skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The aws services stack is deep and deeply intertwined. I've always viewed depending on such stacks in production with skepticism and I'd recommend everybody else does that too.

This might come across as tooting our horn a bit. But it's more about sounding a warning to other startups providing SaaS service built on public cloud. My own misgivings about relying on a cloud provider specific stack (both for the reasons of visibility/debuggability as well as for vendor lock-in) meant that PacketZoom services were not affected by this failure at all because we only use them as one of the many providers of raw machines. We use our own techniques to load-balance/failover among multiple cloud providers too (so even if the raw compute/network went away, our service would take a perf hit but not be completely down).
Frankly, I didn't find the artwork appealing, and I find that pretty much indispensable to enjoy comics. I'm also already following ~10 Image series; more than this and I'll start mixing up the storylines :)
Twist just raised their series C at $37M (~80M total) [1]. Emily (the author) is their CEO.

[1] http://boston.citybizlist.com/article/275318/fidelity-manage...
Write code. Read code. Debug code.
The Learn Enough tutorials use the Softcover system (http://softcover.io/), which stores the HTML on S3 and uses JavaScript to pull it in dynamically. The flexibility and convenience of Softcover come at the price of a little extra JavaScript—a price that, from my perspective, is well worth paying.
A Huge Overnight Increase in a Drug’s Price Raises Protests
This is the same country that declared atheists as terrorists. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-ar...)

Also, they tried to get a United Nations-backed ban on "blasphemy". (http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/10/15/us-islam-blasphemy-...)
If it's a matter of doing what you're told, computers are great for that. Complex problems that require human level intelligence require people who can make localized decisions without being hand held all the way through. The problem of new grads that performed well at university is that they are best at solving narrow, well defined problems. If that's all that E&Y is doing, I question whether they are providing any competitive value.
They seem to have missed an important data point involving alcohol. If the stories I hear are accurate, a few decades ago if you were pulled over while intoxicated, the officer would likely say "You boys drive straight on home mkay?" We've become much less tolerant of alcohol-related accidents, and so that same situation sudenly becomes a much bigger problem. Who wants to risk a DUI to hang out with a bunch of squares from the office?
Dynamo DB was down for so long it will take 60 years to return to SLA
Purchasing items on Amazon was also down for several hours
Those are what're thought of as standard "frequentist" basics; practical tools originally invented for practitioners. Many basic texts aiming to be statistics for scientists will do well, though unfortunately I don't have particular suggestions. Sorry about that!
Elephants Shot with Poison Arrows Travel to Humans for Help
One of the first things Amazon tell you about AWS is the API is king - the console is hosted in us-east-1 but the API is hosted in each region independently.

You don't need automatic failover, but you do need your own scripts to talk to the AWS API. The whole point of AWS is automation.
Sure, but that requires sufficient hardware and a willing programmer.
Check out loopback-angular-admin, which creates an admin interface on a Loopback 2.x API, nicely splitting the Angular parts into controllers, services and directives:

https://github.com/beeman/loopback-angular-admin
https://github.com/angular/material

Google's implementation of Material Design in Angular. Excellent examples of complex, accessible and well-documented components implemented on top of Angular 1.
We are almost certainly the product on HN - eyeballs of engineers interested in startups to advertise startup jobs to if not to subtly control the conversation in this area.

This isn't an awful thing but it's absoultely true that we both are the product here.
That's still more democratic than currencies issued by dictatorships, yet nobody would say they have no value.
MongoDB really? You are comparing a software product to a multi-region global data service? This is just not a great comparison. If you build a distributed global data service on MongoDB you could compare that to DynamoDB.
Try telling the IRS that during an audit and see how long it takes for you to be in prison.
bitcoin is a 256-bit number. Today, governments would like to regulate the usage of approximately 33,437,921 of these magic numbers. I'm guessing most of community can at least find humor in this.
How Hacker News ranking algorithm works:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013

http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574
> but in either case CNNIC should not have issued a non-HSM cert

Putting it in an HSM does not make it OK.
A "fallacy" would imply some hidden logical error or some loose thought, but this isn't the case: the idea that "great men are important" isn't by itself fallacious. The error lies in denying the contribution of "small men".

Furthermore, even if "small men" are important, why wouldn't they benefit by becoming greater? Instead of waiting on destiny to grant us another Leibniz or another von Neumann, maybe we could harness such powers directly from the source.

That, of course, if it works. Tampering with the brain is certainly one of those things that might have very unintended consequences. What neuronal adaptations wold arise from sticking a chip in someone's brain? For instance, the majority of savants have some sort mental impairment. What if by optimizing for specific skills one might perhaps find it difficult to learn new skills? Or maybe the contrary: optimizing for learning and generalist thinking might not increase computational intelligence, or even reduce it.
This is only true if you are prepared to commit tax fraud, or if Bitcoin is not considered a taxable asset class in your jurisdiction.

