skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you manage your long running processes?
I have an application with several moving parts (solr, rabbitmq, celeryd, plus a few more custom python scripts) and was wondering if there are good ways to manage these. By "manage", I mean a simple way to register processes, execute a start command that starts all of them up in a particular order, and then can shut them down gracefully, too.

Of course, I could write my own master script, create and store my own PIDs etc. just wondering if people had some tools they use that they could recommend.
I agree and do not think that model of advertising is a bad thing at all. It is something I find valuable as a user.

I think that Marco is more complaining about how the advertising company in question figures out that you are you at that IP address and computer combination. It's the back end analytics they employ that is building and refining a database of people that continually use their products, of which the users either can't see, access and review, or are ignorant of in the first place. Being helpless is something we all fear as humans, and not having any say as to what kind of information may be in that database scares some people. Is it something that we all should be aware of? Probably. Should it keep us up at night? Probably not. +1 or Google+ helps them refine who they think we are, but really, they don't care who any of us are individually, they care about what will interest us next.
I use Sal's material quite abit, well mainly his finance and mathematics material, specially if i need to remind myself of things i did back at uni. I think Sal is most strongest in those areasgiven his background. However looking at the rest of what he produces if your a beginner in any of the topics his stuff is a GREAT place to start. My weapon of choice is actually python so it would be great to see how those tutorials look like :)

Just gotta say great job to Sal though, he spreads his knowledge and i'm sure many people around the world are greatful for it.
Ok, boss, we've got the prototype going, it should only take about two more weeks to test it and get it secure enough to... What, now? Seriously? It's not... Ok, you're the boss.
Implementing security measures usually provides little short-term return on time invested. Feasibility is not the issue.
I have symmetric 100 Mbps uncapped service in San Francisco for $33/month if I pay by the year or $45/month if I don't through Webpass. It works beautifully.
Venture and PE performance by vintage year
That's the last straw. I'm switching back to Lynx and Mutt!
No one wants to tell those stories - coming across as bitter about a previous deal doesn't gain them anything and could sour investors/partners in the next thing they try.
I guess the accusation of superficiality is warranted if Sal is expected to weigh in with value judgements and instead he takes a hands-off approach. I think many of the soft-science topics ( econ, finance ) etc. aren't as value-neutral as two plus three equals five hardcore math.

eg. http://www.khanacademy.org/video/is-short-selling-bad?playli...

The above video is supposed to be a discussion of virtues and vices of short-selling, but depending on who you are, you will tend to read it differently, because its impossible to be value neutral on that topic.

Here's another one:
http://www.khanacademy.org/video/are-hedge-funds-bad?playlis...

I guess finance geeks such as myself will find the question "Are hedge funds bad" itself a nonsense question. Its like asking "Is recursion bad ?". Unless you qualify it with more metrics, such as "bad to whom/what", what is "bad", as opposed to what is "good" etc.
Some sources of plant fats: avocados, olives, coconuts, almost all nuts.

Bonus: 0mg cholesterol.
But are they really looking out for themselves by doing so? A captain that helps sink the ship he's on (and keeps him from drowning) is not "looking out for #1" long-term.
Can there be an OS and/or language where, making something secure comes by default when you write anything, thereby rendering obsolete the need to make something secure after you make a prototype?

e.g. a language that automatically does array bounds checks, whether the programmer asks for them or not.

Such a system would protect against managers and bosses' demands as well as against lazy and security-incompetent programmers.
Nice links. The UDFs look like a very similar idea to mine, taken further and generalized; I make no claim to originality, it seemed obvious to my compiler-oriented eye.
Solaris 10 has a service management system that's basically the master script that you alluded to with a lot of metadata. It's one of the nicer parts of the OS. Of course, it's also on its way out (even the DoD is planning to leave it behind). For your purposes, I'd just write start and stop scripts that read a list of processes from a file. That way, you don't have to worry about changing the order in all your scripts whenever you add or remove a process from your system - just edit your process.order file and you're set.

Also, there are several ways to kill a process by name on a Unix box, and that's preferable to storing your PID's.
The science behind surviving a zombie apocalypse
This seems to be the same sort of thing people were[0] complaining about with Apple's app store policies; that it was effectively impossible to know the outcome of the approval process without having to invest a large amount of time and money in advance.

[0] It is my impression that the process has been improved to the satisfaction of most people who can be satisfied with such a process.
Save 50% on Perl books and videos - In Celebration of OSCON (O'Reilly)
Ask HN: any big startup scenes in EU?
I've been in the US for close to a decade now and I'm not yet even close to scoring a GC that would allow me to quit working for the man and start my own venture. Despite having essentially grown up here after years of college and working for giant high tech firms, I'm thinking that perhaps it's time to pack things up and take a plane back to the Old Continent.

