skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure whether to mention this, but here goes. I refused to help a company I worked for create a patent, despite the large cash incentive to do so. I didn't want to have my name on a patent for two reason: firstly, I thought companies, especially startups, would increasingly see even engineers who collaborate with the patent system in a negative light. Yammer has proved me right.

Secondly, I didn't want to be personally responsible for making the patent situation worse. Worse? Yes, because despite the assertion made that obviously a good company like ours would only use patents defensively, this was not backed up with any public statement to that effect, nor would even that be binding in the future when management changed or the patent portfolio was sold. Every defensive patent can be used offensively.

The suggestion of a defensive silicon valley patent pool (perhaps owned by some kind of internet foundation), more rights for inventors to control how their patents are used, and pressuring engineers not to collaborate in the creation of bad patents would be a good way out of the current madness without requiring a total overhaul.
Or this could only be for paid customers.

i.e. a folder shared by a paid customer does not consume space for anyone who joins it however a folder shared by a free customer does.
Develop Metasploit Module for Windows RDP Vulnerability and get $1451
Yes, AWS East went down.
I think overtime is often the consequence of managers that don't know when or how to say "no" to client's demands.
Antifragility: a guide to world we do not understand [pdf]
I think this may say more about your personal circumstances and world view than anything much wider.

I've got suits that aren't uncomfortable and weren't incredibly expensive. As for impractical that depends entirely on your life. I certainly wear them less now I have small children but when I was younger I never found it an issue.

In terms of social pressure, well yes, but that's true of a many many things that we do. If you've ever pulled on a clean pair of jeans to go out and meet a friend rather than the dirty (but still hygienic) pair you'd worn the day before, that's social pressure, when you don't just fart in front of people, that's social pressure.

Are those worse than my occasionally wearing a suit to go out with my wife because it makes her happy because she likes the way I look in it? Or because I've just been feeling a bit schlubby lately and fancy looking smart for the day? Or simply fancy a change?

I say this all as someone who typically wears jeans seven days a week and has casual dress as a significant factor when I choose a job.
What would also be great would be a way to import Illustrator files. Because I don't see how designers will prefer to work in that environment.
Looks fine in KDE4. Definitely not as crappy as the screenshots you've posted
They look damn similar.

And we left one (or two) down there as well, it wasn't cost effective to bring it back up to the surface (At the time)... I wonder if they still think that having had to pay for another one.
They are acknowledging a networking problem now.
A larger question would be whether integrative living (i.e. working from home, spending your coffee breaks with your kids) impacts the optimal level of work.

I would bet that knowledge workers burn out FASTER from being overworked than manual laborers. Knowledge work, particularly the inductive side, relies on downtime in order to stay productive.
Sounds more like plugin hell to me. I think it's becoming increasingly harder to convince users to install browser plugins (for good reasons), and it's not even possible on most mobile browsers.
Their dashboard not showing this and Twitter being more reliable as a way of showing downtime is a sad tale.
This is awesome. I've been waiting for this, and it was on my list of projects to build. However, it looks like the execution is really well done. I would love to see a trial version though.
Damn. Even ELB went dark. High availability through multi-AZ my ass.
Mobile banking security bypassed in fiendish malware blag
There's an affordable (USD 299, free 7 day trial) commercial tool for C/C++/Javaallowing structured, context-sensitive code browsing and refactoring that actually integrates into Emacs: http://www.xref.sk/xrefactory/emacs.html

In fact it seems the pure C version is free now; it claims full indexing of 3 million lines of Linux source code in 15 minutes.

I used to keep track of it many years back back while it was being developed, but then C++ starting making up 1% of my projects rather than 99% (nowadays I use the JetBrains PyCharm for those 99% which does a reasonable effort).

