skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't wait! Here's hoping Steam Linux - in combination with the Microsoft's terrible decisions on Windows 8 - can be the catalyst for a mass exodus of gamers from Windows to Ubuntu/Linux and end an era of Windows PC gaming dominance that has long been overdue.
>>you probably don't understand what Python programmers find appealing in a language.

99% of all programmers in this world are in the game for employment reasons.

People are going to go things where money is. In the past it was Python, now its slowly shifting to something else.
Supervillian maybe ;)
Antonio Cromartie Jersey
Goodbye OMAP: Texas Instruments withdraws from smartphones
It's certainly made a big impression, though perhaps not the kind they were after. Revealing something in a keynote talk leads to more scrutiny so making a big deal out of something that isn't ready doesn't seem wise to me.
Many more dynamic pages than you would expect. We do hundreds of thousands of database queries/sec. We do some caching with Batcache - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/ but it's more to handle large spikes in traffic for single pages/blogs. CNN during the US elections, for example.
One of these days I'll be in town that day. For ~12 months now since moving to San Diego I've been consistently out of town the last Friday of every month.

Next time!
APC+mysql cache (not just query but keycache too) is a must, but memcached is pointless unless you have a multi-server website (on a single server APC shared memory is way faster than memcached).

All logged out users should be served a completely cached static page that bypasses PHP entirely, it's way faster than even an opcode cache and way less load.

WP-Super-Cache can serve static pages to logged out users and makes this rather easy to setup. It's practically a must for wordpress.
It's not position data that Apple needs, it's bug reports. Regardless of how much work you put into map data, at some point the only way to know if it's correct or not is to go there and see what things look like on the ground. Crowd sourcing is the only way to get to the quality level of Google Maps.
The important lesson here is that some business models absolutely do work for the particular person. I have no idea what number of pageviews you would need to support a full-time t-shirt selling business. I imagine the conversion rate is frighteningly low. But it really is true that you can make a business out of any sufficiently highly-trafficked website with a sticky audience. But you have to match the costs with the revenues.
I think as time goes on, the digital divide won't be focused on inter-generational (gramps can't use the internet) issues as it is now. Instead, the focus will shift to first VS third world, and rich VS poor.

Generational issues will decay over time as the population becomes made up of a greater proportion of 'digital natives', but the gap between rich and poor will still exist. We should take the lessons we learn here and try to apply them there when the time comes.
The thing that they made available back then was for web applications only. This isn't.
Okay, I can buy that.

But, that basically means that Apple has drastically regressed the user experience in order to force users to help them build a product so that one day it might be able to compete with the product that they were already using for years, and suffer through cruddy data in the meantime. And they expected people to be okay with this?

Google is so far ahead on mapping that I doubt Apple will ever catch up. You're talking about volunteer crowdsourced data versus a company that literally has a fleet of cars and employees out scouring the world and mapping it in detail. Unless Apple decides to make a major play in mapping - not just in iOS, but in building a first-class mapping product to compete with Google Maps - I doubt that they're ever going to have data that'll match peoples' friends' Android-based mapping experiences, and that's going to leave a lot of people very sour on what is supposed to be the premium-brand smartphone.

I have a number of friends and acquaintences who have either already switched or are soon switching from their iPhone 4 to some Android-flavored phone specifically because they're so disappointed with the iPhone 5 + iOS6 combination, and no longer feel like it's the best option on the market. Pissing people off and losing them as customers is a pretty terrible price to pay for wanting to gather bug reports on location data.
I have to assume the genius was off script. The shop I worked at had people sign a document before authorizing anything destructive. We usually imaged the disk anyway.

