skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The GogC++ engineers programming the custom computing hardware running communicating over custom network hardware with custom network software disagree with your assessment that "architectural design" is all that matters to obtain performance. When your compute budget is around a billion dollars per year, constant factor speedups are highly relevant.
I was afraid that mentioning Marco's name directly would lead to my post getting buried without consideration, so I left it as an exercise for the reader. Looks like my worries were unfounded.
That sounds a lot like people using cron for complicated tasks that repeat every 5 minutes (db queries for example). Before you know it, the jobs pile on top of each other locking the DB and spiraling out of control.
Still waiting on decent linux-capable tablets...
I suspect you're thinking of a product that would support a business -- the post you're responding to mentions a "subsystem".

This is only a few steps beyond what anyone who completes a CS degree does at least two or three times during their coursework. If you take one of your end-of-year projects, do the work to make it actually robust enough for other people to use, and share it with the world (then do a few iterations of "wow, people aren't using this how I thought" and "wow, apparently that wasn't robust at all" and "damn I need real revision control", or even "huh; no one seems to want this at all") -- and fix the things that were wrong with your first attempts -- you're now far more valuable working any part of the process in large project dev than any of your classmates.

Your project doesn't need to be big -- it probably shouldn't be, or you'll never get it out the door -- but scoping it is a lesson in itself that's really valuable to future employers.

This is how I got my first software engineer job, fresh out of undergrad with a major in music; I had developed a set of music theory training drills, put them online (for free) and had already fought my way through a lot of lessons about browser incompatibilities, usability for non-technical users, how to support non-technical users effectively, etc. etc..

There was no way in hell I was ready to start a business of my own, at that point, and I was eager to work with more experienced developers -- I wanted to learn better ways to solve the problems I was struggling with -- so in seeking a job I wasn't just someone saying "I learned some stuff in school; can you pay me money for it?". I was saying "I already know somewhat what you do here; I want to learn how to do it really well, with you -- will you pay me to do that?"
If you'd actually read his past blog posts, you'd know that it's the only logical conclusion that can be drawn.
Amazingly cool, and nice writing. I tried to check out the paper linked at the bottom re. collocating an instance with a target VM but it's slow for me. Anyone know what the paper is?

What I'm curious about is if it would be possible to use a network of participating VMs on a public cloud to pass around messages untraceably from one party to another. Should certainly be easier to execute than the attack scenario they studied.
"We as Windows developers..."
> When "prestige" and proxies substitute for quality is when I do no longer want to be part of that industry.

I think using proxies for quality are better than what we have in software right now, which is no focus on quality and working with the assumption that software will be late, buggy, etc.

Also, I don't see the point in being ideological about it. Google and Facebook exist by selling peoples' privacy in ways that people don't really understand. Does that keep people from working in Silicon Valley?
Yeah but then you get to use Leiningen, not Maven.

Leiningen is manna from heaven.
>I do have some concerns that they're having too much downtime. If there's one small flaw in the system it seems that the whole thing begins to fail.

I think this is a case of selection bias. Most of the time, when their is a small flaw, the system transparently bypasses the flaw and the service continues uninterrupted while they fix the initial problem. Because of this, the only failures that people see are the ones where the bypassing process fails, in which case the problem affects many people.

From the point of view of a single service running off of AWS, this is a much more stable system, becuase it will provide your service much more than a system without the auto bypass infastructure. From a end-user point of view, this benefit is not so clear, because while any given service is more reliable, they tend to go down at the same time.
Very cool.

While I love the look of force-directed-graphs, they wind up representing lots of arbitrary/random values, in all the degrees of freedom of the exact location/angles/proximities they settle into.

I would suggest using a more traditional nested-outline view, either overall or within certain subgraphs. Then, the above/below axis could mean something consistent -- like ordering in source code -- and the left/right something else -- like nesting/composition. And there might be more room for projecting persistent time information -- like a piano roll -- off in a particular direction.

