skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hitler finds out Google Reader will be shut down
The answer to the first half of your question is no, so the whole question evaluates to false, whatever the second half may be.
OP wrote an app with no business plan and apparently no savings, quit job shortly afterwards, and is now on the verge of going broke, so s/he's rationalizing the decision - anonymously, in order to avoid undermining the app brand.
Speaking from an independent developer's perspective:

Visual Studio + C# + Resharper = .extremely. productive development environment.

Video games tend to require lots and lots and lots of code, so productivity is absolutely critical - especially for independent developers who don't have a dozen man-years to blow on a project. Using autocomplete I can produce raw code an order of magnitude faster than I could by typing out each symbol name by hand. That combined with amazing refactoring/cleanup tools makes windows extremely lucrative for gamedevs.
Why Google is Killing Google Reader: Blame Google+
Mozilla tried something on these lines, but i'm not sure of the scope of what they're trying to offer. Maybe this will help

http://openbadges.org/

You might be able to fork and play with the khan academy's gamification codebase as well.

https://github.com/Khan

~B
Next will be Blogger...
Great site! Out of curiosity, are you planning to eventually open-source this, by the way?
Thanks.
I don't mean to put down any rags to riches people but if we were to believe the often repeated lessons, then we should be shipping ourselves to Africa in order to become the next billionaire.

I smell survivorship bias.
Direct X.
"peddling chemotherapy"

This is the most stupid and obnoxious thing I've ever seen on HN. Chemotherapy saves lives every day. You can believe that good diets are healthy and helpful for sick people without insulting people that sell nasty but powerful medicine that is proven to work.
I am sorry, but Google+ sharing is not the same reading long-form content from a set of selected sources. Google Reader helps me choose to follow certain good bloggers who posts good content within their website. I don't expect all of them to move to a walled garden called Google+. Even if they do, what is the guarantee that they will not pull the plug on this social network as well, given their past record?
ok. I'll admit this.

Though I'm sad to see GR disappearing, the primary reason for not using GR for me in the past 3 months has been because of Prismatic.

I've tried a NUMBER of content aggregators, content discovery tools, social feeds (whatever you call it) because I do like finding good reads, so far I think Prismatic team has very closely 'got it'.

It's by far the more accurate "we will find articles that you would be interested based on your taste" tool from my opinion.
Sure technical problems happen all the time. But there are tens/hundreds of thousands of engineers/testers across the world who get paid very well to fix them. Bitcoin doesn't have that sort of infrastructure. And if you are responsible about money safety then putting your money into Bitcoin is pretty stupid. Banks around the world insure credit card losses for any fraudulent transactions.
I'm assuming that this will also shut down the Google Reader API, but I haven't seen anything definite. Anyone have confirmation either way?
The point is that there aren't any studies yet because we don't know what to study. You can't say "show me the science" when the point is there is no science yet, or not enough. That's just a cop-out.
2005 - Paramount Said No To TrekUnited Crowdfund Campaign
A pilot is sort of that, actually.

TV pilots are produced as one-offs (often independently financed) and then shopped around to networks as a way to obtain funding for a full season.

So it's a small step from that to saying "We'll finance this show if you can produce a pilot on your own."
The complaint about "images for text" is only valid if the developers behind the site didn't actually think about the problem. You can have this cake and eat it too. Provide the same content in text as you do in images, and Google will be happy to show that in search results, even if it's not visible to your average desktop user. If you care about accessibility at all, you've already solved the problem.

One thing that's horribly annoying, though, is searching for text, landing on a site that has the text you searched for in images or otherwise mutilated with CSS, and having no way to highlight it for copy/pasting. For pulling that one, there's a special place in web hell for you, right next to IE 6.
Dedicated ZFS Intent Log and Data Fragmentation
2005 - $3M pledged to fund a 5th season of Star Trek: Enterprise
Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks.
Awesome to hear feedback like this! We have so far to go with the product though. We can't wait to ship the next big redesign. What do you think we can do to make the experience better?
Sadly, that went away in Mountain Lion.
Although, it is sad for the current Reader users, good thing about Google is, it admits its failures quickly and get over it.
working on that, its a small thing for us to implement.
I agree with that. It's not the vibe I got from their post though.

It read to me like they realized it's much harder then they anticipated (common) but have an attitude of doing what it takes.

Perhaps the OP can clarify :)
You know the next time something like this happens (and, this is software, it will happen), there will be a lot of people trying this attack. It was theoretical before with "enough effort"; now, it is known to be easy.

And the problem will get harder to manage as BC becomes more popular. They could restrict damage because the ecosystem is still small, but when if there are millions of merchants? The alternative is centralized processors, which doesn't make BC that much better than cash.
changing soon
Short and to the point. I have lived this reality more than once. And its truer now than it was when it was written. One thing that seems certain, we careerist engineers will never stand up for our values. On that they can count.
I gotta be honest, I can't figure out how to use this.

