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VLC for Android | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "No.This is an alpha version that crashes all the time... Not the final version. If you try it, you'll see why ;)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Incidentally, I chanced upon another source of VLC builds http://vlc-builder.neo-ns.net/vlc-android/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "didn't work so well for me but, but still looking forward to watching the progress. I use V-player advanced. Best player I have come across."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Works well on my transformer."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Please keep the Second-System Effect in mind!"
}
] | en | 0.962621 |
ISP Bandwidth Caps are Really Rate Hikes | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "As a Canadian who went through the debate here, I can say that caps and rate hikes aren't the same thing. The psychological impact on the average internet user is very different, and so online behaviour will be impacted in a different way.Paying 40$ a month instead of 30$ for an unlimited or very high amount of data means you'll grumble a bit, but you'll still do whatever you did before.Going from a very high cap or unlimited to a very low cap + expensive additional data means you'll very probably try to restrict your data transfers and do whatever you can not to exceed your cap.You don't have a sunken cost like with a normal rate hike.."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "While I don't argue with the title of the article - bandwidth caps really are just a way to deal with infrastructure costs by passing it on to some consumers - the use of IP transit as a reference for an ISPs cost of service is inaccurate.IP transit costs are what a carrier or ISP would pay to get traffic from their main datacenter/CO in a given metro area to the Internet. This is an operating expense and is a drop in the bucket compared to CapEx they spend on the last mile.The cable operators and mobile carriers are freaking out because they are constantly pouring money into nodes splits and QAM carriers(cable) or radios, backhaul, and spectrum(mobile). These are the real money pits of their businesses and their motivation to enforce data transfer caps, throttling, etc."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't understand why ISPs aren't offering some benefit to their users when they introduce these transfer caps. Why not add caps to the lower plans and lower the price as well? If it's true that the vast majority of users don't get anywhere near the caps, then this would be beneficial to most users.For heavier users, offer a plan with no cap (or, say, a cap 10x larger) and higher speed, and charge more for it. I think power users would be much more accepting of a price increase along with higher speeds than a simple addition of caps to all plans with no price change."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The default 2Gb wireless internet cap from Verizon is pathetic.It is even more pathetic with their 4G network advertisement. All it takes is 1(maybe 2) HD movies from Netflix to hit a monthly cap."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Thanks for those normalized graphs. Really gives a striking visual rebuttal to ISP's baseless claims."
}
] | en | 0.985146 |
Why does UI of Microsoft's website so unattractive?Do they lack of designers? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"Microsoft Website\" is a term kind of like \"Europe.\" It covers a lot of culturally diverse ground.In general, Microsoft's approach to the web has always been, get stuff out there and accessible. Unlike Apple or Google, there isn't top down control over all their web presence.I have theorized that this aspect of Microsoft culture comes in part from having had so many millionaire employees at the dawn of the commercial web.What I find curious is that hacks created by Microsoft's MVP approach to web properties finds so little resonance with HN'ers."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Corporate sites are almost always garbage because there are so many department claiming that their content is the most important. Especially so for MS where they have lots of needs to meet: e.g. downloads, upsells, product information, enterprise support, news, etc. I think usually the design department starts with a beautiful layout and the various departments hack it to shit.It is pretty amazing that there are 5+ navigation schemes on one page."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "You know, that's a question I think about quite frequently. Companies like MS and Google have all the money in the world, and yet it seems they are not able to hire teams of designers that can really nail a usable interface. I play with my Android phone and at times wonder who came up with the interaction flows, OS patterns and conventions. It really boggles my mind. I am inclined to say that they feel the market doesn't demand of them good design."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What's interesting is how different their Mac product division's site is:http://www.microsoft.com/mac/outlookIf only that group could share more of its expertise with the rest of the company. :)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I doubt it's a lack of designers. More likely a disability within the organization to make timely changes. I'm sure there are several levels of bureaucracy to wade through to get anything done and lots of 'design by committee' going on."
}
] | en | 0.969292 |
I lost 60 pounds this year. How can I best share what I've learned? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "First off- congratulations, that’s an awesome accomplishment.On fitness “advice”, solicited and otherwise. I am a long time fitness enthusiast, I look like a bodybuilder. This makes one a bit of a pariah in the startup/tech community. Geeks are not muscular, if you are into body modification from a transhumanist perspective you’d best do it in some socially acceptable way like piercing or tattoos. This means people are perfectly comfortable telling you, positive or negative precisely what they think of how you look in a manner that they would never consider doing with an overweight person.Part of this is posing fitness “questions” under the impression that in a business environment, dressed in professional attire, what I really want to talk about how I happen to look. 90% of these are not really questions, they are round about ways of making it clear to me they are not responsible for how they look- as if I care or am judging them somehow.The other 10% of questions there is nothing really you can do for them even if you were inclined- “tightening their core”, “get cut and put on some muscle”, “Best exercise for a six-pack” are no more answerable than “My Internet is slow, what is the best computer to buy to make it go faster?”. All you can do is shake the Magic 8 ball and give them a spectacularly oversimplified answer that won’t do any harm, but unless it’s the answer they already have in mind they will just ignore you. The real answer for "where do I start" is not something they want or will do so I never bother giving it anymore.It may feel like you had a great epiphany, but it’s highly unlikely that you discovered some groundbreaking new method for body recomposition. Outside of the realm of very, very elite athletes none of this data is proprietary or secret. All of the information that most people need to achieve a reasonable fitness goal is freely available- they just have other priorities and there is nothing wrong with that. These people are not unfit because they have not heard your secrets to losing 60lbs in a year, they are unfit because that goal is not a priority in the same way it was for you. Trumpeting, or in my experience even relaying your own methods does not achieve much unless you are a professional in the business of charging for that information.That being said, if it it personally satisfying it’s certainly something you should do."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Random idea... what about a browser plugin that presents a random tip on opening a new tab or starting up? I can't imagine you'll rise above the noise with books, videos, or blogs."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't really know how to "answer" here. Do what you want in the manner you want to do it. At some point, you have to question the "Why am I interested in doing this?" question. Is it ego? Is it to be helpful? Is it to show off? Do you ultimately want to become the next Jared [1]? What's the end goal here?I'm not judging - I'm pointing out a valid discussion you need to have internally. This post makes it seem more ego-driven - and there's nothing wrong with that. But having that internal discussion will help you solve a lot of this.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Fogle"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "You could start a MLM life-coaching business. I met a lady in an entrepreneurship class I was taking was was working in one of those. She had a similar weight story to you.I don't necessarily advocate this by the way. The point I want to make is that the best way to scale 1-1 conversations is to have other people participate in the conversation as well. For some things, weight loss being of them I think, 1-1 conversations with a person telling their story is more powerful than other methods of communication. Even books(which are my favorite, you can always write a book)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Two of the most important things when it comes to weight loss are motivation and dedication. You have to want to lose weight to an almost emotional degree, and the dedication to keep at what you need to do to continue to lose weight even if your body starts to create excuses.It's hard to get people inspired to do so though. It's often something that person has to become driven to do.Alternatively, one can join the Marine Corps and let the drill instructors in boot camp motivate you to exercise."
}
] | en | 0.940503 |
Why you should take everything Mike Arrington says with a grain of salt. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I can understand someone posting an article then other people commenting on why they disagree, but to start a thread just to say \"here's another reason I disagree\"? I don't get it. Not only that, but saying one sentence (minor at that, in my opinion) discredits \"quite a few other things\" but not listing them? I don't know... there's a lot of useless stuff being posted on HN lately, but I don't waste my time (or other people's time) saying \"this doesn't belong on HN\" over and over and over. This just seems to cross a line though, so I felt the need to reply.On top of that, what's with all the Arrington bashing lately? Some of his stuff is good and some is questionable. If you disagree with him, great, just put some meat into the argument. This just seems like you're going out of your way to post something negative. If you want to lay out your arguments for the \"quite a few things\", that could lead to an interesting thread, but I just don't get what you were expecting to achieve by posting this."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This isn't a good example of Arrington being off-target. His point that you can get a much better product for less money is well-supported in his article. How hard is it to use a point and shoot camera exclusively for video, if that's what someone wants to do? A crayon and paper are simple too."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is typical Arrington:So I haven’t actually tried out the new Flip Mino. But I’ve spoken with people who have, and I used the Flip Ultra, which launched late last year, for a while before abandoning it. And I just can’t figure out why people like this thing.So you're reviewing something you've never used? That's credible.I assume the people he's \"spoken with\" here are the same people he's spoken with about twitter being slow because of Rails. I'm starting to think that Arrington has a lot of \"imaginary friends.\""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I can handle him saying this...He is a features guy, he likes a lot of features.I will begin to lose respect for him when a company he invest his money in goes on stage at TechCrunch 50.I will definitely lose all respect for him if one of the start ups he invests in wins TechCrunch50. At some Point he needs to decide if he is his own PR firm or a third party commentator."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "That's a pretty poor argument to support your thesis. There are plenty better ones out there, some of them straight from Arrington's mouth, i.e. he's basically said the key to techcrunch's success is that they don't have to go through the whole verification process that other media outlets do - in other words - take everything he says with a grain of salt."
}
] | en | 0.979216 |
Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Surprise, surprise. No one is doing anything useful with the majority of them, just like many other potentially useful domain names online.I remember how pissed I was in 1998 when I tried to register my first website and found most names were squatted already. Truth be told, I'm still bitter at domain squatters."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I used to be a product/design guy at CNET in their games division. My team was working on one of the biggest initiatives for the company, launching a new site with a pretty small team of engineers (think it was 6, we had no editorial team, just some recent hires for data entry). In any case, we'd been working on it for 5 months or so, really grueling work, but we were young and excited about building something with so much potential. One month before the actual launch someone came up to me and said, "hey, we need you to move the launch date up two weeks". The reason was pretty boring, the usual executive needs it for X, and as you'd imagine nobody was very excited about it. So all the engineers are stuck in a cramp little meeting room bitching about how many extra hours we'd have to put in to get it done.Eventually I laughed and said "Well, no one in this room will ever work on a two-letter domain again. That's probably reason enough. At least we get to say we launched one."8 years later I still think about that day. I've had a pretty wild career, but yep, I doubt I'll ever get to build another TV.com.Anyways, that's my tiny anecdote about a two letter domain! Worked with a lot of good people on it and still work with some of them. It's a pretty different site now, but right out of the gate it was huge and had tons and tons of community contributions to its episode guides, storing everything in a nice structured data style. These days all I think is... man, we could have done so much more with it (we should have put an API out for the data at least). From what I understand, Google's sidebar related data search results have slowly been biting at into the traffic of large wiki repositories like TV.com and IMDB over the past couple years."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Huh, apparently c4.com resolves to 127.0.0.1. Also they're running the screenshotting stuff on the same server that serves their site."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If the Admin is here, The very bottom ones (00.com, for example) should display upwards on hover, not downwards below the footer where it can't be seen."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This doesn't list all possible two-letter domains, just the .com's. There are others, such as uc.edu, ti.org, and 13.tv."
}
] | en | 0.964226 |
Why Doesn't Our Government Actually Do Anything? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The fundamental problem here is demosclerosis - any low-hanging fruit have long since been plucked. Essentially every plank in the Socialist Party Platform of 1928 has already been enacted into law. Nowadays many of the issues government tries to address were caused by the previous round of government efforts to solve problems.But the longer you apply patches on top of patches, the more rickety the whole structure becomes. Eventually you reach a point where you'd be better starting over with a complete rewrite from scratch. It happens for software languages and OSes; it happens for governments too.As for what to do about it, I always liked Heinlein's suggestion (in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) that there should two houses of congress: one whose job is to pass new laws, another whose job is to repeal old ones. Without that second house, the legal code invariably becomes a cancer or an impenetrable thicket.Another idea is Seasteading. Basically there needs to be some way that brand new from-scratch ideas of how to govern can be tried out and demonstrated. The same way stodgy old companies can learn by stealing ideas (and people) from tiny new startup companies, the stodgy old governments need a way to learn by stealing ideas from tiny new startup governments. Any change that helps big old countries break up into smaller new ones or allows brand new smaller ones to come into existence would be a big help. Seasteading (forming new societies in international waters) is one such option; another is the \"charter cities\" movement, where existing governments are convinced to voluntarily allow other legal systems to flourish in small areas that would otherwise be in their domain."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": ">>- Eliminated all gold, and replaced it with unredeemable “greenbacks”They confiscated the gold. \nThe war on terror is a new phenomenon and it should meet the criteria for a significant undertaking."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The reason is that government has valid things to do, but these have been frozen in place since the mid 70's.Right now, the big debate appears to be a 5% taxation difference on the top 10% of wage earners.The only other things that change are fear-based, such as the creation of \"Homeland Security\"."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Well, I'll try to keep my point simple. Our constant need to complain is corrosive. Visionary thinkers shaped our society for the next generation.I didn't enjoy reading this since it was a large complain fest, and that is the corrosive thing that has made our government do nothing. If you imagine a future in which you have a government that is effective, that \"does\" things, somehow you are able to accomplish that goal. You need visionary thinkers, not complainers. And you have to offer up some idea of where you see the future of government, instead of complaining about how it does not do anything. The people who shaped our societies future knew the kind of society they wanted to live in. We rarely talk about what we want our society to look like, what we value as a society. Start talking about these things."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Why doesn't our government actually do anything? Because no one can agree on anything to do. The examples provided all were projects with widespread approval. But today, there isn't a lot of agreement. It will take more visionary politicians than what we have today to convince people their policy is the policy to follow. Yesterday, we had politicians that envisioned a future where Americans could drive across the country or put a man on the Moon. Today, what?"
}
] | en | 0.984064 |
Leading Anti-Marijuana Academics Are Paid by Painkiller Drug Companies | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Drug companies are not trying to stop the legalization of marijuana. Painkiller manufacturers has gotten into a lot of shit for the abuse of their products (some execs almost went to prison and paid $34M in fines personally; see Purdue Pharma [1]. How do they remedy that? By funding anti-drug groups. Unfortunately there are no "bud is ok, but Oxycotin is bad" groups, so they fund the ones that are anti-all-drugs. The main goal of funding these groups is to stop abuse of their own drugs, while looking good doing it.I work in the drug industry. Trust me, none of them consider marijuana a threat. There may be one or two exceptions, but they certainly aren't the companies making narcotic painkillers.[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/business/21pharma.html?_r=..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This kind of indirect monetary "investment" to maintain the moats to your market reminds me a lot of how ridiculously cost effective lobbying can be to companies like Intuit. $10mm/year in lobbying can virtually guarantee that legislation remains in their favor, which blows any kind of product R&D in terms of ROI out of the water.It's frustrating and disheartening to read things like this, and yet the evil business side of me can't help but think, "damn that's evil but so smart of them..." :("
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "So, the big news here is that pharmaceutical researchers (researching small molecule drugs like THC) are largely funded by companies who earn their money from a large number of small molecule drugs. Vice doesn't actually compare pro-legalizing and anti-legalizing scientists.I'll also get on the record that I would not recommend using THC containing products for pain relief without medical supervision or advice.Don't get me wrong: funding bias is a problem, but it gets overstated. The scientific process has to deal with much worse problems, like personal egos, evil publishing, malstructured career mechanics and outright fraud. Still, "paying for the right results" is a lot harder than it is often taken to be."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Sounds like they knew what would happen:States with Medical Marijuana Have Fewer Painkiller Deaths\nhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8245373"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The drug companies fight against any effective remedy that isn't covered by a patent. Besides marijuana, another example is the substance DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide#MedicineIf the remedy has any slightest shred of controversy attached to it, opponents can latch on to it and blow it out of proportion."
}
] | en | 0.961309 |
Winer decides to turn off blog comments | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm frankly not surprised-- Winer has complained in the past about comments. From the perspective of someone who often disagrees with him, I've never really understood why he had them in the first place, as he simply does not tolerate alternative views well."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Comments are often worthless, and the reason comments are worthless is because there's no identity invested in them. When sites like HN and Reddit work (which isn't all the time), it's because there's a community of identities which are invested in the comments. When a site like HN or Reddit grows too much, though, most of those identities disappear.Publishing your own blog post as a rebuttal, or emailing the author, are generally worth more, not only because of the identity involved but because there's a barrier of entry you won't bother crossing unless you're sure you have something to say."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I was thinking about doing the same thing, but then I've decided to keep them open, but just for 15 days after the publication date of the post. That way it is easier to moderate, and I can still have some valuable comments from the real followers of my blog. Just my two cents."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Scripting News has gone the way of Daring Fireball. It was bound to happen."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I guess he figures people will just discuss the articles on sites like this, and he'll no longer have to worry about doing the moderation work. Lazy, but it could work."
}
] | en | 0.99377 |
Is F# Ready for Production? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> 5.Hiring developers is already very hard. Do we want to limit the pool of available candidates significantly (and take the increased salaries that come with the harder-to-find skills)?To that one, if I were in your shoes, I'd answer "yes" in a heartbeat. Using F# can help you differentiate yourselves on the job market. Everybody's looking for great developers, but you guys have a big plus when recruiting developers who prefer functional programming.As an anecdote, Dutch startup Silk writes their entire backend in Haskell. Their founder Salar told me that while finding people is harder, the people they find are, nearly without exception, really good and passionate. They want to work for Silk because they want to code Haskell for their day jobs. They don't cost more than "other" developers at all, because they're so happy they can finally use what they feel is a decent programming language at work.I guess F# has a bit less of a hardcore following than Haskell, but I bet that if you're one of the few functional programming shops in the region, Haskellers (and MLers and maybe even Lispers) will definitely prefer that over C# or Python."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This article is ridiculous. F# is used in production in lots of places from startups like Tachyus and SnappyGrid, to mid-sized firms like Trayport all the way to huge corporations like Aviva, Credit Suisse, EDF and Barclays Capital.IDE Support: Sure, the IDE support might not be quite as developed as C#. But frankly most refactorings are just pressing tab a few times with F#. Refactorings for C#/VB.NET are mostly workarounds for languages that require huge amounts of excess syntax. The IDE support for F# is still way ahead of most of the competition (particularly dynamic languages). The intellisense and error highlighting work fantastically well.Options/nulls: Yes I suppose you still occasionally have to do a null check if you interface with legacy libraries. but I think having thousands upon thousands of .NET libraries means this is a worthwhile tradeoff. Plus you can use the TryGetX methods in F# far more nicely than in C#. http://luketopia.net/2014/02/05/fsharp-and-output-parameters...F# missed by Roslyn: F# has had an open source compiler written in F# for years. C# is a ridiculous language to choose to write a compiler in. See http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/roslyn-vs-fsharp-comp...What's coming next: F# is so far ahead of C#/VB.NET that this argument is ludicrous. Even if F# remained stagnant it would still always be better than C#. It has sensible defaults: immutability over mutability, functional over OOP, parametric polymorphism over inheritance, lack of nulls over null checks everywhere.C# has poor defaults that are now irreparable due to the need to keep backwards compatibility.F# is open to contributions now so I would expect some great things. Joinads, for example... http://tryjoinads.org/Hiring developers is hard: This is a nonsense statement. Sure, if you want to hire 100 F# developers you might struggle, but you're going to struggle to find 100 good C# developers. Yaron Minsky from Jane Street reports hiring OCaml developers was "the easiest hiring he's ever done". If you tweet that you are looking for F# developers I know from experience that you'll get a lot of responses from very talented developers. Most places I've worked have a terrible time finding decent C# devs - interview:hiring ratio is around 50:1."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I can confidently answer "yes" to this question, because Tachyus, the first Silicon Valley start-up in the oil and gas industry, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/tachyus-a-data-start-... , chose F# as the core software language. How did this work out? We went from absolutely no software written to deployed as the core operational software of a regional oil production company in 12 weeks. Our management and our customer's management are so happy with the results we are "all in" and not looking back."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "For those who expect that Betteridge's law of headlines ("Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.") applies here, the article is actually quite positive about F# :-)But even then, it is just worth pointing out that there is a massive list of testimonials from those who are already happily using F# in production in a wide range of areas, including finance, science, line-of-business, startups and many more: http://fsharp.org/testimonials/"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "many of the concerns the op had where with marketing of the f# ecosystem.For example the tooling issues he mention are solved with a Visual Studio Extensionhttp://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/136b942e-9f2c-...His concern with Roslyn seems like a non issues, a f# compiler is also opened sourced and was written in f# on day one. And there are many tools already taking advantage of it being open. So in this regard f# is farther ahead in c# in rubric.As far a c# being ahead of f#, its funny, as most of the new features the are being added to c# seem to come from f#.The op approach to hiring dev seems backward to me, you hire smart people and train then on your tools. There are so many good recourses for learning f#, having candidates without f# on their resume does not seem like a issues.over it is great the he was able to bring f# into his environment. as more people adopt f# for there needs knowledge will spread and his concerns will fade."
}
] | en | 0.955719 |
Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "(Prelude edit: A few people seem to be missing the point I'm making here. I know quite a lot about the predator, and a bit about the Global Hawk. I do not know much about the Sentinel. The jab about building a drone with parts on my kitchen table is a joke, meant to illustrate that this is either an absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect, the latter being most likely. The Global Hawk, for instance, uses inertial navigation as well as GPS. Spoofing GPS against that platform would be annoying to the people controlling it, it would not get you a free Global Hawk. It is a near-certainty that the Sentinel has a similar navigation system.).Some clarification on these drones:Some of them require a human being with Line Of Sight to land them. \"Predators\" (what a lovely name), for instance. This thing is basically a gigantic R/C plane, and a pretty nice one at that.You taxi it to the runway, take it off, and fly it via remote control. There is a human watching it the entire time (although the human may not be in close proximity to the plane. The militarized versions, for instance, have pilots living in Nevada, and planes living in Afghanistan).Another plane, called a \"Global Hawk\", is much larger, and requires almost no human intervention at all. You open the hanger door, press the go button, and then leave it alone.It taxis itself to the runway, powers up, takes off, flies its mission, comes home, lands, taxis back to the hanger, and powers down.If this article is accurate, it would mean that this drone model requires no human intervention, which makes sense if it's primarily a passive, camera-platform.What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.How do I get into defense contracting, again? I have the parts for a \"drone\" sitting on my kitchen table right now that, from the sound of things, is about navigationally equivalent to this thing.(By that I mean a $30 'duino, $50 worth of gyros and accelerometers, and $60 worth of a GPS. Hey government, here's a cost cutting measure: hire me to build you some drones.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Lets flip the tables here and imagine Iran is flying surveillance drones over mainland USA, gathering photos and who knows what else. Would it be unreasonable to think the USA would try with everything they've got to shoot them down and/or capture them? Who would be the bad guy in that scenario?I find it amusing nobody has thought to question what right the US have to fly a surveillance drone over Iran to spy on the country/people. Furthermore, I think it's pretty clear if you choose to cross a well established border and put something in my country without my permission, for the express purpose of spying on me, you better know I'm going to try hard to capture it as my own.Is it even \"legal\" for the US to be doing this?Who judges who can spy on who, and who is the \"bad\" guy when one side captures gear from the other side?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "So, they spoofed GPS and jammed the rest of the communications to make it land automatically. Given that there are test transmitters for GPS devices used when consumer devices are being created it's not a surprise that they managed to do this. Not very long ago there was a GPS jamming exercise in the UK done on a military range.I realize that as a Westerner I shouldn't be rooting for the Iranians but if they did spoof GPS, jam the rest of the communications and get this thing to land thinking it was at its home base then it's at least a neat hack.Also, in the article there's a quote from someone dissing the Iranians' technical ability. This seems like a mistake. Iran is not a 'stone age' country like Afghanistan."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”An ox-cart technology culture that is allied with China and Russia. I hope this kind of hubris is counterbalanced by more realistic attitudes\b in the defense world."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It is suprising that many americans, for the lack of a better term, seem to be \"butthurt\" over this event.Look at this news on reddit for example, first it was ridiculed, and speculation was high that it might have been a crash or accident, that the Iranians had luck, and that it in fact never happened, just propaganda. Then the Iranians showed it, and many comments said \"its old tech any way\". Why the butthurtness?And now, \"the takeover wasnt so high tech anyway\"."
