skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can use the EC2 API and ec2-describe-availability-zones to find out which availability zone is having issues: http://alestic.com/2012/06/ec2-outage-availability-zone
Sorry: I was confused by the HN title, which refers to these people as "Americans", which would imply he's a citizen.

The article doesn't make that claim. But at the same time, unless he's here on a student visa or some such, his employer is required to pay FICA taxes, AFAICT. I think that's true for Haitians with refugee status.

EDIT: I see the title has been updated. With the exception of the "Americans" issue, I liked the old title better. "Amber Waves of Green" doesn't tell you much about the link.
I made no comment on whether or not it was a competitor.
Yes, maintenance (upgrades, security patches, scaling up instances...) if you're going DIY on AWS is also significant. The time needed for setup + maintenance varies greatly depending on the developer(s) as well as the exact project needs, but at a minimum, Heroku needs to be at least as expensive as AWS minimum costs + bare minimum setup costs before switching to AWS could be considered cost-effective.
More people remember Ford, than remember Goddard.
Say someone earns a million dollars a year driving a cab. If he negligently hits and kills someone, and gets a $3 million wrongful-death judgment against him, he is personally on the hook for the whole $3 million.

If an individual earns a million dollars a year by owning a fleet of cabs, each organized as a separate corporation with the legally-required $50k or whatever of insurance,[1] and one of the cabs hits and kills someone resulting in a $3 million wrongful death lawsuit, the individual is out at most the assets of that single corporation (say $50k + legal fees).

It would be ridiculous if the individual paid the same %-age of taxes on that million dollars in both cases.

[1] This is actually how many (most?) cab companies are structured.
There are quite a few Harvard architecture microcontrollers and DSPs for which this is not true. (At least for some values of "want to use" ;-).
Hrm. I don't know. Some of these books are good, but there's definitely some fluff there too.

And... ultimately, I think it's better to get out there and do stuff rather than read about it.
Firefox 3.5.6 on Mepis Linux 8.0 here; NoScript permissions open to github and tumbler otherwise I wouldn't see code onscreen fwiw, tnx for feedback
He may be working more than 27 hours a week, his employer got in trouble for clocking people out before they actually stopped working. He has to take the bus & sometimes misses the last one late at night causing him to walk home. Commuting alone could very well be his other part-time job.

It's probably not terribly easy to find another part-time job when you're a Haitian immigrant without the best English skills and not much on your resume. Even if he found another job would it conflict with his current job? Most jobs don't care if you have another job on the side, they want you there when they want you.

Also sounds like his ego/pride has taken a beating from the treatment he's received. When you live at the bottom for awhile you start feeling like you're going to be there forever. The honest truth is that many do stay at the bottom forever.

I am not sure why the food industry loves to underpay people. I think the last thing we need are lowly paid workers, with no healthcare, pressured to come in when sick making our food.
I would like to politely suggest that a) finding full-time work when desperately poor is maybe not as easy as you seem to believe, especially when there are massive transportation issues at play and b) the tendency to focus immediately on what the poor could be doing better, instead of on how the rest of us could do a better job in helping them, is kind of insane (though extremely popular on the internet).

Could Maurose Frantz raise himself out of poverty if he just pulled a little harder on them faithful ol' bootstraps? Maybe! You'll never know, of course, since you don't know his actual situation and have almost certainly never known anything like it, but your go-to move of imagining that this is the case--that it's basically 'his fault' he's poor--is definitely a good way to calm your conscience. We all sleep better when we're convinced the world is just.

Maybe you've gathered from my tone that I don't think this is exactly the smartest way to go about fixing America's problem with poverty.
Ask HN: How can I learn "advanced" data modelling for Rails?
I'm a beginner (hobbyist) Rails developer. I've gone through many of the available tutorials, such as Michael Hartl's excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial at http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ (both editions, books, and screencasts). I can build and understand simple CRUD-type applications with associations with no problems.

