skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if two significant events are coming together to make this happen:

1) Do consumers/IT workers need to buy entirely new computers today as frequently as they did 10 years ago? I don't think so. I'm running my dev rig on a machine I built in 2008 - quad core Intel Core Duo w/ 8GB RAM on 64-bit Win2k8R2 OS - and it's blazing still today. I'm running VMs, SharePoint, SQL Server all in the background and still it's a great box. Prior to that I was spending $2k every two years probably to keep up.

My wife's PC is the same - it's just a regular box we bought at MicroCenter, I think, in 2009. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD dual core (can't recall). It's super fast. I see no reason to upgrade. She runs Photoshop and MS Office mainly and both are super, super fast.

2) The one thing that made the biggest impact for our computers was to make the OS run on SSDs. Prior to doing that, we were both frustrated.

So combine (a) whether Moore's Law is applicable today, and (b) SSD performance and availability, and it makes me wonder just how much this will impact not only Dell but other companies (HP, etc).

Hell, that makes me wonder: are we spending money on iPads for fun b/c we have extra money that we were going to spend on upgrading computers but now don't have to? Now I'm reaching...
These people weren't fighting any 'system' or for any cause. They plainly saw an opportunity to steal, vandalise and ruin the lives of many hard-working, law-abiding citizens, under the so called 'protection' of the mob.

Hopefully this hard justice will serve as a warning that this simply will not be tolerated in our civil society. If anything, it actually emphasises how lenient the court system normally is, and I firmly believe that sentencing should always be this strict.
Bunchify sign up has launched
Pffff, anyone who doesn't measure things on a scale of 8747-41947 is a troglodyte.
The problem is that our brains are pretty specific in the types of problems they're adapted to solving. Riding a bike, sure. Induction motor controller, probably not so much :)

I suspect that it would be possible to map most control problems onto a problem that the human mind can solve, either consciously or instinctively. I don't think the speed of the loop should be a deciding factor at all, at least when a computer is doing the control. For example, you could map maintaining power supply stability to standing upright just by slowing the problem down and converting the input variables into axes of motion.

To sum up, bumping up the clock speed on something a human could do (even if it took them a thousand years) seems like a very poor criterion for patentability, and I hope the issue is revisited and clarified.
Google+ is already filled with spam
Yes the nodejs concurrency model takes some time getting used to, but working with threads is much harder imo. Raw speed benchmarks don't do enough to give a full picture.
He's still thinking like an indie developer and grasping at opportunities.

Or perhaps he's thinking incrementally. Notch has always been a big proponent of incremental development, rather than keeping a game secret and releasing it only when it's done.
> Your citizenship is the explicit signature on the contract.

A "citizenship" is not a tangible thing. I didn't do anything specific to get a "citizenship", so how can my allegedly "having" one constitute an explicit anything?

Do you not see how circular the argument is? Is your claim really that (a) I'm bound to the US legal code because I "have a citizenship", and (b) I "have a citizenship" because the US legal code says I do? Are you sure you've thought this through?

> As long as you are a citizen you are a signatory.

I'm sorry, but to me the word "signatory" implies having signed something. Your claim makes about as much sense as saying "as long as you have red hair you are a signatory".

> You can remove your name at any time.

That is not actually true; you can't renounce citizenship without the government's consent which it only grants in limited circumstances. You can't do it while residing in the US and if you have significant assets or income in many cases you need to either keep paying income tax for TEN YEARS after you leave or are required to pay a huge one-time lump sum. The practicality of the situation is a bit like being born a slave and having the (limited) right to purchase your freedom later in life.
Thanks. By the way, I've been a back end developer for many years and have only dabbled in the front. The table of contents alone make we want to buy this book (probably will) as it appears to run the entire gamut of front end development and appears to be very up to date with what people are doing these day. For me it would be a "survey of front end best practices" that I can use to dig in deeper.
That's not an answer, that's an IOU for an answer, unless you can begin to describe broad classes of problems and how they differ.
Yeah, the graphs are misleading because of the varying Y scale.

I do like the conclusions section, though. It presented some insightful analysis of dyno/worker efficiency

>It could be that I’m benchmarking from only 1 server but I’ve seen almost no difference between having 40 dynos or 60. You’ll see one when you receive the bill so be cautious, especially if you use an auto-scale tool.

>The same applies to node with cluster, you can do more with 15 dynos running cluster with 3 workers than with 60 dynos of node alone (for a quarter of the price!).
The problem with the whiteboard design is that you have to defer, "oh, let's see if that works" indefinitely. While you spend 90% of your time thinking and 10% typing, you don't spend 9 hours thinking and then 1 hour typing. You spend 5 seconds typing, then 30 seconds thinking, then a minute or so typing, and so on. Getting feedback from the computer is important for anything that's complicated enough to require a design. Seeing what the code looks like that your design enables is as important as a conceptually-sound design.

