skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For many idempotent operations, it seems likely the most fault-tolerant and latency-optimizing pattern is to ask multiple endpoints concurrently - take the first to respond, and discard or terminate the duplicates (and if one fails, so what?). Obviously this isn't cheap; sufficient bus/network and endpoint capacity is necessary - but isn't it the natural progression of a trend?

That's called latency leveling. It's actually done (at least on writes) by the different open source Dynamo implementations.

In addition to idempotence, unless your requests are being serialized through a single gateway (i.e., you're taking advantage of the TCP ordering guarantee), this also requires commutativity.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great approach and has many advantages (and I'll heartily endorse it for many applications) but there are a few drawbacks:

1. When you do want read read-your-writes consistency even under failures, you have to use quorum protocols. Again, quorum protocols are great, but they have drawbacks: you have to wait for the slowest node to finish, you need to aggressively increase replication to achieve read-your-writes and maintain fault tolerance (when |Writes| + |Reads| > replication factor, you can only survive the failure of 1 node with replication factor is 3).

2. Getting de-duplicated commit log with even a partial ordering to ship to another application (or to another instance of the storage system, e.g., in a different datacenter) is more difficult. Although I suppose you could, e.g., notify the other application that a change has taken place and have the other application _itself_ make (batched?) requests for the full after image (as opposed to just the individual mutation) of the data.

Either way, there's no write and wrong, just different approaches with separate trade offs.

[Edit: just read your bio and noticed you're from Amazon/AWS: A far more heterogenous environment than Google. I wonder how the new kinds of applications Google is building are influencing the infrastructure trade offs underneath.]
What if I told you this post annoys me and I view it as trollish? Do you agree that you should take it down since you have offended me?

Really though, who are you to tell me that you are not annoying me. This article and post are pure horse shit and you are the scum of the earth for posting it on HN. If it wasn't for people like you HN would be a better more troll free place.

Your move.
Exactly. My Karma is stuck at 44 for last few months. Earlier used to get good number amazing users (Hacker news sent users with high level of engagement and time spend) but then suddenly stopped getting all the traffic and Karma stopped changing even though I have shared some good stuff recently.
You can buy a Jan 13 $10 put for $2.05 so you have an upside of $7.95, just under 4:1 payoff in the event of a proper bankruptcy. That's not a lot so you can see a fair chance of disaster is already priced in.

As a casual investor the option probably wins because you can sleep easier at night knowing that if GroupOn announce a cure for cancer you are only losing the $2.
Looking for feedback: An expense tracking app
>If wearable computers catch on that make it easier to check-in to the places you go and +1 the stuff you like, they'll make tons more money from useful targeted ads than units of hardware shipped, just as they do now.

I expect that they have patented "location based XYZ implemented by wearable computing devices" up the wazoo before this announcement. Even if Google Glass doesn't become the market leader, they're set to reap its rewards in more ways than one.
Source code for Gimp 2.8 RC1
Thanks for the words. This is more an MVP at this point. My short term roadmap:

Last.fm, Pandora and Spotify logins

Users/Managers/Promoters can add shows themselves; add listings for tickets

I'm a guy who likes very obscure bands and lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and with 9 or 10 selections (one for each sound I'm into), I tend to get back at least 4 or 5 shows for a month long search. It still has a ways to go, but it's more of a folly than a hardcore startup.

On an aside, a product exists for mobile called BandMate. It actually scans your phone for acts (if you keep your music in your phone) and recommends artists to you in a similar manner. Very cool app, and invaluable for me when I'm traveling.
only if you use the car exclusively for the business, and have a separate car that you use for your personal stuff.

+ I heard that deducting car leases is a huge red flag for the IRS.
1M Android Instagram users, 50M Draw Something downloads + ODIN for mobile ads
Why must the article use this headline when the article explicitly says that it isn't actually anything like Bitcoin:

“Bitcoin offers currency from a decentralized source, whereas RCM's solution is from a centralized authority.”
JavaScript: It's a language, not a religion
> The researchers’ unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates.

