skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Odd choices of data visualizations for a visualization-focused product.

Especially the last two: the second-to-last contains the "Sales Amount by Count of Subcategory", and since count is an numeric aggregate, the plot should be a labeled scatterplot and not a bar plot; the fact that it isn't a scatterplot gives me skepticism of the software. The last chart is plain unreadable with that many labels.

Normally I would not nitpick data visualization, but data analysts are the target demographic.
Real-time Linux gets a leg up into more complex computing systems
Permutations in Ruby from scratch
Bros funding Bros: The problem with venture capital
"before", "after", and "around" method modifiers are pretty common in Ruby Aspect-Oriented Programming libraries (AOP has pretty much fallen out of favor for Ruby, but I'm pretty sure at least some of these are still maintained.)
Not sure how long those constraints will matter though, phones get faster and faster, bandwidth increases and webassembly is on the horizon, this could end up like wap.foo.com all over again.
YouTube is primarily a video-hosting and search platform. Most users do not use the community features at all. That said, do you really want to hold YouTube comments up as a model of a good community? ;-)

Facebook filters each user's experience through their social graph, and explicitly prefers real identity. It's very difficult to create a ton of anonymous accounts and harass someone without their permission.

Twitter, where everything is public by default, is more analogous to Reddit, where everything is public by default. Both make it easy to create anonymous accounts and direct messages to any other user of the service. And Twitter, like Reddit, also has well-covered problems with virulent racism and sexism.
The regex sublanguages and engines in Ruby and Python are knockoffs of the equivalents in earlier Perls.

But this thread really ought to be focused on Perl 6.

In Perl 6 one can write:

print "match" if something ~~ /<thing>/

It looks superficially similar. But it's a scalable parsing feature, not a mere regex. That line of code will work when `something` is ten thousand lines of complex Perl 6 code and `thing` is the top rule in a grammar for parsing Perl 6 code.

Perl 6 is not Perl 5.
Likewise, but it doesn't solve one of the things that Riak TS and other timeseries DB's appear to try to solve: querying your data across ranges without knowing the range ahead of time. Essentially you are performing rollups yourself (which requires internal knowledge about how to aggregate values) to not scan gazillions of records to get a month's worth of data. Among other solutions, I believe this is something KairosDB[1] specifically tackles.

1 - https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb
Ubuntu is planning to make ZFS a standard offering
Thanks for the input guys! It turns out this isn't strictly client work, but rather a middle man style "consulting agency."

If I were looking for serious work I'd probably pass, but they do seem legit and I'm more than happy to work for the pay they are offering me as a student.
Amazon Snowball
I'm reminded of Typhoid Mary. "You can't tell me I'm not allowed to be a cook!"
It's because this product is probably aimed more at the business side of the company as opposed to being a pure technology product.
Presumably this is for data that you want graphs of but doesn't fit in Excel?
Gifs in the sidebar, 10/10
HTTP2 only works for HTTPS sites. For a myriad of reasons, that is not practical for a lot of websites. HTTP 1 best practices are going to be needed for a long time.
Google speeds up news article downloads on mobile devices
That was never a problem you just used:

$x = [ [1], [2], [3] ];

Instead of:

@x = ( (1,), (2,), (3,) );

I always found it quite convenient to be honest.
Never trust the first number announced in a data breach
http://cryptopals.com
When you're working with large companies that process enormous volumes of transactions you can't just download things to excel.
If American laborers (yes, engineers, you are laborers) still remembered how to sharpen axes, maybe that would happen less.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/air-france-work...
The best explanation of the timeline tool I've ever found. Thank you!
Perl6 is really a strict supserset of Perl5 in this way.

Perl6 is at least as good as Perl5 for everything Perl5 is good at.

