skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's get this out of the way - I love it when companies are open and transparent about their architecture. Sharing intimate details like this is fantastic.

Where I'm struggling is that there are a number of questionable choices here with little justification. For example, why a HTTP front-end? This is fine for webhooks but I'm not going to let my website's backend open an HTTP connection for every event I want to send out. The decision to store the data in Elasticsearch and Cassandra is equally dubious. In my experience Elasticsearch has been a maintenance nightmare and has not been a perform any and robust reporting solution at scale.
An article about the Greenspan comment, which surprisingly advocates the position: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/10/the_grea...
I'm sure they made a real development investment to add Freemium features on top of their free trial. At Cronitor we recently moved in the opposite direction -- from a limited freemium model to a free-trial -- for similar reasons.

Our free plans were limited to an extent that they didn't blow-up our service. Our primary concern was that as we've built out our product, introduced more advanced features, and signed bigger customers, the risk that a free user could degrade service for paying customers no longer seemed worth it. We considered isolating free users in a separate silo but maintaining that infrastructure also didn't seem worth it.

Ultimately these are hard problems to test because rolling out a change like this requires a lot of work. Even if you release it via b-test you've already made a real investment to get that far.

For those curious, we are keeping the free trial model but we do hope to continue improving trial conversion.

Edit: For clarity
There's also Android and what the cell carriers are doing it with regards to bloatware and security updates to use as another source of material.
TAG Heuer Connected Watch
I'm lost. Why are we deploying DNSSEC again? I agree that HTTPS security comes down to things like key pinning, and not to giant PKIs.
Corexit dealt effectively with BP's PR problem. Oil soaked birds and beaches bring lawsuits and lower share prices.

It was never intended to solve the ecological problem they created.
He was playing DEVIL's advocate
From previous experience, having to exclude communications from a single entity (or single type of entity) is not going to shut anything down.

Case in point: It is unconstitutional to conduct surveillance on US citizens without a warrant. Therefore the NSA's massive collection machine must exclude every single American, right? Wrong. What they did instead was implement a filter where the accuracy of excluding a US citizen is greater than 50%. So if your exclusion rate is only 60% you "accidentally" catch 40% of US citizens in your surveillance net, but you have met the requirements.

Similarly in this case if surveillance must exclude communications from a single law firm then they only have to implement a filter where they are more likely to exclude the communications than they are to catch them. "Accidentally" catching their communications would still be allowed since the filter would be meeting the requirements.
I don't see it. Can't agree with the premise. I use their site because of how convenient it has made my life. Give me something better and I'll switch, otherwise I really couldn't care less about any of these complaints.
How is this a win for Snowden? They can deem the entire program illegal, disband the NSA and put everyone in charge in prison for violating US law and it still won't help Snowden get back into the US without cuffs.

Unless it's an executive pardon or a statement from the attorney general exempting Snowden from prosecution this isn't a win for Snowden.

In any case there might be an interesting development as it might turn into a catch 22 for the NSA if they'll claim that it's technically unfeasible for them to filter out their collection based solely on specific individuals/organizations (which is probably technically correct) it can open a whole new can worms for them (since they've claimed that the collection is targeted and ensures that certain parameters are met (other than it's a phone call, email, skype call or 1 or more person(s) talking in range of a microphone they can jack into)). If they'll find a way to comply well they might be flooded by similar law suits, and even FOIA requests from individuals and organizations about if and when any data about them was collected.

On the other side of the coin this might come to bite us in the arse if the NSA makes a case that to comply with this ruling they'll have to perform in-depth analysis of every communication they collect to ensure that no phone call data is being collected which might involve J.J. Little, especially if VOIP communications fall under this jurisdiction and ofc they can later claim that any intelligence gathered from that analysis is lawful and actionable/admissible because it was gathered in the course of achieving compliance with a court order.

Dear Citizens,

In order to comply with Civil Action No. 13-851 Klayman et al. v Obama et al. we now need to transcribe all domestic and international calls conducted from and to the continental united states, the pacific states as well as any incorporated and unincorporated territories and any commercial fleet vessels sailing under the US flag in order to ensure that the call does not contain any information, data or reference to J.J. Little & Associates, P.C. or it's clients.

Sincerely the NSA.
Agreed. I think it's mostly the publishers fault but it's still annoying.

BTW, most libraries have a digital lending thing now where you can get a kindle book for free for a month or so. (And presumably renew it after that.)