It seems the tool hasn't seen updates in a while (forget about C++11 support), but I remember it working much better than just tags, cscope last time I tried it many years ago.
> Of course we support browsers other than Internet Explorer. Here's the full list of supported browsers: *

I must admit my knee jerked a little on that one. I did the "reading comments before the article" thing and was responding to what I've seen in a number of places recently which is a minor backlash against dropping IE8 support. I've seen it in a couple of places over the last ~year (since there were predictions of Google dropping support in their Docs products when IE10 is officially released). The conversation goes:

IE8 User: I'm not paying to Upgrade Windows of learning a new browser, so if you don't support IE8 I'm going away

Others: Fair enough. We wish you luck in your future endeavours.

IE8 User: Hangs around and repeats the demand to be supported in the hope that if he shouts loud and often enough he'll be given his way just to shut him up. The word "unprofessional" gets an airing at this point.

I have bee in my bonnet about IE as I have no choice but to support as far back as 6 in my day job due to some of our banking clients being stuck in the stone age metaphorically speaking... If I win the lottery I'll never touch IE again due to the hassle it has caused me up til this point, even if it becomes the greatest browser in the world!
In Firebug, I see that just opening that page makes my browser do 281 requests for scripts and what not.

That's insane, users don't like to wait.
Overnight: The First tournament-style competition for developers in MENA
My Nagios awoken 3 AM brain finds no fault in your logic.
So this is why wildfireapp.com was down.
Freight broker
The East coast EC2 servers were down.
Many people would be very surprised to see what MS Pyton is capable of (-:
Even funnier are people doing server monitoring of (things in EC2) from within EC2. When the EC2 outage happens, there's obviously no problem because no alerts get sent...

Doh!
And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law.

The rest of the article says that 50-hour-a-week employees are no more productive than 40-hour-a-week employees, and don't get paid any more. Where do the extra jobs come from?
Should be back up now
You may want to check out Opacity (http://likethought.com/opacity/) which can export to ObjC, HTML5 Canvas, SVG and PNG/Jpeg etc.
> Asking if the tests are correct is really asking if the requirements are correct.

Not really. Tests can have obscure bugs just like any other piece of software. If a test fails it could very well be a bug in the test, not the code being tested.
I agree 100% ;)
I'd have to start learning new stuff that i don't necessarily want to get into yet.!
What you just described totally is banner style. Don't fool yourself! You're just reducing lisp's indent idiocy to something easier to use. Indent I have seen described as "lisp style" (and there are many kinds) can never be called banner-style. Banner style's most important rule is that a new block that should stand out is given one extra indent level, as a whole, except for the header. Lisp style's most important rule is that things that lists of things should have their first element in the header, and the next elements should graphically be right under the first thing, never mind formatting and other things like that. Those concepts are in no way compatible.

Anyways, this:

while(aa){if(bb){
xxx}
yyy}

is not banner-style indent, whereas this:

while(aa){
if(bb){
xxx}
yyy}

is.

It's a little too long: about 90 lines of code

Not too long for Bitbucket.

This "lisp style indenting" happens in Haskell every now and then too -- luckily all the big projects I looked at use fixed size indent. It's usually a sign of a programmer who hasn't written a lot of code, but I bet someone reading this will find some guy as good as Simon Marlow doing exactly that.
This does make me tempted to just put everything in one zone (less latency) and have a backup on another region entirely. Clearly, backups on different AZs isn't the best plan
had a short outage- but its back now
You have the option to save a Core Graphics generated UIImage to NSCache or even to the temp folder.
You could get users to give you a read-only OAuth token for their GMail inbox, which is an extra step (although you can do it for them on the device where you have the username and password, and then send just the token to your server.) Then your server can do the polling and push to the iPhone via an approved technique.

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/#gmail_inbox... gives some details. Contrary to what it says there, it seems to work for gmail.com and google apps addresses.
Can the rpython translator support js as a target? Could you compile pypy to js that way, to provide a python environment in existing browsers?

