skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a huge lump, but it handles 240 v at 13 amp and does so without burning down houses or killing people who plug it in.

I have no idea how many sockets are installed in UK houses and how many plugs are fitted to UK equipment but a new plug / socket design would have to be God-Tier to justify the cost of replacement.

Also, I've seen people wiring plugs and it's sometimes scary, so anything that avoids the need for many people to botch a new plug onto their equipment is a good thing. And I guess this is where most improvement has happened - plugs that can be built quickly, cheaply and safely in Chinese factories for use in UK. You can change the fuse, but the plug is molded and you can't take it apart.
Not a single successful game console will be launched in the next 5 years. I'm sure of it.
And we have our own exclusive design because no other was good enough. Also, so that using imported products its harder :)
And how would the organisation that replaces the TSA be any different from the TSA ?
Show HN: Slides for 20 minute on Redis at LA HN
Whoops -- I think you're missing a big part of the point of compiling into "standard" JavaScript. Not only is CoffeeScript code fully compatible with any JS library ... it's also compatible with code generated by any version of the compiler, and with code generated by alterna-compilers like Coco, and eventually this project as well. The semantic compatibility exists at the "plain 'ol" JS level.
more useful than live blogging
https://github.com/boostcon/cppnow_presentations_2012
Clinical trials are monitors by IRBs (institutional review boards) that independently monitor the trial to ensure that it is being conducted ethically.

It's not odd at all for a trial to be ended early if the drug being tested is obviously better than the control arm. It's especially true in trials that are testing drugs for potentially lethal diseases like prostate cancer.

What likely happened was that an interim data review was conducted, the results showed that the new drug was substantially better than the control arm (and statistically significant) and the IRB and sponsoring company decided that it had an ethical obligation to end the trial and provide the drug to all the patients.
Johnson & Johnson own the rights to this drug they purchased it sometime ago I believe.
I hate those plugs because I can't find adapters to usethem in Brazil (while european/US ones can go directly into our (now replaced with 3-pin version) outlets: http://www.osetoreletrico.com.br/web/images/stories/Edicao59...)
Oh, I notice the Earth pin is longer now that you mention it, you're right. Makes sense, considering it retracts the flaps.
Wow where to begin. Yeah with the title hehe: 'You' in a title obviously means 'Me'.

> Almost any company worth a damn can bring online a server within 24 hours

I know a few companies 'worth a damn lot more than a damn' that can't bring a physical server up within 24 hours unless someone happens to have a spare box with the right specs lying around (unlikely). If they need multiple boxes, well, good luck with that.

But perhaps more importantly, I know of no companies that can get rid of a now unnecessary server quickly and at no cost.

The idea that 'capacity planning' is the best approach to scaling in 99% of the cases is laughable.

Someone who can bring up, configure, secure and monitor a custom backend in a few days is someone versed in operations, even if his day job is development.
And how many people work at the TSA ?

No offense but what you said was grossly insulting to the good people who do work at the TSA. There are bad characters in ANY organisation. I fail to see why the TSA would be magically exempt.
That kind of attitude leads to not being able to take any sort of challenging by anyone who you label fool or inferior, be it by smarts, knowledge, experience or other things.
Can anyone recommend a primer on the sort of scalability issues the author mentions? Some textbook or series of blog posts I can read?
I was at the announcement of the trial data by the investigators this morning. The results were also discussed by a statistician not involved with the trial directly. Not sure that hacker news needs an in depth analysis of the trial design and outcome, but anyway...

In summary, the trial looked at patients who had incurable prostate cancer that had spread and stopped responding to traditional hormonal treatments. Patients had to have no symptoms to be enrolled on this trial. The trial compared abiraterone, a new type of hormonal treatment plus steroids to just being on steroids alone. The question that the trial was asking can be framed as "Does taking abiraterone prolong the period of time that a patient can be symptom free and their cancer is under control?" That was the primary endpoint. A secondary endpoint was survival, or how long they lived.

Built in to the study design was a planned interim analysis of the data. Normally, the investigators are not allowed to just look at the data as it accrues continuously because it creates bias. It is a standard approach to allow one look at the data when say 40% of the expected events (in this case, development of progressive cancer) have occurred. When they did this, the difference between getting the drug and not getting the drug was considered big enough to unblind the trial. This means that everyone finds out if they were getting placebo or the real drug.

There are multiple reasons why one may decide to do this. First and foremost is that if the drug really works, it would be unethical to leave people on a placebo for long periods, because it is clear they have an inferior outcome. Stopping early also speeds the time to drug approval and market entry for a given indication.

