneurs
It is overkill for what I need.

I don't use it enough to really learn it so, I'm always stumbling around that 1 time a month I need to do something outside of my normal routine.

So, I guess, the same reasons I never liked Microsoft Word.
Indeed. I'm no stranger to re-implementing something because no existing version was quite what I wanted, either. On rereading, my post didn't really come across like I intended.

Then again, even when implementing something that (it turns out) already exists, solving the problems that come up along the way almost always teaches one something.

And with Emacs extensions, even if you're the only one who finds it useful, it's still useful. :)
> It killed them as a center of innovation

I'm not so sure. Thinkpad laptops are legendary. They've been spun off to Lenovo but they pretty much set the standard for quality business-grade notebooks. Steve Jobs even used them as inspiration for the updated Powerbook line upon his return to Apple.

They pioneered SOI manufacturing, BlueGene TeraFLOP super-computing, and several other major advances.

Also, their consulting business sort of set the standard for other big players in that market. IME it's not that great, but none of them are great, so kudos for getting there first and not becoming significantly worse! On second thought, lets forget about this one....
When you say "bad rendering", do you mean glyph rendering (FreeType) or the layout stack?
I work on a graphical (dataflow) programming language called LabVIEW. It is primarily used by scientists and engineers for measurement and automation, but is also useful for general purpose problems. The code looks similar to a circuit diagram, where nodes are wired together to form your functions. Various constructs are available, be it loops, conditionals (case structures), etc. It is a very different programming model that takes some getting used to - if you try to program as a C programmer in LabVIEW you'll have poorly written code and will be grossly inefficient to boot. But if you understand the paradigm and use it to its maximum benefit you'll can be very efficient.

Asking if it matches the efficiency of C is a difficult question as it ultimately depends on what type of problem you are trying to solve. For instance, if you're looking at performance-critical low-level bit-banging code, I'd choose C over LabVIEW. But if it involves data acquisition, analysis, and display, I'd choose LabVIEW over C. Each language has its own domain that it excels at where its efficiency (and expressiveness) peaks.
Ask HN: What service does this?
I'm buying a sailboat from someone who has a lot of boats around NYC. I left him a voice mail earlier this evening, he just called back.

He left a message with me, and at the same time sent a txt message with his vm transcribed.

What service was he using? This seems like a brilliant idea. thoughts?
wait, seriously?

the suggested default step 1 for MongoDB is to acquire 3 servers?

i mean, no other database suggests such a huge default configuration. even knowing that their datacenter can get hit by lightening and all a lot of large production sites don't even run with this kind of redundancy.

this seems like a pretty taxing workaround for not keeping an append-only transaction log.
VP8 compared to h.264 in depth
Safety Standards for Firefighters Chapter 296-305 Part 1
Tools You Should Offer With Your Application Program Interface (API)
San Diego city proper has complete M-Cell coverage. 5 bars and snappy latency wherever I roamed. Still seems expensive when it's such a commitment to be with an operator, anyway.
Revealing Game Mechanics In The Retail Space
Because implementing them isn't.
Wow. It's so beautiful.
that's kind of like saying "we told you our parachutes won't open sometimes. well, not in our conference talks or in our marketing but it's on our wiki and we blogged about it".

if you want to see a message that is clearly delivered about (lack of) durability look at memcached. nobody misunderstands memcached's durability/consistency guarantees.

-Mikeal (after a few drinks)
Top Inaccurate Movies About the Future
Yesterday at work a man came to me and talked about one of his superiors who criticized this Excel file he (the first man) made. He made the Excel file because he needed to run some reports, and then word spread around and he shared the file and it got to this particular superior, who called him and complained that there were not enough good data filters.

makecheck... (the first) man was pissed.

There was also this man who used to work 2-3 hours per day creating some crazy Excel files. 16 blocks of with dozens of cells with relevant information, 1000 rows. I made some software for him which generated 99% of the Excel file in 10 minutes. His first comment? Something along the lines of "inerte, this is not very good, it's taking me 10 minutes to fill the 1% remaining".