To be honest though, JS is a perfectly OK language for web browsers, and if you really want to reuse python code it probably makes more sense to translate it before it gets to the browser, using automated tools or otherwise. Supporting everybody's favourite language natively in every browser would be horrible.
MBA Essay
MBA essay are the best opportunity for any applicant to prove his/her talent and extraordinary qualities with the MBA application. Because the applicant will be asked to submit his/her essay with materials of applications.
It's incredible how much of the internet depends on Amazon.
On H.264 Revisited (Mozilla)
Ruining people's lives for no reason at all. Completely nonsensical, but then again when things like this baffle me I get reminded of humanity's past (and present) - gladiators, slaves, genocide, ritual sacrifice, lynching, witch-hunts, genital mutilation, whatever...and things like this no longer seem so bad in comparison.

But I lose significant faith in humanity.
Virtual Machine in Your Browser Allows Use of Windows 8 on iPad
As for tablets, WSX has been given the green light for the iOS 5. As far for Android fans, some work on their version still needs to be done, so they will have to wait a little longer. Therefore, from now on, users will be able to work on their documents on the iPad without being anxious about losing their data. They can also enjoy playing their favorite Windows games (like Solitaire) on their iPhone. And you know what’s awesome about this tweak? You can use Windows 8 on your iPad, or your new iPad and leave everybody stunned!
Tell that to the WinRar developer.
I've found tests very useful for refactoring. I can pretty much go wild, as long as the tests pass at the end.

About bugs in production, after you find a bug write a test that exercises that bug. Then make the test pass. That way, you're unlikely to ever have a regression on that bug.

For browser-side UI tests, selenium is very useful.
It's funny to read it in English about your own language (German). Some of the literal translations are a bit off, though.
>Core i7, 2 gigs of ram

Completely off-topic and irrelevant but say what? 2GB coupled with the beast that is i7 makes the nerd in me cry a little.
Brand Marking Your Business with State Of The Art Dental Logo
Money and money! This word is often consolidated with this particular profession; this is the reason; every single student wants to be a tooth doctor.
Yeah, every starbucks I've been to in Manhattan does this in the morning and lunch hours. It's damn efficient considering.
It would have been way much better if, you sir, would have stop to the first line; there's no need for a new game, as thoughts of replaying the old one is still hunting me.
From The Verge

"While some of the apps have received additional features, it seems likely that the increase in size is mainly down to the huge graphics needed to fill the new iPad's 2048 x 1536 Retina Display. It's worth remembering that these are only download sizes, and once installed the apps may be even larger. Regular apps will likely receive a similar bump in size once developers update them with hi-def graphics"

"iPad apps up to five times larger..."
Game Theory Explained: Why The Joker and Not Batman is Our Savior
But you still sit at work 50 hours, or you go home after 30 hours?

It's true that I'd rather go home after 30 hours instead after 50 hours, but it's also true that I would be bored to death just sitting at work and doing nothing those extra 20 hours.
Sometimes ideas are just floating around, aren't they? I was thinking of very similar things lately as well. Obviously this application must be under development for quite a while already.

One thing that I'm not totally sold on it that fact that it generates code though. It is not going to be the running application which you interactively tweak. Because that is what Bret was showing in his talk. And that is also what you would be doing in Smalltalk. I'm not sure this is as 'immediately connective' (to use a variant of Bret's language) as it seems.

Another approach to go about this would be to store the 'drawing' in a data structure and have a special view that takes it and puts it into an image (or on screen immediately). That would also open possibilities for caching, something that likely would be make sense, as other commenters have mentioned as well. Such an approach would come dangerously close to implementing/reinventing SVG, though. Another benefit of such a data structure would be that it could have some simple, textual representation. JSON maybe? Even XML would do. And that would greatly help with version control and diffing.

I don't see why such a feature could not be added to this app.

Amazing application.
For some people, that might be fine. If you don't have plans for how to rapidly move out of EC2, you might as well just sleep through an all-of-EC2-goes-down outage for all you can do about it.
For some time now I've been wondering why the primary scripting format consumed by browsers is JavaScript (a language intended for humans) and not some sort of standard bytecode that would be executed in a browser's virtual machine.

