skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AWS actually operates 5 independent data centers (called availability zones) within the same complex that make up the us-east-1 region. This makes them significantly more likely to experience an outage in 1 availability zone, but also makes it much easier to architect around the problem.
I'd say yes. I've been in crunch time situations where I haven't had internet/power and it really isn't fun.
Without SHIFT, I can't type PR#6!
This link returns a 404 error for me.
Oh, and here's the rub for me: I don't use my CS degree. Besides pet projects and a general understanding of technology, I am not technical. The vocational approach Catalyst is recommending would have made me a better software engineer, but more poorly prepared for other career opportunities.

I hire CS majors (and more broadly, engineers) into business positions because of the core skillset: problem solving and a desire to figure out a solution.
People really serious about YC have had this done for weeks.

Edit: I stand corrected. I'm the kind of person who gets things done early and then reads/refactors it every day making minor edits.
Thanks! It occurred to us that had we been reading HN before applying we'd have gotten a little demoralized once we found out that all YC companies had apparently "hacked" their way in with some generally non-reproducible gimmick. We figured we should point out that this probably isn't the case.
> Let's not go for shiny kitsch, let's go for expensive sports car with a matte paint job

The only cars I see with matte paint jobs are car modder's econoboxes, which look pretty kitsch.
This answers my point better. The fact is that many of these mapping companies that even Google still licenses to this day have been driving around countries in some cases for decades.

That is the real hard part. Trying to obtain all that data. Because every mistake is potentially one person complaining loudly on the internet.
Inside Apple's major shakeup
But it's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to monopolize.
Why Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol
>>Google is a great place if you have a good manager and an interesting project. If you land on an interesting, relevant project, and your manager supports you in the political processes, it's a great place to work. I've never argued against that, because it's true.

That's true for any company I know of, Hardly an interesting proposition to work at Google.
> Between Siri and the maps screw up the decision made itself.

Care to explain what is the issue with Siri? I use it every day to organize my day (with dozens of meetings and reminders) and it works perfectly fine.

I can kind of see your point with iOS6 Maps. But only to a point. Yes, it did start out really badly. I reported 3 issues that got fixed the next day (literally). One of those issues was also on Google Maps and is still broken there. Since then I haven't seen any problems with quality of data. I do miss Street View, but day to day, the app is fine.

Speaking of maps, when Tim Cook wrote the maps apology letter, he mentioned the Waze application. I've never heard of it till that day and, man, what a great app. Whenever I find myself in a traffic situation, I always fire it up. As far as point to point direction, it is second to none, routing me around traffic jams and standstills of the LA area.
I have used erlang in a number of large projects over the last couple years and for the most part I'm in agreement with the author about both the benefits and drawbacks of erlang (when people ask me about erlang I always say "erlang is great for anything that requires a lot of moving pieces and doesn't require the code to actually look nice or be readable"). I have a couple of other drawbacks I think should probably get mentioned:

Logging is..... strange. The recommendation is to use SASL, which writes your logs in a binary format that only another erlang library can properly read. SASL has some nice features, like auto-rotation and such, but I'd much rather have my logs get spit out in plaintext and just logrotate like I do with everything else. One of these days I'm going to write a proper erlang logger.

Rebar is strange. It's erlang's deployment tool thing, kind of like leinengen but much less intuitive. I tried getting used to it but found it just made testing more difficult and made setup a chore. I opted instead to just steal the makefiles from the mochiweb project and call it a day.

Records have easily the most annoying syntax of any language construct I've ever used. And god forbid you want nested records, have fun with your full solid line of selection syntax. Bleh.

Which isn't to say it's all bad, here's some other awesome things about erlang that I don't see pointed out often:

Polymorphic anonymous functions

The pattern matching is amazing. When I go back to other languages that claim to support pattern matching it feels like I've lost both your feet and replaced them with suction cups. There's no pattern matching like erlang pattern matching.

Hot-swapping of code. Somewhat unintuitive, and has weird behavior in certain cases, but still definitely better then restarting the server that thousands of clients have long-running connections on

Records. Their syntax is horrible, but their usefulness is infinite. They're basically just syntactic sugar on top of tuples that make them easier to manage and extend.

There's more for both sides, but I'll leave it at that. It's a great language, I highly recommend everyone take a stab at it. Even if you hate the syntax it's good exposure to thinking about how to code concurrently.
For those who really want to apply you can do it(I live in the Greater NY area). The "Last minute-rs" will get it done tonight if they are sure tonight it the deadline
But then a YES in case there is a dropbox or Airbnb waiting out there
http://www.amazon.com/Fosmon-HDMI-Micro-Cable-Feet/dp/B003UH... HDMI size problem solved, I don't think that alone would turn away any customers though it would be an annoyance. At least the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 have HDMI output, the lack of that is still my biggest complaint about the Nexus 7 and has so far been the deal-breaker keeping me from getting one. (Lack of SD card support is also annoying, but I can live with USB-expanded storage.)
A lot of people actively work on their application until the submission deadline. If your product is moving fast, along with adoption, it would be handicapping yourself to submit weeks early, I think.
Ask HN: Review my startup - www.JetDeck.co
A CRM for business jet brokers.

