skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Came here to ask the same parent comment myself. Yes, they're an iconic brand within this sphere and they do great work, but these articles are part of their blog. Every page of their blog has a link to the RSS feed. I don't need help keeping up to date on a syndicated blog that I care about. I need HN to show me things I -don't- know about yet. Maybe HN needs a 'best off' page, so brands like 37 Signals can be found even when they don't have any breaking news.
I would bet that most developers who use laptops as their primary development box sometimes tether to a large screen - that is what I do in my home office. I often work in other places around the house, rather than my office, but then I tend to do tasks that don't require a large monitor.

Having your whole working life on a single laptop (with multiple types of backups) is a real convenience and time saver.
If we assume that the second Death Star is built similarly to the first one, it is no stretch that the first one is quite hollow. Lando flew the Millenium Falcon inside of the second Death Star (along with Wedge, who was in an X-Wing) and they ended up coming to a very large area within the Death Star before subsequently destroying it and racing to get out.
Don't underestimate the power of institutional inertia. The large companies that make up Microsoft's market segment will resist change for the sake of resisting change.

You have to keep in mind that the decision makers don't care about the tools. What they care about is making sure the worker bees stay productive. To do that, they are averse to disrupting the environment by doing things like switching the productivity suite. To them, it's worth the license fees to not experience the inevitable drop in productivity (and rise in help desk costs) that a switch would drive.

When it comes to their core business of operating systems and productivity software, Microsoft won. They have no real competition.
Sometimes I feel like the only person who is NOT a PhoneGap fan. It just has so many oddities (white flash on Android for one) and the apps never seem to work as well as anything native.

Am I missing something? Serious question, not trying to troll.
hmm... what problem does this app solve?
That seems slightly unfair. Their direct products, maybe, but the introduction of Ruby on Rails and the philosophy of it did cause a radical advancement in expectations regarding web frameworks and applications for everyone, in the same way that non-iPhone users have benefited from Apple coming into mobile and mixing things up.
I just bang on ESC to get back to normal mode.
Show HN: I made Conway's Game of Life in JavaScript/Canvas
And it was both...
> Also, Hacker News should have a rule that we talk about Star Wars every Friday.

Seconded.
Plop down some coin and buy an SSL certificate. Really not comfortable putting in my email password/other information on an unknown site.
>Imagine if we would see something like V12 in the future, a JavaScript engine running on nVidia CUDA.

For that concept even to make sense, we would have to have massive leaps forward beyond what is currently even believed possible in the realm of auto parallelization.
Ya this is definitely a valid point of view. I'm not sure if we can get from here to there though. So much of the way that business online is done today is based on the status quo that changing it is pretty hard.

Could happen though I suppose. /shrug/
Fans commemorate 57th birthday of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
And you still gave Microsoft your money.
Yard Signs
What are Yard Signs? Yard Signs are small signs placed on the lawns. Yard Signs come in all shapes and sizes, but are most often rectangular and between 12 and 40 inches on each Sided. Yard Signs are a very effective, fast and inexpensive advertising. Coroplast material is traditionally used for Yard Signs. Yard Signs are the best solution for promoting your business, service, political campaigns, fundraiser advertising or events. You target local clients in a specific area and interested people call you the same minute you put on a sign. These signs work well and they are in a great demand nowadays.
Well, I'd probably agree with that. There are some truly bizarro API implementations.
Nah, the code for that is simple and generic in any sane language (and C# is reasonably sane).

But I think the guy I was responding to is at least partly wrong, a quick grep through the repo he linked to shows they have everything necessary for authentication, even if it's not as blindingly obvious as in, say, redis-py and redis-rb.
WWII sodium disposal method
The article is Ok, but posting "REST is OVER" is obvious flame bait. People need to stop doing this on HN.
I've had almost identical conversations with my child in the past, which is not surprising since we do not have cable or an antenna. Who would easily accept the broadcast model who was not brought up with it?

Perhaps more interesting is my older brother (approaching retirement age), who doesn't stream content but consumes through cable. Even when watching currently playing shows he records to DVR and delays watching long enough that he can skip commercials.

It seems to me that the old broadcast model was always awful, but it used to be the only thing going. The first hints of its eventual demise really first appeared with easy access to movie rentals and home video recorders.
As a programming exercise, I wanted to code Conway's Game of Life. I used JavaScript and Canvas to do it, as I haven't worked with Canvas before so wanted to try it out.

Code is here: https://github.com/nomatteus/conway-game-of-life-js
If the LCD screen is a glass, like on Apple hardware, there is no problem. :-)
I haven't used it extensively, but it's one of few ways to make a truly functional app using just JS+HTML5- allowing you to skip past Java, Objective-C, etc.

Of course, there are huge prices to pay for that- particularly on the UI front. But if your mobile app is a very small part of your business (as opposed to the primary offering, which it is for many) then it can make sense.

