skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if they are testing files that are only ever downloaded as part of the test, then all of the CDNs will be on equal footing as far as caching goes (assuming that they randomize the order that CDNs are tested in to try to eliminate biases due to some people quitting before the test is over). Part of what you would be trying to measure is how well the caching infrastructure and strategies actually effect the latency seen by end users. If one CDN keeps things cached on the edge longer, and one aggressively evicts things, that will impact latency which is exactly what you would want to be measuring.
Google Optimistic It Can Remain in China
How to Ace a TED Talk
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Fuseproject and one laptop per child unveil $75 tablet PC for kids
Massive Star Blows Fancy Hourglass Nebula
Human brain is an unstoppable pattern-matching machine and it will invent patterns when there were none if that's what it takes to satisfy the urge. That's why astrology, personality types etc are so popular - it satisfies both narcissism and pattern-craving at the same time.
Agreed. Much like the "series of tubes" comment from Stevens -- that's a perfectly good analogy, and one that technically-inclined people use all the time in some variant like "fat pipes". He said so much other ridiculous stuff that I can't understand why people picked on the one thing that almost made sense.
In Ruby:

0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3
=> false

According to "The Ruby Programming Language", all languages that use IEEE-754 floating-point numbers have this problem.

In Ruby you can get around this by using BigDecimal.

>> require 'bigdecimal'

=> true

>> require 'bigdecimal/util'

=> true

>> 0.1.to_d + 0.2.to_d == 0.3.to_d

=> true
Well said. There was a poll here a while ago, something like 75% of the people that responded on HN had NT in commmon - it can obviously help identify technical people. 90% of CS majors at my college were intj.

From a sky high view, it's been very good to help see how other people think - especially emotionally vs logically and organized vs disorganized. And every other ENTP I've met had damn similar thinking and habits as myself.
This reminds me of what Socrates said: "all I know is that I know nothing."
Maybe Facebook moving into the e-mail area scares Google?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/facebooks-project-titan-a-f...

This would put Facebook in the middle of even more conversations/social interactions.
I did lol, beautiful site though!
Watch Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010 Online | TechnoBuzz.net
Watch Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010 Online | TechnoBuzz.net
And there's telnet:towel.blinkenlights.nl, which has quite a bit of starwars ep4 as ascii art. mplayer also has a -vo ascii feature that will render any video in ascii art.
The Wild World of DIY Synthetic Biology
Don't be evil until you own the internet
REST has always felt a little bit dirty to me; an improper commingling of what should be two different layers. To me, using aspects of the HTTP protocol to have meaning for a higher level service is a bit like using aspects of the TCP protocol as part of the HTTP definition, where in a more ideal setup they should be independent, but layered on top of one another.
Almost all of the REST mistakes mentioned in this article are due to the unholy matrimony of the two layers, and the misunderstandings and abuses that arise from that.
Additionally, using HTTP error codes can break compatibility for anything running in a browser plugin (i.e. Flash) because the browser eats the error code and does not pass it on to the plugin.
Needless to say, I'm a big fan of RPC which runs over HTTP POST normally but isn't married to the underlying protocol. I think SOAP gives RPC a bad name (I certainly hate the crap out of it) and doesn't properly separate the protocols either, using HTTP codes to indicate errors and such.
I read it, turned away, and found my eyes were honest to god burning.

(Not flames, just burning pain...)
The Need For Innovation in Charity Fund Raising
Those who have engaged in charity fund raising programs will know how difficult it is to raise funds and to meet the targets. It is becoming even more challenging in this crumbling economy. Today, every family is suffering reduction in their overall income. Their spending capacity has come down drastically.
Silicon Valley's innovation engine at risk, report says
The reason I posted it was because it was Kauffman and it was (relatively) approachable. But yeah, the lack of math is a bit...surprising.
Concerns over Dubai Resurface: Cost of Insuring Dubai's Debt Jumps
I've been using it and I love it. It's so easy to use and the stats are terrific.
The ads are clean too. i was frustrated with other shorteners displaying mainly soft porn and gambling ads!!
Only one sore point - no support. I have sent a few support requests and have not received any replies. and how do we receive our paymnets?
All the best!
I'm a brit, and I have a very high tolerance to broken English, however I'm from the north where Scottish/Welsh/Irish and various non-English-speaking minorities are much more prevalent and where people generally take more time with people.

I wouldn't say Americans are more tolerant in general, however I suspect they are in the California area. I've met a lot of Americans who are very intolerant of broken accents, the same seems to go in Canada too (where I currently live). People in the Greater Toronto Area can be much more intolerant of accents, where as people from the Atlantic and Prairies seem much more tolerant.

