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Fully Responsive Web IDE (Java, C++, Python, Pascal) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Great job Patrick, looks good, albeit a bit Bootstrappy (though, to be fair znanja looks kind of Bootstrappy too). You, Tim and the team have done a great job!Python 3 support would be great, too."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "To see an actual live demo check out https://compilr.com/piwh1000/c-sharp/main.cs"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> Fully Responsive...AKA just using a Bootstrap theme. Haha However, this looks nice! Well done! :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I also have an app based on bootstrap. The most common feedback was \"it looks like bootstrap\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Welcome any feedback on the product. Our team has been working very hard on it."
}
] | en | 0.923517 |
Zero Tolerance Policies Put Students In The Hands Of Bad Cops | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": ""Zero tolerance" is essentially a legitimate sounding way to reject "Let the punishment fit the crime.""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I wonder how much the massive adoption of zero tolerance policies has to do with the name "zero tolerance" itself. It sounds indisputable. Why should we tolerate things like weapons or drugs in schools? Those things are bad. If you're against "zero tolerance" of them, it sounds like you're in favor of tolerating them.The truth is that there are many ways of not tolerating those things, and "zero tolerance" is an extreme one that causes harm. If it were named more accurately—"extreme enforcement", say—this would be easier to see."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I cannot think of a single occasion where zero tolerance is not the drum beat of the fool."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This comment sums it up nicely:"Conditioning the next generation into docile, subservient servants by using fear as a tool."Yep. At least some students and parents are not being bullied and file lawsuits, which is really the only reason why we even know about these incidents."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Zero tolerance policies are intellectual cowardice in specific, and overall cowardice in general.There are far too many spineless dolts in charge these days."
}
] | en | 0.812588 |
Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this certificate | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Posting from Iran, Im really worried about the current security status. Iran's opposition mostly exists on internet these days and its very seriously flawed.Man In The Middle attacks are increasing and users usually ignore error messages about them.\n(Firefox throws an error dialog but it has an 'I understand the risks' button. People just ignore the error).Also, last year many Iranian FriendFeed users were arrested and the goverment knew about all their private discussions on FriendFeed.\n(FriendFeed has been censored since the beggining. But it suddenly became uncensored for a day or two. On the other hand, FriendFeed generates an 'auth' key for each user and lets him see his RSS feed using that key. And puts the auth key in every page: goverment probably collected auth keys and used it to read discussions of people they arrested)Goverments using internet to spy on their civilians is not a myth. Anonymity, trusting the cloud and related issues seem far more important when you suddenly find out a friend of yours has been arrested and his location and charges is unknown."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "So help me understand...A government agency in Iran has obtained the private key of the root certificate for the DigiNotar Certificate Authority. And with that, they can decrypt and re-encrypt SSL traffic by pretending that they have the valid SSL certificate for *.google.com.Is that the way this works?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Do we actually know how many SSL certs Google uses, and for what?From what I can see:- Google Search & Google+ (https://encrypted.google.com/ https://plus.google.com/) are using a *.google.com from GeoTrust/Google Internet Authority- Google Mail (https://www.google.com/accounts/) is using a www.google.com from VeriSign/ThawteOfcourse I'm also afraid that this is indeed a MITM attack against Iranian users.With SSL certs that costs less than $15 you can expect that things cannot be thoroughly checked, however a Wildcard DigiNotar SSL cert is costing you € 750 a year (in a 4 year contract http://diginotar.nl/OnlinePrijsindicatie/tabid/1417/Default....), you would expect that these things would not be possible.If they however hacked the root CA, it's even more scary, also Vasco (the mother company) makes virtually every Two-factor authentication used for Dutch Banking.."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If you want to disable diginotar's root CA on your Mac (for Safari/Chrome) you can open Keychain Access, select the \"System Roots\" keychain at the top left, find the diginotar certificate in the list, and delete it (or disable it, which is what I did).EDIT: This definitely works for Safari, not 100% sure if it does for Chrome after all."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This type of compromised-CA attack is why I never understood why browsers don't use the OpenSSH model: accept and store (prompting for confirmation) the certificate the first time you connect to a site, then throw up enormous red flags if the certificate ever changes.The Firefox root CA list has dozens and dozens of organizations on it. Could a compromise of any one of them mean that this attack could be repeated?"
}
] | en | 0.972307 |
What books would you recommend reading? Why? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "1) Musashi's Book of Five Rings\n2) Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People\n3) Machaivelli's The Prince\n4) Sun-Tzu's The Art of War\n5) Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action\n6) Steven Johnson's Emergence\n7) Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel\n8) Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything\n9) Mark Buchanan's Nexus\n10) C. S. Lewis's The Problem of PainTaken together, these books cover just about everything there is to know about the sciences, about human history, human nature and how to understand and communicate effectively with other people. Only one other book besides these needs to be studied/read: The Bible."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Favorite computer book: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - ISBN 0-07-000484-6 - Whether you actually like Scheme is beside the point. I got this book for an intro class into functional programming, and we only used sections one and two... but I enjoyed it so much I went through the rest of it on my own during Christmas break. Was probably the greatest experience I have had programming since first groking OO.Favorite non-computer book: Ender's Game - ISBN 0-812-55070-6 - I have probably read this about 10 times. All the other books in the series are good too, but it really stands apart from the rest.As an aside, the Economist is probably the best (IMHO) news source out there, as it actually goes in depth as to the causes of events, rather than just listing them with pretty explosions. It's also delightfully devoid of sensationalist stories normally found on TV News or Newspapers. Added bonus: you get a nice discount if you subscribe as a student. Not sure I could recommend it highly enough."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It is arguably the most useful book I've ever read, albeit with the most embarassing title.As inklesspen mentioned, Elements of Style is a must.Code Complete and the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. Timeless coding wisdom.For a laugh, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, or Hitchhiker's Guide. Body Language, Julius Fast. Kitschy but fascinating insights into body language.Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene. Brian is a fluke of nature--a physicist who can explain things realy well!Anything by Phillip K. Dick. Sci-fi stories that make you think."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "In fiction:Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart. Easily some of the best storytelling I've ever read. 1/3 comedy, 2/3 adventure, in an ancient China that never was. http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0345321383/Homer's epics. I prefer the translation by W.H.D. Rouse, which you can find at http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0451527372/ and http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0451527364/Heading even further back in time, I love this rendition of Gilgamesh: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0618275649/ Even in 2000 BCE they thought the world was ancient.Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder has one of the best treatments of post-singularity life (and what makes life in general worth living) that I've ever read: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0765350785/Nonfiction:\nThe Mythical Man-Month. A little dated (it's directed at mainframe developers and their managers) but still relevant.The Elements of Style (Strunk and White). Learn to write clearly -- it's valuable no matter what you do.Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. Easily the best programming text I've read in the last year, and it's sold me on Erlang."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Here are three books that I have loved reading1. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale CarnegieI know its been mentioned already, but truly this is a book worth mentioning twice. For the introverted or the arugmentative type and for anyone else, this book hits alot critical and sometimes overlooked human traits that everyone should be aware of in their daily interactions with other people.A few quotes by Carnegie.\nAvoid arguments\n\"you can't win an argument, because if you win it you lose it, and if you lose...well you lose it.\"\"few people think of themselves as bad people\"\n-means regardless of how they look,dress or talk, most people are appproachable with a smile and a \"hi\".\"people will always strive to justify themselves\".All three of these quotes are connected.2. The Innovators Solution - Christensen and RaynorIf you've ever heard the quote \"First they ignore you,... then they fight you, then you win.\" by Gandhi. This book puts it in perspective in relation to how small companies over take large companies. 3.The 48 Laws of Power _ Robert Greene.\n Go Go read if you haven't yet. This is a great book! It pullls lessons which you can learn from various types of people throughout history from painters,generals to presidents.My favorite was Law 28: \"Enter action with boldness\". Be bold in your ideas, be bold in how your carry yourself in life.I know I said three 3, but Seth Godin still deserves some mention with All marketers are liars. Which simply I take to mean for us here is if your developing a startup, make sure it has a good...no a great story to tell."
}
] | en | 0.797969 |
Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "An oft-quoted phrase that applies here is \"the enemy of good is 'better'\".Clearly RMS wanted his idea of perfection, and almost 30 years on, perfection remains out of reach while \"good enough\" rules the world on Linux.An important lesson to learn."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think that this article underestimate the ability of Linus Torvalds to manage the Linux developers community. Leadership, dispute resolution, technical choices, compatibility or new features, and teven flamewars. It's very difficult to be a BDFL.The idea is that if Linux were not available, the open source community would have been working in Hurd and not in Linux. But without Linus perhaps the community could not exist (new member leave after a few quarrels) or all the effort is lost in complete rewrites."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Can someone explain to me if the problem with Hurd was that the basic idea was impossible, or it was the way they went about it?i.e. was it the relentless restarting of the project that was to blame, or did they keep restarting because every way they approached it turned out to be impossible?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "For those interested, Debian is planning on releasing a Hurd variant just like they did with kFreeBSD.\nhttp://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/index"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Can anyone tell me how computing would be different today if micro kernels had taken off? If everyone working on Linux had been working on Gnu Hurd?"
}
] | en | 0.963333 |
Obama ends NASA space race with slow road to Mars | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "What I find quite funny about that is that for America, it will take 25 years to get to the Mars. In the meanwhile, my home town has been building a new subway line for the last 25 years and it's still far from being operational."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think the asteroid landing plan is a smart one over the Mars goal. I think we're more obsessed with Mars than is due -- asteroids offer a wealth of potential resources without the immense cost of dropping into and climbing out of a planetary gravity well. Even a landing on one of Mars' fake-moons would be a better choice than Mars itself. Assuming we don't inadvertently open up the gates to hell or something like that..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "NASA has shown itself incapable of meeting deadlines or staying within budget on many projects, and Obama is right to turn access to Low Earth Orbit over to commercial companies (on fixed price contracts, not the normal cost plus contracts). We've been building the same boring \"get us to orbit\" rocket since the 1960s. Wouldn't NASA's leadership (doing science and developing technologies that private companies cannot afford) be better spent on LEO and out? The moon, asteroids, Mars, Phobos, etc.This is a great plan. It's a Good Thing for the aerospace economy in the long run even if there's going to be some displacement in the meantime.It also opens the door for entrepreneurial companies - building rockets, engines, payload integrators, whatever - to make money in a way previously not possible. It's impossible to make money when the government is competing with you. This is a great thing for entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, and people everywhere. There's a better chance your kid will be struck by lightning than be a NASA astronaut, but now the door has opened and we'll see private astronaut corps pop up from a few different sources.Get behind this plan, folks. It's a Good Thing and great for other entrepreneurs, even if we're not building web software. :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I live in the Central Florida/Space Coast area, and there is a palpable fear that soon all these aerospace jobs will be gone with nothing to fall back on in a crappy economy. This speech was meant to be encouraging to a broad constituency of a state Obama and the Democrats need for future elections.As far as science goes, the better-faster-cheaper ethos NASA had with the Mars Rovers should be revived. Robots are a terrific way to get actual science done. That said, the lessons learned from building and working on the ISS would be a good starting point for creating a vehicle to take people to Mars - a place we can eventually make habitable (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Perhaps saving planet earth and kick starting clean alternative energy will be what excites the current or near future generation. After that, outer space exploration will still beckon. I can only hope I'm around to watch."
}
] | en | 0.983843 |
New iphone costs $27.94 more than the old iphone | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "And you are getting 3G and GPS."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"The 8GB 3G iPhone will cost just £99 on a new £30 per month tariff and the existing £35 per month tariff. Consumers choosing either the £45 or £75 per month tariffs will get the 8GB 3G iPhone for free.\"That's much better than the previous offering. I was looking at the £35 per month tariff with iPhone v1, but the ~£300 price tag put me off. So now I can get the same tariff and a reduced up-front cost -- what's not to like?http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "What is the 5%? Why do you not just do $10 * 12 months?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Shouldn't e be in that formula somewhere?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Don't forget that 16GB is $299."
}
] | en | 0.965018 |
USB 3.0 Promoter Group Announces USB Type-C Connector Ready for Production [pdf] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm not an apple fanboy - but I do really like their magsafe & iPad mini connectors (whatever those are called officially). One thing I really like is the lack of "sticky-out-bit" in the middle of the connector, which all USB sockets seem to have, and which always feels kind of unstable or weak to me.Is there a reason why all USB sockets - including these new diagrams - have a feeble looking centre part rather than it being part of the outer ring?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The USB Power Delivery spec is pretty interesting too - up to 100W @ 20V over USB (presumably with modified cabling, too :P)http://www.extremetech.com/computing/172113-usb-power-delive...(a link from a link on this comments page)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> Reversible plug orientation and cable directionThat's all I needed to read."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Sounds great! For anyone not sure of the context, right now Type-A is the "host" end and type-B is the "device" end. However since OTG was introduced that correlation isn't concreted and can reverse during the connection. I might have misunderstood but it sounds like Type-C will be a symmetrical affair (the cable will be reversible). I guess this opens the door for totally new use cases for USB? With extensions to the OTG system we could be connecting two hosts for e.g. transferring files between laptops. Again I could be wrong about that.Also 100W power is great - The power delivery capability of current USB is really limiting.And reversible cable orientation? We are entering a glorious new era."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Where are the photos of the connector?"
}
] | en | 0.967563 |
Why does Numbers hide a huge PNG file in exported Excel sheets? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm not sure why it's including this in the export, but this is one of the default "Image Fills".http://f.cl.ly/items/1X0M2o0V0f3A463c0a2H/Untitled_numbers.p..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Pages does it too. Export a document in DOCX format and you get the same PNG file. Export a document in Word 97-2003 format and you get three of these PNG files!http://mcmillan.cx/blog/2014/05/31/bloated-exports-from-page..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "From the looks of the OOXML format, the image there is just used as a resource. http://web.mit.edu/~stevenj/www/ECMA-376-new-merged.pdf xl/theme/_rels/theme1.xml.rels refers to image1.png. I'd say it's a default background of some description. Still, it would be cool if there was something in there. Maybe taking a look at the frequency of the bytes would help?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Someone should run that image through a steganalysis tool."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It doesn't seem to be explicitly associated with Numbers, but with Excel: http://www.it-volpers.net/2011/03/21/disassemble-xlsx/"
}
] | en | 0.670505 |
Hacker News and the NoSQL Movement | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Not really interesting to people who already read Hacker News :)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "So this is basically a story about how much traffic your site gets from HN, and a plug for the DB company you have a vested interest in promoting?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't know that it's worth linking here, but unlike some of the other folks here, I don't see the horrible sin in pointing out Hacker News to people.How many of us got here by waking up from a dead sleep, finding our fingers mysteriously typing \"news.ycombinator.com\", and then going, \"Huh, this is pretty cool.\"? (Presumably following this with, \"Help! My fingers are typing strange URLs by themselves!\")"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "apparently Hacker News is a blog aggregator..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Please join me in flagging any submissions with \"Hacker News\" in the title."
}
] | en | 0.987611 |
Supporting a talented wife in our misogynistic industry | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's a mistake to jump to the assumption that it's just because of gender. Exactly the same thing happens to plenty of other people, maybe it's because the other person explained it in a different way, maybe because they don't like her on a personal level (irrespective of gender). It might be related to gender but don't discount that other factors could be at play.In any case changing jobs would seem to be the obvious solution regardless of the underlying reason."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": ">ignored or disrespected for no apparent reason other than being a womanWell that's your problem right there. She hasn't figured out how to play the game. The way you have framed the problem, it will never be solved. She will never stop being a woman, and if that is the only thing you see holding her back, there will never be a solution.There are many disadvantages within IT, and being female is just one of them. How about being black? Being from not-Harvard-MIT-Stanford? Being 65? Being 15? Not having a CS degree? Not having any degree? Not being able to speak English clearly? All these things will hold you back. It sucks and it needs to change, but it's a separate issue from helping your wife succeed.She needs to strategize, play hardball, and burn the motherf*ers to the ground. They have to be beaten at their own game, and it's not a technical one. All's fair in love & war."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think details matter here. What you've described is a little too general to know what's really going on. For example, when you say "everyone bashed her", what would we read in the transcript? How many is "everyone"? How was she bashed?I agree that it might be sexism...and it might not. I'd have to know more. I know a talented scientist woman who, at least in one point in her career, put across a very "flaky" image to other scientists, and one of them told her so. She felt hurt about it, but it was true. I think since then she has tuned up her presentation style and probably doesn't get this concern now. But in our context, it surely wasn't because she was a woman, because there were at least 10 other women in her position that were not getting that sort of feedback whatsoever; on the contrary, they were held in high regard generally.If it is sexism (or at least that's a component of it), what a shame."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "OK, I've read all the comments to date, and I'm angry at quite a few of them.First off, here's a simple litmus test for "is X a misogynistic industry?". Does X have 50% women working in it? If not, and there's no actual genetic reason (e.g. this is an industry of literal sperm donors), then it is VERY likely to have a strong misogynistic component. Is there a company with software engineers where 50% of them are women? Never heard of such a thing. Is there a company with software engineers and no misogynists? Never heard of that either, at least not if the company has more than 10 employees.Second, for all of you who jumped in with "it's a mistake to jump to the assumption that it's just because of gender" - wrong. You pick the highest-order factor first, and only then do you go to lower-order factors.Third, yes, America is far better than many other countries at gender equality, but it is merely wretched instead of abysmal. I expect roughly 50% participation in most job markets.You can't sugar-coat and actually confront what needs to change. If sexism is the #1 factor, you fucking deal with that right up front. Humans aren't exactly the rational actors they think they are, so your ideas get less shrift than if they were presented by a man. It's bloody easy to try this, present the same ideas but by a man. Do you get the same rejection? Probably not.Also, sometimes you need to fire people. You find the key movers that are misogynists (everyone knows who they are, it's not a surprise), and you fire them. Doesn't matter how good they are, they are preventing you from having access to 50% of the human race.I feel for your wife, and this is a tough situation, and there are no good answers. Most people don't want to be the person that causes change, because that person typically gets all the pain and no benefit. But things need to change, and some of the comments you've received are appalling, the kind of comment that 50 years from now people are going to look at and say "how could people ever think that way?" In text books.I wish I had some better answers. I've been struggling with this for a while. For specific cases, often the answer is to go somewhere else. If you can't go somewhere else, then if possible change laterally to a different boss who is both powerful in the company and willing to help promote/push your wife's agenda. While the tone of a company can be misogynistic, it's often just a few people, so you need to either avoid them or work around them, or counteract them."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "My 2 cents (not a woman):- It may be bad in technology, but it's much worse in some other industries. (Like Finance)- There are companies that are known for making a stand on discrimination and other similar issues. She should actively seek one of these out, rather than try to change the culture in a place that isn't."
}
] | en | 0.959597 |
Seeking cofounder who can hack and design | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\tGet a job at a game company. Many have huge turnover of coders, and are 'always' hiring. Unless you're a real superstar, they'll make you do shitty work for shitty pay for a shitty number of hours, hence are unlikely to dent your entrepreneurial aspirations like more cushy jobs have been known to.\tStash whatever crumbs they do pay you, and be on the lookout for designers that are both decent and disgruntled.\n"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Good luck with that.Maybe you ought to find two co-founders...one that hacks, one that designs. If you're doing a game, you need a lot of design...all of my previous comments, and Harj's comments, about the beauty of a designer that codes or vice versa, are irrelevant when you need a LOT of great design for a long period of time. In fact, you might ought to have two good designers and two good developers. Games are a lot of work. (OK, indie developers do more and more with better libraries and such...so maybe a one or two man show can pull something great together).BTW-YC has never, to my knowledge, funded a straight game company (Matt Maroon has a fantasy sports gaming business...but it's effectively a US-legal gambling business, which is a whole world away from pure computer gaming)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Is that bold or is it sophomoric? At what point does confidence turn into unfounded arrogance? "
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Dear sir,\nIf you are looking for a co-founder who will do the hacking and design work for you, then what do you propose to bring to the table?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is it possible to be co-founding with someone without knowing them for a while. Anyone here with such experience?"
}
] | en | 0.971201 |
Make Something 40% of Your Customers Must Have | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Nice ideas,but he conflates 'must have' with 'wants'. I learned many years ago, working for 7-11, that selling what people wants is way better than selling necessities. People will nickel and dime you for every percent of margin on necessities, but will happily pay silly margins on wants."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think I prefer \"make something at least someone loves\". That's more accurate because if 1 or more users love your product, you can get to 40% by getting rid of enough users who don't love it."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Shouldn't 100% of your customers be disappointed if your product went away? Otherwise, why are they customers in the first place?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"make something lots of people want to pay money for\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Only when you hit that 40% number(or something in that range)93.5% of bloggers make up bullshit statistics. 84.8% of people use statistics to obfuscate and distract people from the fact that they don't know wtf they're talking about."
}
] | en | 0.96363 |
U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I was struck when we incorporated our company and raised financing how much we still use ink and paper to keep track of things like corporate ownership. When signing so many documents I wanted to seal them with paraffin wax and send them to our lawyers via carrier pigeon.In the case of Facebook, a multi-billion dollar company, it seems amazing that someone can come out of the woodwork and with a little effort in document tampering cause such a hullabaloo. It seems like too important of an issue to be inpart determined by \"spacing, columns, and margins of page one of the Alleged Contract.\"Of course, I don't know of a better system, just that the current system seems archaic. (You probably couldn't create a centralized \"contract bureau\" in the federal government, because many contracts are private, until someone sues.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm disappointed by all the folks calling mail fraud a 'loophole'. Mail and wire fraud are the ways people prosecute domestic 419 (Nigerian prince) scams and other confidence games.This case shouldn't be given a free pass just because the party intended to be deceived is the judicial system rather than the mail recipient."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Did this line strike anyone else as pathetic?In today’s press release, USPIS Inspector-in-Charge Randall C. Till added: “When Mr. Ceglia allegedly decided to take advantage of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, he underestimated the resolve of the Postal Inspection Service to bring him to justice for illegal use of the U.S. Mail.”Ceglia is probably in the wrong and unethical. But the self-righteousness and pompadour of the USPS? Really?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A few thoughts:1. When Ceglia first filed his claims, I called it a \"lawsuit full of holes [that was] built up by sensationalist reporting into a supposed major threat to Facebook and to Mr. Zuckerberg\" and concluded that, \"in the courts, this thing is going nowhere.\" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537158) My sense of this had nothing to do with any fraudulent tampering with evidence as alleged now in the criminal prosecution but instead with the whole smell of the thing: a flaky 2-page contract with basically incoherent terms used as a basis for a lawsuit brought by a backwater lawyer who drafted a complaint that would have been an embarrassment to a first-year law student. It looked like a joke on the face of it, notwithstanding that a small-town judge had initially entered a TRO based on the filing.2. Then, in April, 2011, this case looked like it had taken a major turn: Ceglia had dumped his original lawyer and retained the prestigious firm of DLA Piper; he also produced a mountain of emails \"documenting\" that he and Mr. Zuckerberg had, in effect, entered into a legal partnership giving him a major ownership piece in the FB venture; he also (via the lawyers) put together a compelling story in his complaint making it appear that FB and Mr. Zuckerberg were in deep legal trouble concerning his claims. (Here is my comment at the time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438063) Once again, there was a sensationalist wave of reporting across the web rejoicing about how Mark Zuckerberg was about to get his comeuppance.3. Since that time, through the work of very able lawyers for Facebook, the Ceglia case has been progressively torn to shreds in the federal court to which it had been removed and, as the case has disintegrated, it has drawn progressively less interest (the DLA firm withdrew at the first sign of serious trouble). Indeed, without the dramatic turn of a federal criminal indictment, I doubt that it would done more than draw a few yawns as it eventually headed to the judicial graveyard where most flaky cases ultimately find their rest.4. The lesson here is how prejudice and crowd-think can dramatically affect and distort perceptions. When someone takes on the role of villain (as Mr. Zuckerberg has in some circles), there are those who so desperately want to see him torn down that they will suspend their better judgment just to see it happen, whether he was right or wrong in what he had done. This is not to excuse him in things he may have done wrong in other contexts, but he had done nothing wrong here and it is just amazing to me how many people were willing to take it as a given that he had even with little or no evidence to back it up.5. The other (major) lesson here is that there are serious limits to playing fast and loose with the courts. It is true that there is much abusive litigation but there is obviously a line that cannot be crossed without inviting horrific consequences. It doesn't happen often enough that abusive litigants get what they deserve but, when it does occasionally happen, it is very nice to see. At least it sets an outer bound on what people can do to abuse one another in the courts."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I wonder what will happen to his lawyers. And I wonder what the judge thinks.Ceglia has had a couple of lawyers (Argentieri and Boland) who have been filing discovery motions, and really aggressively going after Facebook and Zuckerberg. If you read only a couple of their filings, it seems really personal for them. They are absolutely offended at Facebook's lawyers behavior, really aggressive in the wording of their filings, and going so far as to call out FB lawyers by name and complain about them.And now it turns out the US Govt found the real contract from email archives and it doesn't match at all.I'd like to see the lawyers punished somehow (reprimanded) for pushing this obvious fraud through the court system so hard and for so long.And if I were the judge, wasting 2 years of his life on a sham case like this, I'd be furious. They were still submitting filings even as of yesterday!"
