skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree that go on appengine might not take off, in no way is node.js "taking over that scene". If by scene you mean the "web app" scene. Just because node.js articles are constantly blowing up hn, reddit does not necessarily correspond to real world deployments of node.js apps.

An admittedly hastily prepared google trends graph: http://www.google.com/trends?q=node.js%2C+python+django%2C+r...

I am a node fan, I subscribe to the node-dev list and have worked on a few applications my self. However I am in no way delusional about the current blog popularity vs actual projects deploying with it.

Also you state that you are able to gain the same concurrency and speed with node that you are with Go. May I ask how you achieve this? Go usually comparable to C code in terms of performance [1]. Go also has amazing concurrency tools for efficient communication between two concurrent goroutines, for example the channel interface[2]. To my knowledge their is no way to run concurrent node processes. You can launch multiple instances of the same program but their is no way to let them communicate without sending data over a socket. You can of course use a reverse proxy to present a single entry point in which multiple node backends can take requests. However you can not claim this as concurrency in the same sense that is available with go.

[1] http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#Performance

[2] http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#concurrency
Hogwash. Oprah won't allow that.
What's you background? What kind of math did you learn by looking at mathematical symbols rather than natural language explanations? I have hard time envisioning how such a leaning process would work.

There are several pretty obvious problems with mathematical notation.
- Meaningless one-letter names.
- Meaning of notations is usually highly context-dependent. (Exponentiation and matrix inverse operation are denoted in exactly the same way, for example.)
- A lot depends on arbitrary conventions.
- People rarely explain how notations work syntactically. It's all ad-hoc,learn by example.
Free on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=EAmgAAAAMAAJ
The "like" button is for publicly sharing your interest in a web page.

And for tracking where I've been, Facebook is no worse than any other ad agency; that they show me that they're tracking me is no worse than DoubleClick's or Google Ads' tracking.
And the AI also can use you for something else, or leave you alone altogether and follow other pursuits.

Right. But the problem is, an exponentially growing AI that's following other pursuits without worrying about us will, with almost 100% certainty, kill us off by accident as it expands. We really need to make sure it does care about us, and that all future generations will care about us, including only building future designs that care about us, etc., and making all of these constraints close to 100% resistant to accidental bit flips, errors, etc.

You'd worry a lot more about a potential Hannibal Lecter maybe wanting to eat your brains if he was not 3x smarter than you, but 1,000x smarter, and doubling his intelligence every twenty minutes. Whether he wants to do it now or not is not the issue; the issue is that every twenty minutes, he's a completely different entity whose goals may not match up at all with what they were before, unless the design is so careful and brilliant that certain constraints reliably propagate forward.
Thanks for jumping in to explain. I appreciate it's not always easy to take part in a discussion that's mostly focused on ripping you to bits (justifiably or not). I for one look forward to see how this evolves, rather than judging everything on the basis of what it looks like on day one. Actions speak louder than words.
With Node I get the best of two worlds: high concurrency and speed

With Node you still need to write in an event-based style, which is something devs often complain about working with Node.js.

"With goroutines and channels, you can say 'I'm going to send a message to another goroutine or wait for a message from another goroutine', but you don't have to actually leave the function you're in to do that," Gerrand says. "That lets you write asynchronous code in a synchronous style. As people, we're much better suited to writing about things in a synchronous style."

from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/google_go/page4.html
Pentesting Vulnerable Study Frameworks Complete List
Ask HN: What is on your desk besides your computer (and components), and phone?
I have a few business magazines, a picture of an island off the coast of New Zealand, a picture of a Porsche 911, vitamins, a stack of biz cards, and a small fan.
doh. thanks. just didn't have my headphones on.
I've installed a lot of apps, and Android is a great platofrm for that. I just wish it was more 'go wild, install anything you want, it's actually reviewed!' like the iPhone... the problem is Google's lack of administration for the Market. Maybe Amazon will do it better?

Like on Debian or Ubuntu, you have the packages reviewed/compiled by the company, and the ones that are not. It would be nice if Google put forth an effort to at least have a 'reviewed and likely to be safe' area. As it is, I have to find software through other methods, like reviews or such on the web, and determine whether the vendor is trustworthy.
you can spoof mac address so that the router appears as that one machine
This is big, but it could be huge with one more element.

Right now, if you build some kind of appliance with the ADK, your market is limited to Android users. You're making a device for which the UI can be hosted on a user's mobile phone. But why does it have to be a phone? A proper Android competitor to the iPod would be a start, but here's what I would see as the game changer:

A $49 Android device with just a gigabyte or two of storage, no 3G, no camera, and an older ARM CPU, that can simply become the dedicated screen for something. You don't have to be an Android user and plug your phone into your exercise bike; your bike (or anything else in your home or office) just has a screen and a touch UI.
* 24 pack of Mt. Dew.
* "Learning javascript and vb" book
* Unopened bills from 4 months ago
* Double dildo
* Lube
I was playing around with the idea of redoing our customer database at work. Our customer database contains for each customer their email address, name, when their service expires, how many licenses they have, and things like that. Essentially a bunch of named scalar values.

