skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not certain if this is ready for the public. When I visited the demo site with Chrome for ICS there were rendering errors with the bottom bar. http://www.imgur.com/WVKzi.png
What Facebook's New Campus Design Tells Us About the Company
The Curse Of Knowledge
Shared Workforce - On-demand Human Intelligence to Moderate Content
Mainframes tend to have prodigious amounts of expensive, unusually fast, specialised RAM. And then they have extremely smart controller hardware that the OSes can hand off almost everything off to.

And this is a theme replicated throughout mainframe design. Everything is replicated, all pathways are wide as possible, everything is integrated from the hardware up to the application layer.

Take virtualisation, for instance. IBM mainframes have PR/SM, a hardware-level capability to virtualise everything in the system down to the lowest level of granularity. And they've done this since 1985.
The only in-the-wild attacks against WPA2 are variations of brute-force attacks.

There are precomputed rainbow tables of common SSID+passphrase combinations floating around, but as a general rule, WPA2 with a sufficiently complex passphrase should be secure against anyone who doesn't have a massive compute cluster at their disposal.
A not-so-modern but fun anecdote:

My father worked on a product called SnapVantage in the late 90s and early 2000s, which basically used the copy-on-write abilities of the virtualized mainframe disk in a StorageTek disk array combined with z/Linux and z/VM as a hypervisor to instantly provision and boot Linux machines.

It looked like a very, very toned down version of the AWS management console, with a near-identical ability to select a distribution, upload SSH keys, find an IP, and have a full, running VM in seconds... but this was in 1999, when watching a Linux box "copy," provision, and come up in just a few seconds was mind-blowing.

I used my nascent Perl skills (as a ten-year-old) to write the installer for the host software, which I believe actually shipped to customers nearly unmodified!

The zSeries still supports a lot of battle-hardened HA features like lock-step execution, hot CPU fail-over, and hot-swap memory and IO which are very rare, esoteric, and hence hard to support in the x86 world (and rare, esoteric, and untested is not what you want in your HA system).

Plus, the number of VMs that can run well on a z/Linux and z/VM environment is amazing - we had hundreds and hundreds of instances running on one zSeries.

There's a very full-featured zSeries emulator called Hercules which will allow you to run z/OS and z/VM (if you can find them, of course). There's also a distribution of MVS 3.8j, the 1980s System 370 / System 390 precursor to z/OS, available for Hercules for free if you want to get a taste of what administering such a system is like. A lot of obscure job-scripting languages like JCL and early scripting languages like REXX were developed for early mainframes and still live on today.
This product has been out for a little while, but its the first time I've come across it.

They are still in beta (no pricing listed yet), but I especially like the fact that the turnaround time is so low.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/using_xmpp ?
The actual system information can be found at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks.nsf/RedpieceAbstracts/s...

As someone who never has need to touch a mainframe, it's quite strange to look through this. It's not the 120 processor cores and 3 TB of RAM that surprise me; it's things like the cooling system and the I/O system that are so different from what I'm used to from working on a desktop system.
How Long Will You Need to Save to Buy a Home In Your City?
Are you saying there is not a big difference between a great mechanic (who fixes stuff that stays fixed) and the one to whom you are always bringing your car back to?
How do you manage to achieve that - instantly stand out on the streets of Bangalore as distinctly "NRI"?

Is it the clothes? Or something else? Please elaborate.

Becasue I met a nice person in Costa Coffee a few days back and after chatting for some time he revealed he was an NRI here for some falimy affair. He went to UK when he was 15 (he looked 25-30). To me at least he didn't stand out like an NRI. Neither his language or the accent. He was a Kannadiga (Kannada his mother tongue) and me being a north Indian (Hindi my mother tongue), we talked in clear and crisp Hindi for about 15-20 minutes.
How to Reinvigorate and Refocus Your Business
I/O is about channels. Channels are fixed bandwidth queues which generally have a 'signaling' rate, and a 'bandwidth' the one that most people are familiar with is a SATA port.

