skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We couldn’t seem to find any way to subscribe to events and publish events without a single point of failure. We looked at everything we could find, and they all seemed to have this bottleneck.

“The Spread toolkit provides a high performance messaging service that is resilient to faults across local and wide area networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast, group communication, and point to point support. Spread services range from reliable messaging to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees.”

http://www.spread.org/

We use this for LAN event communication among standalone servers acting together, and WAN event communication among POPs acting together, for billions of events per month. Any server in a group dies, they elect a new master, so no SPoF.

What was it about your use case that made this feel like a single point of failure or bottleneck?
Show HN: Instastrm - Instagram Live Photo Stream
Please review my week-end project. Instastrm is a live streaming of images from Instagram by photo tags. You can enter or select a photo tags from the popular ones and Instastrm will create a live stream of recently uploaded images from the Instagram server. Check it out here: http://instastrm.com
But HN is not a "Stack Overflow" style community. So if you have done 100+ of these to HN users I dont think you get the point of this community.
Can anyone offer any insight as to why you wouldn't generate a one-time random string with a short lifetime for password reset emails? Sending a blob with data in it (encrypted or otherwise) seems like a potential information leak with no upside.
There doesn't have to be but the way IPOs are set up there's incentive for dishonesty. At the very least, the buyers of the shares are at a information disadvantage compared to the issuer. If you were to personally buy an entire private business you would never accept the level of disclosure that people buying shares in an IPO have to accept. You'd have your experts review every corner of the business.
Coursera-downloader
I feel your pain!
For forgot password, there really is no reason to take this approach, though if you do it sanely it's not a problem. The report generation and other things like that in their code, however, are reasonable to do this way if you do it right.
Rescuing serious journalism by productively reducing it to mindless fun
Understood. They are 1/5 to the way of what most apps make though. :-)

I meant there are multiple variables here and they are focused on conversion rate. I'm not certain they are doing that badly there. If they had a million downloads instead of 6000, the story would be different given the same conversion rates. 6000 downloads is nothing.
Games that I really like and have purchased, I would be hard-pressed to complete 100 levels before growing a bit tired of the game. I can only think of perhaps two games that I have gone that far.

Perhaps I'm not a loyal gamer or a super-fan of any game. But I do buy games, probably 1 or 2 per month. With 100 free levels it's most likely that people like myself would never even get to the stage where purchasing this game was necessary - even if I loved it. And if there was no reminder, I may not even really think about it.

It's wonderful to be a nice company and to give away something really fun for people to play. But, there's no need to be so nice that you can't stay in business. Especially with games at $0.99 or whatever, it really is not asking much for people to pay a little to help support the game that they enjoy.
This sounds like something I would have loved to come across. It didn't come up in any google searches or any conversations with other software people who I talked to about this problem, so I didn't evaluate it. Quite simply, I had no idea it even existed.
Better JavaScript Development With 'JSTerm' for Firefox | Webmonkey | Wired.com
There is also http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ for running Python and other scripting languages on Android. I've used it in the past when I needed to use my phone as a fancy calculate and wrote some Python to perform the calculations.
Given the choice between switching to a computer with Flash (I'm on an iPad) or not watching this, I'm choosing not to watch.
People are the only thing that matter. 
Discuss.
I think you'd have a hard time finding a scientist in the field that doesn't think that the mind is the result of the brain's action, but in origin of life research, "self-replicating molecules" is not the only game in town.

The two main approaches are "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first", though the replicators seem to do better in the popular press. I did my doctoral work in this field, and I was in the metabolism camp along with many of the major scientists working on the problem.

In a nutshell, "metabolism-first" means that a network of many interacting molecules were changing their local environment, eventually creating various feedback cycles that amplified the effect. Meaningful replication (especially of the RNA/DNA "informational polymer" variety) likely came significantly later, and almost certainly after the metabolic system had already achieved a basic state of homeostasis.

It was likely an evolutionary advancement of the "metabolic system" to use molecules like RNA (if not RNA itself, initially) to establish a more robust homeostasis by encoding information about the system in a more stable form.
It doesn't honor aspect ratios: http://dynameme.com/embed/v1/?image=abedgun.gif&topHeadl...

It doesn't check if the letters get really tall:
http://dynameme.com/embed/v1/?image=abedgun.gif&topHeadl...

The text doesn't get burned on the image so I cannot use the images as standalones.
Facebook’s European, Middle East, Africa Head Joanna Shields Is Leaving
I don't agree, in my opinion you have to be priced more than similar products to count as "paying a premium". Like Monster Cable--same product but several times the price.

Walk into the store and you'll see that the best phones from both Apple and Samsung cost the same amount.
I heard the talk was great.

Here's a few fragments...

