skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all those complaining about AWS I think it's important to not fall into the trap of throwing all of Amazon's services into the same bucket. EBS (and hence, RDS) have shown time and time again to be the most complex offerings and more prone to failure.

Generally speaking, at least for now, the parts of your system built on top of EBS should be carefully architected to survive in the face of erratic EBS latency, data corruption, or even downtime. (All of which are part of the standard AWS contract, but happen much more often in practice than if you are used to the mean failure time of a hard disk sitting in a cage.)

This pattern leads me to believe that services such as VoltDB that do not directly rely upon attached storage will prove to be the paradigm necessary to get reliable cloud computing, at least in the AWS ecosystem. On-demand provisioning of disk is an extraordinary hard problem, and a world where local ephemeral storage provides durability through redundancy across nodes and AZ's is probably where we are headed.
> Smalltalk definitely belongs on the list, it's the only one that takes "object-oriented" to its logical conclusion (dispatch can replace control structures).

i believe io does this as well.
Int a[] = {1,2,}; Weird comma allowed. Any particular reason?
Thanks for the input, the similar artist search is a bit slower than I would like it to be... I was doing it with JavaScript and it was a lot faster, I might end up going back to the JS way.

I agree it needs to be redesigned for better usability.
Ask HN: What are the top US schools teaching entrepreneurship and business?
Maybe this is common knowledge for Americans but as an Australian I have no idea. I've found it's really hard to find out anything business related from search engines due to blatant self promotion and SEO common in these fields.
When I was young I also argued, that violent computer games and movies don't make me more violent. That they are fiction and that I can distinguish them from reality.

From what I know now (which might be half knowledge and thus totally bullshit), the problem with violence is not really agression. Everybody is angry from time to time. Also other feelings like fear, frustration and psychological sickness might make you act violent or make you feel that hitting and killing other people is not an act of violence. But other factors are important. One is, that you can picture (meaning have the clear idea) of hurting someone and the barrier that stops you from executing this picture, which is made of empathy ("you are like me, I should not hurt you") and moral/ethics, which are an artificial created result of society. Based on this I feel that violent computer games really increased my chance of one day hurting other people. On one side, when I am angry with other people, I can picture more clearly how I want to hurt them and which tools might be useful for that purpose. Without my "experience" from movies and c.games I might have to think more clearly, how to efficiently apply pain to other people. I have more clear ideas then "take something hard and attack, when totally in rage". Also I feel that my barrier is lowered through these impressions. If I often watch this kind of movie and play this kind of game, the "experience" itself becomes more of a daily experience and less something being special and disgusting.

Maybe I am just not mentally healthy or the one in a million who reacts this way to computer games. So I can't really speak for other people. But I myself am quite sure that violent computer games increase the chance of me being violent and that my parents did a good job of trying to keep these away from me.
Still not seeing it. Both the tone and length of the post I replied to seem far more guilty of either interpretation (in context, given that blog posts are frequently much, much longer than posts on a forum) than the blog post it is basically smearing. The post seems uncalled for and contributes nothing of value to HN. It is merely scathing, for no apparent reason. It amounts to a personal attack rather than a critical analysis of the ideas put forth. Very often, posts of that character are rooted in personal vendettas. I'm not aware of some personal history between the two HN members in question, but the whole tone of the post just rubs me completely the wrong way.
Ya, I've had more than a handful of people complain about the font. I'll look into other options, I'm thinking a redesign is in need for better usability all around. Thanks for the input!
Jon Skeet, wtf.
Apple wins injunction in Europe against Samsung
It doesn't. Webob is a server framework, requests is a client.
The whole design concept needs to be redone
Nullable pointers and shared state reflect the way the machine actually works. If you regard these design decisions as mistakes, then Go clearly isn't the language for you.

(also, which language is Go less regular than? Lisp?)
Fascinating, I am really glad that "we" the new wave of programmers are not only conserned about code quality but are also deeply concerned with "usability". Everyday, as I go back and forth using old libs vs new libs, its obvious that the quality of old libs is pretty damn good but they have crappy "usability". New libs have a bit more bugs, being that they are also "newer", but they are a pleasure to use.
Why not just include arbitrary verbs? The rest of the protocol doesn't change at all...
Apple's email was straight forward and to the point (high signal to noise). The "solution" needlessly tacks on boilerplate, and divulges additional information about the user in the email. If someone's iTunes account has been compromised, it is possible that their email account may have been as well. Best not to show too much.

