skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a fellow entrepreneur from sunny Waterloo, Ontario I've had the pleasure of interacting with michaelrlitt and what I can say is that these guys are going to be big. There's obviously a lot of competition in this space and everybody has good technology under their belt. But what sets these guys apart is that they really get sales and marketing and that's exactly the service they're providing. I have no doubt these guys are going to crush it.
Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace
This is the desktop version of the article, replete with ads and with a 200kB download size. The mobile version:

http://m.pocketnow.com/smartphone-news/more-evidence-apple-f...

is less than 6kB, and has just the article. The mobile version has also been submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2913629
Agreed! The difference is: this isn't a startup. It was a 12-hour "learn to make Chrome Extensions" project that could end up being cool ;)
Language fluency, on the other hand, does exist and is very valuable. It shouldn't be a prerequisite for a full-time hire, but not everything about a platform can be inferred from first principles. Understanding the idioms and pitfalls of your tools comes from practice and experience.
This is the mobile version of the desktop page submitted here 15 minutes ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2913567
Get a picture that is the iPhone4 resolution, and put a few 1 pixel white dots on a black background, you'll see the single pixels.
And if the judge only read the document for the pictures, this might mean something.
Aren't we all friends here? :)

Honestly, though, if LWN was worried about this, they could put some sore of limit on the number of times a subscriber link could be used (per time unit?) or something. I don't think they are, and rightly so: the exposure to their content (which is very good value for the small amount of money they ask subscribers), as well as their liberal policy on these 'friend links' probably lead to more subscribers. Personally, I want to read the LWN articles when they appear there (on their RSS feed, to be precise), and not when someone gets around to posting a link on Hacker News.
What The Touchpad And A Coach Purse Have In Common
Thanks! I've queued this for a closer look.
Ask HN: What you love most about each startup
Example.

Hipmunk: Simple and useful
Mailchimp: User experience
Zappos: Customer service
The entire business model is based on people paying extra to watch "now".

If you look at the cost to watch a movie, the earlier you want it the more you pay.

It starts with theaters, then pay per view, then buy it, then expensive rentals, then cheap rentals, and finally tv movie. You have b-list theaters somewhere in the last as well, and I may have missed some other places.

If you are willing to wait to watch your shows you will pay a LOT less for them. But apparently most people are not willing to wait, otherwise this model would not work.
This is the exact idea behind the 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss - rapid testing, finding a niche, etc.

If you're interested in this idea you'll likely find value in reading the book.
I think people need to understand core concepts of the field, but honestly, you will do fine in most jobs if you don't use certain concepts, ever.

Say, decorators. Or metaclasses. Lots of those are hairy little edge features of a language (where some are quite useful features you should be teaching to new people in your shop if they don't know them already).
Future customers obviously affect revenue, but how do they affect CLV?
So true. Modules are a wonderful feature, but they come with a lot of power, the implications of which are not always easily understood.

To me it's telling that one of the best Rails developers I ever worked with had 10 years of C++ experience, so he was quite wary of multiple inheritance and all its dangers.
bhartzer, a tweet is stolen just like any other chunk of text, by copying and pasting without attribution. To plagiarize, but the word steal is used on Twitter since it's shorter.
When you loose your dice, use your iPad
Why every programmer should have a Tiddlywiki
Hey, I work on security at Facebook, and when you've turned on HTTPS mode you definitely should not be pulling javascript from anywhere over HTTP (and of course our CDNs should all have valid certificates!). You're correct that this breaks a lot of the security that HTTPS offers. Do you have an example packet capture or list of HTTP CDN URLs that were referenced when you were in HTTPS mode? Or of the domain with an invalid certificate? I'll try to get that fixed ASAP.

I'd also love to debug your report getting ignored - do you know where you submitted it? We take white hat reports pretty seriously and I know I've seen a number of them resolved in less than a day after being reported. Check out https://www.facebook.com/whitehat to report stuff in the future (we'll even pay a bounty of $500 for most properly-disclosed security bugs: https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/bounty/).
Customer of VidCaster? I don't think so, check his previous comments:

"I happen to know Kieran Farr quite well. http://www.vidcaster.com/ was one of the first companies in our Co-op incubator. And, I have no doubt, that Kieran is going to be far richer than some reporter who still makes his living writing for a company that think that selling yesterday's news written on pieces of dead tree is a viable business model."
True-- but for a lot of projects, all you really need is macaroni and cheese.
Even if they sold 1 million of them at a loss, that'd still put them about 30 million units behind Apple - so still a distant loser, especially with Android being in the game too. Besides, then all they'd have bought is a chance at selling to roughly that same small group again next year, again at a loss because most of the folks that only bought this year because it was super-cheap aren't going to be willing to buy at $500 next year.