A SATA port can do some number of IOs per second (this depends on how the controller is designed for the most part) and the SATA data pipe is 6 gigabits/second or 600 megabytes per second these days.

A SATA Disk (the spinning rust kind) is different, it can pump out some maximum amount of data per second (usually about 100 Mbytes/sec and has an average seek time of a few milleseconds. So if you are doing random i/os to the disk, so that every I/O needs a seek, and the seek takes 10 mS, you can do at most 100 I/O operations per second (IOPS) if you transfer 512 bytes with each IOP you get a throughput of 100* .5K or 50K bytes per second. If you transfer 100Kbytes per transaction you get 10 megabytes per second. Anyway the bottom line is that an I/O channel is bound both by its bandwidth and the number of IOPS it can do.

A PCIe 'lane' can do 250Mbytes per second and with Intel's 5500 chipset about 2 million IOPs. (Although those IOPs are spread across all PCIe channels) A "big" server chip set will give you 32 or maybe 48 PCIe "lanes" which can be 12 by 4 (or x4) lanes or 2x16 + 8x1, or 2x16, 1x4 and 4x1 (this is a common desktop config for two video cards and misc peripherals)

The bottle neck is exactly like networking, each I/O device can consume a certain amount of channel bandwidth, since they don't run 24/7 you can "oversubscribe" which is to say potentially have more I/O devices than you have bandwidth to service them (this happens a lot in like big disk arrays) and ultimately the transaction rate of the entire system is constrained by the cross sectional bandwidth of memory and I/O channels such that you get I/O limited in terms of things you can push around.

Anyway, a mainframe has thousands of channels. Lots and lots of them. And each of those channels has a lot of raw bandwidth and can sustain a high transaction rate. This makes a mainframe a transaction monster.

In the taxonomy of computer systems, 'supercomputers' have a monster amount of memory bandwidth and high transaction rates (low latency) between their compute nodes (or cores). Mainframes have a monster amount of I/O bandwidth with high transaction rates between their nodes and I/O devices. General purpose computers achieve good economics by limiting memory and I/O bandwidth to stuff that will fit in a single piece of silicon. (or at most a couple of pieces)
Back in the day mainframes had an I/O advantage because they offloaded a lot of I/O processing to coprocessors (e.g. a minicomputer would just have one processor while a mainframe would have one main processor and one or more I/O coprocessors). That advantage appears to be gone now because I think they are using normal PCIe cards and normal cores as I/O coprocessors (which you could also do on a non-mainframe server).

Of course, mainframes are also faster simply because they are more expensive (e.g. 100 PCIe slots are obviously faster than 10 slots), but that's not an intrinsic advantage (in theory you could develop a $10M x86 server — call SGI if you're interested).
Why EFNet has no NickServ
My father has worked for IBM, Airlines and Credit Card companies developing on their mainframes. I believe the the system is called z/TPF?

I can't recall any specific stats or stories right now but you can imagine the discussions between a father who develops primarily with Assembly and a son (me) who ended up being a .NET developer working on various startups. We've had a few talks about the 'cloud' mostly resulting in him laughing at what we call 'web scale'.
the homepage template concept is brilliant -- kudos to wordpress for a HUGE improvement over their last default template
Plenty of other machines have Amazing IO in this day and age now. It is a fairly old notion now that Mainframes were much better at IO than other machines (this /was/ true).

That said, they do deal with IO pretty well. They have dedicated offload processors for transferring data, which means for the same (IO intensive) workload, the CP utilisation of a zSeries machine would be much less than that of an x86, pSeries (or other) machine. And in terms of the disk being a bottle neck... If you're pushing to a disk array that has 192GB (pretty standard) of write-back cache... then no, the disks are not a large concern.

