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[ { "score": 0, "text": "I still don't get the popularity of instagram. Is it the filters or sharing? There are tons of apps that let me apply a filter and instantly share to FB. As someone who doesn't use instagram have I missed something?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Instagram. Ruining perfectly good pictures since 2011.. or whenever they started.No offense to the company but I really hate this trend of filtered pictures. Am I the only one who prefers actual pictures rather then low quality \"old looking\" ones? I'm all for sharing pictures easily but keep them real!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Signed up; around 40% of pictures in my feed are photos of cups of coffee. Is this normal?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Heh, a few days ago I signed up to be updated on when this was available, but apparently reading hacker news is more effective...It didn't show up in the Play store when I searched on my phone, but installing directly from the play web site worked." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I have never used Instagram. Could anyone please explain/justify the 13Mb size of the App?I'm just wondering, because the biggest App I have on my phone is Google Maps, which takes around 12Mb. The next one takes 6Mb at most. I know games heavy on graphics might take more, but a how does a photo App take so much?Just curious." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm a big fan of npm and modular code. - npm to manage dependencies and versions\n - npm-scripts to handle basic build tasks\n - beefy during module development \n (when a bundle isn't necessary) \n - watchify & browserify/uglifyjs during app development \n (when a bundle is necessary)\n - gulp if the project is more involved (LESS, etc)\n - grunt if the project is with a team \n - tape / tap for testing, and testlingify for the git hook\n\nI try to avoid bower since it's no good for re-usable modules. But sometimes you can't avoid it (e.g. threejs, pixi)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Tools:Browserify [1]. You have all the npm packages available, and your modules are compatible with Node. This allows you to easily test your modules, or reuse some of your modules in the browser, the CLI and a webserver for example.Stylus [2] is great. Compared to Sass, I think it’s easier, more or equally powerful, and more future-proof. It’s basically a programming language on top of CSS, while Sass looks more like another language that produces CSS. It’s also written in JS, so you can easily write your own plugins (as npm modules).Browserify and Stylus are also quite nice if your code is component-oriented.This is how you import a component in Browserify: require('my-component')\n\nAnd in Stylus: @require 'my-component'\n\nFor the build step, I always use Make because it’s everywhere except Windows, and I switch on gulp [3] if things get complicated or if I need Windows compatibility.I’m using tape [4] and testling [5] (locally) for tests. Simple.jspage [6] (I’m the author) is a simple tool I often use to transform some JS into a page. Useful for quick tests if you work in the CLI.Services:Cloudup [7] is nice for quick screenshot sharing. On OS X, I just use the built-in tool to make a screenshot, and an URL is immediately copied to the clipboard, I just have to paste it to someone. The delay between the moment when you take the screenshot and the moment when the other person loads the page is usually enough for the screenshot to be uploaded and displayed.scri.ch [8] (I wrote this tool) is a simple drawing tool I’m using to share visual ideas, especially in GitHub issues (just add .png to an URL to get the image). I also use it to make quick interface elements that I can integrate into a web mockup. [1] http://browserify.org/\n [2] http://learnboost.github.io/stylus/\n [3] http://gulpjs.com/\n [4] https://github.com/substack/tape\n [5] https://ci.testling.com/\n [6] https://github.com/bpierre/jspage\n [7] https://cloudup.com/\n [8] http://scri.ch/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Current preferred setup is:- npm for javascript dependencies- vendor dir for sass deps (I've had problems with Bower don't run enough deps to put up with it)- Webpack [1] and some shell scripts for builds. Webpack does all the hard/coordinated stuff and the scripts copy files. I've used Rake, Grunt, and Gulp with Browserify to do the same things and find my current setup works better.[1] https://github.com/petehunt/webpack-howto- Sass. I strongly dislike Less.- React with Bacon- Jest for testing. I'm not completely thrilled with this. It's awesome when it works but I've also spent half a day tracking down a bug that turned out to not be a bug and instead an artifact of the Jest module loader.- Vim with my own set of javascript + library UltiSnips snippets. Tip: when you're writing library snippets, write them as e.g. 'react.snippets' and NOT 'javascript_react.snippets'. This prevents the various library snippets from interfering with each other. Vim supports a file having multiple simultaneous filetypes using a dotted notation `:set ft=javascript.react` and you can use ftdetect to automate the setting." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Bower and Grunt. Dunno how I lived without them.Bower is fantastic for dependency management. This is apparent as soon as you use it to manage the reqs for your project, but becomes even more awesome when you start publishing your own code, even if it's something not many other people use. Right now I have a bootstrap like Sass framework that I built and use between five or six projects. Not too big, but each one of those projects is pretty popular and actively edited. I needed a way to make sure everything updated well and could be temporarily stalled while I worked on better releases. Bower does all that.Grunt is just my workhorse. Bower may install my files, but I need them moved around into certain folders in my project. Grunt handles that with a line or two. I also use it to watch my sass files and rebuild my static sites when changes to the templates or JS files occur. Since I publish some of my code to github I have grunt commands to auto tag and version my git repo and build, merge and publish a gh-pages branch so my documentation is kept up to speed. It also minifies whatever files I need minified/uglified and adds some license and documentation to the top of the files.Almost all of these things I used to do manually or hand separate processes for." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I love http://hammerformac.comIt's like having a precompiler for everything that does live-rebuild/reload, and creates deployable builds of front end code.None of the individual things that Hammer does automatically is actually hard, but the fact that I don't have to think about firing up a bunch of watch commands before getting to work is awesome." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Among other things, HN was a test case for programming in Arc, and mostly by one programmer: pg.So the likely reason that HN does not allow Markdown is because there is/was no Arc implementation of Markdown." }, { "score": 1, "text": "What extra formatting would you want? And why? To some extent, fancy formatting only detracts from carefully reasoned arguments. Why clutter the page with more layout?What would you use, and why?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm not certain but I think its because HN wishes to promote positive up voting not down vote trolling like reddit etc... If its good It will get up voted, if not then just don't upvote it." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The point of markdown is that it's supposed to be perfectly readable in "unrendered" form, so in a sense you can already use markdown in any plaintext context." }, { "score": 4, "text": "If I had to guess, I'd say it's because they want people to focus on the content of comments, and not their formatting." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Previous submissions of the same story from various sources. They all have some discussion:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919562http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922049http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922243 <- This has the most commentshttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'm a 5th year PhD student who is teaching a large (80 student) section of a course, this is the 4th course I've taught. I've also taken plenty of exams as a student, and they are still fresh in mind.I would want to know more information before I decided the students were cheating or not. The instructor refereed to an \"exam room\", and gave an hour range that the new exam could be taken. So the students are not all taking the exam at the same time, this makes it seem possible that the exam is online. If the exam is online, and the students can take it at home vs take it in a proctored room, that would change what would be cheating. If it were online at home (I don't think so from the video) then reviewing the test bank while taking the exam would be cheating. If not, then having seen a question before the exam may or may not be cheating, depending on HOW you saw the question.If you did not acquire questions in an unethical way, then it's not cheating, it's just studying. As an instructor, I will sometimes put problems from the book onto my exam. If the students worked the problems before because they were studying hard, then good for them! I want my students to study, because it will help them learn. I also provide a sample exam with previous exam questions on it; I write most of my own questions and it's important for students to get used to my style. As a student, I had to take a written exam for my PhD. When I was studying for the exam I asked Professors for help, one of my Professors gave me some of his questions. I worked out every single question. He also submitted one of his existing questions to the exam and I recognized it when I was taking the exam. Cheating? No. I just got lucky (and worked my ass off).If test questions are acquired by malicious means, or knowing that they are going to be on the exam, or are the test bank that is going to be used to make the exam. Then it is cheating. So if students knew that the questions came from a test bank, and downloaded the test bank (I'm sure it's on the web somewhere) to gain an advantage they cheated.Finally, as an instructor. Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard. My goal with an exam is two-fold, figure out how well the class as a whole is doing, and separate the students into their grade groups. The ideal exam has some problems that even the D students can answer (to separate them from the F's) and some problems (usually just 1 problem) that are a stretch for the A students. And a mix of medium problems for everyone. If you have too many easy problems, the grades will creep up and you won't separate students. If you have too many hard problems, the grades will creep down and you won't separate students. Writing an exam from scratch is very time consuming. I use my private test bank, and try to add 1 or 2 new questions to the bank when I'm writing each exam. I can understand (but don't agree with) an instructor pulling entirely from an existing bank to write an exam." }, { "score": 2, "text": "What the professor knows:- Some students had an advance copy of the test- The grade distribution indicates cheatingWhat the professor doesn't know:- Who cheatedUnless the university has access to a students network traffic proving they had access to the test, there's no way to be sure who cheated. The fact that the professor trudges through threats and vagaries for a full 15 minutes only seems to underscore this." }, { "score": 3, "text": "So, at least where I went to school (Georgia Tech) it is well known and accepted that students have word of basically every question that's ever been asked for any given course. Professors also commonly post previous exams as study guides for courses.Is this not common elsewhere?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "You have to think that if the professor really could identify the culprits he'd be limiting the retakes to them.Maybe the real test here is for the students to realize that there is no \"forensic analysis\" in the world which could identify a cheater with 100% confidence except for the confession he is trying to bully out of them." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This post taught me more about troubleshooting a faulting process in Windows than anything I've done in the last year or two." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"so the likely explanation was that the toolbar had come onto my system piggybacking on the installation of one of the several video-card stress testing and temperature profiling tools I used while overclocking the system.\"So why would a browser toolbar component become part of a video-card/temperature tool bundle? Poor DLL tracking on the tool developer's part?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Craplets... It turns out that PC hardware is frequently sold at a loss today, and up to $100 of the cost is paid by craplets.This stuff doesn't stop until people know what's installed, why, and what resources are being used." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Case closed - for him.But if ever there was a blog post that explained why I don't use windows this was it!You have some random out of date software application installed on your machine and don't even know it? And you are a highly technical person?I can't even imagine what it's like for a non technical person." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I've enjoyed this and his previous debugging articles.What I don't understand is why he didn't notice the toolbar itself, since he was actively using the browser when it crashed. Perhaps it was installed, but instructed to hide itself? (As opposed to being installed & disabled.)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The author can't decide if he's criticizing Windows 8 as a PC OS or as a Tablet OS.His first point explicitly says \"unless you have a keyboard attached\" which makes me think he's criticizing Windows 8 as a Tablet OS. But his complaint is that it's hard to manage 10+ open apps at once. This is a deal-breaker for a tablet, really? Someone needs to tell Apple!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Start menu search is still in there. (They even demoed it in the keynote) It's just less obvious to access when you're running Win8 as a laptop. Press the Windows key and start typing, no matter where you are." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I really hate this title. How do you want me to respond, welcome to linux?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "its an alpha. Nothing is really a deal breaker in an alpha, since there is no deal to be broken." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I wouldn't call them flaws, I'd call them \"unimplemented inevitabilities\", but it's good to get people blogging about shortcomings in this DP.Microsoft asked for feedback, let's give it to them, but keep in mind, it's not even a beta yet. If you've used the DP, you know there is still a lot of work to be done." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "As usual, read the paper instead [0]. It's short, clear, and easy to read. In particular, it applies only to plants, so the article's musings about jellyfish and elephants is off the mark and even addressed in the paper [1]. So is the irrelevant discussion of \"pulse\", which is oddly supported with video that is just played forward and backward.The paper just claims to support some known, quantifiable correlations with some data. The correlations pertain to mortality rates and birth rates, and certainly suggests no formula for when to die, or causation of any sort for that matter. E.g, is it that bigger plants die less often, or that plants that die less often can get bigger? Does it matter?[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/104/40/15777.full[1] \"Whereas the action of selective processes on animal lifespan cannot extend through their entire lifespan because many lose reproductive capacity with age, this is not the case in plants, which generally remain reproductive throughout their lifespan, suggesting that lifespan could be under greater selective pressure in plants.\"" }, { "score": 1, "text": "The last graph amuses me: http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/01/22/graph_custom-3939...Even on a log-log graph, the data looks like a shotgun spread. Species of similar mass have lifetimes that vary by up to a factor of 1,000. Species with similar life-spans differ in mass by up to a factor of a trillion." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The title is pure linkbait, which is surprising for NPR. I guess that's the only way to get more clicks when the entire article boils down to \"Large plants/animals live longer, on average (except humans)\". Thanks, we hadn't already noticed.A formula that \"tells us when it's time to die\" would imply some sort of prediction about individuals, which they admit is not the case at all. That would actually be interesting." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Well, I don't think the author understood the paper.Make sure you correctly read a paper before spreading wrong conclusions. The article is about the relationship between death, birth and mass (which are obviously connected, the paper is about that relationship). Time is just the scope there." }, { "score": 4, "text": "There is nothing new about the observation that body mass is correlated with lifespan, at the level of species - why should we be at all surprised that the correlation is described by some power law? There are compelling metabolic explanations for these patterns going back more than a century. What really excites modern biologists – and what the article completely fails to discuss (even to the point of claiming \"this rule seems to govern all life\") – are the numerous and dramatic exceptions to the rule: naked role rats, tardigrades, certain cnidarians (\"immortal\" jellyfish & hydra) and planarians, various lichens... In some of these cases, metabolic rate is divorced from body size through a well-characterized, indefinite hibernation 'mode', but more efficient DNA protection, repair and telomere length preservation systems are also important. And there is a substantial literature that explains unusually prolonged life-cycles using Evolutionary Stable Strategy modeling. All of which provide useful perspectives in aging research. Much more interesting would have been an article about how these violations of nature's \"death formula\" tell us how we might avoid death." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Creator of http://www.sharelatex.com here. LaTeX collaboration and environment setup is a big problem, online collaborative environments are going to become more popular. The more of them out there the better so good luck to jdleesmiller and writeLaTeX.writeLaTeX has a nice split view which I have not implemented yet. The rate of update from collaborators seems to be relatively slow (compared to sharelatex). I would be interested in knowing the architecture behind the scenes." }, { "score": 1, "text": "After using LaTeX for the past ~8 years one thing I have noticed is that instant preview is not adapted at all: LaTeX compilation is simply too slow. I prefer compiling when I want to see how things turn out after making a bunch of changes rather than having the compiler throw out a bunch of errors — and breaking my workflow — just because for some reason it decided it should recompile while I was in the middle of writing a macro.Another minor quibble I have with these kind of services is that they often only support [pdf]latex, I'd like to be able to use [xe|lua]tex (after having a taste of fontspec/unimath I simply can't go back).Other than that, great project!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "The preview is nice, but I have more faith in http://sharelatex.com/ reaching a complete and usable product." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Seems like a perfect use for filepicker.ioIt's self-promoting, but actually it'd be really nice to be able to open files from dropbox/github and save the pdf's when their done. Then I could actually get work done on my chromebook" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I am currently writing my master thesis in the almighty LaTeX, and when is was looking for an editor I also considered these online alternatives like this one.The most important feature I came across is multiple files usage. My current editor (TexStudio) has a neat feature where I use my 'main' document as some sort of a container. I put the document header (with the packages and everything) in there and for every chapter I use a different file. This lets me work on a chapter in a seperate file which does not get me lost in a 1 huge file when looking up stuff in the content.It also shows a tree of your document structure per chapter/section/subsection/subsubsection so you can navigate easily through the document. This might be a useful feature for this online alternative.Also, compiling from one of the chapter files actually compiles the entire document, which is nice (because otherwise it'll complain that is has no document structure, packages, etc)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'll chip in with the \"2 worst things I hate about HN\", since I enjoy being contrary.1) The groupthink that arises in certain political/scientific/social debates. I find that the nontech debates here are more uniform and less varied than they are on sites with similar quality.2) While the site's filtration is good, the fact that its only two lenses are \"news\" and \"jobs\" makes the community less flexible and, frequently, less engaging.It's still easily a top three social news site, though, so I'll resume my lurking and quit being a pest." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I would add3) generally very thoughtful discussion in the comments." }, { "score": 2, "text": "1. HN is one of the few places where I constantly bump into people who are simultaneously more knowledgeable, more intelligent, and more accomplished than I am. Humbling, challenging, and rewarding.2. I love that this is a community where smart people help other smart people navigate life, from deciding what to major in, to picking a database server, to dealing with an unruly roommate." }, { "score": 3, "text": "HN loads extremely quickly. I can generally scan through a page of comments quicker than the linked article while their rendering is blocked on 3rd party scripts/ads" }, { "score": 4, "text": "For me its:1) Subject Matter of the articles.\nfor the most part the articles on here are right on target in what I am interested in.I know lately there has been talk of some cruft getting through, but for the most part the quality of articles to make it to front page is high.2) Community\nI find that the community here is respectful and the members tend(and their comments) to be quite knowledgeable and highly focused. The community in general is a positive one." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Paying dividends is a bad signal. That did not work well for Microsoft's share price. And even though OP argues that Apple will not repeat their fate, the argument is weak. There is only so much more iStuff that you could sell when everyone and their mother has an iPhone.Paying dividends essentially signals that company does not see how to spend money and has no long-term strategy for growth." }, { "score": 1, "text": "My problem with this, and all other stories on the same theme, is \"Why?\" Why does Apple NEED to do anything with its cash reserves?The story says: \"Last month Mr Cook admitted that the firm has more cash than it needs for its operations. It’s a nice problem to have. The obvious solution would be to give cash back to shareholders, either via dividends or share buybacks.\" They claim having more cash than they need as a problem, and then spend 5 paragraphs detailing solutions, without further explaining WHY it's a problem.Speaking as an (extremely minor) shareholder, I have no desire for dividends or anything else. My AAPL portfolio has gained 100% in 2 years, that's good enough for me." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'll say it again. Apple should buy Disney because they can provide Apple with gold plated content, it would actually be a halo brand for Apple, and their worldwide brands are highly compatible.When Apple had $30 billion and Jobs was alive, it was possible for Apple to take control. Today they could buy all of it at a premium and still have $10 billion left over." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Actually, this is easy: If Apple thinks the NPV of holding the money is greater than the NPV of not holding it, then they should do so." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I see a lot of posts like this one talking about how apple NEEDS to do something to lower its stockpile of money but none of them seem to explain why. could someone tell me why holding $100 billion in cash is worse then doing stock buy backs and or issuing dividends if the market takes into consideration its large cash reserves when pricing its stock." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Thank you for sharing! I always like to read this kind of stories. For me, I started coding in a silly way. First wave of motivation was when I tried to impress my current girlfriend, her sister needed a website and I said I can code it for her. Right after saying that I jumped into YouTube and searched for \"How to create a website\". Then somehow I forget about coding when I got my internship at one company, which required me to visit hospitals and some other boring stuff. I didnt want to do it, but it was a requirement internship at university. My roommate was a great programmer so I requested a transfer to software department counting on my friend and knowing only a little bit of HTML/CSS. Suddenly, even a single week didn't pass and my friend had to leave, so I was kinda forced to learn ASP.NET and other stuff. After that terrible time of continues googling, stackoverflow, youtubing I became a programmer for a living :)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Great story. Can you add some detail on how much time you've dedicated to learning on a daily/weekly basis and how it fits into your family and work life?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Great story. Great blog post too. And it looks like a great tool. You just earned another potential user :)Good luck and keep up the great work!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Inspiring! I am also trying to learn Ruby on Rails. Like you, I also have an itch for startup. Learning Ruby on Rails is on my top list for 2012!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Great insight. I love the \"outsiders\" view on programming you take. Finding out that the learning curve isn't that great is encouraging." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "While these points are valid, and indeed very insightful in some cases (the logging / encryption issue hadn't even occurred to me before now), I do wonder if the author would ever be happy. Using bleeding edge features will always cause cross-browser problems like this, no matter what year you're in, no matter which browsers are currently popular, no matter how useful the features are. The other way to look at it is that every single year, there are more things you can safely use than the year before. In 5 years time when 95% of your users support all of the features he mentions, will he be rejoicing, or complaining that HTML6 support is spotty?Also worth mentioning that for some of the issues (like differences in cross-domain feature detection) they should really be handled by libraries to abstract the differences between underlying browsers from the point of view of your business code. Browsers will always have differences, fix the problem once and abstract it away!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"Only IE10 is really comparable with ‘modern browsers’ and that won’t even run on anything older than Windows 8.\" - actually it will run on Windows 7 too, but not Vista[1].[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh673549(v=vs.85)..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This post does an excellent job of explaining, unintentionally, why the decision to remove version numbers from HTML was a bad idea. There are so many new technologies being worked on and browser vendors all have different priorities on which to put resources on implementing.Think about if HTML5 had been finalized in 2010, with anything proposed in 2011 or 2012 be considering HTML6 (or HTML5.5 or whatever -- who cares). Wouldn't there be a lot of pressure on browser vendors to support all HTML5 features? As it stands today no one can possible keep up with standardization so instead vendors work on what they think is important -- or cynically what will get them the most recognition." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Wouldn't this be better titled \"The Pain of Modern JavaScript\"?I'll admit I skimmed the article, but I couldn't find anything about HTML." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Here are links re: HTML5 implementations and shortcomings:Browser vendors approach to innovation in the browser is top-down rather than bottom-up: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4233711Poor WebSocket, IndexedDB implementations: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4067779 and http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3642764Lack of integration with native applications: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3642734And, Tim Berners-Lee on giving power to web apps, if we can't give power, they can't compete: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2012JanMa..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is a good thing, and there is basically no way around it.There is a varying degree of a WebKit monoculture on mobile. Without great site compatibility, users will never successfully switch to a non-webkit browser, but currently much of the great mobile content out there assumes webkit prefixes and userAgent. So Opera, Mozilla, and MS basically need to adopt some of the mobile webkit properties in order to get compatibility, in order to get users. It's either that or advocacy wherein we try to get every site ever to not publish with just WebKit prefixes. But in reality, this advocacy effort has been underway already for over two years and we're still in this bad situation.Look at the chart linked to from http://paulirish.com/2012/vendor-prefixes-are-not-developer-... When IE10 comes out (or it's complementary mobile browser), less than 25% of all sites that use CSS transitions will have them working in IE10.Vendor prefixes are bad for us as developers and they're bad for browsers because it leads to situations like these. We'd be in a better situation without them.BTW, one detail that wasn't really covered: I believe this change is localized to Opera's mobile browsers. Their desktop story is, I think, unchanged.(All the above is a personal opinion and not that of my employer, yadda yadda)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I know everyone talks about fragmentation concerns, and WebKit as the new IE6, but does this argument really make any sense? Internet Explorer was a poorly updated, closed source product that only worked on a single platform; WebKit is open source, maintained by two separate companies (that are basically locked in a cold war), and is available on all major platforms. If anything, why isn't the notion of a single rendering engine to which we can all write a GOOD thing? I know there's lots of idealism around standards, etc, but let's get real here -- most people building a webpage simply want it to render properly and universally, and would like to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. Agreeing on a single rendering engine seems to be the easiest way of accomplishing this goal.I've probably missed some killer feature of a multi-engine standards-based ecosystem, but really -- is that the pace at which we want to move the web forward?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is hopefully the moment where things have become so absurd (not a criticism of Opera) that it's time for browsers and standards to tackle the problem e.g. look at the proposed -beta flag.(http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/02/the_vendor_p...)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "In some ways, I understand the need the vendor prefixes, but they do seem to be causing some fragmentation. I'm getting to the point on some CSS properties that I just use the real CSS name (like border-radius) and don't use the vendor prefixes at all since all the major browers that support radius use the non-prefixed name.If you all remember back in the IE6 dominated days, Opera was built to the web standards but in order to make it a viable browser for pages that were only tested in IE6, they had to try to emulate IE6 behavior in Quirks mode, and I'm sure Mozilla had to do the same thing.Hopefully this is a short-term thing unless standards are more finalized and browser implementations become more consistent." }, { "score": 4, "text": "What an idiotic move - So now they want to make webkit the next IE of internet?Standards are standards - period. I see ton of wrong with this approach, or... mabye we should just ignore the w3C CSS Working group.Vendor prefixes are fine - as long they are used as temporary solution, and no one expects them to be the \"default\" way of doing things." