skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Question/Opinion: Proper Bandwidth For Startups
Hello Admins/Engineers

I've asked this question outside of the online
environment and the answers have ranged wildly. I'm
currently hosting an database & web server with a
Dedicated Business Connection from Comcast at 16mb
Down and 2mb Up (Runs about $110 a month). It's the
most available in my area. How many requests can that
handle? And if things were to grow from 100
hits/searches an hour to 1000, then 10,000 what would
be required? I'm asking because it's important we
keep this hardware in house. Currently the site sends
between 45k-110k per request. Hopefully this can be a
reference point for other who may have this question.
List of Base Jumping Fatalities with Descriptions
"Can I download and install software to help me do my job?" -- this is a great question, but will generally rule out most corporate gigs.
They considered making a trillion dollar bill but The Simpsons already did it.
Apple is acting, more or less, as an FTP site plus an OS vendor in this case. In theory, the GPL can put obligations on the FTP site as a distributor, but it cannot out obligations on the OS vendor.

If this were the case, it would not be possible to ship ANY non-GPL-compatible software on Debian, for example, even in a non-free environment.

The question comes down to what the distribution site does, and they have two clauses: one for commercial and ne for non-commercial interests. They do not seem to be in conflict to me.
Securing MongoDB Behind Nginx
Honestly, it's difficult for me to say. Is this two players over the Internet? More than two players? The movement mechanics matter a lot. I've never seen Tron or played any Tron games, but if it will play something like this:

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/tron2-431x300.jpg

Which appears to be kind of like snakes/nibbles then I could see you requiring some of the techniques the article describes. Since players are mostly moving in a single direction for a period of time you could extrapolate their movements by continuing their motion in that single direction until the server is made otherwise aware of where the player decided to move. Then you can reset the player back to the position they were at when they changed direction and then continue them along that path.

However, for when the action gets close-up and quick, where perhaps the two players are twitching back and forth trying to avoid or ensnare each other then yes I can see how lag compensation will be necessary so that the server can accurately figure out where each player thought the other player was when they made their move.

Here are two articles that I think will help you, and they helped me when I was working at this problem:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3230/dead_reckoning_la...

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1370.asp
Which PHP MVC Framework should I use with MongoDB?
This is a good (but painful) thing. The GPL is designed to counteract the sort distribution lockdown that the App Store represents, and it's doing its job here. The GPL is diametrically opposed to the App Store ecosystem (buy once, reuse/modify never), and it's a good thing that it's being enforced, even if it does mean the loss of quality software on the iOS platform.

This really does underscore, however, how important it is to license your code carefully. If you want to make it completely free (as in, "I don't care what you do with it" free), use BSD. If you want to make sure that your software is never used restrictively and that it continually promotes the free software ethos, then GPL is a great tool.
Why are people that purchase/download your GPL app not able to get the code or share changes? All one must do is provide a method for the client to get the code through whatever means. The section deals with third party distribution of binaries and obtaining the source code from the author indirectly. There is nothing stopping one from getting hold of the SDK and compiling the code you have distributed and installing it - they don't even need a developers account. They can't distribute it without paying Apple the developer's fee and submitting it to the app store, at which point it might be considered duplicate functionality, but, that is a separate argument.

Additionally, a client that changes your app is not required to send you the changes back unless s/he distributes it. Modifying it for his/her own purposes doesn't mean you are entitled to a copy of their changes.
Data Analysis: Discoveries from 40 year old moon data
The problem of spam is that you do not want many false rejections (much better getting some spam through than losing some valid emails).

In your example, you say it is easy to see from sender/subject/first line it is a spam, but only because you "know" it is a spam. Could you guarantee the email cannot be spam with 100 % confidence ?
US Export Regulations on Crypto Eased
Looks pretty sarcastic when browsing it from rss reader.
That page lacks an RSS feed. So I made one.

http://page2rss.com/rss/81beb35369eebedecba9707d2b51e920
Of course... read my reply again please.

I am not disagreeing with you, I am saying that I would love to see a better data-parallel language than C (or CUDA to be precise), but it does not exist right now (at least not a practical one that would run on a real GPU with reasonable performance and allow non-trivial nested and hierarchical algorithms).
> I have trouble believing an entire project is using the GPL yet almost nobody cares whether most users are getting stuck with unmodifiable binaries.

If a project is initially started under the GPL, it's stuck that way forever even if they get all-new developers after a while who don't care. If a project is started by someone new to the area, the FSF and supporters are vocal enough that there's a decent chance they'll pick the GPL by default without really considering it. If a project links to a GPL library, there's a decent chance they'll bow to pressure of the FSF's overbroad redefinition of "derivative work" and (re-)license their project as GPL regardless of their own preferences.

