skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meh, maybe at scale. I'd say you'd be better off bunging everything in your db at first, and then extracting bits into more specialised data stores based on testing and real-world performance data.

To take one example from there - storing images in your db - this might actually be fine if you have a cache in front of your app servers, since your db only takes the hit once and then nginx/varnish serves the request after that.

Doing replication, versioning and backup for postgresql across a bunch of app servers is fairly straightforward. If all of a sudden you're doing it for postgresql AND mongodb AND lucene - and keeping all those backups in sync with each other - it gets a lot harder, at least without downtime.

Nosql, lucene etc are great tools, but often they're premature optimization. Make it work first using the simplest tools you have, then add complexity to improve performance only where and when required.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6451/the-xeon-phi-at-work-at-t...

Each core is a simple in order x86 CPU (derived from the original Pentium) with a 512-bit SIMD unit.
> Read part 1 and 3

I have read part 1, didn't know there was a part 3.

I'm just saying that imagine (in a hypothetical situation) there is a large code module written by an original author under the GPL. Over time it is worked on and line by line it is eventually fully replaced with new code by 5 other people.

Even if you get the 5 to agree to a license change, the original 1 would still have an argument that it was all derived from his original work and should remain under GPL.

I have no idea if this situation applies to you, it was just an idle thought.
Ours wasn't viewed by anyone other than my cofounders and I. I take that as an indication that we're not in the running for an interview. If you do get a view, at least you know there's some interest from YC. I suppose it's possible that some applications are good enough that the founders forgo watching the video in the interest of time, but it's unlikely.

Good luck to everyone. Looking forward to seeing the next batch of YC companies.
Hacker News: Unknown or Expired Link
Why do i get a single line <body>" "Unknown or expired link" when I curl some YC pages? http://news.ycombinator.com/x for example.

If YC is full of such great product people and hackers, why wouldn't they use (searchable) permalinks? I'm assuming there's a reason for this, as its not the easiest way to do things.
I should clarify that I'm referring especially to public nutritional advice.

Much of our current 'low fat, high carb' advice stems from the McGovern commission:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Com...

This article provides a good overview:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...

There are lots of other things. Nutritional advice on breakfast, for example, is not based on anything more substantial than correlational studies. It ignores the contradictory evidence of traditional eating patterns that avoided breakfast.

I could go on. We're told to eat a low cholesterol diet, for example, even though blood cholesterol is not directly affected by dietary cholesterol in most cases.

I don't have too many supporting links, hopefully someone else can fill the gap. But the cochrane review is a good source of reviews of the state of our evidence.
But he DOES mention Minecraft, by saying to see what it's like in a decade. Now, if there were 10 examples like Minecraft, then I don't think he could dismiss it so freely. But with a single exception... it is reasonable to consider it an outlier.
No per-minute plan, but Saucelabs gives you 30 minutes per month for free. $12/month for unlimited. It works great.
https://saucelabs.com/docs/manual
For one, Photoshop does not have a "relatively cheap price". It's over $500 dollars by itself, and some thousand dollars with the rest of the suite.

A price is only cheap or expensive relatively to something. Compared to the necessary money to improve a free program, $500 is ridiculously cheap. It's also pretty cheap compared to the benefits accrued by most professionals users by using it.

Also note that the people that "have a copy of Photoshop" and need it with all it's power are not the same people that are "devoting more resources to the alternatives". The former are graphic designers and illustrators, where the latter are programmers.

Since most programmers are casual image editing software users, they wouldn't need Photoshop. And indeed, those users get just fine with Gimp. So it's not like if Photoshop wasn't available programmers would have flocked to make an equivalent program.

And exactly why wouldn't designers and illustrators pay (read: devote resources) programmers to improve it, just like they do now?

If your claim is that people don't pay for OSS development, my paycheck says otherwise.
That's why we have Hacker News, to get the real story. :)
iPhone App Prototyping Made Easy
I am not for
"Provide a feedback mechanism that allows users to report spammy notifications, and crack down on abusive apps."
because 'what is' spam is highly subjective, and this can be used against the App to bring down even genuine Apps!
I wouldn't agree that we can let the iPhone user remain ignorant of what is all this about Push Notifications! If the user bought the iPhone, if the user 'chose to' install the App, then it falls upon the user to learn how to use it! Is it not? When we buy, say, a new electronic equipment, say a new refrigerator, is it not upon us to learn about how to use it controls?
I get your point. And, yes, you are right.

The problem is that a lot of these discussions turn in to pissing matches that are not constructive at all. In the meantime, if you are a working programmer none of this is relevant to you. If you are working on iOS you are, more than likely, not going to be writing native apps in Python or Lisp no matter how wonderful they might be.

