skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "Select File.." button label would make more sense as "Upload your iTunes XML file" instead of expecting the user to read the entirety of the text above or to click the equally confusing "What have I missed?" button, which I assumed was a changelog but was really to pop up the helper text.
I agree 100%! This is the main point that the article misses.

Open hardware and open software are completely useless if the networks are not open. The open internet as we know it would never have happened unless it had been provided by thousands of tiny ISPs. The most worrying pendulum swing of all is the consolidation of all traffic into a few giants like Comcast per country.

Mesh networking is the next frontier for openness.
Because you're not using iTunes. I don't. I agree it's not the best experience ever, but it's a great solution for people like me using small music players (Pragha) that will never be supported by services like this.
This type of attitude is not constructive. Of course I read the documentation. Much more than "copy and paste from the tutorial." I looked at tons of code samples as needed, read blog posts, etc. The limitation wasn't obvious at all.

This reminds me of the attitude that I had to correct in developers that worked for me:

- There is a huge difference between "it works" and "it does what the user expects in a friendly way."

Steve Jobs said that if you need to read a user manual (particularly to do the most vanilla usage of a product), the problem is the product. Not you.
So you haven't been through an accelerator either?
Not in the US, I'm assuming.

My "triple play" in NC, US was $140, that's with 6Mbps internet (at the time), HD digital cable with no premium channels, and digital phone with unlimited calling in US and Canada.

I "downgraded" to 30Mbit Internet. Added Netflix and Amazon Prime for TV and Vonage for phone, saving $50/mo. in the process. I still feel gypped.
No discussion of Exceptions vs Error codes is complete without referring to Joel Spolsky's Exceptions article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2003/10/13.html

Also:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Erik-Meijer-and-Rober...

Erik Meijer interviews Robert Griesemer about Go. They chat about exceptions for error codes. The exception talk starts ~8:00.

Erik is in favor of failing fast with exceptions b/c most of the time, when you have an exception in an application, you want to fail fast because there is "nothing you can do" at the point where you have an unexpected null, etc.

Very interesting discussion between two smart guys.
Compilation does not necessarily need to remove the dynamism. Objective-C is generally considered a dynamic language, though I get the feeling that many think it is just another C++ with different syntax, which muddies the waters, so to speak.

A quote from Apple themselves:

"Compared to other object-oriented languages based on C, Objective-C is very dynamic. The compiler preserves a great deal of information about the objects themselves for use at runtime. Decisions that otherwise might be made at compile time can be postponed until the program is running. Dynamism gives Objective-C programs unusual flexibility and power."

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...
I used MongoDB one afternoon, and guess what! It doesn't have table-locking writes?! :)

In all seriousness, I built a 10 machine Mongo cluster, talked with a 10gen consultant a full day, went to Mongo meetup, and ran all sorts of benchmarks before ever using it in production. I still don't feel like I have the expertise to write a snarky blog post about it.
Using Jenkins CI with Github
Thanks, how would you recommend learning about trading platforms. Say I can write a basic trading program in Matlab and Python, who should my program be communicating with?
It gave me enough to understand the general area this is about, and I moved along for lack of interest. Also, your combative tone is not justified by the situation.
The "Select File" button does not work for me on Firefox 15.0.1 / OSX 10.8.2 while it does when I use Chrome, bug or deliberate choice?
World’s Quietest Place Lets You Hear Your Internal Organs
This is like asking why we should bother having any (new?) HTML or CSS standards at all, when you could write a custom rendering engine in JavaScript for every website.

There is tremendous value in having a solid, usable foundation for web development that doesn't rely on an imperative language to work. To start with, declarative features are semantic and allow for semantic upgrades on wide-scale basis. Do you like your Firefox/Chrome spell-checking in text areas? Do you like them being resizable? Well, this wouldn't be possible if all textareas were some JavaScript hack. (Hey, with only small layer you could actually fake a textarea. Does that seem like a good idea in retrospect, though?)

Also, it would be great to be able to develop simple dynamic web applications (or prototypes) without doing something complex. Progressive enhancement is buried far too early.

If your users are worried about security / performance enough to turn off JavaScript, they probably wouldn't want "HTMLSockets" enabled, either.

I frequently browse with JavaScript blocked by default, and I can tell you right here that this assumption is invalid. There is a world of difference between JavaScript library and a standard, declarative technology. The latter is more likely to be faster, have less bugs, no side-effects and be secure.
Lets take a more scientific look at the YC generation of accelerators (which significantly differed from earlier incubators).

Since 2008 there have been only six consumer startups founded that have hit the billion dollar valuation mark: Instagram, Pinterest, Dropbox, Evernote, Groupon and AirBnB (you might choose to exclude Dropbox and Evernote from the consumer market).