}
] | en | 0.974063 |
Ask HN: When to learn AJAX? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "AJAX, how it's commonly referred to now, is simply the process of loading content from an external page into a Javascript variable. Most of the time it's not even AJAX anymore, but rather AJAJ (Asynchronous Javascript and JSON). In terms of getting started there really isn't much to learn, especially if you have some experience with jQuery.The big thing you need to remember is the A: Asynchronous. Especially if you're new to programming, this won't make any sense to you. As you use it you'll just get frustrated about why it works the way it does. It takes a bit of experience to learn to use it well, so give it some time. Remember these two key tips:\n 1. The code following your AJAX call should not be dependent on the content you are loading. Javascript will continue running line by line after the AJAX request is sent, NOT after the content has been loaded. If any code is dependent on the loaded content, it belongs in the return function.\n 2. The return function for an AJAX call only has the data from the page it loaded, it cannot* see the variables you defined before you made the request.Other than that, just realize that the true power of AJAX comes from the data you're loading in. You can use it to create an <iframe> of sorts that simply loads pre-built HTML files into a div, but that's not all that exciting. If you use something like PHP to process and load data, you can start to make some very cool applications. If you're looking for a good learning project, I would recommend creating a simple \"shoutbox\" that works completely with AJAX, including periodic refreshes to check for new comments.If you don't know what a shoutbox is: http://www.shoutmix.com/main/\nSome jQuery functions to check out: .load(), .post(), .get(), .ajax()*: A lot of times, your return function WILL be able to see variables you defined before the AJAX request because they ended up in the global scope. I'd recommend that you don't rely on this unless your making the variable global on purpose. Otherwise, there's a lot of potential for a debugging nightmare."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Ajax isn't complicated at all. It's basically HTTP requests via javascript. The request returns an XHR object (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest).Now along with this feature comes some differences from regular HTTP, but you can read those up in an article. Just remember the concept."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"Knowing\" Ajax isn't a skill, like riding a bike or knowing what the $() operator does - it's understanding a concept.In short, it's a term that describes a design pattern where some Javascript makes an asynchronous HTTP request in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page, receives the response, and then does something with that information.Now that you've got what it means, the question becomes \"How do I implement that?\", which is much easier to deal with. For this, just keep digging through the jQuery examples and tutorials (if that's the Javascript route you're taking). Find a trivial example, get it running on your host, and then start experimenting with it. Once that's down, repeat with a more complex example. Read some more articles from different authors. Make your own examples. Repeat.As for the broader question of when you should learn it (or anything else), the answer for things like this is always the same: when you feel in the mood for learning something new."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've been working on a hobby project to do an ajax site from scratch, and after a month of flailing I've decided to make a conventional site first and then ajaxify it. If you get bogged down after a couple of weeks you might want to make the switch back to nonajax sooner than I did.If anybody has tips on debugging ajax I'd love to hear them ..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "One thing that will be very important: XmlHttpRequest.I recommend this post, it helped me to understand the basics: http://everythingsysadmin.com/2010/06/learning-ajax-after-ig..."
}
] | en | 0.975918 |
How a colonial past shaped Star Trek’s utopian futures | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This entire piece throws out conjecture as fact and appears to back none of it up with substance.> By making the Ferengis a race of intergalactic traders with oversized appendages and an addiction to “gold-plated latinum,” Star Trek merely updates Jewish stereotypes.If you read the TNG novels you will find that the Ferengi tourists to earth all head for Wall Street regarding it with something like religious reverence, I suspect though don't claim the Ferengi where meant to embody the end result of a "perfect competition" style of capitalism and the capitalist personalities that you end up with and not a shot at the Jews.In fact I'd ponder whether his apparently evidence less assumption that the corrupt money grubbing characters where meant to be the Jews shows his own prejudices rather well."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "While this is a thoughtful piece, it's ultimately misguided. Star Trek is a decades-old, generational franchise, built and maintained by hundreds of writers, actors, producers and directors. There is not single person or "voice" that speaks for Star Trek. With such an expansive cannon, it is trivial to pick and choose story lines and themes to support any conjecture or criticism. Like any other cultural artifact, Star Trek has taken on the flavor and zeitgeist of a given era. Including the at times sexist, racist and xenophobic attitudes of the day.Where the article gets things particularly wrong is exploration in Star Trek. The European exploration of the Americas was premised on exploitation - to find new worlds an peoples to conquer and dominate. It didn't see foreign peoples as human, but as resources to be mined, extracted and refined.Contrast with Star Trek: aliens are almost always extended the hand of friendship at first contact. They are considered self-determined individuals who can become partners in science or trade, if they are capable. The Federation regulates it's interactions with aliens via the Prime Directive. A Directive that is designed to protect the "other" and maximize their independence and well-being. To declare this an analog with European conquest is laughable."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Once the article equates Voyager with the original 1960's series, just about any absurdity is possible because by the time people are returning from where no one has returned before after staying where no one stayed before [Deep Space 9] we're comparing the results of mining the last dollar from a franchise in the age of 1000 cable channels to a show that was on that was on the chopping block each season when there were only three channels and TV was in Black and White.Uhuru was a bridge officer. Spock was mixed race. Sulu and Chekov showed that the animosity of the 1940's and that of the Cold War were transient. It was McCoy and Kirk and Scotty who were always teetering into the irrational and poor judgement. They were the ones acknowledged as most likely to create a 'Planet of the Nazis'.It's Picard for whom that doesn't really seem possible. As a character, he lacks that level of flaw. He's been sanitized. We're in the realm where including a blind person requires cool sunglasses. There's no Captain Pike of The Menagerie to make us uncomfortable.Indeed, the robot as object of romantic interest and as the subject of enquiry into the nature of personhood is...well, just another white guy. And in classic middle-brow morality play idiom, the price a female character must pay for falling in love with the wrong sort of person is death.There may still be 100 more economically viable episodes to come, but when the iconic leather jacket is combined with water-skis, the writers are just going through the motions."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Societies shown in Star Trek are very homogenous. It appears that each species has only one culture each. But if you look at us, we do not have one culture. We have many cultures, and subculture that nests within them.That is not the case at all with Star Trek race. Even humans appeared to be made up only one culture, with no subcultures or variation at all."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Not a single mention of the Prime Directive."
}
] | en | 0.893191 |
Ask HN: Which scheme implementation do you recommend? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you are learning Scheme by reading SICP, you might want to install MIT/GNU Scheme. Otherwise, let me join the bandwagon in endorsing PLT. The PLT camp has its own favored textbook, qv http://www.htdp.org/ .The just-released game QuantZ (http://www.gamerizon.com/gamerizon-news-and-media.html) was written almost entirely in Gambit Scheme (per https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/gambit-list/2009-...). Your Scheme factoid for the day."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As pg mentioned, PLT is a good place to start. It's widely used and has an active community. Dr. Scheme is a nice IDE for learning as well.If you need to compile to C, Chicken and Gambit-C are both pretty well regarded (it has been a little while since I've looked into this specifically so take it with a grain of salt)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "We like PLT Scheme. (You used it to post this question.)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm going to say that it doesn't really matter but, PLT is probably a great place to start.If you want to learn Scheme then make sure to use the R5RS setting on PLT. When I write for portability, that's the setting I use.Most of my writing however, is in PocketScheme for my iPaq.I've messed a bit with Kawa however that just led me to ordering a copy of 'Programming Clojure' so I can see what the hype is all about."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "PLT Scheme is FAR AND AWAY the best system to start with Scheme. It is also ONE of the best to take you as far as you like with Scheme as well.It is possible a different Scheme a particular niche advanced need.For a traditional Lisp-like REPL with incremental compilation Scheme Larceny and/or Ikarus."
}
] | en | 0.911149 |
Stephen Fry on binary choices | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I often find myself in agreement with Fry's seemingly incompatible interests. Like his appreciation for the Free Software movement[1] as well as Apple's achievements[2].[1]: http://www.gnu.org/fry/[2]: http://www.stephenfry.com/2010/01/28/ipad-about/"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "C.S.Lewis has had some clever things to say on the topic. There's this brilliant paragraph in Mere Christianity that goes:\"… so many people cannot be brought to realise that when B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse and worst. They want to know whether you think patriotism a good thing: if you reply that it is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but that it is inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict, they think you are being evasive.\"Think this applies here, too."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Wow, do I know his feeling. I call it 'Coke/Pepsi' binary thinking. The notion that the World is essentially binary, instead of a multi-dimensional varied landscape of gradients."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm reminded of this, written in May, 2007:http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TwoAndAHalfMen.html?HN"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"You just quoted Family Guy\" - I thought you liked The SimpsonsI don't see how this relates to the rest of the examples."
}
] | en | 0.979495 |
A beautiful self hosted alternative to Basecamp | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5698741"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Wow really nice work. I have a strong feeling you need to raise the price."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Why use this over freedcamp.com/ ?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What are the requirements?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Nice, how can I get this?"
}
] | en | 0.942835 |
UN: Disconnecting File-Sharers Breaches Human Rights | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "At least use due process of law, instead of (as HADOPI did) disconnecting users after they had been merely accused of infringement 3 times. That effectively makes copyright owners into judge and jury, and forces the ISP to act as executioner."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Maybe I missed something, but how do you disconnect a person from the internet? One person may have several ways to access the internet, each of them with their own IP address and even ISP, while someone else shares a single computer with other family members or is using NAT.I see no way to enforce such a law unless you jail the person. What were they thinking?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Yeah, but when was the last time any country cared what the UN considered a breach of human rights?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I suppose they also consider it a breach of human rights to disconnect users for harassing other users, spamming, DoSing, breaking into the ISP's own network, wire fraud, and so on. All is as much \"free speech\" and as equally illegal as warezing."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm sure the Data Angels are thanking Commissioner Lal for this."
}
] | en | 0.985246 |
R.J. Lipton - A proof that P is not equal to NP | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Reading Lipton's description of this paper I think I understand how normal people feel when they listen to geeks talk about technology."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The paper is rather complicated, you can see it here http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/#s.p. on the author's site.it would be nice to believe this is solved, but my gut instinct is that it will not be vetted."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This was also good the last three times today it appeared on HN. :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Scot Aaronson bets 200k$ that this proof isnt truehttp://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=456"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "[jokingly] Would be interesting to know, what Does Perelman think about the proof?\nAt least it is not from math community, so probably it is ok to take the million..."
}
] | en | 0.982567 |
Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Damn and blast, where is the podcast of the Bruce Sterling SXSW talk? It doesn't appear to be up here yet:http://sxsw.com/taxonomy/term/44I'm tired of all these bits-and-pieces leaks. Sterling's one-liners are much more fun -- and often make rather more sense -- in context.I suppose, if I had been willing to spend more money, I could have just gone to SXSW and heard Sterling in person. But, instead, I have to wait like a mendicant for them to get around to dribbling it out to me. Maybe this is what Sterling was talking about."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This reads more like a comparison of \"old money\" and \"new money\" to me, than of rich and poor. I have more than one rich friend who would hate to be disconnected."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Of course poor people love their cell phones! But rich people too (even more sometimes)... And what's the point? How you use Twitter is a pretty different story. I find the article has a pretty strange structure anyway, I'm sort of searching the point the writer wants to make. Some more tweeting could help the author to get more concise maybe :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The article was thought-provoking for me, as I hadn't heard the Sterling talk, but she lost me here:I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re curious ....I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into some banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince everyone that regular beatings give you character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.And what is stopping her from doing that? Her Twitter usage seems to be very much self-promotional and one way, so it's not as if she's leaving a community she has a stake in. What's she whining about?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The key word in Sterling's quote is \n'dependence'. I can use these services without becoming dependent on them. They're useful, so is whatever I'm reading while I'm on the can.I don't know, maybe it means more to all those motivational self-help and internet marketing types on Twitter.One of the great advantages I see in microblogging is the ability to walk in and out of the \"attention stream\" at leisure. Try that with IM and you're considered rude or strange.Of course, some probably have a harder time walking away than others."
}
] | en | 0.974283 |
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Okay, that's DIY rooftop installations and though I'm usually against atomic fear-mongering I have to say that it's difficult to accurately gauge the effects of the Chernobyl incident. And to be fair, we also need to count birth defects and other permanent injuries. So I don't know if this is a valid comparison. By the way, without having the facts to support it, I'd wager that fossil fuels cost the most lives of all energy sources, but again, that's also impossible to ever measure accurately and in islolation."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous.\"In other words, this article only counts the deaths of reactor staff and emergency crew, and goes on to outrightly dismiss cancer deaths.The article's stated purpose is to show a comparison of death tolls. The dramatic loss of quality of life due to radiation poisoning for thousands of people exposed to the highest levels of radiation surrounding the Chernobyl disaster, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, is also worth considering when weighing the negative impact.That said, with Chernobyl, we're talking about the absolute worst-case scenario for a nuclear reactor improperly contained (actually, not contained at all) and neglected long after warning signs were shown. We shouldn't practice historical revisionism or insult its victims by downplaying its impact, but we should also remember that its particular history will not be repeated with the containment barriers and safety measures in place at today's plants."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Woah, so that basically means that for coal in the US of the 3 or 4 cents per khw (wholesale price, not yet transmitted to your house) there is a hidden cost that is between 35 and 50% more, assuming $1mm / life (a standard non-conservative assumption by engineers). So basically coal isn't worth it at all? It's not just nuclear, natural gas could be made cheaper (and greener) than coal after you take in the human life costs. I also question why the oil cost in human life is so high. Do they take into account oil related conflicts like the Gulf War?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Seems like at some point you also have to factor opportunity cost into this as well--so the numbers probably become even more compelling. So if a form of energy is especially expensive, that's dollars you could have spent on say healthcare, food, etc.To me this is the real indictment against things like solar, not the risk of people falling off roofs."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "> $4 billion is about the cost of one of the new 1.5 GW nuclear power plants, which would generate 12 TWh/yearIn China maybe, but not in the western world. The EPR for example, is 1.65GWe, and is projected to cost €6.4 billion, or almost $9 billion in Finland. The one being built in France is now projected at €5 billion ($7 bililon), but may cost more as it'll take another 3 years to complete."
}
] | en | 0.969155 |
Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee weighs in: There’s Danger in the Filter Bubble | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm not getting this \"filter bubble\" meme that's floating about of late. My site is dedicated to helping people filter information (www.filterjoe.com), though not in the narrow sense discussed by the \"filter bubble\" proponents. Many regular people I know are totally overloaded and overwhelmed by the web, and most especially the social web (email, facebook, twitter, etc.).Which is the best browser to use? How do I manage 200 passwords? What's the best kind of AA battery to buy? How do I read web pages without getting distracted?It can be pretty hard for a normal person to get good answers to questions like these. Googling won't necessarily get you good answers and many people won't even know to ask (many people don't know that their password practices are extremely risky, or that the little \"e\" they click on to access the internet is a browser).What's needed are better filters. This backlash against filtering takes one very small subset of possible reasons to filter - avoiding contradictory information to controversial topics - and makes a grand leap to the conclusion that all filtering is bad.By this argument, if I do a keyword search on \"passwords,\" it would be best if I were served the random top 10 results that happen to have the word \"password\" somewhere in the title or one of the subheadings. That way I won't be subjected to harmful biases . . .EDIT: typo"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think that the premise here, that by giving relevant results search engines will filter the diverse range of opinions which exist in the world, is intriguing. In the short term, I think it's unlikely that online personalization will be accurate enough to create the type of bubble Tim Berners-Lee is suggesting. In the long term, however, I do see this as significant and dangerous. Unlike the way current tribes work, in which a person needs to actively seek and follow their 'tribe', this is a passive action - over time web services get to know you and seemingly shield you from diversity. The passive vs active nature required to keep up with one's tribe is the part of his prediction which worries me."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't know about you, but a filter-bubble is for me a very difficult-to-visualise mixed metaphor."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If I've ever seen an efficient filter that \"as a result you end up being dedicated to your tribe\", Hacker News is one."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Eli Pariser has a good TED talk along similar lines:http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu..."
}
] | en | 0.888714 |
Working memory at 5 is a better predictor of academic outcome than IQ [abstract] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Thanks to the citation shown in the abstract submitted here, I was able to gain online access to the full text of the article through my alma mater university. The key issue here is that designers of IQ tests have known for a while that their empirically designed tests didn't tap all of the human abilities that might properly be called human \"intelligence.\" The submitted paper test children with the WISC-R IQ at time 1, and the WISC-III IQ test at time 2. But now the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) has gone into its fourth version, the WISC-IV, and the current Wechsler IQ test includes tests of working memory.http://psychcorp.pearsonassessments.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-u...Intelligence researchers get this. The older versions of IQ tests didn't have a broad enough variety of item content to tap important cognitive abilities such as working memory. Working memory is very important, and is a hot area in intelligence research in the last several years (as this paper reflects). The latest versions of the currently used tests are already taking this into account, and include working memory items in the item content of the tests, and subscale scoring to identify which test-takers have the most problems with working memory.Another comment in this thread asked,Does anybody know of a good introductory text about these various theories of memory? I'd love to learn more about them, but following references is a bit time consuming.Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...for a guide to background reading on these issues. The Alan Kaufman popular book IQ Testing 101 is a very good book, easy to read and quite up-to-date, on these issues."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I read a study some time ago which was examining the cognitive load required by humans to parse various natural languages. I cannot find any references to it at the moment, but the gist of it was that the grammatical structure of some lanuguages required the speaker/listener to keep more information in their working memory before the meaning could be extracted from the sentence (e.g. all the verbs at the end of the sentence). In computer analogies, think of it as being required to push the whole sentence onto a large stack which then needed to be completely popped before meaning was extracted, instead of pushing and popping in pieces as some natural language grammars allow.This article thus had me wondering whether people who are raised speaking such languages natively have an inherent advantage in life because they are exercising their working memory earlier on and thus increasing it's capacity, which appears to convey more general advantages."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "And what is 'academic outcome' a predictor of?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The other day there was an article about the importance of motivation in intelligence and success. From my understanding of what this article is, that's a glaring hole in the theory."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is hardly a surprise. Most \"learning\" in school is actually memorization. This is a skill I do not have and have not been successful at improving. For example: My short term memory is limited to two or three unrelated pieces of information. When I was working at Subway, I managed to improve this to four or five after months of daily practice. I left Subway to go to an out of state college. My short term memory went back to normal within a month. I went back to Subway for the summer, I was not able to regain that skill before school started again.I'm definitely biased but I find memorization to be pretty useless as a primary method of learning. Unfortunately, testing actual learning would require the teachers to fully understand the material they teach and have the time recognize when someone was faking knowledge on examination. It's far, far easier to test memorization."
}
] | en | 0.99301 |
How to stop illegal downloads | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": ">Then I asked him to imagine if the product in question represented several months or even years of his life. All that time he was creating, writing, editing, and marketing this thing in order to fund his next project. And then everyone downloaded it, illegally, for free.So he responded to an actual argument with an appeal to emotions? And he seems to be proud of this?Sorry, no. If you have a problem with an argument, you point out the flaw in the argument. You don't try to make the person giving the argument feel bad for the conclusion.> It turns out that we view ourselves categorically as either good or bad, and moving from being 3% legal to being 4% legal is not a very compelling motivation.This is very silly reasoning. People who download illegally don't view themselves as \"bad\", and most people I know who download illegally (aka \"most people I know\") also buy stuff in the same category as what they download."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "By preemptively dismissing any and all \"rationalizations\" as examples of flawed logic, this wise author has effectively created a black hole into which he can throw any counter-argument of his thesis, dismissing it all as \"proving my point\". Yikes - do we want to pay attention to the kind of rhetoretician who constructs such a system wherein no possible counter-argument is allowable?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I like Ariely but he's off the mark here, and ironically I think his \"conversion\" is just as much a rationalization as any he represented in this post.It sucks to work hard on something that you're not renumerated for to the degree you'd like. Suddenly maybe you're a big enough name that this isn't simply due to obscurity, and you resent the fact that people got something out of your effort without paying you for it. But the only thing obligating them to do so in an absolute sense is copyright, and the moral compass of great swaths of the general public seems to have evolved quite decisively beyond it, and as problematic as that is for the current model of creative business I doubt it will change any time soon.\nI'm no economist but I suspect it has to do with an innate understanding of the value of the bits in and of themselves, which due to the low cost of reproduction, is practically zero. This causes cognitive dissonance in some, who believe it is their moral duty to support the originators of those bits by purchasing them through on online store, but apart from the few who actually take an overtly principled stance on the matter, I suspect most who prefer this mode of distribution actually do so because what they are really buying is the convenience and quality of the transaction.So yeah, artists deserve a fair shake in all this. But perhaps it's more sensible to recognize the market is shifting and that the artists and publishers of the future are going to need to take new approaches toward monetization."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think this issue deserves more thought and introspection than Ariely seems to have given it so far.I think grecy's comparison to Catholicism is very striking. One common criticism of Christian religions is centered on the idea of \"original sin\" -- the idea that people are inherently evil and need to be saved. A similar criticism could (and maybe should) be applied to any law that is broken by a large number of citizens. When this happens, I would take it as a sign that there is something wrong with the law, not with people.But anyway, the key thing is that Ariely seems to have a really exciting research question here, which is how and why do people rationalize illegal downloading, and he seems to be tossing it away in favor of dictating morality at them through a megaphone."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I download ebooks as well for several reasons without paying for them. I mostly get a epub version of a book and start reading it. This way I can see if I like the content and the style it's written in. I will get the book as a hardcover version and continue reading on paper at home and on my kindle on the go if I like the content after the first three chapter. So I have the advantages of both media. However, I wouldn't purchase the book a second time as ebook, because it's doesn't make any sense to pay for the same content again. And I wouldn't buy a ebook in the Kindle store, because I don't support this DRM crap at all. It's the same with movies. You'll have more disadvantages if you are honest and buy the movies then just downloading it from the pirate bay _without_ copy protection, ads & propaganda(\"bootlegger are criminals and have to go to jail for five years. Buy your movies\")."
}
] | en | 0.978119 |
Original IBM PC (Intel 8088) in Javascript with Visicalc | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "For some reason I get a control-L (^L) after every character I type which makes this usable for me but it sure brings back some nostalgia!Ah okay the keyboard was only broken in firefox but it works in chrome.My instinct immediately made me type prompt $p$g from something buried keep in my memory!Basic works and you can make a program within a program within a browser. Ha."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Wow, this is awesome! How can I upload original disk images? Can we get an 8086 emulator with VGA? I would love to have all of my old games & software available in the browser. (Scorched Earth, Infocom, Sierra, etc.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "PC-DOS disk 2 has debug.com too. With the \"A\" command you can program fun things in assembler and save to com files :)(color video memory at B800:0000)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Run Visicalc by loading it using the menu and \"Load Drive\", then enter \"vc\" + return."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is awesome, I've yet to figure out a practical use for it. I might try running something like CP/M-86 on it though!"
}
] | en | 0.956911 |
Android Hacked via NFC on the Samsung Galaxy S3 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's not limited to NFC (email or website can be used as attack vectors), but the researchers apparently decided to show off the NFC method as it's a relatively new medium for malware (though of course not a very practical one)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The magnetic strip and chip duplication technology in gas stations and convenience stores are already a point of frustration for insurers, financial services and consumers. Exploiting NFC which is intended to be a generally-accepted payment method in the near future does not give me the warm-and-fuzzies"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It looks to me like the same vector Charlie Miller showed off a couple of months ago. The NFC Forum responded at the time along the lines of \"It's not an NFC thing,\" and said his demonstration \"underscores the importance of providing appropriate security measures at the application layer and enabling users to adjust security settings to suit their own needs and preferences\"http://www.nfcworld.com/2012/08/01/317100/forum-responds-to-..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The article mentions that the \"flaw had to be triggered 185 times in the exploit code in order to overcome some of the vulnerability’s limitations\".How long would that take to trigger through the NFC interface?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Now someone needs to create an app that detects this attack, prevents it and hits the attacker back using the same technique."
