skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While API clients should be able to interpret the HTTP response code, 503 in this case, in a meaningful way, the API should have internal status/success codes that the body of the 5xx responses can contain.

Using haproxy to load balancer is no excuse for this, as you can tell haproxy to serve custom error documents using the errorfile option, and these error documents can be json or XML. And you can use layer 7 routing in haproxy to allow different configurations based on what the request looks like (in the case of, say, you were dumb and put everything your site does on a single domain, rather than putting the api on a different IP/subdomain).
Another reason is to collect data on the webpages you visit for data mining and improving web search. The more data a search company has, the better it can rank results and personalize ads.

See these papers from Microsoft and Yahoo:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.161...
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1557019.1557135
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1835449.1835548
I see that you were careful to say "Islamic culture" rather than "Islam", but I'd highlight the distinction even further and say "some of the cultures often associated with Islam". To my understanding, most of the female-hostile ideas and policies are cultural rather than religious. Much as the female-hostile ideas and policies prevalent in Christendom[1] until quite recently (and still present!) were not at their core religious, though often justified in religious terms.

[1] Such a quaint term, but it's really the right one here, I think.
Like this? http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

I was thinking about this too the other day. Life seems to (more or less) be a set chemical processes that accelerates entropy in a given universe.

Say if you were the designer of the universe and started the big bang. If someone told you to calculate how long it would take until all energy is evenly distributed - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe), the simple way you would calculate this is just to calculate how many generations of stars your universe would support.

But if some sort of life (like us humans) arises and populates, say, 10%, of the star systems, entropy would happen a lot more than you originally estimated! Entropy is accelerated by life!

In my conclusion, it seems that the ultimate goal of all energy/matter - not just life, is to express itself through the second law of thermodynamics - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics). To use up itself and become static again. That ultimate death is your ultimate goal.
Kickstarter is starting to look like an excellent pre-sales engine. Look at all the money he's already "raised" without even a product. Just a nicely edited video pitch, and he's off to the races!
Indeed, how would low sales have been a reason to cancel the phone? How much overhead can there be selling one item through a website, with virtually no marketing or customer service?

And now they're going to keep selling them anyway, so they have to keep the whole pipeline running, but they still won't sell them to consumers.

Either they are not making a profit on the phone or there are hidden motives at work here.
With that attitude, you will not get laid. I had an ephiphany once -- women are terrified of having kids.
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I love this; the notion of non-book texts (usually film) is also one my colleges have worked on in developing our freshman seminars.

But, and I hate to bring this up, but I wonder how differently this idea would play at a college that was not all-male. I've attended a lot of CS education talks that have a strong tension between "games are a way to engage students" and "games are way less engaging for girls than boys". This is a different context, of course, but I'm still curious.
For some reason, I forgot that MS did make tablets. Anyway, I think the perception that the iPad succeeded because it had less features is false. The reason it succeeded was because it expertly worked on top of an existing ecosystem of the iOS and boosted by the Apple brand. If you take those two out I think it wouldve had a hard time in the market hence touting that it succeeded because it had less features is misleading.
You know, your response is basically content free insults. We know that you think I have a deep misunderstanding, but you haven't specified what said misunderstanding is. You say I'm saying bogus things, but you haven't said what was bogus. And you really haven't tried to explain your reasoning.

You left out that we're comparing sets of A and B programs of similar length -- the "sea" is not so large. Actually you kind of acknowledge this but then say bogus things about what it implies.

In this case "similar" was "differs by a constant". Thanks to exponential growth, even if said constant is something small like 50 bytes, the pool of programs on machine B would be 2^400 times as big as the pool of programs on machine A. That's about a factor of 10^120.

If you think that a factor 2582249878086908589655919172003011874329705792829223512830659356540647622016841194629645353280137831435903171972747493376 difference is "not so large", then you've got a very different impression of what "large" means than most people do.

Anyways now I think we're going around in circles. Unless you make a point of some substance in your next reply, I'm not going to bother replying. And no, insults do not count as points.
That upwards pointing arrow is like giving the comments you think help the discussion a +1.
Actually one major aspect of the doctrine called 'multiculturalism' would hold that the sexism built into Islamic culture is legitimate and equal in merit to beliefs and practices in any other culture.

That's why multiculturalism as an ideology is pretty goofy. It actively denies the validity of value judgment with respect to culture.
Getting onto the front page of Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, Forbes, SFGate, Cnet, Wall Street Journal, and every major paper in the country thanks to AP release?

