skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I got a chance to use the Surface today and the thing that I came away with was that this could be a person's only computer. As an example, you can browse the file system, run desktop apps, and copy files to external storage.

That's kiiiinda cool. Marco said that the Surface felt like a computer (is that a bad thing), and it sounded pretty good to me. I use an iPhone now and its artificial limitations are kind of ridiculous.

If/when I snag a tablet, I'll be hard at work making it work like a computer - just a hand-held one.
That's not true at all. Each goroutine has its own variable sized stack whereas Runnable objects in Java don't have a stack of their own. They use the thread's stack. So as long as a Runnable uses its stack (that is the run() method hasn't finished), the thread cannot be used by other Runnables.

So, in Go you can have thousands active function invocations (i.e tens of thousands of stack frames on thousands of stacks) at the same time and they do not occupy thousands of threads. You can't do that in Java.
I am from Germany and you are the first person to tell me about malnutrition in the GDR. After a quick google i call it BS. Yes, the GDR was a pretty shitty state, but socialism per se does not eat babies.
No, it's not too poetic--it strikes just the right chord and really resonated with me.

Wealthy patrician Romans used to keep busts of their ancestors in a hallway in the entrance to their home to keep them (and their guests) reminded about whence they came. We might be able to do something similar for our ancestors, except with "living" imagery and audio. Imagine being able to watch a clip of your great-great-great grandfather and hearing him speak! That's what future generations have to look forward to.
Oh, that makes sence when talking about ideas - not startups. Thanks.
Michael Saylor, The Id of Web 2.0
DNS Prefetching on Hovering Links in Opera
I'm with you --- it was an amazing transformation in our link to the past. But don't underestimate the power of written language to carry on that multi-generational conversation. We can read the thoughts of people who died thousands of years ago, and we still have a lot to learn from them.
Why Do Apple Employees Donate Less than Google and Microsoft Workers?
They will both give Apple the benefit of the doubt while not doing the same for others. Apple flaws are unimportant, others flaws are crazy bad.

For instance, Gamecenter is just terrible on iOS. Looks tacky, barely works. How you treat that in a review is very revealing of your partisan positions. You could make it the centerpiece and how it shows that Apple is losing its touch in new features and is on a downward spiral. Or you could just ignore it.
"The South is America's most violent region; both blacks and whites in the South are more violent than those in the northeast. In other words, the murder rate is highest in those states that most disdain the sovereign ("government") and champion self-reliance."

Looks a bit flimsy. By the same token, it's also highest in those states with hottest weather, proximity to Mexico and the Gulf, lower educational attainment, etc.
I love the Internet archive, but is there a typo? At Quantcast we collect more than 10PB of logfiles each year, and we process 30PB of data in a day.

Something seems off about the number
My connection through the Twitter API is broken
So how reliable is AWS in comparison to some of its competitors? I think there might be a slight bias whenever AWS has a problem because so many big name sites rely on them, and they're the proverbial 800lb gorilla of the cloud computing space.

How many of these massive outages are affecting its competitors that we never hear about?
I would not be surprised if it turned out to perform extremely well - and perhaps even outperform Go. On the other hand, performance is not everything when it comes to writing large software systems. Again, my Erlang experience is that even if we are "hellishly slow" because every message is a copy in Erlang, it doesn't matter. For large software systems it turns out that the architectural design is what is the driving factor to program speed. How fast you pass a message is only part of the whole thing.

The real question to ask is how good a language is for the large scale software design. Certainly Java has proven itself to be there. Go is still young, but it specifically targets some of the problems in the same area as well. In my experience, debugging and the ease of doing so is also very important. And I don't know much about how easily this is to do in Go.
Yes? I know that there is an elaborate forewarning of the VM's uselessness in the TOS. My comment was aimed at the parent, who mistakenly implied that the MS VMs were useful for something.

The stupid things restart every 30 minutes. I don't know what else I can say to underline what an annoying waste of time they are.
Everything can.
As someone that grew up with exceptions, I like the idea of errors being recoverable by default. If it's not fatal, your catch block is going to swallow the exception anyway. And if your error is, panic().

(This could be Java experience scarring my then-young mind)
XtGem
If you squint your eyes enough, automatic reference counting is a garbage collection method. But if you are going down that road, there are other garbage collector schemes which often produces way better performance in the common situations, i.e., copying collection or Mark'n'sweep.

But it is a trade-off. Refcounting collectors need to address pointer cycles. And they are also quite slow due to all the refcount bookkeeping going on all the time. But they have the nice property that the lifetime of an object won't linger around in a zombie state. And there are no point in time where the system is in a "collecting" state and cannot give service.

That said, many modern, multi-core malloc() routines contain a lot of ideas from GCs in them. The gap is closing fast.
To be clear: I mean that it seems too basic even for a final exam of an introductory applied linear algebra course for non-majors.
I asked for arguments against the content of the article.