Now, I want to "scratch my own itch" and build an application I can actually use in my work. Basically, it will need to be able to keep track of tasks and comments arranged as projects and project templates. I'm running into difficulty designing these models and associations because they are more complex. I'm sure I could find or buy an application to do this, but I'd really like to learn how to do it myself, instead.

Question: Are there techniques or resources (books, tutorials, articles) or forums where I can learn to design more complex models and associations? This doesn't seem like it's specific to Rails (to me). Should I be researching database techniques, models, associations, for example, to get ideas?
I made it simpler (and slightly more portable ;-) ) :

typedef void* (*f)();
extern void* apply(void* func, void** args, size_t argc) {
switch (argc) {
case 0: return ((f)(func))();
case 1: return ((f)(func))(args[0]);
case 2: return ((f)(func))(args[0], args[1]);
case 3: return ((f)(func))(args[0], args[1], args[2]);
case 4: return ((f)(func))(args[0], args[1], args[2], args[3]);
case 5: return ((f)(func))(args[0], args[1], args[2], args[3], args[4]);
case 6: return ((f)(func))(args[0], args[1], args[2], args[3], args[4], args[5]);
case 7: return ((f)(func))(args[0], args[1], args[2], args[3], args[4], args[5], args[6]);
case 8: return ((f)(func))(args[0], args[1], args[2], args[3], args[4], args[5], args[6], args[7]);
case 9: return ((f)(func))(args[0], args[1], args[2], args[3], args[4], args[5], args[6], args[7], args[8]);
/*...*/
}
}
RV Storage in Orange County - Your First Choice
RV owners in Orange County California have been looking for vehicle storage solutions. Now they have a better choice for all their trailer storage needs. Now patrons are saving money when they choose this facility over all the other RV storages that offer inferior boat storage spaces.
I feel shame over bugs. Of course, it depends on the nature of the bug, but there are definite moments of deep self reflection, which I think that I internalize as shame. While I reflect and move on, as a professional, I should be making as few mistakes as possible. When a star hockey player screws up a play that could have won their team the game, I imagine that they feel shame - not that they will get fired for the incident, but self relection is how you improve, and in many people, that manifests as a healthy amount of shame. (Not that I'm the Gretzky of software development).

Recently, a piece of code that I wrote crashed after running for over a month because I forgot to lock one of several methods that was concurrently accessing a collection. I was very ashamed of this - this was an amateur mistake, and one that someone with the amount of experience that I had should not have made. I didn't get any any trouble for this, but I was pretty ashamed. "I am better than this, and I should not be making this sort of mistake," I thought and have been very careful to avoid this sort of thing since.
> Statcounter claim to adjust for chrome's prefetching

It didn't seem to make any non-marginal effect on the graph. I wonder if they can accurately account for the pre-rendering.

Of course, pre-rendering might just be that good, that it's always hitting the right pages.
The essay is truly horrible. I don't have the time to take it to bits, but a couple of starting points:

- he conflates earnings and effort, as if by earning 100 times you were necessarily 100x more productive at some point.

- related: wealth is categorically different. The worst chess player and the best chess player must both play the same game. But if chess were wealth, the poor guy would have to carve his own pieces and rent the hall, while the rich guy would turn up and sit while the game played itself, no effort required

- he's right that the middle-classes are the true engines of wealth creation, not the rich. This is the crux of the problem: income inequality destroys the middle class. It leaves only very poor and very rich. No middle class = no wealth generation. That is why it's an issue for everyone, and no amount of "smart people who work hard deserve to control 99% of capital" changes that.
Thanks for the feedback Denis. We will improve and try to do better next time.
Agreed. I may not be the biggest "PayPal" fan but I'm certainly a "Musk" fan. To Mars!
Can you tell some more detail about this AT&T lawsuit against BSD?
I don't really even feel a need to test drive it first. I'm just waiting until I have a place to charge it and my current car dies.
From your Akamai's website: most of the Web sites sampled for the Akamai IO Beta are focused on a U.S. audience.

