skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Open sourced means "source released with binaries".

It does not mean "All code available with all checkins at all times"

Because community projects pretty much have to function that way does not mean that's the only way to do open source.

--An iOS developer and ex-embedded Linux/Linux kernel driver developer who's a little POed that everyone thinks only their way of doing open source is "True to Freedom" or whatever
Glad to see it's not all gloom and doom. I released a game on the market last week (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.interrupt.retrospa...) which has gotten 3500 downloads, earned me $1.30 in ad revenue, and enough in paid downloads to pay for a latte. I'm planning more updates and fixing things based on reviews and feedback so I haven't given up on it yet, but gaining traction is going to be slow from what I can see.
So this works by pinging the server? I ask because a lot of downtime is the malfunction of a specific program or component that still keeps ping and http intact. How do you detect this?

And if it's a ping thing, why would I pay 15 bucks per month and trust a third party when I can write my own script to dump failed ping results to my email?

I fail to see the distinguishing feature that I need monitorfor.me for.
Something like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1185984/is-viewstate-bad-...

Yes I talk to them that we have a high traffic site and we lose them because they don't know about building them. Besides you won't find many Microsoft stack sites dealing with scaling issues. I personally looked up Stackoverflow scaling case studies to design my solutions later.

Back in 2005/6 URL rewriting was still pretty difficult. I started out back then. I converted to MVC completely when 1.0 version came out specifically to address the SEO concerns.

But I guess our discussion is swinging to technical side :)
I am kind of hoping Color takes off, becomes awesome, and is used everywhere just because of all the bad crap being written about it.
By the way, if there's any MySpacers reading that got laid off or looking to jump ship...

I'm a developer at Leads360 in El Segundo, CA. We're hiring right now. I've already interviewed several MySpacers and have extended offers to a few. We hope to get more :)

Email me your resume, if interested: bpaetzke@leads360.com
I have had enough of people preaching startup advice.

When should you start a startup?

When the hell you want to.

You have a family, You have a mortgage, You have an aunt that left you $1M, You have no left arm, You are dyslexic, whatever.

Just start the damn company when you want to. At some point, stop wasting time on what other people think and think for yourself.
Your logic would apply equally well with theism as the null hypothesis ("There is(are) an all-powerful supernatural entity(ies) which has(ve) influence over my daily life, but (s)(t)he(y) have been playing a game called science for the past few centuries")

I think agnosticism would be the better choice for a null hypothesis.
Oh, very cool. I'm going to have to try this out on some place more interesting than my office, and buy the paid model if I like the results.
This is almost right. Right in one sense.

But in a more expansive sense, I read a great quote from some higher-up at Google a year back that really put things in perspective..

He said, "Look, over 50% of the Internet uses Google for search, conservatively speaking. So if we make the Internet better in a general, altruistic sense, and create 2 new internet users, we just created a Google user."

So it's a more positive gesture than the denial-based moat metaphor or 'scorched earth' language imply. (The moat metaphor made me think of IE vs Netscape).
The story of an Audio & WebGL Demo: No Comply
Poll: Are you on Facebook?
Today it is often assumed that everbody is on Facebook. However, there still are some who are not. Even HN users?
Yes and I plan to stay on.
Yes, but I want to leave.
No, but I want to join.
No and i plan to stay off.
Collecting data is not evil. Using data for evil things is evil. Color is not evil. If the secret police used proximity location to capture people and kill them, that would be evil. But do you see why that doesn't make Color evil?

Having control of how your data is used is nice, but it's not helpful to throw around terms like "evil" for such small things.

People get really trigger happy with "1984" on the Internet and sometimes it borders on ridiculous. Orwell didn't have a picture sharing program for handheld computers in mind when he wrote his book.
Globe Tweeter : Firefox 4 WebGL Demo
Thanks for the feedback. Obviously most of us in the highly technical crowd could very easily throw a script like this together, but I'm targeting a somewhat less technical crowd (still guys that know they need it, but don't program).

The other benefit is that I offer (rather, will offer -- don't have it replicated yet) geographically distributed, redundant checking for up to 10 sites. This is a bit harder (and more expensive) to accomplish for the general developer.

Regarding the method of detection, I actually use a standard "fopen," to the hostname and port you specify, rather than a straight ping. In this way you could test specifically for your webserver (port 80) or SMTP server (25) rather than a generic ping. I even use it to test custom socket server platforms I have running.

Does that answer your questions? Change your mind about the value of the service?

Thanks!
You're drawing conclusions outside of my argument. Please re-read what I wrote.

She said I just don't happen to find photo sharing to be a big problem requiring $41M to solve at the moment. And my comment regarding the patents was based on the $41M investment being in their technology, not a photo sharing app.