The chances of getting away with it may be decent depending on how you obtain and sell your BTC, but that does not make it any more legal than avoiding taxes on cash transactions you do that there's tax liabilities on.
Is it? For me, it's generally the opposite. I do a bunch of trial and error as I explore the problem space and the solution space. Small details gradually accumulate. Then, finally, things shift into a new pattern and I say, "Aha!"

After that I'll still have a fair bit of experimentation as I tune. But that feels much less trial-and-error-ish to me; before I was wandering; after I have a direction.
Sure. Mlgamesapps@gmail.com
That is true only in the same way that physical cash is tax-free. Governments can still demand that you pay tax on your transactions; if the transactions are small enough and/or you are good enough about hiding them you may be able to avoid paying that tax (probably illegally).
1] Solid product or service that is legal, ethical and useful.

2] Top leaders with the right mix of vision, ambition, practicality, integrity and kindness

3] Growing at least modestly - it helps keep morale sound

4] Solid and sustainable profit margins

5] Good array of benefits

6] True market competitive pay

7] Mentoring and bias toward promotion from within without becoming insular

8] Willingness to change and innovate

9] A fair process for firing people who are not contributing or actually a detriment to team performance

10] A company of good public reputation (I am not ashamed to tell friends where I work)
From the title, it looked like this was going to be about the block size controversy, where there is serious disagreement about what happens next. The article is more like "can anybody find a use case for this thing?"

Bitcoin has had two runups driven by use cases - Silk Road I (drugs), and getting around China's exchange controls. Both were shut down. For most of 2015, Bitcoin has been around $225 ± 25. There were brief bubbles outside that range, and one big drop, but it came back to that trading range. So it's not interesting to speculators any more. Until someone finds a new use case, it's not likely to do much.

There's been progress. Mark Karpeles, who ran Mt. Gox and apparently stole its funds, is in jail in Japan.
As someone who has earned a top performance award at a big 4 accounting firm, I think they should drop the requirement entirely.

I have an Arkansas high school education. I came to work there through an acquisition.
Taking into account how the war in Syria was financed, I think it would be fitting for those refugees to stay in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, ...
These recent articles make it sound like there has been a recent revelation by the "U.S. Government" that bitcoin has actually been a commodity all along.

The reality is much more complicated. The federal government is made up of many different agencies, and each one is trying to figure out whether they should be regulating it, in case they may take the fall for not preventing the next big Mt. Gox style collapse or scam.

While CFTC have recently decided that they should regulate bitcoin options as a commodity, the IRS have deemed bitcoin as property for capital gains tax purposes, but their FinCEN division (along with NYDFS and most other states) are regulating it very much as a currency under money transmission laws.

In the end this doesn't really matter. The power of bitcoin is that it is decentralized, and, like the internet itself, if an individual is able to connect to the network, then they are able to make transactions with others, regardless of how liberal or oppressive their government is.

TL;DR: Regulations will continue to make it increasingly difficult to run bitcoin businesses in the U.S., but that doesn't matter. Bitcoin's power will always come from the fact that it is a completely open network for individuals.
Yeah. I noticed that afterwords. I had only skimmed the first paragraph of the article when I posted the comment. I'm not a fan of Anissimov, I haven't been since I saw him speak very naively about whole brain emulation in 2005 and later when he made some very technically incompetent arguments for some imagined form of nanotechnological DRM. Even in this case, brain augmentation strikes me as heroically unpromising. Once we know enough to augment a brain, I think we will know enough to create superior substitutes - though an obvious exception to this would be genetic augmentations.

However, his bizarre politics are entirely beside the point. And talking about politics in technical conversations is a very bad cultural practice.
This is crazy. It would be like choosing America to head up the UN Social Welfare Commission.

(edit: this was meant to be a mildly sarcastic zinger, if it wasn't clear)
Yes, one would assume a forward thinking, competitive accounting firm is developing such software / hardware. Who's going to be more successful in the future? The accounting firm with an army of yes men that do what they're told, or the accounting firm with extremely talented / hardworking / creative individuals working alongside computers doing all the grunt work? I think E&Y recognizes that all the assembly line aspects of their job is rapidly vanishing and what's left is the hard part that has no clear, easy answers.
> I don't think it is possible to create an inflationary currency except through central banks.

How so? A number of alt.coins has built in inflation, either through continuous mining, or via staking (such as ReddCoin) or a mix. There may certainly still be plenty of issues, such as lack of ability to adjust the rates without widespread consensus that might make it hard to respond to various situations, but making the currencies inflationary doesn't seem to be a problem.
If you are making taxable transactions, that is for you to deal with the appropriate authorities.

