skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thanks for mentioning that. never knew that uTorrent is actually developed by Bittorrent Inc. That makes it indeed very hard to trust the BT Sync service
Many have no choice. Entrepreneurs tend to split between the unemployably good and the unemployably bad.

The problem with Silicon Valley VC is that it has become so superficial. Unemployably good are 4-sigma creatives who tend to come with ADHD, mental health issues, unusual backgrounds and socialization, and (if they spent adolescence in the US) low-grade PTSD. Those are socially limiting. Unemployably bad people are great at making first impressions because their problems are deeper character issues. So guess who gets funded in shallow bubble times?
Interesting, I hadn't heard of Hayden White before:

> He has argued that historical writing mirrors literary writing in many ways, sharing the strong reliance on narrative for meaning, therefore ruling out the possibility for objective or truly scientific history. White has also argued, however, that history is most successful when it embraces this "narrativity", since it is what allows history to be meaningful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_White

This is relevant considering most non-fiction writing today is influence by "new journalism" and adopts a fiction/literary form. Often using a narrative structure similar to screenwriting (beginning/middle/end) which is antithetical to scientific history.
Anything that I have heard many times before. I find new music very distracting and music I have heard and enjoyed before very relaxing.
or you go away of AJAX calls entirely, by storing all data offline and having a separate process that synchronizes all changes, like remotestorage.io does it, or hood.ie
Great is the enemy of good. Especially when great is not even possible to achieve (wide public adoption of PGP).

EDIT: And you seem to be saying that this is actively bad, which I think is just jumping the gun without identifying any actual issues. Having it be only partially secure until you install a browser extension and then having it properly secure most certainly falls into 'good' and not 'bad' or 'great'.
Will just say for anyone that never used Everpix that flickr, zenfolio and smugmug don't really do the same job. Yes they all host photos, but the whole point is that it's an automated process, imports from multiple sources and does magic like de-duplication.
>So even die hard libertarians who value personal freedom such as anonymity a great deal have to acknowledge that the real life consequences of exchanges like Liberty Reserve are a net negative to society.

I'm not sure I agree at all with this statement. Replace "liberty reserve" with Bitcoin and I certainly don't agree that it's a net negative to society.

Unless by "society" you mean the current status quo, in which case I'd agree but this changes the tone of your message significantly.
We've been using circus in production for nearly 6 months, and I've been very impressed. Configuration makes sense, and it's been rock solid for us. If you've ever found yourself frustrated by supervisord, or upstart, I'd recommend it.
Generally speaking, when offline apps went online, they would "sync". This process is not straightforward, quick nor modern. Web apps don't "sync", they just "work". How can you design a native app that behaves like a web app? That's a less explored question. I'm not saying it hasn't been looked at yet, of course, and phones are some of the first to do it. Microsoft could take the lead here, with their approach of "only showing icons for connectivity when the connectivity changes" and of hiding buttons when they aren't going to work, so you can presume that anything you see on screen is going to work even when offline. Windows Phone and Windows 8 guidelines have a few more examples like this. On the other side of the fence, Apple has done similarly with their apps. iTunes Radio will continue caching the next song and part of the song after it, so even when I go down to the subway and lose signal, I still get to hear another 5 min of music. That said, the rewind and replay features of TuneIn were still superior and it'd be nicer still if iTunes radio transitioned into playing back either cached tracks or my own library instead of stopping dead. (Wouldn't it be nice if while listening, between tracks or when it stops, Siri stepped in and announced why the track can't play and suggests alternatives?)

Part of this new medium is to come up with techniques of explaining that apps work offline -- people's expectations, still, are that if they visit a website, they need to be online. That alone is a huge hurdle.

In addition, some of the best services, e.g. browser-based push notifications from Apple (rather than those of native Chrome) will not work without Internet since they use the same push protocols as native push notifications on iOS (iirc). That said, even on iOS, I think apps can now add notifications without internet, so that should be changing, just as apps can sign up to do background pre-caching of data.

There are some HTML-only problems too: How do you version web requests from remote hosts? How about third-party JS? There are so many considerations in offline scenarios that most web developers never need consider. I really hope offline first takes off as the next "mobile first" or "responsive design". If nothing else, it will make for more robust online-only apps.
I can't help but think that their reliance on (very expensive) Amazon Web Services played a part in their collapse. It looks like they also failed to grow enough, but it should have been possible to sustain a paying service.
The argument depends crucially on how the hash space is searched. If you could avoid inputs that yield previously seen hash outputs then it would be the case that time previously spent mining would decrease the expected time until getting a valid hash. That doesn't happen by design.

Analogies to slot machines and flipping coins obscures this fact.
> And Internet Explorer supported frames, and yet was not Mozilla, and so was not given frames.

