skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you recommend that people estimate running costs for an app hosted with dotCloud before they've launched an app with you?

I can see that your new dashboard would be useful for scaling up and down once an app's running on dotCloud, but I'd prefer to be able to estimate running costs before committing to your platform.

Do you have any guidelines to estimate RAM/instance requirements? I'm new to PaaS-style hosting, so forgive me if this is simple stuff, but if I was running a basic Sinatra app with MongoDB and static file hosting, for example, how could I gauge my approximate running costs under dotCloud?
Ask HN: What is your setup?
I really enjoy the usesthis.com 'The Setup' articles. I'm curious what users of HN have their setups.

My hardware:

15" MacBook Pro Retina, 2.6Ghz, 16GB DDR3

OSX 10.8, Windows 7

Dual NEC 27" Displays (PA271W-BK)

Das Keyboad (Professional)

Logitech Performance Mouse MX

I travel a lot, so a notebook works great for me. When I'm home, it is plugged into two 27" displays, and when I travel, the 15" retina is a perfect weight/size to get things done but not be a hassle. I spend half of my day in Windows, half in OS X 10.8 - I can boot into either in about 30 seconds. And I just love the 'clickiness' of the Das Keyboard - its like a high quality IBM Model M keyboard.

So HN, let's hear about your setups!
Paint.NET is one of my favorite free tools of all time - up there with VLC and a few others in the top tier. Absolutely amazing app.
The title makes a clear statement, and the article itself questions whether a Google dominated smartphone landscape is a good thing.

I'm not seeing the "cheerleadery" side of this.
Agreed. Here's a previous HN discussion on that topic:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4281630
And it's not just that you'll get updates--you'll also be able to grab the source directly from the Android site, make any tweaks you like, and build your very own image for your phone. You should be able to run bleeding-edge Android as it goes into the repo if you feel like living dangerously. It beats the usual "Well, we might get a Cyanogenmod ROM... maybe" for other phones.
Mainly that T-Mobile HSPA+ @ 42 mbps is faster, cheaper, and more widely available than LTE on Verizon
Besides HN I read the somethingawful.com forums and a few RSS feeds of mainly blogs related to web design. I've had to remove the major tech blogs from my reader (Engadget, Gizmodo, etc) because there's no way I can keep up with the number of posts.
The iPhone 5 gets better battery life than the iPhone 4S when using LTE vs HSPA. My iPad 3 with AT&T LTE gets 27 Mbps down and 14 Mbps up on my most recent speed test. I doubt you will get anywhere near those speeds on HSPA+.

The Nexus 4 is a weird mix of premium components with last years radios.
Microsoft delivers at BUILD 2012
But as they pointed out, this is a store that sells accessories. People buying extended battery kits during a blackout makes sense. People needing new iPhones or cellular iPads to keep in touch with family? Also makes sense.
You might like the Samsung Captivate. 4" screen and I am running Jellybean on it. Not current gen, but not poor performance by any stretch of the imagination.
Living in Vancouver, BC; LTE has a few weak spots here, but in general LTE is fast and reliable, and gets me download and upload speeds of between 20-30 megabits per second. It's a faster download than my fibre connection to my apartment (by 20%), and faster upload (by 200%).

I'd say that's pretty significant. I get that Google maybe can't fit an LTE chip into a phone cheaply, and that LTE is the card that carriers are willing to withhold playing to get concessions out of Google, but saying that LTE unavailable, unreliable, and inconsistent just sounds like the sort of apologetics that iPhone users have been accused of for years (since back when LTE was unavailable, unreliable, and inconsistent).
Wifi + sftp client have helped me manage my ebooks on my phone, copying them from my Linux box. You ought to be able to do something similar, just get on your home wifi network and pull over your music.
Introduction to Django Selenium Testing
How Square can help you sell more cupcakes
Carve Your Social Media Message in Stone with Reddit
So alternative VMs and VMs progress can go die in a fire, one runtime to rule them all and in the darkness bind them? No Carakan, no JavaScriptCore/Squirrelfish, no Chakram, no V8?