You lack that?

Edit: The criticism of the Surface is echoed here: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/10/microsoft-surface-rt-revie... (I'm not going to bother to read more about non-retina pads/laptops. My eyes are too old and spoiled.)
> (auth with email instead of username ),

Django 1.5 fixes this with custom user models:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#customizi...
My stance is still the same as two years ago: Golang is a very decent language with a lot of interesting features. But the lack of direct address of fault-tolerance is what I am missing. In distributed systems, you can't hope to handle all kinds of failure scenarios. You have to punt at some point and assume that the problem doesn't ever happen in the real world. And that is where you need fault tolerance.
And you say "they" like all advertisers are skeevy and wouldn't honor the DNT flag.
With 20 years’ notice, paint pellets could cause an asteroid to veer off course
Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout
Looks like this is just a terminal emulator project in javascript.

Project: m3m3n70.com

File: tty.js

Description: Customized web bash terminal

Adapted From: tty.js by Christopher Jeffrey

Authors: Turner Bohlen (turnerbohlen.com), Marwan Hilmi

Copyright 2012 Scott St. Technology Company
An Interview with Chen Guangcheng
Jobs gift was to be able to think like a consumer clearer than the consumer and at the same time techinicaly minded enough to get the best from the techs who are so obvistacted from the end user mind-set wise that they need that grounding that Jobs gave them.

What word is "obvistacted" standing in for? A Google (EN_US) search returns two results, both of which are this post.
It seems it is the norm - lots of people were going back and upping their pledges. They did a ton of updates, and offered cases (for an extra $20 per unit) and a book (at $25) to pull in existing people. And a lot of those of us who had already backed were also far more actively tweeting or otherwise promoting it. Add on coverage here and several other places, and the time pressure. Others pointed out yesterday that it's fairly common for Kickstarter campaigns to get most of their funding in the first 72 and last 24 hours.
It's the Wild West up there, mate.
There is no link between wages and corruption - there are many, many other factors that make up corruption.

Yes there is. If public servants are grossly underpaid, or vulnerable, they'll turn to corruption for income or safety (think of a policeman looking the other way in countries like Argentina). In Argentina, for instance, policemen were very poorly paid after the 2001 crash, and at the same time, an incredible wave of crime washed over the country, much like in Greece today. Police started getting paid much less, for a much more dangerous job (the murder rate for policeman rose dramatically). So they simply demanded bribes (long list of ways how to do this) and stayed out of trouble when they could. To compensate for the danger imposed by their job, they started looking the other way more.
The possibility of someone criticizing your work is stopping your from "starting" FOSS projects?
Isn't there a theory somewhere that there have been accidental recordings in the past when objects vibrate against another and make grooves?

That would be amazing to discover an accidental recording from 1000 years ago that can be recovered using laser scanning to decode.
i get the impression that routers are hard to configure well, particularly used in "complex" ways. isn't there some hardware startup looking at fixing this? i can't remember the name, but thought i had read about it here before.

naivley, it seems like the configuration is at too low a level - individual routers - and that there should be higher level coordination with support for simulating different conditions. or does that already exist? what's state of the art for places like google to manage routers?
"memorizing surface area and volume formulas"? A=PiR*2? This combination of simple problems and extreme time commitment embodies everything that is wrong with the aforementioned approach.
Probably because more then half of their employees work retail (I think).

The article says Apple has 383 stores. The smallest store in my area (I would imagine one of their smallest anywhere) has around 100 employees. Even if the average is 100 that means that more than half of Apple's 60,400 employees make retail wages.

Beyond having lower hour-per-hour wages there are plenty of part-time employees.

One better way to compare contributions would be total employee dollars contributed vs total employee dollars paid in wages.
Beginning Mac OS X Development
Well, there is no announcement for a CTF on this Box anywhere else?
How Long Will Programmers Be So Well-Paid?
PayPal loading animation done in pure CSS
Valve Linux Steam Client Beta Application
Ken Thompson wasn't actually involved in the development of C. He created B, though.
> ...play by the already established rules.

That's weak sauce. If nobody ever complained about anything and just played by the rules, nothing would ever change.

> The apple...closed markets are designed 100% to be the benefit of the consumer...

Oh please dude, gimme a break. Hogwash. Everybody knows that captive markets are lucrative and that Apple's 30% cut makes them a pretty profit. Google's market may be closed, but their mobile platform is about as open as can be. Android itself doesn't stop anybody from side-loading or using a competing store.

Everybody knows how Apple likes to do things. There's no denying it. They want absolute control over their platform because it's good for them.
> A rough estimate from Erlang, is that the typical Erlang program is 1/5th of the typical C++ program implementing the same functionality.

