skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw this not terribly long ago, seems like it might have accessibility issues as it wraps each letter in a span so I wonder. if. screenreaders. would. read. each. letter. as. a. single. word.

Also wonder perhaps about SEO issues - does the google bot execute javascript?
In the history of air travel has anybody ever breached a secured airplane cockpit (of any sort?).

To the extent that we're concerned about the security of cockpits, maybe our efforts are best directed towards better cockpit doors instead of strip-search machines.
cool, I'm excited to check out the app.
> It is easy to underestimate the difficulty of creating the right incentives.

My favorite "Incentives matter" story is FedEx - they were having a hell of a time getting drivers to get packages shipped on time. They tried all sorts of things - threatening, praising, performance reviews, training, etc.

None of it worked.

Then they changed their pay from "per hour" to "per shift" - you work a shift, you get paid a certain amount. Go home when you complete your shift, regardless of how long it takes you.

Right away, their on time rate went massively up - in fact, a lot of shifts started being completed early at that point.
It lessens your potential attack surface and comes at no cost. And as security-ignorant devs are concerned (which we all are from time to time) it doesn't magically fix vulnerabilities, but it can alleviate the magnitude of exploits. It's a good idea.
I read a few places before that 90% of the cost of developing a drug occurs after clinical trials begin but I have things to do other than write HN comments so I didn't look it up again. I will be happy if someone else finds a reference to support or deny that and will happily admit I am wrong if I am.

Of course I'm totally wrong about the 90% delay I put in this last comment, I was thinking about this on the way to the office. If we're thinking about the added cost of regulation we have to compare the cost of regulation to what drug companies would spend on clinical trials in an alternative regime, and that number is not $0.
We certainly don't care, as long as you make things people want.
Note: I wasn't a founder, but one of the two first employees and a minor shareholder. Internally, we called ourselves as a founding team as when we joined, things really started to happen. Founders weren't devs themselves.

Given that we had worked on Jaiku just a bit over a year before the acquisition, getting acquired by Google was a very pleasant surprise.

We were a talent acquisition like the most Google acquisitions are. Acquired communities are rather tiny for Google and if there is important server-side technology it usually has to be rewritten anyway for Google infra.

The toughest part was that we had to let go of the Jaiku service and eventually the community as we couldn't develop Jaiku full-time anymore.

Although we were behind e.g. Twitter (we started before them) and Facebook (we had the stream of posts before them) in users, our core users really really loved Jaiku. It was the first web page they visited every day and many still think that Jaiku's model was superior to both Twitter and Facebook.

This is the key: in talent acquisitions, it's probably best idea to communicate that the service will be shut down eventually. This way the community doesn't have false hopes. If it turns out that you can continue to put enough effort to existing service, the old community will likely come back.

Feel free to ask more. I can try to write a few key points to remember when you get acquired by a large tech company, but I need to code a bit first ;-)
If a smaller company is 100% owned by a larger company then people suing the smaller company would have access to the large company's assets (there is some sort of equity cut-off here, in banking I believe it's as low as 9.9%). Corporate law thought of this.
> The Death of the Web?

...there is nothing like the smell of rotting corpses in the morning. But seriously the title suggest that this will be a one sided and pointless philosophic post.

> Here’s how it will happen.

This post is a prediction.

> Currently, the most sensible way to develop software and make money from it is as a web application.

Last time I checked Star Craft 2 was still a native application.

> It gets around the problems of piracy, distribution of updates, and it makes use of the awesome platform that is the web.

The author probably never heard of Internet Explorer and XSS.

> Sure, it is possible to make money (even large amounts of money) selling one-off software licences, but compared to selling recurring licences for a web app, it’s a dying model.

The author probably never heard of Photo Shop. Sure it's one off payments, but in the long run you will end up upgrading to the latest versions and it's not a web application.

> That’s very sensible, and I expect people to continue developing web applications in the future.

The author probably forgot the title at this point. I mean when I hear "death of the web" I think of all the web being gone for good.

> But, if you poke around web developer communities, you’ll see one obvious trend: almost everyone is either very interested in building some kind of iOS app, or is already doing so.

I really like the "obvious trend" part that tries to sell the phrase as exact science. How much is "almost everyone"?

> This seems to affect almost every web developer community, from Flash/Flex to RoR including Python along the way.

Very nice, but where are the data and the numbers?

> A lot of bleeding edge web developers use Macs, and a lot of them are lusting over iOS and want to build apps for it.

How much is a "lot"? What does "bleeding edge web developers" mean?
Why are they "lusting over iOS"?

> But for many, the web is a shortcut to avoid the problems of piracy and distribution. And the web is a shortcut with a lot of headaches. It’s a lot simpler to build an iOS/MacOS app and distribute it through the App Store than to run web servers and keep them up to date and build billing systems and maintain mailing lists and so on2.

