skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see why the fuss about Craigslist not providing an API:

1. Anyone is free to come up with a better provide that serves Craigslist users' needs, you can argue that craigslist is the dominant player and it's hard to steal users from them, but many niche-focus startups have proved otherwise (or they simply don't have a compelling enough products);

2. When it comes to the time Craigslist fails its users functionally and aesthetically, it's hard to imagine no other players will surge up in the game;

3. Even if Craigslist provides an API now but doesn't improve its user experience, do we just want it to serve as a database for all other services that piggyback on Craigslist?

So my message to Craigslist: "Just think hard about how to serve your users better. You're not an asshole for restricting data access to your site, but it is irresponsible to waste other engineers lives on trying to defeat you while you can easily make yourselves better for your users!"
After the third presentation of a link to this story, I tried it. Something caught my attention for a moment, and when I glanced back I was mid way into the story. Never mind the content of the story: the production of the video is pure emotional manipulation. I don't care what the content is, when I see such blatant emotional manipulation, my alarms go off. I'm not crass, I know true life pain - but using it like this for commercial gain really smells.
After unsuccessfully shaping it as a Facebook-killer? Google's PR department won't give up :)
If only people understood that fact. Unfortunately few do.
Now if Top Gear just gives it an honest review and doesn't go for the entertainment cheap shot of pretending it runs out of power and pushing it down the road.

I look forward to buying my first used electric car in five to eight years. Probably a Leaf. Should be lots of hobbyists at that point rebuilding their own battery packs by hand.
I am on PHPFog for my front-end and with an AWS RDS back-end. I managed to survive this incident without an outage (I am on U.S East as well), although I did get some horrendous response times from RDS for about an hour there.

PHPFog are on AWS and I pay them to make sure they have the redundancy worked out. If they don't, I would yell at them until I got some money back.

I am considering configuring RDS for Multi A-Z, but need to research it a little more first. From what I can tell you just click a button to turn it on, but there were a lot of people complaining yesterday that the fail-over didn't work at all when it was supposed to.

I also have a bunch of EC2 VMs that do back-end processing and have a load of CRON jobs on them that need to run once every 24 hours. If these go down for a couple of hours then there is no noticeable impact to my customers, they can still log into my service and access their historical data.

I have considered spreading across multiple regions etc but at the end of the day it's just too expensive for the small increase in reliability.
> Don't worry too much about the adulation from others, especially strangers. It is fleeting, quickly forgotten, and there is that six month rule about adapting to whatever new level of fame/wealth you attain, so that you keep wanting more.

Is this true with the "publish or be forgotten" ethos of academia?

Being able to point to a list of published research papers seems to be a useful thing for a resumé - and having the juicy ones sniped by colleagues is going to hurt.
I agree. I also remember when regular people just called it AOL or "that big, blue E on the desktop". All they care about is that they can talk to their friends and ask their idiot co-workers about the latest meeting.
I agree. It is a scandal that reporters constantly focus on the individual tax bill of investors while completely ignoring taxes paid by the corporations they own.

The solution is simple: stop taxing corporations and replace it with taxes on capital gains/etc. (Also, while we are at it, equalize the taxation of cap gains, dividends and interest.)
> Chrome is responsible for more activity (requests)

Does anyone know if the prefetching/prerendering Chrome does is a significant portion of web traffic? Because that could easily skew request-based analytics.
> * How do you restart apache on Debian? "/etc/init.d/apache restart". On Redhat? "/etc/init.d/httpd restart". Ah, so Redhat is in the habit of renaming all of their init.d scripts after the protocol of the service? Nope, turns out they only did that to Apache's script. WTF?

For historical accuracy, the HTTP server binary of the Apache project has been called 'httpd', compiles to 'httpd' in the source official distributions and is distributed as 'httpd' in the binary official distributions for ages, if not since day one.
> Does anyone know of prior art (prior to Dec '04) for a search mechanism that obtains search results from multiple domains using sub-plugins and combines them into a list?

Google was doing this two months prior to Apple's filing: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/desktopsearch.html
"Google+ is just an upgrade to Google," says Gundotra. "People have a hard time understanding that."

Well, if they do, your product sucks.
The onus of understanding what your product actually is, is not on the user. You have to make a product so great and easy to understand so that there is no misunderstanding. If you don't manage to do that, you fail. Don't expect people to read your minds and know what actually the product is supposed to be instead of what they understand of it.