I don't know what causes this intolerance, however I believe it may be caused by a lack of exposure to different accents. I tolerate accents very well and tend to have a chameleon-like ability when it comes to moving between areas. However, I regularly visited France growing up, I had Scottish + Welsh + Irish teachers throughout high school and have visited lots of European countries, so I wonder if it's simply due to lack of exposure.
Even Boulder Finds It Isn't Easy Going Green
I've absolutely adored gmail since I got it for forwarding, spam filtering, and providing me with a permanent email address to give out to people. I'm definitely ditching it now over this and this alone. Which sucks because I will miss those great attributes, but they simply aren't worth this nonsense.

Maybe if I could have easily turned it off (or if it was opt-in, of course)...
ModCloth: Using Crowdsourcing to Control Inventory
Does the same argument excuse astrological signs? You're a Libra? Libras need to carefully balance their desire to be accepted by their peers with their conviction that they are in fact in the right. (Technically speaking that's just total horsepuckey I plucked out of the air, but put a lab coat on me and I think I could get 80% of the population to agree that it applied to them. Score one for science!)
That article is talking "carbs vs. fat." Lustig is talking "sugar vs. everything else," and the key to the sugar-obesity link isn't in calorie quantities, but in how it affects future appetite and preferences. After drinking a soda, you will eat _more_ on average than someone on an empty stomach, even though you've just downed ~45 grams of sugar. It's the same reason why you can enjoy terrible bar food once you're drunk.
>75% CS majors test intp. Thatsa lot of stars aligning.
I applaud you making HotChime, but how does it compare to Launchy?
Pretty inaccurate article I'd say. The general premise of "broadband is faster, but there's more to download" is close to right, and I'll agree that 8 seconds was about how long it took to load web pages back when, but it's a very rare page (other than HN itself, ironically) that takes more than about 3 seconds to load on even middling DSL.

And I have no idea why streaming video requires 60ms latency.
How to Find a Business Mentor
But as someone pointed out in another subthread, it doesn't matter if Google is the best secured, least spammed provider in the world (and they may well be), if they turn around and leak your contacts lists. The comments in the big long buzz thread about peoples' client lists becoming aware of each other was pretty egregious.
I've been sharing this with my pregnant friends - http://xkcd.com/699/
Nothing is irrelevant for a testing platform. For instance, how does it handle a canvas tag? It'd be useful to be able to dump out frames as images. A user agent string could be used by javascript to do any number of things, so I would hope it's modifiable.

As to the libraries to make things cross-browser compatible, knowing which browser it tries to emulate would be essential to knowing which lines of code would be executed through this tool. If you can't test the IE-specific code, what's the use if you're developing for IE?
Like this guy? http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/

(Hint: the opposite. The government had to pay him damages for seizing his computers.)
Win without pitching: an ad agency's attempt to break free sf the pitch
there's been such an influx of articles as of late that "silicon valley is in trouble". i dont know where they get these silly reports and linkbait articles from. it's like saying "new york is at risk of losing its finance centric aspect" or "hollywood might not be making movies soon" etc. I doubt any of these people are actually in the trenches. Silicon Valley isn't going anywhere, especially the innovation part. If you have even the slightest sense of how the Valley works you would know that these articles are horseshit.
Police Pursue and Capture a Barefoot Runner
You do realize that A, B, and C are way more damaging and insulting prejudices than mine, right? I just prefer not to deal with people that act like that, you think they're dumb and poor.
Where does my contact list appear on my profile page? I can't find it. I can find my followers, but they aren't the same as my contacts.
This Buzz things gives me some insight what it must feel like to be an average user; I have NFI (still!) what my Buzz status is. Is it on or off? Do I have followers? etc

I'm even more confused as I read more, because it's inconsistent with what I'm seeing, and the reports from other people are inconsistent with each other, making me think there's perhaps some A/B testing going on

[Edit: figured it out. Buzz was enabled for both myself and my wife. I'm pretty cross about this. To me it's a flagrant breach of trust. Imagine what would happen if Apple or Microsoft pulled a stunt like this]
Bug report: uncatchable cursor barks like a dog
I'm actually designing a REST system to connect together the subsystems of a robot with a number of independent microcontrollers, so this is very relevant. Keep the REST articles coming, please!
If it's just a debugging trick, though, then speed hacks seem less useful.
"I understand this concern on behalf of the taxpayers.
People want value for money. That's why we always
insist on the principal of Information Retrieval
charges. It's absolutely right and fair that those
found guilty should pay for their periods of detention
and the Information Retrieval procedures used in their
interrogations."
Why hasn't anyone made an homoiconic graph-based language? It seems like a natural extension of an homoiconic list-based language (i.e. Lisp).
> If you have even the slightest sense of how the Valley works you would know that these articles are horseshit.

