skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree, based on experience. On the surface, MongoDB did solve our data problem, and we thought we sufficiently researched the technology that it would work, even attending multiple MongoDB conferences and talking to 10gen employees.

The issue was that underlying architectural decisions in MongoDB ended up biting us and limiting us rather significantly. It could be argued that this is because MongoDB is a rather new piece of tech (I disagree, I think MongoDB is fundamentally flawed, but it doesn't matter in this argument).

Because of our experience, going with the standby IS the best choice, until you _need_ something else. Riak was a change necessitated by its fast growth such that horizontally scaling was necessary when you're in an environment such as EC2. Ignoring MongoDB specifically, the IDEA of MongoDB simply isn't correct here, a Dynamo-style K/V store is the correct option, and Riak happens to be a fantastic one.
Implementers in metric countries need to take note as well, since the degree is not the SI unit for angular dimension.
I'm not saying it would be good for humanity or anything; I'm just saying I'm lazy and content with not supporting Opera.
Let’s face® it the company behind Opera could use the money that this purported acquisition would bring. Facebook on the other hand could use Opera to build a better user experience on the holy grail of social media engament, mobile!
> Who else is going to sell Facebook stock if not "insiders"

You don't understand the IPO process.

Normally, it is a company with more opportunity than capital. So it creates additional shares and then sells it during the IPO. This process is just like raising capital with VCs, except the term sheet is effectively between the new investors and the company, with the SEC adding all sorts of post-its with additional conditions.

Only since bubble v1 was it seen as some sort of "achievement" for a company; An IPO is nothing more than a poor company begging for money and willing to cause dilution in order to fill its tin cup.
Notes on the implementation of parallel breadth-first search in Rust
Adam Savage's Maker Faire 2012 Talk: Why We Make
Meth Labs & Dead Dogs: The Founder of McAfee Antivirus on the Run in Belize
Hats off to you if you can use DDD heavily. I've given up on that shortly after every time I've tried to use it. It seems very prone to crashes and lockups. MSVC will too sometimes, but it's really pretty rare.
The first call after he goes on the DNC is clearly a violation.

The calls thereafter, when he's stringing them along...not so sure. Once you start saying "I'm interested, tell me more"...I think the company has a fairly solid claim of having a business relationship...if not legally, certainly ethically.
Is Fastmail a reliable provider? Ties to Opera might give it a measure of "perceived quality".

I don't mind paying a few $ for a decent service, not tied to Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft.
well, I do not count missing features as flaws. what I mean by flawless is that iA writer does well on what it is supposed to do.
You may never see this but...try to renegotiate your contract. If they think you're worth it, they will modify the contract to allow the side project. If not, you know where you stand with them and should move on.
>This is no criticism, but for an article on responsive type/design seeing the page being slightly off in terms of fluidity made me smile. Try resizing the article down as narrowly as you can, for me it brought up horizontal scroll bars.

As it should. Adaptive page design is about adapting to different screens, and their design works from an iPhone to a 27" Mac.

It's not about never showing scrollbars when you make the screen narrower than the intended width.

Really, what should they do, show a one-word, long narrow column of text to avoid showing scrollbars?
I agree. ls is primarily a user-facing utility, and has acquired a ton of display and formatting switches. This is not a bad thing. Some of the display options are superfluous but convenient. Others are awkward, very hard, or impossible to duplicate in a pipeline.

New users don't need to be overwhelmed by the man page. -a and -l should be enough for >99% of use cases.

ls shows up in shell scripts too, but that's almost always a mistake -- or a dependency on one of the harder-to-duplicate formatting options.
Ask HN: Any HN'ers gonna be at E3 wanna meet up?
Hi HN'ers. Ill be at E3 for work, looking to meet up with HN'ers of all kinds...if there is enough, we can set up a round-table or a cocktail hour. Lets hear from ya!
Are we asking the right questions?
Do you see all that stuff flashing by when say, Photoshop starts up? Those are plugins. I'm not exactly sure what they can do other than remove the features outright.

Anyways, it starts up in roughly 6 or 7 seconds on my spinning rust drive. I can't find this something to get worked up about, especially given the feature set of Adobe products.
Office space is a fixed cost. Meaning with or without him, they would've paid that amount in rent. The same is true of the internet he used and the couch he slept on.

The only variable cost is the food he ate which was probably negligible all things considered.
It's not. If not for lobbyists we'd have no bill of rights, we'd all still be driving cars that exploded whenever they got rear ended, our rivers would still catch fire on a regular basis, etc.
But Mark is the majority shareholder...
That "N minutes left" div popup is so annoying that I stopped reading the article.
Half of Detroit's streetlights may go out as city shrinks
> I have my doubts that Facebook would pay top dollar just to open source the software.

