skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you really think that Parse is doing all of the security updates that come through Ubuntu or CentOS?

Yes. Yes I do.

This whole line of argument is one I typically hear from folks who've never had to deal with a Sev 1 incident in the middle of the night. If your argument holds, sysadmins and DevOps teams are essentially pointless.

Moreover, even a developer confident handling both maintenance and incident response should value his or her time more than zero. Given that, presumably there is a price point at which it makes sense to simply pay a platform provider or hire dedicated DevOps. There may be varying opinions as to what that price point is, but it does exist if the developer has the cash.
jgrahamc's comment is the highest rated comment, is very negative, yet contains an admission that he did not understand the article. I find that fizx's comment is a very appropriate comment on the state of HN today.
You don't just throw money at things. You take a calculated risk.

So before this spending on paid installs happens you need to have metrics on the Customer Life Time Value (CLTV). Now since you are buying users this calculation could be off.

If:

Customer Life Time Value > Cost Per User Aquisition

Then:

Spend money to acquire customers

So if you rank high and word of mouths spreads then you hopefully have organic growth where user acquisition costs equate to $0.
The Dorky Future: Where Does Google Glass Fit In?
I cant find your email, can u add me in skype my nick is unsobill
Muzzy - a tiny and gorgeous iTunes companion for the Mac [FREE]
> Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more.

This is down to familiarity of tooling, not some intrinsic advantage that EC2 has over managed dedicated hosting. The simple matter is that there just isn't the maturity of tools around automated provisioning of dedicated hosts, which makes them seem higher overhead.

> If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;)

Simple: Netflix have very bursty load, so it costs them less to pay the EC2 and virtualisation premium than it would to keep an equivalent amount of dedicated hardware on warm standby. Is your load bursty? Then EC2 might make sense.

EC2 (or any cloud virtualisation platform) will always lose in a shootout with managed dedicated hardware, unless the shootout parameters are provisioning time and tooling, simply because EC2 is managed dedicated hardware plus an extra layer of stuff on top that has to be paid for.
I'd like Outbox with a dedicated address. I still move fairly regularly, and want a permanent address I can use.

Does anyone have experience with Earth Class Mail or similar services?

I tried PayTrust but it's been nothing but problems for me.
I haven't seen him comment on generics in languages other than C, C++ and Java.

See also below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5821027
There is one major problem to starting what are to become big tech companies outside of the Bay Area: labor supply.

Isn't this THE problem everyone is complaining about in the Bay Area right now?

but when it comes time to hire a lot of people fast, you wouldn't want to be in any other place.

I can name so many other places in the world that I could hire way more developers elsewhere.

There's different types of technically capably labor supply. The one your talking about is most likely the people who are writing very complex algorithms, NLP, or the "hackers" who are writing rails apps over the weekend. The other 90% is writing Java, .NET, SAP (ABAP), etc for big co. These resources are not in short supply and can be found virtually anywhere in the world.
You're likely just a victim of Poe's Law then. There seems to be increasing sensitivity over middlebrow dismissal lately, and your comment is easily misunderstood as such.

Also, ain't no one smack talks mah spreadsheets. Thems run the business (in the insanely non-ideal real world, for better or worse).
Yes, the US gets away with human rights atrocities, and yes, Manning should not be tortured. However, one can't ignore the fact that he released US government secrets to a non-government entity. That is treason. Manning will receive some sort of punishment because he committed treason, and treason is breaking the law. It's fairly simple.
Hash lookup in Ruby, why is it so fast?
> If you have a farm, and you have such a bountiful harvest that you end up producing so much food that you can't possibly use it or sell it all before it rots, under your theory of property would that excess food no longer be your property, because food is no longer a scarce resource for you?

Only if according to the same logic it can be said the excess food is no longer your property because it is no longer useful as it is rotting.

Why would anyone need your food if there is no scarcity? They could go claim some "unowned" food somewhere else. Just like they could "clone" your ideas without depriving you of your idea. Property rights wouldn't be a very big issue without the scarcity.
"and the send snail mail through the web thing from earlier"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5821421

So, now, you can ping yourself. Internet complete.
I donated a car to KPBS a while back. As part of the process they informed me clearly of the California rules of submitting a transfer of registration form within 5 days of the transfer:

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/online/nrl

IIRC, the guy towing the car even gave me a copy of that form. At the time I thought it was just more DMV bullshit paperwork, but filling out that form was a lot easier than clearing up some of the messes described in these stories would have been, so I guess it is actually useful.
Ask HN: What board game do you like?
I'm trying to coordinate an evening board game event at our company and would love to know any cool games folks have tried recently, or ones that are still loved? Most of our attendees are software developers so any advice is appreciated!
Thanks!
Eimi, Event Manager,
Whitetruffle
Bitbucket is great for small teams and individual work. Thanks for existing.
Aren't we also all here discussing this because of the Physics of dying stars? In other words, isn't pretty much everything - not just red paint - related to the Physics of dying stars?
There is no such thing as IP until created by what people in other instances would call "gov't interference." I understand the trade-offs involved and I'm not actually arguing for no IP, but more about the fact that it is held sacred, but any time the gov't does anything else that is "bad."
Heh, I did use Rally for a little bit at one company. Not long enough to form much of an opinion though. It was mostly a glorified bug tracker at that job. Some managers tried to actually enter the "stories" and "milestones".

