skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really love when the companies take time to explain their customers what happened specially in such detail.

It's clearly a very complicated setting, and this type of posts make me trust them more, don't get me wrong, and outage is an outage, but knowing that they are in control and take time to explain shows respect and the correct attitude towards a mistake.

Good for them!
I want to upvote this ten times just because of the Sikorsky Sky Crane comment, but I also am voting because it's just a good comment.
Dying Satellites Could Lead to Shaky Weather Forecasts
An Alternate Universe (Microsoft Surface)
I was thinking more along the lines of the Mr. X thing (http://bionic.wikia.com/wiki/Day_of_the_Robot) or perhaps the lovely and talented Mr. R.I.N.G. (http://terrortitans.blogspot.com/2010/10/complete-night-stal...).
AWS sure does put out amazing post mortems. If only they'd make their status page more useful ...
i thought the point of a private jet, was so that you did not have to share with anyone else
Couldn't pass this one up seeing as I should actually be dealing with this for a class instead of commenting on Hacker News. What it means is that certain sets of symbols cannot be parsed unambiguously without information generated during the parse itself (the grammar is not context-free).

The link in the sibling comment has the canonical example:

foo * bar;

can either be parsed a multiplication or a declaration depending on whether "foo" has been typedefed previously. So you need to keep track of typedefs in a symbol table to correctly parse things.

The biggest problem with this is that many parser generators (including yacc) are much harder (if not impossible) to use with context sensitive grammars.
My photos folder was zeroed... =/
They did this in Guangzhou, where the local TV channel switching from 100% cantonese, to 50% cantonese.

Mandarin use has increased in Hong Kong in recent years,
but for economic reasons, as mainland visitors and businesses have flooded our small city.
Praxeology – Lessons from a lost science
That's incorrect. DNT has three states: True, False, and null (omitted). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_not_track_header
> We are already in the process of making a few changes to reduce the interdependency between ELB and EBS to avoid correlated failure in future events and allow ELB recovery even when there are EBS issues within an Availability Zone.

This is music to my ears. We switched away from ELBs because of this dependency. Hopefully this statement means Amazon is working on completely removing any use of EBS from ELBs.

We came to the conclusion a year and a half ago that EBS has had too many cascading failures to be trustworthy for our production systems. We now run everything on ephemeral drives and use Cassandra distributed across multiple AZs and multiple regions for data persistence.

I highly recommend getting as many servers as you can off EBS.
Why Samsung & Apple shouldn’t expect to keep making wild smartphone profits
They did refund approximately 10x ->

6 hours/24 hours = .25 day.

10*.25 Day =2.5 days ~= 3 Days
Hugely interesting, I knew very little about him but after reading this, I am going on a learning spree! Having lived in Britain, I must admit they do yearn for the days when they were the centre of the word and the tone of the article does resemble this.
US, Canada Launch Joint Cybersecurity Plan
"This distinction is really without a difference."
"In fact, if you're using the Dropbox desktop application, your files are backed up several times."
"It's hard to imagine a scenario where Dropbox could lose your files..."

Please stop. Right there. Stop believing some vendor marketing blindly (even if you do come to another conclusion later), stop reassuring other people who do so and stop calling a sync a backup. There is a very important distinction: Sync has mechanisms in place that are capable to touch the files on your backup. At least in dropbox' case these mechanisms are not completely separated from the initial backup mechanism of each version. I've had two almost catastrophical data losses with Dropbox until I was able to make that distinction. I've come to the conclusion that IT professionals should never ever treat a sync system as a backup system, and if you still think so please don't spread that advice to others.
It is the only socially acceptable bigotry. Something JS to be the scapegoat....
Hacker swipes 3.6M Social Security numbers, other data
DLA Piper is the world's largest lawfirm (by number of attorneys). They have other things to worry about.
Torvalds attacks IT industry 'security circus' (from 2008)
Congratulations on IE10: from Mozilla with cake
Failing fast means that if an idea has a fatal flaw, you want to discover it as early as possible. When you phrase it that way, it's hard to see how anyone could be against it. This is for example why I encourage startups to launch quickly.
There aren't enough problem in the world for that to be possible, ignoring extremely superficial differences.

It always comes down to exercises from CLR lightly dressed up.
Awesome: clean, easy to use and navigate and a great collection of music. I wil spread the word and hats off! Only feedback, would be nice if the genre list followed you as you scroll further down the list of playlists.
"(believe me, it takes MONTHS (or even years) of dedication to actually ace the PSAT or SAT)"

I'm disinclined to believe this statement. Would you mind taking the time to prove this for me? Also, what is considered an "ace" score?