I've actually ended up making an app that's a hybrid of native (for top bar navigation) and one big webview for the rest:

http://www.taxono.my/

I think it's come out as very close to a native experience- it's just a case of putting the time in to make it so.
This article contains a good observation: he wraps his key idea in layers of link-bait and nerd-traps, shallow but emotionally charged ideas that side-track all but the strongest minds.

Hey, this idea is my Intellectual Property! I invented it to keep the morons at bay during Usenet's Eternal September, beginning with AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe's addition to Usenet in 1993. I always tried to put "lightning rod" prose into any Usenet article to divert the idiots into responding with idiocy. Only people with some knowledge can pass up a "lightning rod" and deal with the real issues.
This extension has been around for a long time, just like the PHP Lua extension.
one possible use can be executing some JS code even if JS is disabled in browser
Game Closure raises $12M for HTML5 cross-platform games
The articles by the lead author here are always very interesting. His article "Teacher Deselection"

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...

focuses specifically on a policy proposal for the United States and an estimate of its benefits. The 2010 article "Education and Economic Growth"

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...

appears to be a follow-up to the article kindly submitted here.
It helps you increase online conversions.

1. If you have a shopping website and a visitor regularly visits a certain product page, show him a coupon to boost sales.

2. If you have a blog, target your advertisements based on geography of visitor.

3. Show messages based on user-behavior.

4. Test new features to certain set of users before making it all live for everyone.

Just a couple of them.
The cheapest way will be with e-mail. Build a targeted list of photographers' email addresses and send to them a few times a month. If done correctly you can easily send around 300,000 emails a month for $30.
Last time I looked I don't remember seeing any bindings to the PHP environment.
The difference between your friends guitar story and most of HNs computer usage is that your friend was just trying to learn guitar while most HNers use a computer as a job. I think you would agree that someone whose job it is to play guitar should probably spend (money doesn't equal quality, but just using it as a point) whatever they think is necessary to have the best guitar for them.

When it comes to using a computer all day, every day, having great (not just okay) input devices, and great (not just okay) monitors not only can make you more productive, but also save your eyes and prevent RSI. Desks also fall into this category of saving your actual health.
I have been doing a lot of work with PHP recently, and reading through their library docs, it seems to me like they will put anything in a core extension, regardless of whether it's something that really belongs there.
What is new in about to launch Angry Birds Space
Yo dawg, I heard you like javascript.
The internet was novel, but not revolutionary until the WWW came along. The browser and hypertext brought the revolution of universally-available content.
It's entirely possible I'm wrong, I couldn't get it authenticating with redistogo and ended up just putting it on a private server - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8862552/authenticated-ser...
Well, you cannot deliver apps on iOS/Android/WP7 at the same time for a small budget in a short time natively. With Phonegap you can. Most companies really don't care that it is not that polished because most users don't care. We are talking about apps for the average company, not for companies where the app IS their business or anything like that.

The pizza chain with nice revenue rather has a Phonegap app THIS WEEK on all platforms which works a bit flaky, but works, than having to wait a few months to churn out different versions tweaked and tuned for all seperately.
This reminds me of an amusing anecdote from PGP's Wikipedia article:

"Zimmermann challenged these regulations in a curious way.
He published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback
book,[12] via MIT Press, which was distributed and sold
widely. Anybody wishing to build their own copy of PGP could
buy the $60 book, cut off the covers, separate the pages, and
scan them using an OCR program, creating a set of source code
text files. One could then build the application using the
freely available GNU Compiler Collection. PGP would thus be
available anywhere in the world. The claimed principle was
simple: export of munitions—guns, bombs, planes, and
software—was (and remains) restricted; but the export of
books is protected by the First Amendment. The question was
never tested in court with respect to PGP. In cases
addressing other encryption software, however, two federal
appeals courts have established the rule that cryptographic
software source code is speech protected by the First
Amendment (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the
Bernstein case and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the
Junger case)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
Current Obsession: The Sherlockian
37signals is the most smug and obnoxious company ever. I'm so sick of them. On their desks, where's the empty wine glass that they use to smell their own farts? Thaaaanks!
Zipwhip New User Sign Up Flag (Arduino+Ethernet Shield)
Zero-day Smartphone Vulnerability exposes location and User Data
Instantiation of recursive generic types slows down exponentially
dhh, do you really work that way or did you clean your desk off before that picture was taken?