Two of them are from YC, and Pinterest was founded by a YC alumni.
I have not, but I work about 200 feet from Techstars Seattle and am friends with many of the companies from many of the classes there. I also work for Startup Weekend, so I've heard about a lot of accelerators all over the world.

I'm not saying all accelerators are good. Far from it. And I'm not saying accelerators don't have a ton of problems. I just don't think the article you wrote addresses any of them.
Wow - I totally thought it was something you'd been using to test the survey and left in place when going live :)
Sigh, this whole Android is open or not argument is degenerating into the kind of arguments over 'Copyright infringement vs. Stealing'.

Here's one good solution, call the open Android as Androidium(on the lines of Chrome vs. Chromium).

Very good article on the openness of Android and to implement the above proposal.

http://marketingland.com/what-is-the-one-true-android-and-ho...

>Some like to claim that since Google gives vendors early access to the source, this somehow makes it not open. For those releases, at that specific date in time, maybe so. But, the source is released and generally pretty soon after phones start shipping (honeycomb was a different story and Google's statements on the matter have been proven to be true with the new combined tablet and phone releases).

The problem came to fore when Acer got threatened with being cut off early access etc. when they wanted to launch other phones with Alibaba OS (Aliyun) on them. It's sort of a Android fork, but that's legal, but still Acer had to fold under the pressure or force getting cut off from their mobile business. Early access is much more important to OEMs than you make it seem to be and being able to fork is the core tenet of open source.

>Look, if android wasn't open source, projets like this would be a lot less successful: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

You know what, barely anyone would use CM if they couldn't get access to the Play Store and Google Apps like Map. So they download it illegally from other sources. CM used to provide them but got a warning from Google. So right now they wink-wink-nudge-nudge towards the Play Store.
Swap out "Apple Maps" and "Google Maps" for "iPhone" and "Windows Phone", and you have a ready-made link for Gruber, with a snarky comment about "skating to where the puck was" ready to go.
Phonegap has no such issues as it is now becoming an Apache project (see Apache Cordova). Before Apache I would have steered clear as well, for exactly the reasons you're mentioning.

Of course, a well-made native application will perform better, but PhoneGap can be quite smooth too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467826

As a bonus, you'll get to utilize your existing web development skills. Besides, quite a lot of the "native" apps I've seen utilize some webviews anyway.
Google for Entrepreneurs
Human curated or machine generated? I had this idea for a couple of years, and I hearing it from so many people, that I keep asking myself, why isn't there a decent solution? My thought was that doing it via machine learning, is very hard, and somewhat competes with Google / Facebook in their own field, but doing it manually (e.g. just reading the sites / magazines and updating) is not scaling in the eyes of VCs, so it's doomed to fail, although it's MUCH needed, and there is no real good solution. just beware that you are going to have tons of competition based on all the people I hear that are working on this.
Your response show a lack of understanding about what the real uses of a 3d printer are. The maintenance is worthwhile for the actual use-cases.

Think instead of: A one-off part for a one-of-a-kind car whose parts are no longer made. A chair with the exact outline of my buttocks. A replacement part for a custom-made machine. A life-size doll that looks like me. A prototype of my new widget, which I tweak repeatedly until the production run. Think customization, one-offs, personalization, and bespoke design.
Celebrating the spirit of entrepreneurship with the new Google for Entrepreneurs
Blackberry?! You must be joking.
What does that even mean? Rugby players are big because they want to be big, not because they can't help it.
AWS Console Down?
When I try to sign into the console, I get a message that the service is unavailable.

My instances seem unaffected.
> I have a fairly aggressive lack of sympathy for phonegap/titanium/"cheap shortcut" users in general

They're fulfilling a need that is the same as someone who customizes WordPress or builds on top of Drupal - people who want custom software, but can't afford it.

If the tools didn't work, then they wouldn't be used as much as they are, and if there was no demand for cheap mobile development with compromises, then the tools wouldn't exist.
Don't autoplay the frigging video! (Maybe some editor can modify the title to warn us?)

I hate sites that start playing video without my asking. Doubly so ones with loud noise. I have sound on my computer for things that really need to get my attention. Not because some site wants to interrupt me and everyone around me.

I wish there was a way to vote this link down so that other people who will be similarly jarred wouldn't have to experience it.
For me open source means something else.
Maemo was a real open source platform.
Android is not:

1. You can download part of the source (part is closed).

2. The source you can download and compile does not run on any phone (without some binaries).

3. Can you please send me the svn link to the newest pre-release version of Android (newer then Jelly Bean)?

So as a recap you can download part of the OS as source code. That's something you can also do for iOS. Apple gives you part s to download (to comply with licenses). Admitted Android is way more open than iOS.

Yet, to call it open-source discredits any real open source projects like Debian.