It's all quite self-reinforcing and doesn't require reasoned intent from any of the participants.
sure, that's valid. it's also valid to acknowledge that their exists within that group a sub-group of people (albeit small) who DO actually have "the right idea" that WILL actually "pay multiples over the crappy returns the S&P has over the past 10 years", but DOES require going "all in" to achieve.
FreeBSD developer here.

Apple contributes back lots.

We're very happy that the BSD license has allowed Apple to use our code.
I have a simple technique gmail could use that would cut the email delivered to my inbox by over 90%. Observe that I don't correspond with anyone in Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Chinese, or any other of a long list of languages, and put those message in the spam folder.
I was recently struggling whether commit my new TODO list to WorkFlowy and OrgMode, and I made a small comparison:

Org Mode
+ You get full editing power of Emacs
+ Lots and lots of features (custom TODOs, calendars, hyperlinks,
generating documents, ...) that are hidden and doesn't distract
people who are not aware of them.
+ It IS actively developed all the time :).
- Not really portable - requires Emacs for nice look&feel,
although .org files are just text files, so one MIGHT be able
to work with them.

WorkFlowy
+ Webapp, so it's extremely portable.
+ Web-based, so it's always synchronized :).
+ Ability to zoom-in on a selected part of your list is much better
done than the Org-Mode one (at least the "C-x n s" I know about).
- Bad editing shortcuts and lack of general text editing capabilities
I'm used to (ie. CTRL+arrows doesn't move around text by jumping words).

I finally chose Org Mode (don't need to synchronize that list, and I do need the editing powers), but I also have a lot of stuff on WorkFlowy that I need to have synchronized between work, home, and whereever I go.
yeah i was wondering about creating a single arena with a million square points or more, each player would see a smaller viewport focused on his cycle (snake/nibble), new players would spawn in a empty spot and so on. the server would have to store each point of the trail to calculate collisions.

EDIT:

the game's not particularly exciting but i'd imagine that being on the same canvas avoiding the trail of potentially thousands of players (plus your own) could be cool

EDIT2:

also if it was possible to add 3D to it (the ability to turn in the Z axis) could be pretty awesome
It's tough for sure. I did email them and they promised to put me on their project page. Its in their best interest to promote projects that are using their service.
Great $self->patOnBack() but web spam is a huge unsolved problem that hurts Google's core business and is possibly the biggest threat to their revenue and market share. It's also the biggest opportunity for innovators in the search space right now.
A Fun Developer Interview Question
Ask HN: Why do startups get acquired for a cost way more than the revenue made?
Why do big companies want to buy the startup companies with prices way more than the revenues made (even if they were multiplied by many years)?

Is there any specific example where the startup's technology affecting the buyer companies significantly?
You're absolutely correct, and the answer to the second 'why' is that the sales process in education is unbelievably long and expensive relative to what the customers are willing to pay for software.

I worked for an education startup between 2003 and 2006 that made a learning management system similar to the OP. We also laughed at the terrible UI and outdated technology used by our competitors. Little did we know...

The problem is that you only have two choices in education. You can try marketing to individual teachers using Adwords or the like, but there aren't many teachers who want to spend their own money on classroom tools. Districts aren't keen on it, either. This is strictly microISV territory.

The other alternative is to market directly to school districts or universities. That means you need expensive sales reps and money to burn on travel budgets, trade shows, etc. The sales cycle takes about a year, even for the smallest customer. Your customers are the administrators on the purchasing committee, not teachers or students. The admins are far more concerned with back-office functionality like tracking attendance or whether teachers are following the curriculum than the quality of the UI. In fact, the UI was basically irrelevant so long as it was physically possible to do everything on their list of requirements.

Educators make it extremely expensive to provide them with software. But they don't have deep pockets either, so the margins for software developers are extremely tight. There are no competitive pressures in education. Districts are perfectly happy to use obsolete technology indefinitely. There are still thousands of schools using applications based on Access, Foxpro, and DBase IV. (seriously!) The only thing in your favor is that once you sign a customer, they are extremely reluctant to move to a competitor regardless of how outdated your product becomes.

Thus, the standard business model in education is for the large players like Pearson or Blackboard to gobble up small independent companies with locked-in customer bases built up over many years, cut investment in new development to a minimum, and milk the products until they're unviable.

TL;DR: The people buying educational software don't care and won't pay for good UI.
The original page randomly changes on refresh. Can you make the feed dynamic, too?
When all of you are done fighting, go take a look at http://lazyreadr.com ; I'm betting the figurative farm on it
I think the essential difference is that practicing the guitar involves doing the same thing over and over until you get it right/fast, whereas practicing programming involves doing different things.
No, broadband connections are starting to have major latency issues and it's only going to get worse in the short term.