I don't think that is correct. IE 2 didn't support frames. IE 3 did, but 2 didn't. I remember waiting for IE3 to get more market share so that I could safely use frames.

I can't tell you what feature made them fake the user agent, but it wasn't frame support.

Yeah. Those were the days :-)
Install prey project. I create a guest account on my Mac so if I lose it, people will actually try to use it and connect it to WiFi.
My point is there is no rational bias to distinguish between ritual and superstition and to tell that one form makes better sense than the other. In my opinion both doesn't make any good sense.
I couldn't disagree with this sentiment more.

Of course, it depends on your definition of quality, but for the sake of argument I'm assuming that we're including things like test coverage, code complexity, code cleanliness/readability, structural soundness (cohesion over coupling, the single reponsibility principle etc) and so on.

The point with all of these things is that as much as they might seem to be a waste of time when people can be hacking on something else, they (imho) save orders of magnitude more time than that in terms of maintenance of a codebase: being able to quickly fix issues as they occur; how quickly new developers can grok the codebase; how easy it is to add new features that were not part of the original design.

Unfortunately I have no hard data to back that opinion up, but it is what I intuitively believe to be true based on experiences.
FTFY

If you adopt most any new technology, prepare for labor intensive migrations, alternative scrambling, and disappointments.

The world moves fast, products shut down all the time, but Google is high profile and gets lots of complaints... that's fine, I'm OK with them being held to a higher standard, it'll be good for them in the long run. But, I recently hit a problem because Twitter shut down it's 1.0 API. I'm not running around saying don't use Twitter on every article about them.
I think it's lunacy to send do-not-track... with a user-agent alongside.

The user-agent header is an artifact of history, and should be abolished. I can see no use case for it aside from standards-avoidance.
In the end it's just a title and we all take those titles with a grain of salt when it comes to startups anyway, right? The original purpose of those titles was for official company contracts anyway, so everybody involved (investors, stakeholders, clients) knows what's up and I agree that possibly 10 or 20 years ago being CEO or CTO had a stronger load in popular language. The fact that it's so easy to start a company anno 2013 makes the use of them way more common. From a practical point of view, CTO is also shorter than "Technical founder".
Does it log you out when you walk away?
How do you do that before the thief is able to get into your Mac and steal all your data when you've just lost all your devices?
I get to play with a lot of phones in my company so would I take it over the:

Galaxy Nexus? Yes.
Nexus 4? Closer, but still yes.
Galaxy S3 and S4? Yes, because Samsung is really pissing me off with their lack of speedy updates.
HTC One Play Edition? Undecided. Merging the two together would be the best phone (speakers on One, the proud buttons and texture on the N5) but I wouldn't trade one for the other at this point.
But... phone apps already do all those things, so I don't get what you're complaining about. My point is, apps already seem to be doing the right things. So what's some kind of new manifesto needed for? What is supposed to be changed?
These are more "tricks on optimizing AWS usage" than things to know "about" AWS.
There are many places on earth where travelling 4000 KM for a job will transform you into an immigrant with few rights but usually willing to accept unfavourable conditions because of difference in currency value between your home and the place you found work, basically hoping that a decade or so of hard work will help your family's future back home.

There are also places on earth where you cannot easily get to another sufficiently richer country, so you don't even have the incentive to spare some money, just to go through the hard life of being an immigrant and then either adapt or come back with nothing.

People do choose this options, do struggle for visas etc, but usually to do that you have to be strongly motivated. The system often is kept somewhat balanced by this, but this doesn't means it's favourable to workers/consumers.
sounds interesting; i am currently using hbase for similar purposes. Do "tables" have to be created explicitly, or can I just store a value into a timeseries, and if the ts doesn't exist yet it will be created?
We should take a page out of mobile developments book and provide a pretty graphic that illustrates the 'new project' flow for a web app!

Good point, I joke a lot about being 'victorious' at hackathons, but the truth is, knowledge > than a t-shirt :)
> like checking the weather, or sending e-mails, or Facebook, or shopping on Amazon.

* You don't need to check the weather every time. It's enough if you show me the data you fetched this morning or maybe just 2 hours ago (maybe so the time of the last successful request somewhere)

* Just let me write (and read...) my emails, change the label of the send button and put them in a queue when i click it. Actually send the mails when i get online again. (Fun fact: I am already doing that on my laptop, i write a lot of mail offline and msmtp queues them until i got a connection again. Useful on train rides and flights with spotty or no connection.

