skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true, the Android browser is extremely fast, polished, easy to use, and good at rendering. We still have more performance and polish work to do to make Fennec competitive. That will be happening during our beta release cycle.

But once Fennec matures, I think it will be a better browser for some users - not everyone, but many people. Already there are features that I miss when using Android's Browser:

* Quick access to the tab bar.

* Seamless sync with my desktop history, tabs, bookmarks, form completion, and passwords.

* Add-ons. The ability to customize the browser is great. Here are a few Fennec add-ons that I've written to scratch my own "itches": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/user/5283521/
Headline should read "2 in 10 Americans say reducing incredibly complex systems to binary questions is silly"
While not 100% perfect, nor supported by every app in Mac OS X, you can enable voice commands under "Speech" in System Preferences. This will allow you to do certain things without touching your mouse or keyboard (minus a "listen" hot key)!

Your Mac will need a mic of course (most have them built in, except for Mini and Pro desktops I believe...).
Well, I don't think a GUI is more complex than editing nearly the same stuff in a text editor. But that might be just me.

However, if you want to go down to bare-bones stuff, give a try to http://ikiwiki.info/.

Quite a few solutions exist for such scenarios aswell.
I bumped you back up to 1 because I don't think you deserve to be negative, but I agree with the other reply. It's a bit dramatic.

There's a material difference between land owners exploiting a tough economy and young developers with stars in their eyes getting suckered in by a good pitch.
$15 is ridiculously cheap

For something you want, maybe. But a lot of these services fall into the category of "I might find it useful sometimes but I'm not sure" and most people aren't going to spend $15/month on something they're not sure they want.

The average Tarsnap revenue per user is about $3/month, and a large majority are less than that (yay lognormal distributions!) but I still work to convince people that it's worth spending that money.
One thing you haven't mentioned but it is related to anonymous functions (or lambdas) and is an important part of the fp style is passing around functions as first class objects. It is quite unusual in imperative programming and it is normally only used there to provide callbacks.

Let's say, you want to write a function that exports your video library to an arbitrary medium. In FP, one way to do this is to create generator functions that create DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, etc. Then your export function would take the input and a generator function, and export the library using that function. In Common Lisp:

(defun make-dvd () ... )
(defun make-blu-ray () ... )
(defun export-library (data make-medium) ... )

And then you would

(export-library *my-data* #'make-dvd)
(export-library *my-data* #'make-blu-ray)

Or if you want to use an inline lambda (anonymous) function:

(export-library *my-data* (lambda () ...))
I see some people saying "you NEED this" and "you NEED that". Maybe YOU do, but I don't. At least give me the option to remove it. Yes I'm a minimalist.

Personally my dream browser would have tabs and the URL box in the same row with no other icons or search boxes at ALL. Also get rid of the fat borders, maximize the real estate.

Just my 2 cents.
Blockbuster to file Chapter 11 next month
Well said!

Lakatos in his "Proofs and Refutations" addresses precisely this topic.
Suppose you rent a server at a hosting facility. This server could be a physical server or a VPS. It could be a piece of "cloud" infrastructure (a good list can be found at https://www.cloudkick.com/providers/).

Some people who have little technical operations experience will write their code and copy it over to their production server to deploy it. As time goes on, the server needs to be changed; perhaps you need to add a library to extend the function of PHP. More time goes on, and then all of a sudden you need to build out a second web server, identical to the first. How do you do it? The first web server has been hacked and modified, and it's not necessarily trivial to build out a new one.

Opscode uses Chef to create "recipes" that determine everything you want on a box. So instead of logging into the first web server and hacking on it to get it in your desired state, you modify your recipes to add your PHP module there. Then, when you need to build out more boxes identical to the first, you run your Chef recipe and away you go.

