skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Scala connection pool library?
I'm trying to use Squeryl in a new Scala project. This is my first project in Scala, so I'm looking for a good Scala library to handle connection pooling. Of course I might as well use a Java library. What would be a best fit for SQueryl? Amongst java libraries I'm considering DBCP, C3P0, Proxool and BoneCP, being BoneCP a serious candidate looking at their benchmarks.
If they did not use "Facebook" in the title no one would read this incredibly ignorant article.
But they limit you on page views and also require you put a Typekit badge on your site
An Open Letter to Apple

by Richard Ziade on Feb 21, 2011

Dear Apple:
It’s your friends from Readability. Remember us? You put our technology into your Safari browser last year. We’re writing this open letter because – well – we’re a little upset right now.

Last Friday, you notified us that our Readability iOS application was rejected. In explaining the rejection, you pointed us to 11.2 in the App Store Review Guidelines:

11.2 Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected.

We’re obviously disappointed by this decision, and surprised by the broad language. By including “functionality, or services,” it’s clear that you intend to pursue any subscription-based apps, not merely those of services serving up content. Readability’s model is unique in that 70% of our service fees go directly to writers and publishers. If we implemented In App purchasing, your 30% cut drastically undermines a key premise of how Readability works.
Before we cool down and come to our senses, we might as well share how we’re feeling right now: we believe that your new policy smacks of greed. Subscription apps like ours represent a tiny sliver of app sales that represent a tiny sliver of your revenue. You’ve achieved much of your success in hardware sales by cultivating an incredibly impressive app ecosystem. Every iPad or iPhone TV ad puts the apps developed by companies like ours front and center. It was a healthy and mutually beneficial dynamic: apps like ours get exposure and you get to show the world how these apps make your hardware shine. That’s why we’re a bit baffled here.

To be clear, we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it’s your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like. But to impose this course on any web service or web application that delivers any value outside of iOS will only discourage smaller ventures like ours to invest in iOS apps for our services. As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way… towards the web.

Since we re-launched, we’ve already seen a significant amount of usage across a wide range of browsers, operating systems and devices via the Readability web interface – for both mobile and desktop. Looking ahead, we plan to redouble our efforts to deliver the best possible reading app using the latest best-of-breed web technology.

The new Readability is fueled by the free-form nature of the web. Just as content pumps through the web’s piping, apps like ours thrive as nodes on the web – unencumbered by levies or barriers imposed by others. As we said months ago: “for us, the web is the right bet.”

Still, we’re always looking to give readers the best possible reading experience and a native iOS client would help us do that. We hope you’ll change your mind. If you do, we’d be happy to resubmit the Readability iOS app.
Regards,

The Readability Team

P.S. We’d we be glad to deliver Readability for iOS – with in-app purchasing – if you’d carve out 70% from your 30% fee and share it with writers and publishers, just as we do.
I know this will probably cost me, but Montréal brings a whole new dimension to the question, "What language should we use?" ;-)

Seriously, though, I recall visiting during YAPC, and the after-hours conversations slipping between English and French (and back) mid-sentence.

I really enjoyed the city, but if you want to fit in with the locals, learn you some French (or English).

(I should add that, personally, I don't see this as a negative. My French was pretty darned rusty, but it still made things fun. And everyone was quite cool and easy-going about it, perhaps because I was an American (i.e. culturally challenged ;-) ).
Making browsers servers as well makes much more sense. At least allowing communication that is peer to peer. This would dramatically reduce network costs for the application owner.

There is a Proposal for peer to peer browser communication. See:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
I don't get your argument.

> There is no reason for the channel to be Apple's

How about the reason that it is Apple's? And why would they not want to have their rules on their channel?
I am also not sure about ridiculousness of the rules; and finally "losses value"—it depends. One can argue that this is true for some segment wanting to participate in Apples ecosystem, but it is offset by another, larger, segment which actually benefits from it.
That last category is really telling. Successfully integrating your tastes into the user experience seems to elude pretty much all music players that make a go at it (excluding Pandora, which does exclusively that.) I think this is largely because, not only do your tastes not necessarily match those of your friends, but they frequently don't match your own tastes from last week.