Well, that's kind of harsh. :( I submitted it for general discussion. You don't have to direct your anger at me. I'm just the submitter.
I can totally relate to that. That's EXACTLY why you should start immediately. To overcome perfectionism.
"Those that don't know history are doomed to repeat it" - similar kind of mantra and I like it.
Bill Gates: We need global 'energy miracles'
5 Sites That Are Better Than Google
"The future is beckoning. Netflix has just announced an on-demand video-streaming service offering full high-definition picture quality (so-called 1080p, which has 1,080 lines in its picture) with 5.1-channel surround sound. Each stream being watched will require a megabyte a second of bandwidth and a latency of less than 60ms if it is to deliver crisp, pin-sharp video and pristine sound."

Latency doesn't matter with video, afaik. This seems inaccurate.
That's just silly. mg is much nicer.

http://packages.debian.org/sid/mg
I don't see why not. If the screen is big enough, just magnify the input field and any "finger strokes" within it.

Dan Bricklin was working on something like this for the iPhone, and it'd be a natural fit for the iPad. http://danbricklin.com/log/2009_12_05.htm#notetaker
It depends on the implementation. In C, it is quite easy to have n != n optimized away when compilers have their compiler flags set on. That's why you should use isnan to test nan instead of any other techniques when using C or C++.
And don't forget about a poll that appeared here a while back.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249

As I said there, "Apparently, 76% of Hacker News is an NT type of one type or another."
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Gogax offers you simplified dedicated server packages. They offer different plans. Dual Core, Quad Core and 2 x Quad Core servers.
University of Alabama shooter: Professor/inventor denied tenure
Well, yes, but it's also meaningless: if you're not using buzz, there's nothing to follow. It's like they added you to a chat contacts list, when you never sign in to chat.

Oh wait, that's exactly what it is like, because they did the exact same thing with the launch of GChat: pre-populated social graph. No outrage then about people being able to listen to the sound of silence.
It's funny in some strange way that one of the five sites he lists, Aardvark, was bought by Google two days after this article was written.
Yes. It is very likely that once you have gone through what appears to be a laborious procedure to generate a description, you will accept whatever description comes out of that procedure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html
it can obviously help identify technical people

I would rather have my son, an aspiring programmer, be identified by his coding skills.

EDIT TO REPLY TO BELOW:

My son got into programming by programming. In that sense, I am NOT technical (as my HN profile should make sufficiently clear).

I'm a lot more learned in psychology than in computer science, and that is precisely why I distrust the Myers-Briggs, because it has never been properly validated.
On my middling DSL (320 kbps symmetric) there's a lot of pages that take more than 3 seconds to load, especially if you're not using AdBlock. There are some Flash ads that take 5+ seconds to load just by themselves!

The typical for a large corporate site seems to be 4-6 sec for me. I just timed cnn.com and yahoo.com both at 5s total load time, and aol.com at 8s (all in Chrome on Linux).

edit: Found a new winner: foxnews.com consistently takes between 25 and 33 seconds to load.
Good point, I forgot about Jaiku. I was counting Orkut as strike one though.

Dodgeball seems like a good candidate for number five.
>But how many milliseconds does it take the user's computer to parse and load your code once it's arrived?

Aristus my guess is that the tests need a bit more thought to investigate the time it takes also to manipulate the dom + doc.write, operations which are both notoriously slow. Load time will also depend on the server you are using even for local host and its own garbage collection.

Nice tests though. Will give it a try on my machine, when I get a bit of time.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1040292
It's not tactically worthless. You don't have to dig any deeper than the wikipedia article to learn about its mission:

The ABL was designed for use against tactical ballistic missiles (TBMs). These have a shorter range and fly more slowly than ICBMs. The MDA has recently suggested the ABL might be used against ICBMs during their boost phase. This could require much longer flights to get in position, and might not be possible without flying over hostile territory. Liquid-fueled ICBMs, which have thinner skins, and remain in boost phase longer than TBMs, might be easier to destroy.

If the ABL achieves its design goals, it could destroy liquid-fueled ICBMs up to 600 km away. Tougher solid-fueled ICBM destruction range would likely be limited to 300 km, too short to be useful in many scenarios, according to a 2003 report by the American Physical Society on National Missile Defense.

Upshot being, homeland defense in general, and ICBMs in particular, are not really its mission. It's designed to counter TBMs--that is, artillery. Potentially very long range artillery, but still.

Being able to shoot down artillery from the air with a lot of speed and flexibility could be useful in any number of scenarios. Probably not homeland defense, though. Oceans and all.
This seems like the sort of thing that probably varies by area and the local social norms. In a hippie town, the police would barely give a second look.
A PhD shoots department chair and others for not getting tenure
People like this shouldn't be writing technical articles.

A 700ms ping would be indicative of severe network problems, especially at that distance. The author is probably experiencing packet loss. Realistic ping times across the country are usually 100ms or so. I can ping most major websites in under 20ms.

