skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed - we can do a better job at clarity on the initial page. And the legibility issue, I'll take a look at that. Thanks for the thoughtful commentary.
Does anyone know of an attempt to convert LYSE to a "Learn You Some Akka"?
It stalled after I entered my credentials. It's just been sitting there for 10 minutes.
Perfectly worded. Seriously.
Lol at Python or Javascript being your answers to "fast and concurrent".

Does Javascript even have concurrency constructs?
When I read this article, it screamed Priceline to me. Its essentially doing the same thing that Priceline does for the travel industry. Its asking customers to select a deal or 'bid' on a deal and then uses that knowledge to close the deal with the restaurants. Like Priceline, Loopt will already have the credit card info and I am guessing the customer will be charged automatically.

The key here is timing. Its easier for Priceline to check on the bids with airlines because most of the airline systems support rapid data transfer. In the case of restaurants, it is difficult to predict and build a automated way to get 'approvals'. Therefore, the time it takes for them to get answer back from the restaurant will determine the success of uDeal.
The Gravedancer Fund - RIM is Dead, so let's make something from the parts
I have been a happy dotcloud beta user for a month. As a founder of a small start-up outsourcing the entire sysadmin work is a great advantage and .the support on the IRC has been very valuable. The pricing seems a little steep but I would think that the time saved on doing sysadmin is a great value and would be decent trade-off for most start-ups.

Though I do wish that they would beef up their support staff so that the issues are resolved faster than they are now.
I think a huge issue that he somewhat glazed over is that he is refusing to use auto-sharding. That is a pretty large benefit that MongoDB provides. Oh, and he refuses to upgrade his 1 year old build (1.5, now at 1.8) - no explanation of why but he was willing to switch the entire stack to PostgreSQL.
Yeah, I think its done internally, but according to the requirements you need to have either an active property insurance or an active line of credit, and you need to be qualified for both. So I don't know what's going on there. But I have noticed some of the bank's rates are not competitive.
https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/bank_deposit
Documenting Rails Learning Experience new post: Frontend, lots of frontend.
+1 on Dropbox, Instacast, and Netflix.

Allow me to add a few of my daily use apps: Instapaper, Reeder, iOctocat, TrackerBot, and Evernote.
JavaScript's for-in construct is not the same as iterating through all elements in the array as it will enumerate over all of the object's properties (see here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/500504/javascript-for-in-...)

The other "complexities" in the compiled JavaScript are there for perf reasons (not accessing the "length" properties in the condition portion of the for loop, for example).

Your comment underlies why some users find CoffeeScript useful in dealing with some of the idiosyncrasies and performance minutiae associated with JavaScript.
Prior art is still prior art. What this particular element changes is basically the situation where two people independently come up with the same idea, and they both file for patents. (I'm leaving out some irrelevant complications, but) under current law, whoever came up with the idea first wins, even if the later inventor files first. Under this new law, whoever filed first would win, even if he had the idea later. It's to save the trouble of having to litigate about when you had an idea, what proof you have of that fact, etc.

But it doesn't change the fact that you can't patent an idea that you stole from someone else.
The hard part: making people (like Jack Dorsey and the rest) believe they should do their best work for your company.
Perhaps, but I think you'd agree that my experience in general was very different from what a lot of people are describing here.
Hmm, tried it out. Going "back" to plain old cli git. I got so used to the command line that I'm faster with it.
The problem is everyone has a different 10 apps they "need" and even if you figure only 1% of apps fall into that category for someone, there's still a lot of value in a platform of 200k apps.
The problem with this is that which one are you? If you are doing the hardcore consulting how can you devote the time and mind share needed to build a successful startup? If you aren't doing the consulting how do you find two chumps willing to fund your company for you?
1. Floating inspectors drive me bananas unless they can be pinned in the app "wrapper".

I'm with you here, mostly. iCal's switch from sidebar in 10.4 to popups and floating inspectors in 10.5 is painful. On the other hand, Acorn's floating tools window is good.

