skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cloud is a good thing, but it is pointless buzzword in that context. "Cloud" is when you distribute your stuff over some cluster of physical machines. This increases reliability, allows to scale performance, simplifies deployment and so on. Does it matter to end-user how Google infrastructure's organised inside?

Sure, some cloud providers have compatible APIs (as this is the case with Amazon S3 API), so the data could be moved between "clouds" easily. Compatibility is not a general property of a "cloud", and moreover - this is not a case with G+.

And SAAS is not a "cloud", it's just that nowadays most SAAS are marketed as "cloud" because they internally rely on some distributed storage or processing system. It's just that "cloud" quickly became a buzzword, replacing cumbersome "SAAS" abbreviation.

We've had SAAS in 90's (and, probably, earlier). Remember hosted forums, webchats and guestbooks? This was certainly SAAS, and probably not a "cloud".
Installing the Linux Flash Player 11 64bit for Chrome and Chromium
Github[0] gives Junior developers another way to get an interview. Those with minimal professional experience are able to show - to some degree - that they can code, use a VCS and have an understanding of the push/pull/fork contribution model. Bonus points for contributions, bug reports etc.

I don't believe it replaces one, but for those without a well-seasoned resume, a Github profile works well as a conversation starter.

[0] Or any public VCS, of course.
tl;dr version, twitter is returning an error for links that should exist, general whine about how unreliable it is.

The meta comment here is that keeping a site running 24/7 of the scale of a Twitter or a Facebook or any number of high interaction rate businesses is not a 'simple' exercise. There isn't a lot of off the shelf software that can do that and while you can depend on AWS or another third party web 'stack' it comes with its own problems.

I once pointed out to a principal in a cloud infrastructure company that while I understood that the concept of 'cloud' was that you didn't care what went on under the covers, if you didn't understand what went on under the covers you could make some really stupid decisions above the covers. I likened it to know what the compiler is doing when you build say a recursive tree walk. If you don't know how compilers work, and you decide to pass your tree node structures on the stack, you suddenly 'blow up' the stack when your tree gets above a certain (unpredicted!) size. Just like your cloud app can "blow up" when the kinds of things it is doing start exceeding the underlying platform infrastructure's ability to deliver. (network congestion or latency is usually in that mix).
I don't understand. You're either saying that "scale" is a sports metaphor, which it isn't, or that all words in the English language are metaphors, which they aren't.
This is 16.5 mil a month or nearly 50 mil a quarter.
I put my stuff up on Github in part because I like being part of a community. It also has the nice side effect that it shows that I'm intellectually curious and like trying out new things. If someone is looking for a new hire with those qualities, it'll be a big benefit.

If they're not I don't really want to work there to be honest.
A mechanism for sites themselves to advertise their stack seems like a great idea (though I'd prefer it not occur via fixed URLs like humans.txt or robots.txt, but via headers or meta tags). I'd just suggest not allowing arbitrary additions to a site's stack without any way to verify them.
Thank you for that; greatly appreciated.
Google strategies that helped my site be a success
Very cool. Reminds me of an app I once co-built (with the now famous Mr. Bragger ;) that lets you skin an RSS feed with a customizable HTML/CSS template (compatible with Tumblr's template markup)

http://feedvolley.com/ (code: https://github.com/niryariv/FeedVolley ) - could use a little UI love, but pretty stable. If anyone's interested in building this further I'd be happy to help you get started.
..Making the sports metaphor usage all the more silly.

So he used the term correctly? What does the term even mean? Swing for the fences? So he gets to 'swing' really hard? Or does that mean he gets 'thrown' 'balls' 'softly' enough that he's able to finally 'hit' them 'far'? Is he taking steroids, or their computational or business equivalent?
I think you misunderstood me. I do use all 5 screens. I just don't completely fill every screen because there's no need for me to. I like organizing my apps on home screens into small, logical groups based on what I use most often. Apps I use on a day-to-day basis are never more than a couple of swipes away, and getting "lost" among 80 apps like you suggested isn't a problem because I have nowhere near 80 apps on my home screens.

If it's not something I use all the time, it can live in the app drawer rather than be in my way on a home screen.
Possibly because their business service has a lot more competition than their residential service, hence lower margins.

Comcast business service is actually a bargain, at least around here. You pay maybe $15-$20/month more than you would for bare-bones residential service, you get to run servers if you want, suck down all the Netflix you can watch, and you get instant access to US-based tech support. Also, my understanding is that the various MAFIAA BitTorrent enforcers avoid targeting business-class IP ranges because unlike Grandma in her basement, businesses tend to put up a fight.

I wouldn't even think about going back to a residential account at this point. Given my household's usage patterns, I can't imagine Comcast makes any more money off of me than they would if I had a residential account, so I wouldn't expect them to upsell me aggressively if they were otherwise trying to get rid of me.
That would be nice except I think that you will have different keys for different browsers, and for different machines.