Just because you get some source dump from Doom e.g., after it's been developed, does not make it open source, at least not in my definition. Doom was still a closed source project, as Android is. You just get some source dumps once in a while.

Downvote me as much as you want ;)

Edit: fixed a typo
I agree strongly with this article, but I think it's overstated some of its points.

Yes, if I go to a Web Design commuinity like /r/web_design on Reddit I'll see pages of unusable web pages with hundreds of HTTP requests, 2-8MB of assets and "support" for legacy browsers using Modernizr. Some people view this as the future, but I view it as a site built by an entry-level developer that will be unusable by most of its clients. If you ever want some free comment karma on Reddit find any submission, complain about the file size of the site and watch the upvotes from conflicted developers fly.

However, these things have context.

If this website were for a typical business then yes, you'll have "bugs" flying in from everywhere from the client. They'll not be able to view it on IE7 because that's the only browser their IT department will allow, their users will also be running this site on an ancient computer that cannot handle a dozen jQuery plugins running on a single page and they'll start making demands that you, the developer, will find unreasonable because "that's not how HTML5 works!".

However, if you're creating a new business with a set market of people with newish machines running modern browsers then you can afford to use "new" technology and to sacrifice your precious page size for some creativity. For some markets it is a good thing if a site will heavily utilise JavaScript. For some web applications, it's almost necessary to rely on JS.

Regardless, a good developer will be able to get a modern site working well in legacy browsers even if the user is on IE6. I'm no senior-level developer, nor am I solely a front-end developer, but I can at least do that much on a large-scale client site without any trouble. If I can do it then I fail to see how so many developers can.

Yes, developers will not learn. The average developer is happy to throw as much jQuery at a problem as they can, and they're happy to go nuts because they own a decent computer, use the latest browsers and have a fast connection. The best front-end developers I've ever known understand these problems and can provide similar or better results in an optimised way.
Bug - that's what I get for trying to style a file input. Try clicking just to the left or right of it.
I also like Lua. The speed of the virtual machine is awesome. But sadly Lua is still missing Unicode support. This is a big issue that needs to be solved.
Thanks for the heads up - I'll be deploying the change shortly.
2B Animal Print Ribbed Sweater Dress Reviews
The CEO's response has been edited a few times since the incident.
It is trivial to create constructions where changing a single bit of the data requires recomputing the hash over all of the data. A really simple option to that end is to feed the hash back into itself multiple times. Please go read a paper on PBKDF2 and/or scrypt - they are designed to work with an arbitrary hash function be impossible to parallelize.
Google's official worldwide entrepreneur support program
Demand for Big Data professionals leads to academic programs
HNpod 10: Unsexy Startups with Ilya Lichtenstein and Dan Shipper
A humble suggestion: use Flashblock extension. It is also effective against flash based ads.
weird name for this era...
Ignition
I laughed at that comment and reply by the author. I have always wished that Ubuntu had an extra installation layer were we could choose what software to install and what not to install.
> It doesn't have table-locking writes?! :)

Not really following the snark there. Are you trying to compare MongoDB to MySQL's MyISAM storage engine? Like there aren't numerous other extremely valid RDBMS solutions out there, which don't do table locks during a write? (MySQL InnoDB, Percona, Maria, Aria, Postgresql, Firebird, etc...)
A fantastic one, too. Unfortunately not on Linux, though.
Very nice readable article. Having dabbled with implementation a bit I agree with most of his points.

The author complains about websockets being frame-based instead of stream-based, because he argues if he would want a frame-based system he could easily model it on top of it.

I think frames are awesome. It is easier to build a stream on top of frames than it is to build frames on top of a stream in my opinion (you don't need an extra protocol for starters). Besides that almost anything you would like to do can be expressed in frames, saving most of us a lot of headaches.

I would like to add that websockets are not the end-all answer for web-game programmers. It makes some stuff easier, and reduces some overhead, but it's still on TCP, meaning realtime multiplayer games are still as good as impossible to implement.

Sadly all the issues with proxies go for UDP and then some, so I don't think we'll see any ubiquitous browser UDP protocol anytime soon :(
Can't wait for that. Currently waiting results from my gfs Itunes xml file.
One feature that could help this: verifying that the account holder is the one using the computer, before showing results.

Without this, assuming this plugin is always-on on all the computers one uses, breaking user's privacy just becomes too easy.

And there's a lot of data one might want to leave private except porn(and usually don't post them in facebook): medical issues, sexual issues, marriage and some other relationship issues, drugs issues and probably others.
I stopped reading at "WTF zomg LOL zombie sandwiches!". Just another script kiddie who can't read documentation and blames his tools instead.
Jakob Nielsen: Homepage Design Changes
Yea, I'd like to know where you live. I'm paying 75 for 50 Mbps and basic cable
>Is this an argument against hash trees? Can you explain more about the this potential attack? It seems to be to be equivalently hard to finding preimages.

