skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, I absolutely agree evolution is slow to catch up. But the thing is, we gotta live with what we've got. (Kinda like an election with two lame candidates.) That is the challenge. We're better to work with what evolution has equipped us than to ignore it.

That's what I'm saying. Politicians will apply the fallacy of the false compromise, so in order to get what you want, you have to lobby the politicians in opposition to your opponents.

Suppose you could represent the politician's opinion as a number. Your goal is to get the politician to believe in 1.0. Your opponents are arguing for 2.0, so if you argue for 1.0, the politician will go for 1.5. You have to argue for 0.0 in order to get a reasonable compromise at 1.0.

If I understand you correctly this time, you're saying we would have gotten a better deal if Microsoft had not been able sue competitors. Even the Gates Foundation, with all its billions, can't manage to achieve world peace or universal equality.

I was making two points: 1. if Microsoft hadn't made billions, Nathan Myhrvold wouldn't have been able to fund Intellectual Ventures and start a lawsuit campaign via shell companies; 2. (less seriously) if software wasn't covered by copyright, there would still have been a Free Software ecosystem, because there is a sizable subset of the population whose primary driving instinct is the creation and distribution of useful human knowledge.
When you bootstrap, is doesn't matter where you live
>They have no idea they look like an idiot or that they're making you uncomfortable, and if they did, they wouldn't care.

Oh man, that'd mean I'd make a great CEO if I could learn to stop caring! All these years, trying to figure out how not to look awkward -- wasted!
I'm not confusing. The original comment was:

If I could legally vote twice because I had a college degree, I would -- even though I would support repealing such a rule.

That's doing in practice the opposite of what you believe, promoting a principle that one is also guilty of violating.

It's also unethical in my view. The ends do not justify the means.
How about giving an acknowledgement on your page when someone submits a project / news? Did it a couple of times lately and saw nothing after the submit, even to show that the submission was received.
Thanks!

$/iops between storage types is the subject of the "Cost Effectiveness" charts near the top of the post, but I suspect I'm not quite catching your meaning. What do you mean by $/iops/storage?
That's my understanding too, but MongoDB hit the sweet-spot for us, Riak couldn't handle the raw queries-per-second we needed without requiring extra hardware ($$).
I have an exercise: is it possible to create a javascript file (served over https) that, when included in a non-https HTML page, is able to determine whether any other scripts were included on the page or will be included on the page by a man-in-the-middle?

If this were possible (I suspect it is not), then it might be possible to have secure javascript code running over a non-HTTPS url. (the motivation for this is to have some form of security and still be able to load websockets and make CORS xmlhttprequests to other (non-secure) hosts - with the assumption that these hosts may also be man-in-the-middled). For now, the only alternative is to use something like a packaged app, if you want to make sure your code is actually your code, and still be able to load insecure resources.
So you'd rather install a completely new storage engine and learn to use it than check a doc and install an extension to postgres?
Do you have a changelog or something? What's different?
At least people could understand what pets.com was trying to do. Color was just some abstract idea that made sense because...color.com is a cool domain?
Not true at all: logical fallacies apply to all arguments. In fact, most of them never apply in the context of purely logical arguments - .e.g: argument from authority, ad hominem attacks. Those are the stuff of standard debate.
You need to compare the variations compared to the expected variation for a Poisson distribution with the observed rate to judge whether or not they are significant or likely arise from noise. Just looking at the deviations in absolute number isn't telling you anything.
No location requirements. I suppose I should mention that I am an undergrad and would be unable to apply to the site point program.
> Since when are start-ups a Democracy?

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html
Bad choice of words on my part - youth itself is barely relevant; your overhead and how many people you're responsible for or answer to is. Those things tend to increase as you age.

In my opinion, a spouse and especially children would be indicators against taking bigger risks in the form of debt. I also recommend against relying on a working spouse to support your effort for more than about a month - too much at risk.

Ask yourself how far have you come and where is the business headed? If it's consistent month-by-month and headed in the right direction that's certainly a big plus.
This article is 2 years old.
You shouldn't even have text at all on the bottom half of the slide. Text on a slideshow presentation should be minimal. The audience should be listening to you, not reading your slides.
Absolutely, there is a real lift in interest in this space right now.

