skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is going to sound extreme, but I did measure it. Roughly 30% of my time was spent just managing dependency updates for quite some time. That, to me, felt absurdly high. But, the problem was transitive dependencies and their changing APIs.

E.g., the redis-rb gem decided it was going to change its API. I guess that's fine, but I didn't use the redis-rb gem directly anywhere in my code. I did use a half dozen libraries that used redis-rb, half of which that immediately switched to the new API, half of which did not. The kicker was the new gem also had a hard requirement on a brand new version of redis, so you couldn't update the gem without also updating redis. So, naturally, not all gems wanted to update to the new gem immediately.

This was a manufactured situation that was 100% avoidable. Semantic versioning doesn't help at all in this case. Namespacing your API does. But, that aside, I now found myself having to submit pull requests for libs using redis-rb when I had never used the gem myself. I certainly didn't save any time and the whole thing felt like a gigantic waste of effort.

More recently, I went through this when multi_json changed its API.

And the other common situation is gemspec's inability to say gem Y provides the API for gem X or to override version numbers you know to work (much like maven allows). So, a lot of problems that should be simple to solve become matters of wrangling multiple parties to agree on compromises.

Since actively pruning my dependency graph and only very selectively growing it, my time spent managing dependencies is mostly negligible.
It's a big club.
Reading the part about him cringing on the demo made me think of this:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/6/9/
Though I personally dislike LinkedIn as a company, I think this is unfair criticism.

They modified their API to be more sensitive to users' privacy concerns. There is nothing inherently wrong with a company respecting its users' privacy.

The complainant is understandably disappointed, but he is wrong in suggesting that an API is a contract that the host company can never change. Changing an API can be part of improving your product, and that seems to be the case here.
Previously, in companies that I've worked with that based their products on APIs from Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc, we would purchase a formal support agreement so that when things changed, we would have the ability to actually get some level of support.

It seems these days that companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc, not only do not have any real forms of support, you can't even purchase a support contract if you wanted. Also, they don't have the professional courtesy to maintain their APIs to ensure backwards compatibility, unlike companies in the past.

I'm not sure why people would invest money and time into integrating with products that don't offer some level of formal support, as well as backwards compatibility. If you have no contracts and no stability with your underlying service provider, you are completely at their mercy. This means that any and all apps based on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc are suspect, and anyone who does business with companies like Twitter and LinkedIn who are notorious for screwing over their developer community by changing things willy nilly, is basically stupid. The only development use case is if their goal is to create a popular app quickly, and then exit quickly. If they intend to create a product/company with a long-term vision, they are completely at the mercy of these companies.
Great Entrepreneurs are Masters of Business Chaos
"Look at those/these fucking hipsters" is a reference to an old Tumblr somewhere.
maybe every reason of making iOS Maps is acceptable here too.
How does Dolphin (with Dolphin Jetpack) compare to this version. I remember a post in HN a few weeks back where Dolphin was winning in most benchmarks over Chrome back then.

Anyone using Dolphin?
They were simply using the standard OSX browser plugins (the same Mozilla, Camino and IE used at the time).
I wholeheartedly agree, it's actually something I wanted to write about. A maintainable application should be up and running with a seeded database in a few commands; i.e.: gem install bundler && ./script/install.
It takes more energy for an LCD to show a black pixel. It is not much compared to the backlight, though. On one of my laptops solid black uses 0.5 watts more than solid white.
I don't understand why the likes of Twitter can't simply have set prices, ala AWS: X token activations + Y requests = $ Zk p/month developers have to pay. Clear, easy, fair, progressive. Surely there's a way to keep everyone in business.
Safari implements NPAPI [1] and could probably reuse any NPAPI plugin that existed on OS X at the time right off the bat.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
Nope, just people who dress like hipsters.
You don't know anyone who plays Minecraft?
But at what cost? I get a job today, fine. But then the company that found me the job is pressured to monetize better. Then what do they do? To whom do they sell my data or something based on my data in a way that I do not necessarily approve of?

I generally don't like things tied in to my social networks. This is not because I don't think they are useful, it is because I don't have long-term trust in the companies doing them.
This has been talked about earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703735

A quick observation: the discussion thread forming here is very similar to the previous one.
If they couldn't dress, we'd probably call them nudists.
Lets say I run a mail forwarding service. I get your permission to go to each of your mail boxes and send your mail to where ever you happen to be. Mail is heavy though and to save you money I open all your mail remove a couple of pages / brochures / ads, reseal it in the original envelope and don't tell you.

I promise I don't read your mail when I get caught.

