skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Poornima tells us how they overcame product challenges when building Mint.com
"Warning
All machines of the future need a modern browser and javascript to be turned on."

Smartarse comments like that instantly sour me when visiting a new site.
I would hope so. It shouldn't matter how "easy" something is to find. If the bug was really that easy, the team should have never let it out onto production.
Recently tried out DigitalOcean for a couple of small projects and already noticed some network reliability issues. My droplet was un-accessible for a couple of hours (at least) yesterday. Fortunately, it was for a non-production project and they were able to restore it within about a 1/2 hour. Verdict is still out for me, although I suspect that reliability will improve with time. I'm keeping production at Linode.
It strikes me that the BBC is hilariously bad at archival. They scrapped dozens of Doctor Who episodes in the name of saving space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes).
Hahaha, too true. "Insider trading" is totally a made-up crime, intended more for the selective-enforcement convenience of our superiors in the Justice Department than for "the public". If the public wasn't so damn greedy, they'd invest in T-bills like good subjects. Leave the "high-yield" investing for those who are in the loop. That way NSA staff and their friends in Congress and on K Street can get all the money there is to be made by trading on their contract decisions.
According to the ruling, their patent specifies a sequence of nucleotides of cDNA independent of any method used to create them. I read that to mean that any BRCA1 or BRCA2 cDNA that matches that exact sequence would be infringing on Myriad's patent, regardless of how it was created.
I am pretty certain that he, the_mitsuhiko (aka. Armin Ronacher), being the main developer behind Werkzeug and Flask knows exactly how long bottle.py is.
Susan Kare thinks new “flat” iOS 7 icons are A-OK
>Who has a greater moral character? Someone who puts all their effort into the public service with the skills they have, or someone who has some positive benefit on the public merely incident to his lucrative job?

Surely it's whoever achieved the best outcome, irrespective of how they achieved it.

>Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

Citation needed. There was an economist article here a few months ago on how the UN's world development goals have been achieved ahead of schedule, not because of well-meaning NGOs but simply because of cheap manufacturing in China. The great thing about working in for-profit industry is that the invisible hand eliminates inefficiencies. In the public and charitable sector the incentives are entirely backwards - good, efficient charities that solve the problems they were created in response to put themselves out of business, while inefficient, ineffective charities just grow bigger and bigger.

>Also, by your reasoning, Goldman Sachs (which donates like $250 million a year to public service causes) is a far greater force for good than the EFF (which has a budget of $3.5 million). Now, the EFF might be more efficient at doing good than Goldman's charities, but is it 70x more efficient?

That's true as far as it goes, but we'd expect a bigger organization to have more impact. It's probably fairer to consider some kind of "goodness factor" - amount of good done as a proportion of market cap or some such measure. But yes, Goldman does do a lot of good that largely goes unrecognized.
I've seen people try that. I've seen them break the back button.

Users were not happy.
Python+Django Resources
I know a fair amount of C/++/Java and have started to learn python+django for a couple webapp projects I have in mind.

Ive started with this book for learning some basic python.
http://www.diveinto.org/python3/

What other resources are good for learning python/django?
Patents are silly !
Show HN: Please Critique My Vocabulary Building Tool for Japanese
I built a Japanese vocabulary building tool that pulls words and phrases from popular media, like songs and tv shows. I would love some feedback on whether or not the concept resonates. You can check it out at http://lexicandy.com/ and follow us at @lexicandyapp.

I believe the problem with most pre made lists isn't that you didn't make them. It's that the words are often completely disconnected from content you use regularly. A pre made deck of thousands of words sounds great at first, but then you realize using it is about as fun as memorizing a dictionary… because that's essentially what you're doing.

The idea is to break vocabulary building into small chunks, with the goal being to fully understand the material the words are being drawn from. So while you may not be fluent after learning all the words from, say, the first episode of Honey and Clover, you will be able to watch an entire episode in Japanese.

You'll get a free starter deck for signing up, so no one has to spend any money to check things out. But additional decks must be purchased at 3 cents a word. Here's why:

1. I want to be able to provide a wide variety of accurate content. That means hiring native Japanese speakers to pull the words from the songs, videos, etc.

2. I want to be able to provide explanations for slang, cultural references, colloquialisms… all the things that make a language come alive. Again, that means hiring native speakers to annotate.

3. I want to build more than the basic flashcard program that's there now. Most online language apps use gamification elements, but as an avid gamer I'm into actual games. I'll need money to build both competitive and single player experiences.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?
I don't see the great similarities between iOS 7 and any microsoft interfaces. Can you say more about which product they "copied" and what design features specifically make you think that?
Ask HN: Is Chrome now the standard for web developers?
I've been using Firefox in combination with Firebug for years and it seemed that most web developers are quite fond of that combination. But in the recent year or so the development of Firebug not only has slowed down, but seems to be target of mockery.