Here's an idea: javascript is your bytecode, and you have every single javascript VM as your runtime.
Yep, looks like a C++ developer built that site.
What HN Wants to Know From PG: A WWPGD Postmortem
For localStorage? I can't find any information on that. I know this is the case for Web SQL databases. But as far as I understand, localStorage is hard coded with no chance of expansion. To make matters worse, localStorage uses strings, effectively cutting your storage a good deal.
All the PGP pubkey tells you is that the attacker who owned the build server didn't modify the PGP key.
> This is actual phone handset market being delivered (not necessarily sold, as many of them are subsidized to $0).

Sold is sold, subsidies just change who is doing the buying.
FWIW, Node Knockout is a 48 hour hackathon to build apps using Node. Similar to Rails Rumble.
He's Off to Antarctica
With Geoffrey Hinton involved as a supervisor I expect they were on the bleeding edge for other reasons anyway and just decided to scoop up some extra cash as well. I've not looked closely but Kaggle does seem to be a little like 99designs though.
>That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped.

Sounds like you could use some time meditating about your hostile attitude :) Seriously though, so much of eastern thought related to mediation involves paradoxes that a practitioner reflects on in order to grow.

Think about nothing

Observe your thoughts in a detached state

Do no work but get everything done

etc

I started learning about meditation from the standpoint of trying to detach myself from the constant buzz of thoughts (i.e. 'thinking about nothing'). I seriously doubt that there is a entirely right or wrong way to teach meditation since it ultimately involves a process of self discovery and coming up with whatever metaphor works best for oneself is an important part of the process.
Selecting a lower-res display?
My setup consists of a Windows 7 PC with two monitors:

- 26" 720p (1366X768) primary display - Toshiba 26AV502U LCD Television
- 20" 1024X768 secondary display (Generic Dell monitor)

I prefer lower resolution, as this allows me to sit further from my screens, and is easier on the eyes. I have tried, for example, to run Thunderbird on a 1900X1200 display, and everything is just too damn small.

I'd like to add a third display that is energy-efficient (Energy Star) and gives me 720p, or close, at 26" display size - native resolution, but the trend is in the other direction - higher and higher resolution.

I know I can try running something at half the native resolution, but that requires I get a display which runs something ridiculous like 2600X1600.

I suppose I can get another of the Toshibas, but I'd prefer something more energy-efficient.

Ideas?
This is a well-worn piece of advice, but it's well-worn for a reason - because it's incredibly valuable.

Observing a lot of my friends over a lot of years, I'm starting to suspect that the willingness to fail, and particularly to fail in public, is possibly the key differentiator for people who achieve impressive things.

(I'm currently learning a new skill myself. I was sucking very badly, I'm now just sucking pretty badly, and I'm enjoying the progress.)
Just moved our app live on dotCloud, dashboard made things super easy to manage. Its nice that the CLI and the Dashboard share an API, sometimes it good to be able to get things done via the command line, and sometimes better to visualize graphs and sort through logs via the web. Keep up the good work!
An alternative method of decoupling callbacks is to make heavy use of events within your program. However, perhaps an event is even more like a goto because it doesn't encapsulate state.
Alternatively, you can needlessly spend time fixing a bug in Canary which doesn't exist in stable and will in fact go away before release.
I've been playing with the new dashboard beta for a while and it's really nice. It'll be nice to see some basic CLI functions (resizing/mem management) make their way into the dashboard too.

One thing I'd really like to see with DotCloud is a way to more accurately replicate their environment locally for development. If I'm setting up a new site, I want my local environment to match the live one as much as possible, so a local VM that matches DotCloud's service settings would be pretty killer. Since each service is independent, that may be tricky, but it would be awesome if it could be done.
I am genuinely curious how you guys come up with pricing for the stacks. I understand the convenience premium with the webhost/scaling services like heroku and dotcloud, I buy into that too. But I fall off where say a 1Gb mongodb comes out to $134 monthly, especially considering its almost effortless to set such a db up (fire up ec2 instance, download, ./mongod).

