skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a devops engineer and I never really saw the draw of Heroku or EY after you scale out to a certain size. EC2 is extremely easy to work with and there's tons of documentation out there. Once you setup your CI & CD, write your cookbooks and capistrano (or whatever), it's nearly hands off.
And what problem is that? That people are spending their money in a way you don't like?
i dont know if any league has achieved it (it seems to me none have), but leagues such as the NFL seek to have the teams completely equal. maybe thats not their goal in the strictest sense, but i hear fans telling me they want all teams to have the same exact talent so their team has a chance to win.

if that is true in the truest sense, I do not see such a value in watching that sport. you're essentially watching coin tosses. yay the coin from my home city won, great!
The title should be "Let's not 'invest' in apps like Yo"

For a programmer this is only a win-win scenario. The founder gets experience, funds, exposure, and something whimsical to hack on for awhile. The people in return get this insane idea plastered all over the news only to hopefully inspire a couple hundred kids to get into programming with their chance to strike it rich.

If you hope for anything, why don't you hope that all investors in this idea take a huge loss and do their part in stabilizing tech valuations.
I agree.. if the company is paying the premium why would it matter? Only thing I would be scared of is someone wanted to put a hit on me to get the payout :(
>> "They're good practice"

...In releasing massive security flawed apps.
Once again, Google trying to consolidate all the eggs into a single basket.
Thats more or less how it works here. Our writer check for grammatical errors and the like, but the majority is written by the developers. I guess its more common than I thought. Thanks for your feedback.
Heroku's defining characteristic has always been that it radically reduces the sysadmin surface area of my app stack to something I can reasonably handle. So, while things like Dokku, etc. are really interesting they don't seem to be actually expanding the number of app-stack layers that I'd need to know to properly secure and maintain a server. Am I missing something?
> 2.) is "amount of work required" the critera a pursuit must meet to be valid?

To many (most?) people, unfortunately, yes.
No, they didn't skin Chromium. They made a new interface on Chromium.
> "Hard to take this guy seriously when he can't even grammar right in his intro paragraph. I love yo."

Can't "grammar" right? Can "grammar" be a verb?
There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A person could argue that the post has more value than Yo (though I'm not sure this is self-evident), but it still isn't in the same ballpark as "energy, food, water, health, education." I mean, c'mon Christoph McCann, get your priorities straight!

Of course, I don't actually make that argument, because I reject its premise. As the above argument hopefully illustrates, it is not reasonable to insist that everyone spend all their time in the most socially beneficial way possible. Should we all strive to make the world a better place? Of course. But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.

And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? Maybe an app like Yo will bring us together in a new (albeit marginal) way. That's valuable, even if it is also silly. (See, e.g., the first few paragraphs of this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goo...) Or maybe it provide a cautionary tale to remind us (as, perhaps, it already has) what is really important. Value exists in subtle forms that are not so easy to glibly list, and can be advanced in subtle and unexpected ways. While I wish we lived in a world where more people focused on problems like energy, food, water, health, education, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where EVERYONE works on those problems. I want people to be free to do the unexpected, even if the results sometimes seem frivolous.

So, if McCann's only point is that we should take a moment and reconsider our priorities, point taken. But this looks suspiciously like something a bit more (with respect, and apologies) totalitarian.
Heroku does have it's problems but if I'm being honest I don't have the time to spend using anything else right now. Perhaps when I hit a larger scale/stage I'll reconsider that, but at this stage there really isn't anything better.
If you want NASA reliability, build a NASA-grade 24/7 operation across three timezones.

If your plan is just to have the nerds skip sleep periodically, you're an asshole.
Yo, lets instead spend our time discussing how Yo is a waist of our time.
Show HN: Password-less Authentication as a Service (Open Source)
Or Arbel, cofounder and CEO of Yo, told Mashable that the app has had 110,000 downloads since Wednesday morning and 160,000 total downloads since it launched quietly in April.
And because, sometimes, Game of Thrones (or whatever you do with your spare time) can be the inspiration/genesis for something world changing, or at the very least a recharge period.
Why C++ Sails When the Vasa Sank [pdf]
They did keep it around, though. Opera 12 is still being maintained with security fixes.
Ah thanks, I got so excited when I read the article (because this is a super neat idea) I completely spaced on linking back to the project.
I can't say I meet all that many who are unemployed. Maybe that's just me.
I think you are confusing "the best team winning" with everybody knowing who is going to win a priori.

