skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the response! We went with Node.js instead of connecting the client directly to Rabbit primarily because of socket.io.

So far the amount of activity has been extremely underwhelming for the node instances, but we'll see if this changes over time. The current total activity amounts to <100 activities per minute, and I'm pretty sure we could support at least an order of magnitude more than that. Each node box has identical state at all times to all of the others, with the exception of currently connected socket.io clients.

Honestly the first thing I would do if we had the need to scale horizontally (scaling only for HA for now) would be to reduce the amount of data sent over the wire at all levels. I'd modify the current solution of sending the entire object to send only a reference to the object and what amounts to a diff of old version to new version.

I'm pretty new at architecting stuff like this (this project was my first time making architecture decisions), so I'm sure there's plenty of room for optimization. I'm just hoping that it was architected in a way such that if/when it fails due to load, very little of the code will need to be rewritten. However, given current performance, the increase in amount of activity that would be required to overload our architecture seems like one of those 'Good Problems to Have'.
More On The Changing Face Of IT
This reminded me of a case back in 2003...the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the FBI in a case where they were tripping "recovery mode" to surreptitiously monitor drivers under Federal investigation:

http://news.cnet.com/Court-to-FBI-No-spying-on-in-car-comput...

The court ruled against the FBI here, apparently not for anything related to privacy, but rather due to the fact that such surveillance could constitute an interruption in emergency services.

Note also that the decision is only binding in states that fall within the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction. (And no clue whether this decision applies also to local law enforcement; would assume that it does, but IANAL/LLE).
I appreciate your advice. I kept my post short because I think long posts tend to get tedious and discourage a healthy back and forth. But please don't assume I haven't thoroughly considered the issue.

> I've studied economics well, I just haven't come to the same conclusion as you.

What are your conclusions? It would be more fruitful to hear your thoughts on the issue rather than a critique of my presentation style.

I'm not trying to grind an axe by stating that a subsidy "shift[s] the burden of cost from the consumers to the taxpayers." Wikipedia's statement on the impact of subsidies is nearly identical to mine:

"Farm subsidies have the direct effect of transferring income from the general tax payers to farm owners."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#Impact_of_...

I agree with you that the system is complex. The complexity is precisely what makes it difficult to identify the hidden costs of subsidies.

A subsidy takes taxpayer money and transfers it to producers of a certain good. I think this is inherently unfair, regardless of whether it's done with good intentions. I think the only fair method is to let people choose for themselves how they want to spend their money without coercion.

I'm a vegan, and believe my food choices make a positive impact in terms of the environment and reducing environmental cruelty. But I think it's immoral to force that same belief on others using the apparatus of government. It would be unfair for the government to intervene and make it prohibitively expensive to buy meat or animal products.

In addition to being inherently immoral (IMHO), subsidies have unanticipated costs and unforeseen consequences. Some examples:

- The artificially low price of the subsidized good leads to an artificially high demand for the subsidized good at the expense of demand for competing goods that are not subsidized. This hurts the producers of those unsubsidized goods.

- The corn subsidy has driven the price of corn syrup below that of cane sugar, making corn syrup the sweetener of choice in mass produced foods. Corn syrup is an inferior sweetener and leads to health problems such as obesity.

If you require links to supporting commentary I'm happy to provide them.

I don't doubt that many subsidies are created with good intentions, but because of the unseen costs and consequences, it is prudent, for the long term health of an economy, to avoid them.
Ask HN: What code review tool do you use?
We're still a small 2-3 person team but would like to start using a structured code review process.

What code review tools with web UIs do you use? Would you recommend it? Are there any cloud-based ones?
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It is so annoying xkcd did a comic on it: http://xkcd.com/869/
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Good Afrrtnoon America: customer unioln
Even if the complaint is true, this is not a Ponzi scheme any more than any bank in a fractional reserve system, like basically everywhere nowadays.

In a Ponzi scheme you take new money fully aware that you aren't going to be able to repay in the medium/long term. In other words: you know you don't have a scheme that actually works well enough to pay the profits you are promising. This is not the case here at all. If the complaint is true - which may or may not be -this is theft, plain and simple.

Note that the difference between a Ponzi scheme and a recklessly run investment shop is sometimes academic. One can sometimes be unable to tell apart failed, unrealistic expectations and successful fraud. But here the business model is solid and they have simply taken from users pockets for fun and profit. Again, if the complaint is true.