One system that I'm curious to try is called AtTask[0]. They're located here in Utah (just down the street from me!) and have quite the lineup of large customers. I don't personally know anyone who uses them though.

[0] http://www.AtTask.com
In my experience it does not matter which tool is in hands of people who like to "tweak", "twist", "improve", etc.

I've seen trac with "features", now I see JIRA with "features".

JIRA itself is not bad as issue tracker. (Trac also is not bad)
Google bans porn from Glass, forcing changes to first porn app - latimes.com
Tagabek,

This is a very complicated question to answer for most app developers. We have been trying to discover the answer to this very question in the facebook group for app entrepreneurs and marketers - https://www.facebook.com/groups/appentrepreneurs/

One thing which has consistently stood out is that create an app which stands out. Learn marketing and build a network of apps. The finer details on app marketing are probably beyond the scope of this post.
Thanks for the insight - I've wanted to do this with corporate meetings but haven't got past the first step of actually asking. Maybe people won't have as much of a problem as I think they would - only answer is to try, really.
I could use some time consulting with you. miles@5280holdings.com
Pixel art editor in 600 lines of Haskell
I did time at a startup for journalists so this is burned in my skull.

Lede is journalism jargon, and "burying the lede" is a phrase borrowed from journalism.

> Journalistic ledes emphasize grabbing the attention of the reader. In journalism, the failure to mention the most important, interesting or attention-grabbing elements of a story in the first paragraph is sometimes called "burying the lede".

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

> Bury the lead sort of works, but bury the lede is the conventional spelling of this expression.

http://grammarist.com/usage/lead-lede/

"Lede" makes a distinction between lead (leed) and lead (pb/led).
The Play Framework compiles ;) But yea...other than that, wtf.
I'd be worried if they were encrypting passwords anyway. SHA512 is a hash function.
He said he does not want to move to the valley or NYC.
How does Derby stand up to Meteor? I'm really glad Derby has updated but Meteor (at least to me) seems miles ahead of the curve right now.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills whenever somebody says that mercurial is simpler than git. Mercurial's per-file revlog and structured .hg/store/data is way weirder / more complex than git's SHA-addressed DAG with minimal/orthogonal object types. The only real blemish on git is that lightweight tags should not exist.
Honest question: why do you need a central repository (SVN style) if it's a private repo? I tend to develop my own projects mostly on two different machines, and the core code management and synchronization doesn't need anything but git itself. Is it so you can use bug trackers etc?
Update:

Thanks for the feedback, I agree that the internal url changes on scrolling is undesirable and removed that. It's popular right now for single page sites, but it does break the back button.

The feedback was good and helped me improve my site a bit. The benefits of Bootstrap here for me was that it and a sub $20 theme from wrapbootsrap.com let me put up a very nice looking site that works very well cross platform in a couple hours and does not look bootstrappy at all. The icon distortion for a rarely used resolution isn't the fault of bootstrap, and could be fixed with a small css change. Those icons are temporary and not worth changing right now.

HN seems to really look for the negative and avoid the benefits lately.
I wonder how many users GitHub has.
> he released US government secrets to a non-government entity. That is treason.

That's not what treason is in the USA. Treason is defined in the US Constitution as such:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
New iPhone apps worth downloading: ThingLink, DexKnows, Ninja Warrior Game
PagerDuty Seek a Heavyweight Senior Software Engineer (Web Team)
You've been around the block before -- you understand this "web stuff" and have built quite the number of web apps in your time. Your co-workers come to you with their most tricky performance problems, and project managers trust your estimates with only minimal padding. Junior engineers are elated for the rest of the day after their commits pass your code review.

In fact, you do your job so well that many are surprised you haven't yet been promoted into management. You, however, know that path isn't for you. You want to continue to build features, design systems, and ship products. Someone else can worry about handling the day-to-day management tasks.
At PagerDuty, we’re building an alerting and incident tracking system to help IT operations groups detect and respond to issues. Startups, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between rely on us to alert them quickly when they have operational troubles. We’ve got interesting technical problems in spades, but we’re still very much a startup. We're looking for a senior engineer to join our Web Engineering group to help us add features and improve the performance, scalability, and security of PagerDuty's web app component.

