skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The world does not need 200 programming languages, 1000 javascript frameworks, 500 different web servers and 20-odd social platforms

But .. that is the way we find the way forward. It's like evolution. We may not need 500 different web servers but .. that's a lot of different ideas, a lot of variation, and in the long run, a lot of innovation. Eventually the "best" way is chosen and we go to the next generation.

I actually think the proliferation of programming languages and frameworks, especially open source, is one of the purest meritocracies you can find. They live or die by their quality, innovation, new features. And the whole community is dragged forward. What you are advocating is basically central planning. Did you realise that?

> I can still deliver the same output as node.js with classic ASP/Jscript from 1998 arguably with less code and time spent.

LOL. Dude. No way.

Something you said earlier was instructive as to the mistake you are making with this line of thought. You said that "programmers can't do anything more today than they could in 2001" - or something similar. Or that other guy said it and you agreed, whatever.

Look, that's literally true. In fact it's literally true to say that any programmer can do anything as long as they use a turing complete language. This has been true since the days of ENIAC.

What has advanced, massively, is the knowledge of the best ways of doing things. Design. Efficiency. Elegance, maintainability, scalability. That is what has mainly improved. Knowledge. The laws of the universe have not changed, everyone agrees with that, but we have worked out, a little more, what works and what doesn't.

And I'm afraid your ASP/Jscript falls into the latter category. I'm sure you could mimic some tiny subset of node.js using that toolset. But it would be a hideous mess of spaghetti code. Unless, of course, you used the knowledge you gained over the last 10 years to basically reimplement node.js in ASP, presumably gaining express pre-approved VIP entry to Hell in the process. So things have advanced, haven't they?
Yep... i know. it's kind of an information addiction. I have been there still working through it. but one thing i have found useful is trying to be aware of what am doing moment by moment. Rescuetime.com has been a great help in summing up my activities and gives me pointers to avoid things not to do.
VENTAS POR INTERNET/AUTORESPONDER EN ESPA�OL
Yes, they had DRM for the first 6 years: http://www.macworld.com/article/138000/2009/01/drm_faq.html

It seems true that the labels required this; and it was just serendipitous for Apple that it locked-in users. Although... Amazon dropped the DRM a year earlier (it seems). So it sounds like Apple exploited this good fortune to the hilt, and then some...

It reminds me of how Apple forbids Flash - it's true that flash runs very slowly on mobile hardware; and also that most flash applications are designed for the mouse and don't work ideally with multi-touch; and that this runs counter to Apple's focus on the consumer experience. It's just serendipitous that this leads developers to create exclusive content for iOS, and gain expertise in iOS and Apple's toolchain, which also have sticky qualities (they take effort to learn, and it's not transferable to other platforms).

New products often have natural competitive advantage in many different aspects. It's up to you to find them. It's not something you can just make up for the purposes of having a competitive advantage because if you can't "blame" some real factor for it, customers will hate you for it. So, just recognize those competitive advantages, and don't stuff them up.

Perhaps one approach is to look for possible competitive advantages, and ask if any of them will also happen to give some great benefit to users, that they value.
"Opera's parser will pause until that script has loaded"

I read this as working like IE6 loading a standard SCRIPT tag in HTML. When the parser hits it all HTML parsing stops, waits for the script to download, parse, and run, then resumes. While slow it works for inline HTML parsing.

Dynamically loaded scripts, such as what Opera is describing, shouldn't cause the HTML parser to pause while the script is downloading and parsing. IMO this is a pretty big bug considering how popular dynamically appending scripts has become (eg Google Analytics async loader).
As for the MO - the lulz, would be my guess. Googling it (http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&ix=c2&sourceid=ch...) shows that who ever is doing it is widely indiscriminatory with who they are hacking. As for how they did it, it really depends on the infrastructure in place already. If you are using any cms (wordpress, drupal) it was likely through that, as there are a number of weaknesses published regularly that are used against it. The first thing to do is check current index to see who wrote to it last, and at what time. If it is the webuser (ie apache, nginx, etc) then it was almost certainly a hack from a browser, if it was root, the server has been compromised. Once you have the file's update time, you should look over your access logs to see if there is anything suspicious lines up that time. As for the cleanup, assuming you are using a linux based server and it was compromised, install rkhunter, run it right away. This should catch anything that they would have used (it seems like a scriptkiddy), change any access port, update your ssh password and change the port, and preferably change over to a key based login system (http://pkeck.myweb.uga.edu/ssh/). I would also look into fail2ban (fail2ban.org) if they did bruteforce, as it would have stopped them. As a cherry ontop, you can setup a basic mail script to send yourself a text/email whenver anyone logs into root/any important account.

