skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Does everything you do have to be full screen?

No. You can have two apps open side by side.

>Is having multiple windows open and multi-tasking a thing of the past?

According to the tablet market leaders (Apple and Google), yes. BTW the desktop still supports this for power users. Other comments have pointed out that non-power users likely won't care about this issue.

>I know I'm coming from a place of ignorance... I'm sure I don't quite understand how to use the OS... I design software for a living.

And herein lies the bigger issue. You're used to the old way. You're comfortable with the old way. You like the old way. So do I. That's not a bad thing, and Microsoft left in the desktop for people like you and me (and most others on this forum). Nothing has changed there. I run Windows 8 on my laptop and spend 99% of my time on the desktop like it's Windows 7 with some nice new features added on (and a better security model).

However, a great number of computer users seem to prefer the simplistic style of iOS or Android. It lets them focus on one task using a very simple menu to get from one app to another. They don't need multiple windows overlapping each other, and they don't need tiling window managers. They don't want multiple open windows distracting them. This is why the iPad was made, this is why Android tablets are made, and this is why Windows 8 and Windows RT were made.

For us, we'll complain about the limitations of the Metro UI then switch to the desktop and forget about it. For them, they'll stick to the RT components, possibly momentarily confused by the drastic change from Windows 7 to Windows 8, then settle in and forget they're using a PC. That's probably a good thing. The last thing these users need is their personal IT guy going on and on about how Windows 8 is awful and the RT components are awful and it shouldn't be used. How long have we all spent trying to teach our parents/grandparents how to get around in Outlook and Firefox, writing down a list of steps they'll need to take to get to their email, or how to bring up the new picture of their grandkids? I actually bought my grandma an iPad so I wouldn't need to do remote support over the phone anymore. 5 minutes of instruction and she was ready to go.

I think RT will be a good thing for your average user. I think it will be a mild grumbling point for power users, deserving no where near the current amount of vitriol spewed on the Internet. Think of the RT stuff as an iPad built into (and complimenting rather than replacing) your desktop. You don't have to use it.
isn't it about time they supported a multi-regional failover system?
As a former Forbes.com staffer, I couldn't be more excited to see that Dan Lyons is leading the new site. ReadWrite has a great editor at the helm.
What's the biggest issue with going international or say close neighbour as Canada? Is it simply costs that instantly get created due to cross-border measures, etc?
At 96kByte of RAM...? No.
http://www.coralcdn.org/ I think is a superior method. shrug
Then I guess 7 = 11 because the store 711 puts the together...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

They can put whatever they want in their name, and even mix and match the terms in their propaganda... reality remains that they are different political doctrines.
This can happen in 2 ways, they are forced to or they do it out of the kindness of their hearts (monetary incentive). So the smart play is to do this because it will increase sales for all the electric car companies. Then a Tesla would have to figure out a way to limit the supercharger or charge non tesla cars.
Some of our sites are affected. Good times!
Look Mom I'm Famous i'm part of cpan the movie :) yes the tiny crawling snake called DBI/DBD i guess
I love that a site run by an advertising company uses a stylesheet that will remove all the ad clutter by shrinking your browser window.
I'm not sure they've given an official reason, but it's the mass-market sedan adaptation of the Tesla Roadster, so I believe playing off both the Model T (mass-produced consumer car) and S=sedan.
I see this as a larger play. As the internet generation gets older many more people will have almost their entire life online making the information Ancestry.com can provide much greater and more detailed family trees.
We are running our sites across three AZs, all in US-EAST. Our three web servers (one in each AZ) are not even able to load static test pages from their EBS volumes at this time. We also have a Percona MySQL cluster across three AZs and we are seeing very degraded perfomance in the EBS volumes on all three servers as well. It seems like this is impacting more than a single AZ from what I'm seeing.
This is my understanding; it's based on the assumption that touchscreen devices are the future of computing.
I originally submitted this as a guest column to TechCrunch. It was promptly rejected. HN is the best place for it anyway. Very intrigued to know what you think of it. Thanks!
The problem is that we'll get people using this in a primary role on their sites/apps because it's novel and people love using novel things. In order to have that "fun" look, you have to have a pretty long animation duration (currently ~3 seconds until they stop moving), which is doing users a disservice by making them wait until they can use the navigation let alone start reading the contents of the list.

It's a neat demo, I just fear what developers will do with it.
I remember it well. It seemed like such a solid idea - be able to send money to anyone with only both parties responsibility for what it was, just like handing cash over. I pushed it hard at the time, figuring it was the best bet for being able to finally do transaction freely. Three years later, yeah. You can send cash to anyone. Except, you know.. anyone dealing in drugs. Or porn. Or gambling. Or potentially illegal electronics. Or hebs. But anyone else. Well, not you personally - we dislike you already so for you, no one, but other people might..
Syllables and K's are strong sounds (Kodak). Most English words in English have been claimed; there's no domain name available and there likely at least 5 other businesses registered with that word in their name.

