skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What's the best VPS/dedicated option going right now, Fall 2012
I recently picked up a xen VPS from a rather cheap provider but they're proving to have less than stellar reliability. What are you using for hosting, specifically for things that are quite a bit too big to fit on Heroku?

My particular use case is:

* Stealth DNS server

* Mail forwarding for a bunch of domains

* Light-weight static site

* Potentially heavy DelayedJob workers

I'm looking in the 1-2GB Xen range, but if there's a deal to be had on something bigger I'm all ears.
Just a tip: it's useful to use virtualenv [1] to deal with multiple versions.

[1] http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/index.html
I'd also comment on his speed/mobile concerns: The web is both big and small, fast and slow, dynamic and static. Most developers have a hard time accomplishing both aspects of the duality, but at least they try.

You can praise the small, slow, and static sites, because of what they're good at, but let us also point out that they aren't optimized for desktop browsers to date, don't utilize the speed of their upper clientele of users to offload processing and handling to the front end, and also don't accomplish as much as possible without the need of a state change.

I like what you put regarding complexity, because let's be realistic, as web developers, are jobs are constantly shifting from technology to architecture to agile to scrum to etc.

The author is complaining about mistakes in hindsight, and tries to complain about modern web apps having the same problems? There's always a new frontier in web development; if you can't handle the fact that certain api's become deprecated or that certain features a dev used aren't completely implemented, then do it better yourself. Update older tutorials, evangelize the correct approaches to problems, then, you'll do you part to remove some misinformation of outdated solutions that others are using.
Completely agree with you on the bad flash and links point. Not sure I agree with you on the webapps points though. Would have been nice to have some depth on why you feel PushState is a "bandaid" rather than a full solution.

You also seem to have not taken into account how new HTML5 is. Sure generally a semantic solution exists now but when the vast majority of sites were written this wasn't the case.
Arbitraty limitations imposed on GUI, such as opening things in modal windows.

I'd like to see some additional examples of this arbitrary limitation in the GUI. It seems to me that many design choices can be classified as limitations. If the user doesn't understand the reasons behind the design choices, then the user might mistake them as being arbitrary.
IPhone 5: 4 Million Sold in First Weekend, Galaxy S3: 9 Million Before Launch
Because Google and everyone else in the Android ecosystem* don't care.

*EDIT: I don't mean third party developers when I said 'ecosystem'. I mean the manufacturers.

They're in it for a profit like everyone else, and "open" is just a good a marketing strategy toward tech-minded people as any other. Consumers, on the other hand, still do not care.
I stand that it is: http://source.android.com/

Some people like to state that gmail, maps, the play store and other proprietary Google bits are not open source and that is true, but those are not android. Those are separate apps.

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).

Look, if android wasn't open source, projets like this would be a lot less successful: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
When was the last time you heard of a "bar fight / civil squabble" that involved a reported 2000 people?
This is the best advice here. I got incredibly fed up with my programming career after about 5 years or so. I went off and traveled around the world for a year, met my wife, opened a coffee shop, spent a winter at a ski resort and freelanced in Tanzania (on Zanzibar).

After all that I found I missed programming, and realized what things I didn't like about my career choice, such as long meetings, boring projects and so on. This helped me direct my programming career back to what I enjoyed and has made me much happier and more productive.

So, get out there and do something different! You've got your education and experience now and there will always be a job somewhere for you.
"While the Pirate Party is often associated with copyright and Internet issues"

I wonder why this is. Maybe because they're called the "pirate party"?

I find it odd that so many people are behind a party that blatantly takes away the rights of other hard-working people in the name of "freedom".
Because it's a sockets layer. You could very easily send HTML over it if you want.
Papertrail $7/month
Yes the notes sequence and the base frequency algorithm is yours and I notified you about using it here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4561565

I am sorry for not giving credit to you on the main page.

Edit: BTW, what is wrong with the sampling frequency? I think 44KHz is sufficient and it's working fine on my Chrome. A fork maybe?
Making assertions about patent law that are objectively false would surely be over that line too. Questions of law are for the judge, questions of guilt or innocence are for the jury. Isn't that the rule?
IDEA Maven integration on steroids (For the Maven haters)
Read Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson.
Event handling attributes of HTML5 - Infographic
Or rather history tends to repeat itself :)
Exactly. Bored people go to Facebook.com. Bored? Type Facebook.com. That's what people do. And considering the influx of "content" pages, like George Takei's, which provide continuous content updates all day long, I can see why people check back frequently when they're bored.

Subscribe to 5-10 "content" feeds and your wall will always have another joke or post to read...

