skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was 14 I would build my own computer from parts and boy did I care about upgradability and serviceability. One of the reasons I switched to Apple is I didn't want to spend time making computers, I wanted to spend time making things with my computer.

My 2011 Macbook Air is the best computer I've ever owned. Go to any meetup for software developers and you see a lot of the people in the crowd who have gone the same way. Being a geek (for me) doesn't mean I need to upgrade the ram, or harddrive in my computer. Sorry if that means I get a better, thinner machine at someone else's expense.
Thats a job I would love to have. Datamining and seeing the patterns, figuring out the tweaks, and seeing it affect the economy as it propogates out.

That would be one fun thing to test - and better yet, contrast with real world examples.
Works for me on my Macbook Pro with Chrome (v19.0.1084.56).

http://caniuse.com/#feat=deviceorientation
Woz thinks Siri was better before Apple, but still sees its future potential
Who has the audience you want? Borrow it from them. Start with your musicians fan bases.
Dropbox is much different from Megaupload. On Dropbox you get a direct link and you know whose directory you download from. On Megaupload the uploader is anonymous (to the downloader) and you do not get a direct link.
The sad part is that they're crippling innovation and thus, in the long run, crippling their and all their people's economic prospect. The digital industry is a lot like the invention of the steam machine. Ethiopia will feel, in several years to come, what it would have been like for an early European country, to back out of the industrial revolution.
Once again, politicians are trading the long term for short term monetary gains. (by gains I mean probably the ability to snoop on citicens and to make more money).
If you had a database running on a dedi you could get trashed by a server failure too.

Good backups are the best defense.
No, I understand that replication is the double cost.

I meant cloud solution should not have storage failures which causes data loss.
RDS should not have lost data, and if I were a user of it, I'd be annoyed too.

At the same time, if you've not spotted by now that EBS (elastic block storage, which powers RDS) is not reliable and not to be trusted, then you have to look at yourself too.

EBS is by far the worst product AWS offer, you simply should not use it without a very good reason, and if you do need to use it, you have to assume any given drive image will disappear at any moment - as it did here.

Beyond that, any time you're running a database, no matter who the provider is, if you're not doing backups every day or hour, then you're not doing things right.
Ask HN: Developers often need to solve mathematical optimization problems?
For developers:
When you develop application, do you have often need to solve a mathematical/optimization problems?

Give me some examples...
Yeah, but I have more control over it to prevent such failures.
Myself and my brother built a prototype of a very similar wristband last year, completely independent of these and without knowing about them (we built ours in the summer, we first saw Coldplay's in autumn). At first we were pretty dismayed and annoyed to see that somebody had patented the concept (we never looked into exactly what the patent covers), though one of the guys we were working with has connections in the Coldplay management team and assured us its fine for us to continue.

But then we thought about it some more and realised that we didn't need to, that the coldplay wristbands have some flaws (for what we wanted to do with them) that we can better tackle in other ways. Our goals are very different from Coldplays anyway - they seem to be using their wristbands more to make the DVD look awesome than to please the crowd present (though theres obviously some of that too). Our goal was always interactivity and engaging the crowd in more direct ways.

So we cooked up a similar concept which is not only more suited to interacting with the crowd, but also less expensive to produce. So win-win.

The wristbands are cool and maybe we'll still do something with that (depending on the patents of course - the Xylobands don't really do exactly what we want, so we'd probably want to build our own anyway) but we did the startup thing and pivoted and came up with something better (for our purposes).

The laptop would be connected by cable to a transmitter box and antenna. These are supplied by us on a free rental basis with a £500 refundable deposit.

Our own transmitter cost us about US$20 to build. Sure, it could only be controlled by USB-MIDI (while afaik theirs supports stuff like DMX), but meh, it wouldn't require a £500 deposit.