Romaji[1] seems like a fun place to plunder exciting sounding words from.

Anime and Manga became mainstream popular X years ago, where X is long enough for those early fans to become old enough to start naming products.
From the article: "its customers are online learning companies that want to integrate software with the wealth of data found in Student Information Systems". The app is free for the schools themselves.
The build tasks in Rakefile are couple with SCSS too tightly. I've added a Stylus version (http://bit.ly/T76Ood) but don't have ready to go build tools. You (or me if I get a chance) should extract it out to allow specification of the source lang i.e.:

rake compile:stylus:minified
Are you also on Heroku? Our RDS is also multi-az and is actually up, but heroku bit the bullet so it doesn't matter.
I'd replace my Droid RAZR with one of these in a heartbeat...
As of now , I don't have a problem with my site. Elastic beanstalk with ec2 small instances.
The Gawker redesign was fixed-height.
The Math of the First Scala Assignment
Although I have heard quite a few of these tips before, this is still a great article refresher. I like the idea of tip "8. Light up a MRI scanner", but I'm a bit skeptical on how easy that is to access/try.
Show HN: I spent two years working on an HTML5 game. I finally released it
I can't find it now, but I've read about projects generating haskell code from unit tests. Anyone got links?
All of our EC2 hosts appear to be functioning fine, but they can't connect to their RDS instance which renders our app useless. If you scroll down the page you'll also see that RDS instances are having connectivity issues. Not sure if it's related but for RDS users the impact is far worse.

EDIT: We are also using multi-AZ RDS, so either Amazon's claims for multi-AZ are bs, or their claims that this is only impacting a single zone is bs.
This looks fantastic, but it seems really hard to learn. Need some tools, or a CSS physics engine.
This would be a great time to post a guide to architecting systems for failover using AWS. Anyone got a great guide?
"Myers-Briggs as a psychological test is basically useless."

But as a story around the camp fire their theory (along with Honey and Mumford's development of it) might be useful. Stories, ideas, ways of thinking through. Basis for action, then evaluate the action. Kekule (benzene) and his opium.

"Gardner also lacks any real credibility"

But as a way of getting training teachers to think about the sensory modes they stimulate, there might be some value.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwOXk9stg9A

Action based research, situated theory, stories. Not science. Definitely not Science, depending on what time of day it is (before teaching, I did research)

http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/notes/science-night-...
The N. Virginia datacenter has been historically unreliable. I moved my personal projects to the West Coast (Oregon and N. California) and I have seen no significant issues in the past year.

N. Virginia is both cheaper and closer to the center of mass of the developed world. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't managed to make it more reliable.
Worst infrastructure ever.
It sounded like a lot but then you do the maths:

"To monetize all that information, the website has a subscription model that two million people pay into at $12.95 to $34.95 a month, according to the company."

So even at a lower bound that's close to $26m/month in revenues or $312m a year. So it's only 5x revenues.
Coursera is also down.
as a matter of fact, our app is using multi-zones not just for instances but also for RDS. As of now, I can't reach anything including the loadbalancer.
Ask HN: Why isn't Heroku multi-AZ?
It seems like every time AWS has a problem in a single AZ all of Heroku has a problem or is down. I would have thought their apps as "slugs" system would be designed to avoid this exact kind of scenario?
and the more info online, ie more Facebook timelines, the integration with Ancestry style services is in a way inevitable.
Ran a remote dedicated server to host apps for several years. While it was an enlightening experience, it was a lot of sleepless nights and high anxiety. Traffic spikes, OS updates, security, and plain old downtime. I've used shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting for apps. They all have their fair share of downtime, but I like shared and cloud hosting the best. It allows me to focus on development, rather than running the server.
There are several stores that sell content legally in DRM-free ePub, such as ebooks.com, not to mention all of the public domain content from Project Gutenberg.

Moreover, I think consumers who have purchased a legal copy of a physical or DRM'd book have the moral authority to torrent a matching non-DRM copy, legal technicalities be damned.

Please don't try to paint everyone with the same brush, or resort to name-calling. Techies usually understand the trade-offs and risks, and non-techies simply need to be educated.
Tracy previously posted about her former failed cofounder[0] experience (before Julia came aboard), this one is about a failed hire, but she has a lot more stories about failed acquisitions, fundraising, and products. I've experienced some of these things with my own startup too but it never ceases to amaze me how diverse and different, yet universal, the "hard parts" of startups are.

