skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How are ads not part of the online experience? (At least for everyone not using Adblock). Of course they are. Hell, many click on them!

Actually I think it does - you think your average person on the street wants targeted ads?

It depends. If the alternative is paying or not having the content, absolutely. In my limited experience, people don't really care or mind being tracked unless they can see the drawbacks in their face.
Externe Profil-Seite von /FFI_Cyran_O
Why do we have to compare everything to Apple? We don't. But it makes perfect sense to compare both the Surface tablet and Microsoft stores in general to Apple, as they are very explicitly trying to compete with Apple's dominance. Microsoft stores are even designed to resemble Apple stores, down to the employee uniforms, in a desperate attempt at cargo cult retailing. And given the success of the iPad, any tablet device made today is going to get compared to it.
I believe the damage of cascading failures was also masterfully exposed during your talk on QCon Last year: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Debugging-Production-Syst...
This one is good!

Sometimes there are articles about improvements to something that is claimed to "change the world", while it's just building an electronic gadget into something, or making something controllable with an iphone.

But this here is really a clever idea!
If the alternate universe is one where "you can expand and alter even if it sucks" then can I boot BSD on surface?
Or at least to put their own icing on KHTML's cake.
End of Tenancy cleaners - End of Tenancy cleaning London
The blogger that bought 1 M usernames for 5$? FB called him and said: shhh
How Much Can Driving A Hybrid Car Save You Per Year
The retina display made me a bit disappointed, until I realised how easy it is to read, compared to most any screen (my Linux portable has 15" 1920x1080, but even that is blown away).

I can read literature on a screen now! I have documentation in A4/letter size readable! That combination can't be matched, since larger eInk screens seems to become retired?

Arguably, this changed not only how I use computers but my life for better...
I don't think that there is an obvious way to make it less complex. But complexity is not inherently bad. Internet is very complex, yet it is robust.

What feels wrong here, is that Amazon systems are too trusting to other Amazon internal systems.
The Java ecosystem has a range of solutions to this problem that actually work. I know it's not trendy or anything, but it works. Depends on what's more important to you, I guess.
Regarding docs, what's also extremely neat is, when you're offline, just run "go doc" and it starts an HTTP server on your local machine to serve the exact same fine documentation experience. So thoughtful, one of many small details just part of the overall package, when you need them you find them easily and are delighted.
Haha you got me. PG can rest assured that middlebrow dismissal apparently only gets a disproportionate share of upvotes when it's about health or nutrition :P
I would imagine that these two teams, and the Chrome team, are the only people who fully understand what supporting an application as complex as a Web browser entails. And the IE10 team are now dealing with different architectures (arm and x86?).
It goes deeper than that. The prime difference is in the stance: "Is concurrency a library or is it a built-in feature?". In Java, it is the former, whereas in Go, it is the latter.

In my experience, having concurrency primitives in the language tend to integrate better than having them in a library - for the simple fact it saves some space when writing and reading programs.

As for the choice of `java.util.concurrent` over goroutines it again depends on your stance. j.u.c provides you with some excellent high-level primitives on which to build concurrency. But these primitives are easy to build in Go with its concurrency primitives. Some, like `BlockingQueue<E>` or `Future<V>` are directly isomorphic to a channel or a simple goroutine/channel invocation respectively. It is a matter of opinion whether or not one should actually do these kinds of implementations themselves.

A more important difference, however, is that Java operates on Threads as the "smallest" primitive, whereas a goroutine is a light-weight "thread". That is, you can easily have tens of thousands of goroutines running, but you do probably not want the same amount of threads in a Java system. For that, you need stuff like kilim.

In my experience, I am a professional Erlang programmer, the ability to run extremely concurrent threads/processes is a game changer for much of the code you will be writing.
Letterpress vs Lost Cities - turn based design study
Ok, enough is enough. I have read too much of this.