I'm giving the first 3 months free, please provide your information below so I can get started today!
Quickly Find And Launch Azure Linux Virtual Machines With VM Depot
Does the British Royal Family have a Surname?
Well put, Albert[1], but the promise of opening up APIs was supposed to be to encourage an ecosystem, which locks users in because all their apps are there. Rather than LinkedIn trying to hoover up every penny that might be generated by their data, the goal is supposed to be:

- LinkedIn collects a ton of user data, and had some idea to monetize it

- clever developer has a different idea about the same data, uses the API to achieve it

- users love developer's app, and they stay on LinkedIn because they love all the ecosystem apps

- maybe LinkedIn gets jealous and implements their own version. This is fine, if they don't break any laws, or cut off the original service for no real reason

Partnership sounds like some Facebook-Zygna type relationship. That seems like a really high barrier to entry. If you look at a service like Wolfram|Alpha, they're doing it right by putting reasonable restrictions on API use, and saying up front "license this commercially, contact us". This is a win-win: WA makes money, you're a real customer with bargaining power. Throwing a half-assed api out there for anyone to use, whinging about not making any money, then revoking bits piecemeal is not good for anyone.

1. Your writing seems to lose a certain quality online, maybe stick to prose? L'etranger was very good.
iTunes started out as a third-party playlist manager whose name escapes me (I even owned a copy). It's perfectly possible that it included licensed code that couldn't be open-sourced even if Apple wanted to do so.

Next, Apple was only able to negotiate licensing deals for music (and later video) content from the various rights holders after agreeing to various strictures including sufficently restrictive DRM and functional restrictions such as allowing music to be copied only from computer to iPod and not from multiple computers to a single iPod.

Apple didn't try to stop third parties from working around some of these restrictions but it couldn't be seen to be allowing them to be circumvented willy-nilly and open-sourcing iTunes would immediately lead to a "rip everything to MP3" and "grab everything from all attached devices" features.
It seems I can always notice when people are doing things in reverse. It's like the uncanny valley for me, and it makes me uneasy for some reason.
Five Reasons Why We Suck at Collaborating
Ross and I like to build things. Sometimes we build things that tens of thousands of people use, sometimes not.

In any event, we suck at collaborating.
I'm also a bit perplexed how a business model based 100% on a 3rd party social graph discovers in January, when preparing for launch, that they were adversely affected by an API change apparently made in August.

It also sounds like a change LinkedIn were considering for a while that might have been avoided by sending an email stating "We're planning on building an app dependent upon the the X API call to do Y. Could you please let us know of any changes planned to this feature." If my business model was that tightly coupled to LinkedIn's API and nobody got back to me I'd take that as a warning sign.
> It was boring and wasn't taught in any way which motivated or inspired

Instead of going to university to be taught, go there to learn. You are responsible for your own learning process.

That's not to say that university courses cannot be boring, are being led by people without any interest or experience in helping you by your learning process. In those cases: choose other courses with better teachers, be pro-active and ask the teacher questions you're interested in, engage in the learning community at large, do side-projects, and so on.
Probably just a reference to the previous HN appearance's comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703735

Nothing to worry about :)
It's not the fact that you are using 3rd party APIs. There are plenty of legacy companies that created products based on 3rd party APIs from Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc, that did perfectly fine. Microsoft in particular is extremely professional and will bend over backwards to ensure backwards compatibility. You can still install many 20-year old programs on Windows 7 and they will run perfectly.

As I mention in my post, the issue is that these Web 2.0 companies don't offer support contracts, and don't have a formalized API that guarantee backwards compatibility. THAT is the problem. We ALWAYS bought a support contract whenever we integrated with an API. The support contract gave us some legal rights, but these days there are no such legal rights, and that is what is really risky.
Interesting! I've read in one Scientific American edition about this and about what the Prof. Craig Hogan is studying:

http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Hogan_C/0/1/0/all/0/1

In his current work he is developing the theory of a proposed new phenomenon, which he calls “holographic noise”, a fundamental, universal uncertainty in the fabric of spacetime, akin to pixelation in an imperfectly sampled digital audio file or video display. The theory may lead to the development of experiments that could allow a direct measurement of the minimum interval of time.

http://astro.fnal.gov/people/Hogan/
Watching your competitors release "your" features
Simplified, hand-waving explanation: virtual pair creation can occur in any quantum field theory. We have quantum field theory describing three of the fundamental forces (strong, weak, electromagnetism ... ok, two forces as the last two are unified as electroweak). Pair creation can occur at a (length) scale that is much larger than the Planck scale. (the energies involved are much lower than that of the Planck scale). Treating a black hole classically, one particle from a virtual pair can cross the horizon and the other escape at infinity - thus you get Hawking radiation. At those scales, the event horizon would appear to be smooth - like a pure 2-d surface.

