skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's the other way around; you've missed my point. My point is, contrary to the point you raised in your blog post, it does not appear to be part of the charter of Hacker News to accomodate API's.

Surely you've noticed, over the brief time you've been contributing to Hacker News, that the site functionality is very simple. People have asked for hundreds of features that haven't been implemented. I believe that it's not entirely lack of developer bandwidth that keeps those itches from being scratched.
So... they've basically invented plants?
Stillhouse introduces original Moonshine clear corn whiskey
After the guy admits that he simply ignored failed tests and marked the QA as passed, I think the time for kind and easy to understand communication is long past.
Detexify: handwritten symbol recognition with HTML5
All about User Experince and User Interface Design at uxpx.net
Excellent web site about User Experience and User Interface Design. Share your ideas and thoughts about UX and UI design, lets make online world brighter! Become a contributor or writer for uxpx.net
Also keep in mind that creating a RAID0 of EBS volumes dramatically reduces your reliability too. If any one of the underlying EBS volumes misbehaves the entire RAID set has problems.

Snapshots are still doable, they just require coordination of all the underlying devices to make sure they are all in a consistent state. The way you do this can vary but it's not particularly hard.
Mm it's an interesting idea actually. E.g. I don't mind that other people message me via Facebook, I just find it annoying that I need to be there to read it.
The adventures of Tom Swift, Jr.
I've used Rackspace, Amazon and GoGrid. I'm currently almost entirely on GoGrid and just finishing up migrating back off of Amazon for the second time(Migrated some services back to them when they opened west coast).

There have been some stability issues in the past year(instances going down for maintenance regularly) but haven't had a problem with that in a while and was advised it was due to them upgrading all the servers in their cluster.

The ability to mix dedicated and cloud systems easily has been the killer feature for me. We also prepay and the number of servers we get for the cost is pretty good.
Lisp has too many parentheses...
ZeroMQ and Django
TED: Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team
> I think this is a startling revelation to MOST people.

> Most people do, as you've noted, mix up healthy food with weight loss.

Absolutely. I came up with the idea this guy tested a few years back, and you would not believe the number of people who are convinced I'm dead wrong. (I shared it with a lot of people)
The fundamental is that you can't outsource skilled knowledge labour piecemeal. You either outsource everything, and provide a third party with a functional specification, timings, and the financial means to fulfil those two, or you are, as they say, fucked. If you attempt to outsource individual components of a project to multiple physical locations in disparate timezones, you'll inevitably have a communications disconnect, and shit will hit fans. Developers need to talk to users need to talk to QA need to talk to management. Keep the lines open and clear, and everything goes smooth as a greased-up polecat in a cement mixer. Fail to do so, and everything suffers.

In this scenario, it'd seem that the poor bastards in Uttar Pradesh or wherever-the-fuck don't have a clue as to what's going on. If they did, they'd probably do a halfway competent job. I've worked with QA teams in India and China in the past, and it's been an excellent experience - because we communicated with them non-stop. It would have been preferable to keep those elements on-site, however the parent company of the client we worked with were insistent that we utilise their resources - and because they managed them well, the arrangement was tenable.

Anyway. Don't blame the outsourcee - blame yourself for either making a shitty decision or mismanaging the resources you've acquired.
"All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon."

A line from "The Last Question" by Issac Asimov.
That certain services can't yet be moved to AWS is not an an indicator AWS is compromised. Several services, for example the payments infrastructure, are subject to regulations that make it challenging to implement _at all_, much less in a shared environment like AWS. Again, this is not an argument that AWS is compromised, and teams at Amazon are absolutely using AWS.
I'm not sure how you can say that so matter-of-factly. My security friend was talking about something that Amazon does not (and presumably very few people do) know. Meanwhile my friend at Amazon was just stating the fact that he was not supposed to use AWS, or only with extreme caution. Of course that may differ from department to department, if that's what you mean.
Got Lasik over 3 years ago, paid the middle level ($2700) out of my health savings account (tax-free). Amazing experience, best money and return I ever spent on myself (includes all toys). Do it and be wary of their tiered pricing model: everyone at the office I went to got magically upgraded for no additional fee--the surgeon was vested in just using the best tool 100% of the time.
Diruthenium ... that sounds even better than dilithium!
The problem I have with Derrida, Focault, et. al. is that they're effectively impossible to critique. The density of their writing, combined with their tendency to redefine terms on the fly means that critiques often end up being critiques of interpretation, rather than critiques of the work itself.

