skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Advice I've now heard in the past year:

- Set goals

- Don't set goals

- Build an MVP

- Don't build an MVP, build the full product

- etc etc

Meta discussion: "How to.." articles are beginning to annoy me. They should be titled "How I did this..." or "What I did that worked for me.." A title of "How to..." implies their methodology is prescriptive.
"Even the graphic designer, 35-year-old Slovakian resident Julius Bencko, made more than $1 million in 2010 alone." ugh what a disgusting comment as though graphic designers shouldn't be paid for their work regardless of the status of the company.
I've finally finished another update to my Radi app. It's a Mac design tool that can be used to produce animation and videos, with output to HTML5.

This update adds a number of tools that hopefully make the app more useful for real work. The big one is frame-by-frame animation of shapes, so you can do traditional 2D animation. There's also new support for Markdown blocks with an integrated style editor, so you can easily edit rich text that becomes clean HTML.

I've also updated the landing page somewhat: http://radiapp.com/ ... There's now a comparison box with other HTML5 animation editors, and more screenshots. Would love to hear your comments about it...
Very nice write up. I was actually looking for something like this about a week ago, and was referred to the ECMAScript spec (section 8.4) which talked about "UTF-16 code units" - which I believe is just UCS-2. If this is the case, I kind of wonder if the spec should be updated to make things a little more clear, since the issue isn't straight forward for those who don't know a lot about unicode.
This is what scares me about backing up your files only to the cloud. They could go down any day and you would lose everything.

The fact that a local copy is kept is what I like about dropbox, and why I also keep local backups in an external HDD.
Predicting Disasters Of The Future
It's also weird to see fc have a "get big, then figure out how to make money" mentality.
Wow, is there anything at Google that Jeff Dean didn't have a hand in?
Unprecedented, That’s for Sure
This. Having goal allows you to measure your current performance compared to them. Without any goals you will always be stuck as the same person you were yesterday.
It's not a backup if it's your only copy. Moving data exclusively to the cloud is dangerous yes, but backing up isn't. At worst you get into a situation where you local copy is your only copy until you can back it up to a different cloud. Like you said, that's why it's good to have multiple backup locations.
There's nothing right about this, but I honestly can't have much sympathy for people who store their only copies of work files at a site that's notorious for its association with illegal activity.
[Infographics] Geek or Nerd, which one are you?
iOS catches up to Android in December sales, thanks to iPhone 4S
Unlike computing none of those things reached near-ubiquity within one generation though.
And we are surprised by this? as the US is like the UK where a lot if not the majority of politicians and the 1% are lawyers.

Out in the real world "engineers" are considered the little chap in oily overalls (and a flat cap) who "fixes up the roller dont cha know"

Oh and that's how real engineers are seen in teh UK not some hobby php programmer cobbling together some online shoe shop by cutting and pasting
It's nothing to do with illegal activity, it's just dumb to have only a single instance of an important file wherever it's stored.

Worth noting that some of them were moaning that this was their backup. Not sure I see the issue there, just move them somewhere else - if it's a backup they still have originals presumably.
If they are just backups, can't they make a new backup?
Any free alternatives to iSSH? I don't feel like paying 10$ just to try it out.
no, not at all. In fact I administer my own computer with vi (meaning vim), from a local terminal instance.

But the fact remains that porting an app like that to a touchscreen device meant to hide systems administration (as iOS does) is getting so far BOTH from the history of vi AND its most prevalent current usage.

That doesn't mean it's not very cool. I just thought it would be interesting to reflect on the background.

I guess what some people say about a bluetooth keyboard...almost makes this somehow useful. Still, that keyboard is not always going to be there.
Sure, but if I buy a product released in 2012 that advertises "Unicode" support, and it turns out that it only supports a version of it from the era of IE4, I'm probably going to whine.
Better mathematics boosts image-processing algorithm
Twitter Buys Summify, Gives Everyone a Reason to Use It
I guess maintaining compatibility with JavaScript is more important than minor space optimizations. Also, if you really care about such things, you shouldn't use JSON in the first place (see Protocol Buffers etc.)
I'm pretty sure dropbox wouldn't be affected by this if the feds decided to do this to them, as the files are also stored in the computers' folders.

Although it's not clear if a removal from Dropbox servers could trigger a deletion into my own Dropbox. Perhaps someone at HN knows? Please advise...
The Truth about SOPA - Opinion piece by Rep. Lamar Smith
This is no different than many other criminal enterprises. If we took your logic and applied it everywhere SOPA style then we all would not be able to leave the house or have computers. Look at where your logic has gotten us with the war on drugs.

