skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I should send the Senator my comment on Comcast's blog when they posted their letter complaining about Netflix, which did not get approved by their moderator:

====

I am a Comcast residential HSI customer, and have many clients who are
business HSI Comcast customers. At the same time, I do maintain servers
in my own racks at a datacenter.

What is not mentioned in this letter, is that Comcast is already being
paid - by me, and by every other customer, for access to the content.

Note that Comcast has never said that the Level3/Netflix issue is about
users exceeding their allotted bandwidth (currently at about 250GB/month
for residential); presumably, were a Comcast user to use 249GB of
bandwidth downloading cute pictures of cats, Comcast would have no
objection.

It appears to be the specific issue that Netflix is a possible
competitor to Comcast's TV business, that somehow causes Comcast to
decide that there is a problem.

Understand this: every Netflix video to be streamed, is specifically
requested by a Comcast user, operating under the Comcast-advertised
"High Speed Internet" service and presumably within the bandwidth caps
that Comcast's own contract allows.

That Comcast presumes to have the right to limit, modify, or decide for
me which pieces of the Internet I can have access to, removes Comcast's
common carrier protections, calls into question the truth of your (meaning Comcast)
advertisements for the HSI service, and raises the issue of whether
Comcast is dealing in bad faith with each and every Comcast HSI subscriber.

====
I had the same problem, which I solved by adding the following to my user style (using Stylish):

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
.title > :visited, .subtext > a[href*="item?id"]:visited {
color: #ff6600 !important;
}
}

It marks visited links / comment threads in orange. I use Firefox but think you can do something similar for Chrome.
Timothy Gowers on mathematical implication
Seriously? Where the hell do you live, Georgia?

My last 3 cities: Houston, Cincinnati, Columbia SC.
Varnish supports edge side includes. The header bar could be an ESI and the rest of the page could be cached
How Facebook Used White Space To Crush Myspace | Techdirt
You can still access the service with your FB or Twitter accounts.

An option to sign up with no social account is also planned for a future release.
And that's why nobody sane will try to screw with them. Nobody wants to lose the ability to do video on the internet during next 20 (plus/minus) years.
I think we'll get there eventually.
* A sample report would be nifty - I had to pretend to be a business I'm not to get it

* An obvious feedback form with a callout would help. There are numerous start-ups providing these, or you can roll your own
Someone on #starups mentioned that I didn't post a writeup, so here it is:

http://www.illuminations-for-developers.com/blog/article/201...
I think this is the best thing that could happen iff a group of lawyers backs up the professors all the way up to the Supreme Court. And of course, they win. I don't think any career politician will ever reverse course on the DMCA. They don't fully understand the implications and they don't want to alienate their campaign donors. Instead, we as a community will have to chip, piece by piece away at the vagrancies of a law which should never have existed in the first place.
"Fire in the Valley" is probably one of the better books to actual talk about the people building these things in the 70's.
Exactly "Consumers' computers belong to them" - which is not what Sony are claiming when it comes to hacking your own Playstation.
Netflix only streams HD for certain movies and only if your bandwidth is good enough. If your pipe can't handle it, you will indeed be getting DVD-quality video.
Maybe...the big frameworks that don't support P3 are the larger issue me thinks.
Have you checked out Postling? Sounds like they're a competitor.

Great start -- small biz definitely needs good tools like these.
Sigh, you shouldn't be relying on Google for this anyways. No company should be hosting files critical for your website except you.
Are you using any sort of in-memory fragment caching? That seems like it might reduce some render overhead.
Surely there's a way to target the JVM?

I'd trust my life on the JVM, it's pretty battle tested, and the GC is simply awesome.
The World's Coolest Offices
Imposter! New York's Nodejitsu Brandjacked By Arizona Startup "NodeFu"
Thanks, some helpful tips there.
Also fun and sometimes helpful are the escape sequences '~?' to show help, and '~C' to add/remove forwards in a current ssh session. The man pages have more info.
I think this is a really good step in the right direction, the specification process is now matching up with the way the standard are actually implemented.

I think in the last few days the w3c + whatwg have taken really positive steps, both for the understanding of the technologies and the marketing of them.
Having your features be an instant mark of attention is unsettling. Women often understand this, as they're subject to being hollered at by random guys.
And, presumably thanks to tptacek's hard work, one of the key search terms bringing people in here is "sous vide supreme".
I had the great opportunity in my undergrad college compiler class to write an entire ecosystem to understand better how some of this stuff works. We didn't just write a compiler, we wrote an emulator for a simple, notional architecture. The whole thing was simple enough that we could write the compiler toolkit, the system emulator/VM and run it in a few days.

Then for extra credit we could rewrite the whole thing (or part of it) in another language. And/or get a guaranteed A if we could make the whole shebang self-hosting.

It was a really great way of understanding the basics of a system architecture.

