skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear Blackberry is still going strong in Indonesia as well. Still, worldwide, they're doomed.
Same here. I only have a Mac so I can develop for iOS with it.

There is no other reason to have it, in this house - everything else I do with my Mac, I can do equally well if not better with my Linux workstation.

Its just that its almost impossible to work on iOS without XCode, and so far the XCode VM I set up for the purpose isn't as performant as my MBP.

I'd love to ditch the MBP, though, and just have a plain ol' Linux workstation. I don't see anything terribly unique about OSX in comparison.
That is not a valid deduction from what leot said.
That's pretty similar, except you have the "(a, b) => a + b" inline.
I can't imagine many manufacturers would be willing to lose online sales. Even the highest-end manufacturers draw a large percentage of their sales from online orders.

And, as a consumer, I sure as hell am not going to pay a brick-and-mortar retailer for the "privilege" to shop in their store.
Fair points. My thoughts:

>To say "most big pharma labs" do not have access to the literature is laughable. We had better access than most academic institutions. If we needed a paper we didn't have access to, it took a few hours to get it. The company was more than willing to pay the $50 to get a copy of whatever paper, since we would often blow $50 running one experiment.

I'll admit that my knowledge of big pharma journal access is colored by those in big pharma that I've talked to (anecdotal evidence, oh the irony). Perhaps they just had poor departments or bad access, I don't know.

However, every university that I've been at has instant access to journals. I never had to wait hours for a paper...we had free reign of just about every journal. Even at my relatively small and poor undergraduate institute.

>1) Often results are never double checked in an academic lab unless the work is use in a later project.

99% of projects in academia are building off some previous grad student or post-doc's work. Sure, there are projects which are nearly impossible to replicate (I should know, I spent 1.5 years of my life trying to replicate a previous grad's project). But it's equally laughable to say that data is never double-checked - professor's career is a long string of projects building on previous projects.

>2) Academics (both profs and students) live and die by papers, not so in [industry]

I'll concede that there is often pressure to publish positive results in an academic setting. However, as you rightly mentioned, academics live and die by their papers. It just takes one lab refuting your paper to have a burned career. While I agree that many academics prefer to just ignore papers they can't recreate, there is still a lot riding on publishing replicable data.

>3) Work in academic is often performed by relatively inexperienced ungrad and grad students, while big pharma scientists often have years of experience.

This is a pretty baseless statement? I know plenty of techs working at big pharma that just graduated with an undergrad degree and have zero of wet-bench experience (just like I know of plenty who did the same in academia). Conversely, I can't even count the number of post-docs and senior scientists that work at various universities, with literally centuries of experience between them.
You don't challenge "false, but widely held beliefs" with anecdotes - those beliefs actually is exactly what anecdote becomes when it starts being repeated.

Alerting people to new circumstances is a good use, but that's pretty much all. Proof by counterexample works well only in mathematical logic, which is not how the real world works[1]. In reality you enter the domain of probability theory, and there counterexamples work exactly as the article author says - as an evidence that needs to be properly weighted. And these are those weights that people vastly overestimate in case of anegdotes.

[1] - by this I mean, mathematical logic is not how we model, comprehend and operate reality.
I didn't get that impression at all. After all, Derek wrote this post in 2009, and if you follow the links, the company he rushed back from the hot springs to found seems to have gone nowhere.

All he's really saying is 'you need to be executing on your ideas to be happy, not just thinking about them.' Which is true for a lot of people, myself included.
To clarify - if you add the query hint, run the query, then remove the query hint then has the original query's plan expired?

Edit: I know I'm asking a lot about the plan cache, but as it's a core selling point, then I'd like to know how data distribution changes will affect performance. Stale queries will potentially adversley affect performance under certain circumstances.
Yet Another Visibility API Wrapper. ifvisible.js
AjaxHandler - Easily create Ajax responders with unified JSON response.
Not quite. I think the author was focusing more on any company that you have a stake in and can redirect its focus.

Technically, as long as you're a director of operations, you can redirect the company's vision any way you please. Just hope that the employees stay with you on your wild ride.
Having scaled a site to millions of users and billions of data items I think the strategy of extinguishing fires as they arise is the wrong strategy. It will lead to lots of stress, lots of sleepless nights and lots of unneeded bugs. I know, because we used this strategy and I would not recommend it. There's a better way that's less stressful and better for your health.

It's the idea of being proactive and reactive - - and as a good developer you should master both and be able to switch between these states.

For example, backups and anticipations of future load should be proactive. If your load is close to maxing out today then don't wait till your web site is down before you begin optimizations. Know everything about your systems so you can take an educated guess of how many more users you can handle. Think about which strategies you can apply if you want to scale 10x, 100x, 1000x of your current load.

