skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can fake objects and subclassing with closures, in addition to making it trivial to implement the "one method interface" (aka "functor").

http://roboprogs.com/devel/2010.06.html (example using a subset of JavaScript, rather than a language likely to be unfamiliar to most)

TODO: edit example someday to get rid of "useless use of local variables" (in place of original formal parameters), fix where I call the outer functions "closures" instead of the inner functions.

Of course, it's easier to work with both real objects AND real functions/closures/lambdas -- I can use a hammer and a screwdriver :-)
Setting up a landing page, fast.
I think the point is that it's way easier to use this than something like braintree or stripe that require coding skills. Did you think helium or spacebox were just wacky adverts too?
Thanks for the feedback! Will address those shortly.
This is nice. The one use case its missing for me is copy/paste with formatting. Currently I use:

$ pandoc -f html -t markdown http://example.org/page.htm > page.mdwn
The removal of fear can also be considered a negative effect of a safety net though. Without the fear of failure, whats to stop one from making improperly weighed decisions? Isn't the fear of failure what drives the decision making process to the right conclusion? As a thought experiment: In a world with a marginally better safety net, would we really see cures for cancer or would we just see more Pinterest for X or Facebook for X start-ups?
Thanks for being a great user of Cloud 66. Keep the feedback coming!
The problem (at least for me on FF18/Win7) is that you can't just copy/paste the converted markdown, since it is just a display trick, not actual parsed and generated raw text.
Heh, I did something a year ago to do the opposite - take a plain markdown file and give it some styles.

http://kevinburke.bitbucket.org/markdowncss/

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827892
Your perception that increased vehicle size decreases safety is backwards. Larger vehicles (SUVs, minivans) are safer for the occupants, though SUVs impose more risk on other drivers (because of weight).

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/assets/images/20...

See graph on page 3: sports cars are far more hazardous to the driver than larger, lower performance vehicles.

"Of all major vehicle types, minivans have the lowest risk"

"sports cars have the highest combined risk, of all vehicle types studied"

And from another paper: "For automotive crash safety, the determining factor is size, not weight: larger vehicles have more crush space to absorb impacts. "

http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-Traffic_fatalities_vehicle_weight...
But do bear in mind that GitHub thinks the GPL is written in Perl.
I like Foxit too, but people should be aware that you have to opt-out of some shitty crap-ware toolbar during installation.
Squirrel, like all Java software I have ever used, has this bad habit of getting in to an inconsistent state where it needs to be restarted to use.
It's easy to fall too deep into the abyss to recover when you fail. I would rather have a strong safety net and let a few people collect on it than risk it not being strong enough to do any good.
What we have isn't a password problem, it's an identity validation and authorization problem that's exaggerated because there's no cheap, easy way to perform 2-factor authentication. Last month Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist over at Google did a terrific presentation which is hosted online at http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/openGraph/wid/1_1... basically discussing the problems if identification and authorization. It gets very good at the 18:30 minute mark.
I know Google has done a lot to streamline stronger authentication as has SecureAuth and I think we'll only see more changes when projects like the FCCX come online.
The stuff these companies are trying to do seem stale and to be honest kind of worthless. On top of this I don't consider Lenovo an internet giant and I'm not the only one that's been burned to the point that I've killed off my account with PayPal.
Now if Amazon and Google started working together with companies like Ping, Janrain and SecureAuth, then we'd see something that would be very exciting.
>>There was a Firefox and Opera release for Android even before Google got their own browser ported to their own OS.

That's why I installed opera on my phone. It works so good, I never bothered to install chrome on it. So it looks like I'm an Opera user. Granted I still use chrome/FF on everything else...
Awesome! Sounds like I'll be a customer soon then!
Not so fast. Whether state and local laws can be copyrighted is not a settled legal question, and precedent in the 5th circuit (which California is admittedly not in) says that it cannot. No copyright is broader access than a creative copyright license, so I'd prefer that default.

See http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/293_F3d_791.htm for more on what the 5th circuit said.

An example of something that the creative commons attribution license would prevent is the incorporation of the license text into GPLed software.
great plugin, thanks guys.
If you look at what Microsoft has actually said about it's gaming division it has lost a lot of money that's yet to be paid back. (Not to mention plenty of internal cost shifting that makes things even worse.) Based on the size of there investment in both R&D and other company's it's been a horrible investment that's unlikely to ever be paid back when you include basic opportunity costs.

If you really want to look at sales, games are far from the only revenue source, accessory, downloads, XBOX live are all significant. Nintendo has made a lot of money reselling legacy games. They may be cheap but there is no R&D costs and they get everything not just a tiny slice of a 3rd party game.

