skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Review our product Beacon - a hosted Comet push service with WebSockets
Hello HN,

We just recently launched our product, Beacon.
Beacon is a hosted service for real-time browser messaging using WebSockets (with optional long-poll fallback for older browsers).
It removes the troubles of hosting, developing, debugging your own Comet solution. We sort out the browser compatibility issues, so developers don't have to.

Features:
* Hosted Comet service with WebSocket support
* Cross-browser compatible clients for all major browsers (including iPhone and Android)
* Easy to embed, plain HTML/JS
* Uses a plain REST+JSON API
* Scalable and hosted on Amazon EC2
* No monthly fees, only pay for what you use

As everything on the web becomes "real-time", we think a service like this is really helpful.
Perfect complement to PaaS-services like Google App Engine and Heroku.

Feedback from you HN readers would be very much appreciated. What are your thoughts and what could be made better?
As Beacon still is in beta, you can sign-up for free and try it out.

http://beaconpush.com

Thanks,
Carl over at beaconpush.com
Can anyone actually defend the statement that it is a huge privacy invasion?

I think it is a silly statement to make because, clearly, there is little or no privacy invasion. The button is probably a little deceptive to users - but clicking it does not open up any private details about you. It does, yes, allow them to post messages which appear in your news feed; but I am struggling to see that a a huge privacy problem

Sounds like band wagonning to me :)

(sorry for such a short comment earlier)
MP seeks NAO inquiry into BT £546m NHS deal
Hah. Yeah the most important thing though is always quality of the content, over the aesthetic of the design. But nice design is always the icing on the cake. Good information architecture always beats pretty design in my opinion.
His website, where contact information can be found relatively easily, is in his profile. That might be a more efficient approach. (And anyone who can't be contacted from the information in their profile should fix that. The email field isn't visible to others.)
Your comment is specious.

In the 90's, New York averaged something like 2 murdered cabbies a month.

Uh... NYC was a dangerous place in the mid 90's. Do you have evidence that the gypsy cabs were targets more than yellow cabs?

It's not the gypsy cabs that were the problem, it was the customers.

A would-be car jacker would need to use a stolen iPhone and credit card in order to keep from getting caught right away, but that's hardly an insurmountable barrier.

In that case, UberCab would need a stronger way to identify users. For example, you enter the cab, and the cabbie takes a photo of you with his iPhone UberCab app and uploads first thing.
5 foods it's cheaper to grow
Obrigado por prencher nosso formulário
You can still make money publishing on the Internet. I despair of it for generic commodity content at non spam scales, but half of my SEO buddies are essentially niche publishers. (I probably can't name specific niches, but let's say "Christmas cookies" or "green DIY household projects" or "classic bicycle parts" for rough example of the scale.)

My business is niche publishing if you squint at it: I compete directly with Scholastic Publishing on one very narrow product category, bury them at it, and monetize with ads for a related niche software product.
Absolutely I think forums are great. The biggest thing missing from forums is the up/down voting goodness that brings the best content to the top.

It's important to note that forums and comments facilitate two different things. Forums are really, really good at facilitating discussion, whether or not the best content goes to the top is usually irrelevant (though, I'm claiming it could be made better). I think SO and HN generally suck at this, because I don't know when somebody has replied to one of my posts.

However, SO and HN excel at having great content, and having that rise to the top. I attribute this to moderation and the up/down voting.

I don't think it is impossible to have both features in a commenting system.

> Forums need to be fixed.

Really? There are thriving forums for nearly every topic imaginable. It's probably not due to forums being difficult to use.
Apple QuickTime backdoor
Awesome. I don't see any way for me to get a tweet/email/something to let me know when new stuff is added. That kind of thing would be nice, because I'm sure I won't remember to go back to the site.
if you want wireless phones in your home that talk SIP, they're available in the form of DECT phones with SIP-capable basestations, or WiFi phones. you could get quite a few of either of them before your cost reaches the cost of this thing.

also you won't have to figure in the cost of a massive FCC fine.
Yeah, a company C-A-N abuse our service doing this. It does violate the spirit of our terms of agreement, but honestly... We probably wouldn't notice and wouldn't terminate your account. In fact, we do not throttle our network connections either... If you have a TB of data, bring it on.

We have disrupted this market by creating our own storage and cloud management system. Our costs are far below our competitors. We are profitable and cash flow positive. The occasional abuse won't change that. If you don't know about this, check out our blog articles about our storage pod... http://blog.backblaze.com.

In general, companies don't do abuse us. They know it is in their best interest that we are profitable and thriving. Otherwise, how could be continue to provide the least expensive business online backup available? Every other competitor charges companies on a per GB basis. Our service ... at $50/computer for unlimited storage is both inexpensive and predictable.