What we need is the JSVM! In other words, something like the JVM but adapted for the browser. That probably means it would have a more dynamic typing focus since it makes sense for JavaScript to be the primary language targeted by the system (though there's no reason this couldn't evolve over time just like the JVM has).

All of a sudden you don't need to build in Python support, or Ruby support or LISP support or whatever else you fancy into the browser. The browser no longer cares what you compiled the script from, it just gets the standard bytecode and everyone's happy.
Yes i was surprised too that no one mentioned Opacity, its has been there fro so long and so exactly what this soft do.

but lets hope this one gets updated often.
For historical reasons, many areas of physics come with heir own notation, eg introductory courses on mechanics and electrodynamics are often done using vector notation you know from school with some additional differential operators thrown in, thermodynamics uses differentials, analytical mechanics and general relativity use index notation and quantum mechanics uses bras and kets.

Specialization sometimes makes sense, but it's non-obvious (at least it wasn't to me) that when checking if a force field is conserved by computing it's rotation, you're doing the same thing as when computing the derivative of a differential to see if it belongs to a conserved thermodynamical potential, or that the difference between a bra and a ket is the same as between a covector (lower index in Einstein notation) and a vector (upper index) - things look so different that it's hard to see when they are the same.

Another example is the relation between Newtonian and Lagrangian mechanics. In the lectures I took, it was presented as if Lagrangian mechanics is somehow special because you have an invariant formulation using generalized coordinates, wheres Newtonian mechanics was only ever done in Euclidean or Minkowski space.

It turns out that Newtonian mechanics is as invariant and general as Lagrangian mechanics (however, it's possible to further generalize Lagrangian mechanics, whereas as far as I can tell, you're pretty stuck with second-order system when doing Newtonian mechanics):

The Euler-Lagrange-equations are Newtonian equations and the differential of the Lagrange function dL is just a funny way to write down a force field - ie the main difference between Newtonian and Lagrangian formulation is that you require your force to be derived from a generalized potential (more formally: every hyper-regular Lagrangian system is a Newtonian system, any Newtonian system where the force maps to a closed form under the isomorphism T* TM ~ TT* M is locally Lagrangian).

In my opinion, lectures on theoretical physics are somewhat broken, and that's a more serious problem than the non-issue of whether to use τ or 2π…

PS: Please don't get me started on Christoffel symbols if you're not prepared for another rant ;)
[Irony]Isn't that what Hacker News is for??[/Irony]
Here's an idea I've thought about but don't have time to do anything with: a peer-to-peer monitoring network, so each new server on each new network makes it more robust. No idea how the details would work out.
The tips about how to compose the message are worth a try but I really hate it if businesses contact me with my name in the subject. I instantly classify such e-mails as spam. There must be other ways to choose a subject line that will attract the attention of the recipient.
Sharing recipes has never been easier.
Why Crunch Modes Doesn't Work: Six Lessons
...but I'm quite happy with my 35-hour week, thankyou.

There's a lot that's wrong with the UK, but being forced to work for free thankfully isn't one of them.

I just can't imagine where people get the time for a 50-60 hour week. Once I've been to work, played with my son, fed, bathed, and put him to bed, and cooked, there isn't much time left in the day, surely?
You should at least know there is an outage to have something to tell your downstream customers. It is really embarrassing to have a customer (or your boss) call to report an outage you don't yet know about, even if there is fuck all you can do to resolve it. Basic principle of ops.
Resource consumption is directly related to population. So if the latter is not a concern then neither the first.
Buffer is excellent btw. It's become a must use app for me. The iPhone app is seriously awesome too. Very user friendly. You nailed it.

I have two Buffer subscriptions, one for myself and one for a client and it has become a must use app.