The key to a sustainable platform is to make a profit on each device or be able to make it up with highly profitable post-device sales (video games for consoles or blades for razors).
You don't build a business on someone else's warehouse

From the article:

A software platform is truly a foundation on which entire businesses can be built. It encompasses not just a technical infrastructure but also a user experience framework, usually some form of a selling channel, and a defined large-scale developer ecosystem

If that isn't the very definition of Amazon, I don't know what is. In theory I could build an entire business on top of Amazon's infrastructure (and not just a software business). I could have outsourced labor write or edit content using Mechanical Turk. I could publish it using Amazon's self-publishing tools. I could sell it through Amazon's marketplace or on an ecommerce site hosted on AWS. I could collect payments using Amazon FPS. I can ship products using Fulfillment by Amazon. You most certainly can build a business using someone else's warehouse, just as Heroku and RightScale can build businesses on someone else's datacenter. Fulfillment is a service, but is is a PaaS - a robust logistics platform as a service.
This is an HTTP API, not a REST API.

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...
Ooh, a car analogy! Here's mine: I went to a car dealer and offered to pay for a copy of a car. But he wouldn't sell me one, so I found someone else who had the same kind of car and made a copy of theirs instead.
Although the OP didn't phrase it in perhaps the most tactful way, there is a serious issue of undisclosed conflict of interest going on here. Techcrunch's own policy (I suspect general AOL editorial policy as well) requires full disclosure, and it's simply not happening here.
Are Our Applications Secure Yet?
Intel also hearing rumors Apple testing MacBooks based on own A-series chip
For me anyway if I have so many member variables in a class or local variables in a method that it becomes a challenge to keep them straight then I will take that as an indication to refactor.
Working in pair programming with other developers is a great way to learn new stuff.
Hydropower, dedicated DC, and more: Building an energy-efficient data center
Remembering the "long distance warrior" who took down Ma Bell
I'll take a capture next time and grab the <head> tag from the body. The biggest problem is that it's very sporadic. Some days it will work perfectly with no warnings and exceptions. Earlier today though, I got the "Security Warning" from Google and improper certificate (not even on the static assets) on a network that I trust to a high degree.
You would call those standard? What other applications use those?
When will Y Combinator come to Europe?
Where are the comments hosted? How long are they kept? Are they censored or moderated? Are there rules?
I think both points being made here are correct.

It's true that having knowledge of libraries is valuable, because as you say, how will you get anything done otherwise?

However, there's a certain type of learning that only occurs once, typically when you're first learning to program.

For example: you need to download data from a web page and parse it. If you're a total newbie, you first need to understand that there's a protocol (HTTP) involved, and that libraries exist to parse the markup language (HTML).

Just knowing that those libraries should be available in your language (standard or otherwise - another piece of knowledge) is valuable. But once you've done it once in one language, you'll know the approach for all other languages.

Another way to put it is that it's all important, depending on which problems you're trying to solve. But putting all your eggs in one basket is problematic and does not necessarily guarantee programming skill.
Modules: Does this mean JavaScript sucks?
Are you sure this is still happening? I loaded a few pages, and every resource on those pages was served over HTTPS (and I got no errors, and I'm using Chrome). If you can either reproduce it still, or have any further information, I know a few people here who would like to hear about it.
Tailoring your Blog to your Readers' Browsers
From what I've read, the Judge actually hold the devices in his/her hands. So this sensationalism feels so yesterday...
Placecast Brings Location-Based Shopping Alerts To Retailer Smartphone Apps
ever since the original etherpad vanished we are in a search for a replacement. The a ton of clones that spawned don't count. they are not as stable, fast etc. Things get disconnected, or they added too much new 'cool' features for it to remain fast.

We mostly used it to collaboratively edit specs, code examples, blog posts, etc. used almost daily, now we sometimes connect to a shared remote ssh server to collaboratively edit a file in vim inside tmux or screen ;)

Definitely going to check this out. And may be even host.
Oof, it's hard to draw conclusions from this.

- The stuff the subjects are doing bears only a passing resemblance to the work that most of us have to do.

- Surfing the web is probably what those students are doing for breaks in work anyway on a regular basis [If you gave them no restriction, how many of them would choose surfing the web? How much is this study is just a measure of "if you let people do what they want on their breaks it's better than restricting them"]

- Were students paid differently if they performed better? Were there any incentives to perform the task at all?

- How is the control group of a study measure effectiveness of break strategies one that's doing more work? :(
I guess they get an emergency patch or Samsung pays damages. Just like they already do for the eight billion patents various trolls claim their phones infringe on.
Ask HN: Recommendations for WordPress design/development firm?
We'd like to outsource the design & development of the content side of our website so I and my team can focus on our core competency on the application/data side. We'd ideally like to find a single services firm that can handle everything from ui design, page layout, coding, custom WordPress plugin development, and project management, and deliver to us a clean, modern, professional site quickly and on a competitive budget. We already have content, a site map (enough to get started) and a full time editor specifically dedicated to communications and content creation, plus programmer staff to help with integration & deployment. I've spent the morning searching and searching Google and various sites only to find, in my mind, substandard results. I've got a fairly good budget for the work ($15K+) and would appreciate any recommendations anyone may have for a good quality, very professional but not super expensive web design/development services firm which delivers great results quickly.