The main problem is that 99% of programmers don't know how to prototype. They assume that whatever they commit is what goes into production. No. Try an idea quickly and throw it away if it's bad. That's why we have languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby. While it's 50/50 on using them for production, they are absolutely the right tool for testing your ideas quickly.

And if you can test ideas quickly, you don't need meetings. Spend an hour coding what you would have talked about in the meeting. Share with coworkers. Get feedback. Tweak the prototype. Then write the "ready for production" version.

I've been to a lot of meetings but I've never seen any piece of code look anything like what was described in the meetings. As soon as you hit that one point where the computer's view of things and your meeting's view of things diverges, everything else you discussed in the meeting is invalidated. The computer is always right.

(Actually, one of the answers I got to an interview question at Google was so cool that I had to code it. And the code looked exactly like the design I sketched on the whiteboard. And it ran really fast on a large dataset. So maybe meetings are useful; but only for algorithm design, not for "real-world" stuff like "how should we refactor this thing".)
Right- and are we doing ourselves a diservice by having "Too Big to Fail"- and having companies grow past the optimal size?
Once it is too large, each employed person's output is smaller than what it could be in a smaller company. Which is why a lot of people leave large companies to launch start-ups and why a lot of start-ups that are acquired fail when in a larger and bureaucratic system.
This is why I don't buy the home I live in as an investment. It conflates two very important things:

* My home.

* A large financial investment.

Changing one affects the other. I'm skeptical that life circumstances will magically align so that when it's a good time for me financially to sell my home, it will also be a good time for me to change location (or vice versa).

So I rent.
Actually, people skills can and are learned, but a lot occurs at an early age when you are not exactly in control of your education. Dealing with other children at <5 years is kind of important.

I had a friend in college who grew up on a farm. He was an only child, and I got the feeling his parents didn't really pay him much mind beyond rules and schedule. He did not play team sports or do team activities of any kind and really didn't mix after school with his peers. You could see his lack of comprehension he exhibited behavior and said words that caused offense. He did become a high school teacher.

I too believe not everyone needs to deal with customers. I blame the company for putting someone with that personality type in a job that has customer implications. Their response is also inadequate and should have been much more inline with "all our fault".

That being said, like you, I think he should be gone or put on leave for a while. Deleting backup data is a super no-no. That's a trust violation and has nothing to do with social skills.
Dead Man's Switch - version 2
Really interesting article. One particular statement caught my eye "many P25 systems … are "rekeyed" at frequent intervals, in the apparent (and basically erroneous) belief that changing encryption keys regularly improves security". My belief was that rekeying was useful in order to limit the "blast radius" if a key was compromised and thus improves security. I'd be interested in finding out why that isn't the case, is it because, as in the article, it introduces more problems that it solves or is there another reason?
Suppose somebody made a spreadsheet for big data. What might you do with it?
Spot Instances - Increased Control
Is there any precedent for courts recognizing mathematical or logical proofs? I was under the impression that courts, by their design, rely entirely on appeals to authority in the form of expert testimony.

For that matter, would it be possible to design a court system based on a fully modern understanding of logic, proof, induction, etc., rather than the seemingly ad hoc system we have now?
According to the article, there is no "fruits of $3.5 million", no real IP, no nothing.
Thanks, nice to see my city on there. I don't expect anyone to go out of their way to support IE7, I was just interested in the data on this one. Thanks for providing it.
I'm surprised they didn't keep at it... Jumo had been live for what, like less than a year? They were entering the same space as care, change, and idealist. Those sites took YEARS to develop their community base. Not saying things need a timeline but geez....
I'm a UK guy.

I won't argue that these sentences are disproportionate.

But is it what we need in response to this? I'd argue yes.

The spark for these "riots" was a gentleman who was killed during an arrest. Bad times, of course. Very bad times.

But it's important to understand that the details of /exactly/ what happened here are currently officially unknown. The official report has not been released.

On the back of this, groups of people all over the UK decided to go on organised shoplifting spree's. When asked by the media "Why" they said things like "To get back our taxes, innit." [SIC]

Perhaps a few, who are at the very least comfortable with criminal behaviour, need to be given these sorts of sentences - and then for the media to make it well known it's happened.

A deterrent. Unfortunate for those singled out for it, but perhaps one needed for the good of the whole society.

They looted charity shops for fucks sake. Parents supported the kids doing it.