If Google+ looks like a copy of Facebook to people, then it's just a copy of Facebook.
What is the effect of this ruling, if it is upheld? Will Samsung have to disable this functionality? I imagine that they are not doing that immediately because that seems like an admission of guilt. Will they be able to ship their devices without software and have users install the software in question?
Don't knock it if you haven't tried it

http://www.darden.com/restaurants/
I don't doubt the sincerity of his own fondness of the site, but I still don't see why people continue to pretend that travel search is a pain point. Am I the only one who has no problem understanding travel search on Kayak and Bing? Travel search is a solved problem.
Predictive data analytics is saving lives and taxpayer dollars
A Snitch’s Dilemma
According to Colin Percival on Twitter[1][2], the US East-1 AZ has more IP addresses, and thus probably other resources, than the rest of AWS put together. It casts comments about "limited to one availability zone" into some relief.

[1] https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/219067641023840257
[2] https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/219067963356098561
Is anybody in LA test driving the Model S this weekend? How did it go?
it became common, when companies design something the techies don't like instead of just sticking to what they are used to, to call it "they think they know what I want better than I do", forgetting that's the whole point of design.
How about a sense of proportion?

With due respect for electric cars and their great possible environmental impact, SpaceX is what is important of Musk's projects. It is what might make his name remembered in a few hundred years.
Sucks to be this guy, but that's academia for you and the described situation is not surprising at all. Academia has all the petty jealousy and small town politics of rural hick towns populated by the Hatfields and McCoys.

Given that it's a total wash out, this guy should name and shame.
Only cameras can see through Black-Ops Plastic
I'd really like to know how he's doing it. Is it because he's personally a brilliant engineer, micromanaging the projects to success? Or does he have an eye for great talent, able to rapidly put together highly productive teams? Or is he so motivational that he can take ordinary engineers and inspire them to do extraordinary things? The stuff they're doing is hard. A lot of very talented people have failed in the space and automotive businesses. To succeed in both to the degree he has is mind-boggling. Tesla and SpaceX still have a long way to go, but where they've been in a few short years is remarkable.
I'm ok with a dedicated server provider being good at the physical and network without much focus on applications on the host. You can use a third party for host level sysadmin, but you don't have a third party choice for the infrastructure.
I remember having ugly fonts on Linux... somewhere around 1998.

It sounds like IntelliJ has garbage Linux support and you're blaming the OS for it.
Okay, change it a bit: you're hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (2,663 miles). You can't take a bike, a car, a plane or a different route. And most people agree, 20 miles a day is a good upper limit. Much more than that and you will make yourself too sick to continue. Bonus points for the fact that it's such a long distance that you can't carry all your food with you, so you must be extra paranoid and have a plan (like the article mentions) for food caches.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder why he didn't use hiking the PCT as his scenario, other than many people haven't heard of it.
Although technically true, there's a very widespread misconception underneath that. The low tax rates for business-derived income such as capital gains and dividends exist because that income was already taxed at the corporate level. Uncle Sam already got his bite out of the corporate balance sheet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_Sta...

If these business gains were retaxed at the personal level as ordinary income, that would incent company owners and directors to keep the money in the company's coffers safe from taxation. Then you have corporations sitting on illiquid wealth. Giving personal tax breaks for these business gains creates incentive to distribute money back to the economy to be spent and continue flowing.

I'm surprised to see a reputable publication like GQ repeat the "rich people pay low taxes" fallacy. But it's such an easy way to score pandering points that pretty much every business article and publication spreads the misinformation now.
> why Chrome is so popular there?

Could it be because it has to run on cheap hardware? Is there any more lightweight browser?
I think both projects are equally important. Arguably, Tesla might be even more important considering it will affect far more people much sooner.
The perfect video to start with Pair Programming and TDD
Best video I've found about how to start with pair and TDD, it's a little lengthy but it's worth the time.
What other options have you tried? My experience with stock ICS (AOSP based ROMs) are terrible, the GUI is unintuitive, simplistic to the point of being ugly and rather limited in functionality as opposed to older versions of MIUI (not based on ICS). Sense is not only ugly, but slow too, I have not tried touchwiz to comment on that.
Very good material and the new website with side by side presentation is cool!
Actually, Vic's message has been fairly consistent on this. He's always held that the goal of G+ is to integrate social features across the entire product line, not create another social network.
Hasn't this been debunked? http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2012/03/18/unders...
Slightly off topic: May I ask you what's wrong with XML (as long as it is used for what it's meant?).
They never positioned it as a Facebook-killer. That's an artifact of the tech press. Like deelowe said, Google has been very consistent about this.
Close your laptop
Well Vic, it is a social network and the integration of identity in all your previous services and it is your response to the Facebook threat, so of course people compare them.