What I'm not sure about with Opscode is how they do Configuration Management. If I have three applications on the box, and each of them have independent configuration, does Opscode manage that versioning for me, so that I really can take a new server from nothing and have it up and running with identical versions of my code and identical versions of my configuration files, substituting values in where appropriate? You might want every web server to be identical except for X, Y, Z (maybe you route one web server to one MySQL slave and one web server to a second MySQL slave, for example). I'm not sure what Opscode is doing to make that simple.

I've built out a web interface and underlying architecture for the company I work for to do exactly this sort of thing (and a whole lot more) via Puppet (http://puppetlabs.com). My interface handles rolling upgrades to eliminate downtime and a whole host of other slick things. Our developers do not hand over code to a deployment team; they do their own deployments. I can't recommend Puppet over Chef as I have no Chef experience, but can say that I've been thrilled with what Puppet can do for me.

If you want more information, let me know either here or via email, I'm happy to go deeper if you want.
Panel: U.S. lacks legal framework to fight in cyberspace
Eh. Most of my work (not all) is done within the confines of a company. There are some dramatically different ideas when you're writing something to be used WITHIN a company than when you're writing something to be used BY a company.

Most of it makes sense, or seems obvious, but your SAAS companies don't typically offer Active Directory (or LDAP) integration, as most companies aren't willing to expose their directories outside of their firewalls.

Auditing levels tend to be more paranoid, and need to be structured so that they can be fed into (or are at least sane enough to be read by) the industry-standard log analysis tools.

Admin accounts are typically transitioned to in-house users, or employees of the company, instead of being managed by the man behind the curtain (you).

So, perhaps it's that my experience is different than the majority of HN here, but to me, 'enterprise development' is a dramatically different process than what those guys at 37Signals do, for example.
I don’t think it’s such a big drama. My prediction would be that h.264 will continue to dominate in the next years, either displayed using Flash with a HTML5 fallback (for mobile Webkit browsers) or the other way around, depending on how that whole Flash thing turns out. Heck, that’s not even much of a prediction, that’s pretty much reality right now. What Firefox does or doesn’t do doesn’t matter, the next changes will only come with the next generation of codecs.
Contrarian indicator.

There are some excellent investments out there right now that in twenty years will cause people to look back and wish they had made a move when everyone else was paralyzed with fear.

"Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful." -Buffett
Makes sense to me. If sticking a GPS transmitter on your car violates a fundamental right to privacy, surreptitiously following your car with a combination of cars, closed-circuit cameras, helicopters, and whatever-the-hell else they use must violate that same right. Yet clearly the police can surveille whoever they want without a warrant.
The problem I have with that story is that there are a lot more people writing software for the MS platform than just the virus writers and I figure that if you add that all up the virus writers are a drop in the bucket.

So this applies to all developers, not just to the ones writing viruses.
From what I understand, you can't self-sponsor your visa as a single founder.

eg. You would still need a US co-founder. E1 or E2 may be a better visa to use if you don't have a co-founder.
What about the EB-5 visa? (The Entrepreneur's Visa)

The specifics of the visa are:
1. Each year 10,000 entrepreneurs allowed into the US.
2. The entrepreneur has to attract investment of 1 million.
3. In which after he attains this, he is granted with a 2 year period of 'probation'.
4. In these 2 years, he has to create at least 10 full time American jobs and make a revenue or attract an additional 1 million dollars.
5. If this is achieved, he will be granted a green card. If not, he has to go back.

So my questions are:

A. I know it seems impossible, but how many foreign entrepreneurs actually can achieve this? Are there numbers of how many get this type of visa each year?

B. When is the EB-6 visa coming out? (Same visa but only with 1/2 requirements)
Woa - I've been looking for cmd-tilde :) Thanks!
For more info go to:
http://startupvisa.com/
Rescuing a hosed system using only Bash
This might also be true in education (e.g. Finland has the least amount of school hours in OECD-countries, while its results are the best according to PISA).
It’s a simple equation: moving = longevity
I'm going to do a completely separate post on the subject of first class functions because I think it is too complicated a subject (and with too many implications) to be squeezed in there as an aside, besides that I don't think I'm qualified just yet to write the article in a strong enough way yet. More understanding is required first.

