skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the happy owner of a Nook Color, and it comes with Flash in its web browser. Guess what, I'd rather do without it: it makes the very snappy browser crawls, and it's used almost only to display ads. OK, it can render low-res videos but that's about it. Hardly a selling point to me -- actually Apple was right on this, Flash is a pain for mobile browsing, the quicker it dies the better.
Bang for buck: how a tech investor would view the Premier League table
Adobe Acquires PhoneGap
Congrats to Mr Veen et al, but ... Ugh. Typekit was a great service.

I have little faith that Adobe won't completely screw it up.
CSS4 Preview – Selectors
I thought everyone just assumed that the "Nigerian Prince" thing was a front and it was likely some Eastern European or American behind it all.

I thought the "Nigerian" bit was just to add to the allure or something.
"I'm emphatically not a fan of the Github guys (who seem rather unprofessional)"

How so? They're quite snappy with the support in my experience, and handled the firesheep situation much better than most companies.
I agree with you in most cases.

> Sure, you can do merge sort. Except that the list split step in Haskell is O(n) in time, while it is constant when using arrays. As well as merging lists, since you have to 'reattach' the second list as the tail of the first list.

It's no problem writing a merge-sort in Haskell that uses O(n log n) time. So who cares what the asymptotics of the individual elements of the algorithm are? (You may care about the actual speed of the whole thing and its parts, though.)
http://sublimetext.info/docs/en/
I've asked only 1-5 hours per week from this individual.

You asked for minimal effort; you're getting minimal effort. He probably is putting in at least that much effort, its just a really, really slow pace.

Dev has stated that once we get funding he'll be "more into the project"

Well, yeah. You only asked for 5 hrs a week, and hes working at a discount because you're friends. You're basically screaming you're not serious about this project and that you think it has no future. You haven't given him any reason to invest at all in this project. When funding comes in, it will show him that there is something serious worth getting involved in.

I feel the only way I can tell he is working is that the Github repo is updated.

Hes not communicating as much as you'd like? Then why don't you start initiating the communication? You don't have to hammer him about status reports, but bring him in the loop on your discussions, then you'll know what hes doing, and will help show him you're serious about your startup too. If you are doing that already, then start hammering him for status updates.

What would you do in my shoes?

Commit to bringing him on for more hours, or hire another programmer. Either in addition to him, or to replace him, but if you want your project to go anywhere you should be putting at least a 40hr week into your backend.
How to use chemistry to save Nobel Prize medals from the Nazis
Ah, so it's a "polite" bribe, heh.

Managed properties in the USA also almost always keep a security deposit and find something else to clean. So basically you are paying for their own property depreciation, they cannot lose.

When you have bad credit, it is common here to require first and last month's rent in addition to the security deposit. I thought maybe that was the equal of "key money" but now I understand.
And if my hunch is right, that's what they do right now.
Did the meaning of "no-brainer" change to "the action of someone without a brain" while I wasn't looking?
You didn't check for overflow.
This is great news and I hope it helps do all that others are saying, like improve pricing.

I've had a Bitbucket account for a while and never used it, mainly because I'm more comfortable with git. But after poking around Bitbucket and importing some repos I'm seeing that you really get what you pay for.

GitHub completely trounces Bitbucket with their ease of use and toolset. I hope Bitbucket can step it up.
Bringing Object-Oriented Design to a Rails Application
Show HN : MorningTabs.com, instantly access websites you access daily
Any long article makes me bored.
Wow- Adobe really are going on a buying streak these days.

I can see the reason for the TypeKit purchase, but never expected this one. I'm a little concerned, but Adobe have been good on their promise to push HTML5 so far, so I hope that this simply means that PhoneGap has a ton more resources at it's disposal, and not that it'll get forced down some Adobe-centric route.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Adobe isn't a Flash-only company, but they are invested in cross-platform when it comes to mobile devices. Will be interesting to see what happens.
It seems to me that the reason he went with Noah is because Noah suggested a double or triple of previous value of a metric. While he compared it to a 16% improvement in another.

What if he could reduce his cancellation rate from 3% to 1% and triple his Life Time Revenue? Wouldn't it be as important?

And what if he first reduced the cancellation rate from 3% to 1% and then increased the sign-up number threefold? Oh, but then he'd be almost 9 times as profitable because the same times-3 customers will stay longer.
In morning after waking up there is whole list of websites I have to check. I have built this tool to make it easy to do that.

http://www.morningtabs.com/

It lets you create list of websites to visit and creates a single page out of those websites.

Now I don't miss to visit important websites.

Please let me know what you think.

Would you use it to visit websites regularly?
i like it. I had a similar idea a while back where users can get a dump of their fb/linkedin/twitter details.

As an aside, i figured why not have the ability to download your social graph as well (as much as possible with public profile data)

I think the next step is an api. That way other developers can use your service as an import to their apps.

