skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you avoided amazon, didn't this severely limit the feedback you could get? How did those initial customers discover your product?
Here's[1] a comparison of the two from an RoR guy who used Play! (with Scala) for 16 months. I found the ensuing discussion pretty informative with minimal FUD / bashing.

[1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/play-framework/pl...
You're getting downvoted because this isn't a "language X vs language Y" article at all. Its point is that the language choice doesn't matter when you're building on top of crap, and jumping from one language to another probably won't solve platform problems. It's an article about the politics of being a software developer in enterprise where management is entrenched in legacy codebases, not about language features.
Do you really believe we know all there is to know about how neurons work? I don't. I think there are lots of surprises lurking.
Here is a direct link to our specifications: https://www.tuftandneedle.com/bed/specs

We sourced all of our own materials from the outside fabric to our foam mixtures. We've also iterated on the design roughly 130 times since we first launched it. We try to keep a tight feedback loop on its design.

As an example, when we changed from a cotton bed to a foam bed we built our first prototype by sourcing a ton of different foams from different foam pourers and putting them all in a single room. We locked ourselves in there for a few days layering all kinds of densities and compositions until we found a feel we thought was really great.

We have done similar things with the fabric, stitching, and our policies.

We have a manufacturing license and hope to vertically integrate more of our supply production as we grow.

Let me know if you have any other questions.
using a webmail (yahoo.fr) and I was unable to login at all (tried on 2 computers, no luck) :(

if you want to debug this bug you can email me and will help gladly.
What does that forum think of this mattress?
Ask HN: What is the best strategy to work on a HW consumer electronics idea?
I have an idea of a consumer electronics item that I like and am thinking about the best way to approach it. I am in the process of prototyping it. I know exactly what the end result should look like. But I have not done any thing related to hw outside of prototyping. So thinking long term and aspects of taking it to actually make a finished product, I would like to get some feedback on how to approach it. I am not looking at this to sink money into it right away, but to get an idea on what to expect and how to go about it, primarily to estimate costs involved and time it might take. Specifically -

- How to find companies that will assemble the electronic components for me.

- How to find companies that make the external casing for the product.

- How to go about finding out what it might cost and how much time it would take.

Honestly, prototyping is fun and all but if the longer term aspect of this does not pan out (fall with in my limitations) I am better of spending my time on other ideas I have.

Thanks for any feedback.
To be clear, the claim is the following: There is reason to believe phones have been remotely hacked by law enforcement using carrier credentials to leave the cellular radio running and registering with the cell network even after the off button has been pushed and the phone appears to be off. Starting point for further reading: http://www.brighthub.com/electronics/gps/articles/51103.aspx

The claim isn't my own; it's Trevor's, the founder of Anybots, and one of the best electronics hackers in the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087399

He seems to have a pretty good grasp of reality, and he's more intimately familiar with the electronics than most of us.

I also presented some circumstantial evidence indicating that law enforcement does in fact use this capability in practice, the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722519

If there's fault with this, then I'd like to understand why.
I'm not familiar with the discussion surrounding this, what was the major downside to not informing a user that they had been blocked? On the face of it, it seems like this would make it easier for users to control who sees their feed, without worrying about the social fallout.
I often wonder if they are just concerned about delegitimizing their app market to some degree. Flash gave a similar threat.
Thanks for the feedback -- this is definitely something we can fix quickly.
Is the size of the box why you aren't using Amazon fulfillment, or is there some other reason?
I think a single 'long' press for zoom would have been a better way. By long I'd say 300ms or so.
Then a short tap could act the moment you lifted your finger, assuming it was below the long tap threshold.
iOS uses a long tap to select text though.
Google is reckoned to have about 2 million servers[1] and they're probably dual- or quad-processor. I guess FB have ambitions at that scale.

The expensive bit of running a datacentre is power, both for the machines themselves, and for cooling, and these are linked. For every Watt you put in in electricity, you have to take it out again as heat. It costs more than the real estate and more than payroll. Savings here can add up very quickly.

[1] https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13ttdlibtq5tjv5e04...
Custom Elements - a web components gallery for modern web apps
"Code quality matters when you have a team of people developing and maintaining software over a long period."

And for me, 'a long period' is anything longer than a month, or more specifically, the time period it takes for me to have to change any code I've already written in order to deliver new business value to a customer.

...and just noticed your 'six weeks' estimate. We're on the same page here it seems. :)
I'm not going to lie, once I read the title I immediately looked to see if it was Garry who submitted the article, Even thought I didn't expect it to be him:)

I feel bad about that.

In all seriousness, Congratulations, this is a big honor!!
FaceBook is such a waste of time & treasure. They should all be ashamed of working for such a useless company.
Take a look at what is going on here. These guys are blowing a hole in the side of a high margin industry with a stick of dynamite and cleaning it up with their money catching machine Tuft & Needle.