It's a big market with lots of different segments so the future will definitely be interesting!
Baladacam | Mediterranean Hotel-Bar | Cam 1
Enjoyed the article, but it feels very incomplete without discussion of the solid-state, provisioned iops, and ebs optimization options. Would be interesting to see if those get rid of the bad apples and what sort of benefit they give.
I must admit I was disappointed in last year's contest winners, namely their general focus. I thought maybe something had been lost in the years the contest was not running. But these entries are great! Binary lambda calculus? Top notch.

IOCCC is back!

Check this out

{ echo one;echo two;echo tres;}|./kang
result: the sum in hex
That was my first thought, but then I think we'd see a larger drop on the 30th as well, since that's the last day of the month sometimes too. Someone suggested doing a graph with "days until end of month" on the X-axis, which might be interesting.
What I meant by that is that a brute force offline attack will always succeed if your password is easily guessable regardless of what hashing or password verification protocols are used.
Diggz is the Chief Evangelist at Tropo...
It's not possible. What's possible is using a browser extension to verify some of the essential javascript and use that javascript to do further verification.
I definitely thought this as I was writing these posts. There is a fair amount of quality analysis out there when it comes to LTV but not as much as you'd expect.

The truly quality information comes from thought leaders like Jason Cohen and you can understand why he (or anyone with a rigorous scientific approach to customer acquisition) does so well.

There is definitely lots of room for people to focus more heavily on LTV. It's an extremely interesting, complicated and powerful number.
It only assigns $user in a foreach when the $user is modified, or if you are trying to outsmart PHP-core and use & to pass it as a reference.
Randomly-generated math paper accepted for publication
Shameless plug (hey Tokutek is doing it), in VoltDB replication is synchronous so it doesn't have this problem.

Latency in the current version is nothing to write home about, but in V3 latency with replication is 600-1000 microseconds. Group commit to disk is every 1-2 milliseconds.

V3 also allows reads to be load balanced across replicas and masters so you gain some additional read capacity from replication. V3 also routes transactions directly to the node with the data so you don't use capacity forwarding transactions inside the cluster.

You get to keep transactions to. Now go figure out what you don't get to keep ;-)
Hi Crawford,

Thanks for the positivity and feedback. This is what I was hoping to get from posting here.

We aren't going to hide the fact that other people will write the cards, infact we want to celebrate it. We want the writers of the cards to be a big part of the product. I think that is the only real way to "short circuit" the issue. Having written a number of the cards you begin to make the words more interesting, you add little doodles. The people who have received cards so far seem to like it. It's a bit like when the pizza delivery guy draws a unicorn on the box when you put in special request.

I am self funding this project right now and there are some typo's in the how it works page. I agree with you 100% that needs to be sorted. We have been live now for a week and the UX stuff is top of the agenda. Our back end is quite robust and seems to be functioning without issue. So thats a good thing.

This is MVP 1.0 and in the lean tradition we kinda tried to keep features to the bare bones. If people like the service we are going to develop it as much as possible and make it as simple and fun as possible.

Features to be added:
- Searchable friends yep.
- Faster page loads yep
- Choice of delivery yep

Really glad you like it and can see the potential

Create better memories :)
Twilio Is Crushing It: 150K Devs, 1.5M Phone Calls/Day, 500M Total Phone Calls
If I were writing a PHP parser, then I would convert double-quoted strings of the form "foo $bar baz" to 'foo '.$bar.' baz' when the script is first parsed. So executing the string concatenation in a loop would have no performance difference, because the string is only parsed the first time.

That's just a guess, though, having not actually looked at the code myself.
You're re-calculating the count() on each iteration. Of course it's slower.

Fix that:

for($i = 0; $count = count($elements); $i < $count; $i++) { }
I've stopped using conditionals for anything newer than IE8. I still have to make workarounds for IE (usually by just fiddling with the CSS). IE9 is far from perfect and is still a timesink, this is time that could be spent making resources reusable or optimising content.
Was able to reproduce and get a dump on Win7 32-bit, but had to run the program more than once.
People generally seem to be drawn in by meta-content, self-reference, recursion and the like. Remember how people went crazy about the central premise of "Inception?"

