skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I honestly think this is the best piece of rhetoric to keep our old system in place.

The system is awful, but its the best we got. I'd prefer if we brought back our philosophers and started to have large debates on the writing of new law.

We are to afraid to change our old old system. Depressing.
This post brings up this interesting divide on how you price any of these services. In particular, with software (and movies, and whatever), we know that the marginal cost of producing another copy is low if not zero, and hence in some sense intellectual property can be priced arbitrarily by creators, since there aren't nice curves to determine pricing. This is often the same argument for why IP protection is reasonable.

At the same time, clearly this is not the case for something like EC2, where the marginal cost for another machine isn't necessarily 0, but it is true for Dynamo in some sense. Are we in a world where one can't choose to mix the model?
Thanks for the all the replies below, they clarify quite a bit. Here is another question, how much of the "incredibly difficult" math actually comes in handy and serves real coding purposes other than honing your ability to think logically? Math can be incredibly conceptual at times and as someone who has a psychology background, I know that a person can be not very good at math due to inability to think conceptually, but can be very downright logical on matters that he can understand practically. what do you guys think?
Do affiliate links bring any money if they lead to free content? Actual question. Does not make much sense if they do.
The Warlord and the Basketball Star: A Story of Congo's Corrupt Gold Trade
Linode vs Github: A comparison of how two companies handled a security issue
Thanks! We are using it for internal web apps right now used for testing existing and new products. That's about all I can say for now.
What could possibly be worse? Anything actually malicious or greedy.

For all that GitHub has given to the developer community, an innocent mistake even of this proportion of incompetence is still should not evoke such hatred. And those upset about someone's account being suspended who was actively misusing security holes - well, maybe you should use a provider who looks positively upon reporting security holes by vandalizing customer data. And they suspended his account for only a few hours! Unreasonable? Hate inspiring? Outrageous? I think not.

And by the way, the fact the "issue" of the default had been reported 4 days earlier in a github issue tracker for Rails (which is certainly not followed, let alone on weekends, by github employees) does not in any way impact whether GitHub should have been aware of this vulnerability, and to suggest so is intellectually dishonest.
Well, I give scheduling a free pass because modern processors will reorder and rename the whole thing anyway, provided the instructions are not too badly chosen.

Beating the compiler usually has more to do with having more information. Say, "this register will never have integers greater than X", or "the carry flag will be set to Y here", or whatever. Even compiled intrinsic SIMD beats most hand-coded kernels these days, unless you're doing something very exotic (e.g., mixing integer and floating-point logic to save cycles).

Hand-written assembly is something that will probably go away nearly completely (can't really beat optimal schedulers, superoptimizers), and I say this as someone who's spent many years optimizing assembly.
DIY : USB Password Dongle
What about outsourcing it? Perhaps using MechanicalTurk to have people enter game data.

It'll cost you some money, but depending on how much you value your time, it could still be a bargain.
Google Wallet Now Showing as Unsupported on Rooted Devices
Release date for Diablo III leaked
When I saw the DynamoDB pricing, I assumed the setup was something along the lines of "N=3, writes go to all replicas and wait for 2 responses, consistent reads go to 2 replicas, inconsistent reads go to 1 replica". Given that DynamoDB is using SSDs, I don't see why they would need to broadcast read requests to all replicas -- that's only useful if you have high variability in your read latency.

Someone who wanted an interesting research project might be able to pull back the covers on DynamoDB a bit by issuing a large number of requests, very carefully measuring the response latency curves for consistent and inconsistent reads, and looking at what model fits them best.
as long as stupidness causes people to vote randomly instead of being biased towards bad policies then it isn't harmful to democracy. the stupid peoples votes will cancel each other out and just leave the smart peoples votes. you need research which shows that people are systematically biased towards bad policies.
To be fair, they're not explicitly charging twice as much for consistent reads. You get consistent reads until you exceed your provisioned read amount, which unfortunately is measured in these odd units of "read capacity"). It's not clear (to me, anyway) if the 2x number represents something accurate about resource usage or if it's just a provisioning guideline.