2. A new window for every document makes me crazy, because I like to use tools like Witch for doc-level tab switching.

I'm not so into tabs for documents, but can't live without them in browsers.

3. The push away toward full screen apps and in-app file management is, IMO, a good thing.

And yes, and no. It depends, as with other points. I'm glad that now Mac apps are not locked into multiple windows/floating inspectors for everything, but "you have a single window and you can look only at one thing at a time, deal with it" is also not the panacea.
How do you know they didn't research their user base and find out that more people used OSX than any other OS?

I can honestly say I do not know a single dev who uses windows for development, everyone is on Linux or OSX. My unscientific data is probably as good as yours. So I wouldn't be surprised if they looked at their browser data and realized OSX was a pretty big market.
Jacob, before responding to your pricing comments let me start with SSL: we are in fact the most SSL-friendly PaaS out there:

1) Every URL on the platform gets piggyback ssl by default - no add-on necessary. That includes the free tier.

2) A pro account gets you unlimited SSL on your domain, regardless of how many apps you run. Nobody else does that.

We'll make that clearer in the pricing page.
AMD and ARM's new CPU/GPU virtual ISA
It is worth pointing out that this is 37 Signals. Which means, just by dogfood-ing, they get rid of many of the major 3rd party app categories.

Productivity software make up a lot of the most useful 3rd party apps, and 37 Signals makes web productivity software that cover the same territory.

It doesn't mean their point isn't still interesting, it's just good to remember context.
That is basically what Apple did with the iPhone. There were lots of apps for the other mobile platforms at the time, but the iPhone was simply in a different class.

The problem is that today, you have to come up with something that much better than the iPhone. If a Nokia phone and an iPhone are of comparable quality (which I think has yet to happen), but the iPhone also offers you access to a huge variety of apps, then why would you get the Nokia? It needs to be significantly better in some way.
I haven't seen Qt application on OS X that has look'n'feel of first-class native application. Qt apps are in uncanny valley on OS X.

Apparently, GitHub chose to do best they can for one platform instead of something that is merely good enough on few platforms.
Yeah man. Its a good short :)
Hong Kong newspaper analyses alleged Chinese listening device in cars, calls BS
To be sure, most people just want facebook, pandora and most especially angry birds. But can I get every episode of Top Chef or the latest Golf Digest on the N9 (or even Android)? I think access to content within iTunes is more compelling than the 200k apps. And it seems to be what Apple is betting on.
Knight News Challenge 2011: Sixteen winners
I used scala for a few projects, and overall I like it much more than java. Let's just get that out of the way upfront :)

I loved scala when I was writing and reading my own code, but it started to feel like perl when I had to use and dig through other peoples code. This is a fairly superficial feeling, and I could be off mark, so take it with a grain of salt. I definitely plan to use scala again when I need the performance over jruby/clojure, in place of java of course.
Lavanda Butik Otel
don't want to throw textbooks away, and don't want to select one best course for every subject (inside university, you'll always have to follow your teachers' contents to some extent). I just want to collect every piece of information produced by university teachers & students and think this would be terribly useful
I'd argue that USAA is already trouncing BankSimple.

USAA competes with the same sort of value proposition (convenient banking with great service, but without a B&M presence), and is a fortune 500 company with millions of happy customers.

It's hard to find discussion about retail banks on the Internet without finding satisfied USAA customers telling their stories.
Millions more would pour out into the countryside, looting and pillaging.

While we're on the subject of apocalyptic scenarios, it's important to remember that there is an abundance of guns in the countryside, so any of us "city folk" hoping to loot some tasty country cooking are in for a different sort of treat.

An event like this would probably result in a death toll comparable to a widespread nuclear strike, and would equally destroy the nation as a functioning political and social entity.