I imported my Google Reader data (or so I am led to believe), but all I see is a generic feed full of (admittedly interesting, but not what I want) generic news stories. I see a way of adding 'interests' but not 'feeds'.

My confusion is somewhat assuaged by the awesome '/people' page.

Is this a Reader replacement, or a Reader poaching?

--

[edit: I see that this tool does not include an RSS reader, which I thought it would based on the invitation screen. This does not do anything that I use Google Reader for... which is to read RSS feeds!]
delighted to hear it! how can we make it better?
Sadly, I have to agree with you. I have a fair amount of money in bitcoin right now, but if I didn't understand the ins and outs of the protocol and like debugging, I can think of a few incidents which would have caused me to lose money (or at least think I lost money), and that would have frustrated me enough to pull out entirely.

On the other hand, there are centralized services that manage these details for you, but then you arguably start to lose some of the benefit and appeal of bitcoin (beyond just an investment).
Your logic is slightly wrong. When a project is opensourced and popular, odds are you actually have more engineers looking at it and fixing things, than when you have isolated teams working on software for each individual bank. And that's not even talking about testers.

Then you also are paying much higher fees for what is supposed to be more safety. These fees come in various forms: government taxes, inflation, transaction fees.
This guy wasn't the one screwed, OKPay (a payment processor) was; he took advantage of a several-hour window during the blockchain fork that happened a few days ago, to send them coins, wait until they gave him money for those coins, then take the coins back. This sort of thing is a risk for those operating exchanges and payment processors, not for end users. He returned the coins later - he had to, since he used an account linked to his real name - but a more-anonymous version of the same scenario is theoretically possible.

(On the other hand, there have been a few high-profile instances of end-users getting their coins stolen - usually by keeping them in an unencrypted wallet on a computer that gets a virus, but also in more exotic ways, like depositing them in an "online wallet service" run anonymously and registered to the Cayman islands.)
shard the currency
I was also thinking what a 404 has to do with design decisions. "Oh, and we'll put a link here that goes to a 404, that's popular these days!"
Host your own, and support a FOSS developer by buying the mobile app on Android (what I do).

http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki
It looks like a bit of work to set up, but I might just adjust how I digest things and give this a shot: http://tabs.mediahackers.org. "Rivers" probably aren't going to have the archiving and what not that Google Reader or others will have (maybe, haven't looked that deeply) but most stuff I just read, or not, and move on.
Star Trek has always been a forward thinking community and back in 2005, fans tried to crowd-fund $10M to produce a 5th season of Star Trek Enterprise. $3M was put in by private donors of which one was believed to be Paul Allen.

Beyond that the crowd raised $145,000 dollars to bring the total to about $3.2M raised.

This month Veronica Mars will probably beat this amount on Kickstarter, a platform created to do just that, raise money from the crowds.

We have come a long way. On to the future..
OK, so it's not hard to imagine double spends happening during a fork. This incident proves that as long as there is at least one provider willing to exchange BTC automatically, and is unaware of a fork in progress, then one can exploit the fork and double spend. This is bad, and should be fixed with a technical solution if possible. People will be looking for this in the future.

Here's the scary thing revealed by this bug however: Causing (intentionally) a fork is WAY easier than I thought!

You don't need to control a majority of mining. All you need is to craft a block such that some large % of the mining clients will fail on it. This could be a failure at any point in the bitcoin software. If there is a size limit discrepancy between versions (in this case the DB), or maybe a unicode parsing bug in some library used, or whatever. It doesn't need to be an exploitable code bug. It just needs to cause some % of mining clients to fail and reject a particular block.

It's relatively easy to find a bug that causes some software to crash. Most of the time these bugs are minor, and don't allow any remote execution or anything, so programmers don't necessarily worry about them most of the time. But in bitcoin they could potentially cause a blockchain fork! Which could be exploited, as this incident proves.
This seems to lower the bar considerably to exploit BTC.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A...
An Iron Man Like 3d Hologram Controlled by Leap Motion and Three.js
No, what I'm asking you for is an actual citation to federal law or the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations that backs up your claim ("USG is actively prevented by current regulations from setting up...")

That you failed to provide any, even though I think my request was fairly clear, provides strong evidence that you're unable to do so and your pro-CISPA argument was hand-waving, not based on facts or the law.
Prismatic is beyond Google Reader in terms of features and utility. It's my default application for discovery at this point
That's where I stopped and shall not try it ever if they don't remove and no, I am not going to create a new a/c for that. I mean it's totally for spamming purposes - either to me or my contacts.

By the way, interface looks cleaner, I wish so were the intentions :-)
Not quite. What I got from it was that being in a kitchen is like learning how to learn how to work quickly and efficiently.

