skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
JSON and XML types give you all the pain of a NoSQL system with none of the benefits of an RDBMS. No thanks. My tools elegantly map database fields to my objects; doing this with serialization formats is incredibly crude and brittle. I do it for some edge cases already; I am looking forward to removing that code.

A schemaless datastore does not mean a schemaless app. Furthermore, the application layer is a far better place to do validation simply because it has more knowledge of the real world. An RDBMS can constraint an age field to be integer; the application can constrain it to be positive and within the probable lifespan of a human.

How many old schemas does your application have to support? Only as many as I want to; reprocessing removes the old, which I tend to do fairly quickly. I have done a lot of schema migration over the last three years on GAE and the process is vastly easier than it is in RDBMS-land. There's no need to stop the world.

Hey, I love Postgres. I spent most of my (almost two-decade-long) career building apps on many different RDBMSes. But there are many applications that are better suited to alternatives, especially with large-scale consumer-facing web apps. These threads annoy me; we should all be looking at new tools saying "wow, I wonder what this is good for" rather than smugly burning all the heretics that turn away from to the One True Idol.
Ok, you are making a point about sampling. In periods of high traffic you have more samples that will bias the calculation. But, since the number of samples will be consistent between A and B, everything is fine. Fine.

I believe further discussion will not be productive. But, I suggest if you have a proof about A/B testing as it relates to the MAB problem or even if you have a proof about A/B testing in general that drops the normally distributed assumption or tells you exactly when to switch from exploring to exploiting, I suggest you write it up and publish it on arXv.

Thanks for your time.
Last time I signed up to a new bank there was a box on the paper form for your pin number, which was then typed in a clear text field by the staff member setting up my accounts.

I stuck with my old bank who used a secure entry keypad so I could set my pin.
2GB of space isn't all that much. That's the free plan assembla offers. We blew through it with a year of general disciplined use but every once in a while we dropped a DLL or game asset in and so the 3 people generated 2GB of git in a year. While it's possible to get rid of such assets from history permanently its complex and risks other data loss if you're not extremely cautious.

Just feedback to say that arranging for custom plans at 2GB seems low.
I remember reading a paper that dealt with this issue. The setup was that a spherical mass hit another one into a wormhole that sent it back in time. The velocity was such that it would deflect the first mass before the initial collision, creating a casual paradox. If I remember correctly (and it has been years since I read the paper), they found that the second mass was garaunteed to come out of the wormhole with a velocity that would cause the first mass to hit the second in a way that would result in the new velocity, leading to a consitent system; however the final velocities were probabalistic, not deterministic, of the initial conditions.

Again, I have not seen that paper in years, so my memory might have just made half of that up.
Hmm.. I don't know that geographic size tells us anything important. Am I missing something here?
Many developing countries may have those network operators, who don't know or perhaps don't care.
The ratings agencies declared them as AAA after bankers designed them specifically to be AAA, it's not like that just happened by chance. That was the main goal of the CMO - to create a product with the risk of a Treasury but with a better interest rate.

After that, the salespeople sold them as AAA. That implies to the person buying that it's extremely unlikely to default, generally less than 1% risk. Given that the bankers structuring these had very good reason to suspect that that wasn't true, I'd say that counts as a lie. You're making it sound as though this was supposed to be a risky bet, and that the pension funds simply lost the bet. That's not at all what AAA means. Funds were sold exploding lemons by people who should have known and probably did know that they were lemons.

For CDOs based on other, well understood securities, you're right. In the case of CMOs, most of them did not contain more than cursory information about the underlying mortgages, if that.

If you're looking for a specific instance of a lie, as in Person X told Person Y XYZ, I don't have that for you, and if I did, I wouldn't share it with you. But based on how these things work, there's little doubt in my mind that these things were knowingly misrepresented by a large number of people, which I believe is the definition of fraud.
For a number of years in the mid-1990s I switched between Borland's IDE when using DOS and vi (not vim) and later sam when using Unix. The fact that one world had highlighting and the other didn't have it had no effect on my productivity, at least not one in favor of highlighting. It never occurred to me that I should miss it on Unix or that it was annoying not to have it. They were just different tools that did different things.

I know lots of people have strong feelings about this highlighting or that, but honestly, just try going without it for a week or two. I bet you'll find it is not that big a deal after all.
" Big buggy apps with dumbed downed features designed to lock user data as deeply as possible."

Apple uses a lot of sqllite and xml for your user data. I'd be curious as to what part of your data you are unable to get access to?
I believe instagrams web app is designed this way. Meaning they don't really have a web app.
We all know how to deal with these parasites in the landing gear:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
Seeing all of the (TM)s and (R)s has always annoyed me. When I look at it I always feel an undercurrent that it represents everything stereotypically oppressive about a corporation.