So Rdio shows a page of what's in heavy rotation amongst my friends - but it's not accompanied by any sort of indication that I'm likely to enjoy any of these. My suggestion would be to use some of that $17M to buy up like.fm and push hard on recommendations.
You can't fire someone for griping as long as the gripes are objective? That seems kind of ridiculous. It's clear that companies should prefer employees who criticize constructively (i.e. emailing the boss to say that people would get more done if they made more money but didn't have to work such long hours). What purpose would it serve to make it harder to select such people?
A quick overview of the App Economy, using data from the iTunes app store
How Much Would Mint Be Worth Now?
I don't agree. I think that the bilingualism is a strength. After all, the strongest Open Source markets in the world today are international. If Montreal can represent a bridge between North America and Europe, there's an opportunity for synergy there.
If the subscriptions policy isn't the absolutely craziest move Apple's ever made, I don't know what is. iOS has converted me into an Apple fan, but not if stuff like this continues.
Readability Is The First Victim Of Apple’s New Subscriptions
Sorry, but even Microsoft software itself cannot provide 100% backwards-compatibility between versions. And forward-compatibility is almost non-existent.
There are two levels of mispronunciation. If you pronounce 'Hermite' in English so it rhymes with 'thermite', you have no excuse. It's ignorant and plain wrong. If you pronounce it with a silent 'H' and use the right ending sound and as close approximations to the vowels and intonation as your language will accommodate, that's perfectly fine; I do that too.

It's the difference between ignorance and knowledge, carelessness and respect. That still leaves room for pragmatism and plain speech.
Zagat Relaunches W/ More Free Content - Maps, Lists, Third-Party Reviews
Blogging Drift
By enforcing user-hostile policies, Apple has aligned themselves as an enemy of the GPL, even if they want to pretend they are still cozy with open source.
What a slap to the face. Apple uses their technology then tells them they can't use it themselves without offering in app purchases?!?!
Fighting e-waste with recyclable laptops
Engineering has been good at getting rid of trick questions, but some other groups still use them.
I like the pilcrow so much, I've got a big ol' pilcrow tattoo on my arm.
Haha.

Now, that's a dream I'd be interested in seeing.
This book is like reading Aristotle, it feels pretty old but it talks the truth and the truth never changes
Colour, almost always.
I read that a while back also. I'm afraid you got the wrong impression. Forth is another tool, to be used when appropriate. It seems best used when you can adopt the whole Forth worldview, which goes far beyond the typical mental shifts required to switch between, say, C and Lisp.

As I understand it, Forth shines when you look at the entirety of a project and are prepared to find the leanest, most elegant solution to the exact problem, not limited to writing programs for commodity hardware. Forth people are kind of like Motie Engineers[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye#Moties
I very much felt the same way at the beginning of the process (and throughout the process). But you've got to remember that the worst thing that can happen is they say no. And saying no doesn't necessarily say anything about you, interviews can get derailed by any number of things none of which imply that you are unqualified. I have blanked on obvious things, i have coded horrible mistakes on whiteboards. That doesn't mean i was unqualified though.

Google never visited my university either, but i got approached for an interview (linkedIn ftw) and i accepted it because saying no, or not applying is like turning down free lottery tickets. you might not win but it doesn't hurt.
I'm going to be graduating soon from Dalhousie in Halifax with a BCSci, and I would be more than willing to move to Montreal.

You won't import American talent to Montreal however, why would they come to Canada when they can move to New York, Boston, Seattle, or the mecca of technology in North America Silicon Valley.

This doesn't mean that Montreal won't be a technology hub, but it has to compete with Waterloo which has a lot of draw for new graduates. I know several of my graduating class have already secured jobs in Waterloo.
Not only have I used one and liked one, but I've bought one. The Kindle is great. But it's not very useful as a Netflix device, and my statement was about devices that can be used for both Amazon e-books and Netflix (which is why you had to use brackets while quoting me, and leave out part of what I said). The Kindle isn't a player in that market.
As is clarified in the comments, these statistics are aggregated for all publishers, not just O'Reilly.
I would hex edit my saved games to play around with what you could get in your inventory. You could get all kinds of game items to show up in your inventory that you couldn't normally pick up. For example, I had a bag of fireballs. You could drag a fireball from your inventory into the world view (as you would normally do to discard an item) and it would instead become a projectile fireball in the world. I loved that game.
That's actually a really awesome idea, probably use the github api and write a third party app pretty easily.
I can't name an Open Source startup in Waterloo. Is there one?
This has very little to do with open source and everything to do with Free Software. I get that you can normally conflate the two, but in this case the distinction is crucial.
The part that makes this so hard to grasp is that this question is ill-posed. The "in reality" part is nonsensical.

A primary insight to general relativity is that it makes no sense to define location (or motion) except relative to an observer. This means there's no "true" position or motion, simply an infinite set of equivalently meaningful but disagreeing ways to observe them.

(For interest's sake, acceleration is the lowest order local phenomenon. An object does not need an external observer to measure it's own acceleration due to the appearance of locally measurable "forces".)

