skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is two distinct questions rolled up:

Why technically

Why politically

The technical issues are real and deep but they can, were, and continue to be tackled. The bigger issue is that successfully addressing and deploying robust encryption solutions is not a political priority (quite the opposite).

Keep well in mind that for many online in the 90s, the assumption was that eventually standards for email encryption, as one example, would become well deployed. The fact that email is today routinely not encrypted (disregard ssl connections for the moment, a whole different barrel of fish) is a demonstration that interested power structures (governments, US primarily) were successful in limiting uptake.

There are real challenges to successful distributed crypto, but the political forces in play had the effect of early work withering on the vine for the most part.
The cost increases significantly by doing it later on. Indexing when you have little data is easy. Indexing on a live site with millions of rows and lots of users can be much harder.
As a Linux end-user installing most of my software through apt-get, I think it is your opinion and there is nothing fair about it.

Apple didn't invent this model, they put stricter control, nicely marketed and then monetized on something that's been the primary model of software distribution in Unix for quite a few years now.

Regardless of how nice the app store is, the argument remains that the process doesn't need to be so dictatorial to be successful.

Most Linux distros have their own repositories of software they've reviewed and approved. They each have their own requirements for apps submitted to them, most of the software is free (as in beer and freedom), but I'm willing to bet that if they started pushing for an app marketplace, the element of fairness would not be lost in the process.

One thing that bemuses me about Apple and the trick for which I really raise my hat to them, is how they manage to screw people and still have them rationalize and even advocate for the scam.
Really, you are paying for the privilege to be listed in the App Store and to be distributed to customers.
For the new cedar stack, make sure you serve static assets from some sort of CDN, as each static file served ties up one of your dynos. With Rails 3.1, setting up cloudfront takes about 5 minutes and it's relatively cheap.
No CDN? Adding CloudFront is really simple and the costs are insignificant.
Unless you jailbreak, you can't even make your own app and have it run on your own phone without paying $99/year.

And as far as paying for the privilege of being including in the App Store, seems like the 30% cut Apple takes should more than cover that.
I can even use nick names I assigned to people in my contact list.

"Send a text to honeybunch" (my wife)

"Send a text to cruella Deville" (my boss)

Hah!
ooh, this looks really problematic on multiple levels (why wait for JS etc).

A simple solution, which I've used--and I think the OPs situation is similar--is to just have an additional A-record pointed to the ELB, this should work unless the OP is doing something really fancy. No need for route-53, even go-daddy will let you do this.

However, route-53 gives you much better TTL, so if you ever need to re-route..
I don't quite 'get it': So, "Could you expand on your answer a little, please".

You seem to be saying that the key is "traction", significant and growing rapidly.

Then it sounds like someone who was just featured on the TV show 'Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives" and has significant 'traction' growing rapidly would get a VC investment?

Or so could someone who opened a pizza shop in a hot, new shopping mall.

So, it sounds like nothing about the core technology, Buffett 'moat', potential business size, or business planning is relevant?

Then, suppose the business is a new Web site. Suppose the founder gets from his ISP a static IP address and 15 Mbps upload bandwidth. Suppose his largest Web page can be sent for less than 200,000 bits. Suppose he half fills his bandwidth 24 x 7 for

( 15 * 10**6 ) / ( 2 * 200,000 ) = 37.5

pages sent per second. Suppose he sends three ads per page and gets $1 per thousand ads displayed (CPM). Then his revenue would be greater than

1 * 3 * 37.5 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 291,600

dollars a month. Now just why would he accept equity funding?

Net, it sounds like, for an entrepreneur, when equity funding might help, his project is 'too early', and, by the time the funding is available, the VCs are too late.

So, it sounds like VC funding is for where (A) the business has suddenly encountered some problem and needs cash fast or (B) the founder wants to take some cash off the table and not for usual business formation.

Then back to the restaurant: All across the US, restaurants and Main Street businesses get built without VC funding, and commonly those businesses need much more in capital equipment, ovens, site renovation, trucks, etc. than a Web site filling 15 Mbps upload bandwidth. So, if those businesses don't need VC funding, why do new Web sites?
You should use gitolite, it's a breeze to set up.
The details here is that Siri seems to use some sort of authentication token when contacting the server that the iPhone 4 isn't sending, so it's rejected. We'll have to see if it's possible to work around that or share the token with a real 4S first.
Evaporation also becomes a lot cheaper when you get most of the energy from the waste heat of a power plant.
Being in poor physical shape probably had more to do it.

People drink litres of pop at a sitting too without much effect on them other than being obese.
I thought that was pretty cool up until I tried to hit the back button. It doesn't diminish the coolness, but it'd be a good thing to fix.

(Also Go Jackets!)
Looks like http://www.telescopictext.com/
The five minute shout. If you are stuck for five minutes, ask the room.