If so, I salute you. I'm still 14 purges away from that level of minimalism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA
The World hacker is a former army intelligence officer
I fixed this a while back:
var clientManager = new PooledRedisClientManager("passwordblahblahblah@barracuda.redistogo.com:9287");
While coding I need only two things to be perfect - a)My laptop b)A comfortable desk/chair. Everything else - surroundings, noise etc doesn't matter. I don't even notice these things.
This broke for me with Rails 3.1 last I tried it. I had to use bundle exec to get it to work.
If that were true, why would there be a need for Adblock? Google would just stop showing ads to people who don't like them, or would be showing us all such great stuff that we'd be grateful for them.
Love this - I recently just went through this with a fellow startuper!
Intermediate. It would work well as the second book you read on JavaScript (or, given the way most devs come to JavaScript, the book you read after reading a book on jQuery). But there's stuff in there that even experienced devs might not know about, like Promises and control flow libs like Async.js.
I stress this is just me noodling around, and that I'm not talking about real world risks. But: Is it possible to read unencrypted data of the flash drive the hard way?

Obviously, if it's sensibly encrypted there's no point. But a person may think they have physically destroyed a flash drive only to have left information available.

Here's some links to DIY de-capping and microscopy of a variety of ICs:

(http://siliconexposed.blogspot.com/2011/03/microchip-pic12f6...)

(http://uvicrec.blogspot.com/)

(http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/06/27/hacking-the-pic-18...)
Well, to be fair, writing an AI that can fool itself into thinking it's a human. Is much easier than writing an AI that can fool an average human. Any inexperienced programmer can write a program that fools itself with less than 10 lines of code.

The reason for that is that one of the problems with the concept of the Turing Test, is it's subject to the intelligence of the tester. A 6 year old boy with no talent in logic is much more likely to think a chat bot is a human, than an experienced CS researcher.

The dumber your tester, the dumber the AI needs to be to fool it. If you write a tester who is dumb as a rock, than it's trivial to write an AI that can fool it.

Zach and Douglas are only going into a lengthy conversation because Douglas went through the trouble of making Zach smart, knowledgeable and mimicking many human behaviors. If he made Zach as smart as a fundamentalist religious zealot. Then he could have just said "you're an AI because I told you so" and Zach would agree. But then again, that wouldn't be slightly as fun.
Sure, but only for the cases not covered by the JS.
Urban Airship & OS X Mountain Lion’s Notification Center
If Facebook transitions to its new hardware and the hardware begins to crash and burn and users start getting affected, so will Facebook... there are competitors who would love to have Facebook's lunch. So reliability is pretty up-there for Facebook too.
If you read a bit of Brooks, you'll see why this is indeed more or less inevitable - the addition of hierarchy reduces the communication costs in a growing organization.
This is the company I moved to silicon valley to work for, and it has been a blast. I might be biased, but I think we've got a really great crew at Game Closure. Deciding to move out west was the best decision I could have made.

The past year has been a wild ride. I see now why many people enjoy the startup scene so much. Not only is it challenging... it's a hell of a lot of fun.
All you're observing here is that the mobile browsers are not as developed as their native runtime cousins. This is an indictment of the browsers (and perhaps the platform owner's priorities), not that of PhoneGap.
All the examples, github repos, books, and tutorials I'm seeing with my dive into node say exactly the opposite - the code becomes a mess of callbacks. It looks like enormous work goes into avoiding callbacks, similar to the amount of work that went into Rails in 2005 so that server-side folks could avoid writing JavaScript.

I'd love to see this framework you wrote. Is it open-source? or is it something you're unable to share?
How green is your smartphone
Ah damn, yes, you are right ! Nevermind then ;), still interesting though !
What is the difference between an encrypted hard drive, and one filled from /dev/random or the like? If I fill a hard drive with cosmic noise, can I be face consequences for not being able to decrypt it?
This isn't a core extension, it's a PECL extension--see http://pecl.php.net/package/v8js. PECL extensions are not distributed with PHP. You have to explicitly install them if you want to use them.

I think sharing code is always better than not sharing code. If you run into a use case where this would be useful, then you can just grab it and install it.
Why noy just use requests and lxml, you could do the whole thing in about 10 lines in one file
The behaviour of your brother is one I see amongst my friends & I. We routinely watch sports on tape-delay (particularly NFL which has an amazing ability to take commercials right when things are getting exciting) just so we can skip through commercials.
Very nice looking app. Are you using Leaflet for your maps?
That's the Canadian not Australian flag on your front page.
Broken as if the internet has no commercials? TV exists cause it's simple: streams of stories at the press of a button. No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. I don't think the commercials are the issue.
Steve left out some context regarding what hypermedia API entails. I believe the essence of a hypermedia API is that the client does not construct URLs but instead follows links. Only the server constructs URLs, and the only URL the client should be aware of (that was not generated by the server and delivered in an HTTP response) is the initial URL.
This is garbage, why is it being voted up?

Rails is not bloated it's modular and quite simple if you understand ruby and can read - look at the source. That said his to address his _complaints_:

* Rspec / Testing is slow as it has to reinitialize a whole rails stack every time it runs - run it async smartass it's what you're preaching, use inotify or fsevent with watchr or guard.

