skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that may have been his point. There's a small group of people who insist that Microsoft's mobile devices will take off. Those will run IE. I know I've been pushed away from using certain libraries for that reason.
Lets give Hollywood censorship rights at the dns level on one condition. The government absorb mpaa, riaa and hollywood as an unholy appendage of all the other slow moving buracratic nightmare agencies sucking tax dollars from the people.
I fully agree with the article, and believe that our quality standards in everything should be high.

That said, from my weak anecdotal evidence, non-technical users tend to blame computers for so many things. How many times I've heard people saying how "computers just make things so much harder". I wish to respond "No, no they don't. They make so many things easier". Instead, I laugh and say, "I know, right?"

---

Where I think we should embody this principle the most is in UX. When I come across a half-decent interface, I'm so pleased. That is great, but "wow, using this software is a pleasure" shouldn't be such an unusual feeling.
Anonymous Supporters Tricked into Installing Zeus Trojan
There was an interesting video on Mixergy about a similar strategy (fixing iPhones): http://mixergy.com/magnabosco-milliamp-interview/
Just downloaded it and installed it in virtualbox.

First thing I clicked on was Photos, for no particular reason. So, I'm in Photos and there is nothing there for me to do (obviously). I want to go back to the main screen (where I came from) but there is nothing I can do. I'm suck in Photo land. The is nothing to click on that will take me back. ESC doesn't do anything, or any other key for that matter. Right click brings up a Feedback form. How the hell are you supposed to navigate this thing?

EDIT: Hovering at the top of the screen changes your mouse cursor into a hand. I can drag the entire screen which makes it small. I guess the purpose of this is to dock the current application or something.

I still can't go back to the main screen however...
Man, I wouldn't believe you if I hadn't seen this first hand. Offer a Silver, Gold and Platinum package and people overwhelmingly choose Gold.
We Need to Empower Hollywood, Not Kill Hollywood
Partly.

All through the 90s, Apple had ClarisWorks/AppleWorks,[0] which were basically what iWork is now – including that few serious Office users would look twice at them. (I liked them a lot, but I’m not in the Office demographic.)

And Apple was never heavily dependent on IE, because Navigator was always around. Safari had more to do with both IE and Navigator being awful, and with the long game of getting a light and fast browser ready for mobile and embedded devices.[1]

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks#AppleWorks.2FClarisW...

1. Recall that c. 2003, everything was pointing towards enormously bloated browsers. Jobs was already thinking about iP[oa]ds, and clearly anything on the Netscape codebase’s size trend line would be a dog. Firefox – Mozilla lite – was also a response to this, though as far as I know not with smartphones in mind.
Indeed, if your coordinator isn't a replica you obviously need it to fail as well in order to get data loss -- I was thinking of the symmetric case where every replica is a coordinator and W=1 reduces to "store locally, broadcast, and send an ACK".

And yes, of course there are hairy ways to solve the problem; I just would have liked to see it mentioned so that people realize that it exists.
The code is written to use some trigger.io APIs so you'd need to build the app per the instructions in the blog post.
You Should Treat Your iPhone Like a Toddler: The State of Mobile App Security
There's an open source view that'll let you use a single scalable PDF for things like icons: https://github.com/peyton/moomaskediconview

Disclaimer: I'm the author.
>2. Confederated - Completely distributed. Each machine is its own monolithic platform with everything from DNS to database, including web server on that node, but a cluster of nodes gives you scalability, and workload is distributed across the cluster. (I'm not aware of any examples of this, which is why I'm building Nirvana.)

A bit late to this conversation, but the Opa platform appears to be an attempt at this:

http://opalang.org/

The front page talks about MongoDB integration, but when it was first announced it sounded like the DB was integrated into the framework. Maybe they changed it since, don't know. It's popped up on HN a few times last year in case you want to dig up those discussions.
» Behind LeanKitKanban
> ...so who's to begrudge them having a large percentage of employees overseas?

Absolutely nothing. I have zero issue with having overseas employees. I'm not even American. The point and issue I was trying to address is that they are trying to cast themselves in some golden light as being the crusader of US employment, when a vast majority of jobs which could be brought back to the US aren't.

I would love to agree in that it is honest PR, perhaps if the word hyperbolic was put in the middle that might be true. Because they have clearly stretched these numbers quite considerably. As one commenter adds below, why not include the farmer who feeds the cows, who feeds the truck driver?
They do, indeed, and they provide a great service.

However, if you have two accounts there, logging out and logging in again causes IE9 to just re-use the same certificate instead of prompting you again.
Ugh, yeah, this is now a righteous mess. I don't see why a user's device has to be stuffed with payload that he/she has zero chance of ever utilizing.