Presumably you could sync them up if you really wanted to, but it would be an awful user experience if that was mandatory.
What about $1M+? I want to see the votes on that option.
Offer HN: Free Tax Help from a Pro.
Hi.

I'm a tax accountant. I'm a CPA, an Enrolled Agent before the IRS and a future attorney. I've worked with the major accounting firms (PwC and KPMG) and I've created a profitable accounting firm within 12 months of opening its doors. Plus, I'm 24 and I've saved companies like Pfizer and TIA-CREFF more than 30 million.

Now I'm an upstart throwing my hat into the ring. My technical partner and myself are experiencing the hardships and the highs from disrupting markets. Its awesome.

I know how hard it is to get things done on a tight (nonexistent) budget. So, I wanted to keep my promise to the Hacker News community from six months ago and offer my advice to anyone that might need it on anything tax or business related.

Sorry I couldn't do this sooner but its been an insane ride thusfar.

Original Offer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1837299
Help on Incorporations: http://cameronkeng.com/podcast-ep-1-incorporation/

You can email me directly at cameronkeng@gmail.com if you want to ask something privately.

Best,
Cam.

Ps...Can we bring back the "Offer HN" pass it along attitude back? I missed how the community was really trying to help each other so openly...
Above the mantelpiece, where else? Seriously, I just threw that in because most people have a clock (or several) and ISTM that you would experience a forward jump in time if this hypothetical device could work as described. Not having read the paper yet, I don't know if it would only work for people observing things from a particular perspective, or whether it would just create a bubble of 'extra' time for anything within its field, during which observations from outside would be impossible. Of course, this might make it impossible to escape as well - I took some dramatic liberties with my scenario to explore the possibilities, although I left out some of the wilder ones that came to mind.
This is a particularly well-written article by Wired.
Bored stay-at-home moms (and I know you all read HN)

I'm no longer a bored, stay-at-home mom and I really don't do Facebook, but I still have connections to the types of communities (including some health lists) with high-ish numbers of full time moms and I do read HN. So, in theory, I could start posting links like this around and get such people here...

;-)
You want to go with Rackspace cloud sites. I think its basically shared hosting with lots of sites on lots of machines. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/sites/...

AppHarbor/heroku don't really seem suitable to me - they charge per worker
> The article doesn't really describe how they came to choose those two formats.

I'd guess it's because they're the most common file compression formats? The formats you mentioned are pretty obscure to most mainstream users.
I think the problem also depends on what kind of virtual disk you end up using. Let me ellaborate:

I dont think the problem is purely buffered vs. unbuffered IO. The guest operating system will have performed some block coalescing anyway so the block requests will often NOT be 4K chunks but should have slightly larger granularity. However, if you use a COW based virtual disk layout like QCOW2 which I guess is standard in KVM, you may see additional scattered IO.

I think it is weird to be using COW virtual disk layouts on a file system that natively supports COW as is the case with BTRFS. I would be curious to see what the performance of raw sparse files on BTRFS is vs. qcow2 etc.
Another vote for Xero. I started using Xero about 2 months ago and they're fantastic. They integrate with Paypal (a must for me) and many of the larger banks.

I use a small Australian bank for my business (Bendigo Bank) and I can import the transaction data relatively painlessly. Xero's ability to create rules for automatically reconciling the transactions is a real winner.

Before using Xero I used Excel and that worked but it took a lot of time ... about 2-3 hours a week. Xero automates a lot of that work and now it takes me about 2-3 hours a month.
Reform or Schadenfreude? Reading the Fall of the House of Murdoch
There are areas where it's already at close to that. In law & education for example, there are certain area/keyword combinations that can be turned into phone calls at a very high rate. Add in a few more filters (eg has 14 year old child) and that conversion rate goes up. Gogle already translates conversion rates in active markets into click prices very efficiently.

It would really be expanding the number of $100 clicks available and I think thats almost inevitable.
I wouldn't call Facebook's 750 million users active users either.
Where is 'this.' coming from? Coding syntax?

I just don't get it. I've seen it in HN comments for a few days now, but I fail to understand how 'this.' relates any new information. Reply indenting already tells me you are referring to an antecedent post. (A specific post in fact.)

Am I missing something, or is this just a new web fad I'm not savvy too? (Second option is not entirely unlikely...)
multipage articles are annoying due to the multipage. usually there's a print option.

but don't think tl;dr.
Can you link me to where you're reading that? I don't see anything like that (but I've only skimmed the documentation).
I made the mistake of sharing my salary with a colleague many years ago - I was making almost 2x their salary with similar time and experience but was considered "high potential" ... I have not discussed salary since.
How to Switch from Facebook to Google+ Without Losing Touch
Not all RFCs are standards. See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1796 entitled "Not all RFCs are standards" :)
Connecting to the net using a 1963 modem (Defcon 17 presentation)
Am I the only one who kind of wishes we never went down this "let's fix authentication!" rabbit hole? It feels like we've just replaced one problem with another.