* Bundle exec for Gemfile changes? This guy is inept.. async yet again with inotfiy / fsevent

* HTML5 - It's a server side framework, if you want HTML5 you do it in the markup or the included coffeescript pipeline, why not pure coffeescript / javascript? because I value my time and sanity over the new hotness
The Original "Lambda Papers"
I don't think it's subtle at all. My primary knowledge of 37signals is as the company that spends an inordinate amount of time on Hacker News telling everyone how great it and its methods are.
> No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. I don't think the commercials are the issue.

I'm not sure what TV you're watching, but good content is significantly harder for me to find on traditional TV than the internet.
It violates Separation of Concerns.
I wouldn't want it as a base for developing something new, but if you are knee deep in some old, smelly codebase that should be fixed yesterday, I can definately see how it could be usefull.
Popular startup advice that misleads entrepreneurs
I never thought about using a wine glass for that. Great idea.
I disagree - it's nice to be able to serve a mobile layout to a mobile device. If I'm trying to load, say, CNN or ESPN on an older mobile phone, I don't need all the cruft that comes with the desktop version.

(We can get into all the evils suggested by http://xkcd.com/869/ , but for the purposes of this argument I'm assuming that web developers and sysadmins are competent and not evil.)
Taking a Bite out of Spam
Downloading this now! It looks great so far, cannot wait to try it. I have tried many of these tools coming out; most are browser based and horrible to work with (besides being slow, they basically don't work usually :). So very curious; will give you feedback.
An interesting perspective is putting in the years of learning.
Say a kid realistically starts learning a language at age 4. Add 5 years and you end up with a 9 year kid. 9 year olds are not thaaat good at language.

Compare this with an adult that's been learning a completely new language for 5 years. As in seriously learning, dedicating at least one hour per day, 3-4 days per week. Plus living in the country, listening to radio, tv, etc.

I think the adult will win. Even if you compare with an older kid up to maybe 13 years old, but then it's cheating because that kid has been learning the language for more than 5 years, even if you increase the "start learning definition" to age 7.
Does anyone know any technical details behind this paragraph?
Specifically, are they talking about a new kind of interconnect technology with low power over ~1m distance?

(Searching for "rackspace virtual I/O" was not so useful.)

"Rackspace is leading an effort to build a “virtual I/O” protocol, which would allow companies to physically separate various parts of today’s servers. You could have your CPUs in one enclosure, for instance, your memory in another, and your network cards in a third. This would let you, say, upgrade your CPUs without touching other parts of the traditional system. “DRAM doesn’t [change] as fast as CPUs,” Frankovsky says. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could actually disaggregate the CPUs from the DRAM complex?”"
The author doesn't mention that buying from companies¹ perceived as evil incurs an $I cost. In the same fashion one wants to support indie devs, there's resistance to feeding the beast responsible for bad market direction. It's basically a boycott; one still consumes the product, but without supporting the publisher.

For example, think back to when Spore was pirated: http://torrentfreak.com/spore-most-pirated-game-ever-thanks-.... That's an example of a negative $I cost: even people with no interest in the game were getting on board, to send a message to EA.

¹Companies with dodgy user-experience track records, intrusive DRM, or who are perceived as having a negative effect on industry or the direction game design is going. Examples: Ubisoft, due to the forced-online connection even for single-player games, EA for Origins and banning policy, etc.
This is exactly what I was waiting for. Awesome.
Ohh damn! Fixed now.
In an industry with a lot of computer programmers, why would you ever have to account for introverts?
I know and respect Reg. I've emailed and tweeted quite a lot with him over the years, long been a fan of his writing, and hung out in person in Toronto a few times. He's a great guy. But this rambling theory of his highlights a problem I've noted before, his tragic addiction to smoking banana peels. Although I appreciate the time taken to think about my writing, Reg's "conspiracy theory" amounts to nothing more than the fever dreams and hallucinations that smoking banana peels so often induces. Parents, warn your children about banana peels. I would go so far as to say don't even let them have a banana sunday or a strawberry-banana smoothie. It's just not worth the heartbreak.
I loved this post as well. The author has an interesting perspective on most traditional start-up concepts
Headphones for Hackers
Find them totally arrogant as well. Everything corporate strategy they employ is the "right" way of doing things and necessitates a self-fellating post on Hacker News.
I Went to Site Week and All I Got Was a Better Future
Perhaps a better title would be "advertising on TV is broken".

No one pays any attention to it anymore. And most people I know, like me, don't even have broadcast TV. Or cable.

I watch shows, yes, on DVD -- and largely on my own terms. No adverts.
Really? That's....very strange. The rules for this sort of thing seem so arbitrary.
Ask HN: What is the concert calendar that sucks least?