This phrase seems to a suggest that the App Store fixes piracy issues.

> It’s a lot simpler to build an iOS/MacOS app and distribute it through the App Store than to run web servers and keep them up to date and build billing systems and maintain mailing lists and so on2.

A lot more expensive too: 30% of your selling price.
Offer HN:  Tell me about your work and I'll quantify it and give you feedback.
So I've been working on this site for the past few days: http://valuegrapher.com

It's a nice tool, but probably a bit too complicated for normal people.

I was thinking about ways I could simplify it when I was struck by an idea:

What if I just e-mail people and ask them what they worked on today? They could reply in plain English. Then I could handle the data entry and analysis myself. I could send them back a graph of their productivity once a week or so. I could point out undervalued projects that could use greater attention or warn them away from dangerous time-sinks. Maybe I could just commiserate with their work-related frustrations.

This idea seems exciting enough that I thought I'd experiment with it:

Post your e-mail in this thread or send it to me at JesseAldridge@gmail.com and I will begin e-mailing you once or twice a day to ask you questions about your work. I'll take your answers, quantify them, do some analysis and send you back my thoughts in graphical form.

Privacy seems like an obvious concern... For now let me just promise that anything you send me will remain confidential.

Obviously this approach won't scale very well, so I'm thinking I'll just start with the first ten people who respond. After I see what works and what doesn't I can look into scaling things up.

Update: One response so far. I should make it clear that this service is not just for programmers. Anyone who cares about improving their productivity should get in touch.
Wow, how did I miss that there was a diff in chart/vis apis? thanks!
Age of Abundance
You can thank ESRB for that.
Because this one did:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846909
The militarization of the Internet
Everything in nginx is non-blocking, almost nothing in Python is - this is a huge difference and this can be fatal for perfomance if all your libraries aren't non-blocking. An example: let's say you are executing an expensive query to MySQL in a non-blocking server and you are using the most popular libraries - - The problem with this is that this query will block your whole server and you won't be able to process any requests while this query is performed. If you want to take advantage of non-blocking then all your IO calls have to be non-blocking (like in node.js), else you don't gain much perfomance other than perfomance on hello world benchmarks - - and you may risk to decrease perfomance critically if _any_ of your IO calls are expensive.

Gevent tries to solve this by monkey patching, but this solution is partial and it does not work with modules that use C extensions such as pylibmc (the fastest memcache library for Python) or MySQL-python (the most mature MySQL library for Python).

I would love to see Python move into a non-blocking direction, but for this to happen then a huge change needs to be made and anything IO/network related has to be non-blocking... Which basically is Twisted and Twisted isn't that used, so I doubt the general Python community will move that much in the non-blocking direction.
I think the point was that it wasn't actually that difficult to keep the prisoners alive once the incentives lined up.
Ben & Lee invested heavily in enabling virtual goods before iOS had any infrastructure for it - I think the Tap Defense revenue primarily came from people installing other applications in order to get an in-game feature, not from traditional ad networks like AdMob. And I'm pretty sure Tapjoy still did a seed round of ~$500K or so to get started, although I forget with who.

No arguing that they did have a nice exit, and it's somewhat telling that their acquirer, Offerpal Media, has now renamed themselves 'Tapjoy'. That doesn't happen very often.
Try to articulate how it lessens the attack surface. It means you can't bank up session tokens; instead, you're only able to do everything that a session token would do for you anyhow. Remember in your explanation that session tokens already expire anyways.
In fact generally alcohol doesn't kill brain cells either http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nervous-s...
What if the code is classified?
Yes, just like the original EDGE iPhone.
>An App Store isn't that great for developers ... when it's the only option available. That is not the case with the Mac App Store.

I keep hearing this, but I've yet to be convinced.

Over the last 5-10 years Apple has pushed developers more and more aggressively. They put giant efforts into things like Classic and Rosetta, only to strip them from the OS entirely a few years later. They repeatedly trumpeted the full equivalence of Carbon and Java to Cocoa, and now it's infeasible to use either as the basis for any full-featured application. They developed all kinds of new APIs for QuickTime in 10.5, and then in 10.6 introduced "QuickTime X" as the only 64-bit native solution, effectively deprecating everything else. And most recently there's this unusual attack on the Flash plugin of all things. It's as if they now revel in actively destroying backwards-compatibility.

All of these decisions had the effect of reducing Apple's support and maintenance overhead while strengthening their control over the direction of their platform.

I would be surprised if Apple's very clearly demonstrated zeal for taking control and eliminating developer options did not extend to the new Mac App store.
I find it ironic that just two months ago the same pundits were talking about how WPF was dead and Silverlight is taking over. Now Silverlight is dead and HTML5 is taking over. Yet in MS most high profile product, WP7, it supports Silverlight, but not HTML5.

