skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, that doesn't agree with http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/sla/ which says 25% back for any downtime greater than 1%. If you dismiss extreme cases (like 50% downtime getting a 25% credit), it's not bad.
This really should have been a regular submission, btw. Anyways, clickable -

http://mirkokiefer.com/blog/2010/11/introducing-livelycouch-...
Formal specifications have been used successfully. I'm reminded of this article I read:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/6/92498-sel4-formal-verif...

Unfortunately it's not freely available, but here is one paragraph from the introduction:

"Here, we report on the full formal verification of a critical system from a high-level model down to very low-level C code. We do not pretend that this solves all of the software complexity or error problems. We do think that our approach will work for similar systems. The main message we wish to convey is that a formally verified commercial-grade, general-purpose microkernel now exists, and that formal verification is possible and feasible on code sizes of about 10,000 lines of C. It is not cheap; we spent significant effort on the verification, but it appears cost-effective and more affordable than other methods that achieve lower degrees of trustworthiness."

It was an interesting article and the process they use is not typical. If I remember correctly, they use theorem proving tools, prototype in haskell, and ultimately convert that to C. They claim that Haskell seemed to save them time and their man-hours ultimately were similar to other more traditional micro-kernel efforts.

Edit: That said, if it is indeed practical to do this, it is only on a small subset of programming work, at least at this time.

Edit 2: I found a version that is freely available:
http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/klein-sosp09.pdf

I'm not sure if it is exactly the same as the ACM piece, but it is very close.
Sexually harassing someone who makes $10 an hour to make a point to someone who makes $150,000 a year several thousand miles away and who has actual decisionmaking authority does not strike me as a justice-enhancing move.
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http://lastpass.com/ is indispensable for generating, managing, and auto-filling super-secure passwords that you never even have to know, let alone remember.
how do you detect mouse click with css3?
I wonder if it's worthwhile taking a video camera (like a Flip video) into the pat down booth and filming the whole thing, asking for their ID beforehand. That'll stop their abuse. Maybe setup a site for it too to submit videos.
For those confused, I'm pretty sure this is a joke.
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Though we rarely acknowledge but it’s quite difficult to find a UAA high definition audio bus driver update. A simple way is to direct yourself to manufacturer’s website to get the correct driver download for your computer system.
It might sound odd, but I just create an entry in my contacts in outlook for each service. I've never lost a password and I have access to them whever I go.
Turns out, it is a river in Egypt
I agree, being independent is way better in the long run!
Umm, what exactly are they demanding? Invasive pat-down by an officer of the opposite sex?
I don't think there's a reasonable way to interpret the uninvited and unwelcome prodder of one's genitalia as a victim of sexual harassment.
Won't work. In the last sentence they basically admit wishful thinking. Can we quit voting up faith-based science articles?

“to use a combination of simulation, chemical intuition, and databases of tens of millions of known molecules to look for other candidates that have structural similarities and might exhibit the same behavior.”
Do you have a link with more information? I'm not interested in participating, just learning more.
I'll get behind this. I do not know a single one of my passwords, but I can access them from anywhere. Desktop, laptop, cellphone. Lastpass is easily one of the best pieces of software I have ever used.
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Make sure to check their health insurance laws. I have friends whose child is uninsurable in the state because of a minor, treatable condition, even though his father is a significant level employee of a very large government agency.

Depending how you locate, your employees who need to could live on the Missouri side and get access to the state high risk pool, but with a 12 month pre-existing condition exemption, and no coverage for most cancer treatments.
Yes, terseness is definitely not among Java's virtues. Your way looks a lot more fun to write than mine -- it's amazing what a little well-placed syntactic sugar can do.
Except that most modern lisps don't even nest that deeply anymore. At least, not anymore than every functional language that uses nesting to offer new immutable lexical scopes does.

Seriously, the average nesting depth of a C program is maybe 3-4 (function, conditional, loop, etc), and C programs are simple. More complex languages like Java and C++ will easily have 4-7 levels of nesting on average. Clojure and Arc code are probably right on par with that.
You have the same obligation with an EC2 AMI that you have with a physical server.

Using a cloud/vps/whatever provider does not obviate the need to secure the base OS.
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For what it's worth, a friend of mine moved a rails site from a dedicated server to engineyard.

Her hosting costs went from $350/mo to $1,600/mo, not including having to pay another $1k/mo or so to smtp.com for email marketing.
Why did I make my nexus one mobile web server
Good thing Hipmunk chose a nice, broad and non-flight specific name.

