skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a fan of Tropo and have recommended it to clients, and overall think Voxeo is the team to beat in the telephony market. However, I feel you're exaggerating a bit here:

>VoiceXML is how the big boys build telephony applications. There are a number of commercial and open source VoiceXML products, and tons of hosting companies. A search for "VoiceXML Hosting" will turn up several thousand options. Many of which will work internationally.

VoiceXML is great for IVR type applications (along with CCXML) but it is not suited to a lot of the types of applications developers use for Twilio/Tropo.

>And of course Tropo, as already mentioned, has an open source core as well as a ton of other fun open source stuff

This statement is true if you guys open source PRISM, your SIP server, but until that happens (has it happened?), it's a little disingenuous to say that Tropo's "core" is open source when it relies on a proprietary SIP server to do all the heavy lifting.
The hiring thread is really only relevant to people looking for work, whereas the Bitcoin stuff, even if (imo) overhyped, is relevant to everyone. So I wouldn't argue it is overrepresented.
The site http://www.plivo.org is up again.
What the US does with online poker players' seized funds.
I don't use PostRank but I read all of Ilya's articles. His articles are awesome. He is awesome. Congratulations. You deserve a pay day.
That is the problem. The system is very complicated and verbose to use.

Lets say you want to write a program that extracts all links from a web page. How would you go about this? First, you look up in the documentation how to load a web page over http. This requires several lines of code, and it's complicated enough that you don't know it by heart after the first time you've done it. From there on it gets easier: you get a library and read the documentation to parse HTML and use an xpath or css selector to load all the links and then read of the href attribute. All of this probably requires around 15 lines of code, with various method calls that you have to look up.

In Ruby, I do this:

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://google.com'))
urls = doc.css('a').map{|link| link[:href]}

I know how to do this by heart because there are just a couple of things to remember. Not having to look at any documentation to do simple stuff like this saves a lot of time.
Thank you, sir! =D
Alasan mengapa anda harus memilih tablet Android
http://freedownload-eky.blogspot.com/2011/06/tablet-android-honeycomb-terbaik-murah.html
Terbaik dan dengan harga yang cukup murah
I agree that it was gracious for him to respond, which is why I'm skeeved out by the "consistency" questions. The line between benign question and passive-aggressive accusation is 1 px solid #fefefe.

And I have a thing about us accidentally chasing primary actors in the tech community off of HN by acting like... you know... us.
Hey, Since you mentioned TLS/SSL: I can't seem to find an answer to this question: Does my browser or system, need to contact the CA each time it encounters a new SSL Cert, or is having the root certificate enough?
"But wait a second," you say. "What about iLife? Isn't that all about amateur content?" Not quite. iLife helps normal people create things that feel professional.

This is the definition of amateur. Notably, you can spot things done in their software, Keynote being a glaring example. It has made a template of what a presentation is supposed to look like on a mac.

See when Jobs gives a keynote using Keynote wearing a black turtleneck, we recognize this signature. When your boss holds a meeting with a presentation in keynote with that same or similarly light faded colour background and bold white text, you recognize this as imitation.

Apple have fantastic engineers and fantastic designers and their products reflect a culture that prides craftsmanship, detail and perfection. But to say the web is amateur is to deny the wealth of originality and expression that spreads from it. Youtube has a direct cam to site, record and upload thing going because it enables people to be expressive. They keyword here is "enable" and it's in their advantage to promote the creating of original content by focusing on the enabling factors.

I think the article addresses the problem in a flawed perspective. Facebook being a good counter example. The problem with Apple is probably better tied with their culture. Apple is not social, and until they socialize they will not know what it takes to enable socializing.

A lot of people here are pointing out that MySpace was the amateur failure of the social web, further getting away from idea that social success == amateur, but let's not forget that MySpace was once, many years ago, "the shit" and only got its pedestal kicked out from under it when other sites offered better enabling factors (read: features) to socialize between friends. Sure, MySpace was fuck ugly, because not everyone's creativity is equal! but to say everyone switched to facebook solely because facebook looked more professional? I don't take that. (eh, i guess it was built better to - damn myspace always had fucking down time - whatever)
Would be amazing to see one of these built for Thunderbolt since it is essentially PCIe over a serial interface.
Congrats to the team!

I just hope this doesn't reduce the volume or quality of posts to igvita.com - it's such an amazing resource for technical ruby "stuff".
Peepcode has a great screencast. It is a little dated but you can follow along using older versions of node. This is a good place to start. I am starting to do my own 5-minute screencasts.

http://mcottondesign3.appspot.com/blog/screencasts
Is this even enforceable? Once you've purchased something you can give it away with whatever offer you want. Can someone with a legal background comment on whether apple has any legs to stand on with this argument or if it's just blowing smoke?
Investing in the Women's Web
You're seriously suggesting that the .Net ecosystem is bigger than the Web ecosystem?
Plivo and not Plivio. :-)
The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Thanks, that's the page I was on -- stupid AJAX navigation!

