skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny how we hand-wring about why there's only an anemic startup culture in Australia. Leaving aside the storied legal barriers, there's the fact that the E-3 visa makes it much easier for bright Australian technologists to decamp to the USA.

Until certain developments in my life made it an impossibility, I was thinking of moving to New York. Because it's the most unalike[1] English-speaking place with a vibrant startup scene I could think of to live in.

[1] unalike from Darwin. Even Perth is a megapolis compared to that beautiful flyspeck.
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As opposed to, for instance, rapists, war criminals, and corrupt politicians?
> I think it would be great if there were some better tools for tracking and working with remote hackers.

I've been freelancing lately.

There are probably thousands of such tools. Pretty much every freelancer ever has cobbled one together and some substantial fraction have gone on to release it.

Pivotal Tracker not your style? Try WorkflowMax. Or briefcase. Or IMS Service Track. Or SmartBiller. Or Jobsheet. Or ProWorkflow. Or TriggerApp. Or ...
I feel like Erlang had a lot of publicity a few years ago... but it doesn't seem like it has experienced increased popularity.

Does anyone experienced with Erlang have some insights on why that is? Or am I wrong and is it being used in more and more important things?

I think the model makes sense and maybe forces will yet conspire to make it more popular. But I've heard that it feels "old", i.e. lacking in conveniences you would expect in a modern programming language. And it seems like it should interact better with other programming languages -- i.e. you shouldn't have to assume that every node is written in Erlang. There's no migration path to Erlang in that case.
As a counter-example, my great-grandfather, Morris William Travers, was the first director of the Indian Institute of Sciences in Bangalore and I gather that he said that he had to design the engineering curriculum there with a significant emphasis on learning how to use things like screw drivers and wrenches because the upper-caste Hindus were not familiar with these details of manual labor.

So I don't think that you can discount the cultural factors for our familiarity with hand tools. Certainly even in India, even in 1906, you wouldn't have had to teach a repair man how to use a wrench. But you would have to teach the engineering student. That's a bit of a humbling thought.
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What do startup founders want?
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Yup - because the language extensively uses tail call optimisation, inlining and other rewriting in the execution it used to be hard to reconstruct the original state of the code on a run time failure. It is less of a pain than it seems not to have line numbers in error reports - but it is still a pain.
We are not really asking for them to be transparent - TFA is talking about low-level kernel fiddling to achieve what would take a couple of lines for a custom hugepage size?
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Why don't they encode the elements to YUV once, and then flip to YUV (so not needing to convert each time), as opposed to converting the video to RGB?
Number 1-5 are mostly "I don't want to learn new things", so I'll ignore them.

The whole post is about a system that is badly designed or implemented, making it unnecessarily complicated to learn and use. Not wanting to have to deal with unnecessary complications is not the same as not wanting to deal with necessary complications. People unfamiliar with good UX design can't tell the former from the latter.
Whenever they give me the option to make up my own question, I go "What is the password you designated for answering secret questions on this site?".
Nice list.

I just joined the first startup of my life, and, in a way or another, all of these questions were answered satisfactorily for me.

A couple of additional questions:

1- "What is the flow for making a change?"
2- "Will I be able to improve how things work here?"

A startup should be fairly open to changes. For example, if they develop without a debugger, can you use one? Will servers be updated for supporting remote debugging?
Here's another one: NASA TV again, but in HD: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ustream.html
Documentation: completely invalid. The man pages might seem a little terse, but then if you are looking up a command and you don't understand the terminology, then you should probably consider typing in...

I think a cardinal virtue of documentation is to but info where people expect to find it. Saying "Oh, you read the MANUAL. When I said RTFM, I mean the MANUAL for the TUTORIAL" isn't much of a help. If the documentation isn't where novices expect to find it, it doesn't exist.

Unsafe version control

DON'T DO THOSE THINGS!

How many can be done by accident? Are you using revision control at least in part for the ability to recover from a stupid accident? The fact that it isn't safe means you can't count on it being safe. You can't use it as essentially a way to have real point in time recovery for your repo, and it also means you can't count on it being an audit trail because at a minimum it could bet wiped out. That's fine, but it's worth stating up front that this is something Git doesn't do very well. Fine. Understand it is a tradeoff.
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Git version numbers are actually SHA1 hashes that are based on all the files and the entire history of the project up to there. If you modify the history in any way, then that will be a new version number and you know something has changed.