But Perl6 is way, way more than that.
Drone firm threatened with $2m fine
I don't need to cite other persons to be confident of my own opinion.
For me, the most interesting part is SPICE. To implement a data warehouse, one creates a star schema (OLAP) database from a regular OLTP database. This involves massive amount of work. It looks like SPICE aims to replace the need for OLAP database and produce similar data directly from OLTP systems. I would love to know more about this engine. I hope Amazon open sources the engine (I highly doubt that they will do it).
As Swift Prospers, the Legacy of Objective-C Is Fading Away
A Wall That Plays Music When It Rains
I was at two seminal Steve Jobs events- the introduction of the Apple I and the introduction of the NeXT. The 2nd is in the movie and I have to see if it is accurate. From videos, he was more polished in the 2000s than 1980s.
This is pretty good, AMR inconsistencies aside. It's a nice resource to point people to who have no idea what a "Computational Semantic" is and why I do them.

Also, props for including AMR at all.
Looker (http://www.looker.com), Periscope (http://www.periscope.io), Mode Analytics (http://www.modeanalytics.com), and Chart.io (http://www.chart.io) should probably be even more worried than Tableau.
I'm not Caleb but I self diagnose myself as having the same condition so I can at least speak for myself.

I don't think my sense of humour is much different from anyone else's, I laugh at something I think is funny. My general mood is very flat a lot of the time but other than that I think funny is just funny. I wouldn't necessarily bother going to see a comedian I knew I would laugh at though, if that makes sense. i.e. I don't seek out situations I think will make me laugh and I wouldn't say I enjoyed a night I laughed for 2 hours more than one I watched a documentary or something. I do think I laugh at comedians a lot less than when I was younger, which is one way I think I'm becoming less rather than more emotional if that makes sense.

Music/Art again I don't think are really affected. I listen to some music and subscribe to spotify but I don't use it a huge amount. Clearly I couldn't tell you a song I found uplifting, that's two concepts that I just don't see as related. When people say that my gut reaction is that they're just saying it because they like how it makes them look, I'm not sure if I believe it's an actual feeling as such. I'm not into art but I like things that are nice to look at. I have no appreciation of abstract art at all but I don't think that's uncommon
Why do you attribute the US's success in this area to its economic system and not it's massive population, fertile & expansive territory, socio-political isolation, and worldwide military presence?
Why web apps are slow (2013)
More details https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...
That doesn't stop people from trying. I'm sure some manager in some company is angry at his IT staff because he is trying to load 10GB of statistics into Excel and his staff is telling him that he shouldn't do that.
Introducing Amazon RDS for MariaDB
I recently found a NeXTCube in the warehouse I live in. Blew my mind.
Well here is the BIG position paper on developmentally appropriate practices. At the end of the document is all the cited works. So the words are there and the research and best practices in early education are covered over several courses in undergraduate and graduate level degrees and are in the cited works. http://www.naeyc.org/positionstatements/dap

So the philosophy is laid out and than the practice is sorted out much later sometimes. Other times there will be examples of where certain things to help clarify positional statements. Right now there is still a HUGE thing regarding "screen time" and does active and passive consumption equal the same thing? We have Interactive Screens with the day's activities, rules and other observations. Is that to be counted as "screen time?" The example is limit children to no more than 30 minutes of screen time a week. So does that mean we can't use daily activities?

The short end of it all is, coloring pages fail the philosophy of children having open/creative activities that are student initiated and guided by teachers/parents/care takers.

Position E
> E. Teachers plan the environment, schedule, and daily activities to promote each child’s learning and development.

> 1. Teachers arrange firsthand, meaningful experiences that are intellectually and creatively stimulating, invite exploration and investigation, and engage children’s
active, sustained involvement. They do this by providing a rich variety of materials, challenges, and ideas that are worthy of children’s attention.

Are coloring pages intellectually and creatively stimulating? If no, don't use them.
JAI Primer: A Programming Language for Games
Yes, these suggestions are among my favorite things about Rakudo.