}
] | en | 0.978073 |
How I got a job from a Hacker News post | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is Networking 2.0. Good on you, but hypothetically if you hadn't gotten \"lucky\" by having the predictable consequences of directed effort come to pass, you (and similarly situated geeks) still had options.1) What if big names in your space hadn't retweeted you? Well, since you know who the big names in the space are, you take an hour or two to lookup their email addresses. Then, you send a one-paragraph email:Hiya Bob,My name is $NAME and I really like your work on backends as a service at $COMPANY. In particular, your post on the blog last year about $TOPIC was really insightful. I was able to apply a few ideas from it to my work.I just wrote a post on BaaS myself. $LINKI'd appreciate any thoughts you had on it.Regards,Anyone who writes you back is no longer a stranger. Instead, they think you're intelligent about a field where they currently cannot hire for love or money. You can then followup with \"As it happens, I'm looking for opportunities to put further my interest in BaaS professionally. Do you happen to know anyone who is hiring?\"2) What if he wasn't really close for coffee?Planes, we've got them. I am totally serious. A day off and a few hundred bucks versus a career upgrade, which has the higher NPV? \"I will be in Boston for one day only on XX/YY (or, alternately, week of XX/YY). Would you let me buy you breakfast to talk about this?\" is a very compelling offer psychologically. Your time is scarce, and hence valuable, plus you've already demonstrated three things they'll get out of saying \"Yes.\" (Food, interesting conversation, and \"the ability to get to know someone whose comportment suggests that he is going places.\") Note that that is the only decision they need to make - after you have yes, then you can schedule the details.3). What if he wasn't hiring?He knows someone who is. Get warm intro."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.\" Edison was kind of a jerk in a lot of ways, but he was spot on with this."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I too got my current job from a HN post. I posted about Bay Area salaries as I was flying out here for an interview. I included some of my background information and got a reply saying if I wasn't gonna be making X, they would love to meet and talk while I was in town. Later that night I had an offer. I love Hacker News."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"Given enough exposure, the impossibly lucky becomes the inevitable.\"Nice story, but I don't know if I would go that far. You don't have an unbiased sample, so you don't know how many do exactly the same thing and nothing comes of it. It's the classic \"what do successful people have in common\" fallacy. An equally justified conclusion, based on \"the hundred ways I failed leading up to this moment\" might be \"the chances of success are about 1%\"."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "My last full time job I got by leaving a comment on Fred Wilson's blog. He shared my info with a bunch of investors in my area and they connected me with people in their portfolio who were hiring. About 3 weeks from comment to my first day on the job."
}
] | en | 0.972476 |
Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "1000 plus or minus 200 years covers a huge range. 1000 was just about the fulcrum of the medieval period: life in 800 would have been a complete disaster, whereas life in 1200 was in some places a mini-Renaissance.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centuryIf you really got dropped at a random place, it would probably be grazing land or forest, especially in 800. \nYou'd have to find the nearest tiny village and convince them you weren't dangerous. The stuff you had on you would seem miraculously fine, so could be valuable in trade if it wasn't stolen from you first. But the best way to extract value from your stuff would be to give it as a gift to some powerful protector; money wouldn't be any use unless you could protect yourself against robbers. So it would be all about finding a powerful protector.In 800 you'd want to find the most enlightened bishop nearby, present yourself as a traveller from some obscure pocket of Nestorian Christians in the far east (drop hints about Prester John), and get work helping to administer his estates. This wouldn't work everywhere, though: a lot of Europe was still pagan in 800. If you landed in the north or the east, you'd have to try to find some enlightened local warlord instead. Hard to say what use you could be to him, though; probably your only hope would be that he'd keep you around as an adornment to his court.In 1200 you might still want to find a bishop, but if there was a town nearby (especially a great one like Florence or Venice) you could also find work in a bank or for one of the great wool merchants.Generally: Be compulsively clean, and keep your opinions to yourself."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?\""
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Prediction is impossible, we all know that. What \nwe don't know is that retrodiction is also impossible. \nHistory is a form of science fiction. The future is \nhistory that hasn't happened yet. History is the \nsensibility of one time, assessing another time, that it \ncannot possibly know.-- Bruce Sterling, http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/1-25/Note%2000001.txt"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "How to make gunpowder, from Wikipedia. Warning, gross.\"Historically, nitre-beds were prepared by mixing manure with either mortar or wood ashes, common earth and organic materials such as straw to give porosity to a compost pile typically 1.5 meters high by 2 meters wide by 5 metres long.[3] The heap was usually under a cover from the rain, kept moist with urine, turned often to accelerate the decomposition and leached with water after approximately one year. The liquid containing various nitrates was then converted with wood ashes to potassium nitrates, crystallized and refined for use in gunpowder.Urine has also been used in the manufacture of saltpeter for gunpowder. In this process, stale urine placed in a container of straw hay is allowed to sour for many months, after which water is used to wash the resulting chemical salts from the straw. The process is completed by filtering the liquid through wood ashes and air-drying in the sun. Saltpeter crystals can then be collected and added to brimstone and charcoal to create black powder.[4][5][6][7][8]\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_nitrate#History_of_pr..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "there are a few series that cover that area.(not exact mind you, but close enough)First you have the Assati Shards series(1632, 1633, 1634)...basically a town in Virginia get transferred to Germany in 1632.And then you have the Conrad the Engineer series, where you have a guy transported to 13th century Poland, just before the Mongol invasion.But chances are, no matter where you wind up...you'll be dead within a week. Why? Simple...language barrier. You won't be able to understand a thing....even if you wind up in the most civilized English speaking country. So you'll probably wind up getting burned as a demon who is speaking in tonguesFor example...this is what Beowulf's first few lines look like in original english. Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,\n þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,\n hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.\n Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,"
}
] | en | 0.969214 |
Teleportation on the command line | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It looks like no one has posted what, in my opinion, is the most powerful of the "jump" programs: fasd.My workflow for getting around is just to type "z <fragment of directory name>" and I almost always end up where I want. If I just want to edit a file, not a project, I do vim `f <filename fragment>` and likewise get the file I want typically.The readme makes it pretty clear how awesome it is and I've stuck with it after using autojump, z, and others.https://github.com/clvv/fasd"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Just use auto jumphttps://github.com/joelthelion/autojump"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> Nobody types an entire URL like https://example.com/example-page?input=sample&another-input=.... We bookmark it and give it a keyword like ex or something. From then, we just type ex and hit return to access the website.I don't wanna sound negative, but just being realistic.I don't rely on bookmarks primarily. I rely on "most frequently visited gets auto-completed first" and fuzzy search of Chrome Omnibox. If I do bookmark something, it's to indicate to the algorithm "I care about this, make it easier to fuzzy find it later".But it's a good step in the right direction, good job!Edit: From the description, it sounds like autojump does something close."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Why not just use the CDPATH variable in your shell? If the directory is one you go to frequently, add it to CDPATH, then just cd to it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm quite happy with https://github.com/huyng/bashmarksAlso, the built-in pushd and popd commands are enough sometimes."
}
] | en | 0.938854 |
How Good Is Amazon's Route 53 Latency Based Routing? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This analysis is flawed in that it assumes that the host with the closest geographical proximity should always provide the lowest network latency.Very often it does, but especially for smaller countries that do not have the same number of peering points that exist in the US or Europe, latency will appear out of whack when compared to geographical proximity.For this test to be valid, you would need to measure the latency to the remote host from all four servers to determine if indeed the ideal route was chosen. Even then the latency may vary depending on the time of day or other network conditions.From a practical standpoint, a simpler and more accurate metric would be to compare page load times in different geographies before and after enabling Route 53."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This issue is common among DNS providers and is difficult to solve. I formerly worked for a major DNS company as a developer and this problem came up all the time.The issue is a problem with how DNS works at the basic level. As a reminder there are 2 types of DNS servers. Authoritative DNS servers serve requests for domains assigned to them. Recursive DNS servers will search out the answer for a domain request by talking to root and Authoritative DNS servers.Now a user trying to access a site could potentially use a recursive DNS server that is located close to them but most people have the option to change who their DNS provider is. In countries where ISP recursive dns servers are slow or fail regularly many users opt to change their recursive dns server. When a user chooses to do so they could pick a recursive dns server that is used in an anycast dns server setup ( As a reminder anycast is an ability to trick the internet in to thinking that alot of servers in many locations look like 1 server and requests are routes to the closest server in anycast ie alot of servers in many data centers all respond to dns requests to the ip address 8.8.8.8).Now with Route53's latency based routing Amazon tracks that the 8.8.8.0/24 subnet could respond fastest in US-East and so any one using google's recursive dns service will be give the dns record corresponding to US-East regardless of the clients IP address ( Amazon only sees a dns request coming from google's ip address not the client ip address). With the dns response the client with that ip address will then connect to the ip address returned from Amazon through google.There are DNS products that can bust through this issue."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The intention is good, but GeoIP is laughably wrong. If it worked you wouldn't need Route 53 in the first place.Figure out how to measure real user latency[0] and compare to whatever routing you had before.[0] Hint:\nhttp://carlos.bueno.org/2009/11/dismal-guide-to-dns.htmlhttp://www.slideshare.net/aristus/doppler-12564220"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The article lost credibility right off the bat when it said...\"We don't use EC2, but our 4 locations map well to AWS regions: Washington DC to US-East-1, Los Angeles to US-West-1, France to EU-West-1 and Singapore to AP-Southeast-1.\"Latency based routing is not geo-load balancing. Just because their data centers are in the same physical area, doesn't mean latency is comparable. Route 53 monitors latency from around the internet to AWS data centers, not the author's data center. Unless they are colo'd in the AWS facilities and hanging off their border router, you can't expect good results from using Route 53 like this."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This analysis is very much wrong. So many people don't use their ISP's DNS servers, especially in Europe/Asia. Physical proximity does not guarantee improved latency, and many times latency varies to/from the same node, based on traffic."
}
] | en | 0.968494 |
Doctor performs surgery using Google Glass [video] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "A Syrian surgeon in Edmonton has been doing remote surgery in clandestine hospitals he set up in Aleppo and Northern Syria for a year now. He uses Skype and there are multiple cameras set up. http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/story/1.1341329 he claimed to have done a lot of virtual leg and hand surgeries in a more recent vid if you google his name."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've had my Google Glass for about a week now, and this raises some questions for me.How long did the surgery last? My experience so far is that you can get a maximum of about one hour battery life from Glass when using video.Was the resolution and video quality sufficient for the remote surgeon to really see what was going on? Again, personal experience only, but everyone I've made a video call with over Glass has reported very choppy low-res streams.I'd love a lot more details on the procedure, what went right and what could have worked better, and just how it was done. \n"This thing happened" isn't a lot of useful information."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Can Google Glass overlay its overlay over more than the small rectangly in the upper right corner? I thought not, but they seem to imply that it does (the overlay for the operating surgeon is provided by Google Glass).I'm also slightly surprised that there are no focus problems: the Glass display is made so that it appears to be significantly further away than 40-50cm that you have between the surgeon and the operating field."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm imagining something like this:http://www.surgeonsimulator2013.comWhich would actually be pretty fun as a VR app."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "How was Google Glass necessary, or even preferred, for this application over a normal computer & monitor setup? I can't seem to make that out from the article."
}
] | en | 0.945218 |
Why my VC funded startup failed | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This resonated with me way too much, which is kind of scary. My startup hasn't failed yet, as I haven't launched yet, but I truly understand the technical mindset issue.I've been getting better at this as I have started to focus more on the marketing/business aspect of things. As much as I have learned in the past couple of months, with regards to the business side of things, I can't seem to shake the mentality of \"it's just not good enough yet\".I may have a point though, as I will be competing against in house solutions, so I really have to come at them with a compelling reason to use my solution.I guess the good news is in the next couple of months, I'll have the opportunity to be more formally educated on the business side of things."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The number of people who come out of the woodwork to say that they invented delicious before delicious is ridiculous.He says \"essentially the same\" and then indicates it was actually a great deal more complicated.The hard part is not deciding what to do. It's deciding what NOT to do.I can't seem to find any image or screenshots of the actual site (it appears to have been prodata.de) so I can decide if \"no product clue\" should be added to the list."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "There may not be any specific reason for a startup failure. It is quite normal that only a small percentage of startups find a unique spot on the 'fitness landscape' that would allow them to grow and prosper. The rest may be just as well equipped and funded as the lucky ones, but still they will perish. Randomness among reasons for success dwarfs most of other factors.The rational strategy is not to try to discover some 'success recipe' (there is none), but to do a lot of tinkering, be prepared for many false starts, and make sure that the unavoidable failures will not kill you as an entrepreneur."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The sixth point may or may not be true, but surely plenty of software companies in the last 10 years have started on the VC model of spending a ton of money on upfront development and then reaping the economies of scale afterwards. He doesn't mention anything in his specific situation that would lead us to believe that model couldn't possibly have worked. It sounds like his consulting idea would have been a valid risk mitigation strategy, but ideally in software you always want to get to the point where you are selling zero marginal cost bits, rather than only charging customers for person-hours."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "My somewhat limited experience with selling to enterprises leads me to this conclusion:Sell either to the people at the very top for a high price, or sell to the actual users inside the enterprise for a price (and using a deployment model) they don't need approval for."
}
] | en | 0.992065 |
Advice from a once burnt-out programmer | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is a strange piece of writing. On the one hand, it's telling you that burnout is real, and that you should be careful to avoid it. On the other hand, it sound an awful lot like \"there are worse things in the world than sitting at a cushy desk for 10 hours a day, whiner.\" The latter seems to undermine the former.One of the best jobs I've ever had was manual labor: I was a bellman for a hotel. My primary job responsibilities included lifting heavy luggage in 100-degree heat, being yelled at by cranky guests, and running around non-stop for 10-hour shifts. What made it great? I was almost completely autonomous, and I got paid a little bit of money every time I did some work. There was almost always a direct consequence when I did good work, and nobody told me how to do my job. (My boss didn't even work on the same shift!)I've worked a lot of much more \"comfortable\" jobs since that time, and I've had a lot of time to think about why that luggage-monkey job was so much better than nearly all of the intellectual gigs I've held. So far, I think it boils down to a simple point: there's no worse tyranny than being told how to think. No matter how much luggage I lifted, I was always free with my thoughts. But when you work in an industry where your thoughts are your primary output, it's inevitable that someone (or something) will try to consume all of them. When that happens, you're on a path to burnout."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I find that very often the perfect cure for too much \"thinking\" work is an awful lot of physical work. I started feeling a lot better about working on my Ph.D. when I got a second job stocking shelves on the night shift."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "For me, the key is \"turn off the creativity spigot\". I always thought that creativity is one of those lovely positive feedback loops: do more, have more ideas, do more. However, this only works for so long.I thought that trying to code a new site and write an album at the same time would work. It didn't. My ability to write songs just disappeared.However, I took Christmas off from creativity and now I'm flying."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "That was a fun read.Doing the same thing over and over again for years at the hours the writer says he was working is sure to induce burnout. But if you change even the industry you're writing for and/or the type of projects you're working on, as well as mixing some fun personal programming stuff in there, that helps to alleviate burnout."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I would feel rather empty without coding.That said, I think it's important to have a life outside of one's job. That way, one can escape to fuel up the batteries. Getting a girlfriend, doing some sports and having vacations is a really good way of preventing a burnout."
}
] | en | 0.9875 |
Ask HN: Quitting Job, need some outside opinions | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Hang tight. Bring up your concern to your boss, and make sure they understand the implication of what you're saying (eg, that this is something you're ready to quit over).Sometimes you draw the short straw in consultancies. Question is, is this a permanent short straw, or something that could change 3-6-9 months down the road? Working on interesting projects is where everyone wants to be, and there's a thing we call \"paying your dues\" ;) Have you paid yours?My advice: First, have the above conversation. Assume for now that the situation is fixable -- from what you've said I can't see why it isn't. Next, start interviewing. Talks with recruiters are nice, but they'll blow smoke and make you feel like the most in-demand guy on earth with nothing to back it up. Get a few interviews and an offer in before you bail. No debt is great, but cashflow is king. I would hate to see you Office Space your curent situation and then discover that a fresh grad with 8 months of VBA experience isn't as marketable as you thought.Bottom line -- be smart, take steps to get where you want to be, and keep cash flowing in."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Hang-in there. You said you feel like your skills in Java among others is rusting.Here is my suggestion: take it up as a challenge to code start coding for 1 hour every morning. Just pick a language, ruby or python or java & start building something. Just make sure you do it all without copy/pasting. Just create something and brush up your skills.I have been in similar situation where the feeling that I am not learning new has lead me to look for options elsewhere immediately and the offers I received weren't better than the current one without improving the skills.So, my advice is focus on your skills and do not look at the job as the only place where you can brush up on those. Try working on something creative by the side which will open up interesting opportunities for you in the short run itself. All the very best."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I was in a very similar position as yourself. I too graduated in May of 2011 and took a job that I wasn't too happy with. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted and spending my nights and weekends working on finding and earning the job I wanted.I considered just quitting, working on my own projects, and being happier. But for financial reasons, my first choice was to find a job that would pay me to work on projects that I wanted to work on. I was extremely lucky to find such a job and now instead of slaving at a job that I hate and working on the types of projects I want to, I get to work on similar projects 40 hours a week and get paid.I also moved to Boulder, CO, because of their startup community, since my long term goal is to own my own company.So my advice is to keep interviewing and stay strong!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Hard call. If it's a big consulting company with a variety of projects available negotiating a bit more than just giving your notice might be to your benefit. Ask to go to 50% time on the VBA to get back to the original promise of Java dev opportunities or something. Of course, if the overall fit just isn't right then no sense sitting somewhere you're unhappy!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Spoke to manager today, basically they really want me to stay since I'm the only one doing it and there is no documentation. They even said they'll move me to what ever project I want, if I just train a new guy for the role. I told them tomorrow when I come in I'll decide."
}
] | en | 0.950666 |
Why I like Redis | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "edit: all this is based on retwis.antirez.com memory usage.Ok, just did some math. In order to run Twitter using just Redis 1.001 without to use any new feature that may allow for memory savings, and guessing that Twitter currently contains 4,000,000,000 of tweets (assuming they save the full history for all the users, and that the recent 32 bit overflow means they rougly have 4 billion messages), 30 128GB Linux Boxes are needed.Is this crazy? I don't know honestly as I don't know how many servers they may be using currently for the DB backend.Btw the whole point is, IMHO, that many times to take the full dataset on Redis is not needed. For instance in twitter only recent messages are accessed frequently, together with user data, so it's probably a good idea to take only the latest N messages of every user in Redis (with background jobs moving old messages on disk incrementally), and take all the rest on MySQL or other on disk solution suitable to access stuff by-id.So when you want to get a message from Redis, and from time to time get a NULL accessing to message:<id> you can run the same query against MySQL to get the data. That's something like this: def getMessageById(id)\n m = redis.get(\"message:\"+id)\n if !m\n m = getMessageFromMySQL(id)\n end\n return m\n end\n\nIn this context it is very simple to move old messages from a Redis server to a MySQL server, since messages are on a redis list, so it's possible to RPOP to get old elements, if LLEN (List length) reports that this user has more tweets that we want to take in the \"fast path\".Also note that Redis supports expires in keys. So old messages got from MySQL can be set as expiring keys in order to avoid that a message that got linked in some front page will stress the MySQL too much.This is just to give a feeling about scaling a pretty big service using Redis as main DB without caching layers."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Key-value stores develop fairly quickly. We need an up to date comparison between their features and metrics (performance, code coverage, bugs filed per month, etc.)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This seems like the right thread to tell you I'm working on a new data type for Redis, that is, ordered sets: http://pastie.org/664270Any feedback is really welcomed, for instance, do you know of better data structures to do the work? I'm using a red black tree and an hash table. The pastie above documents the specification more or less. Thanks"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I like the idea of Redis but it has the obvious limitation that it can only be used when the data you're working with will absolutely never grow bigger than available memory. This not only reduces the problems it can be used on but makes the Twitter example given on the Redis website very unrealistic."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Redis is great. I use it in quite a few of my spare time projects.The versatility is my main reason for loving it. From working on large a dataset without waiting for it to finish loading (…as mr. Willison explained), to storing object properties in a webapp-environment, to simple persistent object queues, etc..It's a very nice tool to have in the box."
}
] | en | 0.975411 |
The Dangers of Productive Procrastination | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Unless the thing I \"should\" be doing is immediately necessary or massively more important than the secondary thing I end up doing I'm generally pretty happy to follow my motivation around.I normally seem to get back to the important thing when its deadline or reason for happening actually becomes so important that it really needs to be a focus.It might be the issue isn't that you're focussing on the wrong thing, it's that you stop after having done the first thing. When the code based work starts closing in on me I start picking targets of what I will do before I'm allowed to sleep. I can do as many other things as I want, but that has to be done. I also seem to focus better on boring tasks when I'm tired. It mostly works."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "That was a rather useless blog post. As a lifelong procrastinator, I was hoping for solutions, not a description of the problem..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I have found myself doing this quite often, according to a friend of mine who is a doctor it could be yet another sign of ADD."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Cleaning the room! Been there. I think another major productive distraction is trying to stay updated with everything about the startup world. Reading hacker news. Reading about the new startups in 500startups. Checking out my StartupAdvice list on twitter. What's saying Mark Suster today? New blog post? What about Brad Feld? Anything new with YC, what is PG posting today? So much information :):)I mean all this information is incredibly valuable don't get me wrong. But still is important to know when to step back and stop reading about other startups and what is the right way to do things, because otherwise nothing would get done."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I wish I would clean my apartment when procrastinating. Instead, I procrastinate by coding (for fun, not work). That's it! I'm going to clean my apartment... tomorrow... or maybe the day after..."
}
] | en | 0.970499 |
Searching Email Addresses on Facebook will show User Profiles | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It used to be the default way of finding your friends, before they introduced the whole 'give us your email account info to login and get all your contacts' feature. I use it all the time as well to check people from craigslist or other coldcalls. In fact, it's just about the only thing I still have an FB login for.With all the discussions about privacy in the last couple years I am a little surprised at how many common sense approaches people seem to overlook or at least not implement. i.e. always have an email address for business, one personal/social (maybe these are separate), etc. and use them accordingly. The rest is up to you as far as how much access you allow to your profile, how willing you are to give up your real name to the service, and similar problems. Seems to me people have much more to fear from big data than someone who already has your email address being able to see your name and public profile pic."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This has always been a feature. It's useful when you want to find a friend with a common name that you know personally. This seems like it'd only be problematic if you linked your account to a professional email address..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've known this for a couple of years...Thought everyone else did too. - I use it when sifting through job applications."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Account Settings > How You Connect > Who can look you up using the email address or phone number you provided?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Hasn't Facebook always done this? I've always done this to vet people I deal with through Craigslist..."