The thing is that I've been out of the loop with Europe for so long that I don't even know what the startup world is like down there. Ideally I would end up in the middle of a big hub, some sort of EU Silicon Valley, but I hear that to this day there's not a single place in the world that quite compares to the amount of investment money that can be found in the Bay Area. Perhaps there is, and here's where I'm hoping you guys might advise me.

Thanks a bunch!
It's sad Linus doesn't want to learn.
This is not the question asked. The question is specifically about XML documents, where there is a single and quite easy correct answer for the indentation.
The closest answer would be willful obliviousness. Like how voting for war funding means borrowing the money from sometime in the future. Politicians know these consequences on some level, but willfully just push them out of consideration.

Whatever politicians pushed this in California were counting up the tax revenue that would be collected from Amazon. They couldn't have truly been ignorant that Amazon would pull out, but just kind of put the thought aside to push through the tax plan.

edit: I like btilly's point in the child post too.
Amazon is located in Washington, as a convenience to the user and to the state Amazon collects tax in accordance with Washington state law if someone ("user A") purchases an item from its site in Washington.

This way "user A" in Washington doesn't owe the state any taxes for that purchase, and doesn't have to declare it on any tax forms.

Now someone in California ("user B") purchases an item from Amazon. Amazon is located in Washington and in accordance with federal law is only required to collect taxes for the state it is located in. So "user B" buys the product and Amazon does NOT collect the California state tax. "user B" now has to put all of his purchases down on his tax forms, and pay the tax for the items he bought.

Amazon had an affiliate program in California. This affiliate program was claimed by the state of California to mean that Amazon was located in California ("to constitute a physical presence"). If that is the case, then Amazon would legally be required to collect tax for "user B"'s purchase and remit it to the state of California.

This would effectively mean that Amazon would now have to file taxes in Washington as well as California. Not a problem for a big corporation you say, imagine then that all 50 states implement said system, Amazon would now be on the hook for filing and paying tax in 50 different states, even-though it technically does not have a physical presence in the state.

--

Local retailers have a physical presence in the state, and are by law required to be registered businesses and thus are required to collect state sales tax for the state they are in. If however they also shipped out to other states (lets say they are located in CA, and ship to NJ) they would not have to collect sales tax on the sale when shipping to NJ since that is interstate commerce.

--

This may not seem fair, but if any company doing any business with another business or individual out of the state where they have a presence has to keep track and file tax paperwork for each state they do business with it would become unmanageable, especially for smaller businesses where doing tax for one single state is already a big burden, imagine having to do it for all 50 and each one having different laws or different rules regarding taxation.

The states are basically attempting to close a loophole consumers are using, whereby they purchase items out of state so that they don't have to pay taxes on it, and then technically they are breaking the law by never declaring those items.
I didn't look too much at this, but I've done thenewboston's Python and Java tutorials, and they are AWESOME!
Because you are asking a business to file taxes in all 50 states it does business with instead of the consumer that is purchasing the goods who should be declaring them and paying tax on them directly to the state.
That sounds an awful lot like some bus contention schemes from the late 70s/80s. It's been a while since my grad class that covered that though, so I can't provide any citations.

I notice that we're still stuck in that time period insofar as real software innovations, sigh.
PHP Framework using jquery ui, Widgets Syntax
A. Its a limited problem set. There's only 50 states.

B. Considering the alternative seems to be shutting out the 8th largest economy in the world, as smart ass as my comment was it seems to be worth considering.
Ask HN: What do you do while code is compiling?
Compiling code takes an annoying amount of time. Not enough time to do something worthwhile yet too much time to just sit around and idly wait. If we add up all the time we sit around waiting for code to compile, it would be a depressing number.

So what do people currently do while waiting? Any good ideas on what to do?
Disable Google+ In 3 Steps
The Freelancer’s Guide to the Galaxy
This sucks for a lot of people who support their podcasts through Amazon's affiliate program.
If only he had an Android dev tutorial when I wanted to learn it. Does he still have like only 4 Android tutorials? Because that's too bad. I really liked his Python and Java ones.
Possibly, but potatoes are basically pure starch. I'm open to the possibility that can screw around with your body in great enough amounts- though I don't think I'd ever abandon potatoes completely. Tubers are an ancient food.
looking from a window , you wll see a life
I think the suggestion was, get the license for Rhode Island and North Dakota and Maine before going for California. According to their Legal page, Think is only licensed in Alabama now.
He's just straight up wrong about putting the filename in a comment at the top of the file. It's true: files change names all the time, why make someone change them in two places every time? Moreover, he should be describing the module using PyDoc, not comments.

I'm worried: Sal does not seem like a professional software developer or someone who's done significant software maintenance. Like Visual Basic, he could end up just teaching bad practices that people who watch his videos will just have to unlearn later.