It also contains their transaction history--essentially an event log. Some of the transactions have auxiliary information such as specific line items on an order.

A person subscribing to our service can use it on multiple computers (up to a number determined by exactly what they purchased). So there is a list of the computers they are using it on, with some information about that use.

The state of a customer could be represented nicely by a nested data structure, like a Perl hash or a JSON document, and so some kind of document oriented storage seems like it could work well. Most changes to a customer's data consist of adding new transactions, and occasionally updating the expiration date.

We have a customer service interface that our support people use to view and change a customer's data. Getting all the data by fetching a single JSON document would be much simpler than the multiple queries that are now done to grab the data from the MySQL database it is in, spread across many normalized tables.

In general, with one notable exception, almost everything that deals with a customer is dealing with one customer at a time. For instance, a support person is dealing with the customer they have on the phone. The order processor is dealing the customer's account for the order that it is currently processing.

It's not even clear we need a database at all for this. Why not just a file per account, with the file containing a serialized Perl hash or JSON document or something similar, with a simple classic Unix file locking mechanism used to prevent corruption? This is easy to scale, for both reads and writes.

That brings me to the notable exception to "dealing with one customer at a time". Reports. Reports like to do things involving selecting data from a large number of customers, related by various factors such as having purchased particular SKUs in a particular time frame, or having their credit cards charged through a particular gateway, or things like that.

Reports seems to be something that fits in a lot better with the traditional relational approach.

If the set of reports needed was known up front, I think one could design a system that uses a document approach for storing customer data, but also maintains a relational reports database to hold data specifically for reports. We tend to have a changing set of reports--we do a lot of poking around and playing with data to try to find ways to improve our system and I'm often looking at things I had no idea a week before I'd ever need to look at for a report.
I don't get why this is on the front page. It's just a normal fuse, except it works in the opposite manner. Now a standard fuse made of anti-matter...
You took a real beating on your blog, which prompted my edit.

It may be useful at times to frame the debate in terms of time to market, secondary apps, etc. The relational model necessarily presupposes you will use the database for more than one thing, and over an extended period of time, thus warranting a high up-front investment and agnostic model. This may be right in some cases, but often times it's more important to publish early, bootstrap yourself, and start iterating.
The difference between Apple and Google at the Senate hearings
Edmund Husserl - principal founder of phenomenology
Right, in addition to privacy/security concerns for anything you access through the phone, having an always on, always connected, powerful handheld computer being part of a botnet would be pretty bad.

The malware Google removed a few weeks ago was apparently trying to get the phone's network ID numbers, wasn't it? So who cares what you have on there, they want to steal your phone's identity!

Given the history of Windows, it's not surprising that the average person has no idea about security and installs anything willy-nilly. One might think that Google would have taken heed of that... instead, it seems like we're going to end up with phones running anti-virus that are getting compromised constantly. They weren't kidding when they said Android is the Windows of mobile phones.
But with Go can you write your client code and your server code in the same language?
The problem arises when you put these two statements together. Sometimes we hear a key insight or have an interesting thought and seem to forget it instantly. In reality, it's often filed away somewhere in our heads, only to be refreshed later when something similar jogs our memory.

The true danger for a non-accepted startup is for their ideas to be absorbed into the subconscious memory of the YC advisers, only to bubble up later as a seemingly-original idea or interesting angle for another startup to pursue. This kind of accidental "idea theft" is practically guaranteed.
You also have to have clearly defined ground rules, and it helps to have contingency plans for unexpected events.

In the event the relationship receives a SIGHUP, you can only hope that it terminates gracefully- nobody likes a zombie relationship that's waiting on closure() that will never return due to the sudden absence of /dev/love.
"Facebook only has publicly facing information, stuff that you've already shared with other people."

