skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple relents, and an unplugged Kickstarter is back on
My experience is this is most applicable for medium to large sites with very healthy monthly uniques. But it is excellent advice for all, particularly as more and more mobile devices access your site.

Some excellent best practices from the Yahoo team here on how to increase front-end site performance (which can account for "80% of the end-user response time"):
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
Down-voted because I think that it is just dumb to have a Dropbox account and forgo local backup of the files on the service. Dropbox is not an extension of your mission-critical local storage and backup.

My approach for Dropbox on both Windows and OSX is to have the Dropbox folder on a drive that will never see development work, even if that means creating a separate partition for it. In most cases the system drive works fine (you do have separate system and data drives on your machines, right?).

This forces a COPY operation rather than a file MOVE if you drag-and-drop files into any Dropbox folder. Which means that everything in the Dropbox folder could be trashed tomorrow and nothing whatsoever would be lost.

On Windows you can also do this by dragging files while holding down the RMB and on OSX while holding down the Option key. This, however, is fraught with issues because it is easy to forget and move something in or out of Dropbox accidentally.

In addition to that, daily system and data backups to external media on EVERY SYSTEM in the office ensures that even if you took a sledge-hammer to any given machine all the data could be recovered to within a 24 hour boundary.

So, no, this is NOT a "Dropbox horror story" as far as I am concerned. At best this is an unfortunate "pilot error" and at worst this is a sign of incompetence.

Sorry, a little harsh there, but, as a student, I lost six months of heavy coding work once in college. That really hurt. And that was probably the best time and place to learn that lesson. That is all it took for me to be completely insane about having backups of backups on anything important. Now, may years later, you will not find any critical system in my office that is not backed-up at least once and usually twice.

These days there's almost no excuse for loosing your work. Don't go around blaming Dropbox, not their problem.

I am not associated with Dropbox in any way other than being just another user.

FEATURE REQUEST: It would be very nice if Dropbox client software could have an option to auto-magically COPY files in and out of Dropbox rather than allowing any files to be moved. The above-mentioned hack works fine but it'd be nice to not have to use it. Also, I'd venture to guess that most Dropbox users don't do this, which opens them to unintended loss.
I need to stream, streaming site using soundcloud API
Takeaway for us in the real world: locate an exit before you start moving.
I'd reserve judgment until something actually comes out of it... More generally, "prize funding" isn't a practical mechanism for building real defense projects. Nobody who knows what they are doing will incur huge capital costs for a mere chance at some prize money.
I don't understand how linus being a good programmer makes him less wrong.

There are a lot of people who are nice and successful software project leaders. Being a dick is not inherent to being successful in the software field.
Had you previously noticed https://github.com/bgr/imdb-cli ? Can you tell us how yours differs from that and other IMDB CLI programs that have come before?
There's a little bit more to having kids than convention and group-think. You're the product of 4 billion years of organisms that decided to have 'em.
The only thing it proves is that people working at Red Hat have to deal with linus rage outbursts by the very nature of their jobs.
Stabilization Won’t Save Us
Some irritating design company in California ripped me off and is getting a lot of press for it right now...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/fashion/noted-a-vibrator-t...

...but I've been selling "Seed" since '09.

http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=459&mode=one
This and a few other interesting concerns are up in Delete[1] by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger.

This is a very interesting book that explains a lot of historical context for how the digital age differs from what came before. The linked blog post highlights the temporal aspect of digital memory - that a post from a day ago is as easily accessible as one from ten years ago.

Perhaps even more important is that because we limit what we post, context gets completely removed. So many people carefully curate their identity that the image we see of a person is not only an image from N years ago, but is also only what N years ago's version of one's self chose to publish to the web.

We definitely live in interesting times, I would encourage anyone that thinks on this phenomenon to check out the book.

1. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8981.html
Class action lawsuit against Instagram
Yes, but they're not independent. Given that you missed piece X, the probability that any one piece it's piece Y it's 1/7, not 1/8, so the chance of missing both X and Y it's lower than the product of their individual probabilities.
Thanks for your interest everyone. I'll try to answer any questions here. Going through some rough health stuff at the moment so I won't be on IRC, but I do read the backlog and will respond when I get a chance. Cheers! :)
Ask HN: How does it feel to be founder of a popular Startup?
Most of us are here to learn about startups, to motivate us following other entrepreneurs and inspire us. We always dream and think right before we sleep, how would it be if my startup will be successful, what will change, will I be still same person, should I work less or even more etc. So how does it feel? What did change in your life?
Very cool! I've been using m2Crypto, Tomcrypt, and PyCrypt manually over the last year or two - I've tried various variations, and changed it up a few times.

