skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People build things on top of HTTP because HTTP is a pretty general, reasonable, easy to implement protocol; most alternative protocols tend to re-invent something like it or not become popular. Most protocols resemble or can be implemented on top of (Action, URI, Headers, Body) => (Status, Headers, Body). Most of the improvements suggested to HTTP tend to come in the form of encoding messages more efficiently at the cost of extensibility. Reasonably efficient HTTP servers exist for every platform.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by maintaining state, but if you mean long-lived connections: this already exists in HTTP with chunked-encoding and the new web socket extensions. Stateful protocols tend to be more difficult to write programs for and load balance.
And this one is not in Google's cache. I've taken to reading the cached version of many blogspot pages, for this reason -- I have a browser extension that makes that just a couple of clicks to accomplish. Maybe Google has caught on to this.

EDIT: My mistake; I just had to strip off the bazillion query parameters.

Google cache of the post:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
> Why is it that every new protocol seems to want to piggy back on HTTP?

For the same reason cars all want to drive on the same roads.
Space launch is risky, not just perceived as risky, actually risky.

This is true now, it need not always be so.
Something I just have to point out after reading through the article and the comments there:

O(log_2 n) is the very same as any O(log_a n) where a is an arbitrary base. That is because log_a n = log_b n * c, where c is just a constant factor for any a and b and therefore c gets swallowed by Big O notation. I'll leave out a proof here but it's quite simple to deduct anyway. The implications of this are interesting: It basically means that it doesn't really matter how many subproblems a divide and conquer algorithm creates to recurse on, it always scales equally well, disregarding the factor.

However, the most important thing here for a programmer is, that Big O notation does not say anything about actual performance, since it swallows all constant factors. And those factors are important. That is exactly why we try to optimize the innermost loop in, say, a O(n^3) algorithm.
Why Rating Systems Don't Work - The Raters
On the other hand, this is such a privacy information goldmine that you'd have to increase your security efforts by orders of magnitude.
Ubisoft: Piracy Rate For PC Games Is 93-95 Percent
Risk Versus Reward With Your Capital
Aww, I wish I had the time to participate this time. I had a blast with the first one! I proudly wear my stripe ctf shirt :)
This looks really neat. How are you going to get people to start using it? Anything more active than hoping that an app/user ecosystem develops?
Couchsurfing=airbnb+vayable
What do you guys think the chances are Airbnb will acquire Vayable as couchsurfing's new round gives them ammunition and paints a clear target at Airbnb. I think Paul already sees Airbnb acquiring Vayable to offer a place and local experience.
We considered the protocols you're mentioning. There are a few huge problems for our use cases: PSH is built on Atom which means all feeds are public. That's fine for your public feed ala Twitter, but unacceptable for private messages. We also think it's critical for users to be able to take their relationships with them when they move to another server/provider. OStatus and PSH don't make that possible. They also don't have a standard application access API, so developers have to work around different providers' specifications if they exist at all.

The federated social net was a great first step, but the lack of support for access control/private messages and account portability means that you end up with lots of proprietary implementations of basic features which can create vendor lock-in.
Even worse are pictures and videos. Rather than including a URL to it, the 'push' includes the base64 encoded binary data. Hmm.
Or at least some hard details about what those existing alternatives are lacking. That could lead to further improvement, as whatever communities have already formed around those alternatives could debate the questions and possibly improve their protocols.

As it is the FAQ reads like "those are old and busted, we wanted something new and hot," which gives off an aura of NIH syndrome.
Get Started with requireJS and Backbone
OS X is Getting Simpler. What to do About That
I can totally relate to the point, and know exactly how it feels. But I also feel like 'that one thing' is often a motivator and gives you something to focus on, it also helps bring the team together to focus on doing that "massive amount of work," by giving a clean and easily digestible direction for your efforts.
I would argue that those aren't unit tests, because they depend on the collaborators that you're passing into the unit under test. A change to those objects could break your unit test. That makes it an integration test.

If you're using your unit tests to inform your design, then the complexity in the extraneous objects is relevant, because they tell you how coupled your unit under test is to its dependencies. This is what FactoryGirl hides from you.

I tend to use fake objects for the collaborators. Usually just a vanilla test double will do, but sometimes I use RSpec's stub_model if the collaborator has to behave more "model-like".

I'd recommend http://pyvideo.org/video/631/fast-test-slow-test and http://www.confreaks.com/videos/641-gogaruco2011-fast-rails-... if you haven't seen them already.
Erm - the company didn't take a month off.