}
] | en | 0.95143 |
Iron Man's Suit Isn't Patented, It's A Trade Secret | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"So, Tony Stark gets to choose: disclose the details of the invention in a patent and correspondingly get superior civil (i.e. monetary) relief if someone copies it, or try to keep the invention secret himself and hope that criminal law dissuades people from stealing it.\"This implies something that isn't true: that Tony Stark has to choose between the two strategies. In reality, he could choose to patent parts of the Iron Man suit and keep other parts trade secrets. As we software developers well know, you are allowed to patent each individual innovation, not just the whole of a product.For example, Stark Industries could get multiple patents on the suit software. They could get separate utility patents on the thrusters, the briefcase fold-up design, and some of the suit-specific weapons. Additionally, they'd try to get design patents on each of the suit designs. But, they could still keep the power generation unit and the navigation software secret."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Funny how we make different associations when watching movies.I watched this movie and thought about BCI, computer vision and marvel comics.A lawyer takes a look at it and sees patents, laws and court. \nI didn't even pay attention to the part where Peppers was talking on the phone about patents. To me, it was just some business blabla needed for the scene to make her look busy.However, I did pay close attention to how he manipulated his 3D, his home interface, the jargon used, the software (no comments) etc.Just interesting."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I found most interesting the bit about the states secrets privilege. Every time I encounter that I suspect that some bureaucrat somewhere is using it to cover his ass, and the government is likely in the wrong. Certainly my reading about the facts of the very first case where it was asserted, United States vs Reynolds, says that this was the motivation.See http://www.iasa.com.au/folders/Publications/Legal_Issues/the... for some of the background on that case."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"In the film, Pepper Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, demands action from \"patent attorneys,\" but Stark Industries obviously hadn't patented the technology, or else the government would already have access to the information needed to reproduce the armor.\"When was the last time anyone here read a patent and thought \"now I have all I need to implement\"?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "For anyone who wants to learn more about the nature of IP: Patents, Trade Secrets, Trademarks, Copyrights, Licensing, I recommend this book: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517960.I read it about 6 months ago, it will give you some clarity of thought about these matters. And apart from the odd gratuitous computer metaphor it is quite minimal -- you could probably use it as a reference if necessary."
}
] | en | 0.956947 |
Ask HN: Getting started with Clojure | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I strongly recommend Stuart Halloway's book, Programming Clojure.http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojureMark Volkmann also wrote a pretty good article:http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.htmlStop by the Google group with ANY questions. No question is too silly. We're all dying to help.http://groups.google.com/group/clojureOnce you get the basics down, and you don't mind some shameless self promotion...http://vimeo.com/channels/fulldisclojureSFD"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I haven't done any GUI's in clojure, but i think swing is best doc'd, stuart Sierra series:http://stuartsierra.com/2010/01/03/doto-swing-with-clojure?0...http://stuartsierra.com/2010/01/02/first-steps-with-clojure-...--------------------or SWT:http://berlinbrowndev.blogspot.com/2009/02/doing-it-wrong-fu...http://www.li-am.com/2009/08/button-in-eclipse-swt-clojure.h...http://www.li-am.com/2009/08/swt-is-alive-from-clojure.htmlhttp://www.li-am.com/2009/08/jface-examples-in-clojure.html----------------there's also bits on Qt and JWT, search for them"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I found this comment to be most helpful:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033503"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's a big help if you have a baseline ability to read Java, as it's likely the example code for libraries you'll want to use is in Java. You don't need to be able to create a baroque class hierarchy yourself as long as you can navigate one well enough to figure out the library calls you need to use.Clojure is a fairly gentile introduction to functional programming, I think. You can do imperative-style things with the reference types, so you don't need to completely learn how to structure the logic of a program."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I want to get started in Clojure too. Rich Hickey's talks on InfoQ have been making me feel kind of funny... like when we used to climb the ropes in gym class.But seriously, yeah I'd love to find a project to play with its concurrency features and learn some gui as well."
}
] | en | 0.881575 |
James Frey’s Fiction Factory | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can't wait for Frey to get some competition. On the other, he's actually a pretty good commercial writer (competing with him will be pretty tough on that front) and I almost hope he branches out into the kind of formulaic, Oprah-bait adult fiction that mostly fills bookstore shelves - the stuff that's actually insufficiently pretentious (yes, that is possible). It's practically genre fiction already; why not have somebody drive the point home?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This practice has been alive in various forms of art (ghostwriters on songs, apprentice painters, writers-for-hire, etc.) for the last several decades (at least).As others have mentioned, the work often provides little creative value, but builds huge cult followings and massive profits for the artists. Koons' art regularly sells for $10-25mm and one of Hirst's auctions generated $198mm in 2008. Likewise, musical artists who employ ghostwriters often make it to the top of the charts, and authors like Frey can reap millions from their hired \"co-writers.\"Using \"assistants\" has been around for many years, and it's not going away anytime soon - there's still money to be made. One of the best examples of the absurdity occurring in the creative world is Banksy's Mr. Brainwash character in 'Exit Through the Gift Shop.' Highly recommended to all."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"He was looking for young writers to join him on a new publishing endeavor—a company that would produce mostly young-adult novels. Frey believed that Harry Potter and the Twilight series had awakened a ravenous market of readers and were leaving a substantial gap in their wake. He wanted to be the one to fill it.\"\"In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project\""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This sounds really close to what Mark Kostabi did (does?) with his art: He hires fresh or recent art-school students for basically teenage McJob wages and \"collaborates\" with them (basically affixes his signature on their work) and sells the canvas for US$10000-50000 each.There is a market for this teen/young adult genre-crossing stuff, and it will _certainly_ get saturated at some point. Whether that some point is when Frey starts his Warhol/Kostabi factory or not is the key question."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "He strikes me as being, for the printed word, what Jeff Koons is for sculpture and portraiture, all buzz and little value."
}
] | en | 0.958061 |
Review of Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The title makes it sound like it's an informative article but as olavk mentions, it's a review and a rather vague review at that."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Very vague article, indeed, looks like they're mainly trying to stir some hype for their book. Praising css tables as \"the next big thing\" is just backwards. Matt Wilcox has a good article about that misconception: http://mattwilcox.net/archive/entry/id/1030/The take-home is that css tables are really not much more than the old table tag in disguise - with all the same ties between markup and presentation. If that's what rocks your boat then you don't have to wait - the table tag is here for you to use, today."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The review is pretty vague, but presumably the book is about the display: table CSS property, which IE8 will support as the first IE browser.The review says \"the techniques that will be available to us very, very soon.\" Actually the techniques have been available for years in the other browsers, but obviously couldn't be used widely since IE didnt support it. The release of IE8 will not change that because IE7 (and even IE 6) will be around for many years to come.But of course it is a step in the right direction."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The first that popped into my head was that the title could be truncated to \"Everything About CSS is Wrong\"."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This book is mostly about styling tables. So as a response to the title: I highly doubt it!"
}
] | en | 0.9797 |
24 Hours of Privilege | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Warning: this has nothing to do temporarily beating a system's computer access control."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Neat, I bet you could prove just about any point by fabricating a fictional character and attacking their constructed ideas. I'll have to give it a try sometime."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "For some people the difficulty level of life is on "Easy.""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Too real"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is a great exercise for those practicing stoicism."
}
] | en | 0.931304 |
Attach anything to anything with sugru and magnets | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> Once you make your lights magnetic, you might wonder why all lights aren’t like this.You lose the ability to adjust the beam up or down. That's probably why all lights aren't like this."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm curious if this will fall victim to the same regulatory nightmares Buckyballs is currently facing. [1]Though Sugru is clearly more than just a 'toy'.[1]http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardlevick/2013/11/25/buckyba..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How do you prevent rotation of the magnets when they are stuck together. The light on a bike will experience a force in that direction sooner or later and move.When I saw the dimple I though that was the solution, but it is only a marker for the north side. Maybe the solution would be to apply a thin layer of substance with high friction between the magnets."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Why even use two magnets instead of one magnet (optionally in a magnet cup to increase the attractive strength) and a steel plate?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "+1 for a solution to the falling crutch problem."
}
] | en | 0.861343 |
Google Wallet Co-Founding Engineer Departs Google for Square | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I was really excited for Google Wallet, so much so that I bought a Galaxy Nexus.Guess what? Verizon blocks it. If Google doesn't want to fight for their product, why should their co-founding engineer stick around? Happy he is off to Square.\n(I'm not so much grumpy at losing a specific payment option I'm grumpy at one of the few companies with enough force to lean on Verizon capitulating. New tech gets slowed and I get sad.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Meanwhile, Osama Bedier is still a VP at Google and now an advisor to Mezz [1] a startup which, if he signed the same employment agreement the regular folks sign, means he probably will be moving on from Google shortly. (My personal experience is that Google pretty much considers any outside work a conflict of interest)[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mezz"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Why wouldn't Square want to work to make their payment platform accessible through multiple channels (NFC, their dongle, mobile-to-mobile, etc.)? Just as they should develop for many of the big software platforms, they will probably need to have product offerings that allow payments in multiple ways."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Why isn't Google buying Square anyway? They really need a popular payments platform to integrate with Android. I realize they might not want to sell now, but maybe they want to sell it for a good price."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Just part of the normal turn over when you have more than 32,000 employees."
}
] | en | 0.98612 |
On being a single founder for 7 years | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Mark,\nnice project,but don't be scared that the product is not completely finished ... it will never be ...your most important next steps are now \nget customers , get customers and get customers ....so- remove the \"closed beta\" tag- have a graphic designer give it a 2013 layout- put up an price page- buy some adwords to start doing live user testing- start optimizing the sales funnel"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is truly a case of should have launched quicker, if this is really about a business.It sounds more like a guy has been wandering around the world, living what is surely a very interesting nomadic existence, hacking up a storm, rather than building a business though.JavaScript like scripting language? Custom markup? Beta for 5 years? This doesn't sound like the path to profits to me."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've noticed there seems to be two definitions of a solo founder.1) Single hacker trying to build a business and the product at the same time by themselves. They do everything, by themselves.2) A business where there is a single founder with all the equity. They have employees and those employees are paid with currency.In the case of 1, I think it's a very hard road. Most software is built by more than one person, and most businesses must involve more than one person. You can of course make pretty good money off of freelancing, but building a business around a product is tough. Of course, not impossible.In the case of 2, you need to be willing to \"put your money where your mouth is\" because you'll need to pay people. And even then, if you see any success and want to grow faster, you probably won't be the only shareholder for long. Jeff Bezos started Amazon alone, but they're a public company now so there are lots of shareholders. However, it is interesting to look at eg Sergei Brin's net worth as a ratio of Google's market cap versus the same for Bezos and Amazon. Not splitting equity in the beginning makes a big difference later on if everything goes according to plan (which it rarely does, but hey).The OP probably falls into definition #1"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"This whole time, I worked on the platform source code. I feature-creeped for at least 5 years. I didn't have much of a portfolio to show for it either. \"Congrats on persevering for that long but I almost think this is a case example of the downside to being a single founder...no one to rein in your feature creep time."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is definitely inspiring, and it looks like Mark has developed a very viable SaaS platform if the right demographic is targeted.With that being said, I would suggest that he seriously consider a pivot in his marketing strategy due to competition which has emerged during his product development; Webs, Weebly and Squarespace come to mind. I would say at this point, small brick and mortar businesses are the most viable market target for a product like this.Additionally, it might be worth investing a small sum to recreate the UXD, or at minimum reduce the use of gradients and move toward a more simplistic approach graphically. The center gradient overload is almost migraine inducing.Other than that, I truly hope he's successful with the amount of work and personal funds which he's put in."
}
] | en | 0.971379 |
Ask HN: If you had 3 month to program for fun, what would you learn? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "As a Django dev (currently, anyhow - formerly was largely Windows software dev), I think I would investigate Go, if we're talking purely from a 'fun' perspective.From a professional perspective, I've been dabbling in Objective-C/Cocoa and the Android SDK (trying to dredge up old Java knowledge) - but for something 'new' I think I'd take a closer look at Ruby on Rails."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Absolutely nothing, because I would use that time to use the skills I already have to build some of my small ideas just for fun."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I would master* Node.js as much as possible, and along with Twitter Bootstrap start developing \"real-time RAD (Rapid Application Development) for Web\".I'm learning Node.js, and I'm excited, but my time is extremely limited...so for the time being my RAD is limited to PHP.*If to \"master\" was even possible"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I would like to learn to write games for the desktop and then try to write one, one of the traditional desktop games using C++ and something like SFML. The game development field has always intrigued me."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I think Javascript, tbh.It covers quite a wide range of things you can do with it these days - regular web stuff, applications that run in the browser, and even server-side with Node.js."
}
] | en | 0.984991 |
Last Wishes of a Dying "General" | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Army officer here, currently a Captain in the Army Reserve. Most of what this guy says is spot-on but there's one big thing that he missed. Perhaps this does not apply in the Air Force but I suspect that it does:Senior leaders in big organizations like our military have an unfortunate unwritten mandate to /create/ things: policies, organizations, rules, procedures, etc. This mandate is enforced by the officer evaluation system which demands quantitive measures of performance, eg. \"Implemented XYZ policy and achieved 98% compliance rate across Battalion's 510 Soldiers\".It sounds like a good idea to that leader and to the rater and senior rater who evaluate him but in actuality, it creates a shitstorm of busywork for his subordinates and over time, it becomes impossible to get anything meaningful done because of the never-ending load of mandatory upper-leadership-directed tasks and training requirements.It's a huge fucking mess. Every time I go into somewhere like an Army hospital and I see something posted about the Commander's new policy on electricity usage or whatever, I immediately think \"bullet point on this guy's OER\". Seriously, people are making careers out of this bullshit. The Army is a never-ending stream of computer-based training requirements. Our Soldiers spend weeks of every year in front of web browsers, trying to complete some horribly broken Flash-based interactive training that \"teaches\" them safe driving, STD prevention, social engineering awareness, etc. It's all crap and you know that some Colonel got a star for spending $2MM to implement them.If you want to improve military efficiency and increase troop morale, start rewarding people for eliminating programs.I would love to have a bullet point on my OER:* Successfully eliminated five outdated computer security training programs, saving the Army $15MM/year in program costs and 750,000 hours of Soldier training time."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Glad to see a bunch of military folks commenting here. Inculcating a culture of innovation within the service is something I am passionate about, to counter the reality of what this prescient author writes about.I am part of an organization launching what we call the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, co-sponsored by the Booth School of Business at UofChicago. Its a TEDx/Startup weekend type event featuring junior warfighters from across the services coming together with civilian entrepreneurs to create new national security and defense solutions. National security in the 21st century will be defined by we in the Innovation generation create through collaborative efforts, breaking the antiquated models of the industrial era."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Patton once said \"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.\" If the author's third point is an accurate representation of reality in the Air Force, I wonder how the armed forces went so far to the other extreme since WW2."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Poking around on his blog, I really liked this post: http://www.jqpublic-blog.com/?p=106 (describing the military budget, without some of the shrill hysterics that often accompanies the subject)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I work at a large, non-military government entity. We're in the middle of making some big changes that when complete will save taxpayers a significant chunk of change, and improve the efficiency of a number of things.I feel like I should be proud of being involved in such a thing -- I'm confident that we will succeed. But I have this lingering doubt as well. Streamlining administration will save money, but it will also introduce the situation that the writer's unit faced -- centralized administration.Its been my experience that more often than not senior leadership is uniquely unqualified to make effective decisions at a tactical level. Executives are supposed to drive vision, not fiddle with minutiae, right? Compounding this is the idea of taking authority away from the folks down the line -- where is the new generation of leaders going to come from?"
}
] | en | 0.961674 |
Ask HN: The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Hi Steve Smith,There is a little known visa known as an O1, for 'extraordinary persons'. This is the visa that many foreign founders obtain. One is allowed to found and work for a company in the US while one is on it. I think they last 3 years.Generally, PhD level people can obtain it, though it is a pain to do so. I have heard of people straining to get 10 eminent people to write supporting letters for one's visa petition. A good link is here:http://www.hooyou.com/o-1/faq.htmlThere's a fairly extensive list of what may be accepted as supporting documentation there. I think these are the criteria the government uses:Receipt of a major, internationally recognized award, such as the Nobel Prize; or at least three of the following forms of documentation:\n(1) Documentation of the alien's receipt of nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence in the field of endeavor;\n(2) Documentation of the alien's membership in associations in the field for which classification is sought, which require outstanding achievements of their members, as judged by recognized national or international experts in their disciplines or fields;\n(3) Published material in professional or major trade publications or major media about the alien, relating to the alien's work in the field for which classification is sought, which shall include the title, date, and author of such published material, and any necessary translation;\n(4) Evidence of the alien's participation on a panel, or individually, as a judge of the work of others in the same or in an allied field of specialization to that for which classification is sought;\n(5) Evidence of the alien's original scientific, scholarly, or business-related contributions of major significance in the field;\n(6) Evidence of the alien's authorship of scholarly articles in the field, in professional journals, or other major media;\n(7) Evidence that the alien has been employed in a critical or essential capacity for organizations and establishments that have a distinguished reputation;\n(8) Evidence that the alien has either commanded a high salary or will command a high salary or other remuneration for services, evidenced by contracts or other reliable evidence."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "1.Incorporate the company in US. \n2.Incorporate another company in India. \n3.Outsource work from US company to Indian company.\n4.Indian company hires contractor (you) in the US.Is something like that possible? I'm just guessing really."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I know nothing regarding US immigration law, but what do they define as \"working\"? In other words, could you contribute for \"free\" and just pay yourself via dividends?Otherwise, why don't you just incorporate in India, or wherever else is applicable? If you're going to sell via web payments, nobody really cares where you are. There may be a few issues with corporate clients, but for 95% of people it would be seamless."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "You could move back to India and run the buisness from there....yeah our immigration policies are pretty bad aren't they."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Not a lawyer, so don't take my advises as is. Incorporate in India, then transfer it all to US when you're ready. Develop the code yourself, then have code acquired by your company, or prepare letter of intentions (that when you can do this legally, the code will be owned by the company for your stake increase). And my understanding is that they don't care that much of you writing code for company either paid or free. The government doesn't want everyone to create their own companies and get employed by themselves, getting legal status in US because of this. Your case looks different though."
}
] | en | 0.98299 |
How to handle 1000s of concurrent users on a 360MB VPS | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Why use nginx instead of Varnish as the frontend proxy? If you are using nginx as your http <-> fastcgi gateway, that's one thing, but if you're just using it as a reverse proxy, it seems like a lot of extra stuff to maintain.I like living on the bleeding edge, so I do varnish -> mongrel2 <-> apps instead... but varnish -> nginx <-> apps or varnish -> apache <-> apps seem equally reasonable. The key is caching and being able to handle slow users without tying up your app. All three of these setups do that. nginx to apache only saves your app server; it doesn't do much caching."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is surreal. I just wrote a draft blog entry about the changes in startup economics due to event-servers like node and nginx (publishing tomorrow), and I hit HN just before heading to bed and this blog entry is #1.Thanks for all the love today guys. Have an awesome memorial day weekend if you're in the States."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "At the end of the article, why is apache even being used anymore?Just use nginx and php-fpm (or php-cgi/fcgi)."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This technique naïvely assumes the only thing that is slow is the client. If a backend data provider that the web server communicates with (e.g., database) is also slow, this arrangement merely adds complexity without much corresponding benefit. The origin server will still block waiting on the data provider, which can cause process starvation in the pathological case.Moreover, issues with slow clients often can be solved by raising the TCP send buffer size. As long as the response size is less than the send buffer size, it really doesn't matter how slow the client is: write() will return immediately, leaving the webserver free to serve the next request. Getting the data to the client then becomes the kernel's responsibility."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Worth noting the the story is from Dec '09."
}
] | en | 0.914102 |
To www or not to www? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm surprised at the www supporters. Do not do this. Down the road, you will want to use subdomains (app.example.com, dashboard.example.com) and choosing www out of the gate will make it more complicated then it's worth. If HTTPS is required, then a certificate with www will always get in the way, get a non-www and add a subject alternative name, or get a wildcard.It is much, much easier to redirect all non-www traffic to www if a subdomain is not specified then otherwise and a wildcard or SAN-enabled certificate will make it much more flexible in the future."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "With "www". That makes it a lot easier to add in CDN support, DNS based load balancers, and a ton of other tools down the line.Why? Because you need your domain root to have all sorts of other stuff in it- MX records, SPF keys, and various other things. A lot of CDNs and DNS based tools work really well by utilizing CNAMEs, which you can't do on the root. Putting your website on "www" keeps is as a separate isolated service and makes adding those services easier down the line."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "As a technical person, I can recognize a URL when I see it and prefer the non-www version for brevity's sake.But many non-technical people cannot understand if something is a website URL without the WWW in front of it. It's probably best to add WWW if your target audience is normal humans."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Just map both to the same site.Problem solved."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I prefer no WWW because that makes the domain look shorter and and hence easier to remember."
}
] | en | 0.883897 |
The new emberjs.com | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Beautiful site -- lovely to see open source design in action.It's fun to look at this new site in the context of the progression in the various iterations of the SproutCore saga over the years:http://web.archive.org/web/20081003190606/http://www.sproutc...http://web.archive.org/web/20110211051741/http://www.sproutc...http://sproutcore.com/http://emberjs.com/"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm sad that the on-site docs are still inferior compared to the in-code comment docs. For example, the on-site docs hardly mention the built-in state manager, but they're very thoroughly documented in the code [1]. Many people (myself included) people will usually resort to searching Google before looking in the code when trying to figure out how to do something.Ember team, any insight as to what's being done to rectify this, or why this is?[1] https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/blob/master/packages/emb..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Can someone describe emberjs in one line?(Their description of a framework for making ambitious web apps is a bit vague imho and i don't want to spend 15 mins reading docs about something that may not be of any use to me at all.)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The documentation is underwhelming, from a get-up-and-running POV ... protip for authors of new libraries etc. I should be able to cut and paste your code and have it just work right away.If you don't addvar MyApp = Em.Application.create();to the examples in the docs page the code simply won't work."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's a bit odd that the main example on the home page references an object called DS on 8 of 10 lines, but DS is never referenced elsewhere in the documentation.I know from prior exploration at their github account that DS stands for \"data store\" but I still think it's pretty weird that searching for \"DS\" on the docs page brings up nothing."
