skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll try to help you giving you my point of view. It's a polemic subject I hope it doesn't start a flame war.

JavaScript is a very important language for web development. You can build web apps using it exclusivelly (called single-page applications) or running on a web server (with Node.js). I wouldn't advise any of these approaches to someone just learning web development, though. Single-page applications will required understanding and possibly implementing server APIs, and Node.js is a bit too new for beginners, or at least that's my perception.

Ruby (with Rails) is possibly one of the most popular choices nowadays for web development. I think the Ruby language itself is probably harder to fully grasp than others. But there's a lot of learning resources, just look for Rails books, tutorials and videos.

PHP is a very practical language, to extremes. It's newby-friendly and has been very popular. I have reservations about it because I think beginners are attracted to it and they don't know enough about pitfals (like, for instance, global variables) and end up creating code that can be very hard to understand, debug, maintain, not to speak keep safe against exploits.

Another popular option that's missing from your list is Python. It is a very good language, relatively simple to learn with less mystery than JavaScript or Ruby, for instance, and that promotes better code quality than PHP. Frameworks such as Django, web2py and Turbogears provide good foundations for web development (each in its own style). Django, for instance, has a great tutorial. And there are tons of learning resources about Python, such as http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

So my advice, is, either learn enough Ruby to start playing with Rails, or try Python, possibly with Django.

Myself, I'm currently very happy with C# over the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC stack.

Good luck and feel free to ask any further questions.
I've seen several comments like this, the pixels are there so it seems reasonable that with some software you should be able to select really really tiny icons if you wanted too.
> How many Android users are stuck on 2.2 or 2.3, with a horribly crippled browser?

The answer is: most of them. ~90.2% are on Android 2.3 or below as of June 1, 2012[1].

[1] http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
You may be minimizing the attack surface, but just because a web browser only supports HTML and CSS doesn't mean it couldn't contain exploits.

It's possible that the HTML parser or image rendering library has a bug and that malformed HTML could cause a vulnerability in the browser. Granted, I believe it would be significantly easier to harden parsers and graphic rendering, but it's already been shown that certain image rendering libraries have been exploited[1].

[1] Example: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms08-02...
Sure. The right to tinker is required for actual tinkering, and a right that's never exercised is pointless. Regardless, I don't consider the right to tinker an end in its self. The pleasure of tinkering is utterly unimportant compared with the good that a tinkerers work can bring into the world.

As for freedom of speech, I think the analogy is flawed. The technology equivalent of speech is invention, and the freedom to invent doesn't require anything like the GPL. The freedom to tinker is more like the freedom to copyedit somebody else's work. And hey, I'm for it! Remix culture is great stuff. But it's not in the same league as freedom of speech.

When it comes right down to it, though, I don't consider freedom of speech an end in its self either. The value of free speech is the sort of society it produces, not the speech its self. I favour limits to speech when the effect of that speech is not a net good to society. Now, those situations are few and far between, but they do exist. Yelling "fire" and all that; our legal system has a long and nuanced tradition of weighing the issue in various situations.

The point is that dogma and fanaticism are counterproductive, whatever your goals are. The FSF is certainly not alone in this.
Two thunderbolts so you can use a TB->gig-E or TB-FW800 adapter.

And yes, thunderbolt devices are really, really fast. I have a TB RAID and a TB display on my MBP.
Or both...yesterday google maps on my iPhone took me to Taylor Ave in Sunnyvale. Those are stop signs and gutters deep enough for cars to scrape the ground! Either street north or south would have been better.

https://maps.google.com/?ll=37.384429,-122.022368&spn=0....
1) I could tolerate HR screening for completely random people, who apply via a web form or cold email. Of course, I don't think I have ever hired or seen someone hired that way.

Anyone who comes in as a referral (from investors, employees, friends, etc.) shouldn't be speaking to anyone in HR until after an offer letter is signed. The only possible exception would be having HR handle travel arrangements for on-site interview, but even that should probably be handled by whoever does travel for the team in general (or the hiring manager if everyone normally does it themselves).

