skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I invite you to submit your work from 14 years ago and have it judged by 2013 standards.
I'm not surprised that tech crunch would post a polemic article with an assumed left-leaning consequence.

I'm not surprised a HNer with the user name John Galt (hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged) would call the article "agenda pushing."

But I would be bummed if this above stayed the top comment, as it seems to be agenda pushing in its own right.

Maybe these sorts of articles bring out the worst of HN.
I'm curious about the pricing situation on Elastic Beanstalk. T1.micro instances are very affordable, but is it wise to run a webapp and Postgres on the same instance? I'm not expecting a large audience, but I've heard that one should generally have separate servers for the two.
If I understand him right, it's a monopoly of perfect competition. The barrier to entry is the big capital needed to start. Think of Airlines, although it requires a big seed capital, it's very competitive and this lower prices and increase quality.

The market is competitive, but it's kind of monopolized by the big guys.
Wow. The devs at Mozilla are really working it.

I mean, with empscripten, Firefox OS, Firefox browser, and now asm.js... they're about to force everyone onto their own terms.

This is clearly a big move and the beginning of a major victory for Mozilla and all users and developers.

Serving native apps, in the browser, with JS. And everyone is going to have no choice but to follow them, because all other browsers will fallback to their regular JS interpretter/JIT if they don't optimize on asm.js.

We're talking games and applications that will run an order of magnitude faster on Firefox than in other platforms out of the gate. But they'll still run everywhere, just very slowly.
Show HN: iOS Promo Code Printing Service
¿Que es Marketing Multinivel (MLM)?
I'm not a fan of a future in which the only people that can do interesting things (including the use of SIMD intrinsics) are the platform vendors (eg, Mozilla), while the rest of us live in a JavaScript sandbox.

Maybe Mozilla should try writing their entire browser (VM included) in JavaScript/asm.js and let us know how that goes.
They could just tell who is running the site then. I bet they are filling their bank accounts on one of the offshore islands and claiming that they are poor...
What does 'means of technology' mean?

edit: Full disclosure, I'm totally trolling because I think the parent's definition of 'means of technology' will fall into the definition of means of production.
From Addy @ - http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/07/27/journey-throug... ::

I want something flexible which offers a minimalist solution to separating concerns in my application. It should support a persistence layer and RESTful sync, models, views (with controllers), event-driven communication, templating and routing. It should be imperative, allowing one to update the View when a model changes. I’d like some decisions about the architecture left up to me. Ideally, many large companies have used the solution to build non-trivial applications. As I may be building something complex, I’d like there to be an active extension community around the framework that have already tried addressing larger problems (Marionette, Chaplin, Aura, Thorax). Ideally, there are also scaffolding tools (grunt-bbb, brunch) available for the solution. Use Backbone.js.

I want something declarative that uses the View to derive behavior. It focuses on achieving this through custom HTML tags and components that specify your application intentions. It should support being easily testable, URL management (routing) and a separation of concerns through a variation of MVC. It takes a different approach to most frameworks, providing a HTML compiler for creating your own DSL in HTML. It may be inspired by upcoming Web platform features such as Web Components and also has its own scaffolding tools available (angular-seed). Use AngularJS.
Because I still have faith that the W3C wouldn't sell out to a closed solution owned by a single company.

We're talking about a web standard, not some company's broken software.
Yep, that's where I got the core of the templates. They don't accept all .gitignore templates though unless you provide

> Up-to-date, canonical documentation that mentions the files to be ignored

As @mschuster91 suggested, I need a way to accept submissions that aren't in the github/gitignore database.
Minigen, a mini ruby project initializer
This one is crashing osx for me, but the GWT team did a similar JS port for quake 2 back in 2010, playable here: http://crystalin.dyndns.org:8080/GwtQuake.html .
get_iplayer still works? I thought that it stopped working years ago!
Better to do

$ <file nc host.example.com 8888

(performance benefits more apparent with larger files)
If I had been asked this question earlier, I might have said "It could be useful". Having tried this page, though, I agree with you. It was painful and distracting to step through the first example, and I can't imagine doing it for non-trivial pieces of code. At least for me, it would devolve into clicking "Next" blindly until the end.
>If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you are developing software, and not keeping up with advances, yours will too.

Even if you do keep up with advances, I don't doubt at some point Programming compliers/interpreters will evolve to a point where a five-year old can describe something to them in plain English and they will create/program it.