Now, instead of simply having to remember what username/password combination I used, I have to remember which (if any) OpenID provider I used, how much information about myself does said provider expose, and how to merge my accounts when I inevitably end up choosing the wrong provider and create a duplicate account on the site.
Startup Success Is Not A One Shot Kill
Unfortunately this doesn't make the quality of the reporting any better.
Foursquare group buying deal set to boost retailers
What I got from that is that BtrFS sucks for doing lots of small synchronous writes, something that's relatively unique to VMs and is a major improvement over ext4 in just about everything else (feature set and performance). In fact, it's so unique it never popped up on the tests they do regularly on every patch.
"Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides."
Observing the dynamics of the list, I have to ask: who is JB and why is he/she so worried about VM performance under BtrFS?

Fedora is not a Linux you recommend for someone who doesn't know what they are doing and, if you know VM performance sucks with BtrFS, please, by all means, add another partition and use ext4 (or 3 or 2 or XFS or anything you think may offer you better performance)
Nice work. add a ?t=json option and this could get fun.
This article seems to echo this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283636. I still find it difficult to understand the business motivation behind Android; in this case, it seems suicidal. All the work that Google has put into making Android an opening for search (specifically, Google search) might go to waste if other companies start tinkering with Android for their own purposes.
Two commas, not one: Comma-Delimited Lists in Writing
Why? Look, I hate PHP as much as the next passionate software developer. I did PHP full-time from 2000-2005 until I couldn't take it anymore. I spent a fair amount of time with Drupal and it was technically very impressive even though ultimately it was not for me because the tradeoffs were not where I wanted to be as a developer.

The thing is, what a CMS does is cater to a site which does not have the budget for custom software. A system like Drupal gives a tremendous amount of bang for the buck, and of the open source CMSes, it's hook system is definitely the most powerful once you really understand how to drive it. In the end you're hitting the Drupal sweet spot when you write just a bit of glue code here and there to tune the functionality of existing modules to what you need.

In short Drupal and other CMSes let you build sites with a scope of functionality which would be impossible to do custom development for. In this type of market cost is such a factor that anything less ubiquitous than PHP would be a strike against the system. Furthermore, as the number of modules grow, you need a very large community to keep everything working smoothly, so you don't want to go with a language that has lesser adoption.

Personally I can't stand CMSes because I feel like the abstraction is at the wrong level. To me it's mediocrity by 1000 tiny assumption mismatches. Using Rails or Django I feel like I can craft a minimal, excellent and highly tuned UX exactly to my vision with a better language and lower overhead. Making a CMS in Ruby or Python doesn't address the root pain of living within a heavy and immobile scaffolding. There's a reason you don't hear much about the many open-source Rails CMSes that have been floated over the years.
Blaming technology isn't going to change the fact that journalism is still broken.

Folks like John Gruber and Matt Drudge make a ton of revenue by serving their readers. They have simpler technology than everything stated in this article.
Will Google+ Attract Malware Authors?
Are there any IRL hackfests for the Seattle area planned?
By the time, I got onto G+, almost all my friends were on there. Yes, we're all geeks.

I'm more than happy to keep it geeky over there!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car

Thank you Google for allowing me to find that page in less than a second ;)
You're preaching to the choir. I'm not making that argument. I'm making the argument that always opening your source up removes a fairly thick line of defense against straightforward reverse engineering, and makes software patents seem more necessary.

There's always the prospect of reverse engineering, but it's a lot harder to do and there are situations where it seems rather unlikely. In enterprise software, particularly, it seems considerably less likely that a big company will perpetrate hard-core reverse engineering naughtiness when bound by a thicket of NDAs and contracts - why risk it? A quick browse through the opened source code is a rather different beast.
Or more to the point: finally some thing learns.
Insulin is secreted every time you eat. It's not a bad thing, it's a very fundamental part of regulating your blood sugar. (Ask someone with type I diabetes -- it's a royal pain to control blood sugar manually.) It's released whether you're active, sedimentary, eating a healthy diet, or junk food.

When you eat breakfast in the morning, you're most certainly replenishing glycogen. While you sleep, it's the primary source of blood glucose. Your body will prefer to replenish the glycogen before beginning lipogenesis.
Going further in the thread they mention xfstests and that they run it against every patch.

http://xfs.org/index.php/Getting_the_latest_source_code#XFS_...

and

http://oss.sgi.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xfs/cmds/xfstests.gi...
I need at least a brief description below your tagline. What do you mean by "TV"? An actual TV? Streamed over the net or something?. What do you mean by "control"? With my phone? Through a browser? I still have no incentive to sign up other than morbid curiosity. As interesting as your blog may be, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to saunter over there to read through it in order to figure out what your app/site does.