As for the emulator, it was pretty primitive, but basically it loaded the compiled program code into memory, then would read an operation's worth of bytes, look the operation up in some kind of lookup table (or similar) that mapped the emulated system's instructions to local system instructions say, x86, and execute that operation.

Sometimes the mapping resulted in several operations on the host side the emulated system might execute in one.

eg.
ADD R1, R2, R3

might add the contents of registers r2 and r3, then put the result into r1. In x86 it would be more like

ADD AX, BX
MOV CX, AX

or some such.

(actually we did it a little higher level then that, but that's the idea).

So an emulator needs to provide all of the various registers and operations and such so that the code can execute, it likely has to have the ability emulate the memory architecture and translate I/O appropriately. Some older systems for example could only output to a printer terminal, or to a simple status display, on a modern system you have to translate calls to those output devices to equivalent ones on your system (like the screen).

More complex system may need to emulate several processors. The SNES and Amiga for example have a handful of chips that not only need to be emulated, but much of the software assumes a particular timing in the interaction of those components that can be very challenging to get right and keeping track of all that and running at reasonable performance can require fast hardware.

These days though, not many emulators use the simple execution mechanism I outlined above. Many of them have sophisticated code profiling and execution caches that can significantly speed up the emulation.

In these terms, emulating a system, or a VM (like Java) or some other runtime environment (like Javascript and the V8 runtime for example) isn't really all that different and there's huge crossover in the theoretical concepts between these areas.
A Better Mobile Experience for More People
And that doesn't bother you? They're basically saying, "We may have stolen your technology... oh well, it's ours now. We run the internet."

I guess as long as Google is pushing the technology that "you" like they can do no evil.
Evernote shares their Mac App Store numbers
The Courier predated the announcement, but did not predate the rumors. Other than verticals, tablets were a joke. For how the iPhone changed things, just look at the Android phones pre and post iPhone. Apple dragged each of these markets in a different direction.
Show HN: Simple reference/citation creation tool
What's the license of the document?
Ask HN: Is there a free webservice to resize images by URL?
Looking to hear some comments as to what webservice I can use to resize images. Not by uploading an image, but by passing the URL of the image to the service.

Thanks

:-)
I am reading Tim Wu's excellent book "The Master Switch" right now that is relevant to Franken's concerns. Covers corporate takeovers of information systems starting in the late 1800s.
The line at end of the Wikipedia article puts an interesting spin on this story:

Later, when asked whether he would do what he did again,
he replied frankly, "No, I would not."

This makes me see it as more a cautionary tale than inspiring. Although it is still amazing.
It's licensed under MIT X11 license to anyone to do with as they wish.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if that court case got cited in this new case? It could both serve to argue against Sony's claim that consumers don't have the right to tinker with their product after sale, and as a demonstration of the importance of giving security researchers freedom to study consumer products.
In what other technology or industry can the practitioners carry everything they need for innovation around in their backpacks. If machine shops were so ubiquitous and portable, mechanical engineering patents would be unnecessary too.

Also, software became patentable in 1991 when a lower court overruled US Supreme Court precedent that software for general-purpose computers is not patentable. Some people cite Diamond v. Diehr (1980) as enabling software patents, but that contradicts what the court opinion actually says.
Do you ever question the choice of MzScheme?
What are you going to do with that degree?
It wasn't until the early 90's that software was widely considered patentable. Even then it wasn't till the late 90's that software patenting really started to take off. And much of that was by companies who saw patenting more as defensive practice to help defend against patent suits (much as were seeing in many of the smart phone lawsuits). But it is difficult to sit on a big pile of patents and not make some effort to monetize those assets. I think we're just beginning to see the true cost of software patents. Of course for the big companies it's just the cost of doing business, a cost that gets passed on to consumers. But for small companies it is an existential threat, and that could greatly reduce innovation in the US.

Of course there is the risk that bigger companies with more manpower and marketing muscle will copy good ideas from startups. But I think most entrepreneurs would rather fight that fight by being quicker, smarter and listening to the customer, than to fight patent trolls in court. In the first case their will be a winner, and a looser, but generally the public wins. In lawsuits you may win some, or loose some, but in the long run only the lawyers win.
I think there are far too many happen chances in evolutionary biology to say that an advanced civilization is inevitable; my rational mind has a LOT of trouble accepting that our current development is a long history of happen-stances beginning from life´s first development, but I see no viable alternative. But to think that given another Earth with life it would happen again? With all of the stretches that happen all along the evolutionary tree I find this absurd.
The Bobcats
Level 3 did a great job spinning this into public outrage. Here's what actually happened:

1. Level3 started offering CDN services. By leveraging their existing peering relationships (as a tier 1 ISP) they could essentially subsidize the transit costs of the CDN business, compared to e.g. Akamai which had been paying Comcast for peering to reach Comcast customers.