HR involvement will basically add zero value AND screen against your most competent 10% of candidates.

I'd probably walk out if an HR person talked to me, or someone tried to put HR in as a gatekeeper. I have met a couple of minimally competent HR people ever, and many more who were criminally incompetent.

2) 2-3 interviews with multiple people in each can work. It really depends on the role. What I'd probably prefer is 2 real interviews with 1-3 people in each, and then lunch where you get to meet a bunch more people casually (and basically be sold on the company), and then after lunch, an interview with founders (if they weren't in already). You can short circuit and send people home after the morning meetings if they're horrible, and after lunch if they're not-hire-now-but-maybe-in-the-future-or-may-have-competent-friends.
It is perfectly possible. You buy them from companies that supply the professional CAD market and it is relatively easy to find 32 core, dual processor, twin graphics card systems for less than $5000.
Take the Dell Precision T5500. Google it (to get the crazy long Dell configuration page URL) and you can configure it with dual six-core Xeons, for example.
I'm running the newest Ubuntu on my T410 and I'm not having any of those problems. I used to patch my xorg to get some extra middle button functionality, but even there the default was that it just worked like it did in Windows and with the newest Ubuntu everything worked just like I wanted out of the box.

Now, if you get the crappy Realtek wireless card instead of the Intel wireless, or you get Intel graphics that were released less than 6 months ago you can have serious problems, but if you know to avoid those two things you shouldn't have any trouble.
Well, you can use WPF and that pretty much takes care of it from the ground up, but Win32 was never designed to do that.

My point is that the long tail of apps in the wild are going to be problematic, regardless of what new apps do.
I was under impression that laptop without Windows/MacOS on it should cost less. Apparently it's not the case here. I don't really see any competitive advantage vs. Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc.
Am I the only one who is stoked it comes with a third USB, standard SSD, and HDMI port?
Whoa! ... The Applet is definitely dead, but I included that in my list of languages for the back-end server (and in Fortune 500 environments). It may not be considered cool, but there are still a lot of companies using it.
This is a pretty huge piece of free advertising for Gumroad and its ilk. I know Andrew, and I know he's put his heart and soul into this book. It's a downright shame to see Amazon taking that size of a cut for self-published works.
The new Thinkpads are a huge step backwards however. Lenovo screwed one of the defining qualities of the Thinkpad line by replacing the high-quality keyboards with chiclet island keys that also have a row of keys less than previously.

They also switched from 4:3 to 16:10 and now to 16:9 displays. The only resolution you can get the X-series thinkpads in is 1366x768. At least you can get 1600x900 displays for the T-series. (Which Lenovo ironically calls HD+)

It's almost like Lenovo WANTS me to switch to Apple.
"Do you have the same issues with Android? There's a platform that's destined to be the "future IE". How many Android users are stuck on 2.2 or 2.3, with a horribly crippled browser?"

You do realize that there are third party browsers on Android that have their own rendering engines that you can install right? You don't have to ever use the built in Android browser if you don't want to. I've found Firefox works quite well actually.
This is a great update. You certainly don't want to put anything production on here, but small applications would be great with this. Even a properly cached WP blog (low traffic) would do just fine on here.

The automatic backups and rollback in RDS is worth way more than $19 alone.
My Dad, who is really into video editing and 3D animation, swears by the Mac Pro line. I have been suggesting that he get a fast MacBook Pro, use Thunderbolt with the nice raid box Apple sells, and move on. After the new MacBook Pro hotness and the minor Mac Pro update, I bet he will make the switch.

My world is Linux servers and a MacBook Air (and a good SSH shell on my iPad if I am travelling light) work fine; some local develop using IntelliJ/RubyMine, etc., and good access to servers == happiness. I could personally care less if Apple wants to concentrate on what makes them money.

