skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this writer of this post is more than a little ignorant of the class that he is in and the class that the people he has been meeting are in. As a personal account from someone honestly expressing his own opinion I still think it was a good read but it makes way too many assumptions that are wrong.

For one thing it is really wrong to talk about the "culture" of America. Even just in the same state, even in the same county, the culture of people can vary widely. Just go to Palo Alto, talk to the super friendly people there (because the billionaires wear hoodies and they don't know how much money you have) then try to find the black people (oh they are there .. there are lots of them .. can you find them?) and see if you can talk to them and get them to open up and see what their culture is like. In the south, go to a white church and a black church and then come tell me if they have the same culture. This sort of thing happens all over the world as well. Unless you have stayed in a country for YEARS I don't think you can even begin to understand the intricacy of cultures in that area.

Generalizing a people by their country is no more (or less) accurate than generalizing people by their gender or the color of their skin. It's not completely inaccurate but it is completely wrong a lot of times.
1. Whats wrong with the style - its short and simple. similar to www.medium.com

2. Everyone has been reviewing the beta - apparently you don't know anything bout design lol.. wake up and see the world.
I launched my first SaaS (https://www.wisecashhq.com - cash flow forecasting for freelancers and SBOs) in private beta one year ago.

I enabled the (upfront) paywall a couple of weeks ago and have currently 15 or so paying customers (the early adopters got a 20% lifetime discount).

For marketing, I'm going to use twitter, useful blog posts (educational, howtos) related to cashflow AND how to start your own SaaS successfully.

In terms of getting traction, I think that putting a very basic landing page a year and a half ago helped me get traction - I mentioned the product quite often on twitter while working on it.
So.... the answer to the question in the title is "by law".

The article seems to answer a different question: "Why do Internet firms invest resources in implementing software which aids the NSA's surveillance?" Because otherwise, the NSA will build it themselves, and force the companies to install it inside their datacenters.
I am reminded of this cartoon, http://pbfcomics.com/111/
Awesome work! How did you use Bloom filters to achieve low latency lookup?
Agreed. This analysis article [1] they refer to is overrated. Its almost as bad as the flame war articles that it criticizes mostly because it makes giant leaps of reasoning whenever that suits the author's point of view

For example, author answers the question "how does JS performance compare to native performance exactly?" by takinig a random benchmark from the benchmarks game. What I was hoping for was comparison with desktop browser in

- dom manipulation
- canvas
- css animation performance

There are different problem domains, each requiring different kind of performance. The randomly picked benchmark is probably the one that is most removed from real world usage.

And from my personal experience, the worst performance bottlenecks in mobile JS apps are in DOM rendering and manipulation, not in raw JS speed. But my problem domain isn't games and image processing: instead it involves news reader, presentation editor, GPS tracking, tiled map rendering, exercise diary and stats app, and an app that makes Google Docs run on the iPad.

Interestingly enough, all iOS devices younger than iPhone 4 can do all of the above smoothly, even in a WebView where supposedly nitro is disabled, while the WebView on Android devices stutters and struggles to achieve 30 FPS, sometimes going down to 2-3 FPS even on modern devices and the latest version. So really, the raw JS performance already doesn't matter for my usage cases.

Its the variable rendering performance and behavior of Android's WebView that is the main problem. As soon as you think that you've found a solution to a certain rendering speed problem that works across all Android devices, a new version of Android appears on a certain device and invalidates that assumption by being slow as molasses in January.

Another example that makes it hard for me to take this article seriously:

"It’s slower than server-side Java/Ruby/Python/C# by a factor of about 10"

How can he claim this with a straight face? Java itself is faster than Ruby by a factor of 10 - can he try to be a bit more accurate when making claims?

I agree with one statement of the article, however. "Let’s raise the level of discourse". However, this article doesn't do that at all.

[1]: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...
> We didn’t even invent modern democracy. There were parliamentary systems in England and other parts of Europe over a hundred years before we created government.

AFAIK, England's parliament, prior to the US, could not remotely be described as a democracy. Indeed, it was well over a hundred years later that this would be the case.

I have no idea what he means by "other parts of Europe". My best guess would be San Marino, which has had a democratic-ish thing going for a very long time. But San Marino was (and indeed is) pretty far from a modern democracy in any sense of the term.

The US might not have a lot of things going for it. But I think it's fair to say that it's the first modern democracy.
Also, jffry appears to have figured out the name of the other version of this site. http://findafuckingdomain.com is a humor version using the same backend. ;)
Scheduling background tasks in Play made easy: A mailer bot example
True. But Readable or Readability makes it go away.
Very cute cats
Why don't you check those cute cat pictures and let's have fun!
Very fast, but to be perfectly honest, still a bit useless for actually finding a business domain name without support for other TLD's.