The actionable item in Apple's email is very clear: change my password, and then learn how to be more secure. In the "solution," it is not. You need to "associate [my] new device with [my] Apple ID"? Huh? Do I need to re-register my current device, or what?

I'm all for using Bayesian inference behind the scenes, but don't needlessly flood the user with excess information. Tell them what's up, and what they need to do.

Withholding information could be helpful later, should the user need to verify their identity over the phone (for example).

Sending an email when an account is used for the first time on a new device is not a bad idea, but it could become another hoop for the user to jump through, and again, their email may also be compromised.
equivalent in node: http://github.com/mikeal/request
equivalent in jquery: https://github.com/iriscouch/request_jquery
Sociology term paper means
Sociology is a subject that deals with human behavior; their interactions with one another within their social groups or with other ethnic groups. It also studies the causes of man’s problems, its effects and the solutions found to overcome these problems.
But what if your personal value system includes wanting your day job---what you spend 40 hours/wk or more doing---to be directly implementing something you care about?

Sure, that's a selfish choice to some extent, but I think it's a reasonable one. Some people choose to live in one city over another just because they like it, or to work at Google rather than Wall Street because they like what they're building there more. Some people will pass up a job for one that pays 20% less, because it's building an exciting new app they want to help succeed. Wanting to work on a social-justice project just seems like a variation of that; it's quite common and natural for people to want their day job to be something they care about, if they have the option.

I think the argument as given also assumes that charities are currently operating optimally, and there's no room for improvement or disruption. If you applied the efficiency argument to startups in general, it would argue that you should work a well-paying job and pay other people to do startups. When would it ever be beneficial to do one yourself? Only if you think the market is not already efficient, and your personal intervention as a founder could change things more than working your current job and just funding startups would.
I agree, I'm looking into other options, thanks for the feedback.
Movim 0.3 is out
There is support for arbitrary verbs, just more direct API support for the common ones.

here's the api for a generic request, get is right under it: https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/blob/develop/reques...
I think providing non-trivial information that can help people make decisions is important and something that CS people can do. I'm thinking of maybe open data from/about governments that would allow for greater civic engagement. I live in the U.S. so it's still not as dire as other places, but still it's something.

I'm glad that someone is thinking about this instead of a new way to sell ads.
For those interested in getting to know requests vs urllib2, I gave a talk @ PyOhio, covered some simple examples in each (and why requests is super great) http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/4388/pyohio-2011-consu...
If it brings down the site, you might get into trouble. It's totally consider DoS.
Google has rate limiting protection from a single IP. If you make too many requests, they send you to a captcha page.
> If that is right, then they would be depriving some of the world’s poorest people of desperately needed wealth.

Really silly to see the Economist, of all places, taking this kind of line.

The inhabitants of these countries lack the technological knowhow to drill for oil and mine for minerals. If you're familiar with the area, it's no joke; we're talking about serious physics, math, and computer science to get oil out of the ground and ship it profitably.

For all kinds of reasons the Chinese have these skills and the Angolans do not. The land will remain absolutely barren if foreigners do not bring their knowhow. Moreover, it is not in China's interest to have an African civil war raging over a possible oil supply as well, so they'll quash stuff like that with authority.

Life around a Chinese-Angolan joint venture will not be paradise relative to a US standard of living. But it will mean jobs, food, and relative political stability, which is a far sight beyond what most other nations in sub-Saharan Africa enjoy.
Because it is shedding light on powerful corrupt elites and goes into some detail (given the brevity of the article), without going into wild-eyed conspiracy theories or making half-assed assertions just for the sake of bashing a profit-making corporation.

This sort of transparency is important to a functioning free market economy, especially in resource-rich, socioeconomically underdeveloped economies. Many of these countries don't have a well-developed press to shine the light on the corrupt practices of their government, so it's important and socially useful for the international press to pick up the slack and expose local corruption.
There is http://codeforamerica.org/ although that doesn't exactly fit your description.