It must be funny to all the FP gurus here to see someone struggling to understand the things that are second nature to them, but I find that it is surprisingly hard to teach this old dog a new trick. One part of me wants to say 'enough of this' all the time and reach for a C compiler just to get the job done :)
But is it bad for those 8 people? Or do they just perceive it being bad for everyone else?
Because it is bad. There is another major correction coming and when the second wave of foreclosures hits things are going to get much, much worse for the whole world. People know what's going on even though the powers that be are very optimistic. Every major economist has been wrong about industrial output, home sales, and GDP growth projections so far. They've been wildly off too. I don't think their employers are going to call them on it because they were all wrong. The clustering of predictions keeps people who are massively incompetent employed.

Right now the world's economy is being propped up by debt and phony stimulus money. When that party stops the reality of our situation will be exposed for what it really is: ugly.
I think you're technically right about the difference between the two, but I'm quite sure the author did mean "do good"... more food would obviously be a good thing for Africa.
What gets me is shopping centers. Every one I see if 25% to 50% empty. If I recall, a few years ago you'd once in a while see an empty unit in a shopping center, and usually there was a sign that something was coming soon. (Am I remembering incorrectly?)

It kind of feels like a post apocalypse situation going into some shopping centers?
That is Cmd-` (~ would require a Shift)

And after Cmd-Tab, Cmd-~ takes you backwards in the list of apps. So if you Cmd-Tab too many times, Cmd-~ takes you back instead of having to cycle through.

Likewise, in Safari Cmd-} (aka Cmd-Shift-]) and Cmd-{ take you forward and backward through the tabs. This also works in Terminal.

Cmd-L puts the focus on the location bar in Safari if you want to type in a URL (or tab over to the search)

Quicksilver is cool, but I just use Spotlight for launching apps. Cmd-Space turns on Spotlight.

If you use TextMate, I highly recommend the TextMate book from Prag Press.

Those are some of my favorites.
Ask HN: 280north breaks the mold?
For several weeks now there has been a plethora of articles describing start up best practices in regards to who to select, who not to select, how many to select and methods for selecting co-founders. However, the most recent Y Combinator exit (and perhaps the largest?) was a group that broke most of the advice given. Does this discredit the advice? Is it the exception that proves the rule?

Specifically, here are some of the disparities between 280N and the common advice:

2 founders.
1 is too little, 3 is a bit too much and 4 is out of the question (except for Reddit?). 2 is just right. 280N is yet another example of a more-than-2-founder company that succeeded.

Business / Technical co-founders.
Ross, Tom and Francisco are all wonderful programmers. They all have a degree relating to computer science. Each one contributed significantly to the products that they delivered. None of them are business oriented (though I'm sure that had some business skills and/or picked them up along the way).

Products.
280North didn't create a product and start selling it. They released it for free. Then open sourced the framework they used to build it. They then created a community around that framework. And, finally, they started work on a development tool for the framework and community.

And other interesting notes:

Funding.
In order to do this, they took surprisingly little funding.

Engaging the community.
They took time to engage the community (their customers?) when they could have been coding new features. Of course, this is advice given by several successful entrepreneurs. They also attended and spoke at conferences.

So, HN, what's up? Is the mold bunk? Are 280N just a special case because they were building a framework and community? I'm interested to hear some feedback! :)
It’s Time To Reinvent The Signature Page
Who's lending California this money now? It seems quiet a risky deal.
This is based on the assumption that the car is only ever used on public roads. It's usually a safe assumption, but data is still being transmitted from private property whenever the car is parked.
All I've been able to find is a PDF showing a lot of people with second and third jobs on the BLS website from 1997, so nothing recent.