In my experience the PSAT and SAT were tests that measured how well you can take tests and I do not consider my personal test scores to be the result of years of hard work and dedication.
Ideally, shouldn't there be weak or no correlation between score and college grades, when your sample is all SAT takers? My reasoning (not entirely non-serious) is that people who score high on the SAT get into hard schools and so get their GPA smacked down to average, whereas those with poor SAT scores get into easy schools where they can earn an average GPA.
I wasn't aware of that Paul Graham interview on Mixergy. Thanks for sharing the link.
Those are all good options, but you still need some kind of poll API. What happens if your PSHB endpoint is down for a bit? What if your streaming HTTP connection disconnects?
I Lways ask people to slave a simplified version of an actual problem I have worked on recently. Some times I even learn some thing.

Comparing candidates is irrelevant. You just want N hires that can contribute in your environment.
If there's one small flaw in the system it seems that the whole thing begins to fail.

I wonder if there is selection bias underlying that judgment? Reading all of Amazon's post-mortems of big events, it does seem that the whole thing is fragile. What I suspect is more likely true is that AWS suffers thousands of small failures every month and most are contained as designed, with no(or minuscule) customer impact. It's the ones that turn into highly visible failures that we read about.

That said, I agree with you that EBS in particular seems to have more downtime than I'd expect. (And that other services like ELB depends on it makes it cascade in a way that's hard to design highly-available systems.)
I think there's two villains. It's impossible for both of them to lose, but you can't blame people for being opposed to someone "winning" by being a villain.

Why was Zuckerberg going to Craigslist looking for work? Why did Zuckerberg want to do work for "known criminals"? The project Ceglia was trying to set up was an image database. Much like Facebook. I think if Paul Ceglia had a cleaner past and better judgment, he'd be collecting his (unearned?) share from Facebook in the same way that others, Winklevoss, etc., have collected.

The reason is the trail that Zuckerberg left behind him, screwing people over one after another, betraying their trust. The only person who could keep the damage under control is Zuckerberg. As others have said, other internet billionaires don't seem to have as many "forgotten co-founders" showing up for their "cut". The problem is particularly acute with Facebook. That's no coincidence.

The lesson here is you reap what you sow. Both Ceglia and Zuckerberg.
I've seen plenty of crappy ISP DNS servers ignore TTL values and cache DNS entries for many hours longer than they're supposed to. Unfortunately, it's all too common.
What company do you like that has no sales team?

And did you miss a negative in your last question?
>Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and like IQ scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching or practice.

That is interesting.How would you account for the fact that i increased my score by 130 points upon a retake without the help of a tutor(Too bad my new score was useless since i already had a fullride)?These tests can be gamed.Heck ,even iQ scores arent stable over a lifetime if anyone has bothered to read current research(Fynn Effect blah blah)
One of the few nice things about the C include mechanism is that it's pretty easy (and standard practice) to set up separate implementation and interface files. If the implementation of something changes, but not the interface, I don't want to have to recompile all the clients. This is lost in almost all "modern" languages.

(This is, of course, horribly broken in C++ which likes to inline everything.)
very cool, but a little confusing and some tricky phrases to express visually! Great concept
This looks just like the Apple Store, but without the customers :)
I had to laugh when reading about the Fantasy "Calculators" - included as a fantasy is a "Slide Rule" - when I took my grade 12 physics provincial finals in 1987, I didn't have a calculator with me, but that was not unexpected, so students were also provided with a booklet of log tables - a predecessor, of course, to the slide rule.

The log tables, of course, were more than sufficient for whatever complex multiplication and division that had to be done.
Git chauvinism is ridiculous. Git is great for bazaar style open source. It isn't important for small teams or large coordinated teams.

Every big company uses Remedy. Some just dress it up a little.
Neat, thanks -- I'd forgotten about that.
Different people end up seeing different versions.
Isn't it considerably easier to get every question wrong than it would be to get a perfect score (every question right)? For each question, there is only one correct answer but four incorrect ones. If you're aiming for a perfect score, you have to choose the only one correct answer among the five choices. But if you're trying to get every question wrong, you can choose one of four different answers to get the outcome you want (much better margin for error).
It's true that the Surface is coming in at a 10" form-factor when the iPad holds 70% of the market and the real battle is happening on the 7", slightly lower end market.
How is the status page not useful ? It's so simple to understand.

Green if everything is fine. Green if there are intermittent problems. Green if nothing works.
Next you'll tell me corporations mainly donate to charity for tax purposes and free publicity...

I don't care if they're really doing it to hurt Google. Increased privacy for users is a good thing.
I think the reasons for those choices are:

* It's very uncommon to want your output text actually underlined.

* If you really do want underlining, just use <u>this</u>, since it's fine to put raw html in Markdown source.

* The most common way folks express emphasis is probably with ✱asterisks✱ (HN won't let me backslash-escape the *). A less-common alternative is to use _underscores_ (though I rarely see that anymore these days). Maybe the distant third most-common way was with /slashes/. I guess Gruber had to draw the line somewhere and just support the first two most common ways to write it. That seems reasonable.

