skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> First of all, good old backwards compatibility. There's large codebases still written in Flash, or perhaps things that are in Flash that will never get updated ever again (browser games being a big one), and people would like them to work even after Adobe's dropped out.

It's a fair point that wanting to retain the ability to run this content after there is no (working) Adobe plugin is desirable, but is the browser the best place for this? We don't demand that each version of an operating system is able to run all old application software for that OS; the preferred way of being able to do this is through virtualisation, and I'd argue that's probably a better way to do this, too.

> There has been quite a lot missing from the web standards that Shumway helped pushed through.

…such as? (I'm genuinely interested; I wasn't aware of this)
In another context skepticism would be warranted. This isn't such a context. The very nature of the problem of securing one's privacy demands the type of anticipatory thinking I describe. Skepticism that johnnybgood is advocating is a losing strategy from the start.
Didn't programs such as Microsoft Word / Macromedia Dreamweaver / Microsoft FrontPage provide something similar a very long time ago? Maybe I'm confusing this with something else, but IIRC there were some settings in the menus that allowed you to set up remote hosts (but I'm not sure because I never used them).
It actually still makes them money. The Flash authoring environment is still one of the more popular methods of doing production-quality animation. See http://coldhardflash.com for lots of examples.

The Flash authoring environment is the best vector graphics editor I've used, even without the animation and scripting on top. They're still going to continue that, even if the Flash Player plugin is a bit behind.
It is Apache v2 licensed, which means that Shumway is free software. So, if Shumway functions adequately then I imagine that the FSF will consider the task complete. Believe it or not, the FSF and the GNU project don't demand that everything be GPL licensed.
> Gates was most probably the more shrewd operator, but with little tech skills -

Did you just really say that Bill Gates had little tech skills?

That might be the first time I've ever seen someone make that claim. he's widely recognized as being someone whose "tech skills" dominated practically everyone else.

See "My first BillG review" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
I think they can read but the article is simply pointing out how quickly some kids can get into coding at 4 or 5.
They havent encouraged it either. I believe in the early days the usage of free was gratis as well, thats the impression I got from the manifesto of RMS.

In general my impression is that GNU/Freedom-people avoid the question of compensation.
Hey, We'd love to see and hear about your side projects. Share them here.
If the article assertion is true, then what is the Postgresql of NoSQL? In OSS RDBMSs, Postgresql quickly rose to the position of best designed, less quirky contender (albeit waay slower than MySQL in the past).

Is there a NoSQL equivalent?
Isn't it round the other way for banks - their assets are things like loans (which are liabilities to the borrowers)?

If you deposit £50 pounds in the bank the cash becomes an asset of the bank and they create a matching liability to you because you probably want your money back at some point in the future....
> Title: Why Not Use Port Knocking?

For me, the answer is simple: It violates Kerckhoffs’s principle¹. If you want more secret bits that users need to know in order to access your system, increase your password lengths. If you want to keep log sizes manageable, adjust your logging levels.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle
I want more desktops not less. Not having native support for multiple desktops is a shame in 2013.
Ah, that explains it - I'm outside the USA. Thanks for following up.
Unfortunately thats only a year ago. I believe MySQL added transactions over a decade ago and you still run into people who insist MySQL doesn't have transactions, because five years ago they read something written seven years ago that was years out of date at that time.

You just don't see behavior like that outside the database community. Hey did you know that BIND doesn't support IPv6? Yeah version 4.9.3 doesn't support ipv6. Don't bother me with facts like version 9.0 was released more than thirteen years ago in 2000.

So once every installed and reasonably security patched mysql server in the world supports hash joins, the world has at minimum a decade of people who have no idea what a hash join is, and no idea how or why to use it, none the less demanding that mysql doesn't support it.

(Bitter? Yeah maybe a little. You can get good advice about OS, or compilers, off the internet. But overall the internet is useless for database advice, a couple stars don't outshine the greater cesspool)
Yeah this never works. Scattering some daffodil seeds in a field full of weeds - the weeds win. I never understood the 'probiotic' concept.
Banks are generally regulated, they have to have certain amount of assets to work. They cannot have the same distribution as normal companies do.
The Gnash guys have done a lot of good work, but for a native open-source Flash player, Lightspark became the project to watch some time ago: http://lightspark.github.io/
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The framework choice is not an independent evaluation, you have to take into consideration the accumulated experience level of prospective engineers you can grab within your reach. That's why actually all of the mentioned frameworks will be alive and going. It is increasingly hard to go exotic, if you are thinking of growth and agility. Otherwise you can paint yourself into a corner where recruitment is impossible and a big rewrite is inevitable.
My side project is a topic map-based personal learning environment (PLE) with extensive semantic web integration: http://www.perfectlearn.com/.
I'd be afraid that I lose control of the flash with this. As things are now, I can safely disable the flash plugin and everything is fine. If someone is able to render flash within HTML5, how can I prevent it from doing so?
I've started reading it this morning, and I find the first part of the book to be a clear, concise and practical introduction to the mechanics underpinning functional programming.

