skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> InvokeDynamic support

This is the big one, in my opinion. See here[1] for some benchmarks of JRuby + invokedynamic. We're talking orders of magnitude for some benchmarks.

[1] http://blog.headius.com/2011/08/invokedynamic-in-jruby-const...
"just has to scan and OCR"

Yeah, just OCR badly hand-written text. That's a hard problem! I've run across matches in the census data that I would consider illegible, but that somehow got matched with the right name.
Wow, the content filtering nazis didn't take too long to get at this. Websense'd as "file sharing" :(
I've had two personal experiences of making stressful life/death decisions after several physically taxing days with no sleep.

Not end of life decisions -- and my own life wasn't on the line -- so it's not the same thing, but my personal experience was that the earlier research and prep I had done was like a ray of clear light in my otherwise clouded mind.

I realize this is less persuasive given the lack of detail, but these are not really my stories to tell.
Drag a File to OS X Terminal Window to Get Path, Edit
Inside The Impact Engine
When I'm looking for a new programming language to learn, I ask the question, "Will I learn something new about the fundamental concepts of programming?"

It's my 10x better test. In general, I think all three are good to know, and each are good at what it does. Ruby is in the 'everything is an object' world, and does it well. It optimizes for programmer speed, rather than execution speed.

Node.js is like being dragged halfway to lisp and functional programming. Learned a lot here, but having callbacks is almost like having to program with continuations all the time.

Go is for systems programming, and it's got its own take at concurrent programming. It's worth looking into.

Either way, just start at one, and eventually do side projects in the others. Can't hurt to know them all.
This has the potential to be huge for Mocavo
Some thoughts on the recent public negativity toward Apple
Here's what the License Agreement says:

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId...)

> Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software, and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without refund of any fees. Amazons failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.
Yeah, I was really on the fence about including an SCSS version, as I generally prefer to write straight up CSS without any preprocessors. (A buddy contributed the SCSS and Rakefile for Typeset.css.)

Thanks for the Stylus input. I’ve never used it before and will take a look.
Thankfully the right scrolling bit is all ads, so you can just ignore it. No navigation there, thank god.
Cool stuff. Congrats!

It's nice you also released your notes for it. ;)
I used the trial version of it (that only runs in the simulator)- as a C# dev, it was great. MonoDevelop was deeply inferior to Visual Studio, though.
Learning doesn't magically triple your hosting budget or your ops team headcount. Sometimes 99.9% availability is all you can afford... or all that makes sense to do the work for. Netflix didn't go down, though; I've been watching TV on it throughout this incident.
I just wish Ancentry would spend some time and resources for the Asian market.
Our multi-AZ RDS instance did not failover correctly this time although it has in the past..
Timehope for iPhone now released
Timehop is now mobile! See your photos and updates from this exact day in history. Timehop helps you celebrate the best moments of the past with your friends!
When is Google Compute Engine supposed to be open to everyone?
Althiugh agree with the visionary status of Musk. But, your comment speaks to my point directly regarding the differing customer acquisition models. Apple's growth comes from entering an emerging market. Very different than the car industry.
The emerging market of the car industry started with another visionary, Henry Ford.
"Show up late and there was no fresh milk left, and only yesterday's bread" -- that'll be correct :)

I remember there was a wide-spread (and criticized, even in children's books) habit of throwing away whole loafs of bread, if it lost its softness a couple of days after it had been bought: "an old man tells children he sees playing football with a loaf not do that and tells the history of his times" -- a scenario from one of the books I read when I was a child, and quite a life-like one :)

You should probably ask your friends whether they were hungry -- ever, and esp. on that unlucky days they were late to the grocery :)

Seems, the Soviet system was just a bit too pedantic about not wasting food.
You theoretically can on the 8-bit ATMegas, so I don't see why not. Using it in practice, though, is another matter.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/03/30/linux-atmel...
I don't think Google will enter the space of actually building cars - but they most definitely will partner closely with some of these companies for their self-driving cars.
Tons has been written about Netflix's architecture, and they're down as well. I believe Amazon isn't being totally transparent.
website was down for me, then i refreshed and it was up. If anyone is having a problem viewing, go here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subbania/epnejcjdg...

It has the youtubelink & buy now button.
Great idea. My goal was to just have it pay for itself, I'll write a follow up and let you know if it exceeds that.
Yet netflix is currently down, so maybe there is a problem with the chimp army?
Overkill, yes. However, it's probably also cheaper than going with anything else. It might have cost them $1 more in hardware to go with 512MB of RAM rather than 256MB but they probably saved $10 in licensing fees.

Yes, 99% of Android apps will be useless, but 1% of a very large number is still a large number.

As for battery, virtually all of it goes into the display and the radio. The CPU is sleeping most of the time, so the OS chosen would have very little impact on that.