I'd like to think that a new system of logistics would evolve very quickly after a total financial disaster, so long as the food supplies didn't get so low that peoples' low blood sugar diminishes their ability to control their anger.
Apple legal is going after Open Source startup with their App Store trademark
Ask HN: Is Meego and the N9 a game changer?
I'm sure by now, you've heard of Nokia's upcoming Meego smartphone. I, for one, think it looks absolutely stunning. It's nice to see Meego finally getting its time to shine, however I'm not sure if it will be widely embraced (think WP7).

What do you all think?
MS uses AWS
Yahoo's stock is worth 20 billion... and is mostly owned by shareholders. Yahoo can't give it to someone else, because people like me own it.

Edit: Suking is right, they could issue new shares... IF people actually wanted Yahoo shares and a target company would actually accept them. (would not happen)
It does a lot of initialization while populating the context menu for the first time. It really gives the wrong first impression on UI latency.
You think jQuery, Ruby and Python are subpar?

Why, and who would you pick?
Also the notion of using only a few apps doesn't apply to games, which is one of the killer features of smart phones. They are largely meant to be disposable, and you assume you'll be playing new ones periodically. I might keep 7 or 8 utility apps that I frequently use, but I've got a constantly rotating selection of about 1 or 2 games I'll play, and I'm not even much of a gamer.
GOOGLE INCREASES ITS EXPANSION OF TRANSLATION SERVICES
I'm only guessing here but I'd say it wasn't actual leaking but likely something like firing off 100 goroutines all of which end up on real threads(possibly because they're blocking or something) so the peak memory increases since none of the threads are recycled. This can be trivially reproduced by running X goroutines each of them downloading a web-page many of which takes say at least 1 second. Memory-use will simply grow as is expected(or not). I guess it's also worth mentioning that from experience it's often faster and more efficient to multiplex those 100 downloads onto a max of say 10 goroutines/threads.
Running through the Clojure Koans (on Github) is another great way to get some basic familiarity with the language.
Scenes are generally full of nice people, until they get popular.
Ask HN:   Cloud - is it waiting to bite us in the tush, hard?
Dear HN,

Has anyone read through a service agreement with cloud service providers?

First problem: Cloud hosting services are apparently not responsible for "security and privacy" of whatever you upload. This basically means you don't own what you create/upload - they could pass on your uploaded content to anyone (even for money) and you have no remedy against them. This also means no IP for you (since they are considered public domain)!

Second problem: The cost is sky high when you scale. Has anyone done a cost comparison b/w cloud based maintenence, hosting and deployment vs your own servers on maybe rented out racks? Compare backups and multi-nodal solutions.

Finally: You have no control over your stuff - what triggered this in my mind was when I saw how many companies have their sites taken down while they are being investigated for stuff they have very little control over vs. companies who own their infrastructure and thus need to be subpoena-ed or issued a warrant against to but taken down. For example, consider two scenarios of a popular company, say Facebook or Craigslist, let's make it FB. Now if FB is on the cloud and some teenager kills himself from being bullied through it then all the police have to do is ask the hosting company to take down FB while it’s under investigation. The hosting company wants to keep peace so it complies and FB can’t do a thing about it. On the other hand, if FB has its own infrastructure and the cops have an issue, FB can wave the middle finger at them until they get a order from a judge to shut their servers down, which is much, much harder for cops to do and they must make a strong case before getting such order. So basically my point here is you’re at someone’s mercy and could be driven out of business easily by the flick of a switch.

None of this is concrete, and is just a starting point. However, they are serious concerns, and I don’t think there is a better place than HN to ask this question. Please share your thoughts freely.
Sadly, Eclipse Indigo is only downloadable by 'Friends of Eclipse' at present.
Contractors often work onsite for set lengths of contract (3,6,12 months) on one or more projects.

Consultants often work on a single project they bid on in their own time.
This data is not picked fairly. I suggest we only look into webdev jobs, then Ruby should be somewhere at the top.
Or how about a free, startup friendly plan and in return get free marketing from the startup, a link back at the footer (powered by DotCloud).
Very long article, but if you dont know the many pitfalls of using floating point, you should read it.
Microsoft HealthVault Releases an iOS library
not sure if its related, but i keep getting an authentication error; can't seem to figure out what's going on

http://cl.ly/7roP
That was the N800, a few years ago.
> Quake was the first really 3D FPS (e.g. you could walk under a bridge without "tricks").