I would be very interested if someone knows of something more along the OP's lines.
This motivated me to play around with Net::SSH port forwarding this afternoon and evening. What I ended up with was a tiny patch that allows you to forward a local UNIX domain socket to a remote TCP port over an SSH connection. It's a fun hack if nothing else:

https://gist.github.com/1144486
https://github.com/imbriaco/net-ssh/commit/aa453511f546cd524...
Armando Santos Spring/Summer 2012
i hear you man. i find myself in nearly the same predicament, though i just lost my job…happy days indeed. i'm with abcd_f—write it down and tell someone about it. focus on doing one thing really well but still giving yourself time to decompress, to think. don't let other ideas distract you—save them for later. finish one thing. one thing that you love and can be proud of. and share it with others—especially the design aspects. find someone who has an eye for detail to help you—someone who believes in what you are doing—even if you are yourself a good designer. have them help you create a grand plan for your product, pare it down to a manageable size, and iterate from there. the thing i'm learning about software, job-hunting, child rearing is that it is never done. as a perfectionist myself, it's a hard pill to swallow—there is ALWAYS disappointment, but i don't think that anything meaningful ever gets made without disappointment. and people who don't get disappointed probably never change things (though the suicide rate is lower). life is hard. my three years since graduation have gone from bad to worse. don't feel bad about not finishing school—i thought that i would be able to get something useful that at least put food on the table and pay the mortgage, and i find myself scraping by doing the same stuff or worse than before i decided to go to school. educational inflation sucks, especially out here in the rust belt.

so now i'm doing exactly the advice i'm giving you, except with about half resolve and double the complexity—advice is easier to give than to follow. i'm asking for help from the few who believe in me. here's an episode of a podcast that i've found cathartic— http://5by5.tv/b2w/7 —it doesn't get anything done, but it has gotten me thinking and laughing at least. listen to it while doing dishes or yardwork.

as for medication—i was diagnosed with depression and it ended up being vitamin d deficiency. also, yoga helps.

here on HN is an entertaining presentation by mike lee (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Making-Apps-That-Dont-Suc...) in which he talks about selling everything to work for will shipley for one year without pay. so if none of my advice suits you—do something crazy that propels you in the direction you want to go.
While I'm not currently at liberty to discuss the specifics a start-up I'm involved with, Social Fortress[1], is working with several human rights organizations to implement aspects of our technology for the purpose of allowing individuals to communicate privately, using open communication channels, without having to fear that their government can see / access the content of those communications.

To answer your question directly:

Find a problem that affects people of all 'levels' of society and do your best everyday to solve for it.

[1] https://www.socialfortress.com - The site is sparse on technical information but expect that to change in the coming weeks. Any specific questions can be directed to feedback@socialfortress.com
From the Article: scripting languages weren't really designed for large-scale development efforts involving millions of lines of code

In this instance Carmark is talking about a specific instance - scripting for high-performance games, that still need to work with the tradeoff of high levels of reliability.

He even mentions tempted by functional languages such as Haskell and Caml. Then he lists a couple of reasons it's not appropriate - performance is one, the learning curve is the other.

He then goes on to say that he'd think about it differently, but that performance is such a dominating factor and issue for them. That's driving the majority of the logic.

So I'd not draw too long a bow to suggest that he's canning scripting languages in general. I think the author is stretching with that statement.

you'll have fewer lines of code and clearer separation between components

I think that's the most important statement. If you have millions of lines of code, the answer to to _write less_... and that's where dynamic & functional languages are so important.

I've worked on large codebases. It's rare that one language can cover the whole domain without some big potholes appearing (when I say cover I mean vertically in terms of low-high level code and horizontally in terms of function). That's where your DSL and dynamic languages some into play.
I think Apple patents everything they can find to avoid lawsuits. The patents they've actually used in a product are the ones the filed against Android manufacturers.

It's hard to take any of the patents seriously. Usually the new tech that Apple introduces are patents filed very close to when the product is publicly released so no one is aware of the feature. Even when they show new features that come from these patents it's never quite the same as what those illustrations show.
I tend to see the software world as divided between "Tools" and "Platforms"

Platforms are systems that enable a large number o similar behaviors -- Google is the search platform, Amazon the shopping platform, Windows is a platform as is MS Office. Platforms tend to be a winner take all business, as there are significant advantages to scale as well as strong network effects.

Tools on the other hand do one thing and one thing well. Most products start off as tools - then there are 2 ways to go, either become a platform (eg: facebook) or get bought by a platform (eg: flickr).

I don't see how dropbox is going to be worth $5B as a file sharing tool, nor do I see any platform buying them at that price.

So my question really is -- what is the dropbox platform gonna look like? What do the investors know that we don't?
Morocco awarded African Country of the Future 2011/2012
"Just as you can't add quality to your code just before shipping, seldom can you significantly improve performance without dramatic rewriting"

That's total bullshit. I've seen massive improvements from just a few key optimisations on very large code bases.

