skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a major flaw. A flash-based P2P network is only available among people who have their browser open at that very moment. So it cannot replace torrents because people don't leave their browsers open to seed for other people. When they are done, they close their browsers.

And from what I understand of the spare documentation, closed source clients are going to need to pay license fees to interact with this P2P network.

And did you happen to notice the "Secure Media" part of the protocol?

This is a DRM encumbered, Non-Commercial, GPL infected protocol. I don't think it will be very successful.
Why isn't the shirt I'm wearing blue?
Yahoo, Hadoop, and Pig Latin
Static vs. Dynamic Languages
How the Self-Published Debut Daemon Earned Serious Geek Cred
i think there are going to be bumpy times ahead for P2P-based companies that depend on a limitless supply of upstream transfer bytes from a home. upstream bandwidth seems like the scarce commodity and it is just a matter of time before it is throttled back. my humble opinion, of course.

i have a vudu box and when i'm not using it, it is always disconnected from the net because i don't want to be throttled by my cable service provider (or, more likely, not have it throttled but wonder if it is being throttled every time there's a slow down).
Huh?

1. This is not about replacing torrents. There wouldn't be much economic impact in that since that stuff is already stolen and in any case torrents are not on any CDN network. The point is that sites like youtube, hulu, and any other flash based video services (almost everything) will be able to operate at radically lower costs.

2. DRM has nothing to do with this protocol. You can implement DRM if you want. Its a separate layer. And many of the key content providers will want protection over their streams.

3. I dont know why it is "Non-Commercial" and "GPL infected" I don't know what that means. I would suggest that torrents are non commercial since there are no businesses offering their content via torrents and making money. That is, I believe, the definition of "commercial".

4. The issue of browsers needing to be open is a real one, though that only effects the level of effectiveness (i.e. cost savings). Most services deliver the most popular content most frequently. So at any given time, someone who's browser is open likely has all of or a part of a file that you want.
Considering that Yahoo published their javascript library (or at least some simplified version of it) three years ago, I'm not that impressed.
Average age of Hackers here?
Hi People,

Was just wondering what is the average age of people here on Hacker News and if there is any correlation between age and success?

So, we can do a quick-and-dirty poll here. Please mention your age + how successful do you believe are you on a scale of 1-10.

For me, I am 21 and I guess I am 3/10 in terms of success.

-Paras

PS: I am curious about success because I read somewhere that most entrepreneurs are successful when they are between 25-35 old.
CBS to buy CNet for $1.75B
High Performance Web Sites: Split the JavaScript payload
Memory: Forgetting Is the New Normal
The same way you increase your "luck." You put yourself in situations where you just increase your odds. Go meet more people, interact more, build a network.

Compare it to rolling a die, it's only a 1/6 chance to roll a 6 but if you keep on rolling it you will increase your chances.
The typical Hank article I read is pretty well balanced and reasons out things logically. Not this one, it seems to be completely overblown, but that's nothing new, since the death of CDN's have been predicted for the last several years due to a new entrants in P2P technologies.

If you want a balanced take on P2P and CDN's, read the article and comments on Dan Rayburn's blog: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...

The CDN market is probably close to 1 billion $ and the major players are not going anywhere. To get an understanding of the future of CDN's read this interview with one of the co-founders of Panther Express: http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=450&d..., where he claims that the Future of CDN's is http.

I have no idea how Adobe's P2P technology works, each P2P company seems to have a different approach to content delivery.

Disclosure: I have worked for a couple of CDN's in the past.
Well you can always connect a false statement to another simpler false statement to make your idea easier to understand. Or you can show how if something were true, it would contradict with some obvious truth, and so on. This is not a cause, but it helps for your argument.

Otherwise, we could all go pointing random ideas as false, anyway we haven't to explain why they are false, couldn't we?

Edit: also, maybe you don't like blue after all :)
Very nicely done, but I think the set of "potential girlfriends who are impressed by perl tricks" is a fairly limited pool.
People use CDN's because they want increased quality of service.

I don't see how using p2p technology gives you a decent QoS.

If I told my clients (the large blue chips that ask about CDN's, anyway) that we won't be using Akamai, but instead will be relying on a brand new p2p network they would walk away laughing...
Volunteering opportunities
I live in Manhattan. I have been thinking if I can teach how to hack to teenagers or children. I am certainly not a great hacker, but I would like to show what I know and learn from young hackers. And plus, I would like to get more involved in the community. Do you know any organization that I can get involved in? Or do you know what the best way to find this kind of opportunity?

Thanks.
How do you define "success"? I'd say that I'm very successful -- even if you restrict consideration to the realm of startups, I've written some very high quality code -- yet I have yet to earn a single dollar from tarsnap.
I didn't see an explanation for an alternative solution. I've been trying to think of one all morning and can't!