There are a lot more, too. Another example:

> 1 == 1 ? "sane" : "insane"
===SORRY!=== Error while compiling <unknown file>
Unsupported use of ? and : for the ternary conditional operator; in Perl 6 please use ?? and !!
at <unknown file>:1

Or:

> loop(my $i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) { say $i }
===SORRY!===
Word 'loop' interpreted as 'loop()' function call; please use whitespace around the parens
at <unknown file>:1

Easily the nicest error reporting I've seen in a compiler.
What is the point of this then? Tableau can directly connect to most of these data sources already. Is this meant as a replacement for a data warehouse to take transactional information into a format that is quicker to report on?

EDIT: After reading into this more it seems like Quicksight is Amazon's version of Tableau and connects to SPICE which is Amazon's version of a data warehouse. If you prefer Tableau, you can apparently connect that directly to SPICE. If you already have Tableau connected to a data warehouse, this would appear to be a new competitor to the market and wouldn't add anything to your specific setup (beyond Amazon's claims that they will do it better).
That sheet music isn't Apex Twin, it's a "joke" unplayable piece of written music called Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz made by John Stump
These “intelligent” shorts help you run faster, avoid injury
Other discussion from the front page, which links to the product marketing page rather than the blog:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10346811
Why Companies Won’t Learn from the T-Mobile/Experian Hack
Now they just need to modernize the AWS web console :)

Seriously though this product page is a huge improvement over some of their previous releases so kudos to them.
And as I understand BI, also for when you want complex graphs that can't be easily modeled in Excel.

With BI solutions you can perform "slices" as they call it, of multi-dimensional data (cubes), and then represent that as graphs that can also be used for drill-down on one or more dimensions of said data.

When you have say 17 dimensions, these solutions are easier to use than using excel to try to do the same.

I have only implemented very simple BI solutions a couple of times, so anyone with more experience can correct me if I'm wrong.
I'll probably be trouted by a Perl monk for saying it, but sometimes less is more.
Up Close and Personal with Dr Umar Saif
What website nowadays you do not ever truly need JS?
Since this exclusively uses web tech there is absolutely nothing publishers cannot do today.

A big problem is that they don't and AMP is as much about fixing that as about technology.
I remember getting a basic primer on this stuff when I attended a USAF Space Operations course back when I was in the Army Reserve.

Our textbook (and an excellent book for the layperson interested in this sort of thing) was Understanding Space [1]. It's still sitting on my bookshelf at work and I occasionally have a reason to crack it open.

As a software engineer in the aerospace industry, I was once working on a project to create a simulator for a new satellite program. I got stuck with writing a simulation model for the Attitude Determination and Control system (rather than something non-physics-y like the communications system). A lot of my job involved taking matlab scripts from the scientists and translating them into Ada code. An understanding of the basics of orbital mechanics came in very handy, as otherwise I would really not have had any way of knowing if my model was generating nonsensical output. Not to mention the onus was always on me to prove to a scientist that there was a bug in his algorithm.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Space-Introduction-Astro...
We use Chartio at my company. If you haven't tried it yet, this product is stellar - almost all of our BI needs are handled directly by stakeholders rather than having to go through an engineer, and their support is very helpful and responsive.

I would consider moving off to something like Quicksight if it supported redis. Some of our BI-related data is stored there, and currently to get at it we have an app that proxies data from there to postgres for Chartio's sake.
Prostitution+In+Pakistan:+The+Stories
On a tangential note, the phrase "May you live in interesting times" actually has no precise Chinese equivalent or origin despite it being famous as such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
I don't see how one should exclude the other. I really liked your demo of inline editing. But there's nothing to stop you updating the data asynchronously like that, while also allowing the page to be rendered server side as well.
The concept is nice - students certainly need more exposure to Western literature, history, and philosophy. Perhaps seeing these Tweets will inspire them to look up the books or topics and read on their own since schools don't teach much of this anymore.

But the idea of learning something from Tweets - no way. It's funny to read the comment that they can read the entire Western canon in Tweets (it wouldn't even make sense) and that "they'll be getting a quality liberal arts education." That's hard enough to find at an actual university, let alone on Twitter.