For people who do professional video, sound, etc., maybe the Windows world is looking better, especially with Adobe's neat Creative Cloud stuff. I am a rank amateur when it comes to video and digital photo post production, and even I am thinking of dropping Final Cut Pro 7 and paying Adobe $50/month for Creative Cloud. I think that Apple has made their intentions clear.
Thanks, I learned something today. Oh, and the Dell is less than half the price of the Mac Pro.
I strongly suspect Amazon is offering well-known, "must have" authors a much better deal -- possibly even losing money on sales of some of their books -- and making it up by giving a raw deal to less-well-known, independents like Andrew Hyde, the author of this blog post.

Does anyone here know if this is indeed the case?
I guess it's going to a thin client approach. iMac workstations with thunderbolt expansion and processing farms for rendering or what have you. I bet someone would make a killing with the pro market if they sold an easy to integrate and expandable render farm, or something that uses amazon services.
Yeah, I have to wonder if there's an exclusivity agreement with the Oracle licensing in RDS that requires that MySQL and Oracle be the only options for linux databases.
Oh well, my old Mac keyboard crapped out. And my Thinkpad's is fine. I reckon though the Thinkpad's would be cheaper to replace.
Can the market beat this? Or is the gravitational pull of the giant Kindle market too great?
by working for "roughly X/hour" you've established that the typical exchange rate for your time is roughly X/hour

Well, I've established that I'm willing to work that many hours for that rate. That doesn't mean I'm willing to work more hours at the same hourly rate. Most people I know value their spare time enough to expect a higher rate for working more time.
It's the same in Canada. It's quite frustrating, especially when that's one of the heavily marketed parts of Siri.
Audio professionals editing large surround sessions with lots of plugins and lots of tracks for one (plus you need 3-4 or more PCIe slots to stick Pro Tools or similar DSP cards in). These need as much horsepower as you can throw at them.

Video professionals doing rendering or compositing, ditto.

Not to mention the video cards available, plus being able to throw four full size drives directly on the SATA bus.
Did my 17" MBP just become a collectors item?
The obligatory first project is the To Do app. :)

And I second this advice, you are starting, so try and learn a single language that can enable you to develop a working application; that will lead you to the other parts of the stack (wich would include, among others, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON objects, a server-side language, SQL and a lot of such crap that only nerds like us can really love).
"Mountain Goat" is what I'm calling it.
There's profit and there's profit. The margins are there but the units sold are not.
Net-worth =Assets-Liabilities
> If every web page had its own full chroot/jail (or equivalent), then they would be as secure as native applications.

This is exactly what Chrome has always done and other browsers are adopting: plugins have long had to have elevated privileges (I'm no expert on why), but if you exploit an image rendering or font library, you get nothing, because the browser and each tab's renderer are separate processes, and the latter are heavily sandboxed through the OS. This bug is impressive and the first of its kind because it doesn't attack a plugin, but the sandbox itself, (indirectly) through the IPC mechanism. In that sense it's not much different from attacking the iOS sandbox: web pages have more access to cross-origin communications (and other functionality that must pass through the sandbox, such as downloads), and there seem to generally be more situations where the renderer has to synchronize with the browser, but that's mostly a matter of degree.
Logic Pro with high numbers of tracks and effects/filters.

Anything that needs workstation-level graphics like the NVIDIA Quadro (for doing stereoscopic graphics, multi device synchronization, broadcast pipelines, and more).
Except that you would have to pipe giga/terabytes of data to/from the cloud - that is why lots of in house rendering and catalogue systems use Fibre Channel and similar technologies - one of the bottlenecks is I/O from the workstation
I really liked the Scharffenberger plant in SFBA until it got bought by Hershey and production moved elsewhere. It was at the sweet spot (heh) of quality ingredients, scale (prices at $3 or so, and decent variety, but with small batches), and aesthetics. Really small scale production doesn't add much beyond that point.