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "If people would simply advocate building applications which follow the semantics of HTTP instead of advocating \"REST\", many more people would understand the benefits and conform; there would be no need to write a thousand and one posts explaining what is REST. Unfortunately the original exposition of this way of building web applications was done in a dissertation, in a \"scientific\" style that I think Orwell captured so well (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm, worth a subscription of its own). Another problem is that unfortunately most web developers (not to mention \"SEO experts\") don't have any real understanding of HTTP or the principles behind the WWW, which makes them also unaware of the very practical problems certain design decisions can cause." }, { "score": 1, "text": "One thing I've always struggled with with REST, is how you should handle additional verbs.As a contrived example, say we have a booking GET /booking/:id\n\nAnd we then want to cancel this booking, more specifically we want to trigger the \"cancel\" action (transition), which would change the state of the booking from \"active\" to \"cancelled\". There are a few possible ways to do this, and I'm not really sure which is \"correct\" for REST, or whether it actually matters: POST /cancel (booking = /booking/:id)\n PUT /booking/:id (state = cancelled, note this is dictating the resulting state, not the transition)\n POST /booking/:id/cancel\n CANCEL /booking/:id (custom verb, good/bad ?)" }, { "score": 2, "text": ">Rather than letting clients construct URLs for additional actions, include the actual URLs with REST responses. For example, a \"product list\" request could return an ID per product, and the specification says that you should use http://www.acme.com/product/PRODUCT_ID to get additional details. That's bad design. Rather, the response should include the actual URL with each item: http://www.acme.com/product/001263, etc.\nYes, this means that the output is larger. But it also means that you can easily direct clients to new URLs as needed, without requiring a change in client code.This a thousand times yes." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is missing a few salient points:1) REST is not suited to complex multi-variable queries or transactions2) REST should be a stateless transaction3) REST read results should be cacheable4) REST can use headers to specify content-type/mime-typeREST is not a suitable replacement for all client-server interactions e.g. complex, sql-like queries over many variables. It is best suited to URL-like queries that produce singleton docs or lists of doc IDs.REST in its most common form is a protocol over HTTP and thus can (and should) take advantage of HTTP's methods to provide CRUD: Create = POST\n Read = GET\n Update = PUT (although POST is fine)\n Delete = DELETE\n\nThis negates the need for: /story/395/delete\n\nor /delete/story/395\n\ninstead use /story/395\n\nand send it a DELETE method." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It seems to me that if you want to learn REST, you'd be better off reading Roy's dissertation, which is pretty short and doesn't contain bullshit like, \"Thus, REST uses HTTP for all four CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations.\"" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "My favorite quote:"The amount of support caused by failing pieces of code far exceeded the time it would have taken to test the code properly, period. The agility we gained from our test coverage really helped us refactor big chunks of code quickly."People ask whether it makes sense to spend time on TDD or automated tests in a startup situation. This right here is why." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Good for you guys! This is another example of a product that I would never have thought of producing.How spread out is your business? It seems to me that a lot of larger conferences in the US are held in the LA or Vegas areas. Might you try to locate a US partner near those centers? Or is your business more spread out than that?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Good job, but you have almost 300.000 lines of code according to your GitHub commit stats, why is that damn large? It is almost equivalent to Linux 1.2 kernel code in 1995." }, { "score": 3, "text": "OP here. Shameless use of the exposure... we are looking for a printing partner in the US. If you are in the US and know a high-quality and trustworthy print shop let us know!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "The conference badge team is great and I can appreciate the transparency in this post. Keep up the good work and best of luck finding a US partner." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "http://codepad.org/5TyD9Jqy -- C++ solution with running time of ~0.004s. 30 lines not counting empty lines/comments/braces, half of the code is generating P." }, { "score": 1, "text": "http://www.fzort.org/mpr/junk/greplin-3.pl.txtPerl, 7s. Looks like I arrived at the same recurrence that madars used, but I swear I didn't look at his solution...Memoize magically turns it from exponential to polynomial." }, { "score": 2, "text": "http://codepad.org/1dImO2j0 -- 26 lines of ruby will keep running throughout the year :P" }, { "score": 3, "text": "http://pastebin.com/wBrkKEyk ... this is still running :)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "is 14521794174 the answer by any chance? It took 12 hrs" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is seriously cool, but can't there be a better way to embed fragment shaders in javascript for WebGL? Check out this effect:\nhttps://github.com/brianchirls/Seriously.js/blob/develop/eff...Or is there a tool that needs to be created that will compile a fragment shader for WebGL down to .js, kind of like CoffeeScript?Now all you need is for someone to write an OpenEXR implementation in JS or WebKit and you'll have all you need to build a Nuke killer in the browser. Well, you'll still need the UI framework for the node graph." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"Node\" as in http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Core/core.html#ID-195064124... - not \"node.js\". Seriously runs in the browser." }, { "score": 2, "text": "cooli coded some real time video effects demo a year and a half or so ago http://www.barbafan.de/html5video?video=tron \ni tried to create a lib for video effects then, but ran into serious performance issues, looks like it's time to revisit that topic." }, { "score": 3, "text": "So awesome, glad they're still developing this. I was at the Open Video Conference where they demoed this." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Tried the demo. Didn't work in Firefox 9.0.1 or Chromium 18 on Linux" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Semmelweis is a favorite \"management science\" topic; there's even a pop-psych phenomenon called the \"Semmelweis Reflex\"; the Wikipedia article on it recapitulates much of what Aaron wrote here. The Gladwell formula of using Semmelweis' personal narrative to articulate a frailty of human reasoning was employed to great effect in Ayres _Super Crunchers_; the Semmelweis section is, for instance, noted prominently in the NYT book review.Aaron has oversimplified the Semmelweis story in some material ways:* Semmelweis didn't institute \"handwashing\" in Vienna hospitals. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which suggests that doctors in the 1840s were sticking horse-manure-covered hands into the exposed wounds of patients, handwashing was apparently already a norm. What Semmelweis did differently was to use lime to wash hands.* Semmelweis' actual theory of the cause of childbed fever was wrong, and it was wrong in ways that made his recommendations hard to take seriously. Semmelweis' contention was that \"cadaveric particles\" were making their way into patients, and that those particles could only be removed by lime. But doctors observed cases in which no contact with either cadavers or injected or symptomatic patients lead to the same cluster of illnesses. It was thus difficult for Semmelweis to make a \"scientific\" case for why the lime worked; it obviously didn't help that he was wrong about why it did (his work predates the germ theory of disease, which would have taught him that rather than lime being effective at removing specific particles, it was instead effective at killing bacteria).* Aaron's story (and Ayre's) has a heroic Semmelweis pleading for doctors to simply wash their hands in a specific way to save lives. But that's not necessarily what Semmelweis was arguing. Instead, the case he could have been making, loudly, was for an actual, specific, incorrect cause of childbed fever.* Semmelweis himself was, apparently long before he lost his post, a notorious asshole. It did not help his cause that instead of carefully reasoning about the actual evidence, he instead seized on a single explanatory theory of childbed fever and then demanded (often by barging into hospital wards and berating the staff) that his peers adhere to it.The point is not that Semmelweis didn't make an important discovery, or that we shouldn't be mindful of warped-sounding new knowledge that contradicts our existing theories. Of course we should be objective when considering facts that threaten our existing theories. But there's a reason John Snow and Joseph Lister [and Pasteur] are better known in the development of the germ theory of disease, and there's more to learn from the Semmelweis story than how the audience to a new theory should behave." }, { "score": 1, "text": "While overall, I like this article, there is real danger in advice like this:>Look up, not down. [...] to do that you need to look at the people who are even better than you.While this is great for those who exaggerate their skills, I doubt those would even read this piece. For people with self-esteem problems and a tendency towards depression, however, this is about the worst advice you can give, because they tend to look at the top 1% already and therefore experience their life as a complete failure.>But people will feel more comfortable telling you the truth if you start by criticizing yourself, showing them that it’s OK.In theory this is fine, but if you start seriously criticizing yourself in front of others, you anchor this critique in the minds of your listeners." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is a well-written and useful article. If a lot of people are against you you may be onto something big, or you may be just wrong.I wonder if Aaron will discuss the furor caused by his JSTOR activism (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-c... also see the many discussions on HN, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781615). The case here is not as clear cut as, say, the case of Semmelweis. I am also undecided (hate the greedy closed magazines, don't quite approve the sneaking in part) on it.I would really know what his objective analysis of the situation is unless he's already done a post that I've missed or if he can't talk about a court case." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I've always told people that many of the best conversations with folks have started out with \"Chuck I think you are wrong and here's why ...\" This is especially useful when you are \"important\" (like someone's boss) because getting honest feedback when you are the boss can be nearly impossible at times.Steve Bourne (yes that Bourne) told me once that you should try to cultivate people who could give you a different view on the world, That is helpful stuff but you do have to also get people to be honest. That is hard to do if they think you're 'hot headed' or likely to shoot the messenger." }, { "score": 4, "text": "saying “You were right, I was wrong.” It didn’t destroy her reputation; it rescued it. [...] Wayne Hale took full responsibility: “The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told…I am guilty of allowing Columbia to crash.” He was promoted. When JFK admitted the responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco was “mine, and mine alone,” his poll numbers soaredI would guess that the survivorship bias is at play here. How many people we will never hear about took responsibility and were demoted, fired or prosecuted?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It's funny--I've just spent several days realizing exactly the opposite. Namely, programming is algebra. Not high school algebra, granted, but abstract algebra. I've seen patterns from abstract algebra come up several times in programs I've worked on recently, but I didn't know enough about the subject to take advantage of them. Abstract algebra has definitely moved up on my list of subjects to learn soon!Abstract mathematics aside, this article is a perfect case for using Scheme as an introductory language. Scheme does not have false cognates in its syntax--it practically doesn't have syntax at all! C-style assignment syntax is needlessly confusing; the only reason people still use and teach it is because they're acclimated to it.Scheme has some other big advantages as well. It's exceptionally simple, so there is much less incidental complexity to trip up the student. Additionally, it has far less magic than other languages. Assignment is built into the language, but the syntax isn't: changing a variable looks much like calling a normal function. The same is true for OOP. I found this a big advantage--it's much easier to see that OOP is not the one true way, and that there is no one true OOP way, when things like classes and inheritance are not built into the language. Scheme shows OOP for what it really is: a design pattern that can be useful in certain cases. Compared to a dogmatic language like Java, this is a breath of fresh air!Scheme is also very multi-paradigm. It supports functional programming far better than any mainstream languages but also supports imperative and OO programming well as well. You can even reuse the same syntax for nondeterministic or logic programming. The best bit is that it supports all these paradigms in very similar ways--it lets them stand on their own merits rather than pushing you towards or away from any of them.The most important idea in computer science is abstraction, and Scheme is extremely well-suited for teaching students about it. Beyond this, Scheme is also just a fairly pleasant language to use for normal tasks." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is the first time I'm hearing a beginner looking at a program as algebraic equations! I wonder how people with such backgrounds will take to Haskell. I think their intuitions will get them a long way ..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "?- A = 10, B = 20, A = B.false.Her intuition checks out in my REPL.Seriously though, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Prolog yet. It's the closest popular language to honest-to-goodness mathematics, to the point that some Prologs can solve linear equations that are written exactly as a system of equations." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Maybe you should suggest some language that don't create such problems? There are many languages that use mathematical symbols similar way to maths. Functional languages should be better, since there variable values are not reassigned too often. There are also languages that use another operators for value assignemnt, like := in Pascal and <- in GNU R." }, { "score": 4, "text": "> Um… 10 and 20… but then how can a be equal to b? Programming is not for me.Jumping to this response really bothers me. If you can put your finger on the exact contradiction shouldn't that allow you to seek an explanation rather than throwing your arms up and assuming it's not for you?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Just in case you aren't familiar with Jeff Pearlman:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_PearlmanFormer SI writer. His expose of baseball player John Rocker shook up the MLB world at the turn of the century. He's since written a bunch of sports biographies that have sold very well.He also wrote this, of interest to Hacker News readers:http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/21/pearlman.online.civili..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "In different context, the school could have brought this PR-focused individual on staff the right way.Having a master's in journalism myself, I have much faith in the value of pure journalism, but also little faith in the idea of pure journalism being inherently sustainable (financially).To kick an experienced, passionate journalist off the paper staff is ludicrous, and so is the idea of censoring the paper to show the school only in a positive light. However, a PR/consulting professional could provide much value to a group of young students who are pursuing an industry that will likely be quite harsh to them.Understanding how ads work, learning how to build a personal brand and learning about other industries that seek similar skills to those of a journalist are three things that come to mind.Many working journalists and journalism professors I've encountered have a highly negative view of PR – calling it the \"dark side.\" Many of them entered a job market years ago where it was far more feasible to get a job at a newspaper and climb to larger and larger papers until you have a solid career – today the more likely path is one of repeated layoffs, shutdowns and underpaid contract work.In my mind, these two professors could run this paper as a team very effectively. The business-minded PR professional could help the paper work toward financial independence and help students better understand the current career landscape, while the OP could teach pure journalism and stand up every time the former individual tries to cut out an article that reflects poorly on the university." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I can't access the website (WP DB error), but reading some of these comments seems to give the gist that he's complaining about being a prior-review publication that the school administration decided was a PR vehicle of the school.It was the same thing for me as a student, I was pursuing a journalism degree at my school, and gave 5 years of blood, sweat and tears to my paper as Photo Editor, News Editor, and Editor in Chief. We had a very high degree of oversight where we could not do stories that could reflect poorly on the school in any possible way.Legally this is actually questionable as the money we received from the school was actually from student funds, similar to our ASB, so we technically worked for the students, not the school. Further, being a prior-review and PR paper, means the school approves of everything we write, which opens them up to libel issues if anything slips through.This made it very, very hard for me to get a decent journalism education. A lot of journalism is about the (attempted) presentation of two sides--often in college it's students vs administration, city vs school. And when they decide we're not covering an issue because it's too hot, or we only present a rewritten PR release, I'm only learning how to write content-farm content. And don't even think about starting an underground paper, you'd get thrown out of school. My school really handicapt my possible journalism career which I really learned out on my internship. Luckily I built my own tech career and fell back on that and now run tech for a news company." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I think he hits on what's really the issue, but then gets distracted. The college wanted a PR publication, not a truly independent newspaper.Given that they paid the printing costs (I'm not sure if this was always the case, but it was at the start of the venture), I guess it's up to them if they want to control it like that.What doesn't seem right is them telling him that his later independant paper can't 'compete' with their PR mag. So long as they're not funding it, it's not their concern." }, { "score": 4, "text": "\"What if prospective students, taking a campus tour, pick up the Touchstone and see a column about crappy food or bad policies?\"The prospective students would know that they were visiting an institution that values the free expression of ideas and criticism, over the college's marketing image." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Ironically, there's a company called Yapp (https://www.yapp.us/) that's one of the biggest users of Ember.js that I know of. Was super confused when I saw the title..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "looking at that scary diagram and thinking "will all yapp apps (yapps?) be as structural as the underlying framework?"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I like it - its pretty much my current app set-up for backbone + marionette, but done in a better structure." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I want to build website with Yapp.js, my business model involves SEO, how can I do this in your framework?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "same thing!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I can't wait until Anonymous starts sending infringement notices in bulk. Cutting off people's Internet access based on a few random threats is a pretty obvious denial of service vulnerability." }, { "score": 1, "text": "There is an institution dedicated to \"graduated response to piracy\" in France. It is a complete fail. As far as I know, nobody ever received a letter claiming their Internet access will be restricted.While they rely on technical system to stop piracy, they will fail.For now it is more a societal behavior problem than a technical one. The only way I see to fight efficiently piracy is to make easier to pay than to pirate things. I predict a very long mouse and cat fight." }, { "score": 2, "text": "> As for who pays for all this, the ISPs and copyright owners will share the costs of operating the program, sources said.After reading this, I still don't understand how the RIAA/MPAA are convincing ISPs to get on board. What's in it for the ISPs besides a bunch of angry customers?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I see a future of encrypted bit torrent traffic and hosted torrent files on Freenet." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I believe that LulzSec activities of late, likely accelerated a deal like this happening.Goodbye freedom of the internets, forever." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This stuff is the reason I'll never hate google the way I hate Microsoft. Ok, hate is a strong word, but I just don't like or trust microsoft. I think the world is a worse place because of it. I Think the world is a better place because of google, but there's still a healthy portion of sceptisim that comes with that feeling.The reason I mention this is because right now, it's all about google becoming the next Microsoft, but I don't think that's fair on google." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Getting solar this summer (live in MA which has very nice tax deals) and one of the interesting things I noticed in the process was how much of the cost is the install. Saw one company that is making the install process significantly cheaper which results in a better win overall than if the cost of the cells were dropped by half. Same goes with the idea of transparent cells. Even if they have a very low rating they can go in every window and get installed for \"free\" when the new windows are installed making the payback much faster." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I think Gladwell is wrong. Historically, there have been many cases where researchers have been unaware of relevant work, because it was done in a different field. Search could improve there. If search is the quest for knowledge, then the scope for improvement is unlimited.Sinking to more consumer-oriented search, anticipating what you want before you know you want it is another (creepy) way for search to improve, that Google has specifically talked about." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The goal is very noble and I'm all for it, but there is this problem that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, and electricity isn't infinitely transportable, nor easily stored." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The problem with this is always that they are \"a few years away\", or that we can run the entire economy from biofuels \"in ten to twenty years\".It has been going on for what, 20 years now? It is never going to change until we ignore them until they actually bring about their ideas." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm not sure if this is 'Operate as if in a vacuum' so much as 'Challenge assumptions', especially if you are entering a competitive market.Challenge the format, the value, the technology, and the ability of users (both searchers and advertisers) to learn and adjust when the technology delivers more value.It was a ballsy move. Any number of 'hypothetical' scenarios could have seen it fail massively. Of course, we know that it didn't - and even if it may in your business, there's still good reason to challenge the assumptions you and everyone else are making." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Google completely disregarded the way the entire advertising industry worked and came up with its own solution as if it existed in a vacuumKind of hard to combine this advice with \"get out of the building\". Read enough startup advice, and everything eventually becomes self contradictory. What's more valuable than advice is knowing when to use it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The key point IMO was his sentence \"What what we knew and ultimately figured out was that we needed to economically incentivize advertisers to want to do a better job advertising to our users.\"Which leads to his point \"Sometimes to find the right answer you have to look at a problem and work out a solution which completely disregards current standard practices.\"" }, { "score": 3, "text": "> It meant that we weren’t going to have graphical banners on our site.The topic and timing of this is interesting. I wonder if author posted on this in response to gmail moving towards image ads?:\nhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151563" }, { "score": 4, "text": "\"Operate as if in a vacuum\" is taking a big risk: if you revolutionise the industry you win big, if not you die quietly. Most hugely successful people/companies will have taken huge risks early on. Does that mean that taking risk is a good idea?I'm not saying that this is necessarily bad advice, but I think there is some selection bias here." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It is now apparently Session.js https://github.com/codejoust/session.js" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Here is a live demo showing your own information.\nhttp://visitorjs.herokuapp.com/Fyi: I am not storing the information." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Damn, you beat me to it. After I saw the original visitor.js was a paid service (which blew my mind), I started hacking together the JS implementations of most of the functionality I had laying around already." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'm glad you've done this, because I'd have wasted a few hours on it I didn't have otherwise :-)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I love when disruption disrupts disruption." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "At a point, this just goes to the competitive nature of our society. From a moral standpoint, if who we are is a product of our environment and our genetics, then we ourselves aren't anything that isn't predefined. Someone who is lazy is a product of their genes and environment in the same way that someone with a disease is the product of their environment and genes. So, what makes asthma (which I have) something that I'm applauded for overcoming with medicine while obesity is something people are generally frowned upon for overcoming with medicine? Well, the fact that we want to ascribe the later as a choice - the choice to eat.Einstein didn't believe in free will. However, he said that holding people responsible for their actions was a pragmatic approach for society to take (presumably because such action changes the environment that we are all in).There are huge struggles because people don't want to accept that they have less free will than they ascribe. As such, the goal is to hold people responsible for faults that you don't have and find excuses that let you off the hook for any faults that you have. There are organizations that create campaigns to get society to accept their fault as something that should be compensated for. Short attention span? That's ok because it's medical. Stupid? Lazy? Those are things that are the fault of the individual.It's really hard. If you can medicalize your faults, you get legal protection for them. If you can't medicalize them, you're personally responsible for keeping them in control. That creates a huge incentive for medicalization of everything in the human condition. And we're all worried about being left behind in this Red Queen's Race." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I find it disturbing that this is even controversial.First, the notion that there is an optimal \"healthy\" state is make-believe. We all get old and die, so in a sense we are all terminally ill. We should have a right to improve our minds and bodies as long as there is room for improvement.More to the point, brain types fall on a spectrum. ADHD is just one extreme. Equating \"median\" with \"healthy\" is a fallacy. Consider this: is synesthesia a disease? It can make life very hard, but it can also make patient extremely creative. Imagine a world where synesthesia is the normal condition -- non-synesthetes would be considered retards!If there were a drug that could turn you into a synesthete, should the drug be illegal?Second, we all already take a brain-boosting drug: caffeine, which is both undeniably effective, and has a wide spectrum of side effects. Other drugs like modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison, but they are prescription-only because they don't have a history of social acceptability. \"Used historically\" = \"safe\" is an even bigger fallacy.Third, you can't prevent people from taking brain pills by not funding research (if the research doesn't happen in the U.S, it will happen in other countries.). All that this policy will achieve is encourage a black market and unsafe usage.The whole thing reminds me strongly of that Kurt Vonnegut piece posted here yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388642." }, { "score": 2, "text": "There could be nasty side-effects twenty years down the road, so I'd rather abstain.It would totally suck to be forced to take those drugs to remain cometitive, so I hope they will keep those drugs in limited circulation until their safety can be proven beyond doubt." }, { "score": 3, "text": "\"Steps to keep the benefits from making socio-economic inequalities worse.\"Not impressed - they would rather everyone be equally \"stupid\" rather than some people be smarter than others? These drugs do not take away from anyone, they only add." }, { "score": 4, "text": "\"But she said she was concerned that wider use of stimulants could lead more people to become addicted to them. That's what happened decades ago when they were widely prescribed for a variety of disorders, she said.\"Whether we like it or not, that property of stimulants is not going to go away,\" she said.\"So, substances with a known history of addictive behavior. This is what we call burying the lede (quote from page 3 of the article). As important as the other considerations are that were brought up, this seems to trump them.Do we know how addictive? Addictive like caffeine, or crack, or somewhere in between?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I can only speak of my own personal approach to commenting. I evaluate my own comments by one metric - whether I think my comment will make HN a smarter, more interesting place. I see HN comments less as a forum for chit-chat and more as a venue for a series of short essays on the topic of the original post. I try to avoid making comments of the sort that are satisfying to post but that I would not be interested in reading. If I don't think I'm being reasonably insightful, I don't bother. For every comment I post, there are usually one or two comments on other items that I decided weren't good enough to post.It seems to me that HN is relatively neutral in terms of your opinion; People here seem to avoid the vice of downvoting based simply on a difference of opinion, at least in my experience. The community generally seems to award karma based on how thoughtful and carefully-constructed your comments are. I have one one occasion been downvoted into oblivion for politely and carefully expressing an opinion that is generally morally unpalatable, but someone came to my defence and I eventually ended up with a small amount of positive karma for the comment.I think the easiest rule of thumb is to try and be the opposite of cable news. The calmer and more dispassionate your tone, the more detailed and precise you are in your reasoning, the more carefully you reference reliable sources, the better your chances of being strongly upvoted." }, { "score": 1, "text": "There's criticism and there's negativity. You seem to be confusing these two things. You can put your point across without snarky comments like:\"Vertical list of applications??? Microsoft what have you been smoking?