I wish more people were brave enough to talk about that side.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3776972
I believe this is because North Virginia is also their historical first facility.
Mark Otto (@mdo of Bootstrap fame) is at Github now
Here is a short presentation with another perspective on the Cybersyn project which should be of interest to designers and quantitative visualization types: http://compscifi.com/

It argues that the design of the Presidential control room and its simplified visualizations of economic information created an illusion of omniscience and control over the economy by using visual cues from modernist design and science fiction. But behind the scenes, the project was mostly run by humans exchanging data over teletype machines and hand-pasting information to slides.

There's a wonderful example of the project's simplified model of the economy around 7:58. Do you think this captures the complexity of the Chilean economy with enough fidelity that policymakers could have made reliable predictions about the effects of their interventions? (I don't. This is why: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)

I have great hope that agent-based modeling and simulation will become useful tools in economics, but they are only useful when we accept that they are wrong. We should approach synoptic tools like Cybersyn that promise power and control over complex social systems with extreme skepticism.
"Degraded performance," is a fairly off-handed way of putting what they're experiencing. First RDS connectivity went down the tube, and then EBS followed, finally the EC2 console is failing to operate properly (for me, in US-EAST region at least).

Of course, as soon as I read the report that the issue was confined to one AZ, I looked to move my server over to another AZ. Oh yes, two were full and refused new instances, and then surprisingly, new requests for the other AZs never were received or operated on - and now the console is failing. It's a bit more than just "slow EBS" if that's what you were thinking.

- edit: said ec2 twice in the second sentence, corrected to say ebs.
Should add Twitter to that too?
My dashboard says "Degraded EBS performance in a single Availability Zone". It then lists each of the five zones as "Availability zone is operating normally." http://cl.ly/image/202F3B0I371g
Someone has already shared this
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682222
Not too sure how seriously to take a typesetting tool by someone that uses ALL CAPS for emphasis </snark>

More seriously, this looks quite useful.
SAE J1772 has a data pin, yes. It's how the car communicates rate-of-charge.

The Supercharger uses a different plug, though, which I don't know anything about. The voltage (440v) and speed indicate DC charging, which J1772 doesn't support. (The Leaf uses the CHAdeMO connector for DC charging)
And largest, and busiest.
I reported this internally at Google -- looks like the file has been deleted.
I would disagree with that. My personal experience tells me that users shun multiple windows not because the WM is fiddly, but because the others windows distract them from the content of the window they're focusing on. Working tech support, I've had many users ask which window to type something into when there are multiple windows open, regardless of the fact that there is only one window we've been working with.

Anecdotal evidence maybe, but I don't see any facts backing up either side.
The problem with Gawker redesign was not multiple scrolling columns. The ReadWrite thing is just a cutesy effect, not a functionality change.
ELBs unfortunately use EBS so they are always affected in these cases.
Let them ruin their UX with it and learn their lessons, I say. No point in stunting innovation at the risk of poor implementation.
You make a good point numbsafari, though I disagree with your suggestion that schools will end up paying in the long run. Fundamentally, this is true, but I would add that schools will be paying much less than what they are paying now. Integration with 3rd party apps is time consuming and expensive. If a "once and done" option is available, schools will benefit.

The cost savings for developers is also very real. Instead of having to hire full-time integrators to manage each account with variants for each SIS, developers can plug into an API that works with all SISs once and be done.

Finally, we should remember that having access to an API that is not regulated by SIS companies allows for the development of a new generation of edtech that until now, was not possible due to the fact that much of the data is purposely locked away in the SIS. Would Pearson really want parents using something like Edmodo in lieu of their own portal? In the attention economy, it's not in Pearson's interest to enable these types of solutions.
Haha, I probably should. A friend of mine has already suggested I would be better off doing a PaaS startup because of my sysops skills. I always felt the market is currently too saturated. But looking at Heroku having trouble themselves, may be I should give it some serious thought.
Power user here. I do this as well and use Alt-Tab to switch between the windows. I tend to prefer lower resolution screens as well (typing this on a 1280x800 screen on Windows 8 Pro).

