skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a bit of a tangent, but does "bringing in 'real' programmers" to clean up the mess really work? In my 1-2 years of experience (which isn't much), it seems like time onboarding into a big system (like Twitter) can take months, even for the all-stars. Is "we'll bring in the cavalry when shit hits the fan" a workable mindset for a startup?

(And this isn't trying to be glib, I'm genuinely curious -- I only have experience at a huge place that has tons of process for transfers and such).
We're building a way for others to build and take ownership of their Channels: https://ifttt.com/platform Hobby or personal Channels are an interesting idea!
The FoodTrip mode is free and actually kinda useful
Iso = Equal. Morph = Shape. Isomorph = Same shape.

Isomorphic JavaScript = JavaScript that takes the same shape [in multiple environments].

You're thinking isomorphism as math terminology but it isn't. It's just borrowed from Greek. From a quick search it means "same shape" in regular English too!

Your nitpick would be akin to being annoyed by the use of "group" to mean "a number of people or things considered or classed together" because it has a specific meaning in math.
BlockSign Transaction Specification
I remember a time when Java tried to be the alternative to native applications. When the power of Java was the byte-code that promised write-once run-anywhere. This was about the time the web was becoming big and I guess in battle between html+js & java...well, java lost. I wish someone was still pursuing that dream though. Oh, wait, Unity.

In any case the browser is intrinsically easier to operate than a package manager. I mean really, it can go from displaying a simple static content site with no formatting or CSS all the way to impressively complex web-apps like Google Docs. Not to mention the work of Three.js and the WebGL community. And all I have to provide is a single well-formatted string of no more than 2,083 characters.
I am very interested in seeing those. The linked pictures in this article literally made me say "holy shit" out loud at work.
It is utterly stunning how badly Sun screwed the pooch with Java.

Java could have won the web-app war, with a little more foresight. But a terrible GUI framework, terrible updater, terrible deployment, etc. killed it.

They knew exactly what they needed to make back when the idea of web-apps was still nascent - you can see the scaffolds laid in the history of Java. A zero-installation platform for cross-platform GUI apps.

But they just made so many painful errors that their platform was unusable.
I actually really enjoyed the article, and can relate: about a month ago, I started building openYorkU, a RESTful API for York University, because their data was not in any accessible format, and was just listed (in a .pdf). I thought student-made apps would work much better, and I should work on something all students can use.

Some examples of why it's useful; when looking for courses - there wasn't any way of searching. I couldn't just look for all first year courses, that are 3 credits, and in courses A, B, and C. I also couldn't find all the restaurants, still open beside me that serve coffee (all the data York provided was on a .pdf). With an API, this stuff is simple.

It's still a work in progress, and I haven't had much time to work on it lately, but if you're interested in checking it out: https://github.com/mlisbit/openYorkU-API . This article definitely encouraged me to continue on with the project. More Universities should have open data like University of Waterloo.
I agree with everything you've said (with the exception of speed in many cases), and I would add: easier to maintain. Even supporting multiple browsers is NOTHING in comparison to supporting millions of potential OS/machine configuration installs.

That, and the fact that your app can be available everywhere without having to have it on every machine you want to use it on.

The 'speed' thing is mostly because we have so many inexperienced programmers writing web apps in the world - it's easy to publish these days but I don't think there is that much focus on making your app run really well. It's mostly UI focus. For example you can use Bootstrap and it handles a lot of UI, but most coders don't know what that UI framework is actually doing. Not slamming Bootstrap at all, just using that as an example that many people would know.
Well depending on the legal setup, the company has 100% of it's equity on day 1. Founders and employees both are given options to buy said equity. That ratio is not setup with the expectation that the founders will have 60-85% of the equity in the future.
I'm sorry, maybe I need more coffee, but I'm having trouble grokking your intended meaning.
Mirah: Where Java Meets Ruby
Maybe everyone will know how to do very basic programming, but there will still be professional programmers. We all know how to plug appliances into electric sockets and work with extension cords, but you still need to call an electrician when you need something more complex or to do a repair.
I have them also, you might want to look to get some replacement ear pads

http://www.amazon.com/Beyerdynamic-Velour-Earcushions-MDR750...
This is great. Had I the materials, I'd have gone to start building one half way through reading the front page.
My big pet peeve is that many mobile apps don't keep any local data; every time you load up the app is like an ST:TNG episode reset, as if nothing happened before. Save the data locally, serve that to me when I load up the app, and only once you've done that, check out the backend to see if the data needs to be refreshed. Even though most apps have many clients/endpoints nowadays, most users still access them from only one end-point, so load data locally first makes things much faster. The same can be done with web apps and localStorage.
They also have harder problems to solve when it comes to buses. During the tube strikes, it was incredibly frustrating to have all the route suggestions involve getting the 29 in Camden. Anyone who's attempted to get the 29 from Camden late at night will know what I'm talking about.