Is there an app to auto-rewrite misleading headlines?
In one you listen to your own music collection over and over, in the other you can find new things

Which is why I mentioned other services which allow you to listen to new music. Zune Pass playlists offer this, similar to Sirius/XM stations. Why would Apple bother making radio slightly better when they could completely destroy radio by offering something significantly better which also makes them money?

Making radio slightly better isn't worth buying a new stereo, new head unit for my car, etc. In those situations, radio is simply good enough. Apple doesn't generally play in markets where their best offering is only slightly better than good enough.
Amazon Election Heat Map 2012 (uses book purchase data)
This would be the "killer protocol" for the freedombox, if combined with some smart dyndns management.

Here is a use case scenario I am imagining. I define two servers for myself: home.me.com and cloud.me.com. Where home.me.com is a dyndns to the freedombox. Dyndyns being unreliable, if a tent msg cannot get to my home server, then the messages are sent to cloud.me.com and then pushed to
home.me.com when it comes back online (think POP mail).

The facebook killer then, is a hosted service like cloud.me.com for non-tech people, but a seamless transition to the hosted at home service as soon as you buy a freedombox. This way you have the best of both worlds. Your face in the cloud, and long term storage at home.

Other app wishlist: tent to smtp and smtp to tent adapters for gmail killing
Do check for Replicon's easy to use employee time tracking (http://www.replicon.com/time-tracking-softwares.aspx) software. It pretty simple to use and quick to implement.
Someone posted an article a while back that estimated that the levels people were exposed to would lead to about 194 extra cancers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044477240457758...
What about allow a publisher to delegate a subscription endpoint via something like pubsubhubub? Then publisher just has to push to the aggregator, everybody does their pulls from them.
Actually, we do support passing resources back and forth and for a lot of use cases doing so saves quite a few round trips in the long run.

Our protocol has two distinct parts, one server-server, the other server-app. It's just easier to manage a single "API" than having some support server-server but not server-app--we're hoping to avoid ecosystem fragmentation into those who don't want to support apps or vice versa.
What arguments do you have against a 'pull' style for notifications? Something like a GET to /latest that passes in the last time the client checked for updates and only gets back the URI of the last 10 or so posts since then. An HD video post could contain simply a URI that points to the video, so the video isn't even downloaded until the 'app' within tent asks for it.

This way you could have a path with all the videos on it that you could proxy off to a server with more bandwidth. It would get the user a lot more control over how their content is accessed.

Edit: And what if my server is down when one of my friends makes a post? Will I never see it?
I wasn't holding my breath, but I was thinking there's a possibility they were using short-stroking to speed up most of their systems hard drives by making a quarantined barely touched Glacier zone in the inside of their drives:
https://plus.google.com/113218107235105855584/posts/Lck3MX2G...

My backup wouldn't it be cool if is, unlike the above reasonableness, a joke: imagining 108 USB hard drives chained to a poor PandaBoard ES, running a fistful at a time:
https://plus.google.com/113218107235105855584/posts/BJUJUVBh...

The Marvell ARM chipsets at least have SATA built in, but I'm not sure if you can keep chaining out port expanders ad-infinitum the same way you can USB. ;)

Thanks so much for your words. I'm nearly certain the custom logic boards you mention are done with far more vision, panache, and big-scale bottom line foresight than these ideas, even some CPLD multiplexers hotswapping drives would be a sizable power win over SATA port expanders and USB hubs. Check out the port expanders on OpenCompute Vault 1.0, and their burly aluminium heat sinks:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151285070574606...
What took you so long? I've been waiting for someone to finally get around to building this for a long time.
I know, that's the point I was replying to in my previous post..
You could start by reaching out to companies you have relationships with. We could probably use someone like you.
Good point, but I do see adult-entered reviews at places like Amazon where they write "My kid watches this all the time, bla bla".
In other words, these results are statistically significant, but not clinically significant.

There are entire industries that depend on you not knowing the difference between these two concepts, which makes it all the more important that you actually learn it.
Posts have different "views" one of which is meta which would just have a URL pointing to the photo instead of including it in the post. See: http://tent.io/docs/post-types
I actually made a pretty good friend out of it.
Japan's older than China. But yes. As I mentioned in my post above.
I've been really impressed following your book launch. Nicely done on the pre-sales.

For the side projects book it would be nice to know who is behind it. There is plenty of information about the content, but who wrote it? Otherwise looks like a solid book!

My own book on app design comes out next month (http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook) so I am trying to learn everything I can about other people's experiences.
Are you offended that the author is making fun of certain girls (the particular girls who go to the bathroom together) or that the author is making fun of girls (a group in which a subset go to the bathroom together, and you don't want to be associated with that subset)?
Pull-style requests actually use up quite a bit more bandwidth than push notifications, because every client and server has to query every few seconds instead of just getting notified when there is a new post.