If you want any help, I used to do this sort of cleanup as a job, and I have a free afternoon. DM me.
What if they set it up in such a way where you could either upgrade your subscription or pay a one time fee and have it enabled for your account? Maybe give a trial for new users to see if try want the feature? That might take care of the "5% of users" and maybe bring in some new revenue.

I'm not quite sure if it'd work how I imagine but, if it could work, it sounds like a pretty good idea.
More info here:

http://superfastmatch.org

http://github.com/mediastandardstrust/superfastmatch
Memo to FOSS Force: The VAR Guy Won't Ignore Open Source
Super da.. Great work! Keep going..
At a certain point, supporting the old install base detracts from your ability to build newer and better product. Everything you design is forced to conform to the lowest-common-denominator standards of the oldest hardware models. Alternatively, you are forced to maintain staffing and resources to continue supporting old devices. This can be a serious roadblock to innovation.

Mobile hardware technology is moving so rapidly that it's almost inevitable to see shorter refresh cycles than you would in a more mature space, i.e., in laptops or desktops.
Medical diagnosis codes for billing treatment for space-related injuries
Happy Programmer's Day. Wish you a full day of coding with no bugs :P
I may add a stats / balance sheet page w/ full transparency when I have the time. It's low on my list though, too many other things to add first.
Here in London, the demand for Linux engineers with several years of experience is quite high. This means there are a lot of contract jobs available, usually 6 months in duration, and the rates are around £300-£500 per day ($470-$790 US)

What makes things worse for employers are that changes to UK immigration laws implemented last year, make it even harder to employ people from outside the EU. There is now an annual cap of 20,000 work permits, except if it's an inter office transfer.
Show HN: create mobile discussions
Learn by Creating
Canonical Seeks Independent Developers for Ubuntu Linux
Machinarium: Porting Flash to iOS hurts Proformance
This is fascinating. I'm a programmer, and somewhat familiar with digital circuits. I'd never really understood how someone would go about constructing an analog computer. This is it, bang on. Resistors for linear changes, capacitors for exponential curves. Pretty neat, an array of meters coupled with a bunch of analog components would solve (approximately) really complicated stuff.

It's also pretty neat you can get an approximate solution in a single step, rather than cranking through a bunch of operations. It seems like a compression problem in information theory, especially when you consider the two step or multi step graphs.
German politicians or the German people? Last I heard the latter have not been very happy about having to bail out the entire euro sector.
Works well is subjective. It can be flaky.
Pleasing MSI X SLIM X370
You could perform penetration testing with Metasploit going forward.
Then BitCasa _can_ tell what files you have.

Here's a hypothetical scenario. Suppose Random Joe's machine is searched by the MAFIAA , and they find some videos downloaded via torrents. Then the MAFIAA guys just have to compute the same hash that BitCasa does on these files (or blocks), and submit a subpoena to BitCasa for the users who have files with the same checksums.

For a cloud service to be truly appealing to me, it must offer full client-side encryption. In other words: no one (short of, maybe, the NSA and its zillion quantum computers) should be able to tell what files I have; not even their names.
The Magic Of Making Up-Do and Don't
Ask HN: Review My App, EmailMeButton.com
http://EmailMeButton.com is the simplest way to create a contact form for blogs/websites & it does not reveal your email address.

It was built out of need a few months back when I could not find a 'Simple & Fast Contact Form' for my launch pages and has now grown to more than 4000. As it does not store the email address on the website, it protects against email harvesters. I recently introduced the Pro plan which stores the contact form data, lets you setup an autoresponder, category etc. I do not have any paid users yet.

I would really appreciate any feedback and/or suggestions on general UI & how to market the app.
Give Macheist a call. It's a pretty sweet way to get attention.
Good poll. I like the analytics drill down. If we all go there, we might see some interesting results.
Most of the time these attacks are automated, so there is no specific MO. Common points of entry are:

* Unpatched or out of date software services running on your server

* Unpatched or insecure web applications

* Weak ssh passwords

Finding the point of entry can be difficult. It's basically an exercise in log-diving. The location of these logs may vary based on your distribution, but look for information on:

* SSH auth and security logs

* General syslog

* Web server access and error logs

* Application logs

Depending upon the level of access gained and the sophistication of the attacker's script, it may clean up after itself, which means you may not find anything.

