skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have an important chunk of video stuck on a Flip. The Flip's insidious custom format and the software it needs to install in order to do video transfers is keeping me from retrieving the video that I took.

I hate the Flip for this.

People keep confusing quality and simplicity. I didn't get a Flip because I'm fond of mediocre products, and if I knew it wasn't even going to work, then I wouldn't have gotten at all. I got it because it's simple, and simplicity has its own quality.

Some of the points in the article were good, but in the end, it sounded like it was starting to migrate over to the camp that believes that mediocrity is a good business strategy.

Fine. You might even be financially successful producing mediocre products and services, things that barely work, services that frustrate people but not quite enough that they actually decide to wage a crusade against your business.

But I'd rather see more companies offering excellent products and services, and including simplicity in their equation for quality.
it just comes off as smug. you're security experts, we're all idiots. don't even bother trying if we can't get it right, yeah?

how about instead of telling everyone they're "doin it rong" (seriously?) how about you put your wisdom to good use and contribute a better solution? people don't write their own (bad) encryption schemes and password hashing mechanisms because they want to feel special, they do it because doing it the right way is not easy or natural. you guys know that. integer overflows in c happen because people don't think about them and get burned. they don't happen in ruby because people don't have to think about them. a novice php programmer probably comes across the php.net/sha1 page to find out about storing passwords rather than having a built-in php function that uses bcrypt or something secure (yes, its crypt() does blowfish now but it's not the default or easy). same thing for encrypting data. they should be using gpg but probably end up using mcrypt because it's what everyone else does and they don't know any better. mcrypt has enough options and arguments to pass around that i'm sure people screw it up.

to use your own 37signals fanboyism, 37signals frequently talks about how they work and how they think it's the right way to do it, not just what other companies do wrong. where's the matasano libraries to fix all these security issues we're not supposed to care about?

i'll look past the openbsd/theo jabs because i know you personally don't like openbsd, but seriously, nobody in the project takes the "two holes in the default install" thing seriously anymore. it's not "marketing", it's just something that's been on the website for a decade so it stays. by the way, in the video you mention wordpress' poor security; wasn't matasano.com defaced a month or two ago from you guys running wordpress?
JWZ says that one of his methods to smell bad developers is finding if they are too excited about C++ and templates.
Demo09 Hot products
Surely icc would help more?
I guess there really does need to be a universal sarcasm indicator on the internet.
Not everybody thinks the Copenhagen "Consensus" has the best answers, despite it's name. My impression is that they completely neglect the economic basis for squalor (they suggest better nutrients, de-worming and so on, but don't address why people are in that situation to begin with).
There are two solutions that I see, possibly three:

1. A simple option in the applications settings that allows you to turn it off completely (obviously certain games would never have this option however).

2. A toggle somewhere in the UI, I've seen a few apps do this actually. It's a temporary switch and can be done without digging through any settings.

3. Global option in Apples settings. The problem here is that many apps are built with landscape in mind so this would cause tons of issues.
Actually the meaning is not that specific. To someone who hasn't had the "official" meaning explained to them, the new one is much more natural.

If you're relying on this phrase to convey that idea then you're communicating badly, because many readers will misunderstand.
Google Sites Get Liberated By New API
And those startups blessed by govt subsidy get an advantage over all other startups

Not that I disagree with your overall premise, but this is true of any kind of investment, and getting an advantage over your competitors is kind of the whole point of business.

Also, I don't understand why the HN community should view this as hostile; what's to stop them from applying? Couldn't one argue that all external investment disadvantages the majority of startups since they don't get any of that investment, which results in an unlevel playing field?
I wasn't talking about any mass killers, I was explicitly referring to people with psychical problems. Firearms still seems to be their weapon of choice, won't you agree?

(btw, what mass killers have used fire?)
This is what I'd love to see people do. There are certain (but very rare) times when I want to use landscape.

Even in Apples Mail and Messages app however I'd love for their to be a toggle. Texting or emailing in bed is just as frustrating as any other app doing this (should have added those to the OP).
Sufficiently effective public transportation would be better than autonomous vehicles. (Though of course it's not an either-or proposition.)
I'll go out on a limb and say that they have not helped one successful startup, who wouldn't have made it on their own.

Out a limb is right...come on, this kind of statement has no place in an intelligent debate. It's not even anecdotal, just baseless speculation.
Good point.

Give poor people more nutrients and better health... and they'll produce more poor people, who then will run out of nutrients and health care.
If you're already comfortable with another object oriented language then picking up ruby is pretty straight forward, but I'll tell you what worked the best for me. I started out reading some of the above mentioned books, but when it came to sitting down and programming I still felt a bit lost. So I simple started with writing tests for very very simple things. Like test_print_hello_ten_times to teach me how to create an array and loop over it. I basically test drove how to work with the basic building blocks of the language and literally in an hour or two I felt very comfortable working in ruby.