}
] | en | 0.951677 |
Berlin bans Uber app citing passenger safety | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "To all who think passenger safety equals insurance: you are wrong. Passenger safety is much more.Passenger safety is mainly 3 topics, which are all have to be fulfilled:\n1. The car has to be in proper technical conditions.\n2. The driver is trained to be allowed to drive people around for business purposes. Higher standards apply, then for regular driving behavior.\n3. Insurance, insurance of the passenger as well as insurance of third party. As for commercial drivers, they do much more millage and as such it is much more likely, that something happens.For (1): a commercially driven vehicle makes much more millage, as such it is required to visit inspection every year, while for regular vehicle in Germany it is only every other year.For (2): drivers with a commercial license to drive people around are required to have regular medical check-ups. Also wrong behaving while driving is judged much hard, mostly twice the amount and double the points. That means, they can easily loose their license. That way, there should be a commercial pressure on them to drive safely.By the way, Uber does not compete only with Taxi service. Their drivers don't need a taxi license at all. Because, in Germany there are besides of Taxi additional licenses for such business. The are a number of such services, that operate within legal bounds since tens of years. The only difference between the "cool" start-up Uber is, that those have no shiny App and you have to know there phone numbers. That said, there are also services, which have an App, like http://www.mydriver.de/fahrdienst/berlinThe main problem besides safety is also, that Uber promotes and supports moonlighting/illegal work. Because their argument is, that they provide only ride sharing. BUT, if that whould be true, then why promote a new ride sharing service called UberPool? If Uber would provide real ride sharing, as they argue, then they would only start UberPool and not UberX and UberPop.But with UberPool there is the problem for them, they will compete with lots of other ride sharing companies, which operate in Germany since years and which are well established, like Blablacar, Flinc and others.TL/DR: If Uber would operate within the well established business practices and requirements, nobody would complain. But they don't want, because they want to be cheap on the back of actively ignoring all requirements."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I have to wonder about this quote:> As a new entrant we're bringing much-needed competition to a market that hasn't changed in years.What does a San Francisco startup knows about the taxi situation in Berlin? Uber has often been well received in cities where taxi service is inefficient, but are berliners really unhappy with the service? Does Uber know that taxis in Berlin are used mostly by tourists, and therefore are not that hard to catch?Maybe Uber has spent a lot of time researching the German market, or maybe they are following Walmart steps[1] in applying US notions to a foreign market. But after living in Berlin for a year, I have to wonder: if Uber's free-for-all approach clashes against Germany's love for paperwork, whose fault is it?[1] http://www.dw.de/worlds-biggest-retailer-wal-mart-closes-up-..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "From what I read in other articles (e.g. http://www.golem.de/news/fahrdienst-app-uber-macht-in-berlin...), Uber insures the drivers, but with a lower maximum payout for damages of 3.5 million. The mandatory minimum for car liability insurance is 7.5 million for damages against persons in Germany."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The bigger picture here is the trend of local governments desperately pushing against a tide of ever more pervasive globalisation.The simple reason something like Uber will win is business travellers expect to show up in any city and for it to work. If it doesn't that's not a mark against the Uber-like, it's a mark against the city. People do not want one app per city or country, but one which works everywhere. This is beyond the scope of any government to get near.The thing is Uber are slimy in the way Napster were taking the piss a bit, but it's clear the space is there for someone to come in and clean up."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I wonder if "insurance for a cut" is a thing. Basically apply the credit card model to insurance for cabs. Insurance company takes X% of all rides for providing the proper insurance needed for said rides.Keeps the barriers to entry low (giving up a cut is easier when you just do a couple of customers on the side than having higher fixed costs) and would probably allow a smart insurance company to make a nice bundle of money."
}
] | en | 0.985084 |
Dear jetBlue... | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "So they are asking for JetBlue to give them special treatment? They booked 43 flights in 30 days. How about cutting their flights in half so that they are less likely to miss one?I wonder what their backgrounds are that would make them good resource to interview JetBlue passengers and make them deserving of special treatment from JetBlue."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I sense that 50% of the posters to this thread are missing context.Please read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=759577Before suggesting that the article is not appropriate for HN. The Idea of traveling to all these cities was first discussed on HN.And to all the naysayers - These guys are going to do something more interesting than I've ever done. I don't know what adventures and enterprises and entrepreneurial ventures you've rolled out over the last few years - but they must be impressive if 30dayflight doesn't appear to be HN fare to you..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Not only is this chick completely irresponsible, but this \"trip\" is a joke. He's going to be living in an airport for a month, all for what? No one cares about people who live in airports, nor do they care about the fascinating lives of airplane passengers.I genuinely hope his trip goes as planned, but this social networking media web 2.0 garbage is a waste of the internet."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "first question, how does someone make a living risking \"millions of dollars\" and barely have enough money to afford a single flight?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Someone's holiday reached the top of the HN homepage? Well I hope you have a lovely trip."
}
] | en | 0.976051 |
My Recent Experience with PayPal Customer Service. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Try PayPal's Merchant Technical Support (https://ppmts.custhelp.com/app/ask - Mass Pay is under \"API Products\") The developer forums on x.com can sometimes be helpful as well. They have a few staff members that work the boards.If you're a developer, you don't really want to use their front line Customer Service.It also helps to have an account manager but how you get one is a mystery. They called us up one day and said, Hi! I'm your new account manager."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Either their staff are lying to their customers in an obvious manner (not a good idea) or their internal documentation lies to their ignorant staff (not a good idea).Either way around this is pretty much a perfect example of awful customer service."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I get worried the more I read about PayPal recently. I have had no immediate problems with PayPal before but I am worried it's more a matter of \"When\" I get issues and not \"If\".This whole conversation is very worrying in particular, can they really be that stupid and un-interested?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "PayPal is run by imbeciles. I was once scammed on eBay by a buyer who received my item, then returned a broken identical one, notifying PayPal that I scammed him. Without even looking at my sales record or waiting for my response, they took the money out of my account and closed the issue.After a month and a half of fighting on the phone with people who can't comprehend basic logic, getting an affidavit notarized, AND submitting photo evidence of the switch: I was only awarded 80% of the original amount.The buyer was allowed to continue using eBay and PayPal to scam people, and I got negative feedback.From this experience and the countless others posted to blogs every day, it's astonishing people still use the service.Boycott PayPal!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I was struggling with the same issues in December and I got no response when I posted questions to the official PayPal developer forums. I finally posted the question \"Has this forum been abandoned?\" It took them 3 days to respond, simply to say the forums had not been abandoned. My original set of questions went a week without an answer. Look here:https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/forums/paypal-developers...When they finally answered, this was their response:------------------Sorry for the delay. The reason why you are getting this error is because your PayPal account is not setup to use MassPay API. MassPay API is currently not available on accounts by default. You will need to contact customer support at the numbers below and request for your account to be reviewed and approved to use MassPay API. Thanks.\nUS/CA: 1-888-221-1161\nUK: 08707 307 191\nAustralia: 1-800-073-263\nGermany: 0180 500 66 27\nOther: 1-402-935-2080-------------------I called and got no useful help (my experience was like that of the OP)."
}
] | en | 0.988686 |
Lisphp is a Lisp dialect written in PHP. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Happy to see PHP be taken more seriously around here. Trust me, we're not all moronic programmers using register globals, magic quotes, and other abominations originally available in PHP.This is a pretty cool project."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm the author of this, I made the web REPL also.http://dahlia.ruree.net/try-lisphp/Well, of course, it uses a sandbox environment."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is analagous to McDonalds serving duck confit (and it actually tasting kind of good)."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Minor nitpick, the cdr implementation is (out of need, as far as I can see) terribly slow for larger datasets, it uses array_slice($this->getArrayCopy(), 1) ."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I think I need to change the name of my repository now. I am now the author of \"phlisp\" http://github.com/shaunxcode/phlisp to avoid confusion. hah. It is cool to see a different approach to the same problem! I am going more for source -> source, quasiquote macros, TCO, some arc-esque syntactic sugar etc. and back to php4 compat. Definitely a kick in the ass to release it now as I have stalled since april due to \"work\"."
}
] | en | 0.913822 |
Apple Updates Safari | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "In terms of the supported Web Platform APIs, is this new Safari release any different from the recent WebKit snapshots? (http://nightly.webkit.org/builds/trunk/mac/1)Also, is WebKit2 framework still private on OSX 10.9?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Google Chrome Team: "Ah snap, and we just dropped WebKit!"Edit: It's a joke, guys. :/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I actually downgraded back to v5 because of the terrible changes they made to Web Inspector in v6, so I'm pretty annoyed that they didn't even mention it when introducing the new version -- at a developers' conference, no less!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Now with PRISM support! j/k"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "An iCloud keychain? No thanks."
}
] | en | 0.730021 |
Ask HN: Unlocked Nexus S and T-mobile | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Buying unlocked will save you money over two years because T-Mobile will give you a discounted monthly rate. I do it this way.Also, if you are considering a variety of T-Mobile phones, then you can buy them and return them within 15 or 30 days. For example in the past season I've bought the Samsung Galaxy S, the Google G2, the HTC MyTouch 4G, and will buy the Nexus S.FWIW, T-Mobile has been great for me. The network is significantly better than ATT in San Francisco. Also, the customer service people are head and shoulders above the other wireless providers. They have taught me how to tether in Linux, how to root a phone, and were especially helpful diagnosing a GPS chip issue with me."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I don't know anything about the Nexus, but T-Mobile's service has been great for me on the East Coast. I switched from Verizon about a year ago and with prepaid service spend well under half what I used to. I can also make calls from inside the house again, something I couldn't do with Verizon (except if I stood on one leg in a corner).It also saves time because it's one less monthly financial transaction to monitor--I just buy a bunch of minutes every few months or so. I recommend it for anybody looking to reduce costs and complexity (start-uppers, for example)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Never had a problem with T-Mobile service, and I've been midwest, southwest, and east coast. Haven't been to Georgia. I'm thinking about that phone too, but some of the features missing from Galaxy S (microSD slot) give me second thoughts."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The only purpose for you buying it unlocked is not being locked into a contract."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I lived in downtown ATL and worked in Norcross ~4 years ago, and had solid T-mobile coverage (better than I have with AT&T in SF now, but that's not saying much)."
}
] | en | 0.979022 |
How I Deal with Sexual Discrimination in a Positive Way? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's hard to take this blog post at face value. My experience with the industry has been that IT people are terrified of offending women and go far out of their way to avoid being perceived as sexist. I do know a couple guys that flirt with women at work but that's a far cry from sexual discrimination.As long as we're sharing anecdotes:* My girlfriend of 3 years also works in this industry, and she has never complained about an incident of any kind.* I worked with a female developer who was fired and complained about discrimination. But this was not the case, she was fired because she was terrible at her job.* I also worked with a gay developer who was fired. He complained loudly of homosexual discrimination... but I saw his check-ins (or lack thereof)--he was also terrible at his job.So the two major cases of discrimination I personally know about in Silicon Valley have both been frauds. Is discrimination real in Silicon Valley? Certainly, yes, there's always a few bad apples in any large community. Is the problem being blown out of proportion here? I think so."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think this post is mistitled. Sexual discrimination is about unequal opportunities -- passing over women for promotion, asking inappropriate questions in job interviews, etc.The OP is describing something more like a crime. Extortion."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Okay, I'm going to reach far now: Sorry, but this is blogspam. You have to ask yourself: What is the purpose of this post here? What exactly do you want to achieve by posting it here? The answer is clear, this is posted here solely for generating publicity.\nNow let's dig again: Why do you want publicity for this? \nIf there is a real issue here, take it up with someone who is actually responsible for fixing it. \nIf you want to publicly shame people, then keep posting it on sites like HN.99% of all the people visiting this site won't ever concern this issue, and as surprising as it is to myself, I'm actually a little offended by your insinuation that I should care about this. But that's not the actual problem I have with your post. The real issue is that this kind of topic has been discussed a million times, and therefore has no place on HN."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A few days ago I ate at the Sales/HR cafeteria instead of the engineer cafeteria. A table of HR people I didn't know that was 80% female invited me to join them for lunch, and eagerly chatted me up for the next half hour.This was a really illuminating experience that highlighted for me what an impact the male/female ratio can have. Getting that level of female friendliness/attention at work is totally foreign to me (I don't work directly with many women), and was kind of nice.I think there is a vicious cycle where women in technology get too much attention from female-deprived men, which conditions them to have a guardedness about them, which conditions the men to feel even more female-deprived (and leads some of them to be creepy). It's unfortunate.I'm not sure if this has anything to do with a conference organizer who demands sex (it certainly doesn't excuse it, even a little). But I do think there are a lot of lonely guys in tech."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Any kind of accusation made public is a tricky beast.There are 3 possibilities for the accusation:\n1. The accusation is correct in it's entirety and should be taken at face value\n2. The basis of the accusation is correct, but additional information casts it in a different light.\n3. The accusation is false.If you discuss it, publicly stating that option 1 is true is the only strategy that will keep your reputation intact. Anything else makes you look like a douche."
}
] | en | 0.986613 |
Recursive Postgres Queries | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I've implemented similar designs in the past, but found ltree[1] to be much more useful/expressive when it comes to needing to fetch, order and manage lists of hierarchical data.[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/ltree.html"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've dealt with recursive queries many many times. For legacy production systems I stick to Oracle's CONNECT BY statement and half joins to keep performance okay. Most of the tables I deal with typically have 80 million rows with a fanout of 1:2.5 and a average depth of ~3.A better solution is to create a temporary table to insert results in as you go if you can't afford extra DB results and perform additional inserts to that table in order to effectively take advantage of shared memory on the server side. The second better result is to effectively flatten out the rows as a closure table."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't know Ruby, but does Benchmark.ms clear buffers and flush cache? If no, the second query has a large advantage, sometimes you can get similar performance improvements without changing query..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is absurd. Is all this just to eliminate the n+1 queries problem? There are already solutions for this in any ORM.When loading a survey into an ActiveRecord object, why not just preload the associations? You can then iterate through the children and subchildren of survey in Ruby. Either Survey.includes(categories: { subcategories: questions }).find(1) (one query) or Survey.preload(categories: { subcategories: questions }).find(1) (four queries) would do the trick.No need for convoluted Postgres-only queries."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Super cool, but it seems like this is throwing technology at a problem that could be solved in a much simpler way.Since you will rarely (if ever?) be looking up a single question in a survey, storing the whole set as a JSON array-of-arrays makes much more sense. Then you can look up the set of questions with a dead-simple SELECT."
}
] | en | 0.725778 |
The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think the progression is interesting.It starts by visualising what 1 gallon equals using something that people recognise in everyday life ... then shows a lot of 'wow, it really is vast' slides, then moves to 'well, it's pretty small compared to the size of the gulf / how much oil we have in reserve'.It's not a good example of info-graphics - it's a slide-show with illustrations."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "And it uses Flash for static images. Can't they get anything right?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This shows you exactly what not to do with your info-viz. They show about 100 milk jugs of gray gradient and say, imagine if there were 184 million of them?Whoa Whoa Whoa. HOLD THE BOAT. You (CNBC) are telling me that the oil spill is 184 million gallons is also equivalent to 184 MILLION ONE-GALLON MILK JUGS?!?!? That is just crazy - consider my mind BLOWN! Perhaps you could show a pyramid of 184 million gallon jugs and put a small outline of a 6' tall man next to it?Then there is this one: http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=7 At least there is some useful information on this slide \"674K Homes for one year\". But why the hell show a picture of the entire electrical grid? It doesn't make any sense.The rest of them are pretty bad as well, they either don't show scale, or they show a very misleading scale."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "On The Bugle (a genuinely funny podcast) they were amused by these ridiculous types of comparisons, so they calculated how far cricket bats made of frozen oil would stretch, placed end-to-end."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "As absurd as these visualizations are, it does raise the bigger point that it is very difficult for our brains to understand large numbers.It is difficult for most people to really grasp how much 184 million gallons is, or to tell the difference between $1 Trillion in bailout vs $2 trillion in bailout money. After some point, we just give up and call it \"a lot\". I think this has very real public policy consequences.But I'd bet, we'd very much understand if your boss said he was cutting your $100k salary to $50k."
}
] | en | 0.959146 |
How our small startup survived the Amazon EC2 cloud-pocalypse | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This \"cloud-pocalypse\" simultaneously affected multiple availability zones in US-East. Had you had the misfortune to have your multi-AZ pair in two affected zones you would have had significant downtime. The only architectures that were truly safe from this outage were those with a completely multi-region strategy, and I suspect those are very far and few between."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I am still waiting for Amazon's post-mortem, which I hope is honest. All the other services (4sq, Quora, etc) seriously were all in the same AZ and made the mistake of spreading their infrastructure to multiple AZs?Amazon has seemed rather dishonest about the true breadth of the outage."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "FYI: us-east-1a for you might be us-east-1c for me. The labels of the AZ doesn't mean anything outside of your account."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "that jargon has legs: \"cloud-pocalypse\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Just curious, which app is that? Shozu?"
}
] | en | 0.987638 |
Lessons Learned for Getting Better Results from Developers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is an excellent list, and I would love to work with someone who ascribes to it. I also find it a very depressing list, because almost all of those items involve an awful lot of effort. It's really hard to imagine many people even half-way living up to it. It ends up making me think of the times I've done projects for people who have done just about everything the author is cautioning against."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I manage a team of 6 software engineers, and while I like most of this list, I think #3 will only work for a small team and small-medium projects.If I took most of the burden on to myself to do the work my engineers don't like I would be a major bottleneck.Alternatively, what I like to do, is couch and encourage my engineers through these less savory tasks so they can get to the development as quickly as possible.Edit: You could also argue that it might be worthwhile hiring a business analyst, but I haven't had much good experience with BAs."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"designers speak human and developers speak computer.\"I hate this generalization because it can be used as a blanket dismissal of a developer's opinion."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Pretty good list but I think the author contradicts the notion and importance of iteration. No design doc and no code base is free from changes and improvements, particularly in startups. If you can't deal with changes, you probably should go work for an enterprise company where you spend half your time blowing hot air across the table. You can't just write once and leave it be, the problem with design mockups and wireframes is that they don't really encapsulate the element of interactivity, and certainly lack customer feedback.I also think designers and developers are very much alike even though we often bang heads. It's a creative process to write code, and I think a lot of people outside the circle don't appreciate how mentally draining \"creation\" really is."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "When I read this title, the first thing I thought was, \"Oh no, another poser telling the rest of us what to do based on what they think\".Boy was I wrong about that. This is an excellent post that could have only been written by someone who has suffered in the trenches and knows what he's talking about.Many of his points: 2. Get in bed with the business people \n 3. Ease their pain\n 5. No one gives a rip what the artist thinks\n 6. You get to control those lovely details\n 7. Write it down, write it down, write it down\n 8. Get in bed with the QA team\n 9. You have to have a middle man\n 10. Proximity breeds understanding\n 11. Learn to articulate well\n\nemphasize that the people part of the process is just as important as the technical part. This is easy to overlook and we need to be reminded every once in a while. The main reason we do what we do is not because it's cool (it is), we do it for and with other people.The only point I challenge is \"4. Force business to iterate in design, not in development.\" This is perplexing because it runs counter to most of his other points. The reason people tend to iterate in development instead of design is because it's much easier. They're not sure what they want, but once they see something, they know what they like and don't like about it. I'd alter #4 to something like, \"Learn to prototype well, so everyone is equally comfortable iterating toward the most desirable outcome.\""
}
] | en | 0.980644 |
Heroku founder Adam Wiggins: The Legacy of the Self-Made Man (2008) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Well I'm glad the last 100 years of business history can be summed up with a single strawman. It's such a relief that there was no nuance or complexity in history, now I won't have to do any of that nasty \"thinking\".Sarcasm aside, you present an entirely simplistic view of history perfectly tailored to the point you're trying to make. The only people who are going to believe anything you're saying are the people who already agree with you, because people tend to be less than critical when it comes to their pet theories.As a counter-point, here are some of those grey-suited company-men from the post-Teddy Roosevelt era:Henry FordAlfred SloanThomas WatsonWalt DisneyWill KelloggWarren BuffettWilliam BoeingGordon MooreHenry KaiserThere are more. So what exactly is your point? There were clearly self-made men after Roosevelt. Are you arguing that there were more self-made men before Roosevelt? I'd like to see some evidence to that. Or maybe you're arguing that the general \"sentiment\" was against self-made men. Again, I'd like to see evidence of that, and good luck finding it. First you'll have to define just what the national \"sentiment\" is, then find scientific studies of people both before and after Roosevelt that tried to discern it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> America became the first large-scale experiment of a society that could be called a meritocracyBit of a fail here. The word meritocracy comes from a book of the same title written in 1958 by Michael Young (interesting fella, wrote the UK Labour Party's manifesto in 1945, founded the Open University).The point about meritocracy is that it is a satirical term. (The beauty of it being that in any society the wealthy and powerful can claim they rose on merit. In the time of the Divine Right Of Kings, merit was being chosen by God.)But don't take my word for it, read Michael Young on the subject in 2001.http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Prior to the industrial revolution, status in most societies was based on one thing only: heredity. No matter how much you accomplished - or didn’t - you stayed in the same station of life.Ye, this isn't really true. Lets take, for example, 18th century Naval officers from the UK:* Captain Cook - discovered Australia, mapped the Pacific etc. Father was a farmer* Horatio Nelson - Defeated the French, considered greatest Naval commander of all time. Father was a minister* Arthur Philip - Commander during American Revolution, lead colonization of Australia. Father was a teacher.It is a very common misconception that in old society it was impossible to move from the lower classes into the upper classes. The British Empire, the prototypical aristocracy, was largely shaped and developed by people who were raised in the lower classes. This is because the military, navy, their universities (eg. Isaac Newton), and many other parts of government and private societies were strict meritocracies.The upper classes actually produced a very small number of notable people, outside of royalty (Charles Darwin, Churchill, Brunel (although his grandfather was a French farmer)(Edit: \"America became the first large-scale experiment of a society that could be called a meritocracy.\" - Citation needed. See above.)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "As I tend to point out any time someone goes on a masturbatory flight of fancy like this: there ain't no such thing as a \"self-made man\". There are only people who are too short-sighted or too narcissistic to acknowledge the others who helped them get to where they are."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The \"status\" of olden days, by the by, did not just happen. It was created at some earlier point in time by \"self-made men\": warlords, robbers and so on and then maintained by force or coercion."
}
] | en | 0.970332 |
Ask HN: We're building a real-life, location-based MMORPG. Will you play? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Thanks, but I'm already playing a real-life location-based MMORPG which takes up most of (or rather, all) my time."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "We build a mystical, medieval universe atop these real places.Please, not another one. Although it is the most popular trope, and thus probably has the greatest potential market, that also makes it difficult to differentiate your product. There are lots of alternatives - secret societies, Cthulhu mythos, robots/AI, or some Diamond Age type fusion of several genres.Browser playable is good, but if you have location based checkins I think the mobile app (or rather, mobile version of the browser page since you're text-oriented) should certainly be available from the beginning so people have access to it when they're bored or with friends. It doesn't have to be be exhaustively capable."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "In the university I studied, students organized different games played trough the year. It is a good method to help people socialize and know each other in the first year.One of these game was called hitman. Every student who wanted to play had to provide a picture of himself and was registered as player. Then each player was given a random photo of another player and a small trumpet in paper that rolls out when we blow in it. So evry player was a hitman and a target of another hitman at the same time.The hitman had to \"kill\" the person on the photo that was given to him. Killing was done by blowing the trumpet and touching the person with the rolled out paper.Of course it was forbidden to kill anybody during lessons. The task was made more difficult by allowing someone to be immune to killing by holding an open umbrella above his head.The hitman had thus to first locate its target, spy him without beeing recognized as his hitman and find the best moment to kill the target. Witnesses must be present to attest a valid killing. The last target to survive was the winner.I didn't play the game so I don't know the details, but it was very funny to see these students walking around with open umbrellas, even inside buildings, and all the trumpet noise. It was also funny people talking to each other trying to figure out who is ones hitman. There was enough players to make it very hard to know, even at the end of the gameThis is an exemple of game that was socialy usefull and fun. Organizing, providing the equipment and managing the game could be a business. Sell it in a box, one box per player. The umbrellas might be a bit dangerous for the eyes, so funny big umbrellas without metal in it, just for the game use, could be better and even more fun as well as justify the rent fee."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'll play for sure.I've been tossing the idea of a game layered on top of reality around quite a bit. The pitch is \"imagine a group of WOW players exploring a real cave in Yosemite National Park and fighting against a real invisible dragon for loot.\". The world is great, there is no reason to invent another one.In more abstract (and less crowd-pleasing) terms, I believe that such a game can give a motivation for changing people's behavior (for better or worse). If I have a boring commute to work on foot, then I can just go on a \"quest\" to work, which will be reflected in my profile. The quest could even be charitable. Maybe there will even be an API for quest-givers, who know ;)The real fun begins when you include group dynamics. Imagine getting a quest to capture the dangerous thief kind of Alcatraz, but unfortunately he is so obese that you need at least four people to carry him away. Would you ask strangers to join you on your quest? ;)Check out this great related TED talk by the guy who runs SCVNGR: http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_t...I think thee idea is a little ahead of the curve, but in a few years (call me crazy!) something like this has the potential to be the defining game of a generation.Keep us posted on your progress.P.S.: I second the \"no fantasy\" sentiment. Fairies and dragons don't work for everyone."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I did some brainstorming on this idea a couple months ago: http://mohrslaws.blogspot.com/2010/02/reality-as-genre.htmlThe subsequent discussions led me towards imagining a game that was a sort of cartography sim. You explore the real world, and as you go along, you reveal (/create) an alternate world. The key to keeping it from being another annoying mindless social game, I believe, is to emphasize checkins at more physically varied places, instead of many checkins at existing locations. In short, make it more like geocaching and less like foursquare.On that note, the people that are likely to do this kind of adventuring aren't generally the type who want to sit and grind or be over-involved in a game world. So make it easy to check-in, take care of some things, and get on with your life. The satisfaction will come with seeing what comes of your activity as you get deeper into the game."
