skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That does sound like it could easily cause problems. Graphics drivers are bad in all Linux systems. NVIDIA's I've seen tend to work better - just hope Steam does well with Linux and pushes ATI to finally make some good drivers.
I work at Counsyl, a pre-pregnancy genetic testing company, and I can confirm that there is a ton of work for people not versed in bio. Everything from assay & sequencing visualization tools to more traditional IT challenges like "How do we manage the huge amount of data coming off the seq machines?" -- which is terabytes per day.

I don't have a bio background so I work on software tools and automation to support the rest of the company. Counsyl has huge respect for all levels of science and engineering, so you don't face a credential hierarchy everywhere (but Counsyl is probably unique in this area). We have a strong solve-problems-with-software culture that any dev would be comfortable with.

If the gp is interested, check out https://www.counsyl.com/jobs/
Week 5 of 500 Startups: Always Be Opening
We got one yesterday. Had a list of changes he expected us to make for our app. Most were really redundant and outdated ideas. I wrote responses to each portion of his email: yes, no, maybe...

I got to the last paragraph: if we made all of the changes he'd be happy to bump up his rating of our app to 3 or 4 stars. At that point I deleted everything I wrote and instead politely brushed him off and offered a refund.
This is what I thought. CSS for example grew so large that it often doesn't feel like the right tool anymore. That's why preprocessors like Sass, Less and Stylus are so popular. Trying to combine everything into one language is a really hard problem and I'm not sure it can be solved.
The most exciting news in quite a while! It will be interesting to hear what people think as they try it out and differences begin to emerge. In the meantime, congratulations on both the release and the open-sourcing.
Got stuck on trying to type out answers for the binary clue, yay for viewing page source ;)
Thanks for the heads up. Made a quick fix by taking out affix on the column. Tried to get this up pretty quickly with Bootstrap, need to spend some more time on it this weekend. Sorry for the annoyance.
That makes sense, it would be nice to see what they're planning - how they plan - to support the new videos that will be sure to come. I wouldn't expect anything about it for awhile though, it's new, they're still learning, and they may change their approach early on.
I'm confident it was Firefox. Not the browser, but the community-based marketing campaign - Spread Firefox when it was launched, and before that geeks installing Firefox on their parent's computers (and so on).

For me, a key moment was when my not-very-computery Mum, without prompting by me, phoned up her stockbroker to complain the site didn't work on Firefox. She did so because she felt Firefox was the "latest greatest thing", and blamed the broker for not supporting it.

In my view, modern Apple wouldn't have been possible without the Firefox community web standards campaign. The version 1 iPhone would have bombed if most websites hadn't worked on it.

Likewise, modern Google wouldn't have been possible. Projects like Google Docs, Mail and Maps are much better because of the standards push that started with the Firefox community. It lets Google compete directly with Microsoft.
I don't know much about Mason, but this isn't a templating engine; it's just a wrapper library on top of the DOM API. Since it doesn't need any compilation or coordination outside of the JavaScript process, it's much less complex, and composes well without passing partials and other cruft into the template data.
> All queries are fully parallelized

Does it means that every query touches all servers ? Or does it sends queries to only a subset of servers when possible ? (e.g. range queries on PK)
Cisco VP who is a former CIA officer will make finding leaks his “hobby”
What exactly is the usefulness of having thousands of barometer readings measured from the inside of a phone inside peoples' homes, purses, pockets, workplaces, and so on? Seems destined to be a network of meaningless bad reads.
It is my understanding that this is how it works: OWS volunteers will buy the loan (not OWS itself, I use OWS in the collective sense). They will then collectively forgive the loan. Since each loan is held and forgiven by a group of people, no one individual is likely to come close to the yearly gift cap. Individuals can participate in the OWS loan purchases until they run into the wall (i.e., their ability to participate in the purchase or to make further gifts). Note that this is why I assume the OWS loan forgiveness is treated as a gift--because in the above scenario, that is clearly the intent.

Alternatively, OWS would purchase the loan itself and then forgive the loan. OWS is a non-profit entity, so there would not appear to be any tax issues arising from this (or at least, if there are, the IRS has already indicated that such issues will ignored).
It's amazing how two people can read the same thing and come to wildly different conclusions.
What if Steve Jobs had been a woman?
Battlestar Galactica Prequel "Blood & Chrome" has online-only premiere
1. Yes -- that was the main motivation for MVCC. We wanted to allow people to use rethinkdb for analytics and map/reduce on top of the realtime system without dealing with having to replicate data into something else.