As to loyalty, that's next to non existent in the console market. You get a slight bump on the next generation and that's about it.

PS: From a pure ROI standpoint Nintendo crushed the completion this round. Unfortunately the Wii U does not seem to be making the same headway.
> If your doctor charges you 150 per visit, you will be sure as hell checking that the doctor is good.

But how would I do that? If I had even a fraction of the skill required to tell a good doctor from a bad doctor, I would be one. Hell, I can't even tell a good car mechanic from a bad one.

Competition is great when you have something approaching a perfect market, but medical care is about as far from that as you can get.
Here's a simple answer: sometimes you don't want to be forced to charge your car every day. Especially if it's a long charge. I'm already annoyed that I have to charge my phone every day if I want it to work. But at least I can do a short charge or charge it when it's convenient.

But if your car is dead because you didn't charge it, then you have few other options. So, in my case, I equate "range" with the need for frequent recharging. If the range is too low, I'm basically buying a car that needs to be charged every day if I don't want to risk getting stuck.
I've been following this team, and the product, since pre-launch. They've made a great product by listening and being really responsive to users and building what we, developers, want.
Designer of Forge here.

We're aiming to solve the problems of the non-techie market. People who just want to sell something online shouldn't be worrying about payment gateways, payment processors or designing a checkout process. Forge handles that.

With Stripe, it's fairly easy for a programmer to write their own payment processing backend and build a checkout process for it. We're not trying to serve the people that have the development skills to use Stripe. We're going after the people who use PayPal Buy Now buttons.
Some background on Mr. Lehrer's previous resignation from the New Yorker via the NY Times: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/jonah-lehre...
Considering one of the payments system was literally a copycat originating from the US but then taken to China to develop the same product just in a different place to avoid patent lawsuits. Yes, I do consider some of these to be a bit "wacky." I think this one if I remember correctly may be spacebox or something with a similar name.

Helium i haven't heard much about, so I can't say much about that.

It's not exactly like this stuff hasn't been coded before in easy enough to use solutions. I'm just annoyed primarily that this site wants you to sign up before showing any of the code/example of how easy it is to use if it's free. Seems kind of like an extra step for no real reason.

Also from what i've heard a lot of stripe/braintree really isn't that hard to set up. If you want to prove that the process is really easy you need to show that stuff on the front-page in pictures or snippets.
But this doesn't convert HTML to Markdown (there's already pandoc for that), it displays it as if it were Markdown. It's a clever example of what you can do with CSS, as well as perhaps poking fun at the current popularity of systems like Markdown which artificially restrict us to the IO capabilities of 70s VTs.
I would have prefer to see an example or a demo before having to signup.
What startup ideas might work if gas was $0.06 per gallon?
Just throwing this out for discussion. It's not an entirely theoretical question. Assuming you could operate within the Venezuelan regime, that is. You might be able to pull this off if you stay small enough not to be noticed and nationalized.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2013-02-13/highest-cheapest-gas-prices-by-country.html#slide61
That's cute but, let's be honest, viewing query results for anything but trivial schemas or amounts of data with psql is somewhat close to impractical.
If you bill 160 hours per week and work maybe 200 hours, that’s still 1.5 to 2 percent of your time. I would call that non-trivial and worth at least looking into.
Easy enough for programmers to use, but not people who barely understand HTML. That's the market Forge is serving.
I hear you, and your distinction between creation and delivery definitely makes sense.

That said, the hope is that this new, fat internet pipe will yield creativity and new services/technologies that we just can't predict yet. We have to push these technical boundaries first, because that stretch yields new products and groundbreaking thinking.

History would seem to suggest that that's one way to help lay the groundwork for new and powerful inventions. There are literally innumerable products and technologies we use every day that are many iterations away from the enabling-technology, but would have never been discovered or applied without the initial technical push.
Smoke With Friends
This works too:

pandoc -t markdown http://example.com
Hey daok, there is a sample design as soon as you sign up for the free account!

And you can upload two more before opting to upgrade!
This is a neat solution for a reality those of us who have been building web applications for a decade have faced: If you want your application experience (code + infrastructure) to be stable for a number of years, you have to be more and more responsible for your entire stack.

A reality is what's popular today in how a Cloud, or bare metal is used will be outdated in a few years and it creates technical debt in the future.

It amazes me how developers can obsess over development practices, frameworks, etc and without a thought look at the ugly underbelly of their app that grows as their code and userbase does.

Many developers on HN don't seem to have a relationship with a codebase for more than a few years (I could be completely wrong), but that is the perspective I'm speaking from.

It's great to see this kind of tooling that's focused not on management of infrastructure by abdication, but more of a middle ground.