Reactive programming is great when you are exploring new territory and are unsure how many would use something. This is the state where you don't think about scaling to millions of users. This said, as a good developer always keep in mind how something can be scaled or how fast something is.

In other words: it's about finding balance between the proactive state and the reactive state. Don't optimize prematurely, but don't optimize when everything is burning down either. You have lots of data so use this to your advantage and make educated guess about your way of scaling.
Why didn't they think of using dedicated servers? Dedicated servers would have been more economical than using so many VPSes.
Watching this situation unfold is especially poignant for me. I'm also being sued personally -- despite my acting within the confines of a corporation -- by a lawyer working on contingency. Suing someone personally is one of the least scrupulous things that these litigious assholes (lawyers like Carreon) do. They do it because it's unnerving. Everything you have, plus anything you do in the future is put on the table, and clawing it back off of the table is expensive and difficult. It's a shake down, plain and simple.

Reading all the comments on HN is such an emotional roller coaster for me. Prior to my current legal situation, I held many of the same view points that I read here; e.g., "A judge is going to throw this out of court! This is absurd!" I've heard this same sentiment over, and over, and over from friends and lawyers with regard to my case, but guess what? We're about 2.5 years in to litigation, and only a handful of allegations have been dismissed. Several personal allegations are still in the complaint (a complaint is a legal filing in civil cases), so I still face losing everything, depending on the outcome of a jury trial.

The reality is that judges frequently cannot "throw this out of court" because it's not within their power. Judges can only rule on the letter of the law, and civil law is written to give plaintiffs their day in court without much consideration for the accused (yes, I'm a bit biased here). It's disgusting to watch all this play out with other people involved, but it's gut wrenching when it's your $100k+ hard earned cash that has been spent fending off this type of bullshit.
As someone who has pretty good eyesight (for the time being at least), I am pretty excited about the prospects of coding in the terminal with a super HD screen (I hate having to buy into Apple's marketing speak). Right now I struggle to have three 80 coloumn wide text files open in VIM on my Lenovo X201, and most other people have a real hard time reading the small font on my screen, while I have just gotten used to it. A super HD screen would mean vertical and horizontal lines of code for me without sacrificing the readability issues of going down in font size, assuming I can adapt to the smaller text.
"Many"? Article only mentions 2: from life broadcasting to web broadcasting, then to twitchtv (specialized game broadcasting).
:-) I really like what you are attempting to do here. What would you say your core market is?
The name of the game is differentiation. There are even brands that are only sold door to door. I could very easily see brands that are only sold in stores.
"Mom! He hit me!"

But seriously, this guy is just trying to milk his 15 minutes.

It'll all be over soon. Nobody is going to end up doing anything, and the parties involved all get an increase in notoriety.

It's like a mutual troll, and the joke is on anyone who buys into this jersey shore type hype.
I get this:

SyntaxError at /newsdiffer/browse/
EOL while scanning string literal (urls.py, line 13)
> All he's really saying is 'you need to be executing on your ideas to be happy, not just thinking about them.' Which is true for a lot of people, myself included.

Oh, sure, I don't doubt that's true for many people, it's true for me as well. However, in order to easily test various things, you need to have a lot of people/datapoints to work with.

It's amazing if you have a product that many people want to use and resources with which to bring your ideas to life, but most people who own companies are probably too busy getting those companies to profitability (or improving it) to try any big ideas.

It seems to me that the author had the liberty and ability to try new things a lot (look at the experiments he lists), which requires a good team, an audience to test your idea with, etc...
I don't think it's necessarily game over for Nokia, but they've got to drastically rethink their game plan.

They burned through cash getting the Lumia phones ready, gorgeous as they are, which is a gamble not yet to pay off. They're using the third horse in the race, a platform which it's creators have yet to successfully manage into the mainstream consciousness. Too many flaws to stand next to Android and iOS, but not completely down yet.

Lets not forget Nokia is still one of the biggest mobile handset companies in the world, they've got a solid brand name appreciation in areas of the world yet to be opened up.

Essentially they've still got chips left on the table, it just depends on the next run of cards whether they grow their stack or not. But lets not get in the way of a snappy headline.
Nobody wants to lose sales in principle, but the problem here is that they could lose all their offline sales. That's the point of the article...
I'm always deeply disappointed (less deeply as time goes by, I'm coming to expect it) when something like this in Lego is actually just a peripheral for a program running in silicon somewhere.

I no longer have any of my Lego, but I remember building most of a completely mechanical Turing Machine way back in the early 1970s. So satisfying seeing it work purely mechanically, and I'm sure someone with more creativity and skill than I had, or indeed have, could do it.

