skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks very cool! Trying it right now. Will report back.
You're right that the complexity derives from the DOM. But in my opinion the DOM isn't so much the problem as the fact that it is so hard to manipulate. There are two ways to manipulate it: by low-level node fiddling at a level far below that of the discrete UI elements being represented, or by deleting subtrees and replacing them from a serialized source (html), losing event handlers and embedded state in the process. Neither solution is usable when dealing with complex ui elements that have no corresponding html tag, so you end up needing an abstraction layer that implements of these mechanisms and does the boilerplate work to make it practical. Because of this abstraction layer things always get complicated as soon as you try to move beyond basic html tags with onclick handlers beause you end up learning the pseudo-dsl of the abstraction layer.

The long term solution is to make html itself extensible so you can define additional tags at the start of the page, with all the related logic, and then can go back to straight dom manipulation without needing any abstraction framework. This should become possible with web components and shadow dom, but we have a way to go still.
You are not Google's customer though. You are product sold to their customers. Your buying power, add viewing abilities, knowledge of your age, hobbies and other stats is what makes Google money by proving their add buying customers with quality "product".

> If Google doesn't have users, its ad space isn't worth anything, and its business model ceases to exist.

Yes but that is a second order effect. Basically the majority of "products" have to be convinced that Google is not good enough _and_ there is another alternative (I like DuckDuckGo for example), then as you say, people will stop using Google Search. Then if Gmail goes South, people stop using that. Then Android goes South, they start using iPhones. Eventually Google will provide a lower quality "product" to their customers and Google's stock will take a hit. However, don't be fooled into thinking you are Google's primary customer because you use them for search.
It's really easy to hide people on Facebook, if you even see their stuff in the first place. Mainly, you'll see stuff from the people you interact with.

Otherwise, G+ Circles are ridiculously clunky and slow, due to Google choosing superficial eye-candy over functionality.
s/permanently/trust for 30 days/

Still not great, but it's not permanent.

You can also log out other sessions in google apps, not sure if that resets the dont-do-2factor-auth bit though.
In London and the UK this is indeed how people use the term “contracting”

It's how some people in London and the UK use the term and how some of their contracts are set up. But plenty of other people would also describe themselves as "contractors" despite having a different kind of contractual arrangement, and since no-one has some magical authority to define the term I think your generalisation is unfounded. If nothing else, a lot of boundaries have been deliberately blurred since IR35 came along, so the whole permie vs. contractor distinction hasn't been what it used to be for at least a decade.
Solution:

1) find backup

2) restore from backup

3) live happily ever after

Of wait, you dont have backup...
Inbound links don't immediately get detected as negative. That takes a while.
Isn't it a bit scary that the entire internet (and by association a huge chunk of the overall economy) is effectively beholden to a company that "doesn't owe anybody anything"?

I mean we wouldn't tolerate an energy supplier disconnected arbitrary supplies because they didn't feel like selling there any more.
I think the more scary thing here is it's incredibly easy and dirt cheap to completely bury your competitors with bad SEO.

Think of a multi-million dollar company wanting to dispose of smaller competitors. For even a modest outlay of say $1000, you could do incredible, long-term damage to other companies web sites.

Also, I'm pretty sure Google has no plans to update their algorithm to account for this huge flaw either, making every company vulnerable to attack from anybody.
It's most likely because Mozilla makes things open source, and Microsoft doesn't usually.

I agree that this pretty much seems like another Windows Phone, that won't really make huge competition for iOS or Android devices. I hope I'm wrong though because I hate Java.
I'm sorry that you feel that way. I definitely understand the feeling of being burned, but I've never had issues with something like this, as a user myself of services with a free trial that requires a credit card.

Things like Twitter and Hacker News, where you can broadcast your displeasure of a company's terrible tactics would make it difficult for a company to keep signing up new users if people are complaining about it. The only companies that I see getting away with stuff like this are huge companies who don't care about their customers anyway, like Tivo.

All of my apps have a prominent link in the user settings panel that lets a user cancel their account/billing with one click.
Shit, I make a living making computers work, and managing my Google Apps Accounts hardly makes sense to me.
I used Honelive for a while and I think you should be reasonably happy with them at that price range.

However, I eventually needed an upgraded server, most importantly the ability to do an out-of-band remote reboot. I switched to Hivelocity for that.

To get the best deals on hosting, look carefully at the hosting company's website, search for announcements of sales on Webhostingtalk, and check their Twitter and other social media.
Your original claim is still incorrect.

Even nearby San Jose has a higher proportion of reverse commuters than San Francisco, much higher:

http://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/ACS/Table3.xls
RIP Atul Chitnis. Met him during a conference in Mauritius around 2002 and we had a great conversation about open source software in poor(er) countries.
Ideas (rather goofy ones) for supporting Open Source software.
> I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room.