Juju also has me excited, I think it's part of the future in a way VMware and virtualization first emerged 10-12 years ago.
IMadeFace...this app has three outcomes: white person, asian, & black guy.
There is a little app hidden among the list of all the various RallyDev Apps.

http://www.rallydev.com/more-cowbell

It's good for a laugh.
I don't know if this is some sort of joke or not, but apparently there is some sort of cult / fan club for Gadget in Russia. http://www.odditycentral.com/news/russian-cult-worships-fema...
If you have to grossly limit your revenue to stay unnoticed by a hostile government then why bother?
Jonah Lehrer falls into familiar pattern, fails to face his reckoning
They do offer an example demo checkout form on the homepage. Not sure if that's what you're looking for though.
Firebase allowed us to build socrates.io over one weekend. We didn't have to write a backend, plus we got realtime for free.

I'm excited to see their product mature.
Navicat is a decent way to deal with both Postgres and MySQL (among many other database engines) with the same interface.

All the different ways Navicat packages its products are unnecessarily confusing. Premium Essentials ($20) is almost certainly what you want: http://www.navicat.com/en/products/navicat_essentials/essent...
How Much Traffic is Too Much Traffic For CloudFlare?
>Well, with CLOS you really define your verb behaviour on tuples of nouns (methods) and the verbs (generic functions) are separate

You can do this in any OO language as well: with multi-dispatch patterns. What makes CLOS so powerful is that you can do multi-dispatch without resorting to things like the visitor patters. Simply write what you mean with no boilerplate.
This sounds like a good enough idea, but the front page kind of just doesn't tell any of how it's done, instead it just sort of has an example. Not sure how that is going to convey the "easyness" of it. That is my main concern really.
So Ryan Block leads engadget after it is sold to AOL. Then starts gdgt and sells it to AOL.

What's next?
Great link, I was about to post it myself.

At a graduation ceremony a couple of years ago, the chair of the OR department at Cornell said that OR is "the math, modeling, computer science and engineering of making decisions in often uncertain environments." I'm paraphrasing, but I thought that was a pretty good definition.

I love having studied OR; I would love for it to have more name recognition so that it wouldn't be so hard to explain!
By making the devices the central source of proving identity you'd create a new problem: theft of a device would become theft of identity. They could "prove" that they were you because they had your device.

How is this more secure?
While it may be true, we haven't actually seen a new layout engine written, so it's pretty difficult to estimate how long it'd take. Webkit was mostly functional as KHTML many years and tens to hundreds of developers ago.
Ask HN: How do you consider the current social web trend among startups?
Currently the focus of many startups is on sharing life experiences. Foursquare, Instagram, Vine are all great examples of this. Do you think that this kind of ideas are among the organic ones PG describes in one of his essays [1]? Did the founders that started Instagram feel the need to share their photos with all the world? Many startups are following this trend, so something must be going on, but my guts tell me that it will pass because it's not tapping in our real needs, but just exploiting the rise of the mobile phone as a medium.

[1](http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html)
Disclaimer: I did contract work for Firebase.

First off, the Firebase team is beyond incredible. The dedication they show to their users and their product vision is unparalleled.

Second, the product is awesome. I can barely throw together a static HTML file without help and now with Firebase I've been able to mash together all kinds of neat little interactive WebGL demos.

As I spend more time developing my programming skills I'm happy knowing that Firebase will be there to help me grow.

Awesome release guys! Congrats!
It doesn't solve the $12 wrench security-breach, no. But when you keep your self physically secure, your identity remains physically secure. That's something.
That's a great point. Perhaps a demo video explaining how it works would show the "easyness" of it.
As much as I'd like to agree, facts don't require interpretation.
If they can barely understand HTML they probably aren't going to fair very well with actually selling stuff online anyway.

HTML is much more basic than programming it's basically english in brackets.

Also if you can find me a "programmer" who doesn't know how to use HTML then you have found some very awkward person.
Thanks for this - I had no idea who this was or what he was possibly apologizing for. Context is always great!

It definitely is something he needs to apologize for, too - probably in-person to everyone involved.
(a)is that position exclusive to your company or is someone else also riding that low cost bandwagon

I don't know that anyone in this space has really seized onto that particular position and really "owns" it in the market-at-large. And, to be honest, in a lot of ways, out biggest competition right now is "the status quo", not competing products. Given that our goal is to convert current non-users of this type of technology, not to steal market-share from $COMPETITOR, we may not wind up focusing on the cost aspect at all. Well, other than offering some "earlyvangelist" customers deep discounts just to get in the door and gain some early traction.

So your position of low-cost wont work in this segment of the market; this segment of market wanst SLAs and support and extensive hand holding. Have you done surveys or had customer interviews to validate your position in your target market before deciding your position.