Finally, when someone uploads a 1TB of data on our service, they tend to tell everyone they know! This attracts a lot of customers to start using our service with far less than 1TB of data. You can't buy publicity like that.

Hope that helps you understand what we are up to. Email me if you have questions... If you are a true hacker, figuring out my email address will be a piece of cake.

-- Nilay Patel
VP Sales, Backblaze
So many cases were being thrown out on police IDs they had to change the rules for photo id here.

The computer prints a picture of the suspect along with 11 other slightly modified versions. The witness must turn over the photo sheet and select the right image, police aren't allowed to touch it.
This is supposed to stop the trick of putting a heavily creased ID photo of the suspect on top and the police officer pointing to it while showing them to the witness.

Of course it doesn't stop the police having a quiet word with the witness beforehand and explaining who they want convicted. Surprisingly this is more effective with 'innocent witnesses' - normal members of the public wanting to help the police, than with coerced witnesses.
Virgin America/Loopt--free flights to Mexico
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/have-a-free-flight-to-mexico-with-your-taco/?scp=1&sq=loopt&st=cse
I wouldn't say this is an article on productivity so much as an approach to learning. I find a lot of auto-didact programmers learned this way. The compiler is a great TA after-all.

If there was one thing I could add it would be take notes. If you can explain to someone else the "whys" and "hows" of your solution to a problem, you've got it down pat. Sometimes we get something to work by googling a quick solution, but we forget to try and understand that solution. This doesn't serve us well. Taking notes helps me to submlimate what I learn on the job into hard-referenceable tomes of knowledge.
to bookmark and always come back for their movie reviews (or toilet reviews... or whatever the heck I review that day)

Is your content organized around anything in particular? Only reviews? What's your branding besides you?

Care to share?
Oracle's dislike of MIDP 3.0
now i understand, sorry about that, and tnx for explanation,
i`ll try not to make that mistake again :)
Very true, thanks so much. I didn't even think of that.
I've been using chartbeat for the past few weeks. It's absolutely awesome and I recommend it to anyone here. FYI, I have no affiliation with their team + don't even know the team there.
I've tried Ubercab a bunch of times, and the two times I actualy got a cab were a good experience. It's really nice not having to fumble with cash or a card for payment. Plus you get to ride in a towncar/SUV/etc. It is a bit more expensive though.
Nick Franglen to perform 24-hour generative Theremin piece on London Bridge
I actually found it difficult to pick something that better described this phenomena.

These are obviously people whose compassion for animals is a function of their cuteness. I don't see them organizing lynch mobs for similar but much more inhumane acts against farm animals happening in their own communities. Would people care if this was a litter of pigs? Or a litter of rats?

And leaving aside this specific example, most people on this planet in rural communities don't have the economic means to employ a dedicated medical professional to put down their excess cats and dogs.

For those people drowning the animals is a perfectly legitimate option, it sure beats watching them starve to death.

Ignoring all of this and going straight to "oh those poor puppies, what a horrible person" as most people seem to respond is, I think, a privileged western viewpoint.
Ok, but there are plenty of things that aren't message passing in Erlang, whereas, say, in Smalltalk, pretty much everything goes through messages, no?
These guys will get snatched up by Google. It would be a perfect complement to Google Analytics.
Prolog is not dead, it just has a niche following. Similar to Lisp and Smalltalk, two other languages mentioned in the article. Prolog suffers even more because it requires programmers to think differently -- Lisp and Smalltalk programs can still be written in a procedural style.

Prolog offers at lot of the same things that Lisp also does: symbolic processing, meta-programming, among others. One of the tricks of Lisp programmers is to implement Prolog in Lisp and use it for the areas it is strong. Just read "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence" to see how this is done.
Innovators, You Need an Attitude Adjustment
AutoCAD Coming Back to Apple After 18 Years
Thanks for all the great feedback, everyone! This was our Node Knockout submission, so if you get a chance, please give us a vote. Give us some big points for innovation!

http://nodeknockout.com/teams/starcraft-2-destroyed-my-marri...
I'm undecided. There are more than enough blur effects used that could conceal cuts in the movie's timeline.
It should be along shortly, if not already. I've got it in my personal gmail account and my apps account.
The Kindle 3 is ingeniously designed to be everything the iPad will never be: small, light and inexpensive.

I'd hold my breath on that one, at least until Thursday. Having said that, my Kindle is ordered and on it's way.
Looks like a pretty cool product, especially for those who want to add on small real-time features to their application but don't want to have to deal with evented servers/browser support/etc. I started looking into doing something very similar about a year ago based on having those exact needs actually (the project was eventually scrapped).

