skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spoke to a Rackspace Cloud Servers Engineer a few months back, and he said that they're the same servers (same specs), in the same data centre. Not sure if he's 100% accurate, but regardless, as the customer, the only differences I see are different control panel design, inclusion of bandwidth in price vs "pay as you go", and a monthly vs hourly billing.
The big improvements in JS performance in 3.6 were in regex, GC, and tracing.

Edit: details at http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/01/javascript-speedups-in-fire...
It's funny if you're the one who thinks it up, but it's not particularly witty to click the "join this club" button.
> it is very scary that large sections of a city could be rendered powerless because of one downed power line.

Yeah, we need a much smarter AND more robust power grid.
You should leave fewer periods at the scene of your comment.
Refreshing to see a SvN comment list that wasn't a bunch of variations on "you are awesome!". Requiring a tweet with text in front of the @ reply is just encouraging Twitter follower spam. That is fine, but at least own up to it.
(from http://processingjs.org/blog/?p=77):

F1LT3R[13:10] asked the experts: So the IE development team are officially doing nothing except listening to users re: the Canvas at this time?

EricLaw [MSFT] (Expert)[13:12]: We’re doing lots of stuff :)

Seems like they're dodging the question, as usual.
First few days with Ruby on Rails. So far so good.
3 Tesla workers die in E. Palo Alto plane crash
You know what you can do as a university student in a technical discipline which can't really be done for free searching the internet? Participate in real research, guided and mentored by real-life scientists. Do lab-based classes. Ask questions of your professors. Have deep conversations with your fellow students and with your lecturers during office hours.

Yeah, if you only want to try to absorb the material in a totally passive way, and if you would never speak up in class, then you might as well just watch video lectures on-line and read the books and do stuff on your own. But if you choose to really take advantage of the university environment, you get a lot more than just the facts presented in the courses. I'm sure it's possible to have a career with just your own experiences and self-study. But I don't think you should be so sure you're better off than a peer who got their degree and all the various experiences that can come with it.

By the way, I'm not sure whether you think it's the norm for engineers to not have formal training. Of the seven engineers on my team, all have at least an undergrad degree in CS or a related field, 3 have PhDs and 1 has a Masters.
I realize, could you point to an article about university admissions dropping? I haven't happened across anything saying that universities are in trouble, for any reason other than their endowments getting decimated due to the financial crisis.
Do you mean native SVG support of some sort or something emulated via the Direct2D stuff? Mainly I'm curious whether an actual statement has been made on this :)
I think we can all agree to stay out of his closet.
Retweet.com put up for sale
It wouldn't be the first time. Remember that IT guy who admin'd Bush's secret gwb43.com email servers(in overt defiance of mandated Federal record keeping laws) and who was involved with the election fraud in Ohio? That guy who conveniently died in a small plane crash in 08' right before he was facing summons to testify before Congress?

Oh and look at that, just a few weeks ago the NTSB ruled that accident was likely pilot error and not some kind of crazy conspiracy involving mechanical tampering: http://www.ohio.com/news/83119417.html

The world is more often than not a strange place.
I gave the points from this to the SF Chronicle story that seems to contain the actual reporting.
They can't "hide" an update to IE because too many corporate apps (not on the Internet) depend on IE6 behavior.
You are likely correct on most of that, except that the cirrus chute is good down to 500 ft.

That said, there are other systems that can help in accidents like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAWS

Another option is NavFLIR / EVS which is basically a IR camera to give enhanced visibility during bad weather.

If they did have an engine failure after take-off, NavFLIR could have aided a forced landing. The cause of this crash are not yet known.

Feel free to email me if you want.
I'm pretty sure it's just a rendering technology - not a canvas competitor. Even Firefox will be supporting it:

http://www.osnews.com/story/22543/Direct2D_Acceleration_Fire...
FYI, and hopefully not just morbid:

Local TV news (sorry, no link) reports that planes taking off from that run-way must turn 10 degrees left or 10 degrees right after take-off. They can't go straight because of a nearby field (Moffet field) - a former naval air base currently owned by NASA and famous for being where the Google guys park their jet.

This plane was planned (or instructed, I'm not sure) to go right - they went left.

That they went left AND that they failed to gain enough altitude to avoid the power lines is tentatively speculated to be indicative of a left engine failure.

They took out three high-tension power lines which, the plane geek quoted on the news pointed out, is "likely to seriously interfere with the forward progress of the plane". They came down in a very dense residential neighborhood with debris hitting a nearby day-care center.

A consolation is that as of this report, the pilot and passengers appear to be the only victims. The plane mostly came down in the middle of a street. Nearby residents report that they tried but could not get anywhere close to the plane because of the intensity of the heat from the fuel flame. It was the resident's impression that post-crash fuel explosions scattered debris which is what led to the structure fires.