It's something that seems reasonable, but I don't have anything to back it up. The BLS is probably who would have it though if you wanted to look in to it.
As to your "Why do people pay them?" question, companies get to the scale where managing their servers in an automated fashion is necessary, and deploying new boxes within a matter of minutes instead of hours is critical. As a DevOps guy, our job is to always automate ourselves out of our job. Why do I want to do anything more than once? Deployment tools like Chef and Puppet help with the "Don't Repeat Yourself" concept.

Disaster recovery is another area where these tools can help. Imagine your database server goes down. Downtime can be really expensive, depending on your application. With Puppet / Chef and an interface on top, you could click a button and have a new box spooled up and your data automatically restored from your most recent backup. Downtime would be reduced pretty dramatically.

Auto-scaling is yet another possibility; if you can detect when you need another server, you could script it so that another server gets reserved and deployed and brought up to snuff. Then, when your traffic drops down, you could release the server.

At some point, it makes sense to either hire a DevOps guy, and / or spend money to have the deployment cycle consistent, dependable, and repeatable.
Well, of course ... but first you have to have the money to invest. That's not true for most Americans, especially since most who do have investments have them in their primary residence and retirement plans, the vast majority of which have taken a significant hit.

Then you have to call the bottom, where the adage "Don't try to catch a falling knife" comes into play. A lot of people who bought into the stock market in, say, 1931 lost their shirts.

That said, I'm sure there are good and fairly safe asset classes (perhaps the one this forum is dedicated to? :-) to be invested in right now, but it's certainly riskier than "normal".

Also, when citing that "in twenty years" hindsight concept don't forget survivorship bias....
How much information can you cram into 140 chars
Are some languages more suitable for tweeting? Like Chinese(char per word?) or Fins(long words?).

Hw mch cn u str whl kpng th txt rdbl?

How much data can you store when giving up readability?
BTW my wife rents retail space at a shopping center and even though they have 20% of their units empty, they refuse to lower the price she negotiated five years ago (her lease is up for renewal). She called a few other places and they're also still charging the same prices and don't seem willing to negotiate.

What's the deal with that? Shouldn't prices be going way down since there's so much empty space everywhere?
What investments are you speaking of? Have you gotten into any of them?
This is because the psychological upper limit at which people start to take notice of what appears on their credit card statements when they decide to decrease their monthly expenses seems to be around the $20 mark.

As long as you're below $20 plenty of people will continue a subscription until their card expires even if they don't use a service, above that the cancellations go up, so do the chargebacks and the retention goes down.

This has been researched ad nauseaum by the services you refer to, which is why they all converge on the same price range.
> Spotlight - I don't use Dock, sometimes I forget its even there. I would disable it if I could.

While my replacement isn't spotlight (I just use Proxi with a bunch of switch-directly-to-application-X hotkeys), I don't use the Dock either and would disable it if I could do so easily, without losing Dashboard, Spaces, and everything else that runs as part of the Dock process. (Although I actually still use command-M and Witch to minimize and unminimize windows to & from the Dock via the keyboard.)

In Tiger there was a nice hidden preference that allowed you to put it at the top of the screen, under the menu bar, where it would only come out if you really wanted it to (because the mouseover activation row was only one pixel tall and not at the top edge of the screen but rather the bottom edge of the menu bar), and was thus effectively pretty much disabled. Sadly, that option disappeared in Leopard. The best alternative I've found so far is to make the Dock really really tiny -- you can make it smaller than the System Preferences GUI will let you via 'defaults':

# defaults write com.apple.Dock tilesize -int 1
There's a development locally that started before the recession (Barrow Crossing). It finished just as the recession was hitting its stride, and one of the anchors pulled out before it opened.