I could believe that women tend to discriminate subconsciously against unattractive women; though I don't think the reverse finding would have surprised me either. But did the study actually show that men don't discriminate against attractive women?

edit: the paper is here, it seems to be open access: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1705244

From skimming through, it looks like they don't compare whether the hirer is male or female. But

* Employment agencies prefer no-photos, but don't discriminate between attractive and plain women.

* Companies hiring for themselves don't discriminate between no-photos and plain women, but discriminate against attractive women.

Which is evidence in favour of jealousy: the people who won't work with them don't feel threatened. The paper is considerably more thorough than this though.
I wear photochromic prescription lenses and have horrible vision without them. I'm certainly not going to take them off, and you have no way of knowing that they are not sunglasses just by looking at them.

That might explain my lack of aversion to the idea, though. Have to look into that...
I guess my timing was off when I first submitted this two days ago at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787597 I'll repost here the links from my comment there:

HN discussion from last year on this subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2654346

Blog posts with some more analysis and links to draft reports / amendments:

http://blog.c22.cc/2012/03/29/eu-legislation-digging-below-t...

http://blog.c22.cc/2012/03/29/eu-legislation-digging-below-t...
The very first comment misunderstands reality.
It talks about how you can make java programs that outrun C++ ones using hotspot.
Ignoring, of course, the fact that nothing really stops you from making a good C++ JIT except engineering time, and it would do just as well in those cases.

Nobody does it because the cases in which it would help are small, and most of those folks are willing to do profiling/training runs, and get about as good results, even if it requires more pain.

As Herb said, the languages were made for different tradeoffs.
Speaking as a compiler guy, yes, you can make almost any of them as fast as each other given enough time and effort.

But putting time and effort into a JIT may not be as effective as choosing a different language.
The point is it's a legal invention - introduced by the banks so that people would actually trust credit cards - it's not a necessary feature of a traceable transaction.
Nitpick: There's no apostrophe in the title "Rainbows End". Relevant because of how much it changes the meaning.
If you (rightly) preserve code’s sensitivity to alteration for the sake of the computer, then you also have a responsibility to offer clear diagnostics to the programmer. Clang gets this right: people make mistakes, and often they’re hard to spot—no need to make it harder!
Interesting start. Looking forward to your progress. I think it'll really start to come into its own when you add the ability to include images. I tried using markdown image syntax but I guess you haven't built that functionality yet.

Also, it will take a quantum leap when you make a way to customize the path and zooming, of course.

But for a start, it's really nice and easy. I dig. I signed up. Keep going!
Ask HN: Any real uses of Neural Networks?
I'm struggling to find any use case for neural networks, where they wouldn't be existing solutions that are better and more manageable. Any ideas where and in what context neural networks are actually useful?
Uncontrol: disc [interactive]
I don't see why everyone should seek to emulate Apple, it's the antithesis of the Valley mentality. Everyone else goes for openness, iteration, and lean mentality, not stealth and secrecy, it rarely works.

You can't always design products from the top down. Sometimes you have to run actual experiments and collect data. The Apple aura that they can sit in an ivory tower and perfectly craft things that everyone wants will fade away the first time they release a product that bombs.

Right now, they are successful, so everyone says go emulate them. That's a shortsighted MBA mentality, that there's this formula for success, and you just need to emulate the practices of others.
That's not "rich". That's called working for the man. It is depressing because of the jobs out there are bullshit jobs. No one needs to be stacking shelves at walmart or the gap - people can click on amazon.