This is not an admission of failure. This is not an admission of incompetence. It's an admission that you're stuck. It's an admission that you are human. It's recognition that the project is more important than your ego. It's a chance to communicate with your team. It's a chance to laugh at your oversight. It's a chance to improve.

Just ask. No harm will come of it. And the chances are very high that you will become unstuck.
It gets annoying pretty quickly but the idea is nice.
Presumably why he credits it for the inspiration
Discovered your http://underthesite.com. I think it's a great & DRY way for those who want to tell users what technologies are used.
Weren't those there since 2.x? I remember using them.
I can't say what his intention was, just trying to rebut the feedback.
This is great, but after switching to CoffeeScript, I just can't imagine working directly with JS ever again. It's be awesome if you'd somehow integrate CS development into your system.
Runs beautifully on mine. How old is yours?
> You've never punched something into google maps while on the road?

Correct.
Facebook Tracker- Yahoo HackU project
http://whoWasHere.com

Made with YUI and Backbonejs front end, Node/redis back end.
Awesome interview. Great excerpt:

"When you get very very tired—and I had been up four nights all night long; Steve and I got mononucleosis—your head gets in this real creative state and it thinks of ideas that you'd normally just throw out. I came up with this idea of taking one little cheap (less than $1) part with 4 bits in it. If I spun it around at the right rate, the data that comes out of that chip looks like color TV. And I could put 16 different patterns and they all look like different colors, sort of. Would a digital signal that goes up and down actually work on a color TV the way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was established in the television world? Would it work?

Man, when I actually finally put together this little circuit and put some data into memory that should show up as color and it showed up color, it was just one of those eureka moments and you're just shaking inside. It was just unbelievable. Here we had it in just a couple of chips. I had color, and then I had graphics, and then I had hi-res, and then I had paddles and sound to put games into the machine. It had dynamic memory—it had the newest right type of dynamic memory that could expand almost forever. All sorts of slots with a little mini operating system that actually worked incredibly well. The Apple II was just one of those designs. Anybody could build things to add on to it, anybody could write programs, they could write sophisticated programs, they could write it in machine language, they could write it in my Basic. So that machine, there was just nothing stopping it."
In my experience, a lot of people do in fact enjoy going out to eat for the food, not merely the experience. You get a professional preparing excellent food, usually to a standard higher than you would easily manage at home (assuming you're going to good restaurants), and in a wider variety of cuisines than you can affordably stock up for, too.

Expansion on the previous point: I bounce around national cuisines quite a bit, because I'm a cook as a hobby, and whilst, say, a gumbo won't cost you mutch if you're regularly cooking Louisiana staples, cooking it ab initio from a cupboard that's normally cooking Italian-influenced meals will cost you a small fortune. A quick look at my Louisiana recipe book tells me I'd need to aquire cayenee, paprika, garlic salt, onion salt, white pepper, spiced sausage, Tabasco (specifically Tabasco) and a bunch of other stuff. Then you need to get in all the meat and veg, some of which may be difficult to aquire from local shops or require specialist outlets, which adds in travelling time and cost, and which you'll probably be paying for higher quality for - at least if you're serious about cooking and food - than you might for a common-or-garden meal. That makes your one gumbo cost almost as much as it would at a restaurant.
A more efficient and search-engine friendly approach is to perform a 301 redirect. For a single site, in Apache this would look like

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Make sure that http cacheability is good (send proper http headers, e-tag and expires; serve assets from cookie-less sub-domain). But if the page renders in 1.5 secs, I would try to address that also. That's highly specific to the application and its technical platform, so I couldn't really say how to approach that - But break out a profiler and go for the big chunks for a start.
Deploy a django app to heroku with s3 for static files
I seem to remember from an interview on the rc podcast that 4k would not be enough for them.
I'd be more surprised if she was using MySpace or Friendster.
If you haven’t done so already, I wonder if specifying "my wife is [so and so]," as you can for any relationship, would help Siri understand your query?
This isn't a universally effective optimization. It's an exquisite optimization for when a little imprecision is tolerable. Micro-optimizations like this are rarely worth the increase in cognitive complexity of the code, but Quake had to do a lot of math in very little time on 1996 hardware, so I'll trust Carmack (whose programming skills are legendary if you aren't familiar with him).
The specific year is not an important feature of this story: whether it is five years lost or six years lost is irrelevant. I mean, the story isn't even really about me: it was about the entire ecosystem, as I personally am one of those people who believe "ideas have their time", and therefore that, in that year, a ton of smaller companies were looking at how to approach this specific problem.

