skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WSJ: Sony Rejected Download-Only Next-Generation Console
No, keep asking. Ask until you are blue in the face. Just look at the Facebook IPO- yes, they have a business model, but that doesn't stop people asking whether they will make more money, or even continue to make money in the face of mobile, etc. Look at Netflix and their various issues over the years.

These are all huge challenges. To dismiss it with a hand-wave and say "the answers are all obvious" seems wildly misguided. The only reason I can think you would take that attitude is because you don't want to think about it.
What prevents you from doing this with ajax post on every existing website?
Chrome OS Takes a Leap In The Right Direction
What key role did Meeker play in creating the first tech bubble?
It's not really incompetence by Facebook either. Facebook is strategically distancing itself from iOS by making the iOS native application almost identical to the HTML5 application in user experience (look at the previous iOS app by Joe Hewitt -- it was much better -- they didn't degrade it for no reason). Seriously, I can't immediately tell the difference between using it on iOS or from within Mobile Safari.

That way, they're protected when they get into a real pissing war with Apple -- if Apple pulls their app from the store for whatever reason, they have gotten their entire user base used to a Mobile Safari-quality experience.
That actually sounds kind of cool, but I can't imagine it fitting a big company. Maybe it works for ultra-small companies or individual teams.

Where do ya work, might I ask?
I would posit that you are in the Top 5%. Can you imagine your average PHP web dev trying to grok monads? In the at-times echo chamber around here it's easy to forget just how many people make a living righting VBScript macros, Java, or Cold Fusion, or whatever non-sexy language you want to name.
Useful rake command that converts all the html files to haml in Rails
IPhone 5 disclosed (controlled leak)
Aim & Shoot: Soccer Balls - Free Online Games
I've experienced all the trouble you describe. But really if a person is truly interested in learning something, there is nothing really stopping him. It hardly takes anything to go to the internet download python, a tutorial and start building something. If a person can't even do as simple a thing like this for his career, than I seriously doubt he will go through the grind and do all tough work required for success.

By all means, complain about getting put into a shitty project. But you can't blame the the company for all your troubles. Because career management really is up to the individual, waiting for somebody else to do it for you really shows lack of seriousness on your part.

I know of a few friends who work on COBOL/Mainframes. Quite few times I had advised to pick up a language like Python for their own good. But often the answers are 'What will I get', 'Will I go onsite doing that', 'Look the other guy did nothing and is still at onsite, why cant I get lucky like that'.

Trust me these people never want to learn. They just want to have it the easy way. Fast forward when they see a good programmer making it big in a product company suddenly they start cribbing about how company/manager didn't help them grow technically. While the fact is all the while they themselves didn't want to go the technical way.

The other parts I totally agree with you. I have faced the same frustration as you do. I even know of managers who had never heard of version control systems. Who never knew what a unit test is, or even simple things like a Excel Macro(Which falls into much of their own work).

Coming to those kind of managers, most of them are now facing the heat. Big Corps are cutting down on managerial layers big time. The 90's and early 2000's rush is over. Every one knows that.
Lego Friends has been panned? By who? My daughter absolutely loves them. They come in three different shades of pink and two shades of purple, which is a huge hit, and she's got all the pieces she needs to make houses and gardens and such.

Before we discovered them (last year at around Christmas time), she played with her brother's Lego just as well, but I think the real lesson from Lego Friends is that Lego was not making a diverse enough play system for children - Lego City has been particularly boring for probably a dozen years.
About.me API Enables Developers To Integrate Custom Apps
Twitter already has 100+ million users, a business model and reasonable revenue. But I'm pretty sure many are still asking how will they make money for many other reasons.

I suppose when people ask "how will they make money" they're not expecting a short "I'll just sell ads" as it seems to be what the author is implying. But instead they're expecting a detailed analysis of your whole business model versus market research of how many people would actually be interested in paying for that.

Investors usually ask for detailed multi-page business plans and not a single page business canvas. These are only meant to give you an overall idea to spark interest, not to justify an investment.
The worst part is, there's an easy correlation, not just between volume of users but age of users to the site, and the quality of content. The subreddits that have exploded in popularity recently, and the ones that were only more recently added to the homepage, have some of the lowest quality content ever. Even when compared to subreddits that have been around longer, or were formerly on the homepage.
I seriously think Facebook is going to collapse soon. It's so overhyped it's not even funny -- just look to their stocks to see a prime example. So many people are just itching to get away from it now that it can't last long. We'll see, of course. But it is soon to be a Myspace, et al.
HTML 5: The Next Big Thing for Content
Hmm. Well I was thinking in the context proposed by the grand-grand...parent, even though he backtracked:

"...eugenics.
This is not something I am opposed to from a scientific point of view.
We do it with livestock, so why not us?"

