skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ask on coWonder and let the crowd decide it http://www.cowonder.com
What's in a corkscrew?
Chaos Monkey takes down instances and such. Chaos Gorilla takes down entire AZs. :)
My understanding is that one the big $ houses, $1M+, they don't typically go with a 6% fee, but rather have a "6% on the first $500K, then 1% thereafter".

It makes sense if you think about it, in San Francisco, many neighborhoods have 80% of the houses priced close to $2M (i.e. these are not atypical homes). If everyone stuck to the 6%, then agents would be getting $60K for each house sold (I know they give up some of that to the brand they work for).
Arrays, hstore, domains, etc. Not supported by the activerecord-jdbc-postgresql adapter.
The Internet Attack That Wasn't
Why was the headline changed? The original headline [1] used the headline from the article, "Breakthrough in world's oldest undeciphered writing". For some reason it was changed either by the author or by a moderator to a meaning that is completely different.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/agIfl.png
That may be true but, as far as I remember, it's the most sensibly priced version of Windows yet. Only $40 to upgrade.
Yeah, no problem. :)

It't not really a single-page-app, we just load the next article via ajax. First page loads normally. I prototyped that out but quickly realized it was totally overkill for a publication like this.

This particular issue is actually related to migrating comments to the new domain & urls. We actually have to provide Disqus with legacy urls for old articles. A few got mixed up. The reloading is actually working just fine.
"Create More Failures

Currently, Netflix uses a service called "Chaos Monkey" to simulate service failure. Basically, Chaos Monkey is a service that kills other services. We run this service because we want engineering teams to be used to a constant level of failure in the cloud. Services should automatically recover without any manual intervention. We don't however, simulate what happens when an entire AZ goes down and therefore we haven't engineered our systems to automatically deal with those sorts of failures. Internally we are having discussions about doing that and people are already starting to call this service "Chaos Gorilla"."

http://techblog.netflix.com/2011_04_01_archive.html
I disagree about the vagueness of a name. If I see a great name, I'll understand the point-of-view of the company (usually, a key element of their product or audience). If the company pivots so much that the name becomes detracting, they can always rebrand later: "NewProduct by NoLongerRelevantName" eventually becomes just "NewProduct".
GCC's new Local Register Allocator
My apologies! I was wrong.
I'm not familiar with HN's technical stack (other than arc), how has it scaled as the community grew over the years?
This is why it's extremely important to use programs like Calibre to back up all your Amazon or Nook or whatever else purchases.
Thanks for responding!

Looks like the ads aren't showing up for you. I see the same thing with Flashblock on. We're also still working on properly targeting ads.
You are incorrect - GEDCOM supports same-sex marriage, there is nothing that prevents the recording of same-sex partners.

You are confused with Personal Ancestral File, the Church's free genealogy program, which does not allow the entry of same-sex marriage. Many other programs do, and can export these marriages to GEDCOM.
Hacker News front page discussion of BBC reporting on this same trial result:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4683657
I would actually be very interested in a citation for this.
Had exactly the same thought, particularly in comparison to AWS's status page. I scrolled all the way down just because I was enjoying the timeline.
Do you have a viable alternative name for projects that people just want to release without fully supporting them? Until then most people will keep calling them open source. The term open source has always had a vague meaning that has covered many different types of projects that the creator doesn't get paid for (ex. free as in beer vs. free as in speech). Instead of trying to change the word's definition you might be more effective in coming up with another "free as in X" phrase to denote a project whose creators plan to offer support.
>t's also marginally cheaper since you don't waste elektricity if using the charger only once a week vs every day

I read recently that recharging an iPad every night costs less than 2 cents per year.
Don't know how I haven't stumbled across this sooner - thanks!
Connect-fonts - A connect middleware to serve locale/browser specific fonts
Big Brother comes to BitTorrent
would you do it? :)
Codebug 0.9.1 is out
Funny thing is, the last couple interviews I've had in Chicago and Silicon Valley, I actually get points when explaining caution is necessary when using AWS for production.