Very likely that accommodation bookings are on their long term implementation plan. The flight bookings could also just be a good customer acquisition tool to on-sell additional bookings & services.
I expect that it necessarily has rather low efficiency, so it would be best suited for off-grid / low-equipment situations where you care more about heat than electricity. Say you can make a reusable long stip of stuff that you unroll in the sunshine during the day, and then coil up in your tent and "ignite" one end at night and it takes 8-10 hours for the reaction to reach the other end. Or depending on how hot it can get, maybe even a reusable "campfire" that doesn't need fuel and can be a bit safer than a real fire.
I could have sworn somebody made a SIMBL plugin years ago to provide confirmation for Cmd-Q in all apps...or am I just going crazy?
How is it that you can access it from anywhere, but it is stored on your computer? Do you put the password file on dropbox?
Indeed.

It took me a long time to get used to this in functional programming, and I got annoyed with how deeply nested my code got. Then I learned that it was just the language telling me to decompose my functions! :-)
Someone on Reddit got selected for the scanner, and after getting scanned the TSA proceeded to give him the invasive gope-search too. So it sounds like you might as well 'opt out' of the scanner since it won't save you from having your genitals felt up.
A class I wish more people could take!
They paid $1000 to put their ad on a cracked screen?
Sounds nice, though this one restriction:

Do not rely on query string parameters. CloudFront does not
preserve query string parameters. (For more information,
see Query String Parameters.)

Kinda sucks :(

Makes it a not-quite-standard http reverse proxy. We have been putting cache versioning in our query strings, just because it was easier in our framework than changing the base url... but guess we should just fix that.
Of course there is. Consider a male patient who has a legitimate medical need to visit a female doctor and have his privates examined. That could possibly be a very uncomfortable situation for the male patient (speaking from personal experience). It is not license to make lewd comments.
Oh, I do. Same with C-z as mentioned below. When I'm in a terminal-based session, I keep C-x C-c and C-z around. When I'm in my main X-based session, C-z is zap-to-char and C-x C-c is bury-buffer.
On my machine they look like a macro-lens closeup of a sunflower in full bloom, or alternately, like an Archimedean Spiral or whatever.
Integration is not a bad thing but facebook connect feels more like a lock-in so I can see why developers are against it.
Chromium uses Shift+Ctrl+Q to exit.
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To paraphrase what you said: "I didn't take [statement A] seriously until [statement B]."

statement A = EC2 was owned
statement B = engineers at Amazon forbidden from using AWS

Perhaps English isn't your first language, but the way you've phrased it, you're relying on statement B as evidence/proof of statement A, directly implying a connection between the two. It's difficult to read it any other way.

Rewording your original comment: "It was only when that I heard that engineers at Amazon were forbidden from using AWS that I took seriously the comment that EC2 was owned."
The best way to get around the ban I think is to have low-latency distributed scraping.

Basically, a plugin that submits to RR's site whenever a user is surfing on HN. RR's site then parses it as usual.

The plugin could have some setting like max KB submitted per minute, and RR's site would only request the full page if it was needed at the time.
I swear I have seen the web-spreadsheet-as-website idea on here before. It was not editgrid.com, which amusingly replicates Excel all the way down to the Windows 95 scroll bars. It was actually focused on making the spreadsheets presentable as public pages with live datasources. The site for the tool was made with the tool. Does anybody know what I'm referring to?
The Affective Dimensions of Mathematical Difficulties in Schoolchildren
Doesn't booking.com pretty much have a monopoly in this market? What will your company do that's better than what they do?
Also, Objective-C experiences a dip, C# overtakes VB for the second time and pretty much everything else in the top 10 is down except Java
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/detexify/id328805329?mt=8
US Patent Office Makes It Harder To Reject Patents For Obviousness
You both have stupid arguments which basically boil down to "I don't like it because I prefer it the other way." This stupid flamewar has been fought countless times on countless online forums, let's not do this.
The fact that profit margins are bigger in Hotel search doesn't mean that there isn't money to be made in airfare search.

Hotel search is a thornier problem. There may be more money to be made when someone eventually figures out how to do it right, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't tackle airfare search if you think you've solved that easier problem.
Twilio, Linode, Heroku and more in the Bad Ass Developer Bundle
My problem is that the CDR backronym came with an explanation, making it sound legitimate when in fact he could've just written the quick standard explanation.

Other than that, excellent article.
It could in turn have the employees boycott the methods, I guess it's tough with the unemployment rate in America, many may not want to make a stand because the job is more important to them at the moment.
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I think the idea behind HN is to have a place where you can go to chat when you are bored or feeling distractable. Having every story posted as its submitted is counterproductive -- it makes HN become a job (like reading Email) instead of something to do once in a while when you feel like it.