And my local library's digital catalog can also find books that they don't actually have and let me click a "recommend purchase" button. Last time I clicked it, I got an email a few days later that the book was now available.
Not so much permission as support. Being an official language means that the core internal libraries have Go bindings.
You could have fooled me with all of your seemingly confident talk about treble damages, which in reality is incredibly ill-informed.
Would a judge for a local municipality look kindly upon that sort of interference?
Sorry, but your security doesn't simply depend on your own keys. It also depends on all the keys that dominate your keys in the DNS graph.
If you tried to come up with the name of a product like that for a comic book about some evil megacorp, it would be hard to do better than "Corexit".
Progressive tax on worked hours to solve unemployment in a world of automation
Have you tried shopping at B&H, for example? I have a much easier time finding things there. Newegg is also pretty decent. I get frustrated by Amazon's UI fairly often, by comparison.
Yes, things would be much simpler if our societies were composed of angels rather than humans.
Navigate and search the real-world … online or off
This guide is decent as well if you're interested in getting an analog synth: http://thesynthesizersympathizer.blogspot.com/2015/03/buying...

Not modular, but I've been really happy with my Sub 37. In retrospect I could have gone the fully digital route with a MIDI keyboard, it's a cheaper and safer way to start if you're not sure that's your cup of tea. Having an actual physical thingy to tweak can be pretty magical though, especially once you figure out what the dozens of knobs do and how things interact.

Would also recommend http://www.syntorial.com/ to get started in synths.
The Gremlin Graph Traversal Machine and Language
> How is this a win for Snowden? They can deem the entire program illegal, disband the NSA and put everyone in charge in prison for violating US law and it still won't help Snowden get back into the US without cuffs.

It's good for Snowden because it means he really was a whistle blower. Things can still be good for him even though he's not back at home.
Apples to Oranges.

SuperCollider or Pure Data don't sound like analogue equipment and vice versa. One is not a substitute for the other.

Also you can build your own modular equipment it doesn't have to cost 300$ per module.

There's a huge DIY community
for building/ modding synths.
because its impossible to pin everyone and everything everywhere.

No matter what you are stuck trusting that dns roots arn't being evil in the case of unpinned cert.

At least with DNSSEC you arnt stuck additionally trusting every CA on earth in the case an attacker can mitm, but dosent control said tld.
DARKEXEC, PASS-THE-TOKEN, new way to surf'n domain
This tool and techinque steals windows access tokens, bypassing restriction between user's context without getting passwords or dumping others authentication-mechanism grants...
Using this, it leads to full access all user's resources (filesystem, registry, memory) and obviously all the others authentication-mechanism-grants already held by that user.

The tool-project went out mainly for:

"Administrative" and academic purposes, just think about those billions things n'configs you can't make without being inside own user's context. hell, yeah..

"Evil" purposes instead... just wonder how bad it will be, directly accessing some windows domain network or, effectively in a post-exploitation scenario, gaining access with an account fully-privileged on the local system but without any grant on any interesting remote resource.. and maybe on to the same machine, or being able to access some others, where others have....

Implementing and testing it, we've found this new technique (pass-the-token) reliable and simple, fully offering all capabilities held by the user such as smb, kerberos, and any.. in the same situation/assumption involved dumping memory...

Take a look at references @
www.blackmath.it
Facebook's M is powered by Wit.ai (who they acquired a while back), which basically does what you're talking about. They translate natural language into machine readable data structures. Honestly, its interesting tech and being able to feed in facebook level data volume should prove very good for them.
I imagine the marketing angle must be pretty big. Not only making people aware of your service, but convincing people to use it. A big question when selecting any online backup service is, "are these people I'm trusting with my data complete idiots?" Your posts should really help convince a lot of people that you are, in fact, not complete idiots.

For what it's worth, I've been a happy customer for years and try to spread the love whenever I can. My mantra is: data that's not backed up doesn't exist, and data that's not backed up off-site is not backed up. Thanks for providing a great service for cheap.
Running all Apple across the board is okay until you decide you want to leave. hey don't play well with others. I think rewarding that sort of behaviour with money against my long term interests.
The last time I had to return something to Amazon, the refund was issued starting from the moment UPS scanned my box into their system. I had my money before Amazon even received my box.

There are complaints to be made, but the returns process is not one of them.
Political Image Machine (Search Social Media Photos by Presidential Candidates)
How to Share Your Website's Traffic
I think this is a perspective that makes sense for somebody who lives in suburbia. I don't know that it would make sense to do your everyday shopping online if you have to drive to the store for other items or to return things that you bought online.

However if you live in an urban area, it's an entirely different comparison. First of all, let's face it- taping a label to a box isn't as hard as this guy describes. Second, to return it, you only have to find the closest UPS or FedEx store, which, again, in an urban environment is probably closer to you than the closest Starbucks.

That said, larger box items are almost always cheaper on Amazon than from other retailers in my experience.

