skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This pathetic innuendo is typical of so much of contemporary American debate. If you have something to say, say it. This "makes me wonder" style is just a gutless, moronic attempt at mud slinging.
Low cost Ethernet shield with ENC28J60 | Open Electronics
The World without the Internet
Can you imagine the World without Internet? I can’t. These are some things that would be different without it…
that is only for olark, this is more of a framework. You get to choose the action you want to take.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/01/13/a-shrinking...

Go to figure 6.
New Home, New Furniture
I guess the reason I don't see the problem is because I believe the gambit was so bold that she simply would never start to smoke again. (A sort of personal "nuclear deterrent", if you will. But like a nuclear deterrent, dangerous if used!)
My Ugly Startup : Random Achiever - Earn Real Life Achievements
By no means do I want to spam HN. Just looking to share my story.

My Background :
I am a diesel mechanic and programming hobbyist. I taught myself basic programming and scripting through php.net, stackover flow, and hacker news posts. I joined the freenode IRC server, idled and read other peoples issues and solutions.

History:
I have been designing Random Achiever in my head for years. What direction I would like to see the company grow in, what kind of achievements I should create, what the overall feel of the site should be. While the awesomeness in my head cant be translated with my programming experience, I have created a beta version that I hope will draw some attention.

Achievements:
All achievements benefit the user in some way. Doing things for yourself have a low point value. Doing things with and/or for other people have a higher value. Doing things for your community or charities have the highest point value. I people were motivated to do something new for the achievement, I didn't want them to only do it once and be done. Achievements may be claimed multiple times after the achievement timer resets. Some are only a week, some a month.

So after the initial launch (4pm last night) we have a small user base, and a lot of face book traffic. I hope for some critiques and pointers on what you guys think of the site. Thank you for taking time to read this.

www.randomachiever.com

- Westly -
Thanks for the most constructive post in this whole discussion. Hacker News is a much better place to talk about solutions than just whining.

At Quantcast we have physical servers in 14 cities. We use anycast to achieve site failovers in 6 seconds. Downtime for us would impact millions of websites, so we don't have downtime.
Your arguments about why UGC is incompatible with advertising seem like they could apply equally to all content.

i think a better argument is that unstructured UGC is incompatible with advertising. Pinterest, for example, seems to be doing all right, because their site is basically a repository of things people want to buy. StackOverflow doesn't seem to be having any issues using ads to monetize, because their niche makes their ad-space valuable to advertisers and relevant to users. Where facebook and twitter fail is that they have tons of data about users, but not about what users want at that particular instant. An ad for windows server hosting on ServerFault is not competing with the content, it's complementing the content. it's a natural progression that doesn't require me to refocus to be effective. Facebook knows what i like, but not what i'm thinking about. When i'm looking at pictures of friends, any advertisement requires me to refocus onto a different topic.
In addition, Elon said that he had already committed in his will to give away most of his fortune to charity.
http://i.imgur.com/Mnk7U.jpg

Elon also experienced near-death back in 2000 during a visit to South Africa. He almost died from cerebral malaria. (According to an interview) He tweeted about it here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/152394000857448448
Obituary: Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld, 1923 - 2012
Do I think of it that way? Yeah, sometimes I do.
Travel search will be a problem for me once I don't have to call each airline individually to get the best ticket prices for my two-year old. Discounts for children exist, but they vary based on airports, airlines, ticket type, and most airlines specifically only make them available through their hotlines. That is a pain point that needs to be solved, but it's not something that a pretty UI can do.
Why is this being downvoted? Is it inaccurate?
Hipmunk has a great interface but is totally unusable for one reason: they don't list all flights.

This may have changed since the last time I checked (within the past year), but Kayak would list many more flights than Hipmunk would. Until they have data for ALL flights, what's the point?

Kayak is pretty awesome. The one feature I'd like them to add is a filter for flight duration. I can -sort- by duration, but I can't tell it to just ignore 15+ hour journeys when it's showing me ~8 hour journeys.
Also, simply by showing up to work on time and not being irresponsible, the author of that book had multiple opportunities to improve her situation (e.g., her managers offered her promotions, etc). She turned them all down since she wasn't aiming to write a "how to lift yourself out of poverty" book.

