skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope this doesn't lead to one instance of the application for every program that needs updating. What would be more useful is a way for third-party applications to work with the existing Google Update. That way, you could update all your applications from a single interface. This would be a better experience than being asked to update an application it starts (and you're probably in a hurry to start using it).

Of course, you'd need to figure out some standard way of locating available updates. Is there anyone out there doing this sort of thing?
You're falling into the exact same fallacy he's pointing. Why should he start defending a position he never expressed? There are many things you can "get the impression that". Why would you hang on to them and not address the main points, which are as big and visible as a painted target?
As for the rebuttal, it didn't even try to address the original article. It just tried to change the discussion to a more favorable position.
I wouldn't say google is spreading FUD about themselves, but I know of one company that has a big budget for propaganda.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/01/31/hacktrack...
But you're in the minority. Most people neither know nor care what their computer is doing in the background without their express permission. As long as their applications work, and preferably work quickly, it isn't relevant to Joe Public. Only when so much crap has been installed that the system is rendered unusable do most people start asking, "What is my computer doing?!"
Thanks for this. Your reply reminds me of a thread I read on the arocket list, discussing the rationale behind the new Ares program.

The most interesting thing about it, to me, was that the engineers from the private sector just couldn't seem to understand the political constraints that the government managers work under.

I've only ever worked at small to medium-sized private-sector software companies. It's fascinating to get a look into public institutions and the way civil-servants make decisions.

As a hacker, there's a real danger of only considering engineering constraints, and dismissing organizational or political constraints on a problem or program. I often see bright techies make suggestions that are just naive from a political or organizational perspective. Suggesting a plan that would work great "if only the government weren't so clueless or corrupt" is no plan at all, if you actually have to work with the government.

This is not a direct criticism of pg's essay. I think he's on to a cool idea.

The discussions I've had on similar topics in the past, though, have been really eye-opening. I may be hot-shit technically, and able to hold my own in a meeting, but there's this whole other world of bureaucracy that I must admit I know almost nothing about.

P.S. I found the NIH parts of Darwin's Radio fascinating. The book doesn't have much action. In fact, a lot of the character interaction is between government scientists, and happens in meetings. Nonetheless, I felt as though it gave me an insight into this other world. It was fascinating.
Would you please stop baiting people like this?
> In the long run you won't be able to buy your way out of a shitty foundation.

From what little I've heard about Twitter's development, I don't think they're mindlessly sticking to their initial model. They've been actively looking at ways to move beyond their initial RAD app. Now, I'm sure they had reasons to choose Scala for a layer, whether it's the best or not. Should they have gone with [insert-your-favorite-language-here] instead is largely a matter religious debate.

Any approach has inherent strengths and weaknesses. You can also write bad code in even the "best" languages. But to say they're simply throwing more hardware at inefficient code is probably a misrepresentation of their approach.
The question is why you have to wait. It seems to be too hard to implement a plugin system that can transparently update things without restarting the whole app. The maintenance tasks could be done while the app is running.
Having a background daemon running to automatically update software without informing the user is a poor solution, but trying to solve the problem introduced by checking for updates on startup and thus interrupting the workflow of the user is a good idea.
That line was in reply to the article author's statement that the only way to go is a mainframe:

> No, there’s only one systems architecture that will solve the Fail Whales once and for all.

That is certainly one way to go. Another is to be clever. That's what startups do best... A large company goes to buy a main frame and Oracle licenses while the startup has a really clever idea and orders a bunch of servers from Dell.
It's not just my impression: "This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history."

Al Qassemi seems to say that one could draw a similarly broad and misleading conclusion about Britain. Maybe Hari should at least address this point. I mean, he hints that the answer is yes, and such a conclusion is valid, but he never says it.

EDIT: On second thought, I'm making exactly the same mistake he's pointing out.
> that would be like a programming language without variables or data structures.

I would say it's more like a language where every "noun" is really a "verb" in disguise—e.g. combinatoric logic. You can let K and KI mean true and false when speaking about combinatoric logic, but when using it, they're still verbs (combinators), not values.
"Rumours of YouTube's demise have been greatly exaggerated"

-- Mark Twain
The double think is quite sad/fun. I've heard religious people smarter than me mix the argument "X is true" with "it is good to believe X is true".
We've worked with him before and he came recommended from a friend running a small business.