If you take a real look around much of the economy is this b.s. burger flipping and shelf stacking, and much of the rest are the welfare queens otherwise known as government employees and corporate managers. There is such an epic wastage of the world's human resources that anyone in the know would cry themselves to sleep. Occupy Wall Street is nothing in comparison to the scale of the problem.
As a Smalltalker with a decade of experience, I too find Java a bit lacking. That said, it was a better environment for OO than Perl at the time. I was able to get a feel for refactoring through Java, though. That primed me for Smalltalk and the joy of no primitive types.
Bravo teams with Randi Zuckerberg for reality series
>"Ideally, ad replacement like what you described would be illegal"

Why is that? No one's forcing anyone to wear these glasses.

Do you think Adblock plugins should be illegal? If not, should they be illegal if they display a different ad instead? What if they remove all ads, but put a banner at the bottom of each page?
You were thinking maybe PHP, Rails, and Django devs might decide to adopt a WS-star XML-hell enterprise standard?
The jets are aimed to become available around 2025.

On a some what unrelated note, does anyone here know what the evolution of commercial planes is in terms of fuel sources?

Sources i've seen put non-traditional peak oil at 2030, so it would seem that by the time this technology is developed the fuel could be prohibitively expensive. Will alternative energies provide enough power for super sonic flight?
Polymorphic inline caching can be proven safe; it's just proven safe through dynamic checks of the cache, rather than statically. Miguel is right here, he's not working with a flawed assumption.
We can also look at it from the perspective of the geometric distribution: if the P(Crash) = 1/200k for each mile driven there is around a 36% chance that the car would have made it 200k miles without a crash.
Inside Aaron’s Apartment: A Most Amazing Bedroom
Sorry, my point was that Google's revenue numbers were not prepared according to GAAP.

The "Gross Billings" numbers include the total amount of deals "sold", including the merchants' portions. The smaller "revenues" number front-loads income that should be recorded over time i.e., by including items that should be recorded in reserves or liabilities until such items are resolved.

For example, Groupon treats as revenue all of Groupon's theoretical portion of a sale, including any amounts that it knows will have to refund and amounts that it estimates that it will have to refund. However, such items are not revenue, either b/c Groupon knows it will be refunding such items (and thus has no claim to the money), or because it expects that it may have to. Such items are supposed to be tracked in a separate account. The separate account is balanced out by a reserve account (a liability) which is removed from the books when the risk of refund has passed.
Ask HN: For you who are rich (net worth $1 million+), where to start?
If you have to start from the beginning, what will be your bet today for a startup.

Which service/product ?
Consider yourself luck to be able to participate at all. Some of us are deemed "unsuitable" and banned without notification. Yup, I was banned on the quiet and fooled into continuing to post without the knowledge that nobody could see or respond to me.

It really is shameful that someone like pg would treat people like this.
From Photoshop to Fireworks and back. Intro.
Brendan Eich gave $1,000 to support California’s gay marriage ban
Nice.

I don't agree really on your definiton or usage of "hybrid". For me, your are just a different form of hybrid. Let me explain: With Phonegap the "shell" or container is native, the rest is webview. So this is "hybrid".

If I got your approach right your container includes a bigger bit of native logic and you sparkle some smaller html webviews through the apps. So Phonegap apps tend to be "little container, much webview" while yours are more "much container and app, little webview". Correct?

But this is a detail, I still like the concept and page.
If you redefine C++ so that it looks like Java / C# (i.e. runs on a virtual machine, with a JIT and probably some requirements for memory safety), then yes, you can do these things with C++.

But the people who advocate C++ wouldn't recognize that language as a C++, because all the overhead of a JIT runtime violates the "only pay for what you need" dictum.

(E.g. consider the uptake of Managed C++, C++/CLI, etc.; which effectively are what you describe.)
Geeks will not be "rock stars" until non-geeks start calling other non-geeks "the new geeks" as a compliment.
Unless you serve personalized pages. Which Kink does.
You mention the facebook app directly on the line between hybrid and multi-platform (https://clutch.io/clutch-hybrid/). Do you know an examination or break-down of the facebook mobile app (or any of the others you mention in the graph) where I can read about how these apps really do it?
Can you apply css transformations to that?
I think it would be really hard to secure that as far as an MMO goes, not that there aren't a few tricks that might be worth trying. (Like having a player's CPU emulated on several different peers and comparing the output to find errors or hacks)
Yes, you can perform unsafe optimizations, but optimizations take time, so if you are wrong enough, you lose.