Anyway, the document seems *nix specific. Does Windows have a /dev/random?
U.K. to Recruit "Cyber-Soldiers"
One of the reasons could be its founder/CTO, Ilya Grigorik. Check out http://www.igvita.com/. He is brilliant.
IPad's Days Are Numbered, Says Adobe CEO
I agree…and I assure you I was solidly on the left side of that line. Thus, my best attempts at a "hey — peace, man" impression.
Congrats PostRank! This seems like a natural fit considering the tie in to Google Analytics.
Will it be now, you will be rewriting everything in Python or Go? :P
Ilya is amazing. I wonder if this means that some Ruby will be creeping into the Google ecosystem.
The part I'm wondering is how I get a phone number pointed at my server in the first place.
Cool! I use PostRank every single day to filter out my feeds.
I certainly hope that this doesn't make Ilya give up Ruby and EventMachine. Congratulations PostRank team!
Another pretty neat example is this webcomic: http://hobolobo.net
I think you may have missed the point of the comment to which you were replying. What's the humor of the comic, in your view? I can't discern it myself.

It does seem to need a punchline. Perhaps a zoom out to a larger group of people saying "Bitcoin Rally!" sitting on piles of Bitcoins that they're compulsively counting.
Cash out early, cash out often!
Can you recommend an affiliate program?
Objective-C Blocks vs. C++0x Lambdas: Fight
From a performance perspective, the VM is what dominates and Java operates closer to the VM assumptions about what it's going to run.

If you read the paper, you'll note that the Scala author significantly changed the structure of the algorithm to conform with the way Scala does things (recursion, etc). So it's sort of an apples-to-oranges comparison as far as Scala's concerned, too bad they couldn't write ugly Scala code that would give a better comparison.
If you weren't around for the last dot-com bubble burst here's the simplest explanation for what happened then and what seems to be happening now:

Pump and dump.
Most of the time, the criticism comes before the first contact with the technology being criticized. For instance, most of the people who criticize Smalltalk's "alien" syntax never finished a single tutorial.
The biggest answer that Twilio and Tropo answer is running the voice services in the cloud.

If you've ever tried to get any SIP based product to run virtualized you will know that is no easy feat, and not recommended for production: http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Amazon_EC2
You say on the home page:

> All information is sent over secure https and no information is kept, even temporarily.

The install process asks for FTP server details over port 21. To me, this is misleading - passwords etc. may be encrypted on their way to your server, but from your server to the user's web server it's all going in plaintext.
Well, by analogy with Rack, WSGI, Ring, Plack, etc, widget systems and forms and AJAX are way outside the scope of the problem that Clack is trying to solve.

All of these systems boil down to providing a simple convention for web applications to interface with web servers by implementing exactly one function that takes the environment and returns a triple of response code, content-type, and content.

Everything else you describe would be built on top of this, not built into this.
It sounds like Colin is taking issue with openssl the implementation, while you're defending TLS the protocol. In that case, I agree with you both.

(As an aside, it's great to see two of my favorite HN commenters in the security field engaged in conversation at this level.)
Being a web programmer, I actually started by using the WYSIWYG editor in the old Netscape Navigator (v2.0 I think). I simply created a simple HTML page, then viewed the source code to see what it was doing. This was my freshmen year in High School.

During my junior year our math teacher decided to start a Visual Basic programming class, which I quickly jumped into that class. Then progressed to reading lotsa books, online tutorials, etc.

100% of the knowledge I use today was all self taught, but those first bits of <HTML> is all it took to get me hooked.

I also did some basic BASIC programing on my TI-82, so I could put all the random math formulas into it so I just needed to enter X and Y and it would tell me what Z was. Being that we were allowed to use the calculators on the tests :)

Being biased towards the web side of things, I think HTML5/CSS3/Javascript is a great (instant gratification) way to start learning programming.
The 2000s really did teach us that anything related to economics is a Ponzi scheme.

Hell, does the federal budget qualify as a Ponzi scheme?
The Cryptography of Bitcoin
Short Curly Hairstyles
Curly Hair is completely different from straight hair. Its structure is different and its needs are different. Like short hair styles of any other type, short curly hair styles make a statement.
Totally understand. It's hard not to pick a fight with people (DHH and Fried both) who stand by a "pick a fight" mantra -- but I'm trying my hardest to be nice regardless! I swear!
Perhaps. It took Amazon 6 years to turn a profit, and a mere $5m on $1bn revenue at that.
Your browser does not need to contact a CA to verify the signature in an SSL certificate, but may in some cases want to contact the CA to check for revocation.
I think it's just an advance against future royalties. So if it completely flops, and Apple makes not much money, the labels still get $150 million.
I was just reading a bunch of older articles from 2009 lamenting MIT changing their intro course from Scheme to Python. I wonder if this sort of article would have been helpful in that debate.
Any interest?