Posts have 'views', so a video or photo post would be pushed out with the 'meta' view which would include a URL to the content instead of the content inline.
Starters guide for making Web Apps
Two words: rail gun.
Pay by name uses the GPS in your phone so that when you walk into Starbucks, your face and name appear on the cash register. Walk into a Starbucks in a distant city:

Customer: "cappucino please"

employee: "Paul, right?"

customer: "yes"

employee: "decaf and skim, as usual?"

customer: "yes, thanks"

employee: "ok, you've paid by square"

The partnership didn't mention pay by name, but I can't imagine the partnership is really meaningful without it. This could spur widespread adoption of pay by name. When people start doing this at Starbucks, it will quickly seem like a normal way to pay, and using a card may start to seem clunky.

I guarantee that typing in a PayPal account number is hella clunky, and NFC little better. Do I reall want to unlock my phone to buy coffee?
I am launching my own book in the next couple weeks and was planning to do the same. Is PDF watermarking something people find annoying? If so why?
mobi/epub will be released next week, everyone will receive an update
Don't you think we might not stay on that curve forever?

At some point growth in access to western amenities (climate control, transportation, better food) will level off, and population growth will level off.

Also in 1000 years we'll have athletes who finish races before they begin.
The iBooks store has a maximum price of $15 which doesn't make it very good for value based pricing.
Star Wars Speederbike, in Real Life: Aerofex Hover Bike Flies the Mojave
Side Project Book
AOL continuously highjacks my default browser search (firefox, I search from the field these days) to their annoying wrapper-over-google search engine. The inanity is widespread.
You seem to be referring to info and quotes from this NY Times article

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/health/research/new-autism...

Dr. Volkmar --who you quoted-- is actually against the redefinition and is arguing that the redefinition hides people who do suffer from genuine conditions.

Here is a Yale interview of Dr. Volkmar that left me with a far different impression than the NY Times article:

http://yalemedicalgroup.org/autism2012

And this:

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/feb/02/autism-redefin...
A pretty impressive effect, especially when considering this is just HTML+CSS! I'm still stunned about what those two can do in combination.
unrelated to the game, but on the social network question:

> $url = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/ . "Question_mark_alternate.svg";

can't someone edit the image on wikipedia and change the image displayed to everyone else here -- or is the wikimedia image system only accessible by admins?
I really don't think you've tackled the problem at the correct angle here. Anyone can assign two or more axis to rate things on and call it a better rating system than a one dimensional one because it provides more information. Viewers want more information before deciding whether or not a thing (in this case, a movie) is worth their time. While your two dimensional rating system may work for some, this specific system is only justified for people who want information on "quality" and "rewatchability." For example for a person like me, I don't rewatch movies so the "quality" axis offers me way more value and insight compared to the "rewatchability" side.
I disagree with that analogy. A medal is, in and of itself, the award you are seeking to win. Yes, there may be an intermediary goal involved, swimming 200 meters faster than anybody else, or having an invention that is viewed as the most innovative in a field. But the medal represents your accomplishment.

A funding round, as I understand it, is financing to enable a certain goal. I don't knock companies that seek funding, and I would congratulate any that received it IF that is something that they deemed necessary. I think this notion that it is an "achievement of sort" is the type of thinking that elicits these types of repetitive comments that remind people, an investment round is awarded to make possible a goal by increasing its access to resources.
We take NIH very seriously and originally began by attempting to revise existing protocols. We have some very specific complaints about existing federated web protocols:

• no support for private message (pubsubhubbub, anything atom-based)
• inability to move relationships when changing service
• no standard API for application interaction

by leaving each of these (and others) out of scope see: http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-2-s... they have created an ecosystem unfriendly to developers (who have to approach each provider separately to work out auth schemes and APIs) and likely to lead to vendor lock-in (because relationships can't be transferred and basic features are implemented differently in each system).
It’s Not The Environment, It’s You
Jim Collins talks about this in "Good to Great." He likens business success to a flywheel that takes a lot of effort to get moving but seems to almost spin by itself once in motion. You usually can't point to one particular decision that was "the" push that made it spin, just lots and lots of little things that worked in aggregate.
Shorter term (e.g. next century or so) there's also the easy option of just storing it somewhere safe and keeping an eye on it. There's so little of the waste, by volume, that it's not too hard to manage. The advantages of this scheme are:

1. It's easy. It's what we're doing right now.

2. It lets us recycle the slightly used fuel that comes out of our reactors.

Nuclear waste is not useless. Waste from conventional reactors is mostly usable as fuel, but mining it is cheap enough that this recycling isn't economically compelling yet. Our nuclear waste stockpile can be thought of as a strategic nuclear fuel reserve: a valuable resource set aside for the future.
There are people actively investigating the origin of eggs; they aren't sure the long held view is correct.