Self-referential comments do, however, have a tendency to derail conversation from that which is being discussed. In a threaded comment system, that tends to garner frustration after the initial novelty of the ideas has worn off. Case in point: Reddit has a weird attitude toward self-reference. Over the last year or so, there's been a (personally perceived) decline in self-referential memes, and redditors seem to see it as derivative now.
What's abnormal about the way Android uses the Unix user and permissions model?
Automatically build, sign, and testflight your Xcode projects
I get what you mean, but it might be helpful to translate it for everybody else:

Foreach is doing an assignment in each iteration, robryan is right. But PHP variables are copy-on-write so $user is, until modified, just an entry in the symbol table which is very fast.

And that for() loop also has an assignment -- the incrementer.
I did a similar thing about a year ago. Someone wanted thumbnails for each video they had on a website, and i noticed the graphic designer sitting there in a media player taking snapshots and then resizing them in photoshop over and over again. after some googling I got this ffmpeg command:

ffmpeg -i inputfile.flv -f mjpeg -vframes 1 -ss 10 output.jpg

I had a nautilus script written in python which converts an image to jpg in my context menu, so i substituted the 'convert' shell command with the FFMpeg one and now all i need to do is right click on a video file to get a screen shot at 10 seconds.

It was at that moment I felt that I made the right choice in using a Linux based desktop OS. The terminal/bash is an excellent tool for automation, and even though you could achieve the same on OSX and Windows, it feels to me that the terminal is a first class citizen on Linux.
When they say that supercomputing is essentially a plumbing problem ... looking at these photos, no kidding.
It's just a JSON syntax validator. You can't index on part of the json, postgres treats it as a string.

You can apply full text search on it, but that doesn't tell you if you're matching on a key or a value.
Post has been removed. Privacy?
Each hacker choses how far down the rabbit hole they go, don't disparage others for going deeper.
Call stack from WinDbg:

ChildEBP RetAddr
8942ec9c 82b1d2a1 nt!KeBugCheckEx+0x1e
8942ecc0 82a9ae5a nt!PspCatchCriticalBreak+0x71
8942ecf0 82a9ad9d nt!PspTerminateAllThreads+0x2d
8942ed24 8287b8fa nt!NtTerminateProcess+0x1a2
8942ed24 77b87094 nt!KiFastCallEntry+0x12a
00f8f260 77b868d4 ntdll!KiFastSystemCallRet
00f8f264 75d3301f ntdll!ZwTerminateProcess+0xc
00f8f2a4 75d34d7c CSRSRV!CsrUnhandledExceptionFilter+0xcb
00f8f2ac 75d36f48 CSRSRV!CsrApiRequestThread+0x3e2
00f8f2c0 75d36cde CSRSRV!_EH4_CallFilterFunc+0x12
00f8f2e8 77b87199 CSRSRV!_except_handler4+0x8e
00f8f30c 77b8716b ntdll!ExecuteHandler2+0x26
00f8f330 77b5f98f ntdll!ExecuteHandler+0x24
00f8f3bc 77b86ff7 ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x127
00f8f3bc 77b92cc7 ntdll!KiUserExceptionDispatcher+0xf
00f8f708 77b92c78 ntdll!RtlpLowFragHeapFree+0x31
00f8f720 75c6b349 ntdll!RtlFreeHeap+0x105
00f8f734 75c72ce2 sxs!operator delete+0x1c
00f8f740 75c724f6 sxs!RawStack::~RawStack+0x12
00f8f74c 75c72484 sxs!XMLParser::~XMLParser+0x68
00f8f758 75c72e7c sxs!XMLParser::`scalar deleting destructor'+0xd
00f8f76c 75c686f3 sxs!_unknown<IXMLParser,&IID_IXMLParser>::Release+0x27
00f8f77c 75c73e1f sxs!CSmartRef<IXMLParser>::~CSmartRef<IXMLParser>+0x1b
00f8f7fc 75c74a37 sxs!SxspIncorporateAssembly+0x5db
00f8f83c 75c78001 sxs!SxspIncorporateAssembly+0xb8
00f8f874 75c6a944 sxs!SxspCloseManifestGraph+0x7c
00f8f928 75ce28c7 sxs!SxsGenerateActivationContext+0x48f
00f8fa90 75ce1ad3 sxssrv!BaseSrvSxsCreateActivationContextFromStruct+0x490
00f8fac8 75d34d65 sxssrv!BaseSrvSxsCreateActivationContextFromMessage+0xdb
00f8fc40 77b45e7a CSRSRV!CsrApiRequestThread+0x3cb
00f8fc80 77ba374e ntdll!__RtlUserThreadStart+0x28
00f8fc98 00000000 ntdll!_RtlUserThreadStart+0x1b
The difference between php-5.2 (the version used), php-5.3, and php-5.4 is quite vast for each version, especially since php-5.4 basically cut memory usage/execution time by a third at worst (or directly by half at best) when compared to php-5.3.