My base point of comparison is domai.nr which does a pretty speedy job across numerous TLDs.
The 9 USD Arduino compatible board made by a non-profit
Nice idea, I could really use this sometimes.

However, when I search for namemonk.com it tells me that it's totally available. How reliable is this?
Ugh. I'm a Canadian who is repelled by Rick Mercer's way of feeding Canadians' blind spots and prejudices back to them. His comedy is smug. He is not a truth-teller—he shows people what they want to see.

Canadian prejudice against Americans has little to do with Americans and much to do with ourselves. It's a national neurosis (at least among the educated classes) which we're mostly unaware of. It quickly becomes obvious to Americans who notice it, though. I've had many conversations with American friends about this. Luckily for us, most Americans' feelings toward Canada are uncomplicated, friendly and warm, so they have no idea how far from reciprocated this is. It's also lucky for us that they think we're cute and don't take us seriously, because if they did they'd find a lot to be offended by.

The most curious aspect of Canadian prejudice against Americans is how openly and proudly we proclaim it, as if it could be nothing but endearing. This is a consequence of its being mostly unconscious.
Reminds me of http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/
CTRL+ALT+DEL on old Windows used to open the real task manager

Really? Define "old Windows?"

I have vague memories of the "three finger salute" invoking a reboot on Windows 3.1, as well as MS-DOS. (early 1990's)
A legendary offshore danger
I periodically download the 8GB com.zone root name file from Verisign and compress it into a set Bloom filters that allow for very fast lookup while using less memory than a textual hash. For fast responses, the filters are served over a UNIX domain socket to the WebSocket server on the backend.
Well, I never said static languages suck :) I really like static typing actually, and have seriously thought about using TypeScript or Dart. I've also got years of professional experience with C++ and AS3 and I love them both. I think Java is a fantastic language. And Objective-C...is growing on me ;)

What I did say was that I can be just as productive in those languages as I am in JavaScript, if not more so. It remains to be seen whether I can gain more productivity with TypeScript or Dart.
His FAQ page says the data is refreshed every 24 hours.

> whois namemonk.com
...
Creation date: 13 Jul 2013 03:26:00
Expiration date: 13 Jul 2014 03:26:00
It's pretty accurate, with about a 24 hour delay. Namemonk was registered yesterday and hasn't been updated in the root data dump from Verisign yet.
Haunted Dreams
Same experience for me -- I couldn't justify buying Computer Shopper when pricewatch.com was far more timely. I did enjoy the column with Alice and Bob and that kept me buying it for a little while longer.
> I have no idea what he means by "other parts of Europe".

Iceland perhaps?
I can't verify, because I can't find old WordPerfect docs, but I remember hearing that CTRL + ALT + DEL was save for WordPerfect. The hint was that MS chose that as a monopoly-extending tactic. Might be thinking of ALT + F4, though, and this might be total nonsense.
Yours has to be the most dickish comment on a comment I've ever read on HN. Congratulations.
What is it that you've added to the conversation again ? Nothing.
"They burn out"

I think you misspelled "wise up"
Yes, you're looking for Norvig's "design patterns in high level languages" presentation, here:

http://norvig.com/design-patterns/

Fair warning: it reiterates Rayiner's point upthread.
How to email a famous person
Estonia publishes its e-voting source code
How does the mob get away with no estimates?
Relevant article: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/estonia-publishes...
"The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered"

The whole thing is one big correlation confirmation. I was hoping to find something substantial that would explain the underlying cause.
Pretend-smart pablum.
"but unless you actually are Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison (which is unlikely) then most people around the world are simply not going to care. There are exceptions of course. And those exceptions are called English and Australian people."

What? I don't know any Australian people who would be impressed by American people just because they are from the US. Perhaps you didn't pick up on our sense of humour? Or perhaps you meant Australian politicians?
I'm not going to debate why the republican's platform is bad, I'm just going to throw my opinion in that I believe it only serves a minority of the country.

I don't post here to stroke my ego. I could not care less what someone on Hacker News thinks of my ideas or perceptions, although I do enjoy quality discourse.