I miss probably about 90% of the stories on HN. I enjoy it anyway.

HN is a place to go, not a list of articles.
The key is to make the pat-down as time consuming and embarrassing as possible for the TSA staff. Follow these steps:

1) Refuse the body scanner and request a manual pat-down.

2) Ask to have a supervisor, or a second TSA staff, present during the pat-down. Explain that this is to ensure that no sexual harassment occurs.

3) If you are a guy, ask to have a female TSA staff member perform the pat-down. If your request is denied, calmly explain to the TSA guy that you are homosexual and that a pat-down by another guy will turn you on and will make you sexually extremely uncomfortable.

4) During the pat-down, make comments such as "Oh yeah, I like it when you touch me there!", or "Can I get a happy ending?"
If you contact a Tier 1 CDN directly without a decent commit, you will not even be entertained, but you can always find resellers. Akamai pay as you go pricing was just around 150$/TB pricing with resellers and we have used them for a long time. We gave up on CF after speed issues in Asia. Akamai is the strongest across the globe
I guess nobody informed AirBnB.
No... my argument is: "requiring lisp programmers to pay attemtion to formatting when they haven't had to do so for years, just to make some python developers feel more at home, is stupid."

Mandating whitespace complicates the situation, and for what benifit? You're the one proposing a dramatic change, show some dramatic evidence to back up your proposition.
Can you close tab with Ctrl-W in Mac (like in Ubuntu and Win)? If so - just use it. Ctrl-Q do not quit browser =)
With links.
Paul Graham says:

> We can get rid of (or make optional) a lot of parentheses by making indentation significant. That's how programmers read code anyway: when indentation says one thing and delimiters say another, we go by the indentation. Treating indentation as significant would eliminate this common source of bugs as well as making programs shorter.

http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html
BJ's is not a wine bar ;)
Fascinating to look at the graph - Java really is dying.
Ask HN: What editor originated syntax highlighting?
As a programmer, I don't know what I would do without this feature. Is there an editor/IDE that can legitimately claim to have originated this feature? What is it?
creators = [{"name" :{"name_authority" :TextField,
"name_authority_id" :IntegerField,
"display_string" :TextField},
"user_id" :IntegerField,
"roles" :[TextField],
"attrs" :[TextField],
"xts" :[TextField]}]

Yes you could do something like this. But the lack of keywords does reintroduces some noise via the quotes around strings. Moving the colons around like this to give visual alignment would probably be frowned upon. So my sense is that this would be considered "un-Pythonic" but I could be wrong.
Why raise money at all? To deploy a web app all you really need is a virtual server like SliceHost, Linode, etc. This costs $20-40 per month and should have enough resources for a regular web app until you get really big (in which case you should have some revenue to help cover costs).

Watch Tom Preston-Werner's (the founder of GitHub) speech at Start-up School for inspiration:
http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178966
The unintentional F1 happens to me all the time in Vim and it pops up this annoying gnome-terminal help. I should read it one day.
I saw a lot of this at two of the web companies I worked in the mid-2000s. Outsourcing/offshoring was all the rage and it was tempting for a mid-sized web company to think, "you know, our processes are starting to break down now that releasing buggy code causes a lot more problems, but it's going to take months to build a QA team... let's offshore it!"

It's not trivial. If your software development process can be described as, "some business guy writes an e-mail with four sentences and a developer works with him to implement the feature" or "production and dev environments are never in sync, but devs double as sysadmins and have access to production so they just modify configuration as necessary," then offshoring/outsourcing QA is doomed to fail. You need things like detailed specs and a consistent QA environment. I had projects that took 4 days to develop but 2 months to QA because every "bug" was either a) actually an intended feature or b) some inconsistency with my dev and their QA environment. Throw in a time difference causing a 10 minute hallway conversation now taking 2 weeks over e-mail, and very often a language barrier, and there is no other possible outcome except for an unmitigated disaster.
Not to mention you could now have an entire year of EC2 micro (and a bunch of other services) for free.
You'd be surprised ;-)
And one of these mall cops refuse to pat down the gay guy cos he'll get aids.
The airport is sued for $1.2Gazzillion discrimination lawsuit, it decides to have a quiet word with the politician and suddenly looking tough on terror with security theater doesn't get you as many campaign contributions
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The comparison to PHP's reference really caught my eye. Never having used PHP before, a few days ago I had to write a simple application that was outside my previous experience in any language. It was a breeze-- I thought PHP's online docs were fantastic, with clear descriptions, useful examples, and great cross-referencing.
The problem with outsourcing is always the fact that you get this idea of people with at least decent knowledge of X language and more times than not it blows up in everyones face when it just isn't the case. I don't care if he doesn't understand, if he has to deal with people speaking english/spanish/russian/whatever he HAS to have a decent grasp at the language (or he shouldn't be doing that line of work).