So the answer is to excise "in reality" and then state that both answers are equally meaningful and correct.
+1 for HIMYM reference, I thought the same :)

24hrs is not 'be the first to know', probably all her/his friends will know that before. When I changed status I had a dozen comments in SECONDS.
It's called a bulk discount.
Next up, an app to see who's monitoring you on Breakup Notifier... "Three people are waiting for you to break up! Click here to find out more!"
How dare you answer my rhetorical questions?! :)

That's the most obvious route for Marco - the (rhetorical!) question was directed at Apple, because they appear to thwart a large domain of what iOS could be used for.
I built a proof of concept that sort of does this:

https://github.com/shazow/relay.js

Someone hosts a hub which just acts as a dumb message-passing relay between browsers via websockets. When a server connects, it sets a code payload. Then when a client connects to the same hub and requests the server, it receives the code payload and a streaming 2-way connection to the server.

There's a few live examples like a collaborative whiteboard in about ~40 lines of js.
We should treat it as a document delivery and linking system, as it was designed to be.

Currently, the alternative application delivery platform is the App Store, the runaway success of which is neatly proving the point that the web just isn't up to the job of serving applications in the way we've been trying to hack it to become.

That's also where it's becoming exceptionally obvious, as people struggle mightily (even Apple themselves) to create web apps that have a look and feel anywhere close to those of native apps. And users feel the difference, sense the request/response bubbling underneath and the JS churning on top, and reject them.
If you read the comments you'll find out that this data is for physical book sales across all publishers. Thus the decline of the overall market is almost certainly evidence for the rise of e-books (including books on demand like Safari) and not evidence that people are less interested in reading about programming languages.
I'm pretty sure the therapist's advice was bad, too. First, it labels the recipient as a psycho unfit for a normal life (like having a relationship). Second, nobody is ever ready for a relationship. I mean it would be stupid to wait until you have become that perfect saint who is fit for a relationship. I presume this includes internalizing Erich Fromm's "Art of Loving" and shedding all earthly and selfish desires.

For one thing, it is probably difficult to become "ready for a relationship" without actually practicing being in a relationship. Read and meditate all you want, I think growing within a relationship should beat that in effectiveness. Oh yeah, you can practice with your therapist? That advice is good for the therapist, as it actually says "you should be dependent on me indefinitely".
80%? That seems hard to believe given that *nux clearly dominates the web server market:

http://news.netcraft.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/wpid-ove...
Crashes Firefox 3.6.13 on Ubuntu.
Someone tried astroturfing /r/gaming last week and were called out on it.

Truly blatent spam is extremely rare - it's the stuff that's mostly legitimate that has an ulterior motive that is hard to spot.
Apple feels its position is now strong enough that it can dictate terms.
I don't know for Open Source project, but I often think about leaving Montreal as it's really hard to find good co-founders and to get investments. Usually, investors have ideas on what they would like to invest and you'd have to forget your project and build theirs. Also, IMO, the french problem isn't a problem since the big majority of the startup world speaks english. For instance, if one person speaks english and 5 speaks french, the conversation will be in english as Quebec people are way better in english than the inverse.
I sure hope, then, that you correctly pronounce the initial 'p' in Greek names starting with a 'pt' and 'ps' consonant cluster, rather than omitting it like an ignorant American! (Do you pronounce the 'p' in Ptolemy, or mispronounce it as if it were written Tolemy?)

For good measure one should pronounce it in words like psychology as well, but I suppose the pronunciation error there has been sufficiently fossilized that it's now an English word with a new pronunciation. Perhaps the Hermitian will suffer the same fate as the Ptolemies and psychologists?
>How about the reason that it is Apple's? And why would they not want to have their rules on their channel?

The only viable channel at this point is Apple's. If there were a way to access non-Apple blessed applications without rooting your device, then people might not complain so much. Savvy consumers don't appreciate monopolies.
Is that specific to webfonts implemented this way or the known difference between Windows and other systems? (The Windows font render tweaks its processing to force greater alignment with the pixel grid, to improve the sharpness of the output, where other font renderers are more accurate in their stroke positioning but this can lead to things looking more "fuzzy" (and, depending on your monitor's settings, darker)
No, of course they didn't buy the channel. But that's not the point.

When Apple sells you an iPhone, it ceases to become their phone and becomes your phone. You're not leasing it, you aren't renting it, you've paid for it and it's yours.

This is somewhat orthogonal to the original point, which was that Apple is free to reject whatever applications they like from their application delivery channel, just as I'm free to choose my clients, but it's important to remember.
It is kind of a circular argument to answer "there is no reason for Apple to own the channel" with "But Apple owns the channel". I know Apple does. And Apple should place their own rules on their channel, I don't deny that. My problem is there is no competition allowed.