You can optionally GPG sign a commit/tag which, again, will be invalid if any part of the history is changed.
How would you change the Motorola Droid 4?
Verizon's first Android flagship reveled in its brutal design and geeky touches, but times have changed. The Motorola Droid 4 has shed the neckbeard, put on a suit and is now aimed at the niche enterprise set.
That's why I never got into any of the Zynga games on FB -- they had the strong scent of Tamagotchi (now with extra spam!!!) about them, and I just can't see the faintest promise of pleasure in keeping a digital pet alive, no matter how they're painted. If that makes me weird, then I shall continue to be one with my weirdness.
From what I've heard and seen Erlang is great, but this article doesnt tell me anything about why it is great. Message passing? Come on! You can do message passing in C++, or Python, or any other mainstreem language. Its a matter of convention and system architecture. Its easier to hire developers for a mainstream language, and its probably easier to teach them these conventions then a whole new language + development environment. So, whats all the fuss about Erlang?

PS. I dont mean to be critical about Erlang, I just dont think the article addresses the question in its title.
جدول پخش برنامه های شبکه من و تو از03/08/2012 الی09/08/2012
Just because something is very flexible and supports many ways of doing something doesn't mean it has good UI and doesn't mean it has good discoverability.
In fact my theory was that social games could slide into the same death spiral that Ataridid in 1983... It will also probably happen to handheld gaming soon.

I strongly suspect the mobile gaming fad on smart phones is going to burn itself out sooner rather than later. There's just too much gimmicky crap on the market and, just as in previous gaming fads, this kind of ecosystem strip-mining is eventually going to alienate the gamers.
Doubly so if your product crashes even half as often as Flash. That they cannot seem to code for stability doesn't give me any confidence in their ability to code for speed.

I heard that they refused to work with Apple to improve its performance on Mac, and that was a core reason why they got excluded from the iOS platform -- searching for this I came up with an explanation directly from Apple:

"Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash."
I think people are upvoting on title alone.
But you aren't going to sit down and spend a week learning all the ins and outs of dd, bash, find, or, say, grep. You are going to skim the docs, learn the minimum to do the task at hand, wash, rinse, and repeat.

My path at learning SVN was that way too. Heck I didn't even learn the merge command for a couple years until I really needed to, and then I realized how much I had been missing.

I think the big issue that some of us have with git is it can't do all the same things that svn can do. Of course a big problem with svn is it can't do all the things git can do. I wouldn't set nails with a ball peen hammer either.
I remember when there was a webserver in the Linux kernel. However it was considered a bug that you could not do equal performance from userspace and eventually it was removed.

Should also be possible to fix for this type of case. Making a kernel module is the easy solution and gives a benchmark though.
Besides that it's a shame that the option to just get the stream running in VLC is such a hassle (with VLC I get much lower CPU usage + the ability to freely move and resize the video and place it somewhere on my second screen, even fullscreen)
> What about Mac?

This is a two and a half year old blog post. Mac hardware video decoding is supported now.
Is the Erlang ecosystem and supporting libraries strong enough to support committing/betting resources on using it for production?

We're using Clojure now for our back-end processes because it's a language I can live with, and I get the safety of java interop.
The consequences will be more widely felt than that. Right now mobile gaming pretty much is the commercial mobile app market. When that implodes it's going to take the rest of the app market with it, at least temporarily.
Well, it all depends on what you mean by message passing. If you mean call a method or a function passing it a value type, then yes you can do message passing in any language.

If on the other hand you mean passing data between completely isolated active entities (processes) that get scheduled for execution independently based on available CPU cores, I/O operations, receiver mailbox size... Then you need an multitasking operating system, which is in fact what the Erlang VM is.
This is a blog post from January 2010. I think a lot of the details are out of date. (Mac hardware decoding support, for example.)
Less, managing two version control systems seems like insanity (speaking as one who's had to do it in the past). Having people sign their commits is dead simple in Git, and you could setup hooks to make sure every commit is signed before you accept it.

An alternative (or additional) solution is to setup a server like Shawn suggests in this e-mail: http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Implementing-commit-signing-...
Even when there exist technological solutions to big problems , there's usually a need for strong political component to make them work. Two examples are the birth control pill and the industrial revolution. After the birth control pill finally enabled women to develop careers, it took and is taking a long political struggle for them to have equitable jobs. And even as the industrial productivity increased productivity greatly, people were forced to leave their homes and work long hours for barely subsistence pay , until the worker movement succeeded in helping them.

In a world where technology is relatively abundant, the hard problems are still political(at the country, industry or company level).
Excellent article, this reflects much of my personal experience working with git in the last year.

