skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true- I've spent a lot of time developing HTML5-based apps (i.e. in a webview) and am already surprised at how much worse the Android web engine is than the iOS one. Google should be all over this (and with the release of Chrome of Android, perhaps they finally are) but it baffles me that it took this long. Meanwhile, it took Mozilla to create Boot To Gecko, a true web OS.
I think there's an exageration as well, today the trend seems to be "use nothing by the distro"

Ok, sure, MongoDB still changes a lot between versions, in this case you should use the latest version.

But stop there. Especially if you're paying for support (like RHEL)

There should be a good reason for you to compile Apache / MySQL / PostgreSQL / Python. Otherwise, use the distro version. One (common) exception would be "we need Python 2.7 but this ships only 2.6"

Most of the "just download and compile" have no idea of the work that goes behind Linux distributions to ship these packages.

Yes, I'm sure you're going to read all security advisories and recompile all your stack every X days instead of running apt/yum upgrade
The GP never said that open sourcing prevents turning a profit or anything of the sort, just that he/she wouldn't release the source if the goal is to profit from it.
From my days of optimizing Firefox startup on the Mac, I remember that this doesn't work 100%. The only way to ensure that caches are 100% purged is to unmount the filesystem.
McMaster Carr is 111 years old, so they take a longer-term view. Imagine what this may be in 5 years, and 20, if Amazon keeps improving it.
Mainly it's about incompatibilities. What if you have two apps that require different versions of a library? If you've installed it in site-packages, then you have little recourse. By separating them out with virtualenv the two apps will work just fine.
Have you ever met an accountant that gets up in the morning excited to get to accoutning? Have you ever heard someone say: "Today is my lucky day! I get to go see my accountant!"?

I'm not saying they're not necessary. But if the economy were a mechanical system, law and accounting would be the friction between the belts and the wheels that produces waste heat.
I was a bit conflicted about whether I should post those links. I figured it'd be no different than people purchasing site templates. In any case, I'll opt for being transparent and stick to the initial intention. Links removed.
Show HN: Fastest way to use Twilio with Python.
I completely agree with this post, soon people are going to open their eyes and programming will be taught from elementary school to high school. Not being able to program will be equivalent to what being illiterate was.
Ah the good old "How come [add name here] won, no one I know voted for him."

What % of people use Linux?
> Are you sure path_helper slows things down?

I'm sure that it did, but not sure that it does. The code you ran isn't quite what /etc/profile does. Here's a run of that on an older machine where I work (see below on versions):

$ time eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`

real	0m0.106s
user	0m0.084s
sys	0m0.021s

However, looking at my current machine, I realize that /usr/libexec/path_helper is no longer a shell script at all. It's compiled. Running that same test on a newer machine, I get this:

$ time eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`

real	0m0.004s
user	0m0.001s
sys	0m0.003s

So, in a nutshell, I think you're right for current machines: The path_helper advice looks to be out of date. I can't edit my original answer any more, but thanks for making me rethink this (I've been annoyed by slow-opening terminals in OSX for years. Apparently, they worked on this part of the problem.)
Of course. I'm just saying that in case you're pinning only the default upstream versions from your distro so that they don't change, it's easier to automatically report on which packages have a new version in {distro}-security repository. Then retest and change the pin.

The same can be achieved by subscribing to CVEs... but you have to remember to filter the ones you use. Of course that's not a huge difference, so if someone prefers the second way, there's nothing wrong with it ;)
If you give yourself the user agent of a terrible browser, you're also going to get CSS hacks and JS kludges aimed at "fixing" that browser.

(Yes, yes, people shouldn't use UA sniffing to do that... but they do.)
I don't think amount of free space is a great competitive advantage. If that is the case Sugarsync should be at least 2x bigger than Dropbox (since they are give 2x more free space than Dropbox).

I believe amount of free space only become competitive advantage after services have the same service quality as competition and the same level of integration with applications using the cloud storage (editing, collaboration, project management, photo sharing, etc.).