There hasn't been a generation growing up with Google+ yet.
Seems like it might be handy to travel with a tiny "USB sanitizer" dongle that simply passes through power and not data. Does such a thing exist?

Edit: not quite a dongle, but something like http://amazon.com/dp/B009W34XMM should fit the bill, no?

Edit 2: http://amazon.com/dp/B0042LF23I looks exactly right, although build quality appears to be an issue.
Ask HN: what's the most accurate way to measure time on site?
This is probably Google Analytics biggest weakness, as their method of measuring timestamps between pageloads does not correctly account for single page visits, or visitors who come to your website and open multiple tabs of your pages at one go. This is a huge problem, as time on site is one of the primary determinants of where advertisers spend their money.

Could HNers suggest more accurate ways of measuring time on site, and if there is an analytics service using the suggested method, please link to it?
+1 here! I started a canvas library[0][1] to draw hex grids and boxes, this would have been immensely useful! Maybe I can integrate it sometime in the future.

[0] example: http://hengles.net/piksel/
[1] https://github.com/rhengles/piksel/
Haha, I absolutely have - that was my initial seed list of companies, with a few of the most definitely non startups removed
There should be an xkcd about reposting xkcd when you can't add something meaningful to the conversation yourself.
That is definitely true. Personally, I feel fairly secure in putting my credit card info into web apps for free trials because of protection offered by the credit card company. If I have problems with charges that I don't want on the card, I can call them up and reverse them.

I see how some people's knee jerk reaction upon seeing that a credit card is required for a free trial would be to just close the tab and find a competitor, though.
OK, so it seems like you've found a good set of friends, which is good, but I'm still not sure that you experienced the full extent of the socialization that college offers. But, it's OK if you didn't, it is a high price to pay just to learn how to live with people. You'll be learning that anyway (or probably already have given the way you're travelling).

So my view on the CS degree was that you should have gotten it, not to get a stable job, but to make it easier to get ANY job that you're trying to get. I didn't say to accept the linear path, I just said that if you had a CS degree, it would be much easier to get hired, no matter where you go. And if you state what you're trying to do, there are some companies that will respect that. I interned for 3 months at a company before going to japan (a large one, at that), and they kept me on for the entire year while I was in japan, I worked from home for essentially an entire year. If they can do that for an intern, they can do way more for you, who has a good portfolio.

Also, how is your knowledge of CS theory? You're probably not going to run into automata theory working on simple websites, but it's kind something people expect you to at least have seen/know about.

Your staying plan does sound way cheaper, so that's awesome, sounds like you're gonna have a lot of great experiences under your belt.

At this point, I think you're pretty much set in what you're going to do though, and it seems like a great plan, with some luck
It's reported to run OK on the Nexus S device which is available used for around 125 - 150 USD. Another question for existing developers/users, how does the experience differ between the tier1 and tier2 devices?

Here's the video of B2G on the Nexus S: http://youtu.be/3b0Iy1V2RWc
Looks like it works better on the Keon: http://youtu.be/RyJFB4qzgzo
Free and opensource alternative: https://github.com/domesticcatsoftware/DCIntrospect
Nope. Google does not make money from Android. And with js apps inserting google ads into the app will be trivial. So no harm for them there.
* The scary reality is that right now that entire operation could be destroyed by a competitor in a couple minutes if they knew how... but the idea that the livelihoods of a dozen people could vanish if someone got a little bit ambitious deserves a better response*

Isn't this always the state of running a business, though? A new competitor can always come along out of the blue and undermine your complete offering or drastically undercut you on prices.
Here is probably the best thing I can sy about dealing with SEO... you should care a little, but you should really stop caring a lot.

What I mean is, you should totally care about SEO, and doing basic, simple things like targeting long tail traffic, some simple content syndication/distribution/guest posting, but mostly I've seen that the best results are the outcome of an ongoing process, not the fad of the day.

Creating content, being smart about it, but ignoring the day to day ebbs and flows of the SEO world will make you a much happier person because in most cases, your competition isn't doing anything at all, so putting any effort in at all is almost a win by default.
> Is it because the Win8 HTML5/JS apps are more closed-system-esque than Firefox OS apps will be?

Yes, basically. At least for me.
It comes down to trust. I trust Mozilla that they want to do good for the community. I trust Microsoft first and foremost wants to make money for their shareholders and only after that for the community. This is fine, they're a for-profit company. It's just that doing good for your shareholders doesn't always lead to doing good to the community.

Not to mention Microsoft doesn't exactly have the greatest of reputations when it comes to vendor lock-in issues.
Don't tell HMRC you said that, or the PCG. If any contractual engagement were necessarily disguised employment the way you just explained it, the former would be bringing in a small fortune in extra tax revenues while the latter would wheel out the lawyers.