A magic bullet it isn't.
We totally had link-bait articles. :)
Easy - it's the fabric on which the iCloud-like services from Microsoft will be delivered.

Didn't Apple rely on Azure (in addition to other cloud providers) for iCloud? Or am I completely off the mark there?
I'd take a black and white screen with the promise of better battery life if the display was at least as functional in all other aspects
I imagine reimaging the built-in SSD should be relatively simple. It may be a little more complicated to turn off the signed boot validation and the developer mode warning.
It's a trap (a trivial way to make your code unmaintainable)
Glad to hear you like it. An agent option is something we're thinking about. Right now some people solve this by having a startup script that runs something like: Ninite.exe /silent c:\ninite\report.txt /updateonly /allusers

But an agent would allow us to build some neat management tools too...
When our gear is down, we can actually get into the datacenter to fix it.

What do you do when Amazon is down other than sweat?
> Further if they start today it will be 24 months before they can launch something.

You are assuming other companies have not yet started building electric cars. This is extremely false. I was at the Detroit Auto Show in Jan 2011 and saw Ford driving a fully-electric Fusion around the showroom floor.

Tesla certainly appears to be ahead publicly, but I'm not so sure that's the case.
this.img.src = this.img.src.replace(/Fish[a-zA-Z0-9]\./, "Fish"+this.direction+".")

It looks like this line is executed on every frame for all fish in the level. For Firefox users who have the Ghostery addon installed, this makes things rather slow because every setting of the src property invokes Ghostery to check whether or not it wants to block the image load.

Granted, that should be another reason for me to uninstall Ghostery, but I wanted to let you know.
I most certainly is a magic bullet.

Slays millions with a single round.
That was the first NPC I ever made and it's evidence of my dumb code from back then. Guess I forgot to change it.
> the whole thing looks more subtle (and sensible) than many news headlines report

This is so often the case...
"what's the incentive to stay a subscriber?"

Ancestry adds new data bases every day. All sorts of documents are triple-entered by hordes of cheap offshore labour. You never know when new stuff will include your ancestors: ship's manifests, regimental rolls, cemetery inventories, wills & probates from all corners of the World, etc.
Workplace productivity is going to skyrocket today
(highfive)
I would be really surprised if this service would work smoothly. I already feel bothered just by reading automatically translated text.
When our datacenter is down (cause of our last two outages), we can actually get into the datacenter ... and watch them fix it. Or not.
Yahoo CEO's Comeback Plan Is All About Tech, Not Media
I enjoy how my comments get a few upvotes and then slowly sink. It is somehow nice to "suffer" for truth.
The original quote is true, but he misphrased it.

The convenience store attached to a gas station is very profitable (huge markups on cheap food) but has relatively little revenue. The gasoline is not very profitable (razor thin margins due to competing with, essentially, everyone) but brings in a lot of revenue. (Every customer at a gas station buys gas)

The convenience store is the most profitable part, but that doesn't mean you can get rid of the gas pumps and just sell five dollar bottles of Coke.
Well, my credit card issuer (wells fargo) actually cant' tell me. They say its flagged, for a reason they don't know. (ofc, they do, they just wont tell).

Then they just unflag it after I answer 10 security questions and that's it.

Pisses me off every time.
Probably neither A nor B. The total electricity cost over the lifetime of a Tesla Model S is surprisingly small, so small that it can effectively rolled into the price of the vehicle itself. In fact this is one of the problems with current electric vehicles: the battery alone may cost more than all the electricity you'd use to charge it over its lifetime.

Additionally they can certainly recoup costs on charging non-Tesla cars.
I think it's a case of "well optimized code which does as little as possible can handle an awful lot of users on a single beefy box".
What is wrong with a classic nokia phone? The battery life is easily a week on some of them and other than the e-ink they basically have all of these features.
People submitting these stories should be banned from submitting anything to this site. A waste of our time.

