skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey there HN,

I have an idea in my head that needs to be executed, and I'm looking for some market information. If you please, just take a few minutes to answer some questions about how your team uses voice communication. It's a little technical, so if you're not sure don't worry about it, grab your IT guy if you like :)

Thanks!

p.s. if it goes inactive, that's because I'm using the free plan wich only allows for 100 responses.
Most sites would get a lot more mileage out of a serious study of basic information design principles than tacking on the latest whiz bang effects, be they flash or HTML 5. Demos are fun but on the web I'm after information, not some kind of half-assed video game.
I suspect HTML5 won't displace flash, but standards in general eventually will. Not any time soon, mind you, but eventually.

I've been trying to come up with a way to articulate how I think about this whole non-debate and here's a first stab:

One of the primary reasons Flash will eventually be unseated is not that Flash is closed -- standards, to a certain extent, are constructed in a relatively closed manner -- but because standards and technologies built on top of standards are more agile.

Flash is an awesome platform, but you can only build on that platform. Standards are great because you can combine platforms and build things not explicitly envisioned. Flash's single-platform approach makes it so that it will eventually have to play catch-up to a whole set of features that are being built by mixing and matching standards.

CSS3 + Javascript, for instance, can be used without Canvas to build really awesome functionality.

Canvas + Javascript can be used to make really engaging content.

Flash will eventually have to compete not with another product on features, but an entire web of organic technologies that don't have to wait for other components to advance in order to release the next stable version.
These days, I find myself doing the things I’ve always wanted to do, like being amazing. And when I’m tired of being amazing, I take a nap and be amazing again.

Losing your attachment to "things" could help you be more amazing too - and how!
I actually enjoy these videos. Where else are you gonna be able to take a peak inside valley startups like this?
Cool, thanks for the direct perspective. So it does sound like there is perhaps some space for s service which a company could provide which looked to the shop owner as a 'DIY' service but was implemented as setting up various values in standard templates on the back end? Sort of like 'App Engine' for small business where you "design" it but the modules you use are just front ends for the underlying cloud services?
> 7) Of course you can check for exceptions, you just don't need to add a bunch of throws clauses all over your code base to get the error bubbling up to the place where you want to handle it.

These clauses allow static verification. In other words, the compiler will remind you to handle the error cases.

If you fail to do this and the compiler doesn't nag you, you can bet that most developers will never bother doing it.
Do you think you will change hosts and/or have secondary services elsewhere?
Sony officially 50% of all GitHub's DMCA notices
Don't think so, but I wouldn't want it anyway, the Ruby syntax being as it is. I think the CoffeeScript equivalents are more intuitive:

@current_user ?= User.find()
# as opposed to @current_user ||= User.find()

and

@summary = excerpt?.squish
# as opposed to @summary &&= excerpt.squish
So, in thinking about how to mitigate unforeseen disasters while trying to maintain anonymity - I think the following solution to such a problem would be really easy (not free, but easy)

Host your site/content across multiple cloud providers. Then host VPS web servers with other providers and have them balance between the backend cloud servers.

Then put cloudflare on top of that.

Ideally, you would want to have multiple service instances with the cloud providers which are silo'd from each other - but exact duplicates (e.g. they are under fully different accounts with the cloud provider)

Your front-end web servers keep a cache of content from the cloud servers - and they are pushed to. For even lower-end content needs, you can pull from a drop box account or something.

Any of the front end gear gets seized - You can bring it up with a VPS image really quickly.
The customers don't care about the particular method, they just know what they want to accomplish and try to suggest how they think it may work. It's beside the point and somewhat obtuse to go into detail explaining why a particular way doesn't work.

A much better way to respond to this request would be 'Yes! Here's a one time/time limited password generator that will do what you want'.
Agreed on all points except the selling off of the wardrobe.