Love or hate or indifference for JavaScript aside, this looks like an excellent programming book. Thanks, Reg.
I can tell you from experience that joins are also slow in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Joins are slow.

A nicely normalized relational data model has many advantages, but speed is not one of them.
Nice pictures. It was a great time and those cupcakes were delicious.
That's certainly part of it as well. If you look at fashion sites you definitely have a limited, curated selection of items to choose from. Still, I reckon a basic UI change alone would do wonders before even bothering with the harder stuff like curation.
AppsScript in general should not be used for production purposes, or anything that depends on timely and consistently responses. Even Google will tell you this (and they provide no SLA on AppsScript for enterprise customers, either). That said, it's still a lot of fun to play with, and there are all sorts of useful things you can do with scripts anyway.
Practice a lot of law, do you?
When people have difficulty to compare products they will use the price of the product and comparable products as a guide. If people start hassling you about prices of your goods/services, it means you have not done a good job differentiating your products. E.g. your message sucks (or perhaps your product suck).
You could start freelancing but I'm sure you already thought about that.
Watch company develops wristwatch with its own atomic clock
So three investors out of the top twenty that collectively own just slightly more shares than Gates himself want him out?

Stop the presses.
I've read through the documentation twice (once when it was released and again a week ago) and reviewed the basic demos. Meteor's front end structure seems like it's missing something. It has a data layer and a view / template layer but nothing else. No routing, controllers, etc.

Is there a good demo / tutorial that integrates these missing components, either from meteorite libs or well known projects like Angular or Backbone?
Yes, because they are perfectly suitable to a great deal of use cases (websites with interesting things), and provide a huge amount of functionality that you do not get with the other ones.
You probably wouldn't have an intrinsic motivation and desire to be a biologist. You just happened to pick up technology, thought it was cool and enjoyed it.

Besides, humans tend to do things they are forbidden to.
Your parents didn't stop you from studying "tech-related things" did they? Well, maybe they did but they must have stopped it once they knew it was futile. Otherwise you wouldn't be what you are now.

If your parents tied you up, beat you up etc. to forbid you from studying tech, then that's an environmental factor.
Them not doing so is also an environmental factor.

Believing something is predestined is bullshit. Genetics might give you a better memory, but it doesn't make you a hard worker. Your success depends on your values, priorities and motivation to do so.
Well you can chose to disable pdf.js already; don't see why Mozilla wouldn't make swf.js configurable too. I'd expect flashblock plugins etc to continue to work also.
Funny you mention this because we use Nagios to monitor the availability of Google apps (Drive & Gmail mostly) and I get a false positive about once a fortnight. It's proven much more helpful to just monitor HN/Reddit or Twitter to figure out when there's an outage.
Why not? It worked for PulseAudio, right? Or how about the upgrade between the last two LTS releases?

I can't understand Canonical's downright eagerness to force broken software out the door just to appease their roadmap and rigid release schedule. It's pushed as the newbie friendly distro but behaves more like Gentoo when it's time to upgrade.

I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The track record just does not support that choice.
> If you had different genes, you would have been a cat instead of human, and would not have the brain to be a software engineer.

While I don't discount the whole of your argument, this is possibly the dumbest thing you could have said.
I've said this before here, but to me Django occupies a very different place from a lot of the more recently developed frameworks. And as lame as it sounds, a big part of it is in the large, complicated content-heavy site (go figure, it was developed in a newspaper environment).

Sure, Django can be used to build single page sites and flow-heavy web apps. But that's not its strength. Just as you end up having to do a lot of custom programming to make Meteor or Node/Derby work for a site with 15 different content types and multiple backend administrators, but that's not their strength.
Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream. 5 years ago if you wanted to hire a Django developer it was pretty hard. It's still way harder to find Django developers compared to PHP devs.

As a company, if you push yourself into a corner with newer tech like Node, Meteor, etc. you may come up against hiring issues. Not only that, but Rails and Django are also evolving with time so they too get better with time.

The "age" of a technology isn't the only reason why it gets selected, it gets selected because of a number of factors including features, programmer availability, programmer expenses (in terms of both time and skill), proven track record, etc. Usually age is a plus point in many ways.

