skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Because it's hard enought remember 12 characters already"

-my bank's tech support
The best pitch deck is simply telling the investor you didn't make a pitch deck because you were busy making a real product.
> No one has gotten an iCloud-based Core Data store to withstand the actual multi-device usage it was designed for.

Seems like the guys who build iawriter did or maybe we're talking about something different
But (a) I'm not dumb (I was the guy being confronted), and (b) that is not a great strategy on HN because you will be downvoted to oblivion, as happened in this case.
> There still isn't a canonical Promises specification.

Yes, there is: https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises-spec
In its then form, every partner had to know what every startup was doing, and the number of partners was a function of the number of startups.
Unfortunately, in practice promises end up making your code more difficult to reason about by adding cruft and unnecessary abstraction. They're also very limiting from a control-flow perspective.

This is especially noticeable when you have branching behavior / want to resolve a promise early[1]:

Branching with promises:

function doTask(task, callback) {
return Q.ncall(task.step1, task)
.then(function(result1) {
if (result1) {
return result1;
} else {
return continueTasks(task);
}
})
.nodeify(callback)
}

function continueTasks(task) {
return Q.ncall(task.step2, task);
.then(function(result2) {
return Q.ncall(task.step3, task);
})
}

As opposed to with stepdown[2]:

function doTask(task, callback) {
$$([
$$.stepCall(task.step1),
function($, result1) {
if (result1) return $.end(null, result1)
},
$$.stepCall(task.step2),
$$.stepCall(task.step3)
], callback)
}

I would really love for a post to include a non-trivial problem implemented with promises, vanilla callbacks, and async (and I'd be happy to add a stepdown equivalent), and allow people to see for themselves (how in my opinion promises make code harder to read).

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11302271/how-to-properly-...

[2] https://github.com/Schoonology/stepdown (docs need updating, view tests for documentation)
Completely agreed. My first acoustic was a "made in Cambodia" Fender that wasn't horrible, but really didn't compare well to pretty much any other guitar of any quality.

My second purchase was aiming for something with a solid top, and the tonal quality was apparent from the very first note I played.

My third purchase was aimed at getting a solid body guitar, which is trickier because there isn't necessarily a noticeable difference between a guitar with a laminate body and one with a solid body, though you can certainly find guitars that sound different, neither is clearly better (by sound) on a new guitar.

That said, as I'm told, the tone of a solid body guitar will age, like wine, and sound better and better over time, so long as it's taken care of. A laminate will, at best, stay the same, and more likely will dull over time.

This (and nostalgia, history, etc.) is the reason old, good guitars tend to fetch so much money, because they were likely made from great stock to begin with, and have since aged to sound even better. (I say with only anecdotal evidence).
Are you a doctor? What qualifications do you have to determine that something does not have a valid medical use?
Except in very rare cases, the legal system follows society, it doesn't lead it.

This is why you see Justice Kennedy worried about ruling on gay marriage.
It is obvious to everyone in that room that in 50 years they will likely be viewed as bigoted fossils if they rule against gay marriage (to quote the oatmeal). They aren't idiots. That doesn't mean they are going to jump up and scream that it should happen, because it's not their role in our system.
That's congress and the states.

They aren't going to be the folks who start the revolution, they are going to be the guys who say the revolution was right.

As you've discovered, change of society does not always require radical action. But change of the legal system almost always requires change of society.

When it happens the other way around, society still gets the last say. See, for example, the forced relocation of native americans, despite the supreme court ruling it unconstitutional.
I could see a volunteer, side project. But a startup? Monetization is going to be rather awkward.

"Get support and share with others who have suffered a loss.
Several plans available to support your level of grief:

* Grief Lite: email one person, FREE!

* Grief Pro: email and chat with 5 people, $19.95/month

* Grief Enterprise: unlimited email, chat, and phone
with up to 50 other people: $99.95/month

Developers: REST (in peace) API also available."
My father travels with a bottle of juice/soda regularly because it is a reliable, known, and fast way of raising his blood sugar when it gets too low, and it is far more palatable than non-liquid methods of doing so. He has never been hassled when it is explained to a TSA agent (and he has a doctor's note too). Just because it's not prescribed or regulated doesn't mean it can't be medically necessary.

Not to mention I have personally traveled with all kinds of things including Costco-sized bottles of contact lens solution and gigantic aerosol cans... it is what it is and with screening I don't see why TSA can't let people through with it.
It seems pretty much a trie implementation. Wouldn't the library be better served by having the word trie in its name?
(g a) is valid Haskell and it is equal to a constant function that returns a. In fact, g is the Prelude function 'const'.
It won't be a new problem, it will just accelerate the pace.
Interesting. As you pointed out, I hadn't read the article but was rather replying to other comments.