Putting entries in the block chain is not a taxable transaction anywhere that I am aware of, except that you may need to add an allotment for the miner to process your transaction.
Very lazy, very poorly researched article with cherry picked sources.

The simpler explanation is that the author isn't seeing many house parties because he isn't being invited to them. Dunno, but may be the host is worried he's the sort to write a review about it.
Sorry, are you saying that every blockchain entry that is created needs to be reported to the IRS?
"I don't think it is possible to create an inflationary currency except through central banks."

I don't see why that would be the case. Would not "Bitcoin, but the mining rewards don't decrease" be an inflationary currency?
Indeed.

The “If you aren't paying you are the product” is an anachronistic and ignorant trope leveraged in fanfolk wars. It excuses those things that are paid for and are further monetised. Take for example your music purchases and a “You might like...” suggestion list; you have paid for the system, purchased music, and surprisingly your purchases are being tracked and further monetisation is attempted. Vast troves of interaction data is accumulated and analysed ad infinitum[1].

Free lunches _do_ exist as well, as anyone with a good friend or child will attest to.

The slogans of hypercapitalism are rampant, none of which do justice to the complexities of context.

[1] Yes Apple is included in this, as we know from the extensive market research revealed via the Samsung lawsuit and the fact that Ping no longer exists.
And then, in by far the majority of cases, after much head scratching and scribbling, the "That's funny" turns into "Doh!"

But in an extreme minority of cases, when the "That's funny" remains ...
The future of the world is Islam. They're emigrating en masse all over the world, and unlike Europeans and Americans, they have no problem having a lot of children.

The definition of human rights will eventually be controlled by people like the Saudis. This decision could be seen as very forward thinking for the UN.
Nextdoor for pet owners?
You know this is interesting. There were no symptoms for us at all that something was wrong with Amazon itself, and their status page was not updated in a timely fashion. I spent a few hours (in the middle of the night working with my laptop in bed next to my wife) trying to figure out what in the hell was wrong, only to find out through the grapevine that it was Amazon. This is extremely frustrating when providers are having problems and actively working on a solution yet their status page still has glowing recommendations of their service.
Saudi Arabia have claimed this is misleading. They say they have an open border to Syria and have accepted over 2.5 million Syrians since 2011.

Is this claim incorrect?
Actually, bitcoin is still being used to get around China's exchange controls. That is why there is so much investment in mining in China - mining equipment is treated as capital investment, and it's trivial to then sell the proceeds for USD.

I would also guess that there are far more people using bitcoin on dark net marketplaces now than there ever were using Silk Road (mostly due to all the publicity), but I don't have any sources to back this up.

I do agree that we are unlikely to see any significant changes in the price of bitcoin in the medium term though. In the long run, the price of bitcoin is mostly irrelevant when bitcoin is being used as a payment network anyway.
Numeracy is an important part of accounting :)
In Berlin you can buy a case (20 1-liter bottles) of beer for about that much. Yes, cheaper than bottled water, and certainly enough a very long night for anyone except Andre the Giant.
The point was 'if you don't want to feel embarrassed by things you post in flamethreads and have moderators berate you, don't start flamethreads', that is all.

Take a look at the top comment in the thread for a) an actual substantive criticism of the article b) a link to a much, much better survey article on the same topic.
Same way you remember grammar and syntax in a spoken language. You see examples, practice writing it, learn basic forms, etc...
What do you mean by "distributed commands over ssh"?
> Now they could "theoretically" introduce a pricing mechanism such that a number of people would shut off their AC due to an increase in price. But that is a lot more complicated (most residences do not do real-time billing for energy, harder to forecast how many users will shut off if price is raised, have to maintain real-time channel for price data) and in practice something will go wrong and you'll blackout instead.

Doing real-time billing is not a hard technical problem, it's just a one-time cost to replace all the meters.

At that point all you actually need is a standard IP-based protocol to announce real-time rates. The power company doesn't even need to communicate bidirectionally with individual devices whatsoever -- all they need to do is broadcast the current rate and let the devices make choices. Because the choices various devices make will invariably be "when price goes up too much, use less power." So if people are using too much power, you raise the rate a little bit at a time until they no longer are (or the higher rate causes more expensive generation methods to come online).

The only way you get blackouts is if the rate goes so high that every smart device with a cutout is already off and you still don't have enough power, but that's exactly the same failure point as letting the power company turn off your AC. Only worse because if you need some non-standard power company interface with bureaucratic rules instead of a simple standardized rate announcement protocol then there will be fewer smart devices built and purchased that will reduce consumption in response to high rates.
Kudos to E&Y for taking a radical approach to hiring.

