skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I had noticed that before and fixed it before I read this thread. Thanks for pointing it out though!
Am I the only one who wasn't aware that Heroku announced support for PHP?
Get real about Push Notifications
Same reaction here.

Actually made me remove a filter I had to trash all chats. Saving, resources allowing, from here on out.
Although a less descriptive name allows you to adapt your service more easily. If amazon started as onlinebooks.com it would have made the migration to online everything + AWS + kindle + everything else more difficult.
With that title, I was expecting an evolution from the early days, when the homepage was just a manifesto. I really wanted to see that video, and this one left me underwhelmed.

The use of a huapango as the background music made me smile though.
It's been over a decade since they haven't paid mpeg fees, so apple shouldn't hold its breath.

(Do folks realize that ffmpeg has never paid such fees intentionally and as a matter of philosophy?)
They actually have a very impressive dedicated database service: https://postgres.heroku.com/

It supports scaling vertically by throwing in more cache, faster CPU, etc. Once you outgrow that, it supports horizontal scaling by replicating to read-only slaves.
It's a method with a signature like this:

promise.then(callback)

so:

var p = doSomethingAsync();
p.then(function () { alert("hello"); })
I'll jump in here, since you asked. Bad timing. About 2 hours ago we started getting these completely abstract errors 15 minutes before we were due to present to some VC folks:

2011-09-15T18:34:33+00:00 heroku[router]: Error H12 (Request timeout) -> GET [redacted]-staging.heroku.com/ dyno=web.1 queue= wait= service=30000ms status=503 bytes=0

I have absolutely no indication what part of our stack is having trouble. After much freaking out, we spun up an entirely new app and demoed with the seed data. This weird sort of stuff has been happening to us at an alarming rate over the last 3 months or so. Not being able to deploy, having to put in a ticket, and waiting 24 hours for a someone in support to fix it is another example.

Please don't take this the wrong way: I love you guys as people. I pushed for Heroku adoption at our shop. I absolutely love the concept of Heroku. Until a few months I felt like you guys were doing it way better than anyone else. (Left EngineYard to migrate everything to Heroku.) But these past few months have been really scary. There is a growing consensus at the office that we'll end up migrating away from Heroku to a platform where we can actually understand what's going on and be responsible for what's going on under the hood. After I began using Heroku, I never thought I'd want to go back to that again.

EDIT: Provided a more clear example that is less obviously suspect of a timeout.
This is bad, but not as bad as what I experienced with my hosting service---the employee I was chatting with straight up gave me my password.
I-5 into Seattle has networked variable Speed Limit signs that reduce the speed for people approaching traffic jams. Same idea as this article I think, but no need for transceivers in every car.
John Sculley on Steve Jobs and the Experience of a Lifetime
I would agree that the pain of displaying a version number to the user doesn't necessarily exist. Though, it is a good practice to have releases for your webapps, even if you have multiple releases per day. In this instance a revision number would accurately describe the "version".
This didn't test the decoy effect, it tested bad pricing on the low end and tested price sensitivity on the high end.

Conclusion: frugal users avoid bad prices, high end users are less price sensitive.

Would be interested to see an actual "decoy" test.
From what I can tell it's just a convention in their APIs for binding continuations. You do some WinRT asynchronous call and pass a func to the then method to run when it completes. Nothing more than a onFinished event.

No changes to async programming at all, events and continuations as always.
Working on Wall Street vs. raising millions for your Startup
Reminds me of:

http://jbf.posterous.com/bluyah-development-blog-5-things-i-...