Currently, I just get Trader Joe's (Villars or Valrhona). Especially at the $2-3 price point.
The default location of the reload button changed in Firefox 4 beta a couple months after this study:

http://mozillalinks.org/2010/09/unified-stop-reload-go-butto...
We're talking about features recently introduced by iOS, not features introduced by ICS.
I don't think any "major" brands do but you can find similar stuff in the "gamer" market.

http://www.ibuypower.com/Store/Gamer_Paladin_F950
One suggestion is to move the jquery from jquery.com to your domain for two reasons:

1: It will be one click less, for those who use noscript.
2: It will allow your site to survive the case that jquery.com changes anything, or goes down.

Besides that its a nice toy.
24 hours with the Raspberry Pi
Yeah, sorry about that. It's back up now.
Has it come to the point that the only way to build a serious Mac rig is a high end hackintosh? I had high hopes as I need a very serious rig for work related stuff, I put off doing soe RMA and other nonsense waiting for this thing... and ... this is it?

Speaking of which, has anyone built a monster hackintosh?
IndexedDB API polyfill on WebSql
I appreciate your comment, in fact I think a lot of this thread is based off blind adherence to the popular narrative (just look at the attention given to who leaked and why). I have done a lot of research and reading in this area. The intelligence/military arena is a hobby/fetish of mine. Just look at the impact of the Stinger and the broader US involvement with Russia's occupation of Afghanistan (Ghost War is the canonical reference). For further evidence of the US's awareness of the importance of economics take a look at the grain subsidies and the discussions for and against.
I'm confused: what hardware specifications are you referring to? A simple NewEgg browse disproves this comment unless I'm misunderstanding you.
Who are they, if you don't mind me asking?
I am biased (I've dealt with both ESR and RMS, and had a much more personable time with the former), but I think this is one of the better things ESR has written, and it nails all of my major issues with RMS (almost: I know it gets made fun of a lot but I really find his personal hygiene utterly contemptible).
You're right, and "a lot" is an understatement... there is a whole lot more than a lot.
Apple Updates 2012: Well That Sucked
ctrl+f whispernet 0 results found

He's forgetting about the cost of delivering over a cell phone network.
If you use the end user cost you can get a high end estimate for total cost of 3g service. $30 for 2GB of data makes $0.015/MB * 18.1 MB file makes for a total cost to user of $0.27 for delivery.
FX artists for digital cinema. 4K takes nearly half a gig a second uncompressed.
I might be wrong, but you can still use the display with a current Mac Pro using DisplayPort, right? (You just won't get to use the other connectors.)

I have a 2008 Mac Pro and was looking into doing this, but I'd need to buy a graphics card with DP first.

UPDATE: Thanks! Yes, I was wrong ;-) Another source: http://store.apple.com/us/question/answers/product/MC007LL/A...
Stock Market VIDEO Analysis 6/11/12
You're right about the bias. If you use the filters to view only data from self-identified "Beginner" users, then the address bar usage is significantly lower and the search bar usage is higher (but still not as high as the address bar).
Apple released a firmware fix that makes the Capslock key behave normally if it's remapped in OS X. However, I don't use OS X, and the keyboard doesn't send the event until after the delay (if I just tap the key quickly, Linux/Windows don't see anything), so I assume it's some combination of keyboard firmware + OS X.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1578
http://www.tow.com/2007/12/18/apple-wireless-keyboard-review...
Please forgive me here, but how would I start an app. A website I can do but starting a app and I'm lost!!
I just noticed that it doesn't have a GigE port. that is just switching an hdmi adapter for a GigE - thunderbolt cable. it was probably necessary to get the form factor, but it is annoying.
Ask HN: Building a splash page: what are some great insights you have learned?
I'm interested in finding out what people have done to maximize the conversion ratio for splash pages they have created. Or any ideas they have seen that really worked.

It is a splash page for crowd funding so the more user data I get about state location the better.

Ideally I'd like to find interested people that would provide the following information:
Name
Email
State
(city would be bonus)

Any ideas and advice would be helpful.
Is the future of professionals going to be Windows?

