skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"That's a really easy decision for you to make when it's not your business that's being held hostage.
Personally, If I can't run something on my LAN, I don't want it. So, I love hearing about these issues; I'd like to someday see developers moving away from SAAS for every little function."

My former employer at a small business used to say the same thing, and gleefully pointed out when gmail went down for 3 hours 2 years ago, screaming about how dangerous it is to rely on an external entity for these services. The outcome: we had our own servers for our email, and experienced DAYS of unplanned outages a year, not counting the planned outages due to migrations. On top of that, he had to pay the salaries of sys admins who could have been devoting their skills to stuff that our business actually got paid for.

The justifications for insourcing IT vs. using a SaaS pretty much align with the justifications for keeping cash in a safe in your house vs. using a bank. Sure, they are there, but they all are much, much less likely than the scenarios which will make you wish you weren't handling it yourself (local server failures, local internet failure due to ice storm, hurricane, software update, idiot sys admin) or in the case of money in a safe(house fire, robbery, flood). My company had very competent sys admins, but I'll never forget losing email for 3 business days due to an ice storm 3 states away where the other office was hosting the servers. Then we decided to purchase servers in our other office to prevent this, and then we hired more people to run them. It was fucking stupid, and all due to a stupid mental paradigm of "If i'm not in direct control then it's not being done right." We had less uptime, less security, and a much higher operating cost. That's a high price to pay for illogical, emotionally based paranoia.
That may be true, but sometimes it can also be a pain when you are talking to everything through a load of abstraction layers.

Exactly. Sometimes the benefit of a certain kind of test does not outweigh the cost of distorting a useful design so it will support the test code. That cost might be directly in terms of performance overhead, or it can be a more subtle overhead through (for example) weakening language-enforced modularity in your architecture so you can insert mock/stub placeholders where you want them for testing purposes, which can hurt everything from maintenance overheads to the effectiveness of code reviews.
Show HN: Instaclustr, managed Cassandra hosting on AWS
I think the point is that if such a system were adapted online, it would be prone to abuse. It's easier to "check out" content digitally then it is through a traditional library.
I'd love to get my hands on that Red Star OS.

edit: http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5803379/
The Google Play store does not have a formal review process like Apple does. Once you submit your app, you can expect it to appear on Google Play within 30 minutes to an hour.
Related discussion. Happened a while back here on HN:

Marie Curie day:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4658763
SEEKING WORK - Remote (based in Estonia - traveling is OK)
Full stack developer.

* HTML,CSS,JavaScript,jQuery,SASS

* Ruby, Ruby on Rails, C

* PostgreSQL, MySQL

* Nginx,Apache

* Amazon EC2, Cloudfront

* Heroku

Some of my stuff:

http://letsbreeze.com - project management tool for freelancers (Basecamp and Trello hybrid)

http://getsprouty.com - personal finance management tool

http://github.com/vahtel
In Defense of Silicon Valley (Why Jason Pontin is a Hypocrite)
Question for all Riders...
Where do you storage your bicycle at home?
This type of financial irresponsibility drives me crazy. School districts do so many stupid things in the name of the children, when really all they're doing is trying to maintain their elected positions.

If you stay in your seat for fifteen years, then leave the next guy with a ticking timebomb, it's a victimless crime (taxpayers, children, employees), right?
I just want to express my support for any personal perspective that demonstrates and encourages reading of Isaac Asimov, especially my favorite series. Perspective win.
Hahahaha :) Did not come about this one until now :)
It's not possible to move calendars around in this way. Plus it doesn't make sense to do something like this as a hack.
conspiracy theory

What if this is the writers of that new Silicon Valley comedy show soliciting ideas for their characters w/o having to pay writers!?
3 Dangerous Trends in Today's Software Industry
Dear Jono,

It may very well be that RMS's comments were over the top but please check the numbers on DistroWatch - those numbers will testify that Canonical is not making the right decisions, at least not on the desktop, and RMS's sentiments are quite likely shared by plenty of your former users.
Try Breeze (http://letsbreeze.com), it's a Basecamp and Trello hybrid, plus adds some extra stuff like budgeting, reports and time tracking.
Real AI is hard. It's not that developers don't try, it's that they can't make it better.

About the best the developers can do is give players access to the same interface they have. If you look at the StarCraft community you see amazingly complex AI scripting using what's fundamentally a very simplistic trigger interface. But it's only the top epsilon% most polished maps where the creators put in all the effort needed to make that work.
Ask HN: Should we keep building this cloud managed tablet for the classroom?
We had this vision of a turn-key tablet solution for K-12 educators. We are forking Android to add cloud device management for the teachers to install/remove apps from students device, restrict when students are allowed to play games, and what website students can access. It will also have a school friendly app store that allows the school to purchase app and ebook licenses for all their devices, and push app installs to all of their tablets through the cloud.

