skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry but most of that is FUD.

It doesn't feel native to the browser

Most advanced javascript apps don't feel particular native to the browser either because HTML still lacks basic widgets like a combobox or -button. How many native browser buttons do you see in your Gmail or Google reader interface?

It's not aware of browser resizing - you're locked into a fixed width layout

Wrong. Flex handles browser resizing out of the box, see for example http://www.grooveshark.com

Moreover the Flex layout manager is heads and shoulders above the box model madness of HTML/CSS.

It generally doesn't show up on mobile devices.

That's one valid point. But then again, how many AJAX apps can you name that are really useful on (which?) mobile devices without a special mobile version?

It takes forever to load.

Nonsense. http://omgpop.com feels quite zippy, no?

It disables UI conventions - like being able to right-click on the page - that users are used to.

Point taken. It replaces the browser context menu with a customizable flash menu. That sucks but it's hard to imagine how it could be done otherwise.

Hitting Ctrl-T when a Flash app has focus does not open a new tab.

Works fine here (OSX/Firefox).

It's not easily indexable by search engines.

Neither is AJAX content.

You may like it, but your users probably won't.

That depends very much on the application. Right tool for the job.
An instance of "no such thing as bad publicity"?
If there's is a higher education bubble, then this is what might burst it. We desperately need cut throat price competition between colleges.
Is anybody using Flex for embedded systems? Any thoughts on that?
Damn, I read the whole thing to find out what happened to the woman and her four courses that would cost "roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university", but it doesn't say. So she spent $200, learned some maths, and then... What happened?
The End of Hosting Transfer Quotas?
I guess you think the University of Maryland College Park is a scam school too? The MATH 115 Precalculus course I took there actually covered slightly less material than my Algebra II/Trig course I had taken several years earlier in HS.
Sorry, in re-reading my comment I kind of sounded like a jerk - I promise, it was unintentional.

I guess my point was that you can do a heck of a lot for yourself with basic situps / pushups / floor squats with a bag full of books or sand and it doesn't take anything that requires payments to do so.
I suspect the largest portion of the truth derives from point B.
Cool! Thanks for the info. It's nice reading about people's efforts to scale mid-to-large sites. All the press is on how the "giants" (Twitter, Facebook, etc) do it.
Spoken Directions to Web Content
Better move those speakers away from those drives.

I realized that hard drives were sensitive to vibration, but not that they were this sensitive.
It's probably heresy here, but a lot of people still consider email a terrible way to get to know someone and online means in general to be extremely limited. An online dating site should be like Google: give me a bunch of options, and I'll make a quick low-bandwidth decision whether to invest in a face-to-face encounter. Engaging in an email conversation with someone isn't going to result in a better decision than making a snap judgment based on their picture and profile. I think it's more likely to result in a worse decision, actually. When I meet a potential date online, I just want to get face-to-face over drinks (coffee or alcohol) as quickly as possible so I can decide whether to have a real date with her.

For me, the only role of the initial contact is to say, "I would like to meet you. Would you like to meet me?" Of course, you also have to communicate that you're human and that you've actually read her profile, and you have to avoid communicating any desperation, narcissism, or other creepiness. So it's good to keep it short and make a little bit of conversation about something in her profile just to prove you read it.
Yes, that's how HN works. As a reader, there's no way for me to evaluate a bare opinion. Should I believe it or not? Without any argument backing your opinion, it's just noise.

See http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Nightclubs, yuck. I prefer a more non-hostile environment like a university. :)
I'm not sure that I 100% buy the claim that this is a new form of web navigation -- knowledge base, ticket-tracking, and e-commerce tools have had numeric quick-jump features for years. It is an interesting approach to more traditional textual page navigation, though.
There is a trade-off in resorting to interferometry - your resolution goes way up, but your field of view goes way down. For certain kinds of science, you are still better off with a nice big dish.

(Disclaimer: I work for the largest sub-millimetre dish in the world)
It's the texture. HTML/JS/CSS feels like paper. Flex/flash feel like plastic.

Shoptalk looks great btw. You'll probably want to allow multi-selecting users - dragging them one by one can get tedious.
While not a traditional embedded system, I built a HTML/CSS/JS/Flex app that lives on a touch screen kiosk inside a museum.
Why it's a good idea to sell to lots of little guys instead of one big guy
Long, rambling messages inspire feelings of pity and guilt. The longer the message, the more likely the recipient will feel obligated to send a polite response. Also, when a woman sends a polite negative response to a man, he's likely to respond with, "Thanks for responding, good luck in your search!" That shouldn't count as "starting a conversation," but according to this blog post it does.
Yeah, we use it on a fair few client sites. Works pretty well but sometimes struggles a bit with pasted Word content (but most things do).
2 of your 3 points are purely opinion, so agreement will vary from person to person, but I disagree with number 2.

