skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. We announce different subnets for each continent or region, and all the sites within that region announce the same subnet. When one site ceases announcing the shared subnet, BGP usually converges in just more than 5 seconds. I was astonished the first time I saw it. It really makes you appreciate the solid engineering behind the core routers.

It's nontrivial to determine exactly when to drop the announcement. And be careful, because if you are too eager to drop the announcement, you may do it in more than one site at a time.

At first we used DNS with short timeouts, but those timeouts are only advisory and are ignored by some implementations. We would see most traffic tail off within 10 minutes for a one minute timeout, but it took many hours for all the traffic to migrate over to the new DNS. The folklore on using less than one minute for a DNS timeout is that a huge percentage of implementations ignore sub-minute timeout. Funny how much of the Internet's operation is passed along as folklore and not really known for sure.

Thanks for asking. Hacker News should be about sharing best practices and making the Internet a more reliable place.
You're right. Those Google guys are shifty folks. They should be more like the paragons of excellent product development and non-monopolistic business practices like the good guys at Microsoft.
1. With in-air refueling, a greatly increased time in the air vs manned aircraft.

2. Ability to outmaneuver any manned aircraft by exceeding the human g limit.

3. Greatly lowered cost in both manufacture and pilot training (or lack of).

4. When fully realized, AI that is superior to human pilots -- increasing overall combat effectiveness and reducing error.
Petroleum is only difficult to come by at scale. Coal is perhaps more politically convenient since it seems to be physically present inside friendly first-world countries, but if you wanted to, for instance, move continental Europe to renewable energy, the best source, at scale, would be the Sahara Desert (lots of sunshine, virtually no usable or habitable land area), which happens to fall inside several less than stable countries, many of whom are culturally and geopolitically linked to the same old oil cartel.
Searching for a position of set bits in a variable
The bigger barrier is people living in apartments.
yes i am! the post wasn't done by me though, so "they"
Sometimes they don't even steal the cables... This guy just liked the sparks. http://www.westvalleyview.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleI...
I think they run it on reputation, not on the actual quality of the application. Users do not yet have enough experience to judge on the basis of its actual performance.
Your sentence is strangely ironic... You want a completely free market without regulations and yet you are complaining that a company doesn't give out standard billing rates.

The idea of the non-regulated free market is that you'd choose with your wallet by going for another health care provider that tells you the billing rates.

If you want to force companies to reveal standard rates you are adding regulation. So is regulation needed or not?

Not even Adam Smith argued for a free market without regulation... He himself even identified several pain points and warned against "laissez-faire" economy.
Glad to see that the top three browsers use different rendering engines. Long live diversity.

Edit: in the hope of good css/html5 conformance / no browser specific programming like in the old days
Another problem is shipping. A lot of produce is picked before it's ripe, because unripe fruit is less easily damaged during shipping.

This is a simple reason to buy local produce: if it was picked ripe, maybe today or yesterday, it will taste better.
Pourquoi nos aliments peuvent-ils perdre leur richesse et puissance naturelles?
Frankly your anecdote simply proves you don't know anyone dumb enough to still use IE.
He is one of the most strikingly rational and sincere people I have ever met.
"I don't really see you citing any facts, just a lot of opinion."

In your opinion. In my opinion, you're failing to address the argument I gave.
"Let me be more precise: the middle class has only shrunk because people have moved from X to Y, where $25k < X < $75k and Y > $75k. I.e., no one became poorer, and some people became richer."

Again, you haven't shown this, either. Many people could have gone from $65k to $35k while a few moved from $65k to $650k on the same set of facts. That nobody has dropped below the baseline of the middle class does not mean it is not shrinking or that nobody in it has gotten poorer.

"You still have yet to show how people's income exceeding $75k causes any harm at all"

This is not the point. The point is that massive wealth inequality causes the harm. A shrinking middle class is a symptom of that inequality.

Whether or not you continue to deny or justify the symptoms is not going to change the facts of the underlying disease. I'm not going to show you how dying causes cancer.
In addition, Elon said that he had already committed in his will to give away most of his fortune to charity.

Is donating your fortune to charity in your will really altruistic? You're just giving away something you would no longer need, something which you wouldn't be able to use in any way after you're dead.

On the other hand, by writing that will now, you get to feel damn good about yourself and also have a lot of people praise you.