"You only feel two emotions as a founder. Euphoria and Terror.

https://twitter.com/cg/status/259789009230893056/photo/1

http://instagram.com/p/RBYEi3FfBt/

http://lightt.com/RobertScoble/s/DqvJzkGwUR4pgaEjE9FpK3

https://twitter.com/AlexWeinstein/status/259783632342880256

https://twitter.com/gayle/status/259788576110280704

https://twitter.com/wa7son/status/259785205278187520
Hope this picks up, there are some things I'd like a Sensei to teach me "well". For example MongoDB, "Where should I use it?"
It would be nice if there were something like a live preview. Also the aspect ratio is sometimes thrown off by resizing the images. Maybe set it up as a canvas editor in front (to allow for things like cropping and resizing the background) and send the data uri to the server?
Ask HN: Startup Disaster Recovery
Our company is in the process of raising a round, and one of our investors has asked us to put in place some disaster recovery procedures before investing. What DR procedures do you have in place for your company?

Some background:
* I am sole coder
* All code is on GitHub
* App is deployed to Heroku
* Domain names are on NetworkSolutions
That is probably not affected, as it's not necessary that each copy of lol1 inside lol2 actually be a copy. They could simply all be references to the same node.

In fact, I don't even think that is legal for them to be copies, as this is the means by which YAML allows circular data structures to be represented.
Checklists help you to be less stupid
For those looking for recent Django screencasts, Buddy Lindsey did a bunch at this site GoDjango:

http://godjango.com

He covered a lot of stuff including Forms, Formsets, Social Authentication and Generic Class Based Views.
Cyberpunk Text Adventure, "Cypher"
To me, this rage is misdirected.

The instinct to take a repetitive pattern and replace it a higher-level abstraction is a good one. It is only because we do this that software is comprehensible at all.

If a person's attempt at doing this leads to terrible problems in practice, problems that have nothing to do with the difficulty of the problem itself but rather with configuration or peculiarities of the implementation, then that is a sign that your entire system is built on a mountain of sand.

His conclusion is that "pkg.m4 is a poison that is holding us back." No. The poison is a pile of m4, shell, and autotools that are held together with bubble gum and chicken wire.
I dont get why you would bother using a blob for forgot password.. Isnt something like reset.php?account=joeblow&auth=md5(accountname/secretkey/first10charsofcurrentpasshash/yymmdd) enough?

You cant replay attack the reset link once its used, it expires in 24 hours and so long as the 'secretkey' was sufficiently unique, you wouldnt be able to bruteforce or crack it.

All the php script needs to do is attempt to build a 'good' md5 hash and see if they match- if they do, let you input a new password to store.
One thing that improves reliability is in fact to get rid of the configuration step. Not just the workarounds for broken shells or old Solaris/HP-UX versions with anemic libcs, but the principle of disabling some features or switching to alternative implementations when something isn't found. It just creates new code paths and combinatorial complexity, probably broken because the developer's environment will never trigger them. Distro packagers already prefer hard fails to know when they are missing a dependency.

To compensate, the replacement just needs to offer better facilities for triggering installs of the missing dependencies. That's basically the path taken by modern languages (Go, Python, Ruby, Node… gnome's jh_build is part of the same trend): they have tools to fetch source dependencies from the network, to install in custom prefixes that don't require root, to create isolated prefixes so that multiple versions can be installed in parallel, to freeze known-good versions of the dependency graph.

But those little knobs so you can build your own customised version with decals and your own red spoiler? No one will miss them.
Well you are correct that some bands are only "in it for the music" but in fact that attitude can get you screwed even harder when you're negotiating with a label.

A lot of musicians are comfortable with a meager living - but not too many of appreciate being poor while the label is raking in cash. But, that's the reality of it. A big label has the power to get you in front of a lot of people and make you famous. It's better to build up the fanbase on your own in the long run, but that's a tough road and many, many artists are eager to accept the shortcut in exchange for a crappy deal. That's just the way it is.
I can assure you Detroit has "normal" services like city water, garbage collection, electricity, and the majority of roads are maintained (even if 100% of them don't get plowed during the winter). I still don't see how anyone can say that is "reminiscent of anarchy". Is there an anarchy you lived in that it is reminiscent of?

Downtown Detroit has two major sports teams (the Tigers and the Red Wings), renown cultural attractions like the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the world headquarters of a few companies like Quicken Loans and General Motors... the characterization of downtown in this thread is really bordering on the absurd...
I thought even at that altitude there would still be a significant amount of atmosphere but apparently not. Even 39km there's still a lot of atmosphere to go but I guess it's pretty thin.

When interviewed Kittinger said something "To all those who said Baumgartner suit would tear apart I salute you with a middle finger!" I laughed but thought it was unnecessary harsh since at some point he may enter thicker atmospheric region going 1,340km/h.

