skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What constitutes hidden terms and conditions is a pretty subtle thing. I think you might be expected to seek out the terms of a business relationship such as this even if it's created unilaterally. It's much easier for a consumer to say 'I just wanted to look for a flat, I had no idea there was a "Firstborn child" clause' than it is for a business to say 'I just wanted to bet my whole business future on this information, I had no idea there would be terms and conditions to access it'.
Webscript.io
Seems their previous post[0] from last night showed a bit of overconfidence?

"Consider this the "Everything is Perfectly Fine Alarm."

Having run a few HA Datacenters I don't think that level of confidence is ever warranted.

[0] http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/feelin-fine-no-expected-d...
Solving the wrong Problem
Because their yields are several orders of magnitude lower than modern nuclear warheads.
But whose fault would that be, if not his? Wouldn't it be the job of the head of iOS development to identify the ideas worth pursuing and setting the teams/projects/schedules accordingly?

If the guy ostensibly setting the feature list sends out an email saying "you guys aren't making the right stuff" ... how can you parse that in a way other than "asshole"/"not taking responsibility"?

Or does Apple have an internal project structure more along the lines of Valve?
So that's what I originally thought, but you have to think of it in terms of pickup ratio more than anything, and that's higher with higher traffic overall since it means more people on "new".

It's a bit counter intuitive. Reminds me of learning to count cards in blackjack: if there are more high cards, doesn't that mean the dealer ALSO is more likely to get high cards?
Same thing happens with people who moved to LA after the Northridge quake. They don't really believe in earthquakes at a gut level.
Squarespace: Downtime Expected Due to Sandy
Does Google CDNs host bootstrap, with less or sass similar to the way they do with jquery and some other javascript libraries?
Try this one then, "Hey, we love what you are doing, but saw this new feature and think it is really cool. We are not saying you have to add it, but it would really make our day if you did..."
It does not look like it to me. No .row's, for one.
You might want to also take a look at CFEngine, which inspired Puppet and Chef.

See "Relative Origins of Puppet, Chef and CFEngine" http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/uncategorized/relative-orig...
Fabric + Cuisine is happy joy.
I will never understand why this concept gets downvoted every single time it comes up. Price comes first. It's not really a secret. Everything else follows from that.
If more founders memorized the basics of customer development the startup world would produce 50% more successes. Get outside the building, product market fit, etc are phrases not enough entrepreneurs live and die by. Can't stress enough how smart and underutilized Mr. Blank's work is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines
Just curious, wouldn't it have been wiser to put the failover servers somewhere in the Midwest? It's pretty much as far away from the ocean as one can get, making tsunamis/hurricanes/etc. irrelevant, low earthquake risk, and a shorter flight from NYC. Seems a little inadvisable to place the infrastructure in two coastal areas; I guess it's probably about the local talent pool.
I would suggest the following mental exercise the next time you want to make a comment on HN:

Imagine you are at a dinner party at Paul Graham's house. He's there, obviously, along with several startup founders, aspiring founders, and a few established industry figures, including the person you are about to disagree with or criticize.

It will undoubtedly take more effort to figure out how to frame your criticism so that it doesn't make you a pariah, but the advantage will be that you will leave open the possibility of forming beneficial business and personal relationships.

In this case, I would try describing your own successes with building redundant services, and describe some of the other approaches you found while researching ones that you have built.
One idea that rears its head almost every hurricane season recently is the notion of bombing a hurricane into submission.

...

Finally, whether the bomb would have a minor positive effect, a negative effect, or none at all on the storm's convection cycle, one thing is for sure: It would create a radioactive hurricane, which would be even worse than a normal one.
I (and some others) once interviewed a guy who had recently started learning Lisp. He wanted to show off and use it on the whiteboard. Not a problem, theoretically - we've had a guy give us Prolog solutions beautifully explained.

He botched it. We laughed and let him retry in C. He solved it successfully - and also more people than myself could read the solution. Since he was a really junior chap, we didn't really have an issue with the botching.

I am OK with someone showing off. But you have to actually make the run successfully, IMO. Personally, if you can write FizzBuzz as a call/cc continuation, more power to you. I really want to see if you can grasp the upper reaches of computational abstraction in our field, i.e., show off. But trying and failing doesn't really win you points, at least with me.
VP8 libvpx experimental branch becomes VP9 prefix
yeah, i should have looked at source #lazy
Latest tweet from PEER1, Fog Creek's datacenter.

Storm #Sandy highlights value of #cloud storage http://www.peer1hosting.co.uk/industry-news/us-storm-highlig...

https://twitter.com/PEER1/status/263197209959493632
This is possibly the most important post - now we know there's a real user with a real problem.
Okay, so it's an unsophisticated attack, used for data gathering purposes directed at the police(not the military mind you). And it's obviously Iran. Really?