That said, what provisioned capacity means in DynamoDB is pretty opaque. Great point about the utility of latency information for developers.
You can do quite a lot without knowing much official computer science theory. What CS theory does is teach you what's been done already and what's possible. That helps you avoid some classic pitfalls and keeps you from wasting time doing things someone else already solved.
Thinking differently about the pulse of life (video)
The solution is simple. Don't use a secret token :)
what if your entire job is a distraction?
TestFlight acquired by Burstly
decurate.com. If you're a 2 person team with development skills, the $40k will easily cover living expenses and product launch. You're capped at a salary of $750 each + $1200 for rent total (these were the limits for two members when we were there). We developed the site in 10 weeks and had a significant amount of money to invest in customer acquisition.
I had been thinking about something like this for an app I'm working on, this looks great! Thanks for the awesomesauce.
This is 15 year old research, sensationalized in a headline to sell advertising on Yahoo. Which, I mean, if you think about it, is kind of ironic.

Here's some good info on the Dunning-Kruger effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
10 Interesting Pins about Obama on Pinterest
Research shows that half the eyeglasses bought online are junk
Not really. At least not in the way you are insinuating.
DHH does it in half a line: https://gist.github.com/1975644

`attr_accessible` should only be used to protect the attributes that are NEVER modified by users. Access to the rest of the attributes may differ by user role, and should be handled by the controller. Trying to use `attr_accessible` to protect everything leads to enough frustration to make one eventually give up on security.
No, we are not. My bad, I misunderstood the statement; I thought he was referencing yesterday only, which I thought might not be possible, given the sort amount of time. Obviously if other people knew that's a whole different story.
ASP.NET Web API Processing Architecture
The mobile version that loads on my iPad is different from the one that loads on my iPhone, and it looks like it uses more javascript. Does anyone know the size of the iPad page?
This is a big component of what we'd like to build out. We see so many entrepreneurs building so many different services that often these industry professionals just don't know about them. Connecting the two parties is our primary goal.

I would be interested to know specifics on the 'voting system' you brought up as well as any other ideas you might have! Thanks for the feedback.
Thank you! "policy vs mechanism" popped into my head when this debate for going, but I didn't write it up well like the above post did.
Stuart Halloway provides more information in his Datalog querying in Datomic screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=b...
I wrote my compiler. It's an insult to my compiler to code in ASM. I do it for a few key routines. It's hard to describe, but basically it's an insult to my compiler.

Asm is nasty for other programmers to read -- not polite. A founding principle is having code easy for amateurs to tinker with. Converting code to asm is not likely to help much and it just creates nasty code for others to deal with.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\SWIFT.TXT

, made my reverence
to my master's guest, asked him in his own language how he did, and
told him HE WAS WELCOME, just as my little nurse had instructed me.
This man, who was old and dim-sighted, put on his spectacles to
behold me better; at which I could not forbear laughing very
heartily, for his eyes appeared like the full moon shining into a
chamber at two windows. Our people, who discovered the cause of my
mirth, bore me company in laughing, at which the old fellow was
fool enough to be angry

----

I can't tell you how many times, I've attempted to optimize things and it made no difference. If you have any experience with 64-bit asm coding on modern processors, you can attest that it's a complete mystery how timings work and old school techniques count for nothing.

"get off my lawn!" in other words.
>HTTP requests go in. HTTP responses go out.

That is very true for CRUD apps that make up the majority of web apps. And if you need to do something more complex with a web app, like analyzing data, the CS knowledge required is no different than if it was an offline app, i.e., a CS degree would be very helpful.

However, I think that for the majority of programming jobs out there, a full scale CS degree is a bit overkill.

If you're hiring someone to produce CAD drawings, you don't need a full fledged engineer or architect; you can find someone with a certificate from a tech school.

I wonder if eventually programming will eventually go that route. 4 year degrees for Software Engineers, and tech school certs for Software Technicians.
Thankfully OSI was unable to get a trademark on "open source" so people are at liberty to use the term as they please. I accept the OP's use of the term. You might reject it but please say why you don't think it should be considered to be open source.
> I haven't dug into the code, but doesn't jQuery already use native methods like querySelectorAll where available?

Yes. But it still has quite a bit of overhead as it also handles non-standard selectors (implemented in javascript), things like :input.

> I guess if all you need is to query the document and you know your target audience is running a modern browser... then sure, save yourself 31k :)

If you've got an ever more restricted target audience, you can also use things like Zepto (webkit-only, jQuery's interface in 7k)
I really agree with the first one, it's something I identified in a post I made about the lessons I've learned after 6 years of blogging: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/six-years-blogging-lesson...