Bit tired of hearing "Ponzi" misused time and again. I guess it makes for sensational headlines.
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If you're a Django shop and only using node for socket.io, I recently released django-socketio which you'd probably find interesting: https://github.com/stephenmcd/django-socketio
Most iOS apps use a standard set of system calls to check if the item has been purchased. I assume the hack works by patching the systems calls to return YES to all queries about in-app purchase items. That's how I would do it if I was building something like that. There are no tokens or keys to validate... it's just "hey system, is this paid for? okay!"
Al Jazeera has a long-standing strong and vocal bias against the USA. It seems to be pretty well known.

I have been reading their articles for months. I guarantee you that bias still shows through. Even in their "toned-down" state, I have felt my ears get red reading some of their articles.

They have hardly been warped to be "pro-US". I would be more concerned if their voice had actually swung to be "pro-US"; as things stand, they seem to have gone from "extremely critical of the US" to "still critical but a little nicer about it".
Nice. I wish I could say I know nothing about it and understand it worse than anyone else.
Yes, but jailbreak is required.
+1 on this question...I can't see why they wouldn't allow it though.
Ask HN: Which Startups Have Good Summer Internship Programs?
I have been doing some research into trying to get an internship over the summer with a tech company and wanted to know if anybody had any suggestions on companies to check out. I would probably be better with a marketing internship but do have a bit of coding experience.

I am a sophomore college student (University of Miami) and would be willing to travel pretty much anywhere in the US for a good program (help finding lodging would be appreciated though)

I know some python and some java and plan on learning Django/html/css between now and the summer. Also I have a good deal of experience in marketing, both online and offline.
Abusive and insulting speech is all about tone -- the intent of the speaker.

In this case, I don't see anything insulting about the phrase 'JS monkey'. It's similar to the idiom 'code monkey', and I'd certainly use the term to refer to myself in casual conversation. E.g., 'Today I'm a Javascript monkey.'

We'd be in total agreement if the term was obviously insulting, but I don't see any evidence of that. Moreover, the original comment would be less interesting without the, um, moniker.
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I thought about getting 2 jobs telecommuting: twice the pay for half the work.
Can you cite a few so there's a basis for discussion? I see a lot of people saying they're anti-US, but it's usually supported with articles and video critical of government actions, not the country itself.
>It is actually in the interest of the government to redistribute wealth, so that the next revolution never comes.

I'm not convinced revolutions have much to do with income inequality, but rather the absolute level of poverty among the poor, the opportunities they have to improve their lot, and the input the average person has into the political process.
The hiring threads, posted at the beginning of each month by the bot whoishiring [1], are great resources for finding places to intern at.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring
Yes tech blogs went nuts over it, but I don't remember seeing any actual organized Google marketing push on it. If that were to happen, Google would likely be targeting people outside of the tech community.
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just to clarify, that would mean triple their revenue compared to if those players played normal poker, not an overall measure.

also, for the pros who would normally be 16 tabling, there is only a small uptick in hands per hour in NL rush compared to standard 6 max tables.
Why is Netflix splitting into two companies?
Working at home require twice the discipline needed when you work at the office. There are lots of distractions.
Australia. Our economy is booming and unemployment is arguably the lowest in the developed world. Plus the USD is on parity with the Aussie dollar. If you can get down here, do it.
Just don't host it on EC2: "Our love is like this webserver... vanished from time and space thanks to a disk failure."
Is there a set of future outcomes you would accept which would make my statement sound mostly factually accurate? Like, hypothetically, "We revisit this a year later, and it turns out the IRS has levied penalties against under 100 people for failure to declare accounts, and the overwhelming majority of them were doing something quirky with their international structuring as opposed to being regular Americans tripped up by the law."

If there is not a set of future results which makes "you should be worried about this" the wrong choice, then this conversation is boring to me.

With regards to the Japanese disaster in March, if I were to point to something I said in the immediate aftermath which was subsequently disproved by events unfolding, I would have picked my guess of severity of the tsunami and adequacy of the response efforts. (Undershot by more than quite a bit, overestimated by a little.) Fukushima Daiichi turned out quite a bit worse than I thought it would, too, on the scale from "no problems" to "worst disaster we could possibly imagine." I have to mention because I'm persnickety about this one issue: it also turned out quite a bit less worse than a lot of people were betting. ( To put a fairly easily verifiable number on it, I would have at the time guessed probable deaths at "between zero and five", and there were people who made very consequential decisions based on estimates in the millions. It's kind of funny that they get to count their predictions in the win column if I can't, right?)
Quikster sounds too much like Amway's failed Quickstar. Classy.
I have been reading their articles less frequently in the last month, and do not have any good examples in memory or on hand.

Edit: Today AJE has presented me with a decent example! http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/2011920...