The process has to be balanced between catching the criminals and public good. Right now there are laws in place and due process to stop pirating. Megaupload showed they worked.
Neural network gets an idea of number without counting
What I understand from this is that it is not about what information governments can keep secret but what means they can employ to keep that information secret. In Wikileaks' case they are forcing non-government entities, the media to keep state secrets.
Guys, I have some spare time. Any interest in a cross-platform app that acts as a kind of "raid-1" (mirror) across two or more of these popular services (e.g. DropBox), any one of which you more or less "trust", but, on the theory that the Government can take them away? (or if you don't consier that likely, then just on the theory of "don't put all your eggs in one basket")

The idea is that each service would think you're "just" using them; meanwhile, you're really hedging your bets. Should ANY ONE of these disappear, in spite of general internet connectivity on your part, software panics and downloads ALL your data to your local hard-drive instead (on the theory that perhaps the government is about to make ALL of them inaccessible to you), sends you an email and SMS?

Another feature would be local encyrption. Let me know if there's interest in this. Basically, this is like a raid-1 layer on top of two or more disjoint services such as DropBox, optionally with local encryption.
Centralized Django logging with Sentry
IPad 3 rumor rollup for the week ending Jan. 18
It's worth noting that Kodak was a leader in digital cameras even in the 1980s. It's also worth considering the impact of vertical integration: companies like Samsung and LG also make phones, giving their own CCD makers a boost. In order for Kodak to survive, it would need to be a vastly trimmed down CCD maker or expand into the mobile phone market. That is, there was simply little way for Kodak to remain viable as an independent company.
JPEGs for twitter screenshots, how annoying.
Why is this the #1 story on HN? Keeping anything important in one place is a bad idea.

Btw, we all have our source in git or mercurial (vcs with full history) with an offsite repo, right? also, RAID isn't a backup. How many lessons do people need to keep relearning?
> Although it's not clear if a removal from Dropbox servers could trigger a deletion into my own Dropbox. Perhaps someone at HN knows? Please advise..

Of course it's technically possible, and Dropbox could probably be compelled by one law or another to make it happen. The question isn't "could it happen", but "would it happen".
> This is not a generational issue, this same kind of political issue has existed in all times in various forms. It is an issue of power and control, power to control distribution channels and who may produce what and when.

And note the parallels to Stallman's "The Right to Read" article: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

SOPA/PIPA is just the latest attempt to bring about a world very much like what Stallman described.
It was the directed imposition of federal power over the states that ended slavery, segregation, and black disenfranchisement.

In the US, in other countries it was the abolitionist movement and that was my point. Even in the US it was the appeasement of strong abolitionist, preservation of the Union at any cost was always the foremost concern, Lincoln said so himself, the moral argument of the issue was always secondary to preservation of the Union.

We will never know if the institution of slavery would have ended peacefully, but what we do know is that culturally slavery was becoming unsavory, the abolitionist where winning the moral argument, as they had done in England and we do know that the war and ensuing reconstruction brought bitterness and resentment that lasted for almost another 100 years. There are some who believe that the cultural trend, that was happening around the globe would have continued and that slavery would have lost the moral argument bringing about it's demise by peaceful measures. If that is the case then the war was a travesty, because we may have saved ourselves 100 more years of immorality and a second social uprising to finally and truly free the all people and that is the problem with war, you only get to see the victors side of history.
I can excuse them for the "association with illegal activity"-part, but having only one copy of your data, located on such a site, or in the cloud at all, is very risky. It will be interesting to see how the feds handle this one, considering Megaupload was used for plenty of legal activities as well.
I used it to store embedded linux distro images that I made up for flash cards. 250meg each. Now I've got a bunch of broken links and some work to do. Looks like I'm going to have to suffer through all of Rapidshare's junk now.

Bummer.
I think you have to slide two fingers to opposite sides of the screen for they keyboard to split. (At least that is what was showed in the iOS 5 videos, I don't have an iPad)
Posted a similar comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3489356

@mrkmckz I agree it's a different use case, but any sharing of illegal content by one or more users, might cause the feds to over-react, rather than just looking at individuals involved.
This is a great article, thanks for posting.

I think my favorite response has to be "trading the barometer to the building's superintendent in return for the information wanted".
If they don't happen to have some condition which makes them hard to use for your situation, I would recommend http://www.mediafire.com. I've not used them as an uploader myself, but to me they seem to have the cleanest, most modern interface and no annoying timers for downloading and so on. That should be encouraged.
Exactly. Who benefits the most from this attack? Anonymous or SOPA/PIPA supports who get to say "look what happened, we need stronger laws on the internet".
This thread is starting to feel a bit like the Four Yorkshiremen, but it is fascinating to see how people's exposure to/experience of/feelings about the internet vary with even a few years' difference in age.