That said, I was specific to note a gap between 2005 (when my friends at Okori, Brian Fox in specific: notable as he was the first employee of the FSF, developing bash, readline, gdbserver, and texinfo), and "the time we got organized enough to actually do it" (when Okori actually existed as a company that could allocate resources to building something like that); I therefore feel it is even more unreasonable to be bothering about something I don't remember a specific date of anyway (it isn't like I marked it in my calendar).
Oops, I think I didn't express myself very clearly. When I was sending 20 requests a sec in a load test, the average response time for all the requests was 9 seconds. In a normal case, the page was loading in a fraction of that.

Also, we didn't lack all indexes, just a couple of important ones. We've been iterating quickly on the site and we weren't analyzing the performance as our queries were refactored.
Being stuck due to shitty docs is the worst. Particularly when docs are wrong, leave our crucial info, or the examples don't work (!).

Developers, please take pride in great documentation, and if you get stuck due to someone else's shitty docs, tell them at least, at best: fix the docs yourself. You can often write great (passionate) docs if you just had hands-on experience with the pain-points.

Also, make sure your examples work (examples+tests are often the best docs)
Cool.

But, a minor correction: Frank Ramsey merely proved (in 1930) a theorem equivalent to the statement that Ramsey numbers are well-defined. The study of the values of particular Ramsey numbers seems to have been started in 1955 by Robert Greenwood and Andrew Gleason, and I believe they are the first ones to note that R(3,3)=6.

Disclaimer: Combinatorics is my field. History of mathematics is not. And corrections are welcome.
Congress Targets Amazon's Silk Browser
Blackmail. I have pics of pg and Steve Ballmer sharing an ice cream cone, and I'll make them public unless I get the proper upvotes.

I actually don't know what happened here either. I was at a kid's birthday party, and I look on Twitter to see one of my cofounders had submitted this and that it was shooting up the front page.
The Standford course ain't updated for new iOS 5 features, more over they have not put the fall'11 class on iTunes for public :(
I'm torn- it'd be fairly easy to use pushState to add history, but it'd also be very annoying for the site to add 100s of history pages to your browser. Thoughts?
Costs don't scale with hits per day, they scale with peak simultaneous load. Assuming that your content site is not getting most of its traffic from being on the front page of Reddit on a daily basis, peak simultaneous load corresponding to 100, 1k, 5k, 10k, and 100k hits a day is so low as to be laughable in 2011. There should be no difference in hosting costs.

You could theoretically end up paying more going from 1k to 100k if you have per-event-priced analytics, but that is also going to get swamped by your programmers' coffee budget, so who cares.
Thanks for pointing this out. We JUST pushed a change this week where we removed a huge banner saying "We help families find and manage blahblahblah" and replaced it with a few other things. Maybe we need to revert that!
> There was a gas station with leaking tanks about 50 feet from the edge.

Why not fix the problem at its source (as well)?
Ask HN: Free online resources to learn iOS(5)?
Videos, Screencasts and Slides serve the best for me to pick up quickly besides plain old e-books.
Basic stuff is valuable to people who need to learn the basics. Not everyone on HN is an experienced programmer, much less an experienced web programmer.
I once was stuck for seven months. I never quite understood why my employer was OK with that. The solution however was just as you described. I needed to get away from the computer. In that case, I had to get some science/math straight. Once that was sorted, I steamrolled that roadblock in one evening. True story.
It's an approximation, and thus does not comply with the IEEE floating-point standard. That is, numerical results of the operations should be correct up to the precision of the floating-point number. There's lots of optimizations possible with floating-point math if speed/energy-efficiency is prioritized over accuracy or standard compliance.
https://github.com/jwagner/Neonflames
int int doesn't always fit in an int.*

And yet every programming language that I can think of returns an int when you multiply two ints, and we get along (mostly) just fine. Did you have a better option in mind for that bit of code?
It's replacement for the github paid plans that come with private collaborators and private repos.
Deeper link: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/copyright-czar-cozi...
The worms are the easiest to see. Upping the spawn helps as well.
> Is my understanding of Apple's policy flawed?

Yeah. They're encouraging devs to minimize the amount of data that needs to be backed up, for obvious reasons, but there's nothing forbidding Marco from storing the articles in the Documents folder instead of the cache, and indeed that's probably what he should have been doing all along.

His insistence on keeping them in tmp has caused me to lose a number of articles over the years when I've had to do a clean wipe and the original site has long since disappeared.
Impossible to say without looking at the profiled request. One thing I can say it's I would look at any page-level / HTTP caching until page generation is at least under 300ms for the most common requests.
I'm actually surprised it even works. I would think most communication like this would happen by means that cannot be subpoenaed or FOIA'd.
In Sweden the RIAA/MPAA has been deeply involved in dictating copyright legislation and using the police as their private enforcement agency for years. Not even a secret.
Wouldn't load on my MacBook Pro under in Chrome.
I actually make quite a lot of money compared to the average US income, more than $100K/year. I do save an invest (max out IRA for me and my wife), and I do spend a lot, though I'm frugal compared to most of my friends. $100K in savings is not something amazing from my point of view.