- The cost is listed as per million messages - what happens if I deliver 900,000 messages, what am I charged (if anything)?

- Care to share any details about your infrastructure?

- Have you thought about writing (and open-sourcing) a simple demo app, such as a chat room, to give people an idea of how everything works together?
There's a lot of people who know flash and don't know HTML5 and not to mention HTML probably having some shortcomings.

So there's going to be stuff done in flash to appease the designs of sites. But once HTML is more mature, and people know how to use it, they're not going to do the work twice anymore.

Make no mistake, having a major platform like the iPhone/iPad is pushing that forward. It's hard to tell how or when this will turn out.
In addition, start a blog for the pieces you can make public. Blogs have so many other benefits that you should be doing one anyway (especially if you are also involved in startups).

That said, writing about programming on your public blog is scary because you (usually) know that whatever topic you write on there are people who know more about that topic. You just have to get over that and learn to embrace the benefits of the conversations that ensue. Or write to a private audience.
Several Prologs have extensions for constraint programming, which give it much smarter hueristics. Instead of trying every possible combination of choices and failing/backtracking as early as possible (generate-and-test), it can use constraints to narrow the intervals / sets of possible choices - which usually sets off a chain reaction and further constrains the search space.

Once constraint propagation can't narrow things any further, it can copy the search space, use various search hueristics (such as splitting each copy of the narrowest interval in half), and see if that triggers further constraint propagation (or hits a dead end). It usually greatly reduces the amount of depth-first search. There are other ways of implementing constraints besides propagator-networks and space copying, but that's the way I understand best.

Generate-and-test is great for prototyping, but doesn't scale up to larger problems. Constraint programming fares much better.
Can you expand on this? I had blogged about how I would like future of web analytics to be: http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/what-web-analytics-sh...

Hearing your thoughts on this will be interesting.
Female whale sharks may have a built in sperm bank
OT but as an employee/contractor, I'm interested in what you wrote here:

Employees who don't need those nudges are very rare, and become expensive quickly

Could you elaborate on this? Are these employees just able to take specs and implement them on their own timetable? I would consider myself in this category - I currently telecommute and can go for days without any communication with the manager but still get things done. I just want to see if I am in that category from another person's point of view or see what else I can do to improve.
New evidence that it was once possible to sail across Antarctica
"I also found sleeping on it often magically produces a solution in the morning."

I think this is a great reason to take a nap in the middle of the day if your environment is conducive to it. It works for me as long as the code is the top thing on my mind when I fall asleep.
Gmail is great for webmail, but its not a replacement for Outlook, especially if you rely heavily on contacts, calendar, tasks, or search.

Really? I find Google Apps to be better in all four of those categories, especially search. What makes Outlook superior in those categories?
http://ask.metafilter.com/76589/So-this-consultant-walks-int...

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd... "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered "sure".

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM ThinkPad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130-page report on his miniaturized printer then turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep. "That is correct; take one of the sheep." said the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car.

Then the shepherd says: "If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?", "OK, why not." answered the young man. "Clearly, you are a consultant." said the shepherd. "That's correct." says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answers the shepherd. "You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don't know crap about my business...... Now give me back my dog."
Creating Cross-Functional Teams
I've been thinking about this for a long time. The initial problem is that any old forum is going to have a community around it that knows how it works. This makes any change disruptive to users.

Secondly, most information in a forum exists in a manner that is already organized in a certain way to account for the forum. So, you have a lot of content that is already organized and should be easily found.

Hacker News is no different. It's a forum with threads. SO was the first real departure from this. However SO succeeded for reasons besides the organization. First, it had big names behind it who could pimp it out. Secondly, it was SEO'd well. Finally, it made participation a game. The organization of SO isn't really better then what a forum can offer.

So, I'm back to thinking how I'd go about navigating a large, information intensive forum, but it's not easy. SO is great for Question/Answer problems, but that's hardly the only things forums provide.

Wiki's are another version, though very much document-centric. They allow for discussion and interaction, but in a different manner.

Maybe instead of talking about it, I should just code-up one of my ideas and see what people think.
Well, with ubercab you have a record of who the driver and passenger are before you even step into a cab. I can't tell you the last time I bothered to look at a cab number or license.
I don't understand why this is downvoted. Is everybody satisfied with how the majority of commenting systems work? Do I just have high standards?
VMware and Open Source – Reacting to the Threat
It doesn't fail on all occasions. Our research group wrote a robust natural language parsing system written in Prolog (with some C extensions). The (aptly named) unification grammar, lexicon, and most of the productive lexicon are written in a declarative manner.

This really paid off when in a new research project, which goal is to write a sentence realizer for the same system. With nearly no modifications we could reuse the grammar, lexicon, and productive lexicon. Both the parser and the sentence realizer use the same grammar and lexicon now.