}
] | en | 0.97214 |
The key to good UI design is not simplicity | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "And yet, Tumblr is better than Posterous.I know this is subjective, but my point is: maybe the use of email in Posterous appeals to you, but it never appealed to me."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Agreed and well stated. However, since, the concept of \"familiarity\" will continue to change, how will modern UI designers understand what their end-users know, relative to what they should know? In order for the design to evolve, people must often be led. I whole-heatedly agree with you that simplicity is a relative term, but truly finding the nexus of your users' understanding vs. what they need to know is difficult."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The offer.They suffered through email? The necessity.The success/failure of your simplified (not simplistic) UI rests on, I'd say, the true value of the offer it is presenting to the user.I'm separating learning curve from usable-\"ness\""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Also the money they spend on their website (may be they dont need to spend that much) does not allow them to work with people who are good at whet they are doing ."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "So what's \"familiar\" to the IT-illiterate?"
}
] | en | 0.982788 |
Ask HN: Any Talented Writers Here? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Love this idea. Would definitely love to fund some of my fav authors, esp ones that post on free sites in spare time. I am wondering how this would work though. As a reader I'd totally do it for an author/excerpt I was psyched about.As an author I'm wondering how useful it would really be. After all, if you already have a large following, getting a publishing deal would be pretty easy. And if you don't have a large following, then you're getting little to no money through the site. Is the site designed to actually help you gather an audience, or is it expected that people will divert their existing audience from other means (social media, etc)I'm assuming if I give money I'd get the book for free (at least digital version). And how much would I have to give to get this. Would I get anything else? Like maybe a \"funders-only epilogue\" or something?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Have you spent any time at places like http://www.fanfiction.net/ ?My wife is always saying that there are many authors on there that ought to focus on getting non-derivative work published (if they aren't already).I imagine authors could use pseudonyms for their fundraising?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is a really nice idea (and one, as a part-time writer with a very unfinished novel, I have been thinking about). My worry is that it would be hard to raise the ~$50,000 many authors would need to be able to be able to give up work and complete the tome."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "clickable: http://www.storyfunded.com"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "You should be posting in places that writers hang out, not here.That said, maybe I'll send you a chapter. :)"
}
] | en | 0.978984 |
LastPass Disclosure Shows Why We Can't Have Nice Things | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is to be expected when you have ignorant people reporting on things that they are not willing to educate themselves about. Anyone who wrote sensational garbage about the LastPass event didn't bother to understand how LastPass works and what the real potential of any breach could be.Frankly, it leaves me exhausted in the same way the regular stream of sensational ignorant responses to violent video games, boobs in video games, or explicit lyrics in music leave me exhausted. It's extremely difficult to fight an ignorant public being exploited by a willfully ignorant and sensationalistic media.The likes of Tech Crunch et al who should be in a position to counter such mainstream media reactions and behavior are all too often, unfortunately, jumping right into the fray and showing that they can be just as counter-productive as any big old-media outlets."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is the only sane post I've read about this incident. All the major tech sites blew it way out of proportion. LastPass did everything right, and yet every headline was along the lines of \"LastPass has been hacked, panic!\".They deserve better, especially seeing as how transparent they were about the whole situation and how they handled it."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This reminds me of the recent story of an Applebee's (an American chain restaurant) employee that accidentally served alcohol to a toddler. All the commentary I read on the story said that the employee should be fired. But as long as it was an honest mistake, that's a terrible idea. No employee will ever be as careful with drinks as that guy will now. You shouldn't ask for experience when looking for employees and then fire them for getting it.You have to be careful though because sometimes a mistake like that is not an honest mistake, but carelessness. To bring it back to the topic at hand, LastPass (possibly) made an honest mistake somewhere. Sony is careless. Fire Sony, run to LastPass because now they will be even more paranoid."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Wait a second. I mean it's nice and all that LastPass was being overly cautious. But how reassuring is it that they noticed an anomaly but weren't able to figure out what it was?And this is a serious question, as I'm no expert in the field, but it seemed strange to me that they couldn't explain what actually happened with any certainty."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Don't know if there would have been a way for LastPass to disclose this information without getting the response they did, but in addition to the stupid the coverage they got, they pulled me in as a customer after seeing how goot they were at what they did. So I think there were good fallout from the coverage as well."
}
] | en | 0.97915 |
Barriers to scala adoption | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I liked the comments about immutability in the article, even from an OOP standpoint. After having read the \"Eiffel\" book 20 years ago, and being exposed to programming by contract and class invariants, the whole java-bean concept made me want to vomit. \"Here's an object\" -- too bad it's not good for anything yet, but eventually it will be! (good luck). Beans have to be almost the #1 anti-pattern in Java."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> Another language I don't see mentioned above is Fantom. Some say that already is a simpler language that offers improvements over Java without the overwhelming power of Scala, but it hasn't been widely adopted. There are many theories for this, my own is that it maybe doesn't offer enough new stuff for someone to make the effort to switch. Scala clearly does add a lot of value, so that should be a lesson for newcomers. Offer enough new stuff for people to be interested.I'm glad he at least mentioned Fantom. I haven't done much other than play around with it, but it seems like a much prettier \"better\" Java than a lot of the other contenders. I've never understood why it hasn't \"caught on.\" Maybe he's right, maybe it just isn't different enough to be compelling."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I like Scala, though I just dabble in it. But I have a few thoughts on why it will be difficult for it to be mainstream.One of its greatest features require a meaningful rethink of the JEE stack. Actors passing messages seems to not really work in a one thread to one request world where you should fork new threads.There are too many ways to do the same thing in it. Manipulating maps or list can be done with various features of the collection library. This becomes the Java version of Perl. Some developers will use $_, some prefer variables and they each prefer their own ways. It can make it hard for one developer to pick up where the other left off.Finally, the documentation seems to be more complicated than necessary. The Scala version of JavaDoc available on their site is almost a difficult to navigate as MSDN. From here we go to the books about Scala. These take careful reading to glean even the most basic structures (took me a while to figure out that the primary constructor is all of the lines between the {} of a class that isn't encapsulated by a method declaration)."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't use Scala but I appreciate the fresh ideas it has brought to the Java /JVM ecosystem. Think Jetlang Actors modeled after Scala actors or Functional Java library etc. or even Google Guava ,which although has nothing to do with Scala but promotes a succinct programming style.Keep up the good work !"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Would it be ok to mention we're hiring Scala people in Canada? [email protected]"
}
] | en | 0.956349 |
Skip Class | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Am I the only one who really enjoyed going to class ?This kind of post pop up once in a while here, some guy tells the experience about skipping classes or dropping out of school. If that works for you, great! But I am actually one of those guys that could happily get back to school if I could afford it.School gave me so many things: My wife, my first job, my first client, etc. I could connect my dots back and everything started from the three different occasions I had been enrolled in three different universities. Should you skip class and doing it great? Sure! But your mileage may vary."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Again, different people learn (and enjoy learning) in different ways. Not sure why the title of this post is the directive "skip class" and not "I skipped some classes and did some other stuff and still made elementary mistakes at my start-up, so that worked out.""
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Rather than go to class I created a popular custom discussion forum for students to help each other with the homework problems (back in the early 2000's). Ended up teaching myself perl, html, css, javascript and sql in the process which landed me my first job. Never had to do my physics homework (useless busywork) because the answers were posted on the forum. Still received grades of B+ or higher."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "When people say "I need a job in X, to learn Y, before starting Z," do you think they actually mean it?I understand that sometimes it's necessary. But most of the time, I think people ask use this excuse to take the less risky path."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I enjoyed reading your post. I also struggle to get up to listen to a professor go over material at a very slow pace. I'm taking a class now and I only show up on the day before the exam and on the exam. There are 2-3 weeks of lectures before an exam.. Usually 5-7 hours of studying is enough to get me a B+.I'm not saying everyone should do that. But I'm running my startup and my CS degree isn't getting me anywhere closer to being a success story. The things I've learned by "doing" are probably the equivalent of getting CS and MBA degrees."
}
] | en | 0.980249 |
BBC announces the closure of the Digital Media Initiative | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I was working at the BBC at the time this was first suggested (on web stuff, not video) and saw the edges of this project. From the start it felt like the start of a good idea, but with a huge remit and no focus.The idea of being able to edit video locally using a low quality version of the file, seems like a good one. All the rendering is done on high end servers working at full capacity with no wasted machines. Users can edit from their desktop without having to use a high end machine too. Until you talk to anyone who works in video - how can they be sure the video is lit, focused and presented correctly without viewing the source file. And the process of uploading files, waiting for edit versions and downloading the final files, even over a decent connection added huge overhead.Felt like there wasn't enough discussion with the actual teams that would use this.But as I say, I was not involved nor did it affect me and my team directly so I could be way off in my very small view of the project."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'd be interested to know what technology platform was being used. Around the time this project was being commissioned, the UK govt and the BBC were VERY close to Microsoft.As part of the NHS's connecting for health project, a huge amount of money was spent on MS licenses and associated infrastructure.Time to make public these contracts with Siemens and see what's what. Like that's going to happen..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "£100m? That just isn't OK, I wonder who will be losing their job."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I just assumed all major broadcasters were digital now...does this mean they are still recording and editing in analog?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Perhaps a slight bit of irony there that the TLA of \"Fabric Archive Database\" is FAD."
}
] | en | 0.969148 |
Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Original post with HD graphics: http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Ugh, I really hate stacked area graphs. Usually you can display the same information in a much more readable format by using a multi-colored or dotted line graph with a legend, and use logarithmic scaling to space out all the crap on the bottom.The main problem with these stacked graphs is spikes/dips on the bottom cause everything stacked on top of it to distort in weird ways, making things very difficult to see.Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time, which would be interesting and relevant."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The decline of r/programming with regard to quality of links and discussions was probably inevitable."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Or an alternate headline could be "Graphs show how Reddit became more diversified as it became more popular"."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What a missed opportunity reddit was. If it hadn't turned into a meme/image site it could have been much more interesting. I had an ongoing pattern of unsubscribing from the different sections one by one as I get tired of memes, images, and general low-content posting. Until there was really nothing left."
}
] | en | 0.850524 |
Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Mine are that much better.1 - Don't sleep ! (what?!)1.1 - Reap any opportunity to close your eyes while thinking and listening to people, if they start closing by themselves you've lost the game.1.1.1 - Move your head not your eyes, the tiny eye muscle wont last 30 hours.1.1.1.1 - Rotate the whole body in stead of the neck, if it isn't in front of you it doesn't exist.1.1.2 - Never look in a direction you don't have to. HD streaming takes huge amounts of bandwidth and processor power, the more things move the harder you run out.1.2 - Use half open eyes when the opportunity presents it self.1.2 - Keep the body in the ut most relaxed position.1.2.1 - put the heating up as far as possible AND wear lots of cloths. Heating 70 kg of water takes huge energy. You need a temperature as if you are in bed. (People also make 50% more mistakes at 20 degrees Celsius than at 25.)1.3 - If the task doesn't require thinking (or very little) -> don't think! While seemingly impossible at first, after 20 hours or so it comes naturally.1.3.1 - Get someone to drive you or use public transport but don't look out the window.2 - no drugs2.1 - no alcohol2.2 - no tea2.3 - no tobacco2.4 - dont drink coffee, coffee is for people who sleep.3 - Eat fruit and vegetables\n3.1 - Don't eat meat, all predators sleep after eating.4 - Be overly kind to people, the last thing you need is drama, drama consumes more energy than anything but also forces you to look, listen and think at the same time, all without getting any work done.5 - No sex\n6 - Don't shave\n7 - No personal hygiene (optional)8 - When you inevitably fail to stay awake sleep 14 hours.9 - Don't hurry with anything, drive as economical as possible, nothing can beat that.10 - Eventually, if you have no other data coming at you, the subconscious will learn what you are doing. Accidental naps feel like interruptions before you get here. If the subconscious understands the work the nap wont prevent you from thinking about the work.11 - Stay productive11.1 - If you start hallucinating go to sleep immediately regardless of the location.11.2 - If you get migraine you haven't been doing 2 and 3 long enough.12 - Remove all unnecessary sources of sound from the environment. The brain has no firewall, you don't want to be processing nonsense.13 - Oxygen is like steroids, get as many plants as you can.14 - Forget about all other goals, the only goal is the 168 hour work week at 62.4% productivity or~so.14.1 - The rewards isn't the money. It is sleeping with the thought yer've accomplished all that. No amount of money can buy that feeling.:-)It sounds like a big deal but it isn't anything like running a full marathon in the Arctic, wearing nothing but shorts.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof#Featsomg hax!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "New proposal: Death to "hacks."Unless you're Paul Graham, you don't get to say hacks.We're talking here {"lifehacks", "brain hacks", "social hacks", "parenting hacks", "HR hacks","travel hacks", "Business Insider Tip XYZ hacks"}All of this sounds an awful, awful, awful lot like SHORTCUT or TRICK.There's nothing wrong with being efficient with your time, diligent, and sneaking around useless grunt work w/ a bit of clever automation, but this lame-article hack movement is the worst.Dare I say I've heard enough from these hack writers?Death to hacks."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The title of this article seems to have been generated by an Upworthy-style bot targeted at Hacker News."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I read the whole article waiting for the thesis to become prescription drug abuse."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Good article. I am amazed by how much we can gain if we squeeze out even more output from our useless meaty bodies. Way to go!"
}
] | en | 0.869191 |
Trading Program Ran Amok, With No ‘Off’ Switch | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "'Prediction is difficult, especially with regard to the future'.It looks like they were using some new algorithm, which should have made them a lot of money, had the market gone up after their massive purchases. In that case, they would have pocketed fat bonuses and would not be on the news.However, it has not happened, so the crying and the search for a scapegoat is on. It sounds like the case of the banking business as usual: 'heads I win, tails you lose'.Ultimately, there is a really serious problem with the concept of limited personal liability for companies engaging in speculation. It is an assymetric arrangement, whereby the directors are entitled to the profits but are never personally responsible for the losses. With such rules of the game, it is advantageous to take crazy risks. Expect to see a lot more of this and many more taxpayer funded bailouts."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "What I wonder, following this story this week, is how the software quality controls at a place like Knight compare with those for life-critical systems like those in, e.g., aviation.On one hand, you'd think the QA in finance would be pretty solid, considering that the survival of the company could be at stake (witness Knight). On the other hand, I have a feeling that even there, people just don't take it that seriously.Would love to hear from anyone with more experience writing software for these industries."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "They lost $440 million (and amount greater than their market cap), and possibly the company, on what the world knows to be incompetence.At some point if I couldn’t stop it - I’d be tempted to just kill the power to the server rooms, all of them. There just has to be a way to cut your losses."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "So, some of the owners were looking for a way out, and magically this thing broke loose and started giving away (basically) free money to undisclosed receipients. In the meantime all the technicians were fast asleep and couldnt kick the machines down or something, while they were losing milions of dollars per minute. This article is a completely honest recap by completely honest people, about completely honest traders/bankers (bankers are not people).Edit: on a COMPLETELY unrelated note, trading firms/banks are known to actively pursue the extraction of money from their clients with bogus trades/advice http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-g..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I would rarely suggest this, but if something is so incredibly broken that you're loosing money at a rate of 800 million dollars per hour, screw the customers.Turn it off at any cost. If you are forthcoming and transparent, customers will understand."
}
] | en | 0.993888 |
Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I can't think of someone else right now who could come up with such an easy way to understand computers."Playboy: Maybe we should pause and get your definition of what a computer is. How do they work?Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this café [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward…” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this café, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—“Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.That’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to understand how computers work. Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh—but you asked. [laughs]""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> Jobs: my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.I'm very glad that IBM and its compatible equivalents won the market, we would certainly be in much Darker Ages should Apple have won the desktop war, with their close-minded view on the world and its strict control on contents, peripherals and whatever gravitates around the Brand."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Jobs, conceptually articulating what would become the Internet in 1985:"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Great read. Haven't finished it yet, but this answer was really perfect:"Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "In this interview, Jobs' obssesion with fighting IBM is quite present. A decade later, the obsession was to defeat Microsoft, or at least to gain substantial market share from them.It's quite funny that Apple became the most valuable company in the planet when they let go of this obsession and instead focused on beating the old Apple."
}
] | en | 0.951316 |
Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There is a good book whose title and author are eluding me for the moment that examines the necessity of a frontier for freedom. Freedom requires the ability to up and move into an area that is a challenge for the nearest power to control, regulate, and abuse. That is the only meaningful check on the power of the sedentary bandits that become a region's elite.Historically, this has all been geography. But going forward, there is the opportunity to do something new with technology and section off slices of economic activity into reaches that while existing in the same geographic location as a centralized state are prohibitively expensive to control for its bureaucrats and enforcers.The malaise of the modern world is, I think, in large part due to the shrinking of frontiers. There is little of the world left that is easily colonized but also hard for the major players to reach into, and so the states become ever more grasping. There is no safety valve by which people can up and peacefully revolt with their feet in large numbers, and that won't return until the cost of getting into orbit falls dramatically.Meanwhile, there is cryptography."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I must be missing the actual argument that supports the headline, "Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy". If the claim is that governments cannot keep up with technology, I would hardly call that a cure. That's a workaround."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Pretentious undergrad writing + "cryptography" = heavy bro!!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "See also: copyright law and BitTorrent."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's amazing how many problems are solved when a market accounts for just the two factors mentioned in the article: quality and scamsters."
}
] | en | 0.946717 |
Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs, and it's pretty shady to ride another project's coattails when their intent is essentially to cannibalize it by being sublime-but-free. You can discuss the merits of open source and paying for tools all you want, but basically their goal is to put a man out of business who's made something that a lot of people love, because he has the gall to charge $60. Anyway. I'm all for competition, but do it under your own banner with your own ideas.Also, I think it's weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch. I mean, unless I'm contributing... I don't care. You could write it in brainfuck if it does the job."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If there is one app I've always been thrilled to pay for, it's Sublime Text. I've purchased and renewed the licence ever since v1 came out. While it may not be open sourced, you can see it was created with a lot of love for code and openness. Today there are thousands of amazing plugins to enhance it. And though I fully respect the open source initiative, I, for once, am very happy to support / give some money to a peer developer who has made our world much better."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Great intentions, and huge shoes to fill. Already off on the right foot by going open source. Hope the authors have thick skin, this is one market that people are generally very particular about, and won't hold back on the details.For me UI is almost as important as the engine. I'm a very clean/minimalist/organized person and if the software (or text editor in this case) does not, or cannot reflect that then there will be issues."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't like how it shamelessly piggybacks on Sublime's reputation by using its name left and right and doesn't hesitate to knock it down by calling itself a "successor". This comes across as disrespectful at least."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Lime has been around for a little while now, it seems to have a fairly functional backend but still awaiting a high quality frontend implementation. Part of what sets ST apart is the frontend.One of the most impressive goals on the roadmap is to implement a terminal frontend as well as a QT frontend, which I'm quite excited to see.Arch users can install Lime from AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lime-git/"
}
] | en | 0.969441 |
Live: Head of NSA meets with House Intelligence Committee | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Arguing that these programs are effective by revealing a few foiled terrorist plots is entirely beside the point. Obviously monitoring every communication on the planet would help the government track down a few terrorist plots here and there. If they really want the debate to focus on the effectiveness of these programs then they should explain why they failed so spectacularly to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, a plot carried out by two of the most careless and naive terrorists to date. Heck, even a direct warning from Russian officials fell on deaf ears. Perhaps the NSA was too busy listening to innocent people's phone calls to respond?The effectiveness isn't what's at issue here, though. The problem is the loss of privacy for innocent civilians, to which Obama and other government officials respond to with wishy-washy arguments about "tradeoffs" between security and privacy."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Deputy Attorney General: "We don't get any content...under this program." The use of language across all parties here is really incredible. The Google/Apple/etc denials so carefully worded, the lawyer-speak that avoid saying anything at all for hours at a time in the US gov't...it's amazingly Orwellian.Edit: Did he just say that the fourth amendment does not apply because nobody expected privacy in the first place? I can't possibly have heard that right."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Hopefully this will shift the conversation from "listening to phone calls" and "collecting internet records (eg: emails, browsing history)" to "storing phone calls" and "storing internet records (eg: emails, browsing history)".At this point it's become abundantly clear that everything is stored and indexed in a database, and the only defense against abuse of this database is only policies.One of the worst cases to come out of this entire ordeal is the legal dance around the definition of "listen" and whether it refers to automatically capturing phone calls or an individual listening to a recording of a phone call after it's been captured."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": ""But if we do acquire any information that relates to a US person, under limited criteria only, can we keep it. If it has to do with foreign intelligence in that conversation or understanding foreign intelligence, or evidence of a crime or a threat of serious bodily injury, we can respond to that. Other than that, we have to get rid of it, we have to purge it, and we can't use it." (emphasis mine)This seems very close to an admission that they both have and analyze the data before purging it. Combined with the idea that most people commit three felonies a day and pretty quickly all of these assertions about not spying on US citizens or people in the US goes out the window."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": ""Does the NSA listen to the content of phone calls?"General Alexander: "No we do not have that authority."I think it's pretty clear by now that they're collecting phone call content.Here's another and I'm paraphrasing:"Is there something else being collected?""Besides the 215(?) and 702(?)? I'm not sure as I don't know whether that info has been declassified.""
}
] | en | 0.977468 |
Microsoft to Limit Capabilities of Cheap Laptops | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This isn't \"evil\", it's basic market segmentation. Microsoft doesn't want to limit the capabilities of any device, but if it sets the price of XP to a level that works for ultra-cheap vendors, it surrenders a vast amount of money to companies like Dell.Like any business, Microsoft wants Dell to pay what XP is worth to Dell, and Asus to pay what XP is worth for the Eee. It can't simply charge one amount to Dell and another to Asus. So instead it uses arbitrary specifications to create a category of XP license that is unattractive to Dell and cost-effective for Asus.You can argue about the ethics of this up and down, but when you start looking for it, you see that we're awash in market segmentation. Often, the most egregious examples of it actually have consumer benefits: take airfare, where the total ripoff fares I pay for last-minute business travel effective subsidize tickets for tourists who would not otherwise be able to fly."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "To recap: Microsoft says that if a producer wants cheap window's licenses, they have to limit the specs on their umpcs (screen < 10.2 inches && hd < 80GB && ! touchscreen).This is a good thing.If a consumer wants, e.g., a umpc with a touchscreen, they will be forced to get a linux one. Getting more people to try linux (and giving the linux hardware an intrinsic edge), is probably one of the worst things microsoft can do to itself and one of the best it can do for linux."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The lack of touchscreen interoperability will be a major limitation which will encourage open source adoption.Unfortunately, current client trends are counter to Microsoft's strategy. Firstly, people are buying laptops rather than desktops. Both are getting cheaper. Secondly, Microsoft follows the classic monopolistic tactic of racheting prices. Successive versions of Microsoft software a typical more expensive despite initial costs already being re-couped. These trends create a situation where the cost of an operating system and pre-installed applications take an increasingly large share of the retail price. This creates a third trend of laptop manufacturers who opt-out of the \"Windows tax\" and only supply units with tailored open source software.In two years, we'll probably have a device which is a mix of laptop, mobile telephone and Nintendo DS. It would be a clamshell design with two 11 inch screens with the bottom one being touch sensitive. You cannot rely on Microsoft to support such a device. Nor would it be viable to include Windows. So, such a device would mostly be used with open source operating systems.This design has already been tried. Unfortunately, it was quite a few years ago and it was a commercial failure. However, since then, the technology has improved, the cost has fallen and the volume of people who only want to run open source software has grown significantly. This would make a similar attempt much more likely to succeed.It is understandable that such a trend would adversely affect Microsoft. Therefore an attempt to steeply discount Windows on limited hardware has two benefits. It creates an artificial divide between premium hardware and almost disposable devices where Windows is viable on both. Secondly, it reduces the inclination for low cost manufacturers to abandon Windows."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Wow, just like the old Evil Microsoft. They forgot something, though: Apple is no longer a negligible force. I wonder if this move will ultimately backfire."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Once they secure their position, I wonder if MS will start imposing comparable constraints to the future OLPCs (which they should have never been allowed to put their grubby hands on)?\nAlso, I wonder who in the world their PR dude is and if he sleeps most all days... In any case, they really should be working on improving their public appearance through their policies rather than trying to impose restrictions on their potential customers. Dumb."
