skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nabokov, which incidently is one of the too-impressive great writers mentioned in the comments, beside writing some of the best novels ever, taught literature for years in Cornell. I cannot recommend enough his "Lectures on literature". His take on literature is not post-modern at all (he was not too fond of surrealism and he loved Joyce for his style and not his devices). In one of these lectures, the famous "Good readers and good writers" (http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm...) he said that

"There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter"

(Nabokov himself strongly leans to the latter...)

I will quote the end of this short lecture, as an answer (a very Nabokovian answer) to that nagging and essentially unimportant question: what makes a great novel?

"It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass."

Yes, Ulysses is a precise work, full of riddles and references. Having an annotated edition may give you good grades, or give you insights on the making of the novel, but the device used are not that important - what makes it exhilarating is the joy of the language, the way it sings uniquely, and the way this song builds or subsums the world.

That's my take on what Nabokov meant when he said a great writer is an enchanter. Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor" is an enchantment, as a whole and fractally, down to each single sentence, to each single word. Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is an enchantment, a very long river of neverending sentences. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is the work of a mean and sarcastic enchanter who uses rythm as a weapon. Just as reading Joyce makes you speak in his special brand of English (or if you venture into Finnegans Wake, his special brand of Gibberish), reading Proust, Flaubert or Nabokov (or Céline or Pynchon) infects you with what they've made of their language to suit the needs of their work.
With its gamification tools, SessionM reports 250% lift in engagement
The Nobel in Economics
Asset pipeline has been extracted as sprockets-rails
I really think HN has a habit of taking everything uber-seriously and has a hard time accepting things as light-hearted jokes or fun projects.
That doesn't answer his question. BuiltWith relies heavily on response headers, which are easily faked, and often not descriptive on the actual tools used. Many use nginx, varnished, even apache to run their applications, regardless of how they were built.
It is a nice tool though, I'll admit.
Accompanying email:

We’re working to make it easier for your Dropbox for Teams administrators to
manage all the stuff you and your teammates have in your Teams account. Soon,
we’ll be releasing new features for admins to manage the security of your
team’s stuff and make it easier for them to help when things go wrong.

In some cases, your admin may need the flexibility to take some actions on
your Teams account, such as helping to manage shared folders or restoring
access if you get locked out of your account. In order to clarify that admins
may have access to team member accounts when managing the team, we're updating
our Dropbox for Teams Agreement and Privacy Policy.

You might have some personal files in your Teams account that you’d like to
move to a personal account. For example, if you want to keep vacation pictures
in a different account from your latest Excel spreadsheet, you can use this
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If you need to access your other account, you can log in to the Dropbox website.
A sample Go RPC server/client over TCP
I was just about to ask for a Firefox plugin. :)
I searched for some common swear words and found out an old thread on HN where someone picked a fight with PG. So I guess it is a nice search tool.
Germany facing power blackouts
Hmm - really, that's odd. What browser/OS and netbook are you using? Any chance you can send me a screenshot?

contact@deploybutton.com
About: "In discussions with a theorist, they would never tell me that something is O(n^n) if it is not also Θ(n^n)". So you've never heard someone say, for example, that Strassen's algorithm shows that matrix multiplication for n x n matrices can be done with O(n^2.808) multiplications?

For some problems, the best known upper bounds don't match the best known lower bounds. Also, in cases where there are further improvements in the upper bounds, it doesn't automatically mean people stop talking about previous upper bounds.

(Ignore this whole comment if you specifically meant the function n^n, I have no examples relevant to that function.)
You're right, I reran the tests that I've been seeing, and it's probably CPU that is where I'm having problems with Pypy. I have a test suite that completes in about 17 minutes for cPython and with Pypy I can't even get it to complete within two hours.

This is running the SQLAlchemy unit tests against SQLite, on an Amazon EC2 small instance via our jenkins suite at http://jenkins.sqlalchemy.org. So yes, we are dealing with more limited resources than usual. Usually when something slows to a crawl on EC2 it's because it started swapping, so I had assumed that was the issue here, but apparently it's not. SQLAlchemy is a large library with a lot of tests - 155 test_* modules. So I'd imagine pypy has lots of work to do running the JIT on all those source files, and I guess because running tests means a continuous stream of new codepaths, that means all new JIT activity for each one.

In this particular case, the two tests ran on the same server, and resource contention seems likely. Swap space remained 100% free; the two jobs shared the CPU 50/50 and once the cPython job was done, pypy's went right out to 99% and stayed there. For startup time, the cPython suite started running tests within 3 seconds, and pypy didn't get to the test suite for about one minute 40 seconds. Pypy didn't actually start running real tests, save for a series of "skipped" tests in the beginning, until the cPython job was totally finished at 17 minutes. Pypy then took all 99% of the CPU for the rest of it's duration, and about an hour into it, it's just about halfway through the suite.