They wouldn’t buy it just to open source it. Facebook will buy Opera for its own strategic reasons, and they will open source it only because it’s the optimal model for them to develop this kind of project.

They already open source bunch of stuff. They have the culture and the know-how.
Why is it worse to uppercase the password before hashing for people who use the same password on multiple sites? It doesn't matter if it is a 24 character password using every character set possible, if it is the same password they use somewhere else, and that place is compromised, the attacker will be able to use that password to login to the Battle.net account.
Great. I am getting calls from one company every day twice. I called them and asked them to stop calling. They said sure done. But the calls have not stopped. I am inspired by your post.
We're not talking about C#, we're talking about native code C++ development with the Win32 API. What most commercial Windows apps are still written in and what Microsoft used to call "Windows Platform SDK" or just "the Windows SDK".
Read this one if you have no idea what to read
I dabble in technology but I am not very good at it. I want to learn but when I try to learn a new tool I generally end up on pages like this (Python) - http://www.python.org/download/ - and I have no idea which version I should be using. I realized this when I was on the Notepad ++ site today - http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.1.2.html - and it explicitly says, if you don't know, use this.

Not ripping on Python, I like it, but they should tell me what to use. Same thing with your products. Their is probably one tool or pricing plan that your users choose 90% of the time. Tell everyone to use it. If they have refined tastes, they will be able to find what they are looking for.
Elixir v0.5.0 released
I never meant to sound hateful. As a matter of fact I absolutely don't "hate" DuckDuckGo --actually I seriously considered switching at some point, out of privacy concerns, and eventually decided against it, for 3 reasons, the main of which being the UI and graphic identity. Besides, I feel a lot of sympathy for people like you --I know what it is to be a startup taking on an established behemoth.

But that's the thing with criticism done over the Internet: readers will tend to lend the worse intentions to the poster, an effect that is multiplied when the reader is also the target. Had I written this criticism in an email to you instead of a HN thread, I would have sugar-coated it in order to be listened. There is no better way to have your opinion ignored than to make it sound as an attack on your audience's identity.

Still: do consider a rebranding of your product. The best niche to start from if your are a search engine is probably the niche of top hackers, rather than middle-aged women. Mainstream markets are conquered by starting with the knowledgeable power users for the kind of product you're building (PG has said that quite a few times I believe). If your name & graphic identity are disliked by a significant proportions of people on HN, it's a sign something is wrong.

Thanks for listening.
Uploading bot revisions is broken right now- you can try to upload a new bot, or wait for our fix which should go live in a couple of hours. :)
I liked the older branding more. The greater variation in saturation essentially acted as a second dimension of information that made distinguishing the icons easier. And while I can understand why AfterEffects and Premiere have some similar colors, I think they got too subtle...
(Edit: please ignore the following line, I misread. Kept for posterity.)

The title is incorrect. He threatened to sue but didn't actually do it. Which I'm all for.

(/Edit)

I received, just yesterday, a call from a company claiming they could reduce my credit card interest rate to "up to 0%", but it was obviously a scam as he said he worked both for Visa and Mastercard, claiming it was "the same company and they both use the same Reduce Interest Rate department". I unfortunately lost my nerve a little and called him out, after which he became much more familiar, aggressive and even insulting. Don't have anything beyond a phone number and a name (which is probably fake). Wish I could find the nerve to do this myself.
Doesn’t appear that Facebook think much of Webkit: https://www.facebook.com/unsupportedbrowser
It would be nice if the author had laid out some examples of how telemarketing can be done correctly, without breaking any laws and risking this sort of response.

Hopefully we will see a followup post that explains how Impact Dialing gets away with it, but I suspect that they benefit from all the fear and uncertainty.
All these suckers invested in Facebook, prices fell, and now they're bitching about how there was inside information that they didn't know about, that would have prevented them from investing in the first place. Tough shit. That's life, and this sort of thing will happen. What's NOT ok is to sue (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/23/us-nasdaq-facebook...) over the loss of money, due to you investing in a business you don't know anything about.

I just can't understand why this is okay. My brain hurts.
I'll see your exact opposite view with with my own exact opposite view.

Privatizing Space will do the same thing for it that privatizing the Internet did for all of us. It will take a government-pioneered oddity that was out of reach of the masses and explore millions of ways to make it of financial benefit to the entrepreneurs who can get there first. Like with the Internet, society will be pulled along in the vortex of the Race to Space. Space will become accessible for a price and in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade before.

The technical challenges with space travel are much greater and so the time before we reach the exponential part of the curve is further away, but when the critical mass of Space travel technology has been reached it will be like the Internet in the 1990's. The Internet had been around for 20 years and only governmental and academic types even knew anything about it. Within a few years of its commercialization, its use and uses had exploded. We went from the average joe not knowing anything about it to seeing an abundance of commercials on television for it within just a couple of years.