I made no other comment on the validity of the patents. I believe the investors based their investment on the underlying technology used to create the app and not the app itself. They valued the technology and the team that created it worthy of a $41M investment.
I believe that he's referring to the deal where Google paid MySpace for ad impressions. When that fell through MySpace lost a lot of revenue. http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/myspace-in-trouble-o...
"The goal is not to promote hatred, but rather to help people identity their weaknesses so that they can work on them and hopefully become a better a person."

If the goal is not to promote hatred then why did you call it WhatYouHateAbout.Me?

Hate has such a negative connotation to it. If your goal is to identify people's weaknesses than you should think of a name/domain with a lighter connotation using the word weakness rather than hate
.Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace.

For the record, I think it's irrelevant.. but absolutely I think it's true. It doesn't mean .NET isn't capable, or that lots of .NET programmers aren't capable...

Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web, and that the work that gets done at most of those enterprise shops wouldn't fly on large sites.

It may be popular to pretend that the .NET camp (and to a slightly lesser extent, the Java Enterprise one) doesn't bend this way statistically, but they do.
Why doesn't Google instead completely open up the platform and offer Android certificates for hardware that passes muster? That way the platform stays open and their brand doesn't get destroyed by 3rd rate hardware.
Don’t Expect Me To Take Your Job Search Seriously
I guess it comes from Monopoly?
STAXYN - Health
SEOs prefer to have the "relevant content" as high on the page as possible. Since viewstate is just a large blob, many SEOs assume it decreases relevancy. I've never seen results that confirm this assumption.

Edit: See sajidnizami's post for the relevant StackOverflow question. Though, this still doesn't make sense to me logically. Why would a search engine disregard a (reasonably) longer page?
This kind of app may seem like nothing important until you actually use it. I was very skeptical about it but a few months ago I started used f.lux and it really is useful. I use my computer during the night as much I do during the day and it I noticed my eyes and my sleep was being affected. My eyes got tired very fast at night and I wasn't able to fall asleep easily. With f.lux that really changed. I urge every nocturnal computer user to give it a try!
Thanks for the downvotes, I'll take them on board
I still can't get over how bad Safari is when O'Reilly are so great in everything else they do. Does O'Reilly proper run the site?
Google is notoriously secretive. Here's a pretty clear analysis on what they're doing any why with Android and Chrome.

A dozen years ago Bill Gurley was probably the most read VC blog and then he stopped posting. I hope this means that he is again sharing his thoughts with us because his insights are valuable.
Time Machine in the cloud... for Windows?
While this is a good article, things like this make me wonder if Node's asynchronous programming model is a good one. Certainly I don't think it's worth the mental overhead when you aren't dealing with highly concurrent IO situtations.

I constantly feel like I have to jump through hoops when programming against async APIs. None of the code in the article feels "elegant" to me.

Of course the popular alternative, preemptive multithreading with shared mutable state, is probably worse.
Yeah, i agree the logo might need some work.

Facebook login allows you to see other friends who have also connected to the app so you can comment on their pages, it helps make the app a little more viral.

Since it's such a small app, I thought just having a facebook login might make it more straightforward. But you definitely have a point. I personally feel that fb login provides a lower sign up barrier, but I guess there are many that feel otherwise.
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The point is that all these measure are 'trivial' to break, and so are captcha's. Except with captcha's you impose a burden on your user, and with other techniques you can offload that burden to the developer. I'm not sure what the 'existing' part in 'existing spambot' has to do with it - the time it would take to add farmed captcha solving is marginal (you don't even have to mech turk it - most captcha's are broken with OCR software readily available on the underground market anyway).

captcha = sign of clueless or lazy, or both, developer. I don't put up with it anymore - I have yet to meet a single registration that I actually need that uses a captcha. I'm not the only one, either.
interesting consider Twitter is down right now.
Is it really necessary for me to create an account before trying it?

This is really a more general point, but why do more sites not use StackOverflow's system, wherein you can use the site provisionally, with your identity being tracked by a cookie, and the user can choose to convert to something with a bit more persistence later.
I think he knows about tech. I think he doesn't invest in it because it's volatile.
Let me sing you a song about how my sword brings inner enlightenment.
In a year of Android development I made my own MMORPG for it. However, the technology part was the 'easy' part. But the real adventure is in looking for good artists. Coming up with solid concepts, and turning those concepts into game art and stories.

I'm knee deep in the middle of that. It's almost as fun as programming. Screw the money, I'm doing it for the fun of it.
It was a valid question - the GP was talking about blind users, and then some guy who didn't even read the discussion properly comes waltzing in with a non sequitur about his mom.
Grey’s Anatomy Network of Sexual Relations
Think You Know YouTube? Here are the Facts. (Infograph)
Apple’s Revenue May Grow 50% Through 2012 on Mobile Boom
Microsoft explains the technology behind the Kinect.
True. We considered that too. But we felt that 'hate' might help with the marketing a little bit because it's a more polarizing word. It might not be as appropriate, but we felt that it makes it sound a little more interesting, you don't think?