If you want cycling news go to a cycling news site.
Android apps 'leak' personal details
They sell it as a feature.
> So with about the same CPU time, JRuby will use up to 100x memory in worst case?

The JVM often trades increased memory usage for increased performance. That said "100x memory" is total hyperbole, even in the context of a microbenchmark. If you want the JVM to use less RAM, you can turn down the maximum heap size. Otherwise the heap will grow until it reaches close to full before the GC does a stop-the-world style collection of the old generation.

> Anyway Ruby 2.0 is suppose to solve the Ruby is Slow problem

Absolutely not. There are presently no plans to add a JIT compiler to the de facto Ruby interpreter.

The JVM on the other hand has the most advanced JIT compiler in the world. InvokeDynamic on Java 7 allows JRuby to do method inlining, and on Java 8 it will be able to take advantage of the full suite of HotSpot optimizations, including escape analysis and lock elision when compiling Ruby code into machine code.

No other Ruby VM will have that level of optimization.
It's simple enough, I don't even see what there is to argue.

What there is to argue is that there are industries where regulation serves no purpose other than to stifle competition, and there are industries where regulation serves the purpose of actually protecting people.

Taxi licensing is an example of the latter.

And in general, as much as HN loves the narrative of "plucky disruptive hackers vs. evil entrenched interests", it is fundamentally not right for a company to "disrupt" by skirting laws and regulations that competitors are required to obey. It is also unsurprising that competitors raise an unholy stink when that happens, and you would do exactly the same if placed in that situation.
You are really good at your own game! Love the demo video!
I wonder if it is Google's visual site previews/thumbnails that you get when you click on the arrow at the side of a search result, that are doing this.

Perhaps Google fetches the crawled page from the cache and then renders that for the previews?
Also note that for Fixnum dependent benchmarks, JRuby has to allocate memory due to boxed integers, whereas on the de facto interpreter it's able to use tagged pointers which allow Fixnums to be treated as simple numeric values.

This may be going away in JDK9 as they claim they're eliminating primitive types in favor of an everything-is-an-object model.
AWS sucking at availability (and especially specific parts like EBS, and then services built on top of EBS and on top of AWS) doesn't mean the correct option is to mine your own sand and dig up your own coal to run servers in your own datacenters in the basement.

Even if you're totally sold on the cloud, you can still have a requirement that things be transparent all the way down. AWS is one of the least transparent hosting options around.

If you're a customer of a regular colo, or even a managed hosting provider themselves based at a colo, it's pretty easy to dig into how the infrastructure is set up, identify areas where you need your own redundancy, etc. Essentially impossible within AWS -- there is no reason intelligible to me that ELB in multiple AZs should depend on EBS in a single AZ, but that's how they have it set up.
Individuals have the right to see any personal data that an organisation holds about them.

Depends where the individual is. In the EU this is basically true. Norway, however, is not part of the EU. as for the US, consumers here do not have such rights. It seems you are talking about how you think things should be, rather than how they actually are.
While Allende's formal affiliation was with the Socialist party, he was also endorsed by the Communist party at the time of his election. (WP says it was as an alternate, their primary choice being Pablo Neruda, but he then turned around and supported Allende.) And Allende's government was apparently perceived by some as being to the left of the Socialist party after the election.

Exactly where the government was on the spectrum is open to debate, but I don't think you can say that they "weren't Communist" as though that's a boolean flag that's either true or false.

But I think arguing over where exactly they were politically misses the point; you can have varying political philosophies alongside different economic ones. I'd argue that the two are basically orthogonal. Regardless of where the Allende government falls on the political-philosophy spectrum, they certainly had a fascination with national industries, economies of scale, and central planning.
I was hoping for the same thing. The Minoans are fascinating, I started reading about them sometime this summer just before my summer vacation to the Cyclades. Particularly I think that their art has a certain feeling or touch that has not been reproduced since then.
OP did not alter the headline.
Nice post Tracy! :)
Something missing here: SEO considerations. It matters less as the days pass, but there is still value to getting an important keyword or two in the domain name (or to be the important keyword, better still).