Most recently, though, I've moved to GPG, because frankly, I don't trust myself to do it right.

Your library looks cool, but with all respect, I don't trust you either yet ;)

Good luck with this - It seems really useful, and I hope it gets some more exposure, and can cook for a bit.
Yeah, I started reading this, sympathetic to the fact that facebook is changing how we interact and expecting some kind of insightful revelation about it, and just ended up thinking, "it sounds like you're just kind of an asshole."
Not every new architectural idea is a good one. Lots fell by the wayside over the years. See J2EE or Naked Objects (I actually kinda liked that one). Bad ideas fail faster when criticism is brought forward which opens the floor to new, better ideas.
Now this is why I don't use AwesomeWM, config breaks every-damn-time.
I've run into this problem as well, for me the easiest solution was to run Skydrive for personal and Dropbox teams for work.
When I started, I was very creative, had little restrictions and thought naively that programming was mostly about problems solving. However in my day to day programming work, 30% of the time is spent learning new tools others have developed, 5% is spend deciding what tools to use to build something and how to glue everything together, 25% is spend implementing the project, and the only problem solving is the tedious debugging that occupies the remaining 40% of the time.
Only display the teams folder if the user is a member of one or more teams... easy fix.
So, you liked the conventional group-think and life choices of 20-somethings posting photos of getting wasted at bars & parties better?

Also, if you can't take pleasure in the happiness of your "friends", then maybe they aren't your friends and, therefore, shouldn't necessarily be your "friends" either. If you get what I'm saying.
So, you could be successful if only the morons in the previous generation would let you?

This isn't about me, personally. I'm fine. However, I think most people in my generation have been screwed, and the ones who have avoided it (present company included) tend to be fairly privileged. If you were born in 1990 in the U.S. with average means, then chances are that you're not beating away venture capitalists with a stick.

What's especially hilarious to me is that the age obsessions of VC-istan are thinly-veiled classism. A meritocracy wouldn't give a shit how old you are. The age narcissism is just a way for rich people to brand themselves, because people of average means don't get their startups bought at age 24. They have to work normal people jobs for a few years. The age bullshit is to keep the latter crowd out.

We need a society where the best people are free to excel, rather than wasting their lives taking orders. We'd have such a better world if the incompetent morons currently running it just stepped down and let some actually smart people take the reins. They can keep all their private jets and gaudy houses, but the decision-making power should go to people who actually have a few brain cells to rub together.

Entitlement, to me, suggests people wanting to be rewarded for just existing, with no desire to actually do anything. I don't see that in my generation. Yes, there's some of it, as there is everywhere, but it's not a defining trait. I see a lot of pissed-off people, but I see people who work really hard.
Read the Archeopteryx entry on Ruby Dramas for a preview of that.
Is it just me or is The Grid example page broken? This is how it looks on Safari on iOS 6.0.1 on iPad mini: http://imgur.com/3lIns It looks similar albeit smaller on latest Chrome on Samsung Galaxy S3.
When you buy a domain, you're buying a business on that domain. Like any business you have to appraise its value and also its potential value less the cost to realize that value.

So, if the domain is serving $2,000 of ads every year, it's worth $2k using a common estimation model. You don't want to buy it because it's priced at its value. Yes, you would have a good ROI if you held it, but the ad revenue isn't guaranteed, you have transaction costs, annual costs, etc.

If you know you can double the ad revenue to $4k by changing to another provider or using a proven method of placement, then it's worth $4k to you. If the seller is still offering $2k, then you have a good deal and you should buy. If the seller realizes this and raises the price, then you have to decide how much beneath $4k you need to go to make it worthwhile for you.

If you want to build a business on the domain, then you're pricing the value of each visitor. Let's say each visitor brings on average half a cent in revenue: 400,000 visitors brings $2,000. How well will your business convert these visitors? Say you can convince .05% of them to purchase software at an average lifetime value of $100 -- that's $20,000 per year in revenue. Of course you'll need to build a sales site and the product itself. If that takes $15,000, then the domain is worth about $5,000. It might be worth more since the product and the site could be transferred to another domain, so possibly you could pay up to $10,000 or $15,000 for the domain.

These are just considerations - I don't know the numbers for your business or for the domain you're considering. You would certainly want to choose at least two domains and play the sellers off of each other. Your math might tell you that you'd pay $100,000, but market pressure might bring it down to $50,000 anyway.

