skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd argue that most people use Disqus because its more powerful than whatever they had (or didnt have) and it's so easy to setup.

I should redirect the point of my post to targetted more towards small businesses, startups, random hackers, etc.. Obviously if you're a larger company you can do whatever you want, and it will generally work out.

That said, just because "Netflix uses the cloud" doesnt mean it's the right decision for anyone, and they certainly do not use it to handle spikes in traffic. They've publicly stated that their primary reason for AWS/etc was simple the lack of operational complexity that was needed to manage it. Even given that argument, the cloud at a point becomes just as complex, if not more, than just running servers.

One thing that's helped Disqus out is the fact that we can get ridiculously powerful servers to ease the burden of needing to scale out (horizontally) right away. I believe even our smallest database servers are still the maximum size you can run on AWS (in terms of memory).
Inside Startx Stanford’s Spring 2012 Demo Day [Highlights + Video]
I had to puzzle it out the first few times. Then I found in a college course on hardware design that the rule was named after some guy, which I found gratifying.

I remember having quite a time doing a doubly-linked-list, the first time I had to think it through. Always wondered why that wasn't named after some bloke . . . :-)
> A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed.

A downvote is also justified when a comment is misleading, contains a fallacious argument, or misrepresents contents of other comments or the article. Sometimes even when it's just incorrect. Unless the particular misconception is somewhat popular or difficult to spot.

Basically, anything that could be removed without loss of value, should be downvoted.
Do you mind if i use selector gadget in APIfy? I use firebug and firefinder to get selectors. But i can't expect everyone to have the same tools.
When I saw the empty repo (just with the README) and before reading the kickstarter page or comments here, I thought it was another vapor.js-like joke as a compliment to the original compiler, which IMO does it very well.
Pinterest Growth Hacks: How did it grow so fast?
AFAIK, Netflix doesn't use Amazon for delivering streams to their customer (they use Level3's CDN). They use Amazon for batch jobs like transcoding and to host their API servers.

Using Amazon for API servers is a little surprising, btw. I would have gone with dedicated hardware. Maybe the sheer number of machines for API service is so high that using AWS APIs is a significant saving in operations complexity?
In my case I was quickly hitting limitations of Heroku, and the allocated resources. That said, you could hit the same (higher) limitations even if you're not using Heroku, and even if you're using physical servers.

My primary issues were:

- Lack of insight into CPU/IO/Memory usage

- Should have been able to handle much higher concurrency than I was

- Should have been able to perform much better than I was
Facebook attack claimed by group identified as members of Anonymous
The problem is not that the cloud is not for you / others.

The problem is that you chose the wrong kind of cloud platform for your app, and instead of choosing the right kind, went right back to the early 2000's and rented some physical boxes instead. In doing so, you've flipped your pros and cons lists, but you haven't solved the actual problems.

Heroku is a PaaS cloud platform. Zero server awareness or maintenance. An app only environment.

You would have been better off using an IaaS cloud, where you have to rent instances and install apps, but you still have the benefit of instant, (potentially automated) scalability, intrinsic high availability and minimal maintenance.

Instead, you're renting physical servers which often have a long term commitment, can potentially drop off the air for any reason - such as drive failure, power supply failure - and then you'd have to rebuild.

I think the cloud almost certainly is for everyone, but you need to use the right kind of tool for the job.
So what if they're not magically exempt. If this is something inherent to any organization like it, then that just means the entire concept is flawed.
Instapaper 4.2.2 with Background Update Locations
I am an electrical engineer by schooling, but now work as a software engineer. I have done quite a bit of higher math in school, but in my career, I find that basic math is more useful. Interestingly, although I know some higher math, software engineering requires intuitive understanding of basic math, which some of us skimmed over while cramming for calculus exams.
This is an interesting way to approximate running in the background on a timer.
Machines with a word size that's not a multiple of 8 cannot support POSIX at all. POSIX requires CHAR_BIT==8, and to support the POSIX and C11 memory model for threads, bytes must be individually addressible without a read-modify-write cycle on a larger memory unit. So this kind of thing really is irrelevant as far as POSIX is concerned.
It's based on an international standard. The different plug diameter is an annoyance (why shave .5mm?), but it's still backwards-compatible with the spec, and the standard plugs will probably fit anyway.

(Legally) imported products must conform to the local standards and pass inspection anyway :)
What do you want, a pat in the back? It's awesome that you and your company are doing all those things and run extremely well, and the article is very interesting as a specific tale in the evolution of a particular service.

But then you start projecting all that into the rest of the world, with what appears to be very little actual insight into the rest of the world; showing a blanket dismissal of anyone who can't do the things you do; and refusing to acknowledge that many companies and products operate under very different parameters and priorities.