From which comes one of my favorite lines about business ever:

"You will be forced to choose between work and family - and there’s only one right answer."
You could still run windows server on those though..?
This is a potentially serious competitor to groupon. Here is a link to pre-release discussions from about 7 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126093
Just my opinion, and you're right that it pretty much doesn't matter, but I don't like "Trello" because we already have "trulia" and "twilio". They just are too similar to me.
> it's only that 1 industry

What if she was working at Microsoft, for example? They have their hand in a number of industries. She couldn't become a game programmer even if all she worked on at Microsoft was the .Net framework because game publishers are in competition with Microsoft's 1st party Xbox titles, and she may have overheard a trade secret in the hall way one time.
IE Reality Check for Plug-ins on Windows 8
The Habitable Planets - 1964
The original at:

http://www.amazon.com/Habitable-Planets-Man-Stephen-Dole/dp/0833042270/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
I've thought that. But when I look at those things 5 years later, I realize that it all wasn't such a big deal, and I kind of cherish the ability to see how I thought back then (sometimes I'm more ashamed at how little has changed in 5 years as far as my thought-process and writing style goes).
The original at:

http://www.amazon.com/Habitable-Planets-Man-Stephen-Dole/dp/...
IMHO, Amazon's free collection that comes with a Prime membership is quite horrible. Or maybe you like different stuff than me.

And their interface on Roku is even worse

- ugly, long lists of movies with no way to search or skip through the list

- all seasons for a series (I think Doctor Who has some 20+ seasons there) are placed in the above list as individual shows (rather than being grouped together), and are not even in chronological order

Netflix's interface on Roku is a godsend in comparison.
It's likely everyone you interview knows nothing about it, so it isolates logic and reasoning skills from previous knowledge. The accuracy isn't important.
Actually the DVD is filled with adventures you can play.
That picture with Facebook photos in comparison to the other major sites is impressive, I didn't realize they had that much dominace.

In other news, please, we haven't (IMO) solved the photo sharing/storing software problem. Snapjoy is close, but until I can have public photos, face (people) based grouping, and tags/event organization, it's not there yet.
Http://www.laexposegospel.info/
http://www.laexposegospel.info/
Maybe, but I was talking about the fear of screwing up that the parent was talking about. Some people have no fear of screwing up, even when doing things that probably should make them at least cautious, because they have the view that someone else will fix it for them.
Are you on the shared hosting DB plan? Are you using more than 1 dyno?

We are running 4 dynos, 2 workers, and the Ronin DB plan and we haven't had any problems other than a 10 minute downtime due to a bad deploy by Heroku.
Dropbox hack: get download stats for public files
SignalGuru: Using Phones for Collaborative Traffic Signal Schedule Advisory
I can't find it on the site right and was surprised also.
the internet has upgraded from a series of tubes to a cluster of clouds.
They are only allowing Python and PHP for facebook apps right now. So no, you didn't miss it as it didn't happen.

Today's announcement probably means it will happen in the near future though.
TL;DC <---too late; don't care (you heard it here first folks)
Aye, as someone who didn't have many expectations (though I didn't expect Windows 8 to be a failure either, I'm not one to rage about changing the sacred desktop look), throughout the keynote and this video they managed to pleasantly surprise me many times.

The design aside (which is an entire topic on its own), some of the functionality decisions like contracts just make you wonder why the sodding hell didn't we have these sooner. I mean there's the half-baked drag and drop handler than no one actually bothers to implement even when it makes absolute sense to do so, and that's it. Being able to pull things out of a web service from the file picker, on the other hand, just makes me go "I want this yesterday."
This is the first wave, I am sure there will probably be more people next month who see their credit card statement and wonder why their bill is twice as much.
THE ELITE: These Guys Are Google's Very Best
Hmmm ... it seems as if neosmart has some insanely bad code. I hope neosmart fixes their scripts before IE 10 comes out.
I'm aware as we are running on heroku here, but it gets expensive quick and your options are more limited than if you roll your own. Then again, that goes for the whole platform.
Why not use Amazon EC2? Their free tier (for a year) is more than sufficient for hosting a blog. After the free period is over, you only end up paying about $20/mo for a micro instance with 10GB of EBS.