The author made serious points (even the store uniforms(!) are copied, bad animation handling, office apps are slow, etc, etc).

Why are the anti-Apple fan boys just complaining that the article is biased -- instead of showing that it is biased by answering the "biased" points?
As a Chinese, I want to say that the hosts file to facebook or titter,as same as google.com（google.com.hk） is not available any more because of the National People's Congress ‘s approching. Most Chinese are willing to join in the Communist Party because they want to be superior to who dose not--- every Chinsese want to be unequal...for example, i worked in a big 3 software cop in beijing, where nine of ten of my fellows are Communist members.

God loves America, God loves Taiwan, he dose not love China.
This is still so extremely worrying. How insane is it that we have a law that prevents us purchasing a physical object, and doing certain things with that that don't impact directly on others? Imagine if your tobacco company prohibited you rolling cigarettes and giving them to others? Or your water company legally stopped you being able to drink the water coming out of your taps so you have to buy bottled water?

It's fucking ridiculous.
I worked as a specialist(sales) at Apple's highest grossing retail store(5th avenue) while finishing school last winter, and you're basically correct.

Apple hires sales people almost entirely on the basis of attitude. The philosophy is essentially that you can teach them the basics(and telling customers you don't know and then going to find out is strongly encouraged) but its harder to teach customer service skills. There's no commission and was never any pressure to move through customers quickly.

For 90% of the products apple sells, this strategy works pretty well. The exception is obviously macs, and even there 80% of your interactions require minimal knowledge.

So you end up with friendly staff that's not particularly passionate about the tech specs. Which is clearly preferable the unknowledgeable and commission driven model of big box retailers, but a far cry from the small shops of the 90s.

Overall it's a hard strategy to argue with. The demographics of computer users has changed dramatically since the heyday of the boutiques, and tailoring your strategy to target the enthusiast demographic tends to alienate the non tech savvy majority.
Scientists Recover Oldest Playable American Recording
That feeling is not unique to the British, only they are louder about it for two reasons: they were the winning side in two huge and most recent conflicts, and they speak English so we discuss them here.

Germans have seen their country recover twice, buy its poor half, and become a financial and manufacturing core amongst their neighbours. They don't even need to talk about it.

French are told about La Francophonie, probably since school.

Spaniards, well, even George Bush speaks some Spanish.

Italians, Culture? Greeks, foundations of knowledge? Turks, the Ottoman Empire? Arab countries, al Andalus? They present themselves according to their own view and emphasis of history, it's just that we don't get to read their own views in English.
Sounds like a perfect storm [of imperfection].
Well, they made it and more:
Funding: $788,138 of $750,000
The battery life is very good. It is just the lack of use and I forget about it. There is nothing technically wrong with it but I seem to struggle in finding a use for it to be honest. I just prefer being at a desk on my PC with a big screen.
Am I the only one who finds this blind following of a specific platform all rather childish?*

Platform zealotry is the domain of children, the feeble minded and host of shills who feed on the above two groups (and the platform holder's marketing budgets).

* Rhetorical question (I expect that most HNers agree).
I'm not sure the amount they donate matters as much as the good press they donate. This is extremely valuable.

Consider the case of the bribes paid by the Peruvian government to media versus that paid to judges and politicians. While the latter two got tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, a TV channel owners got $5 million. That acts as a proxy for their power.

What is the parallel? They act out during election season because they are in the middle of handing their most valuable asset out--their coverage. That is the true lobbying asset. Based on what you said I suppose they want to get what they want before the election happens and the horse is let out of the barn.
Sending a cake to yourself and getting excited about it is the lamest situation I could ever imagine of.
here are two links that show the project's progress during its kickstarter life:

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-super...
http://canhekick.it/project/5064d31d8f647c24e5ad60d0
Upscaling from 720p to 1080p will not lose any information if it's done properly. Similarly, upscaling from 16-bit to 24-bit will not either, and running the audio output at 24-bit has the advantage that quantization noise from volume scaling is a non issue. This means software volume controls will not result in perceptual quality loss.
They're emulated, not ported.
Furthermore, what editor would correctly soft-wrap this?