Looks great. Needs a little more substance (just a little).
DotShare.it
Fructose can be metabolized to glycogen via DHAP and glyceraldehyde. IIRC, it's a limited pathway though.
USDA Launches Online Food Hub Resource
Ask HN: Are you interested in a 'boring' business?
This thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2755215) got me thinking the other day. I've met a lot of folks in the Bay Area that are going after 'exciting' businesses, I'll use a definition of exciting as a business that can get significant press coverage. However, I'm someone that's been in the B2B world for some time now, I seem to come across a lot of opportunities that are from a technical perspective not exciting at all....at least not initially.

Just because they aren't exciting from a technology perspective, doesn't mean that there aren't great companies waiting to be built there.

I'm wondering, how many of you are interested more in the company building that then the technology building? i.e. who's interested in a boring business more than an exciting one?

(Braintree's Bryan Johnson talks about this in his 37Signals interview - http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2800-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-braintree)
If you don't want it in alphabetical order, put the apps on your home/launcher screens and organize them how you want. The app drawer is only a fallback for apps that aren't commonly used (therefore, they need to be in a logical order as you aren't likely to remember where they are)
This is a great idea. 3.1 is way more 'breaky' than I'd expect from a point release, but the new features are great. Let's make it an awesome release!
> Because even something as basic as how large is an int is can quickly lead to a bug when someone assumes the usual rules still apply.

Would someone actually ask this and expect a numerical response? The only correct answer is sizeof(int), right?
The problem is that misdiagnosis is really easy.

Lets take HIV for example. First symptoms of infection are usually a high fever and very sick -- like a really bad flu (after this initial spike, you can go asymptomatic for years).

So you go to the doctor with flu-like symptoms, and they give you an HIV test. Now if you haven't had unprotected sex or blood transfusion with an at risk partner the odds of you having contracted HIV is extremely low. So the general recommendation is not to test you for HIV. But you say, "I want to rule it out. Give me the HIV test." Modern medical testing is rarely 100%. The HIV test is 99% accurate, but 1% of the time you won't have HIV, but it will say you do.

So imagine a population of 1000 zero risk people who take the test. On average 10 are going to come back as HIV positive. And maybe start an HIV regimine, rather than just realizing that its just the flu, which would have gone away in another day.

The point is you try to focus on what is common first. You rule those things out first, before diving into the more obscure. This not only reduces healthcare costs, but also reduces the burden on the healthcare system, and likely improves the health of virtually everybody.
Cool, flavors.me for phone apps. Their list of apps that use the service is rather impressive, did those companies add themselves or did app.net create profiles for all of them?
So basically it's all of TechCrunch's content with none of their ability to make money off it. This'll last long.
I've started evaluating real-life things like menus at restaurants as "landing pages"...

"I bet they'd sell 30 more of their overpriced special meal every day if they had the chalkboard in view of the tables instead of right next to the door!"
What's impressive is that they'er doing it mostly by giving people what they want and providing best of breed services rather than by using every opportunity to lock people in and attack their competitors with underhanded tactics (cough patent trolling).
You know, that's the first good reason I've ever heard for me getting a tattoo.
It's just for added emphasis. It's the contraction of roughly "this is the correct answer".
Hah, I prefer the hacker news version. The nyt one is kinda not appropriate.
True, haha.
I know Django pretty decently, but I haven't touched Rails in years. If someone asked me to write out how to do something basic in Rails, I would have no idea what words to write. But what I would understand is the process (what I want to achieve and what theoretical tools I would use to achieve it), what to search for, and what documentation to read, and I would have an answer pretty quickly given those resources.
I have to say it would be pretty awesome if there was a sudden influx in bored SAHMs learning to program / contributing to open source / starting their own company.
This is absurd -- the hacker movement is too small and undisciplined, and it lacks substantial knowledge about engineering and physics, to make this its central project for the next 30+ years.

I'm all for big projects, but the hacker community should focus on what it knows how to do -- write software.
How to Inform Customers of a Data Breach
Very insightful.

I'd also add that G+'s closed nature (invite only) has made the people who are in (and I'm one of those) feel a bit like they're all part of the same little family. Inhibitions are very low. This could change once the floodgates are open.
So, 12 Million for about half-a-million strikes, and 10 potential IP addresses locked out of net. That essentially 24 euros a strike. That cannot be worth it to taxpayers. Really, it can't be worth it to government. This "Hadopi" is a textbook example of something runaway, maybe legislative capture or something.
Nice work. I was going to do something very similar and call it bettercrunch.com - you beat me to it.
I signed up... but the timezone list seemed very non-standard and hard to figure out. Can't you begin with an IP lookup or something?