The "you get what you pay for" point underscores the brilliance of Tuft and Needle's entrance into the market.

You must understand that there are industries, like mattress retailer, that have operated on artificially high margins for generations.

If you look at The company's competitive positioning you will see that they are vertically integrated, lean, and willing to blow apart the competition.

When 2 individual walk into the car dealership and separately buy an identical car. one pays full sticker, markup and a warranty. The other pays $100 over invoice. They both got the identical car; did they both get what they paid for?

I am impressed with the company's story and model. They are going to do well in the mattress business for a long time to come.

I bought a california king tempurpedic mattress from sharper image in 2003. It set me back about 1500 and at that time the other mattress manufacturers were not in the memory foam market. Today, the mattress performs impecibally.

The 5" is suitable because of their foam construction layering and density.

The real deal will be the price point on the 10" model
Because people can recognize the importance of certain paths in life, even as they themselves choose different paths?
Wow, they've come down in price! I actually wound up with 200Mbps TP-Link adapters, because the 500Mbps adapters fall off to fast with distance in my house. AV2 adapters are supposed to sustain performance better over distance, so I'm biding my time and waiting for those to mature a bit.
... And what about the actual action of double-tapping? On some pages it zooms, and on some pages it does nothing, and in fact the first tap fires off a link. How is that simple, predictable, or solid-feeling? It isn't.
You've basically described C#:

Getters, setters fixed? Check.
Functional features? Check.
Most crappy OO features fixed? Check.
Trendy package system inspired by npm/apt-get/gems? Check.
Healthy community with libraries replacing frameworks? Check.

I'd recommend checking it out if you haven't already.
FRP can exist happily alongside imperative methods of updating state. This approach is explored in FrTime for Racket. http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/ck-frt...
This is absolutely something we can do. We'll try this out later today and see how it looks.
And IBM with PPC.
So is this a "Quantum Mind of the Gaps" argument?
Agreed. They should stay put, not run away when I try to click one, and then I have to stop to think about what the text of the thing I was trying to click was, then find where it moved to.
So you're trusting what a Facebook rep says as truth?
Title uses vague words that are not necessarily untrue. Facebook is analyzing self-censorship, just not the contents of self-censored posts. What is maybe interesting to users is that there are people at Facebook who think it isn't right for the user to self-censor, that it apparently robs Facebook and your "friends" of the value in that self-censored post. That seems mildly insane and I'm glad I do not use Facebook.
Codd’s Relational Vision – Has NoSQL Come Full Circle?
We forget how earlier databases fell short, and how relational databases solved the problems of the first generation of databases. In short, relational databases were the noSomething, and I aimed to find out what that something was.
What?
the first part is exactly that...
for example:
"So which is the faster virtual machine, V8 or JVM? My belief is that when you are coding in the most basic building blocks of either virtual machine (i.e JavaScript vs JVM Byte Code) that the JVM will win out every time. If you start to compare higher up, you may end up comparing apples with oranges and see false comparisons. For example, if we consider this comparison of V8 vs JVM performance at mathematical calculations. This blog post tells us that if we relax our specifications we can calculate things faster. Here is the specification that V8 must use for Math.pow and here is the specification that the JVM must use for Math.pow notice that the JavaScript specification allows for an “implementation-dependent approximation” (of unspecified accuracy) while the JVM version has the addition that"

and at the second part too:
"... a limit of Node.js itself when used with the backing APIs that they have to call through to."

It's just hidden better...
to me it reads like a java fan boy is crying why a company switched to language X from his language Y...
Well done on the website and this product, it is something I would try if I didn't already have a tempurpedic that I got for free from my neighbor.

So I would like to know if you had experience with textiles, mattresses, etc before deciding on something like this. I have always hated the mattress industry, this is actually something I wished for many times. I would have done it myself, but this is such an easy idea to shoot down in your head before you even do one bit of research.

How did you have the know-how or confidence that doing something like this was a possibility? I would think that you would have to have some knowledge of sewing, materials, etc... How did you figure it all out? Or did you already have experience with it?

I have so many ideas that I shoot down, even though they are good ideas, they either seem impossible (I would have considered this a silly idea for me to try), or way too ambitious.

Any insight into this is appreciated.
Hooray for trivializing _actual_ issues in tech. Oh, and a rape joke thrown in for good measure.

Jesus.
You can disable it and go back to the old way. Now, at least it doesn't leak information like location or browser.

