skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At Devopsdays I listened to a lot of smart people saying smart things. And to some people saying things that sounded smart, but really weren’t. It was especially confusing when you heard both of these kinds of things from the same person.

Experience has taught me that if someone who is clearly smart, who clearly says smart things, says something that sounds dumb to me, it is worthwhile for me to not just dismiss that. Instead I need to examine my preconceptions for why I disagree, and why they came to the conclusion that they did. Until I have satisfied myself that I understand both why they thought as they did, and why I disagree, there is a good chance that I'm missing a valuable lesson.

This example is a case in point. Clearly it is from the point of view of a web company. The advice offered is not for all environments - there is a world of difference between a case where downtime means someone doesn't see a picture for 15 minutes and one where someone dies.

Now about unit testing and monitoring, let me give an example. I know a company (which I can't name) that releases multiple times per day, and releases every change as an A/B test. This is important. If they release a change, that works exactly as designed, that hurts conversion by 10%, THEY WILL KNOW. (You need significant traffic to follow this strategy, they have that.) This is important. There are a lot of trivial changes that could move the needle 10% without your realizing, and you don't want to move it in the wrong way.

In fact, if you look at the dollar values, a bug that causes 1% of pages to crash which unit testing could catch is simply not as important as a bug that hurts revenue that the A/B test could catch.

But it gets better. If you have 0 tolerance for web pages crashing and have monitoring in place to catch it (I know people who have all crashes email key developers), then you'll catch a lot of bugs that you would catch with unit tests, AND you'll catch bugs that you SHOULD have caught with unit tests but messed up on the test. Which, then, provided more value, the unit test or monitoring?

You want the unit test. You don't want to be catching stuff after you roll out. And one of the automatic questions when you do catch it should be, "How could we have caught that with an automatic test?" But having smart monitoring is more valuable to you than the unit test.
Every time I see that picture it makes me hate Instagram a little bit more.
Well it embodies the best and the worst of internet movements.

While the foundations are good: protecting the web from bad laws, restrictions etc... the execution is really ridiculous. Imagine you're an old style Senator or representative and you see that website with a weird ass looking cat... Do you really think it's going to make them think you're anything but a joke?

I find that the words used are equally ridiculous: "League", "XXX signal".

It really feels like a little club of geeks trying to have an impact in the world and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It could have been a great idea, it's ruined by a poor execution.

edit: I have seen a lot of negative reactions and I appreciate people taking the time to answer to me. I won't edit my previous comment but let me add some things:

I didn't mean to be insulting but if you want it to be a democratic movement you have to avoid inside jokes at all cost. It's literally filled with Reddit/ geek pop culture references and it won't take off in the general public because a very large portion of the population do not understand or don't like it. It's like saying a meme out loud: you feel ridiculous.

For old style senators I am talking about basically any person over 35 that has no idea what reddit/ twitter/ cat facts are and who will find that ridiculous. Yes Senators and representatives are supposed to work for you, but it's like for everything they have to take you seriously. We belong to the Z generation but in order to talk to other generations we have to use common references and avoid cats or internet memes or super hero folklore for what it matters. Serious business in two words.
Good post, I just want to add something:

Some fruits have lots of sugar, like apples, grapes and watermelon.
The Mystery of the Lost Leading Zeros
What really happens to your leading zeros when you save your data in .csv format…
While insiders (and outsiders) are prone to quibble about specifics, I think most people understand and basically agree with arguments for anti enhancement rules.

Things start to get very fuzzy when/if previously banned enhancements start becoming common among non athletes. Hormone treatments to slow or reverse aging, aid recovery, improve body fat levels and such. If a drug can improve stamina in athletes, a milder dose will probably be a nice enhancement for ordinary people. If everyone is taking a drug that makes you more alert and patient, it's weird that athletes aren't allowed to take it. If everyone is doing anti aging hormone treatments to look 40 at 60, it seems ridiculous when a tennis players retires at 31 for want of those hormones.

Competing athletes will "abuse" these enhancements in the sense that they will go well beyond what doctors will recommend. But, you could say that doctors' recommendations take into account the median cost benefit considerations and athletes are at the extreme. In any case, athletes abuse their bodies in other ways. They train well past the optimal (in terms of health) levels. It's obviously not good for your head to get punched 500 times per week, but boxers do it.

Anyway, when your mother can toss a judo player into a second story window, watching the olympics will seem pretty quaint.
It still makes absolutely no sense to me why security questions are used. They're effectively a second alternative password to access your account -- a "password" that's really really easy to guess (especially if you know who the account belongs to).

You might as well just replace "username and password" with "enter your username and what's your favorite food?" or "enter your username and where'd you grow up as a child?"

