skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blah Blah Blah.

Normally, I ignore such responses, but how could I resist bait like that?

Social networking was crucial for a country of high oppressed people to overthrow their tyrannical government.

Ahh, the jury's still out on that one. Let's see how much less tyrannical the next government is. I bet not much.

Doctors can identify diseases from their phone in a way that would have taken days

To what purpose? This is the first generation with worse health and life expectency than its parents. What good is providing so much technology at so much cost to those who push so little value out of the other end of the pipeline?

New times, new problems

No question. All I'm wondering is, "Where is the new value?"

Our generation is pushing innovation at a speed that is unparalleled

Versus what? Citing, please.

Hmmm, lets see...

From 1910 to 1960: The masses received first value from the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, radio, television, electricity, indoor plumbing, sewage treatment, and antibiotics.

From 1960 to 2010: We can carry our phones with us. Cool.

don't confuse the 47 fart apps in the app store as a complete misappropriation of focus

Opps, I completely forgot about smart phones. I was referring to all the instant communications we now have that produce so much activity and so little value. Is that all we've got?
A Comparison of the 4 Largest Aircraft Ever Built
The "subscription thing" is not what you describe. Apple haven't offered a mechanism to make payments — if that were all they'd done, I think people would be fine with it. What they've done is mandated a mechanism that takes money out of your pocket. Yes, developers are angry about it: see http://blog.tinygrab.com/2011/02/21/tinygrab-apples-app-stor... . From the way you talk about it, it sounds like you didn't depend on subscription revenue in the first place, so you just happened not to be affected by this particular policy.

When you say Apple treats you well, you mean Apple hasn't yet changed the rules against you. Apple treated Pandora well until recently.
I don't see the use of regexp in gvent.py.
Apart from the tin foil hat, I love the doublethink in this. So basically you're saying 'screw the spec, make an implementation and make that the spec'?
Apple is to developers as Facebook is to its users
I wonder if there's an update for my MkLinux box!

http://mklinux.org/
[pdf] Mobile Payments go Viral: M‐PESA in Kenya
Churnalism: See when press releases are recycled
The end of the IT department
Snapshots of Front, Best and Ask going back 8 months ago (with comments) in the archive drop down box: http://hackerbra.in/ (with search)
That really seems like an adequate number of books for the large majority (90%+?) of users, esp when you consider that downloading another only takes seconds.

Before Kindle, did we complain that you could only carry a half-dozen books in your bag at a time? Not very often.
I'm not going to pretend I know what Mach is, but around here, (big company that you're familiar with), rebooting/bouncing the servers is pretty much how issues are dealt with. "Response times outside of SLA: bounced the server." "Database connections timing out: bounced the server." "Users experiencing high load times for pages: restarted JVMs. Then bounced the servers."

Root cause seems to be "server up too long."
Looking at BDD from the perspective of requirements engineering
BDD looks incomplete from a testing perspective? Try to look at it from a requirements engineering perspective!
Epic Games makes Unreal Engine even cheaper for indies
You won't be surfing in Sarasota but the beaches are in fact a reason to list "by the beach." Not many beaches (Boracay, Lombok and Sulawesi, some areas of Phuket) compare to what can be found from Sarasota down to Boca Grande and on to Sanibel and Captiva.

I live in Sarasota and find it boring. But then most of my time is either coding or outdoors. I can't think of many more places I'd rather be.
Please don't try to turn this into drama. That isn't what I said at all. Going overboard in praise of Apple is no better than going overboard in the opposite direction.
I'll look into using this for a project I'm working on. For my purposes, I only need detail down to the zip code level, so the lack of depth is okay.
So, could be the other way too, but isn't. The study raises the question Why?
Anyone know what can get an app shutdown by facebook? Apparently, Dan received this from fb: "For example, if an application is making an inordinate number of stream.publish calls and receiving a large number of user reports". What exactly is an inordinate number of post? Was Breakup Notifier spamming signed up users' post stream to get the word out? Or was it just an extraordinary number of api calls that FB was not use to getting?
Apple iPad 2 Event Confirmed for March 2
> "We’re willing to comply with whatever they want us to (within reason)."