I wish they opened every attachment as soon as it was received, so marketers wouldn't know if it was ever opened.
Can you talk about what you mean by technical ceiling, and high/low technical ceiling? I've heard the ideas in your last paragraph referred to as the 'rule of least cleverness', avoiding wizardry always good imo.
So true. Everybody moans about the rise of the big corporate farms, but in many ways those farms are smaller than the 7-11 on the corner. Sure, they may be incorporated for tax purposes, but they rarely have more than one or two employees with the majority of the work being done by the owners' family. The land and equipment are worth millions, but that's not accumulated by a corporation selling shares but through the heavy use of mortgages by a family over many generations.
It's ok to take your foot off of the gas pedal
Oh, I see what you mean about the source now - to make sure the binary I have is the direct product of only the developers' original code, or thereabout. This is what source packages (SRPMs) are for; you can download the SRPM, look at the code in it, and rebuild it if you're really paranoid. You can compare SHA hashes of the code you have with those of either the package builder or the original developers of the code. This requires no web of trust.

You don't need a declarative programming language to for your configuration management or your package management. It just makes for a maintenance headache. And using a dedicated CM tool like Puppet is a better idea because it makes the software more portable and flexible.

When you deploy your application, your package manager has to execute certain things in order to set it up for the first time. A CM can handle this, too. And once it's installed, you may need to change the configuration in a unified way. A CM handles this. At uninstall, your package manager cleans up after the package's setup, which a CM can also handle. By bundling these two, the application now only supports one system (the Nix system). If the software's configuration is completely handled by an independent CM tool like Puppet, it will be supported on any platform Puppet resides on, and because it's not tied to a single package manager you can install the software on any system.

I think the only way you're going to win the development war is to provide a portable, compatible, simple, maintainable, easy to use tool that everyone will want because it solves all of their problems without creating new ones. It can't be a programming language because most people can't program. It can't be complicated or overly powerful because most people will shoot themselves in the foot if you give them ammunition. And it has to work everywhere, on anything. Good luck!
At last, a programming language to combat the pervasive misogyny and sexism of this industry. This is a truly revolutionary example of forward thinking based on decades of extensive research in sociology, feminist theory, egalitarian philosophy and Marxism.

A language that is conscious of issues pertaining to the horrors of rape culture, patriarchy and the solace of women's emotional sensitivity.

Bravo! This is a single step, but certainly one that will pave the way for a new era of understanding.

Right now it's just macros for the C++ preprocessor, but all great things start small.
Brilliant idea, website and judging by amazon, execution.
Im sure you will be having a great new year!

One question: Are your beds flame-retardant?

And if so what are your views on flame retardant mattresses?

Ive read somewhere that in America all beds have to be flame retardant but recently their overall safety is being questioned (chemicals and fumes etc).
Encapsulation is certainly new and exciting stuff. Web Components could kick off in a big way.

My only problem is the range of different widgets that all do the same thing. Already there are countless select-box widgets like Chosen, Select2, Dropkick, etc

We need one to rule them all, and one we can all agree on using.
The good:

1. It is widely used
2. Fairly easy to integrate (variety of integration options)
3. Buyers trust it

The bad:
1. PayPal has a long reputation of randomly placing holds on accounts for no obvious reason
2. Support is horrible and talking to a live representative that can actually help you is near impossible
3. If a hold/reserve is placed on your account you risk having necessary operating funds tied up for days, weeks, months, and even a year.

Overall, while PayPal is good for somethings, I would recommend going with a more "seller friendly" implementation like Stripe or Braintree. Both are easy to integrate and customer service is far superior (and yes I know Braintree is owned by PayPal).
> how many C++ projects do that out there? Not as many as the Java counterpart.

I'm not sure this is a good argument.

Projects where performance is critical are coded in C/C++ , not in java ( browsers , AAA games , databases , servers , micro-controllers , oses... ). C/C++ programming is not about writing 'elegant' code with FactoryFactories , but performances. Even if it means using very basic data structures instead of classes or inlining functions everywhere.
You can see for yourself what it does. Just look at web inspector as you type a post.
The British Library just released 1m public domain images
In Chrome for Android, just tick Settings > Accessibility > Force enable zoom
I wonder if someone has written up comparisons on their productivity between the languages / frameworks. My previous job had me on the python stack (Pyramid / Mako / Sqlalchemy), which I loved, but have been on Java / Play! framework for the last 10 months. The one thing that has consistently surprised me is how productive I feel writing Java. Mainly, I notice I make far fewer mistakes / typos while coding; the IDE does a great deal of the work for me, and as the application grows, having static types has (for me) improved the readability of code I haven't looked at for a while.