I mention the Internet, but the pattern is one that you can see in the adoption of transatlantic sailing, rail travel, electricity, automobiles, etc. Space travel will be no different.
In hstory considerable coverage would have been given to first man on the moon, or even first shuttle launch.

Space X is an important step in space exploration. It got less coverage than ESC - perhaps ESC is a poor example. What else did SpaceX get less coverage than?
> Although manually dialing is very rare, many of these regulations do not apply to manually dialing.

Followed by

> I already had three violations on my hand, but I knew I could get two more pretty easily. The next day, I called the alarm company and asked to be put on their internal Do Not Call list, and asked for a copy of their Do Not Call policy. A few days later, David called me again – violation number four.

So he manually dialed, because of previous conversations indicating a genuine interest in the product(s). And that's a violation? Suddenly all interest in and respect for the author just went down the drain as far as I'm concerned.
Facebook doesn’t have a browser already. They don’t need patents. Your analogy works if you replace Facebook with Google.
Show HN: Redesign of Techli.com (startup & tech publication)
I'm not sure I follow the logic. Why will they have "feature phones" and not, say, cheap Android phones (maybe a cost-reduced Galaxy S, for example)? Obviously developing markets will always desire cheaper devices. But that's not the same thing as saying they don't desire the standard platforms. They just haven't had the choice yet, because the platforms have been evolving too quickly and aren't workable on the hardware available.
SpaceX is going to drastically reduce the price to orbit, which will drastically reduce the cost of all space exploration.

Substantially cheaper price to orbit will allow us to start doing things like economically assembling large spacecraft in space.

A cheaper method to orbit is a necessary building block of everything else, and so far NASA hasn't been able to do that.
Congress views NASA as a giant jobs program, and as long as they are running NASA, cheap isn't realistic.
It's actually a pretty nice example of the problems with overcommenting. For example, redundancy: "atexit(cleanup_children)" is perfectly self-explanatory, yet he repeats the same thing with the circumlocution "We setup our cleanup function as an exit handler which will be called at normal process termination." That's just a waste of both the writer and the reader's time.

And of course, redundancy spawns inconsistency: the code says "spawn_unquarantined_children()", but the comment says "All quarantined (a newly initialized child structure is quarantined by default) children is spawned for the first time." Which is it, quarantined or unquarantined? And the comment breaks number agreement, too.

I find it remarkably illustrative that comment rot has already set in into version 1.0 of a "359 LoC" program (actually 797, according to github).
> Little things like an explicit statement that this variable is only true or false significantly reduce the cognitive load when reading code.

Since it's allowed to use bool in arithmetic context (some_int + some_bool will compile fine, for example), having a bool type is useless. (Useless in C and C++ that is; Java, for example, has sane bool handling.)

I have no idea why C99 introduced _Bool type when they could have just inserted typedef char bool; in stdbool.h. Has anybody ever used for something useful the fact that memory representation of _Bool is constrained to read as 0 or 1?
When I read the headline I thought I was going to see a QR code printed in UV-sensitive ink. This is much more creative.

Like people have said though, this probably isn't as maintainable as a UV-sensitive one might have been.
Key fallacy in the argument: Revenue growth is compared to the average IPO.

If anything, Facebook is not the average company. It's not the average company that's gone public either.

That's not to say they won't have challenges growing revenue. I think that a company that's been around this long should've figured out how to mint money by now. But I think this analysis is wrong.
I like this article. I worked in telemarketing for a while, and was probably one of the shittiest jobs I ever had. Not only did the companies not give a crap about the laws, they didn't care about their supposed customers. We sold worthless stuff trying to pursued them into using it over much better and more established companies. Example: AAA tow services.

I found myself trying to be the good guy in the situation and do my best to actually remove people from the call lists by marking them deceased and that.

But even still the companies would always somehow get those numbers back into circulation hoping that nobody would notice.

Shady shit, glad I don't do that anymore.
Agreed. If Facebook acquires Opera, I'm out of there. I'm quite fond of Fastmail, so I'm really hoping this is just a rumour.
Of course. But you're not controlling your variables. The developing markets are "constricted" in precisely the same way that the first world markets were about 6-9 years ago. So they need different hardware and software.

Opera was doing very well in the first world markets 6-9 years ago, for exactly that reason. They lost the market almost entirely. So, why would the developing world be any different?
The Moon has no copyright law because there is no creative activity of any kind there taking place that could be copyrighted.

I'm glad they didn't copyright the footprints.
Totally agree, the simplest solution is to stop making new apps for iOS. However that doesn't make Apple's way of doing RIGHT.
This idea keeps cropping up, and it terrifies me beyond all reason. It's roughly as palatable as a
direct democracy, because in effect, that's what it advocates.

