skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
blocking / non-blocking has nothing to do with language; for e.g., see tornado for async request handling in python.
Check your math. You're talking about recording the keystrokes and URLs people visit on smartphones. That adds up to such a phenomenally-small fraction of the data they actually download, storage for all 141+ million users could probably be accomplished by your average geek with a checkbook.

For scale, lets assume that each user sends, oh, 100 megabytes of data over a year. Roughly equivalent to 100 million characters, or (going with a 5mb ascii version of the bible I just googled) 20 bibles worth of text, or 1 million URLs at 100 characters long (that's roughly one URL every 30 seconds), so this is likely an overestimate, possibly substantially. And they have all 141 million users for the full year. Punch in the numbers, and you get 141 terabytes of data. Without compression.

That's microscopic. I can buy hard drives for that off the shelf for not too much money. Here, Backblaze sells that much for $7.4k in a single box, which is absolute pennies to a company with 141 million customers: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

Meanwhile, Amazon has pricing tiers going into the petabytes for S3, and very likely receives far more than our theoretical 141TB in a single day. And they're not the size of the moon.
This is not very interesting without any ability to add a filter.
Motor Savaşı
Depends on what are you working on and what's the goal. I'm frequently on call for maintenance of a distributed system. During review I often return code that is not nice enough. Where "nice" means "will I understand this at 3am, seconds after I get woken up". I couldn't care less if it takes twice as long to execute. (please don't confuse it with not caring about complexity though - I do care if it's N^2 and doesn't need to be)

This doesn't mean it's not fun to wrap some long function into a reduce of a list comprehension. That goes into my fun projects, not stuff that's supposed to run 24/7 and worked on by others.
This seems like a wonderfully pointless gimmick.

Plus, last I checked, Spotify is en route to implosion with so many people realizing it's hurting more than piracy is.

A very profitable collapse, by the looks of how much they pay out ;)
Credit Card Debt Reduction - Relief From Debt
terrible title.
What percentage of all the SMS messages send by Sprint Android phones in a day do you think 10 gigabytes is? Start here: the US generates about 2 trillion SMS messages in a year across all phones.

There are multiple YC startups that could write the (bad) marketing sentence "we receive raw data (known as metrics) from X and convert them into reliable, repeatable Measures which feed into analytic applications". Personally, I'm inclined to think that when someone writes "we receive raw metrics", they mean "they receive raw metrics". You seem to premise your entire comment on the idea that "raw metrics" means "tremendous opportunities for abuse, damage to national security, corporate espionage".

Those two points --- 10 gigabytes, and "raw metrics" --- seem literally to be the entire basis of your (currently top ranked) comment.

I wish I could be more strident in disagreeing with you (because your tone makes me want to be), but I have to admit that I have no clue what this company is taking off Sprint phones. I'm inclined to believe that nobody could be dumb enough to take the contents of SMS messages from phones --- Sprint doesn't want that data --- but who knows?

I wrote a similarly negative comment yesterday when this story hit HN the first time. Then I read downthread and found John Graham-Cumming thoughtfully picking apart the story. I read his comment, re-read mine, and deleted mine. 'jgc's comments on this story are interesting; ours are less so; his is buried under yours now. Perhaps you could follow my lead.
Well said. Now admittedly the people I know tend to be on the "computer oriented" side, so there is a sampling bias, but I have yet to meet anyone that chose to have a tablet instead of a PC.

I know a lot of people that have a tablet in addition to their PC, but that hardly makes the PC dead for them.