I'd welcome any help in debugging why the test suite here appears to be excessively slow (is it the slow sqlite module?) Otherwise, if this is just how things are with the JIT + large number of codepaths, that would be a significant caveat to pypy's speed advantage. But you're right, it wasn't memory.

update: the build on pypy took a total of 2 hours 17 minutes.
Off topic, but I got a disproportional amount of fun from the gif. Who is he, what's the context?
The Chilecon Valley challenge
The article in question claims that links followed from https facebook do have a referrer header:

>In testing links from Facebook and Twitter over HTTPS the referer is present in most cases.
I think eventually the pendulum will swing and information density will start to come to the fore a bit more. The aggregation & internal-link architecture approaches are just gaming the advertising industry and will eventually die out (a bit).
It's not just the move that puts this program out of the reach of people with kids or other commitments -- it's the entire schedule. 12 weeks of 10am to 9pm, Monday through Saturday? This is basically a way of saying (whether intentionally or not), do not bother to apply if you are not young. Do not bother if you place too high a value on spending time with your spouse, or your kids, or your girlfriend, or your boyfriend, or your aging grandmother. Do not bother if you've already committed some of your waking hours to serving your community or your church or a part time job that you use to pay the bills.

Don't get me wrong: Tech training is incredibly valuable, and is increasingly critical to the economy. And I believe intensive training has merit. This program may well produce some stars. But why can't it do the same on a 9-6p M-F schedule? What's less intensive about that?

So I hope this doesn't become a model. Because we don't gain much by reinforcing the stereotype that technology is just for young single people who would rather spend the night in front of their computers than with their friends and families. If you want to broaden the appeal of Web development, let's start training real people.
It's facticity, as in 'fact' of the matter. I don't think you've quite grasped the concept or the necessary, productive role it plays. You might also look into Befindlichkeit and the section of B&T that deals with the hermeneutic circle (I don't have a copy at the office, but if you search 'circulus vitiosus' you'll find it).
I know I'll probably get down-votes for this, but its probably good that there ARE people who would at least question Evolution and the Big Bang. There are significant problems with both theories, but most people just assume "its a fact" not because they KNOW, just because thats what they've always been told. But there are plenty of reasons to doubt without having to invoke religion.
You are right, we are not speaking the same language. You are speaking "I want to argue about nothing for no reason", and I am speaking english. Go read the thread again, I did not make any claims other than that your post was full of fallacies. I didn't say "you said juice is healthy". You are accusing me of exactly what you are doing. Grow up.
I don't see a reason you can't. I believe mass media dominate campaigns because of the sheer amount of money thrown onto them.
I never heard of this guy, but after reading this I realized I know about the data structure he invited that is used in Clojure and other functional languages. We should celebrate the important impact he had on technology. His work will live on.
Foursquare vs. Yelp is the New Facebook vs. Google
Xiaomi, China’s Disruptive Phone-Maker
An Operations Research Nobel?
Yeah for the closest possible comparison in your scenario, you want to do a 3 year reserved with heavy utilization.

When you reserve an instance, you are committing to a higher upfront in order to get a lower hourly for the reservation period. The low/medium/high utilization is sort of a knob that allows you to further control this upfront vs. hourly cost. With high utilization you have the highest upfront, but also the lowest hourly cost. If you are planning to run the server 24x7, this will also give you the lowest total cost.
Dropbox ToS Update: "admins may have access to team member accounts"
Just got this via email, the link requires login so pasting it here:

> Hi <name>,

> We’re working to make it easier for your Dropbox for Teams administrators to manage all the stuff you and your teammates have in your Teams account. Soon, we’ll be releasing new features for admins to manage the security of your team’s stuff and make it easier for them to help when things go wrong.

> In some cases, your admin may need the flexibility to take some actions on your Teams account, such as helping to manage shared folders or restoring access if you get locked out of your account. In order to clarify that admins may have access to team member accounts when managing the team, we're updating our Dropbox for Teams Agreement and Privacy Policy.

> You might have some personal files in your Teams account that you’d like to move to a personal account. For example, if you want to keep vacation pictures in a different account from your latest Excel spreadsheet, you can use this online guide to move your files:

> View the new agreement and get started here[0]

> Keep in mind that you can only link one Dropbox account to a computer at a time. If you need to access your other account, you can log in to the Dropbox website.