Not really. I've seen far too many "best practices" and "standards" bodies go nowhere to think that a committee can put together a useful website like this.
But most .NET apps that I see have stuck to the best practice of splitting the presentation layer from your other layers. Re-coding just the UI into HTML5 could very well become a standard, especially if it enables apps to easily move to more phones, tablets, or whatever else gets invented in the coming years.

So it is probably true that .NET jobs will not go away. But that 90% mark on job postings could very well shrink significantly.
An interesting data point: Quora vs. Hacker News vs. Stack Exchange
Branch prediction and processor caches help all languages, and low level languages like C and C++ even more than dynamic languages. What I'm saying is that smart compilers are not in any way a substitute for branch prediction and processor caches, on the contrary: smart compilers are designed to take the best advantage of these features. And on the point why C and C++ are still relevant because of this: it's basically impossible to fully take advantage of e.g. processor caches in languages like Java and Ruby because you cannot fully influence how your data structures are laid out in memory. You can in C and C++. Sure, in theory smart compilers could do that for you, but in practice they don't. And the problem is so difficult that we probably get that in compilers working about as well as a human C/C++ programmer around the same time that we get strong AI.
Most of the cPanel installations usually already have quick installers for all popular CMSs including wordpress.
I'll check into this. We're also working on supporting sFTP.
It's not just Gmail and Node. It's Live Mail and Yahoo Mail and dozens of other Web mail apps that now dwarf desktop mail systems -- at least with consumers.

It's Microsoft's Office Web. It's Google Docs. It's Zoho Apps. Yeah, there are hundreds of millions of users there already.

It's YouTube and Facebook and Twitter.

These are applications with logic and complicated functionality and they're built with HTML and JS and they have hundreds of millions of users, each one of them.

If you think that the Web is "niche" you're in for a rude awakening over the next few years.
What will this mean for the users of the service? Will it be shut down in the future?
The solution I have come up with, something we intend to adopt in Zoho,
is to abandon major cities, and move to much, much smaller towns.

This definitely is a good move especially for a company like Zoho that has an excellent training & skill building program.

I personally would like to do the same once my startup gets going and of course assuming other things fall in place. Probably, that's an advantage for a bootstrapped company rather than a funded one, where one might be forced to stick to such bigger cities with moral suffering.
The appearance and track record† of the code in OpenSSL does the credibility of TLS no favors, and it is totally understandable why someone who had to deal with software security for a platform that ships and depends on OpenSSL would become allergic to it.

But, two responses to that:

* First, what Joel Spolsky says about rewrites. Sometimes code is ugly for a reason. Clean rewrites of OpenSSL will inevitably introduce bugs. Introducing bugs in SSL†† implementations is perilous.

* Second, there are mature alternatives to OpenSSL. For instance, most? browsers don't use it.

† In fairness, that's because OpenSSL dates back to a time when nobody was getting C software security even close to right.

†† I use TLS and SSL interchangeably, which is a foible I should work on correcting, but the difference doesn't matter much here.
I disagree, getting a SIP server up and running in EC2 is no harder than doing it on it's own. Unless you're doing mixing/conferencing, you shouldn't see any delays from the virtualization.
True. Lots of commercial apps and of course they do have an install on their site, which is quite the process. Could be replaced. Maybe WordPress will see this, and they can decide if it's of value to them.
> He says college rewards conformity and competition, not collaboration, theory

Wow I never considered the collaboration vs competition argument, but it makes perfect sense. I have seen one too many students with perfect grades who don't know how to teamwork and learn from others.

I now strongly believe that colleges have to reconsider their entire approach to curricula -- the emphasis on students not sharing their work with others can be counterproductive, in my opinion.
Looks like a PR stunt to promote his company. Also, to promote whatever Peter Theil is doing.
Building the Perfect Team
Pitchie tells us how to build the perfect team and how they're going to make it easier.
I haven't seen a good argument for why the blocks need to be prevented from being found in advance or why the proof-of-work has to depend on the contents of a particular new block (rather than simply authenticating that block).

If that requirement is removed, anything that's (1) useful, (2) hard to do, and (3) easy to check could satisfy. Searching for Mersenne primes could work, for example.

That said, the need for proof-of-work comes only from Bitcoin's arbitrary design criterion of full decentralization. It's an academically interesting criterion but one that is almost certainly too expensive in practice for nearly all applications. Eliminate full decentralization and, even if you allow practically useful forms of decentralization, you get a much simpler, easier-to-defend, secure, and cheaper system. Even if Bitcoin plods along under its current speculative bubble, there's very little reason to think it will be able to compete successfully with other payment systems on transaction fees, because in the long term, those transaction fees will need to pay for all the proof of work.
This was a purchase: the investors bought part of the company. When they signed over a billion dollars, they were not trying to fund operations; they wanted to become part owners. They know that the vast bulk of the money would go straight to earlier employees and investors.

