skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked the article. Forget about whether the word "architect" is used by some as a pretense--the author is suggesting essential qualities of a leader. Teams need direction; this seems to me like good advice for a person to provide direction to other peers effectively.
Flagged as crap. Half of this article is just shouting insults into the void.

If the point of the post is "it would be cool to have hacker cohabitation all over the place, so that we could just zip around the world and live here and there with like-minded people" then the author should just say that point instead of layering on a bunch of bizarre chestbeating.
If the document they're presenting is anything like as cherry-picked as the original indictment, I strongly suspect that the reason they're so insistent on only letting him have the cherry-picked version is that they're lying about the evidence that they have against him. For instance, they picked out long lists of payout amounts and descriptions of copyrighted content as evidence of intent to pay uploaders money for copyright infringing content. Based both on what I'd heard about their attitudes at the time and on a reference to Megaupload's policy of not paying copyright infringers that the prosecutor accidentally let into the indictment, I reckon that the lists were almost certainly being used to avoid paying money for copyright infringing content and that a full copy of the e-mails would reveal that the FBI are lying through their teeth.
> We've also seen our image server's RAID array go from being relatively idle to getting absolutely slammed

Sounds like it is?
Is 3600 Elo the Max?
You'll be disappointed to know that Dart doesn't use bytecode.
I see your point - this guy wrote some nice code that didn't consider "the future". I'd suggest that in a well-rounded team, there should've been a number of people who he either paired with (if you believe in that sort of thing) or code-reviewed his work that should've caught that, right? You implied that would've fixed it but never happened... That's interesting.

Anyway, if this fellow continually didn't "learn", didn't "grow" - at least ask someone to review his work, then I would council him that this needs to change or he's more of a liability than an asset. Enlightenment is knowing your weakness and if, for some crazy reason, you can't do that - then you're not really a "good developer", right?

Sure, you can sorta solve the immediate problem in front of you but you're an apprentice, or mid/junior sort of a person - and I expect you to mature out of it. If you don't? Not a good fit.

I'm not talking about mythical unicorns that do everything exceptionally well - just that the team should consist of folks that can generally do what is considered "Architecture" - and it should come within the team rather than someone outside of it.

I consider labeling someone as "Architect" as suboptimal - "Oh, I don't have to worry about architecture because we have The Architect to do it for me".
Everyone is impressed at how real they're keeping it?

With the risks involved, and the $6 billion price tag (that will surely bloat out), there would need to be at least $50-60 billion in profit potential for rational investment.

Seinfeld is the top grossing show in history, at $2.7 billion.

Maybe they're hoping that billionaires with nothing else to spend the money on will cough up hundreds of millions to sponsor the project, just to get their name on it.

Either that, or they're not revealing the whole plan.
> The point isn't that you should get free internet--the point is that a government should not prevent you from freely using the internet.

Isn't that already covered under freedom of speech?
And if you want more of Crockford's advice, he's done a talk about ES5 changes (which you should really watch, they are great)
This is just more evidence that we should strive to do everything in a browser. Or an app that functions like one. It is more secure. Details should not be exposed to the user.

Remember there is no file system. In fact, there are no files.

We hid them so they do not exist. Out of sight, out of mind.

There's no such thing as binary. That only existed when you were younger. Now it no longer exists. The numbers are gone. They do not exist.

What's really important is how good fonts look. The javascript, the CSS, the browser!

No user cares about content like text, audio and video, they care about window dressing: html and browsers. They care about what you can do with javascript. What can you do? Show me some tricks.

Content alone is not enough. Who wants to read a story or download a video clip? You have to present it; you must entertain and you must persuade, by trickery if necessary. It's not the content, silly. It's the webpage. No javascript, no dice. Don't just deliver the content, entertain me for a few minutes first. Tell me about something else.

No one cares about TV programming. They care about the TV's setup screens and onscreen channel guide. They want these menus to come to life. They want their TV's to become "intelligent".

A webpage without javascript is like a lifeless onscreen TV channel guide that does not track what you watch and report it to marketers, or make automatic suggestions on what you should watch, or display animations while you sit and wait for seconds while the TV's software is "Loading..." in response to your last button push. Boring.

Users want books, newspapers, radios and TV's that have "artificial intelligence". They want others to know what they are reading and watching and they want advertisers to address them by name. Let's get with it. Bring us the future.
>Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much.