> The updated Dropbox for Teams Agreement takes effect on November 3, 2012. If you have any questions, check out our Help Center or email us at support-teamsupdate@dropbox.com.

> Thanks and happy Dropboxing!
> - The Dropbox Team

> [0] - https://www.dropbox.com/updated_terms/
Show HN: When can you retire? An early retirement calculator
Hmm. I have to think about that a bit. On the face of it, EC2 and colocation require completely different skill sets, and those skill sets don't overlap very much.

Being a good Linux sysadmin might be fundamentally harder than being a good EC2 sysadmin; I'm not honestly familiar enough with EC2 to know.

I would point out though that Amazon has a vested interest in making EC2 less hard, so I would be surprised if the general opinion was that EC2 administration was just as hard as Linux administration.
Off topic a bit, but I just want to say I like the layout and the general approach of your blog. If it's a template I haven't seen it before.

The "pondering" section is intriguing. What if you could accept input as to what topics readers might prefer?
They aren't the same thing.

I wrote the code to do this if you want to buy it.
I thought same thing, but read more and realized it was open for awhile, and no one seem to care. It took the breath of his examples to make everyone shock enough to notice.

The only thing that should be illegal is the way all that information was not secured.
1. There's only ONE tip out of 9 that tells the user to use iTerm over the default Terminal. I don't agree with many of the tips here and I wouldn't use them to "enhance" my workflow but you have to critique the article on what it actually says, not what it's geared towards. You can't just say "why is this geared towards OS X?" because that's not a valid criticism.

2. Sure, I never said it could replace a mouse. Only, I rarely ever use a mouse because I don't want to carry around a mouse just for middle click when I can use a Modifier key + single click to achieve the same thing. I also use my keyboard more, even to switch between applications and rearranging my windows using a Window Manager app like Slate. I also never said Apple's website triggers any of my emotions so I don't know where you got that from. I just said Apple has the best trackpads around and you can actually not use a mouse if you don't want to since Apple's trackpad is so good. Also, a Mac app called "BetterTouchTool" further enhances the track pad so you can do almost anything with trackpad gestures, something you really can't do easily on Linux.

3. Yeah, that was just my opinion. I wasn't speaking on behalf of other people.

4. Okay, got it. Many of my friends use that as a reason when I ask them why they run Linux though. They say it's cheap and they don't want to pay $2000 for a Mac which is fair enough. They just want a Unix machine and they can run Ubuntu on a VirtualBox without paying a cent.

This may be heavily opinionated, I know, but like I said, the reason Linux never appealed to me is because I can run Linux apps on the Mac since open source usually means I can run it on different platforms. Take any linux app, and I can bet 99% of the time, it's also available on the mac and I can further bet 80% of the time, there's an alternative on the Mac which is better (in my opinion). The truth of the matter is, there are many Mac exclusive apps that are far better than anything available on other platforms. This is just my opinion, that's all. You may view it differently than me, that's okay!
No point trying to decide what to do about the consequences of a lack of free will. If you can decide whether or not to punish someone, they can decide whether or not to offend. If they have no choice in their action, neither do you.
hetzner will colo a 1HE 100mbit for 39€. 5tb traffic.
It is cheaper to store 100GB in Dropbox than to store your own 100GB in S3. It would cost $12.50 plus transfer costs to use S3. It costs $9.99 and no transfer costs (besides your own net access) to use Dropbox. Dropbox is storing a lot more than 100GB, so they get bulk prices.
The problem is that they all suck. In the UK, I've tried NatWest (RBS), Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC and so far, and HSBC are the least worst... they are by no means good, but they're better than many of the others. They still have numerous problems though: customer service agents that disagree with each other and provide inconsistent information, that annoying online banking dongle, payments being declined at random (particularly embarrassing in shops).

Still, at least unlike NatWest, it didn't take 3 weeks of dealing with different customer services staff to withdraw some cash, and I never got their online banking to work at all... after repeated attempts. Every customer service staff member would make excuses about not being able to help me due to their security restrictions.
Court says reading other people's online email is OK
even more on the topic:

http://www.economist.com/node/21564589
nice litte app :) I don't why some people are bashing this, I think its actually useful. I especially like the idea of what would X do, and then having a searchable repository of links to X's writings/ideas/thoughts. Also as a side note, since your using bootstrap why not just fluid it so it looks nice on iPad and mobile, that would be the icing on this nifty little cake :)
I see there were two articles from The Economist about Start-up Chile this week. From the article submitted here, I see this paragraph:

"Santiago is hardly a paradise for entrepreneurs. Chile’s domestic market is small, its bankruptcy law punitive. Private venture capital is still rare and credit costly. In a sad irony, Chilean bureaucrats are trying to shut down a low-interest lending market set up by the founder of Start-Up Chile. And although the programme to attract foreign entrepreneurs is promising, other government initiatives in that area—such as offering $40,000 grants to start-ups—are less sensible."