Now I come from a background of doing TDD in java, so your milage my vary, but this was a very natural and easy approach to learning the language.
No, May be in other towns in India 5 Lakhs is lot of money, in bangalore its good enough for 2 founders to live for 6 months. Nothing more, nothing less
While it might be/seem deceptive, I think that anyone that decides to base their business off of these tools being free forever without bothering to read the fine print is in for a rude awakening of their own making. Microsoft has provided them with the information, just because they didn't bother to read past the headline is their own fault (the headline is meant to grab attention, not to impart 100% of necessary knowledge).
I often wonder how it'd be if AP Computer Science was based in python.

I took AP Comp Sci in high school with C++. I aced the exam. Yet I cannot program crap in it and always felt limited. I did feel like I'd "graduated" in some ways after being able to say "yes I can do C++" at least for couple months after the class ended.

On the other hand if I learned python, I could do sooo many useful things a lot earlier in my programming career.

May be someone can elaborate more on why C++/Java is better than pyton for AP Comp Sci. I'd like to think it provides a better intro even if it's a pain in the ass. Am I right? On the other hand, I do think it discourages lots of people that are on the edge. I had friends who were genuinely trying to learn C++ and programming in class but had to really struggle. They left with the impression that doing simple stuff is a very difficult. In that respect, C++/Java communicate a very wrong sense of what is possible with little effort through python etc.

I know if I my first programming experience was in C++/Java I'd run away in no time. It doesn't strike me as a coincidence that some of the best programmers started with BASIC. Yet we try to dump C++/Java into high schoolers who have not typed a line of code before.
didn't netscape get its butt kicked by a bunch of programmers writing multithreaded COM?
There's a joke in there somewhere...
Ahh, poor timing for me. Wish it were Wednesday. When will the next one after this be?
I'm not sure what this guy's problem is. If this is what he wants then every time he buys a used game he can just send a one-pound cheque to Electronic Arts or whoever.
Why would icc help more?
Microsoft is free to rewrite IE from the ground up any time they'd like. The only legacy support they need is the same specifications that all other browsers are supposed to adhere to.
Well, for those of us who use our 3GS video cameras in bed, we definitely don't want landscape turned off!
where in KOP do you meet?

I'm literally right down the street from the mall.
Sometime next month. We usually allow members to give feedback on dates before the final scheduling.
By finding a niche market and attacking.
I think you two have this completely wrong. Falling death rates produce a population explosion, but only for a generation or two. After that, birth rates fall in line and things level off. China and India have already seen this play out.

The worst effect of malnutrition is that it damages brain development. What could possibly be a better way to get people out of poverty than to make them smarter?
Hmm; I see that all the practical, do-something project ideas with measurable results were somehow distilled into a collection of woo-woo and vague feel-good umbrella designations.

My prediction: based on what is telegraphed from the 10^100 site now, this initiative won't go anywhere, won't create anything meaningful, and won't significantly change anything.
Unit testing (done TDD style) does not slow you down, it speeds you up.

I do a lot of unit testing myself, but I know many programmers for whom unit testing does slow them down. Some people get so caught up in unit testing and refactoring for better testability that they either get nothing done. And some people do it wrong, test for extremely specific behavior, and their code becomes impossible to change. I have also known people that try TDD but end up failing to write code that they know how to write but they don't know how to test. It is not a panacea. You have to "do it right".

Contrast that with something like source control. It is hard to waste tons of time on source control that you could have saved if you just didn't use source control. It is fairly easy for even the most incompetent programmers to use source control.
if you are willing to jail-break, RotationInhibitor does the trick.
We had been meeting at Bear Rock Cafe. But recently their Internet has gotten terrible, so last time we met at LiquidHub, at an office building by the Gateway Shopping Center. Any location ideas?
Lockerz invites
How to get Lockerz invites and Lockerz information Article
I would consider moving to India for a top-tier incubator program. It seems like a nice long-term bet to place.
Adding yet another option is something that a good developer will do only after careful consideration.

That said, let me say that I do like GoodReader's (an iPhone PDF reader) orientation lock. And of course the fact that it doesn't flail on large PDFs like other apps.
What's awesome about that is that red was heavily tied into their brand identity and purple came from nowhere and really un-does a lot of the brand equity they have built up.
Those pictures at the beginning of the article are highly deceiving... Placing them above that article makes it seem like those images -- with that resolution -- were extracted from the brain.
What's with the crazy devil-eyes cat as a header?
No question, it's a fine line . . . you need to be pragmatic and ask "is writing and maintaining this test going to save me more time than it costs?" Over several years, the maintenance of the tests themselves becomes a huge cost, which is something the TDD guys don't seem to talk about much. (My turn for an overly-cynical guess: since many of them are consultants as you've pointed out, they don't hang around with the same code and the same tests for 7 years, so they don't necessarily see how it really plays out). "Bad tests" are actually a huge net negative for development.