Really really […] really long line

* Really […] really long list item 1
* Really […] really long list item 2

Most editors I know would show that:

Really really[…]
really long line

* Really […] really
long list item 1
* Really […] really
long list item 2

Instead of this:

Really really[…]
really long line

* Really […] really
long list item 1
* Really […] really
long list item 2
I'm looking at this a bit differently. My reading of this is "a series of subtle and bizarre failures combined in a way which nobody could ever have anticipated". I think I'm a pretty good architect and coder, but I would never claim that I could design a system which couldn't fail in this sort of way -- in fact, "a background task is unable to complete, resulting in it gradually increasing its memory usage, ultimately causing a system to fail" is the one-line description of an outage Tarsnap had in December of last year.
Thank you, that's really cool.

EDIT: It answers one of {how, what} but not the other. Anyone got any more?
I second the Ultimate Sales Machine. Very good book. "Pitch Anything" is decent, too.
Sure there is. Determine the bias of people through empirical study. I've seen people "in love" with their iP*. Any claim against Apple they take as a personal insult, even when presented with fact after fact. It's annoying. In some way it's a bit like religion, really. Otoh I've seen anti-Apple people behave in the same way, hating Apple as it is the offspring of Great Old Ones and Satan. They might actually be only thing worst that Apple-lovers.
If I believed in the security and privacy of the recordings, I would love a first-person recording of my life. If it was properly indexed I could instantly recall a video of every conversation or experience I've ever had.
I think that the argument generally goes that if the grammar is unambiguous then it's also easier to read (once you're accustomed to the syntax) because there can only be one interpretation and so you don't need to keep knowledge of what's a type and what's a value in your head to understand a line.
Thanks for the feedback -- yes, this is something I plan on doing (amidst all the other tasks I'm juggling...).

I very commonly hear why people are using Tarsnap, and from time to time I hear why people are no longer using Tarsnap, but I very rarely hear why people never started using Tarsnap, so I really appreciate you taking the time to comment.
Most definitely not blog spam. Are you serious? What led you to this conclusion?
Why is it so important to save on symbol table if it does make language less intuitive (at least for people with C background)?

Because Pascal-style declarations are superior in readability. With type inference, they also allow less typing ("foo :=" instead of e.g. "auto foo =").

You are going a learn a completely new language, new idioms, new standard library, new tools, and you're arguing that switching to a different style of declarations, a very very minor detail, is "less intuitive"? I'm not sure how intuition applies there: are you learning a language by trying to compile what you typed without reading any documentation or what?

Again the designers of Go could have implemented exceptions and let programmers choose what mechanism they prefer.

Because making them optional doesn't work well. If someone uses exceptions and someone not, combining code from those two people will make you use both exceptions and error returns. It would be even messier than indicating errors in C (does this function return 0 on error or -1 or what)?
is there a dead man switch or notification procedure in place?

There are people who should send out that notification if needed, yes.

p.s. Please avoid golf courses this weekend!

Don't worry, I don't play golf. :-)
You need some credibility before you write articles about huge corporations that have achieved something. Atleast you must be somewhere near the top of the hierarchy where your subject is, to understand fully about them, so you can even consider writing about them. I fail to see how a guy with an app on an Appstore can think he is credible enough to write about a huge corporation that has taken risks he wouldn't even imagine taking himself and has had first hand experience and information about the market better than this guy. Microsoft is the one that makes the marketplace and Marco is just someone who submits his apps there. That's the difference in their positions in the hierarchy. What a shitty article.
After reading this article I once again realized why I'll never even think about buying an Apple product. It seems using Apple products turn people into arrogant self-righteous snobs.