The results are comparable if you restrict statcounter's stats to US only
looking at the specs for it, there might still be an issue of ram, since the ATSAM3X8E has only 100kb of ram. if you limit what you do you can likely get some form of it working but to be honest i'm not sure how limited that would be at the moment. You'd certainly have to lower the resolution to something like 160x120, since even 320x240 would take up 192kb of ram in raw rgb. so limited resolution, possibly even doing it in yuv with 4:2:0 like it's a low quality jpeg would probably be possible, but you would end up having some things more difficult to work with e.g. find the red ball. speed wise at 84-85mhz it ought to be good enough to do the processing at a few frames per second which for lots of things would likely be good enough.

all of this is just speculation based off of what i found googling the chip on it, and then the libccv might not even fit on the 512kb flash it has for the program you put on it.

my thought would be, bight the bullet and go with a raspberry pi or something like that for doing image processing, faster cpu, more ram, and you could hook it up to something like the arduino due, to do other logic, and have the due ask it questions like, "where is the ball" etc.

source: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Arduino-Due-featuring-Atmel-A...
You've reversed your economics.

In Miami there is merely a surplus of unskilled labour desperate to work under the table. They don't pay more because they don't have to.
You're doing the best you can with one MySQL server.

One thing you must do is keep a MySQL data dump, as recent as you can afford (at least one per day, more often if you can; note that dumps can have nontrivial performance impacts), in an accessible location. (The easy thing to use is S3; though you're still vulnerable to Amazon outages, my empirical observation over my last three years as an AWS devops guy is that S3 rarely goes down, even when EBS or EC2 is freaking out. But the paranoid person has backups outside Amazon as well.)

Then, in an emergency, boot another MySQL server in a different zone (or even region), recover the DB, and go.

There are lots of problems with this plan. One is that it is wicked slow at the best of times: Your downtime will be measured in minutes or hours. The second is that, when AWS is having an outage, it very often becomes difficult to impossible to do anything with its API, especially launching new machines. (My hypothesis is that this is often due to the surge of thousands of people just like you, all trying to launch new machines to handle the outage.) So, again, downtime could be hours. But hours is better than days or decades.

For actual HA you must run two MySQL servers at all times, one in each of two availability zones, one of which has a slightly older copy of the data. To make "slightly older" as short as possible, most folks master-master replicate the data between the servers. But you must not write to both DB servers at the same time, so one machine will still be "in charge" of writes at any given moment, and you'll have to have a scheme for swapping that "in charge of writes" status over to the other DB when the first one fails. (I'd suggest the "human logs in with SSH and runs a script" method to start, on the assumption that you don't need HA on the time scale of thirty seconds rather than thirty minutes.)

There are several other bits of plumbing involved with replication: Setting up something like Nagios to alert you when replication breaks, learning how to rebuild replication from scratch when one server dies, et cetera. You'll want to check out Percona Toolkit. Or, though I haven't used it yet, you should read up on Percona XtraDB Cluster, which I think does all of the above and comes with the option to buy support from Percona, which has smart folks:

http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtradb-cluster/

The next stage, if you've got money, really love setting up new tools, and laugh defiantly in the face of latency, is to try master-master replication across AWS regions using a product like Continuent Tungsten: http://continuent.com/downloads/software . But I'm not sure what it costs. Probably more than you want to spend at this point in your product lifecycle.
Prescient stuff on knowledge economies from Alvin Toffler in 1990
It's a simple sounding solution but I'm skeptical of the issue being that simple. There's a world of difference between GE style corporation and an S-corp owned by a single person.

The GE type corporations effectively pay very little tax in the present system. They also have the right to spend an unlimited amount of money on election campaigns. In the U.S. system corporations are treated as persons. If a person makes an income (profit) they get taxed.