Q: "When is it a mature time to start to consider performance, however?"

A: When you have problems due to slow performance.

The "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" catchcry is basically the same as "don't solve problems you don't have".
Jeff Bezos patents retro jets, and airbags, for telephones
The point of this article is that the "jobs, food, and relative political stability" haven't materialized. Your last sentence pretty much summarizes the Economist's position and then goes into detail explaining why this is happening in this particular case.
Philadelphia has a Curfew to Fight Teen Flash Mobs
I'm of the opinion that it's hard to say that a good deed done in a dire situation is ethically superior to a good deed done in a less dire situation. Rather than address the problems of less fortunate people elsewhere in the world, I work to make my own world better.

My favorite way to justify my work is that I'm interested in making things and events that make life worth living.

While I do this, I try to minimize the extent tow which my actions are connected to the exploitation of others. When it comes to computers and other complex technologies, I try to "concentrate firepower", which means to use high-tech tools only in situations when it will have a significant effect. Otherwise I use simple tools.
Seems like there are a lot of directions these guys could go
if the original direction doesn't take off. Might try
downloadable-auto updated scrape books. Also know of a few companies making a living off of renting and selling copies
of photos/artwork to businesses, could go in that direction.
Your story gave me a good chuckle. My girlfriend and I both have different types of epilepsy so our mornings frequently consist of: "You punched me in the face!" "No! You punched ME in the face!"
Question for those critical of BART's action: do you believe that a significant fraction of BART's users would rather risk getting stranded in San Francisco (which is what would have happened to them if the protester's plans had succeeded) than to lose the ability to use wireless services for the time it takes to transit the four downtown-SF BART stations?

That's what a demonstration does. Why not rephrase the question: would you accept a complete ban on all forms of demonstration that potentially inconvenience even a single individual?

Next you'll tell me we need to ban parades.
I actually just went back to letting JS do the dirty work, searches should be a lot faster now.
I found this to be pretty interesting. I know someone with a little girl who has CF. The whole situation is just sad all around.

There is a long history of selling dietary advice in book and newsletter form. Hard to say without knowing the details but if you feel like you have something to share it's worth seeing if anyone cares to find out about it. I'd be willing to try just about anything if one of my daughters had CF. Price isn't really a factor to people in that frame of mind.

A blog, forum, and one on one advice site for this seems like it could work assuming your results are real and repeatable (not saying they are or aren't just saying really). Seems like that'd be worth a monthly subscription.
ROFL I just thought of a sad little joke:

Q: What would it take for the Economist to notice rich countries fucking over poor countries for mineral rights?

A: When the rich country is China.

But don't worry soon the Chinese too will figure out how to bribe the pathetic asswhores that call themselves business journalists and we will not have to worry about these stories marring our newspapers.
Bill Gates is saving up for a new Lamborghini
How the NYT paywall is working
Takes one to know one
Ask HN: Career Change to something without computers
I know previously on HN I had read of people who had transitioned out of programming into other work. I can't find the thread now though.

I am considering doing this. I have some health issues and I think sitting at a computer too much is leading to it. I've tried taking breaks from programming in the past and I usually end up missing it so I'm sure I still would continue programming as a hobby, however, I want to look into what other jobs a programmer might be good at that doesn't require sitting at a computer for so long.

Has anyone else switched from programming to another career? What other types of jobs would be good for a programmer?
Please don't fall into the trap of believing that your daily work and working for the greater good are mutually exclusive.

You may not realize it, but you are often contributing to the greater good on a daily basis simply by doing your job. It's sometimes hard to visualize this because we are often many degrees of separation away from the "end user".

You don't actually have to be physically building that home for the homeless or providing food for the hungry; the work you're already doing may be helping someone to help someone else to do that.

I've even thought that the best way to put your technical skills to the greater good is through your day job, not instead of it.

Some of my days jobs have been to write software to ensure that:

- people get the right prescription medication on time
- firetrucks and ambulances get to where they're supposed to be
- parts that go into cars and planes are properly certified
- prisoners are kept in jail
- those same prisoners get proper medical care
- electronic equipment gets assembled properly and on time
- medical supplies get dispatched to where they're supposed to
- insurance claims are processed properly
- quality data is properly maintained for food items

You don't need to do charity work on the side in order to contribute to the greater good.

On the other hand, if you don't think that the work you do during the day contributes to the greater good, then maybe you should consider doing something else with your valuable time.

Do good and get paid. You can do both at the same time.