}
] | en | 0.807759 |
Dyson 360 eye robot vacuum | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I worked on this product back in 2002-2005. I developed the initial wheel system for this form factor of product and early prototypes of their digital motor once we realised we'd need a very high power density compressor motor. Sadly the battery technology has taken a long time to get to the point where it can now give a useable run time, even when the vacuum only consumes 100W. Also the prices of other components, high power embedded CPUs, cameras and sensors have reduced dramatically since then. It uses an intelligent algorithm to maximise the potential of the runtime, meaning that it tries to elminiate running over the same patch of floor more than once. This is what it uses the 360 camera for and SLAM image processing that I still don't fully understand :) The chap with grey hair switching it off at the end of the teaser video is the brains behind all the navigation and image processing software, Mike Aldred, a very clever guy.[edit] missed a word"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm seeing the markup language, not the actual text... FF 32 on Win7. I.e., the whole site is filed with:[en-gb|Vision_headline]\n[en-gb|Vision_subhead][en-gb|Vision_body]"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Nice video showing how its system works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oguK..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Neat. I wonder how it will compare to the Roomba. I own a Roomba 770 and am pretty happy with it so far. I am assuming the filter is probably going to be better on the Dyson.The 360 is supposed to come out in 2015 and only in Japan at first so no regrets about purchasing the Roomba :)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Wow, I really want that Mac Pro, I mean vacuum (http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/)"
}
] | en | 0.914035 |
Ask HN: Why did this post cost me 10% of subscribers? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The problem is you appear to live in a fantasy land. I only read the second paragraph, but it is one of the stupidest things I've ever read (sorry, that is a harsh thing to say, but I think this requires a reply this strong)."Work from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep. Take your breakfast while reviewing your to-do list for the day. Work a few hours. At lunch, discuss with your team what’s the best solution for that problem. Work some more. At dinner, have a great meal with your loving ones and tell them what’s going on with work. Feel free to ask them for their opinion. After that, go back to work, of course – it’s time to answer to those emails, and read a decent book about a topic of your industry. Have a good night’s sleep."This is incredibly self-centered. What about what your loved ones have been up to (as one tiny example?). And god-forbid you have any children. You need to get THEM breakfast on a morning. Perhaps, maybe, you should spend some time with your "loved ones" on an evening, other than just telling them about your work over dinner then disappearing off to work?I would hate to be your "loved one".CLARIFYING EDIT: This isn't intended to be a personal attack on Daniel's life (which I don't know anything about), just my raw opinions as I read the first two paragraphs of his blog article, hopefully to help him understand why some people took harshly against it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "OP, do you have a family (e.g. significant other, kids)? The post reads a bit preachy. When I read this, I think: the only type of person who would recommend this lifestyle is an early 20-something male who doesn't have much else going in their lives. That may or may not be correct (and it shows as much about my own personal bias as it does about the post), and even if it is correct, that's not a bad thing since if that's the significant demographic that you might be aiming for.However, if you have subscribers who have a life at home, with family, that they enjoy, or just enjoy hobbies that are not congruent with making a living, I can see why they felt alienated by this post."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "You seem to be promoting a recipe for burnout, and that's not a popular viewpoint on HN. Of course you need to work hard at anything to be successful, whether it's sports, art, or a startup, but you need to have balance. For example, after dinner I like to read Dr. Seuss to my 14 month old daughter rather than books about programming or startups. When she's asleep, my wife and I like to watch crime dramas on TV. I like that my work stays between business hours and after that, it's family time."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Let me paraphrase you, or meta-phrase, if you will: "What you are doing now, what you are passionate about now, is the be-all and end-all of your life! You need nothing else! Do it 24/7! If you choose to do something other than this, then choose something uplifting, something that supports and reinforces your view of the world! Because it is right! And the only one!"Dude. Chill. Where is your time for discovery? You say "travel, sure", but then you say "Forget the idea about how much fun others are getting in the Caribbean Islands."WTF? How will ever know if you like snorkeling or scuba diving or trapeze or archery, or various other idle pursuits that one discovers when one unplugs?It is possible to have multiple passions. The one you have now is just that: One. Allow yourself time and space to find others."Humans are wired for growth." I don't even know what that means. Humans aren't wired for much other than eating, defecating, and breathing. Everything else is a choice, an itch. Don't over-glorify yours. Don't over-glorify what works right now. Because things change.If you are lucky, you'll discover the changes while you are still young and fit enough to enjoy them.Chain yourself to your current passion, for the rest of your life, and somewhere along the line you will wonder when you traded your monastic cell of devotion for solitary confinement."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Warning: harsh. I had to google it seems you didn't deem us worthy of reading the piece in its entirety. So here it is http://danielflopes.com/choosework/The title is the least issues with the post. The post is content free, pushing anecdotal evidence (the Sam Walton thing) as data, and stating some pretty important things like "Humans are wired to growth. Long lasting happiness comes from setting big goals and meeting them. It comes from the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort." without any supporting evidence.I would guess the people who unsubscribed followed the spirit of your article, and unsubscribed because their time is too precious to read drivel from a random nobody with no discernible achievement... The right to tell people how to run their live is pretty hard to gain."
}
] | en | 0.954974 |
Anyone sell stuff on ebay? I have an app idea. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Sounds like a cool idea. I do know there are several platforms currently out there that may be similar or give you ideas:http://www.channeladvisor.com\nhttp://www.vendio.com\nhttp://www.auctiva.com\nhttp://www.auctionsound.comGood luck and hope this helps."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It was a YC company (Auctomatic) and it was acquired."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I do apps for a living for people. If you'd like to talk, an email address that reaches me is in my profile. (I really wish HN had private messages...)On that note: You should think about sticking up a email address in your profile kapauldo"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It seems that auctomatic is just the app you are looking for.I'd LOVE something like this for Craigslist!!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Do you plan to take this onward to the iTunes App Store?"
}
] | en | 0.963291 |
MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This one's been making the rounds a lot recently.. that said, I am curious about two things:Firstly, the edibility of this stuff. I know they said they only used food grade things, but really that won't go anywhere until it goes through the insanely expensive FDA approvals process.Secondly, if it'll catch on. I can see marketers running wild with this, but on the other hand I can see companies have a vested interest in you not using all of the product you buy."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I never had an issue with this, because I shake the bottle vigorously for 2 seconds before taking the top off, and the ketchup flows much more smoothly."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "1) Is it toxic?\n2) Does it affect the flavor in any way?\n3) Have we forgotten about the existence of plastic squeezable bottles?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Another disruptive technology, the ketchup industry better take note!I wonder how it works with a full bottle?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Screw ketchup. what does it do in pumps?"
}
] | en | 0.979215 |
Getting by in a technical industry without a degree | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "From my personal perspective, me not having a degree doesnt matter in the slightest and i think that it probably helps due to my personal preference, because i dont think id want to work for a company that decides my vast amount of experience is irrelevant because i dont have a degree.It doesnt matter as much because of a number of factors, first, im a contractor and would never take a permie job, also i sucked at school. I left school at 15 thinking i was dumb because i got bad grades. After leaving school and finding computers and learning them myself, i finally realised i wasnt dumb and after a few years in shitty jobs while learning in the off time, i eventually started making an income from my passion.Fast forward to today and my portfolio and technical knowledge in my field speaks for itself. To me, going to university would have just delayed my career by years and im already kicking myself for not getting my act together quicker."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Just some advice for the international readers who might be thinking about dropping out: If you want to work in the US you will have have immigration problems if you don't have a degree. Getting a work visa without your degree is semi-imposible (especially if you're in your 20s).Dropping out was one of the best choices I've ever made but this particular thing is something that has come back to bite me in the ass several times."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "With decades of experience, my lack of a degree isn't a large problem. But let's be clear that many companies will cull my résumé in the first pass. I'm fine with that, as I'd rather work for people who pay more attention.When I was younger and had less experience things were not so easy. Lacking a degree, I had to persevere a bit more when job hunting. Networking was important early on."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Here's my (main) problem with what you wrote: in any job there will be many, many problems to solve that you won't love, but you have to solve them anyway.Passion for the job is a \"nice to have,\" not a requirement. Passion fades, and if your job performance is going to fade along with it, I don't want to hire you."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Well written, and totally agreed that a degree stamp / piece of paper is not an indicator of the knowledge or passion of the individual.However, I do know that lack of degree is always weighing heavily on the individual who doesn't have it. This further leads to compensatory behaviourMy 2 cents - I think an individual is better off taking small steps towards getting a degree than justifying it for the rest of their life."
}
] | en | 0.984437 |
Ask HN: Is it just me or does Firefox suck now? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I haven't experienced any increased crashing but I don't use FF that often anymore so it's hard to generalize. I mostly used FF because it was faster than IE. Now I use WebKit because it's faster than FF. I don't care about a kitchen sink selection of plugins and themes -- I just want a very fast browser."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I used to work in tech support, so I have to ask...did you restart your computer? ;)It is probably some plugin that worked perfectly under 3.0 that is not playing well under 3.5. Try disabling all of your plugins and re-enabling them one by one. For me it was BetterGmail that was crashing FireFox. Disabling it fixed everything."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Firefox itself is OK for me, but firebug and flash have made firefox unusable in the last 6 months. At least on linux. It seems to need a lot of memory on windows, though."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "FF 3.5 is extremely slow on Linux on comparison to Chrome, so I switched there. It's faster on Windows, but that may be because I use it less so the cache is smaller. The lookup times for the awesomebar are too slow."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I have constant problems with Firefox, but they are all related to add-ons. When I turn all of them off, the thing runs smoothly. Of course, the add-ons are why I use Firefox in the first place."
}
] | en | 0.988739 |
A New Approach to Databases — Simulating 10Ks of Spaceships on my laptop | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Correct me if I'm wrong, but doubling the performance of the simulation from a dual-core to a quad-core processor doesn't necessarily mean you have ”linear scalability” unless you can demonstrate the trend continues as more cores are used (e.g. 8-, 16-, and 32-cores).I think the ideal way to demonstrate this kind of claims while eliminating the effect of other factors such as memory performance is to use a beefy server with many cores (let's say N >= 16), and adjust your benchmark to use 1, 2, 3, ..., N cores, then plot the line to see if it's really linear.Two dots make a line in geometry, but you need more dots to project the trend.Time to spawn an EC2 Cluster Compute Eight Extra instance!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It seems like the author considers 10K spaceships a lot. That is something like 1MB of of data. Not that much, even for a single core.Also, there should be multiple phases like, first everybody shoots, then everybody is hit, then blast force is applied. Otherwise there might be an unfair advantage for some spaceships, which can destroy their opponent, before it had the chance to return fire."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"But if the new Moore’s law gives us exponential core-number growth, to exploit those cores we need to grow the number of shards exponentially as well, meaning we’re placing and exponential number of constraints on an application that probably only needs to accommodate a linearly increasing number of users, and that’s bad.\"I'm no expert on parallel programming, but isn't this sloppy thinking? Like the implication is that we must have an exponential increase in cores in order to accommodate a linear number of users...More generally is anything about this approach really novel? Databases can already run transactions and queries asynchronously. Any language that supports concurrent programming can take advantage of this, even if the database isn't issuing a callback. And ruling out concurrent languages that are capable of implementing this approach, but include some language features the authors don't like seems like a side issue.Not just trying to snark... if someone can explain what I'm missing I'm open to it!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "OT: your overlay that appears at the top of the screen if you scroll down far enough means that when you click a footnote you can't actually see the footnote without scrolling up a little."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm confused. Is the author trying to convince me to give up the expressivity, portability, and readability of my Python app-layer codebase for the performance gains to be had by writing my logic in stored procedures?Having moved one codebase OUT of T-SQL stored functions and onto Django's ORM, I can say that this article does not have me convinced the way forward is to move the code back INTO the DB. If my data model is going to be dictating my development toolset, it better be giving me some amazing performance gains and be as good as the toolset I've come to enjoy in a post-ruby-on-rails-world.What am I missing?"
}
] | en | 0.917872 |
Hacking is Important | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Here's what's funny: Rands begins with a story about Borland, and how it was this amazing software company run by hacker barbarians who by 1992 were converting their products with \"complete object-oriented rewrites.\" What he doesn't say is that Borland's hacker ethos is what greatly diminished the company.The company indulged a well-known programmer tendency to bulldoze and rewrite code. The company tried to rewrite Arago into dBase for Windows and in the meantime was surpassed by Microsoft Access. It tried to rewrite Quattro Pro for Windows, ended up with few new features to show for years of work, and was surpassed by Microsoft Excel. Joel Spolsky wrote about both cases in one of his best known essays http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.htmlRands is making the point that companies need hacking, or, as he puts it, \"well-maintained Barbaric chaos inside the company.\" In this he is right. Facebook is trouncing Google with a more hackerish ethos, and is not making the same \"rewrite everything\" mistake as Borland.But Facebook /is/ making some fresh mistakes. If you were to ask yourself, \"Is Facebook maybe taking an excessively hackerish view on anything like Borland did?\" it would not be hard to find affirmative examples, including a series of features that use private data in a way that tends to offend non hackers, and a series of privacy defaults that do likewise.By more fully acknowledging the ways in which the hacker ethos burned Borland (beyond the understatement that Borland's products were \"running late\"), and by acknowledging the problems hacker culture contributed to at Facebook, Rands would have an even better essay, one that both asserted the importance of the hacker way and that acknowledged the potential downsides of hacker thinking. I'd be interested to hear his thoughts on how to embrace hacking while also instituting some checks on the less useful impulses of programmers."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The creative destruction alluded to in this post is well covered by John Boyd's life work, although Boyd presented things through a military perspective. For a teaser, know that Boyd's philosophies underpinned the U.S. plan of attack in Operation Desert Storm.If you want a dense white paper try Boyd's mangum opus: http://goalsys.com/books/documents/DESTRUCTION_AND_CREATION....and here's his excellent (and quite accessible) biography: http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I hope it's OK that I go of track and rant a bit about Rands in general, instead of specifically this post. Because Rands reminds me so much of both Joel and Yegge, in a very specific way. All of their posts make sense, I agree with them and I like them. Most new insight is often just provoking enough that I find myself arguing with it for a few moments before buying it wholesale. Nothing that pushes me far away from my existing core of values and ideas. At the same time it's very well written and hard to dislike. The rands test, for example, I circulated to my managers the second I read it, much like the Joel test.The last few days I've rewatched a bunch of my favorite West Wing episodes. In a sense, reading Rands reminds me of that. It's well written, I agree with it and I enjoy it and recommend it, even though it might not teach me anything new."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I am not sure if I am the only one, but having read some of Rands longer pieces I have found that I have identified certain traits in myself that I hadn't realised before. I couldn't list them off if I wanted to right now, and generally it was some sort of epiphany that I had after thinking about a certain essay of his for a little while, but it has made me a better person.Using some of the ideas and knowledge in his essays has helped me understand people better, and as I said before myself a better person. Through understanding myself better I know what to ask of others around me to accomplish greatness. It allowed me to be more confident and self-assured.His \"Nerd Handbook\"[1] is probably one of my favourite essays, if you haven't read it; I suggest it.[1]: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_ha..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"These people, called managers, don't create product, they create process.\"\nPlease allow me to say \"bulls@#t\". Those people (engineering managers, product managers, managers in general) are in the same team as the hackers and they're usually not dumb automatons with the single desire to maintain status quo. I think they all know the benfits of distruption and hacking and are willing to support it. So use them rather than blame them.I think the bigger problem in major companies is that the engineers are so overburden with work and deadlines that they lose interest to hack or come up with brilliant new ideas."
}
] | en | 0.989064 |
"The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget" or The Death Of Hacker News | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Amen.There's a forum for this kind of thing, and it's called Reddit. As a matter of fact, that's exactly where this article was cross-posted from.I just personally find it galling that this kind of post is tolerated here. It has nothing to do with hacking or entrepreneurship and it only really serves to broaden the exposure of Hacker News to people who really have no business here in the first place. It wasn't so long ago that when there was an influx of outside exposure PG would proclaim \"Erlang day\" and encourage everyone to fill the front page with arcane technical articles about Erlang. It really did feel good to be a part of a site like that, and it also served as a sort of \"reset\" button that reminded everyone what this site was really supposed to be about.That said, as others have pointed out here, \"intellectual curiosity\" is part of the guidelines -- and as long as it continues to be, we'll continue to see articles like this and people will continue to defend them. I gave up on railing against it myself a while ago and I just ignore those submissions for the most part. Fortunately HN continues to be a great source of information and discussion, even if it's perhaps not as spectacular as it could be."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm really just waiting for the next site - it's not that interesting to see mainstream sites being spammed over and over, and \"power users\" silently spewing out submissions from the same 6 sites day in, day out.Worse than the stagnant content though is the pandering ... jesus. What will 42floors and a bunch of HN users write for us this week? How many times will people upvote TorrentFreak and TechDirt tomorrow when they publish their 17th \"MegaUpload: It's Not Fair\" piece? Someone quote PG, STAT!That search engine where they got rid of the top million sites ... I'd like to see a HN where the get rid of the top hundred or so sites and the people submitting them. It's just too boring with them here."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This entire blog post is self-indulgent elitist drivel. The fact that it (currently) has 67 upvotes means there are 67 people in need of an immediate ban. All the blog post needed to fit right in at reddit, which he obviously despises, was some rage faces.Last I checked, even us 'angry nerds' have emotions. It was refreshing, to me at least, to see that something could break through that wall, even if it was for only 6 hours and was immediately followed by... this.FWIW, I didn't upvote the story. I just read it. It made me think about my grandfather's last few days in hospice, which made me a bit sad, because I had just started a brand new job (first out of college) that week and wasn't able to be there when he died. Oh, and then I got to read a bunch of 'sappy bullshit!' comments."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The guidelines states that anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity is worthy of Hacker News. \"The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget\" was a short fictional text about death that tickled my intellectual curiosity. It was a short read and I liked it and by my understanding of the HN guidelines, it's perfectly normal that it was on the front page for 6 hours.This post, on the other hand, serves nothing but bash people for no reason."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The author responded to \"contentless garbage, a work of fiction\" comments the first time it went around the web:\"What was interesting to me was the comments that people made in response to the story. There seemed to be two fundamental threads: “This is a beautiful story; I’m glad there are people like this in the world,” and “What a bunch of sappy, probably fictional, crap.” Well, though strange and improbable, it is not fictional.\"http://kentnerburn.com/archives/304"
}
] | en | 0.988134 |
History of the Super Soaker | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Rumor has it that the CPS 2000 was removed from the market simply due to its sheer power. Anyone who has experienced a direct blast from a CPS 2000 can tell you that the stream packs more punch than most garden hoses. All future models based on the CPS systems appear to have been toned down in order to meet some forms of safety criteria.A friend of mine got this for his birthday the month it came out. His party was a watergun fight. That was quickly abandoned when we realized how powerful it was. It knocked down 6th graders at close range.Instead we spend hours taking turns who got to have the gun and stand on the deck. Everyone else ran around in the yard and tried not to get shot. Last person standing won the round.This is one of my better childhood memories. I am really glad this link was posted so I can use it to back up the power of the water gun in the story."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "When I was around 13 years old I was interested in electronics, reading popular science, and listening to Run DMC and any other hip hop I could get my hands on. I really didn't see that many black inventors or scientist in the news or on TV(except the little black kid that would show up on Mr Wizad every now and then). It wasn't until I was a little bit older that I learned about the rich history of blacks in science. Being 13 years old living on a military base in North Carolina I assumed that the field was something blacks could not get into.It wasn't until I read an article about the guy who invented the super soaker that I found out that your color doesn't hold you back from getting in any field. I learned that he held many patents and that the super soaker was just the most popular. It changed my whole outlook on things and made me do a lot more research. I knew then I had 2 loves, hip hop and electronics and I could do either one if I wanted."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "A true inventor. Even when manufacturer after manufacturer failed he kept pressing on. Kudos."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This reminds me of my old XP 150: http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1998/xp150c.htmlAn unassuming Super Soaker by modern standards, it actually houses a deadly hack which makes it, by far, the strongest Super Soaker every produced.The nozzle was removable to allow for a filter screen to be replaced. However, one was still able to fire with the nozzle removed. This revealed it's hidden power: The Super Soaker Shotgun. The lines feeding water up to the nozzle were exceptionally large, so it was merely the nozzle that regulated the flow. With it removed, the output capacity was massively increased. A fully compressed tank would empty in approximately 2-3 seconds. It didn't go far (10 feet tops) and required a bit of luck, but anything caught in front of it at the right time was instantly drenched in water. It was devastating. There is no modern equal and I don't know if any other guns have been produced with the capacity that this one had. I had won many a water battle with this little trick in mind. Oh, how I miss it!Dammit, now I'm going to spend a ton of money on eBay when I really shouldn't..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I wish I could be Lonnie Johnson -- R&D on squirt guns and whatnot sounds fun!"
}
] | en | 0.992405 |
Rethink your Startup Website: Make a Net, not a Funnel | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is actually quite a useful technique yet equally unknown method of figuring out product viability from your own user cohort.The overall concept...- Not sure if a some FizzBuzz feature is required on your site?- Not sure if people are interested in your awesome newsletter series on Blue Widgets?- And in any event, after you've created FooBar... What will the take up be if you add it to your site?Well, before you spend 4 days coding your new and exciting product, only to find out that no one actually wants to use it... do some market research on your own visitors!How?Easy... put the feature on some of your sites pages and purposefully 404 it, and when they click through, record the event.Just provide some message saying \"Ooopsey, looks like we are having some problems!\".Run the test until you are sure that either: it's working, or it's a total flop.Guess who's already doing this? TripAdvisor. Listen to Kaufer explaining how at TripAdvisor they purposefully 404 their users into figuring out if something is worth doing.http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/founder-stories-tripadvisor..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This isn't an either / or decision for a company. It makes sense to create a net if you're early in the lifecycle of a company or product—before it's reached product/market fit. Once a startup has reached product/market fit, however, creating a funnel and A/B testing the hell out of it is probably a good idea.To use an example from your post, now that you know what people are looking for (and how they're behaving) on your paystub page, you can begin to tweak the design, layout, and flow of that page to optimize whatever it is you want to optimize.With the above in mind, \"make a net, not a funnel\" is another way of saying \"don't optimize prematurely\"."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": ">> Confused about how so many people could visit and still I was clueless about what they wanted, I logged on to the Hacker News IRC channel and asked the room \"Can anybody help? I have a site I don't know what to do with.\"There is a Hacker News IRC channel? Anyone know the details?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "How do people react to fake buttons? I'd suppose it makes them more annoyed. Isn't that counter-productive? Or is it worth the risk?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "In the article, OP wrote about Facebook: \"They didn't want you to do anything but what you wanted to do naturally, they just wanted to pay close attention and help.\" \nDoes OP or anyone else have specific examples of what Facebook did in their early days?"
}
] | en | 0.93887 |
Doge2048 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My confusion as to which doge represents which number is offset by my drive to get to the next tier and see what doge will come next."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is the funniest one yet.\nI thought it would be terrible and that by combining in Doge that it would sully the whole thing and be the straw that broke the camel's back. But really, it adds something to the game that wasn't there.There's a new sense of whimsy that wasn't there in the original, and the messages when combining Doges adds a sense of accomplishment."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "If any site needs a dogecoin donation address..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is a HN meme paired with a comedic reddit meme. We should be aware that it is this kind of content (+1 funny) that degraded /. and defines reddit. HN has not been and, I believe, should not be the place for this."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "For those of you wondering, it's still as addictive as ever. Save yourselves now."
}
] | en | 0.963099 |
'If I Need ID to Buy Cough Syrup, Why Shouldn't I Need ID to Vote?' | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The outcry in the US over requiring someone to show an ID to vote is one of the most bizarre things to come out of that country. And, to make it even more unusual, it's coming from the left, the very people who used to love issuing IDs, numbers, and whose intellectual and ideological predecessors set up most of those schemes.Practically, as much as the anarchist in me doesn't like that, you cannot have a mass society without strong, trusted IDs so this is a lost cause. Get used to them."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If I ever lose the right to buy cough syrup, I might win it back by voting.If I ever lose the right to vote, can I win it back by buying cough syrup?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Any electoral fraud that relies on having bunches of people vote multiple times necessarily relies on there being a conspiracy of >100 people in order for it to be effective (this is the only kind of fraud that can be prevented by demanding that voters produce photo ID).But if a conspiracy is required, then why not address that directly? Offer a $500,000 reward and immunity to any one who provides information about a conspiracy that could have changed the result of an election. Voila: no more "voter fraud"."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't know what the fuck makes me more sick:1) that in the US, an electricity bill is sufficient for voting ID purposes (WTF)or 2) that the US don't have mandatory ID cards. Even our new German ID cards only cost €20 apiece, and if you're too poor you can get benefits. Hello, ID fraud."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Citing the War on (selected) Drugs to justify the War on Democracy! Yay!"