Security is layered, so there are no "5 easy steps to securing your servers" solutions. In general, you should:

* Keep your distribution's software packages up to date

* Keep any custom-built and off-the-shelf applications up to date with new releases

* Use passwordless SSH key authentication with passphrases

* If you must allow password authentication, use a service like fail2ban to block bruteforce attacks

* Use a firewall like ufw to "default deny" access to services except those you explicitly want to provide access to

Good luck.
Supercomputer Reads the News to Successfully Forecast World Event
Ah yes, you're correct. So my yield is way off. Thanks for the correction.
That's ok though. This is exactly the type of riffraff that Google wants to keep out of its gated community.
The way I handle this problem with my web app is to quietly move highly unused features to a state where administrators can still use them but customers can't see them. I let them hide there until I'm satisfied that there won't be a problem removing the feature permanently. I have not had a "roll back" request to date.
While the GSCI is a "long only" investment vehicle, it is utterly nonsensical to say there is no way to short it. All you need to do is buy a set of short positions which are mirrors of the GSCI's long positions.
> And iOS still doesn’t have turn-by-turn navigation

iOS has had turn-by-turn navigation available at least as long as Android - it just has it in the form of third-party applications such as TomTom. For, say, $39 you can install ~1GB of map data on the iPhone. You then not only have turn-by-turn but you can also navigate in areas where there's no cellphone signal.
Here are a few more decision points to factor in for pricing:

1. It's not about building "how hard was it to make" directly into the price. The cost to build is a fixed cost and the selling price is marginal.

2. Neither is it about building "how much value does it add"
directly into the price. An example: light bulbs provide more value than the price at which they sell.

3. What it is about, is asking how many units could I move directly if I sold it at this price versus this price versus this price. And then asking how many units could I move indirectly as a second-order consequence of having moved so many units at such and such a price. Another small example: Thomas Edison sold his light bulbs at a loss for several years in order to sell more units, scale production efficiency and ultimately recoup those years of losses in a single year of tremendous volume.

4. This hints at something people like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Sam Walton all discovered: it's better to charge less if you can sell more because there are more than first-order consequences involved. The idea applies to light bulbs, cars, retail. It sparked revolution in those industries and it will spark revolution in other industries which apply it. All industries are commodities, some industries have yet to recognize it.

Practically, price should be constantly decreasing.
"Your Silverlight plug-in has crashed."

gg
This is all true. But people might be more convinced by the bigger reason: developer productivity.

The module pattern boils down to trying to bring the ideas of privacy from Java into JavaScript. Java has good tools (IDEs) for interacting with, debugging, and testing objects with private data and methods. JavaScript does not.

Once you build your encapsulated module, you find yourself adding extra getters and setters to provide visibility to the code you're writing or testing. Then it turns out to be very convenient to use some of those in the API you export to other modules, and you may or may not remember to remove them before deploying, so you end up losing any supposed benefit of encapsulation.
I upvoted this article because it is really interesting, but unfortunately I disagree that nomography can be relevant today. It is forgotten so easily because its not worth the effort with the availability of computers. Computers aren't hard to use and to learn how to use. Try doing through the exhaustion of doing numerical calculations for a day with a slide rule and nomograms to see why.
Yes. I recommended it to a few people squarely in it's target market and not a single one could understand HH, and not one even wanted to use it. The same people then learned various languages through different means and had no problems. To me that is pretty damning.
The module pattern has its place and can be used alongside prototypes, as you know, but I absolutely agree.
Actually, I have used Delphi, wrote tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of lines of it early on in my programming days, many years ago.

Yes, Delphi, the language, which uses a static, strongly typed language, reference counting for memory management, and native ahead-of-time compilation can achieve good performance. That's a shocker. The problem is this isn't what it's intended for, and the standard kit is hardly optimized for it.
You can use a heap snapshot in Chrome Dev Tools. It has a handy feature where you take multiple snapshots and it shows you the differences in memory usage between them. See: http://code.google.com/chrome/devtools/docs/heap-profiling.h...
I, for one, am all for a "guy who designs the machine that makes tiles for bathrooms" day.

No seriously, manufacturing engineers need more recognition, and don't even belong on the same list as lawyers. More children need to know that "building machines" is a viable career choice. I wish I had known . . . [/rant]
Median Male Worker Makes Less Now Than 43 Years Ago
You are not being hyperbolic. The promise of strong encapsulation is very compelling, but this pattern is only appropriate for Modules (hence the name).

I suspect many JS developers head down this blind alley and get burned.
https://twitter.com/ossjobs what a jerk
How much time do you have ?
You can easily spend several years and get multiple PhDs in linear algebra, but if you only have half an hour to devote to this, I strongly suggest Leduc's Cliff Notes.
http://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-Cliffs-Quick-Review/dp/...

Amazing writing, very succint & hacker-friendly.
The hiring and interview process at Apple
Taking a look a Salix
Uncram launches quickie publishing for social network users
I highly recommend the MIT 18.06 open course on linear algebra - the lectures are first rate. I've been going through this as a refresher, in prep for the Stanford machine learning class.

Link to the course:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...