I think Windows interface has withstood the test of time pretty well. The basic UX paradigm is essentially unchanged from Windows 95 with whatever that followed basically being tweaks rather than big changes.
He's amazing. I absolutely devoured his book 'Almost Everything There is to Know' as a kid, which was the collection of all his cartoons from decades at the Observer. It's now online http://www.timhunkin.com/40_rudiments_book.htm but I highly recommend getting a second hand copy of the book. I must have read it cover to cover about 5 times and I think it's the source of my reputation of always knowing ridiculous random facts.
The Great Founder Race
Re: bowing out. I have found that simply no longer replying when others are seriously mischaracterizing my remarks causes more problems than it solves. It creates additional work of an onerous sort which can haunt me for months or years. I wish that worked. I really do. But I have not found that it does.

Have a great day.
Dude, that's a pretty awful way to do it. After running your example code:

(new Person).constructor === Spy
[ disclaimer, I am an armchair economist ]

"You're talking about the supply side of the supply/demand equation. Essentially, the greater the supply of something, the lower the price one can charge for it. Reducing the cost of production effectively increases the supply, so it ultimately reduces the price as well."

No I am not. One of my areas of research has been the economics of information. Unlike classic 'real goods' economics which are driven by supply and demand, information economics are driven by other forces. One of the paradoxes this sorts out is how something can be 'free' to produce and still have economic value.

In the case of creative works, I theorize that the economic value derives from the creativity itself. One might pay to see a play rather than read it for free because the 'value' is watching the theater bring the work to life. Similarly with 'apps' in that you might pay for one that saves time, or automates a loathsome task, Etc. So the economic question becomes what does it cost to 'produce' (which is go from nothing to something) the work, vs what is the economic value of utilizing the work (aka the desire to have that problem solved). For some things, like Uber (which automates finding the nearest car available for hire) many people 'desire' to have that problem solved and it motivates them to give economic value to possess that capability. (or buy the app, subscribe to the service, etc).

So Parse lowers the cost of converting idea into App, which lowers the economic cost to develop an idea, does it have the same economic value to the recipient? Let me use an example that might illustrate what I'm trying to say.

Lets say you've got a neighbor with a rude dog which barks every time you walk out the front door. This is annoying. Now someone offers to fix it so that you don't have to deal with it, and their 'fix' is to put a giant tube down your front sidewalk so the dog can't see you leave. You might find no value at all in that solution because you could do the same thing and the giant tube looks stupid. Or the person might be some sort of dog whisperer type who could go over and train the dog to not respond like that when they see you. Well in the latter case there is a higher perceived economic value since you don't possess 'dog whisperer' skills and thus you could not implement the solution yourself. But the tube thing, well you could do that if you wanted too.

So back to Apps, what is the economic value of an app you really could create yourself in a 'couple of hours' ? Probably not a whole lot. But if it would take you 'weeks' to make that app, well you're willing to spend $4 to have someone else do the leg work.

Information economics are driven in part by a strange opportunity cost function which I can't say I've completely characterized, but I do know that if we released a tool tomorrow that let you speak to your phone and tell it the 'feature' you wanted it to have, and some sort of thing went out and created that and dropped it on your phone. It would destroy the app ecosystem as we know it today.

Perhaps Parse + Mechanical Turk + Siri can get to that point, if so it would really change things.
Agree - this is also needed for accessibility reasons. Either something like Spacebar for next, or Tab/arrow keys.
Bah. What's a good alternative native email reader?
Or The Neverhood:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neverhood
I do not think that this post is against all criticism, but it is against the non-productive "How hard can it be?" or "This is terrible" type or criticism, especially by someone who has never stepped into that arena and has no clue "Hard hard it can be."

This is different from more constructive criticism like, "This would be better if it also had feature xyz". Even "I will pay for this service when, and only when, reliability is above xyz..." can be meaningful.
Javascript [does/will]* have a "let" statement.

*depending on which version of ECMAscript is being used.
On the video: i have seen you have also on your blog, link to that one, you do not really get credibility linking to youtube, even better, make a simple landing page. Even if people usually do not like landing pages that ask for emails a simple page with description and the video is much better.
Also i got the idea when you said "twitter with videos" everything was crystal clear in my mind and so it would be to anyone who listens to your pitch. This is very important. Work on a strong elevator pitch. You must know it perfectly. And put some passion in it. I know you are excited because we are in the same boat. But other people don't. They will not get more excited than what you show, so if you do not show a large amount of energy they will never be thrilled. Do not get it wrong but you don't seem a marketing guy, I know I am like you, if you can find someone to do your marketing. I worked with a guy that started a website. He was totally not a tech guy and the website wasn't the greatest but the way he presented it made everyone interested.