I'm not saying it's not Iran, it might be for all I know. I'm just interested in knowing why it's so obvious to that guy and how this is not propaganda to counterbalance the whole "stuxnet" debacle?

What could Iran possibly stand to gain from snooping on Israeli police? How about organized crime?
Agreed, this site is very interesting and well executed but I'm not sure I understand the request. I guess visibility?
Eamonn
Newbie
> You assume Grand OP is deliberately advocating risking life to submit a YC application.

No, I understand from the original that someone that is 'scrappy' enough to make their application reach YC under these circumstances would be allowed to jump the line at the expense of those hit hard enough that they can't make it. As if such behavior is something that is to be commended, and as if the reward should be that they make it while others do not. Deadlines are imaginary lines in the sand, they can be moved without penalty or further aggravation if the situation warrants it.

YC seems to have the right idea here.

Plenty of people will work really hard to make their submission as good as possible and will submit the final product at the last moment. Being without power or communications (possibly for days) in a region that is hit by a once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) storm front means that obviously the rules of the game have temporarily changed.

The NYC stock exchange seemed to have its priorities straight, I think some two bit unproven start-up should be able to live with the possibility of having to compete with a few more entries, especially when those fellows are in the middle of what now officially qualifies as a disaster area.
One huge advantage that puppet and chef offer is abstraction from the underlying system. So if you write a configuration that says "Apache should be running, have PHP installed, and have the following 3 virtual hosts installed", then you don't care if you're running on Solaris, Debian, or CentOS. The manifest/recipe takes care of figuring out what the package is called and where the config files go.

I'm not familiar with Ansible, but Fabric seems more like SSH with a for loop. Puppet and Chef are not about automating the typing as much as they are about ensuring consistency. In my Apache example above, if someone goes and changes a vhost file by hand, that file will be replaced with a good one and Apache will be restarted, even if that file was made by a complicated template.
> "we are confident that all of our services will remain available"

When you get this statement from an outfit with the pedigree and experience of Fog Creek, its as close to a guarantee as you're going to find. No misreading necessary.

At the end of the day, they could not be reasonably sure, there was a non-trivial risk that they should have been (and almost certainly were) aware of (this isn't the first time bad weather and datacenters have mixed), and they didn't communicate that to their customers.
+1, This problem is not unique to Google.
While it's not the most compelling of the arguments against DNSSEC (which is an ineffective and unnecessary complication of the Internet core protocols), amplification has been the case Daniel J. Bernstein has been making against it for years. Here's a good intro:

http://dnscurve.org/amplification.html
Weird. I didn't see that the first time I looked. Mumble. Going mad... Mumble...
We depend on FogBugz (hosted) to answer our support E-mails. If the downtime is on the order of several hours, I'm fine with it, these things happen. But if (as it looks like) it is on the order of days, I'll be looking for another solution.

When you offer hosted services (not cheap, mind you), you take on responsibilities. Among them are disaster recovery scenarios. We do have ours and I'm expecting any company for a cloud-hosted solution to have theirs.
It is fallacious to pretend erlang is slow because otherwise you have to write bad, unoptimized C code. First of all, unoptimized C is still an order of magnitude faster than erlang (or more!). Second, there are other languages besides just erlang and C. For example, compared to erlang I can write the same thing in haskell instead, have it written faster, have fewer bugs make their way into production, and have it run faster.
Tagging is indeed the best way to organize bookmarks and it's what we use to organize bookmarks in noteplz.com . Another useful thing i've found useful is keeping the page referer along with the bookmark (one of the few good things i can think of about referers) .
I fully agree that this is how it could, and perhaps should be done. But you assume they are already on cloud hosting, which they obviously aren't. Ofcourse this is also a choice that has to be made consciously. Especially since fogcreek has been around a lot longer than the big cloud providers.

You can look to Amazon to see that cloud architecture brings with it hidden complexity that also increases risk of downtime while you relinguish a lot of control on for example the latency and bandwidth between your nodes.

What I don't know by the way, is wether the total cost of ownership is larger for colocation or for cloud hosting.
Wii U and Microsoft Surface Reaction
Either your engineers are underpaid or you're anticipating a larger price hike than would seem justified to gain the redundancy you need.
that's actually in the last line of the faux code! Good call
Does this idea seriously raise its head almost every hurricane season? Is there any citation for that?

Who (other than Michael Bay) is talking about nuking hurricane?

edit: tried some google news searches, I can't find any discussion about bombing a hurricane other than this article.
Hurricane Sandy knocks out websites
Would have enjoyed this more if it were an xkcd "what if?"
Do you have any evidence of this or is it just your supposition?