That might be the furthest into the future, but programmers will eventually obsolete themselves if they do their jobs right.
"you're a f*ing lunatic if you think you can make money through any other method"

[citation needed]
Opinions like this makes me want to create a new browser engine just to be contrary. And because the web deserves something better than C++.
More like:

do_stuff
while(some_condition):
do_stuff
IIRC IE6 was considered a pretty nasty piece of work by discriminating minds at the time (e.g. more of embrace, extend, extinguish[1]), so no need to time travel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
I just started playing with Hyde as a blog engine, which is a static site generator for Python. So far the only blog posts are about setting it up! http://esd.io/

Flask is very cool too, though, and if you want your sites dynamic, I'd recommend it. I choose Hyde because my eventual goal is speed: I want to see how fast I can get a "real world" page to load.
It wasn't self-propagating, but MacDefender scareware still claimed a lot of machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Defender

Apple also has a poor record at security patching, which allows for more drive by downloads, especially through Java. Further reading:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/06/apple_p...
http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/mac/
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove; javascript runtimes are VMs too.

Java was designed poorly, and it performed poorly. It just so happens that its design was well-suited to long-running servers, however, so that's where it's used.
There are a million ways to copy files, a lot of them are simpler to use than your example.

But that's not the point here. Sometimes you just got to make something because you want to, because it fits a specific need that maybe not a lot of other people have, or because it's a learning experience, or just for the heck of it. So, no, it's not required, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

It's cool that the author did something productive that works for him/her, and it's even cooler they shared it with everyone.

I can say that's already infinitely more than what I made today. How about you?
Because, in many cases, it's a situation of treatable mental illness rather than rational decision making.
I created this EasyPromoCodes.com based on a question that I had asked on HN a few months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4375707).

I was looking for a site that would let me turn my iOS app promo codes into business cards to hand out at trade shows or other industry events.

After unsuccessfully looking for a similar service for some time I decided to build this site.

The site is built using the Moo.com API, PHP, Bootstrap, a Bootswatch theme, and the Google URL shortener.

Any suggestions or feedback you have would be welcome. I hope that this is useful to some of the other iOS developers out there.
This reads less like an interview, and more like a carefully edited set of answers to carefully chosen questions. Nothing wrong with that, I just was surprised to see such well-connected piece to come out of a normally chaotic process.
How does one have anything to do with the other? Would there be fewer viruses (or less Hollywood propaganda about viruses) on pirate websites, or different legal risks (or propaganda about legal risks) in downloading from them if DRM didn't exist? How does it help Hollywood that you can't click "save as" on netflix.com after paying but you can still do it on any pirate website without paying?
The guides are good, but I'm missing the whole put it all together to make a real app tutorial type level of documentation. Can you point me to something like that?
I believe the ideal (for users) would be to target NaCL natively, with a fallback to server-side PNaCL compilation, and an absolute fallback to PNaCL compilation/execution.
Sure, see OpenStack: http://www.openstack.org/

[that said, comparing automated scaling of a Ruby on Rails SaaS app with 100K+ users to a one-click WordPress install is kinda humorous. Even WordPress has a market for expert DevOps guys to manage your site: http://wpengine.com]
"you can also see this from the number of noisy evangelists vs. professional users nowadays"

Actually, where I work, we use Perl almost exclusively. I don't know a single person who I would consider a "noisy evangelist" - we just quietly get stuff done.
Here is your award :p

http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#cat
And the ad itself is just as vague and meaningless as that title. I have to think that these YC job ads are used as a viability signal to the YC partners and that the company doesn't get help writing them.
Are you sure you meant libertarians? I don't see how anything about Singapore would fit in with libertarian ideology...
...one should avoid dispensing bad writing advice

I think you are being a bit hard on tedunangst since his statement "Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred..." applies in situations different from your examples.

For example: "The Times (and some other publications, including the Chicago Manual of Style) do call for using an apostrophe in the plural of abbreviations that include periods."

http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/faqs-on-st...

You can find more discussion here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Representing_plurals_an...
The superb community is one of Python's biggest assets, especially when compared to the Ruby community.

The Python community is made up of some very smart and talented experts. Their emphasis is on developing high-quality software, and doing things properly. Egos are kept in check, and there are always many people willing to offer a helping hand to those who are new to Python.

The Ruby community is generally quite different. There is a much bigger emphasis on celebrity and ego, and being "trendy". The attitude toward software development is different, too, with much more emphasis on producing a lot of code quickly, even if it has security flaws or other serious problems. It's more about being seen and heard, rather than doing.

I'd put the Perl community somewhere in between the Python and Ruby communities. Back when it was more prominent, it had a more lively set of participants than we than we find in the Python community, but a much higher degree of technical aptitude than we find in the Ruby community.
While Singapore may be largely perceived by the world to be free from corruption, one of the officers from the Corrupt Practices Investigation Board was recently investigated for "financial impropriety" [1]. (Which brings to mind a case of "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?")