2. Short answer: we favor consistency (via master/slave under the hood). It allows for much easier API, much fewer issues in production, etc. The user experience is just better. If you're ok with out of date results, you can do that too without paying the price of consistency guarantees. The downsite of our design is that you might lose write availability in case of netsplits (if the client is on the wrong side of the split). Longer answer: checkout the FAQ at http://www.rethinkdb.com/docs/advanced-faq/

3. Read latency should be equivalent to other comparable master/slave systems. We don't do quorums, so latency will be much better than quorum/dynamo-based designs.
Google Sets, Still Available in Google Docs
Haha I knew that post was going to be unpopular.

FYI, Opera had been free as in beer since 2006, Safari on Windows since 2007. Irrelevant to the browser market of course because either had the number of extensions FF had available. Opera also had (and still have) a lot of trouble rendering sites that work with FF and IE, and Safari Win was so much unlike everything else on Windows, nobody uses it just because it's weird.

This post is about placing credits where they are due. Copying functionality from one browser to another one isn't innovation, but I have to admit that one major reason Firefox got popular was the extensions that copied all those functionality from Opera over before Firefox had them. For some reason Firefox never really got to reach 40% usage, and now it's too late. I'm just a little disappointed.
That's what Kickstarter is doing very successfully -- turning the Internet into your rich friend who sponsors your projects.
Will that be Paper or Pixels?
I think the difference is in the aims. With traditional statistics, you're trying to estimate some quantity of interest in the population, while with "big data", you're typically trying to make predictions for individual users. While this can be done with traditional statistics (in fact, the predict method in R does exactly that) it becomes easier to match participants on what books they might like if you have data for what books everyone in your population likes rather than just a sample.

Now, whether or not the inferential premises of statistics hold up on website data (and population data) that typically is neither random nor representative, that's another story.
No worries; I didn't think you were trolling. If I did, I would have ignored it.

Still: to many, it's not as mild as you think.
I don't see the use for CSS; it's not powerful enough to express your styling, so you always need some kind of programmatic processor that generates it (whether in javascript or some other language), at which point you might as well have that same program apply styling directly to your elements.

But yeah, I'd rather have strong separation of markup and behaviour. I love the wicket approach to this (your templates are plain html; the only thing you can add to them is identifiers that mark a tag as being replaced by a component; all logic goes in the code), and wish I could find a templating engine for more modern technologies that used the same approach.
Pretty fascinating. Could you elaborate a bit on red bull too.
Useful for generic purposes. Never knew of it before, but now that I do, I'll look to use it when needed.
Cloud Computing and Enterprise Software Forecast Update, 2012
Thanks. Your blog looks pretty good.
Its still a young project. I agree that its currently suboptimal, but the source is one github (along with the abadnoned enfer, which looked really nice but appears to have been abandoned).

I definitely think Clojure has a future in big data - the repl, immutability and the strong links to the Java ecosystem make it an obvious choice for developing interactive (in so far as this is possible) big data applications.

Also, it's fun to code, which should never be discounted as a reason for a language to succeed.
This might be slightly off-topic, but am I the only one that thinks that command line tools are archaic with some pretty serious drawbacks? I see and acknowledge the power they can wield in the right hands, but for mere mortals it's a terrible experience. Especially on a windows box.

I've started learning Symfony2, and the default is to get it up and running using the dependancy manager composer, a commandline based tool. I've spent a week trying to finish the simple task of installing the framework. No success. Now, I don't make a living programming, so I'm definitely at the shallow end of the programming pool. But still. A week.

There are several problems as I see it:

- No discoverability. You are given no clues whatsoever as to what commands are available to you. You have to know exactly what you want to do. Yes, you can read manpages, forum posts, etc. but finding, learning and memorising a whole set of commands used in some program you might never use again seems like a terrible waste of productive time. Without the manual you're flying blind.

- All sorts of opaque dependencies. Composer for instance apparently requires git installed for it to work. But it doesn't say that anywhere. You also need to define paths, etc. which isn't covered anywhere.

- A million minor flaws and bugs. Until now I've run up against at least a few bugs, either in composer or in some other part of the chain of software. Only opaque general warnings are given, and finding out exactly what is wrong is next to impossible.

- Terrible UI. Copying and pasting doesn't follow convention, copying from a commandline to a notepad inserts linebreaks that you have to clean up manually, there's no way to maximise the cmd.exe window. The list of basic usability flaws goes on.

This isn't meant as trolling or ranting, although I must say I'm genuinely alienated by the commandline. I understand that text is great way for programs to talk to each other, I understand that the commandline is a great way to talk to a remote server, and I understand the power that piping, etc. gives you, so it's not like I'm denouncing the power that's inherent in the tool.