In any case, I'm now repositioning myself as more of a backseat tech consultant for this project rather than hands on engineer as I'm working on an unrelated startup and don't have time to stay involved in the day to day building of audio/visual gadgets, so over the next few weeks I hope to finish off a few more prototype devices and then leave the production up to someone who has a better idea what their doing.
My problem with most services that promote music and have good reach is that they are connected with major labels.

What would be cool is some coverage from sites dealing with independent music and, dare I say, local scenes. Also, as a geek and programmer, I think I'd like to read about such service on a well-recognized tech/startup site.
...but it's got warts and gotchas which will catch out even experienced coders. It does make sense to use a language without the same problems which you know is guaranteed to generate "good" JS.
Photos-UK introduce a real inhabitant of the Falkland Islands
United Nations - New York - June 14 2012 - Press Conference by Sir Mark Lyall Grant,(on the podium) Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom, along with Mike Summers (R) OBE and members of the Falkland Islands Legislative Assembly<p>Credit: Luiz Rampelotto/Europa Newswire
yep, it would certainly appear so..

Just as we were finishing build I also got a private invite to the StackOverflow beta career profile site (now publicly open i believe) which is the same thing but more mature (connects Stack score and a tonne of code repos etc)

So it seems we are not first to the party, but at least we can try and enjoy building a (hopefully) nice product!!

Hopefully a differentiating factor might be that we are planning on focusing more on the company profile/job stuff and generally the whole end-to-end recruitment experience, but lets see..

Thanks for letting me know about masterbranch though, seems like a really nice site.
How to Attract Developers to Your Startup
I always hated that folder.
My current app involves location and mapping using multiple co-ordinate systems - so trigonometry on a curved surface for starters.
also, we are developing further integration with other repos and third parties, but as we are only second day live it will be incremental..!
amateurs. you know you can just "ask" skype to let you in on all your subjects' conversations and they'll do it?
The technique looks good! I feel it could use an 'inspector-like' window for all the variables instead of putting them all over te screen. Clever use of 'star-feature'. (Like Apple does with Keynote or like the flavors.me tool). Prices feel a bit expensive to me. Noticed you don't yet have a logo and/or identity?
Of course, there's always the simple option of "simply sit down".
First Firmware Update in the UK for the Samsung Galaxy S3
"In our analysis we shall assume that John and Marsha perform toilet operations with the same frequency"

Yeah right ... I have a wife, two sons and two daughters and we have 4 bathrooms in the house which works out perfectly. That's one bathroom for each female and a spare one for the three males to share.

And the comments about the lid are funny. I was taught to put it down when I was growing up, but I never find one that way (don't let the dog kiss you at my house).
The Mythical "A" Player and The CEO's Real Job
NeverSeconds blogger Martha Payne school dinner photo ban overturned

Looks like the ban has been overturned.

A victory for free speech and common sense!
To me this is a fallacious argument. Dedicated servers are wildly cheaper than RDS/AWS. Isn't that the whole point of AWS? To have a team of experts managing your hosting to prevent a failure like this?
I agree with the article, it makes valid points. However, you're paying for a luxury item that's a powerful computer and something with an inherently short lifespan. Take it for what it is. You won't be upgrading this machine, but selling it and buying a better one in two or three years. If you're the type of person buying this MBPro now, you're surely going to want the latest and greatest sooner than later. Most people don't work on their modern day cars with all their custom parts, so what's the big deal about a computer?
These musicians aren't very well known, having 100-1000 fans on facebook each. But yes, going viral through facebook is something we'll try improving in the upcoming weekend.
Thanks, thats good advice - we did have an about blurb in one of the early design iterations, but we obviously decided to drop it - will add some details back in.

Thanks for checking out the site.
Why Google+ Can Still Beat Facebook
The argument doesn't really hold up, as we're only given two choices: Upgradable, or amazing screen. If there was a third, "Upgradable and amazing screen" with the applicable price/weight tradeoffs, then the "we can choose" view would be more tenable.