P.S. If you are buying for the value of the name as a brand, then I think for that money you should just buy an actual brand.
I heard this principle referenced in the context of objects such as presented in the post quite a few times already, for example there was a heated discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013807

I explained back then why I consider this not object oriented at all. Here I just wanted to say that if you imagine a spectrum of all the possible breakdowns of a problem into classes, with one huge class at one end and a breakdown so granular you have a separate class for each operation of the system on the other end, there is a point where making the classes have less responsibilities and having more of them is no longer beneficial to the overall design, because you start to violate many other basic principles, for example the "objects" don't really encapsulate any data anymore. I think finding the sweet spot here is the kind of skill that is learnt with experience and not easily passed on with words, hence the wording of the principle is so fuzzy.
I imagine it shouldn't really affect you more than that the success is a form of validation for your theories, work, efforts.
The C++ version can (and often will) use mutable fields behind the scenes. The Haskell version can't. So it is thread safe by default, while the C++ version might break some internal invariant if used from multiple threads. So even on such simple functions, purity can give some advantage.
I haven't read it, but it seems cool.
I'm running awesome 3.4. In this version the functionality is there by default.
The G2 general knowledge quiz of 2012
It can be, although to help I created an app that turns Github issues into a kanban/trello style board http://compiledexperience.com/windows-apps/hub-bug
I feel very comfortable actually, since I'll program in the same language that the OS uses. I'll feel completely at home.
The Haskell language uses the operating system to switch threads and send datagrams. And isn't the OS the biggest user of global state?
It's like doing Yoga in a Karate class.
Dumb idea, but that's the beauty of the free market, if you can talk an investor into giving their money then good luck to them.

On the specifics of this idea, I wouldn't trust anyone in the carwash business because of the horror stories about it being the last resort fro felons, druggies etc. Do you really want those people going through your glovebox?
Have a look at this one.

http://mydario.com/
> At best this is an unfortunate "pilot error" and at worst this is a sign of incompetence.

I'm not sure knowledge of an obscure Windows-specific drag and drop quirk should be a requirement for using Dropbox safely.

> you do have separate system and data drives on your machines, right?

I'm not sure use of a partition table editor should be a requirement for using Dropbox safely. Most people use the operating system that came installed on their PC as-is.

> daily system and data backups to external media

Dropbox makes the following claims on their website:

"Your files are safe"

"Even if you accidentally spill a latte on your laptop, have no fear! You can relax knowing that Dropbox always has you covered, and none of your stuff will ever be lost."

"Even if your computer has a meltdown, your stuff is always safe in Dropbox and can be restored in a snap. Dropbox is like a time machine that lets you undo mistakes and even undelete files you accidentally trash. "

I think it's completely reasonable to expect Dropbox to be a reliable backup solution as-is.
I think the Haskell example should've used this type signature instead. Compared to the OP's example, this has a much stronger implication. There's very few implementations of this type that would make sense, whereas with the other one - it could be 'count' of the number of times 'string' shows up in the map; Or it could be number of letters in the provided string (ignoring the map entirely); Or it could be (key - 1); or any number of other things.

Here, you can't just magic into existence or modify an unknown 'a' value.
In that case I (and tcoppi it seems) have never known it to not work. But I'm using the nvidia driver/xorg setup scripts, so maybe it does require some fiddling if you're doing all that by hand.
>Whether he was right or wrong is irrelevant to the GP's point that writing to Gruber was a waste of his time.

I beg to differ. We are in a thread about BS accusations from random people on the internet, and a HN reader contributes with an accusation about an famous blogger without providing any data to substantiate it.

Sort of the thing the article condemns.
Agreed; it's always annoying when people with no experience in an industry claim that sketchy startup logic will somehow overcome real-world problems that have vexed businesses for decades (or longer). Employment, fraud, and customer development are all very difficult business problems, which is why so many companies have IPO'd by making them the slightest bit easier (i.e., Monster, Paypal, Salesforce).

By the way, visualcsharp, you've been dead for the past 16 days (at least). A review of your comments doesn't explain why, so you probably annoyed a moderator.
> ... individual Dropbox users are encouraged to create separate accounts ...

If only your software actually worked in that scenario. Every single piece of your software is hard wired to believe you only have exactly one account. For example the Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS clients, as well as the website. To see your other account involves logouts and logging back in again having to enter the other account email and password (not saved).

> Users can quickly switch between using personal and Teams accounts on the web today

Huh, the only thing that works for me is to logout and log back in again. I have a personal paid account and a separate team account. What I would expect is how google do it - the account dropdown having your other logged in accounts available for selection.
On a related note, it's funny that "issue tracking" is somewhat constrained to software development (or, put another way, the software development domain has some of the better tools for the task) when it's really applicable across industries.

Several years ago I put together a very-slightly-modified version of Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org) to keep track of maintenance issues with a vehicle fleet. It's worked nearly flawlessly for years and serves the purpose extremely well.