Of course, the writers would argue that that's exactly the point. The main idea of postmodernism is that the work is inseparable from the interpretation.
Yeah but "0wning" EC2 would most certainly get you charged criminally under a number of laws.
There is also Resolver One. - http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/

I have always thought it looked awesome, but is Windows only so I haven't been able to try it.
Capacity planning. It's a thing. Try it out.
Communities That Create: Sparkfun CEO Gives Talk @ Google On Building Company
What is Your story of creativity?
How do you creatively appeal to YOUR customer base?
Yeah, after watching the video, I was wondering if this was just a rebranding of Pivotal Tracker.

If you're going to steal an interface... please don't steal from such an ugly and disfunctional web app. Having to use Pivotal Tracker for 3 months on a client project made me batshit crazy. It's one of the worst user interfaces I've ever suffered long term.
Wanted: HP's CEO Is On The Lam
Use python for prototyping and code generation.

It works for me with C#.

I do frequently: copy-paste fields from specification, make namedtuples from it, write/debug logic, and then: generate C# classes, rewrite logic in C#.

Rewriting in C# is not annoying for me. I just can't play with different ideas in C# as in python.

(And I can't imagine how I can write SQL without python!)
Dedicated servers only give you the illusion of higher security.
And Now, Predictions We’ll Back 100 Percent
http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6320672
Hints on Dark Matter and a Wealth of Planets
Okay maybe I have missed your point.

Let me ask you a question then, to clarify.

You think there's a reason they have an RSS feed of the top stories but do not have a feed of all the stories as they come in?

Help me, an admitted newbie, understand. Why have one and not the other?
First of all, there are managed hardware providers who can get you hardware online in less than 4 hours. Second of all, capacity planning can save you from "needing elasticity". Third of all, if you were on machines that gave you reasonable performance (i.e. not shared hosting), you probably wouldn't "need" nearly as much elasticity.
It's because eleven notes is the maximum that fit "nicely" into the harmonic series our eardrums pick up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)
^^--- this guy used to be a seriously big deal within Amazon operations. Listen to him.
Well, Excel does have VBA. Whether that's a "normal" programming language depends on your definition of "normal." You can do some very useful stuff in it, but you'll feel like you're fighting the language every step of the way.
Can't speak for other YC companies (it may vary from batch to batch), but for us it was a generous rackspace cloud monthly credit for 12 months.
There's a fair amount of research that suggests that the FFA (fusiform face area, where we supposedly process faces) is really just specialized for processing objects that we're very familiar with. For example, bird-watchers' FFAs light up more when they're differentiating between birds, and I think they have increased repetition suppression too.

Anyway, the theory behind that research is that we process faces differently because we're all very familiar with them, so it would make a lot of sense if this other-race effect is purely because Western Caucasians see Western Caucasian faces more and East Asians see East Asian faces more.

I'd like to see the study done with people who are living in a country where their race is a tiny minority.
I wrote something vaguely similar, but it relies on App Engine:

http://midiserver.appspot.com/
https://github.com/skybrian/Midi-Server

Agreed that this stuff is way too nonportable.
Jim Simons: Drawing our best math and science minds into the classroom
I've only heard of a couple of these, so none? http://www.founderinstitute.com/companies
Regarding the "API blocked"...

