skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I find it similar to Wolfram Alpha. The creators constantly reiterated that it's not intended as a competitor to Google, while the press hailed alpha as a Google search killer.
I'm not dogging people who feel bad over bugs, I just don't feel that way myself. I've never written a bug-free piece of software, so I just accept that bugs are part of the deal. When I screw up, I just fix it. On the bad ones, I feel a tinge of regret (as in "oops, my bad. Let me help correct that.") if I inconvenienced anyone else, but nothing I would call shame (which to me implies internalizing negative emotions about one's self).

I don't write perfect software, and I never will. I'm choosing to not feel bad about that. It's all matter of perspective and expectations, isn't it? My colleagues can think less of me if they like - that's their baggage, though, and I won't pick it up. Shame is dangerous, and leads to a lot of the communications errors that developers make, which are often worse than the bug itself, or even the cause of it.
>The most infuriating aspect of Chrome’s search suggestions is that they change after you’ve stopped typing.

That!
Apple has clearly lost it. Whatever once made them cool and different is long gone and all that remains is a pseudo-legalese ganster, using its giant pool of money to hinder software development at the cost of everyone else.

You cannot be a software-developer and support this monster with your money. As a software developer there should be no way you can support this.

Apple is the SCO of this decade.
The words inline assembly don't even exist in the C standard. Of course it's undefined. The standard specifically mentions a select finite list of behaviors which may be implementation defined (ones complement, twos complement, ...).
Could you define "middle class", and perhaps explain how income inequality "destroys" it? By most common definitions, your statement can't be true.

Taking a typical relative definition, if the middle class is [50-X%, 50+X%], then by definition the middle class always makes up 2X% of the nation and nothing can destroy it.

If you take an absolute definition of middle class (i.e., middle class = home with X ft^2/person, tv, car, refrigerator), then inequality is pretty much unrelated to how many people are middle class.

In short, for your claim to be true, you must be using some uncommon definition of middle class. It would help to explain what it is.
Arbitration in Republic of Moldova
Google+

btw, this article is talking about all tweets,not just theirs
I just wanted to include the last line of the interview that you left off, as I think it's actually pretty important:

Wired.com: So what have you learned so far?
Musk: Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.
The travel market is huge and air search is still very fragmented with a lot of the low cost carriers (Southwest, Ryanair, etc.) not participating in metasearch engines. The most recent user research on travel planning/purchasing still shows most users visiting 6+ sites and spending a lot of time comparing prices, checking options, etc. so I think a lot of startups want to find a way to simplify the process. The problem with air though is the margins are low and outside of the UI, there's very few ways you can innovate with someone else's inventory.

At Room 77, we're exclusively focused on hotel search. This is also a market that's highly fragmented from a pricing/distribution perspective. You can get widely different pricing options for the same room at a hotel based on whether or not you're buying through the right channel. Sometimes, those channels are only accessible to travel agents or to wholesalers and other times the standard online travel agencies have the best price. We're aggregating every channel we can tap to find the best prices. Most people also don't realize that hotels discount for a lot of special groups like seniors, aaa members, military members, and government workers and those are not easily searchable today and we're starting to expose those in our search.

Of course, we've got a lot of work to do to simplify the UI and the search experience and would love to hear about any pain points you have when you're doing hotel search that we can solve.

Roger (ex-Farecast/Bing Travel, now Room 77)
If the customers would not accept food cooked by the untrained, it would not have happened. Customers used to not accept food like that, but when margin pressures forced restaurants to use untrained labor, they found they could get away with it. They haven't looked back.
I was also bothered that he glossed over his own income level so quickly, he really should've interviewed somebody else.
Electric cars have been done before, for over a century, and would be done without Musk.

To drastically lower the costs of space launch so that Mars(!) expeditions can be done by "just" billionaires is new. Just add what is happening in drones and the solar system will finally be ours.

[Edit: If it isn't clear:

Electric cars seems to obviously be arriving, if two conditions are fulfilled: (a) better batteries (metal-air, etc) and (b) that solar cell costs continue go down and/or more nuclear power. The time has come, it is so simple...

People have been talking for at least four decades about lowering launch costs, but it has gotten nowhere. Maybe that time has come now, when NASA doesn't have a shuttle to protect and hence no motivation to knife all competition in the cradle by their political clout? Maybe, I just note that this dream finally is successful.]
You may be too young to remember, but as computers were first becoming popular, may people had a hard time understanding them. And no, computers didn't "suck".
If you are hosting on a server(as everyone is) it will, at some point fail. You have to choose a service that has minimal failure combined with quick resolution times. I think AWS fits this description...
Yes, from her telling of it, it worked because she was absolutely ready to pay the consequences. At that point her smoking habit becomes other peoples problem (in addition to second-hand smoke etc).
I loved this deep-rooted aspect of Australian (and, uh, New Zealic) culture when I visited your part of the world. Hotel advertises "$129 / night"? That's exactly the amount that gets charged to your credit card.
>* But as the proliferation of such essays and books suggest, we are far from forgetting about the offline; rather we have become obsessed with being offline more than ever before.*

Really? Because we bitch about not being offline enough from time to time?