Link to the YouTube videos of the lectures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c&feature=resul...
Show HN: Groupcommute.com - Office Carpooling made Easy
This is my first attempt at a web app to service people that I don't know. This all start a couple years ago when I really wanted to organize carpools at my office but the software either was open to the public or cost lots of money to host for yourself.

After watching office hours with PG yesterday, I just thought, what is holding me back from telling people about this.. It is not as polished as I would like but it is an incremental job now.

Group Commute is a free service that allows office workers, those Mon-Fri nine-to-fivers, to easily create and organize carpools. The groups are invitation only, so you will be riding with people you know.

It works like this:

- Sign-up via the "Create Group" link below.
- Enter your details and the destination details (i.e. the office).
- We will send you a private link to invite your co-workers.
- Your co-workers can join the site too, and we will match people based on their routes to the office.

Please let me know what you think.
> At all points over that interval, I had sufficient income to maintain a wife and children to a standard of living commonly accepted among middle class folks where I live.

Except for one little detail: you didn't have a wife and children, and that more than anything made it possible for you to identify that half-hour here and hour there that allowed you to make your move.

Having a wife and children has a huge impact on the amount of time available just to get through the things that have to be done and it is very well possible that at the end of all that you're left with too little time rather than too much.
As a colorblind myself I couldn't agree more. But this is not limited to pie charts, any kind of graphics that uses more than 3 colors to identify labels in a list is completely illegible for me.
The fun trips into functional programming are Scheme and Haskell.
Well they do know that the unchangeable battery will be dead to useless in 3 years. At least they use incremental innovation in every rev to get you something new. Also, if they didn't use this strategy, they'd be more vulnerable to competition.
I fully expect this to be another Java decade, for the following reasons:

1. Android

Java now serves the full stack for mobile apps. The world's largest Internet company, the world's largest on-line retailer, and the world's largest computer manufacturer are all comitted to a Java-based front-end platform.

2. GWT.

Java now serves the full stack for web apps. In the GWT world, writing an application in JavaScript instead of Java is like writing it in Assembler instead of C. In many ways, GWT is still in its infancy, but it is already capable of feats like the Quake 2 port that seem inconceivable in hand-written JavaScript.

3. Google

Google has been a driving force behind the advance of JavaScript over the past few years, but its flagship products have put Java firmly at the centre of its universe. The costly Oracle lawsuit might make them reconsider their course, but would they really after paying $12 billion for Motorola just to protect Android?

4. The cloud

Utility computing will drive an ever-increasing abundance of on-line services that will make desktop applications fade away. While never popular on the desktop, Java is well-established on the back-end and has solutions for most of the practical problems that come up in the cloud. It will be the logical choice for many new cloud-based projects.

5. Platform-independence

As we move towards an ever-increasing heterogeneity of platforms, using a language that is slightly different on each of them is not the way to go. JavaScript has an extremely limited standard library, and no standardized library format, or even a standardized inclusion format. Without plug-and-play libraries, you are doomed to use whatever your platform provides.

6. JavaScript is unsuitable for multi-core.

Multi-core is now the standard, even on mobile devices, yet JavaScript remains inately single-threaded. A parallelized event system could be hacked on top of it, but that brings us back to 5. Java is arguably not well-suited for parallelism, but capable at least. You can ignore multi-core for a while, but only until someone really starts to make you look bad.

7. Abundance of Java tools, libraries, software, books, schools, programmers

This should perhaps be #1, but Java is simply what much of the world knows and uses and you get major leverage from that.

I do think there is a niche for JavaScript becoming a popular scripting language, in favour of Perl, PHP and Bash, which have become outdated due to their focus on local I/O, rather than web I/O. I also think scripting languages are about to become a whole lot more important with the advance of utility computing. Definitely, JavaScript will explode, but the decade will still belong to Java.
It looks like this uses a chat server on alagu.net (https://github.com/alagu/gmail-irc/blob/master/chrome_extens...) but presumably you could run your own server as it appears to be a fork of https://github.com/chrismatthieu/CHATS.iO.
Some of the files that WB removed were uploaded to Hotfile by the copyright owners:

"The software publisher that uploaded the file used Hotfile.com as a means for distribution of its open source software. Warner was not authorized by the software publisher to delete the file"
I wrote this - thanks. :)
I used Jim Hefferon's Linear Algebra to get back into the subject a few years ago. Great balance of rigorous and intuitive. Free book available here http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html/
Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
A lot of people here are arguing about whether Apple copied a particular implementation of a given feature. That is beside the point.

It goes more like this: Apple sees that Android has vastly superior notifications. Apple concludes, "We need better notifications". Apple implement a better notification system that shares certain features with Android's system, but in other ways is unique.

Yes, they respond to market pressure. Yes, they borrow ideas. They also innovate. I do not see any difference between Apple and Google in this regard.