No doubt a large part of any language choice is subjective, but I'm starting to believe that developer productivity has more to do with the tools and frameworks than the language itself. As these continue to improve in Java-land, I'm willing to bet that the disparity in productivity will continue to decrease.
Over wild, baseless speculation? Yes.
Seems like it be a lot cheaper to sell paper wallets, which are then filled with "free" cryptocoins after the buyer confirms receipt and public payment key.
This should be more or less confirmable by using a traffic inspector, right? (tamper headers, web inspector, etc) If Facebook is only checking that you've entered some text, then submitting that boolean (or text length) as a POST?
The WP8 browser is a lot better. WP7 was (IIRC) IE9-level.
Ask HN: Does my co-founder need to quit his job before we seek seed money?
Is it common for seed funds (like Kima15 for example) to expect co-founders to have quit their jobs before being approached? Or is there another way to do it that lets the fund commit to investing but on condition that the deal only closes once the co-founders have quit their existing jobs and come on board full time (with say a fixed time period for this to happen within e.g. 45 days)?

In my case, my co-founder wants to come on board full time but can't afford to quit his senior position at an existing well funded start-up until I have at least some guarantee that I can get a seed round together.
So why not scala? Scala 8 years ago is where java 8 is now, and you can ignore most of the java frameworks.
So you're objecting to the idea of non-scalable mobile web pages? Because the behaviour all stems from that.
How cork is made: an illustrated guide
The Comeback of the Mac
On what basis do you make the claim that you are the #1 rated mattress? I see that you have mattresses that are 5 star rated, but that does not imply you are the best one. According to Amazon's "Top Rated" mattresses, your brand is not even in the top 10. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/top-rated/home-garden/3732961/]
Your analysis is too shallow. The only reason he attempts to compare node.js to Java at all is to reach his point: that the decision was probably more about company politics than tech benefits. The team used a different language not because it's better or worse, but because it'd allow them to avoid building on top of the existing framework -- a chance to get rid of technical debt and start a fresh code base, even if just a seed.
I agree. This is stupid and immature.
Here is the entire list/slideshow in case anyone is interested

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/12/10/40-under-...
So they're running E2E tests on DOM states?

I see a whole new class of submission:

{{Software company}} uses robust architecture patterns on Webpages
The future of nukes: Even if everything goes wrong, nothing happens
I wish that American companies would consider non-American scale when selecting and naming their pricing options.

Statuspage refers to "Up To 100 Subscribers & 2 Team Members" as "Hobby". Where I'm from, that's more than enough in terms of volume for a very profitable B2B SaaS. The fact that it's called "hobby" is in itself a turn-off.

Of course in that price range case you don't get a lot of the "pro" features, but those features also come with volumes which are completely over the top, which in turn creates the impression you are being overcharged for stuff you don't need, phone/cable provider style.

Some get it right, like for instance Zendesk, where you pay per agent (volume/scale), but the price per agent goes up as you choose a plan with more features.
> makes a specific ask

You mean ask a specific question? Or is this silicon valley jargon?

edit:

Through the power of The Googles I now realize he could have been using the stock market form of 'ask'. It makes some sense since you're asking for an investment. Not that I like it any better...

The price a seller is willing to accept for a security,
also known as the offer price. Along with the price, the
ask quote will generally also stipulate the amount of the
security willing to be sold at that price.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/ask.asp
OK I see! You're welcome
Explainer for "double meaning in genetic code"
I wasn't sure how to write a title that was concise and captured the substance of the article.

It seems like you want to split hairs about whether "analyzing posts" means examining text or metadata. Do you think that "NSA is analyzing phone calls" would be an accurate description of their metadata dragnet?

At any rate, if they aren't looking at the content of self-censored posts yet, it certainly sounds like they're at least interested in doing so. According to the article, "This implies that Facebook wants to know what you are typing in order to understand it."
Replace the scrolling "Add Tag / Add annotation" with something else. I wanted to read some annotations but every time I tried to click one this little guy would scoot under my cursor causing me to click the wrong link.
Thanks but I've seen a lot of similar comparisons and they seem to focus on trivial things :/

For example the portion about "Asynchronicity" is a brief paraphrase like "Play is good in Rails its awful or doesn't exist". Performance isn't even mentioned really.

I find that with Rails apps a lot of development effort is put toward optimizing for scaling rather than complex logic, where Play could potentially be stronger. A lot of the comparisons seem to be posted by RoR devs who are looking at Play as a potential new framework for a CRUD app with a very fancy UI. In my mind that's not what it is... I read a few articles about corps using it for big distributed apps with a lot of eventing.

So I guess it's a bit of my personal taste but I just don't see "Rails has HAML", for example, as a reason why it's better given that HAML would be pretty trivial to implement in Play if the community wanted it. Full-featured CRUD frameworks vs. enterprise-ready app frameworks are very different ideals. They each have their place but if one tech were to emerge as really superior I think it could easily integrate all the bells & whistles that rapid CRUD devs like.