After reading it, I think I have to agree that I had never thought about it that way. It makes a lot more sense that a promise is just a declaration of some unit of work, and when you can use a promise like any other data, you aren't just giving imperative commands, but rather describing work to be done and using that as a fundamental part of your code, which is why it drastically simplifies async programming (the relation of promises to monads is quite nice, too). Definitely a good article, thanks for kicking me :).
Oh, well thats part of a general subproject of "what are good low dimensional computational geometry algorithms/problems/techniques that can help do basic data vis well?!". I'm spending a wee bit of time right now evaluating what are suite of primitives / algorithms/ data structures I want to have for designing a EDSL for declarative data vis / plotting.
I think it may be a problem with the link itself. In the past I've seen SO links that auto scroll to the answer of interest, however this one just loaded to the top of the page.
I see no benefits in promises, zero, none.
Realtime Multiplayer in HTML5 with nodeJS
Right I couldn't make head nor tail of the conclusions.
> He can't expect to not justify and explain why his liquids are considered medical. Otherwise, every person who paid $4.50 for a soda before security would just pull the "It's medical! You can't ask questions card"

Yes, he absolutely can. The TSA has absolutely zero right to interrogate him about any medical conditions he may have. Medical information is extremely private and none of the TSA's business.
> That's literally nonsense. Morality is an abstraction of what constitutes proper behavior. An arbiter is a particular body that judges disputes. In the United States, that judicial power is vested in the Supreme Court, per article III of the Constitution. Your concept of the Constitution as a moral agent, ignored by the rest of the government (including the Supreme Court) is just irrational.

In this paragraph, you called my position "nonsense" and "irrational," yet you gave no reason for those claims whatsoever. I agree with the other stuff you said, modulo I'm not sure how you define "moral agent."

The point is, morality DOES exist, irrespective of what any person or government does or says. This is the normal English use of "morality." Government action can either be in line with that, or contradict it. I'm not saying that the Constitution is the source or morality or an arbiter of morality. It's just that the 4th amendment _is_ in accordance with morality, along with the rest of the Constitution, broadly speaking.

> That doesn't make the entire government illegitimate.

So, what's the line? Clearly if the government didn't respect articles I, II, and III of the constitution whatsoever, and just appointed a dictator, it would not be legitimate. On the other hand, if it makes a minor (but illegal) clerical error, it is clearly still legitimate.

_My_ answer to this is that there is no set threshold; it's just a strategic question, a matter of rhetoric. So I don't think there is anything weighing on this topic. What do you think the threshold is?

> If you have read it you have certainly not understood it. Your arguments border upon the delusional.

That's just ridiculous. You keep saying this, but you haven't made a convincing argument that I'm wrong about anything, much less _delusional_, which is an entirely different beast altogether.

I'm not sure if you understand that there is a potential difference between what is right and wrong, and what is actually written into law.
Is there an equivalent for piano?
Before you comment, read the top answer!
> Otherwise, every person who paid $4.50 for a soda before security would just pull the "It's medical! You can't ask questions card"

It actually can be. My father has a doctor's note effectively saying that he's using soda/juice for medical reasons, just so TSA can leave him alone. He's almost never been asked for that note too, most of the time TSA doesn't give a crap as long as the liquid gets tested and is "safe". I really don't understand why he has to explain this to TSA at all cause it's none of their fucking business, but that's how things work (and by god I wish they'd change).

FWIW the only reason the note exists at all is because a bottle of juice or soda that my dad likes is far cheaper than the legally prescribed "medical use" labeled juice that you can get, and works just as well.

:)
"The Internet is full of chimpanzees."

I am reminded of Egor Homakov and his various exploits, especially in the Rails community. Someone points out a problem and the community collectively decided to ignore him.
Wouldn't a bicycle be a lousy transport during the winter or when it's raining? Or when you need to carry something like a suitcase to the airport that's 20 miles away? Your reasoning seems to be incompatible with a bus system too.
i didn't back this project, but it's really exciting to see that they have shipped the ouya, on time. much props to the ouya team and all involved!
I'm curious about what you think is wrong with Storyboards or AutoLayout. Storyboards certainly lack features so not all apps can be done with them, but nonetheless I think they're pretty solid. And AutoLayout works like magic, haven't had any problems (the IB-adds-constraints-for-you thing is annoying, but necessary)
Thanks for that feedback! I thought I had conveyed my own displeasure with CDIS at the end, and mentioned a few times that "only if it worked well". Maybe I should've highlighted this more to reflect my own frustrations that I've experienced so far. I just felt that the tone had gone to an extreme in the other direction (that it's completely unworkable; and even if it did, you shouldn't support it).

