skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I did the server stuff for pic a fight. I had done some work with AWS scripting for bringing up PHP sites, so changing the scripts to work with rails was pretty simple.

This was my first Rails app ever. Well, that's sort of not true. A year ago I tried Heroku for a "hello world" type rails app to see what the fuss was about. It took me about 2 hours to get it deployed b/c of some cryptic ruby/gem/rails/whatever version number compatibility errors blah blah blah... and it kind of turned me off to the whole system. It was not a simple as advertised. I have a lot of sysadmin background, and this was more complicated than just doing it myself...

With the PHP sites, I could spawn a stock Ubuntu Server AMI and use a boot script to have the server install the necessary packages (php, mysql, apache, etc), fetch a repo from github, and configure apache to start the web site.

With Ruby 1.9.2/Rails 3 I tried to do the same thing, but there are no Ruby1.9.2 native packages, and having RVM compile and install from source took FOREVER, so it was not useful to start from a blank AMI. I took some time to install all the necessary junk to make a boilerplate Ruby1.9.2/Rails3 AMI and saved it.

So, now I can do basically the same thing as the PHP sites, just starting with the RoR AMI.

So, when I saw traffic start to spike, I sat calmly at my terminal and typed:

$> ./launch_picafight.sh 5

which booted 5 more instances which came online and hooked themselves up to the load balancer all in about 2 minutes (for bonus points I had the boot script send me a Notifo notification after each server was online so that I knew they had come up).

Learning ruby/rails was enough of a challenge for this project that I didn't learn the black art of deplyoing using something like Capistrano. In this case I had two options: if we needed to deploy new code I could either ssh to each live server and issue a 'git pull' or just launch new servers (which would automatically get the latest code) and nuke the old servers when the new ones came online. Both of these worked fine.

As for cost, having the extra 5 servers running for about 12 hours cost $1.20 according to the AWS pricing guide. Now it's back down to 2 micro instances (it could really run on 1 probably, but we're on the Free tier so one of them is basically free anyway).

I'm not exactly sure how Heroku dynos work, but according to their pricing, a comparable price would have been $0.15/hour which in Heroku terms is 4 dynos. This means 4 Thin processes responding to requests. We had 7 servers each running apache with 5 prefork servers... so 35 total processes running for the same price.

Am I comparing apples to apples here? I'm not sure; please correct me if I'm way off.

Anyway, the point is I know my sysadmin junk and it was just simpler to do it this way with AWS than to learn a whole new system... plus now we have entire servers which we can run other background stuff on for no extra cost. Dunno, I know a lot of people absolutely love heroku, but I've found the tradeoff of flexibility for simplicity to be a bit too steep.
That is such a worthless, and wrong, thing to say. It's like saying that since denial is a sign of grief, if you say you're not grieving therefore you are.
It's not going anywhere. Just get a torrent.
> So said accounting rule changed then?

Or Apple's accountants changed. They seem to be very strange people, and I say that in a bad way.

> And in any case, if that were really true, why not charge a penny? Or the download cost? I don't buy it.

If they think they need to charge for Xcode 4, they probably think amounts under that would be seen as non-compliant. Facetime was $.99 and shipped with new macs.
Cracking software often (not always) require GDB, but running cracked software doesn't require anything but the .app
Uh...OSX just uses gcc as a C compiler and all the Apple specific changes are open source as well (GPL license and all that), so what's stopping me from just distributing a binary (Apple patched) gcc?
The Happiest Man in America
I've posted this before but it's relevant again now and might interest those who missed it the first time. Please, no need for upvotes because I got them last time.

---

I hear you. I actually managed to wrangle Voyager 1 into a brief nerd-out component of my wedding speech:

"Like me, the space probe Voyager 1 launched in 1977. Unlike me, it is one of the pinnacles of human achievement. It is currently the farthest man-made object from the Earth but it could not have achieved its speed and distance to date without gravity assists from Saturn and Jupiter. When space probes are launched, their path is often planned to get a gravitational slingshot from the most significant entities in our planetary family, to take them further than their launch alone might do. That boost is something invaluable, natural and efficient."

"I don't want to call my parents, (mother's name) and (father's name), giant balls of gas, but the boost, the impact they have had on my life, on my sister's life, my brother's life and now the lives of our partners, is huge."

[And then, later on] "Everybody, wish me luck that in our future together, there are only a few occasions where (bride's name) wishes I was the farthest made-made object from Earth."
The liability would be hard to prove and the plaintiff is unlikely to be in a position to drag it through the courts.

On the other if you hire a dud, your boss can easily regard it as your fault and look for mistakes you made.
Still, Smalltalk is seriously cool.