Unfortunately yes, I think the message from Google has not been great it is not well understood.
I was staring at it a long time, trying to make sense of the swirling color lines.
So if shipping source only is perfectly legal, what's to stop OEMs from simply shipping infringing components as source only and compiling on first boot? Strictly speaking, the user initiated the compile (by powering on the device), so Samsung would be in the clear. Technically legal, but I have the feeling this wouldn't survive court.
App Engine's reliability massively improved with the HR datastore, and has gotten even better since the pricing change / SLA guarantee. It's actually remarkably good now, I recommend taking another look.
There should be a way to change the language any time, you are right. People tend to share their agenda with others as far as we have observed and there is an option to make some of it private as well. Most of the development is being done in Turkey.
This is great, and thanks for writing it up. I don't think many graduate students would consider doing this right after graduation...I certainly wasn't in a mood to write another detailed document after getting done with my dissertation (also a couple of months ago, and in computer science).

I wanted to add a little about the end-game. For me, the decision of what to do next followed a slightly different path. In the fall of my 5th year, while planning to graduate, I had to really think about what to do next. Academia sounded interesting, so I went ahead and applied to tenure track jobs, and did interviews. Come winter, I had an offer from an Ivy League school. But I had also wanted to do startups for a while.

From my experience, working on projects that were not provided/sanctioned by advisors was somewhat like working on a startup. You have to build things that others find useful/interesting, sell the crap out of it in publications, presentations etc, and I also had to fund it.(my research was building systems software that improves user experience in poor network environments, like those common in developing regions. One of the definite perks was travelling lots and deploying stuff I built.)

In other words, I have no idea why most PhDs are not be expected to go work on a startup when they finish. They are domain experts, and are expected to be good communicators when it is all said and done.

So, when it came time to make the call---an assistant professor, or a startup founder---I chose the later (and disappointed my advisor). Some friends tell me I could have done that without a PhD, and it was a waste of time. I think a PhD naturally leads to a start up. The Grind, as the op calls it, is something that teaches you a lot about yourself, and surrounds you with some of the smartest people you'll find. Your job, every single day, is to innovate [with a more flexible runway]...and you can make (and learn) a lot out of it.
Probably his companies have less than your average share of bickering VP's and MBA class business types waging corporate warfare with his resources.
Indeed. Corporate taxation makes for good applause lines, but at least in our particular system it's basically a giant target for "lobby for special tax breaks, but only if you're rich enough to hire a staff of lobbyists."

My favored solution is having two taxes: a heavily progressive consumption tax, and a flat capital gains/etc. tax. Because what people usually are bothered by are the Paris Hiltons of the world, not the humble billionaire featured in the article.
Ok, so I just went ahead and ordered a Galaxy Nexus phone. I've been meaning to do this for a while now to see if I want to port my apps to the Android platform, and here Apple just pushed me to do it. :/
Galaxy Nexus is a direct competitor to the iPhone, and Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a direct competitor to the iPad.

Now, if Apple goes after Nexus 7, we will know that they are planning a 7" iPad-mini.
Cool. So at some point they will be integrating Facebook then.

You know because they aren't competitors or anything silly like that.
What does your laptop brand have to do with your choice of mobile development? MacBooks are quite good linux machines if you want to go that road.
Way off-topic, but are you saying that ctypes is less pleasant than the CPython API? My experience with the latter wasn't all that pleasant...
The above is why I love to read HN...

However, it seems that at some point here you are better off going back to getting dedicated hosts at a couple different distributed data centers and dealing with the complexity yourself. Surely by the time you "get to 11", you are spending more to be on AWS than doing it yourself would cost?
Wonder if this will allow Microsoft in Europe to get rid of the EU imposed browser select dialog at first boot.
That's absurd. Let's go back in time to 1995...NeXT and Apple are two separate companies. NeXT had a Dock. Windows had a Taskbar. Apple had neither.

Stop trying to change history to suit your fanboy-dom.

(Also, as gouranga mentioned below...RISC OS had them both before NeXT or Win95 anyway.)
[Hopefully you've got showdead on.]

I find this to be a somewhat odd position. I think it's much more morally defensible to argue for raising corporate taxes and eliminating capital gains taxes. This acknowledges that corporations owe their existence to the state, while natural persons do not.

Is your position based on the premise that personal income taxes are good and necessary? Or, perhaps, an acknowledgement that dismantling that system is probably unattainable?
Are you implying that the corporate tax + capital gains tax is roughly equal to that of earned income?
The IRL fetish
I wonder what folks on HN thought of PG's essay on this subject: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

I'm simply not sufficiently well versed in economics to be able to judge what's best for society. I'm also hoping that this is not purely subjective, and that indeed there might be an optimal golden middle.

On one hand PG's arguments make sense to me, on the other, I cannot but feel pulled in the opposite direction by some kind of populist/socialist desire to chip in more and make society a better place. That said, I don't have millions (billionaires seem to be more generous, so I'm not going to consider them) and thus if I ever were to become wealthier, I wonder if I also would really mind sharing more.

I already don't particularly enjoy paying 30% or more of my income, but I feel like I'm doing my part (being originally from EU perhaps conditioned me to think that this is "the norm"), although I wish that money was better spent by the people in power.
Ive found uzbl to be pretty good and lightweight. http://uzbl.org/
I urge you to reconsider.