And it's a little easier to say than whatyoudislikeabout.me or some other ones we thought about.
The Best Alternative Histories in Literature
AT&T Broadband Metering Is Shoddy And They Know It
I too work with sites hitting high visitor count but I have to agree there with the article. Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter.

I find this shocking and somewhat unbelievable. My wife, who isn't a tech person at all thinks that page load speed matters (she just called so I asked her) -- and sites gmail as an example of a page that takes too long to load (I think that "loading..." indicator actually brings their load time to the forefront, although it really isn't that long).

I just have trouble seeing a .NET developer saying "for high volume sites page load speed doesn't matter", when most people who aren't in the tech industry would concede that it does.
I don't think its as much about the technology platform, as it is about following good development practices, and having a leadership that understands the value of following those practices. Good leadership can make poor technology competitive while poor leadership can screw up a good technology platform.
Exactly. Railroads have been around 150+ years, and they'll probably be around another 150. No social networking company has even been around 10. Who knows if there will be a facebook in 2020?
Actually, The castle-and-moat analogy is much better for Microsoft.

Microsoft's biggest cash cow is Office but Office isn't enough of "natural monopoly" that Microsoft can sit easily enjoying the profits. Instead, one can find a long list of the underhanded tactics MS has used to preserve it's position over the years.

Search, on the other hand, currently does seem like a natural monopoly a la electric companies and phone companies. That is, Google doesn't have to destroy the competition but rather they are reasonably well protected by the immense cost and organizational challenge involved in a creating direct competitor.

I think it's correct that Google other efforts are protective but they're protective towards the situation of open competition in which Google arose - protective against pipe-squeezers and walled-garden cultivators.

Google is more like a "Mongol Hoard". Their defense isn't building moats and walls but clearing brush and obstacles so "everyone" has a open, level field - that Google just happens charge through more effectively than anyone else.
I think that having "The Google-way" is certainly valuable to Google (and engineers). Because there are only a few ways to do things you can build something and then hand it off to another time (SRE) for day-to-day operations. It also makes security and machine management much easier to deal.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just pointing out the flip-side.

Maybe Google should have a separate network with separate virtualized machines and no "Google stuff" for new medium-sized projects. Test whether they get traction there and then port them into "the Google-way" later.

Or maybe "the Google-way" just needs to be fixed up to make it easier. For example you could use AppEngine.
I attended a ColdFusion conference back in 2004-5 time frame where one of their top guys was brought in to talk about their success with BlueDragon.NET to allow them to run CFML on .NET as they transition to Microsoft's stack. They talked about how they were posting dozens of revisions a day and things would break regularly. He joked about how when the site went down a little flash game would come up and people started asking for the site to go down again so they could play the game.

Sounded like a mess and other developers in audience felt the same way. Then I signed up and saw how bad it really was as half my searches resulted in errors and the design sucked, among various other issues. Facebook was just awesome in comparison. I think MySpace's death spiral can be almost completely attributed to their lack of professionalism, for lack of a better word, from the start and the only way to remedy would have been to start from scratch.
What strikes me most about this story is the ATT response. True this is not wireless.

2% of users use 20% of the bandwidth, so they claim that it is only fair to charge. Which is fine.

However the price mentioned is actually what really hits me. $10 for 50GB bandwidth. True its over inflated, BUT the price is not so bad. 20 cents per gigabyte seems like a major profit margin however when comparing to verizon's $10 for 1-3gb (can't remember) per month for the chrome notebook wireless internet service the prices are pretty good. Granted the price is for broadband.

What I think is that we can use these numbers to justify that ATT & Verizon are going nuts when it comes to pricing their wireless & wired caps.
Show HN: Review my iPad app: Inspiring Business Quotes
My first iPad app BizTome is free for the day. I'd love for the HN crowd to check it out and if you like it to please review it.

Inspiring business quotes help motivate me as an entreprenuer, and I've been collecting them as a Google Doc up until I decided to make an app out of it.

http://bit.ly/caqoMT
I still think it's going to fail because they've made it clear, before a user base has been 'hooked', that their main focus is data mining. Usually users are getting utility before they're aware of the privacy issues, and at that point they're willing to give up that privacy. Becoming a Color user means giving up your privacy to get non-existent utility (because of the issues of relying on scale which the article talks about); maybe the utility would be there if everyone were using the app, but from a game theory perspective, the optimal behavior for each potential user is to not adopt the app (so long as everyone else hasn't already).
Does the bridge go nowhere? In America, we only buy bridges that go nowhere. :)
And maybe Sequoia didn't have a photo sharing app in mind when they put tens of millions in the game ;-)
Good quote: "Engineers at Google spend huge amounts of their time being forced to prematurely optimize their backend and frontend infrastructure."