I think the people volunteering their life and their youth for an NGO and going to work with people in need NOW are the ones who deserve praise, not billionaires who are pledging to helping the poor without risking anything. I wish I could be one of the former, yet our society always encourages and rewards the latter.

NB. I'm not arguing against Ellon Musk, I'm arguing against the way you phrased that sentence, and what people are sometimes mislead into viewing as a great deeds. See also Orwell's Burmese days.
The Google Tech Talk mentioned in the story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XdwHo1BWwY
>Elon is awesome, but the founders of NASA contracting companies, intel, car companies, etc didn't reach bill gates levels of wealth

This might be true. But Elon stands to be the first private citizen with a chance to reach the moon or Mars. The chance is (admittedly) slim, but the expected value of being commercially successful at reaching the moon or Mars is exponentially greater than Microsoft.
One of the creators of Django once told me, "Flask is what Django would have been if we designed it in 2010 instead of 2006." Sometimes smaller is actually better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi

This stalled BSD development/adoption for 2 years while the legal status was in question.
What is the underground rivers thing you mention?
If you have that set up, does Heroku give you any extra value?
> based on small, executable ideas over grand strategies like Martian colonization

I think many startups actually do have a grand vision - it's just that their initial money-making product is a small executable idea. e.g. the article dismisses google as just a "better way to search the web", but they had a vision of accessing the world's information (all human knowledge). It's also long seemed to me they are really about strong AI, but they don't talk about that...

Elon Musk does the same thing. He has a vision, but pays the bills with satellite launches. He's not going direct to a Mars colony. Similarly for Tesla, the first model was very niche. Even with the sedan, it's still a tiny tiny fraction of Toyota's output.

This is the way you accomplish great things: one step at a time.
Working with Bitfields in C#
Has Elon ever talked about space in the mid-range future? Ten, twenty, thirty years from now? It's easy to talk about plans they already have for next year, or hopes we all have for a thousand years for now, but I'd like to hear someone knowledgeable about the time between point A and B.

I don't need nuanced predictions, just reasonable conjecture.
Possible but sortof irrelevant, some of the WORST engineers I've ever hired/seen have had certs in their chosen field.
Given that people feel oneness with their offspring and relatives, yes it is altruistic.
I read it a while back, and don't have it on hand. The one thing I'm quite sure of is that she had the opportunity to work at walmart or another store which paid more - she chose walmart.

My guess is that criticizing some local supermarket (unknown outside of portland or wherever it was) wasn't as sexy as criticizing big evil Walmart.
Do you even watch top gear? Or did any of the people complaining about that actually watch top gear?

This is a show that will [jokingly] talk about how much they don't like a new $250,000+ hyper car.
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Relatively speaking, it is. He could instead use it to have lots of progeny and make sure they'll be in a great financial position to pass on his genes.
Coming from Europe, when I was in America (CA) 3 years ago I was shocked that supermarket tomatoes just didn't have any taste; literally, they tasted like water.

When I tell my friends about this they think I surely must be exaggerating. Yeah, industrial tomatoes here in Austria don't taste like real farmers' tomatoes either, but it's not comparable to the situation in the US.

All this somehow reminds me of Soylent Green. Hope our children don't end up not knowing what real vegetables / fruits taste like.
To be fair, I wanted to point out the term 'American' does not just apply to citizens of the USA. I'm not sure whether the Haitians consider themselves 'American' since they are not part of the main land, but they could consider themselves a part of 'the Americas' and thus 'Americans'.
The power issue only struck 1 of the 5 zones in US East (Virgina)

I can't speak to why Heroku was impacted as much as it was. It could be that they have single points of failure, or run at a utilization level that makes losing a single zone difficult.
One of the most notable chemists of the 20th century, Percy Julian, was black and had to expend significant effort working around resulting prejudice. [1]

If you don't think prejudice influences technical progress, look also at motivations influencing various development efforts throughout that century as well as any other historically documented century.

As for Turing, the question remains: If his death was suicide, or homicide, what additional contributions were thereby lost? (I realize the current dialog is exploring the possibility of accident. The ongoing dialog about his death -- including by notable technologists -- is what is making these potential discoveries possible.)

And there is the different, perhaps somewhat opposing view. If Julian hadn't had to work so hard to overcome opposition? If Turing's personal life hadn't made him so aware of the importance of secrets and privacy? Would they have developed in the same direction?

