skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be funny if people were switching to Chrome because they were tired of updates. Chrome updates _all_the_time_. Also no one gives a hoot about version numbers. I don't think people hate the updates, they hate the nagging popups. There's not really much difference between a browser notification and one of those annoying "I see you've been on my site for 23 seconds, take my survey!!!11" screens.

I wrote about this at length last year:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105636695715347097518/posts/G9hb...

A prerequisite to a non-annoying rapid release cycle IMO is silent update. It's why we spent the time to get that part of the technology stack working first. I predict user frustration with Firefox will decrease now they've implemented this.
Going to have to start by proclaiming that several other things are human rights before you get to Internet access.

Access devices are a human right. Electricity is a human right. Access to telecom lines (of some sort) is a human right. Access to mobile or a spot to plug into is a human right. Transistors are a human right. Storage is a human right. Some kind of electronic or digital display is a human right.
I think what he meant was: "Let's hope that this research leads to some simulated animals [much later down the road]".
Textcelerator (browser extension for speed reading)
This is brilliant sarcasm! I have worked with several of these A-List teams / "democracies". They are a perfect storm of nothing ever getting done because agreements cannot be made on a single issue.
The last time I played with Opera's built-in mail client, it was pretty similar.
I don’t think so. With only freedom of speech, the government could still ban access to all foreign-country-hosted read-only sites – sites without commenting or other interactivity. That would include many informational sites and blogs.
The link sent me to Yahoo Finance which had a headline that didn't include about 99% of the words in the headline here. Oh well, my mistake.
Impoverishment perhaps. Drive to your local Home Depot, and look around at the day laborers waiting to be hired.
People tend to over-estimate change in the short term and under-estimate it in the long term.

They're going to miss by 20 to 30 years, at least.
Agreed, that's why I use Mailplane (OSX). It's just a wrapper around Gmail giving me easy account management and OS-level notifications while still letting me use Gmail.
Your meta-pedantics are killing me. Love JS Weekly btw :)
Yes. The similarity struck me when I was thinking of Misesean economic calculation problem and why free-market pricing mechanism (probably) cannot be replaced with something else. (Disclaimer: I tend to agree with Austrian economists on most things, so I'm biased).
No. I also like the restrictions on time, speed and bandwidth I use on my client. Almost no traffic during the day and lots between 00:00 and 08:00 due to half bandwidth "cost" from my ISP. I also want to keep track of how much data has been transferred due to a bandwidth cap.
Samsung wins bid to sell Nexus in court
In many cultures (f.ex. Japanese, Arab) it's the social norm to prioritize family, and you are expected to do it. It's the westerners who ruined it, I can't believe how it can be socially acceptable to miss a child birth for a client meeting. If I were his client and knew he came while his wife is at labor, I would think this guy is completely messed up and needs some serious help, and sent him away quickly.
Interesting! This is really similar to Guiders.js from Optimizely. We've just done some hacking with Guiders for our latest product demo/lead gen landing page for Decal CMS[1] but this seems as though it might be a bit more flexible since it's based on Bootstrap popovers.

[1] http://30s-demo.mockups.decalcms.com/
Via the social contract, by infringing on the rights of another, one volunteers to temporarily suspend the right to freedom. A right cannot be taken away or lost as they are inherent to the human condition.
Well good. Security updates and no updates blowing up in my face. All I want is what I see.
Nokia 808 PureView Arrives in India
Thanks and have an upvote. But my deeply in debt and homeless situation has now been compounded by a suddenly hugely negative bank balance.

Please excuse me while I go have a good cry. I no longer know how to cope.
I guess now they'll have to do all their development. But if they want to hire programmers with Thunderbird experience I know where they can find some...
I am a html5 JS developer taking part in all this and I happen to share your opinion from time to time.
I enjoy using lynx (ok, links2 actually).

Don't worry, there's lots of people who are trying to keep the web worth your attention :)
If I were trying to get people to stop armchairing, or at least be more productive about it, I would just write a simple personal story about how I used to armchair, possibly with some allegorical overtones.
Yeah, my bad. I think I crosswired "computer" and "bit" when I was typing "2D vector".
> No server-side hacks involved

Well, the JPEG file doesn't have the correct mime-type. Chrome warns, "Resource interpreted as Image but transferred with MIME type text/html" in the console. Apparently in the context of an <img src=""> URL it figures it out though.
Andy, you're very confused.
> I do think that they go half the distance sometimes with their privacy measures - "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default, and Firefox accepts and keeps "Third Party Cookies" until they expire.

There's a good reason "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default. If it was checked by default, then advertisers would have the perfect excuse to ignore it: "oh, that's not really the user's preference, they're just sending that header because their browser sends it by default; let's go ahead and track them."