This app wasn't taken down because of "an inordinate number of stream.publish calls."

The question is how this app falls within acceptable behavior. Is it closer in nature to the acceptable practices (such as the FB Newsfeed where you see friends' recently changed statuses)? Or is it closer to behavior that FB wants to dissuade (such as an app showing how many times a given friend has viewed your profile)?
The links submitted are just one part of the overall quality of HN, I would even argue a small part.

What is much more valuable is the quality of discussion in the comments that is really where HN shines, or used to; however you feel.
Data Contract Inheritance - Known Types and the Generic Resolver
As someone with little experience with monetization, which ad networks do you usually use on a site with - at the time - no traction? Yoggrt, Fusion Ads and Deck Network come to mind, but you can't use nor apply for them, so what does that leave you?
Bloom: new ways to see and communicate
And they disabled his personal account too. Not the best way to get yourself to be seen as a good platform for developers.
I'm sure Facebook will refer to some perfectly vague rules. My guess is that its transgression was to highlight how creepy Facebook is or can be.
For a new user who visits this site for the first time, the "2.0" doesn't make any sense. Why add version number to your product name? It's fine to write about it in blog post announcement. But when I visit your site, I don't care which version it is. I know I'm using latest version that is live.
Want to know how the fastest growing start-up in history grows so fast?
"Facebook has also, inexplicably, disabled his personal account."

Sure they can try and justify blocking the application by saying it made 'excessive API calls', but how do they justify disabling his personal account?
If not, I suspect it's that most people already understand that a hosted service, like Facebook, is inherently a walled garden, and hence it's not surprising when something like this happens. Apple's control over what you can and can't do with hardware and software that you own is a little more alarming perhaps?
You don't get to 3.6 million stalkers without creeping out a few people.
A Sneak Peek Into the Future of Beluga
Ask HN: What's the state of the art for temporary landing pages?
I want to hear the HN community's current favourite technologies and techniques for building, hosting and analysing temporary landing pages - the kind you put up to gather potential user contact details and use cases before launching a new product. This is an area that has seen some rapid developments recently, with new SAAS products springing up all the time.

I want to hear about:

- Awesome hosted services with things like integrated A/B testing and automagical social network integration

- Clever techniques for increasing capture (increasing user 'investment' leading up to capturing an email address, etc)

- Your favourite ways of driving the right kind of traffic to a landing page

- Thoughts on how best to give information about the product - video, text, graphics

- Techniques for analyzing the data resulting from such a campaign.

If you have or know a blog post about this area, be sure to post a link. Articles like this are what HN is best at; we have a lot of knowledge distributed throughout our skulls.
Want to Learn Ruby on Rails? Check out Thoughtbot & Fairhaven Capital’s Workshop
> I was referring to all the instant communications we now have that produce so much activity and so little value. Is that all we've got?

We are more connected with people than ever. And future generations will be even more so. I get that there's a general sentiment that spending more time on Facebook or Twitter isn't valuable "real people time." But I'll be contrarian and say it is.

I've kept in touch with more of the people I care about AND have deeper relationships with them because of social software and mobile communications tech. Yes, because of Facebook, Skype, and the panoply of other innovations that may seem like just pointless activity.
Don't Suck Twice
Archive.org Partners With 150 Libraries to Launch an E-Book Lending Program
Sorry, I meant to upvote. Fat iPhone thumb.
No. I don't own facebook's hardware. Apple's terms for their app store wouldn't be so onerous if there was another legal/good way to install software on your own device.
hahahahaahahaha.
I didn't realize they said the sector was overvalued as a whole. That is sufficient. I just caught the part that valuations were all over the map, which to me means that some companies are overvalued and others undervalued, but no significant trend one way or the other.
My guess: no.