Charge is "documented acts of sidewalk vandalism"?

Zynga marketing team super win.
I don't think a Beta sign-up should count as customer validation, no matter how many you get. Curiosity != willingness to pay for your product at your price point. Frequent usage of your product might come close, but it is still no substitute for actual, explicit statement by the customer that he would "buy this product a $X."
Just as a counter-point, I recently visited a friend in Prague who is both earth-loving like Mr. Adams and an architect. She and her husband recently rebuilt their home, and it looks fairly nice for the area despite being quirky for the energy savings. They have a grass roof which I was told was actually low maintenance once they had it in. That said, they weren't 'idiots' and didn't buy into photovoltaics.

Your mileage may vary depending on if your wife is an architect.
The Computer Boys Take Over: Programmers and the Politics of Technical Expertise
When I went to study for a semester in Rochester, I didn't have a car and tried at first to hitchhike.

What really surprised me was how scared most people were (especially when it was around 8pm at night) when I would approach them. It was as if they automatically thought that only a thief or a criminal would be coming to them in a car park.

In France, Spain and Germany (I used to walk 40 minutes to school there when I was 12), I've never seen that, people don't expect the worse to happen to them and don't seem to have their heads filled with tabloid whatifs scenarios or at least not yet.
Love the smooth zooming. That's always bugged me with online maps. And it zooms so quickly, even when encountering new info on a relatively slow connection.

Color me very impressed. Though I am with devonrt on this: other projections?
--this is the meaning of life - there is no other--

he must be a happy person - he found the meaning of life - and he knows that there is no other

either he is a total --fool-- or he knows something that we do not know
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Anyone know if the graph accounts for increases/decreases in Google's overall traffic or its index size?
I'd say, in a given week, I only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work.
Interesting comment.

If facebook's "like" was to replace PageRank they would have to have buttons on a whole lot more pages (Google said a while back they consider one trillion URLs in their index). Especially sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist -- which seem unlikely to ever use facebook widgets.

Do you ever think "liking" could realistically replace Google's crawler approach?
* sigh *

I really really don't like this sexism argument that keeps coming up. There are 1 billion Muslims on the planet, and this view that "Islamic culture typically believes that women's sexuality can be a destructive" omits large chunks of that population. It's as if someone were to judge Americans base solely on the cultural attitudes of the region from Utah to Nebraska. Hardly representative.

Are there elements of the Islamic world that have these attitudes toward women? Without a doubt. But lately the brush being used to paint "Islam" is far, far too wide. What's so wrong with that? Well, for one thing, the U.S. risks pushing away a very strategic military and close economic ally with these sorts of attitudes...
The narrative wouldn't work the same if it were a novel or a film. To take a simple example, watching someone else being reluctant to incinerate the Weighted Companion Cube would only work as part of a screwball comedy. If you have to do it yourself, it's still a funny situation but it feels a bit different.

And if you want to focus on the game, there is an interesting game mechanic, too.
Does anyone else find it disturbing that the image of Java programmers in the video is a sea of anonymous men in corporate clothing? Is that really the average Java programmer's image of what to aspire to be??
Truly amazing. Reminds me of the anecdote about Jim Gray wherein he was able to figure out that the database was not tuned based on the the hard disk noise.
Yup, totally forgot that stuff. A book or movie can change your ideas or emotions, and performance art might even change the way you think about the space around you. But it's still just presented for you to accept or ignore. On the other hand, by the end of Portal, you've had four solid hours of practicing these new ideas! Portal actually changes your skill set as you play it. Portal's genius, to me, was matching the development of the player's skill and abilities right along with the character's relationship to her environment. Aligning the situations in the game to match the changes in my neurons was super-impressive to me.
even with the obligatory "so far" tacked on the end, I think that's pretty significant
Yeah, check 'em out: http://www.amillionpixels.us/sourcecode.htm

There are surprisingly many useful snippets. For example, a single header and source file for an entire, complete A* pathfinding implementation! That's a massive timesaver.
Interesting parallel.

Life (us - birth to death) within "life" (the universe, big bang to heat death), with death being a result (maximal entropy), but not the goal.

Perhaps someday the we'll discover/generate other universes.

Death might not always be the final result.

From the death of the old, comes the birth of the young.

Bah, enough deep thinking for one day :).
Well, at least it takes less than 5 hours to finish, which is a lot better than some books I've read for school.
Chad, new site looks great, is that Paul's handywork?
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You're right... I misread that (although secretly taking screenshots is also creepy).
Why isn't she teaching her children to be afraid of everything? So unamerican.