* I do not use facebook, but i hear that a lot of people also use it as an addressbook, for example. At least some of that data (names, telephone numbers, addresses,...) should be available offline if possible. Depends of course...
My rejection story and thoughts for other people who got rejected...

http://www.sixcrystals.com/rejection-from-premium-institutio...
just started using them, the platform was actually really interesting and well developed. sad to see them go...
Why do you capitalize Java like that? It's not an acronym or an abbreviation. It's just a word - named after the type of coffee from the Indonesian island of the same name.
Eventually "growth hacking" is going to be replaced by "sustainable business plan hacking".
Deconstructing Big Data Governance
FCC Releases Proposed Rules For Terrestrial Broadband Over 22 MHz Of Spectrum
This is bizarre. So, if an individual socialist person in a capitalist economy is corrupt, that's not as big a problem as a capitalist being corrupt?
Mac users did have successfully made one major bank to support Mac in 2004, by pledging about 16 billion KRW (~15 million USD at that time). The situation hasn't improved since then though.
I'd say that being CTO of a small startup is worlds different than a large company (which is what I think you're saying here). It's not meant to be self-aggrandizing, more to simply show which side of the business I work on.

PS - I'm 24. Only 7 years to go!
That's what I implied by AJAX retry. That you need some method that sensibly queues the request, until it succeeds or is no longer needed. That process could easily be called synchronization, sure. Depends on the app, really. The request might "expire" or be no longer necessary, so it wouldn't show up at "sync" time. Perhaps the request could be automatically retried through other devices that are connected -- imagining for the moment, an app that could use bluetooth or local wifi to communicate an operation across to other running instances even when offline.
Ritual is a description of a kind of routinized action; superstition is a description of belief. You might engage in ritual because of superstition, but they are very much not the same thing, and you can have ritual without superstition and superstition without ritual.
Bitcoin makes money transfer easier to monitor. Why do they want to go after Bitcoin?
They won't need the guest account with this product.
Thanks! Congrats on the low level tools team! I look forward to having more APIs to really get deep into the platform :)
Its [sic] funny that people have to all learn the same lessons over and over again

That pretty much defines what the field of computer security is. From DES to AES, we learned the same lesson: As things designed to be secure are put out in the real world, with sufficient enough time, they're broken. It's important not to make the same mistakes again and again, and that's nearly impossible to do with JS-Crypto since there are so many permutations of platform X on implementation (browser) Y. As long as the numbers of platforms is large and the numbers of browsers are large, having one implementation that works properly in all platforms isn't practical.

However, a specific implementation targeted at a specific browser/platform could be vetted provided the JS engine handles random numbers in a cryptographically sound manner. Ideally, the browsers would expose ways to call vetted cryptographic APIs directly via JS.
Data science sure sounds sexier...ish.

The irony of people who use the "damned lies and statistics" quote snidely is that the "statistics" part is not referring to the field Statistics but the plural version of the noun statistics, which of course are easily abused. The field of Statistics is all about NOT abusing statistics.
Sustainable Micro Home that Costs Less Than $30,000
As a very good alternative to TortoiseHg, I find Atlassian's SourceTree to have better UI experience. sourcetreeapp.com
I presume your big reason is that the JS runtime is full of untrusted code of a dynamic nature?
"organized crime" to the level that necessitated the RICO act only came about because of the war on drugs (in that particular case, alcohol was the drug in question).
Are you sure, that Lavabit did not select PFS? Is this documented somewhere? That's quite a fumble for someboday advertising secure email services.

BTW: shouldn't we assume, that the US government operates at least an own intermediate CA for such purposes rather than getting single Certs signed.
One of the key features of Everpix was the "set and forget" capability. Also their dupe-detection was really good.

Do any of those do that? I guess Dropbox is the most established... I'd hate to be in this same situation in a year from now with Loom...
Very sad news to hear. Best of luck to everyone on the team.
Your weather app generally is able to show around a week of data in advance, so if I check weather today and am offline tomorrow, it should be able to show me a reasonable approximation.

Also you generally want to see what the weather is in the future, and its always a best guess, if you want an accurate way to know precisely if it is raining right now, look out the window.

And you asked for an explanation of why you are being downvoted, you are obviously trying very hard to make an example of a counter point for something that doesnt make sense '12 hours ago we thought the weather would be X' is unarguably better that 'this application is offline', but you are attempting to argue it. Even if you did find a single counterpoint it doesnt add anything to the conversation, not absolutely everything is going to have an offline use case, but its clear that we could do better providing offline capability (and to be clear, I didnt downvote)
If you're using Filevault for full disk encryption you can't have Prey installed and use it on an open guest account. You can have a guest account and use the iCloud 'Find My Mac' though.

But that's exactly what I did on my last Mac (which wasn't using Filevault).
How are you going to block dragnet surveillance if they can surveil the method of your delivering encrypted messages? NSA can already see, and modify, the JS used to create encrypted messages (because they've owned the HTTPS gateways), so they can see, and modify, the encrypted messages.
Ask HN: What's a product/service you feel doesn't have an adequate marketplace?
I wouldn't use this bastardized SQL dialect. SQL comes from relational databases, which comes from relational algebra, which is an exceptionally poor model for time series data. It's going to end up a mess and confuse people. SQL is already a mess by itself.