This was a risky investment, yes. But it is neither unbelievably stupid nor criminally insane to make a risky investment. High risk investments can be quite at home in a well developed portfolio.

Now, if Groupon deceived the investors about where the money was going, that would quite possibly be a criminal act. Literally. But that almost certainly didn't happen, or we'd be hearing about it.
i would say open source it, and try to contribute to the project
http://wordpress.org/download/svn/
you might end up getting hired if not by them by someone else who does heavy wordpress development
I'm guessing this public criticism is pretty much limited to tech savvy audiences so far. I haven't seen Groupon get this criticized on cnn, money.com or ft yet, so the wider public is probably still thinking this is a great deal.
Thanks. That would be nice!
Houston Luxury Apartments
Houston Luxury Apartments by Brian Lemer
Would be nice if their release notes were somewhere easily found. Nothing on the download page. Google searching doesn't even find it easily.
Congrats to Ilya. His personal blog has some of the most inpiring articles in Ruby/AI and technichal stuff in general: http://www.igvita.com
The word "effectively" in the title is a weasel word.

Groupon is balance sheet insolvent by definition. Their liabilities are greater than assets.

Groupon is cash flow solvent by definition. They are able to pay liabilities NET60.

In Q2-Q4 2010, Groupon had $669mm with a net loss of $398mm. That is a ratio of about -0.59. In Q1 2011, Groupon had revenue of $644mm with a net loss of $102mm. That is a ratio of about -0.16.

If you are long Groupon, then you are betting that -0.16 approaches zero and then turns positive.

The moral of the story is: haters gonna hate.
I still don't get what are you talking about. What is that "web stuff" that Apple is failing?
What has me.com to do with content, professional or amateur? It is not some blogging platform.
Nice to see another Canadian Company get acquired!

Go Canucks Go!
800 million people are starving in India.

And the Govt/Politicians doesn't want people to prosper.
They fear people might vote as per their conscience in elections.

http://www.deeshaa.org/2011/06/02/the-starving-800-million-i...
Counting hours doesn't make sense
It looks like this offers no way to stream chunks of a response -- you send the whole thing as a list of strings, or tell it to send a file.
Those are the most superficial points of the post; everything else he says is spot on, particularly the disconnect between the claim the the protocol is easy to update and the nearly impassable practical obstacles to doing so for a contentious update.
These are fairly professional sites, though, run by otherwise decent designers and programmers. I think it's more that they adopted an incomplete jQuery plugin, and didn't fully consider the repercussions of changing standard browser controls. That's happened a lot in the past few years... people customize select menus, checkboxes, etc. that are customized (mainly in appearance) with javascript and CSS, and then lost a lot of the native functionality. It produces problems that are reminiscent of why people turned on Flash sites... hopefully the progress of HTML 5 and CSS3 will help this situation, by providing a standard way to do things that have need custom hacks in the past.
I was very young during the dot com boom, but this sounds awfully familiar. Someone (PG?) described the approach of the era as burning investment to create revenue, profits be damned, then looking for a huge IPO.

Presumably Groupon has actual plans for becoming profitable, but big IPOs of companies with dubious fundamentals does sound like a description of a bubble to me. (Linkedin's stock was briefly over $100 - crazy!)
Blanket statements like this are foolish. My own college experience had a lot of regurgitation, but whether you make productive use out of your time there is completely within your hands. I was able to do challenging, hands-on research, make connections that lead to my last two jobs, and build a solid resume.

However, if you choose to party it up all the time, and/or only do the bare minimum to get through, you probably shouldn't bother.
It's okay. Technically, this thread about resizing text is off topic. =)

And, as I mentioned: Yes, I know about the CSS problems that prevent text resizing. I've just always thought it should be considered a browser bug if it doesn't work. After all, if the UI gives you the option to increase the size of the text, it should increase the size of the text regardless of the CSS on the page.
This makes me not like CoffeeScript more. Using with a javascript library is no bueno.
A fresh look at JavaScript Mixins
This is what the VB6 guys used to say.
fwiw, I upvoted both of your comments. I think it's obvious this is a difficult subject based on how many intelligent people disagree on it. I very strongly disagree with your conclusion, but I respect it and disagree with the downvotes.
I opened a bug with Chromium if you feel like starring it :)

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=84888

It will probably get marked Wontfix but hey I tried!
"Blemish free" .... guy obviously has never used iTunes.
"We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions." -- says the guy writing for .... CNN.com
The email announcing the release has some high level information:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/cassandra-user/2011...

The complete list of changes:

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra/tags/cassandra-0....