If the game goes to the best player with near certainty, then unless there's a lot of noise in determining the best player beforehand, you will have comparable certainty about who will win.

Sprinting, marathoning, horse racing, downhill skiing, etc., they all determine pretty clearly who won, and they do a good job to varying degrees of seeming fair.

Determining clearly who won is not the issue --- it is, after all, very easy to tell who won a soccer game. What is at issue is determining who is best. I don't find these examples convincing in that regard. We could do a better job at identifying the top sprinter by looking at performance over multiple races, instead of one race; this would make us less sensitive to things like stumbles, bad starts, etc. I don't think that doing things in this way (Olympic best of 15 100m contests!) would actually be more exciting, though.

Soccer could be a better game, but I get it, you don't like change.

Um, ok?
The discussion of the 'state variable' was interesting. However, it seems as if your model would give a wrong result for a game where one side had near 100% possession (and so relatively few possession changes). In particular, being stronger at maintaining possession often leads to multiple attempts on the goal because of the rules about corners). Perhaps that model would be more applicable for basketball?

The other strange thing about this whole discussion is that it seems to suggest that you could field a team of random people and have a nonzero (within normal human experience) chance of besting the top team in the world. This is so false it's laughable. Even in top tier play, where the teams are all closer together, there are predictable differences in skill and teamwork that ensure some teams would almost never win against particular other teams.

If the Poisson noise theory is correct, I would hope it could lead to specific predictions at odds with the way current professional bookmakers evaluate teams chances, and could therefore lead to a quick and easy way for this author to put his money where his mouth is.
It's not basically Chromium. It's using Chromium yes, but with a new interface.
"Us"? There is no "Us".

There are people that care about the things that you care about, and there are people who make apps like Yo. The latter aren't listening, the former have already heard the message.
I agree with this argument, but there's plenty of work hours in the day, and 2 PM Eastern is just about the worst one to pick. We try to start scheduled maintenance around 8 AM - that way we have fully refreshed devs ready to address any problems, and if something does go wrong, it's a relatively low-traffic time for our application.
Exactly. This is most certainly not cyclic because legislation and incentives are not cyclic in nature. If laws, regulations, contracts, policies, etc. don't change, then this is likely to get worse before it gets better.
Vector fields and HTML canvas particles
With the exception of games, the items you mention aren't distracting much engineering talent from solving the big stuff. With $1.2m, Yo can directly compete for talent that might otherwise go to graduate school or make progress in a more serious venture.
I have this too in Chrome 35 on Windows 7.

Here's how it looks: http://imgur.com/SSMV8j6
To me, there's three categories startups fall into: fun, world-changing, and failures.

SnapChat and Facebook are fun. Google and Tesla are world changing. The failures may be nameless, but they outnumber the rest 5 to 1.

If you're a success story, it doesn't matter to me whether or not you are fun or world-changing. You succeeded. That's enough in itself.
right except that my laptop costed ~$700 and had a dedicated graphics card and touchscreen while the macbook has nothing at that price point.
Really, Google? You are calling the new gTLDs "domain endings"? Is that what we're supposed to call them?
One of the corner stones of their article is that in order to measure the lift on the ROI of an ad the sample sizes need to be incredible large - mainly due to noise and large variances.
The metrics/measure you mention are helpful but very limited. Since, IMHO the ROI is the most important metric for an advertiser.
Quite a roller coaster of experience for 22! I'm sure we'll see great things from Nikki in coming years.

You kids doing startups in your early 20s have so much going for you! I wish I'd not waited until my 30s to get on this train, there's a lot more to lose (and less time to sort something out...)
> - Infiniti cars will stop themselves if they detect obstructions in the direction of motion (rear and forward)

I wonder if that can be disabled? Otherwise, an Infiniti would be a poor choice of vehicle for escaping a zombie apocalypse, or more realistically for making some types of emergency maneuvers (e.g. "I need to get away from a threat, and to do so I need to go over the median or through a small barrier"). Sure, it's the one-in-a-million case, but nonetheless it'd be ridiculous if there was no way to override it even for emergencies.
The main problem is that the company stands to gain if the death rate among their employees is higher than average, so they pay fewer premiums to get to the payoff. That might incentivize them to reduce health benefits for employees.
love this thing. works great.
These don't need to be night shifts. Back when I worked in bigco, we had very competent ops teams around the world - we'd even send developers abroad for 3-12 month periods to train with them and share information.