It still only has a few stores, and they're all major chains.
For reference, the recommended solutions (in order of votes in the comments are:

http://echosign.com

http://rightsignature.com

http://zosh.com
Lawsuit Says Teens Should Not Be Allowed To Like Ads On Facebook
I may want to talk to your lawyer. My employer's lawyer and my own lawyer have different information. Nevertheless, if we can trust the stats on that website you are right.

Can you send me his or her info? You can get my contact details from my HN profile page.
Well, I'd rather the story center more firmly around the Atkinson/Jobs conflict or the whole sweep of Atkinson going from clever hack to being convinced about the rounded rectangles to figuring them out as well. I don't need to know the math to appreciate the trickiness of making quick ovals on Lisa hardware, but if we're going into that, I want to know how he worked out the roundrects as well.
The Web isn't dead. It's feeding great apps - the case of Fotopedia Heritage
Another anecdotal indicator, for the past few months when I go out to restaurants they've been half full. These are places that less than a year ago had 30 minute waits most nights.

I wonder if it takes this long after the crash for people's spending behavior to adjust, or are we really hitting a second dip now?
How about asking for a sample of work that the candidate is "most proud of"?

You may be able to glean their inclination from that alone...
I think they're hoping inflation will eventually compensate...
BlackBerry Twitter
Respectfully, Colin, but you price Tarsnap horribly. You run it like a public utility (a very complicated public utility) instead of a business.

You think this is a good thing, but it's not. Instead of setting a simple price based on what Tarsnap is worth to people --- a task that requires figuring out what Tarsnap is worth to different people and selecting the segment of the market that(a) you want to serve and (b) is sufficiently lucrative --- you have a fundamentally cost-based micro-metering structure that almost certainly radically undercharges most of your users.

You may think you're doing your users a favor by letting them off easy. But you're not. If Tarsnap is worth $11/mo to most of your users (hint: it is) and you charge $10/mo, you're generating value for them. But instead of doing that, you charge them almost nothing, and as a result are much more limited in what you can do for them. Last I checked, you were consulting instead of full-timing Tarsnap.

If you charged more, you could afford to:

* Radically overhaul your website and educate users about what secure backup actually means

* Commission a better user interface for people who you'd like to offer secure backup to but can't because they're not going to use a Unix command-line tool

* Implement more and better features on the backend of your system for tracking data, scheduling backups, backing up different kinds of data, and whatnot

This is all apart from the obvious point that your micro-metered pricing scheme is a Mensa test that almost makes fun of people's attempts to figure out what your service costs. Yes, the fact that it costs much too little means the joke is on you, but that doesn't really take the sting out of it for your prospective customers.
Default behaviour in implementation of STOMP protocol in RabbitMQ with python
LOL, missed the mark on all accounts, but very creative!
Is this eff-pee-gee-ay thing of yours a web app? Is it viral? Show me your virality coefficients along with your 30 day retention engagement numbers -- then we'll talk.

If it's not a web app, you may want to pivot until you have something 18-24 year olds will enthusiastically share with their friends for eighteen seconds and promptly forget.
Where do you live? I want to get a coffee some time, talk Putnams, and tell you why pricing in pico dollars attracts pathological customers who are the worst possible people to sell online backup to, and why instead you should be selling to people who happily pay a hundred times what you are currently charging.

Not specific to cperciva: If you have customers who value your service less than a cup of coffee, fire them. If this leaves you with no customers, consider a new app or marketing strategy.
I have caps-lock mapped to ctrl and visor set to ctrl-<CR>. So my terminal is always two pinkies away :)
If the first algorithm is worth spending time on, so is the second. If the second isn't, then the first isn't.
Nah, I'd say they reinforce the mold.

1) I don't ever remember pg saying 3 or 4 is too many founders

2) Lots of YC companies have only programmers

3) Products: They made something people want. That's pg's main harping point - MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT. That's the implicit social contract in YC: If you make something people want, you will get a t-shirt that says "I made something people want." Pricing, open source, community, framework, monetization, etc are all details.
Things can't be too bad if people have three jobs.