I understand that this may seem somewhat trivial, as it may seem that the lexicon and grammar are plain data. However this is not true:

- The grammar is written as a declarative manner, where goals are mostly operators that manipulate attribute-value structures. These rules are later compiled to plain Prolog terms via term expansion (DCG-like) for efficiency.
- You don't want to perform some unifications immediately, even when two terms are unified. Most Prolog implementations offer blocked goals, where a goal is blocked until a variable becomes instantiated.

However, I am the first to admit that Prolog makes some classes of problems trivial (unification grammars, parsers). There are also many things that you do not want to do in Prolog, because it is a waste of time, or very inefficient. For instance, in our system the following components are implemented in C or C++:

* Finite state automata for quick lookup of subcategorization frames.

* Part-of-speech tagger for restricting the number of frames for each word before parsing.

* N-gram models that are used as a feature in fluency estimation.

* Tokenization transducer.

* Bit arrays (comparable to Bloom filters) for excluding useless paths in parsing.

Conclusion: use the right tool for the job. Unification, structure sharing, and (some) pattern matching are cheap and easy to use in (WAM) Prolog. Most other things are prohibitively expensive and clumsy in Prolog.
Sign in with Twitter? Seriously?

Are standalone user/password systems so hard to add and get right? (I'm serious about this; it seems like a solved problem, yet there also seems to be a number of sites that punt on that, and want me to couple their site with my account on some other site, which I really do not want to do as a default.)

Maybe people need throwaway Twitter accounts, like there is for E-mail.
I co-founded http://confabb.com several years back (circa 2006). It never really got off the ground but the site is still up and functional. I'm not involved with the site anymore.
Modern Science Map
I think you wrote "less" when you mean "more". Assuming that's what you meant, I disagree. From their website, it looks as if UberCab requires drivers to be a livery company, so gov credentials are required either way.

The only way I can see the stolen iphone game working is if you steal the iphone from an UberCab driver, or convince UberCab that you are an independent livery and then rape someone before the stolen iphone gets cut off.

In contrast, a legitimate yellow cabbie just needs to put his coat on top of the taxi license and make sure the victim doesn't see his license plate # as he drives away. That same game won't work with a legitimate UberCabbie, since there is an electronic record that driver X picked up passenger Y.
Chartbeat is very cool, but I wonderful how useful it actually is.

Is the idea to modify content on the fly as it gains traction? I just don't really see how this service adds value (read: increases my revenue, pageviews, xxx), besides some nice live updating charts to look at.
This has happened to me on the past two consecutive days (and nights). A problem that I couldn't figure out at 11pm, one that I spent at least 30 minutes pouring through Google Groups, searching through APIs, trial and error, etc...After sleeping on it the solution revealed itself to me in the morning in less than five minutes. Truly phenomenal and hugely rewarding.
This Is the Nuclear Bunker Where Wikileaks Will Be Located
Connecting DailyMile with CycleMeter
Wikileaks Servers Now Located In Nuclear Bunker
I want to believe the issue most people have is not that she killed puppies (who doesn't?) but the glee with which she threw them across the river, and her obvious enjoyment of the task as she asked to be filmed and then uploaded it on the tubes.
Am I the only person to set a 20px+ programming font? I have pretty good sight, but with a widescreen-ish macbook, you can easily get 120 chars in a window at that size and it's much easier to scan code.
Consolas is definitely my favourite. I switched over in Windows when I first saw it, and now use it in OSX too.

http://www.wezm.net/technical/2010/08/howto-install-consolas...
Development of Tiny Thorium Reactors Could Wean the World Off Oil In 5 Years
Or the "Reasoned Schemer". Unfortunately, most such implementations are slow compared to Prolog AMs.
It's not hard to add, but it's so much more useful to me to not make Yet Another Account.
How long until Google monetizes Priority status?
Productivity is a topic too complicated to put into a few sentences but there is one tip I'd like to contribute: paper and pen are underrated.

There were awful lot of tasks I tried to achieve via pure coding and rewriting / rewiring blocks here and there. All they actually needed was some analysis on paper.
Ironically I first used Autocad on SUN Sparcs. We bought a Sparc 5 just for Autocad because PCs of the day (386) couldn't really handle the graphics needed.

Then they dropped Unix support, then dropped OpenGL support.
Salad? Gimme Steak. (Moving off Cucumber for acceptance tests)
Do you ever fall asleep with a cup of ball bearings in your hand when you are stuck on a problem? I have always wanted to try that ...
Umm, if you think you're "getting" programming the first moment you let your fingers have a go at it, then you're definitely not getting it.