The design of aircraft are angled to near points and aircraft skin of supersonic craft are made of exotic materials to withstand thousands of degrees Celsius. I figured Mach 1 in a bulky suit thin atmosphere or not at some point something may tear, give way or heat up suddenly.
Wow, this is unbelievable. Can I get a source on the case?
So did Friendster. But they both f'd it up. Facebook has held on ... so far.
Miguel IS a Gnome/Mono guy. Or at least he was a gnome guy, and his contributions have helped many people all over the world.
Whatever idiosyncratic stuff you do that helps you get into the zone for a long coding session is perfectly fine.

Shortly after landing my first job out of college, I picked up Orbital's first two albums and listened to them nonstop with a bit of Autechre and Aphex Twin while coding. After I left that job, I misplaced the Orbital albums, but kept listening to Autechre and Aphex Twin while doing other stuff.

Last week I picked up Orbital 1 and 2 again, and put them on while coding. BAM right into the zone. Probably won't work for you, but it works for me.
That is exactly what you should do. The only upside to sending semantically meaningful data in email tokens is that parsing the responses doesn't require a central database lookup --- but that upside itself comes with the downside of losing the control that a simple database table gives you over outstanding tokens. And that's not really an "upside"; it's just a convenience.

Don't encrypt reset tokens. Send random strings.
Thomas Quick: the Swedish serial killer who never was
Quoting the relevant part of what he said:

“I probably would have taken an engineering job…[and] always had a lot of respect for Microsoft,” he said. “A lot of people from Harvard went to work there.”
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/20/zuck-startup-school/#tKVEq...

Not exactly what the title says.
This looks very interesting, but I have a few comments from the introduction:

- Single-page apps offer a more native-app-like experience, but there's no reason they must throw away the advantages of web over app. Almost any conceivable app is going to have different top-level states, and many apps are going to let you access different pieces of content. Support URLs to go directly to those states and to those pieces of content for two reasons: ability to be linked / indexed from outside, and navigability via the browser history. I believe the correct way to look at this is to explicitly think of these top-level states/content, and then look at supporting them in a URL, not the other way around that you suggest ("we probably need to reduce the level of detail that we support in URLs somewhat").

- The MVC pattern predates web apps, web sites and the www itself. The thing I always found shocking was that server side apps, not client, used the pattern at all. That said, getting rid of controllers altogether due to the myriad approaches and variants that exist out in the wild is a sensible idea.

Many thanks for taking the time to write this book!
If you can control the lighting conditions then glossy is probably better.

If you have less control of lighting, or of position of the screen, or etc then matte is probably better.

This is assuming both glossy and matte monitor are equal for everything else.
That is what a distributed has table is. And the values and keys aren't lost--there's just some confusion over what the keys and values are.

The keys and values, at least in Pastry's case, are the NodeID and the metadata about the Node, respectively. According to my understanding, at least. I had to learn a lot to implement this, so I would not claim to be an expert on distributed hash tables by any stretch of the imagination.
Pirate Bay Founder being held in Solitary Confinement
There are several wrong things with that post. First of the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro checks that pkg-config is present on the system and presents a nice error message if it isn't. Second, PKG_CHECK_MODULES can be used to specify several dependencies:

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(DEP, foo udev >= 999 neverhere)

Then if one or more of the dependencies aren't met, all problems are shown:

Package foo was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `foo.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'foo' found
Requested 'udev >= 999' but version of udev is 175
Package neverhere was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `neverhere.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'neverhere' found

It may not seem like much, but for someone not used to compiling stuff from source it means a lot that all missing dependencies are shown at once. A sloppy shell script to check for the same dependencies would mean that the user would first see "foo not found" and go and download that package, then "udev >= 175 required" and when that is fixed the third error and so on.

Also, the error message "You can download mono from www.go.mono.com" isn't very useful for most Linux users. The correct remedy on distros that ship with devel packages is to figure out the name of the package that supplies the include headers and pkg-config file and istall that. pkg-configs error message aren't that great either, but at least they are easily recognizable.

In my opinion, autoconf is a very misguided build system. It is designed so that it should have no other requirements on the compiling users system other than a POSIX environment, a shell and a C compiler. It is a completely unnecessary constraint because nowadays everyone is able to install great languages like Python, Ruby, Scheme and many others much more suitable for writing build configuration systems than shell script. There is no point anymore in using the M4 language to generate a 1000 line configure script when a 50 line Python/Ruby/$OtherNiceScriptingLanguage would work just as well.
From the article - "The reason why Gottfrid is being kept in custody is that he 'might destroy evidence and disturb the investigation'."
U think Windows 8 has a steep learning curve? Watch a 3 yr old use it just fine
No equivalent of the Sixth Amendment in Sweden, then?
Q3 2012, more mobile startups funded, seed deals bigger
It sounds like you are giving in every time. Is that your best option?
I don't want to have a political discussion on HN. But the original claim that France is "one of the most socialist country of the planet" is ridiculous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism)

There are problems in France (As there are in other countries). But just saying it's because France is socialist will not help to solve them.