By making it opt-in, we ensure that a site receiving a do-not-track header knows for sure that it represents an active choice on the part of the user.

You may remember that IE was going to turn it on by default. But then Mozilla and the rest of the do-not-track collaborators explained this principle to them and they went back to off-by-default.

The third-party cookie thing, though, I don't have a good explanation for. When I worked at Mozilla I spent a lot of time trying to convince people that we should block third-party cookies by default. (Especially after I started working on Collusion and saw how prevalent they are.) I kept getting the same response: "We can't block 3rd party cookies, it would break the web."

I don't agree with this, obviously. Before pop-up-blocking became the norm in all browsers, you could have made the argument that pop-up-blocking would "break the web" too. I believe 3rd party cookies are a giant security hole, and breaking sites that use them would be a small price to pay for closing it.

But, I couldn't convince Mozilla of that. It's one of the reasons I decided to leave.

> Are curved tabs really better than rectangular ones?

IIRC from the UI design talk where the new "Australis" redesign was introduced internally, the motivation behind the curved tab redesign was to look "friendlier" and more "organic".

One thing the Australis redesign does which I do think is important is that it finally provides a consistent location for add-ons to add buttons. (The status bar used to be this, but it was hidden in Firefox 4 to recover screen space for content.)
Selling lenses completely breaks their business model and competitive advantage. If Apple is so good at selling computers, why don't they sell motherboards? Not to mention the addressable market...
Thanks and congrats on your wedding :)
not much of a Tweeterer, but lookin at the screens I'll say that you've probably hit on something. Gtalk is designed that way because it works.

VolScroll, tho . . . not sure about it. on my Gal S2, the vol buttons are really out of the way. I'll bet that the only time i'd use them with this app would be when i only could use one hand. even then, it's just as easy to hold with hand and thumb scroll...

And when's the only time you'd need 1-handed scrolling? Behind the wheel of the car. Neat idea, to be sure... just not sure if it's practical.
The Pal-V One has two seats and a 160 kW flight certified gasoline engine, giving it a top speed of 180 km/h (112 mph) on land and in air, and a Maximum Takeoff Weight of 910 kg. Estimated unit price is around $300,000.

Where do I buy one?
There's RoundCube. I don't think it does multiple accounts though.
I've found that, oddly enough, both the high-end and the low-end tend not to hassle you much, and instead it's sort of the middle-range optometry shops that are trying to make a bunch of money on in-house lens/frames sales.

Just about the cheapest place to get an eye exam is in the Wal-Mart vision department, and they're happy to hand over the prescription. Of course, they run the vision dept in part to try to sell you lenses/frames (or contacts), but it's a very corporate/streamlined place, and the actual employee working there doesn't mind if you want the prescription to take elsewhere.

On the other end of the scale, places that look more like a doctor's office than a frames showroom tend to be pretty professional about it. Since I have very strong myopia with some risk of retinal problems as a result, I've been going to a place that's a partnership between an optometrist and an ophthalmologist (M.D.) who do a more thorough eye-health exam, and there it's basically expected that I'll want to take the prescription with me.
That's a great idea. Pick one instance where you got out of the armchair and applied your idea. Inspire instead of creating a guilt trip.
Opera's built in mail client is excellent. It's unfortunately baked into the browser, so while still pretty light (Opera's what 10-15 Mb) it's got a bit of irrelevent UI laying about in email mode. Still excellent though.
What if I can't pay for it? Do I have the right to force somebody else to pay for it? Am I going to be forced to pay for the Internet of somebody else? Why is the Internet a human right but electricity, which is kind of critical to running the Internet, is not?

The Internet just seems really specific (see the list of others at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/).
> This has been possible in Opera out-of-the-box for half a decade.

BitTorrent support in Opera has been removed in Opera 12, at least on Mac OS X.[1]

I'm rather happy that they've removed it, since I already use a better BitTorrent client (Transmission) and Opera always hijack .torrent file to itself.

[1]: http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/sysadmin/#disable-bit...
I started zooming out and my graphics driver crashed which is quite a rare a occurrence these days.
Nobody's site went down. This was a development issue that only affected certain aspects of the API: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/399
And does this prevent that? China and Iran signed on as well.
Not many people seem to understand their libertarian views on things. Their philosophy is neither for free Internet or against free Internet. Their philosophy is about less government intervention.

Yet the Pauls seem all too eager to push federal limits on abortion and marriage equality.
The Chinese delegate stipulated that the “free flow of information on the Internet and the safe flow of information on the Internet are mutually dependent” while signing the resolution. I think his supposed reasoning is that if people are scared of encountering “unsafe” things on the Internet, they will avoid the Internet and thus lose opportunities for speech. But that still seems pretty unconvincing – I’m having trouble understanding how the rest of the Human Rights Council can let China pretend to support the resolution when it has such a weak defense for its censorship policy.
VolScroll is an additional means of scrolling. Touch scrolling naturally works as you would expect.