Rails and Django will certainly be around and competitive. However, if you're asking from a programmer salary perspective then yes, there will be many more Rails and Django programmers by 2016, so moving into more edgy tech might give you a USP, but you may also end up without a place to work in. Maybe knowing Rails/Django + "shiny new tech" is a better combo ?
A big one that's being discussed right now is blend modes and filter effects on canvas, as we can't do a GPU blur or convolution filter on canvas contents right now. We're looking to see if it's possible to reuse some of the stuff like CSS filter effects on canvas 2D contents.

We've also helped with a lot of the baggage around audio decoding and synchronization, since Flash files can have MP3 files that require close sync to the timeline, so we need to use <audio> together with WebAudio, which is a giant bag of worms. We're still working through that on the web audio mailing list.

And we've also helped with some minor additions to the spec that aren't really too hard to implement, like canvas's isPointInStroke().
Another trait that's important for success in life is deferred gratification, or the ability to give up a small immediate reward for a larger reward in the future. That trait, when measured in children, is correlated with all sorts of positive things later in life, including academic success and physical health.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_gratification
> If you want to keep log sizes manageable, adjust your logging levels.

Changing the port is a really good and simple fix. If you also drop packets to closed ports instead of rejecting them, you slow the scan down enough that only a targeted attack is likely to find your ssh port.

All that with no performance penalties, no cumbersome configuration, no experimental software, with one change to one config file. I say do it.
I agree, and it's unfortunate, but you also see this happen in the programming language community as well, just look at the wealth of perpetuated ignorance around PHP for instance.
>And to act like a guide on how to scale MongoDB to store 100GB is a problem is also ridiculous

While I agree with a good bit of what you say. I take issue with this. 100GB is not a lot of data by any modern definition. That this guide exists (or existed until it was removed) is a warning sign of hidden gotchas, which is I think what the original author was reacting to. When contemplating a change as big as mongo, those kinds of things make people whose butts are on the line for tech decisions nervous.

Also, that guide didn't say anything about what data structures were being used, the implicit assumption was that you had a properly structured mongo database to begin with.
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Obligatory: I think port knocking is really silly and you shouldn't waste time with it. Disable root logins and password logins in SSH. If you have lots of hosts running SSH, collapse them down to one exposed SSH bastion host. Then get on with your life.
This is almost done with Rainmeter and http://omnimo.info/. Pretty useful on my B121 tablet.
Intelligence is not a scalar.

This article should make you rethink your example:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/29/chimp-intelli...
>No matter your work, you can't beat kittens.

I think that's the joke.
I'm not a fan of changing the SSH port, but at least I get what that buys you.
I would say that his improved vertical leap will help there too. 3-pointers are impossible against a good guard without a good vertical leap to gain a height advantage, distancing yourself and taking a shot without fear of rejection.
It's fine since all the detailed goop is at the implementation level. Programmers need not care.

Making a distinction between known and unknown calls in the implementation is not only a good thing, but in a language with first-class functions it is all but inevitable because the performance win is so large. (The majority of calls are known, and known calls can be compiled significantly more efficiently than any general purpose call machinery.)
I've got a fun mathematical model supporting controversial assertions about banks. Yes, I could test those assertions against fact by reading the contingent liabilities sections of large banks' financial reports. But accounting is boring. And, let's face it, we all know that I'd just deal with negating evidence by arguing "accounting trickery" is just hiding Truth.
Caution, NSFW content.
There's no surprise it became the default storage engine instead of myisam around early ver 5.5 or so, it is superior to myisam in many ways.

Personally I like the row level locks and the way it can enforce foreign keys, which myisam can't do.
Note, I'm a complete newbie. I spent 12 months doing a Django job, and started a Rails job about ~4 months ago. Before that I followed frameworks but wasn't nearly as engaged.

The impression I get, is that in general, these languages and frameworks will age, get boring, and eventually be something used because of legacy, the existing codebases. Is this bad? Of course not! It means there will always be a wealth of well-documented, high quality software to work with.

But really, the only way to fight off not being 'boring' is by trying to always do the brand new technologies, always having a way of implementing them. Rails with Turbolinks, to pseudo-mimic frontend JS frameworks. Rails also implementing server side events, moving web sockets closer to 'the norm'.