But... At the end of the day, does this really weigh up to the cost of Big Iron, or for that matter the additional licensing of software on top of it?... Not really.. is my answer.
Thanks! It's been an open source project of love for over 1.5 years. The future of Node.JS with AppFog and Nodester are very bright. Hack the planet!
They can also ship on SPARC ;)
Florida Deputy Uses Spidey-Sense to Establish Probable Cause;
In reality, I think people like her are less dangerous/harmful than the amoral snakes who do know how to lie and manipulate convincingly, and cover their tracks. Ms. Hornstein made herself a relatively easy target of suspicion, what with the photoshops and outsize claims; it almost sounds like she had delusions of grandeur. Compare that to sociopaths who deceive intelligently and play dirty games to climb up - they're much harder to catch or stop.

(Not defending her, I just find her actions a little too transparent to worry about)
I disagree. I spend much of my time working in Japan, and notice that people rarely ever lock their bikes, and am told by the locals that bicycle theft (and theft, in general) is rare. I have personally witnessed, in fact, a colleague leave a laptop on a bench in a busy district of Tokyo and when he realized it _an hour later_ he returned to find the laptop there, untouched.

There's a lot of cultural difference to factor into the analysis. I think the article holds true for the U.S., and especially the Bay Area. I've had my own bicycle stolen there (despite a hefty U-lock).
You really think candidates are (or could be) chosen based on anything even remotely related to those abilities?
I used to develop software for system-z(2 years ago). As someone else said, if you are already using mainframes, get another one. If you arent, pretty much you can ignore them. Their hardware is of higher quality, but I think their uptime has more to do with the hermetic seal of human process that exists around the installations. You can't get anything changed in production, ever. And thats fine, because banks have been doing the same thing for the last 30 years.

I don't actually think performance wise they have anything on a cluster of x86 servers. But its hard to benchmark things like that accurately.

From a developer point of view, its not a great technology stack to work on. Its old and out dated, and is pretty incompatible with other platforms. EBCDIC is a pain, 3270 terminal is a pain. Having to allocate files manually is a pain. Having actually about 7 different types of files is a pain.

Its really all a pain. Just dont go there.

Also, I found that guys who had been working on mainframes for a really long time have a pretty outdated view of what the "distributed" world has to offer. A lot of the time they dont understand what "web Scale" at the level of google, facebook et al are operating at.

As an additional funny annecdote, the I/O that a lot of people have been talking about is now conventional if high end disk array's AFAIK. But internally the disks are emulated for the OS to look like the disks it was using back in like 1975. Thats how it gets backwards compatibility, just dont change anything.
I imagine that just the fear of being stopped by an officer would deter people from buying stolen bikes, thus effectively making stealing bikes much less valuable.
IANAL but here are two things I found interesting about the patent:

1. It doesn't claim the methods, only the systems. My (dim) understanding is that this means it isn't a software patent (a "method" patent), it's just a patent on a "system" (e.g. a device) implementing those methods. If you want to claim the algorithm, you have to claim the methods too; these claims commonly mirror the claims for the system, but with the words "a method" generally replacing "a system".

2. A claim stakes out an area of ownership; the more "and"s there are, the narrower the claim, just like a SQL query returns fewer results with the more AND phrases you include in the WHERE clause. That first long claim (on which all the others are based) could be paraphrased as "Like Tivo, but with the user additionally being able to cut/copy/paste ('edit') sections of video, but only when there's a hard drive, and only when there's a CD burner, etc." So a system that omitted or replaced one of those components would not infringe the patent.

The other claims basically just preemptively stake out further sub-sections of the area of ownership so that the next guy to come along can't do what this guy did and just specialize/narrow/tweak the existing invention in those ways.
Congrats man!! Deserved and earned!
Wouldn't you be better to do

var firstnameTextBox = $('#firstname')

Or name your IDs more appropriately?