Some people on right see socialism everywhere.

Some people on left see capitalism everywhere.

Some religious people see the devil everywhere

...

But all off this doesn't solve any real problem.
Uiji.js is jQuery in reverse
Ben Horowitz noted the importance of being 10x better than your competitors..friendster was better than fb, but not so much better that it made people switch.
setjmp/longjmp tends to be pretty primitive, compared to decent eh support.

Standard C does not have thread local storage.
If anyone reading this is interested in throwing caution to the wind and doing a hardware startup: I'd love a 24" eInk display or two, connected via USB. Ideally usable in either portrait or landscape orientation. Sure, the refresh rate would be super slow, but I'd use it for documentation and other reference material while actually coding on my macbook or one of my external LCD displays.
Free Alitalia Flights With Japanese Promo Code
Engineer Whispering – insights into the technical side of the table
Why would you even use blobs for forgot-password? Is there ever a reason to use them over a single-use, time-limited token?
A Typeface Just for Dyslexics? — The Book Designer
I tried it. But I like Gnome 2 a lot more then xfce. For example in xfce you cannot reorder the entries in the task bar.
Maybe a bit more with the spacesuit glove on!
Isn't the healthy answer "either, and frequent breaks"? You should never look at a single focal point too long at a stretch, no matter its shininess.
Hmm, so is the use case a distributed task queue? If so, why not use a consistent hash ring (http://www.martinbroadhurst.com/Consistent-Hash-Ring.html), or just pick a server at random? I'm afraid I'm missing the point entirely :/ Is it about maintaining a consistent list of member workers?
> Yeah, anything above $279 would be a huge disappointment.

how so?
If you DDOS GitHub as a whole, how does that call attention to the one project a bad guy has trojaned?

If the project has mostly "commercial" developers then chances are they work on it during the week. DDOS GitHub during the week and let off for the weekend. That gives a few days worth for your trojan to be downloaded by the unsuspecting. People will also have tired hearing about the "github news" so new news about trojaning will take a little longer to disperse.
Best RonCo quote: "you're going to make money while this guy fights with the record labels" -- why you should do a technology and maybe b2b startup rather than a music (or maybe even consumer generally) startup.
yes, if we describe it, people will start "unit testing" their botnets against us.
Huh, thanks. I didn't understand this was an active check at link creation time; woosh for me.
Write him good letters as this situation is terrifying.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...
Really good idea. Thank you for doing this.
Sounds like a Y-Tree to me: "A Novel Index Supporting High Volume Data Warehouse Insertions," C. Jermaine et. al, VLDB '99.

How are fractal trees different?
Stackexchange trolls with 10 hour trololol song
Scroll down to the 'unsubscribe' link and click

http://stackexchange.com/newsletters/newsletter?site=stackoverflow.com
as in, twenty years too late?

the sex pistols formed in 75. sid vicious was dead by 79.

i wonder when the person who wrote this article was born?

punk as fuck, indeed.
His slides were marked with "confidential, do not distribute". That may have something to do with it. It's unfortunate, his talk was excellent, though he didn't divulge any secrets as far as I could tell.
Voice of reason (one of the comments on that page) -

I love the "It's just file storage/storage locker" arguments/analogies, which always ignore the fact that MegaUpload's affiliate program paid uploaders when what they uploaded was downloaded. That was MU's business model, NOT providing storage space for you to upload the mad-beats for the track you're laying down, and so your partner 1000 miles a way could download, add their part, then re-upload back to you, etc. That's the 'front' to the operation...

So, if your storage space company provided drug dealers a place to store their stash, AND a way to re-sell that stash, AND laundered the money from those sales, AND tried to provide you with plausible deniability for your activities, then you'd have a honest analogy for MegaUpload.

Trying to say that MegaUpload and a Storage Locker company are the same is like trying to say the Sun and a grain of sand are the same, because both happen to be round.
I have my .profile set up to auto-attach to a default screen session, which works with -x.

http://blog.ryanc.org/?p=5
I am still a big fan of MySpace for music. If I see a listing for a band that I don't know, I just google band name+myspace, and know that I will get an instant stream.

Websites make it often painfully difficult to find an instant stream, and before officially releasing a record most band are not listed on iTunes.

The only somewhat adequate replacement became YouTube.
I've always wanted an e-ink display for development. Would be so cool.
You're right. I don't have kids, so I'm definitely interested in how your version! :)
The notes are great.