Anyway, as I said below, there is nothing that stops you from implementing a JIT for C, it's just not cost effective from a "where do i put money to get better performance" perspective. If you did this, these JIT's would do just as well as the ones you think will "mop the floor" with C.

Something that seems to be missed here is that the whole point of compilers (and JITs) having intermediate IR is to abstract away the language to a point that you can optimize and codegen stuff.

So talking about a "statically compiled" or "dynamically compiled" language is well, silly. Most popular languages could be compiled either way[1], it just happens that we don't because it's not "better enough' in the real world.

If you want a real world example, LLVM will happily JIT C/C++ code for you, for example. It doesn't care that it's C/C++. It will even run it interpreted if you like.

[1] Some languages would still require a support library with an interpreter/jit/compiler if you statically compiled them, in order to handle dynamic class loading.
Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies
What's really interesting to me personally is how porn continues to stay ahead of, or at least at/near the front of, the pack technology/performance-wise. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s I co-ran the technology department at a very large network of high-traffic adult web sites (I'm not sure exactly where we would have been in the rankings, but I'd take a wild guess to say it was top 20, if not top 10.) We were doing streaming video (in Real, QT, and WM) at a time when it was still images as the default. Reading comments from SystemOut and stickfigure reminded me of just how (obviously) primitive everything seems compared to today, but we still made it work. Some broad notes from the period:

- Started with single processor Sun SPARCs, which were later replaced by a dual and quad core ones (went from 32 to 64 bit early due to file size limitations), along with a collection of Linux boxes from Penguin Computing (remember them?) Most were in the mid-hundreds MHz range, topping out at a blazing 1GHz by the end.

- Apache, mod_perl, MySQL (postgres for one system), later replaced some of the front end code with PHP.

- No CDNs! Akamai was more or less the only game in town and was still unproven/considered too expensive at the time so we did traditional multiple-host setups (things like image1, image2, along with RRDNS for some other bits)

- No really good, well-integrated turnkey billing systems. The ones at the time often took too large a chunk of the revenue or were designed for low volume/were very inflexible. Custom billing code to directly talk to charge processors (we spoke a custom protocol right over UDP to ours. We had a dedicated line to the processor, too IIRC. Every time a transaction was processed, you got to hear a classic modem-like noise. The hardware on our side was connected to a text-terminal (Monochrome, orange text.)

- In-browser video started out using NPH tricks(!), later used a custom Java applet. Most, however, was served directly to separate client applications. In the days before the YouTubes and Vimeos came along, you had to yes, have your customers download 3rd party software and then provide support for it.

- RAID 1 under Linux at the time had some ugly bugs which would partially corrupt one of the mirrors, requiring weekly manual rebuilds. I had a script monitoring for corruption which would send an email to this crazy old device called a "pager." The corruption always seemed to occur 15 minutes after I fell asleep, too.

Anyhow, interesting to see just how far things have come. Impressive numbers.
A few fallacies, for your consideration
It could be a lot of people just think they are moving in the wrong direction, or perhaps no direction at all, in the last year. In my case the Google services I use are Docs, which has seen almost no improvement in ages, GMail which in my opinion took a step backwards, and Android which has only improved because I spent a few hours loading an ICS ROM onto my unsupported phone. They're not giving me much to be positive about right now. I'm not interested in Google+ and the more it's been shoved in my face the less interested I get.
Well after that part either you find something about their work interesting or vice versa, or you look for some other common interest, or you go your separate ways...
consumer technology shifts further towards entertainment than utility.

It shifts towards whatever people will pay for. There are a lot more wallets interested in entertainment than local emergencies.
Try rereading the comment you replied to. It speaks of the combination of a remote control helicopter and food delivery not being revolutionary.