Personally, I'm still going to recommend that people read Learn Python the Hard Way, not watch this video.
Except that they are not... a book on Amazon may cost $10 and a book at your local Borders may cost $10. At your local borders sales tax gets collected, and the book ends up costing $13. When you purchase it on Amazon you pay $10, and are then supposed to declare that you bought the book and pay a Use Tax. That Use Tax for a $10 is $3. You as a consumer are now obligated to pay the state $3.

Having a business collect sales tax for a state it has no presence in is not in accordance with federal law, and California law does not apply due to interstate commerce laws. Thus there is no way to force Amazon to collect tax for sales to California residents.

--

Go tell the consumers to pay taxes for all of the stuff they have bought, it is the consumers who should be paying the taxes and aren't.
Key Reads for the young technologist
Given the opportunity to identify 3-4 key texts for a young technologist, what would you select? Topics could span from histories to technical works, open key crypto to mobile computing.
Hmm... Not being able to attend a good school because your youngest sibling was born is a very upsetting concept in many ways...
It looks as though it's less "regulation" rather than regulatory capture and lack of transparency.

Why can't CA DFI actually state and publish the rules which would guarantee licensing?
You can also sign up for an account with a mail service like EarthClassMail for a small amount per month.
The public interest in regulating funds transfer companies seems to outweigh --- by, like, a lot --- our interest in a well-orded iOS App Store.
Yahoo and Benchmark form Hortonworks to Increase Investment in Hadoop
Sort of. Amazon must collect sales tax for transactions where they sell a physical product to a customer located in states where they have "nexus" (a physical presence). These bills extend nexus to include affiliates.
It sets a precedent that tracking someone's movements is A-OK.

Not sure how you get this from Google building a new destination site. Doesn't this mean they'd do less cross-site tracking (since presumably they will spend more time on this new site)?
Yea, I have been saying that legacy PR based on controlling the message is fundamentally flawed for a while now.
The radio CPU can be optimized for its job, so it may have extra instructions for error detection, decryption, etc. It may also be on a separate bus with the antenna peripherals, freeing up a lot of bandwidth for the main CPU.

It should be possible to do all this on a single CPU (real-time is no problem - just use an RTOS), but it would be expensive and eat a lot of power.
Free Github accounts for students and teachers
> We can scarcely predict the weather one day in advance. Being skeptical of global climate predictions spanning decades is hardly on the same level as denying the internal combustion engine.

Your analogy disregards the difference in degrees of wrongness involved here. We cannot predict the temperature of the air above your house at 3:28pm tomorrow. We can predict within N degrees the average temperature for the next 30 days, for some N.

We can definitely predict the average temperature for next summer -- we can't say with any certainty how hot it will be on August 8, 2012. However, this failure doesn't negate our ability to identify trends and patterns on a macro-scale.

Global warming is a macro-scale event. It's always possible that black swans will upturn our knowledge and ruin our predictions. Climate change deniers essentially appeal to this aspect of human nature -- that we cannot plan for random events with very large consequences.

But we don't plan for the black swans, we plan for our predictions and, with a healthy dose of skepticism, we remember that the map is not the territory.

And by the way, deniers bet it all that the black swan will be a leveling off or even drop in temperatures. That earthmoving event could also be that temperature increase is actually exponential, not linear as it seems now.
Interesting. Thats still around 800 Mio revenue in 2008. For 2010 I did find:

> "In its 2010 fiscal report, News Corp. said that revenues from its “Other” segment, where MySpace lives, were down 36 percent to $1.5 billion. The segment booked a loss of $575 million, greater than the year before when it lost $212 million."

Read more: http://www.bnet.com/blog/advertising-business/news-corp-may-...
pray and wish it compiles without err
I wonder what authority CA claims over entities with no physical presence in the state. What I mean by that is this: if Amazon wants to ignore this, and still ships to CA residents, what recourse will the state have? If anything, wouldn't this all fall under the interstate commerce powers of the Federal government?
Well 5 states have no sales tax -- including Oregon and Delaware. And another 5 states already collect sales tax from Amazon -- including New York and Washington. So there's really no need to get fancy -- there are plenty of good options for places to locate your company.
You're right that I was confused about the effect of being in a state where Amazon already has to collect sales tax. (I was thinking of tax-minimizing consumers, rather than the affiliates). When Amazon has a presence that requires them to pay sales taxes in any case, they have no credible threat to end affiliate payments. So, it's safe to remain an affiliate in those places. A happy result for Amazon, affiliates, and the States, apparently.

California and others want that same deal.

In New York, Amazon threatened to pull out but is temporarily paying sales tax (some reports suggest into escrow) and maintaining the affiliate program pending a legal challenge. Amazon may yet wind up losing their challenge, in which case they would have to decide whether to treat NY like other states where they collect sales tax – which would render being an affiliate safe – or to follow through on their affiliate freeze-out.