\"(As we're quoting rap lyrics today) I think that you'll be doing just fine if you relax a little." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Based on a cursory look at your comments I would guess the problem is not what you say but how." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I wrote about this on my own blog, and someone from Hacker News came and posted a highly critical comment about me. They concluded:\"The reason you were downvoted and will continue to be downvoted is because you don’t discuss topics with any intellectual integrity.\"The comment was interesting since it was such a pure, mirror reflection of what the commenter was doing. For instance, they posted anonymously, whereas I always write using my real name, yet they called me a troll. They also accused me of repeating myself, though they had also repeated themselves many times. You can see the comment here:http://www.smashcompany.com/politics/the-stuff-that-gets-dow...As the post indicates, I'm feeling ambivalent about Hacker News right now. Sometimes the conversations are really interesting, but there is also a lot of noise. Sometimes I learn a lot by participating in the conversations, but other times I feel like I'm talking to people who have no interest in understanding what I'm trying to say, and who are willing to use downvoting as a method of shouting me down.I'm ambivalent. I enjoy this forum, but I'm also thinking I should probably invest my energy elsewhere. I've been reading this site for almost 2 years now, and I've learned a great deal, and every day there are interesting new articles posted. All the same, I get bored with conversations where I think the other person isn't really interested in hearing what I might have to say. And no doubt, vice versa, of course - clearly I upset someone, if they were willing to pursue the conversation to my own blog (where I was writing about Hacker News)." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Dude, it's karma points on HN. A number on a server somewhere that has no bearing whatsoever on your real life. Have some perspective." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Good. If they were actually that dangerous, we wouldn't be allowed to carry them on board.Shutting down cell radios makes sense; as I understand it, a bunch of cellphones moving at a couple hundred miles per hour can do some nasty things to cell towers, but it drives me absolutely insane that flight attendants gripe at me about turning off my Kindle. I usually just turn the backlight off." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The thing that gets me about these rules is what an insane threat to national security it would be if they were actually necessary. If anyone really thought that mobile devices could significantly interfere with instruments on an airplane, they should 1) raise hell over fixing our obviously broken planes, and 2) demand that we put some effort into actually making sure that people are turning their cell phones off (for instance, by actually checking, rather than asking politely)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This looks like it will change little. You'll still not be able to listen to music on your device (even if the music is local to the drive) during takeoff and landing.The only change is that you can leave your phone in airplane mode instead of having to power it down.I don't know anybody that actually listened to the flight attendants. Most people just put their phones in airplane mode anyway.So basically nothing actually changes. It would be nice to be able to listen to my music without having to hide my headphones so I don't get yelled at.At least on Virgin they don't bother you because they just assume you're using their entertainment system (which I'd imagine generates more interference then whatever your little device does). I guess on their system you have to watch advertising though - makes it worth it to them." }, { "score": 3, "text": "All of these rules usually drive me crazy. I'm a private pilot and I'll take up friends and coworkers for fun all the time. The most common question before we take off is "Do I need to turn off my phone?" which I usually reply with "I leave mine on for backup GPS". I do understand the need to stow away items to prevent injuries if anything were to suddenly happen during takeoff and landing, but telling people to turn off their devices because, and I've heard this before, "they will interfere with the navigation systems" is just false." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I will be beyond happy to be able to listen to my own music, read off my iPad, and just begin the whole process of ignoring the goings-on in the flight. Travel will be so much better without the useless electronics rules.Now to get rid of the TSA..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Can we instead have a discussion about recommendation "engines"? I've been interested in writing one for fun but I have no clue where to start in learning about them. Can someone point me in the right direction, maybe a Coursera/OCW course?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I mistakingly signed up to Facebook with a work email in the past. And noticed many work acquaintances appearing in Facebook's: do you know lists. Which I can only attribute to other people sharing their email address contacts with Facebook, and Facebook holding onto that data." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm always surprised when I see people say stuff like this. For me every recommendation on every social network was more in the line of 'SELECT user FROM users ORDER BY RAND()'.I guess I'm doing something right." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I would think, similar to Netflix or Spotify, that they would use machine learning algorithms (ensemble technique) to perform collaborative filtering." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Where did you see the recommendation message? Facebook or Google Plus?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Unfortunately, the Holy Grail layout works like crap in mobile. In the most recent Chrome and Firefox for Android, the pinch-to-zoom gesture either doesn't work at all, or the whole div is resized as an image without text reflow (i.e. cropping text lines to the left and right). Also there seems to be a forced minimum width, under which the web pace can't be made smaller; this is awful for navigating long pages, or when the default font size is too big.Changing the phone orientation does reflow the text, so I assume that the problem is with how these browsers resize the web page under pinch-and-zoom in a way that the CSS doesn't detect. The funny thing is that the same browsers on desktop work like a breeze when resizing text with the wheelmouse, or resizing the window. Why does it not work the same on the phone?The worst thing is that the layout seems to be spreading like fire. I'm forced to read most major modern websites at fixed font size." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I wish there was a JS-shim that could be used to deliver flexbox (or any cutting edge CSS) to older browsers so I could begin implementing it now instead of waiting some unspecified amount of time before it becomes acceptable." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm quite happy with the modern flexbox syntax. I did a lot of work with XUL and xulrunner years ago - it was slick having things automatically flow into place, but the syntax (and syntax of the derivative box-flex CSS properties), but it seemed to require very heavy markup to get things "right".Flexie [1] appears to provide a polyfill version of flexbox. Has anyone used it in a major production site? What was your experience? There were a few polyfill-type projects for the older syntax, but I never got them to work very well for anything but the most basic layouts.[1] http://flexiejs.com/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Flexbox (or something similar) should have been the first thing to go into CSS spec. Colors, fonts, margins and what-not are way less important than the ability to align elements.Alignin things vertically is still brainded, but at least now it's possible. Instead of setting properties for the parent element, we should be able to just say .vertically-and-horizontally-centered {align: center center;} and be done with it." }, { "score": 4, "text": ""Feel free to open an issue or submit pull request on Github."Why does the link to the project on GitHub open in a new browser tab? Is there some reason this behavior is foisted on folks who would rather have the content open in the same tab? (Spoiler alert: I'm one of those folks.)And, now that I take a closer look, it seems that every non-internal link on the page behaves the same way, spawning new tabs willy-nilly.Looks like a useful project. I'm just legitimately curious why people do this." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Post and Discussion from earlier today.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6898015" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Please add an API!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Great but I think search options could be improved with some categorization, tagging etc." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Whoa, was not expecting to see my company on here. Nice! Where do they get their information?http://publicapis.com/api/iactionable-api" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I've been looking for a website that is exactly what this is. Thank you!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Unfortunately I think this particular review is missing the point of Keybase. In the same vein as attacking Twitter for not making the follow relationship symmetric or attacking Instagram for ruining the dynamic range of pictures, this author is (mostly) attacking Keybase for the very point of what Keybase is.PGP has failed to reach even a moderate userbase outside of crypto enthusiasts, and while part of this, as the author suggests, is painful UI, a large part is also that the web of trust model is unreasonably demanding for most cases.Keybase asks: who are you on the internet if not the sum of your public identities? The fact that those identities all make a certain claim is a proof of trust. In fact, for someone who knows me only online, it's likely the best kind of trust possible. If you meet me in person and I say "I'm sgentle", that's a weaker proof than if I post a comment from this account. Ratchet that up to include my Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, personal website and so forth, and you're looking at a pretty solid claim.And if you're thinking "but A Scary Adversary could compromise all those services and Keybase itself", consider that an adversary with that much power would also probably have the resources to compromise highly-connected nodes in the web of trust, compromise PKS servers, and falsify real-world identity documents.I think absolutism in security is counterproductive. Keybase is definitionally less secure than, say, meeting in person and checking that the person has access to all the accounts you expect, which is itself less secure than all of the above and using several forms of biometric identification to rule out what is known as the Face/Off attack.The fight isn't "people use Keybase" vs "people go to key-signing parties", the fight is "people use Keybase" vs "fuck it crypto is too hard". Those who need the level of security provided by in-person key exchanges still have that option available to them. In fact, it would be nice to see PKS as one of the identity proof backends. But for practical purposes, anything that raises the crypto floor is going to do a lot more good than dickering with the ceiling.And I don't buy the "don't reinvent crypto" argument at all. Sure, it's a bad idea to use your own password hash instead of bcrypt, but maybe you think you can do better and you end up creating the foundation for Litecoin. A general-case argument against any innovation is a dangerous thing.With that said, I totally agree about uploading your private key to Keybase. That's one very scary basket to put all your eggs in and I don't trust it at all. Luckily, it's optional." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The author may have some points; I have not inspected the protocols or the source completely, but the arguments made in the post are misleading and inaccurate descriptions of keybase. Seems like there may be some subtle yet festering bias.1. They are not "rolling their own" crypto. keybase seems to be an interesting wrapper around gpg that helps you establish links between accounts using "proofs of knowledge of secret keys." I haven't tried the service yet; but one can inspect the code:npm install -g keybase-installerkeybase-installergrep gpg ~/.npm/keybase/0.0.43/package/lib/*.js2. "Keybase's pitch is that rather than use a web of trust..."It is not mutually exclusive. Since you have it installed, \ntrykeybase -hkeybase track <id>That seems to subsume web-of-trust"limits on that identification are two-fold...<security of twitter>...and...<soundness of tweeting>"So it is actually the same argument repeated. The first 3 Mission Impossible movies also demonstrate that when you meet someone in person, they might be Ethan Hunt instead of the person you think they are. For the paranoid, there are out-of-band mechanisms around this (that can also be used with keybase). Even without those, keybase is an out-of-the-box mechanism for linking identities that is weakly sound over the Internet.3. "...doing this right"\nOne of the founders, Max Krohn, was at RealWorldCrypto this year. He is an MIT phd and he certainly knows quite a bit about applied crypto. He is also a systems person and comfortable making tradeoffs between usability and security.If keybase allows 1m more people to easily create and use keys, even if their day-to-day workflow is not secure-against-state-adversaries, that would be progress." }, { "score": 2, "text": ""A public directory of publicly auditable keys? Allow me to introduce PKS (an example server) - a decentralized system for distributing public keys."In my opinion that thought process is exactly what's wrong right now.Just compare the two interfaces [1] and [2] and you'll see why why your average person won't be happy to use the pgp.mit.edu keyserver to verify identifies. It's cluttered, complicated and the presentation once you searched for a name is subpar. I'm not saying that keybase is the best way to do it but it's a good start to make the existing tools (Like the webinterface of pgp.mit.edu) prettier and easier to use.[1] http://pgp.mit.edu/\n[2] https://keybase.io/ (search field in the header)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I agree with the OP about uploading private keys being bad, but you don't have to do that – everything works without doing that as long as you are comfortable in the command line. Whether or not uploading private keys should be an option is a good question (I think they probably should not be uploaded ever), but the site is still early beta so they should be given time to work this out without getting thrown under the bus quite yet.I disagree that the existing public key repositories are what people should be using and that the twitter/github integration is pointless. In today's world, we often want to communicate with people we have never met in person. An old tweet or a gist that hasn't changes in a long time seems like a pretty safe way of verifying someone's identity. Apart from the NSA[^1], it's hard to imagine a situation where both keybase was compromised with a bad public key, and twitter/github was compromised by invisibly changing an old tweet (not possible to edit without a big hack) or a gist (not possible to edit without creating a change history within a big hack). So this makes a lot of sense to me as a way to easily verify identity.[^1]: At this point I'm not sure I would trust any encrypted online communication if the NSA wanted to read it." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I agree that the Twitter integration doesn't seem enormously useful. However the GitHub integration seems to be somewhat useful for code signing at the very least.Knowing that the binary or tarball you got was created by the account you are trusting to have actually written it isn't perfect, but it's pretty good for a lot of situations." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm sorry, but 'joking' about blowing up something ANYWHERE in 2010 that is in earshot of another person (either physically or digitally) will likely get you at least a mild amount of attention from the authorities.My question however is did the authorities have someone report this to them, or were they proactively monitoring twitter for such? In my interactions with federal level law enforcement, it seems that their proactive monitoring is poor at best." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The convictions will continue until the quality of humour improves." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Sometimes I'm annoyed, and saddened by how reactionary the internet can get. WE might look at it and see it as a joke, because our frame of perspective is totally different. The government, not so much.If someone 'jokes' about blowing up a building, and the government does nothing, suddenly this is a whole different story. People ought to start figuring out how that works.Pity the guy." }, { "score": 3, "text": "More info, earlier submission here:\nhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334580" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Original story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059803" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I found the original post text just by putting their URL into Google Reader. Gotta love web-based RSS aggregators that cache. Here it is:It seems that Apple has shut me down. I can no longer provision any more devices. The developers website that had a \"remove device\" link is now gone. I looked at the help tab but it still lists \"removing a device\" as one of the options. I guess Apple just shut my account down. I believe that all the copies of Podcaster I released will keep running. I will try to make an update and test it on my iPhone. If it works, I will release it to every user. I would recommend keeping version 1.0.8b around just in case.On a more serious note, what does this mean for me?\nAll I wanted was for someone from Apple to contact me and tell me how we can work it out so that I get into the app store. Instead, Apple took the cowards way out by simply disabling features in my developers portal. This seems like a childish move for a company that has been proving such high quality service and products in the past.I plan to make Podcaster for the Android operating system. At least there, I will be welcomed instead of being walked all over. I will also try to port the app to a jailbroken iPhone.So a final note to developers. Try to stay out of Apples grey area. Don't build anything that would compete with Apple. Don't spend too much time before you submit to the app store because it could be all for nothing.P.S. Podcaster got a 4.3 our of 5 star from 63 reviews. You can read them at http://www.nextdayoff.com/reviews.aspxUPDATE: I just wanted to add that I am not surprised that Apple has stopped me. The application seems to still be working and can still be installed if you signed up before 9/22/08 Midnight EST. If you are one of these people and still want to try it, email [email protected]\nI will also be making updates to the application and will still fix a lot of the issues users have bene having. Give me about a week." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think the most telling word in that post was \"childish.\" Apple probably has legitimate concerns here, but by simply shutting him off instead of talking with him directly they are really missing an opportunity to develop loyalty with app developers." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Apple are doing this to a lot of people. Surely this is anti-competitive?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is going to be a PR disaster for apple, from a developers point of view. He may have been asked to pull the blog post until they get time to talk to him about it." }, { "score": 4, "text": "For anyone interested, the blog appears to have belonged to the author of Podcaster. The cached url is http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:MP2KvHTWHQMJ:almerica.b... .It doesn't contain the last post, though.I'm curious to see how this develops." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Why is everyone just congratulating PG? Livingston is the one who has to carry it around for 9 months and give birth.Kidding kidding, but congrats to Jessica too!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Congratulations!On the humorous side, this reminds me of this story: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms(Richard Stallman speaks a bit about having children)The funniest part is:\"It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce,\n even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing\n to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really\n something to be proud of.It helps more people, too.\"One more link that made me laugh a lot (again, Stallman):\nhttp://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The ultimate startupCongrats!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "So, er, this would be an XX/XY-combinator?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "CongratsHere in Kenya, the kids born around now are either Obama (boy or Michelle (girl)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I know there's a plethora of URL shorteners these days, and most platform providers (eg: Twitter) are introducing their own so they can harvest analytics themselves. For whatever reason though, I keep trusting Google with all of my most personal information. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I have a feeling this will become my standard URL shortener just as Google Apps has become my standard for email, invoicing customers, document management and scheduling. Not to mention Google Reader for having information on all the RSS feeds I visit and Google's search knowing what links I am visiting daily, and probably thirty other products I'm using that stores my information on their servers." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Why do we need url shorteners again ?When I see a shortened URL the probabilities of me clicking the link go down to almost zero." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Nice simple public stats: http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hoursNot a huge fan of the flash chart though.http://goo.gl/Jvhuhttp://goo.gl/Jvhu.qrEDIT: Better graph" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Is it just me, or was I able to \"shorten\" an already goo.gl shortened url?http://goo.gl/fBUb\n --> http://goo.gl/Bkmv\n --> http://news.ycombinator.comThey don't want to allow this, do they?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Ugh. Google entering this pretty much wipes out the space - companies like bit.ly are going to need to work on seriously differentiating themselves from the pack, and even then I don't think they're long for the world.I can honestly say I hope to never be in a market - or working on a product - where google suddenly decides to enter the game. Even if their offering sucks, or is broken, it sucks all the air out of the room because it's OMG Google." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Not only are you competing for that hackathon's prize, you're competing for the reputation of the entire school. I imagine HackRU will be extra competitive." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Question for HN people: Do you associate the word hacking with computer security? I know I do, and it took me a long time to find that the website was talking about hackathons and not computer security.Sidenote: rewarding students for travelling seems to bias the scoring in favor of densely populated places like the NE." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I might be slightly biased, but I think Rutgers has the best shot here with their hackathon being 1 of the 2 remaining. Carnegie Mellon is hella far away, and Rutgers has an enormous community. Strong attendance could put them in the lead." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is awesome - ranking schools by the successes of their extra-curricular hacking is a really interesting way to look at things." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Swift is a pretty cool guy.. keep up the good work." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This map and many others include digital/creative agencies. They may be startups in the sense of new companies, but if we accept that definition why not include every new lawyer, restaurant, or retailer? Agencies are contractors and they don't own the value they build in a product. I hate to be bitchy and don't begrudge agencies but I think they're fundamentally different to tech startups." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Is there any reason why this site is limited to London startups? Does this geographical restriction add any value over a national startup map?Hint for Londoners: Zoom the map out at bit and it shows other places. These places have names like Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, and are located in the areas of the UK that are not London. People live in these places, and there are startups there too.In fact, there's already a good UK startup map: http://techbritain.com/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Social, social, social, social, social, social.I was expecting to see some "non-social" startups in the city..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Inspired by http://mappedinny.com/ here's a London version. It was built as an excuse to learn more about Backbone.js and play with MapBox's API.Source code here: https://github.com/rosario/digitalmap.Any comments and feedback are always welcome" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Here's a couple of fairly complete ones: http://batchgeo.com/map/21737d8f2b05adc3ab1b1869979f2695http://www.techcitymap.com/index.html" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Clipper is a terrible service but not for the reasons outlined in this post. This post misses the point that tagging on and tagging off is a simple and relatively elegant solution to the problem posed by Caltrain charging by distance traveled.But that's not the real problem with Clipper. The real problem with clipper is their horrible customer service. Here's my story with clipper - and I hardly think I'm alone.I got my card about a year ago when I was going from San Jose to Redwood City once a week. On their web page I set up an 8-travel auto-pay system where I get 8 San Jose<->Redwood City tickets, and when I run out it buys a new set of 8 automatically.This works great until one day I missed my stop and wound up in Gilroy (woops). What SHOULD have happened is that I tag off, pay full price for the ticket I actually traveled, and have the 8 ride ticket refunded. If the card 'balance' (non-ticket cash on the card) goes below $0 (or, for them, $1.25 for reasons I don't understand) then it debits my account for the remaining balance.Instead what happened was my card went 'negative', and they shut down the card until I went to a Walgreens (?!) to pay the remainder of the balance. I was cautioned that paying online could take 1 to 2 weeks to clear the card. Where in the heck did Walgreens come in to the picture? By the way, despite having a banner outside advertising Clipper cards, my Walgreens had no idea what I was talking about. They had to call the GM to call the Clipper people to figure out what was going on.Fast forward, and now I'm commuting between Millbrae and San Francisco via Caltrain again. I just started at this company and they pay for Caltrain, so I link my Employee benefits clipper system to my clipper card - a process they made surprisingly simple which unsurprisingly completely F'ed up everything.All of a sudden I can no longer add funds via my regular portal and have to go through the company portal - and get this, though I bought my employee-benefit-purchased monthly pass on Sept 4th, that was too late for September. So I had to go to - you guessed it - Walgreens to buy a monthly pass with cash for the card that could no longer be used online.I'm hoping that it will work again in October... we will see." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think a big part of the value of Clipper to Caltrain is to increase revenues from people who forget to tag off. You're looking at this from an engineering perspective, but not from the business perspective. Breakage is a huge revenue driver for many industries(think of gift cards), and a monopoly like Caltrain is a great fit for implementing a system like this." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This article doesn't even touch the horrible nature of Clipper. Here is a summary of some of the worst that I have experienced:1 - Intentionally inconvenient autoloading of a monthly pass.- They will automatically charge your CC for this but it doesn't load onto your card unless you have tagged on AND off in the specified zones. The even more annoying part is that during the beta period you could just double tag (acts like a refund) at a single station and your monthly would show up.2- Effectively bricking their own card and making $250 worth of mistaken charges.- This is by far the worst I have ever heard about in terms of Clipper fail. I had a two-zone monthly pass autoload setup. I changed it two a one-zone. The next period they charged me for BOTH passes. I asked them for a refund and apparently this PERMANENTLY blocks your card from ever obtaining the pass type that you were refunded for. I discovered this when I changed the autoload back to a two-zone monthly.... and they CHARGED my credit card the $126 but never gave me the pass. Clipper insisted that they never charged me and wanted me to \"prove it.\" It took me somewhere around 5 hours of phone time to get refunds and I still had to buy a brand new clipper card. The mistakes were 100% clipper's fault and it permanently broke my card. I am still waiting for that refund... should have just had my credit card block the charges!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Overall, this is such a non-problem compared to things most people in SF have to deal with (i.e. street sweeping/parking)If you can remember to scan when you get on (which doesn't fit the \"normal\" behavior of a paper ticket either) then you can remember to scan when you get off. It's no different than BART, the main difference is BART funnels you through an exit. If you have a round trip commute, then you are going to enter and exit at nearly the same points." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Having used Clipper a few times, I think an easy way to make it less annoying is to just have more card readers. All the stations I've seen have so few you have to scan the entire platform to look for one." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "In addition to the isolation that others have cited, there's quite an opportunity for moral hazard on behalf of the entrepreneurs you accept into your house. Not only would you have to be very good at selecting capable entrepreneurs, but you would also need to structure the incentives such that the entrepreneurs met some set of goals or else they would have to pay back the investment you make in the form of rent. Otherwise, there's nothing to prevent squatters from leaching your resourses and stringing you along in the process." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The Rust Belt needs ideas like this to stop being the Rust Belt.If it works, maybe you should consider expanding the idea over time – make it into something that can incubate the neighborhood and the town, not just the startup. I bet if you talked to city government, they'd jump all over this.You wouldn't be alone. I actually posted something a few months back to this effect: http://shortformblog.com/us/need-startup-funding-look-no-fur...I like your concept. Would love to see where you take it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "(note/update: for this comment, I'm mostly considering the 23-unit building)If not for long-term, maybe for programming camps/meetups/etc? Something similar to Big Nerd Ranch[1], or many of the other teaching sessions.With a very low cost of room and board (and people often traveling to meetups anyway), you might be able to find people who want to host (weekend? weeklong? longer?) events at your 'hacker complex.'And possibly have long-term residents that qualify for discounts on the camps? i.e. live at the 'hacker complex' over the summer, enjoy the hacker culture of all of the people coming in and out, and go to the events that interest you.[1]http://www.bignerdranch.com/schedule.shtml" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I've been thinking along the same lines, looking at properties that could work.\nUltimately, I foresee one major problem -- their bandwidth, servers, food, electricity, water, heat, etc. will cost you hard cash, while they live rent-free, with no incentive to change the status quo.My alternative would be to charge rent... to their investors.I envision a group of investors to whom the tenants would apply. Investors pay rent to you on behalf of the entrepreneur(s) of their choice. As long as they keep the investors happy, they stay at your place, and you have the financial means to make it work.I've identified multiple sites at which this plan could work, but would need an investor of my own to quit my day job, move into a site, and get it ready." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I think the problem would be the isolation. It could end up as the blind leading the blind. The advantage of most of the \"accelerators\" is that they're run by successful entrepreneurs, bring in more to serve as mentors and provide a network of successful entrepreneurs on top of that. Since you'd be competing with that, you'd probably only get the folks that didn't get into those places and then the most successful startups would leave to go to startup hubs." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "A review of the story in question, for those who are curious:http://www.thesatirist.com/books/HAPWORTH.htmlI also tracked down a copy of the full text, but in the interests of some kind of vague respect for copyright I'll leave you to figure out how to obtain it for yourself." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think this publishing attempt was doomed from the outset. There was no way that the attempt could ever escape notice for long; and any notice made of it would have upset Salinger. At best, Salinger would have felt duped, if contracts etc. had proceeded to the point that publishing could no longer be aborted." }, { "score": 2, "text": "An interesting tale. Salinger wanted the book published but also wanted nobody to know that it had been published." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The real problem here is the length of copyright terms, which now stand at pretty much forever. If we had more reasonable laws then anyone who damn well pleased could published it." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Wow. If he had actually finished producing the book it would quickly become a bestseller once someone discovered its existence. I think the old man would have had a chuckle buying the plain-looking book at some small, non-chain bookstore." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm curious; by the logic given in the article, a woman who was inseminated by way of a glass tube has the possibility of legitimate legal recourse for defective semen, whereas if it were provided via a meat tube, it would be seen as a cruel aberration of nature. It's almost as if in the former case, the semen is considered to be manufactured, since it was purchased. I would like to hear from someone with a legal background to comment on this." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is a crazy advancement of that cleché argument when the kid screams \"I never asked to be born!\"It's not like they would have gotten a version of her without the problem if they had better screenng." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The girl \"does not have to show that [the sperm bank] was negligent, only that the sperm it provided was unsafe and caused injury\"I thought the notion of biological products like this as defective was an interesting idea. I'd never considered it before, and thought it might pique others' interest as well." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The more interesting issue is that we consider people with mental illnesses defective, like faulty car brakes. That kind of scares me." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Doesn't this bring up all sorts of existential issues?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The CEO has decided that you have technical ability but not management ability. He doesn't want to lose your nagios-installation skills but he thinks that an imaginary person whom he has not yet met or hired will be better than you at leading the tech team. He's happy to let you keep the fancy CTO title and perks so you don't lose face, or because he doesn't want a confrontation.I would guess based on your comments and the fact that you're asking this question that politics are not your strong suit. \"Politics\", b.t.w., is just the natural state of people working together... it can be dysfunctional or functional, but as soon as you have 3 people, you have some kind of politics.Since politics are a major component of management, you may actually be happier not doing management.In situations like this the CEO is probably overestimating his ability to find a Magical VP Technology that will magically solve all his problems (unless he has someone in mind, a buddy from a previous company, for example). Likely he will spend 6-9 months trying to find someone, finally hire someone imperfect in despair, and spend the next year or two discovering that person is incompetent, too. But now I'm really just projecting.If you don't like the CEO it may be time to move on. Life is to short to work with people you don't enjoy spending time with." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Two cents here. Similar situation happened to myself, except I wasn't the CTO but the de-facto \"lead architect\" of a major project/death march that had all of the stereotypical problems you read about again and again: product mismanagement, feature creep, overzealous salesforce, and heightened expectations reaching the impossible.Much like yourself, I had been put in charge of an incredibly difficult project and somehow managed to grow a solid engineering team and build the system with them and get something out the door. 500k lines of C#, unit tests integration tests, the whole 9 yards over two years. We had finally launched (late and with much more baked in than accounted for) and started to tighten up iterations and bring in customer feedback. (Yes! We really had no customers using our system for two years during development!) I of course was under a lot of stress as feature backlogs grew and defects lists exploded because the software wasn't rolled out slowly and incrementally to clients but instead sold from day zero as if it was 100% rock solid.So, as you probably had, I had my lunch with the CEO where I was being asked (ie told) that a new VP of Engineering position was going to be pursued to fix all the horrible problems plaguing the software development team. The problems which, at least from our perspective, had little to do with us since we pulled off not one but a series of those small miracles that only happen at 4AM by yourself in the tech room. However, taxed was I and naive, so I figured hey, what the heck, maybe I'll be able to write code some more if this magical hypothetical person can swoop in and take care of all that other nasty business like \"talking to the sales guys and telling them not to sell features that don't exist.\"So, we interviewed for this position fully unaware of what it was, exactly, we were looking for. Being young engineers if a candidate came in and had managed teams before and knew what unit tests were we were thrilled. We had no idea though what to look for, what red flags there were in hiring this person, so the third person or so who came in to talk to us ultimately was hired since it's hard to say no to someone who you don't even know how to judge. (And you can't, of course, just hire the first or second candidate that walks in the door because then you just look like you don't know what you're doing!)So soon after this new hire we began interviewing for additional developer positions, but all folks that came in to meet us for interviews were developers this new VP of Engineering worked with in the past. As it turns out, the first candidate didn't know how regular expressions worked, so I said \"no hire.\" The second, turned out, worked with a friend of mine some years back and spent days on end simply reorganizing the file structure of their svn repository, and so again, I said \"no hire.\"Well, they both still work there and I have long since left. Our system we worked on for years completely thrown out for yet another re-write from scratch, now to be done the \"right way\". The all stars on the team I helped build are all gone except one who has a family to support, all moved on to do startups or larger more innovative software companies.A long story, yes, but I'd urge you if nothing else to consider the impact a hire like this can have on your entire team, since they will now be the ones making the hiring decisions. If you cannot trust them with that (and it's hard to trust anyone with that after just a few interviews), I'd say push back as hard as you can on this particular decision and try to, as PG says, \"be resourceful\" and bootstrap solutions from folks already in the organization you can trust." }, { "score": 2, "text": "In my company, the CTO and CEO are the co-founders. The CTO has a PHd and our revolutionary product is pretty much his brain child implemented by the tech staff under them. We also have a VP of Engineering that they hired. (a Director of Eng in their previous venture). However, the VP of Eng reports to the CEO. The CTO has his own set of staff and they basically brainstorm on new ideas. We engineers respect all of them, but the CTO is definitely placed at a higher pedestal because the bread & butter produect being his idea. But, the CTO does not deal with most of the engineering staff except a few members who are working under him for some latest ideas or our product in the R&D phase, not released to the market yet. As an analogy, the CTO is more like a College professor with a bunch of RA's under him :)I am not sure what your background in your company is. Just wanted to share what i saw in my company." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Sounds to me like he's trying to push you aside." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I worked in a company where the VP of Engineering didn't report to the CTO. It made some sense because the CTO mostly directed the 6 months into the future vision of the company (next features, next product). This worked ok because the CTO had a research team that reported to him and the VP of Engg had the development team reporting to him but it was not optimal.The issues we faced were:- CTO+Research team builds some amazing enhancements for the product but have to fight to get them into the next release (Dev claimed there was no time for regression testing..but next cycle there will be)- Dev team thought the research team were ivory tower elites (even though this was not the case). There were Ph.D.s and people who never went to college on the team.- Research team eventually thought they were superior (reaction to having all their input regularly ignored by dev team)In short, if your company has a legitimate need for a research or forward looking team, there may be a way to make this situation work, but not without regular political disputes and bitterness between teams. Try to find a way to have the VP report to you." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I think this sort of affirmative approach is going to become more common as tech is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role. Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50 years ago, this would have been unthinkable.Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story. Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a profession." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I can't help but wonder how this guy would go about to fix the lack of white people using public transportation. Reserve special seats in the front of the bus? It's discrimination all the same even though it's well meant.Please stop portraying the lack of female programmers as a problem caused by males while it's a problem that women just choose to not do it. From what I have seen most United States tech companies are exceptionally welcome to people from all different kinds of backgrounds. All women I ever met were that worked as a programmer or related (UI, QA, etc) always treated with respect. If you're female and you are an awesome programmer you will notice that you have a big advantage in this industry." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I agree with the start of the article. The tech industry (and engineering in general) suffer from a distinct lack of women. It's a problem that starts at school and filters all the way through to the top end. It's also a problem that's not getting better particularly quickly - in my mechanical engineering course (graduated 2012) the class was around 12% female. It's a slight improvement on my dad's experience in the late seventies, but not by much.I also agree that good female role models are important. Selling technology and engineering to girls as a viable route to take is the key to increasing gender equality in the field.This said, we also need to accept reality. The reality is that the experts in their conference's area are primarily men. Based on my experience, I'd be willing to be that somewhere around 95% of people who work with the database technologies the conference targets are male. Assuming that only a small proportion of people who start working with a particular technology end up being considered "experts" in the area, it's fairly obvious that the pool from which to select women is diminuitive compared to that from which to select men.My experience of technical presentations is that the level of expertise the person giving the presentation has directly impacts the quality of the presentation. I'd argue that by taking the approach they did singnificantly diminishes the quality of their conference. This isn't unique to gender - if they'd selected based on any under-represented group they'd have a similar outcome.Promoting female role models in tech is hard. Perhaps a compromise - ensuring female representation was at least a certain proportion - would work. Affirmative action is always a tricky area to deal with, and it is always more complicated than it first seems." }, { "score": 3, "text": "> Ours is a male-dominated industry – and weaker for itHas this ever actually been shown? I hear it a lot but have never heard any evidence either way. (the latter part)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "that makes absolutely no sense at all, you should invite the speaker by experience and knowledge and not anything else, the criteria should be technical and not political.If there was a selection criteria of newbie then you could select women over men more aggressively.I know a few great female developers but then you have to hope that they have the skills for public speaking.This needs to be done at the grass roots, not at the top level.But saying that, any top level female developer should be automatically included. There are some no doubt but they need to turn up." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "One thing that annoyed me (and it's typical of writing on gender and racial issues) is that he bends over backwards to state, effectively, \"not that having women execs don't drive success\". This hyper-careful threading brings to mind the famous Seinfeld \"not that there's anything wrong with that\" episode (\"The Outing\").My approach in these matters is Bayesian: Do having female, black, Asian, Indian, etc. executives drive start-up success? The a priori probability I assign to this statement is 0.5, i.e. may or may not. I also employ the My Human Law of Large Numbers, i.e. any \"large enough\" human population (i) has a Gaussian distribution of any cognitive skill and (ii) the parameters of this distribution is pretty much independent of the particular population sample. I don't have solid proof of this principle and in certain subdomains it may be wrong (e.g. the great cognitive differences between men and women debate, etc.) but I doubt that population differences would be significant.Now, armed with the simple Bayesian approach and the MHLLN, we can see that most of these articles are BS. The evidence to move the a priori value of 0.5 up or down should be substantial, e.g \"extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof\". I would be extremely surprised if any gender, racial, etc. factor would derive success of any size company.Since the above analysis is rather trivial, one then has to ask why these things continue to be written. I think the motivation is usually benign: One sees the dearth of women in startups and wants to show that \"it's a good thing\". This approach, however, is misguided in that, by making silly arguments or sub-par statistical analysis, it hurts the cause due to the \"the lady doth protest too much\" effect: many people politely nod, but see through your sloppiness and internally become convinced of just the opposite cause (especially if they are inclined to do so, i.e. if the prior was less than 0.5).A quote I like a lot is \"To be ideological is to preconceive reality.\" These authors, rather than being objective, have already decided what their results will be and are just filling up the blanks." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I couldn't give a shit less if someone is male or female: either they can help me code&sell and they can stomach startup life (which is not for everyone, and certainly not for me in the long run) or not.Period.Who hires sex/gender? Big companies and organizations. Startups hire specific people who can do specific things, and, quite literally, can't afford to give much of a shit about this stuff." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Out of curiosity, I often read gender/green studies mentioned in mainstresm press, published by various NGO. I am constantly horrified how misused statistics is. I believe that most of these studies are written for a specific purpose and math is there just to give it a science-cover. Even worse, I hear them cited by politicians making a real impact to our lives." }, { "score": 3, "text": "As a feminist management theorist and geek, study conclusions like this always frustrate me. Obviously, the study sheds little light on the actual cause of the correlation, but my guess based on my personal experiences with leadership strategy is this:The choice to hire diversely is symptomatic of certain types of thinking:\n1) Open / wide / flexible thinking. Someone who hires diversely is more likely to find it easier to conceptualize worldviews farther from their own as still relevant.\n2) Civic responsiblity / empathy. A desire to be a part of the solution to gender imbalance rather than a part of the imbalance.\n3) Long term thinking. Having people who are more different from you on the team is a more effective solution in the long run, because you're likely to cover more bases.This means that leaders who make the choice to hire diversely are more likely to also be leaders who plan slightly further ahead, are more dextrous in the different ways they could see problems, and able to focus on non-top-down perspectives on the business, such as what the customer might be thinking. (All of this is correlative of course, not a->b.) As a result, leaders who hire diversely are more likely to be already be leaders who are better at running a successful company.Ie, diversity is a litmus, not a direct cause.I would be very, very surprised to find if, someday when women run 50% of companies and are in workforce balance, companies with women executives are still more likely to be successful.EDIT: I do, however, think there is also an edge to leadership that can sometimes come simply from being in a minority, whatever the minority is. Not because there's anything wrong with white men, but simply because there's a unique perspective on problems and indirect causality that you get from being at a cultural disadvantage that, if you manage not to get weighed down by it, ends up being pretty useful in business." }, { "score": 4, "text": "That kind of hokey abuse of statistics always gets me riled up. Just because cigar smokers are likely to live longer doesn't mean the habit extends longevity.A more telling study might be to compare success rates of startups with all female teams, versus all male teams. Then at least you remove the bias of having success attract a more gender-diverse team. Although you'd probably need to correct for industry area, since I'm guessing females choose a different set of markets to go after, in aggregate.Crappy logic aside, I actually do think the original claim that women boost startup success is probably true. It's super valuable having team members who understand 50% of the population (and ~85% of purchasers), and knowing your customers is critical." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There are things that I don't understand about this story.I don't understand why Calacanis' choice was between firing his trusted CTO and retaining a convicted computer felon.I don't understand how Mahalo could have checked any reference, let alone 3-5, and not found out that Schiefer is one of the most famous computer felons in California.I don't understand why Calacanis is characterizing something that Schiefer did in 2005, in his mid-20's, as the actions of a \"stupid kid\".I don't understand how Calacanis arrives at his estimation that Schiefer did only 0.0000001% of the damage he could have with his botnet. Schiefer stole random Paypal accounts and used them to buy things, and passed stolen Paypal accounts on to his acquaintances. What's the \"worse\" thing you can do with a botnet? At least the DDoS extortion botnets target gambling sites, and not your mom.For that matter, I don't understand how Calacanis can equate what Schiefer did to the dumb things lots of teenagers do on computer networks (and, for that matter, on conference room floors). Schiefer wasn't a \"hacker\". He's a carder.(As a side-note to Calacanis: sniffing people's passwords at conferences? Also illegal!)Calacanis says Schiefer was supervised in his work at Mahalo. Is there someone who isn't supervised there? I don't understand how Mahalo believes they had the capability to supervise someone who can manage a 250,000-host botnet.Unfortunately, I do understand why Calacanis thinks he doesn't handle sensitive information. He doesn't see the link between tens of thousands of email-password pairs and those people's bank accounts. Just a wild guess, but I'm thinking the guy who steals the Paypal accounts out of bot-infected Windows boxes can make that leap.This is just such a weird post. I guess I can understand not seeing \"contrition\". But Calacanis seems proud that this happened. It's just head-explody weird." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Calacanis' reaction is an interesting one. As he states himself it was the risky, not socially acceptable, decision to make. His telling of the story makes it seem that he made the right decision. I would agree. A little grace, which by definition can only be shown to someone completely unworthy of it, is encouraging. I am fascinated by my own reaction when I read stories like this. Why is it that justice waived produces such a positive response in me? I think it is because my experience shows that I too need grace more often than not. Whether its something as small as being allowed to turn in an assignment late, or a boss who overlooks a broken rule that they had every right to enforce, I need a measure of grace on an almost daily basis. So to Mr. Calacanis: Thank you for reminding us that there is grace out there when we need it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm sad to think that they would have cut him out of the process if they had known.I sort of hate our culture which demonizes anyone who has ever been prosecuted by the justice system and quickly shuffles them into a corner of \"people who we can't legally round up and gas but are just as worthless\". It's really unhealthy to think that decent, worthwhile people can't ever make mistakes in judgement (and learn from them!) and to presume that the law is always morally correct. It's really a great disservice to the idea that we are trying to rehabilitate people." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Turning a hiring mistake into linkbait -- you stay classy, JCal." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Actually, people with a criminal past (or general oddities that are looked down upon by corporate americal) are often a good choice for a small startup trying to save money. My company often would be someone's 'opportunity' to prove themselves after a major setback in life.They are motivated, willing to work for cheap, and appreciate the opportunity so much more than someone 'willing to take a paycut' to join your startup. And when times get tough they will be your most loyal employees.In a startup where cash is tight and the outlook is 'hazy', an employees loyalty is priceless." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This means parking meters, vending machines, laundromats, etc. can receive bitcoin payments without an internet connection. That is actually really cool." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Talking about that, Can anyone please transmit wikipedia via long wave radio? It would be interesting in censor states.\nHiding wikipedia in tv/movie firmware would also be a possibility." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Thats all good and gimmicky but can you tell me: the 1-way connection offers any value to anyone?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Fascinating idea. In the areas that this would work, would it not be simpler to just use a normal cell phones data connection or SMS?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I had a similar idea like this, but using shortwave instead of DVB." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I have a SaaS app, but in a larger (and crowded) market.First of all, I don't think you should charge $25 per month. A company of 10 people spends more than $25 per month on toilet paper! If you're in a market where your customers are cheap or have no money (or both) they may actually be unwilling to pay more than $25 a month. In which case you should ask yourself why you're entering a market where your customers have no money and no desire to spend the little money they have?You're in software! Software is used in every single company in every country in the world. In planes and cars, in phones and toasters. You could be building _anything_. You could be saving companies millions of dollars with 12 lines of clever Perl code!But I digress.- the rule of thumb is that you should charge high prices in small markets and low prices in huge markets. You need a good reason to deviate from the common sense route.- you generally don't need to worry about total market size. Worry instead about reaching potential customers in the first place.- If there are only 5000 potential customers, why not really _sell_ to them? Get a fresh college graduate to cold call potential customers and schedule a meeting. Then sell them a site license for $10.000+ and get them to buy a support contract. This I'd say is the \"default\" way to sell to these niche markets. For $25 a month you can't afford to spend any money on customer acquisition. You can't afford phone support. Every hour you spend per customer on email support is equivalent to 3 months of use of your product/service. Insanity!- Customers who are only willing to pay $25 a month are a not the easiest customers to have. All customers who pay for my most expensive pricing plan are my best customers. They don't email me, and if they do they don't make demands. They pay on time, every time. The people who send 5 emails in a single week end up purchasing the cheapest plan and end up leaving after a couple of months. You're going to attract these customers with a $25 price point.- monthly payments doesn't mean \"free money forever who-hoo!\". It means your product has to convince every customer every month again your product is worth the money.- ignore all of the above if your goal is to get to ramen profitably as quickly as profitable. You're going to make so many mistakes when building and selling your first product you might as well accept that you're not going to make a lot of money. Building a second product is a lot easier when you're already profitable.- it's normal to question yourself when just starting on a new product. Everybody else is flying blind too.- if you can get to the point where you have $200.000 profit where you have to put in 2 hours a day to keep things running smoothly you've hit the jackpot. You can then use your experience and funds to build a bigger and better company that can grow to millions of revenue.- growth will be linear for your kind of app, not exponential in nature. If you need another 4 months to build the product and another 2 months to get the billing/subscription stuff to work right and another month to set up your company and legal issues you won't realistically launch before April 2011. If you get 5 new customers every month with an \"average\" marketing effort (and this is not extraordinarily pessimistic) you'll have only 60 customers after 12 months! Of which you're going to lose at least 30%. So you're looking at $25 * 40 = $1000 monthly revenue 12 + 6 = 18 months from now. People are not kidding when they say starting a company is a lot of hard work! Starting a SaaS app is not an instant path to riches.I've written way more than I planned to so I'm going to leave it at this. I'll just say that I don't have any regrets and starting a SaaS business was one of the best decisions I ever made." }, { "score": 1, "text": "You ever hear of a publication called Congressional Quarterly? Extremely niche market: people willing to pay out the ass for the best and fastest coverage of everything (and I mean everything) related to Capitol Hill. Government employees, contractors, lobbyists, and oh, you know, 95% of Congress because they're just that good.They offer a large number of even smaller niche services; you're sort of expected to make your own bundle of subscriptions that apply to you. But as you may guess by their name, their flagship publication is the quarterly one. Yeah, their big moneymaker is published just four times a year.You know how much CQ charges for their services? Hint: this is their subscription page: http://corporate.cqrollcall.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=79 Yes, that's like 30 different phone numbers you're looking at. No, they don't let you subscribe online.When that happens, you're either dealing with someone living in the stone age or a hyper-niche publication that everybody who's anybody in the world of Federal politics subscribes to, despite its absurd pricetag (e.g., four figures for a one-year sub to just Quarterly). That subscription isn't a status symbol, it's a necessity. Their livelihood depends on the information Congressional Quarterly provides.It doesn't matter how small your market is. If your product is only of value to a slight fraction of the population, then make it so good they can't live without it. And charge out the ass for it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "If your count of the number of businesses there are is accurate, than that sounds like a very small number of potential customers. How are you going to address them all? Unless they have a website where they all hang out to talk shop, you'll have to spend money to get to them, and $25 a month does not permit all that much of a marketing spend.I sell bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers. The idea strikes most people as pretty niche. I once estimated the total addressable market at 2,000, which turned out to be severely understating the number. (Using Twitter accounting I have over 200k users.) If I had acted upon that estimate, I probably would have shut the business prior to starting and never learned I could sell to a multiple of that.It is highly likely that you are underpricing the service at $25 per month, particularly if it creates revenue or provably decreases costs for the business involved. That is a fraction of what an ad in the Yellow Pages costs, for example. (They cost enough to have pricey sales reps pitch them directly to customers.)There is always the option of using the revenue/experience/etc you get from this app and using it to power your next adventure, by the way. If you're intimately connected to this problem domain and will have far and away the best solution for it, and can't see a path to more than $100k revenue per year... oh well? Try it, learn a little, apply your lessons to attacking the next problem." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I would be more concerned about what % of that 1.5M you can make and how confident you are of that. Market size just by itself is a pretty useless figure in most situations if you don't get into the nuances.We are in a similar market-size(even smaller). But this issue has never really worried me too much. At this stage, I am a lot more concerned about how easily I can make the sale in a market than how big of a market it is. Right now, I would rather be in a small market I can easily sell and make payroll/salary. Once you have that covered, you should be able to come up with new product ideas for bigger market.This is more of a problem if you are going the VC route. If you are bootstrapping, it is more important IMO to focus on not dying before shooting for the stars. So if you are not financially safe(ie. no vc/angel) and can get 50% of a $200K market in 3mos with some certainty, I'd go for that over being in a 100M market with a lot less certainty! Of course larger market does not automatically mean more risk. But if it does, I prefer the smaller market.Rephrase your question:1. How much money do I need in short-term to not die as a start-up? Or do I?(may be not, if you are well funded).2. What are the paths to getting the $ along with the seeming risks? You can cold-call or buy some clicks for each market and see which one is an easier sell/less risky and vice-versa.tl;dr: if you are bootstrapping, go after whatever market is most quickly to get you your min $ you need to survive. maximize profit later with new products/bigger markets." }, { "score": 4, "text": ">There's something like 5000 businesses of this type in the U.SDon't mean to be rude but the world doesn't end at the US border. There are likely to be other companies in the same market outside of the US, why write them off before you've found out the size of the non-US market." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "...what is happening right now in this comments section? I came here to get a thoughtful response about the video, or a brief description at least (videos at work aren't a fantastic idea), and all I see currently are "great video!" and "Steli is neato!"Also, title seems click-baity.This smells." }, { "score": 1, "text": "When did sales and biz dev become "hacking"?Can we put this nonsense to bed already?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Most of the comments in this thread seem to be added by people who are associated with the OP." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Good stuff Steli!\nBtw - Close.io is an awesome product with even better service." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I am currently the Director of Sales @ Krossover Intelligence. I have worked with Steli in the past and he is a master of sales techniques. His tactics are efficient and most of all they work." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": ""Your program communicates with something on a network, but some of the information it’s sending is wrong? It’s probably sending it with write, sendto, or send."If you want to debug network traffic, a higher-level tool like Wireshark[1] (which knows about the packet formats for all sorts of different wire protocols and has sophisticated tools for filtering out just the packets you're interested in seeing) would be much easier to use than looking at system call traces.Still, this is a great article, and I definitely agree that learning about your operating system's debugging facilities is useful, but in many cases you can save yourself a lot of time by using a tool that's optimized for a particular task.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireshark" }, { "score": 1, "text": "If you find strace useful, you should check out sysdig[1]. Sysdig is like strace but uses kernel trace points instead of ptrace so it has a lower probe effect on the running process.[1]: http://www.sysdig.org/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Should I stop feeling guilty now about debugging Java programs on Windows using Process Monitor?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "While I suppose this may be a "new way" of debugging for the author of this article, it's hardly a new technique. strace, trace, truss and similar tools have been around for decades now. They're the kind of tools that many developers and sysadmins use without a second thought." }, { "score": 4, "text": "strace with Haskell is really messy because of the run time scheduler for green threads.I would guess that it is similar for other run times that involve similar concurrency management techniques." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There are many architectural differences between CPUs and GPUs that make it difficult to draw the kinds of conclusions suggested by these graphs.Data parallel algorithms with high computation-to-communication ratios, good data locality and low local branch divergence will see these kinds of speedups when rewritten for GPUs. This is an important subset of algorithms, but don't expect GPUs to replace CPUs for more general-purpose computation any time soon." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Thanks for posting this, its an excellent insight.It was interesting when Intel fail to deliver on their roadmap. Here is a link from 2000 where Intel was alleged to be saying 10Ghz by 2011 http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intel-predicts-10ghz-chip...Which of course lead to the great Multi-core debate (AMD started it, Intel followed with two physical die on a package later to integrate into a single die).Which lead to the great Memory channel bottleneck (Intel was in-order single channel, AMD was multi-channel) and resolution (everyone now is multi-channel).GPUs on the other hand have always had memory bandwidth issues so they went wide, the GPU equivalent of multi-channel, from the start. They also benefit from a feature of graphics which was 'do this same algorithm on all of these texels' which is straight forward to parallelize.And as nuclear weapons designers, and genomic researchers will tell you, GPUs are also useful in doing MIMD simulations.Its less clear what the parallel architecture breakthrough is for OLAP type problems (or parallel file systems as an even easier example) These have lots of operations in parallel but they also have high connectivity of data synchronicity across those parallel threads which, at the moment, brings everything down to earth.Fun times!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I would have preferred a logarithmic scale for the last graph (http://csgillespie.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/gpu3.png)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "If someone figured out how to write regular apps on a GPU (which would amount to parallelizing the app), it could change everything.1. What would be a first step towards this? It seems the big problem is that most code is sequential... and the opportunity is those parts that don't need to be, but just happen to be written that way.2. Perhaps another opportunity is to try to remove the layers that make modern software so slow. Can they be distributed across all pipelines somehow?3. Finally, a radical approach is not to try to convert existing apps, but to think about the whole problem of an app from the very beginning (what inputs will you get, what outputs do you want), and try to write that directly on a GPU. By making it concrete, you might see new tricks, perhaps by redefining the problem (the app's features)." }, { "score": 4, "text": "If this chart from nVidia is to be believed, the CPU speed increase will continue for many years to come. They're projecting almost a 100x increase in speed from Tegra 2, in 2014!\nhttp://images.anandtech.com/reviews/SoC/NVIDIA/Kal-El/roadma..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I personally like the Disqus humans.txt file: http://disqus.com/humans.txtEdit: Also, I'm just getting a 404 on the linked Google humans.txt file." }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's not really practical to have a proper list of credits for a company like Google. I feel some people are going overboard with Google-bashing." }, { "score": 2, "text": "went down for me, here's it in google cache:https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5FYB51..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Shouldn't the humans.txt mirror the robots.txt and give humans permission to use the website and explain how?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Is this a weird marketing ploys to get geeks to look at their job postings?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I don't think so. First of all, a Frontend Hero needs to have design sense, ability to learn quickly, empathy with users, trustworthiness to \"fill in the blanks\", and the balls to say no to designs or features that are unnecessary, impractical, and time-consuming. What Sebastian Deutsch described is a CSS / Javascript quirks specialist.Additionally, the article never really touched on how to recruit these people - it just lists screening questions to ask during an interview. To recruit a Frontend Hero, you need to hire great designers and create a culture that treats front end engineers as first class citizens.Incidentally, we're doing that at Airbnb right now. \nhttp://www.airbnb.com/jobs/show/8" }, { "score": 1, "text": " Q: What methods do you know to realize columns?\n A: cleardiv\n clearfix (better one)\n\nWTF? I'd expect floats, faux columns, display: table-* , *-column-count being the answer but get some cleardiv/clearfix instead. I never liked those, especially cleardiv. Often you can do simply reusing next element (#footer {clear:both}), but sometimes that's not enough, alas.In my opinion any competent frontend developer should know these, not enough for the hero. On the other hand, to be able to interview hero you should be at least on that level yourself, which is not the case there, imho." }, { "score": 2, "text": "To me this looks like an endless series of 'gotcha' questions that for the most part are either in the totally obvious or terribly obscure category." }, { "score": 3, "text": "That looks like a very poor checklist unless you're purely looking for someone that rapidly turns templates into markup.Otherwise, a grasp of how the users will interact with your app and what constraints that imposes on the front end is far more important than their ability to regurgitate CSS clearfix syntax and knowledge of server side javascript frameworks they might not have to learn." }, { "score": 4, "text": "... wow, I haven't been paying close attention to the web development community. CSS frameworks are really considered an essential building block now?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Wow, my dad would have loved to come across a tool like this.My father, in his infinite genius, devised a clever naming scheme for his children (three of us), with the following rules:1. The middle name must be a fairly rare name, so that we might be the only one among friends/peers with the name, but not so unique or strange that we'd be ridiculed.I'm really grateful for this, and I consider the uniqueness (yet normalcy) of my name a huge gift. To this day I've only ever met one other Simon in person. (It's extremely rare in the US, but very popular in the UK I'm told).2. The first name must be fairly common, everyday name, named after someone in the family, as a fallback for us.Then, we were all to be called by our middle names. If we grew up detesting that name[1], we could easily switch to our first name as our primary je m'apelle and nobody in our future would think twice about it.John Nicholas was picked for my brother's first and middle as Nicholas was a "good Greek name" that almost nobody in America used. That was 1987. If you look at Nicholas in this tool you'll see just what happened to that name! (in the 1980's it shot up to over 1% of names and remained that way until after 2000).My dad was kind of bummed, and probably would have picked a different name if he had a bit of accessible clairvoyance. (Remember, pre-internet it was hard to even know that you could find this information out at all. I suspect the data he found in the 1980's, if any, was already years out of date)I'm the only child that didn't follow the rubric because Anthony Simon Sarris makes for a slightly offensive monogram, so my parents switched the order (to Simon Anthony Sarris) and I'm the only child called by his first name.[1] My little brother hated his middle name Morgan for most of his life (a girl's name too, some teasing, etc) so most of his friends call him by his first name. After high-school he appreciates both names.Aside- I do think our kind are more predisposed to obsess over names than most: "There are only two hard problems in Computer Science:\n cache invalidation and naming things."\n\n -- Phil Karlton" }, { "score": 1, "text": "An interesting and entertaining study. I question the rigour of the prediction claims (they give a single example, though note that they disclaim that it isn't to be taken too seriously), especially given that naming patterns are dramatically changing.The top girl name accounts for about 1% of the gender now, where early in the 1900s it would account for 6%+.You can thank social media for that, and the effect is accelerating. Our awareness of trends nation and worldwide is much more amplified than it was before, and the forces that virally spread something also contribute to suppressing it lest we all look like fools. Add that multiculturalism and the acceptance of the same has greatly aided the entropy of names.I find geographic distribution and name variations far more interesting (though again, this is changing via social media).e.g.http://names.yafla.com/#n=Isabelle,Isabel,Isabell,Isabella&s..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Geeky naming baby naming story time! My wife's Japanese, and I'm Finnish. To name our kids, I found databases of Finnish and Japanese names, cross-referenced them together (with fuzzy matching to account for spelling variance, so eg. l == r and Finnish j == Japanese y), and filtered out those that were opposite genders. In the end, there were precisely three male names left... and we used two!Crappy code on Github: https://github.com/jpatokal/baby_namesI was originally going to make this a public website, but encoding all the sound-vs-spelling rules is a pain and doing N-to-N fuzzy matching with raw SQL is too slow." }, { "score": 3, "text": "One lovely benefit of being an ethnic minority living outside the "motherland" is that you get a large pool of names to choose from that satisfy both the "only one in their 2nd grade class" and "venerable and meaningful" criteria.The downside is you'll be spelling out your name at Starbucks for the rest of your life and probably grow very tired of saying "No, emphasis on the first syllable, not the last" twice a week. But there are tradeoffs to everything." }, { "score": 4, "text": "> Adolph last peaked in 1913 . It will next peak as a baby name in 2029.Well it's bound to come back someday I guess, 2029 is as good a time as any :)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Whoa there nellie. Complexity ahoy.Why would you want to have a view that dumps out its HTML as a string? If a string of HTML is all you want, don't use a view, just use a template.But putting that aside for a second ... for this particular example, how about this: render: ->\n this.$el.html JST[\"table_view_template\"]()\n tbody = this.$el('tbody')\n for person in this.collection.models\n view = new TableRowView model: person\n tbody.append view.render().el\n\n... or if you were in earnest about only needing the raw HTML from the sub-view, how about just rendering the row templates within the table template, making your render function as simple as this: render: ->\n this.$el.html this.template people: this.collection" }, { "score": 1, "text": "How is the performance when each row gets its own object instantiated, its own template loaded, and its own events attached? What happens when you have 1000+ rows in a scrollable/sortable/filterable table? I tried nested views approach but the performance was lacking in slower PCs when the row count was high.What I prefer to do is the following: class Example.Views.TableView extends Backbone.View\n\n events:\n 'click td': 'clicked'\n\n rowHtml: ->\n x = []\n p = $('#person_row').html()\n for person in @collection.models\n x.push(_.template(p, person))\n x.join('')\n\n clicked: (e) ->\n id = $(e.target).parents('tr').attr('id')\n # handle action for row id\n\n render: ->\n # render self view including rowHTML\n\n\nThe template is loaded just once into a variable and filled in each iteration. Only one set of events is attached to the DOM. Only one call is made to DOM to create all the rows, one string merged from HTML array. I still get the benefit of view and subview templates, without the constructor for subview objects being called 1000 times when all I need is the <tr> HTML x 1000." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is getting way too many votes for what amounts to bad advice. I think you should keep subview rendering methods out of your templates (i.e. keep your templates \"dumb\"). You can just create placeholder elements in the template, and then pass the placeholder element to the subview constructor. Or you can just append a list of collection-based subviews to a single container element.You should be able to write Backbone apps without resorting to stuff like $(\"#row_#{@model.id}\")And for an example, here's a gist https://gist.github.com/2931491" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Something I haven't been able to understand: why does almost every Backbone project generate and update views by applying templates to generate new HTML strings, and then new DOM fragments?Wouldn't it be much more efficient to create a view just once by setting innerHTML, and then update it using the DOM (setting attributes, classes, innerText, etc.)? Surely this would reduce GC pressure, reflow events, and so on.I'm seeing \"use templates for everything\" in most Backbone tutorials and projects, and I can't help but think that this is an anti-pattern." }, { "score": 4, "text": "A lot of people are finding out that views are the hardest thing to do - especially with Backbone. The problem is that views are tightly coupled to the model so it's hard to build them up. I just wrote http://modernjavascript.blogspot.com/2012/06/v-in-mvc.html for another post but believe that it could be helpful in this situation. You'd need to actually write a Backbone.controller class and move the logic in to there but then you could create a whole lot of Backbone.Views that were generic and could be hooked up through the Control (I'd also like to see a Backbone.MultiView or something that could take several views in and then re-emit the changes and allow people to add in several small component views in to a large view either for a collection or a model." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "this headline is misleading. The website was blocked in some schools due to an incompetent configuration of a filter software. The filter configuration has been changed." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This ought to be counter-productive, considering that most students either know or potentially know about the Pirate Party. All this does is making people who didn't care enough become interested. I think the Pirate Party will probably get more votes from this, as people like to feel they are sticking up to the man - voting on a censored and a non-non-sensical party seems like a good way of doing it, especially since their views are aligned with most students views." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This isn't censorship any more than blocking porn in high school libraries is considered censorship. This wasn't a move by rival political parties. The school in question used some third party web filter which flagged the pirate party's website as drug-related." }, { "score": 3, "text": "There is a possibility of censorship of the Dutch party since yesterday.Dutch court bans Pirate Party links to The Pirate Bay http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18016819" }, { "score": 4, "text": "What \"list from IBM\" would they be using? Can anyone confirm this categorization of the site as \"illegal drugs\"?Edit: any chance this was done by someone in support of the pirate party?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "My guess is that you're testing AR associations all over the place and that the business logic in your models is tightly coupled to AR associations. This has the effect of slowing down testing tremendously.I try to write code so that stuff that needs to be tested is not tied to AR. Why should your logic need to wait for AR to fetch records and fire a callback when the part that is likely to break (that isn't covered by AR's test suite) is your logic, not the data fetching or callback infrastructure." }, { "score": 1, "text": "We dont run the entire test suit.\nOur last night test suit took 159 minutes to finish.We automated that in order to run every night.\nWe need a 100% pass rate before we push to production.If you just do something you run those specific tests. \nIf something else breaks due to that, it will be caught ( hopefully ) by the nightly tests.Imagine having to run the test suite 2 - 3 times a day.\nYour day would be wasted !" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I use my Ansible runs (which are much shorter, but still take a huge chunk of the day in agregate) to update my todos and timesheets, doodle ideas... and also to check email and HN. So it goes.Of course, my Ansible runs are shorter because I try not to do the full run every time." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Actually relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/303/" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I start planning my work for the next few hours, scratching down notes / sketching out an algorithm / design a screen / update my todo list . Although I have never had to wait more than 5 minutes for tests to run." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Broader adoption of JS on the server will only begin after ES6 generators land in Node. Due to the complexity of async code, writing JS on the server is not easy for the average team.As of now, you could use Promises but it is still kind of messy without generators. Here is a simple example: #Without generators\n Credentials.get({ token })\n .then (credentials) =>\n User.get({ username: credentials.username })\n\n #With generators\n credentials = yield Credentials.get({ token })\n User.get({ username: credentials.username })\n\nWe use FaceBook's regenerator project to compile ES6 features down to Node's currently supported Javascript features. If you don't want to use the --harmony flag, you should really try it out. https://github.com/facebook/regenerator" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I recently found that AngularJS has supports for promises. I replaced some of the callback code to use promises and it's a lot more readable.Callbacks: Backend.CallA(param, function() { \n aDone = true;\n if (aDone && bDone) { doC(); }\n });\n Backend.CallB(param, function() { \n bDone = true;\n if (aDone && bDone) { doC(); }\n });\nPromises: var promiseA = Backend.CallA(param);\n var promiseB = Backend.CallB(param);\n $q.all([promiseA, promiseB]).then(doC);" }, { "score": 2, "text": "What version of Javascript has Promises and does anyone know the estimated time it might take to make it over to V8 and subsequently node.js?The biggest issue I had with promises is interfacing with non-promise code. There are methods to 'lift' node.js code that uses callbacks into promises, but the resulting code is much noiser.I'm a bit disappointed that the official JS version didn't cut down on the visual noise of the piping so the actual work being done stands out. Maybe there needs to be a different type of syntax highlighter that mutes the promises piping and highlights the actual calls." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I've been really enjoying ToffeeScript, which provides implicit continuations. It was trivial to implement coroutines on top of it: https://gist.github.com/luciangames/7776345.It works very well if you bear in mind what's happening to the call stack. In my case, every call to pause! or wait! is scheduling a continuation to be called later by the game loop. If I'm not mistaken, the overhead of each continuation is just that of a closure.It's very comfortable, coming from a background in Stackless Python, Lua, and Unity.I wish more people would take a look at ToffeeScript." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Fantastic! I don't know if promises are the ultimate solution to async programming, but they're a hell of a lot better than plain old callbacks." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm the developer of [git-annex](http://git-annex.branchable.com/) which is AFAIK the closest eqivalant for git. I only learned about the mercurial bfiles extension (which became the large files extension) after designing git-annex.The designs are obviously similar at a high level, but one important difference is that git-annex tracks, in a fully distributed manner, which git repositories currently contain the content of a particular large file. The mercurial extension is, AFAIK, rather more centralized; while it can transfer large file content from multiple stores it can't, for example, transfer a large file from a nearby client that happens to currently have a copy, which git-annex can do (if a remote is set up). This location tracking also allows me to have offline archival disks whose content is tracked with git-annex. If I ask for an archived file, git-annex knows which disks I can put online to retrieve it.Another difference is that the mercurial extension always makes available all the large files for the currently checked out tree. git-annex allows a tree to be checked out with large files not present (they appear as broken symlinks); you can ask it to populate the tree and it retrieves the files as a separate step. This is both more complex and more flexible. For example, I have a git repository containing a few terabytes of data. It's checked out on my laptop's 30 gb SSD. Only the files I'm currently using are present on my laptop, but I can still manage all the other files, reorganizing them, requesting ones I need, etc.git-annex also has support for special remotes, which are not git repositories, but in which large files are stored. So large files can be stored in Amazon S3 (or the Internet Archive S3), in a bup repository, or downloaded from arbitrary urls on the web.Content in special remotes are tracked the same as other remotes. This lets me do things like this (the first file is one of my Grandfather's engineering drawings of Panama Canal locks): joey@gnu:~/lib/big/raw/eckberg_panama>git annex whereis img-0124.png\n whereis img-0124.png (5 copies) \n \t5863d8c0-d9a9-11df-adb2-af51e6559a49 -- turtle (turtle internal drive)\n \t7e55d8d0-81ab-11e0-acc9-bfb671110037 -- archive-panama (internet archive http://www.archive.org/details/panama-canal-lock-design-papers)\n \t905a3a64-4149-11e0-8b3f-97b9501cdcd3 -- passport (passport usb drive 1 terabyte)\n \t9b22e786-dff4-11df-8b4c-731a6178061c -- archive-leech (archive-6 sata drive)\n \tf4c185e2-da3e-11df-a198-e70f2c123f40 -- archive (archive-5 sata drive)\n ok\n joey@gnu:~/lib/big/raw/eckberg_panama>git annex get img-0124.png --from archive-panama\n get img-0124.png (from archive-panama...) ok\n\nI'm hopeful that git will grow some internal hooks for managing large files that will improve git-annex and also allow others to develop extensions that, perhaps, behave more like the mercurial largefiles extension. I recently attended the GitTogether and this stuff was a major topic of discussion." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Another option available since Mercurial 1.5 is to put the large files in a subversion repository and reference it as a subrepository.http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Subrepository#SVN_subrepos..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I don't get what it does. Does this extension make large binary files \"diffable,\" as it states that's the problem it solves?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I wonder whether Kiln will end up using this." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This could actually give Mercurial a big edge over Git for development environments where large binary files are a core part of your workflow - like game development. Products like Perforce are a big hit in games precisely because they are really good at handling this specific class of file.It's a shame, because I hate using Mercurial, but this would give me a very strong reason to use it for my game projects instead of Git." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I have 2 Rails apps you might be interested in.Big Help is our company's help ticket system. I'd like to get it up to Rails 3 and prettied up. Also would like to implement macros/canned responses and allow them to be inserted via jQuery. \nhttp://github.com/bigfolio/big-helpSubby is a starting point for a subscription based web-app that uses subdomain-based accounts and Chargify for billing. It could use some layout/CSS love.http://github.com/bigfolio/Subby" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I could really use some help with http://freeciv.net, if you want to participate in an open source web game. Please get in touch if you are interested!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is my crazy dream: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcmB_WI1jRkCZG41c2d4cl80OT..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Mezzanine is a CMS platform built with Django, BSD licensed:http://mezzanine.jupo.orgA few days ago I blogged about all the different roles it's lacking in, UX is one:http://blog.jupo.org/post/845040660/an-open-source-brief" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Mifos is web-based banking software for microloans - we're a Grameen Foundation project working to end world poverty.We can use help making our user interface better!http://www.mifos.org/And to volunteer:http://www.mifos.org/developers" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm in language overload at this point. Much more than another language I'd like to see some creative new architectural approaches to problems that are thorny or tedious to solve right now.I mean, if something as simple as applying MVC principles to web development can create a revolution there have to be a lot of other unplucked ideas out there. Software engineering feels a lot like architecture would if people spent 95% of their time talking about materials." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I've been following Ooc for a long time, mostly because I liked the syntax. It's a weird blend of C and Ruby.nddrylliog, I think you should make the \"jump to\" navigation easier to find in the intro guide." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Not to crap on the parade or anything but new languages are a dime a dozen and most all offer the same exact paradigms rehashed over and over and over. What I want is a low level easy to verify OOP/chaining functional concurrent language based on term rewriting. Something needs to be done to allow easier proving of programs with a language that is designed for this. I'm working on one." }, { "score": 3, "text": "> curl: bash -c \"`curl -L http://ooc-lang.org/install.sh`Extra points for this awesome install process. I wish more projects would make a seamless newbie experience higher-priority." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Why not LLVM? Some language compiling to C99 seems kind of outdated since we have LLVM. (And if C99 is really wanted, LLVM can output that too. Whereby nobody really is keeping that up-to-date because noone really is interested in it.)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "A little OT.But I think it is really, really cool that a very technical person is acknowledged to be a capable CEO. Many companies still consider technical people incapable to be leaders (just by definition). Agree some techies may not have the desire or the social skills to lead but not all techies are like that." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Fake Steve Jobs must be ready to explode right around now." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I wonder if the GV thing was a result of internal politics with the aim being to force Schmidt to resign. I mean it seemed a bit too heavy handed even for Apple. Either way he had to go.Hopefully this will mean it's 'game on' for full competition in the mobile space." }, { "score": 3, "text": "What took them so long?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Now tell me that this has nothing to do with the recent events (the Google Voice removal from the App Store)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm not sure who is making this argument anyway. Women are naturally attracted to alpha males.I think the truth is quite the opposite. Programming and IT have historically attracted a large number of social rejects, who, despite scoring high on self-evaluated liberalness, have no idea how to talk to women. Whether the individual problem is general awkwardness, sexist beliefs, bitterness towards women, or inability to engage with women or fawning all over them, if half the guys in an IT department have one of these problems then it's going to be a very unwelcoming place to be for a woman.I remember in my undergrad that the ratio of men to women in CS classes created a problem in and of itself as any remotely attractive woman had to fight off all kinds of unwanted attention from a steady stream of unattractive guys. To me it's no surprise that by senior year they had dwindled to a handful." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Now that doesn't mean the underlying problem isn't worth dealing with. It absolutely is! I think that the world of programming could be much more interesting if more women were part of it. I wish I knew how to make that happen. If I find out, I'll be the first to champion it.This may get me a ton of down-votes, but I'm genuinely curious: is the gender gap in programming actually a problem? If so, why? In what ways would the world of programming be more interesting if it was more evenly split between men and women?I'm not trying to sound misogynistic or anything, just haven't thought much about this topic and I'm not sure I understand why it's considered a big problem. Would love to hear people's views." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I don't think that the lack of women programmers has much to do with male programmers or computer science programs. Male programmers and computer science programs always seem to love women who express an interest in it. Let's face it, none of us want this to be a male-only profession.However, society does socialize people into gender roles. Women are taught not to go for math (which computer science, at least at an academic level, depends on) and the sciences just as men are taught to forgo sociology. Remember, there are departments that are mostly women at colleges and it's equally telling to ask why there aren't men in those departments - not as a matter of discrimination, but a matter of socialization. Anyway, women tend to be pushed away from certain paths just as men are pushed away from certain paths (while I find nursing to be an admirable profession, what percentage of nurses do you think are male? And I think it's decently clear that from a young age, many of us have the image of doctors being male and nurses being female).It's a big problem in our society, but I don't think that programers and computer science departments are to blame. We train children from very young ages to go into certain roles. Once you're along a path (any path at any point in life) there is a high cost of switching. If you've been pushed away from math and science through high-school, the chance that you can switch that in college is very low. You have to make up a lot of work that the other students already did - and you're throwing away the work you've done on an alternate path. Having not had biology and chemistry in high-school, medicine was simply out of the question for me in college unless I intended to work much, much harder than my fellow students - and the premeds were an over-achieving bunch.And, really, this is more of a problem if you're going toward the science than if you're going toward the social sciences or humanities. Why? At my school, computer science was an 18 course major; nuroscience 21 courses; biochem was up there too. What did you need for history? 8 courses. Sociology? 10. Anthropology? 9. And you could usually take those courses at the same time while the sciences tend to build on each other in a linear fashion to a greater extent.It's harsh. Even if you want to change into a science, sometimes the barrier is too high. We need to do a better job teaching children that it's unacceptable for both genders to forgo science and math. Otherwise, you end up (like me) in a freshmen bio class realizing that you have to learn everything that everyone else knew from high-school without falling behind on this course. And I'd say that the majority would take the path of least resistance and go for something they weren't missing knowledge in." }, { "score": 3, "text": "(Insert big anecdotal evidence disclaimer here...)It's not programmers that keep women out of programming (or IT in general). It's not the tools, the bad hours, the awkward guys, or the 'girls are bad at math'/'girls can't program' stereotypes. Right from the beginning I was pushed away from computers (before I'd even decided what field I wanted to apply myself to) by teachers, career advisers, college lecturers, friends, strangers, employers and sexist colleagues.I remember being 13/14 and sitting down to an 'interview' with a career adviser. We had to answer a series of questions on screen which were supposed to tell us our ideal career. Every time I answered I could see that various computer related careers were climbing up the list, and yet I was told by the chap doing the interview that I should be a vet or a police officer. Neither made much sense to me.My computing teacher in school used to prioritise computer access to the boys for after school 'computer club', and although I did ICT at college (A levels in the UK), lecturers informed me that I would only be able to use the qualifications to get into admin/secretary jobs (boys were told otherwise). I was one of only two girls on my course at college, and the other girl dropped out by the end of the second year due to family pressure. My last boss used to make derogatory remarks about the fact that I was female, and colleagues supported my male colleague over me.It's the attitude from everyone else that women can't and shouldn't get involved with computers that pushes women into other fields. I was lucky to have a very supportive family and a partner that wholeheartedly supports women in IT to push me through - oh, and being a stubborn bugger helped too :)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Interesting, but I think this argument is flawed. The author notes that different professions tend to have different distributions of male personality types. Programmers tend towards meek and introverted, lawyers and businessmen more alpha, yet women don't shy away from those fields.This seems to assume that women must magically all have the same personality type and/or no personality selection bias in their career choices. Since women are comfortable going head-to-head with alpha-male lawyers, they therefore should be totally comfortable with geeky programmers. I don't buy it -- all women are not the same, just like all men are not the same.It seems to me that women who become lawyers or businesspeople likely have A-type personalities themselves. Accordingly, they are probably more likely to view competition or confrontation with males in the workplace as a motivating challenge. Women who become programmers are probably, just like male programmers, a bit more introverted and geeky. Accordingly, confrontation/competition with males in the workplace is probably less likely to be motivating, and more likely to be intimidating -- especially when you consider that many \"meek\" male programmer types tend to drastically overcompensate for insecurity in physical situations with hyper-competitive and vitriolic behavior in virtual environments (I wonder what the gender and programmer/non-programmer ratios are like on 4chan).In other words, just because male programmers don't rank as alpha-males relative to the general male population doesn't mean they don't behave like alpha-males in their own environment, especially relative to the female personality types interested in becoming programmers.My 2 cents." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "So if a link is popular I shouldn't share it cuz everybody else already did?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Cool! I would be curious to learn what will be the conversion rate from visitors to sign ups for the alerts, if you're willing to share that after some time :)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "A little tool we developed as a weekend project to test and debug a bigger project we are working on.We thought it would be useful to others." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I was about to add this to Chrome and then it asked for "all of your data on all web sites" which is too much for me." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Damn! Thats inspiring..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I don't think that the main problems are in name / marketing. While these, and price (which is a legit concern) definitely contribute, the whole idea doesn't sit that well with me.First off, what exactly is it? JSON-based message bus PaaS? Paid social network? Appstore? A development platform? \"mobile social entertainment provider\"? Something else? I understand that they're working off a broad idea, but it would be reasonable IMO for someone to think that they're attempting each of these. The blog posts and join.app.net don't really clarify things too much. I think that a broad roadmap (or something accessible to users, and devs who don't want to read the whole backstory to try to figure it out) would really help here.Next up, the project doesn't really sell me on its benefits. Developers/users can pay to be able to write to a feed that other developers/users pay to be able to access (or can access for free?)? There's some potential for turning it into an app-store type thing, making it free for developers and splitting user revenue (with the example given where app.net takes 50%)? What concrete benefits, as a developer, or user, will I be able to derive from this service, guaranteed, in the near future?All of the questions here are part of the reason that I'm not particularly excited about it. IMO there are some great ideas in there, and it has a lot of potential, but at the moment it seems like it's not too much more than some hand-waving and assertions that Twitter's bad, and that you should pay for an (at current) nearly identical experience because it has a whole lot of potential at some undefined point in the future. When originally pitching the thing Caldwell made some comments about how it's not fair to assume that you can somehow improve your monetization later, but this seems to be almost the same thing in reverse - they've got their monetization down, but they're assuming that they can somehow add the value for users later. Of course, I could be completely misunderstanding what they're doing / trying to do or how they're going about doing it..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This post is obviously quite biased towards join.app.net, which I'm not entirely against but some of the arguments are very weak.> The current price of $50/year for users and $100/year for developers is fair,Not when you have no details over what the service is going to offer, what control you're going to have, and how the price may change in the future. Essentially, people have no idea what they're buying. You're asking for a $50 dollar a donation and offering WAY less information than any kickstarter campaign that I've seen.My thought process when looking at join.app.net1. Who the fuck is Dalton Caldwell?2. Why can't they just use kickstarter?3. Who do they think is going to pay $50 a year for something that Facebook and Google give away for free?4. Why is their campaign page so saccharine?5. Why go from having no control to having implicit control (because you're paying for it), when clearly the best solution would be to have full control (and pay for it)?5a. I can get hosting for $60 a year, $10 more than join.app.net is going to cost me. I'm sure if it caught on, I could get a 'join.app' instance hosted for much less than that.So here's the solution - write a spec for a protocol that lives on top of HTTP. Polish the spec. Publish the spec. Write to the spec, be first to market, and sell 'join.app' instances at $12/year. Profit wildly.We all know an ad supported Internet cannot thrive, but free-to-fifty is not a jump that 99.99% of users are going to be willing to make." }, { "score": 2, "text": "They frame the benefits of their platform with too much ideology and too little practicality.Developers can be very ideological, but when it comes to spending money, even we have to be somewhat practical.The question in my mind, when I looked at their website, was \"What can I build with this?\" That's a question that should be answered by their pitch.It would be a much more convincing pitch if they listed a few example application ideas and discussed the role that app.net would play in the implementation.But as it stands, I can't really see what architectural pain point is solved by join.app.net, that couldn't be better solved by existing solutions like RSS, that are far less expensive to host." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Fatigue? Apathy? Both?It seems Twitter has not exactly turned out to be what everyone had hoped, which has probably dampened the enthusiasm. Also, it seems the long-term goal is to build an API with no mention of what happens afterwards.So, aside from crowdfunding, how is app.net a long-term business?Anyone can write a good-bad-indifferent API and publish the standard, but what differentiates these guys from some other api that does exactly the same thing?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm guessing people don't want to fork down the money!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "From Google translate ...Peter Sunde arrested in SkåneOne of the brains behind the file sharing site The Pirate Bay has been arrested.Peter Sunde, 35, was arrested today in a raid in southern Sweden.- He has been on the run since 2012 , says Carolina Ekéus , press contact at NCIS .Rikskriminalen state that Peter Sunde has been wanted by Interpol and that he is now arrested.- He was arrested for him to serve a prison sentence of eight months. It's about the Pirate Bay case , says Caroline Ekéus .Expressen says that the raid took place at a farm in Skåne Tonganoxie . According to the newspaper shall Polish police and skånsk picket police have participated in the arrest .\nSentenced to prisonPeter Sunde were sentenced for aiding copyright infringement along with two other men in the Svea Court of Appeal in November 2010. Together sentenced Pirate Bay founders in addition to prison to pay damages of around 46 million.In its judgement, the Court of Appeals held that the men through file-sharing site The Pirate Bay " has facilitated illegal file sharing in a way that lead to penalties for those who run the service ."Peter Sunde has repeatedly applied for revision of the Supreme Court , most recently in February this year. He also refers to new cases from the European Court which deals with how to assess aiding and abetting .\n"Deeply unhappy 'Peter sundes defender Peter Althin says to Aftonbladet that he still finds it difficult to accept the verdict .- Has a final judgment , you have to enter and serve this . I kväljer them but I still think that the judgement is deeply unfortunate and inaccurate when it comes to him. There was nothing that showed that he had an active part in this as he was sentenced for, says Peter Althin.He says that an open prison now awaits Peter Sunde.- It does not get Kumla Security or something like that. It will be a little more open prison and that will happen pretty soon, says Peter Althin." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Relevant: If you haven't seen it, TPB: AFK is a fantastic documentary.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPB_AFKhttp://watch.tpbafk.tv/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Very clever to arrest him after the elections. Before the elections this would have been a much bigger issue and possibly would have gained votes for the Swedish Pirate Party resulting in more seats in the European Parliament for them." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Gottfrid Svartholm is currently being held in solitary confinement in Denmark, Peter Sunde is arrested in Sweden. I thought these countries were like role models." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Too bad he didn't made to the EU Parliament.That makes two out of the three in jail, which is very saddening. I wonder what will happen to Frederik: I doubt they will just let him be. They are beating three to scare millions." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Where the author talks about imaginary numbers being completely "made up" and suggests you shouldn't bother with trying to understand them, I think that's selling them short.Imagine, if you will, trying to explain to the ancient Greeks the idea of a number that can't be written as a division of integers (the irrational numbers). That would have seemed completely "made up" to them, but we don't really see them that way, they just "are". That concept is has since become normalized, in terms of everyday concepts (like the area of a unit circle). Similar situations arise with fractions or negative numbers to some indigenous tribes, etc.I guess what I'm saying is that complex numbers only as fictitious or imaginary as any other set of numbers that we otherwise feel like we have a good handle on." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Not bad, but I find this to be a state of the art explanation of quaternions: http://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-glory-pt2/#quaterni..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Another good reference:http://www.songho.ca/math/quaternion/quaternion.html" }, { "score": 3, "text": "There's also octonions and sedenions. I prefer the blanket term onion-algebras." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Has anyone here ever seen a good explanation of why quaternion multiplication maps to rotation concatenation?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Find a small project (1-2 wks of work) you can work on together and make it clear that it is a trial process to see how you will all work together; something other than your startup (for possible legal reasons in the future). If any of them are unwilling to do this, that should be your first signal that that person isn't right for you. Also since they came up to you after the presentation of the idea I would definitely make sure they know that whatever you are doing isn't the \"one true idea\" as it stands now, since it is likely to change significantly as you continue to work on it.The \"just go for it\" is advice lite and I wouldn't take it, at least not for choosing your team, which is likely far more important than your idea." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Eat with them every day for a week. You will find out a lot about each other.> ...because I know emotions can fog up the intellect and really mess up your decisions.Is there a particular emotion that's giving you trouble? I wouldn't distrust all of them...\n" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I think you are over thinking this.Sit back, don't put in a bunch of cash. Don't let anyone go in over $1,000(two semesters of books), and you should just ride it out.In all likelihood you will not succeed, but do not take that as a reason not to give it a try. I learned so much from my college projects that sounded very similar to your situation.And last of all remember that if you were able to come up with one good idea, there will be more, you are young and have decades of life in front of you.Get out there and run full speed with this team, do the best you can to make a go of it, and you might find your self succeeding. But, if things do not go as planned, chalk it up to just another life lesson, and try again some time." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Entrepreneurship is an adventure! You're young yet, give it a shot, and you'll learn a lot. You're team may not be superstars, but if they have the drive to see the project through, and can bring your idea to fruition, it's worth pursuing.If you feel your idea is a truly radical innovation, and you're willing to give your heart and soul for it, then it might be worth seeking out an ideal team. However, given what you've said, it sounds like you've made this decision on a whim. I'd say, go for it if it feels right." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The founding team, like any business partnership is like a marriage. Both are social-economic institutions. Both need chemistry to succeed. Both are really messy and messy when it comes time for the breakup. The child custody fight and the division of the assets may not always be equitable. Or, the team might do well together, the startup fail, and everyone parts as friends. There's lots of good suggestions here, and Paul Graham has written a number of insightful essays on the YC library and on his site. The misgivings might be a simply one of, \"Well, if my project is so great ... shouldn't I be more picky about who I want to work with?\" It might be some instinct tipping you off. Whatever the case, you'll have to look at both the strategic advantage for you and all the human motivations involved (including your's). Sorry I couldn't be more specific." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Direct link: http://www.bestbooks100.com" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'd love it if there was more space below the title image. :P Otherwise, it looks okay. 2 small things that came to mind is the hover effect on the book images and the possibility of having a small blurb in the hover box for each book?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "One thing with top x lists is they can suffer from not showing good older titles in favour of recent more hyped titles. Wonder if there is a way to account for this? So it is a more of an all time top x list?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "nice ! is there a way for visitors to vote on their favorite books & you order books based on that ?maybe even add a few if you missed out something ??" }, { "score": 4, "text": "That's a really nice and simple idea. You could turn it into a game, where people vote by bumping their favourite books against others." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "When I think about social software (which is the context in which \"virality\" lives, anyway) I think you have to build for three things - in this order:1. Utility - it must be high utility, even if nobody else is in the system.2. Network Effect - As people are drawn into the system, it needs to scale in value more than linearly3. Residual value - Value taken out of the system, sometimes as revenue. Typically ads.I think that it's not good enough to do these alone, however. You must construct something that isn't just viral but that makes it such that the fact that some person is not on the system is PAINFULLY ANNOYING to the actual users of the system. Consider the growth of email, in general: \"Please just go sign up for an email address somewhere so I can email you!\"If you construct it in this manner, you do not have to spam people. Delicious, which has a lot of users, never emailed anything other than password resets, for example." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think one thing you're missing is the idea of social validation, or social proof, of your product. Like TallGuyShort said, getting invitation emails is rather annoying, and quite insincere. Users can spot that insincerity in a heartbeat. Sure, you'll rake in some users, but what you want is to create a demand for the product. When I did that whole FluShirts thing, I used twitter to message people, and within seconds I would see them tweet \"haha, check out these shirts [flushirts url].\" I'm not sure as to what percentage of shirts I sold were because of twitter referrals, but what that did at the very least was introduce my product to others in a genuine manner to potential customers using their friends.Of course, to gain social validation of your product, it needs to be useful and something people will enjoy. There are some counterexamples, like hi5, that are fairly popular and got to that point because of their random email invitations (I don't know who you are Aaron, Britney, and Alexa), and to that, I'm not quite sure what to say. I guess they found a market. But as far as virality goes, in the genuine sense, I think Facebook/Myspace/Twitter beat hi5." }, { "score": 2, "text": "\"How can I make my app viral\" seems like asking yourself \"How can I make someone love me\".You don't want to make users want to spread your app, you want them to want to spread your app.The \"Invite people\" forms are a really bad way of doing things IMHO. It's like asking your wife/hubby to fill in a form detailing how much she loves you.I'd also say a good strategy is to give users something for free, that they think should cost money - they'll be sure to tell their friends off their own back.Still good ideas in the original article though." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I actually find the examples it cites extremely annoying. I don't like getting constant emails from services just to remind me they exist, I don't like constantly being asked to give referrals, etc...If I like something, I go out of my way to recommend it. If not - emails aren't going to convince me you have a good product - if people like it, it ought to spread itself." }, { "score": 4, "text": "A point to add to the discussion from the metrics perspective: the net promoter score.Net promoter score is an easy tool you can use to determine trends in your users' experience. It can be used as a leading indicator of the 'N' part of your viral coefficient. eries goes in to detail in \"Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction\" (http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/net-promot...).Additional reading from HN members:jfarmer's \"Three myths of Viral Growth\" (http://20bits.com/articles/three-myths-of-viral-growth/)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "A bit of the shame on the interactivity:\"If you are looking to add interaction as a layer to charts, Chart.js is not the library for you. A better option would be using SVG, as this will let you attach event listeners to any of the elements in the chart, as these are all DOM nodes.\"Most charts are far more useful with rollovers to let the user interpret the data. I'd say this is a must have for most anything where you really are trying to give the user insight into the dataset.Also seems to be a bit of a punt by saying this just isn't possible in Canvas. We know where the cursor is no? And we know where the points are. So can't we react to the cursor hovering over a point? What am I missing?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Well done nick. This is the perfect example of a unicorn project - the perfect mix a technical solution, but with immaculate design sense. Even the documentation is beautiful.Would love to see this MIT licensed.I would love to see you rewarded for this project. Donations or a commercial support licence?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "One thing I love about Highcharts is that the documentation is heavily linked to examples on jsfiddle. Your documentation looks really nice and you have lots of nice examples, but I can't play with them.edit: I meant to say that I can't play with them as far as I can tell. Is there a way that I'm missing?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Good job, your charts look really good. Too bad they aren't interactive, it makes the legend+values mandatory to understand the data. Unless you just want to use them as art.Also, the pie chart and doughnut charts seem odd. The general rule is to order the values clockwise (biggest piece starts in top middle and extends to the right). It really helps readability and is a convention.Keep up the good work!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I've been making a ton of d3/html5 charts lately, and I've been terribly dissappointed by the open source offerings of graphs that are both beautiful(tons on dribbble, few even in html) and functional. Was going to work on one, but this actually looks really good!edit: any reason you decided not to use D3 for this?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "From your comments, you had multiple PayPal accounts (disallowed), were in Venezuela, using a US PayPal account, then transferring the funds to a PayPal account in Venezuela, and can't provide a tax ID for the US account. At the same time, you went from zero to hundreds of thousands in payments in just a few months. To PayPal, you likely appear to be a criminal involved in some type of money laundering or tax evasion scheme. I don't know enough about student Visas and international tax agreements to say you aren't actually engaging in tax evasion, perhaps unknowingly.It's not surprising they locked the account and asked for documentation. The tax code pretty much guarantees they would within a year in order to file the 1099-K on your account. This stuff is serious to them, both from a financial (the potential losses if this money disappears because it's not been moving legally) and regulatory fronts (US Patriot Act among others requires banks, like those underwriting your US PayPal account, to be able to accurately identify their customers). This might not be easy to fix." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Sorry to hear about the troubles :(If this wasn't the umpteenth time I've heard this story, I wouldn't say this so pesteringly:To everyone: Stop stop stop stop stop using PayPal. This happens over and over again. For once, thankfully, there are viable alternatives out there -- Stripe & WePay to name two (both of which I've had excellent experiences with).Not saying they're panaceas or that there won't be security/freezing issues from the new guys, but PayPal has a documented, extensive, and repeated history of freezing accounts with large amounts of money in them over short(ish) periods of time." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Sad story, I agree with folks who say you should seek out legal advice.HEADS UP FOR ANYONE ELSE CONSIDERING THIS:If you are going to receive funds with PayPal and they are going to exceed the 'occasional sale' guidelines (which some people interpret to mean the same guidelines at the rule for sending an IRS 1099 form which is < $600 annually.First establish your business presence in the US, that means creating an LLC, getting an EIN [1] and establishing a relationship with a US based bank.If you get hung up on those steps, don't start taking money with PayPal because their zealous anti-fraud/laundering/drug program fires on a hair trigger. It didn't help that the OP is a student from Venezuela which is not one of America's trading partners.I expect you will lose most of this money in legal fees. However, if the business is durable, and you manage to establish your LLC (that lawyer you got can help with that) then you will make it back and PayPal will back down. As long as the money trail can be tracked and everyone in the path reports it to the Federal Government so that they are satisfied it isn't part of a laundering scheme[2], or if it was they can catch the folks involved, you will be ok.[1] http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Taxpa...[2] This is how the laundering scheme would work. Some criminal enterprise hires a bunch of third parties to buy your 'widget' for an inflated price, say $10,000 per copy. You sell the 20 copies, get the $200,000, now you go to a coffee shop owned by the criminal enterprise and buy a Double Vente Latte for $180,000 made out of hand picked coffee beans. The crook now has $180,000 of \"legitimate\" income from his coffee shop, you have $20,000 in \"profits\" on your amazing Javascript widget, and 20 drug dealers have a bit of software they just delete from their hard drive (if they down loaded it at all). Everybody \"wins.\" So the US Government wants to be able to subpoena your customer list to track the money from the drug dealers to you and then back to the crooks. Paypal helps with that. If you make it hard for them to do that, they keep you money." }, { "score": 3, "text": "When you say you're an international student, do you mean you're in the US on an F-1 visa? If yes, you might be in violation of your visa terms. If you have not researched this, please start reading at http://www.justanswer.com/immigration-law/330cd-holding-f-1-..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Apply for a TIN - taxpayer identification number. PayPal can use it in lieu of an SSN. This will take you six weeks. In the alternative, consult a local lawyer and have them nastygram Paypal for you." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "One of my old Physics teachers was an expert on Stone Henge. Did a lot of original research in the 1980s. From what I recall Stone Henge is actually multiple sites on top of each other, so when someone says \"this is what Stone Henge was for\" I am skeptical because we're talking an enormous span of time and several re-buildings with no guarantee that all were for the same reason.This article title is slightly misleading. The migration route of Aurochs theory certainly gives an explanation as to why ancient people gathered in this location. But it doesn't give reason for why the specific structures at Stone Henge were built, as people might assume from the title.What I recall from my old teacher, and his work, was that you can pretty clearly demonstrate that the structures were there for observing the sun cycles, as was typical of many megalithic monuments - sun & moon cycles. Most of the other claimed observations can be explained away as statistical artifacts. Given the evidence of burial and the fact such observations would have had religious significance I haven't seen much to challenge the existing understanding of the site.As an aside, I have visited many megalithic sites in the British Isles (many years go). I find them fascinating. One thing that people often remark on is how they're often in the middle of nowhere, but when they were built they were often in clearings in dense forests, but over time as we domesticated animals that would feed on the bark, killing the trees, then eat the new shoots, over many centuries - millennia - we deforested, for example the moors, and the megalithic sites became elegant monuments to a forgotten age, standing proud against a bleak landscape." }, { "score": 1, "text": "> \"Researchers think the giant boulders came from a quarry near Marlborough Downs, just 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the iconic site…\"One can't help but smile at the \"just\" there! Perhaps if the author tried moving them they might have chosen a different word." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It doesn't seem like this is a new theory explaining why it was built as much as a theory explaining why there were people in the area to begin with." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'm not sur if its me noticing things or the zeitgiest, but ancient history seems to be really interesting right now.There were people here a long time ago. They were doing stuff. We have no idea what or why. A tiny fraction of their stuff was big and stone and durable enough to last thousands of years and let us know they were there and doing interesting things. But, we don't have any context. It would be like future generations finding a gigantic open pit mine in one place an airport runway in another place and a giant statue of Kim Jong Un and speculating about out society.BTW, If there where stonehenges & Pyramids from 20k years ago, would they have lasted till now? We tend to assume not much was going on during the paleolithic. If city states trade & large structures existed during those times, would we know about it?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "> the site, which was occupied continuously for 3,000 yearsGives you a pause, doesn't it?