All it does is bloat up the package and limit what devs can do and still remain in the downloadable-over-3G limit.
This blog post from the former CEO of Sun is perhaps relevant:

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”

My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.

And that was the last I heard on the topic.

http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-artis...
Both.

Amazon has a habit of going down when you least expect it, and while the outages aren't usually system wide, you want an off-site backup site that can handle some percentage of the traffic, even if it's just a "we'll be right back" page.

Additionally, if all your data is on Amazon and it has a catastrophic failure, it's can be lost forever. Your databases should be hosted on your own network as Amazon can't guarantee that nobody will have access to your network segment but you.

If you take credit cards, be especially careful as the service level you choose may not be PCI compliant, which is required by most credit card companies. Read this (may be out of date):
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=34960

If you use their payment system, they do claim to be PCI compliant.

Regarding bandwidth, in your example, you show $8/mbit for bandwidth. I get 300mbps for $3/mbit from Cogent, and $6/mbit for a 100mbit commit.

Additionally, the example shows reserved instances at 51 and self-hosted instances at 131. This implies that Amazon's reserved instances are somehow magically more than twice as powerful as self-hosted servers.

EC2 Reserved instances are NOT an instance type, but rather a rate plan, and Amazon's servers are notoriously slow (and shared), and in my experience there's no way an Amazon EC2 instance is going to outrun a standard dual or quad-core XEON server in a self-hosted model.
I have a problem that the word "hacker" was used in this context. Cracker (as coined by RMS), or criminal is more appropriate.

I've just read Sam William's RMS biography, and the word hack has been used since the 1950s for all things not done in harmful way.

And after all this is hacker news...
A closer look at Windows Server 8 beta
Software seems very meritocratic. What do you think about working on an open source project and taking some client work while in school? GitHub is pretty similar to a portfolio and in design, portfolio is everything.
From the article, it sounds like the whitelist is exactly what was blocked.

It may well have been a list of urls recently found baseless, in which case there wouldn't be an override function ready, but the list was white.
Some people enroll in MBAs to become middle-managers in Fortune 500 companies. Luckiky, those people tend to not hang out on Hacker News, so that advice will only reach people who are thinking of the MBA as a way to entrepreneurial success, which it isn't.
Show HN: Web app to convert documents to PDF
Hi all,

I've been working steadily on a web app that converts uploaded documents to PDF. It's still very much a work in progress and it lacks several big features that I am going to be working on over this weekend. I consider this to be a proof of concept, because I've written a similar implementation of in the past, and it was entirely based on Windows and a bunch of expensive software that was difficult to scale (Windows, Office, Acrobat), and it had to store the flat-file on disk because that's what was needed. My current implementation here uses all open-source software, is on Linux, and does not deal at all with flat files - I just store the raw data in a database. So, there's no Office interop or Acrobat or anything involved. I think this will scale much better. I just wanted to show what I've got so far because feedback is exciting.

Anyways, I don't have much error handling or anything coded in, so it may blow up if you poke it too much.

Also, it will only convert Excel documents to PDF, at the moment. I have to add support for more file types, but that is a relatively simply task compared to the other features.

Basically, sign up, create a bucket and upload some excel documents. They should process and be converted into PDF, at which point you can view them using PDF.js. (so, a newer browser will be required)

Check it out: http://litigance.com
I couldn't believe it is either marketing or mistake. Since the 3G leaks like this have happened so it isn't as if they don't know about it. And all they would have to do is keep from updating the user agent information and mask it as anything else. I'd be interested to see how many connections Ars has had to ANY device with that resolution display over the last 6 months.
Mini-roundabouts are much smaller; most UK roads do not have two lanes in either direction, so junctions are naturally smaller too.

A road with two lanes in either direction would normally be major enough to warrant traffic lights; or, if it's just a particularly wide suburban road, then the lane closest the pavement is often used for parking, and the road would narrow to one lane (with advantages in reducing speed somewhat) for a roundabout.
That's an easy one: they are looking for someone they can trust to solve their problems. They don't care how you do it.
clickable http://litigance.com

oops, no link to sign up page, here it is, though: http://litigance.com/auth/signup

I'll add it to the sign in page.
And they forgot to mention the numbers the "app economy" destroyed/will destroy.
That is true, although one of the things EC has to be careful about is when the mutation history of a key results in different values if it gets out of order.

Consider the example value :

Mutations "insert 5 A" AAAAA
"delete 2 characters" AAA
"insert 3 B" BBBAAA

vs an out of order version:

Mutations "insert 5 A" AAAAA
"insert 3 B" BBBAAAAA
"delete 2 characters" BAAAAA

If you partition and rejoin, even knowing all the time stamps can make it hard to re-assemble.