I think it is relevant because it is human beings who are developing these technologies. And consider, here on HN and in the press, we tend to celebrate those very human beings who don't separate their work and personal lives -- for whom it isn't simply "a job".

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/arts/television/06huds.htm...
Letters of Note: I think I no how to make people or animals alive
I am sorry, I didn't know I was supposed to cheerlead Google and Apple and hate on Microsoft on here like the hundreds of other commenters. I am sure HN needs more of them.

Is there some place where this policy is listed on HN(apart from being obvious in the "pathetic" moderation, story selection and flagging) so that I and the few others who don't share your Google and Apple worship can pack up and leave once for all and not subject you to the horrors of alternate opinions or facts that you seem to find very uncomfortable and pathetic? Or maybe I'll just do what you tell me to and go away, and you can worship your Gods in peace without heretics getting your way.

I like how the many commenters that only submit comments and stories that are heavily anti-MS and pro-Google/Apple are not pathetic but I am. I am sure you find them awesome.
Whatever marginal value they have as a signal of commitment is swamped by their negative signaling. Top caliber talent won't usually be certified; why waste the time getting "certified" by organizations that are probably less competent than you?

Successive rounds of adverse selection produce a "certified" pool of candidates who are unwilling or unable to achieve a basic level of facility in their field on their own, which is its own negative signal.
In my experience, anyone who hires you for the cert over experience

But isn't that usually a false dichotomy? That is, people don't hire just for certs, or just for experience. Certs and experience are both just part of the overall equation, with each (along with other factors) carrying different weights depending on who you're talking to.
I got a chance to chat with one of the test drivers who've been flogging a model S around the Bay Area. He indicated that it was pretty zippy with some mild hooliganry possible.
I don't think you'll be dissapointed.
Indeed, though the transition to electric vehicles will happen gradually in any scenario, so that's not a huge problem.

Over time I expect that many street parkings will have power outlets kind of like park-meters.
You can't just put nodes in different regions, even with a database like MongoDB. It will work in theory, in practice you'll have all kinds of latency problems.

WAN replication is a hard problem and glossing over it by waving your hands is a disservice to readers.

"Real" solutions are to run a database that is tolerant of partitioning, and have application level code to resolve the inevitable conflicts. Riak, Cassandra and other Dynamo inspired projects offer this. On the other hand you can use a more consistent store and hide the latency with write-through caching (this is how Facebook does it with memcached + MySQL), but now you have application code that deals with managing this cache.

Either way you have to have very specific application code to handle these scenarios, and you may even run a combination of solutions for different types of data you need to store. There is no silver bullet, there is no framework or product that does it for you.
In India's free market healthcare system, I had no difficulty finding out billing rates. The common stuff (e.g., cost of a hospital room or a blood test) was posted on the wall, and the doctors gave me details on more specific stuff.

That's at least one data point suggesting that in a free market, prices will become transparent.
I am pretty sure it is pretty strickt. As far as I understand code for airplanes in general is much more encapsulated to do one thing well without any resuability of the code as such. It's in other words strictly causal.

Fighter jets might have more of an abstract layer for all the AI stuff so this might leave more room for an actual OS to reprogram and optimize on top off.
Tapping into North-Africa's solar power would be a great way to do things, but if it's not possible, there are many other alternatives. Oil is not as easily replaceable.
Show HN: Over 100 tested iOS code samples
The most efficient military defense countries are engaging in is developing economic relationships. The number one reason why the US start a military war against China in the foreseeable future. Is not because of their super advanced autonomous airships. But because doing so would be shooting their own foot. As both US and China are highly dependent on one another.

Plenty of small countries around the world have very little military but are completely safe from US attacks because of economic relationships. Modern economics are the most powerful weapon for peace. Not autonomous vehicles nor terrorism.
You say you're committed, I say you're desperate.

(Not you personally)
Tesla CEO Predicts More Than Half of New Cars to be Electric in 20 Years
Even degrees don't mean much. It's not like you get to skip the fizzbuzz and trivia/whiteboard gauntlet by virtue of a fancy CS degree from Yale. Obviously certifications are worth less than Ivy League degrees, so that should give some idea what certifications are worth.

The basic issue is that there are plenty of people with certifications and degrees that can't produce, they are completely helpless. And there are plenty of people with no certifications or degrees that are top notch producers. There's no correlation. You have to test each person, you can't rely on the paperwork from some third party to mean anything.