Regardless, the lack of upgradability isn't something that bugs me. My last two Apple laptops were "upgradable", but all I ever did was throw some RAM in there. The subset of people who want to really tinker inside their machines is vastly outweighed by people who want a very lightweight machine, so offering the "lightweight" option is a no-brainer. The lack of a upgradable machines as an option is presumably beause they've done the maths and realised that the number of people who choose that won't warrant the costs of maintaining the product line; viz. the death of the 17" Macbook LapCrusher(tm).

There was a comment (I think here) yesterday that said, effectively, "Upgradability was a defect of technology not being 'good enough' for long periods". These days, the stock specs of the Macbook Retina will be fine for even power users for years; almost certainly the life of a laptop. The tiny group of "super power users" are those likely to just upgrade their laptops every couple of years anyway.
The author has 3 main gripes: backticks to drop back to JS, the 'class' keyword, and the fat ('this'-preserving) arrow.

But these are all features you can blithely ignore: don't use backticks, and stick to native JS prototypes and the thin arrow.

At which point you're left with, from where I'm sitting, a less noisy, more concise, more enjoyable way to program the web browser than plain JS.
Or even on the lid if it's dark.
A different approach to rendering Backbone sub-views
If it was just a case that hardware capacity has reached a point where most of us really don't need to upgrade our computers any more, that would be one thing. But the article also says that many of Apple's decisions are making their laptops less recyclable - even if the actual materials they're being made from are more so. This is a serious issue that people should care about.

People should also care about not being able to replace their batteries. Even if the rest of the hardware remains useful after 2, 3 or even 4 years, a battery is a consumable. It gets used up. In the article, it says the original Macbook Air was rated for 300 charges. That's not a lot, and since you can't replace it, you're going to find yourself buying a new laptop in 2 or 3 years even if the rest of the hardware would have lasted 5 or 6 years. And your old laptop won't be recycled either, because they decided to glue everything together.
No,I didn't know that. Can you give chapter and verse?
Windows 8 Release Preview Review
Microsoft released Windows 8 Release Preview on 31-May-12. The sooner than expected release of the new software is supposed to add on to the stability, usability, etc., of the new operating system. Based on my interaction with the software, I have a great deal of doubt that the new release of Windows 8 Release Preview, is in fact, a step forward.
Ask HN: How risky is building unofficial APIs?
I am contemplating building an unofficial API for a website that I am not part of, pretty much like the unofficial HN API. It's a website that aggregates soccer news and shows the current games, today's games, tomorrow's, and so on. An API would be very handy. It is risky? If you built one yourself, what issues did you face?
I do like the Public folder, but you can still easily get a list of exactly what's shared; the "Links" sidebar (https://www.dropbox.com/links) lists all links you've created, and lets you deactivate any that you don't want to be available anymore.
The title part "But should we really blame Apple?" rather than the original "UNFIXABLE, UNHACKABLE, UNTENABLE" is a perfect replacement for Apple loving HN crowd.
That "only" lets you go to 2.0x. I've been listening to podcasts at 2.0x recently, and wishing for 3.0x.
Why did Dropbox kill the Public folder?
Show HN: SeuratJS, a Raphaël plugin for creating beautiful pointilized artwork.
That there was space for a newer offer in this space was my thought as well. And I have been starting to look for a adwords prices. But in that area I don't have much experience, and many people dismiss the idea outright when you mention it. It is an application where I don't think I can find many customers in my social group, thought, because those are mostly programmers and already type quite proficiently. I'll look into adwords.
I've always left both seat and lid down even when I lived by myself. Reduces the chance of dropping something in there and, if you don't get the cheap thin plastic ones that crack if you sit on them, you have a seat. But I'm starting to rethink this. No one ever thinks of the children in these arguments. I have a son, for him to prepare for operation #1 he has to first open the lid and then grab the seat with both hands from UNDERNEATH! The bottom of the seat is probably more contaminated than the water in the bowl especially after an operation #2 with the consistency of an operation #1. He's also been taught to put the seat and lid down after which he sometimes does before pulling his pants up and I'm starting to fear what damage might occur if he drops the heavy seat and lid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law --> this should end it ;)
here's one http://www.topsecretwriters.com/2010/02/the-skype-conspiracy... - not hard to find
My current app involves optimization (main point of the app actually) that fits squares in shapes in a certain way.
I really hope they manage to find someone with mixed African/Asian ancestry to play Hiro instead of whitewashing the character. It's not exactly a plot point, but it did give a sense that Protagonist was born ahead of his time.
I find it's very expensive to talk with salespeople to get my dedis configured properly. Particularly when they screw it up anyway.