Seems to be feeding fine as of Mon eve (Nov 8)
Linode are wonderful - best support I've had from anyone, ever. Nice instances, too!
trademe is pretty much just the New Zealand version of ebay (albeit with a better reputation and more engaged community). They are also impressive because they cloned ebays business model early enough to prevent ebay from dominating the New Zealand online auction sector (as ebay did in Australia with ebay.com.au) and sold in 2006 for $700 million (NZD) ($550m in USD).
Sounded like a manufacturing system -- probably Ford/GM's call, not UAW's.
This is silly and obviously poorly researched since hipchat is free for <4 users
I occasionally find them useful, at a rate of about one per week. I didn't upvote them in the past, but I will now that I know you care.

"My 'contributions' are rarely upvoted much, and that suggests my interests aren't that good a fit for the current population."

For what it's worth, I have the hacker friends extension (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpg...) set to highlight all of your comments and submissions.
"A good friend deep in the security community once told me, off hand, that EC2 was "owned." I didn't take this too seriously until another good friend, who has been working at Amazon for the past several years, told me that engineers at Amazon were generally forbidden from using AWS due to security concerns."

"EDIT: To clarify, I'm not suggesting that Amazon knows AWS is "owned" and offers it to others anyway. I'm only noting that, for certain critical services, they themselves do not appear willing to take the risk."

I may not be the smartest guy, but it seems to me that's exactly what you are saying.
In the past, clever things that others have done have been blocked because they placed a substantial burden on the servers.
Stun Fone iPhone accessory: YouTube spoof or real product?
ah! MIPS... the product page on their site does not even mention it!

i read the specs and said "meh. someone cloned the 4yr old eeepc 900. nothing to see here"

now, add a hdmi port and i will consider that instead of a eee keyboard.
You may want consider doing a master's program abroad. In many countries (in Scandinavia in particular) the programs are free and you pay just for living expenses, which you should be able to cover with some contracting work. The programs tend to be in English as well.

I did such a master's at Chalmers University in Sweden and it was really a great experience.
>how often do people have to react to only eyes as opposed to all facial expressions, supported by body language and words?

When they are being lied to. That is, every day.
I think I see your point; when I was a kid I saw charts that handled them separately. (I think it was during Reagan’s or Clinton’s term that they got kerfuddled together.) But it doesn’t help matters that the terms “fruit” and “vegetable” are problematic, at least in English. What a layman thinks is a fruit can be drastically different than what a biologist or lawyer thinks is one, thanks to a real mess of culinary and legal tradition. (The tomato is the textbook example.)
The "maximum insulin load" is going to depend on factors beyond calorie count.

For example, if you consume a can of Coke, your body is going to try to process the sugar in it all at once. But if you consume a donut with equivalent sugar, the fats and oils in it slow down the digestion process. Thus your maximum insulin load(which is the largest immediate factor in creation of fat tissue) will be lower with donuts. Fruit achieves a similar load-lowering quality through fiber instead of fat.

Also note that in a single can of Coke, you consume 39g of sugar for 140 calories(source: Wikipedia). Therefore 1800 calories in sugar alone is 501g of sugar.

I don't know about you, but I usually do not feel very good if I have more than about 20-30g of "naked" sugar at one time. And this guy's experiment does three things that lower his insulin load substantially so that he probably never crosses that 20-30g boundary:

He eats pastries rather than drinking soda, thus he enjoys a nice levelling effect from the oils and doesn't actually get all of his calories from carbs.

He eats vegetables for extra fiber.

He drinks a protein shake, which induces satiety(and depending on the type of protein, may also slow digestion).