I'm getting the feeling that rather like employees who've never considered going independent, there are quite a few people posting here who work as contractors in the sense you're describing (which I'm not saying is incorrect, just incomplete) and don't realise that there is a wider world where maybe other contractors don't work the same way.
> There is a trend towards emotional populist content on the internet.

Fixed that for you.
Except the distribution will be more like 20% for Apple and 80% for Android. The world does not revolve around the US.
NodeFly Buzz: Insto with Matt Collins
I felt opposed to ~ and @ first, before I got really exposed to using them myself again and again.
I'm not getting a login box. It would seem that it's defeated by Adblock (Chrome).

Edit: I am getting the login box when I go to the "single page" link. Removing the DOM elements works.
I think it is a very fair question. The first reason I want Mozilla to win here is that they don't want my data. They are pushing for stronger privacy in firefox, and although I love Chrome I don't think Google can ever support real browser privacy.

I am a fan of JS on windows 8 and winphone 8. However, I own a win7 phone and got burned by their non-backwards compatible upgrade to 8. So I have no love for MS, although I am a big fan of the tiled UI.

I think that FFOS will provide a better place where I can put together an app in Linux with vim. I don't want to install eclipse to write for Android, buy a macbook to write an iOSx app or install visual studio.

I hope that FFOS can be an easy to fiddle playground for me. We'll see.
Golint, a linter for Go source code
I never friended people I didn't wish to hear from to begin with. I've only ever unfriended one person, and I've never broken the 200-friend threshold, so I can't claim to have unfriended hundreds.
Will I be able to play Infinity Blade class games on it?
>> but no one else does

You and I apparently have drastically different pictures of G+.
Mozilla's openness wins it alot of praise. Not to mention, their technology truly has changed the web (Javascript anyone?), while MS has held back web development (they still don't support WebGL). With Firefox OS any web app is a FFOS app, with MS you need to go through their closed store, or their half-baked browser...

Firefox OS doesn't need an app ecosystem, they just need developers to make good web apps. Hence their tools like Javascript, Emscripten, and Asm.js... I've been testing the Aurora browser on Android, and it's already impressive how well interactive web apps work on their browser, I could definitely see Firefox OS taking off...
Yep. Current digital sensors at maximum sensitivity are measuring in the single-digit numbers of photons per photosite. They can't get much better.
Colophon for GOV.UK at launch
I have also not read the article but an opinion.
http://cl.ly/image/0k3p1b0b012B

This is my news feed at the moment. I tweeted a similar picture on Friday. At the top, there is a piece of content from Deadspin, which, while I do like them, but I don't need every update from. Beside that, it is 100% ads, six in total. Any other site, this would be considered completely unacceptable spam. The only ad I'm even remotely interested in on my sidebar is the Titleist irons and that is only because I recently bought a set, meaning i won't need another, so that's a pretty sure sign this ad is ineffective. Same with T. Rowe Price. I just opened a Schwab account, so I assume that was why I was targeted, but does it really make sense for T. Rowe Price to try to advertise for people who JUST opened a Schwab account? I'm really starting to wonder how this could possibly be useful to anyone.

I remember on my first day at Facebook, I sat in orientation while they explained to us why Google's advertising platform would be overtaken by Facebook's, and the idea was that they could figure out what people wanted to buy or were looking at, and then serve them an ad for something relevant. Cool idea and all, but 3 years later, this has clearly not happened, AT ALL. Facebook is still paying an engineering team hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out ways to more efficiently cram my browser full of spam. How is this useful for anyone except Facebook stockholders who want money?
emailed, thanks!
I think Google is trying to push ChromeOS as their desktop solution in the long term. If anything, I think Google will try to make ChromePhones.
The solution here is dead simple.

Shitty links should have no SEO value, rather than a negative value.

That eliminates the problem of people using bad links to hurt their competition.
I think this is a bad way to look at business.

What is the platform where your business makes money? That's the one to care about.
Yeah. To me, the pros and cons ought to assume you're Doing It Right; otherwise, you're probably better off learning to Do It Right than changing your approach.

I see the tradeoffs as:

Server-side rendering gives you better language choices, but it's more expensive to the site owner than serving static HTML/CSS/JS for pages and using AJAX for data only. Client-side rendering is often more performant for the end user than server-side, but that depends on the device and the application.

Which one makes sense, then, depends on whether client-side rendering is actually faster for your application and expected user device usage patterns, and how much you value better language choices versus lower server costs.