But the basic thesis that EC is not appropriate for all data models is certainly valid. I certainly wouldn't want my bank to use such a model for reconciling transactions, they screw up enough as it is.
I like that the 'rants and raves' and adult services are the only two links that show visited.

The other products do one thing and try and do it well, where craigs list tries to do it all, without doing much.
The Joy of iPad
I think your expectation is misguided. YC's goal isn't to invest in novel or revolutionary companies. They're here to invest in startups that they think may eventually become big businesses.

I also abhor the question "how is this different than x's offering"? A startup doesn't need to be meaningfully differentiated from other startups-- it needs to be meaningfully differentiated from what the existing market is currently using.
I personally use SmartGit for committing and visualizing projects, and sometimes use Github for Mac if I'm just quickly cloning a repo off of their site.
Such a simple interface and design but provides a new take on solving a classical problem, really cool app.
because pki is hard
G4 Mac Mini in Apple ][c clothing
With regards to point 1, I like to remember the article on Local-sensitive Number Grouping: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/04/17/57748... - for me, this shows nicely how the rabbit hole, as usually, is deeper than you would think at first...
For what it's worth, I'm a native English speaker and wondered the same things.
You make a good point. Without additional safeguards/depending on implementation, W=1 can indeed mean "durability of one".

This also depends on your failure model. If your node crashed (RAM cleared) and your durable storage broke, you're in trouble. If the data was durably persisted and you just have to restart the node, it's a better situation.
There is at least one astronomer who's doing exactly that. I didn't find his name with a quick googling, but I think it was a Russian fellow. Naturally, not everyone agrees on the step from listening to sending focused, targeted bursts.
There are many examples of SO scrapers that rank higher than SO itself in many cases. Like BigResource.com. So your point is moot.

A relevant point is that should SO slap a paywall around their content, anyone can grab the data and create a worthy competitor. Hence the death of ExpertSexChange.
Social Break turns reading your Twitter feed into an old school video game
By similar principle, the second-cheapest bottle of wine in a restaurant is invariably the biggest seller. Nobody wants to be a cheapskate, but few customers actually know what kind of wine they want or how much they should spend. Restaurateurs know this, which is why it invariably carries a disproportionately high mark-up.
The wave "free-falls" toward the object with exactly the same acceleration as anything else passing by.

I'm not sure what you meant by the last part. The light beams would form a spiral expanding through space. (Like "zooming in" to the spiral, not turning like a screw.) Each photon moves in a straight line, but since the source of the beam is turning, the beam is a curve though space.
One thing I remember is how accurate the US casualty number was -- we had names and hometowns for every US casualty, and usually a cause of death. In some sense, this is to be expected, as we have records of everyone who gets shipped out, and most have at least some family or friends who awaited their return.

We weren't even sure how many Iraqis had died, nor how they died. Some of the more common estimates of Iraqi deaths vary by a factor of ten or more. Records in Iraq are spotty, at best. Most Iraqis don't have a great deal of family and friends in the US, so we don't feel their loss in quite the same way.
Stackoverflow is one of the best things that have happened to tech community, for that very purpose we have created a group to meet other engineers from stackoverflow community for lunch http://www.LetsLunch.com/stackoverflow
> In our case, Whim was somehow taken already when we went to submit, although it wasn't published in the app store.

That's odd. I wonder how much app name squatting is going on.
Right; you need some notion of a total order or commutativity in your update functions. f(A,B) = f(B,A). "Last writer wins" is one example of commutativity, but that isn't often what you want.

What you want is something like a "Commutative Replicated Data Type" [1], where you define a commutative function specific to your application. Libraries like StateBox allow you to build CRDTs [2]. In fact, your example of document editing was one of the areas where these ideas first came up.

There's also a theorem saying that if your program is "logically monotonic"--that is, if your data only "grows" in size, and facts never change from True to False or vice versa--then your program will work under eventual consistency without modification [3].

Finally, bank accounts have to employ eventual consistency. Banks demand availability from their ATMs and give up consistency to handle partition tolerance: your ATM will still work even if you sever its network connection. However, banks, unlike a lot of software, have well-defined compensation protocols for handling inconsistency. For example, they'll charge you for negative balances left in your account via overdraft fees.

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/0710.1784.pdf

[2] http://labs.mochimedia.com/archive/2011/05/08/statebox/

[3] http://databeta.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/the-calm-conjecture...
Your point and shoot doesn't do depth of field very well, let alone let you adjust it after the fact. It's also likely that focusing is much much slower for you than the lytro.