If you attempted to reproduce the experiment without these things protecting you, you would probably feel too sick to continue within a week.
Malicious Websites Can Initiate Skype Calls To Arbitrary Phone Numbers On iOS
Latest TIOBE index - Python overtakes VB for the first time ever
Worker Rights Extend to Facebook, Labor Board Says
In Singapore, most elevator door close buttons work. It's very civilized and one of the small delights of living here.
Surely there's a more interesting way to do this than random variations and picking the best. Why not constrain the color of the circle to the one that maximizes your objective function given its position? That isn't hard to compute.
Although technically illegal, "network self defense" would be a reasonable defense in a case such as this. Firesheep is designed specifically as a sniffer (legal to possess, illegal to use to steal data), and breaking its sniffing and crashing the host software really isn't going to be prosecuted. Remember that this won't DoS anything unless someone is running Firesheep against you.

Think about this: government-funded researchers in security run massive honeypots that attract hackers, who are then observed. Researchers often try to hack back through the botnet, as the Computer Security Group at UCSB did in their well-publicized ten-day takeover of the Torpig network.

Edit: Some more data:

"At the beginning of 2009, we took control of the Torpig botnet for ten days. Over this period, we observed more than 180 thousand infections and recorded more than 70 GB of data that the bots collected."

So these researchers took over the botnet and downloaded 70 GB of data that they sniffed. That's not just data on the botnet itself, but identifying data of the hosts that Torpig had infected. In this case, we have no idea what data was being siphoned around (although presumably not credentials, it's feasible that CC#'s were being moved to and from controllers). So whatever data Torpig stole, times 180,000 infections. We trust these guys because they're researchers, but are they above the law in a case such as this? Just something to think about!
I found it interesting that, of the faces that I misidentified, all but one of them was female. It would be interesting to know if the statistics point to a significant difference in performance depending on the gender of the participant and the gender of the person's face being viewed. I got a 29 overall.
How was Chalmers? I lived in Göteborg as a missionary for 2 years, and knew many students at Chalmers.

Where are you working now? Has your masters at Chalmers been beneficial?
HTC said to be working on its own app store
Yes, this industry is still very young. Another way to think about it is that we still build software the way they built cars in 1905 - to a large extent, most products are build from scratch by hand to serve a very specific set of requirements.

Admittedly OSs, compilers and frameworks are significant steps forward from pure Assembly language, but we're still a far cry from how autos are built today: automakers build a "car platform" by composing different systems, which themselves are composed of assemblies and sub-assemblies and so on. The platform is then targeted towards a specific application by bolting a car body on top, this body is usually separate from the core engineering systems of the car.
I'm not sure where the confusion lies, but I'm guessing you see "security concerns" as equivalent to "knowledge of ownership"?

It seems to me those are entirely different things, as one can be concerned about potential threat without knowing if it is real or not. But I do not work in the security community myself and may be using language sloppily.

I would be much obliged if you could show me where the crux of the confusion lies.
It's even worse than that:

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2010/03/danger-will-robinson-rack...
selling $1 bills would likely be difficult using the bot in the article because the site (trademe.co.nz) is only in New Zealand where the smallest bill is the $5 one. Although there are probably other equally effective sales you could run using $1 and $2 coins.
This seems to me as though the phrase "denial-of-service attack" is being used loosely here. Firesheep is not a service being extended by a central server to many users. You're blocking the individual user (or users) of firesheep with this. This won't disrupt the users of web services that are legitimately trying to use a site. IANAL, but I think this could be argued to be different from the kind of DoS that would land you in prison for several years in at least the US and UK.

That said, a DoS attack against firesheep users, if convicted, would probably have more repercussions than what ever identity fraud the firesheep users could be prosecuted for (per case). This is a great example of where someone trying to benefit society (preventing possible identity fraud) could be labeled a terrorist. I fear the day that the FBI starts going after "terrorists" to protect identity thieves.
Attn, flight-search startups: Priceline, Expedia say hotels are where it’s at
Why You Should Start a Company in... Kansas City
I've always assumed it was because the feed of all stories as they come in contains a huge amount of junk, and also because RSS on Hacker News is an afterthought. I use RSS as my primary interface to HN, but I also recognize that it's inferior to the site itself.
For anyone who doesn't want to log in to LinkedIn, "Sr. Manager, Information Security at Amazon.com"
Yes!!