While the industry may sound glitzy, multi-million dollar aircraft are most often sold with notepads and 30MB of hi-res email attachments. There are no such things as 'cloud data', 'analytics' or 'mobile apps' in the space and any software that is built for business aviation reeks of 1995.

JetDeck is a modern contact and inventory management application to fix the low-hanging fruit problems in an aircraft broker's day-to-day operations.
JavaScript Validator with Esprima
I have no doubt in my mind that Apple itself leaked this info to WSJ. What is surprising is how willing they were to throw him under the bus. Would be interesting to find out what was behind all this. Maybe to pre-empt anything Forstall could say against Apple/Cook or other Apple Execs in future interviews?
He did have, and currently still does have about 150,000 shares of restricted stock (substantially more than he sold), half of which vests in June of next year, half in 2016. To say that his May sale was anything more than reasonable financial planning is stretching it.
This is really fantastic, great job. This is exactly the type of stuff we love seeing built and used with Mailgun.

Regarding analytics, we do provide detailed data either in push (webhooks [1]) or pull (campaigns api [2]). Did you just not have time to integrate that or is there something else that we could have offered to make it easer for you?

[1] http://documentation.mailgun.net/user_manual.html#events-web...
[2] http://documentation.mailgun.net/api-campaigns.html
There is never it's not my fault --- unless you're not attached to your job. Accepting responsibility for your division, even if you personally did nothing wrong, is part of the territory.

If you work with people that constantly offer excuses, even if they are "I was overruled", it is an awful work experience. Imagine you have to team up with that guy to code something and as soon as it goes wrong, he jumps to blame you. Even if it is entirely you're fault (you should claim it yourself, not be called out by a coworker), he still was working on the project. You can't expect to get anywhere by denying your involvement in toxic software that you are clearly involved in.
There will people without power from VA/DC on up the coast for several days, if not a week or more.

Given that situation, a delay would be symbolic more than anything.

Still worth doing.
The water level in Battery Park was 13 feet at its highest and broke previous record 11 feet at 1821. Manhattan south of 39th street lost power since 9:00pm.

This is probably the first time in last 100 years for dwellers living in Manhattan downtown see flood in their homes. Especially for people who lives in ground floor or basements.

http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/171528/sandy-strikes-...
>There's no pattern matching like erlang pattern matching

Really? I'd imagine Haskell's is even better being lazy.

Not to mention the sort of things Prolog is capable of.

Thinking about making a game recently, current choice for backend will probably end up being Clojure or Erlang.
Great points. And unlike your high school papers, which hopefully your teacher at least read through until the end, your prospect may not even read through the whole proposal if you don't start with something compelling. (I wrote a whole other post about this: http://www.mimiran.com/proposals/why-your-prospect-doesnt-wa...)

Keep it short, sweet, and interesting. (If you've ever been on the other side, having to read some of this crap, you can really appreciate it.) ;-)
>kids can't have their own gmail account for example //

http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...

Kids [under 13, dependent on region] "can't" have their own gmail account anyway, it's against the rules.
You summarized it exactly as we experienced it.
better description here than I could muster:

http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari

Save articles to your Reading List and read them later — even without an Internet connection. And peruse pages from the clean, uncluttered, ad-free Safari Reader. Safari works great with iCloud. It keeps your Reading List up to date across all your devices. iCloud Tabs makes the last web pages you looked at available on all your devices, too.

http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_he...
This is one of the most nuanced and gentle pieces of language advocacy I've seen. We should all be so calm and forthright about our language's shortcomings.
Doesn't matter. The whole point in the 20% projects is not to ensure rewarding best projects, but to reward trying. Because eventually the good projects will flush out.

If you say you will punish failed 20% projects. Nobody is going to buy into a concept where you people are likely to be punished for failing to try and do something good for the company in the spare time.
I wasn't accusing anyone of anything. Unless calling you delusional is an accusation.

So let me get this straight. Google's entire reason for not supplying LTE is global availability, and yet, one barely used feature on one carrier is apparently what stopped them from shipping it? Oooookay. Verizon and Wallet have nothing to do this with decision. Zero. Verizon doesn't exist outside the US, just so you know.

For any Android fanboy to not decry the lack of LTE is hypocritical at best. The wholesale cost difference between a HSDPA part and a LTE part is negligible at best. There's zero downside to providing a LTE part because it's also a superset of 3G/HSDPA/etc.

