skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One might argue that securities trading is not a representative social space, because it is so quantitative, because it is so close to (indeed identical with) the movements of pure capital, because it has available to it the most powerful computers and most expert computer technicians money can buy

HAHAHA!

Only in finance do people perceive the incumbents as the future winners. I mean in tech, we mock those with more money, more capital, because we know that no body lasts - everyone is disrupted, and so it goes. It's kind of like government conspiracy stuff, where people think that the government is too incompetent to handle most things, and yet simultaneously believe that somehow they can pull off insanely complex conspiracies. It's like religious people in airplanes - nothing funnier.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

If you knew how stupid a lot of finance guys were - you'd laugh at statements like this all day long. "Oh no they are bigger than us! Oh no they have better computers! Oh no PhDs!".

HFT is merely a matchmaker. The thing you really have to worry about is irrational capital flow to non-useful assets.

87/97/00/07 -> All of them had essentially nothing to do with tech - they just ran on tech (correlation != causation). It was the idiotic capital allocation by humans that really fucks things up.

Buying Russian/Asian bonds cheap, thinking nothing will go wrong was stupid. Buying companies with no earnings was stupid. Building houses in the desert of Arizona is stupid. Tulip buying is stupid - and that's what all of these "crises" are about - people fucked up - they bought things high, and didn't look carefully until the market fell apart.

All problems in financial markets are not driven by black swans. They are driven by slow moving asteroids - anyone can see miles off if they looked at it critically.

Forward looking: Silicon Valley is moving towards a bubble. Gov bonds are in a bubble. Money Markets are in a bubble.

Equity is cheap. High risk bonds are cheap.
I absolutely agree. My last and current employer both offer unlimited vacation. For whatever psychological reason, I find myself taking less vacation than I did when I was _earning_ it at my McJob for the rate of 6.33 hours every month.

If you are such an employer, please consider setting a realistic expectation of what is an appropriate amount of time-off. If there really is no limit, then please consider more intensive training with regard to your company's culture .
Wait a minute -- I'm not a sysadmin guy, but all the servers I've ever dealt with had swapping / virtual memory turned off. Because you'd rather a web request failed, then start churning things on disk.

When you're dealing with a web cache, don't you want to explicitly know whether your cache contents are in memory or on disk, and be able to fine-tune that? It seems like the last thing you want is the OS making decisions about memory vs disk for you. Am I missing something?
I have a saying, "If someone's not crying or dying, they can wait 25 minutes."
I'd like to see the addition a nice API for Amazon SQS.
Google Cloud Storage Integration with Saaspose File Format REST APIs
This article is wrong, just wrong.

I would love it if there were just one kind of storage, and my code could ignore the distinction between disk and memory. But it can't, for three reasons: 10 ms seek times, RAM that is much smaller than disk, and garbage collection.

10 ms seek times mean that fast random access across large disk files just isn't possible. There is a vast amount of literature and research devoted to getting over this specific limitation. And it isn't old, either: all of the recent work on big data is aimed at resolving the tension between sequential disk access, which is fast, and random access, which is required for executing queries.

RAM that is smaller than disk means that virtual disk files don't work very well when you have large data files. If you try to map more than the amount of physical RAM you get a mess: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12572157/using-lots-of-ma...

Garbage collection means that it is easy to allocate a bit of memory, and then let it go when the reference goes out of scope. There's no need to explicitly deallocate it. It's one of the things that makes modern programming efficient. With disk, you don't get that; if you write something, you've got to erase it or disk fills up.

In short, this guy's casual contempt for "1975 programming" is irksome, because it's clear that he isn't working on the same class of problems that the rest of us are. He may be able to get away with virtual memory for his limited application, but the rest of us can't.
Slight correction: The enterprise developer program is for distributing apps within an organization: https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/enterprise/

The B2B program is more for bulk purchase of custom apps.
You are double-posting yourself:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4871546
I didn't read it to be empty, it actually displayed a point of view that is missing in public discourse. Questioning white wash may or may not look mean depending on the observer. It also proposes a very simple moral implication for this type of white wash. I think the white wash is real and it is very mean.

But like you, I also like spending time with what is really interesting to me. I hope I don't read void. Or mean-spirited.
I think they like to tout the big numbers, but you're right. They want you to get something they know is good and already popular. That's why we have the recent changes to the app store. It's meant to limit search to things that are already popular, and also put a heavier importance to things like their curated favorites.