"I think there is still demand for a high quality phone that is light on features and inexpensive."

Sorry, not going to happen. In a modern phone, features are a lot cheaper to add than quality.
I know it's been said, but the Heroku status page is the easiest to use. Very effective use of a timeline.
Why appreciating your life can improve sales
Ten Ways the New iPad Mini will Create Opportunities for Business
You actually can't make that assertion in confidence. To do so, you have to measure the utility of the benefits to a given individual, and the utility of the money they spend on it, and quantify the risk of Amazon revoking/pulling the content.

As hard as it might be for you to believe, your subjective worldview is not absolute reality, and not everyone shares your world-view and definition of utility, so you can't actually judge whether their actions are self-defeating for them.
ORDBMS
Interesting. My Heroku-hosted site seems to be doing fine: http://www.cocoacontrols.com
This is something that's always in the back of mind.

Yes the Kindle is awesome, but how hard is it for a bookstore to come to your house and repossess a book?
Hosted on heroku with a hosted heroku postgres dev instance, I observed a drop in the db response time :

- from a consistent average of 10ms over the last week

- to a new consistent average of ~2.5ms

beetwen 17:31 and 17:35 UTC. AWS started to report the current issue at 17:38 UTC. My app then experienced some intermittent issues (reported by newrelic pinging it every 30s). Don't know if it's related, could it be some sort of hw upgrade that went wrong ?

I did a push affecting my most used queries but that was one and a half hour sooner, at 15:56 UTC, so probably unrelated.
What? Airbnb are re-branding to Air? That's a terrible idea.
ICloud is Making iOS App Development Cheaper
Or, if you are, predict catastrophe 100% of the time.
For added fun, their EC2 console is down. I got this for a while:

<html><body><b>Http/1.1 Service Unavailable</b></body> </html>

... then an empty console saying "loading" for the last 20 minutes. Then recently it upgraded to saying "Request limit exceeded." in place of the loading message (because hey, I'd refreshed the page four times over the course of 20 minutes).

On the upside, their status page shows all green lights.
Never underestimate the amount of young engineers ignoring markets that cater to Baby Boomers.
The choices can change between each time you initiate a quiz. However, if you complete part of a quiz, save, then return later, the choices will be the same, but the order will be different.

Not all of the courses are set up with multiple choices though. In addition to varying sets of correct responses, some answers are mathematical. For instance it is defined such that a question might ask ("What is %d plus %d", a, b), then have choices involving the quantities: ("%d", a+1), ("%d", a*b), ("%d", a+b), etc. with a different random quantity for a and b each time you start a quiz.

Interestingly, I saw one course where it had single-choice questions, with more differences than simply right or wrong. For instance one answer gave 100%, another 80%, and another 0% of the points available for that question.
Actually, what I quoted is for the cheapest service UPS offers between Italy and the US and is only about $15 less than their express service.
>How can you call it "the same device", when everything is different, and they are targeted for different people?

Everything is different? These are two tablets with almost the same name, presented on the same web page next to each other and hence targeting the same people. They look almost identical. They have exactly the same screen size and aspect ratio. Same types of connectivity as well. One is higher specced than the other. More storage, more memory, faster CPU and a few other details. These are clearly two variants of the same device.

And Microsoft itself has made it very clear what the main difference is: Some obscure sub division within their Windows OS lineup. Take away "RT" and "8 Pro" and the names are identical.

It's as if Apple was offering two versions of the iPad, one running iOS and another one running Mac OS.
Well, if you want a promising technology everyone's hyped about the future of js, js is becoming everything and so there you'd have node to play a role. Personally though, I just haven't found node to be that useful compared to Go, also for me the nested callbacks within callbacks are annoying. So I'd say to pick Go, although its a little early in the game to see how well it will be adopted and how many useful libs will be created for it, nonetheless the language itself is beautiful mix that gives you low level (c-like) control and speed, with nice abstractions that make your job less tedious than c and more like python/ruby programming.

Last a note about Ruby, I think the VM is amazing the API is great and programming in ruby you can throw things together blazingly fast and clean, so its also a good choice. Overall though I'd say Go, I think its the best language to come around in a long time and people will adopt it
Not my app, but you could check out iCircuit's experience:
http://praeclarum.org/post/31799384896/icircuit-code-reuse-t...

He achieves anywhere from 69-87% code reuse depending on the platform. They did a bit of a case study a while ago where Frank talks about it - http://blog.xamarin.com/2011/10/26/java-to-ipad-in-2-months/
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.

This is why there has to be clear law that says that one owns the digital content on ones ebook reader. Courts might interpret that you already do, but clear statue law would be very clarifiying.