The problem is that the learning curve is tremendously steep, and I just don't feel it's worth it. To do the simplest thing I need to learn how a whole ecosystem works. I also have to page the information I need together from a number of different sources that I first have to find. It's kind of like having to build a car just to ride down to the baker to get some bread. It's quicker to walk than assemble a car before you can drive.
Lexical Scope in CoffeeScript
Anyone else thinking such a ball would make an ideal "case" for a Raspberry Pi, especially once they add wi-fi to the R-Pi? Here's a ball, kids...BTW, it's a computer too. A kickable, waterproof, indestructible computer.
> some province charges so much tax that to make other provinces eat a share of that cost would be unreasonable.

Sales tax varies from 5% to 15.5%, but only 11% of the country by population (Alberta and the territories) are at 5%, and majority are at 12 to 15%.
What data source(s) did you use to display counties?
Nocilla: Stunning HTTP stubbing for iOS. Testing HTTP requests made easy.
Joe Doliner - Engineer at RethinkDB here. RethinkDB is designed for small teams with big data challenges. When you're just starting up a new project ideally you want to just boot your database up and start throwing data at it without worrying about schema. However with other products on the market, most notably Mongo, there are a lot of features that stop working when you get to a large scale. We've been very careful in developing RethinkDB to make sure that small teams who use our product aren't going to need to rewrite code once their dataset starts growing. As coffeemug mentions above we support fully parallelized queries. This means that when your dataset grows you can add more servers to speed up analytic queries. We feel this a valuable feature for small teams.
Or you could just admit that it's lots of grays and use an actual number. [0..1] for a trust scale. Trust _never_ is binary. (It also rarely is one-dimensional. But that's a different story... You might get away with one dimension, since it's restricted to a very limited set of interactions)
Hehe yeah.
This amount of alcohol on a regular basis (several times a week) can and will cause all kinds of brain damage, not so good for someone who makes a living using their brain.
The real sad part is that is likely used by JsonSerializer class which was just kind of a quick hack to quickly add json support to a few things and it has been deprecated in favor of DataContractJsonSerializer.

So the only people who are using that are people who started using it really quickly after it was released and haven't updated their code to stop using it.
There are more 1st-person details at the Breitbart account:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/08/Orca-How-...

I find this volunteer account notable:

I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN's. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red.

Putting aside Hanlon's Razor ("never ascribe to malics what can be explained by incompetence") for a moment: what if some of these failures were due to partisan/hacker tampering?

If you owned the server(s), you could scramble a state's PINs. You could break redirects. You could bias the projections for overconfidence, or mark records as 'voted' or 'followed-up' that hadn't been.

With a little phone-hacking, you could make sure attempts to call-in with problems get no answers.

A single skilled amoral hacker could more easily suppress thousands of actual votes this way, compared to voting-machine/voting-tabulation tampering. And the details could disappear more easily into the secrecy and cover-your-ass bullshitting that is common in a partisan, temporary campaign organization.
Regardless whether it is official or not, it is pg's preferred api: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4694308
Interesting story, but not much CSI stuff here, since there was no physical evidence that the brother was the murderer. If I were on that jury, I'd also have voted to acquit based on the prosecution's lack of any concrete evidence.
Every time I sign up for a service and receive an email from recurly (or similar services), my first thought is, "this company doesn't care about user experience if they're trusting recurly to send me important communications." The email content is always generic and cold, and it's particularly unimpressive when I sign up for a free trial and receive a "thanks for subscribing" email telling me that I was successfully billed $0.00.

I'm glad that Stripe keeps their hands off my invoices. You could argue that Stripe could just let me turn that feature off, but Stripe understands that their customers are 100% responsible for the end-user experience, and I respect their decision not to get involved in that at all.
or simply "chair".
Beautiful photo of seattle
Well, I think he's an entrepreneur by trade, but I always if he put in the time to learn Ruby/Rails with all that expertise around. As someone who's been slowly learning to program myself for years, I'd love to get his perspective on it.
Mind Wandering - it's making you unhappy NOW.
Agree with most points, a real football beats trash and amplifies the positive experience many time over.
It looks like internal politics at the prospect were at play here. The guy didn't want to be doing this and decided to take his bad attitude out on the vendor he was assigned to deal with.
No. Obama won by 313 to 225 electoral votes. Florida had 29, Ohio 18, and Virginia 13. If you switch all three states to Romney then Romney would have won 285 to 260.
Actually, there are tremendous practical reasons why a religion would include sexual ethics into its moral code.

Prime example: Fidelity within marriage (one of the Ten Commandments). People who cheat on their spouses not only do damage to their relationship, but also increase their own (and their spouse's) risk of being infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

Look at some of the sex-related stuff in Leviticus, like the prohibition on having sex while a woman has her period. Turns out, a woman is at greater risk of getting an STD during this time. So, like the Jewish dietary laws, this prohibition actually helped keep the Jewish people (relatively) healthy.