People who deeply care about the law are already able, and willing, to find the information they
need; I'm all for making it easier to manage, and there are worthy projects in that respect, but by
no means do I want ordinary citizens to start dabbling in legislation. The Founding Fathers'
romantic notions notwithstanding, running a government that provides important services to 350
million people isn't a side-job—it's a full-time job, and arguably a career. Heaping disdain on career
politicians is absurd: if they're good at their job, of course they should make a career out of it.

Which brings me to the idea underlying all these posts: that by keeping close tabs on the intricate
details of lawmaking, we can ensure that they will do a good job. I have heard this argument before.
It came from this guy who wasn't really a coder, but wanted to keep close tabs on what the coders
that worked for him did. So he started asking them to log in all their hours, with messages
explaining what they were doing. And he started looking at the commits in the VCS so that he would
see the actual code. Of course, when he didn't like something he would criticize. He would threaten
people with getting fired if they didn't code according to his standards. The coders tried to
explain that sometimes things have to be done in a way that's different from the "common sense" way,
and sometimes he was even reasonable about it, but he still was not a coder, so he had no way of
knowing what was involved.

That's who we're trying to become with projects like these. The most pointy-haired of pointy haired
bosses. Our pointy hair wants points of its own, and all because we try to hold people accountable.
That's a canard.

We want to hold politians accountable because we feel they are irresponsible. But what about our
responsibility? Who hired these irresponsible politicians to steward us? We did. Instead of looking
for ways to make politicians accountable, let's look for ways to make ourselves responsible. I would
start, on an individual basis, by taking ownership of our part of the equation: our vote. Remember:

"Accountability is something that is left when responsibility is subtracted" -- Pasi Sahlberg

Let's find projects that restore our responsibility. From that, the rest will follow.
I'm sorry if you feel that I'm ignoring your distinction. I'm not trying to ignore it, but argue that I think we can distinguish between "likely recoverable" and "likely not recoverable" for most cases. Nothing prevents you from catching unchecked exceptions. So if you know that you're passing in a may-be-null-pointer-and-it's-okay, then you can do an unusual thing and catch that exception. I agree that we can't classify all exceptions as recoverable or not recoverable from inside the called function, with full accuracy. But I disagree that we can't make reasonable guesses that will be true in most cases.

The function may encounter an error but it is not the caller's fault - that's what I mean by "the called function itself has an error."
Do Developers Love Legalese?
Python (Django) VS Ruby (Ruby on Rails) which should I learn
Very true. Wouldn't be refreshing if at the end of your meal, a manager came to your table and said, "Seriously, I know you indicated you enjoyed the meal, but if we could do just one thing better... what would that have been?"
Hi Corin. I asked to be on their internal DNC list, and several days later, they called me again. That's illegal. Don't you think companies should have to respect your requests to be put on their DNC lists? I mean, if you unsubscribed from an email list and kept getting emails, wouldn't you be upset?
One year of CEO pay equals 3,489 years of pay for typical worker
Social networking is not a fad. If anything it's becoming an underlying utility of the internet much like email, instant messaging and search. Any technology that's so core to the internet starts out as a standalone application (hotmail, AIM, Google) and becomes an underlying layer.

Facebook's advantage? They have a virtual monopoly on this utility. Not only that, switching costs are high (unlike email and search).

Look at the kind of growth apps gets from integrating with Facebook (Instagram, Viddy, Spotify). All social apps going forward will only reinforce their position by integrating with them.
How hard would it be to procure the rights?
Nicest sounding critique, not sure it actually means anything though.
Great, but the main problem is to find out who is calling you. I wish the phone company had some kind of obligation to give me that information, so I could trace back annoying telemarketing calls. Stringing them along until they reveal who they work for just doesn't work well.

Another idea would be for banks to offer special credit card numbers, that get automatically flagged as bogus purchases. Any bank offering such a service? If I ever use the magic number, the transaction is perceived to go through, but it's actually tracked and no money is exchanged. Not sure if it's doable with respect to Visa and Mastercard networks.
You know this is one of those things that sounds terribly hypocritical but in a massive company can easily be just the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Its hard for me to see this as anything more then typical large co bureaucracy.
Did Adobe fix its horrific installers in the latest versions?
You're only as good as the last thing you've done
I've been using them for 10+ years, with no complaints. Their webmail is good, never any problems with their IMAP, a bunch of domains to choose from for their free accounts, and relatively cheap paid plans with decent quotas. Plus, they don't read my mail to sell me ads like Gmail does.
Best code repos to learn from?
I'm going on a trip and thought I could read some actual code along with the usual books and cached articles.
You mean this piece of text:

If you don't know which version to use, start with Python 2.7;
more existing third party software is compatible with Python 2
than Python 3 right now.

Which is almost directly above the link to the 2.7.3 installation link for windows.
I think you just totally missed the point.
First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous
Producing a Mac-compatible Linux distribution
Sounds like a hoopy frood to me!