As of now Dropbox has way more applications supporting it than SkyDrive so it seems Dropbox is still ahead.
Startup Competitions- Miss Congeniality Theory
On the circuit of startup competitions, a familiar formula plays itself out. A smattering of entrepreneur teams puts out 2- to 15-minute powerpoint pitches to a small all-star cast of VC's and a large cast of people-paid-to-be-there.

At the end of the affair, a winner-takes-all prize is awarded to the best presenter, usually selected by popular vote.

What's interesting about this system is that on top of the systemic shortcomings beauty pageants have (Nobody pays close attention, everyone is distracted, the time is too short to get an in-depth understanding of the project or the presenter, there's just way too many to choose between) many of the reviewers have little in the way of technical background to suss out snake oil versus the golden goose, or business background to sense who has a chance of making their whizbang predictions into reality and who couldn't sell booze to a drunk.

It's never as simple as "invest in the winner" to a deep-pocketed attendee at one of these events, but it occurs to me that if you had to pick a winner to receive the cash prize, there's a more disinterested and skilled set of voters- the other presenters.

If I was tasked with investing X in a single presenter at one of these events, I'd invest in Miss Congeniality, not Miss Pageant.

What does everyone else think?

On that note, an experiment: Why not set up a crowdsourced YC-like class along the same lines? You'd have to apply to vote, and you'd have to vote to apply. Applicants wouldn't have the same discerning skills of a YC, but they'd be able to screen chocolates from turds in a massively parallel capacity. It'd also save the staff a massive crush of application reviews.
Ideas Wish List
The gulf in sales will frustrate Samsung, which has always taken pride in performing well in homeland. Indeed, the company is so sensitive to the Korean market that it reneged on plans to fight the launch of the iPhone 4S there.
In the real world, their products do real work. Why not praise that? Fuck consumers - who cares! Business is where they make a killing because their products fill all the gaps.

OneNote works fine for me. Latency is usually in the seconds range which is fine. I don't think you'll be switching devices every 5 seconds. Even on a shitty O2 GPRS connection it's fine for me.
relatedly, i call "`eval resize`" in my .zshrc--any idea why that takes ~5s if it's more than a minute or two since i last did it, but is instantaneous otherwise? (yes, i'm certain that it's that line that's taking time--if i start typing during the delay before the prompt shows up, i get a resize error about unrecognized characters and then a couple bits of random ANSI on my input.)
McMaster Carr keep all the profitable commercial customers who need guaranteed delivery. and Amazon clears out all the low profit/high cost - need an occasional bit of something for a project - type customers.

Selling books/video online rather than in a store was a breakthrough area when Amazon got into it, ordering parts and materials isn't a new idea - Amazon is a lot less disruptive in this area.

My guess is that the biggest hit will be small specialist model/hobby shops, but unless you are in a few big cities there aren't any of these anyway.
Yeah, I don't think you're alone at all.

If I may go even more meta for a second, developing software is like developing a psyche to me.

We meet lots of self proclaimed open minded people every day that still judge a book by it's cover or a sound bite they heard 10 years ago that they still think is relevant. It's in some parts likely remnants of the ignorant and bigotrous past that the better part of society works hard to uplift and out educate. We get our education about the world from tv and people instead of taking a minute to turn a stranger (or a strange way of doing something) into a person we can relate to, or an experience we can relate to.

The issue you raise about pessimism.. If common sense was so common... why isn't it everywhere already?

What are the critical stumbling blocks that are occurring in the paths of individuals who choose to live by insecurity instead of finding some authentic personal sovereignty over their ability to take in, process, and contribute positively to the benefit of all of mankind?

I wonder sometimes if it's the drop of enlightenment syndrome.. where a drop of self-understanding leads someone to think they now will know everything they come across in an instant.

This conversation is more about a symptom though, from a lack of positive and healthy inner dialogue, which prevents positive and healthy self development that fuels unity instead of division.

It's just easier to say you're dumb and I know the right thing instead of being able to be open to change.