Many people do this, I imagine.
It seems to me that error codes are better when you actually want to do something on failure, but exceptions are better in cases where you just want to fail fast,

Go handles this pretty well (though verbosely) -- 99% of the actual error handling you want to do is though error codes, and when you want to fail fast use panics (which do have a stack trace), and in production you can catch and log panics and restart execution. It's not perfect, but I like that it's always obvious where and how to handle errors.
No problem, I was just a little surprised when I saw it :)
I agree on some points, yet I believe the author exaggerates during most of his article.

PushState, for example, is not a bandaid, and for those not-so-modern browsers there are hashtags (let's be frank: 99.9% of users don't care about how beautiful or ugly their URIs are and even less about one particular character).

In many cases such as WYSIWYG editors, which he mentions, Javascript is the only way (HN users might prefer Markdown, but for most average users, that's already too complicated). New HTML5 input types are awesome, but they are in this case the advanced fragile technologies that currently lack a broad support base.

I particularly disagree on the last two points: These days, Javascript and CSS is minified, sprites are used on basically all popular sites and content is gzipped. Many people even use a CDN for their JS frameworks. Loading time optimization is a topic more important than ever before. The same goes for mobile versions: I see a lot of people even offering a mobile-optimized version of their portfolio.

He is certainly right saying that these aspects are all very important, but I don't really see the lack thereof in practice. Any examples, perhaps?
I think the reason might be that people who are able to build "the next big consumer app" just don't need an accelerator to start building. Just like Steve Jobs didn't need an MBA from Harvard in order to build Apple.
Riffwave.js - HTML5 sound synthesis via PCM encoding
I think the reason most people hate Maven is because they have only been exposed to the XML side of things. Which does suck.

But Maven was never created to have you work directly with XML. It has XML and APIs and plugins and whatnot so that tools like Eclipse and IDEA can create awesome tooling around it.

And I think this new Maven integration in IDEA shows exactly that.

Even if you are not using Java you should really check the short video. There are so many nice things in it that could easily be awesome on other development platforms.
Well, Chrome cooked their goose with a totally different methodology. A little agility is never a bad thing when you're being out-competed by the same company who pays most of your bills.
Yandex Faces the Army, Wins Over Mynet
I did the same thing, but it was a ticket to Australia and a work visa.

One benefit of taking this kind of time off is that it lets you know what you truly love. After a few months of kicking around, reading books in parks, seeing sites and meeting some cool folks, I found myself reading web tech articles. That was an eye opener to me--"hey, I really like this career path!"
Do we care? I'm personally much happier with open software and formats, but my Ubuntu laptop can easily read a .docx written by MS Office a Windows 8 machine. I can run many programs and games under WINE. And I can still tweak whatever I like. Meanwhile, people too busy, uninterested, and uneducated to want to change anything can use a simple, elegant, functional platform.

As long as our software is continually developed and is supported (which is why UEFI is so scary), I don't see why we should object to black box computers.
Well said. Responsive design has been around for a while, and I've seen it used well. But not every site has a need to support every combination of big/small/fast/slow devices.
I use a system adapted from http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs to archive every page I've bookmarked (using FF) in the previous month. Then I just query with local tools.

Not ideal, several flaws, but works well enough for me so far.
Fault-tolerant Web Browsers
$600 Million Physics Book on Amazon (With Humorous Review)
Short answer:
Take time off (a few months) and then work on your project.

Long answer:
I worked for 4 years at Apple as a software engineer and I exactly felt like you. When I quit to find my passion again, I could not touch a computer for more than 3 months. It was really hard. I loved engineering and design so much. It felt like I lost the most important thing in life.

I was seriously burned out. I spent time with family, travelled and started appreciating life again. After 5 months off, I was eager to get back in technology. I am now working on my own thing (http://beta.shoeboxify.com) and love my life again.
YC is the Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Caltech of accelerators, all rolled into one. But that doesn't mean startups who can't get into YC are wasting their time going through other accelerators anymore than students who can't get into S/H/Y/P/M/C are wasting their time going to Berkeley or Cal State Stanislaus or wherever they can get accepted. Ya, they'll have a lower chance of success, but there will still be guys who go to liberal arts colleges in Oregon - and dropout after a year - who change the World.
What is so bad about a little Javascript?