>We have never appreciated a solitary stroll, a camping trip, a face-to-face chat with friends, or even our boredom better than we do now. Nothing has contributed more to our collective appreciation for being logged off and technologically disconnected than the very technologies of connection.

A bad idea milked for several paragraphs, and not true at that.

We appreciated solitary strolls, camping trip, face-to-face chats with friends, alright in the 90s and the 80s too. Actually, even more so, because they weren't interrupted every other bloody minute by looking on our phone and checking the latest texts and tweets...
Can you give several examples of what you do consider to be innovation?
I think, judging from his commit comments, the focus was on applications rather than completely covering all possible algorithms without an eye towards ease of usage and implementation.
If anything, I suspect that the opposite is the case. If you're planning to set up servers in data centers on opposite sides of the globe, AWS is great. This is where their abstraction layer pays off. All their regions work the same way, accept the same API calls, are backed by effectively the same hardware. Get your setup working in one region, then copy a few S3 buckets over, change the --region argument to some calls in your script, and suddenly you're up in Singapore.

Plus, Amazon is building tools, like the above-mentioned Route 53, to support just this use case.

Now, those of us who have worked a lot within one AWS region will complain and moan about the horror of trying to work cross-region, but that's not because AWS makes cross-region unusually hard. It's because they make your work within one region unusually easy. We're all spoiled by, e.g., the magic of cloning EBS volumes from zone to zone via snapshots. (Well, okay, it's magical when it's working, anyway. ;)
The very wealthy in the U.S. do not pay a fair share of the tax burden or for the cost of government.

They don't?? The top 1% of taxpayers paid 36.7% of all income taxes in 2009[1] (yes, that includes capital gains). The top 10% paid 70%!

[1] http://ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html
>>although unfortunately the current implementation isn't there yet judging from the Benchmark Game<<

The benchmarks game Go programs are notably faster when compiled with 6g for x64 --

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...
If you want to argue that tax rates should be 11% + 15-35% as the cost of limited liability, go ahead and do it.

But it's dishonest to claim tax rates are only 11%. They aren't.
There are some good books in there, but a lot of them are pretty trashy!

In any case no-one should read that many books about entrepreneurship. Free time IMO in much better spent in reading fiction or history.
A bit off-topic: a prof. at the Uni once told me that David Lowe (who invented SIFT) never got any money from the patent (which I think belongs jointly to him and UBC) because commercial implementations would make a few changes to the algo and just use it, without citation or license.
If any HN'ers know more about this, I would be glad to hear it
Thanks for that, it's an excellent survey -- a stunning combination of factors that he worked like hell to align (that the universe didn't simply take care of....).

He's also comfortable being honest, as in that bit about optimism, and other comments in other interviews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_controversies#Tesla_Ro...

Basically, they imagined the worst that could possibly happen, but when it didn't happen, they pretended that it did anyway.

This is kind of like saying "we reviewed your iPhone app. Because apps can crash, we wrote a review describing all the way your app crashing ruined various real-life activities we had, even though your app never actually crashed."
What a coincidence - "Pepe Deluxe" is my name for my penis.

.

...what do you mean lowbrow humor isn't allowed on hacker news?
I found the reports about the outage - it was 2007 (so obviously much more than a year ago) but very similar to one of Amazon's recent outages - the truck took out a transformer, Rackspace fired up backup power, but cooling failed to start so Rackspace had to shut it all down to avoid melting everything.

Looks like Amazon wasn't the only one with inadequate testing of their continuity plan. And I don't think Rackspace offered alternate Availability Zones at that point.
Glad that bugged someone else.
> If your app is down, it's only because you don't care about the availability of your service.

That is absolutely absurd. At what point did the common-sense solution to "unacceptable downtime on AWS" become "buy two of everything"?
it doesnt confuse me per se, it just values some things i dont care about. i dont need 80% screen devoted to when the flights are and how long there are. i only fly nonstop and pretty much dont care what time of day it is unless its really early or redeye.
>Why is he only working 27 hours/week? If he's serious about raising himself out of poverty, finding another part-time job would seem to be a priority.

Have you accounted for the commuting time? Like the bus that eats away 2 hours every day, and that he sometimes he has to wait for 3 hours?

Plus, nobody raised himself out of poverty by getting multiple part-time, bad-paid jobs. The way to do it is to get a better paying job.