Does SoftLayer offer anything more substantial than AWS?
New Exoplanet Discovery Is Life Imitating Star Wars
I'm developing on a 4 man team trying out Jira+fisheye+crucible. I have no complaints so far and the crucible review process is pretty slick.
Break Google Search
Santa Cruz County Real Estate Agent
I get the feeling that Google has a new policy to NOT support IE9/8/7, like with their Chrome experiments ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812503 ).

Check the BrowserLab results: http://i.imgur.com/S6dQP.png

I would say that there are two options:

* They don't test their site in IE9 (nor 8/7/6) or they don't know/care.

* They are actively doing this..

And I cannot believe the first..
I think I was asking for too much when I wanted an app marketplace.
Strongly disagree. They may do that later, but it would be dumb to do it now. They let people post tweets to Google Buzz, and then Google Buzz was overrun by tweets, and nobody was interested in actually using Google Buzz anymore. They just used Twitter and automatically posted tweets to Google Buzz.

It would be a grave mistake on Google's part to do that so early in the product's life, when people are still figuring out how to use it best.
I don't see how it's any different to saying "Foobar.exe is not responding". It gives you some more info on what the cause of the problem is.
Did you try contacting support? Looking at that log line, I can tell you that it looks like your app took too long to respond to the request (service=30000ms) and our routing mesh timed it out (status=503, Error H12 (Request timeout).

If there's anything we can help with, definitely get in touch. Our support team is top notch.
Footnote 2 is incorrect, the civil war happened in the 19th century, not 18th :)
Sounds like you have a very solid skillset at such things as getting kicked out of school for excessive partying, and being a middle-man who produces no actual value yourself.

You may want to look into the burgeoning field of management consulting, or possibly sales.
This seems great. I know Facebook is switching (or has switched) to requiring 3rd party apps to use an SSL certificate. Since many of the Facebook apps I've been developing don't really require much (many times they're just informational pages, no user input) it seems like a waste to buy a full domain and SSL cert. Being able to just use Heroku's domain and piggyback SSL could be a big win there.
Does Tux Like to Move House?
Really?

http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-...
Love It! I'm seeing it in my stack, connected in the cloud where apps send their data to the DB via rabbitMQ, to make monitors...
Just eyeballing it we have about 40-50 apps using the shared DB. We don't have any dedicated DB stuff with Heroku, but we use varying dynos levels. (Most apps idle at 1, though.)
It is indeed interesting. Thanks for your report. I genuinely wish I'd had your experience.
Hey Helen - I've replied to your email - thanks.
Looks promising. I need to put together a dashboard, and this might be how I do it.

As an aside, it's always great to see more usage of PEG.js.
more detailed:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tatooine-pl...
Not just for the user - calling asynchronous tasks using the new C# or VB keywords is so mind-bogglingly easy that you'll just have no excuse not to do it when writing apps.

Even the use cases that are not covered by the two keywords, like fetching a whole bunch of stuff together or issuing a lot of requests and having the data trickle in as they are completed one by one are handled easily with the Task API, to the point where you have WhenAny and WhenAll methods and you just do "await Task.WhenAll(tasks)".
Well, it's a start. Kudos on using existing standards.
In the real world, you are far less likely to have to evolve something the size of the Linux kernel (1.2 was, IIRC, orders of magnitude smaller than Win95), but it's really easy to continue maintaining smaller codebases (I pointed out Zope version 2 as an example of software that was obsoleted by their original authors but that has been evolving in the hands of a community that felt it would be too much work to port their software to Zope v3).

It also helps that so much of the mission-critical software you run on Linux is also open-source and can be easily recompiled. And you only need to recompile when the software can't run directly: I have Python code running in production that was written originally for Python 1.5.2. Oddly enough, lots of mission-critical applications are written in Python, Perl, PHP and various flavors of shell that run directly on more or less any *nix machine.

The fact is that dead ends in free software are so rare and so easy to get out of, this situation only rarely arises.