Check out this earlier discussion on bufferbloat: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2002992

Basically, if you have a broadband connection, a wireless card and a wireless N router expect bizarre latency spikes. The reason you get those unpredictable spikes is because of the unnecessarily big buffers at every step down the line.
It doesn't matter per se how simple the game is. If the game mechanics are sensitive to temporal latency between players then the game can benefit from these methods.

However, I don't see how a light-cycles game could use any kind of prediction or lag comp. Since players can change direction instantaneously and at arbitrary times, there is nothing that can be predicted. And any kind of lag comp would appear as obvious breaches of the game rules.
Sure, but I still think you overestimate the general security knowledge of web developers. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see that most people aren't even hashing the passwords.
Right, and a lot of people carry small pocket knives on their keychains, etc.
The most general answer is "talent acquisition" (you should do a web search on that, also a HN search will be very helpful). In short, the proposed value of the company is based on the value of the engineering team.
Google Tasks has a big interface:

https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas

which you can also pull into separate window to make an "app".
Apple isn't trying to claim a moral high ground here.
What if the source code is available through the developer's website?
Read the BSD license. They definitely have a choice.
I would think to a guitarist, what we do when programming is "all the same". Just like we think guitar practice is all the same. No, the guitarist would say, there's real differences between flamenco, jazz, prog rock, ...

If you support the 10K hours argument, some things are willingly done and others less so. I make coin with programming, yet people pay to see guitarists.
Stack Overflow top questions in ebook format for Kindle
This case is already covered by Bayesian analysis, no need to make special rules for it.

Also, learn languages! :-)
They want to restrict the syndicated developer. But the program you download is the same open-source app you signed up for.

DRM is indeed an issue, but that goes toward the tivoization clause that VLC explicitly did not adopt.
Congresswoman Shot In Arizona - Shooter's Myspace And Youtube Pages
You need to have a real interest in the subject. Anyone that wants to learn programming can do so but you can't take a random person and force them to learn in and get good results.
You kinda have, basically there's been a mass epiphany that using most 'advanced' programming features tends to actually increase total lines of code and complexity for no discernible benefit.

It's a corollary from the idea that if you think you just wrote something really clever, you probably just wrote an unmaintainable mess that no-one else will really understand and will haunt you for a long time.

It's kinda one of those unsaid assumptions that everyone suddenly knew and yet no-one's really vocalised. Apart from maybe Yegge, I have a vague recollection that one of his articles touched on it.
This is difficult in every single case.<br />
If the article is popular, the community made a decision. Flagging it as off-topic should e handled with care. Maybe he should at least have a look at the ongoing discussion to see, what people have to say. This may give him an idea, why others voted for it.
A good portion of the remainder is not being afraid to make things worse temporarily, I'd say.
Absolutely. It's extremely tough to build a customer base in education, but once you've signed them they're just as reluctant to move on to a competitor. Standard practice is for the larger companies like Blackboard and Pearson to gobble up the smaller fish and either shut down their products or milk them dry. There's very little incentive to invest in product development when no one in the ecosystem experiences much competitive pressure.
"particularly when it comes from people whose livelihood depends on sounding like they know what they're talking about."

Maybe so. But it's also worth noting that guys like Chris Dixon from Hunch/Site Advisor (http://twitter.com/#!/cdixon/status/23788591968686080) and Vinicius Vacanti from Yipit (http://twitter.com/#!/vacanti/status/23852873972457472) liked the list, among others...
I take your point: OpenID is something they might actually want to do, especially if it's promoted heavily.
> This action will not result in the decontrol of source code classified under ECCN 5D002

> because, once it is “publicly available,” it is, by definition, available for download by any end user without restriction, removing it from the jurisdiction of the EAR will have no effect on export control policy.

To me, the above looks like double-speak. Hopefully grellas or someone legally trained will chime in on what the announcement really means.
Howdy Reddit.
See http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1370.asp for an explanation of what I meant when I suggested he use lag compensation.

There is a lag to tell the server when you want to move and a lag when the server tells the other player where you moved, so the lag compensation is for the server to guess where you thought the other player was when you made your move. This is used extensively in Counter-Strike, and I think it has its uses here.
Nobody thought Google could control the web. That wasn't the claim. The claim was, Google was sufficiently badass in 2005 that for any given idea, you got asked if this is so great, why can't Google notice it and do it faster better stronger. There were reasons that it couldn't for some ideas, obviously. But for others, like Kiko, it could and did.
She kept it. I got a few upgrades since I bought CoverSutra a few years ago. Her error is that the change in distribution and licensing was probably sufficient for 3.0.