Still very pretty, interesting, and promising!
An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect
Cert says opendns. Problem?
I posted about this before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4660871

and I still think it is true... IMO Microsoft made a mistake by leading out with the RT. Leading with the Pro and then offering the RT as a feature-reduced lower cost version would have cut down on the confusion as to what RT really is and lessened the initial impression that the Windows 8 experience is kind of underwhelming.
http://sourceforge.net/p/dev-cpp/discussion/
I have looked at some cheap car USB power supplies.

Griffin:
http://mm0hai.net/blog/2012/09/30/Griffin-USB-Car-Charger.ht...

Unbranded, common on ebay.
http://mm0hai.net/blog/2012/08/01/Message-to-an-ebay-seller....

They were both awful. I would be interested to know about a known good one.
Given that the company now appears to deal mostly in iPhone cases with zero USB chargers listed on their site, their technical claims and/or QC may be suspect.
Everyone has decided it is a good idea to use non-standard USB chargers to deliver better than USB power to devices. So as a result the Asus charger won't charge an iPad above USB specs, and the reverse is also true.

You might have been caught by this same problem.
Maybe they don't have automated tests for interactive performance, which is hard to test in an application agostic way. Startup time is easy to measure.
It's not really common or standard to rely on a cluster of VM instances to solve your distributed problems for you these days.

For most programmers: Statelessness is the default, replication and fail-over are the back-up plan.

Talking about Erlang's "fault tolerance" as if it's some sort of secret weapon these days (it was more important 10-20 years ago) is a canard and distracts from the better parts of Erlang.
They probably aren't up to their ratings.

Also, the USB cable may be too high resistance, causing a voltage drop.
I played with Microsoft Surface and my problem with it is that IT IS A LAPTOP. The interface is pretty much made for laptop (you need to have keyboard), and size is a little too big for tablet. It is not something I might be using while watching TV.

It is weird combo of laptop and tablet.
This may be a race one can't win after sleeping throuh the first 4 laps...
speakerdeck had wobbly DNS for a while. Sounds like you're using opendns and it hijacked a failed lookup?
Not really. There are debates about his much, but with regard to coal specifically, it's so bad you can ignore things like global warming entirely and it still comes out more expensive.
I hate to make a "me too" kind of post, but very well put, I didn't think of it that way, you've opened my eyes to another way of seeing things.
Using the A word and "good" in an article title is guaranteed karma.
The interesting thing with this type of bug is that they did not necessarily need to get more load than they can handle over a medium lenght time period (like 1 second). If they get more than they can handle, even over a short period of time, their throughput goes down significantly as the system tries to compensate, meaning that a normal load which they are perfectly capable of handling becomes one they cannot handle.
Its an appeal to the Apple sycophants who troll this web site: "oh no who dares best my beloved Apple?!? I'd better click!"
Hmmm - no, I don't own an Air. I would only be replacing my gen 1 iPad. As such, my expectations were pretty low, but I can't out-type my iPad in any document editor.
It would be interesting to see a list compiled for the most popular services showing the features they would no longer be able to offer with DNT.
Too bad the Amazon Kindle charger isn't in the mix, it is my favorite just because it is so tiny and relatively high output. Would have liked to see same analysis for it.
Yeah, that is the editor's job.
The charger has to signal that it is capable of providing more than the standard current. There are two ways this can be done - one is via the USB standard, and the other is the Apple way. Needless to say most chargers go the Apple way, so you should generally look for chargers that claim to not be compatible with Apple. Here is an example story of trying to find one: https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/5suTrJrp...

In some cases the chargers and devices have gone a third way. This is very typical for tablets as they need a lot more current in order to charge within a reasonable time frame. At that point many manufacturers have made up their own way of signalling the ability.
And still have a sustained wind speed of less than a tropical storm.