For instance:

http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
I find it extremely annoying - if I'd known about it beforehand, I wouldn't have bought the book. It's intrusive, doesn't add anything to the reading experience, and communicates that you don't trust me enough to not watermark something I purchased from you legitimately.
Private crypto key in mission-critical hardware menaces electric grids
"Tent servers can also be run as Tor hidden services to create a social darknet for at-risk organizers and activists."
It sounds like a very nice idea. I'm putting together a "multi-protocol social client". I'd love to be able to use Tent. I am correct in assuming there isn't currently a reference implementation?
But you assume that all users of mint have a mature budget. When you are first starting out you do need to monitor it heavily as it helps you adapt to your budget. Not to mention initial budgets rarely work because there is always some expense that was forgotten.
I hope that outcry makes them see reason.
Since you are interested in logical fallacies, please don't forget that committing a logical fallacy (such as "no true scotsman") does not invalidate the conclusion (in this case: that the author really isn't doing it right).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Just to make the contrarian point:

I absolutely hate any format that is not a pdf file. It puts way too much limitation on the content. Just as an example: I use three "systems" most of the time, one windows, one ubuntu, one android tablet. Pdf works with each one out of the box, I can hight text or copy/past it, edit them, heck even open them in some graphic editing software and extract illustrations as vectors, save it in different formats. In contrast to that, for epub/mobi I don't even know what their native editing tool is so I can convert them into pdfs.
You could keep an eye on Hacker News for developers showing off their projects and spend some time going over their writing/copy, improve one page or section and the show it to them/offer it for free. They may see some value in having you do more or allow you to use them as an example for a "portfolio" or testimonial.

I assume much of this writing/copy will be online, so SEO knowledge will likely be important or something to emphasize.

Copy is often an afterthought, so you would need to develop concrete examples showing how your service is worthwhile.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Question_mark_alterna...

I believe it is very editable once login.
A possible alternative to Glacier+product X (you mention Arq) could perhaps be Git-Annex, recently mentioned as it's Kickstarting a friendly UI component:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385886 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...

Already has Amazon support:
http://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/using_Amazon_S3/

Very friendly with very large files!
Your Brain on Bath Salts
I put my screenname in, had not checked "show...". Then, I went back to check that, and now am getting the "screen name is unavailable" error.
"at a recent valuation"- is that market imposed or internal to the company? Finding one investor bold enough to put in at a $60 basis is completely different from publicly trading at a $60 basis.

After the company goes through $XX million of funding, gets closer to its goal, but the industry and stock market don't value it, you may have singlehandedly helped it go to $45 instead of $0.01, but you don't make out, period.

My understanding is that you can sometimes sell the option for fair market price once it vests (again, publicly traded at that point?), so worrying about how high the strike price is is the least of your problems with this deal.

These deals often have "vest at the board of directors' discretion", "fire before vesting" and dilution gotchas that leave you holding the bag (an empty bag) when it's time to pay you. Keep a close eye on those.

The reason to issue options at market value is to avoid you getting a tax bill right away (for income you don't get to spend). If you do take the deal, be sure you file the correct tax form immediately to keep that tax liability away.

Hopefully this is a great position with great salary, because at $60 this company's mature enough that without a major breakout and savvy business CEO, the options are lottery tickets.
Given the harm that VC involvement can do, those improvements are completely unnecessary and unwelcome.
I upvoted this as it's good to question the assumption and it's easy to imagine this working better without HTTP. In practice though, I feel the project is orders of magnitude more likely if it's built with HTTP and REST. A social product needs to reach critical mass and any hurdles you're putting in front of users and developers need to be seriously justified. In this case, workarounds like cookies are Good Enough.
Uranium is cheap in most places, and we're already set up to use it. In order for thorium to be compelling, you need to either have problems with your uranium supply, or reactors that take advantage of its properties to be better in other ways.

That's why thorium is not a bigger priority. There is some R&D on it; for example, the Chinese pebble bed reactor program is working on using thorium.
Yeah, even after the creator saying what it does and reading the site, I still have no idea what it actually does.
3 Tips to Protect Your Kid's Inheritance Online
We are starting with an easy-to-use hosted service that will launch in a few weeks. We are catering to the development community by offering a simple, standardized API that will be easy to use. Privacy is a first-class feature, and Tent is specifically designed to be usable by high-risk activists[1] and people in countries that block other social networks.

[1] http://liberationtech.tumblr.com/post/13377461578/how-the-ne...
Startup PR 101 — How To Do It Yourself & How To Get Help With