See also the book "Scratch Beginnings", about how a guy started with only $25 and got himself into a stable financial situation (e.g., apt, pickup truck, $5k in savings) in only 10 months with only hard work.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061714275/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Space exploration has little benefit to the average person, esp. for the environmental damage it does. For most people it's just interesting news. I'd like to see more of that innovative talent and gov't money applied to environmental concerns. (That said, I'm still looking forward to tuning into Mars via a microphone/video placed there. Just no ultra-expensive humans, please.)
Considering how much the US has spent and is still spending on the military for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I don't quite get the perception that taxing the rich more would fix anything. The bucket is leaking like crazy at the bottom and the solution is to pour more water? It may be fairer, but will it produce that much benefit, especially when compared to how difficult it would be to make this change? Is this tax-the-rich issue a red herring?

How much more money would end up in Uncle Sam's coffers anyway if the richer are taxed more?
The 99.97% statistic has "may uptime" written next to it, so I guess it refers to the previous month.
it really depends on who's in charge then as opposed to now. Apple in the 90's were kind of meh, and outmaneuvered by the PC ecosystem. Apple now is firing on all cylinders and google is desperately trying to reorganize. in another 10 years, who knows what will happen?
"I am not sure why the food industry loves to underpay people."

Because they can. Your boss or company would do it too if they could. Or if they're too nice, the rest of your industry would do it if they could, and then your boss or company would feel that that's just the way it is.
Popular:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4147907

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150596

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152659

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152965

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154270

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157927

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161845

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4162900

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4163991

No comments ...
Ryan Harris Given 3-Year Sentence For Helping Thousands Steal Internet Service
After I read the first part, I felt really good about the beginner. But after the sequel, I see that this is something which does happen in real life. It is just sad.
Ask HN: Sweet.io An open micro-blogging platform driven by its users
Microsoft OEM VP Leaving Role
That's our next step is automating our fail over. We currently use DNS Made Easy and while you can do that with them it's tougher. We are switching to Dyn, and their Layer 2 failure detection will put our failover in that 6 second range.
> He invested all the money he had on hand—$45,000 cash

Not a good example for "raising oneself out of poverty"

> His parents made good money in the pillow trade, and after college he set up a few okay businesses

That is not poverty.
>Could you define "middle class", and perhaps explain how income inequality "destroys" it?

It's political economy 101. I don't understand your bizarro counter-arguments. Take the first for example:

>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.

It cannot destroy the existence of the category named "middle class", but it can very much destroy its living conditions. It's not just being in the 50%+-X range, it's also what that range represents in purchase power.

>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.

Only in a bizarro world where the wealth is magically readjusted to account for inequality. In the real world this inequality is caused by wealth moving from the middle to the upper classes.

For example, a company moves its factories to China. The middle class families making a living around the US factory and the nearby city are devastated, but the company executives get even richer because of the higher margins.
The problem is in the power network, not in the machines.
There are a lot of things businesses are required to do that they don't do. I saw the checks - Darden wasn't deducting any sort of taxes from the paychecks (yes, checks, not under the table cash payments) of the undocumented workers they employed. Maybe they showed something different to the IRS.
If you want reasonable uptime, you don't have any single points of failure. So 2 of everything.
The Altair 8800 for anybody but the die-hard hobbyist did "suck". It took other companies and other machines to show users why a computer was useful. Its not the user's fault for the misunderstanding.
Here on HN or maybe it was Reddit I read the misspellings in spam/phishing were intentional to weed out anyone smart enough to detect it was a scam.
I don't know but I've heard stories. Stealing cables underground is not common but it happened. And rats and underground water is quite a problem for underground (copper) cables.
Tesla's also doing drive trains for Toyota, for the electric RAV4. Which isn't exactly cheap (about $50k), but clearly not aimed at the status-symbol market.

(Tesla itself is probably headed downmarket as well; the announced strategy has always been to do prestige models first and then ramp up the volume.)
Earlier discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479750

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480016 <- Comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3483783

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3486970

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3488408

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507088

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3726335 <- Links to further reading

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3926227

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940213 <- Comments
So for you, something "sucks" if it fails to win a popularity contest. I find that definition meaningless. Computers didn't "suck", they were and are magnificent, every step of the way.
Route 53 has had 100% uptime for serving DNS requests since launch. The API hasn't, but that only affects changes to your config. It's never stopped serving resolve requests.
This is my main feeling as well. Why does everyone think that taking more money from "the rich" and giving it to the government is going to have better results for society than just letting the rich spend it as they please?
Using that definition (people in the range of [0.5 x median, 1.5 x median]), the middle class has only shrank because more people have become rich.

http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/288306/guest-post-scott...