Essentially they need to start including knowledge not just about how frequent transport is supposed to be, but the typical number you'll have to miss before you can get on. For the 29 in Camden this number is around 5.

But, as Citymapper becomes more ubiquitous within each city, this becomes a solvable problem. They can use the real-time usage of Citymapper to model congestion, and offer better route suggestions. I'm quite happy to use a journey that's 15 minutes longer if it means I'm warm, rather than standing in the cold for 30 waiting for the 'faster' option.
I suppose when you're on an iOS device it doesn't take much improvement in the UX department to get you fired up.
> How accessible is Cron to people?

This is an excellent point. Cron has to be one of the most difficult pieces of software to use, and it shouldn't be. When I first heard of IFTTT, I thought it was a joke. I thought: "Who needs these services when I can just spin up a VPS somewhere, write a couple of scripts and get the data I want where I need it"... How silly of me. I don't think my mother would like to take VPS Setup 101, Scripting 101 and Sysadmin 101 in order to have recipes from one website show up in her mailbox every morning.

IFTTT and similar products helps productive people build bridges between services they use in order to further improve their productivity. No need to pay for a VPS, manage it, develop API interfaces, etc... It all makes sense... and if they're able to bring that simplicity to event handling in small devices, then that would be great.
That's essentially what is meant when people say "use a 'password hashing' function, not a mere cryptographic hash"
When I worked at a big company with an open office wore ear plugs while also wearing earphones, on really high volume. It was like I had my own office.
I don't think those are moral things to do.
But if you vote you do, because you are funding a group of people (the government) that does exactly that: denies justice to the poor (e.g. the war on drugs), and steals from them (e.g. the poor have fewer tax-evading strategies at their disposal).
> Stellar is a brand new decentralized protocol

Nope, it's just a clone of Ripple by the same author. He just dumped all his XRP, rebranded the whole thing, and started a new pump and dump scheme. He tried really hard to remove all the Ripple references from the code, but the whole concept looked so similar (nothing interesting, just another premined, centralized in practice service) that people caught him in no time.
>> We programmed on them in VB6. And let me tell you, for all its downsides, VB6 was screaming fast.

>> These crappy amateur applications were downright speedy.

Compared to what? Visual Basic performance was a joke, even when you compiled it to native code.
Playing Super Mario is also associated with brain changes [1]. Perhaps the answer is simply that as humans, our brains change quite a lot in response to our habits, and that such changes are unremarkable.

1. http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v19/n2/full/mp2013120a.html
>re-write the prototype

>ABI compatibility

In other words, conversion overhead and indirection, respectively. There is no substitute for having an inline definition available at the point of use.
You could say the same about rsync/ftp and Dropbox, but they seem to be doing fine.
I was in London recently and was astounded at how prevalent Citymapper has become there. So I'm now taking bets on who will acquire them:

1. Google --> unlikely, they have a large maps team already, and have recently gorged on Waze

2. Apple --> most likely, IMO

3. Facebook --> who knows why? But probably in the running too.
If you can see your emails on your Android device and Google is admin on your device, why do you say that it is impossible for them to read your emails? I don't mean that they could read them in the cloud but if they can read them locally on your Android device and for example they could send a message back to Google saying "I think this guy should get ads for a new router".... but of course they could do much worst (they could send whole messages back for example).
So where do these experienced programmers sit?
1. native behaviour in Google Now
2. native behaviour in Google Now
3. native behaviour in Google Now

None of these requires additional configuration, it just does it all automagically.
Practical Profiling or How I Made WordPress ~18% Faster
Fractal rendering and Perlin/simplex noise in Julia. Definitely worth it. I learned a lot, since I basically had to write everything from the ground up except the image handling. I couldn't say how long I spent on it.
it would probably still be fast enough, the difference between JS perf and native perf is surprisingly slim.
Google did buy Waze, so they are open to maps acquisitions.
In business, let’s stop using the language of war
Has Segment been in beta? This looks like the same offering they've had for a while (cool as it is). The realtime debugger of everything that's passing through their integrations is a lot of fun to just sit and watch.
I would agree, but at least for me, there is always technology I am working with that I am not an expert. For example, I am kind of the javascript guy at work, so people come to me with js questions. When I have to make a change to something on the server, or even debug something on the server, I could save a lot of time asking someone else how the server works.
How to Write About a Game
I wonder if any of these systems are accessible to the disabled. If your awesome mobile app to grab classes means that blind or motor-impaired students lose access, is that really an improvement?
The criminalisation of American business
Java got such a bad a reputation when it came out for slowness. And it was rightly deserved. The VM took forever to start up, especially on a consumer machine. Download speeds were still too slow. Performance was just terrible from start to finish.
Will the Internet eat your brain?
Or you could use JVM apps. Distributing LLVM intermediate representation code and doing the final compile on end hardware could also work.