Remember if the law says one thing, and you agree (via a T&C or contract) to another, then the law wins. You cannot sign something away if the law says you cannot sign the thing away. No country is a pure libertarian utopia.
Turning The Oceans Into Jetfuel
Show HN: Anybody can modify www.mitt-romney.net
Actually, their deal with Toyota is a better example and ultimately might be the future of tesla
In Memory of Paul Kurtz and Leon Jaroff
so true: "In devops is turtle all way down but at bottom is perl script. "

https://twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT/status/248770195580125185
I'm watching Netflix from Austin, so it's not entirely down in the US.
Crowded, to a scary degree when people started squishing into the lobby despite no actual forward progress at the head of the line. I learned some things about herd behavior that day.

The talks were largely uninteresting. I got far more out of the meet & greets which happened the night before.

Ultimately I voted with my feet and left early.
It used to be that there were records websites and family tree websites / software. Combining them is a win/win: records access has more value so higher prices but no need to keep subscribing, while family tree sites emphasize longer subscriptions to keep your tree online. Both Ancestry and MyHeritage are now going to this model from opposite sides.
I don't care about that. For most of that books, their authors are already dead; most of them are also forgotten to the point of being out-of-print.

Your comment will be justified if the stockpile was smaller and more hit-driven, but 20G is a nice cultural pill you will have difficulty arguing about.
That's a little different. What you're talking about is burying bad news, which is indeed standard political practice. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

What it's not is corruption, which is what the OP is talking about.

For what it's worth, I would say Italy does have a perception of being more corrupt than its fellow European counterparts. This may or may not be true - it's obviously a little difficult to objectively measure corruption, but the Corruption Perceptions Index[1] has ranked Italy as one the most corrupt countries of Western Europe.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
Exactly. And as I mentioned elsewhere in discussion, its hard to emphasize enough how low resolution full body imaging is compared to local area imaging. It's really bad. Slices of 7mm or so in thickness versus 3ish mm. Like all sorts of things, in imaging there is a relationship between the quality of the question and the quality of the answer. Have I got something wrong with me? Versus Have I got a HCC of the liver? One is more easily answered than the other.
Even for people who don't read as much as I do, I think those benefits exist and that you're understating them. (Especially because my Kindle is part of the reason I read so much, not just the means by which I do it.) A Kindle is still a lot more portable than even a paperback. (I can comfortably fit it in a jacket pocket.) It's still way more convenient to be able to buy books whenever you want than to have to plan a trip to the bookstore or library. It's still a lot nicer of a reading experience than most paperbacks.

Yes, I do spend a lot of money on books every year. When you look at it in context though, that number really isn't crazy, even for something I don't end up owning. Cable TV, a Netflix account, Spotify, and going to the movies once a month are all in the same order of magnitude for similar-ish kinds of things, and you don't end up owning anything as a result of any of those, either. Reading--even when you're buying every book you read--is actually a surprisingly cost-effective means of entertainment.

And there's definitely not a 100% premium compared to me buying the physical books--that's a very silly way to do cost analysis. A sizable percentage of the actual benefit of reading a book is reading it for the first time, so losing access to it later doesn't completely devalue your purchase. Even if you were to factor in the chance of losing access to the books you've spent money on later (which is entirely reasonable), you should also be factoring in the chance that you don't ever lose access to your books. Anecdotally, events like this seem extremely uncommon, and so treating them like a certainty doesn't make much sense.

As I said, I'm not trying to defend Kindle (or any other) DRM here. I'm trying to argue against the idea that people who own and use ebook readers are idiots.

(And as for how I read so much...20 minutes both ways on the subway plus another 3-4 hours throughout the week is easily a book a week for me--I read pretty quickly--and I occasionally just sit down and decide to spend an evening reading instead of doing something else.)
There are more ways to generate solar power than with solar panels. Presumably, they could invest in solar power plants. Heck, the highly illuminated towers of a solar power plant can be seen for miles, and could even be used for publicity: "Free power beacons on the road for Tesla cars..."
Based off of the blog post previous to this one about the implementation of SVGs site-wide, I'm confused why they'd risk using SVGs over just CSS alone or CSS+PNGs or even matte'd GIFs? Maybe I'm behind the times, but that seems like a nightmare to maintain comparatively.
Fundamentally, Reddit is the exact same sort of website as Hacker News, but Hacker News seems to be operating fine. What are these unavoidable AWS-hosted services you're thinking of? I cannot think of any but I'm sure you know of several.
Choice quotes from Startup School
Google’s 10-inch Manta tablet to be announced on Oct 29?
Just a prediction there...
They're hard to register and cost more. I registered http://canhekick.it through iwantmyname.com after someone snatched up canhekickit.com. It cost me $30 instead of $10.
See frontpage http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684384
We will be adding this very soon.
I think the B&W contributes to the intriguing visual style.
This looks cool. Data modeling in Cocoa has, historically, been kind of terrible. It doesn't look like there's a solid story for persistence yet, though (i.e. writing data to sqlite). Is that accurate or am I missing something?
The difficult part of making an e-ink Android, or applying an e-ink display to a general-purpose platform is that the way screen-drawing is implemented has not been designed with e-ink in mind.