So to sum it up....just this specific combination is not revolutionary.
So I upvoted both yours and kurtvarner's posts so you can perhaps determine if your vote counts changed.
I'm not aware of any central place where you can go to learn more about all of the apps. But in the case of Facebook you can find out more how they do it here:

* Go to https://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/

* Go to the f8 | Developer tab

* Click "Building Great Social Apps"

* Hit "previous segments"

* Go the end, "F8 inside HTML5 development at Facebook"
I don't understand why there needs to be a privly server in the loop or what benefit to the users it provides (besides the retroactive editing of an email (that is now unreadable offline) if you read it in a web based email program.)

The main use case is handled by a browser extension that handles encryption and decryption of text input/web site snippets.

Having all the content hosted on the privly servers but embedded on pages and always editable is interesting I guess but seems unrelated to the encryption stuff.

The problem for me is that the encryption portion is interesting while the embedded snippet thing is completely uninteresting to me.
At the time, yes, absolutely. Now, Perl is pretty nice, and you get a lot of nice libraries.

I have used Java and Python extensively now and I like Perl a lot more. All three are quite usable, however.
Really cool stuff and I'm not trying to sound negative, but I can't help but think that if you guys get successful with this product (which I hope you will) one of your customers will sooner or later use it to work around the App Store submission process in order to violate the rules in a very visible manner (say for instance, to push porn to the App Store) and in response Apple will decide to reject every app based on your tool in the future. Do you think this is a possible course of events? Are you prepared for it somehow?
I always sort of equated Instagram with "hipster" (not that there is anything wrong with that). So it was kind of ironic when I saw one iOS user threaten to leave Instagram because of the "influx of hipsters". It made me chuckle. I've never been impressed with Instagram and that had nothing to do with not having it on my Android phone. It had to do with all the strange filters that people used. I'm not really interested in getting it. But this whole thing really underscores the feeling that iPhone users think a bit too much of themselves.

That dude's tweet: https://twitter.com/#!/Tyler_Chester/status/1873214042476544...
Instagram for Android hits, users surprised, features lost, features gained
Ahh, I was only answering the last question.

Now that we have some emulators, people are working on compilers.
It isn't a new currency, I don't think. Looks like balances and transactions will be CADs, USDs, EURs, etc.,

If the issuer claims to have backing for the currency then for each CAD issued on a MintChip there would be a CAD in a bank somewhere. Same for USDs.

Since the mint can buy BTCs to issue as well, no reason MintChips can't be used for Bitcoin commerce as well.

http://developer.mintchipchallenge.com/api/java/ca/mint/mint...
Nope, I'm being more general. Throw darts at random programming ads. Take that job. Chances are, it will be something like "move QUUX formatted records from BAZ mainframe to new Oracle Windows Java 7.0 Lightweight Enterprise Server", rather than "start completely anew to help elementary school students learn calculus". Things like ad-hoc record parsing and network connectivity and the ability to easily fork() end up being more important than a clean OO system or a nice UI library, and so on. (Not that they are mutually exclusive... but it's likely that Oracle Windows Java 7.0 Enterprise Server has drivers for Java but not DrScheme, saving you thousands of hours of programming time.)
If everyone uses GPG in their email we don't have to worry about email being insecure, right? Now we just need to get everyone on board with this extra, third party step.
huh? why the down vote?
If I wanted infinite possibilities, I'd go outside. I pay companies to narrow out the nearly-infinite shitty possibilities and provide a useful grouping of the remainder.
Guy that runs 4tube as well as a bunch of other high traffic sites did an ama as well.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/htn7x/i_run_porntubeco...
Wow, so voter fraud will continue. Not surprising.
I'm thinking that the e-dollar will have the same value as $1, guaranteed by the Fed. As if BitCoin had a constant exchange rate pegged at 1.00 against the US dollar. BitCoin can never achieve this, the the e-dollar can.