Good work!
Please unpack this for us foreigners who don't get the reference immediately.
Keeping an eye on HN all the time pays off :) I too was wondering what the hell is going on with my EC2 instances when I saw this thread.

AWS status dashboard: -1, HN: +1
In the Page Sourcecode it says:

<!-- March 14, 2012 -->
<!-- Shadowy Figure- Raise Dead : Infinity Engine -->

<!-- It is coming. -->

So, maybe a new Baldurs Gate ? We might know more in a few hours. ;)
Happened with many of our sites a few moments ago. Went to their status history and no sign of failure. Shame on you, AWS.
Google planning to Re-invent Search by Understanding words
Even funnier than that is watching the latency hit at Rackspace Cloud and Terremark as some non-trivial number of customers fail over.
WMF anyone?

Windows MetaFile contain(ed) serialized GDI graphic calls to generate the picture in a resolution independent way, while still working as a vector file format that other application could parse.

Generating static ObjC seems like a dumb idea except in very specific cases.
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I seems to be a rather common tension in open source projects developed by research institutions.

The goal of users of those projects is immediate usability which clashes with goals of developers, research.

I have some doubts where one can get PHD (publish an article with high citation index) by improving a compiler error messages. As opposed to adding a new cool feature to the language/compiler, cryptic error messages be damned.
Brands should go direct
That gets done for network/application performance monitoring (alternatives to keynote, gomez, etc., and is how some of their own products work). It's kind of overkill for basic application level monitoring -- there's a tradeoff between number of endpoints checking and frequency of checks. I guess you could round-robin checks across a larger number of end nodes, too, to get both.
This is why my sleepy 3AM brain was awoken by Pingdom. Hooray for having just enough redundancy to tell you that it's not quite enough.

Good night.
Too many very similar or related courses...

I'd love to take Norvig's course, but am already committed to Coursera's "Design and Analysis of Algorithms". Came here to recommend it. Tim Roughgarden is an excellent instructor and the videos are well presented.
I am just curious. I see MacOS being used by high traffic sites at this page. (http://w3techs.com/technologies/market/operating_system) -- Market Position image.

Any one have a list of popular websites run on MacOS?
Painless sever management is slowly becoming painful again :(

Worse if you are tied into the AWS ecosystem. You can't even move out or even have backup servers in other places.
Zynga spent $1 million on extra security for Pincus due to threats
Fact is, I'm productive with a 8 hour a day schedule if and only if:

1. What I need to do is clear and known.
2. I've been doing the is same everytime or something of similar pattern.
3. No meetings and distractions in between.

But the fact is, none of this is true in our area of work. To some extent even if something similar exists it wont work for many reasons.

For every person who wants to go back home, there is always a peer who is putting in extra hours innovating, building and learning. By the well known rate of success coming at an near exponential rate to people to work hard and are productive, the rate becomes exponential if they add crazy work hours to it.

Building stuff requires a goal. Then implementation, experimentation, test a feed back loop and then back to implementation. And then this cycle goes on in iteration.

This requires tuits(Uninterrupted large workable free chunks of time) to allow a degree of focus and flow seep into the person. And most of tuits are generally available only early in the morning or in the night. This by default means you already agree to work crazy hours.

So in summary, I can't do a 40 hour work week because

1. I will loose out to my peers in the long term race.
2. Meetings.
3. My work requires genuine supply of atleast two big tuits a day to remain competitive and have a good growth both money and career wise.
Kind of ironic that the website is glitchy on iOS Safari.
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Waking up at 2.30am to a total service outage sucks, but at least I know all you bastards are awake and screaming too. That makes me feel slightly better.

(We're back now. Kudos to Pingdom for noticing and alerting)
"The right choice is probably EC2 plus a non-EC2 provider (your own hosted stuff, another cloud (?), etc.), with protection in case either goes down"

Yes, multi-Cloud strategy... i know a good company for this ;-)
I'm surprised Austin or Seattle isn't on there.