Flash player is not so popular because it doesn't perform well. It perform great. One of the best sources to deliver video and complex interactivity such as games available.

People always attribute the low barrier to entry of flash (7you can crank out a bad website or animation quickly) to the speed and quality of the flashplayer or actionscript/mxml. Honestly, there are many more bad html/css and java sites than flash.

To make a long rant short, quality flash/flex can provide just as good (and oftentimes better) UX than anything else.
1. Good, but you definitely don't need college for that.

2. Potentially useful, but most people can easily absorb this on their own, and colleges don't (or at least didn't when I was in) actually provide any help for those who really do have trouble with this.

3, 4. Evil, but conventionally accepted.

5. Nonsense. Unless you're doing graduate research in science or engineering, lab and shop equipment is a small fraction of the cost of attending college.
I don't think the BP per se is all that useful, but the process of writing it will force you to think about and research a lot of your business. The end result should be greater clarity in your thoughts and goals for your company and an awesome 10 slides ppt.
The thing that is reproducible about Craigslist is their simple, functional layout and organic, community-centric growth. Much like HN.
I think if you try hard enough you can get a degree from a "real", heck even "established" college with stunningly little math.

And indeed personal interaction with a professor is essential to get to a certain level,But if you can not afford that, then the much worse alternative, is still INFINITELY better then no college.

And not a single one of my professors at my real and established university used the Socratic method of teaching, not even once.

Then again I didn't take any polysci courses, just cs, math, stat, etc.

And the ability to pay a lot of money just to get the opportunity to discuss Elizabethan poetry with someone else comes from wealth. Not form talent, or hard work, but the wealth of your family.

Apologies if you actually come from a poor family and made it to college on scholarships and tips from waiting tables.

But the vast majority of the time, people who discuss Elizabethan poetry in college don't really need college as an essential economic opportunity opener.

In short, you are not the target demographic of that $99 college.
#2 is my sysadmin, #3 is my tech lead, #4 is my project manager, and #1 is the person we take out for a beer once in a while to get us inspired.

Good teams have balance, and a creative tension in their problem-solving approaches.
> you'll replace it long before someone needs their backup

How do you know when I'll need my backup?
So using the mild intensifier "pretty" is quite appealing to women, eh? How interesting...
"You may like it, but your users probably won't."

At my job we hold focus groups for all of our projects. Never once has a layman not liked one of our projects because it uses flash.

Most flash hate comes from developers who favor other platforms. Mac vs Windows all over again...
"Festina Lente"
This seriously happened?! That's messed up and I didn't even notice, except that my searches have not been as easy and crisp, but I've always blamed that on SEO.
Paul Krugman on How did Economists get it so wrong ?
I can vouch for this from experience -- a company I worked for many moons ago had Allstate (the insurance company) as a client, which accounted for about 90% of revenue. So every time Allstate wanted something, the company had to bend over backwards to keep them happy.

This massively sandbagged product development, and the company never grew to its full potential, in spite of having some genuinely solid talent working there.
Flex is absolutely Flash. It is simply a library/toolkit for Flash development.
i would love to discuss this further, but HN is not the place to do it, if you are intrested my email is nurullah@nakkaya.com
As I read the graph, it says, "Message length makes almost no difference, although very short messages are noticeably worse."
From: http://stronglytypedblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/scala-tail-rec...

If the recursion is indirect, for example, Scala cannot optimize tail calls, because of the limited JVM instruction set.

Why is that?
I have a client using Flex right now. They're having a desperately hard time finding anyone adequately qualified to perform the work, so availability of hackers is an important consideration.

Also, everything else people have said. It uses a plugin, which slows things down and appears non-native. It's proprietary; if one day Adobe says "Flash Player is universal, let's start charging for it, and jack the IDE cost up 50%. We don't care if everyone moves off of it because we'll make a lot more money off of the relatively short-lived mass influx of license money", or "Let's just not release the new version or ensure compatibility on (Windows 7/OS X 10.6/Linux/Solaris/any other platform important to your userbase) [yet]", or "Let's break compatibility in Flash Player 11 and make a really difficult downgrade path", you and your users are kind of screwed, and so on.
How Fwix Sets an Example For the Future of Journalism
We're using Flex + ZendAMF(PHP) and development is enjoyable. Serializing PHP data types that are also native to Actionscript remove the need to parse JSON and XML. On the wire the data is binary, thus small(no XML tag tax) and fast.

Flex's default widgets and classes are all easy to extend and customize. You never need patches of js to customize some component on the bottom of the page.

Adding features like drag and drop, navigation trees and tabs are almost too easy. Dividing your app up into loadable(and cacheable) modules can keep your application fairly lightweight, althrough still much bigger than a standard AJAX app.

