skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Still, I don't feel sorry for the businesses getting "showroomed" that's the point of a free market, if someone does it better, they should get the business,

The trouble is, the on-line businesses aren't doing it better. In fact, they aren't doing the hard part at all.

go and adapt yourself and stop bitching about it.

Easier said than done, that one.

I think we're going to see shifts in the retail landscape over the next few years as more and more things are available on-line, because bricks 'n' mortar stores do have some advantages of their own that no on-line store can ever fully match:

* You can try out a real, physical product, even examining the exact item you're going to buy if necessary.

* You can take it away with you immediately.

* You can interact with real people face to face for advice or if there are any problems.

There will always be a certain kind of customer who values these things. I know, because I'm one of them. I don't want to buy a $1,000 monitor and find it has dead pixels and some legalese small print makes it my fault. I don't want to buy some jewellery as a gift and then find it doesn't quite match another item the recipient already has. I don't want to buy a pair of trousers and find this make uses slightly different sizes to whoever I bought from last time and the new pair doesn't quite fit. I don't want to buy a gift for a book-lover and find the cover got torn a bit in the mail. For items like these, where the exact details and quality matter and it's worth the time to make a careful purchase, there will always be a market for real stores that provide good customer service and convenient access.

On the other hand, city centre stores that are staffed by unpleasant teenagers who think customer service is not shoving you out of the way more than three times in a visit, which sell commodity junk for cheap prices anyway, and where you have to queue for half an hour to get to the car park, pay a small fortune when you get there, queue for another twenty minutes to get to the till in the store, and then get told that the special offer on the sticker doesn't apply because it's Wednesday... Well, those stores are toast, and good riddance. If I want poor quality products, ambiguous pricing, non-existent customer service, and unreliable support in the event of any problems, at least I can get that from the comfort of my own home these days.
Forget business models – I find it frustrating as a consumer to see the value proposition of a service I value being reduced.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to be unhappy about a reduction in value to me, the end consumer. Do I understand it? Perhaps – I still view it as a poor sort of competitive behavior because it's built around increasing information asymmetry and reducing consumers' ability to compare offerings – rather than making their own offerings stronger.
Using MEMES to explain bitcoin's appeal, its problems, and my proposed solution
I tried to run the simple example and I get:

>>> from cffi import FFI
>>> ffi = FFI()
>>> ffi.cdef("""
... int printf(const char *format, ...); // copy- pasted from the man page
... """)
>>> C = ffi.dlopen(None)
>>> arg = ffi.new("char[]", "world")
>>> C.printf("hi there, %s!\n", arg);
17

Python 2.7.3rc2

pycparser 2.07

libffi5/libffi-dev 3.0.10-3

Debian with 3.2.0-2-pae x86
Why do phone companies feel the urge to reskin default Android?

I never feel it's better than the stock android, and it's usually inconsistent with half of the applications.
Why in the world would anybody create a rainbow table for a salted string?
You’re making money, but are you making a profit?
I was sad to see WebOS die because of the way it handled people like they were people, instead of accounts on services. I'm glad Windows Phone picked up that torch, even though I wish WebOS had succeeded. The only time I go into the Facebook app on my phone is to see who "liked" my status (no idea why the baked-in app doesn't show this) if it's a rare moment when I really feel the need to know this information.

Seamless conversations between text and IM is another feature picked up from WebOS that I feel is invaluable once you start using it.
No.

Please no.

Don't do this.
After getting 10 wrong in a row, I've decided to start buying more mutual funds.
They lacked insight into what was happening with their business model. Apple has shown incredible foresight in this regard.
Funny thing, I always took this quote as Stalin cynically remarking on exactly OP's point: people overweight anecdotes by thousands to millions of times their actual worth as Bayesian evidence.
Thank you. I was clicking everywhere trying to see why I wasn't seeing any 'lighting'.

The author should put a Chrome-only warning on the front page.
I expect that whatever shows up in the MOMA to be the 10%. Further, the "intention of the artist" is completely lost if there is no explanation, and the work is shown in a gallery without context. Something has to give.
Hi moe, thanks for the feedback,

I suppose it's the elastic nature of the pricing that you find complex? I can't disagree with you, it is less straightforward than flat monthly plans. However it is what litteraly thousands of developers have been asking us for over the last year. Our previous pricing was focused on simplicity... but ended up sweeping the reality of our product under tbe rug.

I think you're right that we don't explain enough on the pricing page. Our concern was text overload., but there's probably a balance to be found.