I worked through college dishwashing in a kitchen, cleaning hot pans and preparing food for impatient customers. This line immediately resonated with me:

> I still haven’t forgotten what I learned that summer. I learned the best way to sort silverware, dumping it out on the counter with each hand independently grabbing for knives, then forks, then spoons. I learned that I could work my way out of despair.

Based on how you sort silverware, I can tell whether or not you've worked in a kitchen. If you do it the correct way, then I'm also willing to bet you know how to work smart under pressure.
Forks of the blockchain happen all the time as a natural side effect of the distributed nature of blockchain calculation. How do you propose that a merchant detect a pathological fork?

If you're going to tell me that it depends upon the length of the fork, then you'd better be waiting at least that many blocks before you verify a transaction.
Evolution of HackerEarth's CodeFactory server
You can add both feeds and topics - it'sa bit of a whole new world :) give it a go and see how things work out for you. we are always actively listening on twitter and feedback@getprismatic.com
boom! and let us know how we can make it better!
Classic strategy tax behavior. It looks like Google may be well on its way to becoming Microsoft 2.0.
In a way that might be good. They would get in touch with all of those friends and relatives via 'analog' media like phone, a visit or a get-together :-)

Jokes aside, that would be horrible. I've a domain with GApps but I think my chat is still stuck there. Any ideas how can I break free and still able to chat with my friends(Gmail, Fb and some Yahoo) and have chat transcripts somewhere. Anyone?
That would make more sense if there was a competitor that had arisen with better features and taken away users. Looking at the rest of this page, there doesn't seem to be any competitor at remotely the same scale as Google Reader.

If usage is declining with nobody stealing users, it's less a sign that innovation stopped than the overall market demand started shrinking. In which case, adding more features might not make a ton of sense. There's not a lot of business sense to investing more in capturing a larger share of a declining business.
Not cool, GOOG. Suppose I'll give NewsBlur a try then.
Because that is what googles mission is?

To index all the worlds information and make it universually useful?

Oh right, these days it is making shitty copies of facebook.
Yes, if you have more money you don't need as many things. But in the long term I think that minimalism is going to recede as a social indicator. The reason why has been sneaking up on us for a while: The digital world is becoming more encumbered. People are realizing that they don't have much control over their data and their 'purchased' media. Services disappear regularly along with what we've invested in them.

What's the alternative? Well, currently, there is more freedom in the physical space, and people are slowly realizing that physicality has an upside.

I think we're due for a `Neo-Materialist' movement. Maker Culture is growing and moving beyond bohemian. I have friends with cluttered living spaces and in most cases it is not due to not having enough money to have fewer things. It is just a choice away from the Eastern-esque Steve Jobs-ian "let's have fewer things" aesthetic.

It's becoming more common to have a set of maker and made things that you love and show, and to treat living space as workspace. Buzz around 3D printing may accelerate the trend. Culturally, I'm not sure that this will completely overtake design minimalism, but it has a decent chance.
Thanks. I already use prismatic everyday and love it! This feature will make it my primary news source.
It's not a tree. It's a time-window within a browsing session. If you get somebody to Amazon, you get affiliate credit for what they buy.
Google removes AdBlock for Android from Google Play
Except it's a choice. If OP doesn't like it, OP can go back to a corporate job. I just spent a week in Argentina, and I met with a few entrepreneurs who don't have OP's choice. I had to explain to them why they don't have that choice. They are not attractive to Silicon Valley VCs or incubators. They cannot build products for the global market.

You don't have to be an entrepreneur. If you don't like the game, don't play. If you play, don't expect sympathy.
For Google Reader refugees coming here hoping for their salvation, some advance warning: Prismatic is not a straightforward RSS reader.

It's more similar in concept to Pandora - you tell it what content you're interested in, it tries to generate a content feed you might find similarly interesting.

This does not mean it's a poor source for information, quite the contrary - it's a very useful information discovery tool.

However, it will not show you every post (unread or otherwise) from RSS feeds of your choosing. It's just not that kind of tool.

Here's an (older) article on NYTimes regarding it:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/prismatic-hopes-to-...

This new entry page on their site seems to be an extension of their Google Reader integration they added last June, automating the import of your current RSS feeds as 'seed' interests to generate your Prismatic feed:

http://blog.getprismatic.com/blog/2012/6/1/prismatic-integra...
Insurance in any form is never a good deal, actuarially -- the house always wins. What insurance is, is a way to trade a non-zero risk of ruin (someone steals all your bitcoin and you are broke) for a zero risk of ruin and a guaranteed risk of a small loss (someone steals your credit card number and you are not liable, but you pay 2% of every transaction).

Most people will take this trade all day, every day -- and they are not wrong to do so. It's a valid decision to pay for predictability.
I don't know whether this is funny or sad, but the game seems to have become a chore for this guy.

