skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like we just need a wrapper that lets you pick whether to use Parse or Backbone. That should eliminate the worry of lock in (you'd still have to add the server code if you convert away from Parse, but you'd have to do that anyway).
How To Tell When the Euro Crisis Gets Really Serious
Technology Is At Its Very Best When It’s Invisible
What kind of weird conflicts? My GitRepos are in my My Documents folder and that folder is backed up to Dropbox. But I haven't synced the git folder to my laptop yet.
I like this idea, however at first i thought it was allowing me to get notified of updates on a particular HN thread. I guess what i'm trying to say is maybe there is a better word than follow.

In general, i really like it though! Well done.
Facebook: 29 Acquisitions and Counting - Who is next?
Must read list of optimization manuals for C++ and Assembly
a disclosure that you're one of the founders of Parse would be appropriate.
There's a race to control client, which is mobile. Apple or android can lock Facebook out or require them to use an ad system or a payment system. To control and profit in the future they need to own the entire stack, through to the user, only then will their revenue stream be drawbridge free.
Here's a link to the actual app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kicksend.a...
>> Or is this referring to the fact that I can't have shared variables at all, so I can't cache super common data structures in a local piece of RAM?

This isn't true. You can store variables in APC and they are available in local RAM across all PHP processes (within CGI + webserver at least, the same APC cache is not available to cronjobs and other scripts).

>> "2. I won’t need experts" - It must be nice, if boring, to be working on really simple codebases where anyone that can hack PHP can work on your application.

This can be read as a negative, but I see it as a positive in a lot of cases, i.e. when you already have a plan for your app, and you can get by with a reasonably good developer who can follow directions and write good code. I think what the OP meant was that you're not constrained to rock-star/ninja keywords, but if you find that person, then all the better.

>> This goes along with "11. It plain works" -- yea, depends on how you define works. "A lot of that is based on “assumptions” (or shortcuts) that PHP takes to solve a problem. Most often those shortcuts work, and the workarounds are very easy to implement (I’m thinking mainly about strict type checking here)."
>> And that's the real issue that I can see with PHP. Sometimes, some stuff might sorta make sense, and the rest of the time you're in this weird "gotcha" land, with the inconsistent API and language design.

Correct, PHP is not a strictly typed language and the userland function and class names are not very consistent. There's a lot of other languages that are more elegant and fun to work with.

It does have very real benefits in terms of flexibility, ease of deployment, expected behavior under heavy load, and finding developers who can learn quickly whatever is unique about your stack.

Every language and stack has it's own "gotcha" land; this issue is not unique to PHP. Honestly responding to this in threads is kind of a waste since we'll all be in this conversation again the next time another PHP good-or-bad thread pops up on HN.
The consensus of NoSQL these days is Not only SQL. Nobody is disagreeing that SQL (and the underlying relational algebra) is expressive and general.

For a lot applications/use cases, schema free get/put/delete is a lot more concise than any SQL concoctions. Besides, using RDBMS/SQL to store/retrieve complex graph is neither beautiful or concise.

Just because you can use your Swiss army knife to kill a few roaches doesn't mean you should.
> Maybe it's simply the Thrun factor?

That man's track record of amazing projects is really jaw dropping. Self driving cars, udacity and glass? I want a planet with more people like that in it.
Play Safe - The Safest Way To Let Your Kids Play On Your Android
there would be if an error if error_reporting(E_ALL) was used.
Sadly you have to manually set an exception handler if you want it as an exception :(
Totally Agree! Maybe this thread will lead to some new idea.
"Watch Discussion" could also be good, but anyway it shouldn´t be too long.
nReduce: an alliance of hackers
Looking at http://www.googleventures.com/companies it just seems like they've missed so many of the great companies over the past few years, though there are definitely some good ones in there.

Your personal portfolio is far more impressive. Would be neat if you went there too. You, Kevin Rose, and Joe Kraus would make GV a more exciting investor.
If it would cost as SSDs do, it's pretty simple then: you mount NVM as /, and /var & /srv are still on disk. All your programs lose start-up time and most of swapping.

If it would cost more, you can use it as a persistent block cache (that survives reboot), but it doesn't make much economic sense since nobody is willing to pay money for just faster start-up and warm-up after reboot. If you have 8G of NVM, you could just read 8G off disk in something like 30 sec and be settled with regular RAM.
Rajuk Clg Students Sex Scandel
Facebook to offer e-payment services in Russia
Instagram ;-)
Causation is the other way around. The default(s) will become lower quality, as a direct result of the additional, unfiltered attention. They will get firehosed with a larger audience, and the number of participants will grow in a way not compatible with maintaining a consistent community or personality. Additionally, the switch in community growth from a "pull" model (I'm interested enough in X to actively search for communities about X on the internet) to a "push" model (X was pushed in my face, and I care enough to respond) will tend to dilute the focus and quality of the community.
Modern file systems are not very transparent, but any process guts are much worse. My debugging experience suggests so.