What about the content - any opinion on our actual pricing?
Blaise Mouttet has written numerous papers and online comments which challenge the claims put forward by memristor proponents[1][2]. Debate surrounds whether the device created by HP is a memristor or simply a varistor[3][etc]. The heated debate has been widely publicised in the scientific community[4][etc] and is still ongoing. According to [3], Blaise has an interest in preventing a patent land-grab over these technologies on the basis that the patent claims may use unjustified science.

I also note that the 2008 symposium talk by Leon Chua made mention of Memory Capacitors and Memory Inductors[5]. Stanley Williams started the next talk by thanking Leon for the challenge posted to systems implementers to find and use memory capacitors and memory inductors. If the missing circuit component is the memory resistor (confused with the varistor?), where do memory capacitors and memory inductors fit in?

[1] http://vixra.org/author/blaise_mouttet

[2] http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+Blaise+Mouttet/0/1/0/al...

[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328535.200-online-sp...

[4] http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4236273/Memri...

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFdDPzcZwbs
What's wrong with saying that there are some things better expressed in mediums other than text?
Why would anyone give a shit what China has to say about this? They just censor everything blind anyway.
Contrarian anecdotes are an ill-conceived method of contributing to a conversation, and doing so in some sort of attention-getting way. They appear to all but undermine the entire premise of the original content, and yet, are based on absolutely nothing but one's individual experience with the matter.

I see this kind of stuff all the time on Reddit, and it's become so numbing that you know, no matter how well you construct an argument or how many facts you cite, someone will always come out of the wood works and tell you how you're wrong because it didn't happen that way for them. It wouldn't be so bad if people didn't take that as a genuine counter-argument.
SSL/TLS is super interesting. Because we often aren't set up to monitor it, it's kind of a black box in terms of performance. Here's some interesting stuff I've found lately:

1. In order to establish a chain of trust, the server is going to be sending your browser at least 2 (server cert, ca) if not more certificates, which contain a fair amount of plain text, so there is some bandwidth overhead here.

2. The most computationally expensive part of SSL setup is the challenge/response key verification step, which generally involves RSA (public/private keys) rather than AES (symmetric keys).

3. SSL session reuse is an interesting feature, on one hand it allows you to skip (2), but if those session keys aren't stored securely server side, it opens up an attack vector. So just remember to make sure those values are as secure as your server's private key.

4. In order to skip (2) many servers such as apache have support for a type of "memcached like" distributed key value store allowing instances to share session data called dc. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_ssl.html#sslsession...
The author was referring to contrarian anecdotes in reply to statistical data, not someone's opinion.

- He is only arguing that there is universal truth in proxy by arguing that the scientific method is more valuable than anecdotal evidence. If you don't agree with that, you probably disagree with most of HN (pure conjecture, does anyone else here think anecdotal evidence is more valuable than statistical analysis?)

- I agree with you on this point. I don't think we should downvote comments because a fun discussion is what the comments are for, not to try to prove or disprove a study.

- Statistical analysis is not a specialized form of anecdote. That's a stretch.
Google: Most Censorship Requests Come From Democracies
No, sports fans really do act like they're better because they understand what's happening and you don't. Maybe you haven't been exposed to this because you understand sports. You will definitely get snotty reactions if you ever let on that you don't know about the basics of football or basketball in the US. I don't care, but this is definitely one of those things.
80,000 Words, 161 posts later. What have i learned?
Various chinese nonames? Some of those with Android already.
Science is downstream from philosophy, and behind any given scientific paradigm there are dozens if not hundreds of philosophical assumptions. This means that if philosophy has taught us essentially nothing, then most likely science has taught us several orders of magnitude less than essentially nothing.

Modern science as it exists today is basically a quasi-religious system that is more or less the next version of alchemy in terms of its intellectual heritage. It's clear to me that in a couple hundred years we'll probably look back on the science of today the same way that most people today look at alchemy. Already research investigating the truth of the spiritual underpinnings of science is one of the hottest areas of research, and you can't go more than a couple weeks without seeing some new finding or treatise. It's only going to be so long before all of these disparate parts get organized into a cohesive whole that's convincing enough to undermine the current establishment.
> When using SSL, the remote domain name is transferred over the wire in plain text. Anyone able to sniff the traffic can know exactly what domains you're looking at, even when you're using HTTPS.

Without SNI you can only have one domain name per IP so that security consideration is not really an issue.
As a (somewhat off-topic) aside, I notice that every picture in the article seems to be slightly askew, and generally by the same angle. Can anybody tell me if there is a reason for this, or is it just an affectation of the photographer?
> There is no universal truth as the author seems to imply.