Will they still be the hot go-to languages/frameworks 5-10 years from now? Probably not. Rails will probably feel then like PHP does now('old and safe', with better options available for most cases), and something like Go or some other incredibly thin means of maintaining a backend API to facilitate frontend Javascript frameworks. And after that, who knows. Maybe the web as pages will die 10-15 years from now, instead being replaced by something more akin to a pluggable game or OS engine. Maybe holograms. Maybe we just get robots and call it a day.
Why don't you just provide us a test user so we don't have to go through the sign up process?
Proposed changes to WHOIS system called 'extremely disquieting'
Ten years of working on Krita
What I understand is that you publish your content using Osmek and then use their API to pull it where you need it, be it a webapp written in JS or an iOS app.
Maybe this could be transitioned to some sort of live split testing platform or something...otherwise, I don't see much value to it other than show-and-tell.
In all fairness the only tools that are not (speaking from a devops position at least) hated is chef or puppet. Everything else will at some point go down at 2am.
The studies cited in the Slate article come out of education and speech-disorders research. Those fields have problems too, but not all of the same ones as clinical psych.
The sequence of ports becomes a key. I don't think the principle is violated.

What I think is that you should disable password authentication anyway, and adding port knocking to a ssh server that doesn't accept passwords is equivalent to adding a thin wood plank to a 20" steel door with an state of the art lock.
That is pure FUD. Postgres is no more resource heavy than MySQL (the stock config will only use 32MB of ram!), and will perform better on many real world workloads.
I recall a story of EB White who condensed his lessons so compactly that he didn't have enough material to fill a classroom, so he would just repeat each concept three times.
Play doesn't belong in that list (it's really just a Java-version of the basic request/response cycle design that plagues Django and Rails, Scala or not).

Django is sadly hampered by two fairly complex problems. The first, is their insistence on backwards compatibility and stability. While it's becoming obvious that the basic design of Django creates serious problems when moving away from the request/response cycle, it's a very hard problem to fix if you can't fundamentally change core assumptions within the framework. Second, Python 3 (sans Tulip) just isn't up to snuff for asynchronous coding. Twisted is a mess, Tornado is far too simple.

The Rails team seems more willing to break with the past between releases, but its still hampered by Ruby's inherent performance disadvantages.

Ultimately, while none of these frameworks are disappearing any time soon, it'd be fair to say that many engineers, particularly those working at the edge of the industry, are choosing things like Node, or Go.
I enjoy the Indeed.com job trends for this sort of thing: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...

I'm a Ruby/Rails developer (and I run MemphisRuby) and while I seriously enjoy working with Rails I don't expect it to be as popular ten years from now.

Rails is still tremendously good at what it does and I don't think it's likely that another framework or language is going to beat it at its own game. The real question is whether or not the things that Rails does best will continue to be important in the marketplace.

We've already seen parts of Rails's core competencies carved out by other tools: Erlang/Node/Go enable saner async programming. Backbone/Angular/Ember enable rich web applications. Scala/Clojure/Go/etc. on the "fast compiled backend services" front. Even PHP is keeping pace with the times (Composer, Laravel) just enough to keep its adherents from having a real reason to jump ship.

Ruby and Rails are still pretty much as good as it gets for rapid development of web applications (the backend parts of MVC, anyway), and there's a growing Ruby niche for configuration management (Chef, Puppet, etc).

Personally I find my investment in learning and working with Ruby has been a great way for me to experience a much wider variety of technologies and architectures than I would have otherwise. Thanks to Rails work I've learned tons about AMQP, Postgres, Chef, Backbone, JavaScript, CSS, Ansible, DNS (bind), and more that I just wouldn't have had the same exposure to in a slower-paced development environment.

Your ending line about "still in wide use but not frequently selected for the best new projects" is a bit complicated. Certainly any language stays in wide use once it falls out of fashion and its projects categorically move to the "legacy" phase, but "best new projects" is a bit much. A lot of what we might think of as the 'best' projects are driven by fashion just as much as technical merits.
I am reminded of the Henry Ford quote
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

The design idioms seen in Gnome 2 and Windows 7 are essentially highly refined versions of what existed on the Apple II OS. Personal computers and what we use them for have come a long way since then and it makes sense to redesign the UI to reflect this. Often this means getting your hands dirty and trying new things.
Also - first time users are going to be around for longer than experienced users ;)
I still think HN is a good place to get feedback on your new business and project ideas IF you are fortunate enough to get the right people looking at your post. It's tough though, so many people are desperate for attention that it's hard to stand out. I added my own Show HN on here just this morning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482163) and it's already disappearing from view never to be seen again.
Highly allergic to cats, of all ages and sizes. Regardless of my work, it will always be better than kittens.
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I dunno, is C still "competitive" with newer technologies? ;)
Changing port is the wrong solution to large log files. This seems obvious to me, but maybe I can put forward another drawback of changing the port number: It is confusing.

I mean, you could easily stop using the DNS and use raw IP addresses for everything - this should cut down on your attacks and maybe even spam, right? Nobody does this because it it insanely inconvenient, and ignores the solution to this inconvenience which DNS is. Standardized port numbers exist for many reasons - do not abandon them and create complexity for your fellows merely for your personal convenience.
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