Also: those 27 hours, are they regular, or the boss can reschedule him as he pleases (as often happens)?

This book is an eye opener of how people doing these jobs get by:

http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08...

(the journalist forfeited her money et al, and worked and lived as a minimum wage employee for a year or so, in order to write the book).
..and yet if they release too early when it's not ready they have to hear "it just seems like beta software" "it's too unpolished"
I don't know, that guy in particular seemed to be pretty loose with his money. Lots of travel, private jets, etc. He may not think he is "creating jobs" and maybe is isn't directly, but all that spending keeps a lot of people employed.
Finding Accommodation for the Olympics Games 2012
n 2012, Olympic will be held in London during the month of July and August. It will be 30th Olympic and also a third time for London to host the modern games. There are several of changes are done for the olympic games 2012 and many new venues are also built.
... because no one in the private sector steals credit for someone else's work
The first app or the last app (can't remember which) that registered for the custom URL scheme owns it.

> Maybe apps should just handle things better if they're awoken with a new URL on the pasteboard (i.e. offer to take an action with it).

This is almost how using custom URL schemes would work, but I think it's still superior to fiddling with the pasteboard though.

But you are right. There isn't a standard way to do it now. Most apps that expose or utilize this form integration has to come up with something themselves. Also see http://handleopenurl.com/
Yes they did. The first computers "sucked". They "sucked" in the sense that most people couldn't understand them. Computers got popular and people started understanding them as computers improved in usability.

If Google+ becomes popular one day after numerous improvements, it's ridiculous to say that the first iteration of Google+ was successful just because future ones were.
I play violin. It's a really difficult system to grasp and the left hand and right hand have extremely contrasting rolls -- so one learns two difficult systems just to play one instrument. It prepared me well for learning languages and understanding how to code/hack. http://nato.cc/ for some violin music (warning: classical music YIKES).
As someone who spent time with both biology and computer science PhDs, every bit of that article is true when applied to biology (much less so in computer science, and probably none of it applies to math). Actually it gets worse in biology than what the article describes. There are networks of "friends" established across the country which survive by sharing credit as much as possible. (Someone should write a paper on how such cliques get established -- it is almost like Darwinian evolution, except the other way around.) Members of those cliques often have impressive publication records, but when you start drilling down to what their individual contribution was to each paper, you start believing that you are watching some circus unfold in front of you. In an individual lab, members of such cliques can achieve significant power and influence (since friends know tricks to get paper closer to publication) even despite the fact that their individual ability to interpret experimental data is often very unimpressive to put it nicely.
I am hoping they would offer this course again via the MITx/edX platform later this year
Shelagh was here — an ordinary, magical life
> return false doesn't seem terribly unreasonable.

It should throw an error, not return false. This goes back to PHP's "try as hard as possible to run the script" mentality.

The author doesn't need to know C++ to comment on PHP's failings, does he? And he knows private/public/protected— you even quote him using them. You're probably not familiar with Python, but there aren't any private methods (aside from double underscored-prefixed methods, but that's not entirely the same). That's where he was coming from. It's not that he doesn't know those terms; it's that he thinks that's how they should work.

Judging by your other responses, you're quick to toss out whether someone is a "PHP programmer" or not, as if that has any bearing on their argument. I'll tell you right now, I work in PHP five days a week, and I agree with most all of eevee's points.
It is not "kind of insane", just selfish and self-righteous and evil (in the traditional sense of the word).
Not everything is that easy. An example would be NeoOffice for Mac. You have to "donate" to get the binaries or compile it yourself, except it requires 10.4 and XCode 2.5 [1].

[1] http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/NeoOffice_Build_Instr...
Reminds me of http://olark.com/targeting
Aren't multiple availability zones impacted though? I don't get how Heroku can be so widely impacted if its not for the fact that multiple Availabiltiy Zones have been impacted.
GE in particular paid very little tax in one particular year because they a) took a massive loss in the previous year and b) harvested a huge amount of tax subsidies, mostly relating to green energy.

In the US the very wealthy pay a disproportionate fraction of taxes, relative to the income they earn.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/new-data-top-1-pay-greater-...

http://i.imgur.com/wa8uu.png (A graph of the data)

The US actually has a more progressive tax system than any other OECD nation - only Ireland and Australia even come close.

http://taxfoundation.org/blog/no-country-leans-upper-income-...

Given that the poor and middle class consume disproportionate amounts of government services (primarily redistribution), while the wealthy pay a disproportionate amount of taxes, it's an untenable position that the wealthy don't pay their fair share.
... and what's your opinion of this story professor jack ripper?
Well, just as I'm skeptical about donating to an application I haven't tried I'm skeptical about buying an application I haven't tried.