I'm not sure that 'cerebral' blogs are a mistake. I mean, PG's essays have a huge following. I think if you do it right and capture the right audience then there's nothing wrong with long, well thought out posts.
Alexis de Tocqueville: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

This is the one crucial defence of a restricted franchise - if the only people voting are the ones paying, they are much more resistant to this kind of corruption.
Induction: A Polyglot Database Client For Mac OS X
> Guy drops a zero day on a major service provider

This was anything but a zero-day, and that's the whole reason people are mad. Homakov very clearly made an effort to get this patched before exploiting it before taking action himself. They're not mad that it wasn't fixed immediately on Sunday; they're mad that, on Sunday, there was still a problem in the first place. Big difference.
Correction: He wasn't a game programmer.
Soon, there will be articles on how insecure Git is because, well, it allows people to check-in sensitive stuff.
Is my site banned?
Recently, I've submitted a variety of links that direct to our site because I thought that many of the stories would be of interest to the Hacker News crowd. However, it seems like everything that I've submitted this week has been instantly declared dead. Has my site been banned?
For a fixed amount of throughput, if I want consistent reads, I pay x dollars. If I'm okay with eventual consistency, I can pay x/2 dollars and get the same throughput.

Conflating resource usage, pricing, and consistency using a single metric (here, price) seems confusing, especially without the right metrics to guide devs.
Why is this interesting? It sounds like yet-another data store.
Why I hate tumblr.
I created my tumblr account on Sep 1, 2011. I was using it for my personal blog - http://blog.anujkumar.com . That link won't work because my tumblr blog is down as always. During this 6 month period tumblr gave me an unmatched uptime of less than 10%. Most of the time it was down. I was forced to mail their customer service again and again to get my blog up. They responed but again after a week or two my blog was unavailable. I'm unable to access my blog, my dashboard and even tumblr home page. All I get is this message on their home page -

"Our servers are over capacity and certain pages may be temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to resolve the issue."

I'm fed up of their service and due to them I have lost my faith in all hosted blogging service providers. What's the use of all fancy features when it is always down? Now, I will just go and use custom wordpress install on my own VPS hosting and that is what I will recommend to everyone.

In my last attempt to get my blog up (so that I can retrieve my old blog posts) I have sent them this mail -

Anuj Kumar, Mar 04 23:01 (EST):

Hi, my blog http://blog.anujkumar.com is down since months. In fact, it is
down most of the time. I'm also unable to access tumblr website as it
always says - "We're sorry. Our servers are over capacity and certain pages
may be temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to resolve the issue."

May I know whats the problem and let me know how can I access my blog again?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tumblr response on Mar 05 05:12 (EST):

Hi

Thanks for taking the time to contact us about your concern, and we're sorry for the inconvenience.

We try to resolve any problem with Tumblr quickly, but some problems (like this one) take time to resolve.

We've shared the details of this problem with our engineering team and they'll fix it as soon as they possibly can. Due to our large number of users and the fast growth of our service, we don't have a specific time estimate for when this problem will be fixed.
Read his blog: http://homakov.blogspot.com/ - GitHub suspended his account.
Web frameworks like Yesod have shown that it's possible to make a web framework that is secure by design (at the type level, even) without compromising on usability.
Delta Offers Free Wi-Fi Access To Amazon.com
somehow the page is broken in opera.
Disabling the content: " ."; in #main resolves the problem.
Hm, true. But often tweets are insular. When a funny quip is linked you just want to read that.
Having a JD doesn't make someone a licensed attorney, and I'd seriously question the competence of any attorney willing to participate in a site like this, as doing so would be insurmountably fraught with professional responsibility and legal ethics issues. This is not legal advice.
localStorage may be slow for read/write, but it's very easy to mitigate the problem by doing memory caching and delayed writting. Also storing file in localStorage is a bad idea. There are better way of caching file (offline storage, expire headers, etag, etc.)

localStorage has a lot of space for improvement, but I don't think they should stop to advocate it. It just feel like going backward.
It was a temporary suspension while we investigated the scope of the damage. There was some other weird activity on his account that he wasn't up front about.
Windows support coming to Qubes
This is just the tip of the iceberg with DynamoDB's pricing issues. Based on my understanding of how their pricing works, here are two more major issues:

-You have to provision throughput for each table individually, so you basically have to pay for the maximum throughput you expect for every single table all the time (you can only reduce your throughput once per day as far as I understand). This means that adding a new table can be pretty expensive (even if your total throughput isn't increasing at all).

-Each unit of throughput gives you one 1kb write/read per second. If you exceed your throughput for a second, the call fails. This means that if you want to support the ability to write 50kb (like a "notes" field or something), you need to constantly pay for 50 write units even if you won't ever realistically use that much. And you have to do that for every single table

As the OP points out, it's all about FUD. I'm so terrified of exceeding my throughput allotment that I'm forced to pay for an order of magnitude more resources than I will actually use. This seems to go against everything AWS is about.
Bayesian Networks Lectures by Peter Woolf, UM
Numbers API - An API for interesting facts about numbers
Funny: Every user comment on reddit has about 3.4 KB of HTML overhead (<div>, in-line javascript, etc), including multiple <!--IE6sux--> comments.