Sometimes the tricks were cool.

In Bungie's Marathon for instance, the map format allowed you to have multiple rooms occupying the same physical 3-d space. Imagine a spiral stair case that doesn't go up or down, you just run around and around this long corridor like a manifold mobius loop. Quite fun in multiplayer maps with radar. Also worth noting that Marathon was the first game that allowed rocket jumping due to being able to look up and down slightly.

Obviously Marathon had nothing on Quake, but it was really a great multiplayer FPS for its day.
Consulting cannot scale (easy) because you trade time for money and time is of limited supply. The only way to scale is to work more or hire.
H5ai - Apache index with HTML5, CSS3, jQuery
I didn't mean my reply to be a point by point rebuttal. Your description seemed to match GitX pretty well, so I figured I'd mention it.

The rest of my reply was pointing out how I perceived this to be different than GitX, which was tangential to the point, but I didn't really think a separate reply was required. Sorry for the confusion.
I'm a lot less worried about loosing all my money to some crook than I am to the US being overthrown

I'm a lot more worried about the US overreacting to a cyber attack, or reacting to a forged country of origin. That seems much more likely than overthrow of the government. The day the US government said that cyberattacks could be considered an act of war, I'm sure there were numerous smaller countries and non-state actors scheming ways to make it look like Russia and/or China wiped out the US financial, government, military, and SCADA computer systems, triggering a physical war. It's kind of like the supposed automated USSR doomsday retaliation scenario, except anyone can pull the trigger.
Had some of the same issues with HBase. Ended up going back to Postgres too, but with a twist: http://www.slideshare.net/cloudflare/sortasql
Humans have been around for more than 200,000 years (up to 2.5 million years, depending on how you define the term "human"). So even 4,000 years ago is relatively recent on the scale of human history.
My day job is writing Eclipse RCP based thick clients. The platform is very nice indeed!

JVM (Java in my case :/) + native widgets (fast) + built in update mechanism + robust module system (OSGi)

Love or hate Eclipse the IDE, Eclipse the Rich Client Platform is really solid framework for thick clients.
Microsoft threw one other language into Internet Explorer, and as far as I can recall didn't push it any harder than JavaScript. No other scripting language was ever implemented in any other browser. To call VBScript a competitor is being overly generous. JavaScript was really the only option for DHTML.
Forgot to mention that Solomon and Jerome are extremely knowledgeable engineers and very helpful. They hang out at freenode IRC at #dotcloud.
True, but if it's hard to let your talented people innovate and make money, it's even harder to hamstring your talented people and make money.
My disagreement with Elop on MeeGo
Not just pretty fast--it completely closes the performance gap between Groovy and Java.

http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest/wiki/Performance
flat files!
You should add the Neo4j (http://neo4j.org/) graph database to the list.

Graphs are a much more modern and elegant way of storing relational data. I've used Postgres for over 10 years, but it's not a graph database. With graph databases you don't have to mess with tables or joins -- everything is implicitly joined.

And Neo4j is ridiculously sweet -- store 32 billion nodes (http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/03/neo4j-13-abisko-lampa-m04-size...) with 2 million traversals per second (http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/02/neo4j-10), and you can use Gremlin with it (the graph traversal language), which let's you calculate PageRank in 2 lines.

Neo4j is open source, and the Community Edition is now free (https://github.com/neo4j/community).