I think the pricing was only one factor of Java's success. Smalltalk, for the C programmer, is pretty alien. No source files, no compiler... That takes some to get used to. Java provides a nice path towards OOP that's more forgiving than C++, yet, it's aesthetically compatible with C.
Here is the Wikipedia article on SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) for anyone that needs a refresher:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act
Well, I'll just paste instructions from a crack a friend of mine needed me to help him with:

Install Instructions for Protools 9

• 0. Make sure you have gdb installed. Test by typing “gdb test” into terminal.

1. Uninstall any versions of Pro Tools that are already installed

2. Install Pro Tools, Complete Production Tookit 2 and HEAT (in the optional installers folder) from the full iso

3. Use the [K]‘ed installer to overwrite the necessary files

4. Launch Pro Tools from the loader and everything should work as expected

This crack requires Xcode to be installed. Xcode can be downloaded for free from developer.apple.com. Also, DO NOT REPLACE THE LOADER. The loader included with the new release (loader version 1.1) was designed for this release as a background process which is what people wanted. It also now breaks on ptrace so there is no need for the anti-ptrace extension posted later in the topic. To use Pro Tools launch the loader and wait a few seconds. Nothing will show while it does some work in the background and then it will launch the main Pro Tools app a few seconds later. Big thanks to unsanity, simblism, and XVX for their respective contributions.
While the smart label feature itself works in Google Apps, it seems like the configuration support (editing the default filters etc) doesn't. I can't seem to edit any of the smart-label filters through the Settings dialog.
See the kind of convoluted procedures this silly price is making people do?
Which is one of the biggest reasons why Microsoft's Developer Division created and gives away the Visual Studio Express product line[1], and supplements it with websites like the Beginner Developer Learning Center[2].

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx
The $99/year thing is not terrible. I remember saving money from my paper route to buy tools/lib licenses to some specialized things I really wanted.

Selling your parents on a single $99 purchase is a lot easier than trying to sell a $5 purchase every week. 'Tis just the way it is.

jarin below mentions he wouldn't hesitate buying his kid Xcode for $5... that only works if the parent is in the field also. How many, say, accountants or lawyers would buy their precocious coder-child a bunch of tools or understand the importance of it?
Oh, well... That is fantastic. Many thanks for the feedback. :)
Senate Passes Landmark Patent Reform Bill
the livejournal change:

http://www.davidpashley.com/blog/computing/livejournal-mozil...
Why not? A bubble occurs when people over invest due to mass hysteria. Whether the investments occur through a public exchange, or through second markets the psychology is still the same.
Don't worry, updates will still be 4GB bundles of everything, last time I updated iTunes to 10.2.1 Apple still hadn't found out about bsdiff.
Move Over, Flipboard: Zite is the Latest Personalized iPad Mag
When can we hope to get a 4.3 for Verizon?

I hope we're not going to start seeing from fragmentation like Android already has, as this post correctly observes:

http://shysnowsquare.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/no-fragmentati...
I recently put together a Hackintosh, and it went much more smoothly than anticipated. Just get any Intel processor, and make sure your motherboard and graphics card, or a closely related model, are on one of the recent OSx86 hardware compatibility lists[1]. Then, just follow TonyMacx86's install guide[2]. Post-install, you'll probably want to install a few additional kexts (for example, the sleep-enabler kext). If one of the kexts causes your box to kernel panic on boot, then just boot off of the install DVD again, and use the Terminal (under the "Utilities" menu) to remove the kext(s) in question. If you get stuck, use your google-fu–there's a pretty healthy hackintosh community, so chances are somebody else has encountered the same problem as you.

[1] http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
[2] http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/04/iboot-multibeast-inst...
It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number.

Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why.

It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.
How to Get Clients to Approve Your Wireframes Every Time
Well, HN seems to also attract a lot of people like me who just want to hack, entrepreneurial nonsense be damned. And I will gladly make my software free and "throw away" all the profit I could make, because I believe I am contributing to a better world.
I guess your comparison between the Xcode price and the one of the apple computer on which it runs is legitimate.

The problem here is not the cost of the package in itself -- it is indeed cheap in comparison to the aforementioned computer -- but in the fact that apple chose not to include this cost _in_ the retail price of OSX.

All the bruden is dropped on the devs who then needs to re-sell their apps, generally on the app-store where they are taken another cut.

Apple's strategy seems to give the maximum to the user, while charging the devs that then charge the users. They lock-in their user base, letting the devs deal with prices increases on both sides.
Space seemed so much closer when I was 5-10 yo (early 80s) than it does now. So much space fiction has been replaced by fantasies about wizardry and vampires in an Earth-setting, as though they're somehow more realistic for daydreamers.
You're mistaken. Xcode 3 and 4 are still available with the $99/year dev memberships for iOS or Mac OS X.
I would pay $5 just for a diff-patch-update instead of "download 5GB again because of new iOS-version".
Xcode 4 released with git integration
What is this? It really doesn't explain well...
IGreenwash - Part 2
Utah City Annexes Land For NSA Data Center Cooling
Amazon S3 transfer costs are (worst case) $0.14/GB, or < $0.60 for 4.2GB. Apple certainly pays a lot less than that per bit.
Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE (don't forget Instruments and an iOS simulator!) and give it away for free. Problem solved.
Seriously, whatever magic their accountants may have to do to make a free add-on to an OS they sell remain free, it's worth to reduce the friction for new OSX developers.