I use it primarily when I'm tweetin' & eatin'. One hand is using a fork, the other is holding the phone and easily navigating the feed.
You're forgetting katakana, though.

Yeah... about that. Do you really need two different phonetic alphabets? I mean, c'mon! Give a lazy gaijin a break!
I've been loving Postbox. It's based on TB, but with a better UI and great Gmail/Google Apps integration. It has a free 30-day trial, and will import your accounts from TB seamlessly.
I suspect that's doing some kind of autodetection to decide which version of the page to serve. (Perhaps based on what MIME type the browser requests.)
Matlab is truly the RAD tool of choice for numerical programming and has a solid grip in universities combined with enterprise-level support.

I do not think Octave ever tried to replicate its workflow (which is not general programmer centric at all) and domain-specific documentation but merely focused on the underlying language compatibility, which is really the least important part of Matlab.

On top of that, I seem to recall, Matlab was one of the first of the specialist programming toolsets to offer a very competitive "Student Edition". This was a godsend for schools and universities before the Internet took off.

In short, Octave was too little too late, and Numpy/Scipy, while catching up fast, has supporting tools spread all over the place as well as being geared more to general programmers who want access to convenient numerics rather than numerical modellers/engineers wanting a RAD tool.

Numpy/Scipy etc. may well overtake Matlab eventually, but that will be purely a function of its infrastructure, not the something as mundane as even the nice language (which admittedly was its initial driving force). At least in this respect, it has done a lot better than Octave in much less time.
He was given explicit permission from the prosecutor to leave. He was travelling regularly on that time and went to a scheduled event for the release of documents.
Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately.

We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users.

The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior.

Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests).

(I work for Mozilla but was not involved in MemShrink. Also, I wrote this on my phone, so I hope there are no embarrassing misspellings. )
Fascinating stuff... the latest architectural overview is particularly interesting (http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/netflix-architecture-tuto...) If I had one criticism, I'd love to see a separate overview of the fundamental (CS?) problems, vs. the ephemeral engineering problems (AWS). We all know AWS will go the way of the mainframe (though we may disagree as to timeframes!), but I think e.g. content recommendation algorithms and architectures will forever remain an interesting problem.

Though I'd love to see the monitoring solution open-sourced :-)
Argh, Poe's law strikes again. I can no longer tell if this thread is jokingly or seriously armchairing a discussion on how to tell people about the problems of armchairing. To that I say either "well done" or "seriously?".
A software architect job is about interfaces between modules. An architect job is to design interfaces that are aligned with the product direction and technical capabilities (both of the product and the people developing it) and tell a consistent story, both syntactically as well as semantically.
Without such a person, each pair of developers, no matter how good an engineers they are, will have to develop their own language that is bound not to match those that are developed around it. This adds to the burden of each developer as he (or she) has to use APIs developed by different such teams. Consistency is key.
Because the architect has to see the big picture to do his job, it makes sense that he's also the look-ahead guy. Because he defines interfaces and modules, it makes sense that he gets to evaluate new technologies - so playing with rabbitMQ really is part of the job description.
This kind of job tend to require a working knowledge of the product internal, otherwise APIs can get completely incompatible with capabilities. As such, it attracts good developers that also think "strategically". Because many architect still love the code, you usually see such a person wearing two hats - the classic architect one but also the "lead developer" one - so code reviews, cleanup work and super important (but small) modules tend to be part the architect work, even if not in the job description.
Lastly, the architect must have soft skills. The job requires a lot of human interaction, considerably more than a developer job does. It also requires a much closer interaction with "management", the architect understands the aforementioned big picture.

Is the architect "better" than any developer? No. It's a complimentary role. Is this role always needed? No, but as a project gets bigger and start having more modules, interfaces tend to get hairy without a guiding hand. So why do architects make more? Supply and demand. Not everyone has the ability or the will to think "big picture" all the time. It's tiring, it's complex and you tend to think about balances (how will this affect the future? How much risk? How many man-hours? What's the alternative? How to phase development?) instead of "code purity".

Disclaimer: I'm an architect but I also do a lot of "lead developer" parts. And while the definition tends to get fuzzy around the edges (and some interfaces are made ad-hoc, without that guiding hand), I see the best results when I follow the above recipe (which, sadly, means a lot less coding than I actually like to do).