Indeed not, but to use the coined term, some things are truthier than others. By and large, we can make more informed and better decisions on the "truthiest" truths without mucking up the argument with individual, pointless anecdotes, especially when those anecdotes aren't backed by anything but what simply "happened" to them.
Congrats to the MemSQL team. It's always validating to see more entrants into the space. The comparison between the two systems is fascinating; the approach taking is really different than VoltDB, but the systems share some similar choices as well.

As for your comments:

1. Ad-Hoc SQL in VoltDB is a current area of focus in VoltDB development. We use similar compilation and expect them to be no slower than our stored procedures in the 2012 timeframe. Starting with our release next week, we'll also support multiple SQL statements in a serialized/ACID ad-hoc transaction.

2. On a single-node (or a several replicated nodes), VoltDB doesn't really have many issues with data skews. Rebalancing a distributed system is also in development, but hasn't turned out to be much of an issue with our production customers.

3. Faster at what? Single statement non-durable transactions? That's probably true for simple SQL operations for the time being. It gets murkier once you consider VoltDB features like materialized views that avoid table-scans altogether. I am also curious how durability affects performance though.

But I'm really interested to revisit this comparison once MemSQL supports real transactions and replication/sharding. For the time being, most of the VoltDB use cases we target won't run on it.
An informative read is The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe (yes, that white suit wearing writer). It's a fairly short book, and written from personal experience in the art world.

He talks about the evolution of art toward something that can only be appreciated if you know the theory behind it, and also about the interplay of the (poor) artist and the (rich) patron and the psychological aspects of what the patron it buying (often: they get to be an "insider", with the whole notion of being an insider being something that the artist has constructed.)
Copyright for artworks in this context is automatic. At least that's how it works in the UK. Once your create your own art, you hold the automatic copyright. Unless you made the art under commission to someone else.

Now I might be wrong but that's the impression I have had for years.
That was written almost 2 years ago when it was thought to have mattered. I have about 7 apps installed on my phone, 2 of which are angry birds and angry birds space. I have the kindle app, facebook, and a weather app which sucks.

Any really strong selling app for iPhone, will make it to Andriod which will make it to Windows.

The number of apps in your market is not really important when you have the web.

[ADDED] This may not be as true for Apple users because of the smaller screen size and slower web. For me, I have the LTE Galaxy so I just go right to the web. It is almost as good as my laptop due to the larger screen and LTE. I would guess when the new iPhone comes out, apps will probably become even less important.
Things to Consider Before Replacing Flash with HTML5/CSS3 In Your Website
In recent years; Flash, an Adobe’s proprietary web technology is often regarded in a negative light. Like it or not, Flash has brought out the feeling of outright hate among us.
And then Crypto is regulated - I worked on a project for BT Worldwide where we had a matrix of what what and wasn't allowed to do. In France we had to deny access to some info as we where not legally allowed to use crypto over dialup.

Oh and Burma had the death penaty for some uses of cryptography - luckly we did not have a JV in Burma
Cats, Cocaine, and Currency: Inside the World of Ca$hcats.biz
Building Emotion Into Your Websites - Usabilla Blog
yes, memsql is an in-memory database. the big innovation here is that we're literally hardwiring the SQL into the server and matching queries to those compiled query templates.

Since we work in memory, you see a huge perf boost with code generation because there are no lags with disk.
AAPL Stock Chart 1984-2012: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL+Interactive#symbol=a...;
Interesting.

Can you please point me to a more authoritative source for this? I also had a "green" drive fail surprisingly soon. How did you confirm that they spin up and down "several times a minute" by themselves. Are you sure it wasn't your misconfigured OS telling them to do that?

Since green drives are also slower, I just assumed they traded off energy for data transfer speed.
Interface inspiration at the office
Hmm, affordable managed hosting sounds better. If I need, say, my Postgres instance tuned to my specific workloads, is that included in the price? I assume service configurations are editable, please correct me if I'm wrong.

What do you guys manage exactly? What sort of work am I saving if I get dotcloud?
I understand that, but some of these startup posts have a list of 7-10 technologies. Surely there's some that are essential and others on the "nice to have" list? You want a Django person who knows JQuery, but if they have Rackspace experience rather than AWS, or if it's a Rubyist who knows gem A but not B, it seems like they'd be excluded on some of the job listings.
What's wrong with a wallpaper sampler? There are lots of neat colors and patterns in there too.