}
] | en | 0.978133 |
Show HN: I shipped my first product | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Congrats. Good luck w/ the app and future apps. I think that writing, launching, (and making a few bucks off of) a simple app might be the best way to get started down the right path. If you can get even the slightest bit of success, I'm sure it will lead to more.It's amazing how hard it is just to ship something for yourself. I've been doing website development for 15 years and have launched 100's of sites, apps, major features, etc. for clients and companies. My history of developing my own projects has not been so stellar.To date I've launched maybe 4 projects in the past say 10 years. 2 were very simple content sites not meant to generate revenue. 2 were fun sites which I hoped might generate a few dollars in ad revenue. I never really got any of them where I wanted them and have since folded all but one (I'm still hoping to make that last 10% of improvements to the 4th).Launching is tough. You did it. Fair play to ya."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Congratz on the launch!If you make the data useful beyond geeks (srsly, Mom and Pop aren't going to import CSV in a spreadsheet and start data mining), this could be really cool.For example, you can get the locations from 4sq or gmaps, or allow the user to check in (but locally, without sending the data anywhere). Then, measure how much time is spent on each location and in transit between them (might want to make more samples for that to work), and give me a daily/weekly/mothly overview. Eg: \"30 hours spent in office, 8 in transit, 20 in coffee shops, 5 in shopping\". Something like RescueTime for location."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Just found it in the App Store - congrats on launching.It took some effort though - even searching for \"TrackMe\" put you below another TrackMe (by kimptoc), Track Me (TM), TrackMe FindMe, Track-Me, and Track Me.Did you find it tough choosing a name? Or (general questions) are names less important in the App store, perhaps because most people find Apps through 'most popular' type lists and people searching for specifics know specifically what they're looking for?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Nice work!One small point - the export format is listed as CSV but has semicolon delimiters. I know this is common in countries with comma decimal notation, but if targeting US customers you might want to make the separator configurable."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "That's a really clever idea. I'd have loved this when I was travelling this summer. Something I would be interested in, though, is some sort of battery test comparison. I know that you say it uses minimal battery, but I'm very conscious about that (and I know many others are, too)."
}
] | en | 0.961184 |
Show HN: My app in 4 weeks is done | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's funny that just this past weekend I was looking for something like your product. I've imagined it more to be a webapp with mobile client though. Something like http://highrisehq.com/ but more personal. (A PRM instead of CRM, one could say.)\nIt should keep in sync with my address book (or rather replace it at some point) and tell me not only what I know about the people in it, but also what interactions I had with them. Ideally it would augment that information with things it can find out on its own over Facebook and the web. (A bit like Gist, although I've found the information it can find to be useless most of the time.)Does anyone know of a product, besides Met, which comes close to what I'm looking for?Congratulations on your launch!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Related app request from Loic Le Meur: http://loiclemeur.com/english/2011/03/its-time-for-personal-...You should contact him, you might get some endorsement :)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Congrats on the launch.I like the idea--I definitely see a/the \"problem\" you hope to solve. I'm terrible with names so if I run into someone (\"James\") and they introduce me to their friend, kid, wife, etc. I'll jot down their name in the \"Notes\" field in \"James\"'s contact (\"James's wife is 'Jane'\"). Next time I see \"James\" and can't remember his wife's name, I can check my notes. It's not perfect but it works-ish.The $3.99 might be a bit high for what I consider a \"it works slightly better than my free hack\" app. MVP and all that so sure there is more to come..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I just want to say that this is awesome. Congratulations on the launch. I do not have an iOS device, so I cannot use it. However, the whole blogging about building an app in X amount of time is a great idea and I am definitely considering doing this in the future. :)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Congratulations for launching!I like the simplicity and the concept, and I can already imagine what kind of jokes we may see popping on the net if your app gets popular.I admit I was put off by the price though, but I may not be the core of your target, which I assume is people who do a lot of networking. I'd install an ad-supported version any day."
}
] | en | 0.978819 |
Nastiest Python list comprehension ever | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": " >>> def mystery(n):\n\nIt's a buggy implementation of primes_below(n) through a sieve.\"There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it.\" And this ain't it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do it?Yes, provide more details so I don't have to spend twenty minutes figuring out what it does.(Going by my three-second-look gut feeling: It's the Sieve of Eratosthenes)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Can somebody from the Perl community please but this guy in the right place by supplying a one-liner Perl golf quadruple map call?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think it's a testimony to the readability of Python that I've never even programed in the language, nor am I familiar with the finer points of the list syntax (a[::2]?!), and yet this mucked up piece of shit nonetheless gave me the first impression of a prime number sieve. I actually still don't understand how the sieve works, but it somehow just looks like one. Or is it just the case that assuming every obfuscated loop is a prime number sieve is disproportionately likely to be true?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Does that even run? :)Nested comprehensions are one of the things I hate about Python actually. The functions in itertools are so much clearer. I can't really think of a good reason to use nested comprehensions... they become unreadable really fast!"
}
] | en | 0.947809 |
Ask HN: Death by design, poor on-boarding or do we just smell? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This looks way too complicated. The birds eye view might be your main feature, but it's visually unattractive, and very cluttered.It looks like you have all the bones of a great app, but you need a great graphic design and a great user experience architect to take it to the next level.I tried out your app, which was a nice touch, but it's not nearly as polished as BaseCamp. Even something as simple as a task view in Bird View Projects is completely confusing. Do I turn on the alert checkbox? Add a subtask? What is the difference between the clock and the $?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Just an idea:Figure out a single use-case you want to be The Best at (planning weddings, or whatever).Delete (or at least hide) everything except the absolute bare minimum featureset necessary to be The Best at that.Make the claim on your home page: The Best way to plan your wedding (or whatever).Have a Weebly-simple sign up process (sign up form on home page). Let people dive in and get hooked ASAP.Iterate based on feedback. Make 100 customers love you. Expand outside your niche if necessary."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I would focus on just one aspect that you do uniquely well.Take Rapportive's landing page: http://rapportive.com.\nThey provide much, much more than just Twitter / Facebook widgets but they purposely restrict what they show. As a potential user, I see that one feature and decide it is cool enough for me to install.Providing a single, simple, salient advantage I've found works much better than trying to market your solution as the all-in-one Swiss army knife.What is the one cool feature that you feel differentiates your product?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "FYI - \"Click, close your eyes and count to ten\" was actually closer to fifty on the first load. I went back and clicked the button again, and it only took about seven seconds. Just thought you should be aware."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Intimidating...that's how I would best describe the look of your application. I'm guessing potential customers see a long learning curve ahead and want nothing to do with it. This \"intimidation factor\" conflicts with your stated goal of creating an alternative \"entry-level\" project management system. Furthermore two years is way too long to be developing any type of CRUD app."
}
] | en | 0.989169 |
Unified Dropdown Menu: One Menu to Rule All Links | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'd rather these complex sites avoid having drop-down menus entirely for their top-nav bar. Instead, have the most common general sections linked in the top-nav, and put links to their sub-sections in a section-specific navigation area inside the newly-loaded general section, separate from the top-nav. Less common pages and sections are linked in the bottom-nav.Cluttered top-nav is a hassle to use, with the worst offenders making me feel like I'm looking for a needle in a haystack every time I use it. It's much nicer to drill down to the section you need one step at a time without modal navigation windows appearing and disappearing, especially if the defaults are well-chosen.[It's also worth noting, as mentioned by others here, that the paradigm of stacked windows, and thus pull-down menus, is incompatible with pocket OS designs, so you're going to end up with completely different navigation workflows on different platforms if you go this route.]"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I like this approach, esp how it is implemented on Lebron's site. Like wolffnc3 said above, I would be curious to see if users like the idea of triggering all of the drop-downs with one hover or if they prefer the classic way."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Most of the top bars use single word (or very short) menus. With this unified drop down menu, you are limited to make all the sub-menus at the same size then the top menu, which is not very user friendly.\nI prefer to have longer sub-menus with comprehensible links like http://www.jawbone.com or http://www.nike.com"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Interesting idea, i'd love to hear from anyone who's tried this and see if they've gathered any data on it's effectiveness (a/b tests, heat maps etc...)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is great on desktop, but I don't think it scales smoothly down to the available space on mobile."
}
] | en | 0.956959 |
Y Combinator's Graham Doesn't See "Bubble" in Technology | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My favorite line in that, after the interviewer asked PG what the big successes for YC were and he answered AirBnB and Dropbox:Q: \"But aren't you forgetting Heroku? They just sold for $220 million.\"A: \"Oh sure, Heroku was a success... but you couldn't buy Dropbox or AirBnB right now for $220 million.\""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Speaking as someone who does not live in the Valley, if this is a bubble it's a great deal smaller than the 1999-2000 one, in the intangibles at least. Buzz may be up in the Valley but it's nonexistent out where I am.I do think there may be a rush to declare bubble. You know, a lot of the promises that powered the first bubble are still true. The Internet really is going to revolutionize every business. Opportunities really are everywhere. It just was and is going to take a bit longer than initially expected, and 1999 infrastructure really couldn't support it. (Remember, in 1999, your top-of-the-line server chip is a Pentium III Xeon, built on a 250nm die, at 600MHz or so, and let's not even talk about the price of one of these. Or how your non-very-tech-savvy customers are supposed to get to your very expensive server.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I always think this is funny. Most people didn't see the housing crisis coming before it was terribly obvious to everyone. Crying bubble doesn't make you look like you're any good at predicting anything. The only danger of a bubble has to do with debt.Most startups are funded by savings and while that savings can be wiped out no one is hurt after that hit. Businesses fail all the time and only when massive amounts debt is involved is anyone else (outside the people directly involved) affected.A bubble would start to scare me if people started taking out massive loans to startup companies that had no hope to make money. I sometimes wonder about the quality of the companies that are able to raise money now but I'm not worried about them taking it. The investors will learn from their mistakes and hopefully we won't have as many daily deal sites for me to deal with. In the meantime I'm using Yipit to help me who also raised a decent amount of money I guess. Oh well."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "PG has all these amazing quips.> \"If you have big plans initially, you are probably Webvan\"\n> \"The valuation of an early-stage startup is the % chance they will be big. i.e. a $10M valuation ~= 1% chance they will get to a $1B valuation\".Also, am I the only one that picked up that AirBnB and Dropbox clearly have a valuation higher than $250M. I wonder what they consider their valuation to be right now."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I think the only valid answer to this is a tweet from http://twitter.com/hackernewstips:> Today, @PaulG claimed there is no tech bubble. In unrelated news, @AdKeeperInc raised $40 mil. in funding for \"Delicious, for banner ads\".Which is exactly what AdKeeper is, btw."
}
] | en | 0.987003 |
Ask HN: is there a marketplace for code bases, startups, etc.? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Generally such businesses get sold directly by the owner approaching interested parties (companies in the same space, competitors, etc.).If they end up on a public market it generally means that no-one in that space was interested in it, which is a huge negative flag (i.e. strong indication it's a dud) which drives the price down so much it's often not worthwhile doing the sale (i.e. handling the legal, accounting cost and processed aren't worthwhile)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "There was a recent Sell HN thread where people were posting projects they wanted to sell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5803374 . Hopefully this will be a recurring monthly event, so you might be able to put it up then,"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm assuming there is no users and/or revenue stream. So your talking about an untested business plan, some intellectual property ie code, trademarks, patents. I don't know of anything but I'd be interested to see. Yuo might think about selling it as a service and white labeling the functionality."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "http://us.businessesforsale.com/us/search/Internet-Businesse...That is the major one."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "www.flippa.com"
}
] | en | 0.959903 |
Show HN: My 10 Hour Winter Break Project Mixmatic | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Interesting site. I lost interest in Spotify but I can see the novelty of a site like this.But... your example URL makes it pretty easy to guess at other people's mixes... so not very private. Not that you claim it to be private. But if I was sending a mix to someone and typed in a special message for them, I would not really want random people to read it. Some sort of URL hash would at least make it harder to guess."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Seems to be the season for mixtapes, found another one on HN recently http://muxx.it"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I put together a usablity review of mixmatic.co using moustach.io. I hope you find this useful.http://moustach.io/welcome/e/reviewed/ozH9eZmzRYuRB5bycNJYb-...Good luck."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't use (and never have, but I suspect it's like Grooveshark) Spotify so this question might be stupid. What advantage does this have over just sending an email with a URL to a Spotify playlist?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "First question: Why get co and not a com?Second question: i like the design given the time constraints. What design tools did you use? Any tips on getting a good design quickly?"
}
] | en | 0.970584 |
Craigslist Censored: Adult Section Comes Down | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I hear quite often that prostitution would be a wonderfully pleasant industry if it were only legal, which does not square with the experiences of countries where it is legal or tolerated.You pretty much have to be running schoolgirls out of homeroom to get the Nagoya police to so much as glance in your direction, but Japanese prostitution is a very, very ugly place to be, and much of it is based on trafficking. I live two hundred feet from a \"Korean aesthetic salon\" which is open at three A.M. in the morning. One of the not-so-young ladies who works there has taken to sleeping on the bus bench across the street recently, in heat which has nearly sent me to the hospital twice. You may have heard that Japan has a storied relationship with its Korean immigrants. Those who do -- to use a nauseating euphemism -- the jobs Japanese girls won't do can expect neglect from polite society, because polite society knows that inquiring into her circumstances means they have to know what goes on in those walls, and they are very interested in keeping up the fiction that they do not know what goes on in those walls.Or take the European experience. Amsterdam, city of lights, so much more sophisticated than the American puritans, perfectly legal thriving sex trade, right? It has been taken over by Russian mafia who are undercutting the locals via use of trafficked girls from Eastern Europe. You always have the option as a merchant of sex slaves to one-up what the \"morally upright prostitutes\" allow, safe in the knowledge that they will cover for you because an investigation into what you are doing harms their business interests. Society, meanwhile, has no great desire to actually police what happens inside of brothels, preferring to believe its sanity-saving fictions like \"she wants to be there\", \"it is just sex between two consenting adults\", and \"no slaves live on my block.\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/world/europe/24amsterdam.h...Prostitution, legal or otherwise, is not pretty. It is based, root and branch, on exploitation. To the extent you think that legalizing it will end the exploitation, you believe something which is contrary to reality."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I bet most of the people freaking out about CL's adult services haven't considered that censorship usually leads to an increased demand. They're doing an excellent job advertising to the world that you can easily buy sex online. If they really wanted to help people they'd be advocating a safe highly regulated adult services industry that satisfies the demand while eliminating most of the ugly side effects of prohibition. They completely reject this idea so it seems obvious to me their agenda is more about moral pontificating than helping people or they truly have no understanding of how the real world works."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I never thought TC would ever come up with a quote worth, uh, quoting, but pigs are in flight today!If it’s just a sex crime it isn’t a story. But if a listing on Craigslist was involved, it’s a big story.Painfully true.It's all bullshit as well, this \"OMG Sex crimes\" nonsense. We investigate sex crimes (i.e. rape, abuse, murder etc.) caused by the internet - literally none of them (and I am well above 60 investigations in that area now) have anything to do with personal ads such as the ones censored here.I might be out on a limb here because a) this is based on only a small amount of empirical evidence and b) I've not talked to colleagues to get their take on it, but, most of the internet derived sex crime comes from the \"under the radar\" sleazy dating sites or, more likely, simply someone they managed to get on MSN.These people prey on those looking for a boyfriend, not someone looking to sell sex. Prostitutes are, for the most part, not stupid - they know when to take a deal or walk away.I can't help feeling crusades such as this are actually harmful.\n</rant>"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I can't understand the motivations for this.Several state attorney generals find out there is are people going to a web site, and for all intents and purposes advertising they are going to commit criminal acts. The public is outraged.A rational person whose job is to enforce the law at this point would be dancing in happy circles, because the criminals are not only advertising their crimes, they're doing it in a single, easily searchable location. This makes his job much easier than it was before.So what does this person do in order to score political points with the outraged public? Arrest all these people in sting operations? No. He gets the site shut down. Out of sight, out of mind. And the public is happy about that.For the life of me I can't understand why people do the things they do and feel justified about it. Prostitution is either so bad that it should be illegal and those laws enforced, or it shouldn't be illegal at all because all that does is create problems. There is no middle ground here."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "no, its just located here now: http://newyork.craigslist.org/thp/"
}
] | en | 0.991849 |
Coming Home to Vim | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I took the dive into Vim about a year ago. I was at the stage where I'd become proficient with some command-line tools in Linux, but I didn't yet have an editor I could use fluently from the command line. I tried out both Vim and Emacs, and found Vim to be slightly easier to grok, plus my pinkie got kind of sore from holding down the Ctrl key in Emacs.I changed my default editor at work to be Vim, and started doing all my dev work at home through Vim. I started off just using the arrow keys to move and just using insert mode to edit text the normal way. Each day I tried to add one new command to my repertoire; I learned about how to structure vim commands (c-change i-in w-word, etc.) and move using hjkl and the higher order movement commands like w and b. Now I can maneuver my way around vim quite confidently, and although when I started off I was much slower in Vim than other editors, I now find that Vim is just as fast or faster for most tasks, particularly where I can make use of Macros.At the moment I still have to get my head around markers and a few other concepts, but I've definitely become proficient enough for it to be worth the effort and time invested so far.My tips for anyone learning to use vim for everyday development would be some common tab commands: :tabnew <path> to open a file in a new tab, :tab sball to show all currently open buffers in separate tabs, gt and gT to jump to the next/previous tabs."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Wow, the bit about seeing vim commands as sentences composed of nouns, verbs and adjectives blew my mind. I thought about learning vim, but I didn't know about this, so vim commands seemed like some arcane language that I would have to gradually get proficient at over months.. this might make the transition a lot easier."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm a hardcore nerd and I spend many hours with a text editor during the day. Yet I find vim beyond my nerd level. I just can't be bothered with fiddling with config files and installing little bundles and packages for every functionality.On top of that the whole \"language of editing\" and combining noun,verb,adjective commands, etc... doesn't really appeal to me because I'm too visual when I'm editing code. I can't stop to think about the right semantics about what I want to do, I just do it visually."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm a bit torn. I love the controls in vim, the way you navigate and manipulate text is a brilliant system. It makes it more efficient and more \"fun\".However, I really don't like the configuration system for vim. Reading the article above, I lost interest when he started talking about his .vimrc file and the plugins he used. It seems arcane to have to have these cryptic settings, whose functions aren't immediately obvious, and write them to a file. I understand that part of the VIM philosophy is that it's almost like a language, or that it's like programming your text, but configuration is just something that you (ideally) set once, and then forget about. Even if I do learn what \"nnoremap <leader>ft Vatzf\", if I need to set up my environment again, I'll likely forget what it is and why I needed it in the first place. And even if I configure VIM to have the things I want (for example, NERDtree for project navigation), it'll never look or feel as intuitive as having a graphical interface.So it seems when people talk about VIM, it seems that they're really talking about two things: the control scheme (keybindings) and the editor itself (the environment).Being an android developer, I use eclipse. I use the \"Vrapper\" plugin, which gives me vim keybindings in the eclipse editor. I love it. It gives me the vim navigation that I know and love, but the environment and tools provided by Eclipse. I think this is how it should be - the environment of the editor is best handled separately, and although you can add a ton of plugins and configure the crap out of VIM to turn it into an IDE, it'll never really be a proper IDE.This is why I'm still looking for an ideal lightweight text editor/IDE. My ideal for linux would be Geany, but with Vim keybindings. I discovered Vico yesterday, which looks interesting, but is OSX only at the moment. Might be what I'm looking for, but we'll see."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm skeptical that Ack is \"far, far better than grep.\" Different? Ok. Better? Maybe, based on what you're doing. Far, far better? Probably not. Omitting correct results because a file extension isn't white-listed sounds like a pain.http://superuser.com/questions/39384/best-grep-like-tool/342..."
}
] | en | 0.984732 |
Ask YC: Choosing wiki software | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "MediaWiki is the king of unrestricted wiki platforms. However, if you're looking to restrict access to certain portions of the wiki, or develop some sort of responsibility and/or permission structure, or add features such as forms and even embedded apps, I recommend TWiki. There are lots of plugins available, and there is plentiful documentation."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'd personally go for Ikiwiki, just because it lets me ditch the browser for editing the wiki. I personally hate the embedded text controls in web pages, finding that they invariably stink. Ikiwiki stores the pages in a $SCM repository (eg, your pages are stored in Git or SVN or whatnot) so you can check them out and edit them.Being able to check out the wiki from the repository backend that Ikiwiki uses and edit it with my editor of choice (Vim) is a huge win, I think."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I wrote one for Rails: http://dedawiki.dedasys.com and it's open source.It's not as fancy as the mediawiki one, but it's easy to customize - observant people will notice that it shares a lot with another site of mine, http://www.squeezedbooks.com"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think http://wikinvest.com uses a heavily modified MediaWiki. If you're happy with PHP, it's a solid choice."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "MoinMoin (python) is good."
}
] | en | 0.903464 |
Ask News.YC: What would you do if you were a billionaire? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two chicks at the same time, man. Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had a million dollars I could hook that up, cause chicks dig a dude with money.All office space quoting aside, if my startup IPOs I'm buying a winery in Napa, preferably Stags Leap district, and a house in the hills of St. Helena with enough land to let my dogs run free and terrorize the neighbors.And I'll probably jump into the restaurant industry."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Step One: Construct a giant concrete sarcophagus similar to the contraption they used to seal off Chernobyl.Step Two: Hire a reliable private investigator to ascertain the location of the target: Creed's rehearsal space.Step Three: Fill the sarcophagus with alligators, poop, and diseased ferrets.Step Four: Rent several hundred industrial-grade helicopters and lower the sarcophagus onto the target.Step Five: Construct a monument honoring the heroism of the alligators and diseased ferrets."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Fund scientific research at a laboratory I direct with my business partner Josh. I think we could knock off a few major diseases like AIDS, or maybe get bacteria effectively generating energy.To cure HIV (idea is Josh's): Start with some adult stem cells from the HIV patient to be treated, specifically the stem cells that produce T cells. Introduce the 32 base pair deletion in the CCR5 gene and grow the cells in culture. These can then be \"transplanted\" back into the patient. These transplanted stem cells will create HIV immune T cells. Once there are enough immune T cells, the patient will probably still have HIV, but it will not develop into AIDS. There will be no chance of rejection since they are the patient's own cells. Furthermore, since the body does produce antibodies to HIV, these modified T cells may even be able to fight off the HIV.To test this, we would get a mouse line, which are genetically very similar to each other from inbreeding so we won't have to worry about rejection of the transplants, and introduce the human CCR5 receptor into them. This, in theory, will allow the mice to be infected with HIV since HIV attaches to the CCR 5 receptor to enter and infect the cell. If this works, we can then try the technique of taking some of their stem cells, introducing the mutation, transplanting them back in, and see if their T cell count increases or if the levels of HIV decrease. It could also be used as a preventative therapy, which we can also easily test on the mice."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": " Pay off all my family members debt.\n Setup a trust to provide my family members with reasonable salaries. Just enough to let them do what they want, but not enough that they don't have to work.\n Buy a giant piece of land and move my parent's and their families on to the same property, if they want too...\n Go to university.\n Setup a decent course in South Africa to teach kids about programming.\n Get that silver Porsche 911 that I've always wanted.\n Go to my old work, in my new Porsche, and show it to my ex-boss.\n Fund something to fight crime in South Africa.\n"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Day to day? Much the same thing, actually."