Is there some legal reason for placing them up there (requirement to protect the trademark in this way, a CYA, or some other reason), or are they just up there for show?
So, some people talk this way. You can decide to dismiss all information available from these kinds of articles. You can decide to focus on (and talk about) the style they use to get their point across. You can even decide to feel it is like a "slap in the face".

Or you can decide to not do any of those things. I honestly think that's the choice that will serve you best in the long run.

P.S. Why do people talk this way? It is a style people have for many reasons, mostly because it is more effective - where effective can mean "Makes more people understand quicker", "Gets my point across more succinctly", "Makes people agree with me", or even "Gets more pageviews". You might not like all the reasons, but there are probably at least some valid reasons for talking in this way. Why assume the worst from the author?
Ah missed that part. Good to know.
I have very little experience with post newtonian physics, so could you explain why FTL implies time travel.

Also, doesn't quantom entanglement imply that data travels faster than light?
I believe it is deliberate. Why, I'm not sure. To ensure that you use the Instagram app, I suppose.
Agree ... they might want to use the logo as a branding vehicle for people to promote the popularity of Yahoo!
Yet, the piracy market for consoles are so large that dedicated pheripheral sellers (these mod chip sellers) can exist.

This just points to the fact that software is notoriously difficult to keep safe via DRM, and that people _want_ the content, just not at the price point that large publishers are selling at, and people _think_ that the price point should be lower.
I see a lot of comments describing this as new and unique. Hardly. Video compression by using image diffs and run-length encoding has been around since the 80s. In fact this is more-or-less the technique that Quicktime's first codec, "Cinepak", used.
- to grasp a 20K loc app

Although, 20k lines of Python is probably doing much more than 20k lines of Java.
Standing GuanYin Bodhisattva for Sale
An API Driven Quantified Self
Try this: http://web.stagram.com/n/marissamayer/
>justified his behavior that half pay means half time and no pay means no time.

Am I misguided to think that people who use this as an excuse would never work twice as hard / twice as long when given twice the pay?
and here is the opposite effect, the new windows 8 logo:

http://i50.tinypic.com/15oidfb.jpg

A clean, simple, elegant logo, completely ruined by the honking TM and (R) injected by the lawyers. The bizarre presence of two separate legalese-related sigils on a single logo makes it impossible to miss. Also makes it clear who is running the place.
Sac longchamp pas cher economisez 55% -40%
classique, intemporelle longchamp pas cher texture fine de cuir et un grand nombre de changements de couleur,sac longchamp hobo de renommée mondiale, ainsi que un accueil chaleureux et Prix.
Well that's strange. Looking at publications/citations of H. Markham on
Google Scholar doesn't have anything recent along the lines of that
press release.

http://scholar.google.com/citations?sortby=pubdate&hl=en...

Maybe someone has a moth between their vacuum tubes? ;)
it's dumb, there's quite a few instagram websites now: http://statigr.am/marissamayer
Adding lock elision to Linux
I'm afraid that in conjunction with significant whitespace, they're not at all gratuitous. For example:

describe 'Calculator', ->

it 'can add two positive numbers', ->
result = calculator.add 2, 3
assert result is 5

it 'can handle negative number addition', ->
result = calculator.add -10, 5
assert result is -5

Mandatory parentheses make significant whitespace lose much of its appeal when passing a block construct into a function. This is a large part of the reason why Python limits lambdas to a single line...
My point is that if aesthetics is one of the reasons you choose a language, you really don't understand software development

Some would disagree: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
I tried to send a udp packet with fake source Ip(no evil, i am not a attacker;),but i was failed. I seems that the router of the datacenter censor the packets and drop it; who can taught me how to make it?
Ask HN: Could we make a dns system that steals back domains from squatters?
HN, could we create a DNS system that steals back domains that have been determined to be held by squatter/large domain registrar networks that clearly have no intent to use them? Is this morally ok?
> I swear, De Beers has probably pulled off the greatest marketing stunt in the history of humanity.

De Beers has the advantage of selling a luxury good. The point of buying a diamond is to demonstrate one's financial ability. People don't really want cheap diamonds.

I doubt their marketing campaign is a good pattern for normal products.
i dont understand how you cannot emulate a hardware DRM module via software. How can the netflix app tell if the machine its running on has a legit DRM module, or an emulated one?
I don't even think that was the point. I think the geographic comparison is more a novelty than anything, and I don't even think the author takes a viewpoint in writing his article. I clicked the link because I'm at an Excelerate Labs company now in Chicago, and I'm sure other Chicago Hacker News-ers will click on the link too, but I don't think there was really any point to the article. So un-succinctly put, I don't think you're missing anything.
What does this site have to do with android anyway? Isn't the article basically saying, its possible to develop good looking apps on android?