When it does, you can always weight your options and, sometimes, opt to go with a fork. Like I said, it has happened in the past.
I believe it says that it is public-only data for now.
Believe it or not, I am actually developing exactly the same thing. I guess I'll use Cube then !
I've always thought Ebay could instantly increase its metrics across the board by implementing smarter login saving.

That, and letting auctions run until bidders have their final say.
I could (and indeed that was what we were originally planning when we decided to go with Mac Mini Servers), but I simply don't need to. I open the packaging, put Mono on it and it's ready for work. Why would I waste time with Windows Server if it's not needed?
Totally agree. I don't think too many Facebook app vendors are worrying about scaling.

If Facebook wants to get more developers to embrace their dying platform (when was the last time you heard about an exciting new FB app?), they'll need to silence the voices screaming from every corner of the Internet about their lame documentation and support.

Buy as usual, instead they do a song and dance announcing a new initiative and then completely forget about it, like their Stack Overflow support system which does not seem to have nearly enough participation from actual Facebook employees who can answer questions.
Looking for a Website for (sharing) Books and getting suggestions
Some days ago I read about a new website and as far as I can remember, it was from a polish developer. It's about books and sharing books, with a small social network part. You can enter the books you've read and get suggestions for new books.
I just cant remember the website's name and cant find it neither. Help please!
Languae plural rules
I use Trac for all those things with the following plugins:

* Time tracking: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TimingAndEstimationPlugin
* Planning/reporting: simple trac reports + wiki dashboard.
* Customer service, we have a separate trac instance with Intertrac set up between so you can link tickets.
* VCS integration: works with hg and svn fine

Also costs zero and upgrades flawlessly.
A Hodgepodge of Python
(I don't know if that's what they call it in C# 5.)

Tasks - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.threading.tas....
http://booklikes.com/
How to Make Your Small Business Succeed
One of the major pains when writing facebook apps is that their documentation is either incorrect, out of date or non-existant.

If you create a facebook app using heroku, it looks like you get something akin to a facebook-boilerplate app that is already deployed.

I would imagine the people at Heroku / Facebook spending some effort in keeping their boilerplate app / demo up to date with any api changes that may occur.
I use both Opera and rel=next on my websites and never noticed it prefetching anything (but I wish Opera supported at least rel=prefetch…).

There used to be proxies (Google Web Accelerator http://webaccelerator.google.com/support.html#basics2) that aggresively prefetched pages, but modern browsers don't prefetch unless you explicitly ask with rel=prefetch (or Chrome's own version of thereof).
Got something in my eye reading that...

My health isn't stellar right now. Makes me think about the conversations I'm having now with my woman. Off I go to say something sweet...
The Seven Habits of Highly Obsessive People
Optimizing for the wrong problem.
You're right. I work full time on Facebook Applications and there are several things hindering the FB Platform. First is the lack of moderation of apps. Secondly, the approved advertiser list has too many companies promoting mobile offers (which are spammy) (http://developers.facebook.com/adproviders/). As a consequence Application ads are seedy. Think 'You have 1 new message' type ads, or "Are you smarter than Obama" type ads. Thirdly, the whole Permissions/Authentication system needs to be improved. The Permissions wall in its current embodiment advertise the negatives of adding an Application.

Even if you disagree with the above, you should agree that an API that accounts for 10% of a site's traffic, like Facebook's, is a struggling ecosystem.
Src: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-news-feed-apps-2011-...
I think their own developer console is being rate limited by the API call limitations or something. I can get my own data out of their APIs after signing up for my own API key and using it. The API is really limited right now though... there's very little you can do with it.
It's different because this new message is factually incorrect. "neosmart.net is not responding" means something completely different that what is actually happening; if you open neosmart.net in a different browser, I'd bet everything would operate as normal. What's actually happening is that IE10 isn't stable enough to handle whatever the website is doing, and IE10 stops responding. But instead of admitting that, they blame the website.

Now, this might be happening in part because the website has some bad code, but in 2011 there's absolutely no way any website should be able to crash a browser. That's just crazy. Given that the browser is crashing, that's 100% of the fault of the browser and no blame at all should go to the site.