Definitely agree with the larger point though. PCs (phones, tablets, etc) are ridiculously hard to use and unreliable even if you kinda sorta know what you're doing.
We started using Percona's MySQL builds by default a couple of years ago. There are some nice performance and convenience features not included in the MySQL.com builds. (Un)fortunately we still have quite a few MySQL 4.1 instances happily running and are still using MyISAM across over 360 million tables. Most of that stuff is not running Percona.
Python is now totally dominant in scientific domains. The typical user is interested in ease of use and mature libraries, not in speed or niceties that are debated on Lambda the Ultimate.
WordPress.com currently has 12 load balancers per data center. They are HA and used for different subsets of traffic.
While I understand the gist your comment, you probably didn't read the link. This is exactly how the market works: traders don't have time to follow closely all the markets of all companies they are trading, so they will eat whatever canned news they get -- provided it came from a reputable source.

So when JP Morgan issues a memo saying "Formlabs ... could be a threat to incumbent 3D printer solutions at the low-end of the market in the near-term... First take: potential negative for DDD" - and in the exact same week that Wired published a cover page with Bre Pettis and his good-looking MakerBot Replicator 2... well, maybe it's time to lock in the 110% gains you had this year with DDD and move on...
Square, next great tech company?
The lesson is as clear now as it ever was: users must not be responsible for managing user state.
Two takeaways - (1) The article is bumf wrt the Wordpress.com setup. NGINX plays a role, but the thousands of servers for http, db, memcache, load balancing etc is integral to this discussion (and not mentioned). A typical reader couldn't relate if it did. (2) Directed at a more typical reader, use NGINX for hosting your WP.org blogs, company sites etc. Properly configured, your performance to cost ratio will be terrific. Lastly, on a personal note, it pains me when caching plugins are mentioned as the main part of the solution. No need for these folks. Use the NGINX cache instead and never worry again about a buggy/outdated cache plugin (looking at you W3TC) again. Remove that dependency and you will be happier and possibly better looking.
This is one of those articles, that after you read it, you face palm, and go, "Of course."

I feel stupid not having come to the same assessment after hearing about when the dates were set.
Functional TDD: A Clash of Cultures by Kent Beck
Interesting to see Gruber's take:

"But if the old agreement between Apple and Google expired in the first half of 2013 (which, again, my own sources familiar with the matter agree to be the case), that means the deal was set to expire halfway through the expected year-long life cycle for iOS 6."

http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/timing_of_apples_map_switc...
As a thought experiment, I sometimes imagine a Children of Men-like scenario where, twenty years from now, scientists discover that most American teenagers are sterile.
Users want to be able to manage user state.
It's pretty amazing that we do not understand the physics/chemistry behind them at all. Sometimes the universe still stumps NASA!
According to Dave Gooden, AirBnB had a growth hacker who did her magic via email. "girlsname04@gmail.com" was her address.

She harvested emails from people adveritising on craigslist and sent out thousands of emails. Some call that unsolicited bulk commercial email. Some call is spam. Others call it growth hacking.

Remember, wise man say startups need <em> high growth </em>.

Founding startup is like being research scientist. Science!

"girlsname04@gmail.com", an unsung hero of AirBnB.

Harvard grad gets shut down by FTC for sending porn-related spam from custom-built spam machine in his dorm room. Earns some nice coin. Moves on to greener pastures:- doing the dirty work for internet venture capitalists. Say hello to the CTO of AirBnB.

Ivy League indeed.

The eventual victim is untimately the public investor if there's an IPO or the naive acquirer... because these businesses are not built to last long enough to provide the return on investment the public expects, nor to cover the inevitable charge the acquirer has to take.

These petty criminals doing the dirty work for internet VC are young with many years ahead of them to regain their reputation. But time may not heal bad reputations as well as it used to... because the internet never forgets.
Of the 2000 servers, about 90% of them are running something related to WordPress.com. There are 36 "load balancer" servers in total. I added up the req/sec across those 36 machines and came up with the 70k/sec number in the article. The requests aren't evenly distributed across that subset of machines though, so you can't just divide evenly to figure out a req/sec/CPU rate. I left another comment in this thread that mentions 5k req/sec on a "normal" load balancer and that the limiting factor isn't Nginx CPU usage.
Best of luck! I am some time away from doing the same.
You and I do. Regular people don't.
Maps are operating system features that any application can rely on being present. Their are OS APIs that require that the mapping infrastructure be present.
> But it did fundamentally work.