The problem with android is that it never had any design language like iPhone and the Windows Phone have. They give a framework for an app developer to work within. It inspires them to make consistent beautiful designs. Android has always been this free-form thing which I think caused many ugly apps to be developed for it.

Windows Phone market place for one is full of such beautiful apps, thanks to the detailed guidelines about the metro design.
My point exactly. That process can't work unless you have millions to spend.
on one of the slide in this presentation i found this interesting ( https://speakerdeck.com/u/clkao/p/livescript-tax-free-javasc... )

Javascritp + ruby = coffeescript
coffescript + perl = coco
coco + haskell = livescript

So i think coffeescript is not the end of the line, and i think this mean, there is a serious need for a better javascript
IME SQL schemas do more harm than good

Completely disagree here. The basic tradeoff is between flexible input and flexible output. Without a rigid schema, ad hoc reporting is impossible because you don't have an ability to articulate reporting criteria. I.e. no declarative schema means no declarative reporting query.

I suppose that's ok as long as you never need to report on anything..... Might work....
Have you tried it? I had the same opinion for a while, but after I wrote some code, I found the translated code easy to understand - and the language itself helpful and consistent.
Unless I'm misremembering, I think there are lots of recently made up holidays that are basically just marketing ploys (Mother's Day and Father's Day).
This is definitely being done for a reason. One of the best ways to increase user clicks on a particular link is to remove all the other links on a page.

This case is a bit extreme: Instagram has removed most links not only for mobile web browsers, but also for desktop users. That said, the reason for removing it from desktop browsers may also extend to privacy: I personally really like it that it's not easy to find links to my Instagram posts. Privacy through obfuscation, I suppose.

In any case, Instagram's web presence really encourages users to download the app. That's smart, as that's where Facebook is the weakest... so Instagram was able to focus its (very) limited resources in the one place where it could really shine.
> Unless you play games or use some of the most popular twitter clients.

I haven't noticed any weird issues in games, but it's true that I don't play much, nor do I use twitter with any frequency.

> To be expected, they do very different things.

I agree there should be differences. My point is that with these two apps I see almost no actual similarities in the UI. If you'd told me that one of these was an Android app and the other was from, say, Meego, I'd totally have believed it.

> Evaluate their differences as deltas from the Android baseline (the way a user would), instead of as deltas from each other (which is how someone looking at screenshots on a webpage would).

Ok, but the question was whether there was more fragmentation in Android than iOS, and from what I can see the answer still appears to be yes. The deviation from the "baseline" seems higher in Android.

> Oh, because back goes to the last thing you were doing. The chevron goes up in the app. Any Android user figures this out and why it is this way very quickly, but I can see why an iOS user probably finds the distinction weird.

Maybe I'd understand this more if I used an Android device for an extended period of time. It seems that these have a ton of overlap, though. Most of the time, in my experience, up/out is the same as back, because I got to my current location by drilling down through the content. Unless back is only between apps now.

> This is DoubleTwist being cute

I get what they're doing. My point is that it's inconsistent with the platform.

> The ActionBar generally speaks to navigation aspects of the app, not specific screen actions.

Someone should tell the Google+ team. On their ActionBar, I see "write" (new post?), "refresh", "reply", and "upload picture" (I'm guessing).
Everybody askes that. Yes, I know how to operator a dryer too. And mine leaves the clothes wet too. After a diligent effort to make the damn things work, they still suck.
Presumably. If you can create a mashup on startup advice for the contest from the audio track on porn clips. I suspect you would have a good shot at winning the contest.
Getting Ruby 1.8.7 installed on Mountain Lion (10.8)
Apples and oranges.

Akamai recently deflected an attack on the scale of 1 TBit/s and is present in pretty much every DC (~1000 POPs). CloudFlare has 23 POPs and brags about handling 65 GBit/s...
I understand it perfectly fine for the purposes of this discussion.

Edit: I can't believe people down-vote irrefutable facts, so let me state this ONE MORE TIME:

It is an irrefutable fact of Special Relativity that if you can transmit any information from point A to point B faster than light would travel from point A to point B in a vacuum, then there are inertial frames of reference in which the information arrived at point B BEFORE it left point A.

THAT'S JUST A FACT OF SPECIAL RELATIVITY.

People can bitch and moan about whatever they want to, and come up with all sorts of creative ways to try to work around this FACT, but YOU CANNOT.

c, it's not just a good idea--IT'S THE LAW!
this is awesome, thank you for posting
No, actually we don't. Can you prove that, or is it just hypothesis?
A little odd though: "the quality of the diamonds, measured in dollar value, had declined by nearly 100 percent." I wonder how that was calculated ?
I noticed that in the "computation" comparison, Vbox was tied with the others. That's what I care about.

So it seems like Vbox isn't as good at I/O and graphics. Like you said, vbox installs easily and works well.