There's maybe a technical reason for not including it, and instead of the BS justification that Google are trying to sell us, I'd love to hear it. It'd be far more believable than the current "you don't really need it" reasoning being thrown about.

So yes, you're delusional. You're attempting to justify why LTE isn't included in a flagship phone in Oct 2012. Good luck with that.
It's not the same and that wasn't the poster's point and it isn't a strawman. Metrics are hard. Metrics for complex, creative endeavours are exceptionally hard. Both programmers and teachers are difficult to accurately evaluate and manage. Most developers I know object to arbitrary metrics for the same reasons as most teachers I know do, the metrics rarely measure actual performance and metrics are usually gamed.

Perhaps you would like to contribute something to the discussion instead of pointless sarcasm.
At least one bookmarking service, pinboard.in, offers a paid option of full text search on the contents of all bookmarks:

http://pinboard.in/upgrade/
I second the love for code hot-swapping. That's a beautiful part of the soft-realtime OTP environment that I miss a lot. Lager also helps to mitigate the logging pain a bit.

I constantly missed Haskell's pattern matching whenever I used Erlang's. Same idea, but H-M typing and laziness make me feel less like every pattern match is a bomb that triggers on every refactoring.

Edit: Oh! And how can I forget the joy that is Erlang's binary type DSL! That thing should be everywhere regexes are.
Erlang does have binary patterns on the both of those. Of course you could put something together (I'd especially be curious to see what you could come up with in Prolog) but the go-to solutions in Haskell are binary and cereal, which lack the terse clarity. Beyond that I'd say they're pretty par, maybe a slight advantage to Haskell for the under-utilized view patterns extension.
A CRM for business jet brokers.

While the industry may sound glitzy, multi-million dollar aircraft are most often sold with notepads and 30MB of hi-res email attachments. There are no such things as 'cloud data', 'analytics' or 'mobile apps' in the space and any software that is built for business aviation reeks of 1995.

JetDeck is a modern contact and inventory management application to fix the low-hanging fruit problems in an aircraft broker's day-to-day operations.
World's first two seat solar airplane
If you can get above the cloud base, it seems that the range could be unlimited. The plane doubles as a glider too...
This is a super sweet project. This represents the best in human kind. We just keep pushing the technological envelope of whats possible...
And NO fuel cost...
http://inhabitat.com/worlds-first-two-person-solar-powered-plane-by-solar-flight-inc-nears-completion/
'Idiosyncratic' is clearer, though 'idiomatic' is valid and what I wished to say, but in its secondary definition: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomatic (see def 2)
That's the advantage to great design, it doesn't need to change. Every year Android/Windows comes out with a new design that's finally supposed to make it not suck. Go find a 1984 Mac, look into the top right hand corner, whats there?
why is this relevant to the end users?
Well, I take "insane" as a compliment :) While it is true you can emulate the traffic by looking at web server logs, it was crucial for us to send the exact same request including the same HTTP headers and request body (think POST requests), in real time with the same access pattern.

It was easier for us to write EM based proxy like this than writing a web server plugin that does it, etc.
Warning: I'm not usually overly critical on articles: but this one I can only think is a little bit of flame bait - a little bit of truth from various languages turned into fact?

* String concatenation: blatant misinformation. The only reason the default implementation of Strings is slow is because they're made immutable for a reason. This if for speed and predicability - if you're wanting to build a String then funnily enough: use a String Builder.

* Garbage collection: rubbish. It can run on it's own thread (which can ultimately run on it's own processor). In languages such as Java and .NET the garbage collector has been written so that it collects only what is disposed. Of course you need to be careful about the number of objects your "disposing" (too many can cause the processor to be collecting more than running) but the same is with any language: Erlang included.

* Refactoring... seriously? What happened to compilation errors? Isn't it worse if the structure sends less at runtime?

* Data Structures - I'm not sure what he's worked with before, but modern languages allow the transparency he mentions. He mentions "easy to manipulate undocumented data structures" - of course he is asking for trouble there. There are ways around this in OO languages, and worst come worst: roll your own. Don't mess with the internals where you need to "worry about the original author renaming variables ".

I seriously doubt the authors experience in the languages he mentions. Even so, I doubt his understanding...
pg - its better to be compassionate than not be. if moving the date isn't that difficult for you and doesn't adversely affect the operation of YC - it only goes to strength the resolve of the community.

it would be crazy to allow someone to loose out on their dream of even applying because the mother of all storms decided to hit the east coast of America. surely its http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God exception :)

Lets remember Winston

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

Only good things can come from opening it longer given what's happened.
Don't Kill Math
Fascinating discussion by Evan Miller on the benefits of analysis over simulation ...
Apple, Attention & Competition
Why? Maybe because you are an alien?
Wait how do you know he wasn't told this?
Wow... when it comes to proving your point, less is more.
It is frustrating for customers outside of the US to have to look up and convert these unfamiliar time zones. As a company that services customers all over the planet, why not post UTC?

