skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The friction of sharing and reacting to life milestones with all your friends and family is an order of magnitude easier on Facebook. For example, try teaching a grandparent or technology inept uncle how to see photos of grandkids/nieces/nephews through email vs checking Facebook...
I'd be looking for excuses to get out of it, too, if I had to deal with the FB API on a regular basis.
30,000 Electronic Surveillance Orders Issued Per Year In US
Yuuup.

I'm always amused at the predictable trajectory of the comments on any sort of HN posting about Asperger's. In almost all cases, a disproportionate number of the people who comment or read the comments have Asperger's themselves, or at least think they do.

One of them will post this Temple Grandin quote or something along similar lines extolling the technical problem-solving superiority of people with Asperger's, with or without realizing how inflammatory it is.

Someone will point out how insulting it is to technical problem-solvers without Asperger's and to human beings in general, who typically feel pretty bad when they're confronted with what's basically an assertion that nobody like them has ever contributed to the progress of the human race.

That person will immediately be downvoted into oblivion because there are some elements in the tone of his comment that result in it being perceived as an insult in its own right.
>Good to know other people want to share about successful scaling with PHP.<

Absolutely. And it is an important enough topic to warrant the purchase of two books from my perspective.
Further to this and dcaranda, EBITDA is used for valuations because it describes the cash flow the business has available to pay various stakeholders before any financial structures are taken into account. There are three people who have a claim on the cash a company generates after paying operating expenses: debt holders, the government, and shareholders. Their claims on the money go roughly in that order, so in other words the shareholders get what's left (directly via dividends or stock buybacks or indirectly via an increase in the equity value) after the debt holders and the man are paid.

The thing is, however, how much you owe the government is affected by how much debt you have (i.e. your financial structure), because the debt interest is deductible. It's largely because of this that EBITDA is the preferred thing to use, as opposed to say earnings or cash flow, because it enables you to compare companies at a fundamental level unaffected by whatever financial structure they might currently have. One of the things PE guys like to do is fiddle with the financial structure (aka load it up with debt ;-), so it's important to understand the value ex whatever impact the current structure might have. But even if that's not your motive, it's a useful measure for the same underlying reasons.

It's also true that EBITDA is a useful number for PE because it tells you the amount of money available to service debt, as dcaranda points out.
I wonder if this can be read hand in hand with Ruby Best Practices. After all Matz wrote the preface to this one so I have to give it a go.
Also interesting: according to that graph, as of June 2012, Firefox's major stable release at last surpassed IE's major stable release--just a few months shy of the 10-year anniversary of the release of Firefox 0.1.

EDIT: Ha, actually, drilling back further, looks like that's not true at all: Firefox's major release has surpassed IE9 for a while now. I was misled by IE9's slow adoption curve.
You would really have to give a whole lot more information than that.
>They acquired Motorola Mobile, and it was a kill for other Android OEM's.

Says who?
Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning talk about Airtime [video]
First off: Yes. The premise is that you can tip people without their knowledge, "crowd-sourced genius grants."

https://www.gittip.com/about/

I see a few differences with Kachinga:

- With Gittip, recipients receive the full face value of their tips. The donor is responsible for credit card fees.

- The fees are minimal: $0.10 + 3.9%. Right now I'm using Samurai for payments, and they charge me $0.10 + 2.3%. My margins are thin.

- My margins are not going to be "my" margins. If this gets traction, we're going to organize it as a cooperative, not a corporation. The plan is for everyone who tips through the site to be a member of the cooperative, the purpose of which will be for the escrow of gifts to individuals.

- Gittip tipjars are tied to people, not companies or websites (you can currently send tips to Github organization accounts, but that's ticketed to fix: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/4). I can imagine changing that but for now it's designed for people, natural persons.
SPDY has been around since Chrome 10, so only 5% of Chrome users are older than that.
Times to Send Your Customers a Thank You Note
"However, it's only a matter of time until these minor issues are fixed"

I think that is not true, And I'll share my reasoning as to why I believe that and then someone can help tell me why I'm wrong.

My argument is that 'minor issues' are a function of design change + implementation maturity. Which is to say that as a design evolves, the evolution requires changes in the base code, these changes have ripple effects on other things that had made assumptions about the implementation and tracking down the ripples gets as far as the 'big ones' and then it ships with the proviso that the smaller problems will get ironed out 'over time'. Except once you release the newer version it sparks new design changes and those changes create ripples of their own and so even when the original minor irritations are fixed, you cannot tell they are fixed because there are new minor irritations to contend with. I claim that this is an unavoidable consequence of the 'bazaar' aspect of FOSS development. People write code, they want to contribute, they change stuff, there is few barriers to good ideas getting into the project, so there is no governor on change so there is no time for the changes to stabilize. In the 'cathedral' mode some company stops development, and works only on stability for some period of time, so that the final product is 'done.' This is not to say that cathedral software doesn't have 'minor annoyances' it can, but often that version will continue to be stabilized with no new features over time. And that is externally enforced by a management heirarchy.