TL;DR: architecture is about interfaces between modules, not content of each module. Usually architects also wear "lead dev" hat because they like it.
They plan to launch food supplies to Mars in 2016, 7 years before sending the astronauts and 2 years before they've even scouted out where to establish a settlement.

I don't understand why they would send the supplies there so early. Can anyone explain this timeline to me?
Hi Smacktoward,
I'm the author of the post and I agree with everything you said here.

How to reach out to new users while keeping your existing users happy is one of the oldest and biggest problems in software development. There's no perfect solution, but I like the suggestion of creating a new product name for the new thing. That can sometimes get you into trouble too, as you end up competing with yourself, Microsoft-style, or get users who are confused about which version they should use. But it might be the least bad option.
Is it almost as bad though if people are moving from firefox to chrome?
Most better-off countries treat electricity as something that if not a right, is at least a strong public-policy priority: something that we believe everyone should have access to. At least, to the extent that the country as a whole is developed enough for it to be feasible. And yes, that includes subsidizing it to improve access; rural electrification in the United States and Canada (at least) was massively subsidized.
Make sure all things required for survival and a possible return already be there?
We're responding to a post, by Netflix, explaining their downtime. That post is missing the single most important fact - that they need to be able to failover across regions. The rest of their explanation is just second-order noise.

Anyone who reads HN can see that a minimum uptime strategy for Amazon is to failover across regions. Each time there is a major AWS outage, we hear about HN readers whose service was affected even though they spanned availability zones within a single region. But to date, Amazon's regions have operated independently.

That observation is not dependent on knowledge of Quantcast (which is incidentally, far more than a write-only system), or the other production systems I've built in the last 35 years.

(I'll follow up by email about your support questions)
Is a native, snappy email client something you'd pay for?

$20? $50?

What operating systems? Is there anything specific features/aspects/licensing that would push you to $50?

If neither, (I assume free or close to it) why? How much time do you spend in an email interface? How much is your time worth?

Cheers!
Mars can be mined for resources, the moon can't - or at least shouldn't be.
If people are not allowed to talk how could any of them ever innovate?
So its been a few month without bashing firefox and thus its that time of the year for that again?

Except it has better memory management than any other browser now.

Except its the fastest browser on Android now.

Except the upgrading no longer break addons as they're compat by default now

Except upgrading is now silent (no dialog box, no UAC prompt, no "welcome to the new firefox tab" - yes; on windows)

Except if you need a Firefox that doesn't change version at all, you can use Firefox ESR.

Cause it's not having things fixed now that matters. Nope. Never!
... what?

You're already logged into a Google account on your phone. Or do you really have different account for your phone, thereby foregoing the biggest advantage of having an Android phone (sync with all of the Google services)?
My first post was serious, but it was hard to resist creating an online armchair scientist support group.
I like D as well, or maybe C.
This is spot on, and it's something I didn't even notice yet just always had a slightly uneasy feeling about since I've been using ICS on the Galaxy Nexus.

Another one that I did notice is after going one or more levels deep in folders in your bookmarks requires you to tap the breadcrumbs to go back up a level, and not the back button, since that takes you back to the main browser view. But the breadcrumbs are too long for a portait-mode screen, so you can never actually read more than the first letters of the first folder! So I end up hitting the back button almost every time, and cursing about it.
Seconded on Chez JJ; stayed at all three, and got an excellent amount of networking done with the most awesome individuals. Also pretty cheap as far as BA accommodations go.

San Francisco and "the valley" are very different and far enough apart that you don't want to make the commute between them any more often than necessary. Plan on multiple consecutive days in one before you visit the other.

It's nearly pointless (and a huge hassle) to have a car in SF, and it's useful if not essential to have a car in the valley. Zipcars are cute but they end up being far more expensive than regular rental cars if you need them for more than a few hours. They also require a significant amount of up-front planning, as you have to obtain additional hardware before being able to drive one away.

Best place to meet and network are meetup.com, and other entrepreneurs' pitch sessions. Hacker Dojo and a few other co-working places are pretty good too.
I believe it was Firefox 12 or 13 that made add-one compatible by default. Except for add-ons with binary parts, I don't think you should find so many turned off with each update now.
jono_x: For some reason your account appears to have been banned from the moment of creation. Nobody can see any of your comments.
Whenever you start a sentence with "Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in [tech field]" you already know you are probably wrong about it.
This is a rare case on HN where someone's username is quite relevant.
I would pay if it were something amazing (i.e. not just a bit faster than Thunderbird), probably around $20. I don't spend that much time on email, but I hate the small annoyances of Thunderbird (when I delete messages a new, empty one appears that can't be removed, it has no tray icon, it starts up maximized and I have to close it every time, it has no decent "send later" functionality, etc).

These are all things that Thunderbird doesn't get right. Also, search is completely broken.