And, how does one get sufficiently customisable incremental updates without having to standardise (and implement) a huge complex new language to control them?
Why should they, or anyone else, sit back and watch a competitor get rich off of their work? That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? The validity of some of the patents is undoubtedly questionable, but then Samsung are suing based on FRAND patents that have already been paid for. That's far worse IMO, yet this is constantly glossed over. Samsung are no mor innocent than Apple are guilty. Hate on a corporation all you want, but vilifying consumers for their choice of phone? That's crossing a line. It's inverted snobbery. It like how Apple fans used to behave...
At Square, we’re building technology that sells itself, says COO
I wondering if this is based of sales from Apple stores, Apple Stores and wireless carriers. Or if they are just counting shipments to wireless carriers as sales. I am having a hard time believing that a company can get sale numbers out of carriers within a week.
Why American Phone, Cable and Internet Bills are so High
But why should it matter whether they are in it for the money or not. The fact of the matter is that their source is open and people can take it and do things with it.
Spotify monthly subscription
Hosting monthly
Dropbox yearly
Google Drive yearly
Flickr yearly

The vast majority of my costs are related to cloud storage it would appear.

If I had access to Hulu or Netflix, then I would be happily paying for those too, however, they don't seem to want my money (yet).
Great film. The original VCs were such badasses.
Ugh. Being faster does not work against secure hash functions! Holding all else equal, faster is invariably better.

What you're thinking of are password hashes, which are a variant/application of key derivation functions (KDFs). KDFs often use secure hash functions, which is where the confusion comes from.

You want your core crypto to be as fast as it conceivably can be, because you want to be making progress towards a state where all communications are encrypted by default.
> So in essence any hash that can be run faster in any way will make it weaker in terms of brut forcing

Hash functions have many, many uses beyond password storage. For most of those uses they become more, not less, useful with speed. Fast hash functions are good for everybody. If you explicitly want a slow expensive construct, then chose one properly designed to be slow and expensive. Don't just chose a crappy hash function.

> So in summary I believe NIST should let them all win and have SH3.n with n being the variation of finalist, let them all win, choice is good and that is what n bit encryption is after all, extra choices.

I completely disagree. An organization like NIST has a responsibility to have an opinion on what the 'best' hash function is. They then need to track the state of the art of research that might invalidate that decision, and clearly communicate changes in the decision. While there is a defense-in-depth argument to be made for multiple options, the pattern seems to have been that there are a lot more systems broken because they chose a poorly studied or known bad algorithm than by breaks being found in previously known-good algorithms. We have a lot to lose from everybody making it up as they go along.
If anything, I think the Bay Area would be substantially easier to cover well than a lot of places I've lived or travelled.

Sure, the US car centric model isn't ideal for public transport, but the Bay Area does have substantial high density clusters by the standards of e.g. Norway where I'm from.

It probably wouldn't have been if your population density had been comparable. But the Oslo metro region for example, outside of a tiny city core, consists largely of tiny little towns with mostly single or dual residency houses, terraces and a few low apartment buildings. Larger apartment blocks are found some places too, but most commonly in the centre of Oslo. There are large stretches of pretty much empty space - forest or farms. Density for the region as a whole is driven up substantially by the city of Oslo itself.

The Bay Area on the other hand, at least has most of the population clustered around a handful of major transport links, even though the towns spread out more than a similarly sized city usually would in Europe. Increasing frequency of Caltrain, running it later, and adding a handful of extensions to Caltrain and Bart, coupled with a properly unified bus network, would make all the difference, I think.
I have had two machines from them: a netbook and a laptop. (I build my own desktop machines.) Overall they have been decent purchases, but...

The netbook: wireless driver for the builtin never worked. I had to buy (and carry around) a USB wifi stick.

The laptop: fingerprint scanner has never worked.

There may be workarounds, but the whole point of buying from an ubuntu-specific vendor was that I shouldn't have to mess around with figuring out why my hardware doesn't work.
For Students, By Students: First Round Capital Dorm Room Fund in Philly
I believe they worked towards speed mostly and whilst AES is in alot of hardware the basis of there design was to be hardware independant and with that in mind you can see why no design bias was placed upon what is or not currently enabled in some hardware. In a world were we still have no standard in ragards of BIG or LITTLE ENDIAN then you can see they took the right approach.

Only aspect that Mr Schneier has not highlighted and which you touched upon is that some of the hashing finalists are faster and in that they will in brute force comparisions be not as good. That is another consideration, albeit one of limited time as you already said AES is now in some hardware as instructions and how long since AES being a standard has that taken.

But the whole ability to work on partial blocks and that is what you need to do to gain from parallelisation does open up a while new ballgame in modifiying hashed code and returning the same hash. Now if you can pick a partial block size and then do a brute force test modifying from 0-FF each byte of the block incrementaly for the every permutation and only get a match on the original then that will by design be the one I'd be picking, i'm sure they will be testing each parallel finalist in that way. But personaly if they all pass that test then why pick one winner and have them all as part of the standard SH-3.[1-5]. After all if they all work well then having the choice can only add to the entropy we call security these days.
I think the author is missing out on what you mentioned, specifically that we're attempting to bridge the gap between size and complexity, and new and stable.