When tablets become much more powerful and able to integrate seemlessly with things like additional large monitors, keyboards, and mouses (or whatever eventually really replaces keyboards and mouses) then the PC will likely become a niche product, but then tablets will also have become hard to distinguish from a PC with an added ability to undock one monitor to take it with you.
2011 Panja Movie Cast, Crew & First Look Poster|Tamil Movie
What is considered the canonical graphics book these days?
Back in my time it was Foley and Van Dam.
This has just reaffirmed my fear of east-coasters.
Thanks; fixed. Was more of a 'whether JS will ever reach native-level performance' comment.
Your information is out of date. http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2009-09-06-java-vs-c-p...
Thank you, this was a nice podcast series. Added to my recommendations. :)
Ask HN: Will developers ditch iOS and Android to make apps for Spotify?
trying: https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/pull/6
Bogs Boots Sale
There is a video camera in your bathroom secretly recording you. If the perpetrator never stops by to pick up the tape, is a crime committed?
Web Search By The People, For The People: YaCy 1.0
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

That's where it comes from, and "have little trust in the future" alludes to death even if it doesn't state it.

"Memento mori" is actually used generally to refer to art, while "carpe diem" is solely an idea - and I much prefer the latter for, while it has the same meaning, it is from the positive point of view, not the negative.

Personally I can't think of "carpe diem" (a favourite phrase of mine, incidentally) without hearing Robin Williams speech that is shown at the end of this article.

- We are food for worms, lads

- Believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is going to stop breathing, turn cold and die.

- Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they are capable?

- These boys are now fertilising daffodils.

(If you haven't seen Dead Poets Society.. you should. Wonderful film.)
...if it's 90GB (the upper limit before the recruiter would have been shouting about terabytes)...

A terabyte is 1000GB. Why would they be shouting about terabytes if it were anything over .09 terabytes?
Oh, I didn't mean that as a criticism. I understand why they're vague and all that — I'm just surprised you were able to get this kind of information and curious how you went about it, and thought it might be worth integrating into the front-end if it was anything fancy.
I had the idea to do this (albeit, manually) a while ago, syncing the audio from Justice's "A Cross The Universe" with Youtube video of the concert it came from.
Really cool to see it done, though!
"Have you been to a corn / soy bean farm? Visit one and ask the farmer if he enjoys his job, and how much he makes (many are in the red)."

Have you done this yourself, or are you just trying to score rhetorical points?

I have: my parents are corn/soy/livestock farmers on a small farm they own in the Midwest. Their friends and neighbors are all small operations as well. It's not a job you make much money at, it's true--imagine if all of your income depended on good weather and timing the commodities markets right! They stick with it because it's a job with independence and pride in producing something the world needs. Heritage and tradition, too: many have ancestors who have been farming in the area for a century or more.

It's easy to vilify something if you don't understand it.
The Long Lonely Leap
BizSpark is a program that gives free Microsoft software to startups and small businesses for three years. From my understanding, it has nothing to do with cloud platforms.
I'm the author– feedback and suggestions welcome!
Love the shoutout to Aaron Rodgers! lol

But seriously, as a former Cal-I vet myself, I know exactly what he's talking about. And I can relate to how it feels like that in the world of start-ups.

In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the book "FLOW". We should all go read it.

Good stuff!
none of that has anything to do with writing web-request-handling code, it has to do with writing custom servers.

There are plenty of asynchronous solutions for writing servers, including the very widely used Twisted platform as well as the Erlang programming language. It's a tad annoying that node.js is touted largely by front end developers as solving a supposedly previously unaddressed problem.

to wit:

> emerging set of programming conventions, philosophies, and values that I see evolving in the node.js community

no, sorry, they've already emerged, they've already evolved. Go download Twisted. Use node.js if you happen to like it better. But it's not the fricking messiah.
The power continuum isn't the same as the conceptual simplicity continuum. C++, for example, is less powerful than Common Lisp while being more complex as well.

At the same time, is Haskell more powerful? Common Lisp, relative to C++, buys me the ability to run arbitrary functions at compile-time and generate code. Haskell takes away that power, and as far as I can tell doesn't add anything to replace it. Indeed, it lets your code do strictly less thanks to the type system.
Sure, there are entrepreneurs leaving. But there are still lots of people moving to the States to become entrepreneurs. YC is one of many factors. What's the ratio of coming to going? I suspect that it's still quite a bit higher than 1.0...
A Historical Artifact of Opensource
But simple zip on raw text is what? 3 or 4 to 1?
Particularly when you're talking about urls. So now you're talking about at least a couple kbytes of raw data.