So, a more appropriate title might be Amazon kind of sucks if you live in the suburbs and are trying to buy groceries or items that would retail for under three bucks.
Are there serious opponents of Snowden that deny that he was in some real sense a whistleblower? The problem Snowden's critics have is that he wasn't just a whistleblower.
s/boycott/vote/g
> the ability to select outside of it - difficult as this may be - is valued

My point is that you can't select outside of the labour pool. The same person who is hired by the state to perform care is the same person that a private company hires to provide care. Both entities hire from the same labour pool. As well, competent care providers are often promoted out of the "front-line" work, leaving the less skilled ones behind.

Not only that, but allowing people to choose their care providers can lead to inefficient use of resources. Rather than having one person service a home of 5 individuals, you may end up with 5 people servicing a home. But there are many inefficiencies in the way care is currently provided, so perhaps the expenses could be made up in other areas. And perhaps an individual given more autonomy may function better and thus need less care.
In general, to say that a category has sums and products, these sums and products must be objects of the same category. The axioms for a category are totally agnostic to the concrete nature of its objects. Just because Hask objects are types, it doesn't mean objects in other categories are Haskell types of behave like Haskell types. In the context of databases, it makes sense to treat a schema as a category whose objects are its tables, and whose morphisms are chained foreign key traversals. And tables contain fields that carry data of their own.
If anything, the added volume is probably good for keeping prices down.
Fidelity writes down the value if its Snapchat stake
Worth pointing out (for those of you not in the storage game) that these appliances, while cool, are pretty far from state of the art. We're (Dropbox) packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U. And costs aren't close, let alone the addressable throughput given that you guys just went to 10G.

Serious kudos though are due for the Backblaze blog. You're all at least talking about what you're up to, which is awesome both for education around building large storage systems and establishing transparency with your customer base.

Unfortunately, a lot of the bigger clusters' teams won't/can't talk about what exactly they're doing and how they're doing it for trade secret reasons. If you want to learn about it, you have to come work for one of us. :-)

Also, the orangered hardware looks awesome.
Athletes Prefer MILFs to Coeds 3-To-1
Why you should never build a backblaze pod: BioTeam
He doesn't want a serious attack to happen on his watch. There's a strong incentive to do "everything possible" to prevent one. Very few people would reward him for reigning in his own power, but nearly everyone will blame if an attack happens.
Science Doesn’t Work the Way People Think It Does
I just realized I typed "have" instead of "gave". Now everyone knows I'm a robot. -_-
I may or may not use Cloudflare's core service but would it still be a reasonable place to host my DNS entries?
For me, a really important part of the process is the tangibility. I'm not a analog purist but I do find that one knob per function and no menu diving works much better for me creatively. Unfortunately most digital/software synths cant resist the temptation to cram everything into menus.

As for the price. Modular isn't cheap but you hardly need to be a millionaire. You can get a fully functional starting setup for $500 and add from there as you can afford it.
That's the way it used to be for me, but now Amazon asks me to go to a UPS store to drop off.
Yev from Backblaze here -> We're pretty excited about it. Beta users are providing some good feedback too! We think it'll definitely be the right choice for a lot of folks!
Amazon.com is just ruined by third party sellers. Hard to find anything throughout the mess, and the sellers do things like inflate their sales to push them up the popularity rankings (now called "featured" rankings, so Amazon can inject paid adverts). I often just search for things, pick the department, then select "Only sold by Amazon.com" to escape the nonsense.

I'd happily use another site, but who? Target.com and Walmart.com are both worse sites with odd offline customer service (and meh shipping policies). NewEgg used to have better search/sort but also got third party seller ruined (plus return issues). I hear a few peeps about this Jet.com site, but they've extremely new and have had some issues so far.

I want a site with Amazon's amazing customer services, Amazon's shipping polices, but with a better site design. If they're going to do filtering in the search results then having them actually work correctly would be appreciated (they often don't on Amazon).
Exactly. We understand the benefit of mitigation mechanisms to protect against userspace bugs, but there's still pushback against mitigation mechanisms that protect against kernelspace bugs.
If you're dealing with a larger property manager, they might. If you're dealing with a small-time landlord, it may be difficult for them to deal with the legal fees to get to that point. I'm guessing most would just eat the cost - once.

In either case the leases and the vetting process become that much worse for everyone else. Maybe the landlord starts doing random inspections to check for this. Basically everyone else's life gets a little worse. Tragedy of the commons, this is why we can't have nice things, etc etc.
Rating system is actually the one thing that I think is good about Uber (though firing your emp^H^H^Hcontractor if he drops below 4.3/5 is not).