People used to think the same thing about posting on Ask MetaFilter, and when people actually looked at real data, they determined that the number of people interacting with a post was roughly the same no matter when it was posted, because of the phenomenon I mentioned—in a community where everyone can post, times where the audience is bigger also mean bigger competition for attention.
I hear what you're saying, and I agree. Giving priority to Wikipedia is troubling from a neutrality standpoint. I do worry about a trend arising from this.

However, like others commenting, I think in this instance it's a good thing. It wouldn't even have to be Wikipedia for this to be my opinion; we could see Facebook Zero and I would like it. My take on it is, it's better to have something with a catch than nothing at all. Think of the Space Race: should government be controlling the rockets? Should taxpayers be footing the bill for this immense research? It got us off the ground, and I would argue that's a good thing. Now there is a booming private space industry, because the initial investment, while cause for concern, got people demanding space technology.

If people in African and Asian nations get a taste for web services, for the spread of information, for the ease of communication the Internet can offer, I'm predicting a similar end as the Space Race: private industry will boom once the demand reaches a high enough level. While net neutrality might be at risk in the short term, the important thing is getting the ball rolling. I can't predict the future, but I can extrapolate from the past. People will be demanding this technology in developing markets, and with the Internet comes education, business, and opportunities for improving the quality of life.
An extra day shouldn't make any difference if you are really prepared.
Simple Scala Map/Reduce Job Template
Human ingenuity is quite good at delivering enormous amounts of energy over a very short time. Nature deploys merely huge energies, but does so for very long periods. She wins, every single time.
Finally, whether the bomb would have a minor positive effect, a negative effect, or none at all on the storm's convection cycle, one thing is for sure: It would create a radioactive hurricane

If that isn't an awesome opening scene of a superhero film I don't know what is.
Book idea: The Vanilla Web Diet
You are valuable
Awesome site, this one is particularly freaky though: https://sketchfab.com/show/9Por2SANpJ7ZjLfnyilD56UxLP8

(spin the model around until you're looking at the back of his head, watch how his face always looks like it's looking straight at you, i believe this is a known psychological effect but some quick googling didn't turn up any results)
I don't think I've ever really disagreed with any of your comments on HN before Ed, but this time I do. YC stands to win from having everybody that wanted to apply under the original deadline to do just that, and it shows that they care more about people than about their arbitrary time-tables.

Those that live in an area that is right now an absolute mess will be happy to see their power restored in the next few days and it will be tough for everybody in the region to pick up their lives.

"No matter what": What if your parents had to be moved out of their house and you had the choice between helping them or applying to YC?

And a ton of other examples that I could come up with but you get the idea.

There is a time to be rigid (when there are no other options) and there is a time to be flexible (when things were arbitrary to begin with and being rigid makes everybody lose).

Sure life isn't fair. But if it is possible to make it a bit better by being nice to each other then I see absolutely no reason why you should not do so.

A good business person is running a business, they're not applying to YC. The New York Stock exchange is currently closed for business, the area is an official disaster area. In light of that I think we can forgive a few start-up applicants that they don't have their ducks in a row just yet.

Extra points for those that did apply under the deadline.
Yes we do. Unfortunately, that's all they are -- data backups, sans infrastructure.
//Build/ Live from Redmond
The field is, broadly speaking, Computer Science.
It is an easy question to answer, e.g. http://www.pmsi-inc.com/pdf/GeneracPowerSystem.pdf shows 1MW generator uses about 63 gallons per hour, just a little more than 1 drum.

I don't know the size of the facility, so I can't tell how many drums it would take, per hour, to keep the place running.
There are two model numbers; you are confused by that breakdown as both models cover basic GSM: the difference is only in the LTE bands that each device supports.
If you're looking for a framework for creating REST APIs in Django, TastyPie is also worth a look.

https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie
No, this is not similar at all.

An image of a tape reel is to recording audio as an icon of a floppy disk is to saving documents — a lazy visual shortcut, requiring a non-trivial semantic context. What is the percentage of humans alive today who have used a tape reel recorder?

The boundary between affordances and skeuomorphs is perfectly clear. Just ask yourself — does the form of the design element in question follow its function?
Rekonq web browser
How about summarizing blog posts for twitter?
http://grabcad.com/
My only problem is that they don't version the docs. I couldn't care less if it were easy to find the docs.

I had to revisit a bootstrap 1 site I put together for a client and it was very annoying to track down the documentation.

I considered opening an issue on github but…
You have to be kidding me. I would despise working for someone who cared more about an application to YC than they did spending time with the rest of their family in the waiting area, or trying to calm their emotions by relaxing. Wow.
Because, per Spolsky, Fog Creek wants to achieve a widespread adoption first before they start charging for it (with probably a free tier remaining). Other than that, Trello is very much a commercial app.

Fogbugz IS a commercial app, and at $25/mo (if I remember right) it's in the same category as most other commercial apps, i.e. it's not particularly cheap. It's still down.
Curious: What kind architecture shows a 503 error when your servers are dead (like they are currently doing), but can't show an error status page? Presumably that server is not in the dead datacenter.