So logging all of everyone's texts is probably still out.

But easily logging their browsing patterns. Probably app installation and use. And certainly they retain the capability to log texts containing keywords without going too far outside that aggregate range of data. Or doing targeted logging of all of selected individuals usage.
Good points. BTW how do I check if the b vitamin supplement I have (which I take occasionally b/c I don't eat much meat) is methyl or non-methyl?

I only made the remark about the journalistic quality b/c lately I've noticed that that exact structure (anecdote -> fact dropping -> implied conclusion) is very commonly used by the Times in all different sections of the paper, and clearly from the success of the paper many people are unaware that they are reading a persuasive piece.
Hell yes. TQuality has been lacking as of late. Maybe it's just that newbie illusion PG has talked about or maybe it's real. I feel it's real but hope its an illusion.
It's not as bad as you'd think.

These best practices are just the foundation, not necessary the long-term solutions. Once you have a set of standard, there's always room for improvement or changes.

The biggest problem with N.A. workers is that they can be categorized into 3 types when it comes to "Do Things":

- Do as they pleased (cause they think they know it all)

- Follow the best practice

- Follow the latest and greatest best practice and create some sort of work revolution in the middle of directing the ship toward the goal

You kind of need a "Yes-Man" if you're on early stage of startup inventing your own dream (I'm sure this is going to open a can of worm but hey... it's your startup).

I'm not discussing whether this is the best way or the worst way. I'm focusing on the "why" people chose culture that prefer "Yes-Man". It could be a way for them to exploit human psychology for all I know.

That's the thing. You need to be there to see how things are happening/working. It's totally different in there (Asia) than in here (US).

Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmare advises won't work in Asia while it may work in US or UK.
Found my friend that died in 2002, though it only reported his death and not his fiancee's as well.

What a sad nitpick! :(
Efficient JavaScript
Spotify Launches Apps as Part of Its New Platform
Download Music
Perhaps nothing new here but a good read if you haven't made it through some of the JS performance canon (High Performance JavaScript et alia) or want a refresher
The usual suspects are almost certainly going to file a class-action lawsuit or two over this, but it won't be 'massive' since this isn't a clear and easy win. (The hardest part about this type of suit is showing real, concrete harm to actual people - and not just hypothetical potential harm. So Carrier IQ knows you play Angry Birds - so what? How'd that demonstrably hurt you?)

No, instead the lawyers responsible for offering the class action will be willing to settle for a) a rather nice profit for them, b) a pittance for the handful of individuals they round up to be plaintiffs, and c) some symbolic genuflecting in the direction of privacy, maybe in the form of a charitable donation to a non-profit.

The sum total cost of a) through c) will be carefully calculated - high, but not too high, or Carrier IQ (and their clients, who will also get sued) will decide to fight back and possibly win. Certainly nothing infomerical-worthy - that's reserved for cases where winning is pretty much guaranteed.
Implosion? How did you check that?

And how is it hurting?
Ultimate Landing page idea
You can join their HTML5 player trial here: http://www.youtube.com/html5
Maybe the fiancee's icon is placed under their icon?
No doubt, but if you have Steve Blank as a mentor telling you that you have a good product it might be a significant clue.
IPhone 4S: Case Mate’s Barely There Case is Sleek
Grab As Many Benefits As You Can From Custom Labels
Ahh, but then you're still excluding any culture not using the Gregorian calendar... ;)
I too was disappointed by that oversight.
no problem, didn't assume it was criticism :)