Apple's policies involve dictating the terms of outside services being used in their garden.

Facebook's policies involved dictating the terms of their own services being used in their garden.
Social networking was crucial for a country of highly oppressed people to overthrow their tyrannical government.

No, not really. It might surprise you, but repressive regimes have been overthrown for centuries before Facebook. What really helped was high food prices, historically a harbinger of political change. Social media was marginal.
What a cool website: absolutely beautiful, if at times hard to see the information itself.

I think, maybe, the issue is that the graphics move and are striking, but the information itself does not. Certainly, making the text large and bubbly doesn't seem the right answer, but maybe there is a way to make it pop.

Really, though, amazing. Be sure to check out http://fizz.bloom.io/
Google Calculator 
I had no idea the Google Calculator understood numbers or English words. Yahoo, Bing, and Ask can't do it. Saved me from typing a lot of zeros.

12 billion / 10 million
I use Ruby in a research lab for scientific computing, and in our case, most of our applications are definitely CPU bound. We end up re-writing many of them in C to speed them up and use threading but if we could keep them in Ruby while still using concurrency the faster development times would improve the lives of everyone in the lab.
Ruby is not Rails. I for one would benefit immensely from being able to run threaded Ruby code.
Good call, added it, initial run didn't show a huge difference.

edit:
here are numbers from a few runs:
gvent,http.go
361.43,386.68
354.69,397.15
388.96,377.69
424.81,430.34

http.go averaged 26% utilization
gvent.py averaged 15% utilization

I'm embarrassed posting this because of how grossly unscientific this is..

Not quite as fast as I thought initially but likely faster than the other python competitors.
I've found "Scalable Internet Architetures" by Theo Schlossnagle to also be quite valuable. It contains general advice on how to approach problem solving when it comes to building uh, scalable architectures.

http://www.amazon.com/Scalable-Internet-Architectures-Theo-S...
Mach is a microkernel. That means it's a way to design an OS such that most of the things application programs rely on are outside the kernel, provided by servers that can be restarted and replaced without rebooting the whole system. For example, the majority of the filesystem is provided by a filesystem server, most of the networking code is in a networking server, and so on.

You begin to see why a microkernel that needs to be bounced more often than, say, Linux, which is not a microkernel, begins to lose some of the appeal of having a microkernel in the first place.

(Aside: Mac OS X is based on Mach, but practically all of the stuff applications see is provided by a single server which (to the best of my knowledge) can't be restarted without taking down the whole system. It's a hybrid design.)

Also, just to confirm a stereotype, do you use Windows for your servers?
They should probably fix this. Last week, the girl I've been dating, who I'm incidentally crazy about, admitted via text she was in love with me...

... I never replied because I didn't get the message.

She definitely felt awkward for a while when I saw her, wondering why I had chosen to just ignore that specific text.
Is there a way to directly contact Facebook about cache problems on our page? 
We've been having some difficulty with facebook lately. We had to build an app to put in our page for contest sign ups. When we first started developing this, their Developer app wouldn't load for 2 days. Besides posting on several official facebook page discussion boards and emailing the company to an auto bounce account, we had very little luck making contact with the company.

Our client then wanted to change the first letter of the page name to a lower case. The page has over 1000 fans, so we couldn't even submit a name change request through the page admin. The Help site said it could be requested but provided no means to contact facebook.

Now, we're also seeing memcache problems on facebook's end. Two of our page tabs changed names mid day yesterday. The FBML app is set to use the name 'Rules and Regs', but is now displaying FBML as its name. Our other app is set correctly in the developer's app but is using the tab name we set the first day we created the app.

Is there any way to notify facebook and maybe get a human being to acknowledge our problems from a company so desperate to connect the world's people?
Fascinating. Would love to see this done with other languages/concurrency mechanisms, like Erlang actors, Clojure agents, etc.
To me, that sounds like threatening the candidate to get him to waive his legal rights. I don't like the idea of working for a CEO who would do that.
Google Tool to Move Microsoft Files to Web
Original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2243650
The future of the book
You should probably test that assumption.
FaceBook V Twitter Users (Infographic)
Well, first, there aren't exactly many people defending Facebook either here or at TC.