Sorry, but I don't want to become one of "them". I'm happy with my Surface and other Microsoft products.
Congrats. I'd love to see some real-life software (like WRF) port to that platform.
Also, a white icing finish would infringe on Apple's registered design for the iPad 2.
iOS Accessibility Heroes and Villains
There are some funny parables that can be drawn between 1984 and the way iOS walled garden functions. It's not the same ofc, but to the hacker ethos it behaves in much the same way.

EDIT: Just to make sure, by hacker ethos I consider something in the lines of Stallman which is a staunch proponent of tinker everything.
My general take on their writeup was that they have too many services that depend on EBS working. They should try to find ways to decouple critical services like loadbalancers and Amazon RDS from EBS.
Say you have:

Reader - an interface for reading stuff
Writer - an interface for writing stuff

Some things implement Reader and some things implement Writer. Some things implements both. Now you can declare ReadWriter as in

http://golang.org/pkg/io/#ReadWriter

and everything implementing both will automatically be a member of this newly formed interface. You don't have to go back and tag an "implements ReadWriter" on each of the things you want to implement it. The implementation is implicit if you obey both interfaces.

The power is that you can change your interface structure later on in another part of the program, and the existing code just picks it up. You may not even have the source code , or the right to change the source code, so you can't easily tag an 'implements ...' on top of it.
Who got it and what was the exploit?
You've got to sell your heart
Let me add: more powerful and expressive languages can often get away with far fewer programmers. So if you measure in sheer numbers of people working on, or lines of code being executed, you get the wrong number count.

A rough estimate from Erlang, is that the typical Erlang program is 1/5th of the typical C++ program implementing the same functionality. And the Erlang program even handles unforseen events :)
I have tried the Surface, and been using Windows 8 and Windows Phone for over a year. On the other hand Marco tried it for a couple of minutes, and arrived at a hasty conclusion without even giving it a fair try.

It is a completely different approach to iOS and Mac. And it is better. I can safely say Windows 8's Metro UI is miles ahead of Apple's iOS in terms of UI and UX. Metro UI is prettier, easier to use and by far more productive. Apple's iOS looks static, dull, ancient and boring compared to this.
Wait, not closing <p> and <li> is valid?
How is the Surface disappointing? Explain please. Surface has by far the better hardware, and Windows 8 has a FAR better UI and UX than iOS. How is the Surface worse than the iPad? It's way ahead.
I don't think making the lives of a maximum number of today's industrial software engineers simpler is the main concern of academic PL researchers, nor should it be. A PL researcher should be able to spend time working on formal aspects of some thought experiment without thinking about interoperability, compile times, social issues in large corporations, etc.

And then programming languages are user interfaces. Hence, researching them is a social science and a cognitive science as much as it is a formal science. I don't hear much about that aspect from PL researchers. Arguably, language designers with an industrial background know a lot more about that than academic PL researchers. It may not be very scientific, but they should have pretty good intuitive access to these things.
I think a Google guy once said mostly C++ and Java.
You can use markdown as source for formatting, but the source is very readable by itself.

This is extremely important for writing and also for fall back purposes. Any time there is any kind of a problem in writing or reading or interpreting, just fall back to source.

People can say html is human readable but the difference is huge. I didn't even know that markdown is parsed on hacker news, I just used stars as underscores as natural formatting.

There's also potentially much much less overhead. Ultimately, browsers and your cell phone apps etc should just format markdown natively, meaning huge performance boosts, as html, css, js etc has just become so complex for many tasks as a consequence of do-everything.

My phone's email client struggles browsing back and forth of what should be just a few small text files and file attachments. It uses way too many cycles since it's also a jpeg and css and js renderer with scaling and everything.
As someone who's used text email and news groups, lightweight formatting is very natural and informative. Those services would not have been possible in the past if they had been bogged down with large amounts of excess complexity.