I'm planing to start tagging each tweet with keywords, which in itself may help sift some spam out. But as you pointed out a number of them are very vague which is why I've held of allowing people to filter results for fear of them missing some which may be relevant to them. I'll probably just suggest a wider result set or search for them as appropriate.
At 160 bytes per text and 2T texts per year, there are 800 gigabytes of texts per day. Thus Carrier IQ is monitoring the equivalent of 1% of all texts across all phones. That is still quite significant.
somebody decides STM not so bad tho he's not ready to concede Rich Hickey's points

http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2010-06-04-or-how-i-go...
I think a per-person version of this chart would be interesting as well, dividing the map into regions, counting the number of accidents, and dividing it by the number of people in the region. Placement of accidents is less interesting than chance you will have an accident if you live there IMO. Still cool though :)
More so east-coast roads. It seems to me like the west coast has more traffic-calming devices (though my experience there is limited to two weeks of bicycling in Seattle and Portland). Our idea of "traffic calming" on the east coast is to add strobe lights to traffic signals.
Path, Timeline & Worship of The Self
Link to the apps page on spotify site http://www.spotify.com/apps/

[edit] - seems you can now get the preview of apps on http://www.spotify.com/uk/download/previews/
The fact that it has hooks to even know of the keystrokes is the real issue here. Even without recording or logging them afterwards, the fact that it has the ability means its a possible attack vector for things like worms/etc...

Even if they never do anything with keystroke data, just the fact that they can is the dangerous part. What is to prevent some switch to start sending the keystrokes in the future? I'll be blunt, this companies implementation of its business model strikes me as being borderline wiretapping.
Other ways to move the web forward: stop supporting Internet Explorer altogether.

Agreed, thank you! I'm pretty close to launching a web app I've been developing over the past 6 months or so; I've decided not to support any version of IE.

I made that decision in part b/c of the feature set it needs to support, but also due to principle - I don't believe Microsoft has ever been as passionate about the web as it's competitors. The browser apathy represented in IE 6 - 8 supplements that, and we still see the same in recent versions. For example, IE 9 lacking support for local databases, ES5 strict, remaining on long-term release cycles, etc. So if we want better, we have to vote for it, by choosing to drop support for the lesser browsers that exist in the ecosystem.
There are definitely angry nerds out there but they are in a position of arguing against a better user experience for the vast majority of people who don't want to have malware, a broken OS, their personal data stolen, etc. They should be trying to find less restrictive solutions that provide the same benefits. Otherwise the companies that are moving forward with making a better end user experience are going to win in the long run.
You probably said this in jest, but if you look at a map of US population density, it is nearly identical.
PCs are trucks for getting serious work done.
Insert the Prosperity Plugin
Seriously - Silverlight?

This is a dead product!

Flash is only dead on Mobile - Silverlight is just dead.

I can't believe that anyone saw this as a strategic decision.
The asynchronous aspects were a very small piece of the article for a reason. Node is doing a lot of very interesting, important, and novel things that aren't related to asynchronous events at all. Twisted in particular suffers from too much exposed surface area and having to manage the reactor yourself, which hurts reusability a lot.
Internet Era IPOs: Go or No-Go?
Cross-platform Developer Tools 2012 survey. Which side are you on?
72,000 Employee Company with Offices in 42 Countries is Banning Email
Your forgetting about the web. Apple does not veto websites just things in their little walled garden.
Federal Judge Orders Google, Facebook to Disappear Hundreds of Sites
Inside Energy - Zero Energy Homes - Lazy Pro Blogger
There is no sense of humour on HN.
Mobile Confirm-Button Inspired jQuery-UI Plugin
I dunno, east-coasters seem to have more road rage too. When you get to New York, people are completely and utterly pissed at eachother. Every time I go to Chicago, I notice that drivers all seem to have this underlying urge to kill all pedestrians which we don't get in California.
Nobody had computed the percentage:

Using 2e12 SMS messages/year, 160 characters/message, and 1 byte/character:

(2e12 * 160) / (365 * (2^30)) = 816.501983 GiB/day

So 10GiB/day is about 1.2% of daily SMS traffic.

EDIT: Too slow.
Lack of exposures mostly.

Also Canadians tend to be less ruthless (I'm not going to debate the right or wrong on this but seeing that the biggest and most successful companies are driven by ruthless people...)

Canada also has a small (but growing) market. There aren't too many big cities and big spenders.