DNS can indeed be a bottleneck, but it usually isn't. It's a fairly basic service, and if it's really a problem it's simple stupid to switch to a free provider like google.

Streaming video is not dependent on latency, only throughput.

Dark fiber won't necessarily help. The bottleneck is more realistically in the switching equipment. A single fiber can carry massive amounts of data.
I have to correct myself once again. You can actually upload photos without signing up, just (as I suggested :) by sending them by Email. Cool! Just tested it, works great. That feature is a bit hidden, though, but that makes for a nice experience when you discover it :)

I still think you cannot download full resolution photos without signing up. Did I miss anything?
Better explanation: http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
Divvyshot (W09) launches refreshingly simple photo sharing
I should probably stress that I agree with you on pretty much everything except that last sentence.

As for the Miller-Rabin test, it's basically a case where you can get a correct answer with an arbitrarily low probability of error. So I guess the tie in is that just because our decisions are predictable (or at least mostly so), doesn't mean there isn't randomness involved.

I'm starting to suspect that I'm responding to an interpretation you didn't intend, though.
Like so many similar things, from divination to Dungeons and Dragons, the Myers-Briggs is a game designed to provide a structure on which to hang conversations and creative thought. [1] It gives you some ground rules, some traditional starting points, some classic teams to root for (go ENTJ, go!) and an assortment of useful pivots and props that can be artfully used by the participants to steer their conversation as it progresses.

As such, it's quite useful, though I would no more try to defend it as a scientific theory than I would try to defend chess as an accurate representation of medieval battle tactics. [2]

---

[1] You know what would be fun, or at least funny? A Dungeons-and-Dragons version of the Meyers/Briggs. In fact, I think the AD&D alignment system may be more than halfway there already.

[2] Which is not to say that medieval tacticians, to say nothing of modern tacticians, didn't play a lot of games as part of their practice.
Yes I forgot the urge to conform to a group.
Personally, all I could think about after reading this article was the song Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas:

You think I'm an ignorant savage
And you've been so many places
I guess it must be so
But still I cannot see
If the savage one is me
How can there be so much that you don't know
You don't know

...

But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger
You'll learn things you never knew you never knew

That seems to pretty precisely describe the two groups: Pocahontas being in the nurse's position, unsure of her own stance, while the English men squarely fit into the egotistical group.
More proof that humans are fucking crazy.
Google's server may be 10 times more secure, but it's probably targeted about 10000 times as much as my own server.
Ammeter: Definition from Answers.com
posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1122521
this one is better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Classical-Definition-of-Kn...
Tech Bubble 2.0
Mozilla's Faraday cage for 400 test phones
First of all, not Hacker News. Daily stories about how the police are dumb belong on Reddit. There was no egregious violation of your rights.

Second, what would people say about the police if they allowed a teenager with a mental disability to run into traffic or otherwise hurt himself? It's not an unreasonable assumption that someone running barefoot in the middle of February might have a problem. Barefoot running isn't mainstream. You should just stop next time and clear it up right away. A few quick facts about barefoot running and it will become clear that you don't have a problem. Speeding up probably had them worried you were trying to get away.

Third, good for you for running barefoot. Although it's not ideal, you might want to consider a pair of Nike Free's to protect your feet from glass or other sharp objects [1, 2]. One nasty cut might take you out of running for a week. If you've been running barefoot for a while, go for the 5.0 or the 3.0.

[1] http://www.runnersworld.com/cda/shoefinder_detail/1,,s6-240-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Free
deal with spamming sucks.
Those interested in the (extensive) science of framing biases in human reasoning will want to consult Kahneman and Tversky's classic "Choices, Values, and Frames": http://amzn.com/0521627494

Yes, it's dry and scholarly and will require that you relearn basic statistics. You want to read it anyway.
In Python

>>> decimal.Decimal(".2") + decimal.Decimal(".1") == decimal.Decimal(".3")
True
>>> .2 + .1 == .3
False
I was skeptical but I'm really swayed by a victory that occured six years prior to the PATRIOT act.
Google Groups actually leaks your IP and user-agent for what, 5 years now.
Interview with Eliot Horowitz – CTO of 10gen / MongoDB
Linkbait.
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Well, they do have hardware to seize a running server without shutting it down (by splicing into the power cables/power lines at the wall plate and introducing battery power). How secure is a running machine sitting in a forensic lab? If you're receiving mail from the net your disk is necessarily unencrypted, right? I guess you would also need some sort of dead-man trigger. Suggestions?
They should have also tested "gay men" and "lesbians" separately; I have a feeling that people were only more positive to the "gay men and lesbians" aggregate category because people haven't actually internalized the idea that women serve in the military—so when you say "homosexuals", the image triggered is purely of gay men, and that gets neither the feminist nor lewd-fantasy vote.