At the very least, IE should isolate the problem to the particular tab and not crash.
Why doesn't this work in IE 10 Platform Preview? I am just curious if it would run faster there.
I agree with you, the HTML 4.01 specification says that "next" refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents. A sequence of documents ordered chronologically would be a linear sequence, like the sequence of blog articles published on a certain blog. The individual articles could be regarded as "stand alone" documents and do not require the other articles in the sequence for some "completeness".

The Google article talks mainly about paginated content and mentions that it comes in different forms. The examples given in the article suggest that here we have a sequence of pages where we should or could have only one document, like in the example of the forum thread: it may consist of many pages, ordered in a linear fashion, but individual pages of the thread might be somehow incomplete. The whole thread is the document. I think that this interpretation is different from the interpretation of next/prev indicating a chronologically ordered sequence.

The article mentions also "The first page":

>>The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup.<<

"The first page" means that there is only one. Could we have more than one first page as entry point into the sequence? Like a story with different possible beginnings converging to a common end?
Tumblr is down, here is the cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Would you mind pointing out the parts of that post that lead you to believe otherwise?
Well, as we saw with iOS, inconsistent policies and favouritism don't necessarily kill a platform.

I think this is a big deal because the law of demand is a big deal. What the Facebook/Heroku partnership means is that if I'm some 19 year old with a cool idea, I don't need money or experience in hosting, I just have to write the code to do it. Calling that "modernising" is missing the point entirely.

To return to the iOS analogy, there were a lot of people who said "well, yeah, so Apple made an integrated platform for developing and selling software - but what does that get us that we didn't have before?" The answer to that question depends on whether you consider $1.7 billion in revenue novel or not.
Facebook Introduces “Subscribe” Button and Smart Lists
The repelling algorithm reminds me of one I accidentally came up with (this one uses a plant-like structure instead of particles though)

http://www.genesisbbs.com/appstem2.html
That image is wrong and misleading.

Facebook: 140000000000 photos

Flicker: 6000000000 photos

Instagram: 150000000 photos

LoC: Wikipedia says 12000000 which is around the "Facebook has 10000 times more" so let's use that.

-----

Let LoC be a square of 1 pixel side lengths.

Instagram is 12.5 times as much. So the area would be ~13 square pixels, that leads to side lengths of 3.5 pixels.

Flickr is 500 times the LoC -> 500 square pixels -> square with sides of 22 pixels

Facebook is 12000 the LoC times -> 12000 square pixels -> square with sides of 110 pixels

As image: http://i.imgur.com/gCjqV.png

Ouch.
While I doubt that the market for older and obscure DVD rentals is going anywhere, most of the titles you seek are likely available in your library system. Ordering them on (free) loan from nearby branches would take about as long as Netflix would to postal mail it.
You're right, the support team is very friendly and supportive. But my resolution times for recent issues have been 24-hour turnarounds, even when we were feeling some level of pain and labeled it "high". In this instance, which was definitely an "urgent", I just didn't have any confidence the issue would be resolved in time. Thankfully when we've had issues like this (mostly with development/staging environments) it's always easy enough to just spin up another app. But that doesn't make me very comfortable having my production stuff there.
WebGL software rendering in Javascript
wow, 17 years old? i feel like an amateur. great job on those examples.
Knowing that each API is slightly different there are two paths you could take. An MVC like approach where everything platform specific is sectioned off in the view and just have totally different views for each platform. The second is use the dependency inversion principle, and build a layer that abstracts the underlying api away then depend on your abstraction instead of the underlying API. Either way you end up writing 70%-80% of the code once, and 20%-30% of the code three times. Not great but it beats writing 100% of the code 3 times.

Is C# the right language to do that in, maybe, maybe not but it is an option.
Yeah, that doesn't fun at all. Just curious though, would these new API's [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows...] address your scenario?