}
] | en | 0.984871 |
Why Don’t Restaurants Charge for Reservations? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "What I've never understood is the opposite, is those restaurants which have insane lines, as in 2+ hours waiting outside to get a seat, why they don't simply raise their prices by $1 or $2.There was a restaurant that everyone in college in Vancouver went to back in 1993-1994, Antons Pasta, and you always had to wait incredibly long for - the place was packed 100% of the time at night.I would see this line (fresh from my economics class), and wonder, instead of charging $5 for the tortellini, and have a 3 hour line, why don't they charge $5.50, or heck, even $6.00, and only have a 1 hour line. It's not as though having a 1 hour line is going to result in any lost business.I'm thinking that part of this is the fact that a long line outside, means there will always be business inside, and there is always some paranoia in a restaurant of having empty seats inside, and better to have slightly missed profit opportunity, than to have some seats go empty and make a "reasonable" profit.That's the only theory I could come up with."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Chez Panisse charges a $25 deposit for reservations, that goes towards your meal. But they have two seatings per night, so it is more difficult to fill tables for no-shows. It's still impossible to get reservations there."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I imagine at some point we will see this happen, as society stratifies even further. You can already pay to skip lines at places like Disney."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've encountered another approach in NYC which I haven't seen mentioned here. Some higher-end restaurants require a credit card number (over the phone, maybe online is possible too) which they tell you they will charge e.g. $25 per person for no-shows. The first time I was a bit put-off (giving out CC numbers on the phone never feels great), but now I'm more sanguine about it.Aside: in central London, booking is essential. Many decent (not even high-end) restaurants have most of their tables booked in advance. I did a double-take the first time I walked into a place with two-thirds of its tables empty and was turned away. "Fully booked" seems a lot more common there. I never knew a restaurant to charge for booking, but I did know people who paid "unofficially" to get tables, or had office assistants scramble for them."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's interesting, I remember listening to NPR awhile back and they had a story about how high end restaurants are experimenting with a "ticket" system for reservations. Part of the problem is that even for restaurants where say you reserve well in advance for a holiday, it's surprisingly common for people to cancel at the last minute. So, some have tried to have people prepay for the meal. It might only work for rather pricey restaurants though...Here's the link:\nhttp://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/08/05/337834577/no-mor..."
}
] | en | 0.992917 |
Beautiful fixed-width fonts for OSX | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Wow, this is the ugliest font I have ever seen. I do like the color-less syntax highlighting, though.Also, Haskell looks nicer when you translate things like -> to →, \\ to λ, and so on.But really, both of these things would look nicer on high-resolution displays. When can I get a 1200dpi 24\" monitor? (In the mean time, you can pry hinting and subpixel anti-aliasing from my cold, dead eyes. It's a necessity on the limited hardware that's currently available.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'd recommend Consolas.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConsolasOS X Install → http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/With slightly more effort it can be installed on linux."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This makes me happy.I tried to make 6x13 for OS X a while back:\nhttp://fontstruct.fontshop.com/fontstructions/show/6x13_redu...Then I discovered the full set of characters (er, codepoints?) supported and pulled the emergency brake on that idea!http://rasher.dk/rockbox/fonts/misc/6x13-full.png"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "My current favorite monospace font is Incosolata http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html It's an amazingly legible font and looks great and small and large font sizes."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I use misc fixed in a smaller size on osx in mrxvt (in X11 of course). Anti-aliasing turned off. 256 color goodness in terminal emacs, yummy. This terminal is incredibly fast (especially with anti-aliasing off), it'll scroll through a big file in the blink of an eye. I dislike having to wait when massive input is scrolling through a terminal. I totally love this setup, only caveat is that I need to attach a mouse to be able to paste into x11.Here's a link to my .mrxvtrc file http://gist.github.com/277956"
}
] | en | 0.923448 |
GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "So many people seem enamored of the idea of building software to protect users from NSA, and respond by designing new cryptosystems. These efforts invariably fail, because crypto is very hard, and professional crypto requires 10x verification (particularly at the design stage) as it does implementation.It baffles me that nobody has instead picked up the challenge of taking the PGP/GPG cryptosystem and making it more usable. That seems like an incredibly valuable project that also makes great use of the skills of the sorts of people that tend to want to work on privacy software.Paradoxically, the more you know about crypto, the less inclined you usually are to build new crypto."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Except that the tool itself is so painful to use, and has such a shallow integration with things like email clients, that using it requires a considerable degree of self-discipline.I think I installed it once, and then when my machine required rebuilding, I just couldn't bring myself to install it again.I wish it weren't so, but a new website is not something that is going to speed the adoption of GnuPG."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This blog post is partially about the crowd funding campaign, but the author didn't include a link to the campaign!http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructur..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "2^2^2 years protecting privacy, that is!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "For a more readable format: https://www.readability.com/articles/jzsno986"
}
] | en | 0.966342 |
The inside story of MIT and Aaron Swartz | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I continue to be astounded by the unprofessional, predatory manner in which MIT, JSTOR and in particular the federal prosecutors in this case handled themselves.The article also reiterates that the ridiculous CFAA charges centered on the claim that Swartz had unauthorized access to MIT and JSTOR’s networks (he was signed in as a guest).- MIT officials openly mocking Mr Swartz - "LOL" -http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/03/29/documents-how-aaron-sw...- JSTOR equates downloading files with loss of physical property while simultaneously admitting this is an inaccurate comparison -http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/03/29/documents-how-aaron-sw..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The Swartz/MIT debacle reminds me of a chapter in Starship Troopers. A mobile infantry recruit punches his drill instructor. The recruit is publicly lashed and discharged.Later in private, the commander reprimands the drill instructor: there were standing orders to never let a recruit hit you. They obviously have to punish recruits who strike instructors, but they do not want to. The drill instructors are supposed to be elite soldiers, and this one let a recruit get the drop on him, and that mistake cost the infantry a recruit.MIT had sufficient opportunity to stop Swartz with technical countermeasures -- but they failed to do so. They allowed the situation to escalate until official punishment became unavoidable. MIT may claim that they did not want to punish Swartz; few people will argue that they did. It was not their intent but rather their incompetence that lead to his punishment."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Straight to the relevant email logs: http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/03/29/documents-how-aaron-sw...Lots of interesting material there. An amusing little quote:> his hobbies include changing his mac a lot, not using dhcp, fake registration info and downloading entire online journals"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> MIT has insisted it maintained an appropriate, even compassionate, neutrality toward a determined hacker who stole 4.8 million articles and eluded numerous efforts to stop him before the college sought help from police.The tone of this article is very defensive. "stole" vs. downloaded, both MIT and JSTOR didn't want to prosecute, yada yada."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I am sorry, and I am really not this paranoid world conspiracy theorist kind of guy, but it's very obvious that much bigger things were going on here. Aaron was not popular by A LOT OF powerful people for many reasons. He was on "a list". In times where it is a common fact that intelligence agencies have seemingly endless digital power, all you need is someone who constructs a good story. It's not about the MIT, it could have been everywhere and anyone. The reason for all this will we find in the things Aaron was (sometimes successfully) fighting against. I wish Lawrence Lessig the best of luck!"
}
] | en | 0.938083 |
Start-Up Founders: Take Your Spouse on a Date | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm curious why so many negative articles on startups keep coming from the NYT. It's like they are sinking with the Titanic and laughing at people in the lifeboats."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It is also worth noting the burdens on the children of startup founders and early stage employees. Founders should also consider time they may lose with their kids. Feel free to bring the blackberry to the baseball game, but at least pay attention when your kids at bat."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Suppose I'd have to take time off to get one of them things first. I mean, I was dating someone not too long ago. How long ago was 2006? How time flies when you're fighting a war / building a business.If there's anything I hate more than made up holidays it's... okay, I can't think of anything I hate more right now."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Spouse 2.0 day! Gee, I hope I can find a babysitter and dinner reservation on this short of notice."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "reported as inaccurate. startup founders don't have spouses.oh wait, this isn't digg.."
}
] | en | 0.978332 |
Google Buys Twitter? Chris O'Brien's 11 Predictions for 2011 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I would like to see someone buy Twitter, if only to have a different set of engineers and product people tackle their issues. I find twitter search to be very useful in theory, but useless in practice. Mostly I get the \"older tweets for <term> are unavailable\" message.If it takes an acquisition to make Twitter more useful, I'm all for it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "There are two spheres on twitter, the first one is a broadcasting tool, its the accounts with large follower numbers broadcast their stuff, mostly its promotional stuff but it has a use too. They pay attention to the tweets where their username is mentioned and average joe whose voice was ignored now could make some big brand listen to him and resolve a problem if he has one.\nthe other sphere is the chitchat region, where users with medium number of followers and follow decent number of people have conversations, most of that are retweets, which is just copies of someone's message, retweets are pointless but provide good statistics for trends and stuff. \nanyway, twitter is definitely useful because it is a large pool of current and latest information, but you need really good filtering tools to get what exactly you want, not unrelated noise. \nin terms of monetizing twitter is in trouble. they want to stick ads in those 140 characters? its going to be hard as long as the ads look like ads, but if they manage to learn about the user and his needs for that particular moment so they could serve ads that do not look like ads but are more the services that user needs at that point, then there is a bingo.\nand yeah about google, i dont think google should buy twitter, it does not fit, and google does not really need it. twitter would make a good company standalone."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The expression is \"without further ado\", broadly standing for \"without any more fuss\", and not \"without further adieu\". \"Adieu\", borrowed from the French word for \"farewell\", doesn't make any sense at all in this context.I know it's nitpicking and doesn't add a lot, but still. And I can't even post it on the website because it requires a facebook account. Blegh :("
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It depends on how well Google Me does.If Google Me indeed takes off, as a social layer (on top of application and presentation layer), they could just make buzz more prominent.But if it doesn't, which it may, considering Google's failed investments in Buzz, Wave, Me, investment to buy twitter would seem compelling."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'd actually be really surprised if Groupon doesn't go public this year. Considering they just passed on Google's acquisition I don't think they're going to have a better time to go public then in the next year, before their brand gets too diluted with competitors. I think a lot of investors would also be very happy to get in on a hot new tech property like Groupon, as the economy inches back towards a recovery.And a cloud bubble? Really its pretty damn obvious for the lsat year that cloud based services are damn hot right now, but a bubble? This one is barely just a prediction he's pretty much stating what is currently happening. He can declare victory on this \"prediction\" on Jan 1."
}
] | en | 0.966701 |
A Statistical Portrait of a Y Combinator Batch | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is a really excellent example of using your own product to generate interesting content as a way to drive traffic back to your product.Great work Statwing. Can't wait until I have some data that needs analyzing so I can use your service."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"Higher values for Number of Employees/Contractors (FTEs) are weakly associated with higher values for Average Age of Company's Founders (Rounded)\"I had a suspicion that that might be true, but I wonder why that is? Perhaps older founders tackle problems that need more domain expertise and more people? Or perhaps they can rely on savings and have been able to bootstrap a little better than high-school/college grads?Anyway, good job on StatWing, I love playing around with numbers and graphs. Perhaps some public datasets will help people get more familiar with the app and serve as demo."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Thanks for posting. It would be fun to see the ages of accepted YC applicants compared with the rejected applicants. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the data of the rejected applicants though. Maybe they would self-report their information if you posted something here on HN."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I wonder, is that that spike at 39 thinking \"Shit, I'm about to turn 40. It's now or never!\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It would be interesting to put this against the ages of Gen Y distribution. I believe this grouping would actually look relatively old to the peak in population if we assumed only Gen Y would apply.I am basing this on my memory that 1990 was the peak year for those born in Gen Y. (I cannot find the data set to back it up, but I bet someone else knows where to get it).+ a few outside of Gen Y."
}
] | en | 0.961263 |
Ask HN: What Criteria Should a Young Hacker Apply to College Choice? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's not the populist thing to say, but I'll say it anyway.The top colleges are a great place to be because of the friends you'll make and the level of competition at those places. You can meet amazing people anywhere, but generally speaking they are in higher concentration at more competitive universities.If you're going to be a hacker, go to a top CS school if you have the opportunity. The competition will be more hardcore, the faculty will be great (and will have written some of the textbooks!), you'll be heavily recruited by top software companies, and maybe you'll meet your cofounders there. If it costs a little more, then do it anyway -- does it matter if you're a good hacker? Even at the top schools, if you had to pay for most of them with loans, you'd be making more than enough to pay off the debt in short order after graduation.Debt IS bad though -- you want to avoid it if you can because it ties your hands when it comes to starting a company right out of college. But then again, working for a few years and earning a solid salary for a bit can be a great thing too. Make your mistakes on other people's time. =) Worked for us."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Don't choose a college. Choosing a college means you are choosing a particular brand of credentials.http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.htmlInstead, the best thing to base your choice on is people. The next best thing is environment. Are there particular professors who you look up to who would want to mentor you? Is there a high potential for meeting the kind of people who will inspire you? Do you have good evidence that being in that environment will inculcate something valuable? (And starry-eyed reminisces of an alum are not good evidence. Lots of things can happen at an institution in a decade or so. Get current information.)(Another way to put it -- the reputation of a school is marketing. Doesn't it seem wise to corroborate that with more direct measures of value?)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "For most private schools (and the more prestigious public schools), the only people who pay list price are those most able to pay it. Working class and even squarely middle-class kids will generally qualify for significant amounts of need-based financial aid in the forms of grants. So, to the degree that cost is a factor, you should be considering the tuition in conjunction with the financial aid package offered.I think neither cost (as long as the cost is affordable) nor prestige should be the top criteria.I think its more important to find a good match between the student and the environment of the college. The most important aspects of the environment are the professors, the other students and the available academic programs.I'd discount big research universities, since the foremost criteria used by the institution for evaluating undergrad instructors is 1) are they cheap (ie grad students), 2) does their research attract prestige, funding, and cheap labor (ie grad students). The foremost criteria used by undegrads in evaluating their profs is \"coolness\" and the ease of getting a good grade. Also, access by undergrads to profs is limited. They are usually teach in big lecture environments, and their office hours are limited.Focus more on institutions, like small liberal arts colleges, that place a high value on undergrad instruction, while still expecting profs to maintain a level of engagement in scholarship and research. The classroom environment is usually more intimate and profs are more available outside of the classroom.The students are important too. Every hour spent with a prof will also be spent with other students. Better they contribute to the experience. Also, for every hour spent in a classroom setting, there should be at least as many spent studying and socializing with other students.Even if you have your criteria firm in your mind, its hard to get enough information to base an evaluation on, so it pays to look for points of leverage among friends, family, family doctor, high school teachers, etc. None of them are going to have good knowledge of more than one or two institutions, but teachers will have a sense of the experiences of former students. Older friends and relatives will know about their own institutions. Parents of friends and relatives will know something about the experience of their own children, and also of the children of their own friends and family. What's most important though is that these people will have an inside perspective not just the institutions, but on the prospective student. So, tell these people what the student is looking for, ask them for suggestions based on what they know, and then ask them why they made the suggestion they did and see if it makes sense.It's also worth paying close attention to the way the schools markets themselves. If a college manages to communicate a strong and consistent identity for itself in its marketing materials then i'd give that identity some weight unless their is strong evidence to the contrary (particularly if the same message is delivered once they've issued their acceptance). There are some perverse incentives for small schools to misrepresent themselves, but these mostly come into play before applications are received. Also I think these perverse incentives are checked by the fact that they don't have a lot of flexibility with respect to class size. Too many students and their quality of teaching suffers. Too few and their finances suffer. In addition, if its a bad match and the student drops out, it can damage their reputation, and hurt some of the metrics on which they are judged when it comes time for re-accreditation.Take advantage of the net to get more of an inside view on schools too. We used to have prospective students checking out our live journal group. I think that's died off a bit, but there are still groups on facebook and whatnot, and the school should be able to put you in touch with current students and recent grads.In the end though, its great to do a campus visit, particularly if you are choosing among just a handful of schools. Arrange it with admissions. They may get you a room for a night in a dorm, and they'll get you into classes, and give you a campus tour. Outside the formal activities, take advantage of unscheduled time to talk to other students.Regarding the academic program, a lot of students end up graduating in something they might not even have known about when they entered, and they may end up making a living doing a job that didn't even exist when they graduated. For these reasons, I think its important to get a good solid liberal education, with exposure to a variety of subjects and viewpoints no matter what major they choose, and a grounding in the humanities, so they have a perspective on the forces that have shaped society in the past, and can apply that perspective to understanding present day changes.Last thing, I think the prospect of launching a startup after graduating was raised in another thread. I generally encourage people to keep their options open after graduation by not taking on too much debt. For a student who is planning on a pursuit (like writing a book, or starting a company) where they can expect little or no income for a long stretch after graduation, I think the goal should be graduating with no debt at all. In those cases, cost could become a more important factor; 10K in loans might not be decisive if one expects to have some sort of paying job after graduation, but it could be the difference between having grocery money, or going to bed hungry if you are planning on scraping by while trying to get a startup off the ground."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas? What's the balance between theoretical and more immediately practical classes, and which do you care more about?- Professors: How are the professors regarded as instructors by their own students? During undergrad, your professor's quality of instruction matters more than their quality of research.- Rigor. Top colleges are pretty comparable, afaik.- Class size.- Affordability.- Quality of environment.No one criteria ever really \"trumps\" other criteria. You have to determine your personal weightings for each and decide which place offers the best balance. Also, you may find that your priorities change once you've been at college for a year or two, so unless you have a super good idea of what you want to do, you might prefer well roundedness to strength in only a few key areas."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "None of it really matters. Visit each college until it's just obvious. \"I could spend 4 years here and be happy\" Stay overnight with a freshman. Get a feel for how things are run. Talk to as many freshman and seniors as possible, candidly, in private. Go to some sample classes.Don't just take a tour or investigate it online. I chose my college because the people going there were all pretty hard core geeks. And undergrads could get paid to work for Masters and PHD students on their thesis. (I wanted hands on experience) This, naturally, made having a killer social life a little more challenging, unless your definition of a \"killer social life\" is playing net trek at 3:00am on a friday night in your dorm's computer room."
}
] | en | 0.960584 |
Android: Fragmentation? More like Fragmentawesome. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "That's not to say it was playable on all of them--the Covia SmartQ5, for example, has no keyboard, trackball, or even orientation sensors, and you have to use a stylus on the screen (it also has no GPU so the game runs extremely slowly). And some devices (like the LG Eve) have directional pads that are really poor for games.In other words: Fragmentation is a bit of a problem on the Android platform.Sure, your software doesn't crash on any Android hardware. Good for you! But there's a big difference between does not crash and is useable.Fortunately, your software is also usable on \"average\" Android hardware. Great! But there's a big difference between usable and useful, and an even bigger difference between useful and elegantly designed.The problem is least-common-denominator design: You can't assume a hardware keyboard, and you can't assume a software keyboard, and you can't assume multitouch, and you can't assume an orientation sensor, and you apparently can't assume a minimum level of graphics performance. So you design something that runs well on some hardware, but not so well on others, in a way that's not necessarily easy for a potential software customer to understand or anticipate in advance. And you're careful not to accidentally take too much advantage of some hardware feature that isn't widely available, lest you box yourself into a niche."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I can deal with hardware fragmentation, but I am still concerned with software fragmentation. For instance, we (Bump) have different contacts code for Android 1.x, Android 2.x (yes they were supposed to be compatible), and HTC. Bump is not stable on several devices that have changed the contacts subsystem but that we do not have time to support individually (and we can't compile to install on only a subset of known working devices). And I am sure there are problems on handsets we don't know about (there seems to be a new Android handset that we have never heard of on our servers every week). This may be a bigger problem for us since we are so tied to the contacts database and it seems to be a popular subsystem to change but an unpopular one to developers. In the end it means more time bug fixing than feature developing which is too bad.That being said we are extremely excited about the openness of the platform and the features that enables us to build. :)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The fears about Android fragmentation are, in some cases, overblown. The point that concerns me is that this guy has, or has gotten his hands, on every one of those Android devices.This is a feat that most Amateur developers cannot afford to pull off. It is, however, a feat that any iPhone developer can manage (there are only a handful of devices)My fear, with platform fragmentation, isn't for the people who do this for a living (I do, and platform fragmentation is just one of the many problems we already have systems in place to handle) My fear is for the people who want to do it as a hobby.So for us professional folks, the platform fragmentation issue is very over-blown. But if you're a one-man shop who wants to make some mobile software in his/her spare time (for which there is a thriving market on the iPhone) then this is actually a huge hurdle to get over.Sure, if you have access to all the Android devices, you might or might not have to make code changes to support specific handsets (yet). But if you can't get your hands on every Android device...and you want to develop a paid app in the evenings, get ready for a deluge of angry users for whom your application is just too slow to work. Further, these will be problems you won't be able to debug _until_ you get that email from an angry user."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> \"The cool thing is, Replica Island ran on all of them without complaint. That's not to say it was playable on all of them\"But wait, isn't that the entire point of a standardized platform? The ability to guarantee some minimum of user experience quality?The splintering problem is real, and add it to the propensity for OEMs to add all kinds of (mostly poorly thought out) UI tweaks to Android, and what you have is something that really shouldn't be advertised under a single brand name."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Saw the author of Replica Island talk at Google IO. He's worked for nintendo among other handheld companies and really knows his stuff. He works for Google now and developed Replica Island as his 20% project. I'm glad that his software runs well on all the various android capable devices because if he can't get it portable, chances are not many can. One thing not mentioned in this particular article is the fact that he's not only open sourcing replica island but also the engine he's developed to create it, so it should make game development easier on the rest of us."
}
] | en | 0.976604 |
The new sandbox: open-source and self-hosted | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm sad to see their free sandboxes going away, they were a good option for deploying Django for small, non-commercial projects or tests. The experience was better than Heroku (rsync deploy, reasonable database limit, ssh shell) and the docs were alright.From the free options I've seen so far, AppFog comes closest, but last time I tried them the Python/Django documentation was pretty sketchy and the build process had some issues.What are some other good free (tier) PaaS options out there?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Since my comment on Dotcloud's blog post hasn't been approved, I'll repost here. Mind that this was addressed to Dotcloud...First of all, I want to congratulate you guys on what you’re doing for the community by open-sourcing these projects. I have hope that it will lead to faster extension of the options provided by the already-slick configuration scheme to better support new variations on deployment strategies, as well as better documentation.That being said, my days as a Dotcloud customer may be numbered. Back when I was evaluating PaaSs to use for my commercial project, I chose Dotcloud because I could be free to experiment and test using the Sandbox. While we use a Live application for our production deployment, my company still relies on the Sandbox for staging and one-off tests.I have since run into a couple pain points using Dotcloud’s services. The first of these is the fact that your Postgres service cannot be easily scaled. Dotcloud support themselves recommended that I use Heroku’s Postgres hosting as an alternative. This seems to be just one step down the slope of potentially migrating our whole stack. The second pain point is that the instance-based model is not amenable to running New Relic for monitoring. This is not a problem specific to Dotcloud, but again, Heroku is outflanking you by integrating New Relic pricing directly into their basic pricing model. This provides for much more predictable and bounded billing–super important for my company in our bootstrapping stage.While I certainly understand that the Sandbox flavor must come at a significant cost to your company, the fact that it’s phasing out is a significant reduction in value for mine. I’m sure this wasn’t an easy decision, but I hope you understand that this is a strong push toward testing out my deployment on your competitors’ services so I can evaluate the pros/cons of bailing. I hope you’ll consider this as just one customer data point."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Their new strategy is to decommission the free plans and re-invest in building open source instead.It's not really clear how to self-host and how to transition from self-hosting to their platform if the need arises."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think this is great, with one request: I would love to be able to use the same dotcloud toolchain to deploy to a local VM (or, container, I guess.)Something like `dotcloud local push`. This way I don't have to mess with chef/vagrant/etc for my staging environments: I can simply use my dotcloud configurations for both local and production deployments.It would be sad if I had to create one deployment system for testing environments, and something entirely different for production - because by the time I set things up for tests, I might as well use that same tool chain for prod!I don't mind that the free tier is going away - because for me, it has been less about the \"free\" and more about the \"easy to throw a stack together\".Exciting times!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Does anybody else feel that less than 3 weeks is not enough advance notice before permanently destroying applications?"