However, for gravity, we do not have an experimentally verified quantum theory. It is thought that such a theory would contain the equivalent of virtual pair creation, namely fluctuations in the space-time. So, at the Planck scale, one would expect that space-time would not be smooth and thta you would have spontaneous appearance of quantum fluctuations that would give your space-time a foamy structure. However, these structures would be incredibly tiny and, for "macroscopic objects like a proton (!)", the space-time would still look smooth; fluctuations of the even horizon of a black hole would occur at much smaller distance than those involved in virtual pair creation.
With special relativity I can't help feeling Einstein's real insight was to treat the implications of the mathematics as really true - and wonder whether Lorentz had already done this, but not thought it worth mentioning (us mathematicians tend to have a slightly different conception of reality from physicists).

Of course that's only the first and by no means the greatest of his ideas.
Interesting: wikitravel.org has been around for a long time, and I wondered if they were somehow related. They don't appear to be, but it is funny that both have a "Destination of the month" as well as an "Off the beaten path" segment on their front page.

I imagine there's a smaller number of people contributing to these wikis than Wikipedia itself, so I hope that they don't end up cannibalising each other in a way.
It's obviously a lot better now because I can view it on my iOS device. Oh wait...
Go doesn't have generics. It has cool interfaces, but they solve a different problem, and the lack of generics (or templates, if you prefer) is a real problem in Go.
They were forced to release the code by the license, but they picked the code knowing that from the beginning.
Anki - https://github.com/dae/anki

It's obviously not as full featured as Rosetta Stone, nor does it come with courses, nor does it use voice recognition - but it does rely on basically the same research into memory and I've had a lot more success using Anki than Rosetta Stone.
I often see well-thought and well formulated architecture questions to be closed on SO. Why do mods do such thing?
I've built lots and lots of lego over the years and tried several competitors as well. In fact I built a megablocks porsche last night for my son. The difference between lego and the rest is quite big. First the bricks are perfect on lego, perfect colour and no scratches or flaws. Next the instructions for lego are clear and easy to follow. Then you've got the parts bagged up in sensible sized packs which allow you to complete the steps required without having too much lego about you.

The megablocks kits was cheap, but the instructions were truly terrible. There was even a small addendum sheet thrown in with corrections one of the corrections was wrong itself!!

Add to this the blocks were not of great quality and the colours weren't consistent.

I almost never pay full price for Lego as there are always offers to be had, but the extra is well worth paying. I have kits from the 80's mixed in with todays stuff and it all fits perfectly.

Not to mention that Lego's support is great.
See above where I just addressed a related question with respect to Hawking radiation.
Graphite - A Beautiful & Minimalist Theme Pack & Generator For jQuery Mobile
Vodafone BlackBerry Users In Europe, Middle East And Africa Hit By Email Outage
What, not a single South Asian on the team! They must be actors hired only for this purpose. :)
The habit of grepping all content for keywords without understanding context or definition inhibits rational discourse. Getting third-party apologist about it when confronted is a dead stop appeal to authority.
Is that not the definition of a hipster?!?!
Unforeseen Benefits of Starting A Newsletter (and why you should)
"unfortunately I've lost said link "

If you upvoted the story, it should be in your saved stories link.
I often see articles about a lack of women in tech, but in fact I see even far fewer African Americans and to some extent Latin Americans. This company is one example. Another example: http://pivotallabs.com/team/
CookiesOK browser plugin
Things that depend on common human physiology rarely have exceptions...
This.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be a "bad will" from the power supplier.

I know a store who went down because they were relying on a unique supplier and, at one point, the supplier experienced an issue at their factory, outside of their control (a flood).

The supplier was big and strong enough to deal with the momentarily slowdown (it lasted months) but the store I knew simply couldn't handle their customers' orders and couldn't accept new customers. It quickly degenerated: unable to pay the salaries, then unable to pay the bills, the tax, etc.

And the store, after years of "faithful" services, went bankrupt after a few weeks/months. The sad thing is you could see them trying desperately to stay alive and they were nice people.

So it's as you said: be careful to not depend on a power supplier because several things may go wrong.
Einstein was the first (and it really was a breakthrough) to realize the exact nature of spacetime. He reformulated the Lorentz transformation to show that the passage of time actually changes in different reference frames. (Edit: apparently the reformulation was done by Poincaré, but he still had the idea of aether.)