Vancouver, while it's beautiful and nice and all that, the majority businesses tend to revolve around government agencies.

Every little bits definitely taxed startups chance to be successful.

Compare to Silicon Valley where people would almost definitely give try all-things-mobile or web2.0, Vancouverites prefer to hike, bike, enjoy foods.

All in all, Canada is still conservatives when it comes to technology.

Having said that, I was surprised to see big names in Computing technology born and bred in Canada but all moved and made it big in US. Kernighan, Gosling, Aho, Rob Pike, Rasmus Lerdorf, Kenneth Iverson, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Canadian_computer_scie...

Too bad... Just too bad...
Irrelevant.

The issues are:

(1) That a vector is there for an untrusted third party to record and report all keystrokes

(2) It was put there at the insistence of the carriers, and

(3) That there is no way for a user to turn it off without voiding their warranty.

edit:

(4) This has serious implications for the trustworthiness of Android-based platforms as we attempt to move towards using NFC for financial transactions. Who in their right mind would trust Android (or any smartphone, really) as a debit card after this?
Last time the PC was dead, it was because of the gaming consoles. All the games are there, web browsers too.. why would anyone want a PC? That was half a decade ago and PCs are still here.
East coast: death, west coast: not so death
'Operation Robin Hood' cracks two banks
> But still, having dealt with library version issues sometimes, I think "concurrent library versioning" and "sophisticated package management" sound awfully nightmarishly black-magic to me.

This isn't really much black magic to it, all the use cases are outlined in the docs: http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.6.3/api/modules.html#loading_from_...

The bits that NPM does, is take advantage of the way node loads modules, and process dependencies recursively. For example take a look at how a few global modules are installed on my system:

$ npm ls -g
/usr/local/lib
├── bootstrap-stylus@0.2.0
├─┬ express@2.4.6
│ ├── connect@1.7.1
│ ├── mime@1.2.3
│ └── qs@0.3.1

This means that each of expresses dependencies, at the version listed, is installed into /usr/local/lib/node_modules/express/node_modules.

Also, by default npm installs into the current directory, or project which uses the same package.json format that modules themselves do. I find this to actually be the opposite of "black magic" since you use the same tools to manage your project at the top level, that is used to manage all your packages and dependencies.
Zappos Hackathon Hack-a-long API Contest
In Matlab:

>> tic;sum(rand(1,3e6));toc
Elapsed time is 0.059096 seconds.
There has got to be another way to put that, right?
How much of development is starting a new project from scratch vs. maintenance? Millions of apps are out there written in PHP, and they all need to be maintained.
Rumored Kinect 2 Upgrades Could Be Big News for Robotics
How to delete old files on a filesystem with 30+ million files.
I'd prefer to see a detailed article about that.

Also I'd like to see more detail on why exactly writing custom servers is so profoundly important all the sudden. I hardly see the advantage of even nginx over apache, though that's a different issue.
Interpreting The Constitution In The Digital Era
Neat, but it runs best on Chrome, which already has VP8/WebM.

I'm hoping eventually all the browsers will have something low level and fast enough to realistically do this kind of thing (e.x. Native Client)

A lot of things that need native speeds can be run in sandboxes with a few IO APIs (network, display, user input) just fine. Video codecs are a perfect example.

Imagine being able to link your app to the best available version of HTML6 immediately... or some other application development environment entirely.
Jeez, I'm a sucker for these lists of "X biggest Y of Z", but please keep them where they belong (reddit/digg) and away from Hacker News.
iPhone 5 and iPad 3, both with 4G LTE, reportedly due next year
The Math That Saved Apollo 13
That doesn't speak to the point I made about distributor relationships. There's a reasonable presumption here that anyone selling such merchandise actually offering counterfeit goods because Chanel does not sell into the wholesale market.
How Poynter's Jeff Sonderman Reads the News — and How It Can All Be Made Better
Well, it was mostly in jest, yes, but I think it's more than just that, I think it's also that here on the west coast we tend to drive a lot better than people in New York ;)