But I think the reason the rhetoric is different is because we've all been buying downloadable apps without an app store for years. It's familiar. So it feels like Apple is adding unnecessary barriers for no other reason.

On the other hand, there is less history of service providers allowing you to use any app to access data they're holding on your behalf.
Some consider the 'law' created by their own freely-exchanged obligations with other people to be coequal to, or even above, the laws from governments. This mindset can sometimes lead to more efficient or moral outcomes, and can also be crucial in limiting the harm of, and eventually overturning, bad governmental laws. So don't expect laws to always, or even mostly, supersede other customs of friendship and interpersonal loyalty.
I think it's reasonable for one's "higher law" to include hiring fairness and to avoid even the appearance of collusion.
>I think that allowing to launch better, faster, safer, leaner and stabler versions faster with less bugs and for less money, while, at the same time, uncovering and correcting bugs that have been in the codebase for decades would be a plus.

Did you even read the link I provided?

Netscape killed itself in rewrite, MS almost did that with Vista before hitting reboot and starting over with old code and now you would want MS to undertake a super expensive rewrite? Things rarely work so ideally in the real world, especially for humongous feature/code bases like Office.
All those things you said are government projects. We just tried a grand experiment to see if we could usher in a new era of healthcare and were met with strong resistance, oddly enough, from the _very same generation_ widely credited with producing all of those things (Interstate, Manhattan project, space program) that you mentioned. Those radical free-thinking minds are now more conservative as they grow older, those notions of revolution are replaced by memories and a strong desire to put things back to "how they used to be".

Now, people in their 20s and 30s, the ones that are supposed to be revolutionary, are worried about finding jobs, putting food on the table, and keeping work so that they can keep their healthcare plan. So, the big companies that used to work on big things and revolutionary technology, can now focus on extracting as much profit per product as they can (not that they didn't before, but there was, as you and this article admits freely, more focus on radical innovation and Doing Big Things). Instead of "revolutionary new products and projects" we get "refreshes" and marketing of said refreshes as "revolutionary". The bottom line is more secure, the worker subjugated, and thus the Empire retreats, stage right.
And if all Apple wants is to have shiny games for their platform it is the perfect strategy.

We have an online platform that resells content which is how we make our living. Low margins means that we would take a loss on everything we sold through the App store since we cannot charge more in the Apple garden.

Combine that with having to learn a new platform or hire new developers, it's making a HTML(5) solution for mobile devices look much more interesting for us. It won't look and feel as nice, but at least it will be cheaper to develop, we will get presence on Android/WinPhone7 and we won't take a loss on every item sold.

I agree that for a game developer the Apple solution is pretty good - I wouldn't mind it myself. But when reselling content it's simply a much different proposition - and I'm pretty there are many other companies having the same considerations that we are.
That is the the problem I am trying to convey -- the machines are coldstarted often and MAC addresses are reshufled on every first boot. If your cable to the management network is connected to left socket on the motherboard, that left socket needs to be eth0 on every coldstart. Sometimes it is not. "Yes" after the first boot when ifcfg files has been written it will be stable, but that mean someone has to go and either hand-edit ifcfg files or run ethtool -p eth0 and replug the cables.

> Subsequent cold starts only read the files

No they don't. Thare no files to read. You just wrote above in your commetn that the first time OS boots ifcfg are generated. So after a machine is coldstarted there are no ifcfg files! They are generated once per coldstart and saved. Then during each restart those files are read and everything is fine.