Social consequences are not good for everything, but there are a lot of areas when there are better than economic approach. The problem is that economic incentives are much stronger than social, so the latter can be easily destroyed by the former. The classic example would be the fact that you absolutely, positively don't want to pay people for donating blood - it immediately leads to contamination of blood banks, as people replace the sense of duty with an opportunity for free cash, and thus stop caring about things like not donating blood when they are sick.

Since social incentives are fragile, you want to defend them in the areas they work better than economic ones - hence the opposition to AirBnB.
I flat out had a tough time finding a job in biotech. I landed one and the pay was 30% less than what a regular tech company was offering. I still want to be in science, but now it is a hobby rather than my sole source of income.
If anything market salaries are artificially low because of the power imbalance between employers and employees.

All the current H-1B debacle does is increase that power imbalance even further.
But move left/right/whatever by what distance?
It's astonishing that Backblaze would release its drawings as open source, good for you!

But there's no explicit license declaration anywhere in the drawings zipfile and in fact some of the drawings claim "PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS DRAWING IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURING. ANY REPRODUCTION IN PART OR AS A WHOLE WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURING IS PROHIBITED".

Maybe it's just boilerplate? Or maybe you really don't want to face competition in your specific industry. Regardless, an official open source license (even with commercial restrictions) would be much clearer than this.
If the rent is received on time and the property is returned in the condition it was received, exactly what "unexpected costs" are there to the landlord?

If there are actual costs in the form of damage that actually does occur (violating #2), then the landlord has ample grounds to pursue the tenant to recover those costs. People don't get compensated for things that might have happened.
I wonder if there's code available, from that paper. Results look promising.

Thanks for sharing!
Large companies game everything they can. If they're public companies, their directors are required to.
Baremetrics DID move to a free trial model, as they mentioned.
Can you please explain what does this mean?
The one CA on Earth DNSSEC asks most Internet users to trust is controlled by the f^cking NSA. How is this progress?
That we aren't angels doesn't mean we should give up on striving to be them though.
No free lunch.
My experience with Jet.com has so far been great. I started using it maybe a month ago (right after they ditched membership fees).

Their sorting actually works. Their prices are comparable to big box stores. Their shipping is fast and free (with a minimum order, of course). It's what Amazon used to be before it started kinda sucking.
> Paper is accepted and set to public (or rejected)

Is this even relevant post-scarcity? Just make everything available all the time, just like the rest of the web works.

If it is obvious how many citations a paper have, and of their respective quality, that would carry over to make a quality index for the paper itself. Low quality papers would languish as only friends and family would bother with the.
After using LiveScript I wished there was a transpiler for every language to get LiveScript syntax in there...
Ouch, $20m raised in an Accel-led Series B [1]

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/jut-inc
> - Limiting the amount of visas that one country can claim (similar to the green card lottery)

How can anyone in their right mind justify per country caps that signify the racialist compromises of the Civil Rights Act.

I came to this country at 17 as an undergrad and have a US tax payer funded Masters degree from a top 5 university (not that I believe US news ranking is all that important. I've been here 9 years and can fairly say that I'm as an integrated immigrant as any, but i wont be getting a greencard anytime before 2025 because I'm an Indian. From my perch i could also find it maddening that a UX designer who happened to be born say in the EU gets their residency in a matter of months with far less investment or attachment to this country.

People don't come to this country as representatives of their government.
I just find it weird that every year, the US gives 55,000 green cards to random people with high school education via the green card lottery, compared to 65,000 temporary work visas to much more educated people, yet it's the latter that's contentious!

My girlfriend has a PhD from an ivy league university, and even she didn't get an H1-B!
I don't think anyone would argue that there is a shortage of service-sector labor. The debate there is purely over prices: there are business models designed around having large quantities of $7.50/hr-and-no-benefits labor available (in some cases, $5/hr under the table), and they are averse to having to pay more. But pretending that their unwillingness or inability to pay $10/hr means that there would be a "shortage" of unskilled labor at that price is disingenuous. There's plenty of it available, but maybe only for "fairly cheap" rather than "dirt cheap". That might just mean that certain business models are not very good business models.

In any case, that's not what the H1B program is officially about: the purpose of the program isn't supposed to be to keep wages down in sectors where wages would otherwise get too high for businesses to afford them. Instead the argument is that businesses literally can't find workers in these areas, so H1Bs constitute talent filling a critical national skills gap. My argument is that, if that were true, the wages in these critically-lacking sectors would rise accordingly.
>In my experience, scientists are like extremely junior developers with PhDs.

So from your experience, you are assuming every scientist disdains coding and does it poorly, and every programmer is a master at writing clean and working code.

Perhaps a scientist can teach you about the follies of anecdotal evidence.
Looks like HN Notify emails are flowing again :D
Emails are flowing again it appears.