At least they did something about it.

[1]: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/vi...
why not use bundle gem instead?
This is really the same as saying, "I won't work for company X because I don't think the brackets in the C++ code should be on the following line[1]!"

[1] E.g.:

int main() {
}

vs.

int main()
{
}

This is an apt analogy because most companies will have some sort of code style guide that you have to follow, which doesn't make "coding at company X where bracket placement is enforced" much different from "coding in Python where whitespace is enforced."

I've yet to come across someone that had a severe hatred of Python due to the significant whitespace that was a programmer I respected. The last person that I knew (who had a visceral hatred of Python whitespace) wrote Perl code like this:

sub func1 { shift->func2(shift)->func3(@_) }

or

sub func1 { grep { $_[0]->func2($_) } $_[0]->func3() }

Note: These are literally code samples with the function names changed.

I don't know any Perl programmers that would condone this sort of code. It's a maintenance nightmare, especially since these were not one-off instances. Seems to me that the people that have a hatred of Python's handling of whitespace don't like being 'constrained' by their language, and are probably happier with Ruby or Perl.
Photoshop doesn't work
Does this point the way for better disk performance for potentially all VM software? VirtualBox and Xen sure leave me cold when it comes to I/O. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried the alternatives, so I'm not really calling them out specifically.)
No, it's actually this:

do_stuff
while(some_condition):
do_stuff

The advantage of do/while in this situation is avoiding the duplicate code.
Ahh yes - point taken.
If you want to convince me, show me where in history you have examples of content being created without copyrights, of the same quantity/quality. Obviously we'll have to normalize your data to the size of the population in the past, not to mention the amount of free time they had available.

And if you are really interested in this topic, I suggest you read about the history of copyrights. For example, in the 1800's there was a large debate about the values of copyrights in the British Parliament, which echoes a lot of the same arguments made today (even including a prediction of the kind of piracy we have today). One of the non-obvious points raised is that a model like you describe, e.g. most "normal" jobs where you get paid for your time/output, has some very undesirable properties. Specifically, not allowing for the "misunderstood genius" of people, but solely promoting popular content. The same kind of popular content you say is not of high quality, and which makes up a large proportion of content today, but definitely not everything.

I'm not saying there aren't other answers out there. I'm saying that dismissively saying "look at history" ironically ignores history - the systems in place today are the result of a lot of discoure on these subjects throughout history, and saying "let's just scratch what there is and start over" is about as smart as trashing a large software project and recoding from scratch. [1]

[1] For non-programmers: this is widely considered a very wrong thing to do.
You aren't totally safe as a programmer either.
As software improves, each piece of software can take care of a wider number of people's needs.

For example in ~2001 setting up an ecommerce website probably involved hiring a web developer, setting up an email system for business probably meant hiring an IT consultant.

Now shopify and google apps etc greatly reduce these sorts of needs.

You also have ever expanding and improving open source solutions devouring categories of software.
The point about the cars reminds me of Rush - Red Barchetta:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U
http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108819/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta

About a person who finds an old red sportscar in his Uncle's countryside house, after the passage of a "motor law".
>"I can only write my Ruby code but can't handle operations" is not the right attitude, grow up.

How is such a condescending post at the top?

Everyone running a startup is an idiot because they choose not to waste their time on your priority?

Heroku isn't 10 times more and it wouldn't matter even if it was. Talented people are hard to find and spending time on operations when you might not be around in 4 months may not be the most important thing to focus on. On a 6 to 8 month time scale, heroku would be 10 times cheaper that taking the hit of setting up everything to emulate it. Deployments, backups, monitoring. Those things take a lot of time to setup correctly.
So there is another method of making money for Large Production Movie/T.V.? Please enlighten me.

My citation is reality. Take a look around.
Thanks. We needed this for long time.
I bought mine from lawyers. You guys are all welcome to it, provided you change the various names first.

Thing is, you really should get a lawyer to check yours. These things aren't cut and paste; your situation won't be the same as someone else's, and the details can matter, a lot.

So yes, use this as a starting point. But getting things like these checked by a lawyer is less than a hundred bucks.

Once you're underway, it's basic safety, like insurance is, like encrypting your laptop's hard drive is.

Get yourself protected, once a hundred bucks isn't a big deal.

