skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not every product needs AZ from the start (specially for small teams or solopreneurs), in most cases you'll be doing over-engineering. And in the use cases you need AZs and do it right new tools like convox* are really easy to use and can save you a lot work. It's never been this easy to manage your own infrastructure.

During the years I've used ssh, puppet, fabric, ansible, capistrano, cloud formation, etc for managing servers and infrastructure. And I think that the main benefit of any PaaS, AWS Lambda or AWS API Gateway is (obviously) that they're time saving and abstract the internals. In fact I use them in several small projects.

* https://www.convox.com
Scientific curiosity in itself is not something that should be rewarded.
How to Write About Africa [pdf]
This.
This is EXACTLY it. Good luck finding work if you're doing something general like Political Sciences or Business Administration.
This sounds like it could be quite bad for learning. I've found my learning of an abstract subject, such as mathematics, greatly increases when I can take a step back at each successive milestone of progress.

In contrast, when everything simply blurs together, there are no clearly delineated chunks of memory to latch linguistic markers onto, and I fail to build abstractions out of those thoughts.

Of course, this concern may be moot in the case of computer programming, since the abstractions involved are often concretely represented by the computer itself! In a way, when we program, we are outsourcing a part of our brain, relying on a smaller subset of mental capacity, and relying on the computer to amplify it back again, by handling the abstractions for us.

OTOH, this may simply be proof that going to the whiteboard before coding up a solution is a healthy alternative to hacking away at the keyboard all day without thought.
Correct. Lambda isn't designed for high data through put. That's what Amazon Kinesis is for. Each Kinesis shard can handle 1000KB/s data injestion rates. You would write your data to a kinesis stream, then use Lambda to respond to the kinesis event to write data to your DynamoDB table.
CS conference papers go through the same process as a journal would in your field, but typically with only 1-2 revision cycles. The acceptance rates are much lower than journal because there are fewer retries, so people generally submit ready-to-publish work to conferences. Many researchers don't publish in journals at all, or just do it as a token activity.
As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work.

Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit, that their collective voice outweighs those that do not simply by the fact that those are often the users who click ads, share things, and otherwise generate more value and revenue for the publishers than those that do not.

While the arms race to fight this stuff is commendable (I myself run at least NoScript at home and it is beautiful), I can't help but think the only way to win is to not play.

By that I mean coming up with revenue alternatives for publishers that not only generate more revenue than this approach, but also provide a direct incentive to not use these things.

If such magical solution existed, they would switch of their own volition. Instead, they focus their efforts and dollars (and by extension the focus of an entire industry that has been built on those dollars) on adding more items to the list of bullshit.
That was great. Thanks for the link.
Eliminating tuition fees depends on the benefit to the region.

In my little province for as long as I can recall there have always been complaints about the cost of tuition and any fees at the University.

It's a small University with a mix of local students, regional (within ~400km), some from the northeastern US and others from outside US/Canada (China in particular).

Eliminating any fees just means the student gets a break then as always when they are done with school immediately leaves the province for a job elsewhere. That's zero benefit to the taxpayers who would cover the cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_audio_programming_lang...

What's the selling point of this one?
Solution: Have judges actually get involved. Juries are a cute concept in theory (allowing citizens to check the government and justice process) but it's clear people aren't equipped in general. AFAIK, juries can't interview or request information. And then there's the laughable concept of jury instructions, where the judge ignores human psychology and pretends biases can be overcome by telling people to ignore things.

It's unbelievable that something as basic as viewing the police video requires any "legal" work at all. That kind of thing should just be assumed.
I've always thought that measuring schools by student academic performance alone is an incredibly lazy way of measuring performance across the board because it doesn't take into account massive differences in the average student different schools get.

Measuring difference in student performance between two points in time would provide a better heuristic, and even using that as a measure for funding is silly as it creates a feedback loop. I'd rather see this data being used to identify and study top performing schools and the findings being applied to schools performing in the bottom percentile.

But then this entire problem hinges on how we as a society want public schools to work. Do we want them to act as an equalizer in the sake of social stability and mobility, or do we want them to amplify existing situations so that our top performers perform even better?

Whilst there is obviously already a deep relationship between teachers and their students, another method for taking weight off their backs in the regard of being mental health first responders could be having mental health responders on site, whether that be social workers or child psychologists which is how things are handled in Germany. At my previous school we had a psychologist that was shared across different schools in the area, who would be open to talk about any mental health issues a student might have.