Our whole department (>100 people) switched as part of a move towards decoupled development/continuous integration, we used perforce before. Luckily there were three people with excellent git knowledge who could answer all questions so this helped a lot.

However, I find myself relying on stackoverflow/google for some not-so-common small use cases where a glance at the manual just doesn't help (find all changes in local branch not in upstream branch x?). Also, the git commands and their options are sometimes not very logical as the article mentions (i.e. git show vs. git blame, the first needs the syntax "branch:file", the second "branch file", why? Small things like that take away from the beauty)

git is powerful and I prefer it to perforce for it's possibilities, but I think tools like mercurial are a better DVCS which just didn't have enough hype at the right time.
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Test
Yeah, their definitely is a personality type out there they can target though. When younger I put a lot of time into WoW although I never played Zynga games past the initial novelty, nowhere near enough depth.

Now that I run my own businesses I am definitely after something I can pickup when I have a bit of time and not have it become a chore.
Schachman alleges that Medvedev's visit to Kaspesky Lab and work for Russia's major government bank somehow means that Kaspersky has nefarious links to the government. This is baloney. It's like saying if Obama visits Facebook or Google headquarters these companies now are CIA outlets, or saying if the Fed hires Symantec to secure their networks Symantec is now linked to US government.

Of course Central bank of Russia would hire leading Russian security company to secure their network, who else they would hire? What's surprising in that? Of course leading politician may visit a company that is internationally known for its success, especially Medvedev who insisted on emphasizing the "modern hi-tech president" image. Cooperation between security researchers and cybercrime divisions of security services is also nothing new - what else security researchers would do with their findings? They can't prosecute computer criminals themselves...
And of course they would get licensed by Russian security services - how else one could get government contracts, which in every country are not negligible source of income for many companies?

Making it sound as if pretty standard business practices and realities - which apply both to such undeniably corrupt country as Russia and to the US and to many other developed countries - as a sign of some ominous secrets is a journalistic malpractice. It may sound to somebody uninformed as there's something shady there - but in fact there's nothing in all that stuff. There might be secrets hidden somewhere - but Schachman findings are extremely weak in that regard.
I don't know if the explanation is accurate or just their own product defense, however (long) after playing a video (and not something else in flash), I usually go into top and kill the Chrome flash process manually as it's a) taking an insane amount of memory b) taking a lot of CPU for no reason (I'm not watching the video anymore and closed the page). Seems there is a ton of leakage going on after playing a video. So even though the story might to explain the actual playing of the video, it doesn't explain the molestation of my i7/8gb/ssd machine AFTER I closed (the only) Flash window. Not to mention the crashes.
Totally agree with you. :-) I spend so much time every day clicking the little X to kill the download bar. I think Google developers design for 30" monitors or something... I work on a laptop all day and my vertical pixels are very valuable to me.
I saw a great talk by Jonas Bonér (guy behind Akka) at the S.F. Scala group a few years ago. He said he fell in love with Erlang but eventually gave up trying to persuade people to deploy it and that Akka was basically an attempt to bring the core Erlang principles over to the JVM.

Personally I think people are too paranoid and should worry less about deploying a new VM but a lot of commercial IT shops are very conservative.
Grand central dispatch vs OpenMP benchmark
grand central dispatch is a great model on asynchronous operations. Does it gain same performance on numerical computing compares to OpenMP?
How could one prove that one does nothing unethical? The onus of the proof is always on the accuser - if you accuse somebody on doing unethical stuff, bring your proof.

Just because they registered in UK doesn't of course prove they are clean, but it indicates that if there were some shenanigans, it would be easier to uncover them than if they were registered only in Russia or some offshore. Since nothing was uncovered so far, it serves as evidence - though not proof - that there wasn't anything to uncover. Of course, this evidence can be trampled by the evidence to the contrary - but this wasn't done.
People abusing the information networks are disproportionately damaging because they empower those that are just looking for excuses to turn the whole internet into one big surveillance machine.
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The message that I take is that some companies use Flash as the wrong tool to solve a problem which I'm not interested in. I want to see videos with minimum overhead. I don't want to be bothered with ads, poor performance, poor user interfaces, poor security, ... all which I get through Flash.
Actually, the inliner is not used unless you explicitly enable it (for the core). The runtime BEAM backend may decide to inline as well, but that is another part entirely.