Please?
How well-made is "evil"? Do you ever have any issues with it because it's not really vim?
Really nice writeup, but why not also append a discussion of scrypt and its use of both CPU work factor and memory-hard functions to confound Moore's Law? It's the next step after bcrypt, after all.

It may not be be implemented across as many platforms as bcrypt yet, but there's plenty for people to experiment with [1], if only for learning and educational purposes.

1. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/security/scrypt/

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man1/scrypt.1.ht...

http://rubygems.org/gems/scrypt

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/scrypt/

https://github.com/search?q=scrypt
> For me, real art has a message, it has skill, it is intentional, and the artist puts a genuine piece of themselves into it that you can just really sense.

This is exactly right, in my opinion.

There is obviously a continuum from 'bad' to 'good' art. If this is no obvious display of skill, then it is going to be towards the 'bad' end, no matter how much justification you try to slap on to it. A painting of a bowl of fruit, even when done with considerable skill, can also be bad if there is no message.
OpenSSL is slower on Ubuntu 12.04 than previous versions
Could you at least point out some good modern philosophy? Otherwise your comment is not worth much.
from the faq

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Google reveals 'alarming' increase in government requests to censor content
That's a little harsh I think. It still has a transaction log, so it has certain advantages over memory tables. Some interesting enhancements to indexes also. And it is also binary compatible with MySQL, so you can actually add it as a MySQL node.

I'd say it's a database for a niche market, as one of the folks from MemSQL has been saying. It would fit in nicely under a few scenarios.
This is probably the most accurate forecast. That said, The only people who are going to hire this guy after this fiasco are those who do not know about it.
Nokia won't last until 2014. They are declining too fast. They went from 45% market share to 18% in China, one of their strongest and biggest markets, last year alone. This year they will probably fall way below 10%. Nokia will most likely be acquired by the end of this year or in the first half of next year (or go bankrupt otherwise).
What was not mentioned in the article was why the ClientHello and ServerHello messages include a bunch of random data. The reason is to prevent a replay attack, where Mallory has intercepted Alice and Bob's previous transmission and fools Alice into thinking that she's talking with Bob by re-transmitting Bob's messages from the previous attack. The random data has to be signed with your key so the other party can be sure it's you sending that data. This kind of liveness guarantees are used quite often in public key cryptography.
There are few differences with VoltDB.
1. It's much easier to use (MySQL compatibility, ad-hoc sql no java dependency)
2. It doesn't have any issues with data skews. We are using lockfree skiplists vs b-trees partitioned by core.
3. I believe we are faster on a single box, however this claim should obviously be verified by a third party.
The problem is not that customers are demanding unlimited value for a fixed payment. The problem is that Comcast is demanding fixed payment for variable value. Comcast is oversold, and when everyone is using their link at the same time, nobody gets what they're paying for (a good data rate.) If Comcast had an SLA, I'd accept the data caps, because there would be a purpose to it. But I pay the same money whether Comcast delivers 100kbps or 20mbps, so I'm rather offended by a data cap which is just a bandaid to their capacity issues.
> Then, one by one, the stores that have unwillingly become showrooms for the online merchants will fold up. And the American downtown-and-mall landscape will begin to look barren.

I don't think that's a problem. It's evolution. Like no one today misses spice and salt caravans traveling the silk road not many people will miss brick and mortar shops in the future.
> "FunnyJunk is not suing him," Carreon added. "FunnyJunk didn't sue him. So what are people bitching about?"

Oh, I don't know, the $20,000 'offer' which is tantamount to extortion?
They are not obligated. However, I'm fairly sure banks aren't obligated by law to send you statements* - they certainly aren't obligated to let you download them in, say, quicken format (who could be seen as a competitor). It's just such a big feature that no one would do business with a bank that didn't offer it.

Similiarly Netflix's APIs add value for customers, and apps and outboard memory are/have been a big part of Netflix for me. Will loosing that make me leave? I don't know - but clearly this is a major downgrade in their service.

--

* It looks like they pretty much are obligated by law - thanks benatkin.
Nokia Asha 305 Dual SIM Mobile Price, Features and Specifications
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MemSQL is a row store. KDB is single threaded. More benchmarks are coming!
Globbing in scripting languages
#perl #bash #ruby #python
okay then, that's the usual daftlogic's[1] output.

I thought you are talking about something new.