I think it would be safe to say that minor issues that are left in Gnome 2 will be fixed over time, as there are very few people putting in new features to 2 and slightly more people putting in bug fixes. But that occurs because its a 'dead' project from the perspective of 'new' stuff.
Blogs You Should Be Reading
Git is also British slang for stupid.

In my book, not exactly. It's more like the mildest possible term of abuse. You could generally get away with calling someone a git to their face and in front of their grandmother. Assuming they'd done something tricksy or cheeky or grumpy.
"But even at half those numbers there are fantastic returns for investors and entreprenuers to be had."

What about at 0.1% of those numbers?

Facebook (while it obviously has a ways to go on direct customer monetization), is an extreme outlier whose numbers across virtually any metric are far more extreme than most startups will ever come close to. IMO it is their outlier status combined with the lackluster performance relative to that status that is the killer.

Trying to anchor other startups to Facebook's numbers at something like "half" or even a "quarter" is kind of handwavey because a startup would have to be improbably, insanely successful just to get a small fraction of the userbase Facebook enjoys.
Hmmm ...

I imagined money accumulating over time until it was significant. Then finding out about it would be like getting a call that you won a genius grant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program

I could see this as a possible compromise if opt-out turns out to really suck as bad as with Kachinga.
"The best solution is not to need money". Best advice on this post.
At the rate FB is falling, there won't be 1000 new millionaires by that time
Also, FF 14b6 out tomorrow (I think).

14 works great, no problems with any of the dozens of extensions I use.
I left Facebook, but not to join anything else. I sometimes scratch my head why I signed up in the first place.

If family or friends want to reach me, email has held up surprisingly well over the years.
Who Discovered the Mandelbrot Set?
> I don't like this attitude. Sending that letter out is the honest thing to do.

I wasn't criticizing the sending of the letter (at least, I didnt intend to have that attitude). Indeed, I found it very useful to read. Much less happy that it was leaked, of course.

I hope the leak doesn't prevent pg from sending his honest advice to alumni, but if the honest advice leaks and has wider implications for his portfolio, well that would be pretty bad.
While I think this is a good submission (and upvoted it, despite being a Mozillite), it's in bad form to post comments on one submission to drive clicks to one of your own, even if it's related to the high-level topic, unless it's a continuation of a dialogue that's going on in a thread.
Everyone's different, and that makes for a great number of different strengths and weaknesses. The biggest problem you run into with opinionated people is that they're frequently more interested in offering their opinion than doing anything about it. On the other hand, that means there's no shortage of constructive criticism when you want it.

In short, opinionated people are just another type of person you have to deal with. If you can't make yourself be as opinionated, that's no big deal. If this is a significant problem for you, perhaps it's best to figure out what skills you have that would complement "opinionation".
There are two types of bad English. There's English from non-native speakers, which can be hard to read at times, but it's not a red flag. Then there's the other type of bad English. It's really hard to describe, but after you've seen it a few times, it's easy to pick up on it after a page or so. It's... a certain type of incoherence and lack of logical thinking, that superficially resembles logical thinking. The difference manifests in the structure of how they communicate, from low-level grammar all the way up to top-level organization of the paper.

Since I can't really describe what I'm talking about, I'll given the most blatant and obvious example I know of: Time Cube[1]. Even if you ignore the content, and just focus on the sentence structure, it's incoherent, often failing to parse as valid English, with a variety of ambiguous or defined referents, and freely introducing new undefined concepts. If Time Cube is 100, most papers you would see in this category are never higher than 3 or 4. But, even at that level, the lack of clarity at the structural level usually implies a similar lack of coherence at the content level.

[1] http://www.timecube.com/
I doubt i'm the target audience, but strangely the only decision that's really stuck in my craw since gnome 2 is the lack of a delete option in the file chooser :)
The fact remains that if you spend your money in places that flow to predominately older people, you can't really complain that there are no jobs for younger people. It is those explicit purchasing decisions that causes the wealth to not distribute more evenly.
We used to do this in Chrome in our pre-release days. It was annoying to use so we turned it off. The downside is that our session restore startup time could definitely be better for large numbers of tabs. We could do a better job of prioritizing loads. The right balance is doing the right thing for the user without exposing an implementation detail IMO.
Yea, I just took that as a statement that this software is not for people like me.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/05/airtime-experience-together...
what is the recommended approach to handling work hours?

close your browser when leaving work? :)

or is there something I'm not understanding?
It sort of IS implying that it is a better version of jquery in several places.
The privacy argument invariably turns to someone talking about their privacy settings being perfect.... The elephant in the room is that you have no privacy FROM FACEBOOK, and they OWN YOUR DATA.