There are somewhat esoteric statistical procedures that can determine at an interim analysis if the accrued data shows a statistically significant difference between groups, which would therefore justify stopping the trial, while adjusting for the impact of repeated testing on the type I error rate (ie the chance of finding an association that doesn't really exist). In this trial, there is no doubt that the primary endpoint was positive and clinically and statistically significant, even with only 40% of people on the trial having had a progression event. So they stopped. The data on whether abiraterone reduces the chance of death are not mature, because not enough of the people on the trial have died yet, so those results will be awaited. Stopping early means that these results may be biased however, because the trial is no longer blinded.

This was a large and well done trial, that employed standard statistical practices.
Oh nice, another cloud thread.

I'll just utter my standard: The cloud is great for very small and very large deployments.

If you're in the middle, rent servers.
You're making VPS look harder than it needs to be. Amazon EC2 has firewall that's a snap to configure, spinning instances up and down is a few mouse clicks, updates can be set up automatically (at least for windows), and a filed instances (which I've never seen) means you just need to spin up a new machine from an image and deploy your latest software again.

The only admin thing you need to do is backups (I am still upset that EC2 EBS does not provide timer-based snapshots).
> I don't see any reason to believe there will ever be a new machine with non-power-of-two word size

Well...obviously it's designed to run Forth and not C, but for what it's worth, this is a pretty recent machine with an 18-bit word size: http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?option=com_content&t...
And I'll bet that some of the research that resulted in the drug being discovered by Cancer Research was not conducted by Cancer Research UK. And I'll bet that Cancer Research UK never could have taken the drug to market because they didn't have the expertise to do so.

That's the nature of science, no one person ever discovers a drug independently. All new science is build on the basis of old science.
all manner of things can cause a build up of charge in what is essentially a massive network of thousand KM+ antennas: radio waves, the earth's magnetic field, cosmic rays, wind interacting with dust particles causing static charges, etc.

A bit of an interesting side note: it is possible to build a radio set passively powered by radio waves, requiring no external power:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
Do we need grounded sockets now that we have GFCIs?
Move Over Entrepreneurs, Here Come The Intrapreneurs
He wants to remove semicolons except where absolutely necessary?

Is he nuts? The compiled output shouldn't be relying on an error-correction feature. Especially since it might break minifiers and validators.
Often bad clinical trial results aren't released because they are bad for reasons other than the drug doesn't work.

Also, it's very rare for big pharma companies to screw up a clinical trial. It's much more common in the small biotechs and non-profits. If there is one thing that big pharma companies are good at is drug development (not so much drug research).
How many electricians do you actually know?
Two Jobs for Perl Devs :)

Work from home, 100% remote!

Full listing at:
http://jobs.perl.org/job/16056

Thanks, Ben
Feynman: How Trains Work [video]
What do you mean by triple blinded?

The research was double-blinded, what more are you looking for?
I don't even know where to begin, with responding to the level of ignorance you've displayed here.

Find me a company that isn't purely selling custom made-to-order servers that cant do next-day, let alone same-day turnaround on a new server.

Find me any reasonable tech company who doesnt use configuration management and have configure a server within a few hours of it being ready, let alone a few minutes.

My budget company has even delivered in the 24 hour window, and it takes me 30 minutes to have a server fully configured and ready to go into production. Did I mention enough how I'm not a systems guy and this is still without challenge?

I don't want to start bringing Disqus into this story, as this article is completely unrelated to how we deal with things, but we've never had an issue that we couldn't handle with proper implementation or planning ahead. We also use entirely physical servers for our day-to-day operations.
The webapp is not open source. But the underlying library Scrapify is open source. It internally uses Nokogiri if that's what your question.

https://github.com/sathish316/scrapify#readme
Oh another idea you could think about:

If for each box, you could somehow select all of the scripts and styles inside, and allow them to be edited, with the edits being visible to all in the app, then this tool would not only be great for quick discussions about design, but also a way to quickly agree on it's solution. Don't forget being able to somehow copy that code somewhere for when you actually make the change!

A screenshot of the change with the dialog could also allow freelancers to keep a record of approval with evidence!

While this may be a lot of work, the benefits could mean this app being used extensively in the design and UI process. Let me know if there's something similar integrated.

EDIT: This type of functionality is something that I would pay at up to 50 a month to have because it would save time opening an editor, making the change, reviewing the change, and finally committing the change when all I want to do is get approval from a client.

Look to the stars with this, it's a brilliant tool, and has many possibilities. Good luck!