If the test is testing something (like a getter or setter) with basically no chance of breaking, then it's a waste of time. If the test is likely to be fragile or non-deterministic, it's a waste of time. If the test is just too hard to write, and it's not too hard to just test by hand, then automating it is probably a waste of time and you should just QA it by hand every so often.

Finding the right balance tends to come back to the old experience and skill thing: you need to have some intuition about which tests will give you the most value (because that part needs to be rock-solid, or because it's hard to get right, or because it's high-change) and which tests need to be thrown away or never written because they aren't worth it.

Taking any development process too far tends to work out poorly, and taking any metric (like test coverage) too seriously is always a bad idea. That said, I've rarely seen unit testing taken way too far; not testing enough and ending up with buggy, regression-riddled software is a far more common failure mode.
Sadly, I couldn't agree more.
I agree with you but when building an application that has a primary use of reading lots of information, specifically in casual situations, the orientation seems like an obvious UX decision to tackle.

Facebook and the new NetNewsWire apps are two good examples.
> Having to explicitly scope variables....

... prevents bugs.

> ... the disaster than is OOP

Lifted wholesale from Python.

> You have to learn Perl by memorizing....

Some of us learned it by understanding.
So your frustration in bed is Apple's problem? ;)

On a serious note, I agree 100%. There are lots of time where disabling rotation would be useful: in bed, in a small plane, or anything else super jostling.

Maybe the ability to lock the perspective, but also switch in manually.
I'm not necessarily bullish enough on twitter to say this is a good investment, but I suspect when they actually find a way to make money, they're going to bank.

The fact people are willing to bridge them 100M+ until they figure it out blows my mind.
Thanks for the plug. iAccelerator is moving to Bangalore for this year's winter season.
Well, sure, I wasn't hoping that somebody would say "this already exists and here it is" (though that might be nice) - I was saying "here's something that would improve my life". Maybe I'll even take the time to implement it one of these days!
I've got serious "Key value fatigue." Inevitably these articles are always glowing but somewhere in the comments or on usenet you find the thread saying "we actually tried this and it fell on its face in production." I'm tired of articles that spend the whole time talking about features and showing single-machine "hello world"-esque 'performance tests' while neglecting the things people making IT decisions care about: does it actually work?

For us, we're using tokyo and it explodes at 70GB of data, though I'm guessing its a configuration issue or something. We purge it every week now since its just used as a persistent cache and I haven't looked into why, but it puzzles me how it can just basically break at a certain limit and not just start pushing things to disk.

To cut through the noise, can anyone here vouch for a simple "plug and play" kv store that actually works as advertised, at scale, and ideally is distributed so I can just add nodes as needed? Third party tall tales and anecdotes don't count, I want you to explain in detail your own personal experience running one of these things on a real, live, many-noded system. CouchDB, MongoDB, Tokyo, Redis, HBase, MemcacheDB, Voledmort, Cassandra, the list goes on (I realize not all of these are strict k-v stores), who out there other than the original authors can get up front and say these things work well?
Awesome link. Thanx.
The concept of Pareto optimality is very useful here, though I'd rather suggest you hit Wikipedia than try to describe it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency
Thanks - your explanation was far more interesting than the article :)
I found http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-in-public to be delightful.
I believe that's the point. What you do is make cool applications, and get people to use it. What he (they) do, is security. You wouldn't try and explain the minutia of using ruby over django for web based applications that involve micro-blogging with SMS capabilities and micro-payments to a security researcher/expert. It may be within their grasp of understanding, but it is in no way worth the time to understand all of the requisite knowledge to understand all the underlying information.

Taking just the password hashing stuff. There are entire books on breaking passwords, and how to do it more efficiently. You're not going to go through the minutia of making sure your random number generator is seeded well, with a suitably random number, that your algorithm does not have any flaws, that... the list goes on, but its what needs to be done to make sure that the password is secure. You (as a developer) should not be doing that, just trying to learn about it would take far too much time to be worthwhile. Instead, do like he said in the post/talk, go find someone else who knows about it to do it for you.
You should have used the sarcasm font.
> Has there been any point in time at which Perl 6 was not developing "at a rapid pace"?

Pre-2005, yes. If you care to look at the commit and spectest graphs on Rakudo.org (for example), you can see the activity levels continue to grow since December 2007.

> The entire Python 3 process has gone from idea, to preliminary implementation process, to release, and almost certainly a 3.1 release while Perl 6 has been "rapidly developing" and out at "Christmas"....

Nonsense. Guido switched jobs in spring 2000 in part to focus on Python 3000. Perl 6 wasn't even announced then.
"... May be someone can elaborate more on why C++/Java is better than pyton for AP Comp Sci ..."