Thanks for the info and the data, and feel free to understand why I am ignoring the rest of the stuff.
I'm sorry, but making people pay $100 to develop on systems they own is not developer-friendly. I would much rather they had NO apis and we were allowed to access the hardware we bought.
This is true, but Heroku is not the only provider of services like this, and some of the same limitations and costs exist throughout the ecosystem.

I would disagree that renting physical machines is going back to the 2000s considering nearly every large company is doing this.

Just because the trendy hipsters of the internet use the cloud, doesnt mean its modernizing things, and anyone not doing it is a dinosaur.
The IEC 60906[1] standard was designed to replace BS1363 too, but the british requirement for fuses prevents it's adoption.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60906-1
With luck many silent but wise people will downvote the one or two noisy fools.

There's a strong temptation to interact, even with someone you suspect is a fool. Resist that temptation, and carefully use a downvote.

There's a great article called "Why We Banned Legos" which covers some of the weird problems that online communities get into. (A small group of children get control of the lego, and decide who can have what pieces, etc.)

(http://www.rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path=archive/2...)

Meatball wiki covers lots of these concepts. I've posted it before. Here it is again.

(http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/)
This is going to sound strange, but I miss the cool (big) pufferfish in their normal page: http://6.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/pufferfish360...

That image told me that real people were behind the site, and strangely won my loyalty in a sea of identical clones. The new site removes that and feels pretty but boring and forgettable. Even their twitter icon gives me the "generic social media company feel": https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/2260560652/twit....

This is a phenomenon I've seen with a lot of sites as they get big and overhaul their site with a "real" designer who wants things "to be cleaner". Things usually come out more bland...
Moving Towards The Mountain
Machine Learning that Matters (ICML 2012, Kiri Wagstaff from JPL)
Now let's hope people in the USA without insurance can afford it.

It certainly will be a lucrative, profit-making drug and the temptation will be high to milk it for all it's worth.
".. may sound to western ears"

Ahh, interesting. So if we pull back further and look at the even larger picture, I see that you disagree with the fundamental reasons for why at least some in the US support Israel in the Middle East.

Quoting from the "Friends of Israel" (I could find similar quotes from many other organizations): "Israel is a Western country. With a liberal democratic political system operating under the rule of law, a flourishing market economy producing technological innovation to the benefit of the wider world, and a population as educated and cultured as anywhere in Europe or North America Israel is a normal Western country with a right to be treated as such in the community of nations."

Why do you say that Israel is not a western country?
We'll be laughing when copper hits $20,000 a ton - the ring main is very close to the most economical possible design.
Hey, glad you are working on this. I have later given a talk on structural version control together with demos of structural editing and ydiff. Here are the slides:

http://yinwang0.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/structural-version-...

I think structural version control can open lots of possibilities that are not accessible by text-base version control systems. I'm not really focused on this area, but I'd be happen to to see more people getting interested in this and work on it.

As for the performance of diffing, I think the bottleneck is with detection of moving. That's something that text-based diff doesn't do at all, so not a big drawback. But with structural editors, those moves can be instantly detected and logically merged by the editors. That's too far into the future though. But I think structural diffing without move detection can be of good use already.

Another direction that's possible to detecting moving more efficiently is to use hashing, the same trick used to eliminate redundant expressions in a compiler.
I don't know about way better. We had the experience of being both in managed hosting and the cloud from 1 server each to hundreds, and the cloud was better the entire way, with comparable costs. Especially if you're going to include engineering cost and you're talking about not many servers, any few hundred dollar/mo premium on AWS pays for itself. AWS reliability has also improved considerably in the past few years while managed hosting has not.

Besides, this article is about scaling. If your needs are static, who cares what you use. It's about where you go from there, and I'd rather be on the cloud before I have to.

Management tools have different needs from 2 servers to 10 to 50.
I just want to make sure people know that those changes are bound for a fork once I reach full compliance with the current compiler. The project's one and only goal is to implement the language exactly as Jeremy's compiler does, but be prettier underneath (more extensible, versatile, configurable, robust, etc).
Why one Zynga executive left his post for a small startup
While he may have had a secure job as an executive at the world's biggest social game company, Zynga's former CTO of mobile Laurent Desegur has chosen to leave his post for a new position at Game Closure, a small California-based studio focusing on HTML5.
I am ok with anything @jashkenas blesses.

Thanks Groupon and others for supporting this, I would agree with commenters that name is confusing.
So THAT's the reason for the damn fuses. Thanks!
Fear not. The re-implementation will be completely backwards compatible. It just a smoother compilation pipeline, and adds some output configurability. But regardless, Jeremy and I have decided it would be best to change the name.
I'm sure page files make sense. But if a page-file starts freezing applications regularly for seconds with typical settings and hardware, all while there is still sufficient main-memory, there seems to be some rework necessary indeed.
Add me to the special list.