After doing some research, some schools who rolled out tablets to their students allowed their students to manage their own devices. They decided to educate the students on whats appropriate rather than restricting their tablets.

Now we are not sure if we are solving the right problem any want to manage their students' tablets. HN, what do you think?
I sync everything with the cloud and have a local backup which allows me to rollback any change to any file. So in the event that the cloud goes rogue I can just disconnect and restore from backup. But also, in the event that my office gets burnt down, I can still access all my data from the cloud. I personally would never have a system where the only point of access to mission critical data is through 'the cloud'.
Changes to Ubuntu 13.04 Dash include local search filter, and in-dash purchasing
Great reply in the comments from Ubuntu users here: http://www.jonobacon.org/2012/12/07/on-richard-stallman-and-...
This, unfortunately, is a common GNOME-like mentality. Our users aren't right, we are. We don't need to listen to strong criticism, because we are making awesome things.

Seriously, some of these guys live in a bubble.
> Supply Lines: When you built a mining tower on a resource deposit, there was no need to manually build and manage drones to carry the minerals back and forth. Instead, a road was built from your base to the mine. Drones were automatically created when the mine had a full load and sent along the road to your base. Enemies could blast your supply line and interrupt your flow of resources. So protecting fixed supply lines became a bit part of the strategy.

I always hated this mechanic, and loved Total Annihilation's (and Supreme Commander — not 2)'s resource flows, and necessity of regulating resource flows in order not to gridlock an economy.
Clang is not the solution. Yes it has some better error messages. Although GCC is quickly catching up.

But it can't solve the core problem. It's simply the language. The lack of Concepts (or something similar) means that error messages simply refer to implementation internals of the Template you are using. Easily giving you a long cascade of error messages when it's in some Template that is used by the Template.

All of the sudden you have to look at implementation details of your standard library or something even worse such as boost. Just to figure out what the mistake was.

And there is nothing Clang or GCC can do about it.
http://lunar.lostgarden.com/files/HardVacuum.zip
And the point is? He has done a lot for his state. Which is India's most progressive and prosperous.
Edit: (addition)
I mean I hate camelCase as an enforced standard. I use it when it feels useful. I use underscores as well when I think they are fit.
I just don't like being one standard pretending to be absolute truth for a company.
If the company is a startup, it's even more important that we get to release as fast as possible, instead of fretting over if the code looks like poetry or not. The odds are, the bit of code will be obsolete as a feature in two months.
"There's a curious quirk on every official North Korean website. A piece of programming that must be included in each page's code.

Its function is straightforward but important. Whenever leader Kim Jong-un is mentioned, his name is automatically displayed ever so slightly bigger than the text around it. Not by much, but just enough to make it stand out."

http://mgakashim.com/405/kim-jong-un
5 Habits That Will Radically Alter Your Path
This is actually the way many traders I know work - and they do it through stop loses and position sizes relative to those stop loses. So, if they are willing to lose $1000 on a trade and their stop is $10, then they can buy 100 shares. That way they've built the max lose they want to take into the trade.
Don't fear failure- compute a risk of failure for every project and every action you take, then plan for this risk of failure

Ex: "I will be paid in this currency, but it risks falling" -> I will therefore buy an option.

Having fully alternative plans as you proposed is also a great way to do that (ex: "if this currency keeps falling, I could even move my business there to take advantage of the opportunities"!)

Anyway, failures happen. But if you truthfully evaluated the risk of failure and the "actual failure rate" is within your expectations, then your plan should provide an adequate mitigation strategy and there's no reason to worry.

Positive or negative thinking will then become far less important than the internal belief you can achieve everything - because you will just plan around real risks, and trust your ability to evaluate the situation.
I did an experiment in my town, placing my own qr codes over everything i could find. running for a month, with putting 80 or so qr codes through out town.

the number of scans i got was around 10. no one scans QR codes

I have been thinking about printing up my own posters, like "Scan the code below to donate to Toys for Tots", but i still don't think I'd get many scans.
here's an article
http://www.veracode.com/blog/2012/06/dangers-of-scanning-qr-...
The post speaks of facts and then states:

The goal of the dash in Ubuntu has always been to provide a central place in which you can search and find things that are interesting and relavent to you; it is designed to be at the center of your computing experience.

So, did they conduct a survey to check that majority of Ubuntu users thinks that getting Amazon affiliate links is 'interesting and relevant'?

I'd wager that a majority dislikes the integration of Amazon affiliate links. If so, Jono, is not providing factual information either.

Of course, we all know ulterior motive is generating more income. Then, at least be honest (or silent) about it.