Which itself is going super-consumery with Windows 8..
Over a cell phone network a user would pay about $0.27 to download a 18MB file. There is no way an author should have to pay an order of magnitude more.
When you put the wildcards (DKI), it matches the keyword from your list of keywords, not the search query. So you'd have to put MeetingBurner on a list of keywords to have it show up here (which as others said, could be due to the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool)
Customer Analytics: How Analyzing Real People Will Improve Your Business
Beta testers are not typical users!
If you actually read the article you'll see that he addresses this and that it applies to wifi purchases.
I know this is an old study, but I'm amazing at how many people use the back button. I wonder if that's how a lot of people deal with search results that didn't pan out (they hit back to go to Google, instead of opening them in a bunch of tabs).
Wealth: I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

http://drduru.com/onetwentytwo/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/11...
That's always an option, like we saw with Airbrake being acquired from Thoughtbot by Exceptional. (http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/17212734809/airbrake-acqui...) However, this really only works if you can find someone you trust enough to uphold the same level of quality in the product, branding, and customer service, since any future failure will still reflect negatively on the original developers for some time. I think open sourcing the underlying technology is a great way to allow other folks to pick up where the company left off. (We also saw this recently with Copycopter, which was from the same company as Airbrake. http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/19388751626/copycopter-is-...)
The fact that you can get 2 GB of data for $30 doesn't mean that you can get 18 MB of data for $0.27. Most people paying $30 for a 2 GB data plan are using far less than 2 GB of data.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. Any profit, however small, will exceed any savings you get.

I guess maybe we have different assumptions about what "profit" means. I'm assuming that when someone refers to a line of products as profitable, they are taking into account all administrative costs as well.
> i tried keepass, but it doesn't really work well in linux,

Try KeePassX http://www.keepassx.org/ which works really well in Linux. It even has a hot key to push username and password into the appropriate fields in the browser.

I installed it a week or so ago (after trying others) and am pretty impressed so far.
Um, the winky face was included to indicate sarcasm. Do you actually think that the actions of the US had no impact on the soviet's allocation of resources? To take the discussion back to where it began do you actually think that the intelligence community had no impact on the cold war?
If I used your logic last year when they did soft bumps to the MacBook Pro after not having a major upgrade since 2010, I would've been shitting my pants thinking they would be dropping the MacBook Pro and only going consumer... which, as we learned today, is not the case.

The Mac Pro is a necessary part of their line for professionals and aren't going anywhere. My guess is next upgrade will be a big overhaul. It will also probably come with Mac Mini upgrades & a complete thunderbolt display selection (which I am waiting for).

EDIT: the upgrade I'm referring to is April 2010 when the MacBook Pro's started using the Intel Core i5 and i7 processers, removed the express slot, etc. That's 2 years and 2 months between major updates AND you could say the 2009 was really the last time it was upgraded THIS much. So 3 years? and you're complaining about 2 which is not abnormal by any means.
This is actually a small example of how Amazon keeps being aggressively competitive by making the pricepoint almost impossible for anyone else to match at scale.
Very true, but the fact that the author is paying a distribution fee an order of magnitude more than the $.27 seems pretty fishy.
Really excited about this, I just wrote PouchDB on top of indexeddb and was planning to rewrite the entire thing in webSQL to get support for safari (mobile) and opera, which was depressing since webSQL is deprecated, it looks initially like this does everything PouchDB needs to 'just work' with webSQL browsers, great job
That's a pretty misleading headline. "Americans' wealth" /= "wealth of the median American".
I think it's funny that Apple markets itself as simplifying and reducing wires and reducing clutter... but boy, they like adaptors!
But there's no difference from amazon's perspective, because once you bought the book, you can download it over 3g at any time, multiple times.
then they're doing it wrong.
Sure, on paper you get 2GB for 30$, but really your paying 30$ to be part of a pool of people that use below 500MB on average and some of them pay a lot more than that in overage feels for downloading 2.01+GB.

A more realistic number might be 15$ for 200 MB with the risk of overage fees = 1.35$ for 18.1MB. Amazon may pay more per MB than you do because of that lack of subscription good for life of the device thing or less, but they also have overhead to track that etc.