That is - of course - if that interests you.

Good stuff.
Yes we do, because companies set their priorities based on feedback. If we all kept silent they would (justly) assume that there isn't much demand for a solid CC provider for Europe, Canada, India, etc and act accordingly.
That's not my take on it. Their old PostgreSQL system was largely monolithic, they needed something that scaled well horizontally, so they went with MySQL. Makes perfect sense to me.

PostgreSQL has many, many strengths over MySQL, but historically replication wasn't one of them. Built-in replication didn't come to PostgreSQL until version 9, and until then various poorly scalable trigger based log shipping schemes (like Slony) were used. I wouldn't be surprised if PostgreSQL's built-in replication system with version >= 9 works quite well nowadays, but I think at the time Etsy were considering the switch there was still quite a lot of FUD around replication.
Columbus Day in Infographics, the American Discovery, Risk and Luck
I'm surprised not many people have talked about BDD. BDD lets you focus on the behavior of a method, class, or a set of methods/classes that interact with each other without worrying about the internal implementation details, unlike TDD where you test every method and may end up with tests for dead code. BDD lets you paraphrase what you're trying to do and tells you when you're done. Having said that, i have to agree that TDD/BDD is just a tool and no one should be forced to using it as the only method.

As far as the problem of mocking http requests is concerned, most frameworks like Rails/Spring come with http mocks. But a much better solution is to make your controller code as trivial as possible and move as much of your business logic to models. RESTful design helps you solve this problem. This is not just useful for web applications. Moving your logic from controllers to models is a good MVC principle too. It gives you the flexibility to use a different GUI toolkit for the same code.

As far as the problem of mocking database calls, it depends on whether you prefer your test suites to be real or fast. For simple database calls, I'd rather hit the database and end up with tests that assert behavior than tests which redundantly repeat what the code is trying to do using mocks. Mocking is still a useful technique for things you can't control like an External API.

TDD/BDD is useful for most of the model-centric work we do in Web based software. I'm not sure how useful it would be in areas like language design, framework design, mathematical modeling, algorithm design etc. QuickCheck or some other form of program verification will be a much better choice if your work involves designing/verifying complex algorithms. Djikstra's quote:"Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs" points out the problems with TDD. TDD ensures your system satisfies the specs and the addition of new features don't break existing behavior. But it does not protect your system from behaviors you did not anticipate when you wrote the code/tests in the first place. TDD/BDD will not make you a smarter programmer. Genius programmers like Rich Hickey don't need TDD. Hey, But we are mere mortals who work with other mere mortals in building non trivial systems. And TDD is just one of the ways to ensure fewer bugs in the system.
I was using unfuddle.com just to get a single private repository (didn't want to pay $10 a month for that on github). This is great news.
The code has been submitted to the Apache Incubator:

http://wiki.phonegap.com/w/page/46311152/apache-callback-pro...
I have some conflicted feelings.

On one hand, I'm happy for Typekit team, if everything turns out the way they hope. Possible integration with Photoshop / DreamWeaver could help bring better fonts to the web, help them grow, invite more type foundries, and so on.

On the other hand, Adobe quite often ruin things they acquire, and that would be just terrible, because Typekit was by far the best service for web fonts. Google fonts are quite crappy, FontDeck doesn't have the best foundries, and Fonts.com is expensive, and their fonts are less optimized for the web.

So here's to the bright future of Typekit, in which the service remains great and inexpensive.
You, and most of the other repliers up to this point, haven't fully thought through the implications I was making when I said there can be more than one group of "elite".

Elite embedded programmers who have been using C for 20 years will have other characteristics that set them apart from the non-elite, but are not themselves the reason for them being elite embedded programmers. And so on for other groups of elite programmers. Language geeks are just a particularly visible manifestation of the process, because it's so easy for so many people to get into, and has such concrete effects. (Perhaps less so than when you were using Python when everyone else was still using C and you could program circles around them as long as performance wasn't an issue (which it frequently isn't), but I can still confidently say there are projects around where using Erlang (for instance) can put you well ahead of anybody using a language with a worse concurrency story, no matter how skilled in that language they are. There's a time and a place for superior primitives.)
Are you a student? Because that is the only way that I know you can get a free private repo on Github.
All the Ways Apple Keeps Secrets (That We Know Of)
I'm with you. Nothing under Adobe's tent remains as perfectly simple as Typekit. That said, there appears to be hope that Typekit will be the exception: https://twitter.com/#!/jasonsantamaria/status/12090794772648...
How to Transform Your Gmail in Google Chrome
I get the same issues when I dim my screen manually. I read somewhere that certain people are affected by the power cycling used to "dim" the LEDs. Not sure if I believe it but nothing else has changed in my setup, and I never had any problems before. Otherwise, maybe I'm just getting old.
I couldn't get over the pricing. I'm not doing a yearly subscription based on pageviews to use some nice fonts on my site. Just me?
Maybe also check out an EAV model, not relational, per se, not nosql per se, but could help with analytic pivots.
All I can say is... What took you so long Ryan?
With that low a rate of engagement, depending upon the topic material I'd be concerned with the amount of time it will take even a very competent developer to refresh their memory and get back "into the zone" on this particular product.