The thought that occurs to me is that I wonder if the pilot retained enough control that he aimed for the street on purpose either hoping for a survivable crash landing or (shudder) in a heroic last act to save others knowing he had no chance, personally.
Like everything else in life - it's variable. I'm an idea person who found a highly qualified iPhone developer in the SF Bay Area, who was interested enough in doing dev work for me part-time (he's a FT iPhone dev for a large corp) that he only asked for $2500 plus 3% equity. I'm in Vancouver. I found him on CL. Also, although IMO they mean nothing, he was happy to sign an NDA. It was a good experience.
Do you have a link to a story about this? (Concerned Atlantean here)
Are people voting this comment up because it's committing the mistake that Eliezer is talking about?

From the parent:

Regardless, the claim that rising temperatures will leave us worse off isn't remotely proven.

From the Less Wrong post:

And so the implicit emotional theory is that if something is not proven - better yet, proven using a particular piece of evidence that isn't available and that you're pretty sure is never going to become available - then you are allowed to disbelieve; it's like something a student says, not like something a teacher says.

What evidence would you expect to see today in a world where increased average global temperature helps humanity? If you're going to argue from ignorance, you should be on the side wanting to prevent change. Our understanding of the earth's climate is incomplete at best. The same is true of our understanding of the organisms that are adapted to that climate. We have historical evidence of changes CO2 in the atmosphere causing changes in climate, in turn causing extinction events. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoo_Ice_Age )

Your comment touches on a lot of topics, and I don't have time to respond to all of them. Still, here's what I gleaned of your opinions:

- AGW might not be true, so we don't need to worry about it.

- Even if it's true, it might not be large enough to have a significant effect, so we don't need to worry about it.

- Even if it's large enough to have a significant effect, it might be beneficial, so we don't need to worry about it.

- Even if AGW is harmful, current popular proposed solutions are ineffective, outrageously expensive, or both. Since the costs of the solutions are higher than the costs of AGW, we shouldn't do anything about it.

Doesn't this line of reasoning seem strangely convenient? Don't you think that you're being just a little bit biased toward the "do nothing" approach?
Ultimately, but have you been robbed before? Even if you are armed with receipts/photos/serial numbers/etc, it's not a pleasant experience.
Unix-jun72: Restoration of 1st Edition UNIX kernel sources
Does Heroku offer any alternate persistence engines? I thought they were PostgreSQL only.
"Web developers attending the conference will need to see how the new browser functions, especially with respect to its all-new support for Direct2D rendering (a Windows-only feature that has potential to flatten its competition), as well as improved support and functionality with Silverlight (a cross-platform feature)."

Read:

"We know the house has no foundation, but it's okay, because look at all the sweet shit we added! There's a windvane on the roof, and we gave 'er a new coat of paint, and we even added on a sexy garage in which you can only park Ford cars! Cool, huh?!"
Haha yes, and they require a tweet that mentions three of their trademarks! They've went a long way from being a small design shop, to encouraging speculative work like that... (EDIT: this last sentence is wrong)
What happened to the old article that was just here? It seems the points remain but the comments are all gone. Also, it's been reposted by pg...
yes, moving at only a slightly slower pace then when they have power.
> I'm not sure I get the complaint. It's Apple's operating system, it's never been free software, and clearly they're going to exert some control over what apps get installed. That's clearly within Apple's power and rights to do, and it doesn't hurt anyone but competing app vendors who want to use Apple's (!) operating system.

No, it's the user's phone, and clearly _they_ should exert control over what apps get installed. After sale, what gives apple the moral right to tell the owner of the device that they can't install google voice?

On the other hand, the APIs gvoice exposes run on Google's hardware, using their resources, and their trunk lines. Google has every right to limit use of their equipment.
Internet explorer's version of progress is not even close to caught up to what's already out there. It is slower and less compliant than browsers that have been out for almost a year. And 32% on the acid3 test? Seriously? You can tell exactly where their priorities don't lie.
6ish. Apps release sub-application platforms for apps that we really have no use for but are just so available now anyway.
Slicehost isn't even competitive with Rackspace Cloud! The same company offers all slices at 50% off through the Rackspace Cloud brand.
It's the kind of stuff the readers want. The first rule of journalism is "write something people want", after all.

Remember, this is a site that hates electric cars. When some public figures who make electric cars die, it's good for the readership's religion. The cause has been advanced, don't you get it?
Hang on, SQL databases are poor at highly structured things like an order and that's the sort of thing suitable for a document database?
I loved "Getting Real" and I pre-ordered "Rework" as soon as I could. I like making money too, so I see where you're coming from.

That being said, this feels misguided to me. I think you could have avoided all of the hubbub by just asking for a Sortfolio link and a tweet. I'm sure the product is good enough that you'd end up with some number of upgrades anyways.