It depends on your use case, but I don't think it's right to say any speed increase is meaningless.
AppFog did one better, one low price across any infrastructure, even in some cases lower than using the IaaS directly
As I posted on their page I love the news. The forward momentum of this company is great. Not only are they based in my beloved town, they have a very clear mission, and a clear path for getting there. It's exciting stuff.
Finally much needed improvements to the plugin memory leak! Its pretty much unusable on linux after a certain point .... Trying it out now, look pretty good and works as advertised
Does Your Startup Need A Technical Co-Founder?
Sharp reports 2,000 job cuts in Japan, more changes expected
The CN Tower beams a subliminal slide show
Technical Presentation Tips and Speaking Hacks with Scott Hanselman
right now if you don't mind pre-release code:

browse source:

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-content/themes/twentytwelve

check it out:

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/wp-content/themes/twentytwelve /path/to/your/themes/dir/twentytwelve
Is there a reason for any modern compiler to support linking to functions like gets() without setting an "--use-unsafe-libraries" flag?
Do they do load balancing and stuff between locations and route around anywhere with issues? That would be amazing.

Balancing between multiple companies I think would still be better just because of different middlewares and the cascading nature of problems at high scale though.
The code in question 4 is not a memory leak by any reasonable definition of memory leak. Allocating a fixed amount of memory and using it until the program terminates, without ever bothering to free it, is a perfectly valid programming practice. Why should it trouble anyone more than say a statically allocated global array? In fact, it's a wiser thing to do than religiously freeing everything at exit.

An actual memory leak is when the amount of memory program allocates grows with runtime while the amount of data the program is processing remains the same.
I'm interested to see the designer for this theme is none other than Drew Strojny, founder of the company behind The Theme Foundry.

His backstory is remarkable — he was an offensive tackle selected in the 2004 NFL Draft. Really. You can hear him tell the story in an episode of Founders Talk:

http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/22
I am totally not defending the guy, but the question I have is what does the average citizen expect a 'rich' person to do with their savings? Put them into a pass book savings account at Wells Fargo and get .7% APR interest with everything over $250,000 at risk? When you give your money to a venture capitalist to invest in the startups we read about every day it shows up on your tax return a "MayField Plaza Partners Equity Fund, LLC" or some such. And its not like naming those things are easy.

When I rolled over my 401k from Sun into a personally managed IRA with my broker we put parts into things like "Fidelity Large Cap Fund" or "Emerging Markets Fund" which were pretty opaque except for the prospectus that came around once a quarter. So I'm wondering what the outrage is here.
It's funny, the overall article is not about "how do we disarm conservative arguments" it's about a certain type of argument and how it is used. The examples were "liberal" but that is irrelevant, the point is identical.
The Wikipedia article [1] is a pretty good summary. The main advantages are basically very high IO throughput, very good fault tolerance, and very good backwards compatibility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer#Characteristics
Seems that most of the discussion is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4447008
Or, if you're me, you're often carrying 20 pounds of stuff in a backpack on your back anyway, which probably obviates the 5 pound difference in bike weight. I'm riding a Big Buzz: http://www.rei.com/product/775488/novara-big-buzz-bike , which is apparently "sold out" right now, and it seems to work tolerable well. I've ridden friends' expensive bikes, and most of them don't seem to be worth it unless you're racing or riding a LOT of miles.
Another option is to whitelist your ip address, and then require 2-factor auth only when you're connecting from a non-whitelisted ip address.

Of course this leaves you a vulnerable to ip spoofing, but adds a ton of convenience and could be a good trade-off.
Worked out pretty well for some people in the past.
I wonder if anyone realizes just how severe a provocation it is to cut off a WoW player cold turkey like that.

Seems like a pretty strange sanction though. Hopefully Iranians aren't paying for Twitter access.

Such a strange world we live in these days.
Hi! Teacher from http://devbootcamp.com, here. :)

A startup can have a huge impact in this area, speaking from experience.
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Fairly certain port forwarding still works while a command specified in ForceCommand is still running or if you specify a non-interactive shell.