Go take a look at historical trends with regards to polling on gay marriage: http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx

You can CLEARLY see how public sentiment towards gay marriage has changed over the last 10-15 years. Either this occurred because of people changing their belief structure (doubtful) or because people with one mindset aged out of the population.
Also says domicilio.com is available. I think it's using simple dns lookups, if you made a whois call to the domain you will see that the domain is registered but is not in use.
Ethanol plays havoc with small engines. A couple of years ago I forgot to make sure the tank was empty and the fuel lines were cleared before winter. In the spring I had to take it to a lawn mower repair shop and plop down $50 just to clean out the gummed-up lines. It's even worse - and more expensive - for boat motors.
Dropbox de-duplicates data. That means that if you are storing the exact same file as I am, then Dropbox only stores that file once. It is possible to do something similar with encryption but it is far less efficient.
Hi! I just graduated high school, but spent most of my time hanging out in research labs at a university. If you happen to live close to a public university/college, I would recommend seeing if you can take classes (some states in the U.S. allow for students to take university level classes for free, don't know what the policies are for where you live!) or working with some of the labs. High school is horribly dull, but if you find a way to make it work for you, it can lead to larger opportunities and allow for you to build up a CV/resume while enjoying teenager-y things like school clubs/sports.
The author's discussion of healthcare seems a bit off, or at least misleading, to me. I'll freely admit I'm not an expert and my understanding is that the healthcare system in the United States has all kinds of perverse incentives and lack thereof, etc.

That said:
The author (and others) mention people getting surgery and the like for free. This doesn't seem accurate to me: doctors and nurses must be payed, medicines acquired, hospitals run, etc. The cost may be collected differently (taxation vs. insurance or at time of service) and various systems may be more or less efficient. But except in rare edge cases, no system is free.

Speak of medicine, yes, drugs are more expensive in the US than elsewhere. My understanding is that there are multiple reasons for this, including that some countries with nationalized healthcare can negotiate in bulk, Americans have more to spend, and the insane cost of R&D is primarily recouped in the American market. The rest of the world quite literally has subsidized pharmaceuticals. Edit: which is not to say that drugs are not in fact unusually expensive in the USA. But it is misleading to blithely imply that other countries are less messed up because they have cheaper pharmaceuticals.

Finally, the snarky comments about profit seem a bit off the mark. Do we believe that the food industries in other countries are not interested in profit?
I looked up the author's bio to check which pronoun to use and also did a double take when I saw "senior editor at The Atlantic." I am hoping it is just a case of pandering to the nerd stereotype. The only other explanation is that Atlantic's online push has dramtically lowered the bar for quality.

I fondly remember going over each page of Computer Shopper before going to the Computer Fair to price out a new 486. But I also remember subscribing to VF so I could get my Christopher Hitchens fix.
Original article is behind a paywall (http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130703/ncomms3057/full/nco...), and author's page (http://theory.physics.unige.ch/~brunner/) does not have a PDF :(
Didn't address how the "system is screwed up, restart" sequence was adopted as the "do this to initiate first login".
The U.S. can be called a modern democracy only after 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified.
Iranian Hackers Post Images Over JFK Airport From UAV That Was Hijacked In March
Off topic political rant. Flagged.
That's a great approach I've thought of before -- so how big does the bloomified version end up being?
As far as I can tell, everything he says is grounded in fact or is at least cogently supported. I intend to follow some of his pointers and read more.

On the other hand, your comment is strangely and unintentionally self referential.
I think that's an accurate observation. Ironically, if you only code with a library then it's easy to lose track of what that library actually does for you.

Writing a bit of "raw" code can really make you understand why jQuery may do things in a certain way or why they have chosen certain abstractions.
I appreciate the altruism but lacking any profit margin is typically a bad idea. Non profits make a little bit of profit to pay people and handle the usual unexpected bumps businesses go through. If it turns out each board ends up costing $10 (and he really isn't padding the cost), he's screwed and will either have to eat the dollar or get the backers to agree to the dollar increase.
The incident reported back in March via LATimes: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/05/nation/la-na-nn-faa-...

Back-story on the series of on-going hacks by Iranians against US entities/corporations: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/ir-hack-forum.htm
Historically, there have been large sugar tariffs shielding the domestic sugar industry. There have been some recent changes, like raised tariff-free limits or NAFTA allowing free imports from Mexico, but the market is still used to corn syrup being the most economical choice.
Apparently it got pivoted:

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
Actually it doesn't. Those who strike gold will always make more than the shovel salesmen, just have much much lower odds. But, when the general population of gold diggers realizes the odds are poor the shovel salesmen will still go out of business.

I've always hated applying this hackneyed phrase to bubble tech, because the meta product makers end up being just as silly looking as the product makers when trends change, and often in a worse position for transition.
SEO for small Online Business
> A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

I have my suspicions about HFCS, but what's not clear from the way this was written, and I suspect is the kicker here, is the access to line. Is it the same calorically balanced diet PLUS sucrose water or HFCS water, or is it the same calorically balanced diet INCLUDING sucrose water or HFCS water. The difference between the two of those is massive, and I would bet it's the former not the latter.
Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, English Bill of Rights 1689, the Monarchy never since had absolute power, there was always a powerful parliament.

The English Civil War, a few decades earlier, was fought between pro-parliament (Oliver Cromwell) and pro-monarchist forces.