}
] | en | 0.959251 |
Ask HN: start with python 2.6 or 3? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The official guideline (http://python.org/download/) is fine:Note that both Python 2.6 and 3.1 are considered stable production releases, but if you don't know which version to use, start with Python 2.6 since more existing third party software is compatible with Python 2 than Python 3 right now.If you're just learning to program now, you'll have an easier time if you stick to the officially sanctioned features of Python, rather picking up bad habits from deprecated back roads. There aren't many of them in Python 2 compared to some other languages, but if you want to be safe, Python 3 was meant to eliminate as many of those as possible. You'll get a similar benefit if you follow the official Python 2.6 tutorial first, before reading introductory Python books that were written before Python 2.6 was released.To be super specific, these are the things that you should try to stay up to date on:1. Unicode support in strings2. \"New-style\" versus \"old-style\" classes3. The \"with\" statement, and context managers4. Generator functions and expressions, versus list comprehensions and plain ol' for loopsIf you watch out for these, and read the \"What's New in Python X.Y\" documents for each version between the one you started on and the newest release, the transition shouldn't be too hard.The projects you're depending on may also offer some hints about when they'll do the 3.X transition. SciPy depends on Numpy, which depends heavily on the Python 2.X C extension API and will take a long time to convert. Django is basically pure Python and can probably convert sooner. GAE is Google's infrastructure and will probably be 2.X for years."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> do you skip the mental overhead of unlearning some things that'll get baked in by using 2.6You're thinking that this is a significant thing. It isn't, at least not if you become a somewhat competent programmer.Programming has very little to do with programming language details.In fact, there's a reasonable argument that the more languages you know, the better programmer you're likely to be. Unfortunately, the difference between 2.6 and 3.1 probably isn't enough to help you in this regard. It is, however, enough to help you see some issues wrt language design."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "If all the libraries you need are already available for Python 3, then use Python 3. Otherwise, fall back to the 2.x series. Be practical. Evaluate your own needs before you listen to somebody else. The 2.x branch is here to stay for quite a long time (I'm guessing 2 to 5 years).<BEGIN RAMBLING>\nIf the users don't drive the library authors/maintainers to make their code compatible with Python 3, then we'll have to wait a very very long time for the 2.x branch to go away. I'm not saying Python 2.x is bad in any way. It just takes too much effort to maintain separate codebases for separate versions of the language. Also, I'm sure the language developers could do something much more useful with their time if they focussed on one version of the CPython implementation.\n<END RAMBLING>"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "You can use a lot Python 3 features in 2.6 and later. This document, http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html describes the difference between the two. So while I agree with the other posters that it it would be better to start with 2.6 I also think you could minimize your upgrade pain by knowing the differences and doing as many things as you can in the Python 3 style."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Practically speaking, if you want to leverage a lot of those libraries/frameworks you mentioned, 2.x is the way to go. However, the major syntactical and core differences that break backwards compatibility in Python 3000 (http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html, http://docs.python.org/3.1/whatsnew/3.1.html) should be in the back of the your mind.After working in a bit of py3k, I've found that \"small things\" such as using print() as a function rather than a statement comes more naturally than in Python 2.x, mostly because the latter doesn't complain about it.Other things like xrange()'s departure in py3k as range() becomes a true iterator -- that's something you'll have to be cognizant of.My advice is if you want to get a large project done, with support from popular and existing frameworks, go with the 2.x branch. If you're whipping up some disposable scripts, practice with py3k. And even if you're not, fire up py3k anyway.One of the great Google Summer of Code projects this year is the inverse to the 2to3 tool -- 3to2 -- with the forward-thinking intention of making it easier to maintain one branch of code in py3k. It isn't a magic bullet by any means, but should definitely encourage the transition from Python 2.x to 3000."
}
] | en | 0.964583 |
Amazon S3 Now Has An SLA | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Looks just as useless as every other SLA I've seen. Even the longest outages only get you a 25% refund, with no compensation for incidental damages. Furthermore any outage due to force majeure or \"the actions of you or any third party\" is excluded, which can easily be construed to mean just about anything."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "They can be down for 7.3 hours in one month, and all you get is a 25% discount?They would have done better to say nothing."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The gist of it is a 99.9% uptime guarantee. "
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "awesome, S3 is one step closer to being a true CDN. "
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "We're Committed to One \"Nine\" of Reliability! (tm)"
}
] | en | 0.974913 |
Allow “Phone a Friend” during Technical Interviews? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Technical Interviews should be a sit down and code session for an hour or two with someone on the team (it can even be a remote screen-share session). Everyone I've ever hired/not hired I've done this with and it is quickly obvious if they can do the job. I just give them an issue from an open source project I have and a clone of the master branch and ask them to solve it, they can use Google or whatever resources they want. With me looking at their process I can easily tell if they are qualified for the job.I just hired someone for a job who's first response was to copy and paste the error code into Google and view a stack overflow post with a similar problem. From there he took what the response on stack overflow said and crafted a solid solution to the issue. It took him about an hour and I saw that he had to Google a few functions (Python language) but he showed he knew the resources he needed and the basics to coding solutions to problems.I don't care if you know how to create a linked list in C on a piece of paper or why we have round manhole covers instead of square, this isn't useful in the real world, I want to see if you can solve a real problem and the method you go about it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "We have candidates that make it through the first cut of \"culture fit\" interviews do an open ended coding project with some of our real data.What they do and how long they take to do it is totally up to them. They can call a friend, use online resources, and even contact anyone at the company with questions. They present their project at their second interview.It has been a great way to gauge technical, problem solving, and presentation skills as well as interest in our company."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "All this interview crap is just that -- crap. It's a poorly performing, bureaucratic cover-your-ass piece of bullshit window-dressing that should largely go away. It's the interviewee crafting a word-picture of themselves that might as well be fictional while the interviewers are crafting an imaginary picture of the interviewee that might as well be fictional. The only way to figure out what it's like to work with somebody is to work with them.EDIT: People have to communicate as part of their jobs. An interview is fine for determining that, because that's what it is. If you think it will help you determine how good they are to work with, or how well someone codes, you're living in a fantasy land."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Testing a candidate's ability to express themselves is a good idea, but there are probably simpler ways of doing it than phoning a friend. If you wish to test communication skills, ask them an open-ended question like \"how does a browser/OS/compiler/database work?\".I wouldn't like put one of my friends in such a position when answering an interview question. Nor would I like to be (partly) responsible for a friend's performance in theirs.Anyway, surely a candidate that can do the question on their own is better than one that can't. And surely the friend that can answer the question is better than the candidate?A technical interview question shouldn't be about specific knowledge of particular problems (although bad ones often are, usually having \"Aha!\" moments). They should test areas of knowledge: reversing a linked list is checking if they understand how pointers work, something which is not really possible to learn in 5 minutes of Googling, even if they can then answer the question. Questions should test general technical problem solving skills, which are not easily Googled, even if a specific instance is.Finally, if a candidate requires knowledge of a particular API (e.g. the order of parameters to a function), then the interviewer should tell them. If the interviewer doesn't know, then they must acknowledge that it's not really important, and allow the candidate to just pseudocode it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "That what practical tests are for. Throw a problem to solve, leave the programmer for an hour and see what he'll produce, while having normal access to the online world.But you don't want to check encyclopedic knowledge during interview talk. You want to check how well he understands what he's doing, what is his approach to problems, what kind of problems did he solve in the past and how he did it, and lot of other things that don't require the only one correct answer (and cannot even be answered by one)."
}
] | en | 0.972406 |
The /bin/true Command and Copyright | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Alas, this is almost off-topic but I'll mention it anyway. This is part of the \"Reporting Bugs\" section of the GNU /bin/false command: REPORTING BUGS\n Report false bugs to [email protected]\n\nI love commands with pesky names."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "While looking for the GNU true source code I found that raganwald has blogged about this earlier. His conclusion seems sound: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/recursive-implementation...The source code is in this Daily WTF thread: http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/3779.aspx"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "There are two things that should be note about copyright, which would have prevented AT&T or anyone else from actually enforcing any copyright on such simple files.First, copyright does not protect ideas--it only protects the way an author expressed the idea. The closer the expression is to the minimal way to express the idea, the less likely it is to be copyrightable. In the case of the simple implementations of /bin/true and /bin/false, they are pretty darned close to minimal.Second, if you have author X who produces a copyrightable work, and author Y who later independently produces a work that happens to be identical to X's work, but Y did not copy elements from X, Y is not infringing X's copyright.This second case doesn't happen often. If someone were to decide to write a novel about boy wizards, and produced something identical to the first Harry Potter book, no one would believe that they did this without copying from Rowling. However, if the work is small enough, an identical independent work is believable.In the case of the simple /bin/true and /bin/false, a defense that you didn't copy from AT&T would be believable. Even if you admitted you looked at the AT&T source or had it described to you, it would be believable that you produced your own expression of the idea of \"a do nothing shell script\" and a \"shell script that exits with status 255\"."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "For comparison, here is /usr/bin/false from my Solaris box: $ cat /usr/bin/false \n #!/usr/bin/sh\n # Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T\n # All Rights Reserved\n \n # THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T\n # The copyright notice above does not evidence any\n # actual or intended publication of such source code.\n\n #ident \"@(#)false.sh 1.6 93/01/11 SMI\" /* SVr4.0 1.3 */\n exit 255\n\nYou'll notice the slight difference with `true`."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Did AT&T actually tried to enforce this copyright? Because what I see is auto-generated header that is put to every shell script present on the system. Entertaining nonetheless."
}
] | en | 0.913923 |
Operations Research Tools developed at Google Open Sourced | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "A little more information on it would be helpful. Like, a description. Or anything except acknowledgement of its existence, for which merely noting that https://code.google.com/p/or-tools/ does not return a 404 is wholly sufficient.There seems to be an epidemic on most code hosting sites that prevents people from fleshing out information on their project. Is it just less fun than coding? Do they really not know what a good description / use case would be? Or is it just that most things are one-off attempts which will never be visited again, adding to the pollution of non-maintained code projects out there?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Maybe I'm missing something, but does anyone see what the tool actually does. I saw the constraint solver, but there are already many existing packages that do the same (Octave is open-source, I believe). What is all the excitement about?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't know anything about OR but I see constraint solving on there. Has anyone looked at Alice ML or Oz for solving these kinds of problems? Do they apply? Am I confused?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Indeed Operations Research is a bit more than just Constraint Programming, but this is interesting (I'm an OR guy). A much larger framework with open-source software for OR is Coin-OR:http://www.coin-or.org/"
}
] | en | 0.953752 |
Common Usability Mistakes | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There are a couple of things I disagree with.Colours have very different meanings depending on where the culture. The go-to example is how red is percieved in the U.S. (danger/bad) versus China (happiness/luck).With regards to website names in titles, URLs aren't displayed in some history lists. It's also important to remember the sizable chunk of the population that Googles everything and has no idea how to read a URL."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think one of the most loathsome and ubiquitous UI sins is the \"show more\" style of navigation, where some ajaxy cruft goes and makes the page longer, propagated with more data. Paginated navigation (ex: flickr) is much friendlier and lends itself well to digging deep into the past whereas services such as Twitter, Brightkite, facebook and the like have practically solidified their role as platforms for ephemeral and trite chatter with one simple UI decision."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "1) Good idea. Tangent: a token would NOT prevent a dictionary attack. It is pretty simple to mimic the functionality of a web browser using server side code including grabbing whatever token the web browser should be passing back. Doesn't mean you should not persist data though.2) ...that dotted line is so ugly...but fine5) html maxlength attribute? maybe this is too web 1.0 for some people8) ...ut if you do not prefix your title with, por ejemplo, BBC then BBC bookmarks will be mixed with others. At least this way when sorted alphabetically bookmarks from the same domain will be grouped together and even sorted correctly amongst themselves."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "As for #1, there's a good reason why login forms shouldn't persist form state: it leaks information. Showing the successful username leaks information that that username exists. It also is a subtle, possibly incorrect, hint that the user typed their username correctly. It is just as likely that the user typed their username wrong, and as the number of users go up, the chance of a one or two character difference between usernames is increased. If the username field is filled in, users might realize that they entered it wrong and won't fix it, but rather just retype the password, the wrong password for the account given."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Pluralizing everything with an apostrophe isn't a usability problem, but boy does this article do it a lot."
}
] | en | 0.93993 |
Flaws in Tor anonymity network spotlighted | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I wish the article's author had done a little bit of background work to find references to the CCC presenter's research.Here is the paper published last year describing the research on fingerprinting. The second URL at uni-regensburg.de does not require an ACM account to download the paper.Website fingerprinting: attacking popular privacy enhancing technologies with the multinomial naïve-bayes classifier\nhttp://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1655008.1655013\nhttp://epub.uni-regensburg.de/11919/1/authorsversion-ccsw09....Dominik Herrmann, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany\nRolf Wendolsky, JonDos GmbH, Regensburg, Germany\nHannes Federrath, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany\"Privacy enhancing technologies like OpenSSL, OpenVPN or Tor establish an encrypted tunnel that enables users to hide content and addresses of requested websites from external observers This protection is endangered by local traffic analysis attacks that allow an external, passive attacker between the PET system and the user to uncover the identity of the requested sites. However, existing proposals for such attacks are not practicable yet.We present a novel method that applies common text mining techniques to the normalised frequency distribution of observable IP packet sizes. Our classifier correctly identifies up to 97% of requests on a sample of 775 sites and over 300,000 real-world traffic dumps recorded over a two-month period. It outperforms previously known methods like Jaccard's classifier and Naïve Bayes that neglect packet frequencies altogether or rely on absolute frequency values, respectively. Our method is system-agnostic: it can be used against any PET without alteration. Closed-world results indicate that many popular single-hop and even multi-hop systems like Tor and JonDonym are vulnerable against this general fingerprinting attack. Furthermore, we discuss important real-world issues, namely false alarms and the influence of the browser cache on accuracy.\"Also related (no account required to download the paper):Compromising Tor Anonymity Exploiting P2P Information Leakage\nhttp://fr.arxiv.org/abs/1004.1461Pere Manils, Chaabane Abdelberri, Stevens Le Blond, Mohamed Ali Kaafar, Claude Castelluccia, Arnaud Legout, Walid Dabbous (All - INRIA Sophia Antipolis / INRIA Rhône-Alpes)\"Privacy of users in P2P networks goes far beyond their current usage and is a fundamental requirement to the adoption of P2P protocols for legal usage. In a climate of cold war between these users and anti-piracy groups, more and more users are moving to anonymizing networks in an attempt to hide their identity. However, when not designed to protect users information, a P2P protocol would leak information that may compromise the identity of its users. In this paper, we first present three attacks targeting BitTorrent users on top of Tor that reveal their real IP addresses. In a second step, we analyze the Tor usage by BitTorrent users and compare it to its usage outside of Tor. Finally, we depict the risks induced by this de-anonymization and show that users' privacy violation goes beyond BitTorrent traffic and contaminates other protocols such as HTTP.\""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This exact same flaw exists for HTTPS. Well, SSL in general. It's not Tor specific."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm doubtful of their 55-60% accuracy claim; how could a statistical analysis of encrypted traffic differentiate between samizdat and benign text? Or, more relevantly, whether someone browsing Wikipedia is looking up Tienanmen or just porn?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Note that we at JonDonym will have developed a strong countermeasure within the next few weeks..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I don't get Tor - doens't the risk that somebody does something illicit that appers to originate from your IP render its value questionable?EG the German arrested when a bomb threat was posted via Tor but traced back to his IP?http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9779225-46.html"
}
] | en | 0.871735 |
Photo uploading is broken | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I just want to add in my experience in this field and using Filepicker.io as a service:We spent the better part of two weeks introducing inline images into our social network's stream which worked by the user copy-pasting a URL to a youtube video/vimeo video/imgur gallery page/imgur photo page/direct link to any image mimetype into their status update box and posting it. If they did this, some javascript would (almost) magically show a preview of the attached media and show them that it would be displayed inline. We thought it was awesome and would be the greatest thing ever.No one used it.Not only that, our biggest assumption was wrong: Our users didn't know how to upload photos from their computers onto imgur or another photo upload service, if they were told they could copy/paste the URL to an image and have it show up.Luckily, the weekend after we released this feature Filepicker was announced and we jumped on it right away, I set up a new version of inline images on our site using Filepicker and our previous method combined in less than 2 days, and it was live that Monday, and guess what? While most people still don't add images on our site, the usage rate has almost gone up by 10x."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Oh, how timely! My startup has been pondering whether to incorporate filepicker.io after someone recommended it to us. Photos are extremely important for our site, but for now we've just been using a basic multipart form upload which has been a pain.I've looked through the docs briefly, but couldn't find exactly this question answered: Can we force our users to crop their photos to a certain dimension with filepicker.io? I played with the Aviary demo and was able to crop, but I couldn't tell if there was a way for the implementor to specify and lock the dimensions.Currently we have users upload their raw photo, then send them to a cropping page, and then save that, but if we could replace it all in one go with this tool that would be amazing!Then, if I'm reading it correctly, we're given a URL and have four hours to grab the image from you guys?Lastly, and I feel a little dirty for asking, but I've been working on this since \"what's the worst that can happen?\": are any sort of discounts you can offer for a fellow HN user? We're in TechStars Boston and there's a lot of cross-talk among the startups about nifty tools and services to use, so I can assure you we'd promote filepicker.io if it's as amazing and convenient as it seems!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've been through this precise problem both from a developer's as well as a consumer's standpoint.As a developer, when we built Unifyphotos(http://export.goyaka.com/) to transfer photos from flickr to facebook, and got some traffic peaks, it was lot of work to scale up the download_from_flickr -> scale_photos -> upload_to_Facebook process, and we had 6 machines just doing this. Wish Filepicker.io was there back then. We could just have worried about the features and not the infrastructure. Even better, if Facebook used Filepicker, there would have been no need for a service to migrate those photos.From a consumer side, I've often had to download my Facebook profile pic and upload as profile pic on sites like trello, basecamp, etc. If only they used Filepicker.io..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Thanks for the Picplum (https://www.picplum.com) shout-out guys. We had specific requirements around custom UI for using Filepicker. We worked with their team to get it built and integrated in less than a week. Love the support!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "All I want for Photos-Are-Broken Christmas is a plugin to take a Dropbox folder and display a nicely formatted gallery on a Wordpress blog.It also wouldn't hurt if Dropbox would stop trying to wrap image links in a gallery page. Anyway, here's a picture of a robot's shadow on Mars.https://photos-3.dropbox.com/thumb/AADVCsDpEacRaKHkyoPhQUU86...Uploading was trivial. Sharing was a bit harder because they made it harder.Anyone want to make and sell that Wordpress plugin? It would make sharing trivial for a broad audience with a habit of paying for useful plugins."
}
] | en | 0.938489 |
What everyone is forgetting about the Pixel | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I am a rare convert, I went from PC to MBP and back again. And deeply regret moving back to the MBP. Currently on an Asus UX31e (Zenbook), and whilst it looks quite cool and industrial, the keyboard sucks, the LCD is defective (and I'm currently arguing with Asus about warranty claims, but that's another story). So, excuse my cynicism surrounding the real 'quality' of other high end devices.The hard drive is a pretty good point, the LTE/3G data connection + 1TB cloud storage could overcome this, but I live in Australia, so the data costs would be enormous. Also, I did run Ubuntu for a while on my MBP and it was ok, but there were some hardware issues (power management mostly).I wasn't aware of the kernel issues, this could be a problem. Damn. :P"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm wary about getting a Chrome laptop to run Ubuntu on, because (aiui) there is no way to run a kernel on it other than the ChromeOS kernel. I worry that an update to the Ubuntu userspace could cause it to rely on features present in the Ubuntu kernel but not in the ChromeOS kernel (perhaps if Ubuntu was using a more recent version of Linux than ChromeOS was) and thus crash or otherwise be unstable."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "But there are many manufacturers that make nice hardware. I love my Lenovo, Sony and Samsung make some pretty nice stuff too.What makes the Pixel any better than the high-end devices from these companies? And though many will say that you can't get the Pixel screen on any of the available devices, don't forget that you also can't get a Pixel with a hard-drive of reasonable size."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Not with a 32GB (or 64GB) SSD, unfortunately. It looks like it uses a USB SD card reader rather than a PCI one -- which I expect to be slow -- so that's not a good way to expand storage either.But other than storage, it seems to be almost everything I'd want in a dev laptop."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "To add to this, I just saw this post this morning too, which strengthens this argument https://plus.google.com/112449749826562830126/posts/ZS9Waegr..."
}
] | en | 0.963215 |
2003 Boeing 727-223 disappearance | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "In 2009 a boing 737 originating out of Venezuela was purposefully crashed landed in the sahara desert to transport massive amounts of cocaine. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8364383.stm \n It is rumored that more planes were landed in the desert for similar purposes. Maybe the 727 was used as a one-way drug plane thereafter too?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Cool in-depth story about this: http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-727-that-va...You really get a sense of how parts of Africa is like the wild west."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "...and the tracking transponder was turned off.That is interesting. I would have guessed that it be impossible to turn off the transponder on a commercial grade aircraft."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ABen_Charles_Padilla> Yes, I am Joseph B. Padilla, SR. I live in Pensacola, Florida - U.S.A. I am the Brother of Ben Charles Padilla Jr."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "A private plane was stolen from a friend of mine from a hangar in Texas. I think it showed up for sale as a salvage plane with its wings removed. Considering how valuable aircraft are, it seems a bit too economical to bribe hangar personnel."
}
] | en | 0.891483 |
BitTorrent Piracy Doesn’t Affect US Box Office Returns, Study Finds | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Whenever I hear statements like that (that the musical/movie industry is growing thanks to piracy, etc), the only logical question for me is - why are they fighting it so hard then?I mean, they are fighting the various P2P sites and users for years, spending large amounts of money on various legal fights and lobbyists. The wouldn't do this if it really didn't hurt their sales.People can say \"they are doing it because they are stupid\". Well, maybe they are, but they also have far better statistics than we have. They know far better what is hurting their sales.I am not really arguing for copyright industry here, but I am just saying - if it didn't hurt them, they wouldn't be fighting it so hard."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "People talk about the \"business model\" of the film and music industries.But they have a \"moral model\", which is to present copyright itself as a moral proposition. Everything about why it is hard for us to stop the never-ending creation of new laws and international treaties that attack freedoms of computer use and internet use is due to this moral model.It follows that empirical studies proving the \"harmlessness\" of piracy are largely irrelevant."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "...like rational, scientifically backed arguments, will burst MPAA/RIAA's bubble. For anyone on the outside, the findings in this article are common sense. So is the fact that MPAA/RIAA's business model is severely broken. Yet, that doesn't matter when you have Washington on your payroll. Unfortunately."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What is the logic behind waiting to release Hollywood movies outside of the US?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "US Movies are often released outside of the US to see how well they go, so that an appropriate marketing spend can be done. Various small countries, and small towns will go first. Like New Zealand.If the movie does ok, then that is more evidence for the investors to ok the massive marketing spends. But if their trial marketing fails (and their 10 different versions of it), then the movie will be released changed or released in one of the spare slots; the slots that they need to fill in the movie theatres to keep their quadmopoly(if they don't take up the screens with some crappy movie then some independent might get a shot at a screening instead)."