You can be predisposed to a lot of things -- diabetes, heart problems, and so on -- most of those don't necessarily prevent you from reproducing. But being "intelligent, motivated, imaginative" has little to do with having a "disadvantageous" genetic makeup leading to health issues. So you are not taking the whole "nature" part into account, only part of it.

Also note that I am not necessarily supporting eugenics, just thinking aloud. At the same time, I don't see how your proposal is any better than "classical" eugenics from the human rights point of view. We can take it one step further and assign an importance coefficient for voting. Let the professor/researcher vote count for 3 units; as for the proles, .7 will suffice. After all, why shouldn't people with intelligence, self-control, and imagination have more of a say in where the country is headed -- it's mostly their kids who will live in this country in the future, so it's only fair.
I am not a woman, but I've purchased plenty of bras in my time.

How are they going to make such a complicated process simple, and online? Women have different preferences, and in my opinion spend far too little time when choosing a bra (probably because bra shopping is such an uncomfortable experience).
> At the current rate, in 2025...

If something can't go on forever, it won't. The US will solve the budget problem at the very last second before financial self-destruction, but not one minute earlier.
GNU code has been recommended to me.
SQLite
Ask HN: Any startups renting desk space+wifi in SF for less then $200/month?
There are regular posts and plenty of white knights that defend opposing views. The problem is that most people, as I find with many anti-gay, anti-drug, pro-government people in my day-to-day life, lack the ability to articulate a mature thought supporting their view.

On the weird case that there is a good discussion, the opposing view is upvoted. There were several discussions yesterday stemming from gay marriage and there were several posts that basically said "I'm disgusted purely by the thought of homosexual acts, thus I'm opposed to gay rights" in a more eloquent tone and they were upvoted to foster the discussion.

The frontpage yesterday had a very balanced discussion regarding how MJ does not affect MS in some of the ways that people had hoped. The comments were full of discussion back and forth and first hand accounts from MS sufferers.
Ways to Get a Tech Job Without a Tech Degree
Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Entrepreneurs
"Outsource your monetization" has to be one of the most nebulous statements I've ever heard. Last time I checked, it was a critical factor in the success of a company and shouldn't be taken lightly (especially when the proffered solutions are "sell ads" and "use Kickstarter", among others).

That's quickly approaching the slippery-slope of outsourcing your entire company -- product development, personnel, and monetization. Then what are you left with?!
Wow, is this really what bills in the Netherlands look like? 500 words, half a page?

How do we get our govt to stop churning out multi-thousand page piles of pork-barreling instead of simple, straightforward resolutions like this?
I'm not really sure what FB hopes to gain from trying to elbow their way into the mobile phone market. The market is pretty well divided between Google and Apple with MS and RIM mixed in as well.

It seems like there are cheaper ways to improve their users' experience on existing mobile platforms.

The only non-nefarious reason I can think of is they feel a threat from both Google and Apple in their area of expertise - social graphs.

Of course, it's possible that it's all a feint on the part of FB to get some loving from Apple.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...
Street art of the day: SpongeBob in Rome
Yes.

And it's a good thing to keep in mind with talk about self driving cars and 100mph HOV lanes on HN recently.
That is really neat! Thanks for building that.
Well put. I get why they don't get it, but from my perspective it looks like technical gold-plating a lot of the time. I generally aim to amplify the power of the human mind, not eliminate it from the system.

Of course, these algorithms are cool in certain contexts where you never want to think about it again. For example, ad placement for a giant ad network running against a lot of UGC content. They remind me of neural networks like that: the post office doesn't care how the machine recognizes hand-written zip codes, just as long as they do it reliably.

But startups are all about learning, and interface design is where you have direct contact with users. I want to soak in the data. I want to hang out in people's living rooms when they're using my site. A fancy Lazy Button (great phrase) is the last thing I need.
It's not baseless speculation. There is no other reason for the app to have been pulled, and a similar app has been pulled for the same reason.
I don't think the business model is commoditized. I understand that there are a wide variety of solutions that a site can pick up and switch very quickly if need be, denoting a 'commodity'. It's also true that the costs of these 100MM+ user things have dropped precipitously, making it easier to prolong the decision on the business model. However, it's called the "business" model for a reason. Without one, you don't have a business, you have an app. If a business model doesn't fit a business, it becomes a bad business.

100 million users is a huge opportunity. There are only 11 countries in the world with that kind of population. Maybe that just makes it easier to use ill-fitting business models longer. It seems like the internet is getting a bit tired of ads.
Id argue that college and the guilded trades (law, medicine )by have a net dysgenic influence in terms of propagating iq genes. They cause a great deal of delay in reproduction for the higher iq strata. Ofttimes, they don't reproduce at all, especially the females.
WTF is up with that hate for rich people who want to do worthwhile things with their wealth?