I've been listening to a ton of podcasts this year and everytime the topics browser or development tools comes up people are talking about Chrome. Sometimes mentioning Firefox with a certain tone that implies "If you're still using that old...".

I'm surprised. I like Firefox as my main browser. But there is probably a connection between the development speed of Firebug and the popularity of Chrome's developer tools. Having two browsers running using only one of them to develop feels rather odd, but I feel like I'm missing out otherwise.

What happened that made Firefox vanish out of the vocabulary of most developers?
The quick-start guide to dynamic search ads
’Can't innovate anymore, my ass': Apple's bravado clouds real challenges
I don't really understand what this article is saying or if there's any point to it. It reads like a lot of overly grandiose back-patting with very little substance.

How is the iOS7 redesign different to that of Android and Windows Phone redesigns? Is it just so awe-inspiring and amazing because Apple did it?

I thought people were starting to get past having a verbal orgasm every time Apple did anything and were instead ready to treat them like any other company. I guess we're not quite there yet.
Open source mobile analytics platform coded entirely in Javascript
Sadly I don't think so. I believe in that case it was certain that documents did exist and one party was just refusing to produce them. In this case, the NSA is neither prosecution nor defense, and therefore doesn't have the same disclosure requirements. Further, there's no proof the NSA has such records. But, like most people in this thread, I am not a lawyer.
What made them win the PC war was what landed them in federal court.

By controlling the Windows ecosystem they could "disrupt" any competitors trying to produce applications, pushing Office while alternatives struggled, and they could use Office to push Windows.

Charging OEMs a flat "per-CPU" fee for licensing meant that Microsoft was getting paid regardless of the OS being shipped on the system. They eventually had to stop doing this, but came up with other ways of achieving the same effect.

There's no Office for game consoles. No matter how popular your title is, another platform will have an exclusive of their own that's just as compelling. They can't strong-arm OEMs because they are the one making and selling the hardware.

Linux has all the technology needed to overcome Windows, lacking only fit and finish.
So my advice would be to pick an idea you're passionate about, keep working on it relentlessly, and cut down on reading tech news.

OK, great, but what if there is no market for it?

This advice sounds just like, "Do what you love and the money will follow."

I'm deeply skeptical. It sounds like magical thinking.

Somewhere is this are all sorts of assumptions about marketing and sales that just sort of happens.
A Day in the Life of a Mobile Consumer
Marry her.

I'm only slightly joking. A couple of a hacker and a liberal-arts major seems like a good way to transfer ideas and understanding between the two communities.
Obama administration blocked anti-FISA clause in EU
Is this too good to be true?

I'll give you a project...all specced out...details on trello...you can take from open source projects already slightly ahead of us...graphics as needed...

And if you can build a working proto that the client approves (which I've already sold), I'll even pay you.

Interested? What's your story?

Steve Brett
steven.b.brett@gmail.com
http://tiny.cc/nnjmyw
Thanks, I am already aware :) Two recent finds on that site I've been listening to a lot are Mindsphere - Inner Cyclone (old school melodic goa) and Pavel Svimba - Space Babuska (real crazy, poppy psy, reminds of Haltya, some great mixing/mastering, way too distracting for this thread though :) ).

This site shows that it is in fact possible to offer great quality music online for free & legal download. I'm frankly amazed actually, just how it can be. These producers must love their craft so much.
Paywall for me... :(
But there's no reason the product cDNA should be patentable. It's that a cDNA is, quite literally, just a different storage medium from mRNA. It'd be like saying you can't patent X because it's in .doc format but if you make it a PDF we'd be happy to let you patent it.
Atty. In Fla. Robbery Case Seeks NSA Phone Records
That's one of the most interesting idea i've read about apple and steve jobs in a long time.
I wonder if any management consultant start brainstorms with "why do you think Apple made it to the top ?".

Plus, with the strong duality between Apple public image (the cool, artistic oriented company) and steve jobs internal (supposed) behavior, that gives plenty of room for people to project their own frustrations :)))
You hit the nail on the head =]

The growth has been fantastic and we are super excited. Unfortunately managing it requires as much work as engineering new features. The good news is we've been hiring and growing the team and we're hopeful we'll get back to our regular development schedule in the next 2 months after we've gotten everyone up to speed and worked out some of the speed bumps. =]
1. Very Fast, usually less than 15 minutes (less than 5 to an emergency) during the day. And within 10 or so minutes for an escalation (from monitoring or person) 24/7.