I don't understand how you can call out snobbery at the same time that you equate painting from life with dolphins jumping in front of a full moon, and imply that photography made life painting completely obsolete.
Windows 8 preview is good..may be not windows7 killer with PCs..but surely can compete with Android OS in mobile devices....only problem with Windows 8 is free development tools..hope MS looks into it..else it may loose the race before it starts....

and saying 'RIP Nokia' is very bad...i feel Nokia is still the best with its hardware and looks..i like Nokia 900 looks n hardware rather S3....

Android would have been better option...but they can switch to ANdroid as well when Windows 8 is not helping..there should be no worries about that...
Ahh those, never needed a queue manager cause I'm streaming only. They never seemed particularly useful.
This is exactly how it is supposed to work. Now, freshly empowered, will choose another streaming service. That service presumably distinguishes itself by offering such APIs. So the number of people who switch helps train the market.

Perhaps there is a startup opportunity for an API driven unbranded movie streaming service where the product is the viewing API/data rather than the streaming.
I hate the headline, but Pek is the real deal. I'm also a big fan of Pinstagram, so I might be more than a little biased.
> Is this a serious piece of writing or just trolling?

Note the author. All his articles are like this.
It will definitely be that way for me. I have been using Windows since version 3.1, but Windows 8 marks the end of the road. I basically have no choice but to switch to Linux full-time at this point. Half the Linux desktops have recently gone insane as well, but at least there are still things like XFCE.
Hey Amir,

Totally agree with what you are saying here, particularly once the idea is validated and you start to see good adoption. I've used todoist and wedoist for a long time and it certainly is reliable ;-)

This post mainly covers the really early stages before millions of users, where the most important thing is focusing on the product and market fit as much as possible. We certainly treated scaling issues in a reactive way at this point. I'd like to think we have got a lot better at being proactive as the service has grown and more people depend on us - for example the recent move to AWS was due to hardware constraints in our old setup, it was planned well in advance and executed with minimal downtime.
I'm getting the same issue. Also on Win7 using IE9 or FF12
I thought Exec was a separate company?
Well, you can use UCC/SAN certificates to support multiple domains under one IP.
So often I have been in Comet/Currys/PC World etc and seen older people told they need a £40 HDMI cable, or "this is the last one in stock, it's a great price - shall we go to the paperwork" etc.

I find that sort of thing really irritating. It's mis-selling, and as such it is almost always illegal, but it's close enough to plausible that most people who would be in those stores in the first place won't be confident enough to challenge it.

There's also a certain arrogance about some stores these days, and not just the ones staffed by 12-year-olds. I went to buy a new iPad a few days after they launched. Apple somehow seemed to be price-fixing without getting called on it, because everywhere was charging the exact same price for a high-value, prestige product in short supply, which doesn't sound like a competitive market to me. Still, I figured if those were the rules of the game then I might as well go where they seemed most likely to have stock: the Apple store.

Two Apple staff eventually asked if they could help me. I told them exactly which model of new iPad I wanted. One said that he didn't think they had any in stock and wasn't sure when they'd be back in, but he'd go and check. He came back several minutes later, having apparently sent someone else off to check the stock for him in the interim, and proudly declared that he was right: they really didn't have the product I wanted that was advertised all over their window display, and they really didn't have a clue when it would next be available. Then he grinned bizarrely, as if I was supposed to be impressed by his awesome level of customer service or something.

I walked next door to John Lewis, where I easily found a friendly member of staff, who in turn walked about five metres to a terminal and told me within about ten seconds that they did have what I wanted. She then personally went to the store room and returned two minutes later with the correct box, personally checked that she really had found the item I wanted, and put it behind the till reserved for me until I was ready to leave.

Guess where I'm going next time...
Because HTML5 is not adequate for complex UI development. It seems Oracle is the only company to see that the current "every app should be HTML5" trend will end in overhype and failure.
Well, what about wildcard certificates?

* Without SNI you know - guy A spoke to guy B, who is say facebook.

* With SNI you know - guy A spoke to guy B, who is facebook, and asked for myfavouriteuniquepics.facebook.com.

SNI may reveal some information.
Nokia won't last until 2014. They are declining too fast

If the failboat called RIM has managed to stay afloat for so long, I cannot see Nokia failing any faster.

At least Nokia has (finally) released something which belongs in this time and age, while RIM still insists it will release BB OS 10 "real soonish now", like it has for the past year. Or is it years? Plural? I don't know. I just know that their current premium product is something which was hard to sell 3 years ago. They're so dead.

Where I live, the Blackberry-stores have started stocking iPhones and Samsung Android-phones just to sell something. The Nokia-stores are at least still selling Nokia-phones only.

I have no doubt that Nokia tanking is a very real possibility. But RIM is going down first. Unlike Nokia, they have absolutely nothing.