I recommend pairing it with the TinkerPop stack (http://www.tinkerpop.com/).
This is a very parishiltonesque approach to management. Also, why would the acquisitions listed work out for Yahoo!, while Broadcast.com, Geocities, Kimo, HotJobs, Flickr (Ludicorp), Delicious, Dialpad, Konfabulator, Upcoming and Zimbra did not?
interesting. but I'm thinking about something more "social" and less "elearning". In connexion contents come only from the authors, from what I can see, while teachers (the authors of the universities) may not be the first to see the advantage of putting knowledge there. I think there could/should be a more targeted platform for university didactics online needs.
DHH is probably right that most people only use a fraction of apps, and that should mean any phone could succeed versus the iPhone or Android phones. However, I doubt people are rational enough to realize this when they go out to buy their new smartphone.

Even though I only use ~10 apps on my iPhone and iPad, I'd be wary of buying into another platform that didn't offer the same breadth of choice.
Actually I think just the opposite. Meego is a poor competitor to Android, because of how similar they are. In fact Meego today looks too much like the Samsung skin on Android (it would be funny if Samsung sued Nokia over trade dress).

There's no reason to get a Meego device over an Android device. But plenty of reason to get Android over Meego, at least today.

Whereas with Windows Phone, it is fundamentally different than Android. There's a lot of reason to pick WP over Android (and vice-versa). Nokia can exploit that space for at least a few years -- at which point Meego might be ready to really differentiate itself.
They're eating their own dog food. Maybe they're making it because they want to use it themselves first. I'm sure they're heavy users of Git, and it would probably be easier to do iteration on something you use instead of iterating on something you'll never use (on windows).
We use MySQL mainly and also Redis a little bit. We will probably do more with Redis.

Also, we use S3 as database for some of our larger datasets where latency isn't a concern and are looking at either Mongo or HBase for large datasets that need faster performance.
Anecdote alert:

A female coworker who was also a close friend of mine sent me an issue, asking me if it was related to an issue I had debugged. It was, and the issue was not assigned, so I took it and closed it as duplicate.

She was pissed. She wanted to know if it was a simple issue so she could assign it to herself, close it easily and get credit for it. (Not that our group really used that as a performance metric.) She actually said to me: "That was really unprofessional you ass!" I tried to gently suggest that she might be taking it too personally. If I had realized she wanted to close the issue herself, I probably would have let her. I just closed it myself because it was faster.

Later she told me that she had read in a book that women tend to become more emotionally invested in their work than men do. I told her I was glad she had read that in a book.
a) The arguments i 've heard about religious faith attempt to explain metaphysics by resorting to metaphysics, which, to me, is weak circular logic; but, fair, i don't have the means to disprove them either. My critical attitude was towards religion, the social construct which has historically been used to manipulate human groups through religious faith. Then again maybe religion has been evolutionary advantageous, although it hasn't been around long enough to be selected out of the population.

b) You are right. AFAIK, religious experiences involves the parietal and temporal lobes, so its not just the emotional system. Agree that it's an important (irreplaceable?) part of our self-awareness. However the fact that non-religious people can act ethically in a harmonious society indicates that it might be reduntant. Still, religious beliefs arise in a brain, so there will probably be a way to turn them off (probably not without sideeffects).
I've always been struck by the juxtaposition of Yahoo's commercial efforts and their developer-friendly efforts. YUI was kickass (until jQuery came along). YSlow is the benchmark for measuring site performance, smushit etc. etc. their developers have contributed so much. Just doesn't seem to be parlayed into greater commercial success.
The bill generally updates the process for challenging patents and would change the patent system to one that awards a patent to the first inventor to file a specific claim.

Currently, the first person to invent something has patent priority, whether or not he is the first to file an application.

Wow, after 6 years of careful discussions and deliberations, they've finally figured out a way to make the patent trolling situation even worse. Good job, pat on the back!
You have a point ... except that if government was engaged in enforcing a roll-back on a bitcoin transactions, it would make the ordinary "enforcement" system which bitcoin uses rather obsolete.

... and getting everyone to agree to the rollback might be difficult.

... and considering you would be using the state's court system, the state feel like refusing to use their money wasn't very generous. IE, if the Feds could sink bitcoin transactions just by saying they wouldn't engage in any Fraud protection on them.
I needs to be significantly better to gain mind share, not to market share.