Pretty secure, huh?
Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'm not wealthy by any means, so income is definitely going to be an issue. But I don't have very many expenses or responsibilities (yet), so it's not too difficult to live cheaply on 20-30k a year.
Well, yes, I see that issue. But also that is not as simple as MS now takes it:

- Childporn; pictures of very young children are stimulating to perverts and while there are definitely very 'wrong' pictures in this category, there are also just pictures you took of your young kids and have in your private folders ; that's not childporn UNLESS a pervert gets his hands on it. Meaning when it is private and yours, it should not be removed. It's memories of your children who naively play in the garden forgetting to put their pants on (I wish I could do that ffs) for instance. In the wrong hands dangerous, private and not shared; perfectly normal.

- Pirated movies; at least here you are allowed to backup movies you own, again if they are private, it cannot be that your account is removed for this; you HAVE the DVDs in your home and you ripped them in case of fire or when the break (and they often do after many years).

Both are crap arguments for removing accounts or even data UNLESS they are made public.

Hence it can be solved very easily ; just scan public dirs.
It's brown on white as long as all the images load.
I wish. Mail is designed to be not private at all. It is transferred unencrypted through the internet unless you as user take care of upper level encryption.
Depending upon mood if you are just into watching videos then this may work very well. Personally I like to see everything in my news feed.
Web telelporter is great especially since a cute girl is working at Amélie's Bakery.
Goatse (for example)?
So, my question is: given all the controversy in the (tech) media over patents lately, how is the patent office able to rationalize granting (what appears to me to be) a very bad patent?
Apple isn't immune to the patent game either. What if any of the countless assaults on Apple succeed?

There are a lot of what ifs. There are millions of patents in play.
I'd love to hear the reaction of those universities who initially rejected this and their reasons.
Yep, from the research paper, page 4:
http://bojinov.org/professional/usenixsec2012-rubberhose.pdf
Why don't they just put: "We can ban your account without prior notice for any reason we see fit."

Tons of services have that.
How we test our factories at Doorsteps
A lot more people have seen one of these banners via social media than the real Shell advertisements. Some of them will have talked about it. Some more will look at the cute animals and hate Shell. I suspect that Greenpeace will be able to count on some of these people next time a cute fundraiser knocks on their doors...
I am using the Customer Preview without the 365 cloud storage. It is not mandatory in my experience; you can just chose to not log in with a WLID.
Isn't there a slight problem whereby someone denies knowing the password, you just put them in front of the keyboard and just ask them to type something? Due to it being a subconcious memory, it 'just happens'.
Yeah, the research paper notes that they need to implement 'coercion detection'. From page 12:

"Since our aim is to prevent users from effectively transmitting the ability to authenticate to others, there remains an attack where an adversary coerces a user to authenticate while they are under ad- versary control. It is possible to reduce the effective- ness of this technique if the system could detect if the user is under duress. Some behaviors such as timed re- sponses to stimuli may detectably change when the user is under duress."
The one advantage something like Georgia has is that everyone has it local. Web fonts don't look great in all browsers and platforms - particularly on most Windows browsers, the anti-aliasing and hinting gets pretty heinous.
All the people in /r/keto and /r/Paleo will say that you can't possibly eat something better.

(Those are subrreddits.)
I don't accept that "negative people" somehow screw a startup. Handling criticism makes for a stronger product.
Thank you for the detailed review!

Indeed, it seems like one of those problems where solutions seem obvious (use TrueCrypt!) until you experiment or think about it more deeply.
> Aren't you promoting the same hearsay?

I'm promoting the statistical observation that there is a 90%-95% chance that these types of stories are made up.

My dataset is gathered over the last decade, from hundreds of stories, first published by the "victim", then detailed by the other party.

> so it's buyer beware

No. It's reader beware, if you want to take my comment into context.

The fact is if there is no sensationalism, then there is no story. Hence we get mostly sensationalism when we get stories. And that's not hearsay.
I hibernate my windows PC indefinitely (about 2 months so far). Till firefox 11 or so I had to close it every 3 days or so with 4-5 hours of heavy browsing each day. With latest versions I go for about 8 days without close. More importantly, firefox used to slow down noticeably in between browsing before but now it remains snappy till it starts hitting the disk for paged memory. With this memory leak fixing, I hope to go longer without closing firefox.
Perhaps I'll take you up on the offer. I actually am one of your hoped cases, where there's the possibility for moving to support at some point. Not the biggest fan of some Oracle decisions, but it's also difficult to justify paying for RH support and using it once every few years.
Ask HN: What does it take to launch a successful Kickstarter Campaign?
My first ever Kickstarter campaign failed two weeks ago. It was disappointing, but I learned a lot about what I did wrong and what I could have done better.