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> The consumer version of the Rift should be out in about a year.Yeah, and will I be able to buy one and use it without Facebook keeping a permanent record of everything I do with it (tied to my real name of course)? Will it refuse to work unless it's online? I was really looking forward to the Oculus, but man ... if there is an alternative that doesn't have FB integration, I think I'll buy that instead." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I wonder, what do you guys think virtual reality do to the tourism industry ?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is pretty neat.\nWhat other potential, non-gimmicky solutions could be built with VR this way? What about 10 years from now?Also, who remembers the movie: FireFox, with Clint Eastwood? :)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Correction:Virtual reality goggles and the Birdly apparatus made them think they could fly.The copious references to Oculus make me think the Facebook PR team have swung into action, to try to bolster waning interest in Oculus after the disastrous sellout to Facebook.I'm eagerly awaiting an Oculus alternative, having canceled the DK2 plans. I don't really want to be tying my code into the horrendous Facebook codebase and agenda." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Video: http://vimeo.com/91069214" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "\"... What kinds of features would you like to see in a framework? ...\"explain to me how you intend to let users get to the data? Not pages but raw data (xml, rss, microformats etc). Oh that and cool-uri's. URI's created in a lot of frameworks suck. How are you going to create cool uri's? ~ http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI \n" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Wait until you write the second webapp, and see which bits of the first one you really do reuse without modification?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Nested components sounds like Weblocks, http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-weblocks/, but I'm guessing you're already aware of it.I just started working on a site using Hunchentoot and CL-WHO as well, send me a note if you're interested in collaborating." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Zak, that sounds vague. So I don't understand what you've done. And Rails can be much flexible. What are benefits from your framework for a particular types of web apps?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Have you seen UCW?\n" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I don't think this proves a superiority of any algorithm against other. Just that SuperVision team did a great job on task 1 and task 2. I just would add two things: 1) There is a No Free Lunch Theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem) that had been applied to pattern recognition too and that states that there is not a significative difference in performance between most pattern recognition algorithms.2) There is way more chance to get an increment on performance depending of the choose of the features being used, and that seems to be the case here." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Hinton's team (SuperVision) uses an interesting 'dropout' technique. He gave a Google Tech Talk on this back in June.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78&feature=plcpAnd an older talk that covers some of what a deep convolutional net is:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Sensational title that misrepresent the results of a competition with limited (albeit high quality) participants. There is limited information of general value in this link." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Am not sure if you can apply winner takes all for such marginal difference in error. Give a slightly different database and things go awry.Check out : \"Unbiased Look at Dataset Bias\", A. Torralba, A. Efros,CVPR 2011." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I found the title of this post really ironic.\"There is now clearly an objective answer to which inductive algorithm to use\"" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Here's a year-old story by a more reliable Dutch newspaper, claiming 1 in 1000 phones is being tapped in the Netherlands.http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&tl=en&u=ht..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I call bullshit. Phone metadata is saved since forever yes, but stored at ISPs, not at government organisations. There are strict regulations regarding the privacy of voice data over the phone (VoIP does not count as such though), and I don't think the secret service and military secret service (AIVD and MIVD) can do anything they like. They have more permissions, such as demanding passwords for encrypted files as long as it's not for your own conviction (while normally you have the right to remain silent), but it probably doesn't go that far. Keyword searches are probably not true.It is however worth mentioning that we have this CIOT system which is a publicly known and automated system that actually provides automated access to name and address details of any given Dutch IP address. The system is updated with ISPs' data every morning and can be queried at will. ISPs, even the most privacy-aware one (XS4ALL) do not give statistics of how often their part of the database was queried (I asked them), but it has been made public that the database had a total of 2.6 million queries over 2010 and 2.9 in 2009. That's one in six citizens' data queried for no apparent reason.Tech details: The CIOT system is a centralized search dispatcher, that queries systems provided by individual ISPs. A government official can enter an IP there and within seconds all ISPs have been queried and one probably returns a match." }, { "score": 2, "text": ""De Telegraaf" may not be a reliable source, but even members of parliament are asking questions. Apparently the Dutch government is preparing a massive internet interception program. See: https://www.bof.nl/2013/06/10/nederlandse-overheid-broedt-op.... Sorry, but Google Translate does not translate HTTPS urls." }, { "score": 3, "text": "If you are interested in this story and comments, then you will most likely be interested in the following comment and associated dialogue as well:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830994" }, { "score": 4, "text": "The newspaper that published this, 'Telegraaf', is notorious for publishing bullshit. The article is very short, the journalist wouldn't be able to check if it's true, and the newspaper hungry to publish anything that attracts readers. Offline version of link-bait." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Everyone should really just read the entire Autobiography.http://www.amazon.com/The-Autobiography-Malcolm-Told-Haley/d...Also, they should spell "Malcolm" correctly. :)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "For those who feel uncomfortable with Malcolm's former creed that white people are devils and the black race is superior to all others, please do take note of the fact that he did convert to mainstream Islam near the end of his life thus disavowing any such racism or black supremacy.As Malcolm so eloquently stated:"America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white - but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color."You see, orthodox Islam, from the very beginning, espoused equality for all races. In fact, race in Islam is an inconsequential matter. Take for example, one of the greatest and most respected companions of the Prophet Muhammad was an African: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilal_Ibn_RabahThe fact is that the Nation of Islam could not be any further from orthodox Islam. In fact, an orthodox Muslim could never possibly even consider one who believes in the NOI's teachings to be a Muslim. It's a shame that the NOI usurped the name Islam and applied it to its organization which really has absolutely nothing to do with a religion with such an illustrious history and tradition." }, { "score": 2, "text": " > At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes—until the guard approached again. That went on until three or four every morning.I did something similar as a child, with my guards being my parents (oh what a metaphor). Looking back, as someone who does not read a vast amount any more, I was privileged with both the means, and the inclination, to have such a habit. God knows it made me who I am." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Such a wonderful mind and finely tuned level of metacognition. The arc of the voicing in this passage is beautiful. It saddens me that the world has caused people like him so much pain." }, { "score": 4, "text": "If I only could read all the books I want to read. I can't count the books I bought and only read half or not at all. The stack of to-be-read-next books grows and grows. And now after reading this text I just ordered Malcolm X's biography." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Just so I'm clear on this: The number 1 song on the US charts (EDIT: and a bunch of others, according to wikipedia) isn't on a major label, is a white guy rapping about going to the thrift store, and the hook is sung by a software test engineer?Somebody should call Alanis Morissette and explain the concept of irony, because this is about as golden as opportunities get." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Catchy song, lots of fun - On a side note, while I was in Australia last fall they were playing Thrift Shop uncensored on the radio. We'll never hear that in the states. How about the rest of the world? Does it get uncensored air play in Europe, Asia, etc?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Girl Talk had a similar \"dual life\" experience at the start of his career where he was working as a biomedical engineer during the days in a cube farm and jetting off to Europe on the weekends to do gigs.Here's an early interview: http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/6415-girl-talk/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I just downloaded this album about a week ago after finding another story about it on HN. I was blown away. First album I have listened to on repeat over and over again since Pink Floyds Animals. Its really brilliant writing and just on point." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Site seems to be down for me; Here is the cached version:\nhttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qZ_7OsB..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm an American that's lived in Berlin for the last 7 years, and run a startup here. This post is mostly correct; in fact, it's pretty impressive that the author soaked up the vibe that much in such a short span. But there are a couple points worth clarifying:The jaywalking analogy is stretched. Like, the source of it is partly true, but it's a pretty boring social convention. There are enough places where Berliners proudly flaunt the law that make Californians seem like straight-laced prudes.However, what the argument gets right is that the issue is more cultural than structural. There are a lot of things that come together to make German startup-culture somewhat tamer than the US variety, among them less of a drive for polarized go-big-or-go-home attitude, the historical strength of the German Mittelstand (medium sized companies) and less tolerance for risk.Also, the thing on data and Google Maps seems off. I'm not sure why Google Maps has only recently started to integrate Berlin's subway data, but there are excellent apps for Android [1] and iOS [2] that accomplish the same (and are not published by the local transit authority, and I can't imagine that solo app authors have more clout to get at the data than Google). It seemed a bit lame to assume that since Google Maps doesn't have the data that it must be the city's fault.[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach....[2] https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/berlin-brb/id409357982?mt=8" }, { "score": 1, "text": "OTOH people smoke spliffs in bars and drink beers while bicycling. There's a strong hacker mentality here. Its anti corporate and there's a distrust of American style funding and bullshit valuations. Lots of open source people here.Many people here work at music technology firms, and those lead the world. Ableton and Native Instruments employee 400 programmers total. Emagic was from Hamburg. Soundcloud of course. Somehow these are never mentioned in articles about Berlin.There's a lot of activism. wiki leaks has or had many core people here. We protest and riot without permission. The squats are slowly being evicted one by one.And yes, we jaywalk. Maybe not up in prenzlauer." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Berlin may not be the best representation of Germany as a whole right now. It is somewhat of an anomaly and may be the least German city in Germany right now due to attracting a large number of foreigners (which I'm not saying is a bad thing). Anecdotal evidence: Last time I was walking through Kreuzberg on a Saturday night at least half of the people on the streets seemed to speak English. However, as a German I have to say that he has a point. People not jaywalking is a symptom of a certain mindset in Germany with regard to rules and respect for authority. Along with this comes a lack of individual initiative and risk-averse behaviour. Being self-employed or starting a company is not seen as something to strive for but to avoid due to its inherent risks. People will actually give you funny looks when you tell them that you don't have a 9-5 job and they may actually pity you. When I quit my job to go freelance, everyone always pointed out the risk of not being in steady employment but interestingly nobody pointed out the benefits. This is curious as our social security system is rather extensive (expecially compared to the US). Even if you fail and fall, you're not going to starve or end up homeless and it'll be a comparatively soft landing. In theory this should benefit risk taking, but it does not. In fact, studies show that numbers of companies being founded and people going freelance go up in times of economic distress (e.g. '07-'09) and go down in times of a booming economy. When asked, the people answered that the did it out of necessity and not out of genuine desire to be independent. So we can conclude that Germans do prefer a 9-5 over the risk of being on their own despite the social security net. My interpretation of this is that most German's perception appears to be biased towards seeing the risks and not the possibilities even when the risks are objectively much smaller than perceived. Coming back to jaywalking this may mean that saving a minute or so may in their perception not be worth the risk of being run over or stopped by the cops however unlikely that may be in reality.I also think that this mindset is a bad thing and has larger ramifications in a world that appears to be changing at an ever increasing pace than most people realise yet. Germany as an economy is highly dependent on the ability to export innovative premium products due to the relatively high costs of labour. Mechanical and chemical engineering are two of the main contributing sectors when it comes to exports. The extent of this becomes obvious if you take a look at the 30 stocks in our DAX index most of which stem from these sectors. What is also obvious is the distinct lack of IT companies. There is SAP and then there's Infineon, that's it and those are neither new nor particularly innovative companies. SAP is a 40 year old enterprise software company. I've never used their products but everybody I know who has, hates it. They may be very well on the forefront of companies ripe for disruption in the coming years. Infineon is a chipmaker that was spun off by Siemens (yes, THAT 165 year old Siemens). They have been struggling for years and had to spin off some of their departments which subsequently filed for bankruptcy to save themselves. There is really no company in Germany that would compare to the likes of Apple, Google or Microsoft in size or innovative potential and this looks like a major deficit in our economic structure to me. What I find notable is that nobody in Germany seems to be noticiing or even talking about this. Given that in the future IT will probably become even more important, this may very well come back to bite us." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I lived in Germany for a long time, and have actually been called out by a kid in a stroller who disapproved of my jaywalking (Rotgänger!).But my favorite story comes from a friend, an American who lived in Germany in the 90s. To paraphrase:A firetruck is in front of an apartment building where, evidently, there had been a small fire. The scene is basically calm now, the situation dealt with, and several of the firemen are waiting to climb back into the truck and leave. But a firehose still runs from the truck, across a bike lane, over the sidewalk and into the building.As my friend walks by, she hears crazy, incessant ringing. Turns out it's a man, on a bike, irate that the bike lane is blocked, demanding that his path be cleared.What gets me about that story isn't that the man is batty, not at all. In fact it reminds me of lots of similar experiences I had in Germany where someone's iron-clad, inflexible attachment to rules and order created a totally absurd situation." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Thanks for the write up! Its always hilarious to read about experiences others made in the country I grew up in.Here are some reactions:\nJaywalking - I definitely do that and in Berlin of all cities, I saw folks jaywalking all the time. But yes - generally, there is more discipline to wait for the green light, like in Japan, Korea or China.\"multimillion dollar round was not given in one big check\".\nThis is what I heard is common practice in the valley as well. When a company raises 10 million, my understanding was never that the VC just transfers 10M cash to their account but that this investment would be rolled out. We should definitely review/discuss this.Also, I agree with the appreciation with something fitting into a puzzle. That probably stems from system thinking, growing up in a European community where Germany is only a part in the whole of the continent and its political and economical bodies.Who owns data... mhhh. I think that depends on the industry. Oeffi (http://oeffi.schildbach.de/) for example leverages the public transport schedules of public local agencies as well as Deutsche Bahn. Pretty awesome!On the other hand, data can be very proprietary in the States too. Take for example movie showtimes. There is NO public, free API for that you could build apps on. But yes, overall, you might be right.In in case you want to see other impressions, US-Americans have in Germany, I totally recommend this blog:\nhttp://www.nothingforungood.com (seems it got hacked but hopefully will be up again ;-)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The backers - acquaintances, alumni or other accredited investors - provide funding that will typically range between $20,000 and $50,000 in exchange for an agreed share of the graduate's future income over a 10-year period.Well, I am skeptical, but also glad someone decided to try it out - the chances are slim, but this is so unusual some unexpected good may yet come out of it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "At first this sounds a little like indentured servitude. That too, solved some problems of its time. A little weird though, the concept." }, { "score": 2, "text": "\"The backers - acquaintances, alumni or other accredited investors - provide funding that will typically range between $20,000 and $50,000 in exchange for an agreed share of the graduate's future income over a 10-year period. Upstart determines the portion of future annual income to be shared based on the total sum raised and the person's qualifications, including academic record and field of study.\"I'm failing to see how this is any different than a loan, with the exception you can pay a loan back early AND you know how much you owe the lender. This just seems like for $100k (based on the 5 backers at the minimum $20k that is quoted above) you could be paying many times that for success that is unrelated to the money that you received." }, { "score": 3, "text": "There's an interesting Quora discussion on the legality, logistics and mechanisms behind \"human shares\": http://www.quora.com/Can-you-buy-human-shares" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Since when were college graduates \"students\"?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Not as my _only_ programming language, no. But in general, why not? I value programming languages for what they can teach me. Haskell does make state slightly difficult. (If you need it, just use the IO monad, already. It doesn't bite.) But Haskell makes certain other things easy, things which are extraordinarily difficult in almost any other programming language.For most of my professional life, I've been paid to program in Common Lisp, Scheme, Dylan, etc. Macros, to me, are an ordinary and natural part of programming. But after a while, macros become boring: 99% of them are just a thin syntactic wrapper over something I already know.In Haskell, you don't build higher-order abstractions using macros. Instead, you build your higher-order abstractions using math. And math is almost entirely stateless, lazy and functional. You are forced to think in terms of combinators, abstract algebras, algebraic optimizations, and, yes, category theory. Category theory is the closest link between the lambda calculus and mathematical logic, for example, allowing you to transform some very exotic programming paradigms into actual code.So, yes, Haskell is hard, and it's an ongoing research project. You will spend a lot of time reading papers. (And frankly, you don't want to maintain somebody else's code if you haven't read the same papers.) But some of those papers and theses have blown my mind more in a single weekend than some entire years of hacking in Lisp.Haskell is not the most practical language I know. (State is not the biggest problem for me, but rather the lack of subtyping.) But Haskell is the language I'd be saddest to forget, and the language which has stretched my mind the most." }, { "score": 1, "text": "A couple years back I read a blog post with someone complaining about how hard it was to implement the traditional Lisp \"map\" / \"mapcar\" function. Specifically, one that took N lists and a single function with N arguments. The author was totally right, too. I could implement this generalized \"map\" function in Haskell, but it required defining an extra type class which is a little extreme.Of course, the real problem is that people who are new to Haskell expect to sit down and solve problems in the same way they've been solving problems all along. This author was used to the \"map\" function from Lisp, and wasn't thinking about whether it was necessary, or whether Haskell had a different way of doing things.Here's what the \"mapN\" function does: > mapN (+1) [1,2]\n [2,3]\n > mapN (+) [1,2] [5,8]\n [6,10]\n\nThe reason that we don't want to use \"mapN\" in Haskell is because of the following problem: > mapN (+) [1,2]\n ???\n\nThe result is either \"[Int] -> [Int]\" or \"[Int -> Int]\", with no clue as to which is correct. This is why Haskell has \"zipWith\", \"zipWith3\", ... Not as pedantry, but because the alternative is ambiguous. (You can use Control.Applicative + ZipList, but that's a tad verbose).My conclusion is that Haskell's differences are what throw people off -- programmers have to relearn how to do things they thought they had figured out for good years ago. (In this case, \"everything is curried\" means \"varargs requires type classes\"). It's FINE if you don't want to learn to do things differently and I won't think less of you, I respect your choices for what you do with your precious free time, and I understand that you might want stuff just to work now without learning anything, just please stop stereotyping the Haskellers as a bunch of ivory tower PhDs. I'm not even done with my Bachelor's." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Long and detailed discussion, including original participants, on Reddit, http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/crgxs/do_i_real...My take away:* The Haskell culture is to take questions seriously\n * In doing so, the literature will be cited where appropriate\n * Some people get turned off by research papersIn this case, the guy asked a fairly profound question, and received a long, friendly answer, which included references to the literature.Also, it plays on a stereotype, hence all the upvotes." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Actually, arrays in Haskell are automatically memoized and lazily evaluated. So in most practical situations you get memoization for free.For example, imagine you need to calculate a function f(n) for various values of n (let's say for n ranging from 0 to N). You simply define an array memo_f such that memo_f!n = f(n). ('!' is the array selection operator in Haskell).Because Haskell evaluates lazily (i.e. not until it absolutely has to), it simply stores a link to the definition of the function for each array element. But once a particular array element is used, that link is replaced by the calculated answer.I'll post some actual code to demonstrate this in a minute, just in case anyone's interested." }, { "score": 4, "text": "There is (has always been?) an interesting formula for writing academic C.S. papers: define the most constrained environment imaginable and then do mundane things in it. Haskell is a very beautiful language in a very pure sense and it is the perfect garden for C.S. papers. Likewise, it's an incredibly fertile garden for language features and programming techniques. Is it hard? In some ways perhaps, but to me Javascript's notion of logical truthiness is extremely difficult to hold in my head. It's all relative I suppose." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Is it failing? I think it's a little late for that question. More like \"why did it fail?\"I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your net wide, devote a small amount of resources to a bunch of products and hope some of them take off. That's what Knol is part of and that's fine. Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.Given that I consider articles like this to be exactly the level of mockery they deserve." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Knol is Google trying to Cuil Wikipedia" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Honestly, it took me this headline to recall that thing exist at all…" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Well...here, courage is being scared of embarrassment but doing it anyways. nice try, G." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Why Google's online encyclopedia will never be as good as Wikipediahttp://www.slate.com/id/2200401" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "http://images.google.com/images?imgcolor=red&hl=en&s...A search for \"White Shirt\" with imgcolor=redFun results" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Reminds me of this great piece of coding/data mining: http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/#colors=ea977e,5c259a;" }, { "score": 2, "text": "how long has this thing been around?\nhttp://www.google.com/advanced_image_searchlooks like you can search for faces and line art as well" }, { "score": 3, "text": "It would be awesome if someone could make a mosaic generator using these tools (if they haven't already)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I found that if you search for bikini, then adding an imgcolor really hurts the quality of results." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Things that have changed: * Stories have a much tougher time making it to the front page\n * It's more rare to recognize all of the people in thread comments\n * The level of discourse has slightly degraded\n * The focus of the site has become more general-interest and\n less startup or hacker related\n\nThings that have not changed: * New people claiming the site is turning into reddit\n * Hand-wringing about the direction of HN" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Alexa says traffic has grown 4x since the start of 2009. In fact it's been a little over 2x. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1404759" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Wow, this is amazing. I guess the huge increase has resulted from increasing media coverage of YCombinator and its alumni.I'm here now for close to a year, I haven't felt any major changes in site \"flavor\" except for the fact that the diversity of submissions have increased. However, the core HN reader group is quite successful in prevention too much dilution of content.One reason I don't think HN will go the way of the reddit/digg/etc is due to this dedicated, close-knit community, that is tied to HN in ways quite different from, say, reddit's community is tied to reddit. A coarse comparison could be the Wikipedia admin community perhaps. Also having \"benevolent dictators for life\" like PG helps :-)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "http://hackermonthly.com/ was awesome! What other initiatives have aimed at unearthing the hidden wisdom buried inside HN?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "What studies have been conducted about the news covered by HN/its users/its karma system etc.? Is crawling of HN discouraged? Is there an archive of all HN data available somewhere for download? I noticed an \"Ask YC\" archive at http://ask.searchyc.com/ Are there other such places or lists?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm just not buying it. Look at his example erb code, compared to haml. Which would you rather be typing day in and day out?In terms of learnability, it takes 15 minutes to learn 95% of the haml featureset. So you spend 15 minutes, then presto, less repetitive stress injuries from hitting the shift key all the time when creating view templates. AND it's much easier to read, and it forces correct indentation. That's just a whole lot of win.Also, haml and sass are not mutually exclusive, nor are they a pair. They are 2 different tools that work with 2 different things." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Sass offers solutions for some CSS shortcomings: lack of variables, mixins, terse nesting and like. And easy modularization as a bonus. You can have all that with regular CSS syntax (SCSS).\nHAML offers… well, just different syntax.\nSo I see very good reasons for using SASS and see no reasons to use HAML. Or maybe that's just 15 years I've been writing HTML." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This post is a great example of what I dislike about Ruby culture, making a big deal out of pretty simple stuff. At least the article didn't mention DSLs.This SASS thing, it seems interesting… I'm a Scheme programmer. I'd like something like it. After about forty-five minutes of hacking, I came up with this:https://gist.github.com/956113It lets you write code like this: (make-css\n '((\"body.loading\"\n (font-size \"12px\")\n (color \"#fff\")\n (\" ul#sidenav\"\n (\" li\"\n (blah \"blah\"))))))\n\nAnd generates output like this: body.loading { font-size: 12px; color: #fff; }\n body.loading ul#sidenav li { blah: blah; }\n\nI agree with the guy's point though: SASS is different from HAML in that it actually does something conceptually useful, viz. it introduces a scope-like concept to CSS." }, { "score": 3, "text": "They both abstract the programmer from what's actually being produced and I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing.I'm currently maintaining/developing on a 10yo Java project which contains a mix of JSP pages and ECS^-generated HTML in servlets. Which one is easier to maintain? The JSP pages by a mile because there is a direct correspondence between the source and the output. The ECS-generated HTML is totally obscured within the Java code.So while HAML and SASS (to a lesser extent due to the similar syntax) abstract us programmer from the limitations of HTML & CSS, I can't help feeling that they will create huge maintenance headaches for our future-selves. Will anyone actually know HAML in 5-10years time? So, suck it up and use ERB and keep your abstractions as close to Earth as possible.^ Apache ECS (now EOL'd) lets you build the HTML tree as nested Java objects." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Is it just me or is this the 100th \"SASS rules but HAML drools\" article this week? This one doesn't even point out the biggest weakness of HAML, that it is terrible at inline markup." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The whole concept of co-founder as a \"title\" is a bit ridiculous. In the beginning, when companies are small and things are literally getting built from the ground up, when customer relations are KEY, every single employee who contributes is, for all practical purposes, a founder. Things get dicey when the people with \"founder\" in their title start getting big egos, start getting cocky, and think that they have the sole authority to go around getting rid of people they don't \"like\" in order to intentionally screw them out of their equity and thus keep their positions of power intact.This is a long-running problem in management science: CEOs surround themselves with \"yes men\" (or \"yes women\") -- people who worship the ground the CEO walks on, people who tell the the CEO how \"great\" he is, etc. The CEO assures that these \"yes men\" are paid handsomely to keep the CEO in his role. See also: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57533674/the-evils-of...Early-stage employees who _don't_ have the \"founder\" word in their title, but who still contribute(d) pivotally to the team are oftentimes \"let go\" right before their stock vests. These early stage employees are often paid _far_ below market rate for their experience and education, but promised equity with a slightly accelerated vesting period. Early stage employees work themselves to the bone, and right before they are able to realize their ROI, they are \"let go.