The reason I moved to AWS was because when I added a new (cheap) hard drive to my dedi, they didn't put a partition table on the disk. When the machine rebooted, the superblock got overwritten and I lost access to the file system. (I did manage to recreate the superblock and get the data out, but jeese...)

One time I made a ticket and somehow my record in the trouble ticket system got screwed up and I couldn't put more tickets in. Some wizard fixed that in the SQL monitor after I talked to 3 other people who had no idea this could happen.

As for costs it's not so simple. I've got a processing job I run each week that costs $6 of CPU time because I pay just for what I need. I wouldnt want to run it on a dedi because it's a beast.
"They're good at it otherwise they would have died out long ago."

Not necessarily. They have not died out only because of lazy employers. Employers do not mind paying extra cash since they are too busy to even take an extra 10 mins out to quickly screen candidates. Having said that, I have come across some good recruiters who actually know the employers well, understand the industry and are not complete jerks. But that is like a needle in a haystack.
Given the examples in the paper and how old it is, I wonder what would be an elegant way to do it today with the available tools.
Dictators and corrupt governments are bad.

State monopolies can be bad.

IMHO.
Surely you realised that is the case with a point-in-time backup? If you absolutely cannot lose data then as others have said, Multi AZ is required, or, at the very least, have a transaction log that you can replay (once again, hosted somewhere else).
It's a nice and simple way to serve a webpage or two. Here's an example:

I have a folder with an `index.html` and a `image.jpg` in it. The HTML file can reference that JPG by requesting `./image.jpg`, the browser will try to fetch it from the same directory — and it will find it. Also, the links to an users `Public` folder will not expire.

With the new'ish "share link" functionality, I can't do that, since every file is served from is own path, from its own preview page. To get that link, I need to query the API; to get the direct/media link, I need to query the API again, the resulting link will be different, and it will expire after four hours.

So no more dropping a mockup for a client in a folder, sending her the link to the `index.html` and be done with it. That's a step backwards. Yes, I could store the files on my own server, but that's besides the point.
If they can see me they can take my picture. It should be legal. Impolite perhaps but legal.

If there's situation where I don't want to have my picture taken that's exactly the same situation where I don't want to be seen by anyone.
That is fixed. Thank you.
Thats a sign you have sold out and become the "man" - subs eh :-)
"Let users host web sites out of their public folder! Hand craft HTML still has a place among basic users who just want to put up a web page about their dog!"

I think this is one of the reasons they are phasing out the public folder, as people are able to do exactly that[1]. I remember it was mentioned on Lifehacker a while back[2], so maybe its becoming an issue. With the share functionality, you just get the code[3], making it impossible to use dropbox in this way.

[1] - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4146904/HelloHN.html

[2] - http://lifehacker.com/5528104/use-dropbox-to-share-and-host-...

[3] - https://www.dropbox.com/s/6d3tz52kv87we0w/HelloHN.html
A "nice round figure" is suspicious. In an article no not really, in real life sure. If the purchase price had been 1,192,456,786.36 it would have been reported as 1.2 billion because the 36 cents are an unimportant detail.