Have never had problems with Facebook privacy settings.
No, I this is Steam for Linux. The Steam Console was just a rumor, and that's all.

I've had an employee (friend) verify these facts to me.
Download Photo Explosion 4.0 DVD Full (2011)
Can anyone confirm the articles assertion that " Before you 'grounded' your system, the AC voltage in general acted pretty safe for your customers. The only way they could get a shock was if they touched both wires at the same time?"

It seems that if I stick my finger in the hot socket, there is still a path via me to 0 voltage (the ground). I will still get shocked.
Really you don't know think nearly a billion users and 4 billion in revenue is valuable ?
Notes for Choosing Printers
Most receptacles [in the US] do not have flaps or any other mechanical part. If they had the sort of contraption described, ungrounded plugs would not work and there would be a significant risk due to failure.

The ground pin is longer because it is far safer to ground first before running current, and to continue to ground after disconnecting the current.
Then we'll switch to copper clad steel/aluminum :)
This isn't for in the wall, but outside of it...

For example you plug in a drill but it slowly works its way out, you are working with a screw driver against the wall and accidentally drop it, at this point the screw driver can come to rest on the live pins of the drill that is plugged partially into the wall. With the ground pins up the screw driver will pick a side and fall off...
Cut them up and replace the plug. You wouldn't want an adapter the size of a brick attached to your outlet anyway.
That's one of the advantages of CORS. The other advantage is it allows cross-domain XMLHttpRequest requests in the browser, which will have better error handling than JSONP.
This was in the NEC a few versions ago, but removed. It was very common in hospitals, and then got used elsewhere, added to NEC, and then people complained (due to some plugs, like transformer wall warts, not working as well in this orientation). Of course the NEC isn't itself law, it's just an industry standard which is sometimes incorporated into local code (which is law).
That would just be a default in my fork. Since the output will be massively configurable, you can use any style you can imagine, including a single line with all the braces and semicolons and whitespace you want. See http://oai.cwi.nl/oai/asset/10876/10876D.pdf for a resource on defining grammars for AST to CST transformations.
HN is on the job!

You might be warned by these previous HN topics on life in Saudi Arabia: "In Saudi Arabia Today, A Lady Went for a Drive", "Why western governments won’t support democracy in Saudi Arabia", "Saudi Arabian judge asks hospitals to paralyze man", "Female Producers in Saudi Arabia: "Did you have to wear the black thing?"

Plus as well the more tech-related warnings: "The Great Firewall of Saudi Arabia - Smart & Dynamic Content Filtering", "It's Official: Saudi Arabia Bans Blackberries", "Saudi Arabia blocks Facebook", and "Saudi Arabia bans blogging without a license."
Yes. We still want device manufacturers to ground their cases, and using a third wire that is most likely not mounted the wrong way round is preferable.
The article addresses this. Basically, it's better to risk the small chance of an abusive mod than the large chance of a gradual decay.
Are you sure your cloud supplier has everything in stock to add 100s, or 1000s of servers?

I'm not sure how many servers Dropbox is up to now, but we've got over 200 physical machines (probably nearing 300, growing quickly), and much more when you break them down to how many virtual services there are running. We do that with 3 operations people.

The biggest advantage for us has been the ability to scale up, rather than worrying about how to scale out right now. For a startup, I'd say this is even more important. Horizontal scaling is one of the most difficult parts of my job. That's not saying that it's hard, but the fact is its straight up not as easy as just buying better hardware.
Google App Engine and others also offer similar PaaS offerings. Yes, they all have similar limitations (and benefits).

Large companies I deal with don't rent physical machines, they buy them and then run a hypervisor platform across them to gain some of the availability benefits of an infrastructure cloud. It costs more, but you lower your risk profile. Many of these companies are looking at migrating their apps to a cloud platform (internal or external) to outsource the hardware / software / infrastructure maintenance. They are mostly interested in IaaS.

Cloud is not just for Internet hipsters.
This is all pretty great stuff. Make sure you read through the docs; I'm unlikely to use Fb's C++ code, but I'm sure as hell going to look at making my C vector code do some of what FBVector does:

https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/docs/FBV...
> My wish is that Apple adds paid upgrades for apps in the app store.

As a user, I very much like the current business model. I'm actually more willing to buy an app because I know won't be socked every X months with a fee to update.

It's a very transparent & easy to understand model.

I understand you, as the app creator, wanting to raise more revenue, but I would prefer that cost be front-loaded.
I think AWS is easy, but you're right in that there are so many features you might know where to look.