A related issue is it is not uncommon at all to find people creating certification sets and teaching university classes who have no experience doing design or development of real projects. Their experience is non-existent, also known as academic knowledge. It's not surprising that many students doing well grade-wise in these programs can not do real world work, other than perhaps pursue the PhD and join a university themselves to pass on their academic perspective, devoid of real world capability, to the next generation of academics.

On the other hand, a portfolio of their own work and past creations is a pretty good indicator of actual talent. People know what John Carmack, Larry Wall, and Linus Torvald's skills are, and it has nothing to do with any degrees they may or may not have.
Hear this guy.

The hole purpose of being the best tool is to expose the effectiveness of the insider to the regular folk.

If anyone thinks "the best travel search" shouldn't do all this guy says and more, then go back to using aol or something
Show HN: How to solve Fizz Buzz
>This means your content will expire and then be retried from the origin...which would be down.

I don't think ESI is necessarily a requirement to configure your cdn to serve stale content in case of the backend being unreachable.
Amazing post! Thanks for sharing.
Fighter? Hardly:

>The mission of the Navy Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) Aircraft Carrier Demonstration (UCAS-D) is to mature technologies for a carrier suitable, low observable relevant, unmanned air system in support of a potential follow-on acquisition milestone for an unmanned air system capable of providing persistent, penetrating surveillance, and penetrating strike capability in high threat areas.

Primarily a recon craft with strike capability.
As I start building a social sharing startup I know we might be crazy telling users, from day one, how we are making money on Referly (shared commissions on purchases they generate when they share product links - and matching social disincentives for spamming your friends and having a crappy signal to noise ratio of clicks to purchases) but I just don't see how companies doing the "bait and switch" of adding a business model later is going to keep working. People are getting smarter about this, and more aware that they are becoming the product when they use these services that are eventually ad-funded.

I'm not trying to say we are some genius with Referly, because the money from day one part does turn off some people and might be slowing our adoption a bit. But the upside is that we have to deliver a degree of utility that makes it worth it to the user to know we are making money (and they are making money too in our model).

Is this too much capitalist utopia - or could this really be a model for future businesses besides ours?
Another possible variant is: Paid users get the newest version + support + immediate patches/bugfixes. Everyone else gets it with an n month delay + GPLed source code + binaries.
You really have to pick one or the other of socialism or the free market. Our current system is the worst of both worlds.

That is the essence of contemporary corporatism. It has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism, because it's neither system. The problem is one of social topology, from which money disparities follow, but it's otherwise not really about money per se. Modern corporatism works like this: a well-connected, parasitic elite (~0.5%) gets the best of both systems: the chance of personal enrichment and the freedom of capitalism, and the safety net (up to outright governmental favoritism, as seen in corporate welfare) and low minimal expectations of socialism. The other 99.5% get the worst of both systems.
Yes, the certs are often hard to attain, but for the most part experience trumps them all and the only thing a cert proves is that you had time to read the books and take the tests.

Couldn't you say the same thing for an undergraduate degree?

anyone who hires you for the cert over experience, you don't actually want to work for.

Why wouldn't you want to work for them?
It Is Almost Impossible To Create Fake Meat
The corporation is also distinct from its employees, but they get taxed once.
Have you considered anything other than cheerleading Google and Android and hating on Apple/MS? And I like how you attack him personally and call him pathetic because you have no answer to his post and thus want to wish it away. How pathetic.
I think one factor people don't consider enough is the tradeoffs you need to make in order to make your app have incredible reliability. This article and other ones talk about a bunch of work you can do to help ensure you application stays up in rare events. However, maybe for you particular product, having 99.5% uptime and offering a ton of features is going to help you become more successful than 99.9% uptime.

When you are a Google or a Twitter or an Amazon, you lose lots of money per minute of downtime, so economically speaking it makes sense for them to invest in this. However for an average startup, I don't think having a couple hours of downtime per month is actually going to be that big of a deal. Of course you need to ensure your data is always safe, and your machine configuration is also easy to deploy (via AMIs or something like puppet) so you have the ability to get back up and running in catastrophic cases, but at the end of the day having a good "We're currently having technical issues" screen could very well be a better investment than shooting for a technical setup that can still be up during catastrophic events.
I agree wholeheartedly. HA is hard, a single blog post won't even halfway cover it.