2. Netflix got a good offer for CDN services from Level3, and switched a bunch of their content from Akamai to Level3's CDN.

3. Comcast therefore saw a bunch of paid traffic turn into unpaid traffic overnight, and complained.

This is a business dispute between two self-interested parties. Is it really fair for Level3 to use their position in the ISP business to undercut competitors in a new CDN business? Was it fair a few years ago when Akamai caved and agreed to pay Comcast for peering? Will it be fair for Comcast to use a newly acquired media property to exact revenge on Netflix/Level3?

The problem with Network Neutrality is that it takes a complex issue, the product of many complex business relationships, and frames it in a black-or-white context. The history here is complicated, and the only thing I'm sure of is that everyone's a bad guy sometimes.
It's unfortunate, though, that a few people's lives (the researchers) will be miserable and stressful for the next few years -- just to protect our right to free speech. The researchers deserve kudos for standing up to the bully, but it won't be a fun experience.
Now, when I saw the statement I though "Aha, but zero is both even and odd." As usual, Wikipedia has corrected me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_of_zero).

This article turned out to be a fascinating read, for example, the fact that zero is even leads to 1 having an even number of prime numbers, a slightly counterintuitive proposition, which turns out to be important in the definition of the Mobius function and ... there goes 15 minutes.
Also check out. Grant Skinner's blog post about developing Pirates Love Daisies, http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/12/pirates-love-daisi...
You want thumbnails?
Easel JS Simplifies Working with Canvas in HTML5
HOW TO: Create the Linen-style Texture in Photoshop
In addition to the qualitative/quantitative issue, this site also conflates the general with the specific.

There are plenty of quantitative metrics that might be relevant to an individual's lifestyle, or more general metrics that could at least be correlated to individuals' preferences and choices. But this site is only comparing aggregate metrics of one country to those of another.

The site asks the question "if you were not born in the country you were, what would your life be like?", but the answers it provides have little to do with my life.

I expected to fill out a questionnaire about my lifestyle and see results that estimated how the details I provided would play out in a foreign country.
Color me shocked that Best Buy would try and get you to buy something they do sell rather than something they don't sell. Those greedy fucks.
But people clearly wanted Courier prior to the announcement of the iPad. No one knew what the iPad looked like, yet people were drooling over the Courier. My point isn't that the iPad wasn't a great machine, but rather that the demand was there. Everyone knew that it was time for a tablet -- someone just needed to build a decent one.

The same is true for the iPhone. Everyone knew that modern smartphone OSes were duds, but wanted a smartphone. The big thing I recall was people wanted a decent mobile browsing experience. Apple finally provided it. It wasn't that people didn't know they wanted what Apple would provide... people didn't think it could be done.

IMO the only big thing with the iPhone that defied common belief at the time was a software keyboard. And even to this day, it's not universally loved. But literally everything else in the iPhone could be found on wishlists at the time of launch.
JQuery Address, Ruby on Rails and Will Paginate
Comments are displayed differently for different people.

I once posted a comment which was immediately invisible to everyone besides me - I'm guessing it was marked as spam for some reason, but left visible to me so I think I successfully posted it.
What was the name of the company/product?
Are not your laws of computing, specifically (VII, VI, IV, II, I), moral judgments? Trying to "technology-away" a preexisting moral problem is folly, but software, platforms especially, set a stage of default behaviors. One could argue that those who blindly go along with said default are moral failures (for their lack of analysis), but this would do little to negate the resulting effects of those masses.

On the technical front, what do you propose to copy-on-write? I'll presume by "morals", you mean that I should trust the authors of the hypothetical ImageLib and YourCode to not restrict my use of images through technical means, and to generally do the right thing when it comes to library changes.

Let's say I wish to modify ImageLib as used in your application. For copy-on-write, what is "written" ? Forking YourCode along with ImageLib (immutable references) is a non-starter, as the common case is that YourCode changes periodically, and that I'm uninterested in manual merging, as YourCode just isn't a large part of my life.

So, I've got my locally forked version of ImageLib, but any changes I make are only applied to that specific version of ImageLib. Every other XXCode which uses a different lineage or revision of ImageLib will lack the customizations I've made!

So how can this be solved? Freezing the API of ImageLib would alleviate the need for incompatible releases. But to freeze the API, it needs to be trimmed down to the bare minimum of core functionality, with extras pushed out into other modules using well thought out hooks. After eventually reaching perfection, the API can finally stop changing, and overriding all possible ImageLibs is easy (as only one exists). However, we have completely locked down the API (and thus cut off unexpected new functionality), and have effectively created a format!