My prediction is that it will rain a lot, but that's about all.
I think part of the issue with tablets is that there are people who really want something like the windows 8 tablet to work. Speaking for myself, hearing people chime in "but iPad!" in discussions of new tablets I might be interested in is maddening.

It's maddening because I don't want an iPad. An iPad doesn't fit my requirements, one of which is side loading. It can't share data between apps easily either. Android has intents, which are nice, but I would absolutely love a tablet that could switch to full blown OSX, has a USB port for mouse and keyboard. A true laptop and tablet combined.

That would be a device I might be interested in. An iPad is not a device I am interested in. So you might understand why "but iPad!" comments are annoying to me.
Ask HN: Just relocated to LA for incubator, looking to meet/visit startups
I just moved to Santa Monica for an incubator and I know very few people in the startup tech scene apart from my incubator class. I would like to meet more like-minded startup individuals in hopes of building out my network. My email is on on my HN user id page. Would love to check out some startup digs.

BTW: lots of people ask me why I chose LA over SV. My answer...I have a good amount of friends in LA. For now, I think Silicon Beach has a lot to offer and to be honest, I care about my social life and the woman of LA are fantastic. ;)
I bought two for ~$3 apiece at Fry's a few months ago. One is OK, the other was and is DOA. The one that mostly works sometimes requires jiggling in the jack to make contact, but generally they are a garbage, F-, would not buy again product.
Better Solution to Outdated One Time Employee Referral Bonuses
I think I agree! :) and thanks.
Steam runs well enough with recent releases of Wine (I also had remarkably good experiences running Source games on it, i.e.: Half Life 2).
That because hosting providers have their systems set up to bypass contained failures. Single failures are transparently compensated for, so you never notice them. The only system that could take down the entire network is (mostly) the load-balancing/failure-compensating system. It makes sense that the bugs in these system are almost exclusivly cascade failures.
My bet is: till strong AI is developed.
This is from his PyData talk. All of the talks are being recorded, but I'm not sure when they will be released: http://nyc2012.pydata.org/abstracts/
The lesson here is that if you don't want to pay for an official apple charger, do not buy a counterfeit one just buy any name brand one with the right wattage rating.
Is this a case of water finding it's own level?
It's extra hassle, but you could probably sell it for roughly the equivalent value in bitcoins on bitmit.net or a similar site.
And even with Apple chargers you risk using a charger with the wrong wattage (iPad charger vs. iPhone/iPod IIRC).
Hackers create, crackers destroy. Get it right next time.
> The use-case of an attached keyboard and the fully fledged Office app suite is not what this device is primarly for.

You might want to tell Microsoft's marketing department that because the seem to have different ideas from you.
Would you like a higher quality site? Belittling comments such as this, to a group of the users here, will not get us there.
Why not have more good schools? Why not give rewarding jobs to smart talented people from any backgroung instead of people with degrees from a small number of blessed institutions? Why not give better teachers to kids who aren't lucky enough to have education-minded parents? Why not level the playing field?
80+ Public CEOs Call for Deficit Action
In fairness, it would probably be much shorter than the features that would need to be removed from Google Analytics.
Very cool! I'm impressed at all the energy and fast pace of development coming out of Travis Oliphant's new company. Also, I'm curious about how this will interact with numba. Blaze seems to have a much richer type system and lazily constructs AST trees. Numba, on the other hand (as far as I can tell), does function-at-a-time specialization using much simpler array & scalar types. How will these two different schemes interact?
Why does Clean Code suggest avoiding protected variables?
Castro's Nuclear Epiphany—and What It Reveals About the Minds of Dictators
Honestly I'm not going to sign in with Facebook without being told what happens on the other side.

Also: how is this different from Skype/Google Hangouts, etc.
Yar. Weather people always blow shit out of proportion.

But, I guess it's better than "it'll be some rain" and then have lots of people unprepared resulting in fatalities / injuries.
An intelligent response from Yahoo would have been to do exactly that : show a one-time popup to IE10 users that have DNT enabled and explain them what they win/loose.