Now in Germany we also have a 3 tiered system, where the lowest performing students go to a "Hauptschule", which focuses on putting students into trades, a "Realschule" which opens up moving into either higher reaches of the trades or moving into a "Gymnasiale Oberstufe", which is the conclusion of the "Gymnasium" that focuses on funneling students into universities to pursue further eduction.

Whilst this tiered system has its issues despite possibility to move into higher tiers later in your educational life, it also allows for dividing up certain problems. Students from a "Gymnasium" are usually assumed to come from a stable background, which means less social workers and stronger focus on academics, whilst students from a "Hauptschule" are usually offered more guidance in exchange for a less strict and more practice oriented scientific curricullum.
That sounds like a lotta work, but that's a good thing to have when the appearance is an important part of what you are doing. (cost-benefit, risk management and all that)
A close friend of mine is a public defender, and gave me some disturbing stats.

According to the American Bar Association, it is unethical for a defense lawyer to take more than 400 cases a year; 350 if dealing with juvenile cases; three if they're capital (death-penalty) cases. Every PD my friend knows regularly goes double those limits, because they have no choice and the states aren't interested in upholding the ABA's limits.
Many people have lost innocent-until-proven-guilty in their minds.

You have to ask yourself why people have lost the innocent-until-proven-guilty concept. We still teach it in school, so it's not lack of exposure. Is it the media? Since 9/11, the number of police procedurals on TV have skyrocketed. Social Media? Journalism? Personally, I'd be very interested to see how well these concepts are distributed among class, race and gender lines.
Why does he holds up an engineering team of 250 engineers, all to maintain Etsy, as proving out his hypothesis?

That's larger, by far, than engineering teams producing much larger, much more complex, much more involved pieces of software at Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

This "success story" is the kind of circular self-affirmation that can only emerge when you've been given a blank check, and nobody involved cares whether you've spent it wisely. It does nothing to support his belief in the efficacy of his "heretical" ideals, of which I find this one especially disconcerting:

"You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying."

Imagine if Facebook adopted this strategy, and thus, never hired the extremely smart engineers responsible for things like Hack, or their optimized PHP runtime.

How would they ever escape the costly orbit of PHP? How much more would they be spending on server resources, and how many more engineers would they have to hire to keep things running as they grew?
Absolutely: nick@penmateapp.com. Please have him drop me a line!
The misinformation about adjuncts is pretty widespread. Adjuncts have indeed been hired way more at teaching colleges and for-profit colleges. But research universities haven't really changed their hiring tendencies much, if at all. It's just that there are a lot more non-R1 universities now that statistically, a higher % of new instructors are adjuncts.

Nearly everyone I know that graduated with a PhD from an R1 universities, and was what I considered reasonably good (they were not complete goof-offs and were serious about their work) got good tenure-track positions 0-2 years after graduating.
Curators of Sweden
This looks great, I'll definitely be doing some experimenting! Any way to save the output to an audio file when you're done rather than just hearing it through Alda?
You're ignoring the growing population of developers who are hobbyists or not professional software developers. A lot of these people just want to get something done and don't have their egos tied up in the solution.

I think this is a good idea. Many people accept help online and feel guilty about getting extensive assistance for free because they understand someone went out of their way to help and it's human nature to not want to take advantage of others.

There are already a lot of sites where I've seen people post small bounties like "$25 to anyone who can help me with this small problem." They can't afford to have someone write an entire program for them, but it's worth paying someone to get past a thorny issue.
Never implement a cache that you can't completely disable with the flip of a switch somewhere. Otherwise, when wrong behavior is observed in the system, you don't have an easy way to rule out the cached copies. And worse, as you make "changes" to the system code or the data, you may not be able to tell the difference between a change that had no effect on the problem and a change that was hidden by a stale cache.

This is one of the things that drives me crazy about some of Apple's technologies. For instance, somebody at Apple decided long ago that all application HTML help pages should be cached. The "off switch" for this cache remains a bit of black magic but it's something like "rm -Rf com.apple.help.DamnedNearEverything" followed by "killall UnnecessaryBackgroundHelpProcess" every damned time you modify a page or else the help system might show you an older version of the content that you just "changed".
Pope calls on Europe’s Catholics to help shelter Syrian refugee families
Dang's disagreement is nonsensical however:

>You should flag stories because of content, not provenance.

How can I flag a story because of its content when I am unable to view the content? If a story has no content for me, I will likely flag it, sorry.
The problem is that bullshit is a negative externality. It's cognitive pollution. Those who clutter the world with bullshit reap the rewards of nabbing the suckers who respond to it, but don't pay the costs of imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else. That leads to more bullshit than would be economically efficient.

Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy, the equilibrium amount of billboard advertising would go way down.
They're not getting second-tier justice. Second-tier justice would be fine by them.

They're getting seventh-tier justice. Caseloads that average a single attorney-hour. 98% plea rates. Victimless crimes. Police departments known to fabricate evidence and permitted to persecute, detain, & search with no cause. Years between arrest and trial. Prohibitive bail money. Confiscation of what savings they have to pay a lawyer, on grounds that it's connected to a crime. Tracking of all their communications. A tolerated culture of prison violence. "Stop resisting". Asset forfeiture. Sentence lengths that shock the world.

We don't need to fix all economic inequality to fix these things, because there are other times in our history and other places in the world that have drastically less of these problems, without fixing economic inequality.

The drug war didn't just throw 1% of our population in prison, to satisfy those needs it completely hollowed out due process; You need to have a wealthy family behind you at this point to experience due process as envisioned by the reformers that established it; If you live in the wrong neighborhood and have the wrong color skin no amount of money will pay for it.
All, thanks so much for the comments. We wrote this up so long ago; it's really interesting to get feedback now.

FWIW, The Infrastructure Observatory is working on more tours like this one, mostly in the NYC area. If you want to get involved (or have an idea for a tour that we should organize), get in touch at http://infraobservatory.com or @NYInfraObserve on Twitter.

-Spencer
Is this how bad Ruby's performance? This is orders of magnitude worse than Ruby 1.9.x
Sci-Fi Short on Infinite Parallel Realities
I've passed it on. FYI, you have a typo on your front page: "Mail letters d photos right from your phone." Looks like a cool service, hope it works out!
There are numerous studies, I believe this one being foundational:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17394178
Ha ha... Good one...
As a German, there is a huuge controversy about it.

- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regionale_Schule

- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesamtschule

- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiloberstufe

The whole discussion about it even led to some states abolishing the old system and introducing "Gesamtschulen mit gymnasialer Oberstufe", essentially, the US middle/high-school system. In other places, the Profiloberstufe was introduced. In even other places, in the same city, Gesamtschulen, Regionalschulen, G8, G9, Profiloberstufe AND erweitertes Kurssystem exist next to each other!
...I do digital media for a living mind you...I myself run at least NoScript at home and it is beautiful...

Thank you for not echoing some of your colleagues' ridiculous "if you block ads there will never be any more art ever" arguments.
Definitely!

Though you may already know, aligning notes to exact subdivisions of the beat is called quantization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_%28music%29

Quantized music feels noticeably less organic and lively, to me at least. Audio sequencers like Linux's Hydrogen give you the capability to mess with "lead" and "lag", but it must be done individually for each note and so is fairly tedious.

I've used the Python module pydub along with a random number generator to set samples slightly ajar, but, while it helps, a purely random approach doesn't capture how human performers implement lead and lag.

I absolutely recommend pydub as an easy way to manipulate sound files.

https://github.com/jiaaro/pydub
Thanks for the info on this, I hadn't seen Kinesis before. I also tried something similar with S3 upload but Kinesis looks a much better solution for what I'm trying to do.
Are QR codes still a thing? Or were they ever a thing? Dunno, my brain seems to filter them out automatically, I rarely notice them.
yep -- the devops part is valuable on the app creator/dev's side and this architecture is very valuable on the amazon/cloud service provider's side too.

The smaller the scheduled unit of code is, the more densely they can pack the workloads and make more efficient use of their system ...squeezing out the pennies at their scale makes a lot of sense.

I've seen some vendor lock in comments here -- but certainly the big 3 or 4 service providers will have these features figured out soon - and seems to me some open source to schedule functions across compute will appear in no time that could be used by the smaller providers. replicating all the other features is much harder -- this is a great moat amazon has built.
Man arrested for parodying mayor on Twitter settles civil lawsuit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-lqO1dnX4

Nuff said about jurors and the selection process.
> And that's exactly why manufacturers go to such lengths to prevent people from hacking on their consoles. With the way they are priced, and depending on when you bought that PSP, it may have cost Sony money if you didn't buy any games for it.

There is this revolutionary business idea of selling stuff at profit. Cross subsidizing always bites you in the ass. Loss leaders too.
I have no skin in this game and really don't know much about what is going on, but really appreciated that rundown. I've always wanted to know what goes on inside these places.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229
> why not produce plants with, e.g., much bigger seed heads?