Now it would be nice to see a reputable, affordable online liberal arts school. Maybe something like Codacademy where employers might take the coursework completely seriously.
can you explain what you mean by:
"If you actively wait for good opportunities, and sharpen your skills along the way, you'll be in an enviable position all along your journey."
The e-ink display showing a shipping label is brilliant.
Pakistani helicopter
It absolutely can. But now you're dividing your time between what you're trying to innovate in, and doing boilerplate stuff that has already been solved and set up for you. There are only so many hours in the day.
Then I am certain that the scientific cataloging and analysis of the the pharmacological properties of traditional medicines started before the alternative medicine movement.

For example, "Ethobotany of the Tewa Indians" (1916) at http://www.swsbm.com/Ethnobotany/Tewa_Ethnobotany-1.pdf starts:

> ETHNOBOTANY is virtually a new field of research, a field which, if investigated thoroughly and systematically, will yield results of great value to the ethnologist and incidentally also to the botanist. Ethnobotany is a science, consequently scientific methods of study and investigation must be adopted and adhered to as strictly as in any of the older divisions of scientific work. It is a comparatively easy matter for one to collect plants, to procure their names from the Indians, then to send the plants to a botanist for determination, and ultimately to formulate a list of plants and their accompanying Indian names, with some notes regarding their medicinal and other uses. ...

> Ethnobotanical research is concerned with several important questions: (a) What are primitive ideas and conceptions of plant life? (b) What are the effects of a given plant environment on the lives, customs, religion, thoughts, and everyday practical affairs of the people studied ? (c) What use do they make of the plants about them for food, for medicine, for material culture, for ceremonial purposes? ....

http://www.swsbm.com/Ethnobotany/Tewa_Ethnobotany-2.pdf has more details about specific applications.

So you can see already by this time scientists were collecting this sort of information.
Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10345777
Even at 300k points per second, PostgreSQL or MySQL can easily service your needs. The scheme that this article presents is really about batching writes to disk to get high throughput.

mysql> CREATE TABLE test.polls_memory ( id INT(11) PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, poll_id INT(11), time DOUBLE, value INT(11)) ENGINE MEMORY;
mysql> CREATE TABLE test.polls_disk (id INT(11) PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, poll_id INT(11), time DOUBLE, value INT(11)) ENGINE MyISAM;

#> for i in `seq 1 500000`; do echo "INSERT INTO test.polls_memory (poll_id,time,value) VALUES ($i,UNIX_TIMESTAMP(),$RANDOM);" ; done | mysql -uroot

mysql> INSERT INTO test.polls_disk SELECT * from test.polls_memory;
Query OK, 510001 rows affected (0.95 sec)
Records: 510001 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

And this was just on my laptop. I know that on enterprise grade hardware I can get that write rate up to millions per second. The question isn't getting it to disk in batches. Its the read patterns you can support once you decide you are going to batch your writes.
It's actually a project started and run by my brother! I'm tremendously proud of him and what he's achieved with StaffPad, whilst simultaneously running a business as a contract music producer as well no less.

Seeing him on stage with Nadella was a particular highlight.
Amazon RDS Update – MariaDB Is Now Available
It's a desire to keep a truly revolutionary invention, the most significant since the invention of the printing press, which evolved in a "lawless" environment, from being harmed by excessive regulation by political powers that are often driven not by doing good, but by doing something to get re-elected.

The political system moves extremely slowly, is often targeting conditions which are already obsolete, and is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel when it comes to technology.

Just look at the way anti-hacking laws are abused to put people who do something as innocent as vandalize a college calendar entry in jail. Look at Aaron Schwartz. Can the court or legal system tell the difference between cookies meant for tracking, and cookies meant for single sign-on or mashup authentication? Can politicians write laws to deal with the reality of fast moving web and native platforms without creating loopholes for abuse that result in lawyers abusing the system?