The academic discussions are most definitely necessary. When they take place in places like HN I am not sure that they surface in the best possible light. There are no real conclusions. There are no "calls to action". No test cases are produced and few, if any, real-world results can be pointed to. I seriously doubt that such discussions on HN would start a massive movement to introduce a new paradigm that sweeps a significant portion of the software development universe. I think those things happen far more organically and, by the time they bubble-up to places like HN a significant body of work is already in place.

I'll use as an example something like Meteor. I don't know that full history. I did learn about it on HN --which is solid indication that there's value in HN as provider of programmer-relevant news. However, I don't think that Meteor had it's genesis out of a discussion on HN. And a significant body of work was already in place by the time it made it into HN. And, as far as I know, Meteor wasn't created out of long academic discussions on HN or otherwise. It probably was an idea that coalesced into a project when the founders got together and bounded it around (best guess).

I have seen (and got sucked into) many pointless discussions on HN about these kinds of topics. Discussions about such topics as "to vim or not to vim" can get, to be kind, "interesting", when, in reality, they are pointless. You use the tools that let you get to a shippable product at the time you have a project on your desk and move on. In that context there is no "best". That was my point in mentioning making money with assembler. Did I want to write complex code in assembler? No. Was it necessary due to performance? Nope. Was it a pain? Absolutely. Did it work? Yup. I had lemons and I made lemon-juice. Optimize later.
But the problem was, as far as I remember, not the weaknesses of his passwords. Hell, the hackers didn't even tried to brute force the keys, they just conned their way in. Time and again, the human factor proved to be the weakest link in the security.
Door locks are no better.
For some reason I have a SkypeOut subscription. It tends to get used only when the SO is simultaneously making long distance calls on the landline.

Skype quality is usually attrocious. But yesterday I had my first crystal clear call in over two years. It only cost about $72 to finally get that!
> My Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust—seven, 10, and 19 characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as well—but the three accounts were linked,

No, you had one 'robust' password, one good password, and one godawful password that you should feel bad about not securing better.

And then you linked all of the account together, basically putting all the keys in the kingdom in the weakest safe you had.

It was a poor decision, and has nothing to do with the strength of passwords as a data protection mechanism.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098756

> why wouldn't they use (searchable) permalinks? I'm assuming there's a reason for this, as its not the easiest way to do things.

It's straight forward, but not when you are using closures and continuations.
Decentralized Evaluation of REs for Capability Discovery in P2P Networks
They aren't quite so primitive. The Atom is also a Pentium-class in-order core. It may be Pentium class, but it's also running at ~2 GHz.
What about memory? There's a fairly large overhead for pure python data structures compared to C/C++.
I suspect it's more useful for their big customers who need to test multiple versions – IE's most dedicated users are in the enterprise space, where Windows XP is still a major desktop platform.
That's quite remarkable, given how contrary and argumentative developers often seem to be!
The truth is anything below IE8 should be dropped. IE8's great... it has developer tools, JSON and localStorage, etc. IE7 and below have none of that.
I think I can be of service here...

pjmlp stated "All forms of software development are fine, as long as the developers manage to have some form of sustained earnings from it, which is not so easy as many think." .. in which, in context, he likely meant that those who are inclined to look askance at closed-source companies should realize that there is much sustained value to be derived from such activities. Our community tends to frown on people who advocate the Jim Gray[1] closed-source perspective, so pjmlp was naturally inclined to be defensive.

icebraining was simply taking issue with the portion that reads "All forms of software development are fine, as long as the developers manage to have some form of sustained earnings from it" which, if taken literally, suggests that extreme cases like software that kills kittens is morally good as long as someone makes a buck from it. I am pretty sure that pjmlp did not mean it in exactly this way.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/microsoft-exec-open-sou...
> I wonder if the 'net and mobile craze is creating a situation where CS grads are coming out of school having nearly no idea that there are very interesting worlds out there that lie outside of those domains?

I don't think so. I think its just making the world more accessible to people who normally wouldn't have entered.

I myself was always interested in CS / Programming, but never had the discipline to learn it. Web stuff got me involved later in life, and now having the discipline, I"m slowly working my way down (as it were..). I think those niche's become apparent to people who, being interested in the subjects, just keep digging.
With a silencer, I guess. What do I know? I've never shot anything nor do I plan to - but it seems a silencer would be quieter than a dog that was still dying of poison two days later.
LGPL (let's stick with version 2.1 for now) gives you a set of options for a "work that uses the library".