}
] | en | 0.993361 |
Swiss City Of Bern To Switch To Free And Open Source IT Solutions | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's quite interesting, since Switzerland has been quite \"under the thumb\" for a while when it comes to proprietory software, so this comes as a welcome relief.Disclaimer: I live and work in Switzerland."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The city of Munich even has created their own Linux distro in 2006, called LiMux, which is part of the identically named LiMux project, aimed at switching all their software systems to free and open source software. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Swiss Neutrality"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Cool. It would be interesting to see an estimate of the savings from software license purchases they no longer have to make, and what they plan to do with the savings."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Hopefully this will contribute to improve the open source office software."
}
] | en | 0.985751 |
Merging multiple RSS Feeds into one | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you'd rather not rely on an external service, it's super-easy to use SimplePie ( http://simplepie.org/ ) to merge feeds and, if you'd like, output another feed: http://www.webmaster-source.com/2007/08/06/merging-rss-feeds...(Not the best tutorial, we should have one on our wiki. Disclosure: I'm the SimplePie lead maintainer.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I built and sold a company that focused almost entirely on this one task several years back :-) It's still going though I can't personally vouch for it as I don't use it any more. Nonetheless: http://feed.informer.com/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I did exactly this to make a poor man's blog planet a few years ago. The only problem is that you get a rather messy looking system of pipes and modules as you add more and more feeds."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "You could also use our WIP http://thirsst.com -- but we disabled the feed bundles for new users. Ping me at [email protected] if you care."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "McAfee site advisor flags this site as a malicious. Proceed with caution!"
}
] | en | 0.909319 |
Reddit is a failed state | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Tbh, I found the Washington Post profile of the moderator of /r/TheFappening to be even more fascinating. johnmcjohn frequented asexuality and Asperger forums and voiced his frustration, and detailed his financial troubles and professional failures on LinkedIn and begged for money from strangers on Reddit and also moderated and advised users on /r/cocaine on how to obtain and use cocaine. "It's odd that a man with self-diagnosed asexuality created a forum as a trove of naked celebrity photos."The degree of detail of personal information that we post online if someone resourceful enough like a reporter at WashPo can gather on ourselves, both our public or pseudo-anonymous personas truly reveal everything about our professional, psychological, financial and personal lives.Recently, two events happened to me where I was confronted with IRL with what I said online which I thought was anonymous. I felt really uncomfortable initially because I felt simultaneously really rude to the people who have read my comments because it was my pure unadulterated thoughts without any real life filter; and exposed because there are honest thoughts of mine like stream-of-conscious thoughts that I'd never express in public to communicate to someone else, kind of like Jimmy Carter who answered "Yes, in my thoughts" to the question of "Have you ever cheated on your wife."Going back to the main topic of discussion, if I was exposed to the core by WashPo, I'd be no better johnmcjohn. But like johnmcjohn who made his profile public again on Twitter because "there is nothing to hide," I feel honesty in all shapes of forms, even if it exposes you as a 33-year old guy with a questionable personal/professional background who shares celeb nudies is the way to go.I post a lot of provocative comments on this forum; the first few times, it was because I felt arrogant or wanted to attack some of the people-types whom I disliked in real life online. But after someone replied to one of my comment and gave a good counter-perspective and made me learn new things and new perspective. It made me not afraid to be downvoted and keep being honest. I hope that more confrontations and humiliations come my way, so that I can learn from them."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Reddit comes of smelling less than rosy in this episode. It seems as if it is ok to post the most intimate details about people as long as they are not reddit users, then suddenly privacy is really important.Link-dumps and fora in general could do a lot more to protect the privacy of victims, there are whole websites dedicated to doing harm to others, usually people who had absolutely no idea that the innocent picture they took or allowed to be taken would end up online some day to ruin their lives or cause them at a minimum great distress.I've been battling this problem for years, and even 'consenting adults' can get themselves into a ton of trouble if they do not oversee all the possible consequences of their actions.It's the main reason why I've decided to ban all forms of nudity on my website, even though I personally believe that people should be able to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes, and by extension their own homes on the net the amount of grief that can come of it nullifies any positive effects.Reddit could and should do more to stop abuses like these and hiding behind the 'free speech' banner when clearly the images distributed were distributed without the consent and probably even the knowledge of the subjects of the images is cheap and tone-deaf.Which is a pity because reddit is one of very few sites on the net that has very long term potential."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "There are a lot of assholes on the internet, but in general I'm unwilling to hastily put limits on freedom of speech, even when those assholes use it to be assholes.I am not sure what people are asking for: Do they want reddit to start censoring more stuff? That can quickly become a slippery slope. Do they want reddit to break DMCA laws? That's not going to happen. Do they want reddit to fall on its sword and censor nothing even if it means the demonization of reddit? Probably a bad idea too.On another note, I mostly use reddit to read /r/cpp, /r/netsec, /r/Iceland, /r/hiphopheads, /r/bourbon (and friends), /r/LosAngeles, and a collection of other interest specific subreddits. I barely noticed the recent shenanigans. When an article attempts to paint reddit as "being filled with [insert broad brush here]" I always cringe; any large site cuts across most demographics. It's filled with the same type of people who use the internet; that is, the same that are walking around in your city right now. It's filled with everyone."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Reddit's true corporate philosophy looks simple. These appear to be the 2 immutable laws of Reddit, and everything else follows naturally from them:1. Anything goes2. Unless it causes immediate and obvious harm to RedditI think the mission statements from Reddit's CEO are a torturous attempt to construct a grand community vision that embodies these laws. He might say it's the other way around, and the laws grew out of the vision, but I think these laws are shaped mainly by the economic and business realities of managing a huge community on an understaffed shoestring."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I know I'm repeating what's said every time people complain about the state of things on Reddit but if you unsubscribe from the defaults and pick smaller subreddits that really interest you, Reddit is amazing. As in my life would be noticeably different without it."
}
] | en | 0.933532 |
Your startup should clone the "Send Feedback" feature of Google Plus | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "We're actually building this sort of tool. http://bugherd.comAt the moment it is a more traditional bug tracker, but the side widget is designed to accept anonymous feedback in this sort of form as well (coming soon)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Hopefully feedback widgets (e.g., UserVoice) take heed and develop this and/or someone throws an open source equivalent together; I'd love to fork this on Github, lots of potential."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I loved the fact that they implemented a send feedback on it. If only Chrome had a send feedback button option!But I don't think it's that intuitive to black the info out. I've sent a few blackouts already and I didn't even realize I should black out the info. I didn't know I could do that until I saw someone else do it. So I think they need to make that part a lot more obvious."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Your startup doesn't have time to develop this (it's not trivial).Someone should offer it as a service instead."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Yeah it's quite thoughtful, although the \"black out personal information\" feature seems like a bit of a dark joke."
}
] | en | 0.937186 |
One New York LLC law is hurting small businesses | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The law firm I used to work for had a great hack for this law. Essentially the LLC was formed with a mailing address in a county where the publishing was exceptionally cheap and after the publishing was completed the LLC address was amended to the HQ/principal place of business address. We did the publishing requirement for clients at the time of formation, for $284.95 (this was in addition to: NEW YORK STATE FILING FEES, ATTORNEY'S FEES, LLC SEAL AND BOOK, ARTICLES OF ORGANIZATION, LLC MINUTES, LLC REGULATIONS, MEMBERSHIP CERTIFICATE AND PRELIMINARY NAME SEARCH which we charged $234.95). Total w/publication $519.90, which falls in line with the article to some degree, whether that is reasonable is for the client to decide.For those that care. Section 206 of the Limited Liability Company Law of the State of New York states:\nUpon the effectiveness of the initial Articles of Organization of an LLC, a copy of same or a notice containing the substance thereof shall be published once each week for six successive weeks, in two newspapers of the county in which the office of the LLC is located, one must be a daily newspaper and the other a weekly newspaper designated by the County Clerk. Proof of such publication by the Affidavit of the publisher or printer of each newspaper must be filed with New York State within 120 days after the effective date of the Articles of Organization of the LLC.As a side, I am generally pro-LLC (this is a serious legal analysis, do not just make a decision based on others advice see a corporate lawyer), but my understanding this runs counter to the general principal of SV where they are pro-Corp."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I hate this law.This fee is to have your LLC advertised in a newspaper. This is not going to the state, but to a newspaper or journal. The fees can be high, over a $1000 in Manhattan from what I understand.This is to inform the public that you have formed an LLC with the name so they can contest it or what not.The most amazing thing is the moment you register your LLC it is published on a state website. The day after I formed mine I got about 6 calls from banks wanting to setup my business account.So the law is 100% unnecessary and corrupt.I didn't pay to have advertisements taken out. My LLC is not in good standing.What does that mean, well from what I have read I am not allowed to sue as an LLC until I come in compliance.http://www.masurlaw.com/1182/new-york-llc-publication-requir..."In addition, the Secretary of State has indicated it will not keep a record of LLCs that are not in compliance, further reducing any real liability for failing to publish."Now, my LLC is small and exists purely for organization of income, banking and taxes. If I had real liabilities, employees or large contracts, I would think twice.--edit--I just remember one more thing about the law, theater groups are exempt.http://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/llcfaq.asp#pubreq"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The explanation in the article leaves out a key piece of the whole rationale for the law. The person spearheading the change says that "[t]he original intent was to educate the public that an entity has been formed." This is only part of the story. The real purpose is to give the public notice that a limited liability entity has been formed.Historically, limited liability has not been the default, but rather has been the exception. Thus, it was considered important to give the public, including service providers and potential vendors, notice of the existence of a new limited liability entity. This way, the public, in contractual dealings with the entity, knows that their legal right to sue is circumscribed to suing only the entity itself, not the people who own and control the entity. This is a real consideration for, e.g., manufacturers that provide inventory on credit.Of course, in the internet age it's easy for any vendor to quickly check the status of a potential customer with an internet search. Also, limited liability has basically become the default for business entities, so potential service providers and vendors are always wary of the issue. And of course: nobody reads newspapers anymore. But people saying that the law is "corrupt" are way off the mark. There was a very legitimate purpose behind such notice requirements, which have long been a part of the process of creating limited-liability entities."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": ""Whether or not this is true, it’s outrageous that small businesses are forced to spend money that does not go to the state nor help with incorporation."How does a journalist end a story with "whether or not this is true"?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "On the other hand, one New York benefit for tech companies is ST121.3 (sales tax exemption for hardware): http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/st/st121_3_fill_in.p...\nI had some issues with the 5th ave apple store, but the lincoln center store handled everything smoothly.The publication cost, even in manhattan, is less than the savings on a few new macs"
}
] | en | 0.986507 |
What is your server naming convention? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Despite the heated arguments people have about this it really doesn't matter that much. There are pros and cons to any choice, and it's mostly a matter of personal preference.If you're going to have < 50 servers you can very easily use cute names and it will probably never bite you. In fact, it's somewhat easier. Humans are pretty good with people-like names. Servers named with friendly names take on special characteristics in your head.If you're going to have 1000+ servers then it's just not practical to come up with names manually. But you'll also probably just have large numbers of the same kind of server. You could have servers named gary1 - gary434 and a standard that says "gary servers run XYZ service(s)".But, generally people encode some info in the hostname. Things like xweb23prodlax2 could be "external web server 23 in Los Angeles datacenter 2", so that's <role><instance><environment><datacenter>. If you're going to run multiple different app stacks you might also use an <app>. So hnxweb23prodlax2 might be "Hacker News' 23rd web server in LA" I don't recommend zero padding numbers (01 vs 1), since it looks bad when you break the padding's length.You may want to separate components by hyphens (which are fine in hostnames). Don't worry about keeping them under 8 chars or anything, nothing modern breaks on reasonably long hostnames. You can also use sub-domains for parts that make sense.hn-web-23-prod-lax2 isn't bad, and it's easy to parse reliably.\nhn-web-23.prod.lax2.yourdomain.tld works as well (but makes your short hostname not globally unique, which probably doesn't matter).Naming locations based on the nearest and largest airport code tends to work well. Including a number in the location is a good idea, since you may end up with more than one datacenter in a location.I don't like putting actual software names in hostnames. So I'd never name a server mysql5lax2. I'd use "db" not "mysql". You might swap it out for Postgres or something, so the role is what's important.I highly recommend not using IPs for hostnames (the way EC2 does). It might work for EC2 where they're committed to never changing things, but you're probably going to have at least one server change IPs at some point, the hostname shouldn't change when that happens. Same thing with putting rack #s in or other things that are likely to change (unless you absolutely know they won't).You should use DNS (via CNAME records) to get pretty names. For example git.yourdomain.tld might be a CNAME for repo-1-corp-lax2.yourdomain.tld.An incomplete list of things you might encode in the hostname:<customer> (joeinc, hn)<app> (cms, api)<role> (web, db, dns)<instance> (number of this type)<location> (lax1, nrt2)<environment> (prod, dev, qa, corp)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The large companies I worked with typically use a combination of one or more of the following on the server names: \n - abbreviated physical location (city/state/data center,availability zone/country)\n - abbreviated environment (demo/test/dev/prod), \n - server role (db/app/web)\n - sequential number/letterExamples:\n ATLWEB301 (Atlanta Web 301)\n DEMOVA050 (Demo Virginia 050)\n NYCDB015 (New York City Database 015)The standards vary significantly, specially depending if you are talking about internal / public servers. The length also varies but most people try to stay below 15 a-z characters. I personally like to give servers more generic names and not have to worry too much about it. Ex: ATLDEMO001, DENPROD014...If the servers are public (I mean accessible via internet) most companies refrain from using any information on the server name that could facilitate a potential attack. For example: putting DB on the name of a database server.Small companies, on the other hand, have a lot more variety. I have worked on servers named after Lord of the Rings and Simpson characters, Greek mythology gods, etc... I had a frodo mysql server that gave me a lot of trouble."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "For servers:\n3 letter abbreviation for location, first number indicating the iteration of the datacenter in that area, Second number is the floor of the building the system is at, hyphen, row number of the cabinet the system is in, Iteration of the cabinet in the row, hyphen, lowest rack unit the server is located in.eg: chi18-018-23chicago datacenter 1, floor 8, row 0, cabinet 18, rack unit 23For switches, simply:\nas018-1.chi18 for an aggregation switch, int018-1.chi18 for an internal network switch, ipmi018-1.chi18 for an IPMI switch, And if you have more than switch for a purpose in that cabinet, then the name is 'as018-2.chi18'The systems are almost always connected to a switch that's in the same cabinet. Though, we keep every system documented in our inventory system, with it's specs, IP addresses, switch ports, and power outlets. System also provides bandwidth graphs from every switch, and if a server as well as ipmi are ever inaccessible, we can remotely control the PDU & Outlet as well. Though, we always have employees onsite at each datacenter to check the console & hardware."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "1] If you can visit a local telco wire office, go do so; especially with all these questions in mind. Telcos have dealt with this problem way before most of us were born.2] Use DNS's hierarchical nature to your advantage, e.g.tld -> domain -> telco location code -> box N = box38.lsanca.example.com3] Your network design perspective will impact how you approach naming, so be careful you don't cement with names something where the design will change, and then your names no longer make sense."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "We use stuff from the kids TV show Knightmare. So our app servers are called treguard, merlin, mogdred, hordriss, database server is called knapsack, etc."
}
] | en | 0.968921 |
IOS vs. Android from the Trenches | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I use an Android every day, and my wife has an iPhone. The absolute biggest thing that annoyed me about using the iPhone after being used to the Android is the lack of a dedicated hardware back button. The problem you describe about an app opening the browser and then trying to get back to the app on the same screen you left it is so irritating in iOS - It's a huge glaring issue that is seamless on Android."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Deeper integration with the Android OS allowed Bump to offer more functionalities than its iOS version. Same with the Dropbox app."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I love these compare-and-contrast articles about developing on different smartphone platforms, but I'm interested to see how the second-tier ones go, as well. I've heard that webOS is a delight to develop on, WinPho is bad, and I'm not sure about Blackberry OS or the other lower-tier ones."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I personally love how android handles the latest activity window by dragging down the top area. Is there something similar on iOS4?. This and the back button are really good features."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Good feedback. Makes some good points; the pixel-perfect layout vs. flow layout is a very significant difference. We've done a similar bullet-point writeup: http://voxilate.blogspot.com/2010/11/ios-and-android-odd-dev...One major pain point is dealing with fragmentation. Of course iOS is no stranger to this, but it seems Apple does a better job preserving backwards compatibility. On Android there are wholesale API changes between 1.x and 2.x, and apparently Honeycomb revamps the entire Activity UI framework. Yuck."
}
] | en | 0.923076 |
Steam In-Home Streaming | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I have been using this on and off in beta. If possible I highly recommend a wired network connection. I have been testing it on a WRT54GL and that was not always sufficient. When my AC router is not misbehaving (ASUS RT-AC66U) I've been able to play online FPS shooters surprisingly well. Fighting games or FPS that are heavily twitch based won't work, but pretty much anything that can suffer the occasional frame drop or isn't precision works well.tl;dr You may need an N wifi router or better that is rock solid to make things run smooth."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've been using this more and more lately. Most recently to play Dark Souls 2 on a laptop in the living room rather than having to be sequestered upstairs in the office.It's pretty amazing how well it runs, with the input lag being minimal and the quality of visuals far surpassing what the laptop could actually handle on it's own."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "If you add Chrome as a non-steam game, you can stream netflix to your linux laptop. The audio actually syncs better than it does watching in wine!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's really working great, I've been using it for about the past six months (beta) and it always went great, way better than expected. I wasted hours and days trying to come with a similar solution and it always sucked. Glad they came up with something actually enjoyable."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "To anyone running headless systems, it's worth mentioning that this works extremely well for remote control of network systems. I've played with it a bit so far and I'm quite impressed with the low latency/high quality."
}
] | en | 0.940816 |
Want to be a mentor to a HN Startup? [gdoc] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Form leads here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tgPKuNIdWWOPUpj2ZnF8N...\nfor your viewing pleasure.I'm hoping this can serve as a list of people on HN who startup founders can approach easily for advice with any of the thousand given problems we face daily."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If you're in the UK, check out the ITC's mentoring scheme:http://www.itcmentoring.com/ ( http://www.wcit.org.uk/ )The quality of the mentors is really quite impressive, and we've got a lot out of the scheme."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I really like this idea! I would also like a column for location, as I think it's key to be able to meet a mentor/advisor in person."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "You should put the link to the spreadsheet in the form."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "P.S. A big thank you to those who are signing up!"
}
] | en | 0.902553 |
Why American Mothers are Superior | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm writing this from Hong Kong, where I run a scholarship for young entrepreneurs in mainland China. A few thoughts:-To understand the mentality of a Chinese parent, you need to know a few things. First, the obvious one child policy, and the expectation that this one child will support their children but also their parents and grandparents (no social security, minuscule pensions and a non-existent safety net). This puts an enormous pressure on the individual to have a stable and high wage job. Lots of people on these boards are in startups (or would like to be), but few Chinese nationals are willing to take that route due to the immense risks involved. They're gambling not only their personal wealth but also the survival of their family.-School is brutal, particularly college admissions. Each student at the end of high school takes something called the gaokao. Imagine the SAT on steroids (2 days long) that you only take one and almost wholly determines what \"tier\" of college you get admitted into. You can take it once a year, and if you fail, you have a second chance one year later (the intervening year is usually spent studying 14+ hrs a day). You pour a gazillion college-bound kids into this crucible of death, with only a scant few slots at the other end. Even for the student goes abroad to study, they've been indoctrinated with the cutthroat and \"success at all costs\" mentality necessary to get ahead in China. It's a numbers game, and the numbers are stacked to make your life hell.What does this have to do with obsessive parents? Take these last two facts and mix in some historical perspective. Many of these parents either lived through or are sufficiently proximate to the turmoil of the 1960's and 1970's to know how brutal life can be for those that do not get ahead. It's not the American poverty of temp labor and living in a trailer park; it's the poverty of starving to death. It's the poverty of not having shelter from the cold, of having zero access to medical care. While this is less true of today's China, the fear of this poverty survives, even for those in relative affluence (think of your grandparents that lived through the depression and still are obsessively thrifty).I can understand why these parents are monomaniacal in ensuring (or trying to ensure) a better life for their kids. With grueling competition, a one-child policy, scant social safety nets and a vivid memory of how brutal China can be, it makes sense."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Also worth reading is The Last Psychiatrist's response to the Chinese mothers article: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_a..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It reads like we're having a child-off between exceptionally gifted Chinese children, and exceptionally gifted American children. What about normal children?I'd love to see these anecdotes turned into evidence."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The title of the article is \"Why American Mothers are Superior\" but the body of the article primarily talks about the writer's own parenting, and from her description we can clearly tell that she is far from representative of the typical American mother. I am definitely not going to endorse the Chinese model, I think it has huge problems, but I think there are many 28-year-old unemployed History majors out there right now wishing that the status quo on American parenting had been a little bit different when it could have helped them. There are a lot of fat kids in theatre school, a lot of mediocre musicians, a lot of aspiring fashion designers who would maybe benefit from a little less love and a little more splash of reality."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I found it sort of silly in both articles that they make a universal qualification, but then follow up their reasoning based on more or less anecdotal, personal evidence. Whether you're Chinese or American, it doesn't make you superior at all. What makes you superior is the direction and tone you take with your children based on who they are and who you are. Where this jingoistic element came in, I'm not really sure. Call me naive, but I think that China and America are both really big places that probably have many different cultures and families that take different approaches to raising children.These labels don't advance the conversation much for me."
}
] | en | 0.960729 |
Modern Perl, the book, is Available. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is great. I've been anticipating this book for a while. I'm tired of hearing the same canned complaints about perl. It's a great language. Thanks for showing us all why. :)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "One question, I noticed that the pdf from from the onyxneon site is 185 pages long, when a previous draft which i downloaded from chromatic's site was 273 pages long.Where did all those pages go?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I wonder for how much longer the 'give away the PDF, sell the print version' business model will work. Not that I'm complaining!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Since I couldn't find the HTML version hosted anywhere, I posted it myself:http://danonline.net/modernperlThank you so much for writing this, chromatic!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Reminds me a lot of Skeet's \"C# in Depth\". Thanks for sharing."
}
] | en | 0.953831 |
Ask HN: Can't stay at a company for more than an year. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "You have to start analyzing, what is it that you really want out of your career? Mastery of a development stack? Creating a start-up company? Project Manager? Set a goal, start with the end in mind and from there you can dedicate your steps towards that.When you keep jumping jobs, it means you haven't figured out what you want to dedicate yourself to because you easily get distracted by 'new and interesting' things. Truthfully, when anyone is really passionate about their job, they never see it as 'work', they naturally tend to stick to it for the next 3 or more years of their life - and those people are the ones who tend to naturally create \"interesting\" things (ex: 10gen, 37signals, Redis, NodeJS etc.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Why not go freelance? Or - a bit better - take medium-term contracts? That way you get to dive into things long enough to enjoy them, learn something new and (just as importantly, IMO) contribute something meaningful to the company you're at, then you move on as part of the agreed plan.While that is effectively what you've been doing for the past three years, it'll come with a different mindset that might mean you're happier. (I'm assuming \"help me\" means you're not happy). For me, that's certainly one factor in why I prefer being an independent dev - but at the same time, I also get to enjoy working on good projects with great people for a run of time.(Of course, being independent is for everyone, and has downsides, too)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've changed jobs 4 times this year, same shit. Also, a new grad.I learn fucking fast, so after some months in the job I know everything and it gets fucking boring and I start to get depressed :-("
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If you continue this trend, you are going to look like a ticking bomb to employers. They will assume you will leave within a year, and thus not hire you. Of course, unless you are a development god."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "May be you are looking for something that would challenge your skills."