But ignoring the setting is just plain arrogant.
Do away with Stacks and just use Heap for memory management?
Show HN: A quality social news site
So the title basically tells what I'm trying to aim to. A quality social news site without cat pictures etc and with a very easy submit system (a firefox addon).

I'm planning to add at least chrome extension later if the site goes as planned..

At the moment the site is in it's beginning but all comments and suggestions are welcome :-)
Why do they assume that I'll be only testing on either laptop or desktop?
So the title basically tells the focus of the site. A quality social news site without cat pictures etc and with a very easy submit system (a firefox addon). It's a bit like a hybrid between stumbleupon and hacker news/reddit.

I'm planning to add at least chrome extension later if the site goes as planned..

At the moment the site is in it's beginning but all comments and suggestions are welcome :-)

Here are 2 screenshots that show the addon (the panel at the bottom only appears after you move mouse over the vote buttons)

http://i.imgur.com/B9eO0.png

http://i.imgur.com/LHbWx.png
Tangentially related, on one of my (national) highschool math finals, I decided to bring an abacus instead of a calculator. The proctor gave me a weird look, I explained I was using it as a calculator, and he gave me no problems.
" Since the designers of the Apple charger went to a great deal of effort to build a high quality charger, I conclude they must not consider voltage sag worth worrying about. Or, more interestingly, maybe they built this sag as a feature for some reason. In any case, the chargers lose points on this."

I'm not versed in the arcane arts of EE— could anyone give me a basic definition of voltage sag? And would there be any reason to build it as a feature in a charger?
Do you think it's possible to mod the plastic peace that is the back-stand by shortning it? Is it removable or replacable itself? Could be a good kickstarter idea... "Surface RT stand for tall people."
Why should the best students (and what does that even reslly mean?) get the best teachers? Maybe the best students don't need great teachers.
That is the most satisfying answer; I couldn't agree more.
In Google-related hurricane news, I'm rushing to release a small update to pressureNET, my Android-powered barometer network, to display recent pressure tendencies on a map (over time). There are a number of pressureNET users in the expected path of Sandy, and I'm curious if my data can play a role or provide insight during the storm. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.cumulonimbu...

It's free and open source of course, at http://cumulonimbus.ca.

I definitely feel a bit in-over-my-head with regards to meteorology and atmospheric science, so if anyone feels like they want to help out that's always welcome. Email us at software@cumulonimbus.ca
Sandy vs. Irene: Sandy is going to be worse. Way worse.
0h Game Jam EU is tonight
I will say HTML apps don't give themselves on Win8 near as easily as on other platforms (with the exception of Cut the Rope). It's pretty obvious when you've been dumped into a webview on iOS or Android; HTML apps in Win8 do feel different from their XAML counterparts, but it's subtle enough where I can't put it into words (and average users will likely never notice at all).
I work for a big 4. No, I don't make more money, particularly taking into account the number of hours I work during busy season.

That said, if you're a CPA and you're good with VBA, you're in a good spot.
Yes. Marcos article got slammed.
For those more interested in the storm than the Google cancellation, this article has a good explanation of the weather-system side of things: http://epawablogs.com/the-great-halloween-hybrid-named-sandy...

(I submitted it earlier, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706518, but it died in the purgatory of /newest.)
Fiiiiiiiiinnnneeeeeeeeeeeee. X(

As for the CC issues, I'm starting with C-SPAN simply because there is a lot more precedent for legal non-commercial fair use. Using this for other situations is another question. Based on a cursory exploration it seems that there is a strong argument for programmatically accesible syndication being legal in most cases. This means that it is probably fine to use the stream to made a visualization / application that doesn't actually render the transcript to a user, but is simply based on it.

Also, any application that renders the captions but is dedicated to accessibility seems like it may be protected by the law.