For example:
Timing. I was trying to launch a summer clothing brand, but due to Amazon Payments delays the Kickstarter page didn't launch until mid-June. This forced me to move back delivery times, and turned a lot of customers away.
Choose the right demographic. Certain demographics are more likely to succeed than others
*Have a large Facebook or Twitter fan base. When you already have a large following, they'll make it much easier to get coverage and social proof that convinces other customers who are unfamiliar with your brand to buy

For all the HNers out there, what do you think it takes to fund a successful Kickstarter campaign?
Windows 8: Top Reasons Why I choose XAML Over HTML5
This

It may be an interesting research, but it certainly won't help with that issue (with noting passwords down maybe)

And one thing may happen, you can have no clue of what your password is, or write it down, but you may need to look at the sequence to remember it! (Piano players may identify there)
that SJ passed away and the author is using the wrong grammatical tense.
The problem with using coercion is, the people using it never believe it's useless regardless of what's coming out of your mouth.
Don't reserve for 3 years.

AWS cuts their costs at a relatively reliable rate. We've done the match an found that the 1 year reservations are absolutely worth while, but that the 3 year reservations are not. Granted that was for our specific workload / use case.

Money has a time value, and this stuff is getting cheaper fast.
Ahh okay that makes sense. Very nice then. I was thinking more of the Truecrypt variety, but Encfs sounds ideal (albeit not really a file system).
And safe in countries outside the US as (some/all) of the patents won't be valid there.

Have members of this forum thought about the consequences of an unencumbered India and China with a large developer community?
Sharing photos across social networks
Sorry we have to check. Are you human?
But the thing is that they are (probably) not actively scanning your files for such content and those terms only come into effect if you're reported by someone.
I just cant take such initiatives seriously if they have Facebook-Buttons...
A bicycle-powered e-waste recycler
You know, I actually think it would be better if the patent was upheld. Imagine the fiasco it would create. It would put the spotlight on the absurdity and abuses of the patent system when applied to technology. Might even get non-technical folks interested.

Ultimately I think the solution is going to be one of the ones Judge Posner outlined in his editorial, but it might take a big shakeup like this to turn patents into the issue-of-the-moment for the populace and get something done (you know, in the usual rushed, nobody-read-this-legislation way).
What Shell may have done -- namely, claiming jobs creation and downplaying environmental cost -- is something very different than what Greenpeace did here.
Milky Way Above Easter Island
13,397 feet
Every service I've worked on doesn't look, because they don't want to know -- there's no business reason to know. Having this kind of knowledge about customer content is completely counter to the business goals.

An intelligent company will work to minimize disruption to the user. Affording the user privacy and turning a blind eye to this sort of thing goes a long way towards producing a usable product.

But, what if someone complains? What if this photo was public and resulted in a complaint?

Even then, the idea that an entire account should be suspended over a TOS violation is absurd. By all means remove the content. Perhaps even disallow uploads for a time, or even indefinitely. But a policy of disabling everything including unrelated services and purchased content smacks if ignorant product design and typical Microsoft hubris.

This is a great example of why their product services can't gain traction in the market.
Since I'm spending more than $1,000/month for an RDS master, which is backed by EBS, i'm intrigued at the idea of running our database off of these. Of course I'd lose all the awesome automated features of RDS, but worth considering.

Maybe AWS will release a High Performance RDS option that runs off of them. Wishful thinking.
They have very different smoke points.

In short: coconut oil (also palm oil) will be useful after you use it to fry, while olive oil will stop being olive oil after just some heating. In fact, do not fry anything with olive oil. Olive oil should be added to food in your plate only.
Dawn of the Dish
> All cloud storage providers need a policy similar to what Microsoft have.

No they don't. Its my data. Stay the heck out of my storage room that I pay you for every month, on time.

Its disappointing how far those companies go in playing cops and judges. They should provide service, not the letter of the law.

If cops have a good enough reason to believe you hosting child pornography, they could get a subpoena from a judge and then request Microsoft to open your vault. Otherwise we getting to the point where we don't need judges anymore -- we have bunch of creeps at Microsoft or other company deciding on what is "right" or "wrong". And this is wrong.
Really excellent piece of work. I've been using Omnigraffle for almost 10yrs and this is the first web-based tool that I've felt good about. Really great work.
It'll actually end up being a tax benefit while costing them no actual red ink.
Hmm.. brb patenting the process of applying for a patent.
Awesome! I see they lost the Soviet Lunokhod 1 array for nearly 40 years!
It's free, unlike those other, costly browsers.
'Abandoned' is Eugene Robinson's term. He is a famous, left of center political commentator and writer for the Washington Post. He is black, and if you had any idea of what you were talking about, you would realize that 'Abandoned' doesn't reference them being taken care of by the mainstream at one point. It references the fact that the 'white flight' of the 1950's - 70's is a misnomer. It was really a middle class flight from cities, but the black middle class was delayed in their "abandoning" the inner cities due to racist housing discrimination policies in white suburbs. Once these were taken away in the 60's, the black middle class also fled the cities.