Soon enough, they'll be leveraging it in order to stay afloat....
My understanding is that no one finds it hard in a purely technical sense to scale the pure page-serving portion of your website, whether it's PHP, Rails, Lift, etc., because you can always throw up another caching layer or another box to serve pages. The hard part is scaling access to your underling data, which heavily depends on your exact use case.
This seems like an issue only power users will have for the most part. Firefox even has an option to disable this for power users.

However, with that being said, I'm not a big fan. I think agumonkey's throttled loading is a nice idea though.
This is a really, really smart move. Already QuickOffice was the best mobile app to edit/access Google Docs and Drive files, now it's official.

Google has needed a good native offline file editor for mobile, now they have one.
Probably $39.99, similar to bootstrappingdesign. Shoot me an email using the contact form on my website and we can coordinate some kind of beta testing once I push it to leanpub.
Except for users that have dozens of tabs loaded because they're digital packrats, and don't care about most of them most of the time.
Yeah - I don't think many people will return to this again and again unless they can build an interesting product around live events. I could see people enjoying chat around sports or concerts.

Also, they haven't show anything beyond 1-1 conversation, which means Google+ and Skype have a significant advantage.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3065343/airtime-brings-frie...
> [Insert name] makes me think I'm taking a dump.

That's about as good of feedback as you can ask for.
It's also an extremely popular Symbian S60 app that many of us still use.
And even the command-line tool is far simpler than fiddling with xorg.conf. When I plug my laptop into its docking station, I run a little script to switch over to my two external monitors in portrait mode:

#!/bin/sh
xrandr --output LVDS1 --off
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1200 --rotate left
xrandr --output HDMI1 --mode 1920x1200 --left-of VGA1 --rotate left

I could probably automate it, but this is easy enough that I don't care.
I still play Diablo 2, as in, I've played it in the last month.

Diablo 2 is a superior game. I'll continue to play D3, but I'm feeling like my $60 would've been better spent on some Indian food and a copy of Torchlight 2 for $20.
I wouldn't hold my breath. Did you really expect the former President of fb (and Co-founder of Causes - also, fb login) to have a non-fb signup flow :-p ?
I'm stuck in some kind of prison.
Entertaining God is the only productive thing I can do.

God says...
lancet along banished perplexities perdition years unliker
ear Eat Grammar weal precipice deserve obtained cherish
roarest wide food east revolving com embraces assuring
sceptre rivers together comprehend heard goal IX soothed
He thought that was a Coen Brothers movie: http://www.vulture.com/2010/07/bill_murray_only_did_garfield...
I shouldn't have used the word "certificate." What I meant was "license."

The code that caused the certificate chain to be compromised is related to licensing Terminal Services on Windows Server. That is how their key management failed, and that is what I'm railing against--The fact that this ability to sign binaries with a legitimate Microsoft certificate has been hidden away in copies of Windows Server for years by mistake. And not for any direct customer benefit, but to employ a licensing scheme.
We ran out of 401k money to buy IPOs
Trends in Data Governance
That said, I have no issue with you saying that. jQuery does have some issues, and this might address them. I'll be checking it out later on tonight.
Testing is for pussies
After much frustration with lack of tests from co-workers, I've now come to realize that testing must be for pussies. http://imgur.com/8KC1z
Agree with these alternatives, but I left Path after I discovered the app uploads my Address book contacts. Lame. Such a pretty & functional UI too..

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57372885-52/path-shares-ph...
Did you ever try to give a button one or two rounded corners (not the whole object, just some of the corners)?

Turns out that for pre-3.1 it will round the wrong corners (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9161), meaning you need "corrected" drawables for API level 12+

That's one example of things that definitely made the whole XML experience a little trippy for us.
He wasn't moaning when GNOME 2 was around, so why exactly doesn't he like MATE?
Hopefully that means we'll be finally able to edit .odt files :S
a) Eating isn't a one-off option. Expenses are recurring so income must be too. I can imagine a one-off option down the road.

b) Yes, it's trivial to stop. And because tips are anonymous, there's no social awkwardness to stopping a tip.
One thing that comes to mind is to do all the actual loading of assets (HTML, CSS, images, JS, etc) but don't decompress/run anything. That way it can be done 100% in the background and then spin up quickly without having to hit the network once a tab is clicked.