Something had to be done. This was it.
Not sure if he still does it, but he used to send out GoodFET's free of charge so long as you'd build them. I've used his programmer to program multiple different chips and it is absolutely fantastic.
I await your proper and full analysis, or a link to one.
Working with threads in the context of a web request is not hard.
If radio with secure key 1234 was always issued to Agent Smith then you could track him (especially since the key is sent in the clear)
So changing the key helps disguise Agent Smith, but so would swap radios between units regularly, it doesn't solve any of the problems of sending the key or how the encryption works.
Also, you probably want to put the things you are comparing on the same chart.
Beta release should be available in the next couple weeks.
Or, an otherwise fundamentally unpatentable algorithm with today's core counts could become patentable five to ten years from now when pocket computing power is measured teraflops?
Ninja Rockstar considered Harmful
When calculating the cost of purchasing/ renting, are they including condo fees, property/school taxes. In some areas the tax/condo fees alone exceed typical rents.
Android runs some scripting languages, so you can code on-the-unit. http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ python, lua, beanshell (java scripting), perl and ruby (via JRuby) and some JVM languages.

Although scripting languages tend to be slower, especially on a smartphone and especially on this one (500MHz), they are increasingly mainstream, and the tools are available on the unit. And probably, vastly more powerful than the platforms most of us got started on (ZX81 here).

disclaimer: I don't have an Android, and haven't used these languags, so don't know what limitations they have on a smartphone, nor how serious those limitations are.
Note that yahoo does not seem to rely on graph algorithms to do that. To reach from X to Y, where X is not directly connected to Y, they ask X which of their friends might connect them to Y.

Have there been any other prominent attempts (besides the famous friendster feature) to validate this hypothesis?
I'm getting really close to automatically flagging anything from TechDirt. I don't recall ever seeing a worthwhile story on TechDirt that wasn't covered much more accurately elsewhere.
Having witnessed first hand the devastation and destruction in Hackney - most small business owners who lost pretty much their whole lively hoods would state that the sentences being handed out aren't enough - and I whole heartedly agree.

How many of those small businessmen shook their heads but did nothing over happy slappers and countless other creeping failures of the rule of law? Civilizations don't fall because the barbarians get strong but because the middle class stops defending civility. If the yeomanry do not guard their liberty, they abdicate it.

I'll stop writing here. If I go on I will start quoting The Boondock Saints and lose all credibility.
It was written completely from a sincere place. I used to study linguistics and 10 years ago was pretty darn good at languages. I see dudes like Tim Ferriss saying they can learn a new language in three months (I question this) and I speak to Europeans and Africans who have 5-7 languages. I used to take liguistics classes and could converse in a numer of languages. Being good at languages was part of my identity. However, we can't be good at everything. If you don't use a muscle it atrophies and that's happening with my language skills. That's what I was trying (perhaps unsuccessfully?) to express. I'm sad that this part of my identity isn't working like it used to and it makes me feel like an imposter.

I liked your C language example.
To be fair, the submitter/author runs AWS, which makes this a little less typical to me.
Looks promising.....I heard it might be an open source project too??
Can stimulus packages lead to lost decades and ballooning debt?
> it’s cheaper to buy a home than to rent in 74% of America’s 50 largest cities

This "statistic" wouldn't happen to come from a company that earns its revenue primarily through the buying and selling of houses, would it?

Most Americans should rent, especially in today's dark economy. The average American is unskilled, has not saved for retirement and lives paycheck to paycheck. Such a person should avoid big purchases because accumulating debt is a gamble on future earnings.
Kerckhoffs’ Legacy: The history of open source and network security.
I'm still amazed no one mentioned an amazing post about the same subject by Jason Cohen from Smart Bear:

"Why I feel like a fraud"

http://blog.asmartbear.com/self-doubt-fraud.html
When I use emoticons, I feel like a bad writer. I feel like my jokes were too subtle or just not funny, so I have to make up for my deficiency by inserting a symbol that says "I MADE A JOKE HERE, BUT NOT WELL ENOUGH THAT YOU GOT IT."

It's the same as in a face-to-face interaction where someone laughs at their own joke in hopes of inspiring you to laugh-- generally, not a good strategy.

Still, I understand the utility of the emoticon in the customer-service situation, where you have no shared experience to base jokes on.
His guide to secure P25 deployment suggests simply rekeying whenever a radio is lost, stolen, or compromised, since in a law enforcement context, key theft is much less likely than in military operations. (Cops don't often get shot down over enemy territory, for example.)
Rather than do a drive-by downvote, I'm going to say that while I may share your sentiment to an extent, it has been my experience that HN usually prefers more substantive comments.
Do women talk more on their cell phones than men?
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Progress is moving slowly. I'm not sure there's much I can ask you to do. The best thing is if I can lighten my other responsibilities, like bug fixes, etc. :-/
I slogged through much of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (http://fcic.law.stanford.edu/). One of the conclusions was that while mandating loans didn't help, they weren't numerous enough to be a major cause. Once the mortgage-backed securities engine got churning, there was an enormous demand for more loans to feed it. That provided most of the incentive for the bad loans, not government mandate.
Yes it may be an open source project..
New Route 53 and ELB features: IPv6, Zone Apex, WRR and more
I don't think there is a facade in this case. Usually never that simple.
Absolute worst thing though is a slow or troublesome connection; in that case you're better off with no connection at all.
Of all the screenshots to take, why those? Frustrating!
It's high. I've done it with results typically from 3 to 25%, depending on the demographics. Problem is that it doesn't really scale. Great to get a few hundred or thousand followers, but you aren't going to get to a million that way.
Which is quite an achievement.
Just a heads up we do async chat all the time here at my office, but we use Skype instead of Campfire. I don't want anyone to feel like they need to pay a monthly fee to get that service. Skype does persistent chat, you can add people to rooms and they remain persistent as well. You can 'favorite' rooms to keep them sort of pinned in one spot in your list of active convos. It's handy.