This is purely anecdotal but I use PHP for large scripts doing lots of inserts/deletes (>100,000) from databases and relatively simple logic.
I think it's completely contextual. We call our users 'members' at Fotoblur, since we're a community. When I was in college working as a waiter one restaurant insisted we never call customers 'customers' but 'guests.'
According to the request headers it's using php-5.3.13 (released May 2012).
Signal Processing Primer
Really great article and neat product!

One question: on the throughput graphs, I understand why you normalized them per graph, but were there any differences between graphs (particularly in terms of EBS vs. ephemeral) that would be sufficient to drown out the variability within the throughput graphs?
I've been meaning to give Vero a try for awhile, it comes highly recommended from some friends, and we have a lot of users who're using it along with Zenbox as well. Awesome to see them providing good material - I especially like the examples.

A question though - at what point is your product developed enough to differentiate on plans? When should you focus on tracking LTV - MVP? 0 customers? 1? 10? 100?

I'd like to see a "Ok, you're just getting started, here's what you're going to need to put in place immediately, and here are the signs that you need to look at the next steps after that."

Any chance of that Chexton? :)
(Another disclaimer from another enterpreneur)

I am one of the founders of kiddom, an interactive learning environment on the iPad. We initially focus on math skills, and all learning happens in a story telling environment. We should be live on the app store in about a week or so in the US:

http://www.kiddom.co/

If you have any feedback, my email is in the profile.
Database access latency will always trump any language design issues, except in extreme cases. This article does make some of those cases obvious, especially since they are easily-overlooked programming mistakes.
Questions from a Bailout Eyewitness
Inspiring Tutorials of PHP,JAVA,MySQL,etc. http://9lessons.info
http://www.9lessons.info
An Interview With Jameson Detweiler From LaunchRock
The data should have been labelled from the end of each month rather than from the beginning - then there wouldn't be the anomaly on the 31st.

I.e. n[i] should be sum over all days d of tickets[d] where d is the i-th day from the end of the month that d occurs in.
The $var == "" issue is more understandable when you realize that PHP attempts to do type coercion to test comparison for all data types, while the equality operator (triple equals, ===) does not attempt to do type coercion.

Also, foreach(range(1, 1000 * 1000) as $i) will execute at roughly the same speed as for($i = 0, $count = 1000 * 1000; $i < $count; $i++), so the difference is negligible.
> This is a non-argument. Being a hypocrite doesn't make you less correct.

I don't think people are attacking the argument. They are attacking him, personally, for being a hypocrite.
Large web apps do often spend a lot of time manipulating strings and arrays in memory. It's absolutely true and I've seen it myself several times -- a performance penalty that is measurable and noticeable to users.

But that pales in comparison to the overhead of a Database call, or even a call to Redis or Memcached.

I've read (from sources I trust) that a database call on a modern stack like .Net or JVM is 4 orders of magnitude slower than a local method call. Think about that. So if the time you spend brushing your teeth is a local method call, the entire next day is a database query.

I can't remember the source here but the information is available with a few minutes of coding or googling.

And to the caching point -- having data cached locally in memory is great, but you can't trust that.
Has Social Media Turned Election 2012 Into A Joke?
A123 files for bankruptcy
Nice tip, but I was even more excited to learn that Dirk Gently had a brief TV adaptation this past year. I might be verging on blasphemy here, but I almost think I like those books better than HHGG these days.
For a start, it uses a special group to denote 'this process can access the internet', requiring a kernel patch: http://elinux.org/Android_Security#Paranoid_network-ing
This is also something we desperately needed at my last company, but we couldn't find FOSS that supported it. mysql offers XA, but I've heard mixed reviews.
SocketStream http://socketstream.com lacks the media blitz, but it provides authentication and integrates with pretty much anything in NPM (one of the stated goals of the author), and still provides all the benefits of a real-time framework like Meteor (for more than a year now)
I'm in the test prep industry, where customers only stay active for 2-6 months (3 is typical).