As with absolutely everything else in software, there's no one-size-fits-all correct answer.
Once I wanted to delete one of the blogs I had with Tumblr and, in the end, without understanding what was happening, I deleted my account instead. I'm usually very good understanding workflows so I got really surprised by that outcome. It was also not possible to recover any data. I kept a diary there so it really sucked.
I have ABP installed (Chrome + Mac). Still getting the login/signup/paywall. This is what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5814168
I'm not very familiar with Node, but I had assumed that a more flexible or movable client/server dividing line was the point of Node, and assumed it's what people were already doing... but maybe not. Can any Node afficianados speak to this question?
I've never heard the term "application developer" in a web context before -- in all the jobs I've looked at and companies I've worked with, the terms have been "front-end", "back-end", and "full stack" which is the combination of the two.

I agree that a full-stack developer should have familiarity with Linux, setting up servers, configuring MySQL in basic ways, and whatnot -- that's what the "backend" part is built on, of course. As you say, they need to be able to deploy an app. But their main job is coding, not administration.

So they only need familiarity with deploying, not expertise -- they should be able to get a few servers running for a startup with load balancing. They should not be expected to know the intricacies of MySQL tuning, network security, Linux security, network management, and so on. You're not going to expect a full-stack engineer to know how to use Wireshark. (Gravy if they do, of course.)

I'm just making the point that full stack does NOT include professional-level systems administration or database administration. A full-stack engineer is not a magical go-to guy who knows everything. It's just front-end plus back-end. It's firmly in the realm of coding, not administration.
Interesting, and useful info.

I am developing a similar application with a map and live data generated dynamically by my server. The difference with my app, is that the data will be global, not for one city.

The Citi Bike Map appears to load all of the data available regardless of map extent, which can be practical with a small dataset.

How do you deal with caching when the extent of the user's map is constantly changing? My server currently returns data relevant to the map extent only. If I were to get Cron to regularly crunch out one big global cache to send to the browser, I would kill my site.

I am assuming the best option would be to figure out some sort of tiling scheme.

If anyone out there has any ideas about that, I am all ears!
> 1. Most stuff being shared is of no value to most people. Does not encourage exchange of good ideas.

These two concepts are not at all the same thing. Social communications between friends and family are not idea-based, they are fact-based. "How was your day?" "How's your sister?" "What happened to your face?" "How are you feeling?" "Did you get that new car?" etc. People want just want a taste of the other person's life and emotional state. Facebook is great for that.

I agree that Facebook is not great for exchanging and discussing ideas. As you point out, that is why forums like HN have grown at the same time as Facebook has grown.
I have ltdex.com, a designer t-shirt site with inventory (100 or so blank american apparel) 50-75 printed. We had a fab sale last summer, and I make 100 or so in revenue per month (4 shirt sales). I don't have time to do any marketing, but someone who posts a lot to tumblr etc, could do really well with it.
So why did you friend a load of people you don't really know?

It's like going to a great restaurant, ordering five times as much as you can eat and then complaining about the food.
I am a bit worried about the performance of the phone, too. Couldn't find reliable benchmarks of the chipset, yet.
Separate from the fact that a comparison between sharecropping and developing for Microsoft is absolutely absurd, pretending like the only jobs available in the developer community are dependent on either Google or app stores is ridiculous.

It's not ironic, and it's not true. Being a developer gives more freedom and more pay than the vast majority of jobs. The fact that there are some developer jobs that are gasp dependent on large companies in the field does nothing to change this.
I can attest to the quality of this print, I got mine a while back and it is quite nice. Still looking for a frame like the one in the photos though.
Justices Allow Police to Take D.N.A. Samples After Arrests
The browser is not the only place that can cache HTTP responses - proxy caches from the client's ISP and/or local WAN or corporate intranets should also obey caching rules in the HTTP response headers.

HTTP caching works. The problem with the bike share site in my opinion is instead of using established methods for scaling (like HTTP caching) and other good practices they reinvented the wheel as a Rube Goldberg monstrosity which, big surprise, didn't work.

Remember kids - don't scale until you need to.
I didn't accuse MTK of stealing IP.

I was pointing out that most games are optimized for the Snapdragon and Tegra families of chips. So unless MTK is "borrowing" the IP from one of those two, many games aren't going to run great.
What exactly do you propose Firefox OS apps to be written on in developing countries? Computers that aren't powerful enough to run Eclipse would likely be no better (in price or productivity) than an Android tablet with a cheap Bluetooth keyboard.
The Hidden Costs of Starting a Company
Well, for those of us who are specialized, perhaps something like philosophy would be a valuable addition? A combination of very high-level and very low-level skills can compliment each other well.
$230 seems like way too much. There are much cheaper cloud services: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain. Which would probably make the practice much more widespread.
Azure continues to improve
Historical and current data on startup valuations, angel and venture capital
Especially as all the data seems to be there, it's just got 'display: none' in the css.

The only reason I can think of is to stop ugly flashes as it zebra-stripes it. There's surely better solutions for that?