I guess reducing overhead is not sexy because it doesn't involve new features. In the future everybody will just create their typed static oneliner email as 10000x10000x10000 pixel 100 fps 3D movies of 2 minute length (you see, that's the time it takes to read it), and if some supposedly slightly technically literate person asks that perhaps they should use a word 2020 .doc instead for reduced file size, the answer is "but you can't do a space station flythrough in it".
Well, you have more than 98% of your links with this anchor text: nexus tablets. Out of 118,824, about 118,100 use that anchor text. (I used ahrefs to get this)

That's a massive flag right there. Many of these are sitewide links (which, again, isn't going to help your case). The only saving grace is that many of these sites are pretty relevant to your site. Even then, it looks like it got hit by the Penguin update or the EMD update (since your domain's an exact match, and just about every link has that as the anchor text). There isn't a need for any manual action... there's a massive footprint as far as your backlinks profile are concerned.

Here's the good thing: It seems you have interlinked a number of your forums from their footer. That accounts for a majority of your links... and because it's in the footer, it's sitewide. Because you own those sites, you can perhaps remove the links.

The sites I have seen recover from Penguin have either removed the "bad" backlinks, or diluted their then backlink profile. In your case, it's a bit easier. If it's hit by the EMD update, I haven't seen any site recover from that yet so can't say anything.
Took me 15 seconds to find multiple USB sounds cards on the Interweb as well.
Seems like a lot of pent-up demand. What are the practical applications of something like this?
How many words do you know?
I disagree with that, they made the Django admin interface really easy to extend, and entirely pluggable. If you don't like any part of Django, you can roll your own, while using the Django-provided functionality until yours is ready.

I would agree if the components were tightly coupled, but Django is very well structured to let you substitute any component. At any rate, it's much better than writing everything yourself outright, and I'm speaking as someone who has launched more than 10 Django-based products.

That said, I really want to try out Go...
Ssshh, don't talk about Erlang/OTP too loud, they might realize how good it is ;)
Start at ~10:20 for the cascading failures.

Very entertaining IMO. But I would suggest the speaker cut the off-hand ostracism of large groups of people.
You say that only because you never went to a Perl Mongers meetup.
If git doesn't keep its own copy of the data

Plain regular git does keep a copy of it's data in your .git folder, and every checkout/clone/copy of that repository stores the data, and it stores all old copies of all files. That's how git works. It also makes it a bit unweildy for large files like that.

What's cool (about git) is that the hash revisions (i.e. what git uses instead of version numbers) is basically a checksum of every file and every old version of every file. So if an old version of a file changed, the checksum would change and you'd be on a different branch!
This post hit me like a train full of nostalgia!

The "local" store for me was The Memory Location in Wellesley, MA.
Like Dubai, Ghana, Singapore, Ireland, Chile, and Finland.
Databases (RDS) do need storage and EBS is their tool for that. If something else was better, it should replace EBS across products.

To your point, w/o knowing architecture, seems like ELB run state could likely be on ephemeral storage (if ELBs are EC2 instances) backed by configs on S3 unless run state is crucial across resets. If not instances, maybe use S3 directly, or ElastiCache.
Like Ghana, Costa Rica, Singapore, Dubai, Ireland, Chile, and Finland.
Just added the following to the crontab on my laptop so when it boots up, it emails me about any zero byte files.

# Look for zero byte files in Dropbox
MAILTO=my.email.address@example.com
@reboot /usr/bin/find ~/Dropbox/ -type f -size 0

I also have full system backups going back three months, with two hourly incremental backups for the last two. So if I get an email about any zero byte files, I should be fine restoring them from my own backups.
I am correcting you: Playing 16-bit audio with a 24-bit output device doesn't distort anything. No matter the bit depth of the audio file you're playing, CoreAudio converts it to 32-bit floating-point PCM. Then it converts down to something the output device can handle. I'm pretty sure Windows does this as well.
Super Accordion slider using only CSS - look ma no CSS series