My point was mostly to discourage people from completely writing off the idea around CDIS, that you shouldn't work with it "even if it worked", and countering some of the incorrect assumptions that some people were making. I think there's great reasons to adopt it (theoretically), and (this might be personal opinion) I don't believe that they're too far from cracking it. I guess time will tell. I've figured out a few hacks to backup data, to recover from failed syncs, walk through users with cleaning up their iCloud containers and get devices to setup sync again. They're mostly hacks that shouldn't be required, but have gotten to the point where users mostly have a great experience with the app, and even if sync fails or they start seeing weird errors, I can recover their data and walk them through restoring their state. I've only seen 3-4 people who have lost access to their data completely, and that really sucked. But that's a risk anyone takes with any technology, home-made or provided by some other platform.

I am open to the idea that I'm maybe too optimistic about all this. But having spent a lot of time and energy on CDIS, and having my app in production supporting CDIS for a few months, I think it was valuable information to share. A lot of issues that devs might run into while testing don't actually pan out in real-world usage. People don't have their devices sitting open side-by-side, trying to edit data simulatenously. But in any case, my plan is to compile a list of all the issues I've experienced next, and maybe some of the hacks that I'm using to work around them, and do another write-up in the near future.
I like it. Better than a prezi or a ppt.
On Project Management – Dance Performance Analogy
i like a lot of this design, only thing that i'm not really a fan of is the twitter-like sidebar when browsing games.

but that's all i have to say that isn't overwhelming positive. thanks for sharing, moeed.
I can speak your comment, since my side project is a Node.js server that talks to several APIs, a database, and N web clients. Like you, I've worked more than a year on it, but I had a positive experience with Q [1] and jQuery promises.

Promises make async code easy to manage, even at scale. Each API request gets its own promise. What happens inside that promise doesn't matter, as long as it returns a result or an error. If talking to the API takes one request or two, it does not matter with promises. We can abstract these API requests in such a way that even if document retrieval is a multi-step process or a one-step process for each document source, the collation process can know nothing about the retrieval process to work.

In other words, promises allow us to separate concerns. Document retrieval is one concern, collation another. Promises, by abstracting asynchronous control flow into synchronously appearing objects, allow us to write simple programs at higher levels. Separating concerns makes the server easier to test and easier to extend.

If you want to see how I've used promises, you can take a look at my work on Github [2].

[1] https://github.com/kriskowal/q

[2] https://github.com/fruchtose/muxamp
iA Writer is document-based, and I believe these are working fine in iCloud. Things break when iCloud is used to sync Core Data based apps.
PostgreSQL as Schemaless Database [pdf]
It doesn't scale particularly well though. With many thousands of active users here, posting when they have implemented some really cool technology they want to share furthers the HN community. However, posting when they have personal or emotional issues would dilute the HN community and turn it into something different.

That said, there will always be exceptions and I'm neither the person nor am I qualified to make such determinations other than to choose to upvote or not.
My bank limits my password to 8. When I questioned while creating my account, they asked me to visit the login page - in the login page you are asked for the answer of the security question and also presented with 8 input boxes - one for each of of the password characters - but having to enter only randomly selected few from the password ( for preventing key loggers from getting password, of course ). This seemed like a valid technical reason to limit passwords to 8.
This could be translated to,

"Because we estimate the added costs of supporting users will increase by X due to more users forgetting their password due to length"
The real problem with spam is that there is no presently widespread, realistic alternative to email in the field of P2P store and forward communications infrastructure that is less centralized / vulnerable to state surveillance and other common attacks.
Because the developer is storing passwords in plaintext, and he wants to save database space.

This seem far fetched, not sure what thought process would lead anyone to come to this conclusion. Even if you have a million users, you have ~8MB worth of passwords. I'd imagine even developers who are not competent in cryptography realise that.
So what you're saying (and I'm trying to ask this without laughing), is that per TSA rules, I can't bring a liter of potentially explosive liquid, but I can bring several smaller containers of potentially explosive liquid, as well as a dry (empty) 1 liter bottle?
The difference between CLI and GUI is simple. The latter is highly optimized for a particular workflow and to perform a set of preconceived tasks that are baked with a release that gets an occasional update.

If you asked me to show you why I find value in editors like vim and emacs, I'd show you a DSL I wrote for work purposes and show you the extensions I wrote to edit them efficiently. Alternatively, I'd show you a number of customized workflows for cross compiling lua to C# or something.

I've used sublime text, textmate, bbedit and I'm not saying they aren't well designed editors. They are and if the stuff you are doing is stuff that everybody is doing, then great. But I don't think you understand that at this point in time, none of these GUI-based editors come even close to satisfying my personal needs as a developer.
Actually they blew $12 billion on Motorola for a hardware manufacturing company (tooling, personnel, supply chain, patents, etc), and $6 billion in cash.
The Lean Startup: A contrarian view
A JSON API is the methods & options that are available for (de)serializing your native Python or Django objects into useful JSON.