"c" rather than cpp because it's "lingua franca of programmers" ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html
"Then of course there are all the "Singularity" ideas: prevention of aging, Friendly AGI, consciousness uploading, and so forth, but most of these aren't going to be accelerated much just by throwing more money at them."

Actually, the implementation of the SENS plan would benefit from having more money. Aubrey de Grey has said a few times recently that they basically have more leads to follow than money to do it. www.sens.org

Aging kills between 100-200k people PER DAY (not to mention all the suffering of people around and loss of knowledge and expertise).
MongoDB works very well for us with 100GB of data per collection, although we did run into a severe bug with .count not using an index, totally killing performance (we're talking 60 seconds to return).

Inserts and indices, however are very very fast, and the bug was fixed incredibly quickly and now works in trunk.

It doesn't seem quite cooked yet, but it's a very very nice start, and promises much. I prefer it to the other KV stores that are out there right now, anyway.
Syntax checking "on the fly" for Vim
"Daily Unique Visitors" is what the graph claims to show.
> In my considered opinion, the way that Perl 5 is partially evolving into Perl 6 even before Perl 6 is out is further evidence that a big bang was neither necessary nor desirable.

I disagree strongly.

If you look at what I've called the milestones in the Perl renaissance, you can trace at least half of them (if not more) back to Perl 6.

If you like modern Perl, you owe Perl 6 a huge debt of gratitude.
13th and Spruce.
The standard counterargument runs like this:

"Great, now founders have to waste time pitching to VCs and applying for government aid. Even less time available for working on the product."

Of course, this doesn't quite address your point :)
I love python, so I think this is fantastic for the language and the community.

I was taught Java at school... I hated it even then.

However, the higher level languages abstract away the core of computer science. ANSI-C is what should be taught IMHO, so all the smoke and mirrors are removed and THEN you can appreciate the higher level langs and their lovely (sometimes) abstractions.
So you're hosted in Germany? Is your target audience in the US? Prices are great in Europe in general, but the latency between US West coast and Hertzner was too high for us. They also had network issues at some points with a lot of TCP retransmission, that did not help.
Not only is gcc -Os faster for every benchmark I've ever tried, ICC is also some 10% faster again at running ruby interpreter than GCC.

However, none of these speedups is as large as upgrading to Ruby 1.9
I read the first two paragraphs twice trying to figure out who Bartz is. They quoted her twice in the second paragraph, as Bartz, but never said, Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO. So I looked it up. Bizarre journalism.
Spotlight often lags 1-5 seconds for me.

Quicksilver responds instantly, every time.
Questioning Accidentalism
SVG is XML-based and it's very easy to output graphics from your code from any programming language. There's a cl-svg library (http://code.google.com/p/cl-svg/) but I haven't tried it. There's also cl-cairo2 (http://www.cliki.net/cl-cairo2) which is based on the cairo library.

For realtime 3d graphics there's cl-opengl (http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-opengl/). I'm using it right now with sbcl and the glut wrapper (cl-glut). It comes with some examples too.
Learn Perl
I'm really excited to see "Build [a] real-time, user-reported news service" on there.

Because that's exactly what we're doing.

And these potential projects only showed up because people asked for them.

Google has pretty much just helped validate our market for us.

This is so awesome!
What a whiny article. If you're fat it's because you're eating too much and/or exercising too little.

Pointing to studies and "decades of research" to deflect blame doesn't change the facts: you got yourself into your predicament (by consuming too many calories), and only you can get yourself out (by adopting a sustainable, healthy diet).
yeah, I actually do know, I've seen the team page before.

but afair hn/yc was started solely by pg with jessica's book release shortly thereafter, at least that was the impression I got. other guys must have joined later (or they kept low profile before)
that's a big step towards growing their dev popularity

Looks more like a last straw to me.

There's simply nothing they could realistically offer at this point to lure the web community into their walled garden. Dozens of OSS stacks are competing for mindshare. Microsoft is not even playing.
My prediction: Google will fund something useful, and it will bear a vague resemblance to one or more things on this list if you squint at it hard enough.
boto and Elasticfox.
I added the qualifier of "most" because I wasn't sure about that one. I'm not a biologist so I have to rely fully on the opinions of others to tell me what avenues of aging research are likely to pay off and how soon. But anyway, I'm pretty confident that the biggest problem all these fields face are their public image. Fix that and the money will follow.
C++ was the language taught at my university - I was indifferent at the time because it was what they taught and I started writing practice apps in C++ the summer before I started school.

As soon as I went to work for a game developer (my first industry job), everything was C and my thinking about programming languages evolved much more than when I was at Uni. I was left thinking why C++?

The year after I left school, the department switched to Java. I guess they know best!