Another reason to not use slashes for emphasis: using them might interfere (or at least cause headaches) with writing directory names, fractions 1/2, and "and/or" wordings.
I've been doing the same as you, unfortunately due to changes in cofounder structure, which has a pretty large impact on the application.

I am currently under the impression that all of the applications are reviewed by at least one partner after the deadline unless they haven't changed since submission and all the partners have already seen them. I don't think there is a danger of no one seeing the updated application.

As for how they resolve differences from one submission to another, I do not know.

All in all it would be interesting to get an official answer to this question.
Very likely you've seen all three questions before. Here's one.

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Customers that do tens of millions of dollars a year tend to call us and get a lower price from us. They don't use the signup box. It's common for enterprise companies to self select by calling for special pricing and in most cases we oblige. We want to make a fair deal for all parties.

On the other hand, I get it - You would never use us, you would try to build it yourself. I can respect that. I get like that for a lot of stuff I see.

The founding team's past experience is in algorithmic asset valuation, commodity trading and machine learning. We are life long learners and are dedicating our time to find better ways of helping ecommerce stores pick better prices. We have several years of experience in workflow automation and we apply that to our current business to make our product as cheap as humanly possible and pass those prices along. Our closest neighbor in the pricing game charges hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees because they use so much human labor to do things.

Saurik, if you ever want to do one less thing and want us to do your price testing. Please give us call, I would love to find a price that makes it worth your time.

After all, I am fond of dynamic pricing. :)
With the exception of the truly brilliant, (the 0.01%) the other 99.99% of us do have to put in the better part of a year to nail 2400 on the SAT. If you were able to do that without a lot of hard work and dedication, than I commend you on your inherent brilliance - life is going to be a lot easier for you than the rest of us.
It's not uncommon for interviewers to ask a few warm up/intro questions and then proceed to more advanced questions--so if you didn't get a few questions right, you may simply have missed some easy ones, so they didn't ask you the hard ones. This would leave you the impression that you "almost" made it, when in fact you may not have come close.
The Lowly Button Gets an Upgrade
Netflix stock jumps up 13 percent over Microsoft buyout rumors
Slides eight and nine, to me at least, suggest by the implicit contrast between research and helping programmers that the Go designers just weren't interested in the state of PL research.
How are you distinguishing between what's "critical or core to the processes themselves" and what's not? What makes taking bytes from a disk or memory cache and pushing them over a socket somehow more "critical" than getting the client to the right server in the first place? Neither one is useful without the other: it's a cohesive whole that now works much better since dl.google.com was rewritten in Go.

I'm genuinely interested in this particular objection. I've written several components of a multi-component system (itself just one major piece of what makes our CDN work), and it never once occurred to me to say that one component was more or less "critical" than another. In this system I've written 12kloc servers with intricately managed resources where cachlines matter, and I've written 1kloc servers that just repeatedly make internal RPCs and occasionally tweak the behavior of the system. I've seen the system's behavior when each of these components fail, and both sorts of failures cause major problems. Is one more critical than the other? I'm going to get paged and users are going to suffer whichever one fails.
Maybe they fixate on maximums because those are what are used plea bargaining? Would you leave the possibility of 20 years in a federal prison (no matter how remote) to chance?
The lottery idea is a terrible one. Missing just one question on the test is enough to drop your score from a 2400 to a 2370 in many cases. Achieving a "perfect" score is largely due to luck.
Quite a nice writeup.

It saddens me to see Microsoft disappointing, time after time. There must be great material for anthropologists to figure out how such an incredibly smart and talented group of people, with almost unlimited amount of money, can continue to be second-rate. In fact, comparing the cultures around Linux, MS and Apple is bound to reveal some greater truths about human/societal behavior which could be applied to improving the lot of countries and cultures which have stagnated.
I never liked Go, but I admit I like it a lot more if it means I don't have to deal with Maven and other dependency systems as much like the slides say. I've been doing Android since it came out, but before that I was J2EE, and it could be hell if Hibernate needed a different version of a dep than something else in your code stack, for example. Handling JARs by hand stopped working, and the countless XMLs files listing deps for all parts of the system and library started getting full of overrides and the like. Eventually Oracle rewrote all the class loading for their app server which allowed dependencies to have dependencies which were invisible to apps using them. So something as basic as class loaders had to be completely reworked to deal with this, and it was still damn complex and a pain in the ass.
His impression pretty much matches mine, except I'm more enthused by the keyboard covers. I find OSKs intolerable; I agree with his assessment that Office is useless for creation - I will argue that having a full-fidelity viewer is very nice for attachment handling.
That would be true, but you are in fact allowed to miss a couple of questions and still get a perfect score.
Actually at most big company jobs the programming tasks have well known solutions but need people to grind them out.
In-Text Commerce Startup Cemmerce Raises Another $500K
Yegge's blog post and CLR textbook are all you need. For a more social version go read the Reddit subrddit on interview problems or read glassdoor.
Two things: 1) Cool concept! (would feel more natural with sound). 2) Wow, I've been living in Asia for about two years and didn't realize facial hair was trendy now! Or is that a NY thing only?
That depends on the section of the test. Critical reading you can get several wrong, writing depends on your essay score, and math you typically can't get any wrong.
This is possibly the funniest thing I have read this year. As an aside, the amount of thought and focus this guy obviously can devote to a single topic is amazing. I really hope someone is paying him lots of money (or whatever he prefers) to use his talents for good.
I had a bit of a tinfoil hat epiphany just yesterday about this... consider:

-Until now, Apple has been adamant about not releasing a smaller iPad.

-Apple has a ridiculously efficient supply chain which can probably adapt very well, considering the next point...

-Tim Cook just went on record saying that Apple wasn't concerned about product cannibalization.

-The Surface tablet is just about to stick it's foot in the door, well after Apple has established itself at the top.

Aside from the obvious (consumer demand), does anyone else think this might just be one of the most comfortable bets they can make? Put out 7" tablets while they're hot, let people forget about the Surface, by the time Surface 2 goes 7" they can push out a much newer full iPad line...
Seriously? blue uniforms, white name tags, flat display tables, guru bars... It's like they purposely tried to copy every distinguishable Apple retail formula except they're pushing PCs.

Does noone have any creativity left anymore?
Yes, she still plans to, but we have two small children and spending time with them is more important to her.
Ahh, I guess he's working on his own version of git-based hosting with visual diff
It may be because I'm cranky this evening but I found the author's sarcastic quips really fun to read.

On the content itself, it sounds like if you're not targeting a specific service, you could code this up and launch a few hundred c1.xlarge spot instances (larger instances => fewer neighbors) and just collect keys. Or am I totally underestimating the amount of manual work required post-processing?
slide show didn't work for me in FireFox... haven't tried it in Chrome :)

Update: was trying to use a mouse to switch between slides, but later tried, and figured out that it only works with keyboard :)
Go has many strengths, but for Rob Pike to claim that Go addresses concurrency for the modern CPUs better than Java is just clearly b.s. Doug Lea, Cliff Click, Brian Goetz, et al. addressed multicore before Go even existed. I call b.s. when I see it.

(The nearly cult-like mentality of some of Go programmers is really quite annoying.)
How do you reconcile the large leaps in SAT scores that people achieve through preparing for the test? For example, while I had a fairly respectable score in high school, after I spent a little time working as an SAT tutor in college, I was regularly scoring perfectly on all practice tests and recently release new tests. Surely my IQ hadn't jumped drastically. Just curious for your take on this.
Blogger Buys 1.1 Million Facebook User Emails for $5
Well, naming things is one of the 2 hard problems in computer science. ;)
How surprising, Marco panning Microsoft products.

That store experience does sound awful though. There's nothing more off putting than over eager sales staff interrupting your curiosity.
> and I don't buy the argument that it's _only_ because their minds have been poisoned by overexposure to other languages.

I've not heard that argument. I think most Haskell people would acknowledge theirs is not an easy language to learn and program.

The argument is especially non-stick because in practicality every programmer will be "poisoned" by other languages. That means that even if Haskell wasn't a hard language to learn in theory (i.e. if a "virgin" brain could learn it just fine), in practice it will be.

It's easier to expand on the solid points of the language, not easiness of understanding. But like I said, I've not seen Haskell being thrown around in that fashion.
Save Humanity From Asteroids With Reflective Paint Clouds, Says MIT Grad.
Oh my.. this cringeworthy exchange reminds me of when Larry David tried selling cars :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neqO5y3Xaq8
A few helpful articles have recently surfaced that have changed the way I answered questions on my application. 2 weeks to review the imagined hoards of applications couldn't be easy but I'm praying resubmitted applications aren't thrown aside at first glance.

In comparison to my most recent submission - my first application was beyond ridiculous.
Amazon outage: Dissecting what happened
Learn to Play: Minecraft in the classroom
Sixth person from the right seems to be talking alone. Maybe the person he is talking to got fired and was edited out of the video? :)
this is such a biased article with strawman arguments ("can you replace the sound card on the surface?") and silly comparisons(the author actually writes he could buy 2 ipad minis for 1 surface).

the criticisms about the store experience and salesmen notwithstanding, this is apple fanboism at its best.

It's far better to keep an open mind and experience new ways of interaction than to deride/scoff at alternative UI and UX.

I switch between Android, Windows, and Mac OSX; it's far more interesting to enjoy more platforms than forgo trying new experiences.