Responsibilities

We're looking for a senior engineer who will provide technical leadership for our Web Engineering group. You will be responsible for:
Mentoring junior engineers in PagerDuty's deployed technologies, our engineering standards, and the art of software engineering.
Collaborating with technical leaders in PagerDuty's other engineering groups to analyze complex feature requests and suggest implementation strategies.
Providing engineering input into our product planning and scheduling processes.
Cultivating engineering best practices within the web group, and, in conjunction with other senior engineers, company wide.

Overseeing the design & evolution of PagerDuty's REST API (http://developer.pagerduty.com/documentation/rest).
Shepherding the process of converting PagerDuty to an API + rich JS client architecture.
Building & shipping features!

Requirements

7+ years of development experience as a senior software engineer working on customer-facing and web-based systems.
A deep understanding of the performance and security issues faced in the design of web-based applications.
Mastery of at least one modern web programming framework: Ruby on Rails, Django, CakePHP, or similar. Some experience with RoR is preferred.

Excellent knowledge of Javascript. Experience with large scale JS projects and JS frameworks such as Backbone.js is preferred.

Basic UNIX sysadmin knowledge and a willingness to go on-call.

Excellent technical judgement -- you know when to use an off the shelf solution, and when to roll your own.

Please apply to jobs@pagerduty.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
I guess it depends on what you're looking for out of all this. If you're just trying to create a product so that you can offload it down the line then maybe you should question your initial intentions, there are other ways of making money after all.

If on the other hand you want to change society or improve the lives of people and you have recognised a way of doing so then don't give up. Treat your choiec as a journey or adventure. You're going to have set backs and failures and spend many nights thinking about quitting but you will overcome them and the struggles will make you a better person in tthe long run.

Just because you don't get to the summit of everest doesn't mean you haven't achieved anything and it doesn't mean you haven't improved as an individual and it doesn't mean the next time you try to climb you'll fail again either.

Edit: Also, update your blog, its long overdue!
I really like bitbucket. The other day I actually looked at their pricing plans to see if their was a small plan I could upgrade to for additional features. I cant really even think of new features I need; And, the size of the free plan is good enough for me. I just really like the service. Weird.
bootcamper.io
Congrats and keep pushing forward! Although I have really focused on Python in the recent months, I keep an eye on the Node landscape... Derby always looked promising, along with half a dozen or so frameworks as well.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, appreciate it
Hashing for the Homeless
We use Bitbucket at Cloudmanic Labs we are pretty happy with it. GitHub almost has too many bells and whistles. We do use Github for public stuff as that is what everyone uses.
I found it pretty popular in parts of the python community. And I guess it's used for a lot of private repositories.
I'm pretty sure he's talking from the user's perspective, not design/implementation.
Prototyping with Express is definitely a great way to get started quickly. The one thing I'd say for newcomers is that it can get messy pretty quickly (mostly when it comes to the files), which anybody with MVC habits will probably notice relatively quickly. I made this https://github.com/grownseed/NodeExpressStartingPoint/tree/v... a while back, it helps me get started even more quickly and it attempts to keep the file structure relatively manageable.
The link is returning a 403 now (perhaps too much traffic from this article).

For anyone that still wants to read it, here's a citation -- you can easily find a copy by searching for the title of the paper.

Bacon, David F., Perry Cheng, and V. T. Rajan.
"A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection."
Convergence 6, no. 17 (2004): 32.
I think I can debunk this: red paint for some reason needs more coats than any other color (house painter speaking, step back!) At least with modern paint. Before Behr Ultra a deep red wall would almost always need three or four coats, don't ask me why.

Maybe they went with red paint because it was cheaper and they didn't know they would need three times as much to paint it. But more likely it was because red barns just look better against a green field.
Context seems good enough.
Aside from presupposing the fact that life could not possibly have existed in the form it currently does on earth before stars started dying... it kind of misses the direct connection the author is going for (correct or not, and other commentors have already taken the latter angle).
Imgur's technology stack in detail
Leveraging Big Data To Create More Secure Web Applications
My info came from this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5792842 which, now that I think about it, appears to be a bunch of second-hand info about the golang mailing lists. rsc posts here about golang sometimes but I don't think he's mentioned generics specifically.
I think Zynga will continue failing simply because they were wrong about human nature and user needs.

I've seen my acquaintances on Facebook, playing less and less games, sending less and less invites. I'm connected to a lot of regular non-technical folks on Facebook and I barely see any traces of games in my feed, whereas 1 or 2 years ago, my stream was chocked by games.