Stuff you've shared with other people != public information. That's the whole reason Facebook exists.
If I was the PR company for google I'd be pretty pleased with the 12 stories they have on the HN front page at the moment.
Mark, the guy behind this accelerator, sold his company for multiple millions. Are you suggesting he doesn't have the business experience to see this for the bad deal it is?
Thanks swombat, I welcome constructive feedback, but have been a bit taken aback by the nature of some feedback, the best way to engage Entrepreneurs and investors outside of the tech community is to work with them and provide constructive feedback, I'll keep listening
sweeping from left to right, excluding imac, kbd, mouse, cell phone, extra monitor:
- despair.com "Potential" desktopper
- graph 8.5x11 notepad
- small form diary/calendar
- sunglasses
- my keys [ironically, to a 911 turbo s cabrio]
- delcom usb led 904005-SB http://www.delcomproducts.com/productdetails.asp?productnum=...
- two ipads and two ipod touches
- book for financial exam
- lego police set [police minifigure collection] and lego helicopter
- cars from a few lego train sets
- cufflinks
- pencil holder with staedler 0.3 drafting pencils
- american express
Thanks! What did you like about it?
Bonus: Your bike/whatever will automatically sync with an optional Android app based on your account. Also, some of the sub $100 cheapo Chinese tablets are the hardware you describe.
DOJ wants wireless providers to store user info
No, I'm not. I'm interpreting it pretty loosely. Sorry about that. Correct me if I'm wrong here, though.

More directly, what I meant to say is that since there exist true theorems which cannot be proven within any particular choice of mathematical formalism, we need to operate with tools beyond simply symbolic manipulation. That was the death knell of Hilbert's Program and solidly separated the formal specification of math from "that thing which we're studying".
My hope for this deal is that Microsoft partners with CLEAR (or any nationwide data provider) to create a VOIP Windows Phone.
Papers of current project, pop-up post it dispenser (indispensable, no pun intended), a few books I'm currently reading, etch-a-sketch.
Dude, I'd be embarrassed admitting something like that was on my desk.

shakes head at vb book
I'm sure you guys have enough time to dedicate to the companies, but it does lose a little of the "exclusivity" for the companies themselves. It used to be I could name every company that came out of a YCombinator class, now it's likely a bunch will go through that I've never heard of.
Growth that high -- 6.4% -- for the next decade would be huge for Skype and make this not just acceptable but a home run for microsoft.

At that 6.4% rate skype has twice the earnings in 10 years it has today.
My First ROR app: Comments/Suggestions Appreciated
I kinda wish I had a vb book. I could handle vb6 way back when, but now the whole .NET thing makes me cry (why is it System.Drawing.Color.Red????)
What's your product? What's the industry? Where are you located? Does your cofounder need to live/move close to you?
It is hard for me to argue this with you, because I agree that 6% is a steep price to pay for any favor, be it an interest-free unsecured loan or a $20k seed investment.

But that's a subjective point.

What's not subjective is that an interest-free unsecured loan for $32k USD IS a favor, not a mugging, and while I don't think it's worth 6%, or even 1%, it's not right for me to accuse the offerer of that loan of mendacity.

A question I'd put back to you:

Assume that there is no seed fund or accelerator program you can get to accept you, other than this one. Assume that you need the $32k; stipulate that you cannot, say, bootstrap or consult your way out of the first 6 months living expenses.

Would you advise someone not to start a company instead of accepting this deal?
MacDefender and its variants
I've been looking at getting into Go programming.

This could be a cool opportunity to do so. Does anyone have any resources for writing Go webapps?
That actually makes a lot of sense. It leverages your own judgement about your friend's judgement and provides potential social consequences for bad behavior.

But the nature of your friendships is poorly captured by Facebook. You can't really tell if people have been friends for 20 years or 20 minutes. Or if they've never met or made a baby together.

There ought to be a simple way to quantify both the "trustedness" of a relationship. At the very least, there should be a "Trust" button underneath every friend's profile photo.

With that info, Airbnb could tell you who your trusted friends trust, which is way more useful.
"those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols"

The downside of the growing public awareness of people on the autism spectrum, some of whom are geeks, has been the slow trend towards conflating intellectualism with atypical mental function.

Some people like to call right now the "victory of the geeks". I suspect that within the next 10 years, nerdy kids will start being diagnosed as having Asperger's by school counselors and the like with about as much care, caution, and accuracy as we saw with ADHD.
Summary: Be proactive and do as much work as you can to provide evidence on your own behalf, don't expect them to do the work for you.
I think it should have been a stronger announcement. This is the single most important problem for Android to squash.

Why isn't google able to separate skin and operating system to avoid this sort of fragmentation and delay on behalf of carriers/manufacturers? In that way, Google could update the OS and the skin will just run (possibly without support for new features). At least in that way costumers can enjoy enhancements to the base system regardless of feature updates.
Sounds like tips for getting hired :)
You seem to be confused about SIP. SIP is the "Session Initiation Protocol", and its entire point is to coordinate initiation of a direct session between endpoints, the so-called "SIP Trapezoid".

SIP is a lot like SMTP. When you make a SIP call, you talk to your local SIP server, which talks to N intermediaries (usually 0) before going out to the public internet. After passing off to the destination server, the connection can go through N intermediaries on the remote side before being delivered to a final user agent. This connection isn't for delivering audio and video, though, it's for coordinating a direct RTP connection to use for audio and video. Once the two endpoints are communicating, they send information about their real network location, work out details about NAT, and set up a direct RTP connection, possibly using STUN to deal with NAT issues. In a normal SIP environment, neither party's SIP server ever sees any of the actual media.