Smaller companies use Heroku so we don't have to build the same expertise in house. They're able to charge a premium not because their developers have to work crazy hours, but because there's a certain base cost to having these kinds of distributed teams.
Unless my mom or dad recently signed up for HN, I'm not terribly interested in any of this paternalistic (and patronizing) advice on how I should spend my life and time.
You can minute-resolution step counts through their Web API.

If you're interested in raw accelerometer data, why not just write an app that uses the accelerometer in your phone?
> Furthermore, the units are used only at compile time. At run time, a Length<Inch, f32> value is stored in memory as just a single f32 floating point value, with no additional data. The units are “phantom types” that are never instantiated and have no run-time behavior.

I love that you get all of this safety with zero runtime cost.
Liquid Helium – 1963 video
On the other hand, there are things like cookiecutter[1] that allow you to basically create generator 'templates' that are your own. This way you don't have to get upset about the generator making a choice that you didn't like.

[1] https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter
CodeHS Teaches Code in Schools
I get that people can waste their time how they like, and freedom of speech means you can publish and share any addled, paranoid rant, but 2.5 million hits is 2.5 million wastes of 2:18. That’s 5 million minutes. That’s closing in on 100,000 hours that people spent watching this hooey.

People are not an engineering problem to be optimized. A person idly browsing Facebook and sharing sketchy conspiracy theories is not in a productive mindspace in the first place. So what? People are no always intelligent or perceptive - that's just part of being human.

Sharing or Liking are public actions. Meaning, the act of liking something provides you with a data point about the person doing the liking. If a FB friend of mine liked the white-power Stormfront web site that's a useful piece of information for me to know. If my friend believes or is beginning to believe in 9/11 truther hooey, I want to know about it. Maybe we can talk to him and maybe I can change his mind.

2.5 million liked a piece of hooey. It's good that we know that. You can't debunk B.S. if you don't know it exists.
Yeah, I'm skeptical about plans to build whole integrated circuits out of them, but these high frequency, low-loss devices could be killer for a lot power electronics applications— motor controllers, DCDCs, etc.
That's unreasonable and illogical. Think about it:

1. Cars burn gas all the time. Decelerating, idling, and accelerating all waste fuel.

2. Cars take longer to accelerate to average speed in city traffic than a bike does to get up to its average speed.

3. Cars are the enormous majority of traffic.

2 and 3 put together means that cars stopping at every intersection would kill the flow of traffic. That's why traffic signals are used instead of stop signs.

4. Cyclists have far greater visibility, meaning they can more easily see their surroundings. This makes the "stop and look" penalty lower and quicker than for a car or truck.

5. Vehicles are much easier to see than cyclists. This means that cyclists can see cars more easily than cars can see cyclists. This means that the burden of spotting the other kind of traffic should be on the traffic more difficult to be seen. IOW, cyclists should pretend they are invisible to cars (which they often are). This might seem callous to the poor, unprotected cyclists, but by disabusing them of the notion that they are special and protected, it would actually increase their safety.

6. You simply need to face reality. In the west, cars are the vast majority. Your mindset is irrational. By trying to force cars to respect cyclists, you're actually harming cyclists' safety. Cars are big heavy machines, and cyclists are unprotected bags of flesh. Mixing them together is foolish and asking for trouble.

It's not a software problem, it's a hardware problem. Instead of trying to write a driver that accepts bologna in a floppy drive without tearing it up, stop putting lunch meat in the grinder.
This is an interesting discussion and I a waffling on this issue like an incumbent red state Democrat...

I am a little surprised that no one has trotted out this history lesson:

"In 1969, Ken Thompson wanted to play SpaceWar on a PDP-8 computer..."
Deployment and maintenance should not happen in the middle of the night. We've known this for years.

You design your systems to degrade gracefully, hopefully transparently. Screwing up your engineers' sleep schedules is a terrible idea, so you deploy during the day when people are awake, clear-headed, and on the clock.