(also, a tidbit that's kind of a continuation: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2121549)
Al Franken is not "informed". He is a hollywood shill who happens to fall on Netflix's side this time.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/10291211924/the-19...
Learning lisp: the bump free way
I upvoted you: everything in your comment was correct, on-point, and good advice. I'm more worried about all the people who don't follow the best practice. I know a guy who used to run web servers for dozens of clients, who didn't know about HTTP headers before I told him.

For what it's worth, in-memory caching is a totally different animal. You can expect the in-memory cache to keep a typical object for minutes or hours, depending on usage patterns. You can expect the disk cache to keep a typical object for days or weeks, across browser restarts and even system reboots.
Tim Wu recently discussed these issues on CSPAN and I posted his interview on Charlie Rose a few days ago (videos):

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/TheMas

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2080742

Warning: put in a historic context, he predicts a somewhat disheartening outcome.

A cringe worthy update from the CEO's of Time Warner and AT&T. Straight from horses mouth [starts at 18:40], the two share their perspectives on regulation, innovation and the net (recorded on 1/12/11):

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/InnovativeI

Summary: Innovation requires less tax, less regulation. Pleased with recent FCC rules on net neutrality.
Is this a snipe at the W3C from the WHATWG? Is it a coincidence that the W3C announced the HTML5 logo yesterday, and today the WHATWG is dropping the 5? Why would that not have been coordinated? I feel like the W3C logo would make more sense as being HTML instead of HTML5
I think he means that the nginx reverse proxy is just a part of the infrastructure, like the server, OS, MzScheme etc they use.
Only working when I'm feeling alert and clear. I find it's far more productive over time to stop working every day as soon as I start having trouble concentrating. I don't push myself to get in another few hours of work, I just stop.

The second part of that is making sure I get a good full night of rest, so I can maximize the time I can concentrate per day.

I realized that for many years I spent a lot of the time being groggy and sleep deprived. Only in the past few years have I learned to control my sleep and concentration.
"In 7 seconds, a hundred or more connections accumulate. So the server ends up with hundreds of threads, most of them probably waiting for input (waiting for the HTTP request). MzScheme can be inefficient when there are 100s of threads waiting for input -- when it wants to find a thread to run, it asks the O/S kernel about each socket in turn to see if any input is ready, and that's a lot of asking per thread switch if there are lots of threads. So the server is able to complete fewer requests per second when there is a big backlog, which lets more backlog accumulate, and perhaps it takes a long time for the server to recover."

I may have misunderstood but it sounds like you have MzScheme facing the open internet? Try putting nginx (or another epoll/kqueue based server) in front of MzScheme. It will handle the thousands of connections you have that are waiting for IO with very little incremental CPU load and with a single thread. Then when nginx reverse proxies to MzScheme each request happens very fast because it's local which means you need much fewer threads for your app server. That means less memory and less of the other overhead that you get with a high thread count.

An additional advantage is that you can enable keepalive again (right now you have it disabled it looks like) which makes things a faster for first-time visitors. It also makes it slightly faster for us regulars because the conditional gets we do for the gif's and css won't have to reestablish connections. Less connections established means you give your OS a break too with fewer syn/syn-ack/ack TCP handshakes.

Someone mentioned below that reverse proxies won't work for HN. They mean that caching won't work - but a reverse proxy like nginx that doesn't cache but handles high concurrency efficiently should give you a huge perf improvement.

PS: I'd love to help implement this free. I run a 600 req/sec site using nginx reverse proxying to apache.
>I would be interested to hear your arguments on how dropping H.264 could increase usage of the <video> element in the long term. I just don't see a case for it.

It's very simple - a significant share of the browser market was never going to support <video> with H.264. In which case you end up with a fragmented market and everybody's using wrappers like Flash anyhow.

Of the available formats, WebM is the one most likely to eventually get everyone on the same page. Without that, <video> never really becomes a standard.

It's been posted elsewhere in the thread several times, but if you have a few minutes, this is probably the single best article I've seen on the whole mess:

http://antimatter15.com/wp/2011/01/the-ambiguity-of-open-and...

If MS jumps on board, which wouldn't shock me at all, you've got 90% of the browser market signed on.
So the solution is to add a variable for confidence in the completeness of the equation. Perhaps range 0.5..1.5. And then another for confidence in the confidence.
But isn't it too late?
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/01/h-264-66-percent-web-video/
This is from May last year, I bet it's even higher now.
Say by some miracle that webm takes over, even though it's free, it's a Google run project, and we now that Apple chooses stability over availability (i.e. their rejection of Flash)

From my experience building a HTML5 video playback portfolio for a client, playing high quality webm/ogg is just not doable yet, even via Amazons CDN.

And what i don't get, on a very basic level, are these companies that own these file formats really ever going to cash in on all those files out there? I mean GIF, JPG, PNG are all patented formats, and they are everywhere.

Why doesn't Google announce for example that they will also stop supporting JPG/PNG/GI in favor of their open source WebP format? If they were really drawing bold lines they should be honest about it.