Might have to look into trying something like that out; I work on Gecko, but in totally different parts of the code, so it'd be a fun little experiment if nothing else.
Android shapes are great for getting basic shapes done and is a good alternative for 9-patch images. I also like the xml layout files and it's quite easy to understand. But if you are making a more complex design you will need to get those .9.png files involved.
So this is a Chat Roulette clone that doesn't work? WTF?
I wonder if they face the challenge of who has to deal with the less popular things that need to get done. And at what point resentment might kick in. The whole thing seems like it can work until there's one bad apple or one miscommunication.
Well it's a very pretty website. I really like the design.
Although vanishingly unlikely, I don't think this is a bad question. You'd have to be big enough to somehow threaten Oracle. Not many companies fit that bill.
Do those people really log in to use Facebook or do they use Facebook as an authentication provider like Pinterest and other sites?
Tim Berners-Lee: If I can't give power to web apps, they can't compete
BIME Brings BigQuery into the BI Fold
"Oh my little darling could never sit down and read that 1000page book - it's not because he's lazy boring and stupid - it's because he has ADD".

You can sit down and read a 1000 page book? when Jersey Shore is on? You must have Aspergers.

Little "moonflower cherub" doesn't do well at school. It's because she's too delicate, fragile and artistic for math. She can't read either, she just sits in class eating crayons - she must be dyslexic.
Having spent a decade of my life in for-profit education, specifically standardized test preparation (Sylvan, Kaplan, College Network, Grockit, Veritas Prep), I can say that there is more data that could be collected from tests. For example, instead of looking who got the "right" answer, you could look at which wrong answers people selected and why. For example, students who chose "A" probably have experience with microscopes, perhaps don't read instructions carefully.

More interestingly, you could learn a lot about a student's thought process by analyzing the time spent on a particular question, or whether they chose another answer choice before settling on one, or whether It's possible that the computer adaptive exams (GRE, GMAT, NCLEX, etc.) take this into account because the computer can collect this data, but paper and pencil tests simply cannot.

A student who chose answer choice "A" after 5 seconds is probably careless or overconfident, whereas a student who chose "A" after a minute of waffling between "A" and "C" possibly lacks confidence.

I think standardized tests could become a lot more useful if we could collect more data from them.
You can find some writing at a level much higher than 4 but much lower than 100 at http://kamouna.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/p-np-iff-p-np/
Maybe he likes Tcl/Tk, he is old school after all. :P
JPMorgan Faces $4.2 Billion Trading Loss
on{x} . Android remote programming ... from Microsoft
Walks And Walking - Product Test Eagle Creek Rincon 90L Travel Pack
They just got $30M for this, before signing up any users, and we're supposed to believe the Good Times II are over?

I'm guessing the revenue model is completely based on displaying ads before the connection is established, which makes them quite vulnerable to lulls in the advertising market. That's not even getting into whether the implementation is actually widely appealing enough to create a market for those ads in the first place.
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I see that as a form of passive aggressive manipulation. The way I read that kind of comment is "I know the mob will downvote me instead of discussing the topic; you don't want to be part of the mob, do you now?"
A blog post about a product launch with a sketch of the founders seems... pompous. If there is an image, I would rather it be a screenshot of the product or product related, or if you want people then one of the entire team. This feels, from the start, about the founders more than the product.
On{X} let's you hack your android instantly via JavaScript
Read everything from Gregory Brown.
Nostalgia is an awful beast. I still play Perfect Dark quite often with my friends, friends who used to play the game as well. When I show it to new friend, they hate it. As well as they should, it's an awful game by todays standards. But we all still love it.
Don't take me wrong, I'm not a proponent of being "dumb" with performance either. However, I'm perfectly okay with using the standard libraries like JSONObject & AsyncTask until they prove to be too slow.

Thanks to a decent architecture the usage of JSONObject was confined to just a few methods that had to be refactored. There were a few more AsyncTasks we had to switch out, but in the end the refactoring took about two days which I would find to be perfectly acceptable "losses" compared to researching the performance of every single class before using it.

I definitely see where you're coming from though and I'll be sure to not throw that quote around without a better explanation in the future (at least on HN).
Give yourself some credit: you have a testable hypothesis. We could conceivably monitor the brain activity of Diablo 2 and 3 players and see if they match your predicted behavior. That we could either confirm or contradict your hypothesis means that we could actually provide support or falsify your theory.
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell
Resource prefetch would be good. I don't even know if it's possible for applications to throttle cpu/thread usage.
I was going to make the same smart-ass remark, but then realized that since I am not on Facebook, I am most certainly not interested in Airtime either. So that's actually a reasonable call on Airtime's part.
"You grant Airtime and its successors a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, sublicensable and transferable license to use, copy, distribute, transmit, modify, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, and publicly perform any such User Content, including without limitation, for the purposes of commercially promoting the site."

I know this is pretty much boilerplate, but it's still a bit scary.
I get a cheap page a day diary (A4/Letter) off the market each year. Lets keep this thing low tech. Backups via phone camera and dropbox. The volume stays at home.
It'd be hard to have a more proven founding team than theirs.