And taking that to the extreme, J/K/APL is usually 1/100th of the typical C++/Java program implementing the same functionality. Unlike erlang, it's not more robust - but it's often faster (not because of some theoretical advantage - when you write 1/100th of the code with the right primitive, you have more time to think about optimizing it)

But as another poster said: Shh, don't tell anyone about our unfair advantage.
Maybe you can use 3D printers to make "impossible" cakes like crystal structures (ie. Dr. Manhattan on Mars)
One in a billion: How technology is transforming dating in China
Ask HN: Wordpress nested multisites - or any alternative?
Hi,

After checking the requirements for one of our partner sites we would like to consolidate, Wordpress almost fits them, especially with the Network/Multisite feature. There is only one catch: we would like to use nested multisites, like the following different sites:

domain.com/ [#0: admin site]
domain.com/en/ [#1: English info pages]
domain.com/fr/ [#2: French info pages]
domain.com/en/blog1 [#3: English blog with long articles]
domain.com/en/blog2 [#4: English blog with short news snippets]

The examples above are of course simplified, but I hope you get it: different parts might have different management, different content and update cycle, sometimes (eg. through language change) different theme.
e.g. domain.com/en/about-us shall be served by #1, /en/blog1/some-post shall be served by #3.

Do you have any experience with such setups? What is the catch? Is there any alternative?

Thanks!
I used to write software for print manufacturing. Paper is high tech. It's also appropriate tech for many use cases.

In addition to privacy, paper is durable. Being physical, it's possible to safe guard the chain of custody. Paper is also largely tamper evident.

I'm still weirded out by digital signatures, both the crypto and fax kind. How are they challenged, verified, revoked? Electronic mediated transactions make sense when systems are double entry (credits and debits) so that each party has their own audit trail. But they seem rather virtual to me for things like transfer of ownership and voting.

Learning about the legalities of digital signatures is on my to do list.
I spent a year working on a project in Go, so got pretty used to the language. One thing I did wonder though was how would it fare on very large systems; how could Go hook up to work like MPI across clusters of computers?
The English speakers must not have taken many math courses: there type declarations much more commonly come after the variable name than the other way around, although both styles are used. I mean "Let G be a group and f an automorphism of G" is much more common than "Consider a group G and an automorphism of G, f".
"To me it looks like Go is designed to make compiler writer's life easier rather than programmers."

Did you read the slides? They fully acknowledge compiler speed as a focus from the get-go.
I think they were the two members of the Mozilla team that delivered the cake to their IE friends. (Matt Brubek and Eitan Isaacson).
I miss uriel to respond to some of the really inexplicable posts on this thread. :(
They've had exactly one true region-wide failure - that 17 minute routing failure earlier this year. Running a truly multi-AZ setup has avoided every other outage popularly reported as “the cloud is falling”.

Some services - e.g. Heroku - have lots of impacted customers but that's due to their architecture, not the underlying AWS.
Are you kidding me? This post is so full of arrogance and brazen oversimplifications of both Java and Go, there is so little of actual value to even bother discussing.

It's almost like you don't realize that Java came out a decade before Go, or that you don't understand the power of Goroutines or the power of writing your own low-level concurrent code.

I'd hate for you to find out that java's concurrency primitives are probably implemented using the same constructs as goroutines and/or are available to devs in the sync package. (Feel free to write "thread"-safe data structures. Hell, if you'd wanted to complain about the lack of generics in that case, I'd have even joined you.)
Agreed. HN and other news sites tend to write only about success or semi-success stories, and we are missing the huge number of non-success ones. Non-success is not a failure, it is a data point, but typically don't get through the news.
> And the chances are you are going to be importing lots of "little code" from the "big library" anyway.

That "big library" is often supported by someone else. One day, a year down the line, you realize startup time for you executables went from 0.01s to 2s because Big Library's initialization code now scans all subdirectories for some caching optimization, and stuff like that - stuff that's a win for general users of biglib, but not for you.

> I just don't get this

This is not about theory, it's about practical experience.

You'll notice that successful C/C++ libraries tend to include everything that's small enough and that they need to function - because dependencies byte you later on. e.g. libav/ffmpeg has its own copy of md5, libtcc has its own slab allocator, gsl has its own everything, everything ships with a copy of libz in case the system libz is borked.

The Go library just starts applying this principle a little earlier - inside the standard library. I suspect that's because they envision a python-style batteries-included extensive standard library, which has no benevolent dictator to put order in it.
+1. Or at least factor the high-level industry into it (engineering vs marketing vs retail...).
Show HN: my collection of HN plugins
I created this 3 plugins to create a better personal experience with HN, they are not made to create a nice UI, in fact, it might make it more confusing, but they help me to find more interesting things to read and have a general better experience.