Remember what Visual Basic did for Windows: it killed DOS development in a couple months. Having a very simple IDE any corporate drone can use to make good-looking applications would drive a lot of acceptance for Mac in medium businesses.
IntelliJ IDEA 10 (personal license): 220€

Yes, I finally decided to take the plunge and buy it in December, after a few years using Eclipse. Never going back.

I used to be a big Eclipse proponent, but I must say I don't understand the "I want free tooling" mentality anymore. If it's a tool you are going to use every day, the cost is nothing compared to the productivity gains.
$5 is super cheap and affordable.

My time isn't though.

And I'll waste a lot of it now because I'll have to hunt out a corporate credit card and/or fill out an expense claim to install it on the (company owned) macs we use at work for dev.

$5 may as well be $1000 dollars for the effort I'll have to go through to get it now.

And all so I can get GCC installed so I can use homebrew to build the open source libs I need for doing web / backend dev.

Hoping Apple releases a "lite" version that contains the bare minimum needed to do that without all the extra IDE fluff I never use.
That only works because you assert Apple wants to lock users in.

You must not have much experience in computing. Pretty much every [1] platform provider seeks lock-in. Google seeks it just as much as everyone else, their primary platform just happens to be their web services and not a specific OS. Microsoft and Symbian and RIM do as well, of course, and presumably HP/Palm would as well if they had any customers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in#Apple_Inc.

[1] Save for, perhaps, a few co-dependent open source platforms.
Try sampling a population who have been fully informed about what is going on and see the reaction you get.

I've yet to see a 'fully informed' sample from anyone. While people don't like getting tracked, they don't like getting tracked in contrast to an imaginary situation where they can access all the same content with no tracking whatsoever, which simply isn't possible.

Whenever people complain about ad targeting, you should think of the guy who spends all his time grousing about taxes while still wanting the government to pay his for roads and his Medicare and his Social Security. Same thing.

Ultimately, businesses do not have carte blanche to engage in whatever shady practices they like in the interests of increasing profits.

Of course. This is why online businesses will end up doing what, for example, a credit card provider or a magazine publisher does - they'll tell you that they're going to sell your information six ways as a condition of receiving the service, and the public will say 'well, I want the service, so what choice do I have?' Unless, of course, the government makes the very practice of ad targeting illegal, in which case the content goes behind a paywall where the poor don't get to read it.

If publishers who want to spy on everyone make opt-in mandatory in response to measures like this, they will just create a market for publishers who are willing to share their content with ads based on that content alone...

Now this argument is like the guy who thinks the government can balance its budget and lower taxes just by getting rid of some sort of vague unspecified 'waste'.

You are more than welcome to try to make real money through contextual advertising alone. Unless you own a search engine or are churning out made-for-AdSense content tailored specifically to search queries, you will fail. Brand advertisers doesn't do much contextual, so say goodbye to agency CPMs. The contextual stuff itself performs horribly when users aren't explicitly in 'search' mode. Why do you think those 'three weird tips to losing belly fat' ads are everywhere instead of Google AdSense? Yes, even that spray-and-pray CPA stuff outperforms contextual. Now picture all your brand advertising going away and trying to subsist solely on the pittance you get from education loan and car insurance ads. Now picture doing this while trying to produce quality content. Good luck.

I get that people don't like advertising, and I get that they don't like analytics. People expect the web to be like a backlit newspaper, and when they find out that their reading material is reading them back, they're disconcerted. However, they're just going to have to get over it, because that's the real price of 'free'. The alternative is paying for it, which helps turn the internet into a place for the privileged.

I've yet to see a scenario that's going to end up better than the muddling-through we're doing now. You can effectively opt-out just by installing an extension, as can anyone else who really, truly cares about a website knowing they're a college-educated male between the ages of 25 and 34. Stop trying to fix the world, you're simply going to make it worse.
From the article:

"- 13 x 10 % => 130
"

Good grief, I hope not! :D Unless there is some subtle difference in Erlang between - 13 and -13 (one - might be the negation operator and the other might be the subtraction operator for instance). Hopefully this is just a typo.

With respect to the atoms, since they are basically a bunch of constants that never get dereferenced and so cannot be garbage collected, wouldn't a better way to handle this be to create some kind of out-of-memory look up table, preferably one with good caching of commonly used values?