This is especially true if your business is planning to generate lots of business through organic. Especially false if it doesn't.
Does Amazon explain anywhere what regions, availability zones or whatever have single points of failure for each of their services? I guess that's supposed to be what an "availability zone" is but somehow that doesn't quite seem to capture it. It's pretty hard to build reliable apps without knowing where the single points of failure are in the underlying infrastructure.
The sentence is in "first grade" (in Italy there are 3 grades of sentence and the third is definitive), so things can change in the other grades, and probably will, because this sentence caused an uproar here in Italy.
It seems that the site is down. Would they close "FamilySearch.org" because of the acquisition? Or is this because of AWS?
It's the honest approach, really. Having numerous dealers compete for my business just offends my sense of fairness - sure, I could get a test drive from one, then accept a lowball from another dealer - but is that really sustainable? At what point was that "lowball deal" really just the actual price you should have paid whereas the competing higher priced dealer was inflating their price so they could spend an hour or two showing you the car?

To this extent, I even rent the car I'm going to buy (go to service dept at dealership, ask for the specific model). This way I can tell about all those ity-bitties like oh, whether the car will fit comfortably in the garage, how it feels on the way up the mountains, etc.
That's the entire point of a class action.
To just reiterate this further, I am still 301'ing urls that have been dead for nearly 5 years. I still get requests in for them. I don't want to 404 them in fear of losing that slight bit of traffic so I just 301 them. I am really surprised they don't remove these urls from their cache and I can't think for the life of me why they don't?
Until it can't. Then five years later you get Spanner.
Italian seismologists sentenced to 6 years for failing to predict earthquake
Just had the following support chat with an Amazon rep:

Me:I have really enjoyed Kindle on multiple devices so far but I just read the following account of a different Kinde customer and am appalled at Amazon's treatment of this individual: http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/
Is it really true that at any moment, Amazon could delete all my books and not tell me the reason? If so, I strongly request that Amazon revisit its DRM rules & regulations. Thanks!
Hi Elakkiya!

Elakkiya:Hello, I'm Elakkiya from Amazon Kindle support.I'll be happy to help you today

Me:awesome
Basically it comes down to these terms cited by Amazon Exec Michael Murphy in his letter: "Per our Conditions of Use which state in part: Amazon.co.uk and its affiliates reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion."
Is this true?
Without needing to cite any reasons whatsoever, is Amazon able to delete all my books?

Elakkiya:I'm sorry for the inconvenience you had about this.
May I place you on hold for 1 to 2 minutes while I check this for you?

Me:Sure
No inconvenience so far for ME
just for the person in that article
so I'm asking if it is factually correct

Elakkiya:Thanks for waiting.

Me:sure

Elakkiya:It seems there was some problem with the account. This is the reason for the account closure.

Me:obviously. :) the appalling thing is that amazon doesn't want to tell her what problem
so my question is: does Amazon not NEED to tell its customers which problem an account has before closing it?
obviously amazon needs to have the right to close accounts
but i'd say in those cases it also has the responsibility to state why
more than a hand-wavy "there were problems"

Elakkiya:May I place you on hold for 1 to 2 minutes while I check this for you?

Me:sure

Elakkiya:Thanks for waiting.

Me:sure

Elakkiya:On further going through this issue, I see that I need to transfer your concern to the appropriate department who handle these kind of issues.

Me:ok
please do that. will they respond via email then?

Elakkiya:Yes, you should hear back from them in the next 1-2 business days.

Me:great. i assume you have my email since i'm logged in, right?

Elakkiya:Yes,John.

Me:Thanks, Elakkiya. Have a great day!

Elakkiya:You're welcome.
Thank you for visiting Amazon.com. We look forward to seeing you again soon.
> The problem is that Kindle users probably did give explicit permission (for some definition of explicit permission). I'm sure there's a clause in the ToS that allows Amazon to delete content that you've purchased.