The number of people who are middle class or higher has remained contant since 1970. Using Alan Krueger's definitions, all inequality has done is moved people from middle class to rich. Is that a bad thing?
So your premise is: if the masses do not understand, then it's not useful. The masses determine whether something "sucks" or not.

I suppose the very fact that the word "sucks" being used to describe it goes along with your mentality.
I think Route 53's TTL is 60 seconds.
I have a PhD in Applied Math from one of the Math departments in the country, and now do biomedical research. Believe me, the cynicism is well placed.

I wanted to get a PhD because I believed as you do. The fact is, though biomedical research is a field where cheating can take you a long, long way. The experiments have gotten so big and expensive that scientific accountability is at an all-time low (for example, check out this commentary [1] on pre-clinical cancer research. And the money in biomedical research attracts power-hungry people. At the same time, the pressure to publish in order to obtain grant funding is enormous, and the incentives to cheat to get ahead by e.g. playing games with credit or retarding competitors with sly reviews is correspondingly intense.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...

TLDR: drug company attempts to replicate results of high-impact cancer
biology research papers, in a search for new drug targets. Failed to
replicate the claims in 47 out of 53 papers. Authors refused to
provide materials necessary for replication until company signed NDA
stating they would not publish the results of the replication
attempts. One author tells the head of the replication effort "Well,
we only got this result 1 time out of 5 repetitions, but we decided to
report the 1 instead of the other 4, because it's the better story."
(NDA story is from the subsequent Nature clarification, sentence 4 is
from a news report on the commentary.)
One needs to look at overall tax receipts. Not just income taxes. The very wealthy primarily pay capital gains taxes and not income taxes. Also, the 36.7% figure is not meaningful without knowing the percentage of wealth the very rich control.
Maybe they're "contractors" and it's left up to the employee to pay taxes.
It's a bad point of view to look at government services consumed. The very rich live in a system that allows them to have gotten their wealth. They benefit greatly from living in our society. They should pay to maintain it.

What matters is not the percentage of all taxes they pay but what percentage of wealth they control and how much they can pay. I agree with Christ in this matter. To whom much is given much is expected.
"If files could package and pass around metadata in the same way they pass around data"

They can. It's all just bits. If your files don't and your API does, it is simply because your files don't and your API does, not because files can't and APIs can. Files can have metadata and APIs can be written that treat things as blobs.

There is a distinction, but it's not API vs. file, it's what semantic context you're in. Your MP3 player reads out the ID3 tags, because it's in a music player context. Your backing cloud store (like Dropbox) just sees blobs. Interoperability is less about agreeing on file formats than agreeing on semantic contexts. (Yes, file formats are important but they come later, and most arguments about them are actually arguments about semantic contexts.)
Offshore will also be slower. Try pinging servers of them and compare them to yours. I think that is also important.

And yes, the IP location matters:
http://youtu.be/keIzr3eWK8I
Cheaper, "better", faster is actually doing us quite a bit of harm in the food industry. Such as foods that are meant to look pretty but have poor flavor & nutritional value, food borne illnesses, over-consumption of unhealthy foods & factory farm pollution.
I have already built my MVP... Now what?
Difficult to know what you mean specifically by "advanced" relations.

Might be worth looking at SQL itself first so that you understand what goes on inside the ORM.

Get comfortable doing join , inner join , outer join etc across multiple tables.
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in a statement: With temperatures near 100 degrees expected this weekend, it's critical that we get people's power back on as soon as possible.

So let me get this straight: the critical issue with not having electricity after a huge storm is that the A/C isn't working? And 100F/38C isn't even that hot, right?
I have an issue right now, where I would love to have the ability to respond to customer reviews: I'm the author of InstaDesk, a Instagram Mac Client. I just released version 2.0 a couple of days ago, a huge update with lots of new features and improvements. Now that Instagram is offline, people who update to 2.0 think 2.0 is the culprit and write bad reviews telling other users not to update to version 2.0.
I already put a big banner onto my website (http://www.instadesk-app.com) explaining the situation, but most people never go there, and those that do don't even read the banner oftentimes (People can send bug reports from the website, and I still get bug reports every so many minutes even though the website itself says that Instagram is down).
So right now it would be really helpful for me, to reply to the review and tell people that the app will work fine again in a couple of hours.

There is error detection code in InstaDesk that checks for faulty network connections and brings up appropriate errors, but I failed to take into account that the complete instagram.com could time out. Matt Gemmell is correct in that we, as developers, shouldn't try to reply to users but instead find the root cause and fix it, but that doesn't work if the root cause is beyond our control.
Is it just me, or does this come off as incredibly cynical?