Sometimes, it's easier to have more work, simply because you can stay focused on it long enough to get more done and/or to think about it more thoroughly/deeply.

It's just one item, but perhaps take a look at whether you could adjust your development cycle for this fellow to accomodate more useful, efficient sustained bursts.

(Again, I don't know what the specific work in question is. The pertinence of my comment is therefore unclear.)

P.S. Your use of the word "dick" indicates that you are already emotionally engaged in this topic. Beware. No one's Mister Spock, but if you're letting your emotions lead, you may be heading for a mess. Also, if I were the developer and saw your use of the word "dick", our relationship would be over.

In short, you seem to be dragging some of your own baggage and/or faults into this.
Show HN: BillingSavvy: Compare Pricing of Chargify, Recurly (Stripe Soon)
If we had to re-make the decision of what remote DVCS host to use, I'd certainly look strongly at bitbucket. We have only a small handful of developers, but many repositories (60+) all getting low traffic.

We've used both Github and Beanstalkapp.com and both charge based on total repos rather then disk space or developers which, frankly, drives me a bit insane. I think both have better features then bitbucket (as far as I am aware) and better UI's (subjective) but my 60 small repos run me $100/month at beanstalk - not sure what it would run @ github.

I can't find any disk usage limits @ BB's site, which makes me wonder if there are hidden caps. If BB ever struck me as being as slick as github, I'd move our business in a second, even if the cost was higher then it is now ($10 a month? Really?!).
Early indications that Amazon Fire outselling E-Ink Kindles 3 to 1
A lot of people/companies I know were using Assembla and Beanstalk.

I wonder how big a threat this is to them, rather than Github .
I notice that Bitbucket hasnt integrated Issues tracker with git. Bitbucket's bug tracking was IMHO much superior to github.

Plus Bitbucket doesnt format the README markdown as nicely as Github.

EDIT: I notice that I was mistaken. you need to enable bug tracking from the admin tab.
Discover Google+ Widget, the 1st widget that uses the G+ API
My thoughts exactly. Sad to see innovation die for no reason.
Ask HN: Should I offer to buy a domain name that is about to expire?
For a new project I'm working on I've been looking at a particular domain name that is set to expire next month. It isn't a very "special" name, but it fits with what I'm looking for. Based on that, I don't think the actual domain name is worth very much to others and it appears it has never been used by this individual.

I would assume that this person is just going to let the name expire, so my question is do I just let that happen and then grab it up after the waiting period or am I better off just offering a small fee to this person now and trying to get it transferred? I know it is hard sometimes to get an expiring name, but also afraid that once you contact someone a seemingly worthless name becomes valuable. Anyone else been in this same situation?
Real estate agents are not allowed to collect more than 1 month's rent as a fee. This means that the borrower's and landlord's agents will have to split the fee, each of them getting only half a month's rent. In many cases, some of the 'key money' will filter back to the agent as commission.
But "send s* into LEO" was always stupid. IAMNA-NasaHistorian, but wasn't the Shuttle was built because NASA and its contractors had a massive infrastructure that none wanted to shrink? "We have to stay in space" had political plausibility, and the absence of a compelling science agenda wasn't noticeable to the Congressmen who _wanted_ a compelling agenda to justify maintenance of infrastructure in their districts.

I think Stephenson's dead right about the effects of risk aversion, but I don't understand sentences like "In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past." The Lehman Crisis is only the latest evidence of Omniscient Collapse. The safety record of the Shuttle is another.

My current guess is that part of the problem is excess compartmentalization and excess complexity. These seem related to large-scale corporate organization. Believing that risk is a real if weird economic cost, I have to wonder if these enormous corporations really deliver their promised bargains of scale economy. It's certainly plausible to imagine their capital has to include a government backstop, and that maybe our institutions would be somewhat less enormous and stupid if we would just let their risks come to the fore.

But that would lead to more chaos that our corporate leaders and politicians would like. We've got a leadership class more interested in managing than accomplishing, and it's showing up in all sorts of places.
On the scale of things that will positively affect your startup, finding a cofounder is probably near the top. (Sounds like you know this already.) Out of curiosity how are you looking now? I know its hard but there might be more options to explore.

Particularly in the bay area; I've had great luck at Startup2startup, founder dating, and YC events (how I met my current awesome co-founder).
A teacher shares: The Secret to Living Well on $40,000 a Year
6 Reasons Amazon Will Acquire Netflix
This is pathetic...