Though I haven't checked ;)
Hmmm, Isn't this late by about 7 to 8 years. We've been asking, requesting and begging them, (while Flash was till with Macromedia) to improve the compiler, make it faster. One of the dreaded thing about Flash was that we have to wait for minutes while it compile. We dreaded the notion of pressing "Ctrl+Enter" on the keyboard.

MTASC by Nicolas Cannasse, came to our rescue and it was a good one - super fast. Nicolas is also behind haXe.

http://www.mtasc.org/
http://haxe.org/
New Zealand may lose the distinction of not allowing software patents
In just three short months it is going to feel horribly dated.
« C evolution », le scooter électrique en préparation, chez BMW
Le constructeur allemand BMW est en train de fignoler son premier scooter électrique. Son nom provisoire est « C evolution », mais aucune date de mise sur le marché n’a été communiquée.
Don't buy upgrades, ride up grades -- (allegedly) Eddy Merckx.
What's wrong with 1995?
This seems completely bass-ackwards. If we want to get Iranians to "come to the light" that is US policy, one of the best ways to do that is to actually have them interacting positively with people in the United States.

Furthermore, while I can (sort of) understand not having US money filter into Iran, I can't understand why there is any problem with Iranian money filtering into the US. Every dollar out of Iran is a dollar less the regime has to "fight" its idealogical war.

There are days I get really tired of the letter of the law being the only possible interpretation. When I sympathize with my Iranian brethren trying to get into a raid because their gear is sucky blue crap, it becomes one of those days.
re the decent player aspect: I've given up on Vimeo.

I use Firefox with the usual privacy plugins: NoScript, RequestPolicy, AdBlockPlus, and Ghostery. No matter how I configure the settings, including disabling all of them, I can't get Vimeo player to work.
Odd - Google alerts have always taken the better part of a day in my experience. I must be using the slow option. ;)
This would (possibly) be true if all mistakes were weighted equally. As soon as some mistakes have more weight (like maybe the machine killed you on accident because it thought your spleen was in your ear), then looking at aggregate numbers doesn't cut it. You'd need to look at both the frequency of errors, as well as severity of errors. I'll take the guy who messes up 50% of the time, but at worst will give me a paper cut over the hypothetical machine who only makes mistakes 1% of the time, but they're always fatal.
I'd like some advice if you have any. I am a 23 year old living in Austin, Tx. I am writing a business plan in hopes of getting backing but im not really sure how to find interested parties. How did you go about deciding on your ventures?
Not sure about U.S. and international 3G / WiFi coverage.

I'm assuming your app is localized into a bunch of languages. While your competitors' apps are available in these countries as well, are they also localized into commonly used languages?
I'm in Tokyo and I got stopped twice by police officers wanting to check my bike, on a 3 month period (I do 2 rides of 30 mins a day). For basically no reason (other than being a foreigner in a country where the police is racist?)
In Tokyo they were really active in checking it too. Police going around and randomly stopping you to check your bike registration. I think I was checked three times in two years (maybe because I'm a foreigner).
Slow Web Movement
Should Your Company Just Say "No" To Dropbox?
It will be packaged with WordPress 3.5, which is slated to be released around early December.

It's probably called Twenty Twelve because (1) they're trying to be optimistic about the 3.5 release date and (2) the theme was meant to be included with 3.4, but didn't get done in time.
In other words, the expected value of opacity is greater than the expected value of transparency. Got it.
Opal - tools to improve the command line
Looks really good, but is strikingly similar to another of Drew Strojny's themes: http://demo.thethemefoundry.com/linen-theme/
The difference is that the Tumblr page was posted as a Hacker News article and the Google image link was posted as a Hacker News comment.
This is awesome. I wish the people at Authy the best. Now I'm gonna 2-factor auth the hell out of everything.
Sounds like a great study consistent with my experience and the prevailing view of the anti-diet.
I'm most impressed by the fact that the first thing you are hit with is a thorough and readable code sample.