Thankfully though, they managed to convert the generator run times from the completely unfamiliar "hours" unit into the much more universal "days" unit. </sarcasm>
I really don't know what the proper procedure should be in a data center when the big klaxon goes off and you here those fateful words over the intercom, "Close all doors, DIVE, DIVE, DIVE!"
Havoc as Storm Comes Ashore
Count this towards my ignorance towards the business world, but are executives of large companies really that petty and childish?
I was specifically referring to the suggestion Valve could have an option to boot a machine directly to a given game. Which would imply no other third party software would be running.

So the current (in)existence of other Linux software would be irrelevant.
Can you share a link to the actual application?
I was wondering, if you happen to know, why there are so many colos in NYC / Manhattan? In general wouldn't you locate a server farm somewhere with cheap land / electricity / cooling? What advantage do they get from being there?
I feel like a "How to hack the front page of HN" that is about how you shouldn't hack HN: you should just post/write/produce great content is also needed. I'll write it now, post it tomorrow.

I feel like the title of this post hints at a similar sentiment.
W3.org: Web MIDI API Draft Published
In related news, RedHat is starting an OpenJDK project to port the JVM to ARM. Oracle has an implementation but it hasn't been open sourced (yet?).
12 Surprising Signs You Could Be an Entrepreneur
Again, None of what you are saying seems to be a problem only at Google. These are really MegaCorp problems, and they apply to Google as well.

I knew even from the beginning even 5-6 years earlier, when there was immense desperateness among geeks to work there. It was only a matter of time when all MegaCorp problems will eventually plague Google.
The original MacOS design wasn't 'perfect' but it was very, very good. And Apple messed with it at their peril. They gave themselves a similar bar with iOS 1.0 - they know a lot about interaction design, and how to make a UI feel smooth and intuitive, and they aren't going to scrap all of those good decisions for the sake of looking new.

By contrast Microsoft have some interesting design ideas but they abandon them in the very next major version in favour of trying something else, which is jarring for users and doesn't inspire trust.
Remember all those X on a computer patents? Well, welcome to X on a smartphone.
The biggest problem is that the basements where the fuel is stored are flooding, which is taking out the pumps to get the fuel to the generators!

Was just listening in on FDNY radio scanner and they mentioned oil/diesel floating down the street in water.
The other evidence though is that Forstall has been depicted as "the bad guy" for a long time. Well before he was expected to be departing.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc...

He was even described as CEO-in-Waiting. Even then, the same things were said about his personality conflicts with others:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/scott-forstall-is-app...
Couldn't help but created a mental checklist

Score : 10/12

What's yours?
By the way, Ash (and the rest of the the Spark59 team) are working to build a system to provide pirate metrics dashboard with cohorting, lifecycle email campaigns, and measuring impact of a/b test by creating cohorts for each group and reporting results in the context of AARRR.

http://usercycle.com/
I guess I hadn't considered that, although it makes sense that the people seeking treatment would skew the results.
He ran an org in which nobody tackled him in the hallway

Do you know that they didn't? And there is a lot of gray area between tackling and release that a good manager should be able to dive into.
I am an applicant in SF and ready to submit. As I watch CNN coverage the whole episode, I see that it is really bad. NYSE floor is under 3 feet of water! A day postponement will give the applicant in east coast a breather but don't know how much of help it will be with all the power outage and other hassle with a day. Well, they are going to do the start up anyway. :)
I had to look up the 3-envelopes joke:

http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes....
Hearsay says that all of 111 8th was taken down voluntarily to prevent damage from flooding.
I always found it interesting at Google data centers their 'power fail' checklist started with 'call for fuel'. Basically as soon as power failed the diesel generators would start gulping fuel like there was no tomorrow.

Seeing reports of data centers experiencing flooding I really wonder what best practices are for a data center in a flood zone. Not like you could float it or anything. It hasn't been on my list of worries (Santa Clara doesn't flood much, more likely to fall into a crack in the ground). Anyone here who has an action plan for flooding at their data center? I recall seeing a nuclear plant that had a levee wall, that was pretty impressive.
It's not so much as petty as it is a need to control the direction of the conversation. By placing a stake in the ground, the conversation will stay in the general area that the company (and I'm not including only Apple here) wants it to. Part of the field called "public relations".
[2010] Previous submission with discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1785561

The author of this piece is widely criticized by more scientific writers:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-barry-kaufman/satoshi-ka...

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201105/b...

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/attractAddHealth.pdf

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/09/10/satoshi-kanaza...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/05/23/th...