However, as a concerned parent, I hope impressionable youngsters don't mistake this for 'Yay, I don't have to go to college to get a decent job anymore'.

The lifetime earnings for a college degree holder[1] is probably a lot more than for those without a degree.

If you can afford it, go to college. If you can help it, don't drop out. Get that degree. If possible, get a Masters degree. Those six years staying in school getting your undergraduate and graduate degrees, will make a huge difference in the rest of your life

We are not all destined to found unicorns or be an early employee in one. For the rest of us mortals, going to college will make a difference.

Even a Thiel Fellow probably needs to be admitted to a very competitive school to drop out and get the Thiel Fellowship.

[1] Forbes; http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2014/05/05/federal-res...
We had a good discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225203
Or you could just run in multiple regions. Using multiple cloud providers limits your ability to take advantage of provider-specific features - why waste time writing your own load balancer when you could use ELB + multiple regions?
I remember there was a similar row a couple of years ago with an other country with a bad human rights record. An argument then was that the position carries little real power, but is a way for a country to show that they want to improve their human rights, and other countries allow it as a way to put some soft pressure on the selected country.
DynamoDb was only down in only one region, for the first time in years. It's hardly a reason to migrate off, especially with DynamoDb still being available in every single other region throughout. It's simpler to fail over to another AWS region than to an entirely different cloud provider with a different API.
That's like saying "signing a paper is not a taxable transaction" - if that paper is a transfer of property, it probably is a taxable event, and so would the entry in the blockchain probably be, if it's between address owned by different people.
So across 64-bit ARM and x86-64, what is the ratio of instructions across the same program compiled by effectively the same compiler (modulo of course maturity in code selection and peephole optimization)?

My guess is that x64-64 still saves quite a few pages of memory over 64-bit ARM on a large program.
This statement is a bit hyperbolic. Bitcoin isn't as anonymous as say cash, but it's a lot more anonymous than most online payment methods (excluding a few altcoins which can really just be seen as innovations in the bitcoin/blockchain space).
Who are they? Thats the whole point. Previous generations creates the environment that the next ones grow up in.

The US isn't wealthy in any easily calculatable sense. They have been borrowing from it's grandchildren for a long time now. Most other western countries are doing the same. Some of those countries though have forced retirement savings but otherwise it's all borrowed money.

Blaming any specific generation for the framework the previous one set up for them is just flat out ignoring what it means to be a human being living in a society.
Or just different state. Texas has much more relaxed legislature around real estate, which makes it more attractive to emigrants from other states.
Ever since Napster physical media is no longer about distribution but has become merchandise, like T-shirts or stickers. And CDs just aren't as nice of a collectible as Vinyl.
The double whammy of being poor – making less and getting charged more
You mean reading and following the instructions manual is hard work beyond the reach of a normal human being??
It depends hugely on what you are trying to do.

You are definitely right to be thinking in terms of a team, because the myth of individual performance is damaging in so many ways.
Lethal Drones Are Industry's Latest Headache
We're always happy to help with that, but can you please email hn@ycombinator.com about it? And thank you for the polite response—I really appreciate it.
Why are you selling?
If you live in the US, or are a US citizen, then yes, every bitcoin transaction you make should technically be reported to the IRS as capital gains/losses on your tax return.
Just finished uninstalling AVG...
"Or you could just run in multiple regions."

Not when the original goal of the very service is to have presence in all geographical regions. If aws us-east is hit, I want the users to transparently failover to a server on east coast (perhaps one hosted by google or softlayer) rather than be directed all the way to us-west or eu.

And as for ELB, one doesn't use ELB for a custom protocol that load-balances/fails-over itself from the client :-)
Futures for C++11 at Facebook
> In an ideal world, I believe that a flat structure would be best.

"Any sufficiently complicated company w/o management contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of management." — @wycats

In my experience, that's held true nearly every time I've worked in a flat team or know someone who has (anecdotal, I know).

Point is: figure it out now and you'll thank yourselves later. Starting flat and changing it later will just lead to more pain and damage to the team cohesion and structure.
That's funny, but I think it touches on the effects of easy credit to this whole phenomenon. Kids are graduating university today with what was previously considered unconscionable debt, and then they pile up credit card debt because they want the best of the best that they see every day on Facebook and Pinterest.

I'm not saying this as a blank statement against young people, there are irresponsible people living beyond their means at all ages. But consumerism as a trend in aggregate has amped up to record levels, and SV is a significant part of that.
How would you even get the idea that this was the claim made? Your claim was that bitcoin transactions can't be taxed outside of mining fees, the negative of that is not "All bitcoin transactions have to be reported and taxed"
I really liked this style guide.
https://github.com/johnpapa/angular-styleguide