}
] | en | 0.975587 |
Ask HN: Examples of Great Getting Started Wizards | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I checked out Dropbox's Getting Started page after reading the comment and liked it alot. In fact, I spent today implementing a getting-started page similar to Dropbox's one. In my case, Marrily is a B2C app, and the first impression of the average user (presumably females -- excited, frustrated, and maybe choosy because they will be emotionally attached to the app and the planning) will probably be critical. I have not looked around that much, but Dropbox's implementation is nice, and in my case I only had to tweak some code to get the Getting Started checklist to work.I'm not sure how well the Getting Started list would work when people use the app, but my gut feeling so far, as I pretended to be a new user, is that having a list of concrete steps to start without too much thinking is a no-brainer. Combining with a guided tour (e.g. mqmouse's suggestion of amberjack) with the list will be a good way to familiarize user with the app, and build up their engagement from passive (the app is there to be discovered) to guided (the app is presented visually and very direct).My take on this is the getting started should only highlight the most critical features of the app, while not forcing users to go through a lengthy wizard. This app comes to my mind as one of the worst wizards I've seen: http://www.rsvphere.com/.Good luck and keep us posted with your progress."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Even though dropbox is probably simple enough to use without one, their \"getting started\" walkthrough is really the golden standard in my mind. Grooveshark is a little different, but whenever you access the site from a new IP, their little tooltips are informative yet unobtrusive. They're constantly improving their product too so they help with that too.Just signed up for LeadNuke though, if anything comes to mind while I try it out I'll add it later."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The Obama campaign intranet used game mechanics to show people what task they can perform.http://www.empowerbase.com/index.php/organizational-change/o...Some photo retouching tools show a grid the possible actions, so that users can select \"brighter, more like this\". etc."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Why aren't you pricing lower to draw in startups? There is still some automation that could be done to make the process easier. For example, why not let users give you keyphrases, and you pull in \"relevant\" blogs/posts/sites that they can filter through? That helps reduce search time. (not sure what feed2lead does with RSS).Email templating is nice to have, but IMO most businesses probably won't use more than 3 different kinds of message.CRM add-ons are also useless IMO, unless your customers are specifically asking for integration for it. I would think most people who use your service wouldn't do enough volume to warrant it.Ideally in the future, you'd also want to integrate email directly through your app or the client's server. That way, you can send all at once, track responses automatically, and maybe do a few neat things with that. I had the same idea for this app while doing cold email sales to drum up business. The hardest part isn't sending the email, it's finding more and more sources."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Android's widgets widget is quite good. Simple and to the point. Think Microsoft Office's paper clip, only that you can get rid of and which has 5 or 6 tips in it."
}
] | en | 0.948449 |
J: an alternative to cd that learns where you spend time | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is nice.Kind of but not really in a similar vein: I have 'sd' aliased to a small script that goes to the 'next interesting directory', where an 'interesting directory' is one with a visible non-directory or more than one sub-directory. So, for instance, if you're sitting at foo, and underneath you is bar/baz/bat/bit.txt, 'sd bar' will bring you all the way down to bat, and then 'sd ..' will pull you all the way back up to the previous interesting directory.Just to keep from getting lost, it does a pwd when it gets where it's going, and because typing ls after cd had burned itself into my muscle memory, it goes ahead and does that, too.It's a small thing, but I really like it for hopping around source trees in languages that use directories to denote package structure."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "For any zsh users out there, I made a couple changes so it works in zsh: http://github.com/burke/j"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Very neat tool. I saw this when it was mentioned on a post I made not long ago.If you want something you can simply add to .bashrc, here are some bash functions to also help jump around to directories you want:\nhttp://mattie.posterous.com/some-handy-bash-commandsThere's a link there for the \"up\" command (taking you to some directory higher in your path with that name) and also for \"down\" (similar downward) and \"cdd\" which just does a rapid use of locate to find the first directory that matches."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "why not use CDPATH?At work, I have the interesting heads of our source tree in CDPATH, so I can get to most directories I care about by typing their short names.For instance http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200503181431142..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Ok, I feel like an idiot. When it says \"source this into your .bashrc\" what does it mean?I know where .bashrc is, but simply pasting it into the file seems like .. the wrong way to do it. Couldn't really find an answer on Google"
}
] | en | 0.918957 |
Git Management for WordPress | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Wordpress is less than ideal for managing via git, primarily due to their plugin architecture. The best way I have managed to use git is to put the repo at the wp-content level and only watch the theme and plugin directories. Then anytime I make updates to a plugin or group of plugins, I make sure to commit those changes as a seperate commit to what I am normally working on. It is tedious and hacky, but it at least gets me basic version control functionality with the ability to roll back on any code that can effect theme functionality."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It seems as though it works in reverse from a normal git setup--items which get changed on the server directly through say a UI initiated upgrade can be tracked and reverted in GIT from a dashboard. Kinda cool for single server installs.Storing the DB state in GIT is going to be an issue with a site of any substance."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've done this before (though not using this solution), and I'll never do it again. Managing Wordpress (and the database backups) with Git causes ENORMOUS history files over time, to the tune of many gigs on the server depending on the size and configuration of the site. It isn't worth it. Perhaps only monitoring a couple directories (such as plugins) would be better, but too limited for a serious whole-framework solution."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Slightly offtopic: was surprised yesterday when publishing my first plugin at wordpress.org to find they use SVN.Thankfully there was a deploy.sh script on github [1] which could be used to deploy your plugin from git repo straight to wordpress.org's SVN repo. :)[1] https://github.com/pdclark/deploy-plugin-to-wordpress-dot-or..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Wordpress in next to not manageable with git anyway in my experience.The plugin system is totally broken when it comes to versioncontrol. Anything added to wordpress might f.. up the db or the cms itself.\nWordpress codebase is f.ed up, ugly, badly architectured yet this is the most popular CMS and its ecosystem is huge.\nIt's amazing and scary."
}
] | en | 0.933839 |
How to attract girls to the tech industry | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "When the article tries to deal with Lovelace:> Ada Lovelace was coding in a time when few men didReally? Even such an obtuse statement indicates a complete ignorance of what she did weakening further any point they have to make. Not helped by the fact they have not indicated the IT interests and acomplishments of the girl whom is the subject of the article. Some of the worst (Male) employees we have ever hired as developers had either 1st class BEng or even PhD level qualifications. Degree programs in IT in the UK are approaching worthless for the most part.This article is infuriating, a complete abomination and demonstrative of everything which is wrong with the approach to girls in technology. The topic is now approaching a level of dullness that makes me wonder if anything will ever change.Issues with the articles assume external factors actively opressing the abilities of girls. Abilities cannot be suppressed. They can only fail to exploit them in the light of other social roadblocks. There is no indication of any understanding in the article as to why girls don't pursue jobs in STEM. There is an inferrence that a patriarchy is responsible and is actively seeking their exclusion. Applications of statistics in this area fail to illuminate but at all any useful causal link. The reason being polical correctness refuses people\\\n who might be willing to propose logical reasons for the gap an audience due to the refusal to listen to what is perceived as mysogeny.How many women are there in other industries who have to, on a daily basis, do highly competative problem solving. There are plenty in Science and Humanities PhD positions. How does that differ from seeking actively problem solving roles in IT?I'm so fed up with the whole thing."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> Mrs Lovelace was coding in an age when even few men wereIt's even better than that. Ada was coding before there were COMPUTERS.Also see Bret Victor's rant on creating the future:\n"In 1968 — three years before the invention of the microprocessor — Alan Kay stumbled across Don Bitzer's early flat-panel display. Its resolution was 16 pixels by 16 pixels — an impressive improvement over their earlier 4 pixel by 4 pixel display. Alan saw those 256 glowing orange squares, and he went home, and he picked up a pen, and he drew a picture of a goddamn iPad."\nhttp://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm a woman and a programmer. I don't know why they aren't more female programmers. Going through school up through high school, I always had the impression that of my fellow classmates, the girls were the best in class. Pre-calculus was the highest math course my dinky high school offered, and there were a couple girls in there with me out of maybe eight students total. It was only when I came to college that I started seeing way more men in my CS and math classes, and lost the impression that guys were just apathetic about school. The only girls in my classes were Indian or Asian, and there weren't many of them. One other white girl I knew told me she went into CS because she thought that was the right field for becoming a secretary. I've never had problems with guys harassing me because of my interests or jobs, for which I suppose I'm fortunate. I wish I knew why there were so few women in my college CS classes, and why I rarely meet other female programmers in my town now."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The title is actually Why tech needs a makeover to attract girls but the article doesn't say why. Technology is at the forefront of the economy and women have a vital role to play feels rather empty.And while I'm sure Brazil and India can offer insights and be on the forefront of improving policies, those are not really very enticing models to emulate. Let's be honest, women in India work in IT to get ahead because India is poor."I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."Hipsters are living the dream. Most people don't want to slave away at the keyboard."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Obligatory Kate Beaton comics:\nhttp://www.harkavagrant.com/history/lovelacesm.png"
}
] | en | 0.979355 |
So You'd Like to Make a Map using Python | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Cool article, explains how you can do anything using Python, although doesn't mention Mapnik. However, for most people, these days I would recommend to try TileMill (https://www.mapbox.com/tilemill/) to make a map. The CartoCSS can let you style anything based on attributes and it also lets you add and style raster data."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "My biggest problem with maps these days is the data license for commercial use. I dont need very detailed map, usually administrative level 2, but it's hard to find accurate sources that dont make you pay thousands of dollars per small userbase. We create our own app and distribute it, therefore cannot exactly estimate our userbase. Does anybody know of a decent source with good, fairly detailed world maps and liberal license ? Doesn't have to be free."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "In our company we use python to make maps, but we go with the traditional GIS approach, dependencies?: postgis and mapnik.\nThe first two examples would be solved by a single postgis query, the last one maybe would require some extra work. But nice work anyway, bookmarked."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Surprised to see that they're using basemap instead of cartopy. There's nothing wrong with using basemap, but it can be a bit clunky, i.m.o.Then again, cartopy is only a year or two old, so it doesn't have the traction that basemap does. It's gained a fairly large following very quickly, though."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "There's also Vincent[1], which has some mapping capabilities and is built on top of Vega (a "visualization grammar" for d3js).[1]: https://github.com/wrobstory/vincent"
}
] | en | 0.913912 |
The Parable of Mustache.js | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Build libraries with a spec, encourage competing implementations.This is how it's been done for many years in Java land, and it's good; really good. But it does come at a price: change is much, much slower, and eventually people might get impatient and just do their own thing.The way it works now in Java land, is that a new idea or technology comes along (e.g. web sockets), some projects implement it with no spec, and a couple of years later (hopefully; it sometimes takes much longer) a spec is created, and you get lots of compatible implementations.Sometimes you want to pull your hair out in frustration at the pace, but sometimes you're so glad to have 4 or 5 high-quality implementations for a standardized API to choose from."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm quite happy to rip optimizations out of code whether they be optimizations for speed, extensibility or reusability if - \na) I don't especially need speed, extensibility or reusability at that moment in time\nand b) it hurts readability and maintainability."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I love this! To me, nearly every good programming practice either boils down to or is dependent upon eventually picking a nice spec and separating out the implementation. It's not to say that that should be the first step: the first step is often a prototype and learning phase where you discover what a good spec would even look like, but instead that a medium-term goal of any good project should be to spit out one or many formalizations of what to expect this library to be/do."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Jan, was the conference where Yehuda avoided you Froscon a few years ago by any chance? I remember having a chat with him about the issues I was having with Mustache at the time and him hinting at solving all of them in his own project.We're still using Mustache.js for server side rendering at https://starthq.com even though we experimented with Hogan for a bit, but it proved to be less stable."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is it just me or does "clearly, not cleverly" essentially go out the window when the pro programmers get their hands on things?Agreed that hugs always win. Programmers especially need to give (and hopefully receive) more."
}
] | en | 0.974339 |
How to delete and purge my HN account? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Just stop coming here. Deleting your account doesn't stick it to "the man" anymore than not coming here."how did the downvote-jury chosen? why are they superior? what's the rule for them to downvote? for me I just feel they are a group of jerks lurking, if you call this democratic, fuck it."I thought this was pretty well documented. You have to have a certain number of points to get the downvote functionality. This is to prevent the exact kind of shit that you're complaining about. The people that are here for 3 months and then angst for "the gold old days", then downvote everything. I've not even been around here for that long, but I've been a member of the internet for long enough to know that communities are fluid."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I do not know HN's policy in particular, but some online community sites either prohibit this altogether, or do it only in select situations, as deleting and purging an account can render old archived conversations less useful.You might try sending an email to: [email protected] if you're wanting your account deleted."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Allowing deletion of comments (especially en masse) can completely ruin a thread by rendering it incomprehensible. The combined value everyone else gets from posts not being deleted is probably greater than the benefit you would get if it was allowed."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What would happen to your posts and threads? What if you are successful and I want to delete my account in 2 years. Will I be able to search and find out if its possible, or will I need to start a discussion like this one?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Send a polite message to the mods, with a good reason.To just lock yourself out, set your password to a long random string."
}
] | en | 0.974724 |
Flying Car (and 0-60 in less than 4 seconds!) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Yikes, what a death trap. This monstrosity combines the unreliability of a car with the dangers of a small aircraft.Cars are not as reliable as aircraft because they're not maintained as well, and the operators are far less disciplined.It is generally accepted that small aircraft aviation is generally 10x less safe than driving on both a passenger-mile and per-trip basis. And most small aircraft are flown for recreation, not transportation. When you fly for transportation there is a need to get from point A to point B on some reasonable schedule, which pressures the pilot to take all kinds of risks with weather, maintenance, etc. And that's for a rigorously licensed pilot. I doubt that the pilots that fly this thing will be up to the quality of even your average Cessna pilot.Combine these two factors, and you have a flying coffin. I would not be comfortable living within even a hundred miles of one of these."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is the tribal adoption scenario he's referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincaye"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": " What we want to do is develop a commercial market. Sell it\n to people up here for whatever they want to do with it. So \n we can get the quantity up so we can get the cost down so \n we can serve the humanitarian missions market which is our \n primary market.\n\nI wish the One Laptop Per Child people had taken this route instead of the \"for a limited time each year, we'll force you to buy TWO of these (and donate one of them) for each ONE that you want\" approach that they chose to do.The end result was noble in that you were contributing to charity. But the way they did it made me feel like they were gouging people."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The big problem with his \"stuck in traffic\" scenario is how do you find the space to take off. Not to mention the legality of the whole thing.Granted, it's a really cool demo, but he needs to admit that there is little real-world practicality."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Wow, that's great. Here's a video showing more taking off, flying, etc: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8b0oR0-Pgo"
}
] | en | 0.981511 |
Show HN: Felt – Personal, handwritten cards mailed from your iPad | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is not true \"handwriting,\" it is a printing of handwriting. This sort of practice is usually imperfect, and the fact that the note is not written at all is generally pretty conspicuous.Frankly, I think that most people would view this as disingenuous. The whole point of handwritten cards is that their supposed to be, uhhh, handwritten. A printout of something written seems sort of perfunctory, and isn't really better than simply sending a typed note. Indeed, the fact that one is attempting to forgo the work of writing a real card and instead using something like this will just dilute the sentiment of the gesture and appear lazy."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I remember when I ordered my mom flowers for Mother's Day (only a diplomatic gesture, since I hate the whole commercial logic of it), and she was quite upset that I had done something so impersonal as to order flowers for her online to have them delivered on the day.I had still picked out the size and combination, mind, but something about it felt insincere to her.Personally, I don't see a problem, but just a word of warning that some feel differently about the concept.Perhaps a safe way to go about it is to send it to people under a certain age."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Ok, I was figuring the handwriting would be fake, or produced by some third party. The idea of capturing your own handwriting, and printing it on the card, is pretty ingenious."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Aren't there already a million of these apps? I know that Postcard on the Run gives you the option to scribble in your own signature, and the results are as expected: crappy.I was hoping that this would be a service that provides real handwriting, as in, hire some professionals with beautiful handwriting and streamline the postal service. I'd use it all the time.Also, kudos for making it iPad only :["
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is there a \"send on [date]\" feature? It would be nice to pre-write birthday greetings, etc."
}
] | en | 0.992102 |
Ask HN: which bike would you recommend | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "What bike to choose is a very personal thing.There's no substitute for riding lots of bikes. Pay attention to how upright you like to be, how far forward you like the cranks, how wide you want the handlebars. Pay attention to whether the shifter and brake positions work well for you. Pay attention to how stiff you like the frame to feel.The only specific advice I would give you is, don't think too small. Right now you just want to do a daily routine in the park, but if you get a bike that just barely lets you do that, you might miss out on some of the other joys of biking-- touring, day rides, grocery shopping, whatever might grab your fancy in the future.You might also prowl around EcoVelo (http://www.ecovelo.info/), an advocacy site for sensible commuting bikes. That site should give you lots of ideas about what, in general, other people value."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is like asking \"What sort of woman should I marry?\", without knowing you it's impossible to say."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I love my Trek. It's a great utility bike, not flashy, and lightweight: http://www.trekbikes.com/ca/en/bikes/bike_path/fx/72fx/But if you're looking for a fixie, my friends tell me that they love their District (also Trek): http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/urban/district/district..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What does daily routine in the central park mean? Is that a mountain bike scenario (offroad, bumps/potholes, gravel etc), a road scenario, longer distance where you want comfort, shorter distance where you want speed, dual on-road off-road, around town....Bikes can come in a 'one size fits all', but you'll be hating your bike if you start liking one particular style of biking.Post a couple more details and I can get you some decent advice!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Find a local bike shop and talk to the people there. Ideally, find one where the owner actually works there. Talk to them and find out if they are there because they really actually care about cycling. Ask if they ride to work. Ask if they race. If they do really care about cycling, you can usually trust them for the most part (in my experience). Ask them for advice."
}
] | en | 0.985648 |
Y Combinator's Paul Graham: Dot-Com Bubble Was "Dumb Leading the Dumb" | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you're sitting on a large chunk of a commodity (early stage equity) you're unlikely to go around saying that it costs too much."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Interesting that a whole sfgate article came out of a single comment on this site."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "News outlets have been picking up from HN very fast indeed."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If there even was a bubble occurring it is only in the seed funding stage and not the IPO/late VC stage which ended up affecting much more than just entrepreneurs and investors.The amount of money being invested/risked is much less than it was back in the 90s, and as Paul remarked the quality of entrepreneurs and investors is much better. Most likely lessons learned from the 90s"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Or at the very least, the unscrupulous leading the dumb."
}
] | en | 0.966203 |
German villagers build own broadband network | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The part that is completely missing in that article - and could be interesting to people from outside from germany - is that this shouldn't be necessary if you follow the official worldview. The ISPs are obliged to provide High-Speed Internet to the whole of Germany, but the government is not forcing them to do that, instead letting them promise and promise again to make that happen.They do it somewhat with LTE, which they have to roll out first in rural areas before being allowed to go into the big cities (where the money is). But in the DSL-market, where there is no such force applied, they simply don't do it. Promises are worth nothing and the market doesn't succeed in providing basic infrastructure."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is also happening in Finland. It worked well for single villages, etc. but then the municipalities discovered how cheap these co-operatives were and enlisted them to build big networks. Now these companies with very little actual expertise of network building have tens of millions of budget to network almost entire counties and are failing hard."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is not at all uncommon on Sweden. Rural communities come together and organize fiber buildouts in their own local areas. Average cost is around $2000 per connection. The biggest problem is generating enough interest to make a build out economically viable.We've been working on this for two years where I live and the digging will finally begin in august, 180km of fiber to ~600 homes."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It is an interesting problem even in some areas that are not too remote. My parents are within 2 miles of the nearest cable or DSL connection, but it might as well be 100 miles. The spent a while considering a 50 foot tower for a line-of-sight radio link to a town a few miles away, but right now they still have HughesNet service with low caps and high latency.I am really not sure how I feel about their situation. They have plenty of money to throw at the problem, so they could fix it if they really wanted to, but that isn't the case for everyone. For now it is just horrible when they want to show me a youtube video and then we all huddle around the laptop for a few minutes while it buffers."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "A lot of local citizen groups have tried to do this in small towns in the US but typically what happens is Verizon or Comcast comes in with a big budget Ad campaign rallying against it. Of course their plans usually involve using the cities tax dollars but the basic idea is the same.http://www.tricitybroadband.com/"
}
] | en | 0.976659 |
The Shortest URLs | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you actually use the short url you are presented with a interstitial page for 10 seconds and prompted to sign up. Sorry, but that's kind of lame when compared to bit.ly and the like. (My example: http://➡.ws/shopobot)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I didn't understand this UI at first. URL shorteners are very common and they always have the same UI: Enter long URL, get short URL. This UI has an extra step that is small and somewhat hidden, so I kept missing it and wondering why nothing was happening.Once I get past that, how am I supposed to find a unique URL? All obvious combinations have already been taken. It seems like it would be better to generate a short URL based on words in the destination page's title or something. That way the server can take responsibility for generating something unique, short, and memorable.Finally, it seems disingenuous to market this as \"shortest URLs on earth\". Only until all the short ones that are easy to guess get taken. If you want to guarantee that users get the shortest URLs possible, it would be better to generate them - that way you can use all possible strings.Other (mostly terrible) ideas for guaranteeing \"shortest URLs on Earth\":* Buy lots of short domains, so that you can use the short combinations on all of them.* Expire the short URLs. Charge extra for permanent ones. The expired ones can be reused.* Make the short URLs language-specific and vary depending on the request language."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This thread: http://➡.ws/ㅅ퍥Meta: http://➡.ws/testing12"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think the novelty factor is great.The way I see it, this isn't necessarily a tool to generate the shortest URLs by character count ... it's more a way of demonstrating the sorts of characters that are valid in domain names, and just how short a domain name can be.I chose ✩.ws/shaun -- and I think it looks cool!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "OK, so I am trying to tell someone by phone how to get to my webpage. How do I do that?\"Key in Right Arrow.ws/abc\"Yeah, that'll work."
}
] | en | 0.960276 |
Click this link to opt out of Google's shared endorsements program | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I love the way Internet cos, led by Facebook and now Google are progressively conditioning us to different interpretations of online privacy.First it was "Like or +1" anything you like. Don't worry, it's all private.Then it was, everytime you "like or +1" something, we'll tell all your "friends".Soon, the definition of friends was enlarged to mean "people who you may know or are in some circles", effectively broadcasting your "likes and +1s" to tens of thousands of people.Finally our "likes and +1s" are now considered public endorsements, and fair game for being portrayed as advertisements (minus any compensation to us of course).I stopped using Facebook "likes" a year back, and deleted my Facebook account a few months ago. As for Google+, I signed up briefly when it launched but then promptly closed it. I've never +1-ed anything, and never will."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It's not that bad once you read into it. It's not bad at all. Google displays my recommendations to my friends, and since I only really like/+1 things I would recommend, it seems natural, and maybe even convenient.Unfortunately, the crux of the issue may lie in consumer protections. While you and I may know exactly what we're endorsing, the average consumer probably does not. The average consumer probably also does not understand that their friends also do not. Otherwise, we wouldn't see so many "FREE $500 COSTCO GIFTCARD - CLICK HERE" posts on Facebook.TL;DR: While I haven't formed a cohesive opinion about this, the problem with endorsements lies in the average case--not in the best case."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's great that Google are giving a way to opt out but I'm really struggling to see why this is something bad. Such endorsements are only shared with people you're sharing stuff with anyway, and if I saw a friend had "endorsed" a business that was displaying an ad I'd actually pay attention to that."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "You can opt-out easily if you don't click any +1. \nAnd on any case, What is the problem? If I like something, I don't care if people know that I like that.Of course If you want to build a virtual profile of your self, and you are afraid that the people discover how you really are, I can understand, but on that case, the problem is yours, not google's."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's cool to have this option.But it disturbed me. I feel like it's a way to shut off the protest (a small small minority of interested persons)...It feels like it's a choice now, but the reality is not really...\nmy sister, my parents, will never go on the options, and will never defaulted it. \nThe choice is disconnected with the impact, thus making it kind of invisible. \n"By default" is a small, but commons dark patterns."