I don't plan on switching even after reading this article.
I thought Apollo Diamond had gone out of business, but it appears they have morphed out of a small R&D model to something more serious.

http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=241868
Ask HN: How do you increase your Dunbar Numbers?
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar_number
Networking is hard.
Eventual consistency, yes. What I'm saying is if a few pics disappear for a half hour while things resolve themselves, nobody is going to care... or likely notice.

It's not a bank.

By the way, I believe social networking is mostly bullshit, which is my "LOL" at the "social graph".
There are thousands of LyricPioneer-likes in ShenZhen. Which LyricPioneer do you mean?
Cool, thanks for the links!

This looks like a really good system, and far more transparent in how it works vs. the "Black box" approach most systems use.
Crowdfunding as it stands is a form of charity or maybe status because there's no guarantee anyone will even attempt to follow through with anything. That's why I only use it for charity or art. Are they attempting to change this in any way?
Zero day found in all version of Internet Explorer
I have to say, I've really liked some of the posts on this blog. The comparison of monte carlo and markov models of Chutes and Ladders[1] is very intuitive. I think it's a great way of understanding forward vs backward statistical reasoning without falling into the usual borderline religious divides.

[1]: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november12011/index.html
Japan and the fax: A love affair
How WebKit Renders the Web
Mothers' Day: 1870

Fathers' Day: 1972
On side note, she uses Instagram instead of Flickr. Looks like Flickr needs to step up. Would be fun to see if she says to Flickr team, "I won't use your app unless you improve it"
I'm really jealous of the folks who can do this. Unfortunately, I feel like young people will not be able to afford this. Which makes me wonder, what's the average age of people attending?

Despite being really jealous for how easy this makes it look to 'learn to be a hacker', I personally will stick to the Zed Shaw school of learning.
A lot of it was just execution problems. But I think it summarizes into a perfect storm of moving the development team to a new product and putting the existing money maker on bug fix only, two rounds of dedicated sales staff that woefully underperformed (sometimes comically so looking back), and the landscape of paying customers going into insecure funding situations of their own.

On those points:

1- Moving the staff to another project was a tough call, but one I think I would have made in the CEO's position, it just was a gamble that didn't work out as well as we were hoping as it took new product iterations off the shelf for too long. But while the old product was keeping the lights on, its growth curve wasn't going to get us to where we needed to be.

2- I'm actually interested in HN's ideas on hiring good sales/marketing staff and how they should best be managed. Across half a dozen companies now I've failed to really find good competent sales people and any effective way of managing them without getting in their way. It's just a very hard position to hire for -- hiring engineering is a piece of cake in comparison. I think if I were CEO of a small startup, sales people would be hired on 90 day probationary periods. But I've heard counter arguments that sales folks in my vertical really require 6-9 months to build out their sales pipeline and start seeing results. However, some of the issues were stupid, like not answering phone calls or failing to handle simple contract negotiations without blowing the deal, or not wanting to manage contract staff to execute on part of the sale and simply moving on to other opportunities.

3- The customer situation was a surmountable obstacle I think by expanding the size of the sales net we were throwing out there. There were several related markets with better funding sources we could have gotten into that we didn't take seriously until it was too late. We also had some immediately good opportunities that got bungled because of #2 above and because the margins weren't as good as other opportunities that we chased instead and failed capitalize on anyways.
How about the iPhone? Many 'imitations' yet people who don't really know any better by the Apple product. "I don't want a fake" is very likely the reason.
So... why is there no second-hand diamond marketplace? Lots of people would want to buy cheaper diamonds and there has to be people wanting to sell theirs.
Give me an example of this 'injustice' that you speak of? I try to convince everyone I know to become a programmer, white, black, man, woman, etc...and it doesn't matter. People gravitate to whatever they want to work on.

It's not like you minorities can't buy programming books from Barnes and Noble, or can't login to online courses and start learning.

If they don't have a computer, then we're talking strictly about affluence, and that's much different.
I reject that definition and suggest that it should instead mean, "a pejorative term used for a person or company who enforces one or more patent(s) that do not fullfil the requirement of being non-obvious and inventive against one or more alleged infringers in any manner, especially if considered aggressive or opportunistic, or with no intention to manufacture or market the patented invention".

When I say patent troll, I mean someone using patents to delay innovation instead of using them to encourage innovation (as they were intended). In this case, there's clear prior art and they are suing after the company responsible was acquired by Red Hat. I'm not going to accept that someone is not a patent troll if they happen to have an application or framework that, e.g., redirects users to a online store for purchase of the full version of an app after tapping a link. Everyone in the field, the companies starting the lawsuits included, know that these patents should not have been issued.
If there's no way to export it, its locked down.
Dart!
As a developer I also find my psychology difficult to manage ..