Maybe he just means all friends whether they are logged in or not?
I'll paraphrase the argument as "Blub doesn't include an XML parser therefore Blub is rubbish."

Open source used to have a similar issue regarding Microsoft Word documents: "Open source operating systems were rubbish because there wasn't any software to read and write Word documents." Now that such functionality is available, the argument moves to another feature such as boot time or support for native applications.

Let's imagine that we have an open source operating system that runs all games, boots in 10 seconds, works with 6000 random devices and comes installed with a terse language which fetches web pages, parses XML, talks to 20 databases and Java applications. How much of this functionality will be of any consequence in 10 years?
StartupIndex: Canadian Startup Map
Surprising the Techcrunch still does not have coverage of this
Bugs vary with Complexity?
Ask YC: New twitter utility?
This morning I was thinking about how I like to use Twitter primarily as a way to keep my finger on the pulse of different sectors of the world. Twitter is great since you get ground-level real time knowledge from people in the know, but you already knew that.

Twitter makes it hard to manage your stream though, so I am proposing a site called "Twitchboard" Think of it as alltop for Twitter.
Twitchboard would identify (by hand to some extent) the top 100 or so quality Twitter mavens in any one of several categories and allow you to see the steam from that category.

-Politics
-Technology
-Arts and Entertainment
-Business
-Regional interests

I've run into a TON of great Twitters in all those areas, but it's not something I'd want filling up my entire feed all the time, it would be a lot more useful I you could go "Hmm, lets listen to what people in and around the world of politics are saying today" and Boom* you can check it out before rolling over and seeing what the most active sports people are talking about.

What do you guys think? Is there something like this out there? Would it be handy?
Surely whether speed is important depends on what corner of program space you happen to be exploring?
CBS Acquiring CNET For $1.8 Billion; 44.6 Percent Premium
Mark Cuban among Carl Icahn's nominees for Yahoo board
Most entrepreneurs come to believe that liquidation preference is evil. The truth is that liquidation preference is not evil and it is a right that should be granted to investors to give them proper protection (against liquidation, not liquidity). It is the "participation" right that is evil (allowing greedy VC's to double dip and essentially turning their equity investment into a senior note plus warrants). So give them non-participating liquidation preference and everyone is happy. However, the reality is that no VC's will let you do that unless you have all the negotiation power. This is a very good article. If you want to know more, I also write about the other do's and don'ts regarding VC's. For struggling entrepreneurs, it is an important topic and worthy of further discussions. Thanks for posting.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/vc-worst-enemy.html
I'm with ya. I'm fine giving age (37) but asking how successful I am just throws a wrench into it.
Photo-music video creator Animoto raises round from Amazon
i agree, but they will also want you to run a pilot to see how it goes.
Finger Trees: A Simple General-Purpose Data Structure
How about starting off by telling us what you've done already (i.e. where you've already spent hours looking) to find such an oppty and then let us offer suggestions outside of what you've already done?
this can be solved by using a real ISP that does not oversell as much, instead of cheap comcast,timewarner, or att
If you want to avoid scribd hell, the original pdf link is here: http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~ross/papers/FingerTree.pdf
Strands Absorbs Another Personal Finance Company
The procrastination rituals of everyone from cattle ranchers to CIA agents
I am excited about the typography and the new graphics engine. i wonder if their font engine is faster than ours is already in flash.
What Grade Your Photography Portfolio Deserves?
Do you know what grade would you get for your online photography portfolio if this were your home assignment? “A”? Sure? You can claim “A” only if your portfolio is devoid of the following lapses.
I actually had no clue Yahoo! was still that popular. I don't know but a few ppl who use yahoo email addys and AFAIK I know no one who uses their search engine. I'm actually quite surprised they had so much traffic. I guess that hijacking people's browser settings when they install software works!
There is a huge void that you can fill with your skills here in Africa,that is if you are interested. I believe you will make more impact and touch lives than in the US,which i believe is saturated?
Agreed. I find it ironic since a piece like this is likely written at least partially in an effort to attract programmers to facebook. To me it reads: "Come work for facebook and re-invent online chat. Again." Now, if the article had been about how they pushed the state of the art, I would be pretty interested, but none of this not new technology.

As for the dark launch thing, it is a fancy trick, but there are ways of doing load testing in an automated system by having test servers simulate the load from real users. This usually can give you much better data without wasting bandwidth, slowing down users' experiences, etc.
I am 24,but going your prognosis i.e."...most entrepreneurs are successful when they are between 25-35 old.", then i guess next year will be my year!!!
You sound like you have experience with this. Do you have more information?
Build and host a processing.js app in your browser with AppJet
Could this be a replacement for torrents? I don't understand why someone couldn't write a BitTorrentish client in Flash/Air. It could really lower the barrier to entry for many people. Have you tried explaining how to use the BitTorrent protocol to a lay person? Seriously, if the Pirate Bay offered an in browser Flash based P2P client that was interoperable with other BitTorrent clients, that would really shake things up.