I think the more important thing is how long would it have taken for them to start from scratch and build Yammer. Integrating the Yammer team and Yammer's products is going to take time as well so there are several variables there that need to be compared not just a simple back of the envelope pay a few guys a few years sort of thing.
For years Apple has wanted to get closer and closer to the "appliance" model for their products. They are targeting consumers who's gut instinct when it comes to fixing their computers is to call a "geek". These consumers just want the damn things to work and would rather not worry about upgrading it over time. This is of course very unattractive to the hacker crowd, but they make up a much smaller percentage of the computer using public now than they did 20 years ago.
Without being a nerdvana, G+ could also differentiate itself from FB as the "FB for serious things". That could be a very interesting proposition imho.
Sorry, but wouldn't that defy the purpose? You can only use JavaScript client-side, and I assume it would take a lot of time, effort, and "why" to make browsers ship parsers for other languages.
I love the idea that upgrading RAM/Hard Disk somehow equates to hacking your machine.

It's akin to someone thinking they are an F1 mechanic because they can replace the car battery.
The rewards are all wrong in this market.

(1) Most companies are bad at recruitment. It's just very far from whatever their core business is.

(2) Since the value of a better employee is huge companies are willing to pay for it. In most markets, when people are willing to pay for quality, firms are able to take that money and turn it into a higher quality product. If a market appears for $100k cars, car makers will spend that money making Ferraris. The value of that may be questionable given that 10k can do most of the stuff you'd be doing with the Ferrari but that's besides the point. The point is that the manufacturer found some way of spending your money on the product.

The problem with recruiting is that they have no way of spending your money in any decent way. They can spend to get volume up, to a degree, but there isn't really of reliably spending your way into getting better candidates. Instead of doing something useful (to the employer or candidate), everything goes into a zero sum game of fighting each-other for openings and candidates.
Depends on the app you are writing. For example - in my daily work I've used math more complicated than computing average/sum of numbers only a few times in 5 years. Once it was geometry on a plane when writing code for pathfinding in a warehouse (great fun :) ), other times it was mostly to calculate amounts of goods based on something (mostly converting units, calculating volumes, etc - basic stuff).

My hobby is wrtiing games, mostly 2d, but I've tried doing 3d too, and there you use math much more often. Mostly 2d/3d geometry, integration for game physic (for most purposes naive Euler integration suffices, and it's really simple, you can invent it without knowing about physics, nor what integral is, but still - it's math). Also requires math - collision checking, ai, space indexing, pathfinding.

When optimizing something, basic statistic is handy, but not required. And sometimes it's nice to be able to come up with Fermi-style estimate of something - like how much cpu time/memory you will need if you make this initial decision or that.
I think he means it's part of the demo page, which must be static. The keys in the menus say "ctrl".
A lot of people do (incorrectly) assume this sort of thing, even in cases when it would only take cursory understanding/research to spot the limitations a given service has and where it might fail in a disaster recovery situation.

No matter how good you think a given "cloud" solution is, no matter how much too big to fail you thing the company responsible is, you should make use of the redundancy options they provide and make sure you have reasonable backups elsewhere too (local to you or on another completely separate remote service).

This is what made me dismiss Google's App Engine when it first turned up (I've not looked for some time, they may have addressed this concern long ago): there was no easy way to backup all your data to another location/service and the not-so-easy ways would probably all end up costing a fair bit in bandwidth charges.
If theydriver hey made the battery and drive readily upgradable by technicians I think the article would be moot. They didn't so it isn't. Today's laptops tend to sell with the maximum addressable ram in them (apple only charges $200 for the 16GB option).

I had a PowerBook 1400 - the most modular and upgradable apple laptop ever, with the CPU on a daughtercard. When I upgraded the CPU the laptop was still pretty useless because the ram was maxed out. Today, CPU progress is far slower, you're almost certain to have maxed out RAM, so the only things that really matter are storage and battery.
That'd waste more time than moving the seat does.