Building native versions on the developing end is a foolish idea not suitable for programs in general, and it is time we abandoned the approach. It made sense at the time, but much time has passed since then. Some software might benefit from the increased obfuscation, but other than that it's just shit.
The biggest problem with this study is a huge selection effect. The users of marijuana are very different then non users, and heavy users are very different from light light users. This by itself would show large correlations across a large swath of measurements.
I imagine that without haptic feedback, so far it makes more sense to be looking at your hands while you're using them in VR. But I had the same thoughts -- would it be better to have a setup where the Leap Motion is on a pendant or something so it's mounted on your chest?
Democracy was once a comforting fiction. Has it become an uninhabitable one?
A generic REST Endpoint action and a generic Webhook trigger would pretty much do it, but I can imagine why you wouldn't want to offer that.
> While IFTTT’s dream is for all companies to play nicely together via its open platform...

A closed-source integration service is not an open platform, and this is especially relevant when it is an integration platform. I am betting (and building something towards the same ends) on more people embracing and promoting open alternatives than at any time before. IFTTT's market is huge. There are millions of programmers around the world who'll never write any code outside work, and they vastly outnumber the rest of us. The next step in open and free software will be making coding, forking and deploying apps as easy as editing Wikipedia.
I recommend a good pair of in-ear monitors like the UE-900s[1] with some Comply Foam tips[2] for extra isolation.

1. http://www.ultimateears.com/en-us/900s

2. http://www.complyfoam.com/products/Tx-200/
Telling the user that "he/she" messed up is the best way to get them to abandon your website.

Clearly explaining that there was a problem, the problem has been sent to the appropriate individual, and guiding them to potential solutions is a better approach.
Traction: A book for every founder's library
http://ukraineatwar.blogspot.ru/2014/07/launch-location-dete...

Not to mention BOTH Russian media and Russia-backed terrorists has admitted to downing the plane before it was even know it's MH17.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f00_1405864049

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emfVpkBKoow
Haskell has treasures.
Musik Mixology Ahoi!
Visa Checkout: Pay with your username / password
Like the back-end of a compiler? JVM or LLVM?
I appreciate reallygood404.com's 404 page.
I'd rather have good software that just works. Don't fix it if it's not broken. Updates.. what are they? If it's not broken, it doesn't need updates. If it's broken, I probably won't be using it in the first place. Test before you release. Don't outsource testing to your users.

Just like in the 90s...

Web developers might think what they get to do is fun, but as a user the idea that software I use is going to change overnight without my permission is crazy. I shy away from web software. (Also, all of it tends to run far too slow on my system anyway)
/r/headphones [1] is very welcoming too.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/headphones
The Streets of Cairo, or the Poor Little Country Maid
I'm sure how you know these tax discussions inevitably go, so I'll just ask you to reread your commit and correct the very large inaccuracy in the last line to be what you actually meant to say.
To be fair, the original systems often are not very accessible for the disabled. My university uses peoplesoft and it's a steaming piece of shit. The blind/impaired are better off contacting the undergraduate office/registrar, which they often do (it is so much easier).

So I guess that in a sense, everyone is wrong.
@Pinboard: "Maybe the $30 M will allow IFTTT to stop asking people for their Pinboard passwords, and use the API token"

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/505031713681330176
He wasn't trying to hide the fact that Stellar is a fork of Ripple.
Approximating Earth as a sphere (2012)
Source compatibility provides an upgrade path. This was useful when C++ was introduced, because it allows you to take an existing C program and incrementally start using C++ features. You could claim this is less important today, but I have a counter example. Look at gcc. It used to be written in C, but switched to C++ recently. Try that with mandatory indentation.
The problem of software feeling slow even though hardware gets faster is not limited to web applications. Wirth's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) precedes the widespread use of the Web as an application platform. Also, Stanislav Datskovskiy's rant "Going Nowhere Really Fast" (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=300) doesn't even mention the browser. So the web stack is not the root of the problem.
Why Do People Dislike Basecamp? “Blank Canvas” Syndrome?
And running in a sandbox, they are (mostly) unable to harm the users computer, which is big part of why it's easier to convince someone to use it.
Love this thing. You guys gotta get more users!
One of the things that marks a "salaried" job out from hourly paid is that there are normally no fixed hours - unfortunately a lot of employers do not seem to understand this.
If you change 50 to (say) 1000 you are getting most of the benefits.