Like it or not, the world rewards well-dressed, well-manicured people in a pretty absurdly extreme way.
I think the Flash plugin was a smaller install. Plus Flash was a lot easier to learn than animating in Director and learning Lingo.
Yes, although some of those are more "worked on" than others; the last entry at blog.on-a-horse.org is from almost a year ago, and the page at haskell.on-a-horse.org has been broken for a while.
Sure - but why doesn't TechCrunch invest in some polish?
Do people who applied to bigco Google want their resume passed on to GV-backed startups?

Do those startups want people who applied for a Google job but (presumably) got passed over?

Hard to see how this candidate-sharing provides a big GV benefit.
I wonder how serious the corruption charge must be in China before facing execution.
I'll take this opportunity to bash the Unix "tail" utility. "tail -c +n" is supposed to mean "print all characters (or bytes, rather), starting at index n". Unfortunately, the implementer used 1-origin indexing, which is bad enough when I expect 0-origin. But there's also a clear alternative semantics that doesn't even use the concept of indexing: "tail -c +n" should mean "exclude the first n bytes". Both interpretations lead me to expect the following command to output "56789", but it doesn't, and I have been burned twice already by off-by-one errors due to this:

$ echo '0123456789' | tail -c +5
456789
One minor point: The iPhone and all other iOS devices have an excellent screenreader and are in general very accesible out of the box. Judging by the stories you hear on the web at least some blind people use iOS devices and are quite happy with them.

Here is my view: If what you want to do can only be done with Flash then – of course – you have to use Flash. If you can't reach some people you want with a HTML5 solution (because their browsers don't support it) then you have to use Flash. If you can't reach some people you want to reach with Flash then you have to use HTML5. If you want to use HTML5 at all you probably have to use a Flash fallback since it's quite often the case that some people you want to reach can't use HTML5.

Tradeoffs are always involved and the landscape is changing too slowly to care about anything but current (and not predicted future) usage statistics – in most cases. It always depends on the necessary work and supported features. Ideally you would support both but that's either sometimes not possible or too much work for too little gain.

You might not currently want to use canvas but, I think, video has become a pretty obvious case. Today it's eminently possible to use HTML5 with a Flash fallback with little additional work. MediaElement.js (http://mediaelementjs.com/), for example, is a beautiful and elegant solution to that problem.
Comparing Indian states with countries
"lenguages" was weakly typed.
The nature of Flash is changing significantly. During the previous decade Flash was a multimedia plugin for websites. Now Flash is focused on a write-once deliver-everywhere solution for app developers.

It's all about simplifying publishing.
Please tell me this is illegal and FBI will be sued over this...
Unless you are running a gaming service, latency hardly matters for 'everyday' websites. With most people on broadband of some sort, 2ms or 160ms ping times is not relevant - they wouldn't even notice the split second delay before the page started loading.
The axiom of choice also allows you to prove the existence of a strategy that allows near perfect predictive accuracy given a function and a set of all past points. The reals themselves admit many far out properties such as virtually all reals being "inaccessible" or the existence of a know it all number.

No, the problem that those who dislike the axiom of choice have is not inherent with the axiom but more the law of excluded middle. Constructivism has no rooms for such imaginings hence those who follow it are not happy with existential proofs. This more practical viewpoint will prove more profound IMHO just as bayesianism is winning the day. Just too many things connected.. types and terms in programs, intuitionistic logic, parts of physics, topoi, CCC.
48 hours writing a game in Lua (which indexes from 1) drives this home: in tile-based games, converting screen co-ordinates into tile co-ordinates results in zero-based indices. My graphics routines were full of +1s and -1s as a result.

Generally any time array indexing intersects with mathematics you are going to get the same issue.

That combined with the fact that, in Lua, sometable[0] doesn't produce a not-present exception (it returns 'nil') resulted in a lot of unnecessary cursing.
Pro-Tip – when you are using a CoLo for your servers:

* Make sure you failover to servers in a separate cabinet.
* Better yet, make sure you failover to servers in a different data center.
* Best Possible – Configure a task to switch your primary and
failover environment from data center to data center
once a week at random times. Or eliminate the concept of primary
and secondary altogether.