What we presently have is a broken system in my opinion. The very rich earn their money through capital gains and the capital gains tax is very, very low. The very wealthy in the U.S. do not pay a fair share of the tax burden or for the cost of government. Perhaps eliminating corporate taxes while simultaneously greatly increasing capital gains taxes would be good. There could also be some bad consequences to eliminating corporate taxes altogether.
Five Years On, iOS Security Has Been a Huge Win for Customers
Yes, I definitely was. I figured it out after a while, but it definitely bothered me.
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.

And seriously: The article doesn't tell us, but we can assume he's a first or second generation immigrant from Haiti, a place of truly grinding poverty. "We" have already given him an absolutely tremendous hand up by giving his family a chance to be here. We could easily deal with the "problem" of poverty like Frantz's if we simply didn't let Haitian refugees and other extremely poor individuals migrate here. But I think it's for the best that we do offer that opportunity when we can.
I see the dip, but IE usage "at home" is still more than 2x that of Chrome (44% vs 20%).
Operating Systems used on Top 500 Supercomputers
No "Christmas" celebration for 2012
Good point - I guess my biggest complaint is that companies like Facebook and Twitter pull some of the most brilliant minds. These minds, in my opinion, could be better spent finding solutions to big problems like cancer, space exploration, green energy, clean water etc. I guess it's not so much that I dislike social networks, more that I dislike the opportunity cost of having smart people go work for them.
New versions do not need to be limited by old browsers. Why not build a mutable API? Your browser doesn't support canvas? Oh, too bad, but the Canvas module will just be undefined so you, the developer, can choose what to do with your user.
All money is double taxed, triple taxed, etc. The money a business receives from selling a good is 'taxed' money. If you earn a profit (gain) you pay a tax. It's the only way to keep things consistent and fair.
No idea. Someone who has experienced that on Heroku should weigh in...

We're hosting static media on S3, but this project has no UGC and very limited amount of media assets, so you'd have to consider the AWS costs depending on your own needs.

When I first deployed to Heroku, I was serving media right from the web dyno, and it was working, but since the app is serving up the files (not Nginx serving them directly instead, or similar), I'd imagine that's not a great solution in terms of scalability.
You are looking at the nominal corporate tax rate. What is relevant in such considerations is the effective tax rate.
MacOS KenDensed: Patent Ping Pong & Happy Birthday, iPhone
Just because they are required to pay FICA doesn't mean they are. Under-the-table cash payment jobs are not that uncommon particularly for laborer work done by (possibly undocumented) immigrants.
Insert coin: a look back at our favorite classic arcade games
And then you flip the big red switch
I don't know what I was expecting. The title was, after all, "How to beta test your mobile apps".
need apt-get install ia32-libs g++-multilib if this is on 64bit
Yes, these stats are from May 2012 and they were first published on June 1 (29 days ago).
There's a difference between software having features and having opinions. For example, Pylons (http://www.pylonsproject.org/) ships with a large feature set but doesn't feel like you're forced to use any of them, whereas Django ships with a larger feature set and doesn't give you much choice.

Naturally, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
Replying to App Store reviews
The one thing that I find most difficult is how to actually recruit new, quality beta testers, which the article doesn't really touch upon. I've had some success from sending out personal tweets, giving sneak peeks of upcoming projects on dribbble and emailing bloggers to give me a shout out.

Never the less, the signal to noise ratio has always been very high.
You're probably right, I was (still am) irked by the amount of nonsense I had to wade through before I got something tangible out of my time investment. In my defense I provided something useful to go with the my "causticism", so I can claim my heart was in the right place all along. :)
What's the deal with the % measuring? I know going below three nines is seen as "bad service", but three hours of outage in a month gives you 99.5%, not 99.97%
also check out http://simplecv.org
Why do you say 90%?

Also, do you mean worldwide or U.S. consumers in particular?
Google's secret sauce has a lot less to do with page rankings and a lot more to do with how to do really cheap and efficient data processing.
Check also http://www.vlfeat.org/.