He might still be scamming us, but so far we've been pleased.
I think you need to tone down the pre-college stuff. Looking at your resume, it's not really clear what you've accomplished in the past couple of years versus what you did in high school. It's cool you did all that stuff, but none of it really has much to do with being a developer. Put a short blurb in your resume mentioning some of the crazier stuff you've done ("Wrote and published X books, including ..."). That's one of those cool things to talk about in an interview to gauge if people could interact with you in a workplace setting, but probably not a reason to hire you (meaning you might not want to play it up as the primary focus on your resume).
Thanks for the link.

Funny how the legal fees dwarf everything else for a web startup. I could get a couple years' hosting for the price of drawing up these kinds of legal docs.
I don't understand the hate of the diggbar, reddit's had something like that forever & I actually used to use it and liked it (6 -10months ago, reddit completely deteriorated so I don't really go there anymore); I wish HN had one.

Here's how I use aggregators:
1. Load up the page
2. Skim the headlines, opening each one in a new tab
3. Read the tabs

The bar allows me to then vote up the story after I've read it and get to the comments page.

On HN I have to open 2 tabs one for the story and one for the comments.
I disagree with the author. Bringing up "what about x" has many valid uses. For example:

"Look at my perpetual motion machine!"
"What about the cable plugged into the outlet?"
"Don't change the subject!"

"You are a murderer because you killed Mr. Jones."
"What about the fact that Mr. Jones broke into my house and was trying to rape my wife?"
"Two wrongs don't make a right!"

Certainly it can be abused but very often the "what about x" argument can be a valid way of introducing new and relevant information.
Actually for twitter it could very well be the cheapest option

At an industry event last fall, I suggested this very strategy to the newish VP of ops/engineering/scaling Twitter had just hired from the porn industry. My advice was Professor Frink-ish: "why not just buy one really big computer?" I was only half joking, but he wasn't impressed by my idea. Perhaps he remembered my name and that's why their recruiter has not called me back.
I much prefer Sparkle's approach of opt-in, in-application updates, and I sincerely hope that Mac application developers will not adopt Omaha.

http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/
As a three-time ironman finisher (Wisconsin '04, Lake Placid '06/'08) this is spot on. The key is long, slow, boring training, keeping your eyes glued to your HRM to stay <zone 4. It's also why a lot of first time ironman racers don't do as well as they trained for since they tend to get caught up in the moment and go too hard, go anaerobic, and spend the rest of the race paying for it.
Anyone else find it funny that this post coincides with COBOL's 50-year birthday?

It's a good PR move, though. By showing that mainframes work for Web 2.0 (even with a faulty argument) they'll probably score a corporate sale or two.
Canada doesn't have a quota system like the US, but priority is given to skilled immigrants and their immediate relatives. A skilled immigrant can get a permanent residency visa in 1-3 years, whereas a grandparent might need 5-10 years. In the US, the quota system is disproportionately biased in favor of relatives - something like 70% of all immigrants. The only path for skilled immigrants is H1-B, which has an annual cap of 65,000 visas.

For example, Canada issued about 250,000 PR visas last year. 150,000 went to skilled workers and entrepreneurs, whereas only 65,000 went to family members. (Of which, 44,000 were spouses)

The statistics are here if you're curious: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/facts2008/...
If you glance at the page that Auren Hoffman links to, you'll see that he defines his "A players" in the classic "Rock Star" fashion - they won't work with anyone but other "A-Players", they'll leave if you hire other types, etc. You can follow the link I provide for this.

Sure, people perform differently in different job and people who perform well should be hired. Even then, the "only A-players" thing is dubious - even in a super bowl team, some people are supporting players and good "stars" respect their support and* a variety of talents is useful even in software creation.

It's pretty obvious that venture capitalist Hoffman using his "Rock stars" rhetoric to pump up Rapleaf as "another Google". "Truly outstanding people" is not a particularly well articulated criteria for hiring but it sure appeals to the plebs and the marketers. It's unfortunate, because your management philosophy shouldn't be a "look at how great I am" tool. If you really need to get people to look at you, there are other ways to do it.
The single thread model has some serious limitations. For instance maybe you would like to load some images & then popup a component containing them. In a threaded world, you can have synchronous communication where it just waits till the download is complete before loading what depends on it. Right now you have to register callbacks, sure that's not too tough, but chaining like that makes it more difficult than it should be.

download -> componentA > componentB > ComponentC

whereas it might be easier to just go:

CompnentA(file.download());

instead of file.Download (CompACallback, FaultCallback);
Why can't they just charge a membership fee to upload? Would it be way too expensive?
If that's not relentlessly resourceful I don't know what is! Loved the part when he lost the track and had to figure out which way to go.
> Another is to be clever. That's what startups do best...

Amen to that. The fact that we give Twitter such a hard time about their growing pains is reflective of our growing "reliance" on them. Clever approaches to "mission-critical" applications will include plenty of trial and error and iteration. A bank's not going to say "let's experiment with some other approaches."