"...can sell ice to an eskimo..."

But can't sell a programmer, and college friend, on the idea of not being a "dick" to them? Sounds like the two founders have zero skill but do have HUGE egos.

They're paying him $25/hour below market rate, he's got a house and family, they have yet to provide him with any equity in the company after he's worked 100 hours on the project, they refer to him as a "kinda founder" and they're getting a special discount because they're college chums.

Are you sure the programmer is the one being the dick?
This title seems misleading (and doesn't match the one currently on techcrunch). Adobe acquired Nitobi, the makers of PhoneGap. PhoneGap itself seems to have been "donated" to the Apache foundation.

EDIT: fixed stupid brain fart.
Git isn't what attracts most people to GitHub

I disagree (partly).

GitHub is indeed a sort of social-network for developers working on open-source projects, and this makes it really attractive. Their interface is also totally kick-ass and I love them.

But for my private projects GitHub is totally useless and also expensive, which is why I have been hosting my own Git repo on an instance that I own - it's pretty easy to setup too.

I am very excited that Bitbucket is offering Git as an option, as Mercurial for me is not really compelling; not that Git is necessarily better but it's what I know and have absolutely no reason to learn yet-another-tool-that-does-the-same-thing.
This makes the move to transfer PhoneGap itself to the Apache Foundation all the more reassuring.
This has probably been asked before, but is Bitbucket really unlimited?

If I encrypt my drive, convert it to ASCII, and upload it, will they host it?
Why don't they just create a key value style API for Oracle? If people are prepared to a lot pay for a database, maybe the same people will pay a lot for NoSQL.
You might be a bootstrapping startup if...
Perl has a special distinction that it not only helps you do all this things seamlessly but also makes a great scripting language for any task imaginable today. You get one platform for quick scripts plus application development of almost any kind.

Until someone else has to maintain your code. I've noticed that most folks who default to Perl tend to write Perl in a manner largely inconsistent with the next guy's. "Bending toward your paradigm" is not an inherent good if anyone else ever has to deal with your paradigm after you leave.

Consistency at 90% your-arbitrary-metric-of-quality is generally better than wild inconsistency at 100% your-arbitrary-metric-of-quality, at least when multiple people are around.
I agree with the parent...when I saw this headline, I immediately thought of this blog: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/.
Sometime soon, Oracle will develop or acquire a NoSQL product and this whitepaper will be buried. It will then be replaced by a new whitepaper to get you excited about how Oracle's new product will revolutionize price and performance for your web application.
I think their pricing becomes much more compelling at the portfolio level. $4/mo is completely reasonable for web designers building sites - as is their Performance pricing for more pageviews.

Though, I wouldn't be shocked to see Adobe jack those prices up. They've never been keen at competing on price.
> I'm emphatically not a fan of the Github guys (who seem rather unprofessional)

How so?
Fair enough; your analogy is better. But not for the reason you point out.

Because FAT32 naming conventions are radically different from Linux', and because it supports radically different directory restrictions, and because it has attributes that Linux doesn't understand, and because it doesn't support permissions, I have to always keep clearly in mind when I've mounted a FAT32 volume v. basically anything else. Yes, I can mount it, and it works just fine until it doesn't.

This is my experience with hg-git. Mercurial tags can be moved, Git tags can't be, so I need to keep that in mind. Mercurial signatures don't map to Git ones for obvious reasons or vice-versa, so I can't actually figure out whether a given release was signed by the project author. Mercurial branches lack Git analogs, so I have to remember not to use them. Mercurial bookmarks map to Git branches, so I have to be ready for bookmarks to move in odd ways as Git users work with my hg-git repository. Mercurial's multiple heads per branch have no real analog in Git (they'd be up for garbage collection). This list goes on.

When I use hg-git, I have to always keep the Git model in my head, AND keep the Mercurial model in my head, AND keep in mind how those two models interact. This isn't fun, and it's not anything remotely close to transparent. It's amazingly impressive how well hg-git works, but claiming that GitHub supports Mercurial due to hg-git is horribly misleading.
You can get dedicated machines that hold 16TB of ram in 18U. Also you can get 2x8GB of ECC ram for 150$ and with bulk orders it drops even more.
Font combinations for the novice designer.
It seems to me that pageviews is relatively transparent. How do you think it should have been priced?
This is a difficult problem in Europe and fair play if you can get it done. I have some friends who built the software behind Sentenial which does DD processing in Ireland & Europe. Their CEO & CTO was scared away from adding in CC processing into the mix because of all the complexity. Not that this should necessarily scare you, just go into this with your eyes wide open. If nothing else, this is a bureaucratic minefield.
give it a try and tell us, probably no one tried this one yet ;-)
Couldn't agree more. I think the two founders just have no clue. Good on them for sharing the details though, they probably have a genuine desire to understand why they are failing.
The Edupunks' Guide