It is quite used in the research community, with new algorithms coming soon (check this: http://eccv2012.unifi.it/program/tutorials/modern-features-a...).
So, disagreeing and showing facts is throwing a fit?
You list Facebook as being an equal problem for developers. I remember seeing articles on the other four companies you list, but not Facebook. Did I miss something? Honest question: what did I miss?
I agree. It seems like the author of the post threw together a list of books that came out of a cursory search on Amazon. This is linkbait, and I'm flagging this post.
There are also many reasons why you should not. (Speaking as someone who left her PhD two years in to do a startup.)

The best thing to do if you are facing the option of a PhD and also interested in other paths (startup, bigco, etc) is to fully understand what the PhD will do for you and what it is like. Including the impact it might have on your mental health, career, and ability to do a startup later. Reading essays like pgbovine's are a great way to fully understand this decision.
Which EC2 Availability Zone is Affected by an Outage?
Why should I bother following your demands? If you've ignored a million blog posts that clearly explain it, you'll ignore me as well. And if you don't have enough experience of better programming languages that the warts are obvious, then what I could have to say would make no sense to you. To you it would be just the way things are - even though they aren't that way for other developers in other languages.
If files could package and pass around metadata in the same way they pass around data, I might agree with Dare's conclusion. However, for me, metadata is becoming too important and has destroyed the utility of files (and pure data) being truly useful.

Example: Photos. The file is the photo. However, think of all the things besides that: face tags, text tags, album, ratings, etc. If you've ever tried to import 5GB of photos from iPhoto to Picasa (or vice-versa) you'll understand what I mean.

This is why "stuff in the cloud" is so useful: API support is there from day 1 so that you always know what CAN be exported and how.
This graph is about a month old at this point, it should update with the newest stats tomorrow. Until then, you can see the day-by-day stats for the past month here:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120531-2012062...

Here's another good one that splits the IE line into IE 6/7/8 lines, and the Firefox line into 3.6/4/5+ lines:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combine...

Also be sure to check out the plurality-browser-share-by-country view via the world map:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120531-2012062...

Granted, it's hard to know who to trust regarding browser market share stats. But more data points are always useful.
The Raspberry Pi has my interested, as it does seem to have significantly more power for this type of thing (in a limited sense)
I need to sit down and read the docs better, but is there any easy(ish) way for me to use this with Ruby/Rails?
Pymothoa: JIT'ing Python Over LLVM
"Super judgmental" for saying to close your laptop during a conference talk?

This is common, fucking, courtesy. I cannot even fathom how one would find that "narcissistic".

The part about "opening them" if the presentation is boring, though, is problematic. Who is to call that?
US Navy X-47B Robot Fighter Jet Completes First Phase Of Testing
> So he didnt just say "tons of people use PHP", he said "tons of people use PHP and it solves their problems giving results".

The original discussion was about whether PHP was a good language. He came in and said, "It is because look at all the people who use it! Obviously it's fine!" That's an appeal to popularity.

> On the other hand your arguments are appeals to "logic", "theory", etc, eg idealism and elitism in the face of actual results.

What results? We're not talking about Mom & Pop's Homepage, here. Posting about how most sites run on PHP doesn't help us when we're not talking about most sites. We're talking about building apps.
Prior to Appstark, we were building games and we had to recruit beta testers. We recruited around 800 beta testers for our game on Android, all without a single blog covering us. I will do follow up post about it.
"Apple is an amazing marketer"

Love how he tries to downplay Apple engineering by bringing up marketing.

IMO Apple is one of the top engineering companies around. Others mention their innovative design but look at how they engineer their products to fit into the design aesthetic.

I do wish most of these superficial software pattents would go away, but don't say Apple is not innovative
It looks like they link to the GNU Scientific Library which is GPL so they need to have GPL compatible licence.
So Chrome is the most used browser and IE is the browser used by the most people. Which is the more profitable status?