I think that's the point of the article - if you need it to "just work", go with something that can provide that. Not to say they won't eventually get to a comparable point using unorthodox techniques, there will just be stumbles along the way.
It's very simple: Google update takes away control from users. This is absolutely the wrong way to handle this.

Say I'm at a coffee shop with wi-fi or using my notebook through a cellular 3G/EDGE network and this update starts downloading a large Google Earth update that I never asked for. Why should I be paying for the charges because Google wants to update their software without telling me?

Another issue is versioning. If I'm working in one version of the software and don't want to use the newer version until others thoroughly test it and fix the critical bugs, why should i be forced to upgrade? I've used a lot of newer versions of software and many were actually worse than their older versions. Again, why should they force users to upgrade? Why not ask?

This Google Update is bad news all around. It installed itself like a virus rootkit on my machine with Google Earth installation and I was never notified (yeah, a note is probably buried deep in a TOC somewhere). Luckily, LittleSnitch told me about it and I removed it from the Launch Daemons... and I also removed Google Earth because of it.

Finally, why should Google get updates about my location at all times? Every time this thing pings their server, my IP is inevitably transmitted to them.

Sparkle does this perfectly. You can completely disable update checking or allow it to check on periodic intervals. And when it finds an update, it informs you with an update window and shows you exactly why it is updating and what was fixed and what more you get. This Ohama thing gives you none of these options and it also runs at all times like a virus.

If MS did this, people would be all over MS. But when Google does it, people defend them.

Any software that adopts this Omaha crap will be blocked from my machine as well.
Accreditation for less established and less lucrative professions is much easier. The grip tightens over time, within a profession.

It's hard to think of any really good educational institutions that can't seem to get accredited for political reasons.

Three years of on the job training is better education than three years of schooling in practically every field. Plus you get paid rather than have to pay. Yet on the job training does not count as education that allows you to legally be a lawyer, doctor, teacher, parole officer, military officer, etc.

The problem with government sanctioned accreditation is not that the specific decisions about which schools meet the requirements get politicized. The problem is that accreditation allows the intuitions who reap the tuition money to define what education itself means.
... And yet sites like Flickr are huge even though JPGs are as easy as anything to post on your own website.
http://www.multichannel.com/article/191223-YouTube_May_Lose_...

As with all analyst estimates, you can't totally bank on accuracy, but I'd have a hard time believing they're far off.
Then are they really smarter than you?
I'm fearful of sounding like a redditroll, but Hitchens handles this particular topic well. He asks people to name a single moral act believers can do that nonbelievers cannot do. Then, when no one has an answer, he asks a corollary; name a single act of evil done entirely in god's name.
Really? I bet they are way, way off.

"To arrive at the estimated $360 million bandwidth tab for YouTube, the analysts assumed the site will receive 375 million unique visitors in 2009 and that a maximum of 20% of those users are on the site at any given time."

There's no way 20% of visitors are streaming video simultaneously. I doubt it's even 1%. Kongregate maxes out at about 0.5% of its monthly uniques connected to chat at once.
I guess seeing that it is open source we can change that behavior now and hook it up to the windows task scheduler to lessen the intrusiveness.
Ask HN: Best resources for small IPhone Web App?
I am developing a small php-based web app to be accessed both by desktop and iPhone/IPod Touch.

I am wondering what tools people use to make IPod Web Apps. I have come across iWebKit (http://http://iwebkit.net/) and WebApp (http://webapp.net.free.fr/), but I don't know if there is anything better or more useful out there.
Also, if you have any pointers to detailed tutorials or source code examples, that would be cool.

thanks in advance, ...
New hacker magazine
You could just as easily argue that if more students study engineering its hurts those currently in the industry, that alone is not a reason to be against it.

You're so wrong. The whole purpose of bar exams and similar certification requirements in most trades is to limit supply. Almost every profession does this in one way or the other, except engineers.
http://www.answers.com/maximum
Not all all. In both cases, your "what about" stayed on topic.
> EDIT: On second thought, I'm making exactly the same mistake he's pointing out.

Congratulations on recognizing that.
Why is re-writing some of the system in Scala a debacle and or expensive? I haven't followed it too closely, but I got the impression that they have had success with it so far.

Well, when you have a track record of screwing up on a fairly simple problem for 3 years straight then a switch of programming language will not magically solve that for you.
Hey guys, I wanted to mention -- (and I might repost on Monday since I waited too long to edit the message)

1) Here is my resume: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/153216/ycombinator-resume.pdf

2) I'm also interested in interning anywhere in Europe, I speak Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish as well.