I was trying to do a DNS change and I couldn't find the DNS panel anywhere until I Google'd it.
France outlaws discount eBooks
I had a similar experience: with minimal negotiating we were able to get 50% off their initial quote. I also renegotiated our terms later within the contract period with relative ease.

They pad their pricing pretty heavily, so don't be afraid to ask.
I completely agree. You can find trusting people overseas... It all comes from building a relationship.

Granted, being 5,000 miles away (and not having face to face contact) can hamper that process, but there are plenty of trusting and responsible "outsourced" individuals that can handle quality control jobs.
No. Plants are living organisms that require (relatively) complex cell machinery to carry out photosynthesis. This is a single molecule that can be "charged" but does not change its chemical composition.

The mechanisms that plants (and animals) use for chemically storing energy are useful for living things, but aren't all that great for long-term, large-scale energy storage. In some sense, we already use plants like that (biodiesel) and, in general, it sucks.
Colin was implying that negligent management of EC2 could leave Amazon employees criminally liable. Obviously anybody who "owned up" EC2 is already a criminal.
> For example, if you consume a can of Coke, your body is going to try to process the sugar in it all at once. But if you consume a donut with equivalent sugar, the fats and oils in it slow down the digestion process. Thus your maximum insulin load(which is the largest immediate factor in creation of fat tissue) will be lower with donuts. Fruit achieves a similar load-lowering quality through fiber instead of fat.

You have an understandable and common misconception of glycemic index. You cannot always intuit which foods will have a higher glycemic index. For example, you incorrectly seem to believe that cola has a higher glycemic index than a donut. In fact, donuts have a higher glycemic index than do colas.

You should not conflate your subjective feeling of "badness" with the objective measure of circulating insulin or glucose (unless you have rigorously established the correlation, which is not obvious). Subjectively, I feel just as bad when I only eat a donut as when I only drink a coke.
Capacity planning is hard when data volume doubles / triples over night.
Have you looked at just buying the hardware and colocating it? $400 should get you half a cabinet. Bandwidth can be found for a few dollars a meg. As you're buying redundant servers, you can get refurb/ebay stuff and save on the upfront costs (who cares about next business day service replacemnt if you have spare parts?).
I used COM and the Python Win32 API to automate Excel, creating reports from data in an MSDE DB. We did this quite extensively at my first job.
Gomory mentions 3 choices for a country that stops making something: (1) import it by selling something else it makes, (2) go without, and (3) import it by promising to pay later. The Buffett article he links to says because America's been doing no.3, the foreigners will use those bonds to buy property in the US before they're inflated away, and that the US won't likely confiscate foreign-owned property.

But neither author mentions what makes the US different to China, Japan, India, and others taking over US manufacturing. Chinese can become Americans, but Americans can't become Chinese. The US (and Australia and Brazil, etc) are founded on immigration. Foreigners buying US land can be given US citizenship as an alternative to having their property confiscated. The children of Chinese (and Koreans,etc) are going to Western countries to be educated, usually hoping to stay. By offshoring manufacturing and ICT, the US, Canada, etc simply get a larger citizenship base, not lose any global competitive advantage.

Despite the rise of China, many of the younger generation of Chinese still want to live in foreign English-speaking and European countries, and that's not likely to stop. And eventually, Americans will eventually vote for the government that lets them in the easiest, because house prices will start rising again when the international students rent them and immigrants buy them.

But Americans and Australians don't become Chinese or Vietnamese, nor do they want to. An immigrant-based nation such as the US can outsource its manufacturing to ethnic-based nations such as China and India, and stay rich BECAUSE it's an immigrant-based nation. People from ethnic-based nations will generally prefer to live in the US or Canada BECAUSE they're immigrant-based nations. So the US needn't worry about outsourcing to India.