In any case, the lytro probably isn't for you right now.
I trust Path with some of my data -- most of it generally created for the specific use within Path.
This sounds a lot like what Krav Maga claims about its teachings. They certainly have a point when they say that fighting in the ring and fighting against gangs with guns and knives on the street is a very different situation that traditional martial arts do not do much about.
Mailgun rocks. We use it at dotCloud and it has never failed us.
I agree. It took me an uncomfortably long time to figure out that the cheapest plan was on the right side and got more expensive on the left.
Apple opening gigantic Retail Store in Paris?
But they specifically reported in the article that those user agents were coming from Apple's IP block.
I was going to write the exact same thing but I'll just second your comment. I am mostly a dedicated customer but use various cloud offerings here and there.

When I take into account the amount of time Rackspace saves me versus dealing with my non-managed servers, using them is a no-brainer.
If you want far better information on pricing, the following old (2004) article by Joel Spolsky is excellent.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
There was an article recently about how all the low end development/design will be done without developers/designers and only high end will need people. Tools like this seem to be propagating that idea.
So, basically, if you apply common sense to Twitter, everything will work out fine. While this may seem to be an obvious fact, unfortunately, a lot of people seem to forget that.
It used to be that if you wanted to use your camera's RAW files, you were locked in to one piece of software or had to wait forever for support in other software. This has gotten better, but it's still a problem. RAW support for my camera didn't come for a month and a half after it was released.
Illinois judge: law barring recording police is unconstitutional
I'm aware of that - but Zepto and Backbone don't have a UI layer
Which tech magazines do you read and recommend?
Agreed. Depending on whether you have written a follow up email or not, maybe you can follow up with email now that addresses how you are going to solve their problem without buzz words (perhaps a wireframe or something visual can help too)
iPad 3 prices and storage likely to stay the same
I think they've done a great job on making it simple and approachable. I haven't had stability problems but it is a little sluggish on our medium-sized repo.
Or they could just revert it to the CUPS default page.
Disrupt This: A teacher's challenge to Silicon Valley
Mixbook recruiter spams DHH for Sr. Rails role
This guy wins! I'm sure everyone on HN gets these clueless recruiter emails, but DHH always puts these idiots on blast. That's the only way it'll stop them from doing it.
Foursquare says goodbye to Google Maps; who’s next?
Depends if they care about X-Forwarded-For, or not.
The Jerusalem Syndrome: Why Some Religious Tourists Believe They Are the Messiah
You think that would make sense to most Chrome/Windows users?
This is a neat article about how context shapes perception of self.
Teaching is a lot like programming in this respect -- if you try to enforce metrics of "performance", you usually end up with optimization for those metrics and dumber, less-educated students. Similarly, students tend to optimize too, just from a different standpoint. Examples of this:

If you rate teachers based on the grades their students get, they will usually award their students higher grades for the same (or worse) performance. This isn't just a joke; many, many professors have reported their deans bearing down on them for awarding too many bad grades, often to students who are so incompetent that they cannot write basic English sentences or perform long division. The solution -- not remedial courses, or letting them drop out (that would hurt financial aid income) -- but letting them pass even though they lack the basic skills to learn in that class, let alone pass. This also leads to the student mentality that they are being "given" grades (and thus can beg for higher grades) as opposed to earning them through their own effort in the class.

If you rate teachers based on the number of their students pass a standardized test, the teachers will focus solely on the contents of that standardized test and put a huge amount of effort into educating the few students who Don't Get It, at the cost of all the students that do. I had this experience in primary and secondary school, where teachers lamented that they had to go over material for the Standards of Learning tests constantly and repeatedly, dramatically lowering the amount they actually had time to teach. The end result is a quick dropping of everyone to the lowest common denominator -- which often just ends up shifting the entire bell curve to a lower point.

If you rate teachers based on student evaluations, your results are nearly useless. Most students don't bother to write in much detail, since they're just glad to be done with the final exam (I did this too!)-- and often they use it for "revenge" on professors they thought were too hard. The teachers who get the best evaluations are often (though not always) the teachers who gave the easiest work and grades, and whose students turn out to be the most woefully unprepared for what comes next. Just like customers of your software are not always good judges of what they really want, students are often terrible judges of what good education actually is.

As far as I can see, nobody has come up with a magical metric for rating teachers. If anything, most of the metrics out there are outright counterproductive -- and you can see it in schools across America, where teachers are being constantly urged to inflate grades for their 'customers', overlook plagiarism, ignore the most talented students in favor of the least talented ones, and help drive down the quality of education for the next generation.
I didn't miss it.