[1] Yes, I know, you can use Super+a, but most users will just click the Dash or press the Super key. It's the most obvious thing to do.
If you believe his actions are ineffective, you can criticise them, but you can't say that he's not doing anything.
"I hope english is not your first language" - What do you care? You are just being a dick.
How to install SOLR 4.0 Cloud with Tomcat 7 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
What did forecast 2010 look like from 1990?
The author says that after doing graphics for this game Hard Vacuum, he went to Epic to draw sprites for Tyrian, so it's no surprise they have a similar look. :)
> In his reply, Jono claims that Stallman's views on privacy do not align with Canonical's

That's pretty obvious. The question is every user needs to ask himself is precisely this one, "do my views on my privacy align with Canonical?"
I think dependency injection is designed to mostly solve that problem but with that you want to program in a very specific way (e.g calling the DI framework's factory methods rather than just using "new" and a constructor method).

This makes it more difficult to retrofit to code and is sort of awkward when you are integrating with different bits of code and libraries that don't use DI.

Thus the usefulness of mocking frameworks to "force" a particular class to be a certain implementation for the purposes of testing.
Samsung Hints at Galaxy S4 Announcement in January
It looks to me like this will not remove window.console.log statements - which developers would insert to bypass the fact that console.log is normally banned by jslint for production.
You could generate a unique key for each visitor as a sandbox user and then give the prompt to convert to a full account once the user has started interacting with the site. Be sure to make it non-intrusive though.

See how they have done it on https://hollyapp.com/

It took me a while to find that link again, but I thought it was worth it as an example.

Good luck.
Actually I've noticed quite the opposite. At least in the more populated parts of Europe, in my experience Apple Maps does fine and in some cases does better than Google Maps (in my home city of Berlin I find Apple Maps to have been an improvement, primarily in the department of Apple Maps "knowing what it doesn't know" where as Google seems to guess and be wrong. Also, transit. Google is terrible for transit in Europe).

I recently used Apple Maps to roadtrip through Germany and Austria, and it worked without a single hiccup. This summer I had the beta running in Switzerland and it was fine.

In the darker corners of Europe, well, I'll just say in Belgrade iOS maps literally had nothing but a pin. No streets at all. So it seems wildly dependent on where you are.
Me too! Before we used fruitstrap[0] we used DeviceAnywhere. This was a 2U rack unit that contained a franken-iPhone. The hardware buttons were soldered up to GPIO on the DeviceAnywhere.

[0]: https://github.com/ghughes/fruitstrap
I always found it surprising that certain people and governments from the East condemn the West for everything and anything, while embracing the technologies which were invented and developed in that same West.
>I really miss the ability to compile to native code in most implementations for mainstream languages nowadays.

What's your use case for it? Is it covered by .net's (often overlooked) native compilation capabilities?
> The cable TV delivery costs are not that big compared to content costs.

I was under the impression that infrastructure buildout was very expensive and was the main reason why it took someone of Google's size to create a new fiber service.

> If you want live TV, the bandwidth and jitter requirements are enormous, the burst requirements for fast channel switching are a pain.

Netflix seems to be pulling it off OK. Do you mean that the costs are high for the business (in terms of bandwidth spent delivering content) or that the costs are high for consumers (in terms of getting a fast enough connection to make this realistically possible)?
I didn't say he wasn't doing anything. He's certainly doing something. Maps still don't work properly.
It would be great if some mod added "(2005)" to title. I also didn't realize that fact until I read your comment.
What many people don't understand is that C++ has at least two target audiences: (1) people writing low level libraries using templates and other esoteric stuff; and (2) people writing application code. (1) is needed because C++ is a language that can target multiple environments and operating systems. The template craziness is necessary to make the system fast and easy to use for application developers. If you are writing applications, however, you should try to use only bread and butter features, along with standard libraries such as STL and semi-standard stuff like Qt. Once you understand this, your life will be much easier with C++.
Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders Final 2012 Meetup #35, This Thur. Dec. 13
I would have thought that the feedback (so far) on your post would have shown you that the HN mood is that code conventions are not about "pretty" but are a fundamental standard for professional programming.

As an aside: code expected to be replaced "in two months" has a horrible habit of still being around in 10 years.
And some biology crankery comes from physicists: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-phy...
> What concerns me even more is that it must be pretty much impossible for a beginner to pick up C++ today.

There certainly are issues when learning C++. But I don't think it's impossible. A major concern is the fact that there was never a centralised website collecting good information and filtering out the crap. There never was a central Tutorial or Reference.

All the knowledge is hidden in very expensive books and worst of all there are many publishers simply spitting out piles of bad C++ books.

http://isocpp.org/ and http://en.cppreference.com/w/ are a huge improvement.

Stroustrup's book is a great introduction: http://www.stroustrup.com/Programming/ I wish he'd made it freely available. A lot of programming beginners aren't happy to pay $50-$70 for a book when they can go to other languages offering great beginner tutorials for free.