Now, I was saying, you can have a provisioning scheme where during coldstart, in your kickstart file you can fetch and write stable ifcfg files to prevent machines from creating their own. What we do instead is install a custom RPM with a udev script where an algorithm sorts the network interfaces in a stable way (since we only deal with a known and limited set of motherboards and network cards).
>I tend to value my friends and my own moral code much more than I value the moral code of lawmakers.

We're talking about a law made to protect employees. I don't want to work for a CEO who values his friends over his employees' legal rights.

There's also the point that a CEO who follows this advice risks exposing his company to a lawsuit, which is a violation of his duty to the company's shareholders.
Isn't it creepy with the 'See Friendship' feature already?

I wouldn't be surprised if facebook came up with a similar 'Breakup Notifier' feature soon..
John Allspaw's books are great. I'd recommend these also:

The Art of Scalability http://www.amazon.com/Art-Scalability-Architecture-Organizat...

Scalable Internet Architectures http://www.amazon.com/Scalable-Internet-Architectures-Theo-S...

Enterprise Cloud Computing http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Cloud-Computing-Architectur...
Everything in moderation.

A big part of political-economic maturity (for me at least) realizing that just because the supply/demand lines from your Econ 101 class don't line up, doesn't mean that something is worthless. It could be that you're not measuring everything. Culture matters, preserving social mobility matters.
also Emacs has a build-in (as of Emacs 24) mode which exports to pdf and html, and allows code snippets to be evaluated /in-situ/ -- see http://orgmode.org
Love the tools analogy! So true. LOL
Well, given that he/she discovered me as a cousin, I highly doubt that. :-P
Another Search Engine on the Block
Disabling his account is either a display of creepy dictatorial power or an indication of incompetence and lack of common sense.
New 13" MacBook Pro
My guess is that the system that does this is completely automated. The number of API calls his app was making set off a flag for spam/spammer and his account was disabled accordingly.

Until he contacted them I wonder if any human was even aware that his app had been blocked. The interesting question here is how Facebook will respond in this instance.
AdSense or affiliate ads (i.e., Match.com). No one said it was pretty.
I will agree that there are a lot of legacy IT departments that need a serious shakeup, but...

Sure, nobody has complex needs that can't be satisfied by a bunch of web apps, and everyone already knows exactly the hardware they're going to need to properly do a job.

Additionally, everyone online offering said web apps is totally competent, never has data loss, is alway available, and meets the exact needs of every customer.

There's a huge market for bespoke solutions, and people who understand technology and guide customers into good decisions. This is what sysadmins and other competent "full-stack" people are for. Don't use them at your own peril.
A better way might be to nuke the undesirable, put their branch on notice if they start to cause trouble, and remove them if necessary.

It avoids unnecessary disruptions. Not all branches will shake if a leaf falls.
I certainly hope so. There's just way too honking much literature out there oriented on ethX to simply make ethX go away.
there is now a "lexbind" branch in the Emacs development repository, so this won't be the case for long...
> No they don't. Thare no files to read. You just wrote above in your commetn [sic] that the first time OS boots ifcfg are generate [sic]. So after a machine is coldstarted there are no ifcfg files!

As long as you don't reinstall your OS, or lose your data, your config files are there. Cold starting hardware does not delete data.

Are you trolling?
I have a hard time categorizing that attitude as Machiavellian since it promotes treating all potential recruits the same in the hiring process.
Snapshots of the HN front page - one per month
Unless your IT department is the core of the business, this just gives one more reason why people in IT should learn their core businesses.
I can understand why people will resist this, thinking that somehow renaming eth0 to em0 or similar will break stuff, but here's the rub: It'll only break stuff that's badly written.

There's a right way to enumerate network interfaces and a wrong way (which is dependent on the language you're using for enumeration - the wrong way is assuming that eth0 is the only network device).

Bear in mind that the new convention is not entirely dissimilar to how WiFi cards have worked on Linux for some time, so the only things that will break will be things that:

a) Assume eth0 instead of enumerating devices
b) Have a legitimate reason for using eth0 only (I can't think of one, but I wouldn't be surprised if one existed)