I've always thought the person discovering a universal truth in an argument is the winner, they got to learn and grow as a person. The person who may have helped deliver that truth might have strengthened their own belief by reviewing why they believed those things, but beyond that, it can feed insecurity to put on the facade of ego.

I think I'm at my quota of HN for the day, thanks for the cool comment about future goals, I liked that a lot.
I especially like the one that adds a slot to a smartphone case to hold a credit card, or a few dollars!
Fortunately I'm in a one-service-one-server environment, so I may be biased here ;)
Shares come in different classes with different valuations in any case, there's no single number. Presumably zwigby is talking about the eventual market price of a post-IPO public share. But of course there's no requirement that these be issued 1:1 with the existing shares.
We need a plugin that automatically encrypts everything before it goes to the cloud and then decrypts it when we download. So when the subpoena start to rain our data is safe regardless of what Microsoft or Dropbox are forced to do by the gov
true. i did my lesson and avoid everything that does not show "backed by amazon". That's why i mention "return rate of 80%"

i did bought some of those from 3rd party, and those are in the garbage.
Yes you should, but if you have them: do it. That’s what the article says. ;) Please don’t push it in a wrong direction.

What I actually wrote is: because we’re a LAMP web hoster, we compile MySQL+PHP+Apache ourself. And because we’re a Python shop, we don’t let Ubuntu/Red Hat dictate which Python version we use.
I tried creating an account, never got a "your account is created" message on the page or in a email.
I also tried logging in using the app but i guess my account isnt set up.
Everyone here is talking as if it's a all/nothing game. I'm using both DropBox (to continue to share with existing people) and SkyDrive for my larger, private stuff. I was able to move several gigs off of DropBox (with no effects with current people I share with) and then downgraded my account. A 2 Gig should be enough for me to share with the people I already share with, and I moved several gigs to MSFT.

Personally, I think DropBox should have had a smaller, paid plan than the $10/50 gigs. I only needed about 5 -7 total.

Problem solved for now, though.

Edit: I should add that my gigs of stuff I uploaded to SkyDrive today took a fraction of the time that my DropBox uploads take (not entirely sure why, but I've always felt DB throttles large files when uploading).
I'll check that out. Thank you for your suggestion. One thing I find strange though, this started happening after I upgraded to Lion. It wasn't like that when I was using Snow Leopard and both Time Machine and Spotlight exist in Snow Leopard.
This article is very short sighted and tries to address an issue that cannot be solved by the tools he has.

Let's start with the title. "Software Engineers Will Work One Day for English Majors".

How about "Software Engineers Will Work One Day for someone" because those two options are basically the same except that one is flame bait.

You have two pills you can choose from: Red pill is entrepreneurship; Blue pill is salary/contract. The red pill is the only way for above title to not be true. Blue Pill means you'll be working for someone. Either pill is fine it comes down to personal preference.

Ignoring entrepreneurship (because this article isn't the place for it); the article states that by age X, we will price ourselves out of a job because the newer model is the shinier model. So you shouldn't or be aware that there is a glass ceiling when becoming an engineer.

I'm going out on a limb here but, that is the wrong way to think. You are out of a job at age X because you've been sitting on your degree for 10+ years! Go F'n learn something and demonstrate that you are better and deserve that role + salary increase. You work for that "English Major/Human/H1-B Visa" person because they worked harder than you and stole your lunch.

Here is a real solution: Create/Find/Get a master’s degree in leadership & management for people with a technical background. These technical people need the soft skills it takes to make it to the next level. Getting rid of a H1-B visa program doesn’t solve the problem; it is just a stop gap.

In the end, you just need to update and learn new valuable skills.
Dotfiles.github.com - A guide to dotfiles on GitHub
Nick Bilton has a Brain Fart
SEC filings tend, amusingly, to be very down on the company filing them. They're filled with lists of risks, to better fend off the inevitable shareholder lawsuits. But of course because "everybody knows" the SEC paperwork is fudged downwards, it gets treated just like marketing material (which everyone knows is fudged upwards) and ignored.
Sadly, the closest thing to the 'numbers' promised in the headline are D'Angelo's GPA and the magnitude-free claim that traffic has been "breaking record after record".