Shouldn't this be considered a contract of adhesion? At what point does a piddly subscriber have in dictating their terms of engagement with a huge DRM'd content provider? This would get real interesting if, say, you were required to buy stuff for your school on a Kindle that your tuition money paid for.
Mono seems to be becoming what Java could have been if Sun had been sensible--a VM-based garbage collected system with a lot of high level portable libraries that gives you a lot of cross platform capability, BUT that is happy to let you write a Windows program or a Mac program or a Linux program if that's what you want.
I really love the music and audio from the trailer video. The gameplay and art style looks great too. I'll be buying this in a couple of days once my exams are over. Congratulations on shipping!
what "biggest party", the one which was allied with Berlusconi?
Scientists sentenced to prison for Not predicting an earthquake
> Slow startup / test runs. At one point, loading large amounts of files (like during rails bootup) was much slower on jruby than MRI.

You can develop on MRI and deploy on JRuby. Several people, including myself and Square, develop JRuby applications this way, and validate stability across multiple Rubies by doing matrix builds on a CI system.

Check out Xavier Shay's talk on the matter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMpd4CzR1f8&t=16m

I know several people balk at this suggestion and claim development should be as close as possible to production... and do that despite the fact they develop on OS X and deploy on Linux, develop with a case insensitive filesystem and deploy to a case sensitive filesystem, develop in an environment without load and deploy to an environment with load, etc...
Ask HN: What to do in downtown Austin, TX?
I'll be in downtown Austin on business, but I may get a chance to do something else with two nights there. Any recommendations for things to do or check out?
Thanks Azat! Had no idea this would get picked up by HN at all, it's quite the compliment.
Musk says, "It is impossible for [dealers] to explain the advantages of going electric without simultaneously undermining their traditional business." But every other technology introduced, from the electric starter in the 1910s to hybrids in the 2000s, has gone through the same process. Chevrolet dealers have explained the advantages of and sold 24000 Volts in the US.
Sorry about that, we had an explosion of traffic following the release of our SG-CLI, and it appears our auto-scaling code affected an availability zone because of a higher-than-normal write load...
How about something like Gumroad?
That's insane, this guy has his hands in everything. I believe he's also had his hand in solar energy (SolarCity), and was involved in PayPal.

Just reading his wiki and apparently he can even beat Russia's Putin in Judo. I usually take everyone's success with a grain of salt but this guy seems to have it all. Real Life Tony Stark?
"rvm get head; rvm install jruby" also works ;)
During commencement at our medical school, one of the second-years on stage said "I know what you're all thinking: you were expecting all sorts of crazy intellectuals and artists. But everyone is so . . . normal."
From Airbnb to Coursera: Government Shouldn’t Regulate the Sharing Economy
Reddit Relies on EC2 which was all down (now recovering) ... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684384
The indexable "world wide web" of startups, big tech brands, VC, video sites, porn and blogs about cats falling out of windows, yes.

When it comes to the deep web i.e. corporate applications, business tools etc, it's just not seen at all. These are the things that produce a lot of value and solve a lot of problems. I'd argue they are cumulatively more valuable than the above.

EsEnt, AppFabric, IIS7 ARR, PowerShell cover your concerns above all of which are scriptable and automatable.

When you consolidate your time across the year spent on developing a backup methodology for your server, managing updates etc, monitoring, testing, where does that leave you? I know Linux inside out (I've been a professional user on and off since 1998) and I know you hit the same number of roadblocks as windows along the way.

Also your deployment model sounds odd. Do you check in your production artifacts/dlls and configuration? Do you build on your production boxes? Also your demonstration applications are tiny. A single deployment we throw out has 95Mb of release compiled DLLs across 48 assemblies...

We use NHibernate and have a test harness for MySQL already so we're not bothered about SQL pricing (anyway it's still plenty affordable as our product is valuable and pays for the licensing).

I was using rsync on Windows 2000 back in 2002 to sync press image libraries so that's a moot point really.

Azure cuts it for the ramp up phase of your product if you factor in the above. We did a proper cost analysis.