That is about all I can say on iOS too. It is... definitely a Microsoft product. That said it has way more POIs/businesses than Maps, and a few that Google doesn't include. Though to be honest knowing where comcast has an academy in my city is less than useful its rather complete and doesn't have bars listed that have been out of business for years.

A for effort and data contained. C+ for execution. Would like to see what Google comes up with on iOS.
The majority of our transient bugs on WordPress.com are probably related to APC opcode issues. We try to catch them and handle it gracefully, but it isn't always so easy.
Why does that is proposal have informal slangy cruft like "poly fill" and exclamation points? That is improper for a stabdard.
agreed. was thinking the same thing but you beat me to it. anybody who has ever evaluated an A/B test would look at this and immediately question the significance/validity of the result. if only somebody would actually back up their claim with ALL the data for once (i.e. variance and specific sample sizes)
The whole iDevice ecosystem is complicated. I've seen even tech savvy people suffer data loss or prolonged inconvenience. A lot of it is caused by bad design and buggy software, but a lot of it is also caused by Apple arrogantly throwing up intentional roadblocks.
Can you please elaborate on this? Perhaps we have a different definition of user state.
"Google is so far ahead on mapping that I doubt Apple will ever catch up. "

We're not talking rocket science here. If Apple wants to catch up to Google on mapping, they just have to invest time, money, and attention. We're talking at most two years for Apple to get where Google is today.
"I figured that a “Genius” would quickly figure out whether it still had iOS 4, and if so, would just update it to iOS 5 or 6 and then set up iCloud backup."

Wait but "Updating to iOS 5 will delete all of the apps and media... To preserve your content, apply this update on the computer where you sync apps, music, videos, and photos." [1]

[1] http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2011/...
I sure as hell don't. I look forward to the day when everything is in DropBox/iCloud/Bitcasa/whatever and I can finally stop lugging around 2 external hard drives for backup and worrying about what would happen to my data if somebody stole my laptop.
What does it even mean? The article is pretty incoherent...
I too remember 97 as the first year of Linux on the desktop, when people gleefully predicted that Microsoft would collapse under their own weight.

Feels kind of cute, in retrospect.
Unless you have an AMD graphics card, in which case you get to deal with all kinds of corruption in general desktop use.
Your average user expects an OS update to be nothing more than new features, they don't know/expect of anything to be wiped out, or know any kind of possible data loss might occur,
Adobe Launches New HTML5-Centric Web Developer Suite
So you've set something like that up for your grandparents and they have no problems using it? Otherwise, this is just Monday-morning quarterbacking.

There are many ways music could have gotten on the iPad. You can purchase music from the iPad. Or you can enable manual music management so that any computer with iTunes can copy music to the iPad. Or it could simply be that Marco synced a bunch of music to the iPad and his grandpa never changed the songs.
Nah, just means they can count to 3. Still holding out for HL3.
Marking the links as rel="nofollow" should prevent that from happening, shouldn't it?
Conditional formatting in Google Spreadsheets is hopeless to the point of not being worth trying. It needs to work on a cell by cell basis, not just column/row. And you need to be able to overload cells with more than one rule.
Microsoft Windows Update Hoax Steals Your Passwords
I'm pretty good with technology compared to the average person (or at least, those whose job description does not consist of spending their whole lives in front of a computer), and even I managed to wipe out a lot of my iOS data when simply switching to a new computer (thankfully I had done an iCloud backup in anticipation of things going wrong and was able to restore. Still lost one app's data in the process, for some reason).