Who knows what others servers are located in the cabinet you are sharing. The good news is your mitigation process also becomes a first class disaster recovery plan as well.
Did we forget about HTML-emails?
Jquery animated image(script)
I built this on my lunch break for no good reason.

you can turn any image into a animated image with this.

animatedData = [
50,//FRAME WIDTH (width of each video frame)

50,//FRAME HIGHT (height of each video frame)

200,//IMAGE WIDTH (image file width)

200,//IMAGE HEIGHT (image file height)

100,//SPEED in MS (FPS = (MS/10))

'animated-image'// DOM ID (DOM Element ID)
];

window.animateImgGrid = [0,0,

((animatedData[2]/animatedData[0])-1),

((animatedData[3]/animatedData[1])-1)];

function animateImg(animatedData);

function animateImg(array){
$('#' + array[5]).css({'background-position':'' + (window.animateImgGrid[0] * array[0]) + 'px ' + (window.animateImgGrid[1] * array[1]) + 'px'});
if(window.animateImgGrid[0] >= window.animateImgGrid[2] && window.animateImgGrid[1] >= window.animateImgGrid[3]){
window.animateImgGrid[1] = 0;
window.animateImgGrid[0] = 0;
}
else if(window.animateImgGrid[0] >= window.animateImgGrid[2]){
window.animateImgGrid[1]++;
window.animateImgGrid[0] = 0;
}
else{
window.animateImgGrid[0]++;
}
window.t=setTimeout(function(){animateImg(array);},array[4]);
}
Thanks for switching to youtube, appreciated.
Even easier, you use Softlayer and use their global load balancer.
It's cut very similar to MTV Cribs, not sure what that says though...
And by little guy you mean all the multinational corporation that got hacked?
Or the FBI could just go through the proper channels like everyone else and contact the datacenter and request it's immediate takedown (after providing a warrant, of course). This isn't the first time the FBI busted into a data center all willy-nilly knocking innocent peoples hardware offline. Not only does this adversely effect the innocent users, it also almost destroys the datacenters reputation and it's a loss for nearly every party.
IBM LotusScript allows you to set each array lower bound to any integer. You can also configure a whole module to have a default lower bound of either 0 or 1.
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/domhelp/v8r0/index....
The Internet "soft war" (motion graphic video)
Show HN: Simple Video Chat
Apple's revenue in 2000 was $7.9 billion. In 2010, it was $65.2 billion.

Google's revenue in 2002 (earliest full year I could find) was $439 million. In 2010, it was $29.3 billion.

Amazon's revenue in 2000 was $2.7 billion In 2010, it was $34.2 billion.

Microsoft has lagged and that's why the media thinks MSFT sucks and Ballmer needs to be ousted.

Microsoft is probably a lot like RIM: the top guys look at their balance sheet and think everything is roses because they have growth while everybody else is lapping them over and over again.
If you are small enough to have to colo, you probably can't afford to sue the FBI.
I can't say I completely disagree.

When I was putting this together, I kind of felt like I was writing a general article on one method of exploiting polymorphism--not necessarily the Strategy pattern specifically. Honestly, I'm still not sure.

What I do know is that JavaScript has a number of features that make OOP significantly more informal--namely dynamic typing, object literals, and first-class functions. I'm thinking of implementing more patterns in JS in the future to try and get a better grasp on this...

I think jbwyme is getting at this with his comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2680408 (specifically "Then, if needed, use a prototype to set defaults"). Using the prototype is not really necessary at all, but it adds some amount of formality to what is otherwise a ragtag collection of objects.
Can anyone tell me why they take whole cabinets of servers rather than just yanking the offending ones?
At least Javascript is a proper language (even though it has a few warts). It's a scheme after my own lisp/
HTML5 Video Player With Elegant Flash and Silverlight Shims: MediaElement.js
The problem with that is once someone DOES get your 1Password database, they can crack it at their leisure. Now sure the encryption is strong, and sure it will take a long, long time, but once the attacker has your 1Password database they only have to keylog your master password once and you're SOL. If you keylog my LastPass account you still need my grid (soon to be SMS 2 factor auth when LastPass implements it).
I'd agree that refactoring for clarity can't reasonably fall under a wide 'correctness' umbrella. Definitely more reasons to change code than correctness.