Yes, we are already decided on WordPress so please, there's no need to highlight your favorite CMS of the moment. Thanks for any recommendations!
To first order, people don't understand version control systems. Even highly educated, computer-literate people.

This is a major reason why the CMS was invented in the first place. It's also a major reason why Dropbox was invented.
Good thing you didn't read the article then. I'm saying kids shouldn't be bored out of their minds learning in a standardized, uniform environment that ends up teaching at the lowest common denominator (not in every case but most cases).

I'm saying give kids the full intellectual terrain of life to learn from. Put them to their own devices instead of the devices of the state and you will be surprised at what they learn.

I was fortunate enough to participate in programs at an early age that emphasized this type of learning and it was amazing how quickly one could learn algebra up to calculus if just given a few weeks of passionate learning instead of rote testing. - James Altucher
Comments are not hosted, they're passed through a relay server and immediately discarded. There's no censorship or moderation, other than stripping out HTML tags. No rules whatsoever.
Gamers originally hated Steam and only installed it because Valve forced them to. I think this supports the point that you can't start out with a platform.
Also, for most SaaS apps, your first month churn is typically WAY higher than your second, third and fourth. You need to simulate in order to find the true LTV, also, be sure to include the fact that ARPU typically goes up over time as people upgrade their accounts, so account for that too.
That's what submarines are for, and it seems far easier to make a cruise missile that goes Mach 3 from a hundred milse off shore than a missile that goes Mach 20 from across the ocean.
The real culprit here is really "fsync is slow".
A couple of months ago I write a little test that basically wrote a 1MB file, in increments of 16 byte write() calls, followed by either fsync() fdatasync() or.. nothing. That is, basically:

while(written < 1MB) {
written += write(fd,buf,chunksz);
//fsync(fd);
//fdatasync(fd);
}

Here's some of the times it took to write a 1MB file (Fedora 14, old hard drive)

chunksz = 16:
No sync'ing: 926ms
fdatasync: 727114ms
fsync: 3024498ms
(yes, THAT slow)

chunksz = 256:
No sync'ing: 65ms
fdatasync: 53786ms
fsync: 191553ms

chunksz=1024:
No sync'ing: 20ms
fdatasync: 20232ms
fsync: 48039ms
I think the position that it's about specific code is not defendable. What if I delete the file and retype it as a coder (see Theseus)? Is this the same file that was in a former release? If I automatically code format it, so no character is at the same position as it was before? Is it the same file? The only thing that makes sense is considering releases as the particular thing that is licensed (with each source file being a considered a part of the release, not a part in the history of the file).
I read the article. This thread started with "S3/AWS aside." I think "Amazon" isn't a platform because it's not a single thing ("Facebook"), but Amazon offers a number of services which can be used in concert. Maybe those are actually the same in practice, but they exist in different spaces in my brain.
Relevant: http://xkcd.com/606/
How Google can still become the greatest company ever?
While offering these amazing products, Google offered some real bloopers on the way. Wave, Buzz, Knol,Lively,Orkut, SideWiki, OpenSocial are a few. There is no doubt that any company which would venture into so many fields will come up with some bad one's too but that is not my problem. Google is still a great company but it can be still greater by prioritizing better, by doing what they are good at. No company can be good at everything. Trying to be good at everything is the Microsoft-mania and it sucks
What about Neuromanc--oh. 1984. Drat, that's a good 9 years later. Well, I was/am still very fond of Neuromancer and can't wait to get around to reading more of Gibson's other work, along with Dick's work. Does Lem address Gibson at all at any point?
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
Furthering our wanderings down this off-topic thread, I agree with you completely, but every time I point it out, I get accused of being a "pedant". I've implemented several truly restful APIs, and they've always worked beautifully, but they're internal or private. I tell others about it, and the immense advantages, but they see every other HTTP-RPC API out there and copy that instead.

Why is it that there's no examples of a truly restful web service in practice? The only one I can think of offhand is Sun Cloud's API, which is pretty dead. Its hard to espouse the virtues of a truly restful API when there aren't any examples to point at.

Edit: The downvotes would seem to just further my point...
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Not using them for your embedded videos (and getting the extra views on your site that will launch you higher in search) could be a mistake for many businesses.

If you want to prevent click throughs, after the video starts to play, just put up an invisible div over the video, but above the controls, so the user can't click through, but can still controle the video.