The energy to produce the biomass in the seeds still has to come from somewhere, from photosynthesis. They cannot create energy from nothing by just changing a couple of genes. Some people are working on a more energy-efficient version of photosynthesis, but progress has not been fast.
As a note, I decided to look up CF based on this comment. This lead me to cloudfoundry.org, which appears entirely devoid of content. Just useless talk about "heavyweights" and so on. The menu didn't appear to have any links to anything useful either. Clicking on products lead to a page with three product names. Having visited the site, I'm actually now negatively disposed towards it (but your comment outweighs my experience, and I'll still attempt to check it out).

Granted I only spent a minute, but if this is a typical experience, I'm unsure how anyone would come to the conclusion that there's any software worth using there.
Just like the ocean and the atmosphere is an infinite sink for carbon. Look at fraking causing earth quakes, things we can't internalize will never effect us. The crust of the earth is an eggshell floating on liquid rock, we should take care of it.
Relevant one-page article: "On “Write-Only” Conferences" - http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/IEEE-IS_letter2007.pdf

(conferences in exotic locations for which you only need to submit an article to attend)
Bless you for sharing.

I bookmarked it for those off days when I need a good laugh.
I though the spec on rm says it cannot delete the directory you are currently in? http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009604499/utilities/rm....

Plus, it mentions . and .. as no-nos
Many paywalled articles provide a way of getting around the paywall, for SEO purposes. Open it in a private window, or search it on Google, or in the case of Quora articles, add the share link. On some sites the "paywall" is a modal you can just delete in the browser. It's not really that nonsensical - those methods or alternative links will wind up being posted in a thread anyway. And a thread that doesn't provide any way of discussing the content should die on its own, because the comments will be nothing but complaints about the paywall.
All great answers. Thanks for the links here!
I wish he'd at least spread it over six pages, with a link to the next page positioned less prominently than a [mocked-up] Google AdSense ad-unit with arrow.
Programming Coordinated Behavior in Java (2010) [pdf]
The majority of animals (by weight) on the planet are livestock. Most are mistreated. Everything dies, how it gets there is what matters. The utility of the end state doesn't justify the path taken. The path needs it own justification.
ACLs are, for the most part, unneeded.

The old (other, group, user) * (read, write, execute) unix model is much easier to use, and sufficient for the vast majority of uses.

Occasionally, there is a need for something that can be expressed by ACLs, but not by Unix permissions. In most deployments, it is so rare that people who are not aware with ACLs just find some other way to do it.

ACLs are not the end-all-be-all permission system either. I would really like a permission system that says "in this directory, everyone can create a file, but no one can create an .mp4 or .mp3 or executable file". ACLs can't do that.

Some 20 years ago, when I occasionally had to audit file system permissions, Unix ones were usually properly set up (every user has write access to their own stuff, read access to shared stuff, and no access to other's users stuff, with groups used to do exceptions), and NT systems were always a mess, with lots of unexpected permissions and wrongly set up ACLs because complexity.

The best setups were always Novell Netware with their "Trustee" security model, which makes it much easier to get what you want than either ACLs or Unix perms
People's capacity for bullshit is rapidly diminishing

Even though this proposition is in bold 20-pt type, no arguments were offered to support it. It isn't obviously true, and indeed there are reasons to suspect the converse. Dare I say it, but a bald emotionally-appealing assertion of this sort seems sort of like... bullshit?
The UK had no tuition fees when I went to university in 1983. They even gave you a couple of grand for living costs if you were hard up. The trouble was that university education was only available for about 15% of the population, basically sorted by exam results so if you didn't make that you were kind of screwed. Now it's like 47% go to university. Neither system was/is perfect.
I think it's a good analog if he's suggesting that all the cows with magnets will eat up all the metal leaving little for the ones that do not have magnets. No idea if that's how it works though.
This makes no sense. Computers are made of centrally manufactured components, and are regularly replaced by new ones as technology advances.

This applies to CPU's too and is in no way mitigated by FPGAs.
Yeah it's bad.

Also, I can't believe I forgot to mention Walter Duranty. He was writing around the time of these Hitler articles. As far as I know, no one paid him to do what he did - he just did it for the sake of journalist activism or something. There's a lot of that too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
> this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work

Really? People do do an awful lot of stuff which doesn't work. Is there good evidence that this stuff works?
I didnt see that. Who knows why they are connected! Maybe for the Moscow–Washington VOIP hotline ;)
Bullshit doesn't work so much as it works slightly enough to see a better return on investment than other kinds of promotion (and certainly a better success rate than a complete lack of promotion, a strategy many small websites apparently employ).

You know as well as I do that the myth of these strategies succeeding for every business cases and for every brand (and the propagation of that myth by the entire industry) is more of a strategy for bringing in clients than it is for helping them achieve more online success.