As someone who is constantly not using the features I'm learning about due to IE7/8, I mess with things that definitely won't work on anything other than Chrome Canary. Why? Because it's a fun and brave new frontier.

I really think you can't complain about the web being NOT perfect. It's full of dinosaurs and people are still running on oil. And besides, this newfangled green revolution has a ton of kinks we need to take care of before we can make the switch.

Transitional. The web is in a state of flux always.
I'm not sure I see the use-case there as being more useful than JS based WebSockets. Writing a general JS library to do what you suggest would be pretty straightforward, and the server-side work wouldn't be any different (serving partial HTML based on request type).

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

If your users are browsing with a browser so old it doesn't have a reasonable JavaScript engine, then it wouldn't support "HTMLSockets," either.

Basically, there's nothing you could do with "HTMLSockets" that you can't do with WebSockets, and with only a small layer to make it so. However, there's a whole host of utility that you get from WebSockets that you could never get from HTMLSockets, or would require a huge amount of hacking in order to get it to work.

And all this is beside the "pureness" argument, where one might say that HTML is for data, CSS is for design, JavaScript is for behavior; WebSockets are behavior, not data.
The company has also gotten into bed with both Twitter and Facebook on social networking, and doesn’t offer any out-of-the-box integration with Google+.

Twitter integration makes sense for Apple. But Facebook integration does not, as I explained in June.

They are attacking Facebook too. The new social features for photos are a clear shot at Facebook as photo sharing drives much of Facebook's network effect. That's probably also why Facebook are getting in the phone business, as Apple are one of the biggest makers of cameras.
The longest JDK class name
Mobile is closed because the network providers are terrified of letting devices that they cannot control on their network.
Books are by default sequential, but they also offer a lot of different means of indexing to get what you want: the table of contents, the index, or just flipping through. And if you have no idea where you start, you know where to begin: at the beginning of the book. Software projects are often not linear, but trees where the leaves are files. Even in a reasonably modular code base, there's no real beginning. But I'd disagree that code is inherently unsequential when it comes to understanding it. One would have to do exactly as you suggest. They'd have to start with an overview, tell the conceptual story, then write the implementation. They'd have to write a literate program.
Yes. HMAC is very slow. Also, length extension is a pernicious and scary little property to have lurking around your crypto designs; you want it gone.
Again: the "brute force" thing you're mentioning here is a non sequitur. It's akin to suggesting that Intel should manufacture slower chips to make passwords hard to crack. Hash functions should be as fast as possible; it's the job of a KDF construction to slow the process down to resist brute forcing.
I don't see anything wrong with "pay what you want" Ubuntu as long as people who pay don't get special treatment. The easiest way to ensure that would probably be anonymous contributions.

Similarly, certain definite projects like "get X functionality into Y application" could be valid targets for a kickstarter-like projects. Paid-for code released under GPL. Why not ? This measure would be best reserved for unfun tasks, something no one wants to do.
The interviews with other jurors made it clear that they deferred to his opinion in this case, the which makes it very hard for the foreman to deny what happened. Groklaw links a lot of the interviews so you can see for yourself, if you're curious.

I'm not sure why people are surprised here. It's not like the verdict against Samsung wasn't warranted and won't be upheld in subsequent cases. The problem is the juror's dismissals of other patents held by Samsung that clearly were applicable.

The only thing that makes this broken patent system remotely tolerable is a fiction of fairness. If we allow the jury to discard even this in punitive fashion, then things are worse than we realized.

P.S., sorry for the first garbled iteration of this post. I'm still dialing in SwiftKey for tablets.
„The ingeniousness of a construction is based on its simplicity - Everybody can construct complicated."

Sergej P. Koroljow (1907-1966)
As a general tip for app websites: please prominently show on your website the app logo I'm looking for in the app store when I search for "transit" - with no knowledge of what combination of words in your url make up your actual app name. I searched for "Transit" and had hunt through several transit-y apps before matching up your screenshots (I'm on iOS 5).

The "Available on the App Store" button is nice, but if I'm reading this on my laptop I'm not going to go to your website so I can click the button.
I'm aware of the problems which have gone on at Foxconn and personally I do not wish to purchase products manufactured in that manner. The main problem is that as a consumer it's hard to distinguish between products constructed within reasonable working practices and other products made under conditions analogous to slavery in prison-like dormitories. So I think there needs to be something similar to "fair trade", but for computing gadgets.