Most commercial applications allow you to try them in one way or another before buying, if I'm not allowed to do that (which by itself smells bad) commercial applications more often have reviews (at least user reviews) and if I'm ultimately about to buy an application that I haven't tried or really got a feel for you can bet that it is because I'm becoming desperate and haven't found anything else decent (in other words I've put in quite some time in exploring alternatives before even considering to buy that application).

The same goes for this software model, only when I buy an application I usually get some support etc. If I donate, I usually, already have what I'm donating for. Quite a big difference.

And honestly, if the author is deliberately trying to make my life difficult just to trick me into donating I'm going to be annoyed, and since I deeply disagree with that type of model (donations should be earned, it's not a form of annoy-ware) I will, out of principle, be very hesitant of donating (I'd like to say that I'd never donate, but if the application was truly exceptional I'd probably donate anyway (but I'd attach a comment describing that I dislike it)).

I can put up with quite a bit of tinkering to get something to run, but not if it is because the author have deliberately kept the make-file to himself (as he implied in the comments) just to get people to donate. Huge difference.

I'd probably be more recipient towards a commercial application with a decent trial-version. I much rather pay for something than getting it for free from someone being rude about it.
The original Tesla was only practical for 1% of consumers. If the Model S is practical for 10%, that's real progress.

Low cost and high reliability come from volume production, which creates a chicken and egg problem. Elon started with the very high end, and is working his way down as a method to gradually build volumes and develop experience and technology to eventually build high volume low cost cars for everyone.

Contrast that to the "expensive fat econobox" approaches the other carmakers tried and abandoned.
If you operate a service where uptime is critical, two of everything isn't enough. You have to ensure they will be separated geographically and logically so that when things like this happen, you don't lose your systems.

We operate systems that sit on the pages of the top e-commerce companies in the world. We have 10 separate segments of clusters. Operating in four AZ's in East, three AZ's in West-1 and two AZ's in West-2. When this outage happened, the servers that were impacted in east were removed from our DNS and within 9 minutes the impact of this event on their sites was eliminated.
That's not even the half of it. Presumably most of his wealth is in either stocks or bonds. In stocks, it's providing capital to enterprises to produce products people want to buy and likely hiring a couple of people to do it. In bonds, it's either doing that, too, or funding government projects like roads and schools.
>I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions about my point of view from my merely pointing out that nobody, no matter what government programs are available, is going to raise him or herself out of poverty working 27 hours a week.

Actually people have raised themselves out of poverty by working far less. IIRC, one guy in the article, just chanced upon Jezz Bezos and invested a small sum in Amazon.

That said, there are people unable to work themselves out of poverty even by working more than 40+ hours per week. Try talking with people working on your nearest Walmart for example, for some insight. Those kinds of salaries are spent as soon as they are received, in gas, rent, utility bills, foods, the kids, etc, rarely leaving anything to pursue something more, enroll in some educational program, etc.

Plus, people working 50+ hours a week in some office job, a lot of times slack, browse the web, gossip around the water cooler, and such, that in the end their productive time ends less (and much much easier on their body and mind) than a guy working 27 hours a week in a restaurant kitchen, which could be a no-breaks, work constantly, hell.
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. My old company (Acquia) kept a lot of customers up through the various outages with mere two-zone redundancy.

You do need to actually engineer for failover and recovery, though. That point is correct: It doesn't necessarily help you to have half of your servers survive an outage if that still kills your service or requires painful amounts of manual intervention. And it really is a lot easier to just shrug, keep your backups up to date, and pray for your zone to come back ASAP. Do your cost-benefit analysis.
The trials and tribulations of the poor and rich ends of the spectrum don't tend to surprise me, but the wildly varying ways the middle class perceives their incomes always does.

It surprised me that a family bringing in $900 a week ($47k per year) doesn't feel comfortable in Des Moines (statistically it's above local median). But then they note every 2 weeks they pay $375 for health insurance.. 20.8% of their pre-tax income! Yet their "state and federal" taxes are only about 10%?

For all the bleating about paying "less tax" than other countries, it's ironic that an ostensibly "free market" healthcare system is less efficient, more cartel-like and wildly more expensive for its users than, say, the "socialist" one in the UK where you could live well on the same money and still be paying your fair share without getting any handouts.
The original title was useful. Changing a descriptive title to a useless phrase is disrespectful of the HN reader's time.
I'm dyslexic, I hate reading. I've always taken the attitude of 'just do it' and 'learn from mistakes' but a couple of weeks ago I decide I will start reading at least a book a month.

After reading the Lean Startup I feel like I've learnt more about building Startups than what I have reading various startup related articles on HN all year.

I'm sure this isn't the case with all books but I wouldn't agree that it's better just to go out there and try to do stuff you don't really understand. You'll probably just be wasting your time in most cases.
Open source electronic projects