This is all fairly similar to what skype does, except skype has additional infrastructure for routing media through other clients, in cases where two endpoints can't find a way to communicate directly, as I understand it. I'm not actually authoritatively-informed about skype, though, so don't rely on this last bit.
Ask HN: Please review my site IOUmate.com
I.O.U. Mate is a new service for tracking I.O.U.s of any kind, from dollars to drinks to books you've loaned. It can be used to schedule recurring debts like allowances or shared rent. You can invite friends to share I.O.U.s with Facebook, Twitter or email, or you can choose to track debts privately.

As the designer and developer of this service, I'd love to get some feedback (and of course, early users). My company (Cerebris - I'm a co-founder) developed this application in order to try out a lot of tech, from Rails 3 to jQuery Mobile to Omniauth to hosting at Rackspace. Once we realized how useful it had become to us personally, we decided to add some extra polish and features.

We're keeping this service completely free, although we may add premium features in the future. We also plan to introduce native apps for a small fee (perhaps $1.99).

I really hope you find I.O.U. Mate fun and useful. Please let me know what you think - I'd appreciate feedback of any kind. I'm particularly interested to know how people like the new mobile interface.

Thanks in advance for checking it out!

http://IOUmate.com
Honestly, your idea probably isn't that great. Even if it truly is, these things tend to have pretty short half lives. By the time it accidentally made its way to another startup through a YC partner you'll probably have had a lot of opportunity to already act on it. Or someone else will probably already have come up with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_v._MP3.com
Weinstein said, "when this information is not stored, it may be impossible for law enforcement to collect essential evidence."

How did law enforcement ever manage to catch bad guys in the days before smartphones?
Twitpic changes its terms of service
Why Microsoft Buying Skype Sucks for Consumers
This would be great, but I don't think the music industry would in any way allow this. I think I just read something that they are trying to pressure Amazon into actually storing a copy of the same mp3 for every user which is using their cloud service in S3. This is their way of trying to cause pain to Amazon, in that they want a 'physical copy' of each media file for every user which has access to the tune.
You are probably right, though they should just call it "distributed hash compression technology for super-fast uploads", rather than "if we already have a copy of that song, it doesn't need to be re-uploaded".
And there it is. This will infinitely increase the popularity of airbnb and solidify it as a service that has same credibility as renting from an estate agent.
That's a reasonable summary. From looking at my server logs I can tell that they only spend a few minutes using the application during the approval process, so it is vitally important that you tee up as much information as possible for them.
A Tiny Apartment in Hong Kong Transforms into 24 Rooms
Uber To Dump Hundreds of AT&T iPhones, Switch To Verizon
When eBay sold Skype (the first time), a lot of the commentary was along the lines of 'of course they never integrated it - get two people talking and the first thing they will do is agree to sell at a reduced price to avoid the eBay commission'.

So when the OP says "It makes us wonder why the startup didn’t release the feature sooner" my immediate thought is: if I knew a friend of a friend had a spare room available, I'd be communicating through Facebook to arrange it for cheaper (or, if they're good enough friends, free) rather than through Airbnb.

Now, the connection for Airbnb isn't as direct as with eBay - I would need to go through the friend, and that adds time and drama. Maybe the Airbnb team are confident that that extra hassle will outweigh any sly users of the system; or maybe they're just super confident that adding social validation to their potentially risky business [1] will drive customers in droves, so a few sly users really don't matter [2].

[1] Potentially risky in that paying to sleep in someone's spare room (or even a private apartment) is a riskier travel proposition than paying to stay at the Hilton, or even a reputable Hostel.

[2] And, to be fair, they're probably the users you don't want anyway.
I think this is the killer feature for Airbnb. I have loved the idea of the service, but haven't used it because of the slight creepiness worry (perhaps unfounded, but I think common). I know I'd feel comfortable staying with friends-of-friends though. I bet this is a huge draw for many news users for Airbnb.
Just stop thinking about it and find another job. I was in a position in 2005 where I was treated like crap by my boss. I found a new one that paid more and treated me better.

In the end you are responsible for your career path and work surroundings and you are the only one who can or will do anything to fix it.

The statement below throws up a red flag for me. It is the people who MAKE the time to pursue advancement that achieve it. People who do there job at work because it their job tend to always be in crappy positions and underpaid. Fix that.

[hear you. However, programming is not my life. I'm intellectually exhausted when I come home and have no drive to pursue the things I TRULY love]
I'd like to see more server-side XLST.
Oh brother...