Or look at the religious rationale for prohibiting prostitution: It treats the prostitute (often a woman) as an object rather than a person with innate dignity, and even in cases where the prostitute is making a seemingly free choice to engage in the transaction, there are often hidden pressures (addiction, mental illness, a pimp) that affect her ability to make a truly free choice.

Those are just three small examples, but there are many others.
* In the previous incarnation of rethinkdb the focus was on maximizing performance on SSDs. Is this still the case - does rethinkDB perform better than other databases on SSDs? Do you have any benchmark numbers?

* How does rethinkdb compare to MySQL Cluster? Both are distributed, replicated databases with a sql-like query language.

* Any plan to offer a java client?
yeh, that would be interesting to know.
I have quite a few questions about this implementation, but here are two bigger ones:

1. Why are constructed Maps here having delete, get, has, set, size, keys, values, and iterate added outside of the prototype? I guess I don't see why you wouldn't just put these on the prototype. That said, .call seems to be unnecessary in a lot of this code.

2. Why isn't there any attempt to make lookups for primitives faster. It's all O(n).
Yeah, but in my experience, the PM's response to that will be "can we get it done sooner?"

If the estimated time aligns with what they want, then you're fine. But that's rarely the case and when things slip the code cleanup is pushed to the back burner.
Great work, can't wait to try it out! :-)
FYI,

Taylor's self described "best nuclear friend" (1) is a fellow named Carl Willis who has an interesting, albeit infrequently updated, blog called "special nuclear material" here: http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/

(1) http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played...
How do you plan on monetizing the business ? Are you looking at some kind of consultancy play, ala Redhat / MySQL (pre-Oracle) ?
I also believe that Hacker News runs on a small stack of services developed by some past companies from Y Combinator.

I would agree that there is also little to no desire to make Hacker News "the news place" - where it supports thousands of posts a second and is extremely popular. In general Hacker News is used (and the hope is to stay that way) by startups and people interested in startups - it's slowly growing out to include more types of people - marketing, companies, blog posts who just want a lot of hits, etc - and not many people want to purposely support that.
> modern browsers are great at not losing form data

I wouldn't know. I had a bad experience with a lost webmail ~7 years ago. As a result, I ALWAYS copy form data to the clipboard before hitting Next.
The point about asking questions you can get from the website definitely rings true. We had a customer ask us about 15 questions, the answers to which were all on the website on our features page. He then asked for us to walk him through the installation of our app and a demo. After 30 minutes, we had to cut him off.

We'll definitely be on the look out for these types of customers going forward - and the cost definitely outweighs any sales we would get from these toxic customers.
Using Solr’s PostFiltering to collect score statistics
I strongly disagree. I grew up in uganda as an expat's kid (age 1-15). I used to play everyday with a lot of kids in the neighborhood. I was the only one with an actual fifa ball and they always waited for me with giddy eyes to show up on the local grounds despite having their own ingenious banana bark and kavera (plastic bag) balls.
I made sure to give each one of them a ball when i left and most of them still treasured them when i went back a year ago.
Sometimes it's not about a warm and fuzzy feeling. You have to see first hand how these kids live.
For the county shapes, the low res data is from D3: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/tree/master/examples/data and the hi res data is processed from the US census: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/
:) Me too.
Not sure if you've seen this one:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...

I haven't done it, but I hear its excellent.
Most of your complaints sound like problems with documentation (it existing and/or you using it) or problems with a poorly defined tool (edit), lol, or is specific to the Windows shell.

I can think of several GUI apps that have ALL of those problems but I also can't script them, alias them or fix them.

I spent 75% of my day in the terminal because I'm proficient and fast with it. Most of programming has a learning curve, I don't see why people expect otherwise when it comes to an interface that is every bit as powerful as a GUI but with a specific interface.

No offense but with the number of misconceptions in that post, maybe you need to spend more time with it before dismissing it out of hand. (edit) seriously, you don't know about Notepad.exe and line breaks. :/ Man... if you would spend a bit of time on tooling and learning your environment you probably wouldn't be spending half the time you are doing whatever it is you're doing. Jumping into something is fun, but for sufficiently complex things, you DO have to step back and read the manual.

Knowing what Symphony does, I'm quite sure that learning the CLI tool would be a far better use of everyone's effort than a GUI tool. This is even a place where I think the CLI tool makes exceedingly more sense to use.

edit: To be fair, if I had to use Windows default tools and a PHP generator tool all day long, my words would probably be more angry than yours.
Interesting paper!

I have an autistic son (and my second might have something similar but much milder) and I suppose I would meet the "systemitizing" criterion (my wife wouldn't, but that doesn't really argue against the conclusion of the paper). Of course, anecdote != data, etc.