And who is this larger segment that benefits from this decision (besides Apple employees and shareholders)? Is there a group of people who hate to have the chance to use Readability?
I would think that it has to do with finding the corollaries between words from each language. It would simply be the way a person has, by a side effect of learning two language, trained themselves to think differently than most people.

The ability to receive information about one subject and relate it to another has always set people above the common straight line thinker.
Exquisite Corpse 2.0: Collaborative Story Writing w/ FoldingStory
Simple unit tests within dependent type system
Just to be nice and actually answer this person's question rather than just downvoting them:

The distinction, as I understand it, is that labeling it an "open letter" tells us that one entity (Readability) intends not just to publish a given letter for all to read, but also make clear that it is directed at a second entity (in this case, Apple), in the same way as if Readability had sent it directly TO Apple.

It is also often hoped that such an open letter might elicit a public response.
Ask HN: Why does Union Sq Ventures only have 6 people?
http://www.usv.com/team/

Doing VC research for class right now and can only see 3 partners and 3 staff for such a large/important VC. How/why does this firm do this?
It's often more helpful to explain why things work in terms of the physics we understand right now that not at all. Sure, it's dissatisfying to hear "the arrows can't stretch because that's the way it is", but it's a useful metaphor that can help explain time dilation and why we can't go faster than light. Physics answers often end up with "because that's the way it is", but that doesn't mean that the things you've learned up until then are useless.
I've worked for a couple of startups in Montreal. Their biggest competitive advantage was always that they could do things for less. This is because wages are low and so is the cost of living.

I don't think that undercutting your competitors is a viable long term business strategy since you end up being cheap labor. This also discourages innovation since the focus is on copying what someone has already done and doing it for less.

There is already a lot of talent in Montreal but if Montreal is to become an open source startup hub, it needs to change this cheap labor mindset into one of innovation.
I think climate also counts too.

I can't remember where I saw this mentioned in the context of tech startups (pg's essays, probably), but if you're good enough and ambitious enough to choose whatever location you like, why not choose a location that has all the "nice place to live" qualities? Not to mention, "a nice place that wealthy tech investors want to live in".

Last week I saw Lane Becker give a talk at SproutUp here in Toronto. He's originally from Winnipeg, but was pretty blunt about the climate in California vs Canada. There's no way he'd ever come back. It's not the first time I've heard it.

Taxes, business, and tech-investment-friendly environment issues aside, this is a major weakness that our bigger eastern cities (Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, Montreal..) need to make up for in other ways. What things can we use to make up for our crummy climates? I'm not sure... but I don't think local pride, ambition, or even "we have smart people" really resonate with anyone outside of those locales. Smart people are everywhere, and are globally-mobile.
The eye-opener to me, visiting Mobile World Congress, was that it's fully plausible that smartphones can hit 80% of developed world phone shipments in 2-3 years.

I'd have laughed in anyone's face who'd suggested that a year ago. But the economics of volume have kicked in big time, and the marginal production cost difference has shrunk while the cost and risk of designing the next featurephone keeps going up.

2011 is volume build year. Nobody expects that Apple can retain its market share. Android needs to be smoothed out a lot, but with the breadth and depth of OEM commitment that will happen this year.

Nokia is banking on the cellphone industry moving slowly as it tends to do. Consumers may move faster.
Communication Skills should be evaluated as a part the total sum evaluation. When going through a stack of resumes, I look for clarity, not grammar, and if I can spot your spelling mistakes, you're in trouble. :)

Communication gaps are like any other quality/time/scope/cost factor when managing people. If the lack of language skills aren't counterbalanced by brilliance in other areas, you'll end up with a net loss in investing in the employee.

Evaluating whether the poor language skills is a sign of being lazy, hasty, arrogant or simply from another native language group, you could miss a good deal of other high-value talents.
A nice summary. I was having drinks with a vc and he said the issues always remain organizational. Brooks saw that software is no different.
The Yoshi (Multi-Platform Gaming)
Rolls Royce Plans for an Ultra-Luxurious Electric Phantom
Perhaps this says something about the average Digg user that they would not want to publicly share :)

Sorry for the snarky comment, I just had to. As other commenters have pointed out, we are entering into the age of "online personna warfare" -- which in my mind could end up spawning true AI since the monetary stakes are so high, as annoying as it all is right now.

Brain-teaser question: if you had a hundred friends online, and they all knew you and joked with you and provided support when you were having a bad day, asked about your family, etc. -- as long as they blatantly did not try to sell you anything, perhaps just mentioning a product every few months as part of a normal conversation, would it really matter if they were robots?

Product placement is going to go from actors in movies to robots on internet sites. Right now it's just happening in a very klunky and annoying fashion, but it'll get smoother. Very strange times we live in.