Windows 8 and ironically Metro are actually very keyboard friendly. I can imagine if I get hold of a surface pro unit, I'll probably be entirely happy with a touch screen, keyboard and stylus and do away with the mouse.
Does anyone know if this really is just one AZ? Seems like an awful lot of larger sites are down. I'd expect at least some of them to be multi-AZ by now.
SSH issues are isolated to instances that are EBS backed. Instance storage backed is working OK for SSH.
Bill Gates explains why the Surface is "unbelievably great" (video)
I think rather his assertion is that Windows 8 has great keyboard shortcuts for power users, as well as an interface that is friendly to standard users. It's easy to look at the UI and think it will be horrible for m+k, but with keyboard shortcuts that gets better.
Counterpoint: "xkcd"
Realistically, it's at least in part because everyone defaults to the East region. So it's the most crowded and demanding on the system.
It's also not really actionable. Cool, my company name lights up the parts of the brain that deal with mathematics, shape recognition, and spatial coordination. Is that good? Is it better or worse than lighting up the part of the brain that deals with vocabulary, puns and humor? Or one that tracks moving objects?
You never know. With the current trend being the sale of licenses and not the actual content, maybe one day in the future people can only sell licenses through approved license sellers. If you think that's ridiculous, what do you think people 50 years ago would think of what's happened to our airports? It's not that far fetched unless one thing changes: techies as a whole start lobbying harder and with more money.
Here's an article that has a little more depth and fewer Instagram references.

http://descrier.co.uk/technology/2012/10/ancestry-com-acquir...

>"The buyout group includes the private equity firm’s co-investors, members of Ancestry.com’s management team, including CEO Tim Sullivan and CFO Howard Hochhauser, and Spectrum Equity, which already owns about 30 percent of Ancestry.com."
FailCon Live Stream by TechTalks.tv
No they are not. The two are designed to work together. When your PC is docked with a keyboard attached, it's a workstation with tablet features. When it's not docked, its a tablet with workstation features.
Well, we've gone from "degraded performance" to completely losing our EBS instance store for our master MySQL server. If we don't see resolution shortly we might have to look at promoting one of our slaves and moving forward from there.
Google Advanced Search Shortcuts
Yes, the Tesla charging port has a data link that allows Superchargers to speak directly to the battery's firmware. There is almost certainly "Tesla DRM" built into the handshake between the S and the Supercharger, although like all DRM it could probably be reversed engineered and compatible systems created.
That's a lot of fun when you are trying to copy a Blu-Ray, less fun when you are dealing with 100kW.
In case your eye skipped over the “for free” part, I would
like to emphasize that again – owning a Supercharger
enabled Model S really does mean free long distance travel
forever on our high speed charging network.

I really wish they'd stop saying this. They're essentially committing to building a nationwide electric car charging infrastructure for $nodollars, and never charging customers to use it, ever.

Which means either

A.) They're not going to build more than 30 charging stations.
B.) They're all going to be significantly far away from population
centers, and used only for interstate travel.

No matter what, a Tesla car is going to be spending 99.9% of its time charging at home or at work.
I didn't give suggestions on how to test it because I figured someone who knows how to automatically generate regular expressions from examples would also know how to test it under load (or that it should be tested before being made public). It should not be that difficult to simulate simple user behavior, especially since the majority of the functionality in this case is tied to (presumably) one method in the code. Run it 100/1,000/10,000 times simultaneously behind the scenes with a bunch of test examples and see if your server vomits. Pretty easy.

Honestly, I'm a bit dismayed that you are challenging me on this. "Load-test your code before releasing it" should be a strict requirement for anything that is submitted here. Otherwise, how are people expected to give feedback? Why is our time being wasted on stuff that does not work?
I don't know if I agree that learning technologies that does not prove to be commercially viable are a waste of time. You can learn a lot from a topic even if it is not directly related to your income. Machine learning is a hobby of mine, which I, sadly, haven't had the chance to work with professionally. But by learning about it, I think my mind has sharpened and I think I now have a much better grasp of linear algebra which is related to my work.

Similar experiences can probably be derived by learning about JavaFX, like understanding its pretty smart canvas api. Silverlight has, I don't know, state of the art drm technology for video streaming?

The point is that learning is almost always a good investment that pays off. If you love what you are learning about, then the investment becomes much smaller and the payoff almost immediate.
But then, again:

1) Almost every other country in Latin America suffered from a military coup based on the same ideological grounds, that applied almost the same policies. They all suffered an "intervention", and not all ended up like Chile. There is not even a correlation between "interventions" and their current economic state.

2) Chile is not the economic leader of Latin America, Brazil is, with it's modern success atributed mostly to a former union leader, who was also part of of Brazil's "Workers Party", Lula da Silva.
Ancestry.com is possible largely because of the Mormon church. There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven. To allow Mormons to identify these ancestors the LDS church has spent decades going around the world and making microfilm copies of birth, death and marriage records and the like. At one point when I was doing genealogy research on the East Coast I went to the local Mormon church's family history library and ordered a microfilmed copy of some birth records from the Russian Empire in Yiddish and Russian. I could then go through the microfilm and try to pick out the names I wanted.

Because much of the hard part (getting access to these archives and making copies of these records) has already been done, Ancestry just has to scan and OCR these records. My understanding is that Mormon volunteers do a lot of that work as well.