Essentially I am asking: If you were trying to sell me your product how would you justify the $132 for 1Gb mongodb when I can get a 1.7Gb instance at amazon for a fraction of the price ($46, on demand).
The classic response. :)
A life less posted
Well, the data never leave JVM, that is why it is so "fast" - it never fsyncs.

What if JVM instance crash under load? Data lose, but, see, it is not our fault - our code is OK.
Once you've worked in assembly language, you realize everything is just another form of jmp.
A New YouTube UI Experiment
Do you have any metrics proving that these tactics don't work?

I mean, sure, I can see why you don't like them - but having a marketing tactic that is wildly unpopular and having a marketing tactic that doesn't work are not the same thing.

Case in point: a lot of people hate the "one wierd tip" ads that The Truth About Abs uses - but they seem to work pretty well - http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/11/02/the-truth-ab....
Alternatively, subsidies don't change who is doing the buying, but rather obscure the buying behind a built in camouflaged payment plan.
You lost me. His point only applies to single people because people in monogamous relationships have learned to suppress "being friendly"? I have not seen anything that would suggest that is true, I could not guess the relationship status of anyone in my office based on their friendliness.
How would you compare SQL benchmarks? Oracle, mySQL, SQL Server, Postgresql? You can find any specific use case where one will out-perform the others. A lot of DBAs assume the Oracle is the most powerful, but it is also harder to manage and VERY expensive to run. I know that most NoSQL databases are free, except for support or multiple datacenter usage- but what about the cost for DevOps? Or backup?
Dude go for it! Sounds like the opportunity of a life time and you sound like you know your stuff. Send some emails!
Real Life Zombie Game Returns to London
That's a whole nother dimension though. Sucking so hard til you come out the other side, then it's a win.
Similar to this is the Scala fold convention.

An example from the Play! Framework for form submissions:

def submit = Action { implicit request =>
contactForm.bindFromRequest.fold(
errors => BadRequest(html.contact.form(errors)),
contact => Ok(html.contact.summary(contact))
)
}
Yes.

Light from source A travels at the speed determined by the last speed-wavefront that passed it. This can be modeled by storing the speed on the sources, or by calculating from all gathered orbs in the world, and selecting the most-recent, when the time is calculated by (<time picked up> at <distance when picked up> at <speed of light before picked up>).

All such waves will be entirely contained within the previous wave because you cannot go faster than light and the speed only decreases, so all that matters is the speed before it was picked up, which is the speed the wave-front moves at (or does it move at the new speed? eh, pick either one, it doesn't matter.)

Then, for each orb picked up since the most-recent that affected the source, the time for the light to reach the observer is based on <distance to orb N> at speed <before orb N> until <distance to orb N-1>. Then repeat for orb N-1 until you run out of orbs. In this case, N would be the oldest orb whose wavefront has not yet passed the source.

It's a piece-wise calculation (the reverse of what's described), so it would be slower than instantaneous changes, but there's no need to model photons. And I would guess there's a reasonably-efficient way to calculate this on a GPU, so it could probably be real-time. Or it will be in a year or two.
This is why I hilariously love meditation. The goal is to suck at meditating, because there is no goal.
Clay Christensen in the Innovators Solution lays out an explanation for what is happening here. Apple used vertical integration to make a giant leap forward with their iPhone that you couldn't have made in a non-integrated company. They ended up overshooting the typical consumer's needs though in the following iterations of the iPhone. And the technology that was at first difficult for competitors to reproduce became easier to replicate (thanks in part to Android). Samsung, HTC, and others were able then to provide good enough devices (and in certain ways, better devices) to consumers at a lower price point.

Apple's response has been to move up market towards tablets, and have been able to use their vertical integration to produce devices that no other Android manufacturer could match at first. Microsoft is building their own device to have similar quality, but they are doing it as a vertically integrated company. Amazon showed you could do a partial vertical integration (heavily customized Android and integration into their own media resources) to take away the low end of the tablet market from Apple. And slowly the Android tablet manufacturers are catching up to Apple.