If you really wanted a "value-add" for your existing Pro customers, you would have opened this up to them separately, especially since the big selling points of pro subscriptions revolve around being able to separate yourself out from the crowd with premium real-estate on the page and larger ads. If I were a pro member, I would think this actually devalues my membership as it encourages more people to compete with the premium page locations.

Nobody is insinuating you guys need any kind of financial help; if they thought that was the case I don't think people would have said a peep about it.

At the end of the day, you're still the guy that a lot of people get their business ideas from; I'm sure you know what you're doing. At least it will be easy for the rest of us to quantify the results with a simple Twitter search: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23sortfoliosvn
Frankly, I think Foursquare was already super useful for burglars, PleaseRobMe just made that a little more apparent to everybody using Foursquare and other services like it.
Madair, politics, not science operate on "quality of debate". Science operates with the assumption that all claims are false until they have been proven to be true by an empirical observation.

Therefore, the only way this conversation could scientifically meaningful is if someone provided an empirical experiment that verifies that the error range of modern climate models is small enough to make them meaningful. I don't claim to be capable of proving that they aren't, I merely observe that such an experiment has not been done.

Until that occurs, those models (and this discussion) are effectively meaningless unless viewed from a political angle. So, welcome the useless bickering, because you are a part of it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132211
Google Buzz 'breaks privacy laws' says watchdog
While they certainly can't break old releases, it seems that with IE 8 onwards they could implement something like that, doesn't it?
Obvious, huh?

http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-be...
Why bother robbing anyone when you can just trespass on unsafe-looking property and sue?
The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today
My brother does QA for Blizzard and I'm pretty sure he's been working on the Starcraft 2 team. Congrats to everybody who's work so hard to bring us this much anticipated title. Goodbye free time indeed :-)
Yeah, I was happy to find out about Tokyo Tyrant as well, had never seen it mentioned.
I would say that's probably why you shouldn't.
Provided you don't go to a crap school. If you go to a crap school... well... you're on your own.
The other article was tripe. People were upvoting based on worthiness of the story, not on the particular writing at the original site. Now everyone can read actual facts and come up with their own opinions.
You sort of answered your own question there. Just looks like pg changed the article source to one with more detail.
Social banking startup SmartyPig explained in 1 minute
ReMail (YC W09) Acquired by Google
Arbitrary killing of posts and comments by editorial fiat is a storied HN tradition.
ReMail acquired by google
Ah, I see. Guess I wasn't familiar with the HN editing procedures. Shame the comments were lost though...
Yeah, Heroku should put up or shut up until they start offering alternate NoSQL databases (and no, MongoHQ is not an alternative because of network latency).

Interesting article though.
I've used Linode for many years and have always been pleased with their service.

Comparison between Slicehost, Linode, Prgmr, Rackspace, Amazon:
http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
I'm always curious as to what these apps require that newer browsers can't handle or rather handle differently, does anyone know of any examples off hand?
JS loading is slow in FF, but the real killer is anything DOM related. On large pages this is measured in seconds not milliseconds. The worst part is that it scales non-linearly with # of DOM nodes on the page, # of DOM nodes loaded in other tabs in FF, how long it's been running and who knows what else.

The longer FF works on improvements on benchmarks on which it is already fast, the more market share Chrome will take by making fast things that actually matter.
A thought: In the period from 1980 or earlier to the dot.com crash, ~ 400 students in each MIT class were majors in the EECS department ("Course 6"). With a class size of ~ 1050, that's 38% of the students.

In the early '80s EECS drastically changed it's core curriculum (or at least the CS part of it, SICP/6.001 was the start), and it definitely got better at teaching it.

If that also gave the students a better foundation for higher level courses, then we'd expect significant grade inflation based on MIT's policy of grading on mastery instead of the curve.

Also during that period the EE to CS ratio was 3:1 and flipped to a mirror 1:3. If CS is better or markedly better taught ... and be sure to factor in higher availability of computers, before MIT and at MIT ... that probably also is a factor.

Assume also during this period that only half the majors had a "calling" to EECS; therefore the quality of teaching would make the most difference to the other half to whom it doesn't come so naturally.
When I first started using clearcase I hated it. Now many years later, I really appreciate the power it brings to the table. Sure it has negatives just like all vc tools too, but the easy branching, dynamic vs snapshot views, automatic merging, the ability to merge directly from a fellow developers views, etc. has really made my team more productive. However I will say that it takes considerably more expertise to setup and maintain that something like svn or git. So there is the added expense of having full time clearcase admins.
One of the people on video said it well "we're very vulnerable without power."

Coincidently, Elon Musk's focus has partly been addressing that.
people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia

I doubt it. All people I know use Google as their URL entry field, as the concept of URL is too machine-oriented to be comfortably used by the average guy, when good search is available. Given that, Google donating to Wikipedia is a pure win-win situation.
Haven't we always had such a dichotomy?