Cheers
There's also a jQuery port with many improvements, called jmpress.js[1]. And you should also have a look at my App for creating jmpress-like presentations, Imprys[2]

[1] http://shama.github.com/jmpress.js/
[2] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/imprys-lite/id523769425?ls=1&...
Back when I was developing web apps, I was surprised to hear that programming was supposed to require any math. But I've found that, as I've built more interesting and sophisticated things, I needed more math. I took about 15 math courses in school, and I can't think of any I haven't found useful.

Lately I've been looking at using model checking in my work, which touches on much of the math I know. Advanced logic to give a specification, and automata theory to run it. Group theory to express symmetries that let it run orders of magnitude faster. Add a bunch of real analysis and statistics if you want to do it probabilistically. Apparently number theory crops up too.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine develops ImplicitCAD, a programming language for making 3D objects. How does he test whether his 3D models have holes? Algebraic topology.
With Steam already running the moment I double-click an installed game from my list it's taking about 2-3 seconds before they pop open full screen. If you're taking 20 seconds then it may or may not be Steam's fault, but it certainly isn't an intrinsic property of the software.
hji... how can i contact you to apply for this position.
my email is rohit.neotheone@gmail.com
Yeah, the latest Lightwave runs on Linux. I installed one of the Beta's a few months ago and it ran OK, though it didn't include everything the windows version had. I still use Lightwave via Virtual Box.
What's their business model right now? I see them in a very tough situation: the people who want to shorten links are not their customers - they're the product (the data). The companies that need analytics are their customers, so that's why they're making these changes. Yet if you push away your users, you got no product.

I guess this is what happens when your users = your product.
Same here (Chrome on Ubuntu)
Two thousand servers is nowhere near the scale of the average person wondering if they have to go in the cloud. And once people have reached that size, I hope they don't follow random blog advices.

Before that, for anything that fits on less than, say, 20 servers, you're way better off renting servers.
For some games, you can just run Steam in Wine, and the game in Wine, and everything runs out of the box. Check the Wine documentation for each game before buying to ensure it works.
Every redesign upsets users, where "users" is defined as one or more people with a blog. People do not like change.
Oh! Selector gadget is wonderful, and I still use it to this day. It's so easy to forget that there are real people behind the tools we use - so fizx and tectonic, I thank you!
As someone who's grandfather and grandmother both died of cancer-related complications (edit: in the last four months, my grandmother not even a week ago) and with a grandfather-in-law who has terminal cancer, for once I'm going to abandon cynicism, gloss over the lack of scientific details, and dare to hope.
There's an anime character who ends every sentence with です (as I described above). GP is probably referring to a famous internet meme where that's the only word she knows.

Some context: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/desu
This did not come across from your previous posting. I read it as saying that we spend so much more on these other projects that we shouldn't be so concerned with the money we send to Israel.

Thank you for your clarification. But then I don't understand why the TSA is listed there. While I am opposed to it in part because it does not add any extra security, I am not aware of any "hate crime" influence in its operations.
Well, one reason that it could go that way is that the attitude that the maintainers has had toward feature-creep is "just make your own fork!" That's why we now have more dialects than we can shake a stick at, but it has kept the main branch from becoming PHP.
I can't believe you upvoted him at all, he wasn't joking he was mocking you while failing to comprehend the connection you were making. Given the subject matter here, I find that very ironic indeed.
If 2-factor is used simply to log in, then any attacker who targets your phone/tablet to get your totp secrets from google authenticator could compromise rsa token protected logins as well. They'd only have to wait until you log in legitimately and compromise your account at that point.

Real security against compromise of the device you're using to access a service, whether the 2nd factor is a hardware token or generated from a seed stored on an android/ios device, would require making every significant action, not just logins, re-prompt for a token. I haven't seen many systems that do that, because it harms usability.

I'm not disputing that there are cases where RSA tokens or other hardware solutions make sense, but the physical burden of more than a few hardware tokens would be too much for normal people, even if cost were no object. 2-factor totp/hotp oath auth is far better than 1-factor auth, and presents minimal annoyance to people who already have their smartphone with them 24/7. It can be deployed on every saas website with minimal additional burden to users.

A compromised android/ios device that you use to login to services is, as outlined above, pretty close to game over even if you have a separate hardware token. An attacker may not be able to maintain access, but the account information and various settings can be compromised in an instant. 2-factor of any sort pretty much solves the password reuse problem, and also the problem with individual service passwords getting compromised somehow in a way other than an ongoing compromise of the user's machine(s).
The Service Patch
The public demands that Something must be Done. The TSA is Something, therefore it is Done.