It really adds up for a large thread.
Facebook as well...

https://github.com/search?q=FB_SECRET&repo=&langOver...

Not really a "vulnerability" because you can't keep stupid people from giving out their secret key.
Not if you buy the free book, but you might end up buying another book instead (e.g. from recommendations). One still gets a (smaller) cut if the customer buys anything else within the current session.
I'd say the biggest blogging mistake is not having a "popular posts" list right near the top of every page. I want to see the good shit you write, right away.
Git has no real way to track that, only commits. We do track it internally, but AFAIK it's not exposed except through post-receive hooks.
Entrepreneurs Build App In 24 Hours To Help Get You To Your Next Appt. On Time
How is democracy not about selecting leaders?
Isn't DynamoDB backed by SSDs? Perhaps that is the reason for the increased cost.
You would think but sadly, no.

They serve the actual tweet as "Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0"

https://pastee.org/bzeb5

EDIT: Just to check, I also looked at one of their css resources. https://si0.twimg.com/a/1330626450/t1/css/t1_core_logged_out...

Cache-Control: private, max-age=31449600

So I'm not confident Twitter actually understands how to set things.

PS: Hey Twitter, I can help =)
I came here to say almost precisely this.

However, I do think it's true that people aren't smart enough for democracy, and that's a part of why we need a constitutional republic instead. Is there something wrong with that line of argumentation?
There are better places than w3schools to learn HTML and CSS. See http://w3fools.com/.
Damn, I misread webdev as webdav.
Don't Kill Your Startup With 1,000 Trivial Tasks
Bookmarked! Looks like it will definitely help startups get some general direction in regards to legal docs.
Critiques of this sort are incredibly daft.

Just like you or I can't possibly read every EULA and privacy policy that pertains to us, an individual in a democracy can't even begin to have sufficient knowledge to make the correct choices. Most politicians never even read the bills they vote for!

That imperfect knowledge will exist in every possible form of government. So, um, what's the argument? Are we arguing against scaling ignorance from small select groups to the population?

The conclusion is, "Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders?" Aggregating responsibility to narrow (and possibly wilfully ignorant) self-interests is not a solution.

Edited: removed references to a certain political candidate.
I agree with you that this is not a Rails bug.

But I disagree that Homakov's hack "only demonstrated a mistake on Github's part." It rebutted the Rails team opinion (and again, not all of them disagreed with Homakov) that this was a trivial, edge-case problem.

IIRC, one of the changes in Rails 3 was that interpolation in ERb templates were html sanitized by default:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4731992/rails-3-how-to-re...

The fact that web devs write templates vulnerable to XSS is not Rails fault, but apparently the problem was prevalent enough that HTML sanitizing was turned on by default.

Apparently, there wasn't empirical evidence to show that update_attributes had the same rate of mistakes to justify a change in defaults...Homakov's hack was a powerful rebuttal.
Unfortunately, Python 3 is the new Perl 6. It offers reduced performance[1], changes some of the hardest-to-debug parts of the language (like Unicode), and capriciously introduces backwards incompatibilities. For no obvious gain!

As just one example, could Guido not have made the print statement a function through the simple mechanism of:

from __future__ import printfn

Then new code could use printfn and old code could use print, and all would be well. But instead, literally billions of dollars will be wasted changing every single print keyword statement to a print function invocation. Sure, you can use 2to3. But the tool is that worst of all worlds, a compiler that doesn't really work 100% and actually reduces the performance of your code in the compilation process.

For those who do not want to waste their time on this port, Python 3 is going to accelerate the move towards full stack JS just like Perl 6 accelerated the move towards Python/Ruby. This JS stack will be MongoDB + node + Backbone/coffeescript or some similar permutation.

After all, if you are going to literally have to recompile your language with 2to3 and deal with all the edge cases, why not go whole hog with something like emscripten[2] or a souped-up pyjamas[3] to convert your legacy Python 2 code to JS? Then people just need to start porting C/C++ numerical libraries over to V8 through something like v8-juice[4] and we will have all the missing pieces.

[1] http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/whatsnew/3.0.html#perfo...

[2] https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki

[3] http://pyjs.org/

[4] http://code.google.com/p/v8-juice/