\" This is a slimy, insidious thing that anybody working for a startup should be keenly attuned to.I convey this knowledge from firsthand experience. I am absolutely certain that the CEO who manufactured falsehoods in order to screw me out of my fair pay and equity is an unethical scumbag who lacks the maturity and the moral fortitude to be running a company.If you're an early-stage employee in such situation, here's what I did, glad I did:(A) Don't sign _anything_. If you are an employee of an early stage company, think of yourself as an employee founder, even if you don't have the word \"founder\" in your title. You built or helped build the company where it is today; you have a legal stake in the company(B) Request an extension of time to review your \"termination\" paperwork. They usually try to make you sign something within 7 days. Ask for 30 - 45 -- or just ignore the deadline. Especially if the severance they offer you is insultingly low and doesn't contain any equity(C) File for unemployment insurance IMMEDIATELY. If they're firing you without due cause ( almost always the case when their motivation behind firing you is to screw you out of your equity ) you are entitled to collect UI -- you paid for it, you deserve it. File for unpaid overtime as well. http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_overtime.htm Think about it like overtime is OK, as accumulates in stock, if they screw you out of your stock, they're screwing you out of your overtime, which is illegal(D) Don't worry about what people think. If you were fired because the company is trying to screw you out of your equity, there is no reason to be ashamed that you were fired. It happens WAY more than people realize -- the slimy underbelly of greedy people and shoddy ethics(E) Don't give up hope! There ARE good people and good companies in the Valley -- there are companies that hold on to their early stage employees and let them realize the fruits of their hard work, companies and execs who don't try to screw the worker bees out of their efforts. I've interviewed with a couple of them, and am not giving up. When I first started working at the company that I used to work at, I would arrive at ~7 AM sometimes. Another employee (@mjallday) would also, and I remember telling him: \"I'd still want to be working, even if I was a millionaire.\" This is _so_ true, and why I haven't and won't let one bad experience ruin my faith in humanity" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think oftentimes \"firing\" is the wrong way to look at this.I founded my startup with two cofounders. We all agreed, with the benefit of hindsight about eight months in, that we were the wrong guys to be working on this together and that we should step back and look at the situation. I started that process but they could see it too.We analysed the problem (their skills were more ephemeral than executional… networking/introductions/ideas) and it led to us occasionally overindulging in \"taking the idea for a walk\". I was frustrated because I felt very strongly that we should be building and dedicating all our time to shipping software and speaking to our users.The conversations were entirely amicable. They had both invested cash and time, and had received equity + founder's round equity as a result. They kept their bought equity and we reduced the founder's round equity by 50% each, and I reallocated it later on to two fantastic directors who have been, for near enough a year, surrogate cofounders. Both of my original cofounders dip in with advice as we need it and have since been really helpful.Nobody was fired and I appreciate that sometimes it's necessary to have a sterner conversation (and indeed sometimes it's probably appealing in the heat of the moment). The thing to remember is that everyone has an emotional attachment to the company, and that makes it a very tricky conversation to have." }, { "score": 2, "text": "A. Is this something you can work out?Stop right here and define \"this\" and think about it from many different perspectives. One of the biggest challenges with founder issues from my personal experience and from talking with other founders is lack of clarity people have in their heads about the objective position. They immediately want to jump to solutions or to fixing the problem without even being able to elaborate the precise problem beyond \"he sucks\" or \"he can't do x\" etc. The problem with stopping there and not critically thinking further is that you risk not trying hard enough and smart enough to make conflicts between founders work out. For every tragic founder story, there are plenty of successful stories where if you dig deeper, you will find the successful founders who at one point were at significant disagreement but instead of moving on, they took the time to deliberately make things work out. This may require Founder A to coach Founder B in a specific area or for Founder B to rapidly change certain behavior etc.From the outset, be willing to invest time and brain to making things work out before deciding to split. This itself is a huge ask. If a founder isn't willing to engage in good faith difficult conversations on a daily basis(about any topic), that is a bigger grounds for splitting for me than any specific issue." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Pretty interesting article in the way that you explain some really diplomatic way to handle these kind of situation. But I really think the best way to avoid these kind of problem is to set each founder role in the company. I just wrote an article about that as a reaction to your article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5029029" }, { "score": 4, "text": "So basically, talk to the other founders, investors and lawyers first and hope the guy you want to fire doesn't realize what you're doing." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I know you said software, but if you're into web development at all, Freewebs and Clearspring seem to be two big companies in the area.Disclaimer: As an FW employee, I may be a bit biased. Besides, it's technically Silver Spring MD. Go figure." }, { "score": 1, "text": "We are a start-up seed-funded by investors in DC. Depending on your expertise and/or time frame, we may be able to leverage your help :)We are fairly well-connected in the start up scenes here in DC through introductions from our investors. If your expertise doesn't align with our needs, I will be happy to make introductions. Drop me a note, my Email is in my profile." }, { "score": 2, "text": "We're an energy efficiency software startup called Positive Energy, and we're expanding rapidly, looking for software engineers (Java, web, database) to grow our engineering team. We're based in Rosslyn, across the river from Georgetown. Our products are 100% software and are designed to help utilities inform their customers and drive down energy usage. You can read about what we do, our team and our jobs at www.positiveenergyusa.com." }, { "score": 3, "text": "It's not small, but I like working for Booz Allen. I have been on a small project <3 million a year budget and 3 developers so it's like working for a small company but with great benefits. The only real problem is a large portion of your pay is in benifits (ex: 16 days off, 2 floating holidays at level 1) which is nice if you have a family but it's not so hot if your trying to save up capital for a startup." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Juice Analytics: www.juiceanalytics.comLooking for python/django developers, UI types, db developers, and machine learning people..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I wrote an open source face recognition demo here for Google Glass if anyone is interested:\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1aeMJY1AO0\nhttps://github.com/lnanek/MedRefGlassIt doesn't use lambda labs since they weren't out yet, but it is just as easy to use other APIs anyway." }, { "score": 1, "text": "After the current NSA scandal, is there any chance for wide adoption of a wearable mass spying device ?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "You could easily make it completely opensource and standalone by replacing the calls to web-based api's like lambda or betaface, with the standalone face recognition engine from openbiometrics.org https://github.com/biometrics/openbr" }, { "score": 3, "text": "If they don't like it its only because they want to be the only ones doing it. Seriously facial recognition is the one big technology useful on the glass and Google knows that and probably developed a lot for the glass itself." }, { "score": 4, "text": "They've said on twitter that glass is deliberately left open / unlocked." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it.I wish he would have gone further and said that if you aren't creating the future you have no business predicting it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "One single company could affect a global semantic web adoption within 6 months: Google. Once they decide to give webpages with semantic info a higher relevance, armies of SEO experts would swiftly generate vast amounts of semantic information..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "[\nRemember, you heard it here first (or tell me where you heard it before :)\n]Without having read the article (yet), my theory is that the web will become \"semantic\" in the sense \"semaniacs\" hope for ONLY when users can generate structured content (other than just photos, articles, comments, forum posts etc) EASILY ... that is: differently from when HTML started out, site owners cannot get such a ball rolling by painstakingly fleshing out RDF mark-up manually. Rather, those web sites will be \"semantic\" that provide wiki-like editing for data sets.As an example, imagine a web-based database of restaurants:\n- Let everyone provide tags for different categories (taste ie Indian/Italian/Regional, style ie luxury/fast food joint/middle-of-the-road, features ie garden/bar/smoking area)\n- Let everyone update base facts such as address or name changes\n- Let everyone add photos, media, reviews, comments\n- Most importantly: let everyone rate/confirm/deny everyone elses contributions\n- Reward by credits/trust/rankings but where commerce is involved, also by discounts/\"miles\"/whatever.Make it easy for websites to do that, or create successful websites that do that so others follow suit should this be what people really want, and you have a semantic web in no time.If the semantic web is what people want, this will be the only feasible way to create one. If it's not what they want, we will find out soon enough." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Sorry, semantic web = semantic networks a la Quillian. It's a step backward.RDBMS work because they have a solid semantic foundation with n-ary relations. Description logic based formalism can't do n-ary, nor can RDF triple stores. The whole adventure is ill fated and us database weenies knew it from the start." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Other than the oft-repeated 'machine readable', I'm having a hard time getting over the conceptual hump of what the Semantic Web is." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Hacker News, Twitter, IRC. I follow a lot of people on Twitter and I have interesting tweets, and many follow me back. I have made several new offline friends this way.Some of my IRC friends from the 90s are some of my closest friends now, too. It's cool 'cause they're geographically distributed so I have people I'm tight with in almost every major country.Interestingly enough, one of my closest friends in my city I first \"met\" on the GNU Screen mailing list. I met him randomly at a conference here after moving and recognized his name.Also, local user groups are good places, too.PS: Freenode irc is full of dorks, but it's a good starting point. Try EFNet or one of the smaller hacker darknets (e.g. Buttes or hardchats or antisec/anonops) for the real motherfuckers." }, { "score": 1, "text": "In my experience \"interesting\" is often at odds with \"like-minded\"." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Usenet, back in the day, was a great place to meet awesome people. I still have several great friends whom I first got to know via usenet. Unfortunately usenet kind of died, and for some reason all the replacements that have shown up since are but a pale shadow of what usenet once was." }, { "score": 3, "text": "School.If you're in college right now, and especially a top-tier university, try to meet as many people as possible. Don't miss this opportunity; your network will be invaluable once you're done with school. College is a great place to step out of your bubble and college admissions committees usually do a good job of putting a diverse group of interesting people in one place. Meet people from different backgrounds, countries, and majors. Even though you may not realize it now, you will one day need most of the people that you meet in school." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Try attending local TEDx meeting: http://www.ted.com/tedx" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The top comment is bullshit.I could not get through those three books but I get paid to program. My code is repetitive and shitty but I can produce a working web app as long as it doesn't have to support too many users, and it's fine.My husband never read any books about formal programming and taught himself from those random \"learn Java\" or \"learn python\" books. He's a mathematician and programs to write simulations/solve equations, and he gets paid for it too.If you can't get through those three books maybe you can't hope to be a computer scientist, fine. But you can certainly program, in the same way you don't have to be an English major to read or write." }, { "score": 1, "text": "K&R is awesome but... C would not be my first choice for a beginning language.Things like pointer arithmetic, memory allocation, etc. distract from the basics and high-level concepts.I would start with Python or Ruby these days. If Python is good enough for intros at places like MIT, it's good enough for me.C is a masterpiece of elegance and simplicity and gives you a mental model of how a real computer works, and it gives you a foundation for understanding Unix, but I just think it overloads a beginner with stuff that gets in the way.came to comments expecting a lot of reasons why Scheme or Lisp was a better choice LOL" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I suppose most of us would give a similar answer as what Joel gave, but I found this nice pair of comments:Is this really the only way to be a good programmer? I'm someone that wants to study programming in my spare time and that's a bit of a daunting list for someone new to the industry... – toleero Jul 28 at 14:54No, it is not the only way to be a good programmer. But if three books is a \"daunting list\" than you might be underestimating what it is that programmers do. – Joel Spolsky Jul 28 at 15:05Seriously." }, { "score": 3, "text": "tl;dr: If a book were going to teach somebody how to program then you wouldn't be asking this question. A book requires a self-motivated person to pick it up and read it. Assuming you're trying to teach somebody who didn't have the desire to learn on their own, then you're going to have to relate to them and explain it in a way that they'll understand. Getting them interested and excited about it usually seems to be the best kick-starter.You know what? I've actually unintentionally taught several people the basics of programming. I work at a small company with other bright people who are not programmers by study, but have learned how to communicate programming with me. I truly believe that teaching somebody to program is as easy as figuring out how to best explain something sequential to them. Usually, I begin my stealth teachings under the guise of me just trying to help them communicate their program requirements or ideas to me. I quickly jump into the lower level explanations of things and somehow I manage to get them excited or interested enough that they actually feel like talking \"programming\" with me will be cool. I try to explain to them that programming is like giving the computer an ordered list of things to do, and it'll do them exactly in that order. As simple as 1, 2, 3. I then explain loops. I don't get into functions and classes because that's not necessarily important to them understanding the flow of logic. Most people seem to easily grasp the concepts of if-then, and loops ... this is all really simple stuff for most people to understand at a basic level. I don't even necessarily mean code, but more so logically what an if-else means. I find that most people generally give you the \"yea yea I got it\" type of response while explaining this. Once I get them to this point, they're where I wanted them to be. I then try to include them in scenarios where I'm debugging something. I don't deliberately ask them to help me do my job, but I more so start talking out loud and usually they'll come over to help brainstorm. I show them my code, and explain the logic flow (if-else, loops, etc). You'll be surprised at how easy it is for people to actually help out here. Sometimes it's the non-programmers who can give the most obvious advice. At this point in time, it's up to them. If they're interested enough they'll progress from them, otherwise it may just no be their thing. I work with 8 people, and I have actually had one guy learn Python and he now writes Python tools for us - he knew zero programming. I also got our accountant into programming because he would always ask me the status of projects, and slowly over time I got him speaking \"programmer-speak\" with me, and now he basically understands all my programming yammer. I realize that these guys are not writing the next Redis or Twitter, but they were non-technical guys who are now on their way to being on their way to writing those things. :)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I am firmly convinced that if you don't enjoy programming you'll never actually become a programmer.It does not matter how smart you are.It does not matter how much you WANT to become a programmer.So the first thing I do when introducing someone to programming is point them at tools that will allow them to be productive quickly to see if they \"get a kick\" out of creating things with code.I think Joel's advice to start with C is GREAT. But only if the question is \"I think I love to program. But I'm a noob. I want to become a great programmer. How do I start to become one?\"" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I've run a conference for freelance web devs 2 years in a row, both times at a loss (though the loss is shrinking each year) but have tried to keep the ticket prices down, but also try to cover some expenses for speakers (hotel or travel for speakers from out of the area, primarily).Tried to keep tickets at a max of $99 the first year. Bumped up to $149 second year (with cheaper 'early bird' tickets both years). Bigger issue was trying to get sponsors to help defray costs. Given the nature of our conference - freelance web professionals (devs, designers, etc) - surprisingly a lot of companies weren't interested because we weren't 'targeted' enough. I may have just been getting polite brush offs, but I'd contacted 45 companies - many of whom sponsor other tech conferences - and had 3 sponsors the first year. A few only want to send a speaker and schwag, but no money. Conference venues and catering staff don't like to be paid in bobbleheads and cup holders, unfortunately.A note on schwag - I basically hate it. I think it's wasteful, and going to conferences where I've paid hundreds of dollars, then given a bag with a bunch of plastic crap made in and shipped from China just gets my goat. So we don't do 'bags of crap' at my conference. I don't think too many people have missed it so far.gentle plug - http://indieconf.com is setting dates for this fall in North Carolina. I remember inviting Amber to come speak at our first conference two years ago, but the timing didn't work out - perhaps we can get her to come this year. :)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "As a frequent conference attendee and speaker, a lot of the points that this post enumerates resonate with me. Our profession seems to have a love affair with conferences, and it's been getting worse year after year.I believe a large part of the problem is that many conferences are priced with the idea that the fee will be covered by corporations that pay for their employees to attend, as opposed to being covered by an individual. Businesses have an easier time justifying a $1000 conference ticket (especially if they're able to recruit or scout out new potential hires at said conference) than an independent consultant.But, conferences don't need to be quite so expensive. Conference organizers just need to reorganize their priorities. The best conferences I've ever attended (and paid for out of my own pocket) had less than two hundred attendees, were not held in a hotel, and had an incredible focus on the local community.The best example of this: http://brooklynbeta.org/2011. Total cost for the conference was $100, and an additional $100 for the (optional) special event held the day before the conference, both of which included food, coffee, sponsored after-parties, more beer than we could finish, and the list of attendees and speakers was the best that I had ever seen.People need to start voting with their wallets a bit more. Stop going to conferences that suck.[Disclaimer: I now work for the organization that runs Brooklyn Beta, but did not work for them when I attended the conference in 2010 and 2011]" }, { "score": 2, "text": "While I'm not a \"fan of expensive conferences\" per se, I thought this was a bunch of junk. FTA:\"I’m a huge proponent against expensive conferences, as I feel that the point of these conferences in the first place is to get the community together to learn and meet each other.\"As The Dude once famously said, \"Well, that's just like, your opinion, man.\"I don't think that at all; I think a conference that I pay for should be a learning experience. I think that, for $1000 or $2000 that I should be able to get vicarious experiences from attending the sessions/demos/labs that I would either (a) not have been able to receive elsewhere, or (b) not been exposed to. It should replace my time at a training class, for example, except that it should be broader experiences.Networking is fine but dude - you simply have it wrong if that's what you think programming conferences are all about. And you have it wrong if you think that tech conference attendance fees are paid for by the individual programmers/devs who attend. Oh sure, there are some folks who pay for these huge costs out of their own pocket but, by and large, this is a \"job perk\" or a \"job training\" event that is, thus, paid for by their company.Sorry but, for most companies, there is no \"networking\" budget for the programmers/devs." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I've never attended any conferences in my life (and I have been programming for 25 years (16 years professionally)). I can buy books, read online, watch videos online on more programming topics than I have time/capacity for. My tolearn.txt is quite long all the time.\nFor networking among programmers there are more than enough online communities.\nBusiness networking would be very useful (basically meeting people who need my knowledge/expertise and learning about business opportunities), but how can I do that among people who want to sell the same thing that I want to sell?I am not saying that conferences are not useful, just I did not find the motivation yet to attend one." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I kind of agree. I've attended two conferences for the past few years: Pubcon and An Event Apart.Pubcon was priced at $699, and included three full days of sessions, with 5 different tracks. I learned a lot there, and felt it justified the price.An Event Apart was $899 the first year I registered, I believe, and this year is $1045. I work for a small company that pays these expenses, but I couldn't even justify asking for that this year.I know that I am paying to see some of the \"biggest names\" in the industry. Several of these people are excellent and entertaining, and I don't doubt their knowledge in the field -- Dan Cederholm and Jared Spool specifically.But do I really need to pay over $1000 to hear from the \"biggest names\"? I'm not sure if it's worth it. Yes, Eric Meyer is a genius at CSS, but how do I somehow explain the ROI of using slightly more optimized CSS? Or one year AEA had a speaker who spent almos the whole hour somehow relating fashion magazines to web development. Ugh.I guess what irks me is feeling like I'm paying extra for the celebrity status of some of these speakers, when in reality, I'd most likely learn just as much _useful_ knowledge at a Wordcamp or one of the multitude of sub $200 conferences." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Regarding the keypad issue:9. It's almost impossible to get the right letter without being able to see the screen. Because you have to place your finger, listen for the right letter, then \"lift it off\" and place it again. Trying to slide your finger inevitably results in it thinking you're \"holding\" the wrong character and \"pressing\" the one next to it.... which then causes the phone to input that first character. Of course, you don't \"know\" whether it just inputted the wrong character, or whether it just announced that you'd re-selected the same wrong character, because there's absolutely no difference in the audio cues.Is there a market for making some sort of Braille screen overlay for the iphone, similar to something like http://appadvice.com/appnn/2009/11/your-iphone-can-also-feat... ??" }, { "score": 1, "text": "You can't even put in a fucking server name without giving it an email address, a password, and letting it fly off to the internet and bang on things it thinks* might be your mail server. Once you've got that, you can put in an incoming server and username, and an outgoing server, and then you wait while it fails to connect, automatically because it hasn't got the right port. And then you have to go back in to set your outgoing server's authentication. It takes a 3-minute process (laboriously hunt-and-peck your name, email address, password, and mail server settings) into a 15-minute process as it repeatedly \"helpfully\" tries things that you know are going to fail, but can't interrupt and can't cancel. So you wait for several minutes before it realises you really do need to use an alternate port and enable SSL.*While this instance may be specific to the iPhone with screen reader and setting up wireless, this kind of make-it-easy-by-removing-options-and-attempt-to-probe-for-everything is especially frustrating when you know what the options are but the device or UI wants to do something itself in the name of helping you. I find these kinds of things especially frustrating because it's often difficult to verify the settings after it's been automatically set up.No, you need to leave the Mail app, then find Settings, scroll down (see 2), select mail and other things, select mail, select this account, select this account, find the password field (without it reading the field names, I remind you), and put in the password, then save the settings and restart the mail app.Finally, an example of \"having all the settings in one place\", but divorced from the place the setting is used is a bad idea. I never really understood the mindset that this is supposed to be easier. I know that the app needs the settings, I can find the app no problem, but its settings are some where else, with navigation totally separate from the app. I guess it makes accessing the settings consistent across apps, but this is a weird thing to optimize since you should rarely be messing with app specific settings, and when you do, you're already in the app." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Considering that the guy goes on to slam everything Apple in the comments (including saying you have to buy a peripheral to use more than one mouse button), I'm taking this whole thing with a grain of salt." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Apple is the only company I know of even trying to make an accessible modern SmartPhone. It's been less than 6 months since accessibility features were introduced. I think patience is reasonable in this case. Apple is almost certainly developing these accessibility features at a financial loss." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Trying to find the source of this: someone recently observed (maybe here on HN?) that a number of communications methods we take for granted in our everyday lives started as accessibility options. The example that struck me was text messaging, which allegedly began as a way for deaf people to use cell phones. Anyone know the reference?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "One caveat: until the mythical PHP 6 comes out, if you're using unicode at all you should be using the multibyte string functions. http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php Python has had unicode support for a while and generally does the right thing, something that might be missed with blind PHP replication." }, { "score": 1, "text": "For anyone interested, you can actually make the startsWith and endsWith methods a lot faster by using strncasecmp or substr, like this:https://github.com/Nycto/Round-Eights/blob/master/src/functi...It could be a micro-optimization, but I find myself using these methods quite and it's a simple tweak to make." }, { "score": 2, "text": "May be slightly off-topic, but I feel a little pain behind my eyes whenever I see the hack-around-namespaces function naming (e.g tt_whatever, for \"ThumbTack\" presumably).Surely a singleton class would be a nicer way to do this (or just leave the \"tt_\" off, why is it necessary, you're not overriding core functions)?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I love StartsWith, EndsWith and also Contains in C#. Contains especially feels so nice to use compared to IndexOf all the time." }, { "score": 4, "text": "In JavaScript I always use: String.prototype.startsWith = function(s) {\n return this.substring(0,s.length)===s;\n };\n String.prototype.endsWith = function(s) {\n return this.substring(this.length-s.length)===s;\n };" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Not sure you made the right choice.\nThis is how to use CORS without Preflights: http://homakov.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-to-use-cors-without-...And this is why JSONP is almost always a bad idea (for sensitive data): http://homakov.blogspot.com/2013/02/are-you-sure-you-use-jso..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Yes, you generally need a fallback when using CORS. When I can get away with it, I prefer running a proxy on my origin domain for this fallback, as it allows me to use all the headers I like (rather than JSONP).The article doesn't mention that many modern browsers don't respect MaxAgeSec for caching the OPTIONS requests, at least not for more than a few minutes, which is another knock against CORS due to it causing 2x the number of requests versus JSONP.Also the article doesn't mention that, once you've already moved all your header data into the body, you can make simple requests that don't require preflight OPTIONS requests [0] - which eliminates the problem with the 2x the requests.[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/#simple-cross-origin-request-0" }, { "score": 2, "text": "At RunOrg, we've encountered this a few times with our CORS-only API.It is against our philosophy to leave users behind only because they are locked in by outdated infrastructure. We still want to support them.It is against our philosophy to bend the purity of our API to accommodate wrinkles in how outdated infrastructure declines to support standards. There will be no JSONP alternative to CORS in RunOrg.The solution we propose each and every time is to mount a proxy to our API on the same domain as the site it is used on. Users on modern infrastructure reach us directly at api.runorg.com, users on CORS-hostile infrastructure reach us through the proxy and still get their data (albeit with decreased performance). It's a fairly simple technical solution that leavers our API clean and supports non-CORS modes of access." }, { "score": 3, "text": "A different position would be to simply let these misconfigured and badly written networking programs fail - and let them fail hard.Yes, it will be painful in the short term and users will notice outages, but in the long run it will result in these issues being fixed. If we continue a policy of reversion to bad workarounds (which is really what JSONP is), we not only add complexity and the potential for obscure exploits to our own software, we ensure that nobody at Cisco et al will ever feel the pressure to fix these bugs." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Would using HTTPS prevent the VPN and various proxies from messing with the traffic as described in the article?" } ]