Those options are:

1. Give out source to the library, and either source or object code to the work that uses the library (so that the work can be relinked)

2. Use shared linking and build the work into a .so that would work if the user replaced it (There is a point of contention in LGPL 2.1 as to whether you need to make it possible for the user to replace the .so. It's clear what the spirit is, but the actual wording does not require it)

3. Include a written offer for the stuff in #1.

4. Offer source from #1 through the same place that offers binaries.

5. Verify that the user already has the source, or that you already sent it to the user.

If the app store requires static linking, that rules out #2.
I've downloaded VLC and XBMC when they were both available in the App Store, hod do I re-download? They dont appear in the "purchased" section
> There's no quality difference between a $5000 LV handbag and a good $100 one exception fashion, trends and branding

While I understand and perhaps agree with your larger point, I have to disagree with this claim. LV stuff is expensive, yes, but the product is very good quality, and comes with what is essentially a lifetime warranty.

Yes, LV is several times the price it "should" be. Problem is that everything else is also several times the price it "should" be. In the larger context, I don't really think LV is particularly bad value, or that the sale price/actual cost multiplier is that much different.

And there is simply no such thing as a good handbag for $100, for pretty much any definition of "good" (substitute briefcase if you are male). To sell at $100, the manufacturing cost of a handbag would have to be maybe $10 or $20 max - whatever you think about LV you cannot possibly claim they cost only $10 to make.
You could do a proprietary application about libVLC+VLCKit and distribute on the AppStore. And one could still side-load your application.
The last line is right on par too…

> None of those challenges seem like showstoppers. Which means that practical quantum routers and the quantum internet that relies on them are just around the corner.

Seems like quite a statement to make.
Even if IE was proven twice as fast in all test there is still plenty of reasons to bash it. Every version released is another variation developers will have to test on, branch code for and add some meta tags to work around it's quirks for years to come. At least that's how it's played out for the last 15 years or so. Time will tell if their recent changes will make things better, but better than horrible isn't really an admirable goal.

That said, yesterday I opened a site I've been working on and have rarely tested in any version of IE, it makes heavy use of the Google Visualization API with several interactive charts and tables on a single page, it destroys IE 6, 7 and 8, was OK in 9, but 10 rendered and executed it perfectly. So there is hope that the next 15 years won't be as plagued with IE quirks as the last but that is if, and only if, IE 7 to 9 can be eradicated faster than 6 was AND MS keeps up with the faster and transparent release cycles AND they support older OS versions AND they stop trying to add 'features' that cause developer lock-in AND developers stop buying in when they inevitably do. But that is a lot of ifs.
Especially on a touchscreen keyboard, and/or use a remote control to type it into an Apple TV etc.
I am not sure to understand what you mean, to be honest.
Lazines is the exact reason people don't bother with correct password management. Lots of people know that password re-use is bad. Yet almost all of us practice it to some degree. Lots of people know that passwords should be as long as possible and as "random" as possible - yet only a select few truly follow this. Why? Because it's just easier to type "john123" than "Jh98N%@badmouthpiecez". Ask anyone which one is a better password, and what would they prefer and what would they truly end up using. Laziness.

The problem with passwords is not their strength. It's not the passwords themselves. It's the way people use the web. For example in the article the author mentioned that because he had all the accounts linked, breaking one meant ability to break the others. Well duh! Perhaps try NOT linking accounts together like that next time?! Oh? It's hard? It's not. It's inconveinient. We're lazy and we want our stuff to be in one place, "cloud", because "it just works". And when shit just hits the fan, you're screwed. Not because of passwords, but because of the way you manage your "digital life".

The whole "digital life" concept is utterly retarded from security point of view. Not the passwords.
BSD is used exactly because you can hide your improvements from others. You can hide the code of your proprietary extensions.

If you choose to, you can give or take away my freedom to further improve these extensions. No different from closed source.

On the other hand if what you are targeting are "companies" that take your code and never give back, then BSD is a fine choice.
>This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home address.

I simply don't believe this. Absent a keylogger or some massive security breach with Google themselves, I can't think of any way an attacker could get into my gmail account short of rubber-hosing.

The author hand-waves all of this by saying "let's say you're on AOL". Well, let's say I'm not. Let's say I have an account at Gmail with a > 20 character password and a > 20 character answer to the password reset question. If someone can break into that within a few minutes, they are severely undercharging at $4.
VMWare Fusion's importer works perfectly - in the past there used to be a concern with drivers but at least by VMware 4 it just works.

Procedure:
1. Download
2. Use unrar or http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html to unpack the segments
3. Open VMWare Fusion & choose import
4. Get coffee & wait for disk I/O
5. Install VMWare tools & pending Windows Updates
6. Take a snapshot so you can reset it after the timelimit sets in (as noted by Microsoft, they disallow storing data durably for more than 90 days)
Thinking about it some more I think the best chance of surviving into the medium term is some cataclysmic shift in exchange rates (maybe not so improbable given the Japanese Government debt). An effectively free drop of 20% in Japan based costs would give quite a massive boost that might give time to attack other problems but isn't enough on its own (assuming Sony's debts are in Yen as the value of many assets would also fall which could put them under before they could benefit from trading against the stronger currencies).