My understanding of one of the core reasons that erlang is valuable is because of its robustness in a multi-threaded environment. It would be a shame to undermine that robustness by having it blow up because of too many global constants.
This isn't as interesting as I hoped it would be from reading the title. It looks like the only technical aspect of this is caching the input file, which makes sense but isn't very exciting. Is there any work being done on sharing some of the encoding work between different resolutions of the same codec? I don't know a lot about video codecs but it seems like you might be able to encode the higher resolution video and save some of the intermediate data to use with the lower resolution video to at least provide hints.
All the hypothetical teenager would have to do is point them to one of the many news articles about other teenagers making millions on the App Store.
I'm an academic who develops Free / Open Source software and distributes libraries and binaries for the Windows, x86 and x86_64 Linux and Mac platforms along with the source. One important library generates C code based on a domain specific language, links a shared object and uses that; on Windows and Linux, we ship a cut back gcc and libtools to do that; libtools doesn't work on the Mac (at least last time I looked into it), so we asked Apple for permission to distribute their linker back in 2005, and they said no, so we have been telling Mac users to sign up for a developer account and install XCode (stupid since they had to download multiple gigabytes for a fairly small binary).

Even getting XCode for our own use to put on our Mac build server will be difficult now; $4.99 may be a token price, but any price in the academic world means that things have to get charged against a cost centre; policies mean it probably can't be charged as IT overhead (like Mac build servers and operating systems can) because it is specifically for development, so it needs to be justified as part of a grant. For things like that, the University will probably want Apple to go a months long process to become a designated approver (Apple hardware is not normally purchased direct from Apple), and to pay for things like that by purchase order - the administrative cost of which would be greatly more than $4.99.

The end result of all this is that Apple will probably not be a supported platform for our software any more, and users will be asked to use a virtual machine or move to a different platform if they want to use our software.

Apple is already one of the most difficult platforms to develop on, largely because of the way their linker and object loaders work; it is one of the few platforms (I think Irix is another) where objects to be opened with a dlopen like mechanism are in a different format to normal shared objects; making the barriers higher for academic users trying to develop multi-platform software will simply result in academic and other free software being less available on Mac; some academic users like being on Mac, but I expect that as it becomes progressively more of a disadvantage and Apple becomes more of a pariah, this will change.
I've had similar experiences. If I am very tired I don't get "coder's block", but the code is often rubbish.
> Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE

You can start from here: http://www.gnustep.org/experience/DeveloperTools.html
4 clicks just to get the form? I don't think so...
Watching new users try to figure out how to exit these editors: priceless.

(This is tongue-in-cheek! I use Vim!)
I use the "Add to Tasks" option to add notes to messages. You can try that if it works for you.
I imagine this will be like xcode for iphone only working on intel macs. You could develop (but not release) on PowerPC mac by changing a couple plist keys, and apple still sold a lot more macs anyway.
Discovery spacewalk seen from the ground
Well, each time a single app sells on the app store, they get 30%. If we assume it costs $5 to host XCode, then if each developer averages 17 downloads, they'll make a few cents off of each one. If we assume that one developer in a thousand gets 17,000 downloads, they'll still make money.

The argument for covering their hosting costs seems hollow to me, even if we assume it actually costs $5.
Training involves neural adaptation, a large part of which occurs while sleeping.

The systems of the body are not neatly partitioned into modules.
I just hope they keep Xcode 3 around. The idea of paying $5 for make and gcc is abhorrent.
$5 seemed reasonably, $10 is too much. For me at least.
I suppose it's just the irritation from the term HTML5 being used in all sorts of inaccurate or misleading ways. What you said wasn't inaccurate, but I feel like throwing in the term HTML5 was unnecessary. But yeah, it's pedantic. It's mostly me being irritated by others.
That's a very good point. Really the only benefit I can think of to providing it over the phone is that it would work with any (well, almost any - it wouldn't work with a rotary phone) phone, not just a smartphone.

Thanks for the feedback! I will get started now :-)
Experiment with doses, however. I found that I could be groggy on rising if I took the standard 3mg.
Hey thanks for your thoughts. I definitely agree that I don't necessarily look at the author's name to decide whether I like the article enough to upvote it - that's not really the point I was trying to make (I guess I didn't make it clear enough.)

What I was trying to say is that when you come from a position of credibility which is not necessarily based upon the fact that people recognize your name, it makes people more likely to listen to what you have to say. While that point may seem obvious, I think the subtle part is that you can position what you write or what you produce to highlight the fact that you are a credible source. In essence, what I'm trying to get at is that beyond a snappy title, and blind luck, there are small changes that you can make to how you position what you produce to make it more likely to succeed. Enhancing your visibility and credibility is one of them.