I put the word in quotes to try to express a much wider than usual connotation for the word (air quotes, if you will..). It's a shame that language is all we have to communicate on the internet.... :)

I also agree that we shouldn't precisely define tradeoffs before continuing on a single, specific, problem.

I just think that, in the macro sense, we can and should get better at defining the factors that would inform such a precise weighing of the tradeoffs for clarify, efficiency, expediency, etc... Doing so would give us better instincts for single instances where doing a precise comparison would be absurd.
My evaluation is that their priority is preservation of evidence, and they consider a few random websites being down for a couple of days to be relatively unimportant.
You can pack a pretty good wardrobe with a few items. One nice suit jacket, a pair of jeans, a couple ties and a couple shirts. The shirts and ties you pick colors carefully so the mix, it will look like you're wearing a different suit everyday. Jeans for casual events, or mix with the jacket. All thats really missing is a pair of dress shoes and a pair of walking shoes.

With a little thinking you can mostly fit your life in carry on.
It would be standard operating procedure to dry up support for Lulz in their community by beating up folks like Ryan. It works on the theory that if you publically abuse a few lightweights then other kids will think twice about helping out when Lulz comes calling asking if they can 'put a few files on your board' or 'host an IRC server.'

It's not like they are going to send a lawyer over to bail him out.
Then host VPS web servers with other providers and have them balance between the backend cloud servers.

If you don't know what the word latency means, this setup will teach you all about it.

Another problem is that your various providers will probably charge you for WAN bandwidth. So you will pay three times for every request: Twice from backend to balancer (one charge from provider A, one from provider B) plus another charge to send the same data back out from the balancer to the customer.

Plus you will be miserable trying to keep your site up 100% of the time across two cloud providers. Have a problem on either one, and 50% of your capacity will go offline.

Might be better to realize that "my servers were seized by the FBI" is a rare occurrence and you can probably afford a few hours' worth of downtime and/or data loss. Make offsite backups from your primary provider on a relatively long timescale (once per day, maybe once per hour if you're more sensitive; live database replication for the crazy-sensitive) and have a procedure for spinning those up at a secondary provider. Test that procedure every month or so. The beautiful thing about cloud services is that you can pay for your emergency-backup servers by the hour and only when you are using them, or testing them.
Bootstrapping the CNN of tech: The story of TWiT
ugh, forgot I was hellbanned.
shaders are not arbitrary code nor are they executed in the kernel. the same goes with API calls. while opening APIs to new parts of a system always exposes new risks, specious reasoning is not sufficient to determine if the risks are manageable and mitigable.

notice that khronos and the webgl implementers have not responded with content-less dismissals of these concerns. they have outlined the exact steps they've taken to secure their API from the limits of the GPU model and their work to prevent buggy GPUs/drivers from executing webgl content at all. If someone can actually demonstrate (or even speculate on a mechanism of action of) an actual attack that isn't addressed by their current systems or (in the case of DoS attacks) their ongoing work with OS and GPU vendors, then we can talk about fundamentally flawed. Until then it's a matter of risk assessment.
What did you use to build this?
Agreed, was more referring to the "just pants and tech t-shirts" thing... it's passable, particularly in our industry, but one might be surprised at how many doors open (and how many open doors fall into your lap) when you just happen to be well-dressed.
Ask HN: Education-focused start-ups?
Who are they and what are they doing? Especially those focused on K-12.

Thank you!
No, it's about as unhelpful an answer as you can get. Why would you even bother?

Would you answer him the same way in person if he came to a Haskell meetup?
"He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security."