Personally, I don't believe that keeping the browser open is really that much of a problem. I keep Meebo and GMail open all day. It's been said, Firefox is the new Emacs; just another operating system.
For YC Readers: who have built a good website that nobody visits.
I just came across the article "How to Market Products That Are No Longer Popular", though it is specifically not for web products but it could be helpful to YC readers who have built wonderful websites but lack visitors, the fundamentals of selling any products (and making it popular) are the same and this article is worth reading it.

Article: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1950
When I was given assignments for SML, I was constantly running into x or y restriction whenever I tried something. Maybe my prof knew how to setup his assignment for maximum frustration using SML, and normal usage is not so bad (after you gain some skill in it), I don't know. But consensus from my class & some people on the net is that it shouldn't take hours to get a 10 line program working. Principle of least surprise is something SML does not follow. Also there's a lack of a support network & decent documentation for it compared to more popular languages out there. I'd rather use lisp than the traumatic experience SML was. At least the syntax isn't much to learn.
Google Maps With Wikipedia And Photos
The point is, there's never an explanation for why something isn't true.
Safari Carpet Bomb
I don't think a discussion about this sort of thing on digg or reddit would even begin to approach the high signal/noise ratio of this comment thread. For this reason, I'm not terribly disappointed with the topic digression.
I'm tired of this incessant chatter about libraries, libraries, libraries in discussions about language. Of course libraries matter; I don't want to write code to convert a bitmap to jpeg. But the "libraries are the new language" belief is a gross exaggeration that has become way too commonplace. If it were true, we'd all be programming in C.

Programmers are not welders. Programming means writing new code. Language is the medium of that code, it is hugely important, and it gets more important as the complexity of one's problem increases. The only way that libraries would become more important than language is if programmers stopped working on complex problems or new problems.

Ultimately, this overemphasis on libraries is a variation of the discredited "code reuse" meme, in which programs are imagined to be strung out of components, so all you need is enough components.

Edit: Another common thing about these discussions is otherwise intelligent people ignoring the fact that it is possible for a program written in one language to call a library written in another.
Got Skype? Want Skype?
would you use skype if google bought them?
"Facebook does not disclose the number of servers it operates. But research firm Data Center Knowledge puts the tally at about 10,000. The slug of cash will help Facebook buy approximately 50,000 more servers"

60,000 servers? Jesus christ. Are they planning to scale to take account of Alien users or something?
SWFUpload, Paperclip and Ruby on Rails
Apps take time. IIRC, for a long time the big Python applications were Grim Fandango and some research software at LLNL.
Glasnost: Bringing Transparency to the Internet
As I look at this article now, it reads "userbase" not "active users." Did an earlier version try to claim facebook has 70 million active users?
20 Useful Tools to Make Web Development More Efficient
Actually, the two companies I mentioned - Kontiki and Red Swoosh have amazing QOS. Bit Torrent sucks for that, but it is an engineering issue, not an architectural or conceptual one. Akamai actually acquired red swoosh, and is integrating it into its platform as, I think, a defensive move. But clearly, the kings of the CDN world understand that a widely deployed well engineered p2p network will have an impact.
i think instant scalability will come from an application server, something like glassfish for example

deploy your application to glassfish and let your AS scale it
the article itself points out Python isn't that fast either

i can only see speed being an issue in these heavy data type things, for which you should probably be using an APL language (as they are quite exploratory-friendly -- and fast -- for these types of problems)

i've been using Arc for a while and the speed has never been an issue. most of your time developing a program is spent writing it, not watching it run. about the only thing that annoys me is that it currently requires mzscheme
Ask YC: Learning to hack...
One of the common pieces of advice given by the hackers on this site to the non-hackers is to "learn how to hack." In the past few weeks, I have come to the realization that I, too, would like to "learn how to hack." Here's the problem: Not having an extensive technical background, this piece of advice seems to be quite vague. With which languages should one start in order to learn to hack?
I sent a similar version of this question to PG about a month back and he referred me to the creators of Appjet, a YC startup he said was working on this very problem. After looking at the site and receiving an email from one of the founders, the answer I gleaned was to start with learning Javascript. I would like to know from this community whether I'm on the right track to "learning to hack."
Is XP Support from Microsoft Flat-Lining? | Tech Jaws
Comcast is Buying Plaxo | Tech Jaws
Growing Customer Loyalty
recently i learned of Verizon's FiOS which has multi-Mb upload rates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_FiOS
Was it not possible before to create, say, a bittorrent client in Flash? Not sure what Flash was capable of (I know it can network, but maybe only HTTP?).
Robert Noyce and His Congregation
Google Doctype - a review
I don't agree. You can explain why something is true, right? (at least in some cases, not for all cases, you know, Gödel and all that). In such cases you can actually explain, it follows that if X is true, !X isn't true, and you have an obvious explaination for that.