}
] | en | 0.978464 |
Infographics might be more fun to look at than a company website | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "In this particular situation, it doesn't work at all. The infographic didn't teach me anything about the product.It starts with a segmented wheel that seems to describe the "Overall time saved". But where does that come from? Time saved doing what? Time saved by whom? And 2 cells are in grey, why is that?The graphic right below ("Future add-ons") has weird labels. What do "Good", "Great", and "Awesome" mean here? The progress bars hint at the fact that the X-axis is a quantifiable value. But they're actually arbitrary opinions. It looks like "Payment integration" is more awesome than "Advanced user search", and Referall Program and Launching Soon Page are just good. By the way, why are these two in white?The "What happens next" section displays those progress bars again. Looking at the X-axis, I see Php, Ruby, Java... So it looks like a ranking for programming languages? Well, it also says Mailchimp, Social Login and Analytics. So what is it supposed to tell exactly?I closed the infographic and went to the website. First thing I read: "User Management in the Cloud". Ok, I finally know what you do. These 5 words taught me more than your 3 Million pixels image."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "'There's an xkcd for that' may be hackneyed but really applies in this case:https://xkcd.com/1273/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I noticed that their popularity is perfectly justified when I didn’t remember even once closing an infographic before scrolling down to the very end of it (and some of them has been very long).I don't think this is true, and even if it is, unless you're in the business of making mouse wheels a user scrolling to the end is not the goal - getting a conversion (sale, signup, phone call, etc) is. The fact you scroll to the end isn't very interesting - do people call the companies they see infographics from? I don't.A good infographic is a representation of interesting data with an imaginative and informing design. Making something into an infographic doesn't have any inherent benefit. They need real thought and hard work to be useful. There are popular, dare I say even beautiful infographics, but many are dull, unimaginative ways of reporting data without actually adding anything. They're created as if Excel had an "export table as cartoon" feature.People are as likely to ignore a bad infographic as they are to ignore a bad website."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The infographic may be more fun to look at, but it is far less obvious where the "call to action" might go. In fact, you may be hard pressed to place one at all.And I think this is a fundamental result of the nature of the graphic Vs text.With text, however arranged, there is a flow, a direction, and we are used to gaps, pauses, and beats - punctuation, paragraphs, chapters....A graphic is closed. A graphic attempts to present everything. Nothing more. Nothing less.Achieving flow and direction in a graphic is difficult - and I'll assert, blindly and without evidence, that flow is essential to the placement of the call to action. "Ah, the end of [sentence|paragraph|story], now I [click|call|shout with joy]!"With a graphic, a button is just another part of the picture, no?The infographic is very interesting, intriguing. I just don't know what to do with it. Like shots from USA Today, it seems to tell me something, but I don't know what to conclude, and I move on to the narrative of the sports section."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Your current home page tells a good story by simply outlining the benefits of your app. I don't have to think to "get it" when reading your existing home page.The new infographic shows me the benefits but it is harder for me, personally, to digest. I had to strain my brain to "get it.""
}
] | en | 0.923545 |
For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Viruses seem so weird to me. They're naturally emergent nanobots."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Given that the human digestive tract (reportedly) contains more bacteria than the human body has cells, and they are vital to our survival, how can spraying bacteria-killers on food not be harmful?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Elanco, sells a liquid phage product called Finalyse that is sprayed on the hides of cattle before they’re slaughtered.I'm thinking that name is just a little too on the button."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This was fascinating. Could phages be engineered to attack mrsa and other superbugs we see in hospitals?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This could be a replacement for antibiotics once they become completely ineffective"
}
] | en | 0.939686 |
Awsbox: A DiY PaaS for Node.JS | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I know that Mozilla has made a concerted effort to improve their public relations and \"get out there\" more, but it really seems like the Moz crew is just churning out innovations and interesting products one after another."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm really excited about the idea of building a generic DiY PaaS out of docker (for container management), mesos/chronos (for scheduling and allocation), and cloudformation (for auto-scaling and bootstrapping the cluster). I don't really want to do this as a business, but I think it could exist and be really nice.Some install notes for mesos, chronos, docker on EC2: https://gist.github.com/fizx/b50319b6576773a0841a. If anyone wants to hack around with me on this, my email's in my profile."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Looks like a great start, that's sth I've been waiting for a long time.It would be great if it supports adding more instances (dynos?), balanced through ELB. And... worker instances. And... Some configuration management.The potential is huge!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Very cool. Is there anything similar for Rails?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "So, we are heading towards PaaSaaS?"
}
] | en | 0.970337 |
Lengthen My URL | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "was reminded of something on a similar note, shadyurl (http://shadyurl.com). \"don't just shorten your url, make it suspicious and frightening...\"it generates similarly ridiculous urls like:http://5z8.info/michaelangelo-virus_l6h3k_openme.exeand this project compresses files by making them much, much bigger:http://tac-compression.com/"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think that http://hugeurl.com/ probably has first dibs on this joke by a couple of years."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Should be: http://doyouwantyoururltobelongerwellwecandothatforyouhere.c..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I thought this would get the original address of a shortened URL. That would actually be useful."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "http://www.lengthenmyurl.com/urls/c8b23684df9a50a093cc1baa53...So basically, it's a URL obfuscator?"
}
] | en | 0.885182 |
Ask HN: Which CAs can you trust? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't know if what your threat model is here, but if you believe the NSA can suborn any CA trusted by your user's browser, then the question of which CA you use is moot. (Modulo something like certificate pinning, which helps if your advertising company that runs an enormous popular mail service also happens to also develop a popular browser.)Assuming that an adversary can get one suborned CA to sign a certificate for your domain, the adversary can use that certificate to MITM first connections to your site without causing any sort of warning message within the browser. They can then both sniff and alter messages going in either direction, including e.g. stealing credentials, cookies, and what have you."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "With the current implementation of SSL, there really is no point in picking one CA over another for security purposes (unless you don't trust a CA with billing, etc. data). In the typical use case of a web browser, any trusted (root) CA can sign certificates for any Common Name/domain - so any government or private entity that can influence a commonly trusted CA can get a valid certificate for any site - irregardless of which CA you chose to trust.Furthermore, if done properly, your CA will never handle any of your (private) key material, so the CA itself has no special privilege with respect to the communications you sign with the private key, so there is also no reason to pick one here.The only cryptographic thing they can do right or wrong is to allow easy and hassle free revocation of your certificate in case of a key compromise..\nThe main factors I would consider in picking a CA are pricing, customer service, acceptance and whether they are recognized as 'extended validation'."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "As I see it - until there's broad support for Certificate Pinning, your users browsers are going to trust all 700-ish CA Root certs that Chrome/Firefox/Safari/IE(/and others) ship with, so your choice of CA doesn't stop Mallory from creating a plausible SSL cert for your domain with her choice of compromised CAs, and have your users believe she's you no matter which CA you carefully chose.Having said that - if you're being diligent, make sure you generate your own public/private keypair and only send the CSR to the CA to sign your public key.I noticed recently that StartSSL, although they'll happily accept a CSR, also offer to generate your key pair and give you the private (and public) key. While I understand their desire to make acquiring an SSL cert as easy as possible even for non-technical people (especially since they'll give you a cert for free, so minimising support is clearly critical to their business), the idea of having my private key come from something other than a machine I trust that's completely under my control seems very wrong."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It sounds a bit as if you were worried your CA could hand out your key to the NSA. That's not how SSL works. CAs only certify the validity of your public key. Your private key never leaves your machine. If you are looking for a vendor that supports your cause, take a look at Namecheap: https://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "You can't trust any. Centralized certificate authorities are a weakness. We need to get distributed trust system like a Bitcoin of CA."
}
] | en | 0.944408 |
Ask HN: How do you invest? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm a buy & hold stock market investor in companies which have good management, care about the shareholders and of course, good balances.I use the simple strategy of (1 - my_age)% in the stock market and the rest in fixed income funds(or less risky investments, including some hedge in gold and dolar due the fact that I live in the third world and currency fluctuations happen frequently).It's funny because even though I work with software development, I don't have much interest about internet companies(read FB, TW and so on). The other sectors in the industry are less of a gamble and I like that."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I personally own (not through a broker) shares in a diversified portfolio of companies, all of which offer Dividend Reinvestment Plans with optional cash purchases of additional shares directly through the company's transfer agent. This means that I pay no fees when purchasing additional shares for my DRiPs, in fact, a lot of the companies I invest in offer discounts on shares purchased through their Share Purchase Plan. I mostly invest in large companies that pay reasonable dividends with long histories of stability and dividend payments/increases. My goal is to almost never stop buying, making use of dollar cost averaging, and earn a safe return that ought to still beat the market in order to save for retirement/other future investments."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Of the money I invest --25% in Vanguard dividend growth index fund25% in Vanguard total stock market index fund25% in Vanguard total bond market index fund25% in stocks I chose myself"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Betterment and Bitcoin speculation for the most part. With the right knowledge, you can certainly outperform Betterment, but as a programmer I'm content just outsourcing that and saving that time for other things (like getting better at programming, for example, which implicitly earns me money as well)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The Taleb way - 90% in debt instruments and 10% buying options for the black swan event."
}
] | en | 0.952153 |
Landing page of our upcoming product. Do you understand what we do? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": ""Create groups, send links, share files and we’ll organize them so you don’t have to" <- This doesn't mean much to me. Maybe I didn't 'identify' with the problem you're trying to solve.If I understand correctly, you're a service that uploads e-mail attachments to a central location? Kinda like sending all -mail attachments to google Drive, then sorting by who you send to?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I like your design, and the message was quite clear. It didn't take very long to find out was your product does and was value it can add to a group workflow.The parallax effects on the front page aren't very smooth when scrolling though, and my personal opinion would be to have the Russia/English navigation item displayed as the last item rather than the first. Other than that, it looks great!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I understand what you're doing, but the plans (at least in English) are quite confusing. Technically they are all month to month plans, but naming them "Month" "Year" and "Eternity" is rather confusing. I would definitely think about renaming them to something not having to do with a date range."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Short: no. I'm guessing it's about sharing files and commenting on those shared files. But, that's a guess. So, try another version of your explanation."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I got the general idea of 'better shared files', but it only really made sense when I saw the screenshot. I'd suggest moving that further up."
}
] | en | 0.895774 |
KDE Ships First Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I always loved how configurable KDE is and prefer it over others. I somehow always felt more comfortable using KDE than say Unity or Gnome. Its very stable , fluid and fast now as well. However, there are certain problems that just don't seem to be addressed much -1. Cartoonish or early 2000's looking icons. They simply are not pleasing to eyes any more.2. Lack of UI widget themes. Although there is plethora of colour schemes and window decorations, which I hardly care about. What I want is complete themes, with different widgets. Its just Oxygen or Windows 98 kinda themes. GTK has really strong community in this case.3. I don't know how to put this, but most kde apps (except base apps) feel overloaded. This is common complaint too I guess. I'm not asking that they should do what GNOME is doing, but there must be something that can be done. When I use Windows, many apps still have a lot of functions but still manage to look better. I think some of this can be addressed by building a better widget set - (better tabs, toolbars with smaller icons and less whitespace overall)Overall my complaint is 90% about how it looks."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The black font over the grey window. The buttons with the cartoon icons. The hideous tray icons. Sheer ugliness.I can't believe I'm saying this, but Unity 7 is the most polished looking Linux desktop."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Linux needs professional designers as it needs programmers. It remembers me to Enligtenment old themes, a genius programmer but horrible designer, the theme the KDE people are displaying is hideous, not consistence at all. The people that designed this thing has no training in visual arts whatsoever.I have to agree that Unity looks better than this.Where is Everaldo when we need him?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm using KDE 4.13, and I really love it. I think it's the most usable and polished Linux desktop out there. Downloading the beta now.Thanks KDE Team. I love you."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Does anyone else still wish that some of the OS's would look more like BeOS did/does?"
}
] | en | 0.976829 |
Machine that Levitates Objects Using Sound [video] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If we assume they want to hold objects with a size of half a centimeter, a quick calculation shows they are using a sound frequency of 68000Hz.-> 340m/s / 0.005m = 68000Hz.If we limit the frequency to above human hearing range (>20000Hz) then maximum size of objects held in this way would be about 1.7 centimeters."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Could this be used to create a 3D display? For example, when turned off, it's just a pile of styrofoam pellets, but when on, it can use standing waves to create shapes in midair?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I wonder if this would be a good technology for a pick-and-place robot for circuits.Obviously the palsy needs to be fixed, but assuming that's solvable, it would be interesting to see it used as perfectly sterile tweezers.Alternately, there seems to be some impressive vertical momentum imparted. Perhaps it could be used to launch small components into the air to be caught by another acoustic field, which does a more refined drop or transfer.Or... Well, there's an awful lot of applications, really. Truly cool tech.** This isn't the first time a trick like this has been done, but it's the first I've seen with such control and dexterity.Low frequency sound "halting" flow of water (illusion):\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mODqQvlrgIQNon-Newtonian fluid on speaker:\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zoTKXXNQIUOf course yesterday's article on General Fusion showing the power of a well focused waveform:\nhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996683"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've been watching this same story submitted over and over again - it's nice to see it get some traction.In case you're wondering, the other submissions have no comments, so I won't link to them, even though the other sources may have more videos, more commentary, or better explanations. I've decided not to do the cross-referencing for a while."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "mikeselectricstuff did a hack playing around with this concept <http://youtu.be/qy1w6rTpC2g>.Not nearly as sophisticated as the linked post, but still pretty neat (especially seeing how he messes around with it)."
}
] | en | 0.885096 |
Ask HN: How do you find good designers for your projects? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I simply tried here and got lucky twice already.Simply post a 'Looking for a designer' with some basic requirements (job duration, an idea of the scope and your location preferences) and ask for portfolio links.That'll get you plenty of response.Make sure you put an email address in the text area of your profile!One of the issues some people run in to when looking for designers and programmers is that they want to scrape the bottom of the barrel pricewise, but that is going to get you in to a very long period where you'll be looking at stuff that doesn't cut it.In that case I'd suggest moving 'upmarket' a bit and spend what it's really worth. If you ever get lucky and find that $10 per hour designer or programmer that delivers stellar work let me know.One that I have no personal experience with but that has a really nice portfolio lives here: http://www.gursimran.com/ , I've spent half a day just looking through her website and flickr album, quite amazing.--edited for clarity."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You haven't mentioned any of the crowd-sourced design sites:http://99designs.com\nhttp://crowdspring.com"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I know crowdsourced design gets a lot of flack around here, but take a look at crowdspring.com or 99designs.comI used to work at CS (as a dev), so I got to see a lot of entries.You can get some good work for way less than an independent designer would charge. Some buyers ended up establishing relationships with designers they liked, too."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If you just need design (little \"d\"), it would be hard to recommend anything other than 99designs.com, since you can get dozens of people to do the design work you need on spec, at effectively no cost to you, then pick the best (or none at all).If you need Design (big \"D\"), then you get what you pay for, and you should be going with established, known quantities like an identity/brand specialized design agency. They do cost a lot of money, but that's because Design (big \"d\") is very hard.The difference is that Design (big \"D\") is about strategy and communication, whereas design (little \"d\") is about drawing and coloring. Sometimes you need one, sometimes you need the other, and sometimes you need both."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I look at universities for design students (graduated). I had general good experiences with that way.\nAnother possibility might be to look in eastern europe for offshore design agencies."
}
] | en | 0.958136 |
Ask HN: Would you use AWS for a primary infrastructure if you're a bank? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The FDIC is where most of your IT security requirements will come from. Below I have listed a few items which make the cloud a non-starter. In summary, it costs $20+ million dollars to start a bank. The reason every small bank has the same crappy online banking and digital services is because everyone except large institutional banks has to outsource everything to a handful of third party providers who can maintain these requirements.As far as your business idea, you should check out simple.com. They have been working on the problem for years and have just barely managed to cut enough red tape to provide a not terrible user experience for a handful of tasks.Have a full accounting and audit of every VoIP device, VPN device, wireless device, switch, router, modem, firewall, and proxy server connected to the network.Demonstrate physical access controls for employees, vendors, and anyone else who may have access your equipment.Every single person with physical access to customer information devices must have a 10-year criminal background check performed (this is actually a federal law that applies to the Finance, public education, public transportation, etc industries).Formal configuration and patch management procedures for all devices (including upstream routers and switches).Diagrams of physical and logical network topologies.The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 requires physical destruction of devices storing customer data.Reporting of all physical security incidents to FDIC IT examination."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Are you opening a US bank under a US charter and US law and with US insurance? Each type of institution (eg: national bank or credit union) has its own rules and covered or rfulated by a different governmental institution"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Almost all major datacenters have pretty high security. Your main concern should probably be securing the software, not the physical servers."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Problem = banks offer poor online serviceSolution option A = Start a bank and create infrastructure to offer better online serviceSolution option B = Create infrastructure to offer better online service and sell it to banksWhich one scales?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Maybe start a bitcoin bank? No regulation. A bitcoin loan shark."
}
] | en | 0.973633 |
GWT, Cappuccino, Sproutcore: AJAX-Framework-Shootout | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "For a look at what we have done with GWT, check out TeamPostgreSQL (http://www.teampostgresql.com).It is a fairly complex web application both in terms of UI and functionality, developed and maintained by essentially one guy, which IMHO speaks volumes about the power of GWT to produce and manage AJAX application code. All of the code base contains zero lines of Javascript - it is all regular Java classes."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Another one worth mentioning is qooxdoo, which I'm currently evaluating. I would probably go with Cappuccino if I had more experience with Cocoa/Objective-C. However, qooxdoo seems more approachable if you don't have the Cocoa background -- it's surprisingly well documented. Although it doesn't look as visually appealing out of the box, you can create a custom theme."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "On the note of cappuccino looking awesome (which it totally does) this kind of shows how GWT could look: http://demo.vaadin.com/sampler/#Components/Forms/FormBasic (haven't used it myself though)."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Apple has one due to come out this year called Gianduia ... and that's about all I know about it. People I trust who know more are absolutely raving about it, but, typically, details are scarce on the ground. Am very interested to see what arrives, though."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Cappuccino also has nib2cib now which allows you use inetrface builder which is great if you are coming from a mac background. Also there is Script# for people .net. Personally I prefer cappuccino."
}
] | en | 0.897392 |
Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"For its part, JSTOR says it worked with Swartz’s lawyers to get the data back[...]\"Interesting way of putting it. I would have said \"removing the data from his possession\""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "manhunt for a slender guy with a backpack riding a bike on MIT’s campusWell that must've narrowed it right down."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": ">The two MIT officers and Special Agent Pickett then tried to stop Swartz, who jumped off his bike and ran away, only to be caught and handcuffed by the Secret Service Agent, according to the report.RUN FASTER. I really can't stress this enough. The reason he got caught is because he didn't run fast enough. If you're going to do stuff like this, LEARN TO RUN FAST. Cops are fat and slow. You can usually get away from them, especially in a place like MIT.http://i.imgur.com/2pMx2.jpgLook at that kid! That is not a fast-looking person. Run faster, guys."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Sentencing a criminal to jail is theoretically supposed to be for the good of society. So in a case like this, they'd better ask themselves if society would ultimately benefit from having him behind bars.The actual damage done here was negligible, especially considering the questionable locking-down of the content in the first place (i.e. maybe it should always have been free, and it was still valued at only $50,000 by the school, not $1 million). Swartz maybe did something stupid, but his ability to contribute to society is still far greater out of jail than in. There is also every bit of evidence to suggest that his intent is to contribute positively to society.In other words, if he serves more than a few months in jail for this, or is actually asked to pay a million dollars, I will be incredibly disheartened by the \"legal\" system."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I feel safe knowing the Secret Service was on the case. Wouldn't want any of that published scientific knowledge falling into the hands of the public, after all."
}
] | en | 0.989126 |
Ask HN: How do you see the future of computing ? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I hate to say it but 10 years isn’t that long a time. Keep in mind the HTML 4 spec was approved about 12 years ago and we’re still using it. So I think a lot of the building blocks we’ll be using in 10 years are probably already taking shape (HTML5 for example)That said I think the improvements we will see in 10 years will be based around the maturation of frameworks. In just about every environment, be it Rails or .Net or whatever, you see programming in general moving to a higher level. People using mature algorithms to focus only on what they need to customize and in doing so making programs that are easier to use while being a lot more stable.I think that leads to the 20 year question. As programs become more stable and a generation of kids grows up with computers they trust not to crash I think you’ll see computing in general change. Add that to cheap, widespread touch screens and I think you’ll see a lot of things that are currently \"physical\" become \"virtual\". You can already see this now with things like EC2 which turns physical computers into virtual constructs that can be manipulated through software.Think about it. Other than your oven or refrigerator what else do you even have in your house that couldn’t be made virtual? Your entertainment system, your computer, your alarm clock, etc... can all be moved \"behind the screen\". Even the oven and fridge can be made into components that interface with a virtual console.That’s when the fun really begins for programmers because that’s when we get into the business of creating virtual worlds. I don’t know how that will take shape exactly as far as programming is concerned but I assume you’ll start to see hybrid functionality where physical interaction becomes a lot more important than back end functionality (which again will be largely covered by frameworks at that point). In many ways it will probably mirror how physical electronics are created now. Most electronics are built using pre-fab Integrate Circuits that do most of the work. The manufacturer just creates an appearance and a user interface.Anyway, that’s one man’s opinion."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I had to walk a bit to think this through. My mind works best when walking.I think touch screens will be cool toys for the toddlers, but adults will use something different. Think about it, your fingers are blocking your view just when you need it the most.I don't know what will happen, but I hope some technology would get the drones out of those cubicles. Something like chorded keyboards and holographic eye-wear combined with wireless network.If some country would start to teach the use of chorded keyboard in elementary school, it might be a huge leap for the economics of that country.If you work in small room, your ideas will be smaller too, if you work while sitting, your mind will be sitting too.Nowadays programmers work to make software for other people. That will change. In future people will increasingly do their own software as programming is already taught in some schools as a basic skill. And programmers will increasingly make software for other programmers as the percentage of programmers/workforce constantly rises.Both of these will shape programming towards \"write what you want, and the machine will optimize it for you\".Actually some of the programming might not be writing at all. Some people are way better with images than words, and even today dudes draw pictures to help themselves to grasp what they are doing. Look at well formed C and the python, indentation was meant to help, now in python it's the way of doing things. Same might happen for other stuff originally just meant to display the info a bit clearer."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "10 years from now.. too short to tell, but 20/30 years from now, I have strange thoughts.I do believe that in one day, Information Technology will invade each place, home, school, office, road... anything that exists in everyday life... I dream that everything in life will be connected and Internet will become more important than oxygene, something like cars, TV and cellphone now.The IT world will be very promising, it'll be big and no one can control it. I think. In my opinion. The IT market will be so big that even giant companies like Google and Microsoft will be nothing rather than companies dominating a niche with a considerable market share.I think in the future, the IT will grow strong, companies like msft will grow their sales but loose more market share, as the IT growth is stronger.I think it's time for many \"big\" companies formed of 3 or 4 poeple. Look at startup now, it's just the begining, how was the web in 95? it was a few number of websites, they made good income and dominated the web (like yahoo.com and msn.com) now they still make money, but the web grow in a way they can't control it and the market is far big than their potentiel.I think the future of IT will be so complicated that you can never, anyone, understand it... many new things everyday, startups launched each seconds... and many news, ideas and discoveries... It'll be fantastic, but we'll miss the days of the simple Hacker News interface.meet you in 2040, hope this thread still exist..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think that Martin Fowler hits the nail on the head with Illustrative Programming: \"When you look at a spreadsheet, the formulae of the spreadsheet are not immediately apparent, instead what you see is the calculated numbers - an illustration of what the program does. [...] Using examples as a first class element of a programming environment crops up in other places - UI designers also have this. Providing a concrete illustration of the program output helps people understand what the program definition does, so they can more easily reason about behavior.\"[1]Illustrative Programming will fit particularly well with, and benefit from, programs that collect, crunch, and display data - this being area that I agree will see a lot of growth and attention.[2] \"The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades,\"[3]Tools that are more suitable for large and complex data sets than Excel, and easier to use than R will become available. These will be used, as many current programming languages are, by people that are not trained in software development. Visualization will become much more important, so programming tool usability will improve. We'll see the influence of statisticians in our programming tools. Chasing down posts by others with similar problems and bugs will become easier. I'm not sure how much headway Illustrative Programming will make into the more hackerish areas of programming, though I hope it's a fair bit. For the best predictions on what languages will be like, just look critically at the languages that are at the start of their lifespans now (http://mythryl.org/ ? Arc?) and also at current research.I think, though, that the most interesting changes will come from the sort of programs we'll be writing, the sort of people we'll be working with, and the sort of tools we'll have available, rather than from some feature x or y of some future major language.[1] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/IllustrativeProgramming.html\n[2] http://flowingdata.com/2009/06/04/rise-of-the-data-scientist...\n[3] http://flowingdata.com/2009/02/25/googles-chief-economist-ha..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Well, I expect that most programming language research in the next 10 years would focus on exploiting multicore programming. If we're lucky, we'll all be using something like Haskell or Erlang, and all apps will be multithreaded. Languages that choose to ignore multicore will slowly suffocate. Writing multithreaded apps will become much easier than it is now, if not trivial.It's not wrong to dream, is it? :)"
}
] | en | 0.975552 |
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