We’re petty, emotional and vindictive

We can’t think properly

We don’t do due diligence or reasonable research about anything

We’re poorly educated

We lack empathy, and have a deep distrust of companies

We universally dehumanise businesses

We don’t read, and we’re not interested in starting now

I mean, I do agree with the overall point, but I like to think humanity is better than this (even if not by much).
I haven't tried this (I use single EC2 deployments, some Heroku, also have a Hetzner server) but it is something that I have been thinking of: have the web services that back up your web app on a single server, and yes that will fail on hopefully rare occasions. Host the Javascript+HTML5+CSS front end on S3 with Cloudfront CDN. The home page of your app will almost never go offline and you control what to report to your users if your backend services are offline. Sure you lose core functionality, but you still have static content and a friendly message about temporary lack of services.

Going beyond that at a cost of slow response times when trying to access a downed backend, you could deploy back end web services to two different hosting providers, perhaps running something like CouchDB replicated on each provider. The Javascript on your UI could switch to an alternative back end after a timeout. For "one page" style apps, you could maintain the state information that a backend host is down in the browser.
I've never written code for these architectures, but my assumption was that a modern GCC will happily bodge this for you in software, so its probably only super ancient/exotic stuff for which the lack of ability to cast applies
But many people are saying that despite paying for multi-AZ for RDS, they were still down. Do you think they didn't also load-balance across AZs for their webservers?
> ostensibly "free market" healthcare system

Some guy said of sick care in America: The American health care system is socialism without a central plan, and capitalism without markets or prices.

You really have to pick one or the other of socialism or the free market. Our current system is the worst of both worlds.
I think that all of that can be supported by file formats. There is no rule that an image file format can only hold the pixel information. The issue is that it's hard for all vendors to agree on a standard, and once it's agreed upon, people want to add more information to it. We have EXIF for images, but what happens when iPhoto and Picasa both add face tags?

I don't believe files are the issue, it's agreeing on the interchange format that is.
Doesn't Germany have crazy data retention laws and privacy regulations? I'd be more concerned about having to follow two sets of laws than trans-atlantic latency.
If you can't access your data on the cloud is it really your data?
Just a thought.
Still, Gundotra won't rule out the possibility of sponsored stories down the road.

We don't serve ads [on Google+], but that doesn't mean we won't have sponsored stories," he says. "There may be more relevant forms of advertising that we do believe work."

Great. Something to look forward to.
Are you excluding the "free" healthcare in the UK from your definition of "handout"?

What "fair share" of taxation would they be paying in the UK?
Very cool demo of modern web technologies, though things get messy towards the end with all the intersecting lines.

The most interesting thing about the evolution of the web is when Chrome arrives in 2008. Chrome has essentially remained unchanged visually since 1.0. Look at the design of browsers change once Chrome hits. Pretty remarkable.

It's pretty clear that Chrome's release was vital to the modern web of today. The most obvious one is the GUI, but they changed the game for web technologies and the speed at which we interact with the web.

Firefox introduced extensions and changed the game for a lot of us. Then they basically took a nap for 5 years until Chrome came out. I wish I knew what went wrong...
It's not just being in the 50%+-X range, it's also what that range represents in purchase power.

In the US, the purchasing power of that range has dramatically increased over the years. We live in bigger houses, consume better medicine, more food, more education, more and better electronics and entertainment, etc.

I think you'll be hard pressed to find a single category in which contemporary Americans have less than 1970's Americans, for any reasonable value of x. If you dispute this, go ahead and find that single category.

Only in a bizarro world where the wealth is magically readjusted to account for inequality. In the real world this inequality is caused by wealth moving from the middle to the upper classes.

Are you seriously calling a world of economic growth and technological process "bizarro world"?

We have become vastly wealthier than we were at any historical period, ignoring short term fluctuations (e.g., recessions). In the 1970s, the bottom 11% didn't have flush toilets.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cf...

For example, a company moves its factories to China. The middle class families making a living around the US factory and the nearby city are devastated, but the company executives get even richer because of the higher margins.

Hahaha! Now I know you are writing a parody of something - first complaining about inequality, then complaining about wages becoming more equal.
JavaScript Prototypes Made Easy
I don't think Chrome is especially lightweight. It tends to be optimized for speed by using as much resources as available.

It might be better than IE in that regard, but it doesn't have any huge advantage over firefox.
> George Orwell said journalism is “printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

Orwell? I'm pretty sure it was Lord Northcliffe (founder of the Daily Mail in late 19th century) who said "News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."