We(developers) will always be able to feel it when we're using a Flash app(before we even right click), but the CSS/Style/Skin support is good enough to make the app look inviting.
My point wasn't that college is the best way to do numbers 1,2,3, just that it DOES provide these for better or for worse. If we are going to talk about alternatives, we need to talk about how college can provide these.

I agree that on #1, online learning is probably better than classroom. I was just saying that classroom usually provides it today.

WRT #2, I disagree that people can easily absorb it on their own, otherwise there wouldn't be so many lonely socially awkward people in the world. And yes, if you have real trouble, college won't help. But if you are sort of graceful when you arrive though, college can help polish that gracefulness even more, with very real benefits in the real world.

I disagree that #3 is evil. Again, my point is that people need it, so if we shift away from conventional universities we need to provide it somehow.

I DO agree that #4 is evil. I just wanted to call it like I see it, and explain some of the resistance to really opening up education.

WRT #5, I wish the OP would refrain from using words like "nonsense", which seems a little antagonistic. I think my point still holds. Part of my point though is that efficiency is changing, especially with shifts from print to electronics.
I think because of your educated background you vastly overestimate the number of people that are taught algebra well in college. Even the people that did take real algebra sometimes don't cover all the content necessary for a strong base.

You also overestimate the amount of socratic questioning that goes in college, even at the top ones. Socratic questioning doesn't exist around 80% of the engineering classes at my school (UIUC), and we're ranked 1-5 in basically every engineering field. The advanced math here is pretty much the same, although I think our math department is only around average. The point being, the lack of socratic questioning in the classroom isn't a disqualifier for a beneficial education. Sometimes just presenting the material and giving someone a problem set is the right thing to do. The benefits from socratic questioning can be achieved elsewhere. Hacking on an open source project, posting in online forums, or speaking with professors, for example.

All of that being said, I'm not convinced of the benefits of this online system. The only way I could see it being even remotely useful is if most participants transfer to a public institution of decent caliber after taking basic general education classes.
Check out Diomede Storage - it's a cloud storage service that allows you to specify the type of storage (Online, Nearline, Offline) for exactly this purpose. www.diomedestorage.com
So, just to follow up, I saw that the OCUnit macros ( http://www.sente.ch/software/ocunit/ ) are all using defined using the do...while(0) guard.

I was wrong. It's the more platform independent way to do things.

For code that's only ever going to be compiled with GCC, though, the statement expression method is cleaner, I think.
FusionCharts Free is now really free (open sourced [MIT & GPL])
"The Cloud": that term does not mean what you think it means
This is like the DIV vs TABLES argument. It really doesn't matter. Use what's best for your target audience and application. If you're writing a game, use flash. If you're making a traditional website, use html+javascript. For everything else in between, some key decision points off the top of my head:

(1) do you care about mobile browsers? if not, flex works on 99% of desktop browsers, and looks almost exactly the same on all platforms with no additional code.

(2) do you need real, bidirectional, binary-friendly sockets or is long-polling with json/xml parsing sufficient?

(3) do you need to make extensive use of tables, images with flowing text, and other complex forms text layout that are trivial to do in html but difficult to do in flex?

(4) do you plan on creating a lot of sound / video / vector animations that need to perform reliably and consistently across browsers and platforms?

(5) does your application need to do a lot of client-side processing?

(6) can you combine the two approaches? example: gmail uses flash just to play the "ding" sound in chat or to show the file upload progress bar; video sites mostly use flash only for the video element and do the rest of the layout in html/js; etc.

Here's an interesting one: compare the rendering speed of maps.yahoo.com (flex) versus maps.google.com (javascript). And the fact that on the smartest mobile devices -- iphone, G1, blackberry -- they all have native versions of the maps app, because the javascript on maps.google.com is so intensive that it's an incredibly poor experience in any mobile browser.

Full disclosure: I work on voxli.com, where the UI of the chat room is 100% flash, but the rest of the website (registration, login, intro, etc) are in html/javascript.
Does that page commit the fallacy of "making a lot out of what we can measure, because we can measure it" or what?

How about whether the message says something interesting? Something funny? Something that shows that you actually read the profile you're responding to?

You could call these things "subjective", but that would be fruitless and asinine.
That makes sense. In software, markets have more say in standards than standards bodies. This can be good and bad (such as when IE-HTML/CSS becomes the market standard rather than W3C HTML/CSS).
I've seen that kind of IP-location in ads. Personally I find it hilarious - it is a huge flag that they are scamming me because I live in a small town, so my first reaction is not "wow they are just like me", it's "that can't be true".