Japan printing itself out of debt might be quite a good move although clearly not without its costs amongst savers.

Anyway getting well out my expertise here.
It's canvas. SVG would still need to insert DOM elements and would probably start displaying performance problems at 5000 elements or so.
I have to agree that there isn't a sure thing. Dan Cook is a very smart guy, but even smart guys can get the wrong perspective and end up running into a wall.

Personally I look at the game business as a sort of "innovator's hustle," where most of the effort is going towards the novelty aspects - even in the design. Traditional/historical games have lasted by remaining captivating for lifetimes, rather than 40 hours, so raising the bar for long-term retention is not an impossibility, provided that a way to market the design over an equally long time exists. But it's far more straightforward to push for marketing-immediate elements(graphics, storytelling, ad campaigns, etc.) and that's led to an industry characterized by budget escalation.

From this angle, F2P's profit engine is primarily running on the basis that more novel and more appealing games can be made via a change in the business model. If the innovation stagnates, so will the market for F2P. But the business model isn't directly at fault for that. Tactics like blind conversion of every existing type of video game into a F2P straitjacket are what make it a fad, one likely to recede to a more reasonable level over time, but not one that goes away entirely.
Those kind of links are a great irritation for me when browsing and reading HN.

Instead of http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=KnmhPyrF1t
Why not for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/news?page=2
?
So... hacker news chose to let their product be limited by an engineering issue?
> I'm just saying that imagine (in a hypothetical situation) there is a large code module written by an original author under the GPL.

This is not the case here. And part 1 explains exactly this, with the git log part.

Part 3 will close the loop altogether.
I initially zoomed into Paris and was very unimpressed with the 3D view as all of Paris was flat. However, I tried clicking on "See all cities" in the top right, found my city, Toronto, and took a look.

http://i.imgur.com/ldgtc.jpg

VERY impressive. Especially considering how smoothly it works in my browser.
Lots of efforts that otherwise could have been used on something more productive.

GPL was just fine. No VLC on AppStore - I could live without. Hey, I can live without Apple too but this is not about me.
Yep. I was surprised too :)
I want a clock with that !!!
While idle, the profiler tells me that the function with highest time is yp at line 5198 in chart.js. But no idea whether that's really the culprit.
I have a game and when I say it's free to play and in the future I plan on adding some paid options, people automatically assume they will suffer if they don't pay. However, I plan on adding paid options that are purely cosmetic. We'll have to be very clear upfront that the game is 100% free unless you want to make your city standout which is really up to you.
I understand your points. It's why we wanted to give free unlimited lifetime accounts instead of a free year or something else to monetize.

> It's rather useless compared to actual help.

Arguments against helping in ways that have specific impact (providing food, assisting with relocation, etc) are a straw man. It's not better to do nothing than something of small value.

I have plenty of photo albums in my closet and if those somehow got lost or destroyed then I'd be devastated (more than any other physical object in my house).

> If you're still charging them $.01 a year, that's still charging them something. You ought to fix that.

Really? If we get more feedback like that then we're happy to change or give refunds. We're set up for subscriptions so it's the easiest way to do address verification. If a penny a year is too much, we'll gladly fix it.
Look for "Static Library Exception"

http://multinc.com/2009/08/24/compatibility-between-the-ipho...
Google releases an open-source linear book scanner
No. I am quite too busy for that...
But measuring distance over the actually existing possible routes is much more accurate and honest. See these random examples: http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisdesktop/com/gp_tool... and http://blog.lib.umn.edu/levin031/transportationist//WalkingM...

Granted, this either needs more processing power server-side or a data model where the network (street, areas, etc) data is actually available on the client machine to calculate it.

edit: http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/ is a very nice detailed write-up about those maps.
1. Apple distributes source to the LGPL pieces, so that is not an issue for them.

2. The rest of what you said doesn't make much sense to me. I'm not clear on what distinction you are trying to make.

There are those that believe that the question of linking is mostly irrelevant to whether something is a derivative work. Lawrence Rosen is the canonical example of folks in this camp. But even in that camp, static linking may be a problem, it just depends on what is being done.

So it's not really true that "static linking isn't a problem".
Price change is not fundamental to economics. It is fundamental to a post-Fed inflationary policy that seeks for a low (or at least a consistent) unemployment rate. That being said I think this is a great case study of "menu costs" on steriods.