Why do I get the feeling that most people have no clue WTF they're talking about? :-)
It's easy to waste millions when you're making billions, and you don't have to answer to taxpayers.

Quite the opposite. The taxpayers only wake up once every 4 years, and even then they buy the crap that's shoveled at them, and the fearmongering ("OK, we may have made a few mistakes, but you still have to vote for us because the other side is evil"). Anything that happens between now and the next election will be largely forgotten, and anyone who tries to remind the electorate will be shouted down for "negative campaigning".

On the other hand, the shareholders are watching the actions of the corporations every day of the year. I'm not personally doing so, but I pay a variety of mutual fund managers to do it. If they can't maximize my return by steering clear of corporations that are flushing money away, I'm going to fire the fund manager and put my money elsewhere.

And that's why you'll never see a private organization as poorly run as a government agency, at least for any period of time. The quality of education we get is absurd for the money thrown at it. The amount of time it takes for a highway construction project to be completed (not to mention the number of workers I see loafing around when the town is filling potholes) would never be tolerated in industry. I could go on all day...

This "government is wasteful" meme ignores the fact that there are powerful non-government actors milking the government.

This is certainly true. But it doesn't absolve government of its responsibility as stewards of our money. The fact that government is just so huge that this is impossible is just another symptom of the root problems.
I'm still not sure where you got the idea that the British ate the aborigines from.

I'm filing this under "extraordinary claims demanding extraordinary proof" for now.
You buy the EMC unit, because you want the EMC tech to call you and say "we see you have a failing drive, I'm en-route, and I'll be there in 15 minutes with a replacement". Even if you are not paying attention, the unit called in and told the control center it needed attention.
Yes. No. No. Yes. Yes. Agreed.
Slow Network, Slow Application or Slow Server?
Do you mean that you have to pay for emergency medical services like the ones needed when you are hit by a car or you have appendicitis?
I have never used marijuana and never intend to. But things I wouldn't do myself shouldn't necessarily be illegal.
Of course! I've been smoking cannabis since I was 16, but now, I only use it when I do front end work (weekends). It allows me to have laser focus for the task at hand, and allows me to forgot about the unimportant things that also need done during the weekend: laundry, cleaning the apt, dishes, etc.

"I'm just wondering if it's a regular part of the lifestyle of many successful hackers"

I think it does not matter if you're a "successful" hacker or not, it matters if you understand how it effects you and your work, successful or not. I know some that cannot work without it, but I also know some that cannot think straight while stone
In the mid 90s I lived with an MIT educated hacker who was our programming team lead. We worked on a Windows multi-protocol email client that had back ends that talked to AOL, CompuServe, PRODIGY, MCI, etc. My roommate coded nearly all of the back ends, and was responsible for much of the design and architecture of the program, which was for us a fairly big success.

Every morning before work, he'd make a pot of the nastiest, strongest coffee you could imagine, pour himself a cup, and drink it with his morning bong hits. He'd then drive myself and our other roommate to work in his beat up Volvo station wagon. Once he got to work he'd shut himself in his office, crank up his stereo (no headphones) and start reading his email.
Very much relevant. That ruling meant among other things that political spending amounts cannot be limited.
(Not-so-farfetched) conspiracy theory alert

This has new policy hit a wall with the press and has gotten nothing by negative writeups. When it was announced, I made a statement, as did many others, that there would very soon be an "incident" that would let this cure. That appears to be happening right now with this worldwide blitz on Yemeni packages. One and done.

Two things here are very unfortunate:

1. This is one of those huge media events that take all the front page space and interrupt network programming. It's going to instil fear in some population and give merit to the security theater.

2. Interestingly, given that this is supposedly cargo, we're still not talking about systematically scrutinizing cargo. Even so, in a political context, I don't think anyone is going to sufficiently separate the two. Right now, the big lines are Richard Reid and Christmas Day Bomber.

No matter what happens now--letters to Congress, TSA abuse reports, journalistic stunts--I fully expect to get my bread buttered at the airport.

One more thing: there's a good post on the front page about incentives. How about a tax break for fondling or photo shoot on has to endure? Let's provide disincentives for the Fed to keep this up.
This appears to be roughly how prohibition against alcohol ended in the US: first with essentially universal defiance; then with a popular wink-wink-nod-nod "medical alcohol" exemption of sketchy legality; then with faultering enforcement and inconsistent and imperfect legal codes... and finally repeal. (Of course, for MJ the situation should be simpler because no amendment is needed to the US Constitution to end prohibition... merely an act of Congress.)
It's a fair question, and I personally don't see a good way around the legalities of this.

However, the moral questions are quite obvious, and it seems obvious to me that there would be consumer watchdog groups (like Consumer Reports) that would keep us abreast of these antics. Even if the law can't pierce the corporation, crowdsourcing and reputation certainly can.
Landing Page Test: Video vs. Image
You've probably admitted to and documented multiple counts of Computer Trespass, knowingly using a computer service without authorization and knowingly gaining access to computer material. It's a Class E felony.