Or is it just that something at the datacenter level is redundant?
SmartAsset (YCS12) Raises Money to Provide Financial Advice
Windows website loophole allow anyone to get WIndows 8 in just $14.99
"When the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked." Warren Buffett said it in reference to economic problems, but somehow it applies...
Docs Found in Meth Lab Show Inner Workings of $ Linked to 23 Conservatives
The Midwest isn't immune to the effects of hurricanes. We've frequently lost power, sometimes up to a week, when bad hurricanes come through. They just become super storms over the Midwest and take down trees which cut power lines. And snow/ice can often take out power for up to a day.

So, I'd think that rather than place something in Ohio and New York, both which can be affected by the same weather pattern within a day or two, different coasts offers better protection.
That was my first reaction. I've never heard people about nuking hurricanes. This is a first.

Also, the guy's name was Landsea. It's always fun when someone's name seems relevant to what they do.
Great, so now all my mobile apps can have the same performance, consistent look & feel, and full access to the phone's capabilities as Phonegap / Cordova / Titanium! Clearly this is a step forward for mobile development.
I just released a small REST API framework for Django as well: https://github.com/jarcoal/django-sliver

It's built entirely on CBVs, so if you're familiar with them, you will feel right at home.

The API is not frozen, so it's not production ready yet.
This sets up an environment that Cook prefers, IMHO. A clear-cut decision maker about all things product design, Ive replaces Jobs. Inasmuch as a Cook/Ive pairing can be beneficial, they're missing Jobs as the great overseer. I think this is not finished playing out.

As has been seen, mistakes aren't really tolerated when Apple's name is on the line -- someone almost always pays for it with their job. Apple has started to show cracks in the armor, and I imagine we're going to see a few more events of non-perfectness in the future. (Entirely reasonable, but nonetheless those that contribute to an image.)

If things don't go Apple-esque perfect in the future, I wonder who starts pointing fingers?
Verold I think is another company doing something similar.
I agree with you that bilingual reference books are often not terribly helpful when learning a foreign language. I also think that you're spot on when you write that reading extensively is an excellent way to improve your knowledge of a language. But in my experience, you can only do this once you have reached a certain stage in learning the language. Before that stage, it's critical to build up a sufficient vocabulary and (secondarily) to learn the grammar. I've learned several languages as an adult, and I made the most progress in the beginning by committing to learn at least 10 new words or phrases a day. Once you reach around 500 words (that's a wild guess, but it's in the ballpark), you should be able to start reading certain carefully-selected books and learning new words through context. In my personal experience, it's only at this stage of language learning that "immersion" is really effective.

So yes, learning a language is far more than learning words. In fact, to underline what you wrote above, most trained translators explicitly attempt to map ideas, not words (although there are in fact multiple "translation paradigms" on how exactly to go about this). So absolutely, many words and phrases are specific to a given language, and don't map one-to-one.

Nonetheless, as an adult learner, basic vocabulary -- combined with grammar -- provide you with a foundation upon which to build your language learning. Nouns like "man, woman, head, shoes, etc" and verbs like "go, speak, find, search". Without a basic vocabulary, it's pointless to try to build up oral fluency, or to read books. No serious language learner that I know willingly picks up a book in a foreign language and starts to study it without some preparation, or dives into in-depth spoken interactions with a speaker of the target language with no background in that language. Most try to establish the most common words of a language, memorize them, find a good grammar, study it, and only then do they start to interact with the spoken and/or written language.

(Background: native English speaker who learned one foreign language as an adolescent and several others as an adult / ATA-certified translator with a decade of experience doing technical/medical translations. Currently: transitioning back to professional web development!)
This is bad Python:

- "isgoodtime" is a magic variable that changes depending on when it is imported. It should therefore be either a function or method on an object.

- "if isgoodtime == True" should be "if isgoodtime:" (although this would probably change to "if isgoodtime():"

- words in functions should be separated by underscores, e.g., is_good_time, to_great_content
Output is 5 sentences. Quality is still being tested but here's a sample:

from this article http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/09/do-you-need-to-be-a-jerk-to...
Do You Need To Be A Jerk To Be A Successful Entrepreneur?

- I recently read Ben Austen’s WIRED article about Steve Jobs, which prompted me to put together my thoughts about the tradeoffs of being a successful entrepreneur.

- After reading it, you might be convinced that you can either be a jerk and successful or decent and mediocre.

- Successful people come in all forms and they all have different limitations, baggage, prejudices, and ways of looking at the world.

- Jobs was successful because his unreasonably high goals, brilliant insight, and relentless passion made people want to work with him.

- You don’t have to have a surly personality to be successful, although sometimes it comes with the territory.