"Ah of course, if only people acted more white they wouldn't have all these problems"

This statement is exactly what I'm talking about. As if there is one 'white' culture in America. There isn't. I speak in a different manner at work than I do at home. My native dialect is not considered acceptable in business. I don't say y'all or ain't, and I shorten my words into the Anglo-Saxon, northeastern dialect that is the de-facto business standard English of the U.S. If I don't, I suffer the consequences. 'White' is a race, not a culture. But again, you completely miss this. I guess you also think that a black person who speaks in a north-eastern anglo-saxon dialect is 'acting white' correct? This is such bullshit, and it is the epitome of a person who learned about culture in a classroom, rather than living in a truly integrated environment.

My best friend growing up was victimized (physically attacked) by 'Abandoned' kids because he did well in school and 'acted white.'(there words, not mine) Nice to see this type of thinking isn't limited to just them. /s

The majority of white people I encounter who claim to be multicultural have never even spent the night under the roof of a person of color, let alone attended churches or social gatherings to truly understand that its about culture, not race.
I'm not sure you've got 3-4 right, but it doesn't matter. Step 1 sinks the whole thing.
DOJ investigating BazaarVoice over antitrust violations
I get the impression he knew what was going on without the cameras.
Exxon made a profit of $41bn on a turnover of $480bn - about an 8% profit margin. That's not really "money for nothing". That's a healthy return on a gargantuan investment.

Some tech stocks profit margins: AAPL: ~30%, MSFT: ~30%, GOOG: ~25%. 3-4 times higher than Exxon. Do those companies all make money for nothing too?
Nitpick: This is not unbreakable crypto. This is more of a more secure key storage mechanism. Perhaps also a good defense against phishing attacks.

And it's not unbreakable. For starters, this system absolutely requires that the passwords be stored in the clear.
The All Drug Olympics SNL sketch is the first thing I think of for articles like this.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4090/
It should make a private copy of the data it needs.
Ah there we go, I didn't think to refresh :/

One of those days
Perhaps I'm being dense, but what is the proper tense?

Nothing in that sentence reads to me like the author thinks that Steve is alive (okay, 'see' maybe).
I'm not entirely sure why this is surprising news to anybody; in the original iPhone announcement, I believe Steve Jobs said, "...and boy have we patented it."

Let's be frank: Apple is not the only major technology company with a massive collection of questionable patents that they could use to stifle their competition. The system, as it is today, basically forces companies into these patents because if they don't patent it someone else will. To put it colloquially: "Don't hate the player, hate the game."
I think IBM actually have a patent on "patent trolling."[1]

[1]: http://slashdot.org/story/11/01/02/1534223/ibm-files-the-pat...
Andrew McAfee: Could automation lead to chronic unemployment?
I'm glad you liked it. I don't need any gifts, but I appreciate the sentiment.

You might be able to get some free media coverage if you make a blog post explaining that Pinterest is forcing you to change your name, maybe include the relevant text of the C&D they sent over, indicate a possible loss of business and customers, and give it a title like "Pinterest Claims To Own The Word 'Pin'". Then email tech bloggers and media publications and hope they pick up your story. Everyone loves a good David vs. Goliath story.
I'll just leave these here...

http://www.rsync.net/philosophy.html

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/tos.html

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Some friends of mine just completed their successful Kickstarter campaign for Sunglasses with a Bottle opener - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2093465669/jackhawk-9000... and from the feedback that I got from them it was about the video and the outreach that they did during the campaign.

They created facebook groups, updated the kickstarter page and built a cultish following out of family and friends. They also had enough level in which people could show support and then share the link on facebook to expand their network.

But having something that solves a perceived problem, having it close to completion or "just needing the money for production" seems to work because people know that they will get the product.
If anyone is interested in a live example of a MMORPG built in HTML5, this was a project of mine at my last job: http://play.parallelkingdom.com/

It uses the Cometd javascript and java libraries. In my opinion, you can get very "real-time" feeling games on the web with these technologies.
Especially if the patent were found to be invalid elsewhere, and Android gets banned only in the US. That would cause people outside our industry to stop and think.

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure Apple wouldn't get that far - they could demand a $20 or $30 royalty instead, so consumers won't be directly confronted with the insanity; Android phones would just start being closer in price to iPhones.
There's also the fact that your password will ALWAYS be shown as one of the sequences. Would-be hacker just tries 5 times and notes that THIS sequence keeps showing up, that must be the right one.

Maybe there's a more obtuse use-case but this seems like more of a cool experiment on human memory than a practical cryptography tool.
0. Adding a launchrock page before anyone has any idea who you are.
> We can’t take all of our energy and all of our care and finish the painting, then have someone else put their name on it.

What a load of shit. What happened to “great artists steal”? Great art must be stolen to inspire new, greater art.

The iPhone is awesome. May a thousand devices like it bloom.