Perhaps there's a more narrow 'scope' defined for this project, but simply from the title, it seems an 'effective' Django developer would appreciate guidance for the best ways to do AJAXy things (including, especially, RESTy web services for backing AJAXy front-ends).
AFAICT, you just made a case that "an administrative search" is legally allowed, not that they're allowed to confiscate his stuff or prevent him from flying with it. Does their right to "search" - examine his stuff - also imply their right to just take whatever they want? If so, how does that work?
Thanks! The ID number is only referenced in this file: ~/Library/Mobile Documents/BJ97GLR9R3~com~cjournal~icloud/Configuration.plist

It's just a reference to check if your current device is participating correctly with the rest of the iCloud container, so that you can tell if someone deleted the iCloud container behind you while the app wasn't active, the app would be able to handle that situation. It's only exposed to the user in case something is wrong and the user can quickly check this value from that plist file. In practice, it hasn't proven too useful to expose this to users, but something to build on for a future update.
Typically bank tech support have no idea about the inner workings of their website.

My bank uses 2 stage auth to login which works really well. However, they have a sort of shortcut service where you can activate and pick a password and then use that password to do quick stuff online or in their mobile app. The quick stuff still let's you transfer away all your money to someone else so it's basically a gaping hole.

That password has the wildest restrictions I've seen. It allows only a-zA-Z0-9 and it must consist of exactly 6 characters. No restriction on containing at least one digit or anything like that.

I've e-mailed them several times about this but their response is that this particular service has been out sourced to one of the many companies they out source things to, so they have no control at all over it.

And it's rather funny because you can tell that when you use this service, you're taken to a completely different server farm than the rest of the internet site. Fucking scary is what I call it.
My synopsis on this:

+ Even if it generates tweets on the basis of somebody's interests, and does so in an intelligent manner, doesn't that kill the purpose of twitter? I, for one, don't want to read computer generated tweets even if they talk about something I like. I want to read opinions of people I follow, they're experiences, and what they like/dislike — not a random fact generated by a bot.

+ It violates Twitter's ToS. That itself makes it a short-lived venture. I mean no discouragement to the dev team, but I always emphasize on conducting thorough research before embarking on such ventures which are somewhere in the shady areas of policies and rules. Especially when your product is build over an existing product, in this case, twitter. And if twitter decides to get a mood swing, and this product is denied access to their API, I don't want to be left with 500 new followers in my list, while being followed only by my mom.

+ It makes good, and goes on to a becoming a successful product, I think — and again, going back to my first point — it reciprocates being interesting with just getting followers. It makes socialization a formality with the end-goal being to have a greater number of followers than anyone else. That is more harmful to the twitter community than those sleazy services ("GET THOUSAND FOLLOWERS REAL QUICK!!")

+ Needing a credit card for the free trial? Ain't nobody got time for that. Plus those "sleazy" services are free, while this one charges $7/month (A little too much, because this is just a gamble. You have no assurance that you will get a significant number of followers in a given time.)

+ How long before they make revenue out of tweeting ads and sponsored tweets from your account?
hahahah old but always such a fun read :)
Multi-format open source reader for Kindle
I'm surprised I haven't seen this site before. As someone who cut his teeth on the early Mac it sure explains a lot. Not many people would write an entire blog entry about how the Mac's dynamic memory allocation worked:

http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
when you add time isn't that 2 dimensions? ...still beats seeing one pixel flashing
May I ask what bank you bank with?
Sure, there's an excuse. Or more correctly, a reason: network integrity. The question isn't what's technically possible. It's what's practically necessary to keep parasitism to a minimum.

If Spamhaus blacklisted my ISP and had reasonable evidence that they were harboring spammers, I wouldn't yell at Spamhaus. I'd tell my ISP to kick out the spammers or I'd leave. This isn't a hypothetical for me: I moved a cabinet of gear out of an ISP precisely because they were dealing with the devil.

I can't remember now if Spamhaus was involved, but I was definitely grateful to find out that the ISP was harboring spammers. It was a clear sign that they were in financial difficulty and were being run by idiots. They were out of business less than a year later because of those financial difficulties, and because their good staff didn't want to work for assholes.

If you want to run a blacklist in a way that you think is better than Spamhaus, nobody's stopping you. If you are right, then presumably people will pick yours up and drop theirs. But my guess is that they'll retain their popularity, because people who actually have experience dealing with network abuse are pretty happy with their approach.
Why no source code?
Um. No. That works for GitHub, Facebook and Pinterest (and God knows I'd kill to be in their shoes) but for the rest of us this advice doesn't quite work out.

Any investor will also want to understand the overall market, trends, pain points, customer case studies if any, competitors, product roadmap, etc. Don't want to do this type of work on your pitch and don't have the kind of explosive growth the companies above had? Good luck.
I assume they would probably still _attempt_ to limit the amount of total liquid. But the idea that terrorists can bypass a chemical bomb detector but not figure out a way around the amount of liquid limit is laughable.