On the idea: i have many doubts. The idea is nice, for sure videos make a more direct contact. But that is also a problem. People doesn't want a to make too much strong contact, not everyone wants to show his face. A service like twitter relies on it's user base, i do not know if enought people would do it. Twitter is also fast. looking at 100 tweets will take you 2 minuts. looking at 100 videos will take you at least 2 hours considering buffering times. And same goes to upload a video.

Anyway i wish you the best of luck! :)
As a startup founder I often ask myself the very same question: yea, to what degree have I secured even the initial $6 billion. :)
Of course you don't regret your devotion to your family. But what you've actually written in this thread is a defense of prioritizing work over family. So which is it?
> Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it.

The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot. Since most people leave it connected to the power socket, I wonder why they don't wake it sometime and do all the updates and go back to being powered off.
The philosophy page this article cites is hilariously contradictory: it bemoans hackers working for other people rather than bringing their own ideas to life, and then encourages them to work for other people through the OP's service--the same arrangement, except that he profits.

Not to mention the allusion that the people doing the hiring and the people being hired are the same sort of people, while characterizing the latter as constantly on the verge of running out of money, and the former as able to afford having their own personal projects implemented by others.
Mutt?

In seriousness, I'm not sure there is one.
I actually use a Galaxy Nexus myself, but I decided to switch from Corona SDK (cross platform) to objective-C and cocos2d! I guess ideally I intend for it to be played on the iPad, but I definitely want to port to Android when I'm done!
Native to what?
I guess I will have to shift to Postbox .. which is a private variation on Thunderbird.
Why switch now? It's not like they're deleting it off the Internet.
This is actually an area for a long-lasting philosophical debate. Here's is a paper by Isaiah Berlin [1] on the debate over positive and negative liberty.

>The first of these political senses of freedom or liberty (I shall use both words to mean the same), which (following much precedent) I shall call the ‘negative’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ The second, which I shall call the positive sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?’ The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap.

[1] http://www1.nsd131.org/classpages/bwilliamson/Shared%20Docum...
I think he meant as a desktop client.
Outlook ?
This is awesome. It's been a long time since I was blown away by an HTML hack but this blew me away. Yes!
I think more powerful tools yield different apps, not just the same apps in less time. Because of the process of human design, I doubt we'll have solid, robust, lasting apps built "in a matter of hours", but potentially more and better version 1's.

Development aside, designing, testing, marketing, etc. seem to take a certain fixed amount of thought, discussion, and reflection. So it might still take a few weeks or months to build a great app, but in that time, you could experiment more. Going from, say, days to minutes to build certain features would be incredibly valuable. You could try things you never would've had time for otherwise, and end up with apps that wouldn't've even been possible with other tools.
This is rather interesting, given that Mozilla had recently adopted the lead developer from the Mozilla-based IM client Instantbird to incorporate chat into TB15. Knowing the software is deadpooled, I wonder in hindsight if that was a last-ditch effort to stay relevant or if that effort helped highlight the inevitable decline/futility of desktop-based email.
Long live mutt :)

In the "who's the user, whose the product" dynamic, I'm a bit confused over what's what in the Mozilla empire. And while no, I wasn't a user, Thunderbird's among the better and more complete email clients out there, I don't see this as a good thing.
Thanks, and the woolbuddy.com dude is amazing! Saw him and his giant needlefelted creatures at the Maker Faire a couple years ago.
Great, I could use something like that in the current project. Oh, twitter bootstrap.. too bad.
>They have said they want to interview him before charging him, and they've refused to do the interview in the UK or remotely, instead insisting that he be on Swedish soil.

He's already fled the country once ahead of questioning. It isn't unreasonable to want to have him physically present if the questioning is going to result in an arrest. Hence the warrant.
My own preference is mutt, and I'm deadly serious about that.

KMail / Kontact is actually a very nice client / integrated suite (and it will happily play either way). I consider it the best general PIM I've encountered on any platform.

Balsa and Thunderbird (GNOME).
There's a wholly unconvincing argument as to why Dart isn't pushing a VM as well, http://www.dartlang.org/articles/why-not-bytecode/ . Might as well be titled "Why not the JVM?" in my opinion.
I have no doubt that at some point Google will start building some sort of integration between Glass and Street View. They're already starting to do what you're talking about with street view data - they're using ReCAPTCHA to OCR street signs and house numbers to try to get more accurate address information for maps.
Thunderbird is(was?) pretty good for what it did and was a good competitor for Outlook about 5 or 6 years ago, but the POP and IMAP protocols and the servers that implemented them were no good and never came up to the level of Exchange.