If you only have to rehash a branch as apoosed to the entire tree and match hash's then you have a easier time as it is alot faster by design.

Now if the way the hashing work is that only say 1234567 will get the hash value 11 and no other variation then i will have no issues and welcome this as a great achievement and pure brilliance. But I dont feel this is the case and nor could it be by reducing any large amount of entropy into a shorter definition and that is what a hash function does after all and one hash value will match more than the original data.
It's on the download page.

http://www.mongodb.org/downloads
We're more in the area of things that actually are not websites than websites. The websocket stuff I added as an experiment and if people want to use our stuff to make HTML5 applications without a proxy server in between. If it's indeed between browser and website someone could MITM it of course if that person can also give you a fake security certificate into your browser.

But on the large scale that will never happen. Maybe in corporate networks but I doubt that this will become widespread.
Talking to some friends who work in phone shops here in the UK it's pretty apparent the stock just isn't available. There haven't been enough phones to cover pre-orders let alone the constant stream of people coming in every day asking if they have any iPhone 5s available.
The world is moving towards 64 bit. 9 out of 10 machines I lay hands on run 64 bit. Just move on and stop complaining.
Can you recommend a concise taxonomy of crypto that spells out these kinds of distinctions clearly? I think it would be particularly interesting to see these "X uses Y" (ie. KDF uses secure hash) relationships spelled out, to better understand the "primitives" of crypto and how more specialized functions are built on top of them.

I would never have thought of a password hash as a KDF, because you don't use the key for anything except to compare equality. I also wouldn't have thought that an important property of a KDF is for it to be slow. In the case that you're using a KDF to compute an actual encryption/decryption key, this property does not seem important, because the output (the key) is just as sensitive as the input (the password).
I think there is definitely an element of (3) in their strategy.

From the link - "While we have sold out of our initial supply, stores continue to receive iPhone 5 shipments regularly and customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date"

I think they estimated how many they can sell, gave shops 80% (or some other fraction) of that, and made sure they had millions more ready to provide to these shops over time.

The ideal situation for a manufacturer is to "sell out" in the first few days, but not sell out for so long that people go to rival products.

Apple are exceptionally good at supply chains and hype management, so I have no doubt that they made are controlling supply to make this launch look as successful as possible.

The best way to manage this is having a bit of a stockpile.
"The next big consumer app = mainstream. Does that not make sense?"

No it doesn't, that a big consumer app is considered 'mainstream' is an artifact of the fact that app got marketshare, its a dependent variable, not an independent variable.

Your claim is similar to ones that argue college is a waste of time, spend that four years doing things instead of learning stuff you'll never use. The fallacy of the college argument, and yours, is that structured learning has benefit in information gained over time at the start which is unmatched by unstructured learning.

Consider the time spent in an accelerator at those 'useless' mentoring meetings, they are with folks who have done a lot of different things, seen what is successful and what isn't, and more importantly know what traction 'feels' like when its happening. That lets one quickly learn the right stuff without having to waste time chasing ideas which aren't really having an impact.

I noticed that you backed off your argument a bit here: "I hear accelerator programs can slow you down in certain scenarios." If you're being honest with yourself then you can understand that "certain scenarios" is not "all scenarios" and by that reasoning your thesis fails. By that reasoning you would have to change your thesis "most likely" to maybe "possible".

If you want to reason about what makes a consumer app either a good fit or a bad fit for an accelerator that would be good to talk about. What sort of problems are ill suited to an accelerator environment and why? (and trust me, meeting frequency is not a good metric) There are a lot of accelerators out there [1], why not go through their funded projects and rank them consumer/non-consumer (you will need to define consumer app fairly precisely I suspect) and then bring some reasoning to the table that lets folks know how you arrived at the conclusion you did and why you believe it. We'd love to hear about it.

[1] http://tech.co/top-startup-accelerators-ranked-2012-08
What is so bad about a little Javascript?

What's so bad about having a declarative way of doing something that a lot of people will find useful?

And, how does one get sufficiently customisable incremental updates without having to standardise (and implement) a huge complex new language to control them?

By using element IDs. Every element in the incoming frame that has and ID that matches and ID of an existing element replaces it in the document. People have been doing this for years. It's called AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP). Doing this without any custom code and with every update being as cheap as sending WebSockets frame would be absolutely awesome. It could be used to create very sophisticated and dynamic applications with very little complexity either on the client or on the server side.
I'd also like to try it out if it could use my last.fm history since I've been switching platforms and players a lot but I was always scrobbling all the songs.

But anyways, very cool idea :)