For me it is hard to imagine a less rewarding "career". What else has such a hard limit on growth potential?
I LOVE both this movie and all the "hitler finds out" vids. It's hitler's great gift to the world, really.
You can't just let products sit around and fester. Even if you're not building new features, you have to support browser updates and patch security holes, and the latter in particular means you have to keep around folks familiar with the details of the entire stack. As services age and folks move on to new jobs, that gets increasingly expensive to maintain as you have to train new maintainers.
See my reply to another user. It would be like me complaining about how scary it is to climb big walls in Yosemite.

If it's too difficult, don't do it. If you choose to do it, don't complain. Being an entrepreneur is a privilege, not a prison sentence.
Yeah, I've been keeping them separate, if only to make it easier to decide what kinds of functions go where.
I'm always happy to hear about programmers starting a company but, come on people! "firing from every single weapon at our disposal without pause," "the most difficult part of this stage in a founder's life", "everyone who knows what I'm doing thinks I'm insane"... these are things that we say when we give ourselves TWO WEEKS to start a company?

The OP already said they are all programmers and can easily get consulting gigs. If the runway is two weeks, what expenses could they possibly have? Obviously they didn't sign a 5-year lease. Two weeks isn't probably enough time to get a payroll system and bank accounts all set up, so I don't see that happening. A runway implies that the business has to shut down when they run out of funds. What could there be in two weeks - an AWS bill for fifty bucks..?
Embedded Android - Porting, Extending, and Customizing
The optimizing for happiness business plan
$25.00
One of his transactions was on the 0.8 chain (during its short life, and the other was on the 0.7 chain. So it's better to think of it as a transaction being invalidated rather than double-spent, because in the end there were no outputs that didn't come from an input.

This is using semantics to try to minimize the severity of what happened. For a time, the world thought there were more bitcoins in circulation than there actually were. Someone thought they were holding BTC which turned out not to exist, since after the chains were merged, those extra BTC just ceased to exist.

That isn't a big deal if both sets of BTC were sitting in a holding account somewhere. On the other hand, it IS a big deal if (as is the case in most financial transactions), the parties exchanged another item of value (say, $1000 cash) in return for receiving each BTC transaction. One of those parties now has -$1000 and zero BTC to show for it.
Thank you, Donny.
pretty sure that's what's happening here.

warner bros is covering the distribution and marketing.
Install something that literally does nothing relevant to Google Reader functionality. With the Chrome extension installed, the feedly.com/home web page works and I can read all my feeds. When I remove the extension, the site stops working.
I completely agree but have a few words of precaution that might prevent somebody from falling into a trap that I did.

My advice is DO buy high quality books/courses that teach the fundamentals too. Scan them so you know what kind of stuff you can learn from there. When stuck making something try to learn the hard way.
Learning from blog articles/tutorials like "How to make X" that give you prepackaged answers is just very unproductive in the long run. Been there, done that.

Also keep in mind that when you're working with other people knowing the right jargon is very useful. It will make you better at finding the right answers on Google too. Speaking jargon is the natural language equivalent of high-level programming.
If you said text messaging then I would agree. That's the first thing that came to mind because traditionally everyone wants to save characters when texting resulting in ur, b, etc.
Blogspam.

I'm fed up with this blog, they somehow manage to hijack every news item even though their posts read like something a drunk child wrote.

Source: former PM speculating on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Google-Reader-Shut-Down-March-2013/Why...
I've done a lot of contracting. At least for us mobile developers, it is generally pretty easy to drop by a meetup and just ask if anyone has any gigs. Often people will announce they are hiring too.

You can get anything from days to weeks to months of easy work this way. Many people will even pay you by the hour day by day to just sit with them and pair program and train them how to write apps themselves. Sounds like you are a web developer, I don't really know how that goes. Asking friends if they or any of their contacts need some work done is good too.

Then of course there's eLance, oDesk, and the rest. If you don't have good reviews there and clients asking for you then you pretty much have to underprice the already cut rate prices to get work. I've hired there and gotten work for others there, but the wages are too low for me to be willing to do it myself.

You shouldn't really count on any one contract coming through, though. Always keep at least two in progress at once and be OK if one client balks at paying no matter how good a job you did, etc.. It shouldn't have been a big deal if one client clearly wasn't going to get back to you.
> and can be interrupted at will

Unless you're running tmux, obviously...
You take something else?

Tomjen isn't my name, but it is close enough.
this is already built into the protocol.
At least with MySQL's tools, thanks to ssh's happiness to work as a pipe, it's very easy to clone a database locally for fucking about when you're trying to do something like this:

ssh remotehost.example.com mysqldump -udbuser proddatabase | mysql -uroot testdatabase

(n.b. the mysqldump options that may lock your production tables during the dump.)
Quite the best thing I've read all day! I wish all the content I come across on the web was as well said. Thanks for posting, 6ren.