Example: why is my shirt red? Because I only have red shirts on my house. Why isn't my shirt blue? Please refer to the previous explaination of why it's red, then it follows it can't be at the same time red and blue, etc etc.

And it's great it's like this, because otherwise we could be saying a lot of random predicates are false and no one could argue with us. So I think asking someone "why x is false" isn't illogical, after all if there is a reason to say "x is false", surely there is a way to prove it's false indeed.

Edit: part of the problem with this discussion, of course, is that there is not a fixed meaning for "why". "Why" is a very ambiguous question, it doesn't specify whether we want to know the intention, the proof, the cause, etc. And even, what is a cause? If you are talking about historic events indeed you can't explain why X didn't happen, but from the same pov you couldn't ever explain why Y did happen at all, if you see history as something deterministic & linear. So whether you're right or wrong actually depends on what you see on the word why...
The greatest tech trend that will happen is that the cell phone is going to change. The greatest change in the cell phone is going to be in the user interface, and I believe that the cell phone is going to go towards less traditional input methods.

I have a "smartphone". And it's too complex to use, because it is trying to use a PC windowing system on an embedded device. It has menus and tabs and lists - those things don't work simply because the screen is too small.

The iphone works to a large part because there is a lot of thought put in the user interface. The human-machine interaction.

Other companies are seeing this, and they will start innovating, no longer in the hardware, but in the software. That's when we'll see the new cell phone features I expect:

1. Multitouch
2. Squeezing
3. Voice recognition
4. Context sensitive UIs
5. Motion detectors that do something depending on how phone. Example - phone in pocket, everything is off. You take it out and look at it, it shows you date, calls, etc. You start playing with it, it figures out what you likely do
6. Entire surface of phone interface

Till people start working on the UI, the phone is stuck. When the UI changes, things will become massive with the phone.

That's why google is going Android. They know where the future OS is.
Well, that's a minute of my life I'll never get back.
I agree with the review. The very best of it is in the section on Web Security. However it's probably early days yet.
And even if it was true, the earth pretty much IS flat. It curves on the order of 8 inches to the mile. Unless you travel a lot, curvature from 1 set of stairs has more effect on your life than curvature from the earth.
I like that phrasing. And most bright kids never get a "colleague" like that. I just finished reading Lockhart's Lament, and it made me sad that even though I was one of the best students in my IB program in high school, then got a BS in CS, I had to learn from the internet 10 years later that math is a journey of creative discussion.
Backboard: Get Feedback on Your Design Projects
It's not always about algorithms. If you need, say, something that can parse rfc 822 messages, you have to read the rfc, implement it, find out which applications you need to talk to have implemented it incorrectly, and then work around those bugs. Even if you could write the implementation in 2 minutes, you've still got a time consuming task on your hands. Worse, you will probably need to implement more than one library for a medium sized application if you're using an unpopular language, so multipy the time it takes to finish the task above by x.
Wow, silencio, I had to check the comment header to make sure this wasn't one of those comments I write in the middle of the night and forget about :). I think you might be my long lost twin.
Anybody at vkernel.com?
I don't understand this argument. When someone says "Why don't you... X?" are you going to enumerate all the things you'd rather do than X, and then explain that the effort involved in doing those things precludes X? Or are you just going to say "That's a stupid question. Tell me why I should."
Why does the unknown/expired url page suck?
I tend to hit this page fairly often as I leave my browser running in the background. Why doesn't this page do something nice like redirect me to the main page with a message? Instead, I have to go play with the URL to actually get any content back.

I can understand why it's such a plain page, but since it happens fairly often I would think it would be better to handle it more intelligently.
Anybody on startup news working or know of anyone working at this place? I'm looking at some of their products for the vmware environment we manage & thought to ask since they're a startup and on v1.0... we just deployed a trial of their app & it looks pretty good!
Verizon picks Linux—but not Android—for mobile platform
New code is extremely important, but if you're missing a key library - say, html parsing - a 10-second task can expand to take a day. That makes "exploratory programming" hard. You can have both a well-designed language and a great selection of libraries, in Python or Ruby.

Not that it's Arc's fault; Arc just isn't at the point in its lifecycle where the libraries are at Python level. It's more like Python 0.5. It's a good goal to have though.
Sure, but somebody has to make a start, or we will be stuck with Java forever. Maybe you can often use libraries from other languages, too, as in the example of the Cairo lib.
I've seen a similar argument. If an employee agrees to work for less than a statutory minimum wage, does it matter? Yes, because it makes it harder for anyone else to get a better income.
Scary stuff. Maybe one of the reasons I'm so comfortable here.