In regards to the anti-US bit- I do not mean to say they hate America. I have no reason to believe they wish America ill- though they certainly seem to wish America would get out of the Middle East. What I mean is they appear to have a very critical bias towards the actions of America, and I suspect this is what most people mean when they describe Al Jazeera as "anti-US". This bias is not unilaterally a bad thing- but that does not mean it does not exist.
We are currently focused on startups in the states but definitely sign up if your team is talented. We do get approached with quality gigs both in the states and overseas.
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Affiliates (no longer?) don't get paid based on a straight up deposit, but instead need to have their signups play through to earn a certain amount of FTP points, which are correlated to rake paid. The CPA rates start at ~$75 and go up for those who drive volume. Rakeback affiliates make only 3% of gross rake.

See http://www.pokeraffiliatesolutions.com/full-tilt-affiliate-p... for more
...and even more restrictive than that.

"You must be over a certain age to use this feature."
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There's a difference between "giving the customer exactly what they're asking for" and "listening to what the customer cares about". Ford said to avoid the first. Netflix is failing to do the second.
A quick google search returned this:

* qc for python (http://dan.bravender.us/2009/6/21/Simple_Quickcheck_implemen...)

* QuickCheck Wikipedia page with links ot implementation for many languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck)

Personally I am looking forward to trying out qc for python. Has anyone here used it before?
Thanks for mentioning F.lux. I recall reading about it a while back but never tried it. I'm planning to install it tomorrow.

I did a quick search for an iPad equivalent, but nothing promising turned up. I'll keep looking. Much of my evening and night reading is on the iPad and I've wondered if the 'glow' has been disrupting my sleep.

If anyone has suggestions for non-jailbroken iOS devices, please share. Thanks.
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This says it all: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/netflix
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Google+ is dead.
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Many great bootstrapped startup do this, but who has the time to solicit new projects. This solves a huge problem. Nice work guys.
Social network Hi5 dumps Linux/Postgres for Windows Server
The magic of making up review
Is a rule of thumb, not a hard rule.
We haven't even figured out if downloading a movie is 'stealing' yet, and now we have to figure out if printing gun parts is illegal too?
Actually, the "sharpness" control on any type of monitor applies a deliberate distortion to the image that produces a sensory effect that gives an impression of a sharper image. The image isn't actually sharpened at all. It works much like unsharp masking in photography. Particularly on an LCD monitor with a digital video connection, a sharpness setting of 0 is absolutely the way to go.
Why not on x86 assembly?
Not sure why Wired is so pro-Google+. Their latest issue had a piece based on the premise it was a success. But I see usage levels under 1% of Facebook’s and under 5% of Twitter’s, judging by numbers on those infernal social widgets across the web (and also as observed among my friends).

Do they have some vested interest?
Thanks Peter! Yeah we had this problem while working on our last startup. It's hard to find quality short-term gigs that pay you market rate, and that you can work on as a team. ODesk and elance weren't worth our time.
See: actual Mono apps.

I only have a handful of experiences with GUI-intensive C# apps on Mac and Linux. They were all flat-out bad, though.
Ask HN: What do you think about business cards?
A few days ago I found myself sitting at a table with a school board superintendent. After overhearing her describe a project that she wanted to begin, I introduced myself and gave my best elevator pitch for a related product that my company has been working on. I'm leaving out the details of the exchange because they're not pertinent to this question.

Either the pitch was good or she was just being polite but whatever the reason she immediately asked for my business card.

I live in a (very) remote community and have few face-to-face interactions with potential customers so business cards haven't been a priority for me. Although I ended up emailing her the next day, a card would have come in handy at that moment and I was left wondering if perhaps having a few cards at my disposal might be a good idea.

How do others feel about the use of business cards in the modern context? I can see them as a very useful tool in certain markets but I'm wondering if other small companies or contractors continue to carry them for those 'just in case' circumstances.
I used reviewBoard but i don't recommend it. I want to know other recommendations too.
Elad, really enjoyed your post. I am a notorious procrastinator, I start things I don't finish, I am very easily distracted, but I also run a small business. I didn't hire GSD types intentionally, but it happened through sheer luck and I would definitely favour those attributes in the future. My two current employees, usually without deadlines or any real structure, crank out work at a great pace.
This is really hard to do. The problem is the scalability is that personal project's just don't get to being say.. 500gigabytes big. And they don't have some 1000 programs asking questions, nor do they have junior engineers working the db.

This problem is akin to stress testing a fully functional system.