For my part, I was born in 1973 and got my first computer (a Compaq Deskpro Portable) when I was twelve. I taught myself to program GW-BASIC and later QBASIC, and then pretty much abandoned computers until about 1999, when I abruptly found myself making an internal website for my department in a large corporation. (I've been building web applications for a living ever since.)

I was aware of email and the internet during the 1990s but must confess that I didn't pay much attention. I certainly didn't buy the hype coming from enthusiasts about it heralding this epochal shift that was going to transform how we all live, work, play, socialize, organize and get civilly engaged (oops).

I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, and as a result, it fascinates me in a way that my teenage son can't really understand because it's just there for him in the same way that telephony was just there for me as a child (though I'm also old enough to remember rotary phones).

But my fascination with the internet goes beyond the fact that I watched it arrive: it fascinates me because it really is transformative in a way that other new technologies that arrived during my childhood were not. When I was growing up, our family got cable TV (remember the brown box "converter" with a line of buttons running from channel 2 to 23?), an Atari 2600 and a VCR. They were all nice consumer appliances, but none of them had anything like the transformative impact of ubiquitous internet connection.

Cable TV is already passé. When I'm consuming media rather than producing it, I prefer a la carte to the all-you-can-eat buffet. I canceled my cable ten years ago and never looked back. The internet is simply a better content delivery system than cable/satellite.

Video games are fun and entertaining, have risen technically and thematically to the level of an art form (on par with literature and film) and may yield some insights that can help us learn and stay motivated. However, the technology doesn't really drive a broader cultural shift. At most it has crowded out board games and is encroaching on TV watching as a more entertaining drop-in replacement. In any case, some of the most compelling video games owe their success as much to their online connectivity (over the internet, of course) as to their intrinsic gameplay.

VHS is not only obsolete in the particulars of the cassette technology, but in the more general sense that physical media are slow, cumbersome and wasteful compared to unlimited broadband access to digital content. The last dedicated physical media player connected to my TV was a DVD player. The next device I'm going to connect to my TV is an internet-connected media server. BluRay is simply a last-ditch effort to double-down on an already-archaic distribution system.
Time To Concede Home 'Ownership' Is A Fraud
MegaUpload: What Made It a Rogue Site Worthy of Destruction?
Out of the box thinking..?? Have a look at the question.
Over-commit: I have to disagree with this completely - if things don't go well it leads to disappointment and being taken advantage of. How about 'be realistic' and 'be communicative'.
DOJ Didn't Need SOPA to Shutdown "rogue site" MegaUpload
A continuous journey of customer support optimization
When I was a kid, nerds were picked on...now Congress is feeling threatened by us and calling our class out by name. That is a change as big as the technology the nerds brought about.
Don't forget Sharepoint as well. From what I understand, it is a major source of revenue growth right now.
Cartels Are An Emergent Phenomenon, Say Complexity Theorists
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At least the uploading to multiple services is covered over here: http://www.multiupload.com/
Why not just keep it in the drive instead of downloading it when an online copy disappears?
The "Delete profile and Google+ features" link in the Google "Account Overview" has also been removed, so it looks like you can no longer get rid of your Google+ account after the fact as outlined here:

http://www.troublefixers.com/how-to-delete-google-plus-or-go...
Tim Berners-Lee says SOPA violates human rights
I'd say that by doing this they will gain more users to G+ than they will not gain for Gmail or other services due to concerns about G+.

On the other hand, being able to sign up with an arbitrary email address has always lead to issues once/if you switch to Google Apps and intend to share local parts.

Google has no obligation to provide G+/GMail-less accounts and I'm sure there is a lot of technical and business reasons for coupling them. As it's their service, that's what we get.
Quoting Greenspuns tenth law:

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program
contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden,
slow implementation of half of CommonLisp.
1) What if the family can't afford it? Do you just deny them graduation?

2) I'm not necessarily saying that they get stolen when they go home. A room full of iPads just sitting there over the summer is a very tempting target for thieves.
When to have been born?
Does this mean you can't make throwaway email addresses anymore not linked to your real name since google doesn't allow alias on G+ you always be at risk of deletion?
I still see the link - it moved from the G+ setting to the Google Account settings.
I disabled animation for chrome.
I feel really bad for some of these users; certainly, for the less technically-inclined or interested, how were they to know that an otherwise legitimate and professional-looking website would disappear with their data overnight? Whether it's RapidShare, MediaFire or Amazon S3-backed others, to the regular user they all look the same.