But yeah, it is not much of a problem having no line numbers when your functions tend to be of a 4-5 line size.
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There is a huge difference between the way the US works (with all its flaws) and the way a dictatorship works. The Soviet Union/Russia is more like a mafia organization than a state in the usual sense. If anyone here wishes to raise their awareness of this it is rather easy (google for Litvinenko, Magnitsky, Politkovskaya). This is why the WIRED article was truthful.
The issue with git is that's got all this cruft built around it, but for the most part it's very rare you need to jump into it in that level. I've been using git for about 2 years and only needed to rebase for the first time very recently.

There are issues, and flaming the author saying he needs to read more is disrespectful (and ignorant of the issues), but git is a community, open source project. Not happy with the existing docs? Rewrite them, call it git for humans and off you go. I've seen projects doing work to 'nice' the command structure, so there's other people attempting it.

But we can all agree git reset is weird.
Erlang has experienced increased popularity. Yet, it has not experienced the avalanche popularity increase you see with e.g., Ruby or Javascript. I think Erlang is lucky that this has not happened since the community would not be able to keep its current excellent condition if that happened.

Erlangs forte is in a very specific kind of system. If your problem is

* Stateful
* Concurrent
* State has to "act on its own"
* Distributed over multiple machines

Then Erlang is a nice tool for the job.

The language is not particularly old. Note you are not allowed to call a language old if the "newer" language is based on C or its semantics :)
On the iphone, the file system is always encrypted, and the encryption keys are stored on the device, themselves being encrypted with your PIN/passphrase. To perform a remote wipe, it only needs to zero out this single block containing the FS keys, making the whole FS unrecoverable since the keys are gone.

I wonder if the same thing happens on Filevault2. In that case, Apple's only choice would be to rent some serious GPU time at NSA or something...
First of all, language design is tough business. And for not appreciating that, with all my heart, I thank Netscape's project managers for rushing JS designers.

That said, I don't get all the hate towards ObjC. Taking into consideration its requirements, I think it has been doing great for us.

As for _.m, I appreciate the effort taken by its author, really. However, I won't be using it because it hurts one of the most pristine features of ObjC, which is readability. Fix that, and you'll get a lot more love from the community.
This is an extremely outdated article which was posted before they added "StageVideo", an API that fixes this problem 100%.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/stagevideo.html
My bank does something that at first I thought was weird but I get a bit more, they ask me to confirm a specific purchase on a specific date. Or to who a payment of X amount was.

At first I thought it was completely pointless, someone gets my bank statement then I'm done, but they only ask about the purchases since my last statement. Not saying that Apple should be asking 'what app did you buy on the 1st August?', but a small confirmation outside of the data you provide would probably be useful.
Wikipedia ,which is basically composed of many small non-connected parts. But a project like python where the parts are more dependent on one another do need a leader and some hierarchy.

And self organization is at the basis of market capitalism. So TED do seem like the same old political agenda packaged with a bit of techno-optimism.
Stop defending bad design. We can do better than this.
You must have heard wrong, and it's the other way around.

Apple did not open their video acceleration APIs until they released OS X 10.6.3 circla mid-2010.

http://xbmc.org/davilla/2010/05/03/osx-gets-h-264-accellerat...
I'm not blogging but we are a new niche start up targeting the school sector in the UK, http://www.studentreport.co.uk

If you know of any teachers/schools that'll benefit from an app like this, do pass it on.
I wouldn't use threads in mission critical software such as that, so that solves the problem.
Wow, I just found out about Higher-Order Messaging. This is pretty awesome.

Here are some links for more info:

- http://cocoadev.com/wiki/HigherOrderMessaging
- http://macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/07/16/hom.html

---

As an aside, I like to use my own [ATFunctionalCollectionExtensions][] for this purpose, which is a blocks-based implementation of map, reduce, inject, each, and filter.

[ATFunctionalCollectionExtensions]: https://github.com/kballenegger/ATFunctionalCollectionExtens...
I _think_ you lose a _lot_ of color going from RGB->YUV, also you are just replacing one expensive color space conversion with another.
> That they cannot seem to code for stability doesn't give me any confidence in their ability to code for speed.

Much more importantly, it doesn't give me any confidence in their ability to code for security.
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I think the problem for Open webOS preventing them from backporting it to older hardware is the proprietary drivers.
There was quite a bit of disappointment with HP when it was announced that Open webOS wouldn't be available for the Touchpad. I can understand their reasons but it does put more pressure on the community edition now. They are doing great things though, so theres little doubt a stable Touchpad version will be available soonish. I don't own a Pre but there seems to be a lot of love for it. I personally think webOS on the Touchpad has a beautiful and elegant user experience but is a bit of an arse to develop for so I'm going to wait until a stable Open webOS release to seriously look at its internals.
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