This radically changes LTV, as we don't have multi-year timeframes. We currently sell a course as a one-off purchase. We could move to a monthly model, but there are fairly fixed licensing costs.

How would you increase LTV in an industry with quick turnover?
Lynx view with konami code
http://i200.photobucket.com/albums/aa238/jessephatz/th_Obvio...
QuestionCopyright.org | A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright
Though I believe it still has a per-collection lock.
University of Phoenix to Shutter 115 Locations
Unfortunately, I find their two liner really weak.

"What do we do? We offer content marketing and PR strategy for startups. How do we do it? We offer a startup-focused three month process that gets our customers noticed, secures early user traction and acquires new customers. "

Just boiling your business down to two lines, doesn't make it interesting or understood. I have no interest in what this company does after hearing the two-liner because they told me what they do, not what they can do for me, and I think that is a big difference.

It's also just a bunch of buzzwords. Advice I got from a friend long ago was to speak as you would to a friend. You'd (hopefully) never speak to a friend in the terms used above. Don't fill yourself with self-importance by using what you think are big terms, make it simple and make it interesting, and like the article states, make it short.
I din't yet understand the risk from the 'Host' header issue. In order to modify this header for a user's traffic, wouldn't an attacker already be in control of the user's browser or (unsecured) network path to the server? And thus, would have even easier ways to display arbitrary malicious URLs/content?

Or is the mention of password resets an indicator that an attacker, in their own separate connection, can contaminate an email sent to other users with bad URLs? (If so, detecting suspicious Host values would seem to leave a risk that legal-looking but wrong Host values are still trusted by the email mechanism.)
Only if they get to them within 8 hours, per the TorrentFreak article - after which they shut down and require an encryption key to restart. Add in any level of geographic distribution and it would take more than 8 hours to find, subpoena and confiscate rendering that technique useless.
for ($i = 0; $i < count($users); $i++)
is moronic

person who wrote this should be fired
Yes, the differences between graphs were fairly substantial. You can get a sense of the EBS vs. ephemeral difference by looking at the "Throughput by Threadcount" graphs (about 1/3 of the way through the post). Briefly, EBS has much higher throughput for random writes; ephemeral (instance storage) is faster for reads and bulk writes.
"More senior executives will recognize the shit sandwich immediately and it will have an instant negative effect."

Why would it have a negative effect? Even when you realize people are just being polite, most people still appreciate it, no?
I've also posted the history (or, "scratchpad") of my winning code (2012/kang) to Gist: https://gist.github.com/3909337 (possible spoilers ahead)

Okay, it is quite cryptic and a bit unorganized (as I frantically updated the code as I saw any optimization opportunity), but it may be interesting to see how the code is gradually shorten.
It doesn't make sense to look at an averaged plot like this without error bars. Just comparing 2009 and 2010 there seems to be a huge amount of variation.

Even better than error bars would be box plots of the data corresponding to each day of the month. You can easily produce such plots with R.
Isn't giving out tickets in a high accident area is exactly what should happen? Tickets in a low accident area must surely be less likely to change accident rates?
UK Mobile Operator O2 to scrap network database after repeated failures
Always great to hear that we've been recommended by some friends!

Absolutely a relevant question. I was going to put a few disclaimer paragraphs at the top but took them out at the eleventh hour because this post was already pretty long.

For the sorts of tactics in this post I'd say you definitely need product/market fit and a steady stream of incoming customers. Depending on the price of your products, the product mix and your target market this could be 50, 500 or 5000 customers/potential customers. It's more likely to be the upper two, in this case as you need a good sample size to get see any change and know that it's statistically relevant.

After I get through this series of post (or in the meantime, if I get a chance) I'll put together a post that addresses exactly what you've asked for: what 3-5 lifecycle emails should you ABSOLUTELY be sending from the word go and at what point should you implement new strategies like those mentioned here.

It'd be my pleasure :). chris AT getvero.com if you ever want to get in touch and chat directly too.