Personally, when I've had this itch, I work on learning map-reduce in mongodb/riak.
Go has a QuickCheck-like package distributed with it. It's under testing/quick.

http://golang.org/pkg/testing/quick/
Ford ids
Dude, you just made me feel more ancient than you'll ever know.
Expecting 1/2 day free labour will filter out experienced, non-desperate engineers. I've put up with that kind of stuff in my early 20s but certainly wouldn't any more, unless my personal situation was desperate.
The poker sites make a large amount of money by taking a 5% rake on every pot played.
Couldn't strategic skill be improved? (Serious question. Don't know much about Starcraft. But for a game like chess, it was considered very possible to improve your skill in strategy)
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It can be justified because our entire economy would collapse otherwise. If most of the people in the US want to continue to purchase goods at relatively low prices then this is what is necessary. Go ask the average person why they do not shop at Whole Foods. Now imagine what would happen if every company paid their employees as well as Whole Foods does for unskilled labor and put as much effort as Whole Foods does into sourcing products that are better for those producing them (http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/products/whole-trade.php). What happens to those on the lower end of the earning scale in that situation?
3D graphics is something I've always wanted to look into more once I have a lot of time on my hands. Watching a good deal of Notch's ludum dare already whetted my appetite.
And now just glancing over this article makes my finger tips itch, I'd like to take a week off and start diving into it. It's just great. I love the extra work Fabien put in to link to many external books and articles.

This is so bookmarked!
I'm inclined to call this survey bullshit. There's no information available about it, except a blurb at the very bottom of the infographic claiming that it's from their survey of hiring manager. At best, it only tells you how lazy hiring managers who use careerbuilder.com are when they work from home.
Ask HN: Are scientific software startups viable?
I would like to hear what's the view of HN about startups based on scientific software, eg image processing applications in engineering and medical fields.

As an ex-academic I have the skills for crafting these kind of software and I love the idea of writing some piece of software which could participate in curing diseases.

One obvious problem is that the market for applications like these are limited, probably of the order of 1e-5 smaller than angry birds users.

This is very disappointing for me. Every time I plan to think about this type of startup, the tiny marketing domain kills the motivation.

Please share your past experiences about scientific software startups, and express your views about the viability of such startups.
$1 billion lost per quarter and no plan to end the bleeding at Microsoft
Done. See you all there.*
Thanks, Cmer
*Looking for a ride from/to Boston.
Something about this mindset is depressing to me. Obviously we all want to get shit done, and every company wants to hire people that get shit done, but this definition of 'get shit done' seems very narrow and robotic. The author seems to want to evaluate a programmer's efficiency the same way we evaluate the efficiency of an assembly line or a sorting algorithm.

The problem is that the smartest, most creative, and overall most productive people often don't think this way at all. Instead of slogging away obediently at a problem for six hours, they might dilly-dally on twitter for two hours before having a lateral insight that lets them solve the problem in 15 minutes. They might go to Thailand for the first 3 weeks of a 4 week project then, in a semi-sleepless 100 hour binge, produce a technical masterpiece with a beautiful UI and additional business-savvy features no one else could have thought of thrown in on the fly. Would it be better for your company if this person just sat at his or her desk and focused perfectly and coded 10 hours a day like a good little robot? Does it matter? The same qualities that make some people brilliant will tend to make them unable or unwilling to work like this. You can gripe about irresponsibility or lack of discipline, but they are indeed getting shit done, just not the same way you do. You can pass on them because they don't fit your mold if you like--a more open-minded company will quickly be there to capitalize on the value they offer.
Expensive services aren't the reason health-care is so expensive. Not only is it a circular argument, it's also easy to disprove: look at other countries, where people get the same "expensive services" much cheaper.
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Oh the good old days of downloading the latest Focke's list and wardialing everything in my area code to check out all the BBSs I didn't know about.

One of my friends found his first wife that way.
Google has various open source offerings (including Rietveld, written by Guido van Rossum, who also wrote Python), see http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2008/07/looks-good-to-me-sour.... I have no opinion on any of those, though.
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I didn't know what you were talking about at first, as I viewed the link from inside the news:yc app and it gave me the normal site page.

Hit the "open in Safari" button and then your complaint became crystal clear,

So awful, when the iPhone renders the normal page just fine.
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Why Hospitals Need Medical Billers
Brk, I'm coming from Maine, via Boston. I'm up for carpooling.
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Snikolci, I'm coming from Maine, via Boston. Please ping me, too.
If you have any references for what effect that might have on sales, I'd be genuinely curious to see.
The man hours I've lost playing Doom and TradeWars on MBBSes could have fueled a few startups...
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It was something to do with the compiler deleting the source file if there was a type error within it.