}
] | en | 0.903498 |
Feds Approve $44K Doctor Reimbursement for Using Drchrono (YC W11) iPad App | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I showed this to a friend who has created software for the medical industry and has close ties with/knowledge of the industry. He allowed me to copy his thoughts here, with some very minor edits for privacy:Regarding Drchrono app:> a) [...] compared to PAPER it's pretty good! but its not built with speed in mind, iits built to tackle other things like billing, and assumes a more traditional practice. it aint gonna make you more $$ in an office as it does nothing to speed up the workflow and allow a doc to cut staff, which is THE overhead in a practice.> b) that 44k comes with a lot of strings. main one is that you have to have 30% medicaid patients. that alone can bankrupt a practice, as medicaid pays a fraction of what insurance/medicare pays for visits. an efficient practice, for example, would look at the 44k and say 'f that'.> other strings is what [some doctors] refers to as the 'thought police ' - you have to regularly submit reports on your patient stats to the gov't. not nec.a bad thing, but few doctors want some beauracrat to be eyeballing their stats without knowing anything about the actual patients. i'm not sure how the data will be used... i generally dont think \"outcome based\" compensation is a great way to pay either bc its hard to quantify health and management of chronic stuff etc.And opinion on medicine more generally:> medicine has been, and ought to be, a relationship business - which defies a lot of efforts to quantify it. a lean practice [with] deep personal relationships with patients (as opposed to a clinic style 35 patients/day practice, which is mayhem and prone to problems) ought to be what ppl strive towards. thats not the trend... trend is towards big groups bc individual docs are dumb and cant run their practices well.> anyway, its' a long discussion... :-) not clear what the next 10 years will bring. hunch is we'll be big losers when primary care is mostly atrophied and big groups with salaried docs are common. remember how much innovation comes from large entities. [a certain private practice he knows of] is 10 years ahead of anyones bc [it is] lean and innovative."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Nice going, guys. As a med student, this sort of stuff really excites me. It seems like the government is willing to incentivize the adoption of electronic mobile technologies in clinical practice.To all who are making quips about the $44k incentive: the amount of money that is spent on resolving logistical, administrative, and medical errors because of disorganized, incomplete health records, yearly, is astronomical. Doctors are often very technologically stubborn and those who run their own practices will usually opt for implementing whatever traditional, paper-based system they're accustomed to as they have concerns that lie elsewhere. $44k (or less) in government incentives could prove to be an amazingly cost-effective investment if adoption of these technologies can truly reduce the risk of error.I've been eager to play around with Dr. Chrono, but I'm not practicing yet, so is there a demo I can play with? I suppose I could just sign up for a free account."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "At this point it's downright comical. It seems like a significant percentage of startups these days go to market on a design that is directly copied from Shopify.compricing page:http://www.shopify.com/signup\nhttps://drchrono.com/pricing/Or worse, look at that little badge in the top right and compare it to the one at www.shopify.com frontpage."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Why is my tax money subsidizing software that should have to fight in the free market like the software most other developers write?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Personally I don't think the 44K incentive has ever made any sense. All it has done is allow existing EMR providers to charge more for their poorly designed software. \nPhysicians would have switched over on their own, if the reason were compelling enough - and that reason would be user friendly software at a reasonable price. Startups would have had more opportunities without the incentive. Now they have to offer it just to compete."
}
] | en | 0.972264 |
No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "One of my (rather cynical) friends predicts that liberal, secular, Western culture is going to die out in the long run. He thinks certain religious traditions that encourage children and families (traditional Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism) will survive, but not us. I argued it was a race--could our culture infect theirs before theirs outpopulated ours? It'll be interesting to see (in the ominous, \"may you live in interesting times\" sense of the word)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Sometimes worry that this is a depressing answer to Fermi's paradox (Fermi's paradox asks why no intelligent life has been found, if the odds of it are so high):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradoxMaybe when a species/civilization gets to a certain point of sophistication and intelligence, the motive to keep expanding (or even reproducing, apparently) stops, and they don't go on to colonize anywhere else.Really, the only reason the Americas are so populated right now is because of crazy overpopulation in Europe at the time. If a new continent was discovered today (or if Mars was suddenly terraformed), how long would it take for it to be populated? Would it ever be?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think the problem is integrating family life with the rest of your life. Right now both concepts are completely orthogonal, so when you start a family suddenly you have a much bigger management problem.(I Am Not An Anthropologist, but) My understanding of traditional hunter gatherer societies is that women would keep on working even with a small baby. The baby could be strapped to the womans back, or simply kept close by, so that the woman could keep working but still have quick access to the baby to nurse it when needed.When the child got older, they would have the entire tribe looking out for them, so there wasn't a need for constant micromanagement. We have daycares, but that only lasts half the day. After work the parents are expected to dedicate the rest of their night to supervising. That's a big (and unnatural) time commitment, in my opinion."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Women of Europe! We need to remedy this situation. I'll do my bit if you do yours. Email address is in my profile, please attach pictures.(I kid, I kid. I've already done my share: the little one is expected next month)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Compare with this article from a few months back: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.... . While this article isn't exclusively about just birth rate, it notes that Sweden has one of the higher birthrates in Europe. Looking at wikipedia, the birth rate for Sweden is still (what I suppose is) low, only 1.67, compared with the US at 2.09.edit: just in case you aren't inclined to read through, the article is about granting fathers paternity leave."
}
] | en | 0.948214 |
WikiLeaks candidate quits upcoming Australian elections | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Australia implements a form of proportional representation where the votes of losing candidates in an election can be directed to other candidates who remain viable, so as to ensure they are not wasted even though they are no longer optimized. Candidates encourage their supporters to vote themselves #1, and give their second-preference votes to someone else, though voters are free to disregard this. In such a system, by voting for every candidate in order you can also make sure that your least favorite candidate is disadvantaged, essentially an explicit vote for 'anyone but X'.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting'white-anted' refers to erosion from within, as by termites.As for the particular events of the story, I am somewhat surprised (eg by the idea of giving preference to right-wing candidates), but also not. Assange's comment that Wikileaks is a party of accountability and not government sounds to me like a desire for power (as a kingmaker) without responsibility. The coalition structures that often emerge in proportional representation systems lend themselves to this sort of politicking."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The Wikileaks party ought to be ashamed of themselves.Not only did they screw up majorly by preferencing hard-right parties ahead of the progressive Greens. But they betrayed Scott Ludlam in WA who was one of the only people to stand up for Assange.http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/08/19/wikileaks-partys-adminis..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "See a better explanation here: http://danielmathews.info/blog/2013/08/statement-of-resignat..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Bloody hell we've got an interesting election on our hands. The Liberals and Abbott will triumph in the House of Reps and probably the Senate depending on preferences it seems. After that though, it's very interesting."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Australian election politics sounds like a genuine labyrinth. And I thought the primary process in the US was difficult to wrap my head around. Compound this with what, according to bentoner's link [0], sounds like substantial internal conflict within the party, and I don't have high hopes for the success of the Wikileaks party in Australia this go 'round. Though honestly, it sounds like they're just discovering that a democratic, Kumbaya approach is anathema to actually getting anything done. It all works great when everyone agrees. When divisive decisions have to be made and stuck by? Not so much. Dr. Mathews appears to agree:>He really ought not to have set up a party with internal democracy.[0] http://danielmathews.info/blog/2013/08/statement-of-resignat...EDIT:Excerpt from Wikileaks party responsehttps://www.wikileaksparty.org.au/the-wikileaks-party-announ...>If we are unsuccessful in having the AEC adjust the submitted preference nominations to meet the National Council’s directives, we will release a “how to vote below the line” card so all supporters and voters can follow our true preference nominations, or select their own, so any remaining errors on our GVTs will not be passed on to our voters.If I'm understanding this right, the Australians have the privilege of instant run-off preferential voting, and still prefer to just vote party line? Could an Aussie please explain this phenomenon to me? Coming from the states, I'd be frothing at the mouth to have anything other than our absurd closed (depending on state) primary single-vote elections."
}
] | en | 0.974484 |
Show HN: Weekend hack - Twitter Bootstrap + Jplayer + Youtube API | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is pretty good! I built a video/audio playlist app myself earlier this year called Muxamp, at http://muxamp.com/. I like your approach to the user interface, especially way you've laid out the top bar."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Your list of videos below the video player keep jumping to the bottom instead of sticking at the top of the list for me.Also, if you plan on continuuing with this project, I recommend improving your web page's performance: http://imgur.com/t02Hb (Although, great job at correctly ordering the CSS and JS files in your HTML - that is such an easy and great way to improve your page's speed.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Your dropdowns are being hidden by the video player. To fix this you need to1. set the `wmode` on the embed to `opaque`, though this disables some optimizations and thus takes up more CPU2. hide the video while drop downs are active3. (probably best) move the drop-downs to where they don't overlap with the video"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Looks great!! I have been playing with jplayer for a bit now and have been wanting to get started using it with the Youtube API. Are there any good tutorials or information about using the two together?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Great work. Conceptually Not unlike Youtify.com. Think its open source as well. https://github.com/youtify/ - you guys should team up!"
}
] | en | 0.886591 |
Introducing Avocado: A new toolbox for interaction designers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's nice to have a set of abstracted patches instead of having to build every goddamn thing from scratch."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Why does everyone build these on top of Quartz Composer? It seems like there's a huge demand for a prototyping tool that supports animations."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Oh no! Not another VPL :-) I am looking forward to seeing interesting applications."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "See also: http://facebook.github.io/origami/ - Another QC-based UI/UX toolchain"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "please do not auto play the videos."
}
] | en | 0.860193 |
Ask HN: How do you pull all-nighter+dayers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't. I think it is extremely unhealthy and unproductive to stay awake and work for such long periods of time."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Concentration and motivation from the task at hand. Most of my all-nighters have been unplanned and were reactive to a software upgrade gone bad.A memorable one was a software upgrade to Cascade switches at AADS. Turns out the new firmware consumed more RAM than anticipated and we ended up with 10's of thousands of circuits down throughout their network of ~250 backbone switches. I spent 3.5 days straight with nothing more than a couple of two hours naps and LOTS of pizza, coffee, soda, etc. The magnitude of the situation pretty much prevented me from sleeping. Had a couple of other 36 and 48 hour shifts during that same job. Every time I've done any marathon sessions, it was always unplanned and urgent."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Can't speak from personal experience, but from I'm read this is near ideal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil Don't get the Indian generic, it is reportedly not equivalent.And don't pull all-nighters, you're much better off getting some sleep if not a full 6-7 hours."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I find coffee to be terrible for all-nighters. I find the best method to be a combination of 15-20 minute naps and either lots of strong black tea or small sips of sugar-free energy drinks.Of course, as most posters point out, actually sleeping is always best, but sometimes it just has to be done."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "fear tends to work well."
}
] | en | 0.961877 |
How did non US citizen founders funded by YC get allowed to work in the US? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I have been on 6 different visas, over 15 years, I have quite a bit of experience in the matter.1. 90% of the answers in this thread are bad advice. Some of it really bad. A lot of it just misleading, bogus or exaggerated (on HN, it's bad form to criticize others, but when it comes to life-altering advice such as here, I can't let it stand).2. It's too complicated to explain in a paragraph. It depends on too many factors.3. The best lawyer site I have ever seen is http://usvisanews.com. Read this weekly for 6 months, then you'll start having an idea of how it worksA few facts:a. anybody can incorporate a US corporation. You don't even have to set foot in the US, by the way, to do so.b. the main issue is living in the US while having some kind of activity for a company. It's usually defined as work, and that's when you must be very careful and have the right status."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I suspect that while the non-US teams are at YC, some of them are technically 'tourists' (i.e just on holiday). They don't need a visa to enter the country so it's a case of hear-no-evil, see-no-evil.If they decide to stay in the US after YC, then they have to deal with the nightmare of immigration and get themselves proper work permits.For those who need a tourist visa to even enter the US, I have no idea."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I am an Indian on H1B Visa, possibly the worst country to be from relative to the US Immigration System.An immigration lawyer told me that I can register a company but I cannot work for it. But later when I find U.S investors who will own equity in my company I can ask them to sponsor the transfer of my H1B Visa to my own company.This doesn't make me thrilled, but hey - it is something. Sitting on my hands is killing me, so I am moonlighting in the hopes that the lawyer is right, and that I can find investment using only my moonlighting efforts.If anyone knows better please let me know."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I lived in the US for 7 years, did both degrees there and worked in between.Thoroughly familiar with the immigration system.The short answer is, without making a 'large' investment (i.e. $500K min) + showing that you can provide at least 10 jobs in 2 years - you have a steep climb to be able to stay in the US.That being said, anyone can register a company - from any country. You can have the company in the US, register a bank account, get a tax ID, pay taxes, etc....but unless you are doing a certain amount of business and creating at least 10 jobs, you can't actually live here.People will say you can register a company on a student visa (F1), that's BS. Don't do it. You might not get caught immediately, but it violates the intent of the student visa - which is a 'non-immigrant student visa'. i.e. you have no intention of staying in the US. You are just there to work.The same applies to H1-B, and other work visas. All of those visas are non-immigrant visas, which means you don't intend to migrate to the US permanently.Some people have successfully started a company on F1, but if you ever get audited by the US Immigration service, there is a very high probability that you will get deported.All of that being said, don't worry about it. You can travel to the US on a visitors visa, or a business visa, for a few months (for e.g. to participate in YC), and then go home - while still having your company operating in the US. Once you are big enough, if you sell to a large company, like Facebook or Google or something, they can do an internal transfer (I believe it is a J-visa).Also, there are paths to a green card (family, marriage, or investment) that given your situation the best would probably be investment once your company grows enough for you to open an office in the US.All of that being said, make sure to see an immigration attorney and get good advice. But more importantly, read the various requirements for yourself - from the links others have posted here.Some attorneys might tell you they can get you a green card through an F1 or H1-B....make sure you know your stuff, and be suspicious.I have many friends that have told me that they have spoken to attorneys that assure them they can start a company on an F1 visa. I have spent hundreds of dollars and visited at least 4 different attorneys (including a past immigration judge) and they all tell me the same thing. By doing that, you violate the intent of the law."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I have a slightly different question: considering I have no interest in emigrating to the States, what if my hypothetical startup gets funded by YC or any other american early stage venture firm?Would I be able to incorporate in US and pay taxes accordingly? Can I keep working from my home country? What are the real, tangible advantages of running your team in US, other then the favorable startup environment you can get in places such as the Valley/SF? Are investors much less inclined to funding foreign teams, does it makes it more troublesome?Sorry for the loads of questions, but sometimes I fail at understanding why so many people think is a must to go to the states to get a startup off the ground.And thanks to anyone who will take the time to answer."
}
] | en | 0.985007 |
WiFi is no longer a viable secure connection | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is stupid for two reasons:(1) They're cracking pre-shared keys, which is the least secure mode of deployment for WPA2; they can \"crack\" it because it's essentially password-protected. Modern wireless security use crypto-strong keys derived from secure authentication. That's not how home wireless networks get deployed, but it is how corporate wireless networks are set up.(2) Nobody who cares about security relies on WEP or WPA; they use 802.11 to set up an insecure last-mile to VPN through. Nobody has broken any popular VPN protocol in the last 5 years."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Since when were we under the impression it ever was?I sure as hell know that I don't trust wireless; wired is bad enough. Tack on an open-ended medium to invite all of the fun guys onboard."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Sounds like they only increased the speed of brute force attacks. Use a strong password and you'll be fine.EDIT: That said, at least for me, the main reason I need wireless encryption is to prevent neighbors from using it. It would be silly to rely on wireless encryption to safeguard sensitive network activity. That's what SSH, SSL, etc. are for."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Elcomsoft is the same place where Dmitry Sclyarov worked when Adobe tried to put him in jail for breaking PDF \"encryption\": http://www.freesklyarov.org/"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Well...I have been using VPNs for years. It's sweet to connect to insecure, possibly malware-intensive, password-grabbing \"free\" wireless spots that abound around hotels and airports and grab all their bandwidth while everything they get is highly secure cryptographed data.I say that if they ever get my data, they should at least deserve it."
}
] | en | 0.960139 |
JSX: XML-like syntax extension to ECMAScript – Draft specification | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Facebook has been doing a lot of work in this area, initially implemented in PHP by Marcel Laverdet in 2010, called XHP[1]. Not only does it permit you to embed conformant HTML into your PHP code without inadvertently introducing XSS vectors, but it also allows you to compose HTML primitives into high-level markup. Stefan Parker has been regularly blogging since 2011 about how Facebook uses XHP in its UI design; one of the best posts on the topic is here[2]. You may also recall the now-defunct "Facebook Lite" which was written completely in XHP.Laverdet also implemented something similar for node.js called js-xml-literals[3], which I don't think has gained much traction. As for how it's different from E4X, refer to this page[4], which makes the argument that parsing and producing XML are two different tasks; E4X attempts to do both while all of these other approaches focus on producing XML.(I don't think that this perspective on the history of react.js/jsx has been well-publicized before, hence the post.)[1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/xhp-a-ne...[2]: http://codebeforethehorse.tumblr.com/post/52824249342/buildi...[3]: https://github.com/laverdet/js-xml-literal[4]: https://github.com/laverdet/js-xml-literal/wiki/Differences-..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Many of the comments seem to be along the lines of "why create a markup syntax to build more markup and throw it in JavaScript" - In my opinion that's not the real benefit of JSX, but just one use case.The great thing about JSX is that it doesn't build markup. It doesn't even need to be used for markup, it can be used for anything. It's frequently associated with markup because it has been used alongside React, but JSX standalone is a simple syntactic transform for XML-ish notation to JavaScript.This is quite convenient in some cases, as you can elegantly write DSL's, where each of the tag names are JavaScript functions - and writing the equivalent JavaScript would look something closer to a lisp (moving the function name to the right of the paren).This: <Database name="business">\n <Table name="user">\n <Column name="id" type='int' length={10} />\n <Column name="first_name" type='string' length={255} />\n <Column name="last_name" type='string' length={255} />\n <Column name="choice" type='enum' values={['a', 'b', 'c']} />\n </Table>\n <Table name="account">\n <Column name="id" type='int' length={10} />\n <Column name="first_name" type='string' length={255} />\n <Column name="last_name" type='string' length={255} />\n <Column name="choice" type='enum' values={['a', 'b', 'c']} />\n </Table>\n </Database>\n\nrun through the compiler[1] becomes this: Database({name: "business"}, \n Table({name: "user"}, \n Column({name: "id", type: "int", length: 10}), \n Column({name: "first_name", type: "string", length: 255}), \n Column({name: "last_name", type: "string", length: 255}), \n Column({name: "choice", type: "enum", values: ['a', 'b', 'c']})\n ), \n Table({name: "account"}, \n Column({name: "id", type: "int", length: 10}), \n Column({name: "first_name", type: "string", length: 255}), \n Column({name: "last_name", type: "string", length: 255}), \n Column({name: "choice", type: "enum", values: ['a', 'b', 'c']})\n )\n )\n\nI find the first easier to read / reorganize in blocks, which can be useful in lots of situations... definitely not all situations - but having declarative markup while being able to imagine it executing as the latter, constructing actual JS objects with specific logic built in - rather than needing to "parse" the XML tree and deal with an extra step of execution, etc, etc.[1]: http://facebook.github.io/react/jsx-compiler.html"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think this is a great and well intended effort.One of the biggest use cases for Javascript is to manipulate and create DOMs. jQuery solved the manipulation part beautifully, but DOM creation remained a hassle. Lots of templating solutions have been attempted, but none of them seem to hit the sweet spot just right (that's a primary reason why there are so many).JSX is a novel contender that may be just right - even if it's not, it will hopefully push us as a community towards a better solution by offering a very new approach with its own benefits and problems.Thanks to the peeps at fb for taking the time and effort to make JSX bigger than just reactjs!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The example used to demonstrate template literal "syntax noise" in this proposal is an unfair exaggeration, in my opinion.JSX is handy because it allows authors to think about the hierarchical relationship of components in terms of how they would be laid out in something like HTML. Template literals may not be ideally suited to the JSX case, but they represent a promising "native" solution to the problem JSX tries to solve. I'm always happier when I can leverage something that is native to the language I'm using to solve a problem."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Really surprised this doesn't mention my project that implements JSX as a sweet.js reader. It's a much better sweet integration than the one list that forces you to use a very different syntax to use JSX.https://github.com/jlongster/jsx-reader(Hey React guys... I know you know of my project, what's up with that?)"
}
] | en | 0.962361 |
Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian To Join Y Combinator | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "That's awesome news. I've always been impressed with Alexis - particularly his sense of humor and genuine friendliness.For example, a few years ago I ran into Alexis and Steve in an Italian restaurant when my Mom was visiting me in San Francisco. They were sitting a couple of tables over in the mostly empty restaurant and I took a moment to go over and say hi to them since I recognized them from Startup School. In the conversation I mentioned my Mom was visiting me and when I gestured towards our table Alexis excitedly declares \"Hi Mom!!\" to her. The funniest and most endearing part was how sincerely pleased he was about meeting my Mom. It was a great bonus to our evening to run into him.Anyway, great news for a great guy."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I met Alexis in Thailand. I approached him not knowing who he was because he had a Reddit t-shirt so I assumed it would be cool to chat with him. We didn't chat very long but he sent me a Reddit bobblehead when he arrived back from his trip. He's an unpretentious all-round nice guy."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "which has generated over $150,000 for charitiesWow, I had no idea. Serious props!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Congrats Alexis! From my time with you at the Awesome Foundation I know you'll do great things with YC."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Very cool - the return of an East Coast presence for YC is a good thing for New York and Boston based early entrepreneurs."
}
] | en | 0.994076 |
Google boss says 'nobody was harmed' by Buzz debacle | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Anyone else starting to get sick of this guy?I still like Google all around, but the privacy comments were insane.... And the Buzz thing really pissed me off.They are damaging their brand with him being the face of Google.It OK for Google to make mistakes (or what people might perceive as privacy infractions), but at least sound apologetic when you do... Least you could do."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I guess he himself was confused. Because when the Picasa buzz hack came out(use Picasa profile to find out a person's email), I posted a link to his Picasa profile, and only a few minutes later it was deleted.So what Eric is saying is that privacy is fine and dandy for him...but the rest of us can go eat cake."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think Eric Schmidt doesn't really understand the average user and apparently the large user base who don't give a damn about status updates.The whole strategy to impose Google Buzz was disaster. First things first, you shouldn't really play with one of your favorite product unless you have full faith and knowledge that it will complement.They should have employed the Google Wave strategy to release Buzz or just made Buzz as an opt-in feature and then geeks could use. The change of any kind is intimidating for the normal user and Google should have taken that into account."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I have to say that Eric Schmidt's record on privacy does not inspire confidence."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Google took the address book of each and every buzz user and made a subset of that data public with little or no warning that this behavior would occur.This is a huge, huge miss step for a company who wants to be the banker for all of your personal data.Trust is everything.Look at how many services Google offers They can know your buying habits, where you live, where you are right now, your credit card number, your friends, your contacts, your browsing habits. If they can't be absolutely trusted with your data it is game over. Period. The end."
}
] | en | 0.992435 |
Walt Mossberg's Windows 8 Review | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The video shows people interacting with a vertical touch-screen. For short amounts of time, like getting money from an ATM, this works OK, but for prolonged usage like working on office documents, it leads to Gorilla Arm [1]. I'm afraid people will find out the hard way and will get desillusioned about their touchscreen user experience. Why doesn't Microsoft foresee this?From the Jargon File:\"Gorilla Arm: The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; “Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly in real use?”.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_arm#.22Gorilla_arm.22"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I have been running Windows 8 (RTM version) on my laptop for two weeks (as I am a MSDN subscriber, thanks to BizSpark). The Metro interface is cute but after a while, I am completely back to the Desktop environment. To my surprise, it is exactly like Windows 7, minus the start menu. I even wonder whether this is because I upgraded from Windows 7?So I would say, if you are worried that it'll destroy your Windows experience as you know it, don't. It's still there. Really still there, with some minor improvements (e.g. task menu). If I didn't get this for free, I would have felt cheated (as in, this is just an UI skin over my existing Windows 7). What I miss the most is the start menu, and I guess I'll download some start-menu app to replace that.I don't use my laptop as a tablet so I can't comment on the Metro interface, other than that it's fluid (like the Windows Phone). I don't see there is any chance I'd buy the Surface RT though... The App Store is very limiting at this point. But then, I am not their RT audience."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This was more of a restatement of the press release than a review."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Windows has always been the base OS on my home computers. I've used a separate ESXi box, or local virtual box VMs for development. Thus far windows 8 tells me that it is time for me to shift totally to Linux and just sacrifice gaming, which was the sole reason I held onto my windows 7 environment on my primary home PC's. I also dread the day I will have to deal with it at work. I have between 20-30 windows open at any given time with anything from ArcSight to multiple putty sessions running. How will that possibly translate to this blocky touch screen interface?I can't be alone in this feeling, although I do feel a bit like the old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn..I really can't stand this environment and"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I tried out Windows 8 on a laptop a few weeks ago. I used to use Windows extensively (3.1, 95, 98, XP) before eventually switching to OSX.Some things I like:- Transitions between windows are super fast and smooth.- Style is clean and lightweight. A distinctive approach.Things that made me uncomfortable:- No Start button (although you can download 3rd party programs to bring it back)- Trying to have two windows next to one another felt much harder to accomplish. Using Snap! just felt way more complicated than what'd you normally do in Windows/OSX.- Start-up screen is kind of overwhelming and inefficient. It's a cool concept but the variety of boxes just makes it hard to interpret information quickly. It reminds me of iGoogle. I just don't need all that information at once.- Some of the features are hidden and require a lot of exploring to get it right, like remembering which corner does what when your mouse moves there. I've never found those type of mouse gestures intuitive.But I should note that I've spent decades learning one paradigm so this could very well work with a younger generation that isn't as married to a UI concept."