Zynga games seemed like fun. Users stayed for a while for whatever reason. However advancing the game by pressing buttons to increment counters is simply not fun. Once the novelty passes, you start realizing what a stupid game it is.

There's also a new breed of games on iTunes. Games that require slightly more skill, but after the first level or 2, they become next to impossible to advance unless you pay up or spam dozens of your friends. Again, at some point users realize that the game is not at all about skill or fun, but about willingness to pay up.

Basically this new breed of games is depending on new users for survival. At some point the market will get saturated by people that tried these games out and that have grown tired of them.

Also, what the hell does social mean anyway? 10 years ago, social meant to play CounterStrike or StarCraft with your high-school buddies, games that are still played by groups to this very day. Does social mean spamming your friends with annoying invitations? Or does it mean multi-player games where you and your friends can have fun together? I'm asking because I'm seeing a lot of the former and not much of the later ;-)
Sure it's not hard to spin up a Node process on a VM, but the abstractions Heroku provides are pretty nice: "git push" to deploy, Procfile to define process types, a simple command line tool for tailing logs, scaling processes, set environment variables to configure, etc.

Plus you need to know a bunch of stuff about sysadmining to properly secure the server, stay on top of security patches, etc.
Being Bleeding Edge Is a Good Thing
Eh, I am coming from the perspective of a user, not a VCS developer. I find git repositories way easier to navigate, let alone perform complex operations on, because how they work couldn't make more sense to me.
The argument goes: Because iron oxide is abundant, it's cheap. Because it's cheap, it's used to paint barns.

There are a lot of arguments in the comments below but many of them actually support the statement. E.G. farmers used cow's blood or rust because they mixed their own paint. In other words, red was the most common and readily available pigment.

Arguments about modern storebought paint having the same price for all colors are also besides the point. (a) The tradition was well established before the 20th century and all prices being equal gives little incentive to change it. (b) Do they still make red paint from rust? (c) Do you really believe the paints all cost the manufacturer exactly the same?

That said, I don't really know anything about the history of red barns. I'm just saying as presented, it's a stronger case than many are giving it credit for.
Patent Alchemy: The Market for Technology in U.S. History [pdf]
Firebird Speed Becomes World’s First Website Dedicated To Speed Funding
The CPI is usually extracted out from CPM, and you are actually charged cpm(theres a couple that charge cpi/cpc). So since a free app has a much higher install rate from the view, it lowers the cpi.

The idea is for 100k they'll put youre add in front of 800k users, and 80k will install if its free. but only 1k will install if it costs money. numbers totally made up.

The ones that do charge cpi, if your conversion rate isn't high enough that theyre profiting[since they're paying per impression or could show an ad more likely to convert], theyll just kill your app and not advertise it.
I love bitbucket but I would like to be able to create clusters of related BitBucket projects, by language, tool, etc. Right now there isn't even a search feature, let alone any browse capability.
Hahaha. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the most typical HN user I've ever seen. Seriously, that gave me a good laugh.
Am I the only one who would look up a possible product name before using it? There already is a (well known) software from ASF named 'Derby': http://db.apache.org/derby

Why would you start such a confusion? Why would you want to fight with that software for page ranking? Why does this mostly happen to JS technologies?
Tired of pretentiously named apps. Mailbox, and now Outbox.

Yes, I get it that Apple Computer shortened their name to Apple, and that it's cool to be like Apple. But that isn't OK, and it doesn't make it OK for your startup. It's pillaging of the English language. At least when I say apple, context may help people to recognize when I mean the fruit and when I mean the tech company. With Outbox and Mailbox the context is less likely to provide the needed hint, because the lowercase terms and the uppercase terms in the same domain: email.

Adding to the pretense is the fact that they don't even own "{{product_name}}.com". Instead it's "{{product_name}}mail.com" or "{{product_name}}app.com".
BBC Online clock to be removed after complaint; "inaccurate and misleading"
Sherri Dissects and Slashdots a Phish
> there are many non-running cars which would be (if certain repairs were made) perfectly legal to drive. Buying up several of these cars and assembling the best pieces is neither illegal or nefarious. Even buying a few "totaled" cars as donors for certain parts is perfectly fine as well.

Right, but that has absolutely nothing to do with what the original comment mentioned about pulling together parts from illegal cars to make one legal car.

Let's be perfectly honest, even if I put together 5 1991 Subaru Loyales to make one good one, I won't be making money because it's still only worth $2k.

On the other hand, if I can "get" a few 2009+ luxury cars and turn them into a good car, I stand to make a lot of money. I think you'll find you can't legally and cheaply get 2009+ luxury cars.