Once the video ends, pop up whatever you want if you don't want their recommended videos to show.

Best of both worlds.
Learning Kanban with getKanban
Pardon me, I inferred from the hackersandfounders.tv site that uses VidCaster was an independent venture and not by a co-op incubator or anything.

The main point I have against this article are that

1) It's poor journalism in that little research into competitors was done. Leena Rao doesn't seem to be aware of the many competitors who have been in this space for years (like VidCaster) but only a few like Ooyala and Brightcove (which TechCrunch uses iirc).

2) Lack of disclosure as to the relationship between TechCrunch and YC startups is a problem. There's an inherent bias without full disclosure.
Oh, so you don't see comments that were made before you get to the site.
I was baffled by the site for a moment giving me a blank page. Apparently css sets the opacity of the main area to 0 and javascript has to come in to override it.
Do these people realize that there are a lot of pirates that pay for their ability to pirate things? Between seedboxes, or usenet, or a faster internet connection, or extra disk space...some of these people are paying as much to download this stuff illegally as they would if they just bought a cable subscription.

And, honestly, the lack of ads is a bonus, it's not the sole reason pirates pirate.

How the hell the media companies continue to screw this up is baffling. They've got a product that people want really bad. And yet...they don't really want to give it to people?

Huh?

If people were banging down my door to use a product that I had created, I think I would probably be working my ass off to facilitate their ability to pay me for it.

For places like FX, which carries several shows that I like: why on earth can't I just stream FX from your website?
While relevant, xdissent's post[1] is dead banned. He wrote:

Or install MS VMs for IE7, 8 & 9 with one command: https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2913557
Under certain circumstances I believe this to be true, drugs will be a net positive (HIV comes to mind). However, we know that in most cases genes are not your destiny, it is the combination of genes and environmental triggers (such as diet, lifestyle, pollution, etc.) that cause disease.

To the extent that we encourage people to believe that their actions are meaningless we actually increase the problem by enabling a feeling of helplessness and despair that causes people to put all their faith into a "cure", whether that be some kind of drug to manage the symptoms or gene therapy. Why bother eating healthy when I can simply take this pill?

We also have a mistaken assumption that drugs are somehow perfect solutions when in many cases the cure is worse than the disease (statins come to mind). Combine known side effects with the fact that the research behind the safety and effectiveness of drugs is distorted by the media, manipulated by the drug companies, and ignored by the doctors and what we have is far from a solution to our problems.

You are right that we don't have a long track record of fixing genes (or curing chronic illness) and this should cause us to be humble about what science and technology can achieve. We must acknowledge the potential of science and technology, and thus push the limits of what we are capable of, while being aware of it's limitations, and behaving accordingly.

Skepticism should not become nihilism, nor should science become a religion.
Everyone can still log in, what's the problem?

Also, I just checked, there don't seem to be PHP unit tests for crypt(), in their tests directory. (http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_3/tests...).
If a large % of Facebook users used this, it would quickly become unusable on the site.

Any ideas about handling large usage - separate people out into smaller manageable groups by IP/geo/other?
Capitalism is fine.
Aaron Swartz Says He Co-Founded Reddit; Reddit Founders Say He Didn’t
You've deprived the content creator (well, a distributor) the chance to make money from you consuming the content at some point in the future.

eg, Fox will let you watch their content on Hulu 8 days after broadcast. But you don't want to wait 8 days, so you go pirate it. Fox makes no money.

If you'd waited the 8 days, Fox would show it to you via Hulu, and show you some ads, and they and Hulu would have made some money.
Parallel Processing Using the Map Reduce Programming Model
Sort of a hello world introduction to MapReduce on Hadoop.
Correct, you only start listening once you get there. This is intended to be more of a flash-mob style application, rather than a reliable communication application
That's a good solution for devs.

Many of our customers aren't technical and like having a customized player + instant detailed analytics + landing page creation + chaptering, etc.
Anti-Social Game Design in The Sims Social
I really enjoy PHP: I learned on it and in doing so became familiar with its numerous idiosyncrasies. However, and I know this is a weird sentiment, I'm waiting for it to fall out of favor. Then, hopefully, most everybody new to programming/scripting will move on and the community supporting PHP will be pared down. The release cycle will slow, and the gains the language has made can be consolidated and stabilized.

But that's me: I'd rather code in a quiet backwater (e.g. PHP in the future, when everyone has moved on) than be screaming along the cutting edge. Such a goal is definitely the opposite of many.
Well, it's a bug. It's not supposed to happen, and AFAIK it occurs only for some (one?) specific version...
Here's a good thread with patches to apply:

http://forums.precentral.net/hp-touchpad/287848-my-hp-touchp...
The advance here is not the lack of a password per se but the lack of any authentication at all.
The author's list of "skills" are programming paradigms. You can't be skilled at a paradigm, only within it.