Benjamin Franklin

Ignore Dr. Franklin's words at your own peril.
to try it out without making it permanent, just open a Terminal window and enter something like this:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome -enable-vertical-tabs
Saying "some" is somewhat disingenuous as haskell on a horse is the only one not being actively developed at this time.
Foursquare 3.2 Iphone Apps Latest Update
Don't forget a pair of suit pants to go with your suit jacket. http://oppugn.us/posts/1274663044.html
With all the focus these days on mobile, I think the product to keep them current is WP7. However, they don't seem to be pushing it as a real alternative to iOS or Android. And it's really a shame, it's a great bit of software. Without a big marketing push, though, it's unlikely to become a viable alternative.
Sorry, I haven't looked for a while.
So certain WordPress plugin trunks ( AddThis, WPtouch, or W3 Total Cache) were compromised? That blog posts seems very vague on the details.

Just enough FUD to scare both the novice and the advanced users.

Any core committers care to comment here?
why would you wait for microsoft or adobe to implement it? what you describe is exactly what has been happening for two years now, just with multiple browser makers working on independent experimental implementations.
Ask HN: How to inspect a Macbook?
So a lady came to me wanting to know if I could look at her Macbook. Apparently her husband was an IT guy and they divorced, well that wasn't pretty. He supposedly put key loggers and spyware programs on her Macbook and now she's pulling her hair out because no one will look at Macs around here.

My question: There is so much junk on here, I just want to wipe it all and start over but she wants me to actually investigate and see if there are shady programs on here and document it. How would I go about doing such things? Also, does anyone know of a program that shows all outgoing internet connections and if there are fishy files?
Articles like this make me really happy I am who I am. The fact that you need to sell most of your belongings and turn your apartment into a barren wasteland to be happy is no better than feeling like you need to buy things to be happy.
HTML mailers were the bane of my existence in my previous job. I'd finally get everything looking right in all my tests and then our third party testing service would come back with some obscure spacing issue in Windows Live Mail, or Eudora, or Outlook 2007, and I'd spend the rest of the day coming up with fixes that wouldn't break something somewhere else.

As long as Microsoft continues to use the MS Word Rendering Engine to display e-mail in Outlook, it won't matter what kinds of standards work is attempted in the HTML e-mail space ... and even if they change, it's not like all those old Outlook clients will go away for a while.
I've reported a bug or multiple bugs to all of those guys, and for the record, Microsoft has been by far the most proactive and aggressive at wanting to get the details to their researchers the fastest.
This post reminds me of the adage "Americans Live to Work".
Edmunds estimates the total cost of ownership for a Mercedes-Benz E-class sedan at $77K for five years.
http://www.edmunds.com/mercedes-benz/e-class/2011/tco.html?s...
Why does GitHub anonymize DMCA takedown requests?
Nullification, anyone? I thought all that had been settled...
"Your expectation that you will understand it without the necessary background is misinformed and frankly amusing. That being said, the popular press is there to do exactly that; contact your favorite media source and ask that they cover more advances in "science". They get paid to do this sort of work for you."

The problem is that the people assigned to cover science for the mainstream press generally don't understand what they are writing about and, I strongly suspect, because they operate under constant deadline pressure they never even read the scientific literature. They just interview the scientist who did the research and interview another scientist in the field for another perspective and report the most interesting "sound bites" from those two interviews along with a bunch of horribly naive (and often flatly wrong) conjectures about what it all means. You can't really blame them. They're journalists. Most of them majored in journalism, English literature, political science, or history in college and probably never took a science course above the 100-level at any time in their entire undergraduate program. What we need is more Richard Dawkinses, Michio Kakus, and Carl Sagans - academics who take on the task of explaining science to non-scientists. The way you get that is by creating the funding apparatus to make it happen. Academics are quite sensitive to the priorities of funding agencies - they rapidly become very interested in research topics for which funding exists. :) If funding exists for a professorship focused on enhancing the public understanding of science, there will inevitably be plenty of academics competing to fill that position.
If hackers get out of hand it already playing havoc in all business.