I would simply use functions and operators over time series or data frame types. Perhaps take a look at the R zoo library for examples of more advanced things people do with time series.
Great post! Really loved it!
Plus a portable battery charges more than just your phone.

And with USB being so standard and available pretty much everywhere, it almost seems like a non-issue. It's not like back in the day when you had to have separate car chargers for different phones for example. I've seem USB charging ports in trains, airplanes, airports, hotel rooms, portable camping battery packs and even some power extension cables.
I'm curious why you need to preserve the timestamps. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense, I just haven't ever had a time where that's been a requirement.
>I would easily throw $50 at a 10 minute consult with a doctor instead of having to make an appointment and haul myself in to the local clinic.

I remember hearing an NPR report recently about some doctors running their private practice similar to that. They were basically operating on a subscription model - they would come see you if needed, but for quick consults and the like, they'd do things like Skype calls to talk with their patients. Struck me as a very interesting idea.

EDIT:

This isn't the report I'm thinking of, but it's very similar:

http://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-virtual-urgent-care-the-...

This is for urgent care, but as I said above, I've heard similar reports about private practices working this way.
Well Google Hangouts on iOS7 can make and receive phone calls for your Google Voice account but KitKat cannot. Hangouts is considered the primary SMS application but even though option screens exist you cannot make Voice your primary app for texting. This means voice control is effectively useless.

I'm extremely disappointed that Google launched such a tight integration with such key functionality missing.

I've also had to clean my phone off twice because Google's backup service continues to think the phone is new so it keeps sending me a bunch of crap I don't want on my phone.

I haven't seen a lot of lag issues yet, but I've only had it for 24 hours or so.
This looks really cool, but it's pretty annoying that you allowed me to download and install on my Mac without telling me the iPhone app costs $3.99. In fact, I can't find anything on the website that says this thing does or does not cost money. Maybe you are hoping that people will assume it's free, download from the website, and then buy it on the app store because they already got that far. If so, it seems a bit dishonest.
I was actually looking at a bunch of open source time series databases and settled on kairosdb but this looks pretty nice.

I think there is a hackernews rule someplace that a more interesting tech alternative shows up right when you decided to go with something else.

For reference here is the list I created when researching these:

http://opentsdb.net/overview.html
Built on HBASE

http://www.gocircuit.org/vena.html
Built on go + go'circult uses google's leveldb

https://code.google.com/p/kairosdb/
A rewrite of opentsdb which can use Cassandra

http://blueflood.io/
Built by Rackspace, decent but still seems a bit immature

http://graphite.wikidot.com/
Obligatory Graphite reference
(uses whisper, new backend called 'ceres' is being developed)

https://github.com/agoragames/kairos (yet another 'kairos', alternative backends for graphite - SQL, redis, or mongo)

Riak seems to be popular with SASS metric providers (hosted graphite, boundary). There isn’t any code but there are a couple of talks that explain how and why they went with Riak:

http://basho.com/hosted-graphite-uses-riak-to-store-all-cust...
http://boundary.com/blog/tag/tech-talks/

http://vimeo.com/42902962
Actually I was wondering if there is any experience/benchmarks about Amazon high-performance instances.

anyone already used this ?
You use the guest account as a honeypot so they open the Mac and use it for long enough (without wiping it) for you to get a wifi connection and can get the location with Prey :-)
Had an initial reaction upon seeing this post and came here to "share" only to find that so many have the same reaction. It just smells like a product that Google will be killing at some point in the not-too-distant future.

I get the whole idea behind the current environment to just throw stuff against the wall, see what sticks, then iterate.

That's great for start-ups, but, I would suggest that it is actually a problem when a well-established company does this repeatedly. In addition to Google just appearing flaky (which in itself is not good), customers do lose faith in the company's commitment to its customers/users and to their products in general.
Death to QR Codes
Constant folding can (theoretically) turn a O(N) loop into constant-time, and may trigger further dead code elimination. Your typical template metaprogram for computing Fibonacci numbers will do the same.

The time when mortals could more or less 'see' what the memory usage and execution time of a C++ code fragment are is well beyond us.
Well of course I didn't click through to read it. I was just trying to imagine why so many people cared about what someone in the Bezos family thought about a book about Bezos, and I figured it must be, "aww, what a talented little kid, that's so cute!"
Forget Teslas On Fire, Elon’s got another challenge
3. How do you prevent secret agents from looking in your window with binoculars?
Visit toilet after dinner.
Does anyone know which algorithm they use underneath for duplication detection/delta encoding? Is it rsync or something else?
It is, but mostly because of the low barrier to entry in software.

I'm technically minded though--chip designer. Software is a hobby for me. I guess I more meant that I'm not a JavaScript programmer and don't know the subtleties of that ecosystem.