156.10 Computer trespass.

A person is guilty of computer trespass when he knowingly uses or causes to be used a computer or computer service without authorization and:

1. he does so with an intent to commit or attempt to commit or further the commission of any felony; or

2. he thereby knowingly gains access to computer material.

Computer trespass is a class E felony.

http://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article156.htm#156.10
Thanks so much for your feedback!

1. Interesting. Uploading a spreadsheet is the minimum viable product that we have up and working today.
2. Makes sense
3. Will definitely get to work on UX/general website improvements. Really appreciate the link.
Sounds like $3 a note isn't the right price point for you?
Electric Car Drives 375 Miles on a 6 Minute Charge
edit: agreed, Cannabis does not kill brain cells, our body actually makes it's own version of thc.

excerpt from Botany of Desire:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpH9C8-y708&feature=playe...
I found this part of his article to be interesting. I'm working through a CS degree and learning C++ for the first time after cutting my teeth on Python and C#. What exactly does he mean by "(restrained) C++"? He mentions a contract studio using the STL and boost. We are using the STL in our data structures class...does John Carmack eschew the STL and roll his own data structures?
And if you sell chalk, it might get used on the chalkboards for the Manhattan Project...

I don't think it's a problem at all that you can't enforce morality. I'd be much more offended by licenses that tried to enforce some sort of morality by forbidding redistribution to particular groups, whether it be the military, Amnesty International, Saddam Hussein ( http://www.google.com/search?q=saddam+hussein+playstation ), or even the Situation from Jersey Shore.

Theo De Raadt put it best:

But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
Seriously: the opposite of this sentiment is true. We should be working to hoist stuff out of HTTP. Authentication is a perfect example of something that endpoints should be able to decide without having their options influenced by the protocol.

If there's a single advantage to conveying a username/password in a dedicated HTTP header as opposed to any other way of using HTTP to convey the same information, it hasn't been well articulated to me. Down with HTTP Authentication!
They rarely brought prisoners back. They were a large part of the initial colonization of Georgia and Louisiana in the US, and of Australia, probably other places too.
mrjob: Yelp open sources its Elastic MapReduce framework for Python
tl;dr: yes.
> So a lot of iOS apps are likely to be developed (in the past and in the future) by web developers, if only because they make a nice mobile client for their existing web application.

> likely to be developed (in the past and in the future)

The past already happened unless the author invents time travel it's impossible for more applications to "likely to be developed" "in the past".

> Why would you deal with all the angst of writing a billing system

I could not agree more, use PayPal and a shopping cart that supports it.

> why would you maintain servers, deal with hairy scalability issues

What kind of scalability issues?

> deal with the craptastic reality of Internet Explorer,

I don't know, let me see why I develop for IE... ohh yes, because it means that my app is accessible to IE users!

btw: looks like the author remembered that IE actually exists, see previous comment.

> why would you do all this if you can just plug into the App Store and let it handle all the headaches?

Three reasons:
1) I need to learn Objective-C and iOS APIs
2) it means a lot less users than the IE users
3) I don't want to give away 30% of my earnings to Apple

> Sure, for some apps, it will still make sense to be on the web, or even to be only or mostly on the web. But for many, the web is a shortcut to avoid the problems of piracy and distribution.

I really like paragraphs where "some" and "many" many are used to give a sense of scale without presenting facts.

The web is not a shortcut to avoid piracy problems, it wouldn't work for games.

> It’s a lot simpler to build an iOS/MacOS app and distribute it through the App Store than to run web servers and keep them up to date and build billing systems and maintain mailing lists and so on2.

It's a lot smaller user base too.

> To put a final nail in the web-coffin, a lot of web developers have already gotten acquainted with the fundamental tools for building Mac OS apps while building their iOS satellite apps. It’ll be an easy transition for them to build their next app solely in the Mac ecosystem and avoid all the headaches of the web world.

Once you earn 1000$ it's easy transition to 200$.
That is a far-fetched conspiracy, especially compared to the direct, obvious, immediate tactical simplicity of "send crazy shit to the US to make them overreact at great cost to themselves" for terrorist groups.
This model exists, although not yet in mobile - Solve Media does it as a way of monetizing already-existing captcha traffic. Instead of filling out a captcha at the end of a signup, you watch an ad and type out a phrase within the ad to move on.

I can't imagine this would perform well in places where the captcha wasn't already required - there'd be too much dropoff. So while it might be interesting to advertisers, no publishers would run it, unless you charged so much that it made up for that conversion dropoff, which would then cause it to no longer be interesting to advertisers.

Making an ad product that keeps both parties happy can be tricky.
Anyone who quote "hate"s people for smoking pot definitely hates Barack Obama.