The root of all evil. At Google. That's ironic.

Another great quote: "Amazon EC2 is a better ecosystem for fast iteration and innovation than Google’s internal borg system."
I dunno if I'd call search a natural monopoly at all -- Office has file formats and other forms of lock-in. Search just has a URL.
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I'm not sure what you mean by MVP.

You're definitely right about me being afraid of making mistakes on the engineering side and now that you point that out I think you've helped me see that I just need to start building something instead of coming up with reasons why I can't or shouldn't.
Just because you pre-install something on my phone doesn't mean I'm going to use it. Think pre-installing AOL on those Dell laptops..
Very interesting, as always (although old (2004)).

But wouldn't it have been more useful to test the capability rather than ask? Once you know the driver's lying ("yes card"), what do you do? How do you find out what it's actually capable of doing?

If you have to test then, why not test earlier is my question.
> Oh wow. Wow. I hereby revoke my previous statement. These are some God-awful infrastructure decisions. Version control and a staging server are the most basic necessities for a scalable dev project. I even set them up when I'm working on a personal project, alone.

Exactly. This seems to follow the Kevin Rose formula: make horrible decisions (or be entirely absent from decision making) without any understanding of technology, then blame your developers and technology choice ("Digg V4 failed to due to Cassandra").

If it weren't for Facebook's success, I can bet you'd see people blamining PHP for Digg's failure: prior to Facebook, P in LAMP also stood for Perl (and occasionally Python) and LAMP wasn't "universally" considered proven (unlike J2EE + Oracle or .NET + SQL Server), nor has Facebook been even remotely close to a "vanilla" LAMP site (since at least 2005)-- with many mission critical subsystems also being built in Java and C++ .
Collecting data can definitely be 'evil'.

Would you be okay with the government sticking cameras in your house? What about your bathrooms? That's data collection.
What about "Yes, but I don't use it.". Some sites force you to use a Facebook login, so I created an account but it has nothing on it but my name (no pics, etc.).
f.lux was written by a schoolmate/friend/investor of mine. Hooray!
"Even with the ever-increasing prominence of iPhones and Androids, it is exceedingly unlikely that you'll be at a location where multiple people own those phones, have downloaded color, and are using the app at that precise moment"

The only hard part is getting people to install it. Once it is installed push notifications or constant polling in the background can tell you when others nearby are using it -- I imagine a combination of fine GPS, WiFi SSID comparisons, and cell tower IDs would fine tune it. Of course, not being a mobile developer I don't know whether the last two are even obtainable by a third-party app.
I really need to add sound to my Android game. [1] It's a board game, which means elaborate sound isn't a normal part of the experience; but it could at least click as you move the stones around. I suspect, as the author says, that most people would turn it off; but it'll contribute to the appearance of a polished game.

I released the paid version last November, for 99¢; so far I've had 8 sales. A month or two ago I released an ad-supported version; it's up to 123 downloads, and has earned 5¢ in ad revenue--most of it in the first day, which makes me think advertisers were experimenting to see if my users would click through.

I never expected vast success--it's a traditional Malagasy game, not a flashy video game--but it'd be nice to get enough to pay back my $25 Market membership. :-)

[1] http://fanorona.thibault.org/
This sounded like a good idea to me when I came across it (I think on HN?) a while ago. The logic makes great sense.

However, what I found was that when I come home late at night and want to work on something, I'm planning to stay up a while. I don't want my screen to go low-contrast and dim, I want to stay up and work! When I'm working late, I expect my computer to stay up with me. It felt like my computer was getting sleepy before I did. Eventually, I removed it.

Neat idea, just didn't fit my use case.
Rackspace Cloud Files Now Supporting Extremely Large File Sizes
Agreed 100% on making dual infrastructure. Google Search and other high-reliability products need to stay on time-tested infrastructure.

Making a "wild-west" of infrastructure (a-la an in-house EC2) would really be the right way to go. And, as you said, put small & medium sized stuff there, and make porting over a moderate but not impossible task.

With respect to AppEngine, it's often stated as some kind of panacea solution for scalability for small applications. But, as a web application developer, I see AppEngine as "Googleisms on the outside". And by this, I mean that AppEngine is also a walled garden. Can you access a MongoDB instance from AppEngine? What about memcached for caching? Solr for document indexing and search? These are all things that are easy to do in a dedicated machine environment and greatly benefit small projects, but are impossible via anything Google builds.
I agree with nearly everything you had to say except for your bit about interviewing. At a properly functional startup people spend A LOT of time thinking about recruiting. You seem to want to reduce that load at google.

Rather than reducing the load Google needs to better connect the work of doing good recruiting to to individual/team success. The total disconnect between who does the interviewing and what team a hire ends up working on is the big problem, not the total amount of time/effort being devoted to recruiting.

-harryh, googler from 2004-2009