Thunderbird simply didn't have the other half of the equation, Exchange clones failed to live up to their promise and Thunderbird floundered with the introduction of Gmail.

With a powerful Exchange replacement on the server side, it could've flourished as the client of choice.

Not to mention that Thunderbird did not have a source of revenue like Firefox did.
Bathrooms are rarely designed with OCD sufferers in mind.
I generally agree with the sentiment, but I'm not convinced at all by deathbed regrets.

It's easy to say you wish you spent less time working and more time doing the things you love, because it's easy to forget how working hard enabled you to do the things you love.
Based solely on my own experience, I believe that the benefits to be gained by physical proximity decrease according to an inverse square law. The benefits gained from sitting with the team you're currently working with can't be discounted, but as teams grow and your team overflows a single office, the synergies shared between team members in the same room far outweigh those with team members in the next room, to the point where they could be next door or across the country with little difference.

Embracing the distributed approach and realizing the cutoff point leads to building better tools for collaboration and integrating them into the work environment. Without this recognition, the mentality is that you can always talk to someone in person.

I've worked in multinational companies where collaborating with someone across continents, bar the time difference, was just as easy as working with someone down the hall. I currently work for a company that has not yet achieved this recognition, so working with anyone outside my immediate office takes hard work and determination.
Person will also have anything you add to Spy's prototype if you do that.

Attaching the "parent" prototype you want to have in the "child" prototype chain to a dummy constructor and new-ing that will do the trick for widest compatibility, although Object.create in ES5 and __proto__ (standardised) in ES6 both give you more direct access to the prototype chain:

function inherits(child, parent) {
var dummy = function() {}
dummy.prototype = parent.prototype
child.prototype = new dummy()
child.prototype.constructor = child
}

function Spy() {
Person.apply(this, arguments)
}
inherits(Spy, Person)
It isn't unconvincing. They make the case that bytecode is not assembly in reality, and constrains what you can do in languages compiled to it.
Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in an email client and Thunderbird is already a solid client so personally this message won't deter me from using it
For what OS?
Read here:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/04/netflix-recommendations-...

In parts one and two, it's explained that just about every list generated for users is an up-to-date set of recommendations. You point out yourself that recommendations is one area where caching it's truly viable (at least, not in a traditional sense).

I'm definitely not the right person to go into all the details (nor do I think such a discussion would be prudent on HackerNews)--but I wanted to weigh in quickly that there's a lot of stuff served that goes way beyond the notion of a "static" content that's trivially cached.
Fun to play with!

One very small point - you might want to change "Courtesty of" to "Courtesy of" (unless it's deliberate).
How about lock-in? What's your (the users/owners) stance on that? It seems my app will be completely hanging on Parse.com; they can change the pricing, go bankrupt, get hacked, get bought, go down(AWS) or whatever scenario making me wish I didn't use them? This functionality seems a bit too crucial/low-level to be not in-house or open source.
Perhaps you have only read part of my remarks here. I have made the point that one should try to be there for important events like the birth of a child. But in the grand scheme of things, missing a birthday dinner but keeping your job, when that job is presumably supporting the family, is the right call. He said it was one of the largest clients his firm had. If the firm lost the client, depending on how large the account was, it could have cost the company more than just his job. How would he feel about that outcome? Work is sacrosanct because it is how the world takes care of people. There is a great scene in a movie about this. I wish I could remember the name of the movie.

I do not see the world in the black and white terms you are viewing my remarks through. That probably explains a lot.
From the site:

"Meta-architecture: the architectural vision, style, principles, key communication and control mechanisms, and concepts that guide the team of architects in the creation of the architecture"

I think poe's law applies here; I honestly can't tell if this site is a parody of the "software architecture" discipline.
I'd say the value comes not from the time to build, but the utility users derive from its use.

Then WORTH would be how protectable that app was. i.e. if EVERYONE can copy that app, it still has high value - but its worth may be really low.

Protection can come from network effect, IP, it being reliant on a far more complex upstream dependency etc...
Good on you for linking to NameCheap by default.
FF14 and Chromium 20
Completely agree. I'll admit I immediately starting worrying about alternatives, but so long as they keep pushing out security patches, I don't see any reason for an alternative.