I personally assign blame straight on the general public. The general public is a bunch of scared nitwits who can't stand any possibility of any risk when flying on an airliner, even though they literally stand a higher chance of dying on their trip to the airport than on their flight. This irrationally frightened public demands that their elected officials protect them from the imaginary monsters under their figurative beds. Government simply complies with their wishes.
I'm going to be taking a serious look at this for my own projects.

I like Format: https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/docs/For...

Histogram is going to come in handy. :)

fbstring seems to be exactly what the doctor ordered.

I like the emphasis on cooperating with the memory allocator in fbstring and fbvector. If the entire library does that, that's going to a big win for long-running programs: memory fragmentation can slowly increase program footprint, requiring the use of fancy arena allocators etc.

I had fun reading their vector doc: https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/docs/FBV...

I like dynamic: https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/docs/Dyn...
My business is such that external events cause immediate spikes. My traffic might double because Apple released a new firmware, or might go up 10x because someone released a jailbreak without warning me. That capacity requirement quickly trickles down and settles to its original levels over the next two months until it spikes again.

Netflix is in a similar position: you never know when A&E runs a new documentary making everyone suddenly want to watch this one specific old movie at the same time, or when a trailer for a sequel hits during the Super Bowl and when the game is over everyone is inspired to watch the original.

Some businesses thrive on environments where capacity planning 24 hours in advance is impossible, an where holding excess capacity seven days later might mean 10x the costs of running your business. Claiming that these people are incompetent or couldn't possibly have profitable businesses is ludicrous: the cloud isn't for you, but I /love it/.

Btw, the extreme irony is that your entire business model works because your argument is often false. Most of the small blogs I know use DISQUS not because it does something cool, but because they only get traffic randomly based on events they have little control over: Apple announces something, to take advantage of it they write an article about it to be published an hour later, and then their site which normally gets no traffic suddenly needs to handle insane load.

Your cloud-hosted (to be clear, not necessarily that you host it in the cloud, but that you are a cloud to your users) comment engine solves that problem (as well as adding similar deployment advantages and simplicity that is also known from cloud hosting).

(Note: for those who want to heckle me "your service falls over when jailbreaks come out", it doesn't: the third party repositories do. The core site, the payment processing system, and my repository barely notce, and when they do it is normally due to a bug that I rapidly notice and fix, and tends to have limited effect.)
57% of world’s personal computer users run pirated software.
cool - let me know when it's ready
Yeah, sure, for you that's easy. Clearly you've done it before.

What if you've never seen the AWS admin panel? Is it really that easy to pull a well-architected AWS setup out of thin air? Maybe, but from playing around with it (I've used S3 a lot and there are plenty of gotchas) there is a lot of nuance I'm missing without experience. (see all the "oops we did it wrong" posts on HN).

I've been in software and systems architecture a long time and I probably wouldn't be very confident I got it right on my first try. Perhaps I'm overestimating the domain knowledge needed.

I'm not at all suggesting Heroku > AWS, but in my experience an early stage startup with only developers shouldn't play sysadmin. It only leads to pain and suffering later. And, time spent mucking around with AWS should be better spent figuring out product/market fit.
would love to get in touch regarding this job opportunity... let me know your email... mine is rohit.neotheone@gmail.com
>So if you hire a smaller fraction of any racial category of applicants than there were in the pool of applicants or in the workforce of your region, then your hiring method has disparate impact.

Is it necessarily because of the hiring method, though? Couldn't it be possible that there is something about the company as a whole that causes people in a protected class to avoid applying to the company? (For example, if the company has racist ads.)
Morality is not maths.
Are you suggesting that the TSA security does not represent a change from airport security prior to the TSA's existence?
Right, if time was an issue I would have used an existing implementation, but since I largely code as a hobby I figured I may as well take the time to practice implementing stuff like this.
The Cloud Is For You
I've been experimenting with using NetBSD pkgsrc on musl to see how far it goes. Many hundreds of packages compile and pass all their tests, including, for instance, every major language interpreter, various development libraries and resources, and XFCE4. Things that don't compile usually fall into one of two categories: (1) using #ifdef __linux__ to mean #ifdef __GLIBC__, and (2) fundamentally unportable packages that have huge hacks for every single platform they support. There's rumbling about creating a package support wiki where people can document what packages work, don't work, or require patches to work, but it doesn't yet exist.
>There are bad characters in ANY organisation. I fail to see why the TSA would be magically exempt.

I agree with this statement: any organization in this position is vulnerable to attack.

However, it should be noted--as was the grandparent comment's intent, I believe--that the TSA, rather than providing additional security, appears to be introducing an additional vulnerability.
Lawsuit Shakes Foundation of a Man’s World of Tech