Files are data and structures are part code. You can't do much with code 'cause of turing completeness.
I'm confused as to what a set of glasses has to do with an implanted camera that caused issues for a fictional group of people who were cheating on each other?

Any examples that aren't absurd from the get go?
It's not in the slightest bit true about Danny Elfman -- in fact, it's farther from the truth in his case than any other film composer I can think of. With the amount of synth and guitar that Danny performs himself, he actually has up to half his tracks laid down by the time the cue is getting approved by the director. Not only is he not outsourcing the composing, he's not even outsourcing the performance except where he needs to. And he's certainly not fiddling around with a tape recorder when he has a $100k+ Pro Tools rig in his studio.

All film composers have different processes, and it's true that few of them take on the details of notation, and all of them have teams that they work with. But you're absolutely right that that's a good thing, because that's how film music works: Turnover is extremely short (sometimes as little as a couple weeks to write an hour of music), notes on the page are not the product, and specialization allows the process to move forward and the job to get done.

This blog post irks me in part because it's an unkind rumor, and in part because it's a completely inept metaphor.
Figuring out which function has broke might take a year (literally). Sometimes reboot is just reboot.
They've changed a lot since then. Not trying to defend Apple (I disagree with a lot of what they do on the App Store), but I give them credit for learning from their mistakes (I think they need to reject more crappy/scammy apps with false advertisements though - like this one: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/record-call/id480526628?mt=8 )
>a small advantage that can't make up for the fact that it isn't as universal as e-mail or texting

Well, I'm a teenager, and sadly Facebook is far more universal as a means of contact than texting or e-mail, personally. I don't have the email addresses or phone numbers of most of the people I know (often because I don't know them well enough), but I do have them friended on Facebook.
I did read the thread, thank you.

"An unmaintainable codebase makes it hard to deliver working software in the future." is a truism that I chose to respond with a question, because I am not of the opinion that Domenic_S was even remotely suggesting that anyone write unmaintainable code.

Domenic_S's argument of "working software is the most important deliverable" isn't really a bad point, regardless of what language you're using. If you have maintainable code that doesn't address the application's requirements, how much does maintainability matter then?

In the real world, there is hierarchy of priorities, and for most, working is at the top of the priority list.
Good work, I like it and am forking it to add a little bit extra I may have for it after practice tonight.
Personally I don't like the idea of "image" based computing very much. I mean, it's fine in a lot of circumstances, but the file system provides a nice broadly compatible database that is consistent across programs.

I think the need for such a well defined and accepted user organizable data store isn't going away regardless of the underlying storage medium.

I like that my file system can be reasoned about in very concrete ways. I'm okay with using a tag based system like gmail, but I find it very flat and more difficult to organize vs traditional hierarchy of folders.

And btw, GET OFF MY LAWN!
Sierra Nevada completes four Dream Chaser milestones
There's something missing here. The Apple TV is still a hobby. 3M units a year is not significant enough to sustain an app ecosystem similar to the iOS platform.

Apple has been in this position before with small platforms. A good example is webobjects. They lowered the price and relaxed the license on several occasions hoping it would take off, but so long as it didn't they didn't invest in it too significantly.

I think John might be right that there is a new platform being announced, and certainly this level of TBC implies some very significant software announcements, but I don't think its AppleTV. Or at least not the current AppleTV.

Either some major new functionality in iOS, or a significant new TV product or something else completely seems more likely to me.
Sean Parker: Apple may have been behind Spotify’s late US entry
I left a job a few years ago the moment that I realized that the people who were allowed to have ideas and the people who were allowed to implement ideas were always going to be, by deliberate design, different sets of people.
Simple. You put them in some hipster frames. BAM, instant success.
I don't think it's just a matter of authorization. I think you would have to use something like anti-forgery tokens to prevent automated scripting of http requests.
Awesome tip! Thanks!
to gauge marginal positive externalities, invert the principal component & see what remains.

as an example - suppose you wake up tomorrow and google search stops working. never mind why - some random bug impossible to figure out, so it just stops working. Then what are the positive externalities that remain ?
Well, gmail. youtube. android. gdrive. maps. picasa. blogger. reader. googledocs. googlecheckout. etc etc etc...
and that's not counting a single api / framework / language( gwt, go , dart, chromium, etc etc...)

now suppose you wake up tomorrow and facebok stops working. Then what are the positive externalities that remain ?
Well, ???
I'm a single parent (full & sole custody). You said "single parenting + full time job + nights/weekends-style startup"... I mean I'm really, really not a helicopter parent; I have a life apart from raising my kid. That being said I think a single parent who's working full-time AND doing a "nights/weekends startup" would wind up short-changing SOMETHING.