We definitely have a long way to go, although I think a lot of the stuff we put up with is also due to accommodating external forces like backwards compatibility, pressure from the music and movie industries, etc.
...at which point Google will be two years ahead of them. Mapping is Google's wheelhouse; it's an afterthought for Apple. I wouldn't bet on the hardware company ever beating the data company at mapping. Apple would have to become a fundamentally different company to seriously challenge Google's mapping offering.
I think I need a monitor with better color fidelity. Half of these look like whiteness.
>I was first told the Year Of Linux On The Desktop would be 1997

Yup.
If a shortage can't exist by definition, then maybe we need a new term, or a different way of thinking about a shortage. I am willing to listen to people who claim there is a shortage of engineers, though I am skeptical of the claim.

I think about it this way - how does the pay, prestige, job stability, growth, and forth for an engineer compare to the other options available for highly talented people? As it stands, I think that it does make sense that there would be higher demand than supply for engineers at the current salary levels.

As an example, I read about a guy with a PhD in Engineering from a strong program and several years work experience who was writing specialized software. His salary was 125K a year. The article was about granting more visas to non-us citizens, and the writer clearly thought the 125K salary ended all discussion of whether the pay was extraordinary, high enough that clearly a shortage was in effect.

Personally, I don't agree. This guy had gone through a grad degree that typically takes 6 years or more (twice as long as a law degree, 3 years as long as an MBA, as long as a med degree and half of a residency). He had gone through a much harder undergrad degree than most, and he had already proved his ability to write difficult code. 125k isn't close to "shortage level" salaries for someone like this. I know employers would get sticker shock, but I think you'd have to go up to 250K or more to be competitive with comparable professions (at the elite level). Keep in mind, 6 years of a PhD + a few years of work experience would be equivalent to a 6th year associate at a law firm - but without the extra years of earning.

I'm willing to consider the possibility of a shortage, but right now the evidence seems very weak. In fact, the salary level for engineers compared to other top professions goes a long way to explaining the low interest in these degrees, especially at the grad level.
Android OS Updates: Who's the Decider?
Can't the APIs stay constant while the supplied data/backend gets changed? After all, isn't that the whole point of having a public API so that the implementation can be changed without changing the calling apps?
half life 3 confirmed!
Coincidentally, I thought you meant here at HN.
That's something Apple forgot in their skeuomorphic design of Notes.

People expect that when they get a new notepad their old notes will still be there.
I respectfully disagree. The average user has no idea what an OS is, or why you would update it. It's something they do, under instruction, because other people are doing it.
Steve Jobs last presentation
7 Reasons Some Entrepreneurs Don’t Meet Their Potential
Even though I didn't read the article (I rarely read TC articles), I will have to say I think this is more of a publicity stunt than anything to prep for their "reboot".
Here's my issue with the "advancement" that Bret is doing. It's all conjecture. He has no product. He has no users. He has theories. Theories that sound good to you and me, but, ultimately, theories that are untested and unproven. There's no evidence that any of these changes would actually help anyone learn to program any better. Who is to say that a person new to coding wouldn't be overwhelmed by the amount of information Bret's system is asking them to process? There's a pretty strong case for cognitive overload when you have lines of code, different code hints that appear not just over every line, but every function and number, a time bar with many different symbols on it, etc. But, again, no benefits or faults can be found with Bret's proposed approach because it's untested and unproven. Conjecture, hypotheses, and assumptions.

This is where Khan Academy exceeds. They have users. They have real people really trying to learn how to code. This means they can test their assumptions and modify their approach. An imperfect solution delivered today is better than a perfect solution delivered next week.
I personally don't think it is worse. It fixes some previous annoyances, Siri is considerably improved, and I'm one of the few that prefer the new Maps app. The only thing I can really say I don't like about the update is the new App Store card view.
Checkout Luxolasg profile on DiscoverMatch.
"Roadblocks" is not why these people didn't have a device properly restore and back up. The point is that there shouldn't even be a way to mess up this procedure, not that YOU want direct access to the file system.
I worked at the Apple 5th avenue retail store until April, and there is a document that has to be signed acknowledging that you could lose all your data. That said, it's usually framed as a "this probably won't happen, but just in case"
They did that in the iOS 6 beta, the users were known as developers. And yes, we do pay $99/year to be able to test things like this. The forums there listed the same things people here are complaining about. It was all said on those forums, we were just under NDA not to talk about it.