I fully expected this to be a Jessi Slaughter article. That is a set of bad parents.
I think all "meaning" is constructed. The human brain itself is a meaning-making machine. He's stated a preference.
I appreciate the idea, but I have a major issue with it. I personally get motion sick from playing various kinds of first person games. (The problem first showed up for me with Doom.)

Judging from videos I've seen, Portal would be exactly the kind of game that I can't comfortably play. Normally that is not an issue because I don't have to play games I don't like. But if they get a kid like me in the class, how will they deal with it?
sorry, meant selling it immediately is NOT what you want to do. sorry for the confusion.
There is a short and entertaining TED talk on this topic.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/catherine_mohr_builds_gree...
I've heard stories about Ted Williams - the last baseball player to hit .400. A shipment of new bats would arrive for the team. He would look them over and pick some out saying "These ones are 1/8th of an inch too short."
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This person seems to be confusing culture with random shit I click on.
Ask HN: Small side-project with clear user tunnel?
In preparation for an incoming project next week, I'm tweaking my toolset, and implementing A/B testing (amongst other small improvements).

However, historical data suggest, that such tweaks can not happen "in vacuum" -which would inevitably lead to scope freak- but rather within the scope of a specific project which would exercise the new feature-set.

Thus, I'm offering my weekend for the community: got any fun little[1] itch you need scratched that has a clear user funnel with specific goal points? If so, share below. Best one will be implemented, and put online -it's a win-win for both of us :)

[1] The toolset is kinda extensive, what with rolling for over 8 years, so well-traversed paths (eg. registration, password remainder, etc) are almost always a 5-minute job; except for the business logic which inevitably varies from project to project. So def little = thin business logic
I might have misunderstood the story, but if this happened to me today on my gear I would simply turn it all off, connect that half-erased hard disk to another machine, mount it, and pull all the data off. And only after a lot of googling to see if some of the lost files could be "undeleted".

Salvaging the disk by recreating a minimalist system on it is heroic and hacky, but was that the only way?
Life is it own purpose.
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Amy, Freckle is great! I really love the UI and the attention to details that you guys put in. I'm glad that you guys are doing amazing. You are amongst my heroes/inspiring list of people :)
Agreed.
I wanted to make the point that computers are providing more direct feedback into our lives beyond simulators and data stores. I did use stronger language on purpose. It is a bit of a leap to say a computer told you what to do, but it is not that far from the status quo of suggestions.

Facebook example was a bit more of a stretch. I don't think dating sites have very sophisticated automatic algorithms, but something like a game opponent matching system might be a better example of an autonomous system that directly results in a social interaction.
I almost decided to explain myself until I saw you have been here for a little over a month, so I will just say "Thank you for reminding me. Sometimes we forget. Cheers".
Have to agree with fezzi's post here. Try to find a way to talk to customers. You should be talking to them anyways to get their feedback on the idea behind your product.

If you must use beta users as a metric, be very conservative and realize that most of those signed up will probably not even use the beta, let alone buy the product (this varies by industry and product of course, among many other factors). In your case, you might think 1 in 100 signups will become customers, or 1 in 1000, or 1 in 10. Since we don't know what the product/market/marketing methods etc are, you're the best one to make the guess.

But yeah, you should talk to real potential customers.
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A possible contributing factor just popped into my head, and only applies to a small subset of the tech industry. I know from experience that big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and undoubtedly many others, all have significant numbers of workers who are non-exempt contractors(i.e. not direct employees). I don't know how much labor laws vary from state to state, but in WA they are legally bared from employing these special contractors for longer than 11 months. After 11 months they have to convert them to direct employees. So in order to shirk the law and evade paying equal benefits, salaries, options, and corporate taxes, these companies dismiss those contractors for 30 days, then re-hire them. At least in Washington state, this is a standard practice for the past decade or so. There are many loop holes and exceptions, so I'm not even sure of the extent to which this contractor law is applicable.

At Microsoft or Amazon, at least a few years ago when I saw the HR numbers, at any given time, ~20% of the total pool of workers can be temp contractors, so that is a sizable numbers of workers coming and going each December, at least on paper, even if those workers stay on as contractors for many years. (As an aside, I've always wondered why this doesn't generate the same amount of bad PR as the entire video game industry, especially the "EA slave-ship").

I don't have nearly as much direct experience outside of the software industry, but I imagine other industries are doing likewise and on a far broader scale.