HNTagger: https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101/hntagger

Tag users, there is also a file with some tag ready to be used. I like knowing who am I talking to, like if it's a dev of some company, a marketing person etc..

HNNewest: https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101/hnnewest

Highlights on the /newest page the posts with some comment or more than 1 point. Also highlight Ask HN, Show HN and text posts.

HNReRead: https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101/hnreread

Shows the number of comments/score since you refreshed the page(orange) or when you opened the thread(blue)

There is also the HNBox, which is all of them together: https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101/hnbox als avaible on the Chrome store
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hnbox/bphebkcfkkmdemhbbomehjbopofkhmib

This plugins were created for me but I hope will be helpful for someone else also.

Enjoy.
Attention conservation notice: Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata. Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I am sorry to say that our employer knuckled under, and so did we, and we replaced that version of the paper with another, without the offending citation. I think my judgments on Wolfram and his works are accurate, but they're not disinterested.

I'm curious what proof Wolfram Research was so protective of that they would interfere with academic research to keep it a secret.
A few people said it already, but if you get into a store which is not smack in the middle of a tech startup area of a city (where the rest of the world lives), you'll see people browsing tablets (and laptops) in a very similar way; they walk and try Androids and iPads (and Surface?) in one go. They want a tablet as they have some purpose for it or they don't need a desktop of laptop (the latter becoming more and more relevant every day; I see a lot of non tech people pick up iPads or the more expensive Androids instead of laptops). If they had a brand in mind they most likely will buy that, but, as I frequent large stores in different countries, I see people (young and old) just touching 5-6 of them before buying. I really don't think anyone gives a crap about 1st/2nd/whatever generation or whatever software. They'll buy what they like then and there. So MS SHOULD be on par with the latest iPad, hardware and software OR have prices comparable with discounter Androids. I see it as a hard sale for non techies otherwise. They compare their 'feeling' when touching it, browsing apps, browsing the web, playing a game and watching video. And then they compare price. So I agree apples and oranges on a tech point of view, but business wise who cares; it's a bad comparison only on price (compared to cheap Android pads), on features no-one cares; you pick what's better for that price.
I didn't find much of this article very stimulating but the last comment made a very good point about fields in general:

"So why aren’t there more people drawn into the[any] field out of sheer interest? Because when you’re poor, which most of the world is, money is more important than passion. It’s not until you reach a near First-World level of development that pursuing your passions rather than escaping poverty seems like a reasonable and/or admirable thing to do."
clicky:

HNTagger: https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101/hntagger

HNNewest: https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101/hnnewest

HNReRead: https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101/hnreread

HNBox: https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101/hnbox

HNBox on chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hnbox/bphebkcfkkmd...
This looks really cool! Not sure what I'd use it for, but it looks awesome.

Have any use cases in mind?
A succinct quote and something I had never really put thought into. Nicely said.

It’s not until you reach a near First-World level of development that pursuing your passions rather than escaping poverty seems like a reasonable and/or admirable thing to do.
Mostly, but not entirely. Under the "Impact on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)" section they state that due to two other bugs, some Multi-zone RDS instances did NOT fail over, because their systems knew that the masters had stopped replaying to the standbys, but had continued to process some transactions (albeit more slowly, as the failures cascaded and amplified), and thus prevented the automatic promotion of a standby, as the standbys were now out of date.
The only thing surprising to me is that Japan's number is not much higher. Their political apathy is astonishing; in my opinion there is no functioning democracy in Japan.

Call me jaded but I am surprised to see the numbers so low for a lot of countries. Perhaps the questions asked how things should be, rather than how things actually are.
Okay, but... just to help you out a bit... the News Feed was never called a Wall, actually. One is about you, the other shows posts by others.
I would say likely forever. Programming is a commitment. Many people will just not be able to sacrifice other things in life to keep up.

Programming isn't a "learn it once and you're good for life" sort of career. Programmers have to keep learning every day to stay relevant.
Stanford alumni have created 39,900 companies
Should I trust the "untrusted certificate" screen?
Not sure exactly! It just seemed like a fun thing to try.

I guess I am just interested in how to make code more visual.

I haven't tried it on a "real" code base yet but I will.
Why You Need to Fail
Just a note: In 1999, before the jobs disappeared, it was the same articles...
I can only guess this isn't being upvoted to not make other potential applicants aware of it! :D
This is an initial concept/prototype I've been working on today. Pretty neat I think, but not exactly sure of the use case yet beyond making code more visual. All thoughts on that front gladly received!
see how far you grow in 4 months. looks cool
If only there were a guiding economic principle that could be applied that would relate the supply of skilled workers with the need or demand for them.

God with such a framework, we might even accidentally elevate the discourse beyond that of a comic-laden TC "article".
10 Content Marketing Examples for Entrepreneurs