I'm putting mine on a nopaste, with all the names removed, because I don't want to turn my comment into an advertisement.

http://pastebin.com/MbZUb1Mi

I hope this helps, but seriously, I'm just some jerk on HN. Once you can afford it, get the real thing.
Automattic privacy policy and terms of service are allowed to use under creative commons license:
http://automattic.com/privacy/
That invariable seems absurd to me. It seems much more inevitable to me that we eventually will be able to eliminate the majority of jobs. Is that not the goal? A transitory period where unemployment slowly increases is going to happen and needs to be addressed.
I am not convinced of this analogy. What is illegal is not copying data off DVDs, it is breaking the DRM to do so. The difference is not obvious because most DVDs are protected by DRM, but that is not true for websites.

As another example, Flash (which is being directly replaced here): Apple happily ships browsers without it, users are already used to a video not working every now and then, and no one has ever pushed to outlaw browsers without Flash.
| Their emphasis is on [...] doing things properly

Too bad that doesn't extend to a better solution to packaging / deployment. :P
When you're writing code in Perl, Ruby or some other language, do you normally not use any indentation? Do you leave all of your code left-aligned?
God is perfectly just. There is absolutely no reason to fear anything -- you deserve whatever you get.

God says...
C:\Text\PARADISE.TXT

he forest, hart and hind;
Direct to the eastern gate was bent their flight.
Adam observed, and with his eye the chase
Pursuing, not unmoved, to Eve thus spake.
O Eve, some further change awaits us nigh,
Which Heaven, by these mute signs in Nature, shows
Forerunners of his purpose; or to warn
Us, haply too secure, of our discharge
From penalty, because from death released
Some days: how long, and what till then our life,
Who knows? or more than this, that we are dust,
And thither must return, and

----

God says...
singular praised moments burstest feed necessarily readers
purposes song blinded cataloguers abated tosses overpass
waters harder turning governors disorders wrote acted
do_not_disturb blushed Observe experiments Spain beholding
enjoying deeper IT Beginning drew pleasureableness USA
blasphemy marriage-covenant disalloweth disallowing God_is_not_mocked
scratching retreat meanwhile well-ordered Perish rob fluttereth
hesitate deceit strikes blasphemous -i -not diversly file
when_hell_freezes_over augmenting VII architects attain
abhorred skies Iowa Taiwan compassion tempting extremest
Howsoever ambitions attributed Philippians Glory pestilent
real occurred eat hurried sentence ruminating saddeneth
infuse treat hopefully tongue-science treachery heavily
muddy injurious Saviour Cyprus fashion pause Amen enlargedst
Might Enlightener woundest
Amazon doesn't care about you as a seller.

I was a seller on Amazon for 5 years and ran into these problems all the time. You can't even ban a buyer that you think is scamming you, so they can keep buying from you, filing claims, and Amazon will eventually ban your account for poor service.

The best part is that this is all automated. When you try to appeal it, they don't actually look at your account and you get banned for life. Nobody in my household can sell on Amazon now because they banned my account. I made them thousands of dollars during my time selling and they don't even allow me to talk to someone about my account.

I had near 100% feedback when it was banned and a scammer filed claims against me which eventually got my account banned. I always offered to give money back 100% for any problems, but that wasn't good enough. They wanted to keep the item and get their money back.

I seriously doubt if you bought something from Amazon directly, that they would refund you before you sent the item back.
Yes, in dictionaries, but as explained here --

http://arachnoid.com/wrong/index.html#Dictionary

-- dictionaries don't define words, they only report how people choose to use words, however irrational those uses might be. Consider the word "literally", which dictionaries define as meaning in accordance with reality, or the opposite, depending on who is speaking:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

But among educated speakers, an atomic bomb is a fission weapon, and a thermonuclear bomb is a fusion weapon -- opposite physical processes to convert energy from one form to another.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon

Quote: "The first fission ("atomic") bomb test released the same amount of energy as approximately 20,000 tons of TNT. The first thermonuclear ("hydrogen") bomb test released the same amount of energy as approximately 10,000,000 tons of TNT."

Clearly distinct meanings.
But that's what unemployment benefits are for! Let someone else save my money for me ;)
Maybe the noisy evangelists are the only ones with enough confidence to publicly proclaim that they use Perl. The others lack confidence and don't publicly announce it because the general programming community responds with disdain / pity.
Isn't the main point about competition? IE6 never had any meaningful competition until Firefox came along, then lo and behold, all browsers started getting a lot better a lot quicker.

I don't see why WebKit-everywhere would be different. If they become lazy and slow at implementing features, what's going to make them get their act together other than a competing engine that's beating them in some regard?
Do you think, maybe, the transition will take some time to happen?
They banned chewing gum for the longest time. Singapore definitely isn't socially libertarian.
So you mean Servo and Rust? Actually, I just installed the Rust compiler to tinker with Servo.