The display might either seem "flashy" because the full screen is blanked and drawn for every update, or the screen gets "muddy" because the graphics stack isn't keeping track of how many times a screen areas has been rewritten without being reset.

Page-at-a-time updates, like those between pages of a book, are the most compatible with how e-ink works.
As a tangent, I hate how trademark law protects the "Amazon" brand for book sellers, but there are 2 different companies. I think that if the company wants to keep a trademark, then any company that uses/is licenced that trademark is legally counted as the same company. This way Joe Soap, upon seeing the "Amazon" trademark, is not able to screwed around by corporate structure shenanigans. Or Amazon Ltd. have the choice of giving up the trademark.
Same thing here. My first quote was sadly religious as well as many others, among less than ten quotes.
28 Beginner’s Tutorials for Learning about MySQL Databases
"You should be able to pull off a great name in 1 day."

One of the things I always suggest to people is running name choices by potential customers when appropriate. As such you simply wouldn't be able to do this in one day. Even if you just wanted to check and see how well people hear the name when you say it and can easily spell it that is going to take some time. The amount of care you take in this area of course is related to what the name is being used for of course.
Why doesn't Heroku have a "Technical Difficulties" page?
When AWS or other issues take Heroku down, why do they display broken sites instead of something less hideous, like the old-fashioned "Technical Difficulties" slide from television's days of yore (or better yet, a static page you provide)?
I haven't experienced the retention issue myself. My pattern of usage is to only open from the tiles. I tend to use the back button to navigate through previous contexts (hold it down and then slide left/right to pick a task/open application).

Regarding notifications; you know about tiles right? They have status on them i.e. unread count etc. A notification is pretty just a poke in the ribs to check the tiles rather than a queue of things to do.

Jail-break and run unsigned apps? Yes there is for nearly all devices - see xda-developers.com. I really don't care about this myself though. Mobile telephones have never been open platforms. Even Android is a fragmented minefield in this respect.

It's just different.
Actually if the fee is just a filter, they could refund your money if you buy any car in the next say 6 months. That way it's less of an obstacle for potential buyers but still filters out non-buyers.
With the craziness that's leading to WPF / Silverlight being deprecated in favour of a sand-boxed Metro UI, it seems like MonoMac is looking like the best place to create full-featured Desktop apps with.

Played with MonoMac on the weekend, it was super easy to get going and the bindings are nicely polished in idiomatic C# (uses same technology as used in MonoTouch). The bindings end up a close match to the official Obj-C APIs. Easy to translate Cocoa docs to C# APIs (which end up being nicer IMHO). It was also seamless to create UIs in XCode and access them in C#.
Ah yes. "If smartphones turn out to be the future, people will probably just buy them from existing phone brands that they trust, like Nokia or Motorola." — a lot of people in 2007
Netflix seems to be operating just fine for me in the southwest USA.
some benchmarks from Wed, 10 Oct 2012

jruby-1.7.0.RC2 -Xcompile.invokedynamic=true

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/jruby.php
A new glow for electron microscopy
Noticed that Rackspace was down for a bit - I presumed they're getting hammered on their WWW as people are considering an infrastructure switch?
Conversely, the internet has made the plight of the screwed-over-little-guy much easier to publicise, making results more likely.
Silicon Valley Bank: The bank for startups
Trouble At Google
Ask HN: "key derivation function" vs. "password hashing algorithm"
Trying to get my head around the subtle difference between a key derivation function (like PBKDF2) and a password hashing algorithm (like bcrypt or scrypt).

Not really wanting to start a religious war over which is better or worse - I'm just trying to understand what the difference is between the two techniques. I read that PBKDF2 shouldn't be used for storing passwords, then elsewhere I read that all kinds of different people and places do exactly this.

Crypto is not my strong point in my day job, and I promise I'm not implementing a homebrew crappy encryption algorithm on my own, I'm just trying to understand this difference well enough to explain it to someone here who's asking.

If PBKDF2 shouldn't be used for password hashing, if I use PBKDF2 to derive a key from a passphrase, what do I do with this key in order to get a password hash I should be storing? Passing it to a hashing function seems kind of counterintuitive to me.

If I pass that passphrase to bcrypt, I get a password hash that I can store. I got that far. There's just some intermediary step between of "derived key in, password hash out" that I seem to be not understanding.
Right to Repair: A boost for the consumer — but for the car thief, too