Without these events, it's unlikely the U.S. would have been founded explicitly as a Republic. As it was, Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists argued at the constitutional convention for an elective monarchy. (Which is why the presidency is more powerful than the anti-federalists and others would have liked)
JIT is a feature to get around lack of performance in stack-oriented, archaic, bytecode VM. I'm not going to argue about it's practical performance merit, but it's not really an advantage over a native code compiler found in bunch of other languages (since it is a native code compiler itself).

GC has arguably been the best thing Java brought along into mainstream, but it has been a solved problem for a while. The strategy that Java GC adopts, while a natural fit for Java and a host of other procedural languages, is suboptimal for many others.
It wasn't supposed to be an insult. My last Windows experience was XP and the TFS invoked the Task Manager on that OS. I never used 3.1, so I don't know. But the GP seemed to suggest that the Task Manager shortcut has changed in newer versions.
But mistermann is right; his point is the critical one, and you've responded to it by changing the subject.

Another humorist who does this, in a meaner way, is Sasha Baron-Cohen. The lesson here is not how ridiculous the people being ridiculed are, but rather: Who controls the editing controls everything. Christopher Hitchens said brilliantly about the dinner party scene in Borat that it showed not how racist Americans are, but how polite they are.

Mercer's portrayals of Americans are not portrayals of Americans at all, but of Canadians' self-congratulatory caricatures of Americans. It makes me cringe with embarrassment.
>No, the Internet companies have said that's not what's happening.

Ah, it's ok then.
Unfortunately neither can I! I'm sure they had one when DuckDuckHack was first announced but the docs have changed a lot since then.
If you could add more TLDs, you could win me away from https://domize.com/
Recent versions of Windows have been incredibly stable. Are you sure you don't have hardware issues?
Great! Same thing I've been doing with mine (http://sociostock.com) with regards to the lander. I've reviewed some landing page debates from the likes of 37signals, but was curious as to how often you altered your design and the effect it had on signups/conversions?
Besides ARM and x86, Android also runs on MIPS and PPC.
As PC magazines go, I have to admit, I kinda miss Computer Shopper. Some of my earliest, and fondest, memories of getting started in computing involve poring over issues of that magazine, reading the columns, drooling over the parts advertised in the copious ads, and dreaming about ordering up a motherboard, case, power supply, video card, etc., and building a computer from scratch.

As history would have it, that's pretty close to what I did. I bought a 386DX/40 motherboard and CPU, a whopping 1 megabyte of RAM, and a few other bits, as I pieced together my first PC. Then a guy I went to school with offered to sell me a dead 286 box that had a good power supply, videocard, floppy drives, etc., that I needed, so I bought that, and cobbled together this Frankenstein's PC of a computer. Got myself a 28.8 modem and start exploring BBS's, Tymnet and Telenet networks, reading Phrack magazine, got into phone phreaking and other sordid activities...

Then somehow I got hold of a shareware C compiler, and a copy of Herbert Schildt's book Teach Yourself C. That started an addiction that led to Borland Turbo C++ for DOS, and the need to upgrade my computer to an absurd 4 megabytes of RAM.. and eventually to Borland C++ (the full suite), a whole shelf full of C/C++ books, and my earliest forays into this strange world of something called "linux" and "open source". Then came the Internet, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Freshmeat, BOFH, Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly, Dilbert, etc...

Years later - who knew that this is where it would all lead? wistful sigh

Call me a sentimental old fart, but Computer Shopper will always hold a special place in my heart. :-)
You could just, you know, ignore it and carry on with your life. You'll be happier that way.
I really don't like the hate for perl. Sure, it's got some stuff which can be a bit difficult to understand at first, but that flexibility is nice when you just want to whip something up quickly. It reminds me of how people love to hate Java because of it's verbose code (myself included). At the end of the day, if you know what you're doing it really doesn't get in your way.

I do a lot of metaprogramming and text processing at my job. Using regex as much as I need to in most other languages just feels clumsy compared to perl. It's a great language for sysadmin type stuff. It has a good niche. I wouldn't use it for what this guy did, but I have no doubt that tons of stuff in CPAN probably made his job significantly easier.

I don't think perl is hard to learn - I spent a few days with the camel book and was able to pick it up fairly quickly - and as others have said any language can be unreadable or abused. Also, I don't use Moose or objects in perl and I think that OOP can be cool but can also be abused just as much as perl's nonstandard syntax.

When it comes to other types of projects, I don't think your language of choice makes a huge difference in theory. I think javascript, perl, python are all pretty good and not too hard to pick up if you already have programming experience (don't know about ruby, although I assume that the same holds true). What really makes a difference in practice is the network effects, though. I really love perl, but I'm going to go out of my way to learn other languages because no one respects it and the job market isn't as good for it. Oh well. I don't really mind having to choose based on fads because I honestly think that my choice of programming languages won't make much of a difference on my performance.