So what this makes me ask is what will be next for Apple? They haven't been good at playing the high-volume, low-profit electronics game, so they'll need another "blockbuster", highly innovative device, and I am excited to see what that will be. It drives the industry forward, and creates exciting new technology we all get to benefit from eventually.
Except that's not what we measure. Instead we find the speed of a photon depends only on the medium, not on the motion of the source or receiver.
Wiring a Generator to Your House
> particularly to fail in public

This reminds me of when I learned to dance Salsa, and more recently, Tango.

It's a far more public failure than writing a blog post. Your body – the very thing that experiences the embarrassment of failure – is your instrument when dancing. To add insult to injury, you're failing in front of a never-ending stream of women.

But, thankfully, sucking is temporary and life is long.

EDIT: I'd like to add that life is much, much, better when you know how to dance.
Help Restore the NYU Research Labs Destroyed by Hurricane Sandy
IOS 6.0.1 already jailbroken
Wow that reply makes me look like a dyslexic doesn't it?
Sry about that
Is there a study comprehensively comparing the results of those different settings on a variety of data sets. (your opinion is commonly stated but I can't find any thorough evidence to it)
I'd be interested in a link to that stat. I remember reading something similar a year ago and I'm curious if the landscape has since changed.
One can geolocate well enough with many IP addresses that, with a bit of additional data if not solely using the IP address, the request source is quite identifiable.

Even several years ago (i.e. in "less sophisticated" times), I had a few occasions to do this manually. The experience was eye-opening. (It's one thing to understand the concept. It's another to drill down and target someone in a matter of minutes, if not moments.)
What about the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials?
Pixelmator is going to be your best bet for a Photoshop alternative on a Mac. It's far faster, more beautiful and all-around pleasant to use, not to mention the original was built by just two brothers and I like supporting smaller teams that actually use their products (something I wonder if a lot of Photoshop developers do given the issues that are consistently not addressed with each release).

It imports PSDs, but last I tried, it had trouble with layer styles.
100,000 is already very good.

Anything inside a million at least suggests that there are real users visiting the site.

The sites in the millions basically do not have any traffic. Newly registered sites get into that range from a few random search engine hits even before they have any real content.
You aren't listening to me. The speed of the photon is c in the direction it's traveling, a photon traveling due west is going north with no speed at all.
I saw PicDigest yesterday and think it's great (I didn't chime in though). Regarding the tech blog coverage, it may be too early to tell - they may be still "getting around to it". Nonetheless, I'd start hitting up blogs directly. PicDigest is something that would be right up MakeUseOf's alley for example.
A Record Player That Turns Felt-Tip Doodles Into Electronic Music
What makes developers happy, angry, and everything in between?
"I don't know when or where I am being called from, or what the state is of the rest of the program at this time."

Gotcha.

A parent object should own a child object. The parent can directly call a method on a child. The child object shouldn't really know about the parent. Hence, it uses a callback/delegate/protocol.

Callbacks are a mess if there isn't a clear parent to child relationship.
Small scale redundant web hosting
Your First Mechanical Keyboard (with Skulls?)
I think this is a great insight.

A lawyer's action can benefit or harm himself; it is fairly trivial to determine which in any particular case. However a lawyers actions can also benefit or harm lawyers as a group.

A single lawyer initiating and losing lots of lawsuits is not really going to benefit himself, but he is doing his part to drive demand for lawyers even higher. If lawyers were microbes, we could expect to see this sort of behavior become more prevalent so long as it provided a benefit to lawyers with similar traits greater than the damage done to the individual lawyer.
What does an average developer score on the Aspergers quotient test?
When I'm comparing products or deciding to use a service i'll often search [product under consideration] vs [competitor]. Entering this conversation by titling your articles with relevant search terms seems smart to me.

Here's a link to the vsee vs skype article: http://vsee.com/skype

Here's an excerpt:

So Why Skype?