You realize the vast majority of rich people just sit on it right? Maybe they would stop sitting on it if we were not so hard on the ones who made good use of it...
Presumably it is exactly the same as in any other web application--the save method is using an HTTP request under the covers, which must be rejected if the user is not authorized to perform that action.
No resque setup/management, no auto-scaling setup, scale huge with zero effort (go from processing one image to millions without lifting a finger), redundancy and reliability (how are you going to ensure that with your Resque?), full visibility into your tasks, etc.
When Slow Data is Bad Data
"Outsourcing your monetization" sounds awfully close to "outsourcing your profits"
Mary Meeker's Annual KPCB "Internet Trends" Report [.pdf]
Good to know it's in the works! Definitely a messy problem with current browser limitations.
Family Tech Support Myths: Don't login as Admin
I like this, it's a very simple example reiterating that it's dangerous to play with statistics.
Because it's a pre-canned response of someone out of tune saying "they don't know what they want so it isn't worth listening to them. Just let them complain till they realise that we were right all along."
Comparing the JS guide with the iOS and Android guides I see two absences:

1) Files

2) Facebook and Twitter users

May be that it's not possible to upload files or authenticate using OAuth using only the JS SDK, and without having and external server that secures the private keys?
Google Brings ChromeOS To The Desktop, Launches Its First Chromebox
CyanogenMod downloaded 2 million times Gadgets
Opera Mini Handler untuk Android Gratisan | All About Cyber
Good idea. Though if they bought both Rim and Opera I think I'd cry. There is me trying to desperately escape Facebook.
iCar? ;) that could be awesome ;)
What all startups could learn from the Facebook IPO
IronWorker is billed by the second so if an image takes 5 seconds to process, you only get billed for 5 seconds of the hour. No need to deal with auto-scaling heroku workers to keep your costs down.

And priority on IronWorker has a much different meaning than setting it on your own private Resque instance so comparing that based on price isn't really a fair comparison.
Thank you, while there is certainly a grey area, and I don't expect a company to know the future. They should be actively figuring out how to make their company sustainable. If not, you aren't a business, you are either a charity, hobby or scam.
It would probably work pretty well for a game based around creating and sharing levels.
You make a lot of points that I agree with. I just don't think your solution is the right one. Math, when it comes to writing proofs and peer review, should absolutely be optimized for other experts. Whatever makes communicating ideas precisely among themselves is what's important here. I don't see the benefit of changing this process so those of us as outsiders can take a peek.

But as you said, there is a very large part of math that deals with applying these concepts and communicating them to non-mathematicians. The way we go about this is definitely in need of a do-over. Finding more intuitive ways to communicate these ideas is critical a critical part of this (possibly including more descriptive variable names). But, I think there will always be an inherent chasm between the math experts and those who are using the results they discover. An example is the difference between the calculus track of courses that every science major takes, and say, abstract algebra. The math that mathematicians do and the math that the rest of us learn will always be vastly different. It's just the nature of the beast.
Mr. Venter touches on this in a talk: http://longnow.org/seminars/02008/feb/25/joining-3-5-billion...
Thanks for replying. I'm going to check again. I must have been doing something wrong. I'll contact you by a more appropriate means when I've figured out what.
Hey! I'm working on an app that does that. Bar codes are a bit tough to deal with (no 'central' database), as are subsidiary relationships, but we've come up with a way to handle it. We then generate a score based on the manufacturer and what you've subscribed to, which tells you how well the product aligns with your values.

We're just finishing it up now, and it should be released in the next month or so (Android first, then iOS). We have a working mvp at the moment, and we're quite happy with how it's been going.

I could post it on HN when we release, as I'll be looking for feedback :) Or, if you have an Android, contact me and I can send you our Alpha.
Internships should be subject to labor market rules
I have never had an issue with Groupon and I have never heard of any of my friends or anyone in general having an issue with them.
It's funny, because your "Announce your vote to the world" comment (ostensibly) wouldn't be welcome on Reddit: http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/reddiquette

(No offense intended, I just thought it was hilarious in the context of this conversation. Maybe you meant it as a joke...)
In my experience: "real men" like diesel just fine here in America. So long as it's bolted to an F150 frame and can tow your whole house, and also your neighbors house, and his garage, with two Toyota Prius' parked inside.
> Even though PHP has quite an extensive function library and is a template language in itself, it doesn't provide enough to compare even to a micro framework like Flask.

PHP and Flask are two completely different things. One is a programming language and the other is a framework. To say "PHP doesn't provide enough to compare" to a microframework shows a gross ignorance of what PHP can do and a grand exaggeration of what Flask is actually doing.