I'll take a 1PM outage over a 1AM outage any day. If that's bad for business, business should pay for the engineering time to build a more resilient system.
I think this is the crux of it. All the objections to WordPress are from a developer's point of view. But when you scoot around to the user's side of the table, all of those issues are invisible. WordPress dominates because WordPress addresses its users' needs well enough that it's really, really hard to be so much better that you can overcome the network effect. In order to beat WordPress, you need not just a better technical foundation or some whizbang design — you need something that makes it so much more attractive that people who aren't developing for the platform say, "You know, this is worth the extra effort compared to WordPress."
I think I was misunderstood. By de-demotivation I meant re-motivation :)
I envision an app called "Monkey Pissing" that enables users to reserve their spot at the urinal during specific times. "Get paid $13 an hour just to piss!"
The manual that came with the Apple IIc my family had when I was a kid included sections on programming the computer with Applesoft BASIC. What an optimistic thing to include in the manual that every user gets! And, yet, those were the first lines of code I ever typed into a computer and I'm still doing it 30 years later.
Preview of McSema – Framework for translating x86 binaries into LLVM bitcode
See also the profilist extension:

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist
Free Utility App(Win8.1) PDF to JPEG
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Developer
5 to 1? Try 1000 to 1.
Our last engineering job req we received about 10 sysadmin applicants almost all of which started with a "I know I'm not an exact fit but..." sort of line. Maybe it was just an oddity.
>The iPhone didn't "change" anything or provide new features. ... What iPhone provided was a sexier, easier interface.

You just contradicted yourself. The interfaces of those Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones were terrible for many people. People cheered when Steve Jobs talked about how he used them and he wanted to throw them against the wall because they were so annoying to use. That is a change that people felt was worthwhile and it was more than just "sexy"; it was worth getting rid of your "free" or $99 phone and paying $600 for a smart phone for the first time for millions of people. (They weren't originally subsidized.) That's not "no change."
Not just subsidized mortgages. Also tax and other incentives, zoning laws that make it more difficult to build rental properties, and infrastructure that can't support (or is specifically designed to prevent) the kind of population density it takes for building rental properties make financial sense for developers in many areas.

Combined with a lot of political tailwind behind these kinds of broad-spectrum public subsidies of landowners, because in the USA it's common for working class folks to think of themselves as really just being rich people who happen to not have a whole lot of money.
Mozilla Composer was part of the Mozilla Suite (a predecessor of Firefox).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer
Stackoverflow.com is down
> I await the day any kid asks "How do I make my own webpages?" and we can answer "You've already got everything you need, just press F12."

Small correction: they'll ask "How do I make my own apps?"

And the answer will be the same.
Topo Map Generation
22 is so young.

At 21 I was on a plane headed home from another country. I cried in the office. I cried on the plane home. We'd Burned almost half a million dollars, a couple of years of work, let go a team - and had nothing to show for it. With no degree, no more money and no job I moved back in with parents.

So I suppose this article resonates, and in the most literal sense - I've been there.

I think the hardest thing for me at that moment in time was I didn't really have a handle on just how young I was and how much more I had coming. It was all I'd really done with my life up to that point.

It's taken me quite a few years to gain that perspective, and it's a difficult thing to communicate. The world is inconceivably vast and expansive and you have the next half century to build within it. Yourself, your ideas, your creations.

At that age and on that scale it's only a failure in the moment. Then, as time passes it becomes just another step along the way. It imparted knowledge upon you, and opened doors you don't even know about yet. All of the parts that hurt fade away and you're just left with the experience gained.

The fast-paced echo-chamber of the technology startup world is a particularly hard environment to step back and get a real sense of perspective in, which makes it a particularly hard environment to fail in, especially as you'll always be reading about someone else magically killing it.

I've failed since then, and I've succeeded since then. But as the years roll by, I've come to realise that the winning and losing don't even matter, because the journey just keeps on going regardless. If I saw myself now, when I was on that plane at 21, I'd have thought I was looking at someone who had mythically 'made it'. But you know what? I haven't. It's exactly the same: I've got another 40-odd-years of succeeding and failing ahead of me, in both my personal life and my professional life.

Personally I find that quite cathartic.
Ditto. While I'm never going to use this Yo here thing, I don't consider it to be something that never should have existed.

Yo and the mere fact that it exists means that the per-unit cost, monetary or in terms of effort, of making something more useful has fallen, once again. The barrier of entry for something more innovative than Yo has dropped and people, at large, have become just that tiny bit more receptive to something even more interesting than Yo.

Ten years ago, just the concept of Yo actually working and having a user base in the millions would have been the biggest thing since sliced bread. If aspects of the present might be a little over the this-is-amazing hill, then that's not too much of a doomsday portent for the future as it's being made out to be.
Count it as a lesson learned.
The dogmatic downvoting here is disappointing (no alliteration intended). You seem to be right. Reason doesn't work. I know there are reasonable cyclists, but few are speaking up here.