I did however a realistic calculation of what will happen if I need, let's say, a week in an ICU and a month of hospitalization (you go skiing, you fall and hit a tree, you break your spine). I will be bankrupt. Even with my expensive insurance plan hospitalization can easily cost $10K/day, and most of the drugs you will be on, are only covered 80%. That's if you don't need some exotic drugs at $5K/shot.

I realize it's a gamble, but the stats do say that 50% of bankruptcies are due to medical expenses, and 68% of them had health insurance.

Sources:

http://www.pnhp.org/bankruptcy/state_by_state.pdf

http://www.pnhp.org/bankruptcy/Bankruptcy%20Fact%20Sheet%20-...
It's tragically ironic that the very thing Microsoft would have been very happy to do -- lock down windows and control all apps on it -- is what is taken for normality everywhere else but windows.

I'm not trying to defend Microsoft. It's all too clear they have been very anti-competitive. But if windows had the controls on it that apps on iOS had we'd be hearing folks call for criminal prosecutions.

I understand the gee whiz factor of Apple. I own a bunch of Apple stuff and I love their design. I also understand that if you don't control your garden, all kinds of weeds grow in there. But geesh, folks, Jeff is correct. Perhaps this is the best future we could hope for, but it is an extremely sub-optimal destination compared to where we thought we were going.
Feels like a audio version of Dribbble[1] — a SNS allowing for sharing small snippets of design you're working on. It's gained massive traction in the design community.

[1] http://dribbble.com/
Neonflames? I get what appear to be more like galaxy clusters. But still very cool. I like the way they seem to grow organically after you click rather than instantly draw.
> "In theory, the government should be representing the people, but the cozy nature of the relationship suggests it was exactly the opposite. The government was representing industry against the public interest."

Aren't artists and content creators "the people", too? Just because the RIAA represents the "industry" to so many people doesn't mean that they're not, if even as a bi-product, fighting for the rights of artists.
Nothing on Chrome 14 or Firefox 7 on Windows 7 for me.
This is about politic lobbying by interest groups that hits closely to a hacker's interests so I say this is relevant. An alternative explanation would be that it is "internet politics" and by that relevant to people who use the internet and even more important, rely on the internet.

But your comment might even be downvoted just because it does not contain anything contributing to this thread but just spreads negativity.
Overtime, Solidarity and Complaints in Wall St. Protests
I didn't downvote you. However, from the guidelines (which I'm sure you don't need a link to):

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
In fact, they're not.
Another problem is the output flow is more saline, which affects sea life.
Geo-located email
Hm, if there is a backslash it hasn’t started yet. I have seen nothing but an outpouring of love for Siri around the web.

I don’t even think the examples in the ads are very carefully crafted. They are all pretty simple, stuff that nearly always works and where there is not much potential for confusion. Creating reminders, calendar entries, checking the weather or writing text messages is something Siri seems to get right nearly all of the time.

Only when people start to push beyond that will they see the limits and because of all of the fun you can have with Siri I don’t think it matters much.
It's great that she donated her body to science instead of letting it go to waste rotting in the ground.

It's also great that they didn't try to patent her genetics and that they're being shared with other researchers. This is how it's supposed to be done.
Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid) has an interesting rant on social video games:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU

The gist being that games like Farmville are A/B tested to maximize addictiveness and profit, rather than maximizing fun.
You can say "April is my Wife" and hopefully that will record the relationship. If that doesn't work, go to your contacts and edit your own contact info and add her as your spouse. Then you can say "call my wife" & that should work.
There's a Canadian startup making a device that gets (part of) its energy from the difference of ion concentrations in salt/desalinated water.
http://saltworkstech.com/
There's a large desal plant in Florida too, it supplies part of the water that I drink. You're right in that it's energy intensive, but at least in our part of the world the largest problem was water quality. There's a lot of biomass floating around in sea water and it means having to constantly repair the filters. I believe there was a big issue with an invasive species of mussels as well that do quite a bit of damage.

http://www.tampabaywater.org/facilities/desalination_plant/i...
IOS development tips
Considering the fact that the very reason that the RIAA exists is because of the government (collusion/anti-trust laws prevent labels from working together directly on things like pricing) and as a lobby organization, this doesn't seem that revelatory.

The whole point of trade associations (MPAA, RIAA, IFPI, ESA, CRIA, AJA, BSA, etc) is to avoid collusion while protecting the interest of associated members.

I had a lot of things I had to be aware of when working with other labels. All these tests, etc. SOX compliance also added another wrinkle.

In the case of those mentioned, usually these members are associated with intellectual property and representing copywrited works.
And you are aware that if windows phones ever pick up, the os and office patents aren't enough for ms to defend their ecosystem. Right?