It would be nice to know real details: are their 'boards' taking off? What are more demographic details on the newer users? What's the rate of change or new record levels?

I believe the larger-than-just-Q&A theme of Quora is still: moderating and surfacing reliable information, against the backdrop of an increasingly polluted and adversarial open web. While it's sad that's necessary, it's a big and important enough opportunity to justify their (prior and rumored) valuations.
People overestimate the difficulty in learning different alphabets (and the assumed difficulty of the languages which use them).

I'm on vacation in Israel this week and learned the Hebrew alphabet with standard flash cards in 2 hours (incidentally by doing something similar to this post by remembering the names based on something the character looks like). At various points I've learned the Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets in a similar amount of time.

The real difficulty is, naturally, actually learning the language. The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.
Yes - I realize this is either a cynical political game to make a politician look like a champion of freedom / a salutary reminder to the police about the constitution (delete as appropriate)

Of course any police officer that can't think of a dozen things to arrest someone for - probably wouldn't be on the street anyway!
Honestly I didn’t think it would be necessary. :-/

Your example is btw the advanced version. Many people just ssh on the host, fire up screen and start their server inside.
The Psychology Behind Redesigns: Are You Just Insecure?
There are two issues at hand:

1) People are pretty terrible at understanding things exponentially (or overall, just non-linearly). Bumps in the road for programming I've seen can set a time goal back by 10x. Thought it would take a week? Suddenly its more than two months.

2) As highlighted here, we're often bad at translating all of our assumptions and intuitiveness into code. Its just a website with a login, with a, etc.... Yet, there's a lot of details there that you're forgetting about.

Experience is the best thing here you can hope for, but even that can fail. Unless you're doing exactly what you've done before, you're going to hit bumps.

Also, no client wants to hear an overly long and safe estimate. You might even think it will take 6 months, but the client wants to hear 2. Everyone else is telling them 2. You look incompetent if you say 6, so you say 2... maybe 3.
From the grandparent post: but when I see the spelling mistakes . I don't disagree with the conclusion that the original poster did not present a compelling argument, even if it where spelled correctly, but spelling has very little to do with ones ability to reason. All too often people use it as an indicator of intellect in other areas of reasoning, when doing the same thing in public to a person with speaking difficulties would be out of the question. It is roughly the same offense, but for some reason it is far more acceptable in written communication, this causes a lot of long harbored issues for those that suffer from the affliction.
Weight.

An MP5A2 [1] weighs 2.5 kilos.
100 rounds of 10mm weighs 2.3 kilos.
Add the weight of a drum magazine.

Can the model used carry 4.8 (+) kilograms? 10 and 1/2 pounds seems like a load.

[1] Going with the first SMG model that came to mind.
[2] 1 of three calibers an MP5 can fire.
This. Always push yourself to learn.
French pronunciation might be okay, but it's definitely quite difficult the other way round because many words have some parts which just change how the rest is pronounced or have no sound at all.
I think this is the difference between a constructed language and a constructed script. There are several examples of scripts being constructed in a short time period by one or a few individuals, that have worked out great. I don't know any constructed languages that have had comparable success.
I’m sorry if that felt to you like that. I’ll consider rewording it.

update I added some more context. I would never spit on my beloved tmux. :)
'Codea'-Created 'Cargo-Bot' Made on the iPad, Hits the App Store
You could almost make (d)ropping items into a similarity, too.
The 48k model only had 32k of available ram, of which roughly 8k was screen memory and system variables. The lower 16k was ROM.
This is worth getting your head around just for the console.

<this post is partially for those of you who are, like me, relatively new to javascript. If you're one of the demigods that works at twitter/facebook, go ahead and ignore this>

I've been transitioning all of my projects from python cgi scripts (yuck), to shtml files, javascript clients, and APIs that run on node.js.