I can't imagine there would be any satisfaction to be had in that kind of stretching.
5 Things About Television
Good question.

I can't talk about my current company's business model, although anybody looking at it would say that ads are certainly one plausible candidate. For what it's worth, the last company I helped start is ad supported, as is one I worked on in the 1995-2000 timeframe. Before that, I consulted a lot for publishers. (The old kind, whose business plans started with: first we slice the trees real thin.)

I say that to demonstrate that I'm not entirely knocking ad-supported businesses. They can be a great way to pay for something that is otherwise hard to monetize. But I also know how hard they are to get to scale, and I know there's a difference between them and businesses that fill a need strong enough that people are willing to open their wallets.

So in sum, I'm ok with ad revenue as a business model. But I hate, hate, hate people using it as a fairy tale so that people can pretend they don't need to think about their business model.
Exactly! Reddit is Usenet, except good stuff flows to the top and spam is eliminated through community voting and moderation, which is an improvement and no small one either. Plus it's easier for the non-techies to create/customize subreddits with their own subculture, so it can evolve and keep people engaged. So far, Reddit has scaled far better than Usenet did.
Sometimes those weak ties are weak for a reason.
Which of the Basic Assumptions of Modern Physics are Wrong?
> If that's a waste, then I don't really know what else is meaningful in life.

The "strong tie"? I'm just not so sure changing the "weak tie" is such a net positive for society. I'm not going to claim that FB doesn't have its positives but I'd rather see a society building strong ties with fewer people than weak ties with many. (and, frankly, doing nothing but wasting time for hours per day)
This form factor paired Google's self-driving car tech seems like a no-brainer. High MPG rivals electric cars, cheap manufacturing cost, and for once, even the licensing interests align. I'd buy one.
thanks for the answers!
I would guess that there would be some form of vesting and/or the earnout would be affected.
Google has become the fat portal we love to hate.
Yeah, that's true for a lot of people who don't realize it. It's much easier to Friend somebody you met at a party than it is to exchange email addresses - and then you never have to ask "is this address still good after all this time?"

I have over 400 facebook friends. I only have 200 contacts in my email address book, and most of those are probably stale.
in this world, how do you programs on different computers reference the same piece of data? ipv6 address/memory address?

the whole path/file thing is really useful for distributed computing.

Also what would users use for object naming(especially across address spaces)? How do I search for a presentation or spreadsheet without a reference to it?
Agreed 100%.

The thing that really kills me about this: cluelessness about one's business model can be an adaptive trait in a bubble. When the situation is crazy, sanity is not a virtue.

A post like this makes a good Exhibit A in a case that we're in Bubble 2.0.
It'll be awesome for prototypes!
Death To The Dock Connector? Apple Is Looking For A Connector Design Engineer
Quick correction to the how it works page - Singapore is not in China.
You can group subreddits together with a + symbol between them - e.g. reddit.com/r/technology+gadgets+programming
Can you say more about why? I think I know what you're getting at, but since you've talked with a lot of people I'd love to hear your broader take. (If you can't talk here, please do email me.)
There is also this older hacker news item that's relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620546
really? I post photographs on G+ entirely out of network effects - that's the site that my friends check reliably. Flickr is like a black hole, now, socially.
But the Flickr user experience is still nice compared to G+'s clunky too-much-javascript.
How could i grab a website and execute js on this site to get the complete dom?
Hi everybody,

is there a way to grab the website and execute the javascripts? Some Websites inject Content via Javascript and Ajax and it would be great to get these.

I am porgramming in Ruby. Maybe there is a way to do this with NodeJS?

Thank you for your help
Oops, boneheaded mistake. Fixed now, thanks! :)
> (And that's reads-with-no-joins, since they are not supported either.)

Am I missing something? The very next slide seems to describe how they support one-to-many joins by flattening the table hierarchy. (They also claim to allow "joins to external sources", but unfortunately there are no details given for that feature.)
Saw this on reddit yesterday. Hacker News is the new Digg.
Why is this different than say Instagram by a celeb which happens all the time?
I was hoping for more substance. The title implies the article would compare/contrast Public vs Open for APIs. But it doesn't really do that. There is a bullet list of "what makes an open API?" but not one of "what makes a public API?". Some examples of each with reasons why it they fall into the category they do would be nice as well.
I've joined as part of the NRS12 batch and I can't wait to collaborate and share my progress with other founders.