Discussion of the other article happened on HN four days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4641645
Another case of how Apple doesn't care about its customers. They offer the opt-out option but turn the service on by default and don't notify anyone.

Good thing (for Apple) most of their customers have had too much koolaid to care.
‘Invisibility’ could be a key to better electronics
I'm sympathetic to much of your comment.

But I'm pretty skeptical that the solution to problems in American federal government is to make our federal government more similar to California's state government by adding term limits. That simply shifts power from individual legislators to unelected party apparatchiks.
[Python]: Wanted experts in Python async APIs
thanks for the link to the old discussion!
Print Advertising. The Decline?
It would work in any small company, famous or not. Big companies have too many divisions that don't talk to each other. (Just call me korinthenkacker.)
How wireless charging works
When you're using something like AWS, you absolutely need to think about implementation details. As we've learned a few times now, sometimes AWS has datacenter-wide outages. You need to stripe across multiple availability zones, keep off-site backups, etc.

So yeah, you gotta think about it. A lot of the time, public cloud is the correct solution; however, you should have a solid understanding of what you need to do to run reliably in that cloud, how to build redundancy in the cloud you pick, when you might need to move to a different solution, and how to make those processes easier.
Thoreau did and was put in jail for stopping such payments.
However its the 21st century now. I propose a little checkbox to check where do I want my taxes to go. As a matter of free expression of my taxpayers will.
I strongly half-agree here.

Commit early, hell yeah!

Branch often, umm, no. I feel that the excellent branching features of modern DVCSes have made people lazy and afraid to confront the inherent concurrent nature of working in parallel with people on the same codebase. Sure, if you're a 200 person team, there might be no way around it some decent branching setup. But don't forget: every feature branch means postponing continuous integration.

Continuous integration is the core of any productive and effective agile-ish team. Daily standups are nice, backlogs are lovely, but without continuous integration you can't get that design-develop-test cycle short enough to deploy/demo early and often.

Therefore, when working on a product or component with a limited team size (say, up to 15 people that are in close contact with one another), I believe that it is best to get your code on the mainline as fast as possible. Often, in git terms, the simplest way to do this is simply directly committing and pushing to master. Doing this helps signal conflicting concurrent work early, and it helps avoid double work. It encourages necessary but unforeseen design sessions before the work is done, rather than refactoring sessions afterwards.

The only strong downside to super-fast continuous integration that I can see is the chance that you "break the build" (or the tests, or whatever your situation has that needs to be OK for developers to be able to add features). If the team is in close contact, this is typically fixed within minutes ("hey Mike, you broke xyz.cpp" "oh damn, sorry, i'm right on it"), and if it isn't, well, git has cherry-picking features for a reason! You can use the tools to avoid the broken code for a few hours until the guy who broke it is back from the hairdresser.

Sure, you can do good CI with feature branches, but people have to be disciplined, and push their feature branch with master very often. Like, multiple times per day. I've never seen that work in practice. This doesn't mean that it can't work in practice, but it does mean that "branch away, buddy!" may be bad general advice.

When committing straight to master, the danger is of course that people hold back pushing their commits over the line entirely, which is bad too, but I find that once the horrible, horrible "whoever breaks the build gets pie" rule is replaced by the "whoever pushes more than x changed files/lines at a time gets pie" rule turns that culture around just fine.

I'll be the first to admit that this might work less well with e.g. highly distributed teams in different timezones. But that's hardly the most common scenario.

Continuous integration is called that for a reason. If you do A-few-times-a-week-integration, then call it that. And in my opinion, you're missing out.
I often am very sketchy on the merits of Coffeescript, but how does it have a position on a 12wk crash-course? We can't even expect a competent non-programmer to jQuery-programmer in that span of time; much less great competency in JavaScript; and now another level of abstraction? Why?
This is similar to the approach recommended by "What Color is Your Parachute", I believe.

I've not actually gotten a job this way, but I have used it to talk to people outside of my field. When you're polite, and ask people who are good at what they do to talk about their work, people tend to be pretty happy to oblige!
I work 30 hours a week for a measly GBP3.10 per hour.
Launchpads would not be affected by this deal which only is about the OMAP series.
I'd love to hear any ideas/reviews. I was inspired to create this calculator after reading this Mr Money Mustache article:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

If you are interested in the math behind the calculator see my blog post about it here:

http://blog.networthify.com/math/the-math-behind-the-calcula...