For somebody like me, that has been writing python+cgi for the last 5 years, diving into javascript was daunting. Terrifying even.

Console made this a lot, lot, lot easier. In javascript, you can call

console.log("thing")

and it will print it out to the console (again, this is obvious if you're done any JS development, I'm sure).

But that isn't all...

Suppose that I'm working with an object called map_pins. In the javascript console, I can just type:

map_pins;

and it will print out the object for me in a tree that I can traverse by clicking the little sideways triangles.

Very, very nice.

I can also interact with my javascript functions from the console. If I have a function called update_bounds(), I can force it to fire from the console by just typing:

update_bounds()

This is really, really nice. Before I discovered this, my javacsript was full of alert("I made it to this without crashing");

It was awful.

If you're learning JS and OP's article looks over your head, at least take the console away from it.
Cool! 15 minutes sounds about right. I learned it over a single pint on my last trip to Seoul. I can tell you navigating the city becomes easier when you start to understand signs like megchu (beer) and tsikin (chicken) :-)

(sorry for the quick transliterations)
I'd be careful about that generalization, since a fair number of scripts require you to be able to speak the language before you can really even transliterate properly.

In many semitic languages, they don't write the vowels, which is no problem if you're versed in the language, but makes it much harder as a learner. (Not to mention the multiple letter forms if you're at the start/middle/end of a word in Arabic, but that's easy to get used to.) I believe there are cases were you _can't_ identify a word without understanding the context of the sentence, but I can't cite proof of that off hand.

It's probably fair to say that most western alphabets, and virtually all contrived alphabets are trivial though.
RentHop (YC S09) Launches Algorithmic Apartment Search In Boston
"Cargo-Bot was developed by Rui Viana using Codea. After creating an initial prototype he spent several months polishing and perfecting his design. The completed Codea project was then imported into the Codea Xcode Template (to be released soon) and published as a native iPad application." -- http://twolivesleft.com/CargoBot/
Do these "Plagiarize Other Apps to Try To Make a Quick Buck" articles make anyone else throw up a little?
If the page is not HTTPS an attacker could inject html to redirect your data a site which is not stripe (say the attackers fake stripe). HTTP stripe forms are not secure.
Network Science of the Game of Go
>I've noticed an uptick of the "poor maligned Microsoft" angle lately. It is a boorish tactic to neuter counterpoints (essentially the yang of the "fanboy!" rallying cry).

There are a bunch of MS haters around, even on HN.

For example, Microsoft watcher and insider Paul Thurrott's site http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN(banned from even appearing on the new page), most probably due to excessive flagging from haters and fanboys of other platforms, while Gruber's posts get top billing.

> I would argue that many Microsoft products get a pass they would not get from any other company.

Really?
so is this more like bribing politicians or more like paying the bad guys to be left alone?
Some good will come of this I think. Much of what Google would want to lobby for, the rest of us in software would. Industries that make a fraction of what software does spend so much more on lobbying and reap the benefits, its absurd that software companies have not followed suit.

I certainly am not naive enough to think all of Google's aims will be noble here, but I suspect they'll be closer to it than Apple or Microsoft.
Ideally there is a one-to-one mapping between text and speech. To me at least French is more difficult in thespeech-to-text direction (because of all those mute letters at the end of most words esp. verb forms that sound the same parler, parlez, parlais, parlaient, parlai, parlé) while English is more difficult in the text-to-speech
It's a record for Google, and a comparatively high amount for a tech company. But $5M certainly isn't a notable lobbying expense in Washington.
Yeah, alphabets are usually pretty easy to learn. I can read (and write) the two syllabic Japanese "alphabets" - really syllibaries - which only took a week or two to learn. Of course, you need to practise to get good at it.
I don't get it. Can I say the same thing about GDrive?

"Yes much like Google+ is a Facebook killer."

So GDrive too is destined to fail?

I guess it's cool to be snarky and earns you some points, but are you trying to make a point here?