Long story short, I'll need to look into it; for now I'm banking on the service as it stands being fair use, which I legitimately believe it is.
I remember a similar incident at Microsoft that brought Bing down, the solution was to add 2 more Cisco core routers (which works in pairs) at a cost of 100k(200k?) each.

It's funny watching software people getting owned by the hardware people ;)
> Sensible defaults are important; if you can guess what users want most of the time, then you should just do that.

That is a good general rule. In the case of DNT, the header was formulated specifically with the intent that the default would be off, regardless of what you expect the user to want, so that turning it on communicates individual user intent. This is a reason to ignore the general rule in this specific case.

A good related example would be license agreements. Most users want to ignore them entirely. Focus groups would indicate skipping them. But if you make a click-through license agreement invisible, while that's a better UX, the agreement is now completely legally invalid. In order for the agreement to be valid, you need the user to have an opportunity to read it (even if focus groups indicate nobody does).

And while you expect 100% of your users to accept the agreement, the default needs to be "No, I do not accept".
That's why you have regular HNers like patio11 arguing that the way to make it as a consultant is to own your business outcomes. If you frame a project to a client as "you have X problem. I solved a similar problem X' for another company using solution Y, and it led directly to a $Z increase in revenue", then as long as $Z > your rate they can appreciate what a no-brainer it is to hire you.

Of course, it's much easier to navigate yourself into that sort of position if you're an external consultant than if you're a salaried engineer whose manager hands you specs. Figuring out how to make that shift within the confines of a larger company's bureaucracy is phenomenally difficult.
Forgot one big con: Python lambda functions aren't "proper" functions (ie. arbitrary multi-line code blocks). Guido van Rossum has addressed this many times, saying (in effect) "it adds undue complexity and would be un-Pythonic", eg:

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358

This is one of my (very few!) gripes with FP in Python.
From non-programmer to shipping my first web app in under 2 months
1 + 1 = 10b is what he's saying.
>That's what everyone said about windows 7 and XP and NT

Nobody said that about Windows 7.
I really just meant: that aesthetic bliss was a fairly unlikely emotion for an Air Force pilot and MIT-trained PhD in astronautics to bring aboard the Lunar Module and bring out on the surface of the Moon. Hence, "smuggled".
I'm pretty sure there is a guaranteed-success Kickstarter for a $10-20 clean-charging plug in this story.
One of the Continuum guys said to expect "a week or so."
They just need to consume more, problem solved.
Like me tender, Like me not
Because it's probably going to fail to cope with all the weird and wonderful Linux installations out there to start with & they'd rather it didn't gain a reputation as being a buggy sack of offal.

It's hardly unusual for companies to have a limited beta before they open out to a wider audience.
Show HN: Sprinkles Add some colour to any website
They are soliciting feedback and testing, they would rather have quality than quantity.

What they don't want is thousands of forums full of posts saying "OMG it crashez steam4Linux sux"
WinCE with IE has been running on ARM for a long time. I had a Sony phone back in the 90s running a version of IE, there were versions for PowerPC MacOS and some Unix-es (don't know the CPU arch on those and that may have been done by an external company).
You don't understand the objection precisely because you work at Google. :)

The reason that people are objecting is because serving up files is not exciting or innovative and doesn't show any particular 'win' for a language -- I could write the same thing in Haskell, for example. The details about how it's serving up the files from your Googley FS are irrelevant to the non-Google employee. :)

I.e. I can run nginx on any machine with a decent CPU and saturate a 10Gbps link serving static objects.

If you were to say that the gigantic global network of awesomeness that is Google CDN runs on Go, the average non-Google employee starts to care because that's something that you can't just do with some off the shelf OSS software. Then we can start taking Go seriously for mission critical use.

That's the though process, anyway. If you don't agree with it, that's perfectly fine. :)
Why did they chose the Apple ecosystem? Gruber's been in the ecosystem a long time, but Marco made a choice within the past ten years. It's not like they made the choice for no reason.

Where on the front page does Marco write a long form article where he bases his opinions on the opinions of others?