2. Two server stacks (co-location and in house). ~ 8 or so physical servers each place. Workstations are about 50 with most being very simple machines in the manufacturing area.

3. It was a flat fee. My guess is it was ~
This is widely reported size of the waste, but as I understand it, because the program was cancelled 'only' £2bn was wasted.
This is not actually true, I am not aware of much info on CMS roll outs, but large CRM and ERP software projects at private enterprises fail all the time.

This is very common, I think perhaps the hacker news crowd probably have more experience with real software behemoths like google, facebook, microsoft and/or scrappy smaller start ups. Perhaps in those realms this doesnt occur because software delivery is their bottom line. In run of the mill fortune 500 companies major software projects fail commonly, and CRM and ERP projects fail even more frequently and have price tags in the 10s of millions, and when they fail the company has no choice but to roll out a new one
Similarly, self-citation is a known issue.

http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/SCSP-09.html
I picked up flask for a one off helpdesk request frontend for someone a few months ago.

Compared to asp.net, its an absolute joy to work with. It makes me not want to grind my face off with a blunt spoon :)

Glad to see some awesome progress with it.
Microsoft has no hope of becoming an IBM.

IBM manufactures lots of hardware, produces new technology it licenses, and has an enormous software consulting division. Microsoft does none of these things.

If anything, Microsoft will become like Computer Associates (CA Technologies), a company that milks products enterprise is hooked on and can't quit, squeezing money out of these things for decades to come.
Their setup works well with companies that are willing and able to pay tons for a setup that works well top to bottom.

Last job used MS for everything, but they got a setup which worked well and anyone they hired could use. Plus it's well supported (although they were stuck on XP still, that's going to be lots of money).
So I'm not super familiar with drug patent laws - can those synthetic version and naturally occurring version be identical (as in chemically) or does the natural one need to be subtly different (e.g. extra methyl group, or whatever)?
Ask HN: Java and PHP rant
Why so much hate on Java and PHP? two very marketable and ubiquitous languages but everyone seems to hate them? what is wrong with these two languages.

Java personally seems to be a simple and pretty language to me I can see why the hate on PHP the thing is ugly but it still seems to get the job done fast and simple.

why do hackers seem to hate the most popular languages?
Defending NSA PRISM's Big Data Tools
I've used them for a few personal projects. I've loved everything so far.
So obviously hyperbole for colour. Thought that was clear from including a coffee-fetcher for the coffee-fetcher. But it's fact that that getting to any real responsibility involves playing a long game of politics that inherently doesn't value merit very highly - and that the guy who saves 1% at Facebook did not have to jump through those hoops to get to there. Which loops back to my assertion that it's not a sound conclusion that the Facebook guy could have done more in public service.

> It kills me to see people who get free sodas and 150k while commenting on Hacker News presume that a workplace they've never been is some wasteful USSR-esque bureaucracy.

Interestingly, that does not seem to extend to the same demographic presuming that government magically became efficient throughout because they were pushed a little on budgets?

> If you're looking for a corporate mess with no cost accountability, look at the big government contractors.

If there were all straight lines and accountability in the government, then their contractors wouldn't be getting away with it.
Copyright would be more appropriate there. Children could be considered derivative works, but I don't see how they could be patent infringement.
Two things that made me laugh watching the video:

1) That some very official looking people are forced to address him as Mr. Dotcom... which is on my list of the most ridiculous names a person could give themselves.

2) The giant statue of a rino in his yard. Really? A Rino?
I think this may be the story you intended to include with your second link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842510

http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
The author of this article was a victim of the availability bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
This summary has been somewhat debunked:

http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/06/nsa-poll-you-are-readi...
You're on HN, so I can deduce that you have a very good mental model of how consumer Operating Systems work, this includes the FS. Lots of people have very poor mental models of OSes (and File Systems/Directory organization). This is true for newcomers but also for people who have been working with computers for years.

>The iPhone, when connected to the computer, can be accessed like any other filesystem. You move files in and out of a folder called iPhone/Music.

People have problems with that. You don't, but it's a big issue to a lot of people.

How about this, they turn on iTunes all their iTunes music is available. They turn on music app on their iPhones, and all their music available (streamed or downloaded). Every song they buy, is automatically synced to all their devices.

Which is easier? Which one requires you to understand "syncing", or file systems, or copy-pasting vs. moving, or a thousand other little things that you need to have a handle on, just to listen to music on your devices.
An Office Landscape Designed to Kill Boring Meetings
It doesn't matter that cDNA is similar to something found in nature. The fact is that DNA complementary to the mature spliced mRNA sequences of the BRCA1/2 genes does not exist in nature.
Because most of big and horrendeous systems are written in them. And maintaining such systems is a PITA.