What do you want to do when you "grow up"? If you are hanging out on HN, I assume you have some interest in start ups...read my other comment. And I can give you a lot more reasons why you should continue [especially if you are at one of the better institutions].
AWS eu-west EBS & RDS down in one AZ
Just when we learnt about the issues in us-east, AWS managed to remind us Europians that we're no better and the service is as unreliable here as it is in the states.

The difference I guess is that we do not have other regions within EU so going multi-region is slightly more difficult (trans-Atlantic latencies, legal issues of e.g. storing user data in the U.S etc).

Status: http://status.aws.amazon.com/ (switch to the Europe tab to see Ireland's status).
Chrome, the 1 gig of ram browser that everyone just loves.
Home Renovation Review Startups Offer Homeowners Peace of Mind
with google+ events and instant upload before it now i m starting to understand what google meant when they said google+ is not a network its a social layer across google properties﻿.

they are just connecting all the services and features into a single coherent thing
Statcounter claim to adjust for chrome's prefetching, but they never said how (headers?)
As an academic in math (perhaps the lab sciences are different, I speak only for what I know), I find this absurd. Perhaps mathematicians are nicer than other academics, but within math I have never heard firsthand of any story of this kind.

The advice given is breathtakingly cynical. You take risks by sharing your accomplishment, yes, but if you don't describe your accomplishment to others then you are depriving yourself of oxygen. Communication is the lifeblood of science, and in math at least, others are 1000x more likely to help you than to screw you over.

I would recommend, to anyone pursuing a Ph.D. in math at least, that they categorically ignore this advice. Hell, I'm confused as to why anyone prepared to believe this would want to get a Ph.D. at all.
Google Galaxy Nexus Smartphone
But it helps to be pragmatic and interesting, even in systems. mobisys and mobicom is full of stuff that is more interesting than pragmatic.
YouTube End Users Have The Opportunity To Shift Their Usernames To G Plus
Prizes.org to shut down in 6 months
> he's spending his considerable capital on things likely to make an impact on the world, not on frivolous applications like social networks.

While I agree that the guy is awesome, his projects are inspiring and I dislike this social everything wave as much as you probably do, social networks do make an impact on the world, probably even faster and more direct than space ships.
The unsolved part of the problem is that not every airline allows their flights to be shown on these aggregating sites, which is a legal problem, not a technical problem.
Was anyone else bothered by the pictures not matching up with the sections? Each picture was followed by a section that wasn't related to the text, which was a bit confusing.
Second this. He's also seems just an exceptionally sweet and lucid man. If anyone has actual knowledge about this question, I would love to hear about it. Worth a blog post, or a book contract, even.
I think one major reason is that his companies have a 'strict no-assholes policy.' [Clip http://www.oninnovation.com/videos/detail.aspx?video=1256...]

I have seen a few of his talks and he makes it look really easy.

It's probably well known already, but in case you missed it, Iron Man's character in the movies is based off of him to some degree.
اجابة امتحان الكيمياء للثانويه العامه 2012
The OP undervalues that bit in the TLDR: "stress-free deployment". For us, hiring or contracting a DevOps guy with 1/10th the chops of the heroku crew would cost 10x what we are paying them, and I don't think we'd have a better quality of life.

Heroku is only expensive if your time has no value.
Entrepreneurs Need Focus on Their Business Model
I've seen this "double taxation" argument in favor of a lower capital gains rate, and it's a flawed one. To see why, consider that your nanny doesn't get taxed at a lower rate just because you pay her with income that was taxed when you received it. The corporation is a distinct legal entity and it is taxed as such.

This taxation scheme isn't gratuitous. The corporate vehicle offers investors the tremendous advantage of limited liability. When it comes to a creditor's suit against the company, the corporation is treated as a distinct entity and the investor is not liable in such suits beyond his investment. The cost of being treated like a separate entity in lawsuits is being treated like a separate entity when it comes to taxation.

Limited liability is not free. When creditors cannot collect because an investor's corporation has insufficient assets, they bear the losses of activity that is attributable to and generates profits for the investor. If investors did not want to be taxed this way, they could reorganize their investments as partnerships. That way they would be taxed as individuals and bear liability for their business activities like individuals.
Just like Facebook isn't a social network. It is a social layer across Facebook properties.
The article is devoid of content, entire text can be summarized as "strategize your strategy", "do the right thing at the right time", and other such gibberish.

The point of the article is to plug something called "appstark", which as best I can tell is a library + service combo to collect and aggregate user feedback from inside iOS apps. Their web site a train-wreck of an attempt to explain what the service does, papered with "free trial start now!!!" buttons.

Frankly, a short and to the point explanation of what the service does would be more welcome here than this spam.