Also he got his Nobel prize for his work on the photoelectric effect. He wasn't the first to come up with the idea of photons, but his model was the first that could explain the effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect#20th_cent...
One would be able to look up a complete representation of the current known state of Mad Men, all known airing dates in all countries, places where it might be available to (legally.) steam in your jurisdiction, etc, etc.

These are all the features of a normal API. As well as access to the above, you could (selectively) register for updates to be pushed to a URL of your choosing when there are additions or amendments to the data held about the show. (or all shows, or all shows matching your criteria, etc)
The nerd in me read this hours ago. When I got home I had to do some data mining of the Lego site and put the numbers together.

Average Brick Price

Australia:18.3c
UK: 14.9c
USA: 10.8c

So yes, the price is almost double in Australia what it is in the US.

Average Licenced Brick Price

Australia: 22.0c
UK: 17.5c
US: 11.5c

If the link works, you can see all my numbers on my Facebook page: http://rick.ph/lego_price_analysis
People should stop thinking "geek". A mug punter is going to be freaked out that the advice that HTTPS means their data is secure will not care to understand technical BS that excuses the fact that HTTPS is not secure in this instance.

"We" expect HTTPS to mean secure and unbroken along the way. This tells us that HTTPS might not mean secure at all. It doesn't matter what geekery is used to explain it, its not what it says on the tin.
Ask HN: Software/technology that will make an impact in the near future
What do you think will be new/emerging software and/or technologies that will make an impact in the near future?

Something like (imho) Node.js, Redis or Scala, which appeared and quickly become very popular and widely used.
I had a course on using Lego DACTA (lego mindstorms without the mindstorms brick) when I was in fifth grade. Pure awesome.

Too bad mindstorms are ridicously expensive here in Brazil, I am yet to put my hands in one.
You can use any separator you want in an s/../../ expression, not just /, in this case the separator is _ (this technique allows you to use / without creating a "picket fence": s/r\/x/r$\//).

So the regex just means replace "r/x" with "r$/".
Here are some of the stories from last year:

http://bo-ne.ws/forum/read.php?7,32149,32149

https://plus.google.com/+ChrisPirillo/posts/Df3JbGjdNe4

Apparently they prolonged their IP protection with a trademark, which was dissolved in court last year:

http://boingboing.net/2005/11/17/judge-to-lego-your-p.html

http://boingboing.net/2010/09/15/lego-cannot-be-trade.html
Because it's available everywhere, including shared hosting. IIRC it can be reconfigured to other storage mechanism
Maybe, having the real data on power usage from the components instead of a script reading a non linear, corrected and unreliable indicator, they know it doesn't matter as much as XDA thinks.
Rob Walling is a solo entrepreneur that hires Virtual Assistants, coders, designers etc.. in order to create/manage his own products (i.e. http://hittail.com http://www.dotnetinvoice.com/ and others).
You can get more info about how he is doing by reading his blog http://www.softwarebyrob.com or better listening to the podcast http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ he co-host with Mike Tabber (another solo entrepeneur, his site http://www.singlefounder.com/ )
And I now know that there is a Lego StackExchange. Simply amazing!
I got to see a demo of this at CES. Very neat. I asked about downloading custom firmware to the brick, and they said it would be supported. Since is runs some version of the Linux kernel now, that should really expand the range of software which can be run. It has a USB port, so WiFi networking is now also a possibility.

Since it supports Bluetooth (presumably serial port profile), that makes communication to smartphones easy.

I'm hoping 3rd parties will make more sensors and motors for this platform. I can envision uses for small solenoids, and maybe stepper motors too.
Sadly, the Android Modding community is usually short on throughly testing findings in a scientific way that goes beyond anecdotal evidence. When you inquire about such things or comment, you either get indifference or at worse, hostility from those that start to think you're better than others for wanting to find out the truth from statements. Some users start to confuse curosity and questioning with outright hostile interrogation and lay on comments like "if you don't like what this guy is doing, then don't use it or read it." Sure there are trolls that really do cause problems, but those that honestly want real answers or to help get thrown in with them at times.

Granted that it's not all like this as some groups out there and developers really do care about such things (like Cyanogenmod). However, that's typically not the mode of operation. For example, kernel modders that think it is a good idea to disable fsync by default. On top of that, they generally do not give an option to enable it for end users. Result was lots of data corruption when people pulled out their batteries.

This is just my observations from being heavily into the modding community for around 2+ years helping to administer one of the larger modding forums. I try to push for factual information as much as I can and to lead by example when possible through any code or mods I might publish, but the community is pretty set in its ways still. I do think my efforts aren't in vain when I get the occasional positive feedback from users, so it keeps me going. However, there are just too many non-developers mixed in with a minority of actual developers and end users cannot seem to discern between them.