The big problem you are trying to solve is "our password database just leaked; how fast can attackers figure out the passwords?" Say you can run SHA in 1 microsecond, and 1000 iterations in 1 millisecond. Even though it's 1000x slower, that's probably an unnoticeable difference as far as your performance is concerned. (YMMV)

But, anyone trying to brute-force the passwords out of your database will now have to do 1000x the work.

BTW, none of this will help you much if your users choose passwords like "abc" or "password".

(IIRC scrypt lets you blow up in size as well as CPU, which makes GPUs impractical for attacking.)
Hey Simon, co-founder here. Any product feedback would love to hear - especially first impressions and any concerns that come up..
So who or what is to blame then?

If web applications run like shit and give me a poor user experience compared to native software? I can't blame anyone or anything? Is the web so perfect despite all its flaws?

Oh sure, there is poorly performing "native" software out there too. But in my experience, pretty much all web software performs poorly.
Not to the point he was replying to though - the medallion system was being talked about as a way of controlling competition through regulation. That's not what's happening with McDonalds.
LLVM helps, but it's not nearly enough. You need a standard library including network and GUI at least. (Edit: or statically-compile everything.) Java probably would have worked, but as I recall, Microsoft killed it.
Anybody over 50 here that uses marijuana regularly and is still sharp?

That's an honest question, my own connections do not include programmers over 50 that smoke marijuana regularly so I'm curious how many people would bill themselves as such.
> The next step in open and free software will be making coding, forking and deploying apps as easy as editing Wikipedia.

Github?
I'm OK with that. What does cross platform even mean? Windows, Linux, OSX? Maybe Android and iOS?

It's still easier than rewriting all of the development tools, libraries, etc in javascript and for the browser, and your app will be responsive and fast.
They also have a really nice API: http://platform.seatgeek.com/

I've been working on a predictive model for concert ticket values using their data as a training set.
Show HN: Startup idea valuator
I think you're right, and I like web applications and think they are a good avenue. However, looking at mobile apps and how updates work there, it is a nice middle ground. No doubt it's more essential as we're talking about phones, not desktops. But I think this sort of computing has come back in some ways.
Could a hacker learn the hash key and salting by opening a bunch of accounts on the site before stealing the database, then comparing his known passwords with the hashed values?
I completely agree - I don't necessarily know what better would exactly look like - but explaining the why as opposed to the what is a great place to start.

IFTTT really is not that complicated, it is something that many people realistically could utilize, even if they aren't very tech savy. Something as simple as a beginner mode which hides everything except complete recipes from the user might go a long way in appealing to a broader user base.
http://xkcd.com/1367/
True, it's pro-Ukraine. The format was what I thought was particularly interesting for the HN audience (pretty well executed news-on-map interface + strategy game style icons). Keep it killed, though.
Rants that boil down to implementation concerns always come across as whiny. Web apps aren't fundamentally slow, we're just ironing out the details of this free, basically ubiquitous, basically compatible platform that no one is forcing you to use.
To be fair, there are a class of problems you solve by storing your passwords behind a simple one-way function instead of as plaintext. I was asked earlier this week to audit a system that made the old passwords available to the user on their profile page. Using md5(), for all its shortcomings everyone has mentioned here, would at least make this architecture mistake impossible.
A while back, a local non-profit here in Flint, MI held a campaign and got a handful of these put up. It is amazing that, in a city where anything not bolted down is fair game for theft, these Little Free Libraries are (afaik) always stocked, and I have never heard any stories of people finding their LFL empty one morning. It does restore a little faith in humanity.
There's also option (2b) The new CTO is no-one special, but actually spends most of their time dealing with administrative bullshit related to the integration, leaving you more free to focus on managing your team and architecting ad-servers.

Given the only context we've got is that the new CTO has no background in design decisions related to your problem domain or affiliation with any of the acquired companies but is an ex-company leader with the trust of the CEO, I'd even speculate that's the most likely outcome.
Waterloo has open data now?
I never had much trouble supporting those 'millions of potential OS/machine configurations' but keeping a web-app on the rails for multiple browsers + mobile is the stuff of nightmares. It is almost as if they break things on purpose.
You certainly can do some post-customer care survey and collect personal testimonials of happy customers who praise how great your service was. But these better be really awesome, otherwise it looks too forced.
Did they share the program with other people? Why did 6+ people all rewrite the same program? Or did they have different specific uses?

From the first example of the article, it says that within the time span of one semester there were 8000 students who had used the software. In another example, the site used to compare courses at Berkeley now has over 50,000 registered users. Berkeley even paid them for the website afterwards because of the value they saw in it. They all produced something that lots of students use to solve problems/increase efficiency in academic life. That's not a trivial thing to do.