In the long run, if high-profile removals happen like this, I can see it causing a general lack of trust in SaaS for the average home user.
Maybe the point is to push people to commit properly? Many people under commit and thus do just enough to satisfy those commitments. I know when I'm super busy I am also super productive. When I was working full time and going to grad school I would go days without reading a 'fun' website. I was slightly over committed, but it drove me to be some of the most productive I've ever been.
It's somewhat troubling to me due to the `real name' requirement of Google+. Seems I can't create a semi-anonymous email at gmail anymore?
How Secure is Your Data Center
but having only one copy of your data, located on such a site, or in the cloud at all, is very risky

I agree with you, but think it's harsh to judge the users by it. It's not that long ago that it was nothing short of a miracle if the average home user - or small business for that matter - had any backups.

In a way, I'm heartened by the progress.
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Out of interest, is there any reason you don't store and serve them from Amazon S3? It's pretty easy to upload files to that using their web interface, or Panic's Transmit client if you're on OSX ( http://panic.com/transmit/ )

I seem to remember S3 also makes it easy to turn on an optional .torrent link, to save you some bandwidth charges.
I see the title "Delete profile and Google+ features" but no link to an actual action when I visit here:

https://www.google.com/settings/general

My guess is it's going away for everyone, but I guess that's speculation.
I struggled to find the demos from a deep-linked page. I think a nav item called "examples" would be handy. It's the most important thing I want to see with this kind of software, as the proof is really in the pudding.

Also investing the time in creating some more impressive animations would really sell this to people. If you don't have the knack for it yourself, outsource it to a designer or, dare I say it, make a competition out of it.
It leads to a bigger discussion, though, about what happens to your files when a cyberlocker (Megaupload, Dropbox) or backup provider (Backblaze) shuts down.

There's another submission on the HN fp that seems to tackle just that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3489313
Go Daddy Chooses Colombian Model for Super Bowl Commercial
I would recommend http://www.mediafire.com

Isn't that replacing one dubious service with another though? Right now, I'd imagine that something akin to Amazon S3 is the only reliable solution, and even then I bet they have their fair share of infringing material stored.

It's quite the rabbit hole the FBI have gone down with this action.
That's because it had servers in the U.S. SOPA is aimed at companies that keep their ops outside the U.S.
S3 costs money?
There are implications for business accounts too: if you need a real name you'll no longer be able to sign up in Adwords with something like admin@<company-domain> (and changing the company's Adwords to another person becomes a headache).
Amazon brings single sign-on to AWS management
Foxconn Responds To CEO’s “Employees Are Animals” Comment
Sounds like you have a good case for suing him for blackmail.

That aside...

Does you contract state that you should have accepted non-programming work?

Were you given a reason for being fired, or did you part ways by mutual consent?

On the first point, if your contract states that you must accept work unpaid or paid outside of the scope of the development, then you should have accepted the work. If it does not then you have no reason to accept to do additional work, and it is not a reason for termination.

Without a reason for termination you have not much to worry about you could argue it was by mutual consent, but you could also threaten to sue him on other grounds if you feel that he has breached your contract in any way.

Counter suit usually shuts people up, particularly as they know that the cost of going to court to defend something as well as trying to claim against you could be a case of throwing good money after bad.
Consider someone who died in 1955 at the age of 70. In their life they saw the introduction of: home electric providers, telephones, radio, movies, automobile, air travel (from nothing to the jet age!), nuclear energy, the polio vaccine, penicillin, color photography, frozen food, and more. There are also less known changes with deep impact: the introduction of municipal garbage service cleaned up our cities and improved health, the vertical filing system revolutionized data management, Linotype made it possible to have newspapers more than 8 pages long, the tractor, artificial fertilizer, and a mass of farm inventions opened up agriculture. Home refrigerators lets people keep fresh food longer and more cheaply than ice boxes could. Modern foods ranging from cornflakes to PEZ were invented during that time.

And you think the cell phone is more fundamental than, say, the widespread deployment of telephones in the first place? Before then, there was no way to have a voice conversation with someone more than a 100 meters away.

When the polio vaccine was invented "church bells were ringing across the country, factories were observing moments of silence, synagogues and churches were holding prayer meetings, and parents and teachers were weeping. One shopkeeper painted a sign on his window: Thank you, Dr. Salk. 'It was as if a war had ended', one observer recalled." (Wikipedia for Jonas Salk.) That vaccine still saves the lives of 100,000s of children every year even when compared to the 1800s. For that matter, before penicillin you could die because of a rose thorn accidentally scratching your mouth, as the sad story of Albert Alexander shows.

Tell me, how is the cell phone a more fundamental change than these?