}
] | en | 0.967191 |
Dear Github, can I go home now? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Looks like he's just trying to shed some light on how bogus those activity graphs are (and also illustrating how easy it is to game them). The GitHub contributions graph probably shouldn't be used for any sort of meaningful measurement of skill, open source involvement, job candidacy—or anything else really. I found the two related articles linked in the readme really interesting:http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-an...https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-c...(Still reading the first one.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Before I checked what it was, I checked the profile of the person behind it and saw that he had contributed to open source code for more than a year. I thought that was very cool and noble and continued to read the readme of the repository and found out that everything about the person's history is fakeSo if your purpose was to make people believe that you're a good contributor and then realise you're just a liar who fake his contributions, you've done the right thing!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "People whose opinions of you really matter know that the green boxes don't."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "As much as I hate gamification, I feel like it's probably been used for worse things..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "so... you want customizable metrics/views for your github page?how far til this becomes `myspace for code`?"
}
] | en | 0.902465 |
Electrons and Atoms | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It might be useful to look at the history of this bits vs atoms idea. During internet 1.0 era, about 20 years back, the prevailing idea was the everything was becoming bits and the winners will be those who will manage the bits instead of being stuck on the atoms side of things. If I remember correctly, the MIT guys (negroponte) and Marc andressen (ironically, who is quoted by Sam) and others were huge into this idea. So, looks like we are coming to the idea that it is bits and atoms. I would say take it further and it will be atoms only. The bits side of get absorbed into the atoms side of things and will no longer be a differentiator.I'm sure the first pizza place that installed a phone or fax machine was killing it with customers. But that didn't make them a communications company. Soon, every pizza place got a phone and a fax machine and then it back to who made the best pizza. I believe we are in the installing 'phone/fax' machine phase of smartphones. After 10 years it will be not a differentiating factor and the people who control the atoms side will win.EDIT: There are companies that are digital by nature (information, music, publishing etc.) so obviously this absorption of bits into atoms idea extends to companies that have a large atoms side to them."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "From my list of top startups:Heres the ones that strongly supports it: 1. Square: Easy payments for the real world. \n 2. AirBNB: Lodging on the real world. \n 3. Pinterest: What I like of the real world. \n 4. Twitter: Whats going on right now in the real world. \n 5. Palantir: Intelligence of the real world. \n 6. Uber: Transportation in the real world.\n\nStartups against it: 1. Dropbox: Storage for my digital life. \n 2. Evernote: Notes for my digital life. \n 3. Box: Enterprise collaboration. \n 4. Splunk: Visualizations of digital things. \n 5. Cloudera: Hadoop for Enterprises.\n\nNot sure if it's very strong - seems like they are equally distributed."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I find this post to be a little bit uninformative. Sam is making the argument that the most successful companies are those that bridge the physical and digital world and increase a human's efficiency to complete a task. The startups that do best are those that focus on this.This seems like a bit of a trivial statement in my mind. Is this not what most startups are trying to do? Solving an inefficiency in the world.Before the last five years, it has been difficult for PG's definition of startups to focus on the physical world, because of our discomfort with putting parts of our physical world online. Most successful startups up until now have helped build up an infrastructure that has allowed new startups to emerge that tackle physical problems.I.E. Uber required Apple to develop the iPhone and a lot of startups rely on Heroku and Parse as a service.I really enjoy Sam's writing, and I was excited for a post dealing with the advent of hardware startups with the success of 3D-printing. I didn't find this post to be up to par with some of his other posts."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'd also observe that the initial companies that took on the purely digital side of things (e.g., Second Life), might have just been too early in a world not yet as digital as it is today. That is, people didn't have enough of a digital life that a service aimed exclusively at it would be of sufficient value. That could change as more of life becomes fully digital. So it's possible that the online/physical thesis is "fighting the last war," so to speak and future companies might not want to pursue that."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm still trying to figure out something that cannot be linked to the real world"
}
] | en | 0.969657 |
Strikingly Creates Simple, Beautiful Web Sites in Minutes | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Suggestion: Make it more obvious that your Terms[1] and Privacy Policy[2] texts are actually links. Or maybe you aren't expecting anyone to actually read that?Probably a 'design' decision -- but then I clicked on them and they're just plain text files that aren't even formatted to be readable.(Yes, I realize I'm being harsh here, but really. They're explicit .txt files. Come on.)[1] http://www.strikingly.com/terms.txt[2] http://www.strikingly.com/privacy.txt"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Someone mentioned the other day that \"beautiful\" is overused. I think I agree: the websites may look unique, but I'm not sure beautiful is the right term. I think polished may be better.I want it to actually mean something, dammit."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I was trying to scroll through the home page on my laptop, using the arrow keys, and it didn't work. When I pressed the down arrow, it scrolled me to the next section, but some sections were too tall and didn't fit on my screen.Specifically, it's the Beautiful mobile pages section, that features a picture of a laptop and says \"Our responsive templates look great on any device, automatically.\" Ha."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "My fault for not reading the fine print. Created my site and was ready to buy it but realized the site has to remain hosted on strikingly servers. Would love to pay a one-time fee to download the source code for site I created and upload it to my own server.By the way this was the easiest, most beautiful web site I ever created. I do NOT have an eye for design and this really made me feel like I had a good looking site even though all I did was put my info in a template. So thank you :)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "First, I don't appreciate having to give you my (fake) email address before I can see the pricing.I would also suggest making it easy to replace images, especially the logo and the hero elements, with plain text boxes (textured/gradient/solid background). That might work better for boring businesses than stock photos.Otherwise, nice little service, wish you best of luck with it!"
}
] | en | 0.919556 |
Affordable telepresence robots heading home | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Telepresence is likely the first killer app for robotics. It's been possible for quite some time now but very difficult to do well.The ubiquity of good, low-power wireless networking was the holdup. Our phones and tablets have finally brought this about.First the robots appear as a toy to watch your pets from work, then you personal assistant pops in twice a day from India/Africa/(low wage outsource of the moment), and finally Siri rolls around your house picking up your socks (and informing the NSA if your feet smell at all terrorist-like).Welcoming robot overlords and all that 20th century slashdot yap..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Telepresence robots seem like a narrow niche to me. I'm not sure I see them breaking into home use.They offer two advantages over video on a tablet-1) Height, and therefore a certain kind of sense of presence that might be useful in a business setting. It makes you a bit more a part of a meeting than a speakerphone on a desk, or even a tablet on a desk. Harder to ignore or overlook.2) Mobility. Useful in office settings, certainly. Useful for a doctor making rounds, that kind of thing. Less useful in a home, and currently stairs of any kind would be a showstopper. As would doors (which could be automated in an office/hospital/etc, but not likely in a home).For more intimate contact with family, though, it seems to me a tablet is far superior. They can be held and moved by the person on each end, and held closer as well. Plus they just seem more personal.Telepresence Robots seem useful for cases where you want a sense of personal space around your video image. Tablets seem more useful for when you explicitly don't."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "2 hours of battery life seems pretty short. The tablet portion should probably have a separate battery and can then have a 7-10 hour battery life, like most tablets these days.Maybe they should add a wireless charger to the package. When the batteries get down to 10%, the unit automatically wheels back to the charging station.Now, if there's a sleeping dog in the way, or a box or something, then the robot's out of luck, but otherwise it just takes care of itself, like a person going to the toilet once in a while.The other obvious thing the product needs is a robotic arm. So useful. Obviously, bringing the medicine to a bedbound patient springs to mind, but the uses are really unlimited."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've always felt that a race to the bottom has been inevitable for telepresence robots. Just look at what happened to Android tablets.This 50% subsidized pricing on a new product tells me the race has already begun."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Maybe I'm getting old, but the thought of a father tucking their kids in from the office does not sit well with me..."
}
] | en | 0.952383 |
Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "For people without children, here are some quick notes on the situation in kiddieland:- My son is 7. We bought iPad edition first, shelled some more for PC edition last month, and I'm sure I'll be forced to buy more in the future if MS puts a price tag on it.- I spend a fair amount of time during weekends for deciphering the modding world, trying to find something called CraftBukkit, learning to mod, finding launchers, finding maps shown on some Youtube video etc. because the son is mad about it. BUT, he's spending hours trying to learn JS (ScriptCraft on Bukkit) just to make an exploding arrow. I truly believe this is analogous to C64 days back then.- School started today, he's moved to another school this year. The first thing he asked to his news friends was about Minecraft. Then he advertised how PC version is superior to the one on iPad.- My 2 yo daughter knows what Minecraft is, tells she'll play Minecraft when she grows up.- While we were shopping for school supplies last week, saw two people asking for Minecraft licensed school bags for their kids.- We live in Turkey."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "That's 2.5 Instagrams, or 0.33 Nokias. What do you feel, realistic, too much, too little?Personally I feel this makes (much) more sense than instagram, these guys have a very loyal following, a tremendously strong product and actually make money.Congratulations to everybody on the selling side in this deal, too bad it had to be Microsoft but with amounts like that there are not too many companies on the acquiring side.Does anyone know if this was stock / cash / a mix?edit: this Microsoft - Mojang deal will do more to get people into (games) programming than a million $ adspend by codecademy wouldedit2: right now (16:43 my time) microjang.com is still freeWonder how long it will take before that is a registered domain.edit: microjang.com is now no longer free. Registrant:\n Microjang Development (DR is US)\n PO Box 100439\n NY, NY 10163-4668\n US (UNITED STATES)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "There goes all hope of Minecraft being released as open source.There was a blog post from several years ago from Notch saying that after he made enough money with the game, he would "probably clean it up and release it as open source". Oh well.Instead now we have the DMCA-infighting and an atrocious modding community that hosts their binaries on shady file upload sites, their "project page" in a forum thread, make their measly money from adfly-like sites and have never heard of Github.So much wasted potential. Anyhow, congratulations Microsoft."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I have been trying to understand why Microsoft would buy Minecraft. Even though Minecraft is really important, and wildly successful, but the price tag for a game studio with one successful game is rather odd, considering it is unlikely Minecraft will sell millions of copies more (it is already the most sold game ever made). This is a long shot, but it may explain it:If Microsoft is trying to build its own Steam competitor (which given Valve's current strategy to make Linux an alternative gaming platform to Windows, makes sense), then Minecraft is the perfect acquisition to start it up, for a number of reasons. It is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn't part of Steam's userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.Anyone else has any other idea why the 2.5 billion price tag?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Very peculiar seeing this news after Notch was so critical of the OculusVR sale to Facebook.Seeing as I bought my premium Minecraft account on 8/1/2010, I must be due some sort of equity for supporting him at such an early stage.edit: Oh, and what do you think will become of the old alpha/beta/release builds? I'm thinking about going ahead and archiving them all in case access to them is revoked. Not sure if I'm being too paranoid, but I much preferred the simpler versions without all the distractions like XP, hunger, and those weird tall black guys."
}
] | en | 0.940269 |
Valve Officially Passes On Windows 8, Confirms Half-Life 3 is Linux Exclusive | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Seems to be fake. I did a Google search and buzzleberry.com is the only site covering this.On top of that someone on this forum http://www.vg247.com/forum/topic.php?id=6802 sais that buzzleberry is always writing made up articles."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Looks like hog-wash. Gabe knows that his main audience uses Windows."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Sounds to good to be true, there any other confirmations on this?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Server seems to be struggling, google cache herehttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...I'd definitely like to see some other sources on this one!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"In a recent survey taken by Wikipedia on operating system statistics, approximately 1.58% of all users use Linux, just losing out to next popular operating system, Other, at 5.41%.\"LOL, I didn't know that \"Other\" was an OS... Seems like a copy-paste problem..."
}
] | en | 0.957236 |
How I Start: Erlang | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "BTW this is the author of Learn You Some Erlang for Great Goodhttp://learnyousomeerlang.com/I just wanted to say that both this write-up and in the whole book you can see passion, and excitement for the topic. They say cliches like "work of love" but if anything that defines it I think.It is the little humorous bits, the additional "Don't Drink Too Much Koolaid" parts, the visuals. It is a fantastic resource.I think this post is a partially the response to "Why Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang" topic we discussed recently. There was a lot of "Too hard to get started" and I think Fred took the initiative and did something about it. That is great. Thank you Fred!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Thanks for the write up, especially the part on relx was enlightening. I've been toying with Erlang, and have three questions I have not been able to find good answers to. Maybe someone could elaborate?1) How well does Erlang deal with multiple VMs on a single machine? Are there any upsides to using a single VM per machine? (So, run your own code along side a RabbitMQ instance for example, if that is even feasible.)2) What is a good way to have run-time mutable configuration data? I was looking into Mnesia to store user / password combinations, but it seems a bit overkill. Ideally a solution that lets you add / remove config data from a running node on the fly.3) How do you handle access control to the node, while preserving the distributed Erlang features? VPN all machines and then only listen on the private interface?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is a really great project that could really make going from zero to "productive" with a new language so much quicker and more fun. I can't wait for Rust and Elixir to happen :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Very cool! I think detailed examples like this are much more conducive to getting a feel for a language when you're just starting out than the typical "sift through the official docs then build a Hello World example." I'm going to set aside some time to work through this (and then go through the official docs.)Kudos for the Simpson's references; that's one of my favorite episodes :) I look forward to more of these."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Hey this is really nice. I tried to get into Erlang from reading Armstrongs book (Programming Erlang) and just couldn't grok it. I think the later chapters of that get a bit more 'concrete' and start making real things but I lost interest by that point. Reading this has made me want to try again, though."
}
] | en | 0.896624 |
Raise Your Hand If You’re Still Using Google+ | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I use Google+, but not as much as Facebook or Twitter, and the reason is the mobile app isn't that good.I do my social networking on the go, and I use Tweetdeck to keep everything in one place. Until Tweetdeck gets Google+ integration, I can't be bothered to open up another app...What I do use Google+ for is pictures. The background upload is great and I like that Google+ doesn't seem to compress pictures.That said, Google+ needs to differentiate itself by integrating with more Google apps, most notably Google Docs..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I do. And love it. I scripted my blog to import all my public posts on G+. My friends read my G+ posts, my family reads my blog. There was some service posted here on HN that I signed up for which auto-posts all my G+ public posts to my Twitter. So I only have to post in one place. Works out quite well. Also, I created a sorta popular G+ extension (Plus Minus) and people from all over the world have started to add me. At least to me, G+ doesn't seem to be dying and new features keep coming out on a daily basis."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Liked it, put up a 'Moved to G+' image on FB and stopped reading there.Then Google decided that they are in charge of the name policy and my account was blocked ever since. G+ as a concept was wounded.Then Google thought it's a good idea to give me a popup saying 'You know what? Your account is blocked, you cannot read the content here anymore. Appeal and bend over or - hey - you can take your data with you when you go out of the door. We won't stop you'. Every link to a G+ post was inaccessible. It died in my world.They fixed that now (so now I get a popup saying 'You're still not part of this community. Really, you can leave us if you want' - but I can close it and read the posts), but I don't care anymore. I didn't bother to delete my profile completely yet, but I haven't used it forever now and I'm missing nothing at all.For my tiny micro cosmos (not representative, my own view) they failed hard to keep the enthusiasts. Opening my profile brings the cliche 'wait for the tumbling weed' feeling up in me."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It may be a serious problem for Google+ that Google Apps users cannot sign up. They are alienating their most loyal customers.I still check G+ every day, and there's a core of active users in my circles. But it would be more useful if I could connect with my colleagues who are Apps users."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I still use it, because I like it better than FB. However, most of the people that signed up when I invited them don't appear to use it much. I feel like I'm yelling into the wind."
}
] | en | 0.978987 |
Entertainment Weekly Mag Has A Smartphone Bound In 1000 Issues | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This really surprised me... and then it didn't. When I first read about the CW ad I figured oh, it'll be a little 320x240 screen with a battery and wireless unit attached, some simple bios-type display and wireless driver, etc.But I imagine as they were looking at options, they found they were paying for essentially 3/4 of a phone, and it probably would run them more to design and assemble this custom solution than it would to just buy 10,000 surplus phone skeletons with everything included and write a simple Android app.That said, it's pretty insane that this thing will make calls and everything. I wonder what kind of restrictions are on the SIMs - time, data, minutes?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "2 days ago, 71 points, 34 comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4605295...which is a submission of http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/ew-has-smartphone-inside/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This title is misleading. It should say Entertainment Weekly bound 1,000 issues with smartphones."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Heard about this years ago. It's cool, but also quite sad. All these thousand or so manufactured just to be thrown out in one or two weeks, never again to see the light of day?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "So, what's the trick to finding one? Bring a metal detector?"
}
] | en | 0.990372 |
Where is the One Percent? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Is median income the right measure to use here? This leads to weird anomalies like how is Bergen County is 1% but New York County (Manhattan) is 4%?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Cost of living.\nCost of living.\nCost of living.$85,000 in San Francisco will not get you much. The same amount in Kansas will have you living like a king."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Of course, you can break into the global top 1% with a mere $34,000 a year."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Whoa, so any small business owner who is more or less successful is considered the 1%? The situation is worse than I thought...Seriously, I think the 1% should include only those earning over 500K a year (there's about... oh 1% of them in the world :-))..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What I'm really curious in these days is how this map would look if we had a map of the World instead of the map of the United States.Where would the 1% be then?\nHow many of us would be in the 1%?"
}
] | en | 0.962326 |
Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "First of all let me say that I have no problem with paying for software, even closed source or otherwise. I already pay a chunk of personal money for JetBrains tools and stuff from RedGate to let me get on and do my job more efficiently, and my company does the same.However your license condition:"If you want to run Helium on another machine then you must first remove it from the computer you were using it on previously."I work across a few different machines - work PC, other work PC and PC in lounge at home, VM's etc. This license condition just isn't practical or financially viable for solo developers or small dev shops who work like this. Do you actively check for multiple installs under the same license i.e. with a registration server? Altova XML Spy used to do this and it quickly got binned after the first year's license came up for renewal because they messed up the licensing records (PC crashed, couldn't de-register in-use licenses etc, hassle, hassle hassle) and we had developers working in VM's for a bunch of different projects all at once. Yes we could defeat the LAN sniffing it did to find out if two copies of the XML Spy were running with the same license, but it was too much effort and we resented having to do this - despite each dev being properly licensed.Vendors such as JetBrains and RedGate license the software to me/company for use by a single developer/user, I don't have restrictions such as "you must first remove it from the computer you were using it on previously".I/we are happy to buy licenses for each developer on our team "using" the software, but not for each and every VM or dev env a single developer is working in. As such I haven't bothered to let my colleagues know about this tool which sounds pretty cool, nor have I tried to download it (forcing me to part with contact details to try something really puts me off).I understand that you have to eat and pay the rent, but even for a company like ours, that has a fairly generous budget for development tools, this type of "per-installed machine" license is considered hostile for the type of tool being sold.I'm generally not a negative person when it comes to "Show HN" and I truly appreciate the efforts people put into their projects whether it be for a paid-for product or showing off some hacks or tricks, but your license....it frustrates me."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "@mherrmann - There are various ways you could monetize Helium and be open source - here are a few ideas. All of them assume that you will be open sourcing your code. The reason for open sourcing this would be to basically achieve wider adoption which will in turn allow you to monetize 5-10% of your audience (Enterprise customer for example).1. Open Core Licensing - You could create a community edition and an enterprise edition. The community edition would be completely open source and available for free. While you work on the community edition you could identify the 5% of additional features that certain customers (Enterprise for example) would pay for. I think this is a pretty fair way to balance between giving away a free product and creating an enterprise/professional edition where you'd charge a license fee from customers who would have the ability to pay for it. One of the challenges with this model is to make sure you find the right balance between the community and enterprise edition since some people will be upset that certain feature aren't released in the community but make it into the enterprise edition.2. SaaS - If you open source it and gain widespread adoption - at some point it might makes sense to create a service that allow users to run these tests on the cloud and create a complete suite of features around it. Many developers are happy to pay a service fee for using an hosted version of the open source software that allow them to not deal with hosting, patching and servicing that software. If you do that releasing it under the AGPL will give you a competitive advantage since if someone would like to create a hosted service and improve the open source software, they would have to release all changes to the community (or license a commercial version from you), however if you decide to add some secret sauce in the hosted solution, you ARE NOT required to release it to the community since you could license it under a commercial license to yourself.3. Offer professional services, support and training - Once developers will start using this in their workflow and start being dependent on that software, they will want the peace of mind of paying for support (or the ability to contact you and ask questions). You could have various SLA of support. For examples: Community edition (FREE) would have access to community forum where users could help each other - at first you'd seed that forum with your own support to kickstart the community. Then you could offer several level of support, from email (9-5 or 24/7) to phone support to various customers. Additionally you could offer up to a certain amount of training or consulting to write custom tests for customers who will need your help integrating this into their workflow. Most often people will opt for paying for a basic license even if the software is free just so they have someone to nag and talk to if things go south.There are more ways that you could monetize open source - if you found this reply useful and would like to learn more - feel free to reach out to adam (at) binpress (dot) com - I am the co-founder at http://www.binpress.com - the marketplace for commercial open source - we're on a mission to help developers monetize their open source projects."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I hope you succeed with your project, but sorry, I feel that your pricing is batshit insane, pardon my French.$200 per year subscription for 1 machine for the basic license with support only for the installation, basically. And probably bugfixes, I'm guessing.If for whatever reason I'd like to create a 3-4-5 VM test farm I'd have to pay $600-$800-$1000 per year.And, again, subscription. If I don't pay after one year I cannot use this anymore.Combined with the closed source factor, I really don't like it, sorry."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I read through the comments and see you are catching a lot of flack for being closed source and daring to charge. My advice, do what you think makes sense for your company. You seem to have already done some cursory market research and I am guessing based on that you've decided on your current course of action...stick with it unless you have a good reason to change direction.Feedback is definitely important and useful but take it with a grain of salt. The HN crowd is a rather biased one and doesn't really reflect the broader dev world. Maybe try attending some dev meetups where you are likely to get a more diverse opinion.You've already quit your day job to do this, unless one of these folks is going to be paying your rent, you should absolutely focus on monetizing your product.In terms of the open vs closed source issue, I do agree that dev products should make their source code available, but that is only so it is easy to fix problems and address security concerns. You don't have to make it "open source", as in: allow people to freely alter and redistribute. I use this same approach with my company's product, which is also a dev tool (see my profile if you want to check it out)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Hey, looks nice. \nWonder how lib is detecting inputs by "user-visible labels". Looks by html structure, or uses some "magic" methods?"
}
] | en | 0.972776 |
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