Extending this employment pattern to the whole economy, it might explain a big percentage of these mysterious to pin-down "seasonal workers." Or perhaps the labor statistics are just being fudged across the board(thanks US BLS!), from the top down, to try to keep a lid on the worsening unemployment and underemployment situation. I suspect it's a lot of both.

Since the 70's America has been hemorrhaging "real jobs"—i.e. non-service-sector jobs that actually pay an inflation adjusted living wage. Those of us fortunate enough to win the career lottery by going into tech have been quite shielded from the backdrop of the economic decline, and the mass exporting of (manufacturing mostly?) jobs to overseas.
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Actually, that vote is going to cost you a significant percentage of your income.
It's a cool math textbook, yes.

What I love about it—his main point—is his conjecture that it's not a far step from the "challenge everything" mentality of the original punk movement to "challenge everything" mentality that the brightest kids engage math with. Just apply some rigorous thinking.

It's a different way to approach math, directed to an audience that typically doesn't do a whole lot of it.
In a lot of the ones titled snippets, I do see dependencies. Some to Windows DLLs and some to the CRT. But they're relatively self-contained.

Cool stuff. Thanks for the link. Although I'd still call them functions. :-)
The cheapest new cellphone from in a developing nation would fit the bill.
Exactly! Maybe he and Salman Khan should get together and do something.

This could be a great candidate for a multimedia textbook... 10-minute videos + notes + interactive proofs?

Virtually nobody knows what "math" actually is before college. Even in college I suspect the number is still low. If nothing else his project has the potential to fix that.
Sorry for the delay, and no I am not soliciting. I mean I would like to read one, preferably a really good workflow/usage introduction and let's say adequate detail to reproduce all components/processes of an example application.

Who would offer some donation or commit to contributing to great documentation projects? What are some great OS documentation projects? I am getting tired of too many decentralized, semi-contemporary search results while trying to learn new tools.
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Or it's not that goofy, and you see greater value in seeing a world at peace than imposing your parochial judgment on someone else. Man, we fought a war over skapegoatism; wise up!
What app is that? Looks like something that'd help me get to work on time.
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Ironic that one of the best-selling Android apps would be an app that so many Android users swear isn't necessary.
People are excused from "required" activities for all varieties of physical and psychological conditions... I am sure that it would be no different here - an alternative assignment being the likely resolution.
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I've been thinking about how to make a similar service for watching TV at home. It'd be great if they offered more than just YouTube, but YouTube is the obvious place to start.

My plan was to make a web interface to some Selenium scripts and then run the web app on my home network and connect to it from my phone. After seeing this, my way of doing it may have been way too complicated. I could just have an app that generates a redirect to the page I want to visit, whether it is YouTube, or Last.fm, etc.
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He was emphasizing a particular point, and I agree that point is the single most important in the entire thread.
Is any other search engine is or was transparent about their algorithm to your liking? Bing? Yahoo? DuckDuckGo?

If google published the definitive spec of their algorithm (i.e. source code to their search engine), would you read hundreds of thousands lines of code? Would you be able to comprehend it? Would you re-read it every week to make sure that hundreds of commits made by google engineers didn't change it in a way you don't like?

It's preposterous to think that you could comprehend their algorithm in a way that allows you to make an informed decision about whether to use or not. Let's assume you understand it and don't like how it works, what you gonna do? Use Bing?

You don't need reassurance that Google's algorithm is aligned with your interests. It isn't. Neither is Bing's algorithm or anyone else's. BMW doesn't make cars that are aligned with your interests. Apple doesn't make phones that are aligned with your interests. They all make products that are aligned with their interest to make money, they put them in the market and you decided with your money whether you think they serve you or not. That system works pretty well.

You have a choice to use any web search engine you like. You can decide whether you like their results or not by making queries and inspecting the results. You are free to create a competing search engine. Those are your rights.

You don't have a right to require google to disclose how their products work. There's a name for it: trade secret. It's protected by law and it's google's right to keep it to themselves.
I love the url interface. I just used it to post a comment on HN. Very convenient.
Yup :) if I may say so myself.
“I want to program like they do at Oracle …” - now the dream come true.
I'm sure part of it is that employers don't like to lay people off before Christmas as it makes them seem heartless, so they queue up and dump a large group after the holidays.
Or to become energy...
Honestly, this is cool, but also a travesty. Portal is in no way on the same level as some of those other works of literature, and certainly not enough time has passed to see if it survives the years of literary criticism that will be required to tell if it ever should be. It seems like a move that simply panders to . . . well, whoever is pandered to by moves like this.