New York has essentially chosen the same course as California, so it will likely be resolved the same way in both states. Other states, likely including Texas and Massachusetts pending current legislative battles, are following this approach as well.

My point is: this isn't just a California-shooting-itself-in-the-foot situation, and a company can't just jump to anywhere-but-California to get back into the affiliate program. Many states, including many other top tech and business centers, are treating Amazon the same as California.
>> I make no claim to originality

Oh, I didn't interpret it as such either; just some interesting related work :)

Another peripherally-related idea is Active Messages [1,2]. I see it as the analog to UDFs or other rich executable messages for efficient node-to-node communication in large clusters. It's sort of like RPC if you squint hard enough; you send little executable messages that run on a remote node, and can send you back some data if you want. I guess the point is that having rich executable messages allows you to get around long physical latencies between sender and receiver, as well as more mundane intra-node delays due to userspace/kernelspace context switches.

[1] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/tve/thesis/ (particularly chapter 4, it's a bit wordy but has lots of detail).
[2] http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA204210&Locati... (there's lots of other published work on J-Machine from Dally's group, too)
c&h every single day. always gives me a laugh. I also read the oatmeal. Though he doesn't really do comics.
We're planning on adding at least Facebook as a login alternative (with minimal permissions). Maybe other methods in the future as well.
Why what does he say? Can you summarize?
Did they fix that godawful UI with regards to squeezing in the url bar next to the tabs?
That is why you have that legal address. That is where all correspondence for the business is sent. This is called a statutory agent.
The lack of Profiles for Google Apps (for organizations) is a big annoyance. If I try sharing RSS fiends with friends in Google Reader, everyone shows up as "Anonymous". Many people complained about these problems on the Google Reader support forums last year, but Google still hasn't responded or fixed anything.. :(
Ask HN: Has anyone visited 8-3-11.info?
I was recently made aware of a website, http://8-3-11.info, that is very mysterious.

They are taking questions, http://www.formspring.me/8X3X11 , but not giving away too much information.

Has anyone in the HN community come across this yet?

WARNING: There is an odd audio file that auto-plays in the background.
Security Footage Vancouver Canucks Riot 2011 - Blog - Mission Possible Spy Store
We did before Google bought Omnisio and killed it. Acquisitions sure seem swell for the founders; not so much for the users.
I've used daemontools (http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html) and supervisor (http://supervisord.org/). Supervisor is somewhat more user-friendly, daemontools feels more solid (it has fewer prereqs for starters).
This is pretty sweet! I like the idea a lot... Just out of curiosity, did you develop this yourself?
The culprit seems to be “-webkit-text-size-adjust:none” set for all elements at the top of blog.css.
try out Golang
Nice to read an article with the fundamentals of Bitcoin correct in contrast with the largely inaccurate stories from the past week framing the Mt Gox hack as a Bitcoin failing.
I was actually surprised it stayed so steady after all the hacking/malware headlines. It seems those types of headlines can't easily scare away Bitcoin owners. They truly believe Bitcoin is here to stay, no matter what temporary obstacles may appear.
Dietary cholesterol has not yet been shown to be harmful.

Some well-researched books on the subject include "Fat and Cholesterol are good for you" by Uffe Ravnskov and "The Great Cholesterol con" by Anthony Colpo.
Bitcoin Charts
I look at my tax deductions each month in the UK and sometimes feel like weeping, then I see figures such as 'Doctor Visit ~$95' and take for granted not having to pay for healthcare.

Just out of curiosity, was that $8/9 for a pint/litre of beer or a 4 pack. When I was in NYC last year I don't recall it being anywhere near that expensive.
The problem is that "secure" isn't a well-founded concept.
For instance, Java does the array bounds checks you're talking about (and throws an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if they fail). It checks memory accesses and won't let you access memory that's been freed or is otherwise invalid. It does

However, I don't think anybody could seriously say that Java is totally "secure." There are plenty of security-related things that could go wrong (e.g. a man-in-the-middle attack) that Java can't handle unless the developer takes steps to prevent them. By definition, that isn't "by default."

If you want to prevent security problems "by default", you're going to need to specify each problem you want handled, and you're going to need to recognize that there are a lot of security problems that a language or OS simply can't stop by themselves.
The right ad, for the right product, at the right time adds huge value to me as a user.

If I'm looking to buy a specific product, have finished researching it and now know what I want then I don't really care if I get the product via an ad, via an unpaid link, or via walking to the shop. It comes down to price, availability, and service and if I'm delivered that via an ad I'm happy.

It's called perfect advertising[1][2] and - while no one is there yet - Google is doing more to make it happen than any other company I'm aware of.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/ad-perfect.html

[2] http://nicklothian.com/blog/2010/08/25/perfect-advertising/
So why don't you still use it if I may ask? :)