The online communities were self organizing and self regulating. A sort of virtual Burning Man. From the WELL, to USENET, to the Modern Web, we've had 3 decades of "lawless" evolution, in which relatively few people have been harmed by legal behavior.

More people have been imprisoned or had their livelihoods destroyed by "regulation" than those supposedly hurt by ad-tech. The people being Dox'ed, the people being assassinated because of posts on Facebook or Twitter by Mexican drug cartels are not being hurt because of data center hosting policies.

We fought the Communications Decency Act I and II in the US and the Clipper Chip in the 90s, because we didn't feel the government had any business getting involved in online publishing and services. I wrote one of the first anonymizing proxies on the internet to hide publisher locations from the government (http://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark.n...).

I have watched for decades how laws intended to do good things to protect people on the net have in fact been used to harm people. That makes me deeply skeptical. In software copyright, in software patents, in censorship laws, in cryptography regulation laws, in "privacy" laws (drafted by entities who themselves have a vested interest in state surveillance)
Show HN: Codecast – Teach and Learn HTML and CSS in the Browser
Then pay for Spotify.
Microsoft's Lumia 950 XL looks deceivingly like a flagship Android phone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10341524
Show HN: Challenge CLI, a command line interface for programming challenges
My Bitcoin Investments Returns for Q3 of 2015
Those are some optimistic assumptions. Perhaps the Robots will refuse to fight and will all hold hands and sing kum-bay-ya, eh?
AWS Snowball
> Edit: Huh, I was shortly un-hellbanned and am Hellbanned again since the previous comment didn't live up to some interesting-level standard? :-)

Maybe your comment got rescued by someone using the new vouch feature?
And if you don't want ads, then pay for the content.
If you are asking honestly, it is because women, statistically, will only date men of similar educational attainment.

So the result is that if you are a guy without college, you'd avoid an area with a higher ratio of educated women, whereas you'd have better luck if you did have a degree. Vice versa for women.

Not trying to make a point one way or another on educational attainment, gender, etc., just recommending based on my own experiences.
Hi everyone! Challenge CLI is a simple command line utility which I created. It shows you all the active contests, upcoming contests, short contests and hiring contests directly on your terminal. It's programming challenges for hackers. Built using Python.
If you test at a high enough level you shouldn't have to throw the tests away while refactoring.
I'm really not a fan of the fact that their preferred version is <html [lightning bolt emoji]>

I can't even put it in a HN comment.
I figured as much; I've never thought Aphex Twin's lines were particularly challenging, he's just got a very unique approach to sound design and composition.

Would you prefer a technically playable piece by way of Michael Angelo Batio?

http://www.fundamental-changes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...
The picture on the page doesn't give me an accurate estimate of the size. They are actually 50 pounds (says on the blog)!
Now Is the Time to Break into China
It's not a moral imperative to process all data, it's a moral imperative to pay others for the product of their labor that you're benefiting from.
Russia has all this and its GDP per capita is one quarter ours. Not to mention the fall of the Soviet Union, etc. Yeah so "just having resources equals success" is asinine.

Not to mention all the academic research on the success of open markets, low regulation, etc.
A lot of what you are paying for in BI solutions is implementation costs and then to a lesser extent yearly maintenance and support costs. I wonder how they intend to lower implementation costs, since that is kind of lengthy and inherently difficult process.
Yeah I used to never carry cash, until I started eating at a couple local restaurants that only accept cash
Using generic ASIO4ALL drivers I'm able to get latency around 30ms using "generic" sound cards like the stuff onboard a ThinkPad. ASIO4ALL takes over the sound device so only one app can use it. Without it, latency can be rather much higher.
Microsoft seeks the same acclaim from the 950 XL that it won with the Surface Pro, delivering one device that serves two purposes. The 950 XL will fall short, though. Mixing the ecosystem of a smartphone with the productivity of a desktop PC is very different than mixing a tablet with a keyboard for personal productivity.
What are some typical use cases for Amazon Kinesis streams, on the web?
The XKCD about FedEx's bandwidth seems particularly appropriate: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/