> But I tell you, writing clean, understandable, side-effect free and secure code in PHP is much harder in comparison than I expected.

If you were talking about Ada or a similar language, I might agree with you, but you're talking about Python. It's just as easy to write bad Python as it is to write bad PHP.

From the rest of the post, it seems like the problem isn't that PHP is bad, but that you don't know (even remotely) how to write good PHP.
I bet this is not the most expensive POS you can get in NYC :)
The idea that any single default can possibly be considered high quality for tens of millions of users is unrealistic. That's like going to a grocery store, asking for a "default shopping cart," and hoping its contents will be suitable for you.
I sent the Parse guys a tech-support request on Friday morning before Memorial Day weekend. Most places you send emails to are a black hole and I didn't really expect a response until after the holiday weekend, if at all. To my surprise, I had an answer in my inbox by end of day! This is the kind of support I love in a company. I have not stopped telling everyone I know that they need to check out Parse. They're saving me tons of time getting my next app out the door.
A browser isn't just a "feather in the cap". It's a big, complicated machine.

There isn't really a point in the article, except that facebook should buy opera "to feel like it has come of age". What would facebook do with a browser? Provide a better user experience on the Facebook Browser TM? No, I think it would separate them a bit too much from their Mission of Helping Everybody Share Everything.
How did you guys where to place the cutoff between having a single application "page" vs having normal server-side rendered pages? It seems like you guys have somewhat of a mix here I'm just curious what percentage of the rendering is done server side vs client side. What are the relative tradeoffs between the two?

Perhaps not related to backbone but how are you encoding the different "views" in your single page application? Does the client download all of the templates upfront or how does that work? Also does the client know which template to render for a given api call or is that passed down from the server as well?

I'd be very interested in reading a blog post demonstrating how you strung all of this together! Pretty cool!

Thanks!
Agreed, plus the pain-in-the-butt Diesel engines were to start in the winter up north. All those memories are tough to shake.

I was going to buy a diesel for my next vehicle, but I cannot find anything outside of Volkswagen and I am not buying one of those[1]. I do believe the other side of the problem is that their are not many diesels to buy.

[1] poor build quality (door handles broke off) and obscene repair prices ($300 to change headlight - not user serviceable) on my friends VW bug. It had worse build quality than my 2008 Chevy Cavalier and that's saying something.
>The only non-nefarious reason I can think of is they feel a threat from both Google and Apple in their area of expertise - social graphs.

Google, perhaps.

But Apple hasn't made much of an inroad into the social sphere at all. I'm not sure if it's even going to be something that they're going to consider moving into, considering the razor thin margins that social network companies make.
I think there's something wrong with you if you are emotionally invested enough in a website you don't even like to experience anything even close to sadness or depression.
And I thought making money was the most important thing about a business. Stupid me.
The writing is so hard to read ...
By 2050 the 2nd Most Spoken Language Will Be Hindi-Urdu, the first Chinese
one thing is: freshness is a factor for google ranking. so if you could communicate a fresh page to google in exact the moment when new content arrives (+ there is a chance, that there is a "fresh" spike for search demand) then it's a factor.

but more important:

also with 50 000 000 URLs, as your site gets crawled with about 500 000 pages a day (which is average) or 1M pages a day (which is good) it takes already 50 to 100 days to index your whole site - so it makes sense to communicate only the changed sitemaps (at the exact time when they changed) to google, as the sitemaps get fetched quite fast you up your chances, that the new LP gets crawled/indexed faster. it depends on how fast your page turnaround is (new pages, updated pages, deleted pages) if it makes sense for you, or not.

(p.s.: in most cases for most business, a (near) real-time sitemap is overhead.)
I'd guess that most redditors would prefer a front page with fewer pics on it -- but pics proliferate anyway, because they're so easy to read and upvote. I don't think it's elitist to say that the situation is unfortunate.
The one equation that will save and grow your startup
You like doing UX/Design? We are hiring
OpenLDAP Everywhere Reloaded, Part I
The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate
Show HN: a platform for life stories. Featuring Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad.
Insufflated it takes about ten minutes to come on. It is extremely overwhelming - not necessarily in a bad way. Disassociates are by far the weirded class of drugs.
RIM's been trying pretty hard to build a popular smartphone (in today's market) without much success. I'm not sure having their phone's "Facebookized" would make them that much more popular - and it would almost certainly not be popular with their remaining enterprise base.

Not to mention that my sense of the cultures of these two companies (admittedly, from the outside only) is that they're about as oil-and-water as you can get. Buying RIM would mean taking on maybe a billion or more in inventory risk, plus the risk that you'd see a lot of the talent walk out the door anyway (something that's been going on for a while now.)