http://cl.ly/2d3d1M072M1H1h3P1A0i
If there is a physical limitation to the amount of light that can be produced by a light bulb that uses black body emission to generate light, then a standard of efficiency that exceeds that physical limitation is an effective ban on generating light via black body emission.

That's the way Congress loves to roll: they won't explicitly ban something they don't like (so they can save face with their constituents), but they'll do everything they can to make it untenable.
I match what the other does to me. That said, I am a little annoyed with the concepts of greeting and signature within an email. Thanks to the "From:" and "To:" headers, this is redundant data. A lot of people write emails as if they were writing snail mail. Yet, simultaneously, those greetings and signatures do sometimes convey a certain formality because of my experience with snail mail; depending on my mood, I will either chuckle at the "Dear Sir" or read the contents in a more businesslike tone. I wonder if these parts of the writing structure will fall out of fashion in another 50 years.
If you count in binary, 2 bits are two orders of magnitude.
Some of the views can be bypassed by the developer (say a dev has no need for the cropping or messaging view), but we're always refining our flow and looking for ways to adjust our UI. If you have any suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Just shoot an email to team@sincerely.com, SUBJECT: iOS Ship Library Feedback.
It's not that they were slower or trying to waste your time with long "radio silences", it's that they didn't realize that you didn't realize that "Hmmm...Very difficult" was an upfront, flat-out, "fuck no" in their culture.
Hopefully this hard justice will serve as a warning that this simply will not be tolerated in our civil society.

That warning is better served by preceding a potential riot with a few decades of prompt, strict, and small punishments for failures of civility. A person who knows that there will be consequences does not participate in a riot. Or at least it would be a polite English riot with the mob leaders passing out cucumber sandwiches.

... I firmly believe that sentencing should always be this strict.

Alas, punishing an impromptu mob for the arson of its most destructive member does not un-burn-down a buildingful of shops, and the thrill of seeing the mob railroaded might even encourage a career-criminal arsonist who knew to take precautions against being identified.
I remember running this type of setup back in 2003 with text files and Blosxom. What's old is new again?
EventMachine uses an event loop like node, so threads are somewhat irrelevant here. Unless "workers" are threads and not actual processes, but I am pretty sure they are processes.
Mega post de gadgets tecnológicos
Todo sobre productos espía
Improving accessibility for Google Reader, inspired by readability
I spend way too long in google reader everyday. After about the 100th article my eyes start to hurt from all black text on a white background.

So I decided to fix it with a chrome extension.

Readerbility (inspired by readability) darkens the background, increases the font size, and uses a more readable font.

It's just some small css changes, but if you have the same pains that I do, you can grab it from here and upload it to chrome from the extensions page.

Best,
Chris

https://github.com/cmaury/readerbility
Maybe someone left on auto-update and the server restarted after a hotfix? (sorry, cheap shot I know)
Not really, cars only have to meet one of two standards, California or EPA.
Speaking of SHA-3, "biclique cryptanalysis was ﬁrst introduced for hash cryptanalysis". Here's an interesting quote from the paper regarding the relationship between attacks on block ciphers and hash functions:

"... the block cipher standard AES is almost as secure as it was 10 years ago in the strongest and most practical model with a single unknown key. The former standard DES has not seen a major improvement since Matsui’s seminal paper in 1993.

In contrast, the area of hash function cryptanalysis is growing quickly, encouraged by the cryptanalysis MD5, of SHA-0 and SHA-1, followed by a practical attack on protocols using MD5, preimage attacks on Tiger and MD5, etc. As differential cryptanalysis, a technique originally developed for ciphers, was carried over to hash function analysis, cryptanalysts are now looking for the opposite: a hash analysis method that would give new results on block ciphers."
This is comparing nodejs with Ruby's EventMachine, so where do threads enter the picture? It's been a while since I looked at EM, but if I remember correctly, it's pretty much in the same area as Python's Twisted or node.js, as opposed to something like plain ol' Java threads or Erlang.