That's an ongoing process for us. We've done a ton of customer interviews and we're always trying to do more. Note that we aren't yet committed to a "lowest price" message and strategy, but I'm tentatively leaning that way. And you make a good point about how, in some segments, that's a non-starter for other reasons.

The fact that this stuff isn't easy is why I think you're right in calling it "the million dollar question". :-) Assuming you have a reasonably decent product/service, it seems that positioning / marketing strategy are pretty crucial to determining if you become a million (or billion) dollar firm or just an also-ran.

We're working in the enterprise software, B2B space, where sales are high-touch anyway, so it's hard to say whether or not we can do any low-cost experiments or micro-benchmarks that will actually tell us anything useful. But that's something I've been chewing on for a few days now; trying to figure out a way to do that.
It was a shame gdgt probably never caught on as much as it could have. They consistently had the best live coverage of events, which was the only time I visited their site, unfortunately.
This was extremely well-written. It's a shame he had to sully his good name by taking the easy route and make up quotes, etc. Hopefully he can bounce back and revitalize his career.
I said this last time Firebase was on HN, but I'm more than happy to say it again: if you're doing anything with real-time, you owe it to yourself to give Firebase a shot. We've been using Firebase for 8 or 9 months now, and I can't being to count how much time it's saved us, allowing us to focus on what makes our app unique rather than scaling a real-time communication server of our own.
Awesome, thanks for posting it and not even for the setup script. I haven't heard about owncloud before.
In the context of OP's argument, I fail to see how government safety nets aren't just another example of "chains."
BlackJet - private jet seat service
I'm going to read this again after I post this comment. Everything he says applies equally to me.

Thought I had something more insightful to say. Guess not.
i'm pretty happy with ems' sql manager - while not free, it has everything i ever needed from a postgres gui. working with psql to query large data sets seems a bit tedious to me - i prefer a multiwindow gui application with a decent tabular view that i can browse through. i heavily use psql for maintenance stuff tho.
I thought the grammar might be wrong there, and it turns out, it is:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103916/it-were-ve...

The corrected versions are: "I wouldn't have been surprised if it were already named Lingua Mathematica..." or "I wouldn't have been surprised to learn it was already named Lingua Mathematica..."
The chief problem is that once you have a question going and are getting answers, if it's deemed "not suited for SO", you're SOL. That question can't be moved to some "off-topic" forum, because there is no off-topic forum, because the entire platform is not a forum. I feel this situation can be resolved simply by making an unsuitedfor.stackexchange.com, declaring it not part of the official model (i.e. basically a gimped forum) and moving all non-factual questions there.
nice, this is hilarious and awesome. people are totally gonna use this!
> you can always start an open source project that fixes these parallelization issues and start building out an engine that is better

Sure. We (Mozilla) are doing that right now.

> It'd probably be a 5-7+ year project

If there is no WebKit monoculture. If there is, such that the project has to duplicate WebKit bugs after reverse-engineering them, then it's a lot longer, if possible at all (because some of the bugs are parallelism bottlenecks).

Which is precisely my point. A WebKit monoculture would make it less possible to start such an open source project.

> Think long term.

You mean the one in which we're all dead?

Even if a hypothetical WebKit monoculture "merely" delays the advent of more-parallel rendering engines by 20 years, as opposed to preventing it altogether, that's still a huge loss in my book.
I agree, I would rather not have to commit to the product by signing up before knowing exactly what it does
Search: State of the Union Address 1790 to 2013
What Motivates You (and How to See it With Meditation)
It's a legitimate question the parent asks. In my book, the guy deserves oblivion, after he has been revealed to be a pathological liar and fabulist. If you love the field of journalism, this guy should disgust you.

Bonus trivia: Lehrer was paid $20,000 to deliver this speech. Ridiculous and a mountainous source of embarrassment for the Knight Foundation.
While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for

That's one problem: many web developers program for browsers, not standards.

In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation,
that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards.

Yes, and IMHO that is what happens to browser rendering engines atm. Everyone agrees/complies to one technology and by doing so it becomes a de facto standard. Then new approaches for new problems can be taken from there, without reinventing the wheel. But this also creates room for alternatives to rise, so we are back to multiculturism. :)

E.g. replacing JS with some other language would be such a new alternative. Open-Source-Lua-Presto, imagine that! ;)
WebKit and jQuery are good. Bootstrap is a fundamentally poor product, and I don't mean the concept of there being a standard framework that people can build upon, I mean the execution of Bootstrap itself.

So I freaking hope not.
BYOD nightmare: iOS devices hobble Exchange servers when they synch
That there wasn't much differentiation between the service and the more well known providers. But like I said the key is explaining the "easyness" of it on the front page rather than just an example.