Anyone know if there is a way to edit this post after a few hours?
ScreenCastle Records Your Screencast without Software
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Summary: Strunk and White are grammatical incompetents.

Nonsense.
Generalization: With no change (in product itself or demand for that product), a product's current margin is unsustainable in the long run.
Stanford iPhone class:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php

UI library for websites to mimic the iPhone UI:

http://code.google.com/p/iui/
Isn't this the great flaw in the author's theory?
' It seems safe to assume that YouTube’s traffic will continue to grow, with no clear ceiling in sight. Since the majority of Google’s costs for the service are pure variable costs of bandwidth and storage...'

If traffic grows, and bandwidth and storage are the highest costs, then revenues should increase while costs decrease as bandwidth and storage costs come down.

Or is there something else I'm missing there.
Nothing useful can stay free forever.
As a human, I'm both fascinate and horrified by your reply. Why don't you go through very half thought he has to see what might be a legal problem - oh wait, you are talking about that...
I know a lot of companies around here who would gladly pay $150k+ for a truly "great" programmer, if they could only find them.

People say this all the time but $150K is a rare salary for a programmer. You have to work at Google for years to be paid that much as a base salary. If a company is offering $150K but can't hire anyone it usually means the company sucks. I.e. it's an overfunded VC time bomb, a boring telecom/security job or something semi-shady.
Then again you might just see more hits because breaking out causes your page to reload.
Says the CEO of a competitor.
People here are not used to hearing open criticism of their country or their rulers. The "Dark Side of Dubai" article really didn't spare anyone's feelings, to say the least.

That kind of disrespect beckons retaliation of some kind. Since Mr. Hari is safely out of reach in the UK, the only response is to openly dis the UK - even if it means dredging up stories from WWII.
Spouting speculative bullshit seems to be the cheapest way to create news.

Same website, but other end of the spectrum speculating YouTube will make $500 Million:
http://www.businessinsider.com/analyst-youtube-revenues-will...
wow, thats quite a serious resume. What happened to the one page overview? :)

we should talk if you're interested about an internship in UK
This is also a great page to explain to normal people how computers actually work.
He says later that youtube is big enough that they've maxed out their economies of scale (hence costs won't come down, which seems like a reasonable argument).

The real flaws with this article are that user content is growing geometrically compared to paid content (citation? where does he get this from), along with the fact that the author is the CEO of fliqz.com - a video streaming company. Good job reporting conflict of interest, business insider.
This is hardly a new idea; the Soviet Union did this for real many times:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nati...
All part of the lock in scheme - students have far more {interesting} opportunities to tinker with open source, imo.
got any invites for vark?
Single Finger Text Input - Dynamic Language Model
In fairness, he wrote that more than 4 years ago. ("I'm a normal guy at Bella Vista High School ...")
Twitter Url Shorteners Trends
Geoffrey Pullum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Pullum

knows what he is talking about.

"What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. 'At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard' is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:

"* 'There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground' has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

"* 'It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had' also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.

"* 'The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired' is presumably fingered as passive because of 'impaired,' but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. 'Become' doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that 'A new edition became issued by the publishers' is not grammatical.)"

I agree with Pullum that one of the big problems of Strunk and White as a guide to writing is its nearly complete ignorance of discourse structure or any other level of analysis beyond looking at single sentences.
Of course, this is all predicated on the ability to successfully classify potential employees as A, B, or C players.

A couple of months ago, I interviewed at a startup for a product management position. During the interview, it became clear that none of the interviewers had a clue about what product managers are supposed to do. It was almost as if somebody told them "You need a product manager!" (and it certainly seemed like they did), so they went out searching for one. I doubt that they would have been able to tell a good product manager from a smooth-talking bad one.

If you're trying to hire somebody for a position with which you have no expertise, I recommend bringing in an outside expert to advise you and screen candidates.
Care to give reasons for your opinion?
OK, here goes some back-of-the envelope math (risky business in this group, so looking forward to hearing what I'm doing wrong..). Where I have made assumptions, I have erred on the side of 'expensive', i.e. this should be an upper bound estimate:

75,000,000,000 streams/year

400 kbps (average bw)

average stream length: 300 s (stream length, not video length, highball estimate)

-> BW/year = 1.13e9 GB/year

0.1 $/GB (BW cost, based on AWS S3 prices, again a highball)

-> BW cost ~= $113m / year

Only 1/3 of the estimated amount, and I'm not taking account of any clever stuff YT do to lower the costs. What gives? Is this a peak BW issue?