I could probably write a tutorial and exercises that will cover all of the requisite things for Windows:

1) Finding an image (also - what is an image?)
2) Launching a new instance from an image
3) Connecting to instance using RDP
4) Basic monitoring
(on the level of - are the lights blinking?)
5) Finding and pressing the reset button
6) Creating a new image, to be used later
7) Setting up auto update
8) Configuring the firewall

This will take an hour to read and do the exercises, after each anyone can run their stuff in the cloud. I'm not talking about complex system, but a few web sites and a database is easy enough to set up.

Firewall can be buttoned down to only allow ports 80 and 443 (or just 443) to public, and RDP port to your own IP address. If you're using Microsoft stack, they will keep you fully up to date. You would still have to update your own software, but presumably people can handle that.

The only thing is automated backup - you'd have to write a script for that and schedule a cron (schtasks) job.
So a big pharma company like Merck wouldn't use a big publishing company like Elsevier to create fake "medical" journals and publish research?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=elseviers+fake+journa...
First, I think you have to assume that the TSA will always fail and visibly so. If we assume the best, the goal of setting up an organization like that is to increase the barrier to such an attack, not to be the organization that directly prevents it.

This being said, I don't think we can assume the best here. I think it's easier rather than harder to get prohibited items onto airplanes than it was pre-9/11 and that's the real metric of success. Use of shiny new machines without a thorough review of weak spots and clear efforts to compensate is a recipe for bad security.

I don't think it's just a matter of government refusing to allow its ideas to fail. It's also a product of two more major antipatterns here, which is "Never use the tried and true when you could be using the new and shiny instead" and "security is a product, not a process."
It's more complicated than that.

http://newsblog.mayoclinic.org/2010/03/19/study-on-stopping-...
http://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2010/04/19/when-clinical-...
Once again, the fact that you can't punch someone in the face over a computer network bites us on the ass.

Back in the BBS days I called this 'modem machismo'.
I just want to chime in and say that I've been thinking about and researching solutions to this for years. Only recently have I been pushed towards creating a real product that does solve this problem (due to enough people liking the idea at a Lean Startup Machine competition for us to win). The idea is relatively simple...we prioritize content by segregating people into dynamic communities consisting of users who are highly similar behaviorally. The goal is to create a million little hacker newses behind the scenes.

Practical implementation is more of a nightmare, but at this point we're in limited beta and you can sign up to receive an invite at http://foldr.co (just go to launch in the upper right and put in your email for the invite).

This project is my personal crusade, primarily because I have watched so many great communities die. I can't say for sure whether or not the solution will ultimately work, but it won't do any good if nobody tries.
>You're right, I'll get a security cert + force ssl.

As someone who has worked in security for years--in particular, application security assessments--thank you for taking the sometimes hard-to-swallow criticism well, and deciding to actually fix things rather than just deflect the issue. You probably have no idea how many (even reputable) organizations decide to "accept the risk" and ignore security findings. (Edit: More so than the SSL issue, I'm talking about fixing the CSRF)

>The user is not a known quantity and it's his/her first submission to HN, it's very possible he/she is hoping that PayPal email addresses/passwords that you put in match.

There is nothing wrong with the logic in this statement, but you also need to be careful how far you take it. One could argue that any of the small "Show HN" posts around here are hoping to harvest credentials. In fact, I'm sure that some of them do. When using software as a service--or indeed, any web application--there is an inherent degree of trust behind it. Even if the user had made many HN posts, or not bought the pre-made site (which looks nice, IMO), or purchased an HTTPS certificate... credential harvesting is still a real threat.

Even bigger services that claim to encrypt password databases have often been shown to in fact do nothing of the sort (eg, sending password reminder emails etc).

This is why security guys worth their salt will always suggest using random passwords for every service you sign up for and keeping them in an encrypted file a la KeePass or a TrueCrypt container with a long, complicated "master password" for the archive. Additionally, it's always a great idea to enable 2-factor authentication where ever possible (for example, Google accounts).
[for the US]

The longer ground pin at the top provides a mechanical advantage when a downward force is applied to the plug. Since this is the most common accidental force (e.g. something dropped or a cord on the ground dragged) it slightly reduces the risk of disconnect.

In addition, the ground at the top allows for a better view of the pin and receptacle hole.
Venus to make rare transit across sun Tuesday
But the key thing is there is a difference between de facto functions of an organization (DHS is, de facto, an organization which seeks to control the populace) and the intended functions of an organization (DHS is intended to keep us safe. It does this by seeking to control the populace....).

The first is the domain of the structuralists in Anthropology. The second is the domain of the politicians.
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