Are there any commercial projects that have taken this approach? "Software-style issue tracking for brick-and-mortar businesses"
As the saying goes: "Someone is always going to build a bigger picture idiot."
You should take a look at http://www.redbeacon.com/my-home/ Its a tool built specifically for tracking household repairs and projects. Plus, Redbeacon can connect you with home service pros (plumbers, handymen, etc) if you need help with any of your tasks.

disclaimer - I'm an engineer at Redbeacon. Many of the team members use our My Home tool for all kinds of projects around the house.
MIT & UPenn Grads' Healthcare startup is solving India’s problem of Belly Fat
I spent 30 minutes trying to convert my config from 3.4 to 3.5 and then gave up and came back to dwm, meanwhile it gained better support for multiple monitors, the only reason I used awesome in the first place...
It will be as easy as making a folder called TEAM (or the team name) in the user account when he joins a team and automatically delet that folder when he is out from the team
@russel - I think for Type 1 diabetes it would be nice to get a bit more data, I was on continuous monitoring for a week and it was incredibly helpful to see a bit more information than 4 readings per day.

I think with diabetes, I certainly want the data to be adaptive beyond "constant diet, timing of meals" etc.

@j_s - Yes, I think he makes some fantastic points.

@inetsee - Yes, lots more variables than BG readings, but getting that right is a good start.

@axsar - Thanks, will have a look, although it still relies on proprietary data cable.
I'd like to add to this: Riemann is more opinionated than Esper. While you can use it as a general event processing system, it makes some assumptions about event structure which are geared towards application
monitoring. For instance, Riemann events have a fixed schema with fields like 'host'. You can treat them as open maps and add arbitrary kv pairs in your streams, but that extra information won't necessarily be serialized to fixed-schema formats like the protocol buffers interface.

Riemann is also more general than Esper, in that you can define arbitrary operations on events. It sacrifices having an up-front query language in favor of composable functions with stateful side effects. If you want to write a stream that restarts an EC2 instance on failure, it'll be a composable first-class citizen and you can write it right in the config file. Same goes for a stream that pulls in, say, parallel colt to do some heavy statistical lifting. On the other hand, Riemann doesn't include the full range of Esper queries as builtin streams yet, and the ones that are there haven't been optimized to the same degree.

Hope this helps clarify things. :)
Do you not trust dropbox as a backup of your data at all or do you require 2 backups of everything?
... ok.
Isn't there something to be said for the standard port 80 website that the average person can use with their built in web browser without the need to install custom apps? I'd rather see everyone using a "sociopathic person's website" to stay in touch than see a fragmented environment in which some people use one program to stay in touch on port X using one protocol while other people use port Y, while you don't like either but instead want to use port Z.
I do the same thing but with 6 months instead of 12. I think the absolute limit is somewhere between 6 months and 3 months. Most stuff which is at least 3 months old is stuff whose only value is for reminiscing about later. On the other hand, sometimes I don't want to delete something at the 6 month mark because I find it to be still relevant or it is a cover/profile picture and I don't want to replace it. I've tried going without Facebook for a while, but I find that my peers use it a lot for communication. They tend not to like email which is unfortunate because email will outlive Facebook and the immediate successor to Facebook.
Daily Mail? Keep that trash off of HN.
All my systems (Linux) use btrfs and I have cron jobs making regular snapshots including of the Dropbox folders, so even if horrible things happened I still would have access to the original files. I'd have to have Dropbox mess up server side and have something bad happen to all of my client machines.

On Windows you can get the same effect using VSS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy
Ask HN: Podcast or a Book for holiday traveling?
I should clarify, I'll be driving to and from Dallas Texas equaling about 8 hours of driving, so it must be an audio book. I can't drive and read :)

I sometimes listen to a 5by5 podcast or a "suspense-spy" novel but I am pretty much open to anything.

I would prefer it to be Tech related but it is not a requirement.

What do you enjoy listening to when you are stuck in the car?
"Equating communism in general to a restriction of freedom is simply erroneous."

Perhaps, but it's certainly an easy mistake to make, since historically, all governments that have claimed to be communist have been authoritarian or totalitarian, and none have had democratic control over production (or really over much of anything). Some of these governments hold "elections", but who is going to be in charge after the election is never in doubt.
I think that what matters the most about Linus is not being a good programmer (in the beginning of linux maybe it was important) but his capacities for project management, maintaining a vision for so long, and calling shit "shit" when is necesary for the goodness of the project.
You're probably not the target market then. The author just saved you some time.

I really hope every silly .io site doesn't start having half their page bouncing up and down now...
An obit for lead. The countries that still use it are an "interesting bunch".
Hacking on Xmas Eve