[1] http://www.daftlogic.com/projects-online-javascript-obfuscat...
Absolutely not. I think a lot of people are intrigued by this.
There's a shoe store in Canada that impressed me recently called "Call It Spring". My gf wanted to buy a pair of shoes, but they didn't have her size. They offered to mail the shoes to her free of charge, and it arrived at our house within 48 hours. Also, their prices are very reasonable in store, so the thought of comparison shopping online is hardly a factor.

If a retailer has low prices relative to their competitors, can give you what you want now, or ship it to you free within 2-3 days if they don't have it, they are successfully competing against online shopping IMHO.
FolloWords technology stack; MongoDb, Redis, Python
No. At most they may force the big chains to give up physical stores, but honestly I can't see why I should pay more to buy in a physical store -- there is relatively little benefit to it.
Except for there is no law being broken here.

If drawing and distributing a picture of someone in a negative fashion were a punishable offense, every political cartoonist in America would have been put on the chopping block long ago.
I had and loved a similar NEC CRT. But 2048x1536 on a 22" display is ~116ppi. Apple's non-retina laptops have been higher than that for years (with the MacBook Air being highest, at ~135ppi), and Sony, at least, has offered configurable 1080p displays in 13" laptops (~165ppi) for some time.

It was pretty nice a decade ago, when everyone was moving to LCD monitors that were vastly inferior in every measure beyond size or weight, but, at least in terms of ppi (and on consumer grade equipment), display technology eclipsed the CRT quite a while ago.

edit: I'd forgotten that CRTs were measured with the bezel included, so at 20" viewable, the display is 128ppi. So closer, but still pretty far behind.
I've seen a lot of comments online talk about how in the US people are very litigation-happy and the law enables it. Does your situation exist because you're located in the US or is your situation something that would happen anywhere in the world?
Every time I see a cloud pricing page, I think "this is 100x more expensive than my 50 Eur Hetzner server".

It's hard to get excited when I see 1 GB of total RAM costing $350 when my 24 GB, 2 TB, i7 server costs $60. Sure, scalability, blabla, but if you're talking startup-friendly, then a dedicated server is hundreds of times cheaper.

I always regret getting a Linode box for historious rather than a Hetzner server.
Like Singularityhub or phys.org or sciencedaily, TRN's SOP is to credulously repeat the claims of dubious papers, and give them massively misleading titles.

Bullshit TRN articles:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4057225
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047622
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4021790
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4007047
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993640
Not an EE, but I've observed a few things about electrical infrastructure:

- The work is usually done by outside contractors, working off of specifications that may or may not make sense.

- Some aspects of testing have the potential to be dangerous to the people doing them. (ie. if network switch fails in testings, no big deal. If some types of electrical switch break during testing, the tester is dead.) High voltage electricity is not a toy.

- IT and facilities staff usually don't talk much, and often don't understand each other when they do.

- There's no instrumentation. I get an alert when IT systems aren't configured right. Nothing from the other stuff.

- There is a wide variance in quality of electrical infrastructure that isn't obvious to someone who isn't skilled in that area. IT folks don't need to deal with computers built in 1970. Electricians deal with ancient stuff that may be completely borked all of the time.
Exactly. If you're in an entirely new space (e.g., Twitter when they first launched) -- an MVP should be the minimum thing that proves the functionality, e.g., distributing your status to friends via SMS.

If you were trying to launch a Twitter competitor now, you'd be hard-pressed to get away with the same degree of minimalness.

However, if you had a unique take on the approach, say, all Tweets get posted backwards and upside down, then you can probably get away with a page that does that, as minimally as possible, to test and see if people actually like that. If they do, then you start fleshing it out. If everybody hates it, move on to the next idea, or pivot it into something better.

The point is that the MVP allows you to qualify whether or not people will use it. If you're solving somebody's pain, they probably don't give a flying hoot if it has fancy mouseovers, or a WebGL rotating background, or even good typography. Do those things help? Sure. But if the idea at its core is rotten, then all those things are is a waste of time. They are things that slow you down from figuring out whether or not the core of your idea has validity.

If the idea is proven, by somebody else entering the market first, then the bar is raised on what gets counted as 'minimum', unless you're approaching the problem in a uniquely different way. Google Drive is, as near as I can tell, a feature-for-feature knockoff of Dropbox. That said, it couldn't be crappy. The Google Docs integration isn't enough of a differentiator to allow for the bad initial first impression of a half-assed client. If it worked in some fundamentally different way though, perhaps it could have.

The point though, is exactly what you said... MVPs are contextual, and the context is the market. How unique is the idea. Is it radical thinking? Does the model need proven? If nobody's done anything like it before, why not? Is it a great idea that you're the first to stumble onto, or is it a bad idea that everybody else has realized stunk, and haven't done it for that reason. Get your product out there to find out, as quickly as possible.