I guess it might work better for the folks that live in NYC or LA.
Seems like he's just making it easier for Backblaze to match feature to feature by listing out the differences O_o.
I think you just paid some principal on my comment; nice extension/extrapolation.
Not all hydrocarbons created equal
A true proportional font terminal for Linux and Unix
In the heyday of the mainframe, accessing a computer meant using a console or terminal with no choice but columns of text in a fixed-width font. Now that is the wave of the past, and every major website, and most minor websites run with a clue, use good proportional fonts. The last stronghold is the terminal, and normal terminal programs will not let you use a fixed-width font. This page tells HOWTO hack Ajaxterm to serve as a terminal with true proportional fonts.
Seems to be the most dangerous thing to drive without a helmet. Hands are at the worst position to protect your head in case of an accident your face is guaranteed to smash into somewhere till your arms reach to cover your head.
Apparently the JVM goto instruction can only jump to an address within the same method:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/Inst...
XMPP is being bridged over HTTP POST to a single google-defined URI.

All the normal request/response limits still apply.
Stanford group release Open Source Camera - Frankencamera
An autonomous flying eel.
Looks fun. I wonder about the handle bars being too low, forcing one to slouch in order to use them.
Watch Busty Blonde Gang Banged And Jizz Bla... Online - VideoSurf Video Search
But, but, isn't part of the point of college to keep 18 to 22 year olds out of the job market? And perhaps more to the point, the real function of college is supposed to be creating citizens, not just employees.

That said, it's pretty clever. Even smarter would be finding a way to accredit classes that use Berkeley and MIT's online course material, including their YouTube lectures. Add on a virtual TA and you could get to $49 a month.
Because you can access it from that other server that bb kept, and maybe even those two other servers if they're halfway smart.

Replication is what it is all about.
The hidden cycle-eating demon: L1 cache misses
there are tags attached to all videos, not sure what you're missing.

what would be nice is if the tags were wikified to allow the crowd to deterime the content of the video rather then the uploader.
this comment is loading....... loading.......
Actually I don't think online learning is better than classroom, I wrote two blog posts (the more recent is http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/overcoming-bias-an... and links to the earlier) claiming that the Web is NOT adequate for serious study. Books are the thing.

The nonsense was a bit strong, but I have seen this claim over and over, and equipment suitable for learning is much less expensive than tuition. If you REALLY want to learn, you can even build large amounts of the equipment yourself (that is also the ultimate test - Pass/Fail - does it work or not). I don't know if they still do, but the UMCP had a required physics shop course where you learned to use machine shop and electronics tools to make specialized equipment you may need.
The P90X program is amazing if you stick to the six-a-week workouts and are really strict about your diet. It will kick your ass in the beginning, so be ready for that. By the end, you will be enjoying the workouts that you dreaded when you started.

There is no gimmick here: you have to work hard and diet hard (although "diet" just means eat smart and healthy, not follow some bullshit fad). The main benefit of the program for me was that it provided variety, structure, and intensity levels that I didn't have to think about.

I would HIGHLY recommend it.

One note: if you are WAY out of shape, start with a more basic program to get you up to speed. This isn't a program for people who are way overweight or haven't worked out in years. It is not for beginners.
If P vs NP formally independent then NP has very close to poly-time upper bounds
This is completely silly. I'm going to give some silly answers. I'll assume that these are male stereotypes, but only because I don't know enough female engineers to extrapolate humorous traits.

#1 has no social life, grits his teeth constantly and will probably get grudgingly, angrily married to an unwitting research assistant in his 30s/40s after wondering (for a period of no less than 20 years) why stupid people exist. No children, or an over-worked prematurely-balding vicarious living vehicle, will result. Self-perpetuating cycle.

#2 has a weight problem, and will probably sink into a muttering pile of self-loathing in his late 20s, only to rise again as a slightly-douchey fitness freak or a committed family man. He will marry, be quite happy in mediocrity and become a bearded old programmer. Lots of kids. Weirdly, this one is most likely a gun-toting Republican. Kids will most likely be a bit less incurious, which will make him proud.

#3 is cool and I want at least one on my team, but because he's a lone wolf by definition, he gets uncomfortable easily. He's most likely a man of at least a couple vices. Has a billion hobbies and a pile of old equipment. Least likely to be academic, which is at odds with his vast knowledge. Simultaneously happy with the present, but haunted by a hope for what could possibly be.

#4 also looks on Google for answers, cuts corners at every opportunity, is a great engineer because he conserves all possible energy. Marriage is unlikely, but will probably be an okay father if he manages to stick around for longer than 10 years. Least likely to manage the money he makes without a stickler for a wife.

I'm happy knowing all 4 types. I'm happy being a 3rd/4th hybrid. This really scans like a palm reading, as does the question. ("Will I be rich? Will I have love? Will I have children? Is that a good thing?")
Could you please show me where can I find the tags? :) It's either I can't see them or the videos I'm watching happened to have no tags. And how can one search for tags rather than titles?
Also known as the "printer-ink" model.
About an hour a day, six days a week is what you'll need.
If you look at SANs in general, Sun undercuts that whole space, especially if you look at what they do with the 7000 series which combine SSDs and HDDs.

http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/