For example, the American left chastises the right for being greedy, etc., and that there are higher pursuits than the material. Yet it's the left that thinks that money is so important that they must take it from others to support one's lack of it.
> I will be joining Google in Mountain View as a Product Manager on the Gmail team.

> Gmail is where my obsession with email started as an engineering intern back in 2004...

That must feel great.
Congrats!

How much?
I disagree. Clarity was hurt. This title suggests multiple schools "out", which doesn't make a lot of sense (did the schools band together to out their gay friend? Or a corrupt politician?). Yes, obviously I can figure out what he meant. But there's a jarring half-second of confusion that disrupts my thinking, slows down my reading, and distracts me from what is being communicated.

I'm not rabid about grammar - the rules should be a bit malleable, depending on context. But most grammar exists so that we can understand each other. If you have poor grammar, I will have a harder time understanding you and we will have a harder time working together. In fact, I will be less likely to want to talk to you, because I could instead be talking to people with good grammar, and when I talk to them I don't have to pause for those cognitive potholes where I have to puzzle out what they're trying to say.
Other than that, Perforce is junk. Here's a nice feature. To decide what files to commit, you edit the boilerplate "p4 submit" generates in $EDITOR. Except if there is a problem exec-ing $EDITOR, p4 just decides to commit all your changes with no message. p4 may be good server-side, but the clients are junk, and I wouldn't trust them with anything important. Like with Subversion, if I ever have to do something complicated, I always make a "cp -a" backup first.

Git may be "hard to use", but at least it doesn't shred my work for no reason.
We Are Back – Embargo Zone | Embargo Zone
To be fair, Direct2D and Silverlight are actually potentially quite useful features:

Direct2D is a hardware acceleration layer for 2D graphics. If it's fully integrated into IE that means we might finally be able to get a full quality <canvas> implementation in IE (Even if we still have to build it ourselves with JS) - way better than the current VML based hacks.

Silverlight also gives developers a nice alternative to Flash if all they need to do is get access to things the browser doesn't expose yet. It's still not as good as pure js/html, but it's at least got functioning open source implementations (unlike Flash).
Congratulations are definitely in order, but seeing as they're discontinuing their product, I can't help but be reminded of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117668 :-)
Microsoft to pull Facebook, MySpace into Outlook
I think the comments can still be accessed here :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132211
Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty
Gabor hits Send: reMail Acquired by Google
The comments on the Gizmodo site provide plenty of reasons to discount this suggestion.
I liked this. There's a touch of empathy there for "stupid" users. But it's not denying the serious problem that these people represent, especially when they're in government, writing policy to control an entity that they aren't even close to understanding.
Latley with terraplus - diigo from furl (sounds like hurl.......)
Awesome. Congrats Gabor & company.

Seems like Google is acquiring an awful lot of ex-employees lately, with Etherpad, Aardvark, and now ReMail. Makes sense given their hiring push and large cash supply, but it makes me wonder if the best way to fame and fortune is to do well at Google and then to leave Google...
Arrgh ... it's not 1/3, it's around 3,000. But your point still stands, they're rejecting 2/3rds of the qualified applicants.
I agree wholeheartedly with this article except for the part about s3/cloudfront being the only tool for storing binary assets. MongoDB's GridFS extension does a fine job of handling files in the database since they shard and replicate just like database records. As for serving them out, you can run it on a cheap unmetered server using nginx + http://github.com/mdirolf/nginx-gridfs
This American Infographic
> Just looks like pg changed the article source to one with more detail.

And one which does not read like trying to turn a tragedy in to an attack piece on Tesla Motors. That's got to be a new journalistic low.
Not all unis are like that. We start with functional programming and programming essentials in general with Scheme (lisp derivative), and then do some object oriented stuff with java, and then some systems programming with C. None of the classes are related to the specific language, the language is a tool to illustrate the concepts. These are all in the first and second years. After that, there are more advanced classes in each topic. Maybe some schools are just doing it wrong?
The source doesn't break out EECS from the rest of MIT. To be fair, though, this looks to be really long term data. If you dig into the numbers (http://gradeinflation.com/MIT.html) things look a lot more steady over the last 30 years. It looks like there was significant inflation through the 1960s but it flattened out since then.
There is no explanation of why a filesystem is a bad place to store "binary blobs".

If you're collapsing the metrics that you're storing IN SQL there is something really wrong going on.

Logs are OK to store in SQL, assuming you're scraping your logs properly and are logging the proper things. Logging every clickthrough in a relational database is somewhat insane. Logging 10 minutes worth of aggregate clickthroughs is perfectly fine. If you think logs should be a ring buffer I challenge you to tell that to any admin of a system that is subject to laws governing the length of time you must store logs (which is pretty much all e-commerce?).