From 3 hours down to 10 minutes, and he complained.

Anyway, I'm sharing these two tales to tell you that IT HAPPENS (yes, sadly).

So here's what I think you should do. Fix the bug, say that you did, try to contact the person who found it, and move on.

And see the bright side. Someone used your app, found a bug on it, and now you have the OPPORTUNITY to show how quickly you fixed the bug and how you tried to make your users happy. On the brighter side, what happened and could happen is something AWESOME. Someone actually found and tried your software. You have users! And they found bugs for you that you were not able to! And now you have the chance to show others how do you respond!
(Disclaimer: I work on LabVIEW.) For refactoring and layout, there is a diagram cleanup tool that will automatically re-layout your diagram for you with just a button press. It does a pretty good job IMO, and really changes the way you code. Also, version control is supported, and allows for graphical diff and merge. While there is no search-and-replace, there is a search function. (Search/replace has quite a different meaning when you're dealing with graphs rather than text.)
GridView Header Freeze Using CSS
copied from my blog:

@kristina

for some reason wordpress wanted me to moderate your post so sorry for the delay in it showing up.

>> Whoopsy, got your emphasis wrong there ….. Seriously, though, this “unchecked” type
>> of write is just supposed to be for stuff like analytics or sensor data, when you’re getting
>> a zillion a second and don’t really care some get lost if the server crashes.

did the default change? the last time i attempted to a concurrent performance test this was one of the barriers i hit. my issue isn’t that you include this feature, it’s that it’s the default, i certainly believe there is a use case for it i just think it’s harmful as a default.

>> Since CouchDB is “not a competitor” to MongoDB, it’s nice of you to put all this time
>> into a public service.

haha, that’s funny. i regularly use non-CouchDB databases and I get along great with all the people from other databases at conferences. even if i did feel like we were competing, i wouldn’t care. this post really is about reliability issues i don’t think your users are fully aware of and i honestly hope that you fix.

>> fsyncs are configurable. You can fsync once a second, never, or after every single insert,
>> remove, and update if you wish.

that’s really good to hear. have you optimized for a “group commit” yet?

>> This is because you assume you’ll run it on single server. MongoDB’s documentation
>> clearly, repeatedly, and earnestly tells people to run MongoDB on multiple servers.

I responded earlier to the complexity of actually keeping something available that depends on this. so i won’t cover it again.

>> That’s not to say that things never go wrong, MongoDB is definitely not perfect and has
>> lots of room for improvement. I hope that users with questions and problems will
>> contact us on the list, our wiki, the bug tracker, or IRC (or, heck, write a snarky blog
>> post). Anything to contact the community and let us try to help. I wish every person
>> who tried MongoDB had a great experience with it.

You make it sounds like this is all just a matter of bugs, it’s not, and i find blaming it on users who don’t use JIRA or get on IRC a little distasteful.

these issues are architectural and until you do something append-only they aren’t going to go away. someone mentioned earlier that you plan to do an append-only transaction log, if that’s accurate then it’s fantastic news.
Some android phones do not support 2.2 either. This is the way of the world.
BTW Starcraft 2 beta phase 2 just started in US.
Not really. You just add extra tests for your new functionality as usual. If you're replacing old functionality, you'll have duplicated tests until the feature is rolled out for everyone.

I think the key is being able to tell if bug reports are related to an activated feature. For instance, our error tracker tells us which user account triggered the error. From there, we can see what new features they have enabled, and factor that into our debugging.
Awesome, have signed up. Wait to get the first issue.
Gotta say, as a database developer, this is what interests me as well. Let's assume you've had a datacenter-wide power failure, and you're running the repair process on your master and slaves -- what does that look like? How long does it take? What are the factors that influence whether or not it will complete successfully?
Doesn't work on the iPad.
Bureaucrats spent $1.14M for allocating $1K