Of course, Skype is an excellent service if you're on a good network and don't have to be too concerned about data security. In addition, you can

make phone calls to recipients on traditional telephone networks
be part of the 663 million registered Skype users as of September 2011
Skype from almost any platform: desktop (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), mobile (iOS, Android, Symbian) and smart TVs

As you can see there's way more to it than "attacking competitors" they're legitimately explaining the differences between the services.
A very relevant ZenPencils comic. Advice for beginners: http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginner...

The gist is that you get into something because you have a good taste for it, but for the first few years of doing it your taste is far ahead of your skill. The trick is to keep doing things anyway, knowing they will eventually catch up and surpass your taste.
Can't say I agree that funding this type of endeavor is "one of the most important functions of a state is its ability and willingness to invest in projects that would be otherwise unprofitable or far too long-term for any rational player in the private sector to take-on." Government does many things marginally better than the private sector, and many things poorly.

For example, the Pyramids are a stunning achievement that couldn't have been completed without using government. However, I don't see them as being particularly helpful today.

Governments don't need to have "economic functions" other than protecting property rights, and maintaining a sound currency.
Actually, looks like it does pretty well on reads. It's the writes that mongo can't handle. But we all knew that already...
You are absolutely right in what you say regarding integration.

I disagree with your final analysis of where this leaves Apple. I think Apple will continue to hold a significant chunk of the "high-end" luxury market. iOS will maintain high price points and Apple will maintain its polish--and consumers with expendable income will keep their sales strong. I suspect their market share in Europe, USA, Japan, and wealthy Chinese won't drop too much (30% of market? 45%?). Android will claim the entire low-cost market--the rest of China, India, South America.

I think Apple will maintain its profits, but Android will secure the majority of the world market. Apple is trying to maximize percentage of industry profit rather than percentage of industry sales.
Soon, thank you. But I doubt I'll connect it to this or any of my other sour and shitty identities. Time for a fresh start.
I wonder why Apple took this route. When they introduced the iPod they made an agreement with Line 6 who owns the mark Pod for the guitar effects processor.
The problem with using intuition for feature engineering is that intuition is often wrong. But more than that, it's much less scalable than a system that learns progressively higher level features from lower level data automatically.

And parameter selection isn't nearly as involved in practice--but it is important to know what you're doing because you'll basically be translating from papers to code in order to get a working implementation, at least until some startup comes out with a plug and play deep learning paas

For anyone interested in playing with the tools that are available, deeplearning.net provides a set of very good tutorials with working code.
When you start doing something small, your minimum viable product is your most valuable product. It is all you have. If you don't make your MVP, you are missing something of a highest value.
Cosmological redshift comes from general relativity, not the SR Doppler effect. Local motion does produce a shift on top of that, but that's not all redshift. Nearby galaxies are actually blue shifted.
I don't see why they demonize this: "If Google decides that HTML5 web apps are the way forward, making them a first-class citizen in future versions of Android, then other mobile OSes will have no other option than to follow suit."
Nothing impressive with this. I know of a few companies that sold crappy devices with crappy OS's. RIM, Nokia, etc. and they dominated the market.

Android has become the new Nokia.

Big Market Share. Worthless user-base.
What is my SoundCloud user_id?
Thanks so much! That's a great collection :)
TokBox Acquisition A Fire Sale?
They look really good, thank you :)
I have a huge problem with all this JS precompile-languages
This is similar to how we do our email delivery of dashboards at Indicee (http://www.indicee.com)

We don't use D3 for our visualizations (I'd love to, but our users can use the dashboards "live" and, well... Internet Explorer 8) and we snapshot the entire dashboard - which isn't quite as clever as what is done here, but does have the advantage that the resulting mail is self-contained and does not require the dynamically generated images to be hosted somewhere.

Like these guys, I have nothing but good things to say about PhantomJS. We'd previously used another "headless webkit" - wkhtmltoimage - in a similar role but Phantom's design as a general purpose scripting engine for headless browsing tasks is much, much more useful.