And C++11 is pretty new. So of course there is a transition period with books, articles, references catching on.
The point on environment made me think of Civ, though turn based, in which affecting the terrain and fighting are somewhat linked : clearing terrain for faster transport, nuking an enemy city.. But it's nowhere near what's described in the article. Then you've got the total war franchise in which terrain is essential to tactical fighting, but still, terrain can't be modified to affect the fighting itself (and there are bomb units and cliffs, so the opportunity would be here). Maps are still very shallow in the strategy genre, it seems that they have resources and movement properties and that's often pretty much it.

While we're talking oldies, this made think of Master of Magic (turn based), which had parallel universes, another concept that is very much under-utilized. And 'parallel universe" is a theme up for the round 2 of voting for the upcoming ludum dare.
If the ability to sell the content on the second hand market makes the original purchaser more likely to buy the content first hand, then it may be said to help the rights holder.

On the other hand, by selling on the second hand market the original purchaser may make others less likely to buy the content first hand, harming the rights holder.

The latter effect is almost certainly more significant than the former, so the net result is negative as far as the rights holders are concerned.
Corning Glass Class (Parallax Scrolling)
Uncommon knowledge about an extraordinary material.
Did you check xn--ggle-55da.com? Google's already registered it :). Some TLDs have restrictions on which IDNs can be registered, specifically to avoid this kind of spoofing...
"Viewing in simple list mode due to high traffic to this document." - HN traffic can stress even Google? :)
I believe this is what otherinbox does.
GNOME isn't Ubuntu.
You don't realize your shopping cart is slow, and it is costing you money.
I quickly put one together. http://mgakashim.com/405/kim-jong-un
In 40 or so years when nobody can obtain a working SNES, and someone wants to look back and understand how the SNES hardware worked, they won't be looking at ZSNES' source code for that purpose. (hopefully we will have transistor layouts ala Visual6502, but you never know ...)

bsnes aims to emulate the hardware as closely as possible, with a side effect that it runs every game as a result. Other emulators aim to play the games, with the side effects of bugs in the least popular titles which nobody notices.

For today's hardware, Snes9X is the best choice for just playing games. But in ten years when cell phones can run bsnes at full speed, and you have to emulate an x86-32 to run ZSNES anyway, why not use something more reliable and guaranteed? GUIs are just frippery, easy to replicate or improve upon separate from emulation.
It's so exciting to finally go live. Ben and myself have been hard at work on this for the last 6 weeks.

Please give us your feedback.
Sure. The YC investment comes with a valuation; they take X% of your company for their funds. The YCVC money is convertible debt and defers valuation to the next round.
True, but it's still miles better (for the rights holder) than torrents.

There's also times when I've bought a game or something with the intention of playing it and then re-selling it, but I just never got around to the reselling part.
Glancing at a selection of these ideas, many have already been done.

A big part of starting a business is ensuring that you do your market research right, know your competitors and identify what need you are fulfilling.

Some examples:

* "Share your wifi" - see http://www.btfon.com - this started years ago and is back by a huge telecommunications company.

* Checking browser and O/S versions - https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html

* Anonymous email - http://www.sendanonymousemail.net etc.

* Online image editing... http://www.photoshop.com etc.

RS
No, but Jono Bacon was extremely entwined in GNOME for a long time.
The "force multiplier" from education is better than anything else; labour is the greatest single cost to almost all businesses, and the amount of education needed is high and will only increase in the future. Alongside healthcare it's pretty much the best possible use of government money.

Whether these new schools improve education is of course an open question.
Show HN: Mince pie tracker
AT&T forecast ads from 1993: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8

Apple, 1990: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlfTDlgAl_A
Great article, an enjoyable read. Thanks.
Ok, I'll bite (terrible pun intended), what's the point?
"The prospect of losing your job, say, may seem a lot more scary when you can't even bear to think about it, than after you have calculated exactly how long your savings will last, and checked the job market in your area, and otherwise planned out exactly what to do next. Only then will you be ready to fairly assess the probability of keeping your job in the planned layoffs next month. Be a true coward, and plan out your retreat in detail—visualize every step—preferably before you first come to the battlefield.

The hope is that it takes less courage to visualize an uncomfortable state of affairs as a thought experiment, than to consider how likely it is to be true. But then after you do the former, it becomes easier to do the latter."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/o4/leave_a_line_of_retreat/
>Then again this seems to be a 2005 article about a 1993 game and I don't even recall what the situation was like in 2005. Probably a lot less modding etc.

Just a few anecdotes from the FPS genre: Team Fortress was a Quake mod released in 1996, Counterstrike was a Half Life mod released in 1999, and Natural Selection was a Half Life mod released in 2002. It's pretty amazing all these are still around in incredibly polished sequels.
Catfish hunt pigeons in France
But your post is the one with the righteous entitlement.
Red Star, the North Korean Linux Distribution