You're saying that this Matt person should have had a person that could be able to speak baby language to communicate effectively? He shouldn't have to do that at all. What's the point in outsourcing if you need people that speak baby language to communicate effectively? Matt took control of the situation and I think he was quite civil in firing that dude. I know more than one manager whom would have snapped big time at such stupidity.

Aside I've been in this same position with a three different development teams in India. Awful experience. I'm not saying there are no capable people in India, there are boatloads of great people in India, but sadly with 1.2 billion people your chances of stumbling into one of this awesome people are slimmer than Kate Moss.

If I get hired as a French speaking programmer, and I can't either speak French or program, I'm a total lier and will probably go out the door in flames when I get fired. I don't think outsourced teams should be exempted from this.
I'm using Linux at work and Mac at home, so I fixed a lot of problem by using a Mac Keyboard at work ...
Ask HN: How do you host private data?
I have not worked for a company before to see how they do it, and I can't seem to find much info online regarding the topic.

How (exactly) do you host sensitive/private data for your company like source code, financial docs, or even the private company intranet?

I always assumed that these were just hosted on some non public facing box on the LAN or something, but then I realized that it is probably more likely that the data is on either a box in some data center that you colocate at or some VPS service that you use alongside your public facing services. But I suspect most companies have issues storing sensitive data on any kind of hosted box or cloud store.
Pharen: a Lisp to PHP compiler
For anything that needs much CPU at all that isn't going to be the case. Any Rackspace node will be literally an order of magnitude faster for anything CPU bound, compared to an EC2 micro instance.

On the other hand if you just need memory (without necessarily having the clock cycles to quickly access it), or just something that will eventually handle occasional requests, a micro instance should be just fine.
It's illegal to record these guardians of our freedom protecting our rights.
Letting DRY Drive
By requiring parenthesis, indentation becomes so much simpler, the programmer doesn't even have to do it. It's done automagically.
Unfortunately it's not really self-contained enough to post; the most complicated thing in it is basically a copy/paste of the "Dijkstra's Algorithm" sample-code on Wikipedia, though.
No, but they did use mouse pilots in a long term animal study of 3 years (20 years in human pilot equivalent years).

Most of the study subjects reported dizziness, headaches and the infamous restless paw syndrome, which made it pretty much impossible for them to continue flying safely.
Just curious, are there any benchmarking results that show this?
Haven't seen an Otis in Tokyo yet. Not that I look very closely. Lots of Mitsubishis.

Every time an article like this gets posted, I'm a little surprised that there is no mention whatsoever about the international angle. "the close door button doesn't work," [IN the US].

Many elevators in Tokyo simply will not close until someone presses close.
Yep, Java is dying. Or the pie is getting bigger, or the TIOBE index methodology is flawed.
The latest developer version of Chrome (9.x) has an experimental warning dialog in "about:flags".
You choose to go to the doctor, the TSA is imposing.
I've always been somewhat skeptical of TIOBE numbers, but this time I'm utterly confused. VB is listed as "(Visual) Basic" and under the "Very Long Term History" chart it is ranked #4 in 1985. Is this referring to plain old BASIC?

Additionally, there's another entry further down for VB.NET at 0.323% -- if it is added to the VB percentage, it would bump it above Python and C#.
I always liked the way Larry Wall put it: "Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/7700fb02a2...
You should use an ETag in your HTTP request header to do versioning, and keep the URL static.
There's plenty of VC money like you describe available--Visa Card money that is ;)

All jokes aside, theoretically there is a capital market for any combination of risk and return--as long as the latter outweighs the former to some degree. At $350k/yr (revenue?) you're just not talking about a sustainable return. An investor would likely want more equity from your startup than you'd be willing to fork over in this type of situation.

Luckily there's another capital structure you can turn to--debt. There's a much larger number of people who would be willing to hand you over $20k so long as there's relative certainty you'll pay them back (eventually). These are the family, friends, and fools who get you going. You'll probably still have to sell them on your business a bit, but these people inherently believe in you (the most important part). Pay them back and everyone wins; don't pay them back and risk damaging a personal relationship.

Hope this helps.