RealMac annoyed me one time when I got v3.5 (or whatever it was at the time) in a bundle, but 3.6 was a paid upgrade…because they didn't think there was quite enough to justify bumping to 4.0. 3.6 came out about 4 months after the bundle, IIRC, so it was doubly bad PR.
Social network data and research
Well, actually you do need to have a developer account to install builds on any iOS device. The 99$ fee is necessesary even for installs on your own device.

I guess they have their reasons for not just opening up provisioning for everybody, although doing that would sure help them win over the open source crowd (not that they really care about that in any way).
Enron Email Dataset (500,000 emails)
I don't know if they're still available, but the Forrest Mims electronics books that they used to sell at radio shack are absolutely awesome, teach theory and have tons of simple (and not so simple) circuits you can build. They're mostly analog though, digital is much easier, just connect a few parts together and then it's all code.
Also a Federal Judge from Arizona was shot dead.

"Ms. Giffords, who represents Arizona’s Eighth District in the southeastern corner of the state, has been an outspoken critic of Arizona’s tough immigration law, which is focused on identifying, prosecuting and deporting illegal immigrants, and she had come under criticism for her vote in favor of the Democrats’ health care law.

Friends said she had received threats over the years. Judge Roll had been involved in immigration cases and had previously received death threats. "
Yeah, my question is how does this filter compare to standard carbon filters, which, despite the ridiculously high cost of those filter pitchers and faucet filters are actually dirt cheap to manufacture and are highly effective.
Press and hold A, don't let go, prints infinite As with one key stroke.

That's not writing a program and it's probably not the answer Google wanted but software can't really do a "keystroke" anyway, it just prints characters to the screen/file/whatever.
Naive me, I thought it was because he knew more than one version of assembly.

One time, I did a database assignment in MySQL instead of SQL server because I was only running Linux at the time, and didn't have access to the school's lab the night before the assignment was due. Ya, I know.
Where did the games in the Mac App Store go? 
I can't find any using search (e.g. Harry Potter, Lego, etc), and there is no category called Games.
They should have businesses accounts pay $100/year, honor system with a badge or something if you have paid (your company would look really bad if it didn't), and they could make a ton without having to do much.
> values expressed in the GPL: allowing your software to be built on by those who agree to return the favor.

GPL3 has gone far beyond that; instead of just requiring that the software be usable as a starting point and building block for new work, it now also mandates that it be user-serviceable. You don't just need to be allowed to modify the tivo software to make your own dvr, now you also need to be able to modify the software in-place on your existing device.
also if it was possible to add 3D to it (the ability to turn in the Z axis) could be pretty awesome

Hmm.. what would the trails look like? A line is pretty easy to avoid in three dimensions.

Maybe rectangles could be extruded from the line segment between the last two turning points.

Or you somehow control two light cycles and extrude the line between them.
Node.JS 0.3.4 out (with experimental HTTPS)
Quake 3 engine implements weapons prediction (very well)! back in the days, every Quaker had his best snaps/cl_maxPackets values in his .cfg. :)
Righ-wing gunman shoots Congresswoman, Federal Judge
I'm not entirely convinced about this, so perhaps someone can help me out. If I contribute to a BSD-licensed project but don't assign copyright, wouldn't that give me the right to ask Apple to remove the project from their store on copyright grounds, assuming somebody submitted it there? What does the GPL have to do with it, in general? (I realise the specifics of this case are slightly different.)
You don't have to circumvent the app store. You can choose a different platform. Saying that the iOS platform is the only market worth mentioning in this debate is a needless restriction. They can choose instead to go the android route or move off of Mobile completely and do something else.

iOS and the AppStore are popular for many reasons some of which have a lot to do with the Content Creators who are publishing there. It is not however the only marketplace and Creators have other choices.
I actually feel the opposite -- microcontrollers are exactly why I got back into electronics. Being able to write a few lines of code that interact with the 'real' world -- that's what I find exciting, and analog circuits are tedious necessities in comparison.

Regardless of your ultimate interest Arduino (and the AVR microcontroller family in general) is a decent place to start :)

If you do have previous development experience, you'll probably want to move past Arduino pretty quickly. You can pick up an Atmel STK500 development board for just $79, and either use it with AVR Studio or the open source toolchains (avrdude, avr-gcc, avr-libc, etc): http://store.atmel.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=p:1050007
Full quote:

--

"This action will not result in the decontrol of source code classified under ECCN 5D002, but it will result in a simplification of the regulatory provisions for publicly available mass market software and specified encryption software in object code."

--

ECCN 5A002 is "software". This simplifies provisions for "publicly available mass market software".
I'd honestly go ahead and bite the bullet and say these students are lacking in an important intellectual capacity if they can't handle that extremely modest amount of abstraction. If they are successful it is probably due to a solid work ethic.
Using markov chains is fun until it all goes wrong. My Twitter bot sadly seems to have become infatuated with Justin Bieber sigh

http://twitter.com/markov_chains