Which leads me to believe this was an upper management push and they are willing to deal with the PR fallout. beta 1 maps was really really bad, gm is workable. It has improved a ton during the betas, and that was a 2 month-ish spread. I'll give Apple a few months to clean up the data, it makes Core Location way more useful than when it was tied to Googles' api. Note this is for things like the vector road parts of the map, you can basically have your location clamped to the road. Sometimes gps signals are... erratic when driving in cities, this helps things out immensely. But we'll see if it is another ping or not.
Can I ask what the $4 in profit and 30M nights/ year to justify $2B valuation are based on? Just wondering if maybe my math/ view on it is wrong...

Looks like they charge a 3% fee meaning a night @ $100 would bring in $3 of revenue (not profit). At 30M nights that's $90M in revenue, putting the $2B valuation at 22.2x revenue... seems slightly unreasonable (at least not a valuation that public markets are likely to put on it). Thoughts?
Hm. I'd just rather eat food with known ingredients than food and supplements with unknown ingredients, especially given that the supplement industry is fighting tooth and nail to prevent itself from being subject to the same level of scrutiny McDonald's is.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/07/02/dietary-supplem...
He's not talking about playing poker online.
F# Type Providers - paper from MS Research
To write really long names, use chrome console, type avatar.msg="I AM 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890", close the console and press return on your screen
Starwood doesn't own most of their hotels, nor do most of the staff, revenues, etc flow through Starwood. It is just a franchise/branding company with a property management and reservation system. Their direct employees are in line with airbnb.
Yup, he was very widely cited (along with Vannevar Bush) back in the '80s when people were playing a lot with this sort of thing, but almost everything he actually tried to create seemed hopelessly baroque and over-engineered.

"Simple" is a very important concept in the real world, and what he churned out was anything but.

[I recall his book "Computer Lib" as being almost completely unreadable too, and remember thinking that he must have doing drugs when he wrote it...]
Ivoire: A Simple BDD Testing Framework for Python
When you create a company that acts as an agent or marketplace between 2 parties you have to take on some of the risk in the transaction if you're profiting from it.

AirBnB struck a goldmine in apartments cos it's pretty hard to 'steal' an apartment and take it away or damage it beyond all repair through normal expected use. I would gather most places are 'uninsured' for the duration of the sublease because the normal conditions have been broken but owners feel that that is a risk worth taking on for the expected return.

Cars that sit around are a different story - I feel for these guys http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/01/luxury-car-sharing-service-... but the truth of the matter is that with the next tier of high value illiquid stuff below apartments such as luxury cars and boats the perceived risk of letting somebody 'borrow' it is much higher. It is entirely feasible that whatever you're leasing out could get destroyed/sunk/totaled/stolen in normal use for its intended purpose. To provide such a market you would have to provide the insurance that goes with it and that's the hard bit.

This is why zipcar et al has stitched up the lower end of the car market. The car is 'common property' and they have the insurance to cover all who drive it.

Not saying it shouldn't be done - I'd actually love to build AirBnB for boats cos I sail but I can't afford my own boat or the charter prices being asked.
Direct link to the Paper (PDF)

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/173076/information-rich-t...
They could've tried licensing far better map data from Navteq/Nokia like Amazon recently did for the Kindles by using some of their 100 billion dollar stash. Amazon did not try to roll out its own maps with half baked data. Whether Nokia would have been willing to license to Apple is a different question.
Techcrunch is idiotic, I wish people would stop posting it to HN.