Hopefully the community will graduate some awesome startups and will give the next batch some program klout.

My biggest worry is that this batch works well and a number of companies raise investment and we see thousands upon thousands of startups flooding the process the next batch.

However I'm stoked to be part of this.

Manchester UK participant.
If I were Facebook, publicly I'd focus on growth, while quietly building killer applications with the massive amounts of data they have.

Consider how many photos they have with users' faces tagged. They'd be crazy not to leverage that data. With the right facial recognition technology they will own that space, which would be extremely useful in products that compete with, say, Project Glass.

Ditto with location data, but they don't quite have the same monopoly there, so I wouldn't be surprised if they acquire Foursquare in the next year (perhaps more difficult than Instagram give the stock price)
If you check http://www.sigmod.org/2012/, it appears this was an "industrial presentation" and not a full paper submission.
Something you may consider for your CSS: vendor prefixes are no longer required for border-radius declarations.

Mostly true for box-shadow as well, except for the Android browser I think.
Interesting angle. I suppose this illuminates how best they could go about the things they are rumored to be considering

For example, the payment processing system. This angle says they should focus most on the non-one-to-one transactions like group dinner and movie outings, splitting the rent, etc. If me paying for such things through FB helps me settle the bills and get repaid (or get to mark someone's timeline with a cheapskate whuffie point), then I have an incentive to start paying through FB, and encouraging others to do the same. Lots of other apps and services have tried to capture these transactions, but they seem to usually suffer from needing all/most of the people in the transaction to sign-up for yet another account. That is the hurdle that FB has already crossed for 4/5 of the last movie outings in my anecdotal experience.

Cell phone... well I don't see how this social context angle helps with that, since phones are already well into that context. But browser, sure. Social web-browsing has also been tried before, also seemingly always failing to overcome the hurdle FB has cleared.
Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us there's a "shift" from an analog
world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in
which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence.

The way I understand this quote, it's opposed to centuries of sociology/psychology, cf. Aristotle's zoon politikon and Lev Vygotsky's “Through others, we become ourselves.”

My point is, the nature of the influence of others on ourselves has not changed, only the medium this influence goes through is different. And needless to say that this new medium is nothing more than a complement to all others through which we already achieve social presence.
The links under 'Home' and 'Community & support' have commas at the end so won't work.
I think the great thing about this is that it's scalable. It's purely a community driven effort - you host dinners at your own location, collaborate with other teams, get mentors. The benefit of nReduce isn't it's selection, like YC, it's the community. So, if this grew to thousands, that would be great, making everyone better off and more successful.
Reminds me of a Charlie Munger quote:

that to get closer to the right answer, scholars should "invert, always invert."

You have a strong point there. Most top 100 websites I see are just frontends to databases.

I kid you not.

Their competitive advantage is proprietary data holding and network effects to get more data.

Google - search + database frontend.

Facebook - database frontend.

YouTube - database frontend.

Yahoo! - search + database frontend.

Baidu.com - search + database frontend.

Wikipedia - database frontend.

live.com - database frontend.

Twitter.com - database frontend.

QQ.COM - database frontend.

Amazon.com - database frontend.

Most of the stuff is just a front end to a database.

Their positive marginal benefit derives from holding that data, using it as leverage to get more data, and then serving it back to their users in a tight loop.
Coffee Break Hero
Commodity NVM is huge for big data transactions.

Bye bye WAL
Bye bye fsync
Hello NVM replication
I think I'm gonna cry
I get your point and you're so right a larger community could only benefit N-Reduce.

In my opinion if a few gems make it large from the program then the crowds will flock to be part of the program, misinterpreting it as a get rich scheme.

However, I'm sure this could be easily solved and is a scaling issue N-Reduce will be happy to have. :)
Thanks for the tip! I meant it was near China... Kinda.. :)
You can do this with Node+jsdom or PhantomJS.
i'm an atheist myself, but gratified to see this guys beliefs being respected. its one thing i hate about reddit.
Germany in trouble with EC over lack of ISP, telecom data retention
Widespread adoption of NVRAM may require a significant change in security models, since data once assumed ephemeral may be persistent. For example, it may be trivial to recover cryptographic keys from a running system.

(Disclaimer: I'm working on a solution to this.)
I think Go is quickly approaching the status of an 'official language.' I know this mostly by rumor, so if any Googlers can shed light on Go's role, that would be much appreciated.
Thanks hovertruck - will take that into account for the next update. I have to say I´m not a trained/professional web developer, but I know which parts can be fixed soon.
I wonder why it says "Android Version 2.2 and up, excluding Galaxy Nexus"? Anyone know why it specifically excludes the Galaxy Nexus?