And Ruby/Python are much more productive.
What is the differentiation between the colo servers, and the in-house? I am imagining that everything on site, ran the day to day "office" stuff (email, active directory etc); and the colo was something else?
You must be joking - http://chris.millr.org/ios-7-looks-familiar-cant-quite-put-m...
I first found digital ocean on lowendbox when they were opening and even though I only host side projects on there, I've never had a problem with them.

I was never aware of their performance when compared to Linode and Rackspace until that one comparison on HN several months ago. With that being said, from their expansion from 10,000 instances when I first signed up to over 200,000 today, I have been, thoroughly, impressed with their servers and overall operation.
Ah, I understand your frustration now. Thanks for the clarification.
Well, I wouldn't say that...cDNA patents are like saying "You can't copyright that public domain book in .doc format but if you make it a PDF you can". cDNA is no different than post-transcriptional mRNAs that have already been processed to remove introns (Which is part of the "unnatural" claim) in terms of the data stored; cDNA and mRNA are just two different storage mediums. Albeit they have some different biological consequences but thats nothing special as far as patents should be concerned
Because it was made to be taken anywhere you go. As I see it, Microsoft is marketing their new console for online gaming. It worked for Diablo 3 and Sim City, don't see why they wouldn't try to pull this one.
Well, that actually may fly (arguably). The difference between that and the "warrant canary" is that you are not specifically taking an action in response to the NSL that is designed to notify another person in violation of the order/letter. What you are talking about is more of an intrusion detection system.
I've personally worked at 3 large organizations that have tried to formulate and develop an all-encompassing content management system. One of those organizations is a broadcaster that was also trying to build a digital content management system.

Every single one of those projects has been a total boondoggle. Always over budget. Always changing scope. Always missing every single milestone and deadline.

Now, I know that this is not a statistically significant sample size, but this sort of thing seems to be more common that I initially thought. It's like the worst-case scenario of design-by-committee.
Skillshare wants to pay your student debt while you build life skills
You need to put yourself in your target markets shoes. You have to close your eyes, visualize their day, visualize their life, and see how it ties into your application and whether your application truly solves their problem.

Or go talk them and not guess what their day is like or whether your code solves their problems.

Asking people if they would use your app is pointless since there is no prototype

I first want to know what their actual problems are, not what I naively assume them to be. And I would not discuss a potential program in the abstract, but get feedback on something concrete.

Find an idea, see what problem is solves, and fly with it. Better yet, just try to solve your own problems, don't think about whether it will make you a billionaire. Worst case scenario is you have a cool project you were passionate about and can add to your portfolio.

Thanks, but I did that. It was fun, I learned a lot. Didn't pay my bills. I have a lot of fun projects to keep me busy. What I want is an income.

"Follow your bliss" and the endless variations of that are trite.

Passion may be necessary, it's certainly a goal, but it isn't sufficient.
The only reason failed content management system isn't an oxymoron is that content management system is three words.
Because then we start training users to just ignore those warnings about self signed certs and effectively destroy SSL because man in the middle attacks are made easy.

and I just saw your clarification. Who doesn't use self signed for that?

For that matter, you can do that within and organization and just push out your CA cert company wide. Save some money.
Gad, I am so sick of SEO. Not Jacques article, but SEO in general.

Google owns the game. They run the game on a computer. Ergo, if you want people naturally coming from Google, you must do things its computer likes.

Only they won't tell you that. Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody links to you, you ain't getting no traffic.

And I think it's unfair to call all these guys leeches, miscreants, or whatever. I don't like a lot of the things they do, but I also respect the fact that I live in a first world country. I have a good way of living. If I were terribly impoverished and only had to spam a lot to feed my family? I'd do it. We assume everybody else on the web lives the same lives that we do. We also are getting this quasi-religious thing going on where Google must return what I want at the top of the search results. If it does not, somebody has sinned. I'm not drinking that cool-aid.

I'm with Jacques on the solution: a new protocol and the elimination of single-points-of-failure. This thing where Google keeps updating it's algorithm and tens of thousands of people keep gaming the system has to stop. It's not healthy behavior either for Google or for the spammers. And it's destroying the web.

Sidebar: you know, if you think about it, with all the walled gardens and vendors refusing common protocols and such, the web itself is under attack from multiple angles.
I used digital ocean to setup a mirror test environment.

How is their reliability? I noticed once or twice it I would lose connectivity.

I have quite a few boxes on linode and thinking about switching over production infrastructure.

EDIT --- And today damn linode decides to go down.