It's interesting, even in their favorites recently I seem to be seeing more of the big companies and more of the same apps that have already been featured popping up.
Current student here. There's quite an even mix of backgrounds: some people came in with very little up on github, some with lots. Give it a whack -- I see no reason you'd make a poor candidate, or hurt your chances for the future by applying now.
Show HN: Our 1st startup video. Any thoughts?
If the traffic is terminating on your own servers you in no way need deep packet inspection to determine the source of traffic and its nature. Even if the traffic wasn't terminating on your machines, you don't need DPI to determine src and dst ip:port tuples. Which is all you need to do what your suggesting.
I have seen people register just for free stuff and not pay attention to conference (Considering tickets get sold out in 2 minutes, if you really want to go for conference sake, its a bummer).
Well, this might not be that accurate. There are several app/companies that generate revenue outside of iTunes run transactions. Apple's in-app purchase rules only apply to digital content and services; they do not apply to physical goods and servicse. So, Kayak, Expedia, Hotels tonight, Viator, Amazon's store app, etc are all quite popular and earn money from their iOS apps that wouldn't be recorded or "taxed" by apple.
My experience is in the context of payments - when charging someone's payment card, check whether it's one we've issued and just run it as an internal balance transfer rather than run it through Visa (read: free). When doing the whole "build fast, iterate quickly" thing, it's easy to forget about such optimizations, especially when it's a relative edge case and works just as well if you leave it alone (arguably better, since there's less conditional logic in the code)

So by "network" I more meant database (i.e., network of users).
How can I give my wife emergency access to logins, passwords, etc.?
Once again, Google copies Yahoo http://autos.yahoo.com/
The idea is worthless if no one has to buy, remember. The whole idea is to give out a little free to get people connected and hooked, let them use up their data, then charge the hell out of them.

I think it's awesome, by the way. It basically the freemium model that is kicking ass in software right now, ported over to the real world.
Wow, would love to know what are the apps too. Or perhaps, in what category / categories are your apps in?
This can't possibly be a surprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_c...
Javascript for Pros
A friend of mine just published his first book on Javascript. From Syntax to Node.js. Show him some love!
I've been reading about Go a lot lately, starting with Effective Go, and now the tutorial book Learning Go. (and periodically referring to the FAQ when I'm stumped by design decisions)

It's been enjoyable learning it, though I'm yet to write any code in anger with Go. I find some of the concepts around concurrency and OO design have really made me think about the way I write in other languages.

One thing I cannot quite make sense of though is the treatment of errors/exceptions. This article says:
"Exceptions make it too easy to ignore them rather than handle them, passing the buck up the call stack.."

But the example given seems to me to do exactly that:

if err != nil {
return err
}

Worse still if you forget to do something with err, or don't handle a specific err !=nil situation, it seems easy for control to flow past the error handling and into code that expects no errors.

Are there small, easily understood open source projects written in Go, that would provide tangible examples of the benefit of this error handling approach?

The learning materials thus far have not really convinced me, maybe code in the wild would.
One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks
A novel App after a long time.
Yes you are missing something. Varnish doesn't use the swap. Varnish uses regular files, cached in memory via the kernel's regular buffercache mechanism.
0x80000000 on Windows. Linux i386 sets the boundary at 0xc0000000 :) This is yet another aspect where Linux made a better choice than Windows, as this gives processes 3GB of virtual memory instead of only 2GB.
Certainly that can't make it acceptable.
Everybody Knows...
Contrary to the belief of many, "npm" is not in fact an abbreviation for "Node Package Manager". It is a recursive bacronymic abbreviation for "npm is not an acronym".

https://npmjs.org/doc/faq.html#If-npm-is-an-acronym-why-is-i...
Wow, I used to chat on an IRC server that guy hosted on this domain. Small world.
We had a similar debate at dotCloud when the team discussed the appropriate amount of vacation. Unlimited was very tempting, but in the end we decided against it because 1) it's ambiguous and offers little guarantees, 2) it makes a lot of people suspicious ("Like AT&T unlimited?") and 3) it doesn't force people to take vacation.

Number 3 was the worst. Passionate people will burn themselves out if you don't setup some sort of "vacation monitoring". We liked the idea of making that explicit: lots of vacation, and rules that force you to use them regularly.

In the end we went for 2+1 weeks on the first year, and 3+2 weeks after that.
UIUC was 2nd. I was on this team. We did a Street Fighter browser-based game controlled by webcam. You can play against friends over the internet in realtime.

MIT was 3rd with a chrome extension called "minimap" that allows you to scroll in your browser with smartphone or webcam. Also allows you to have a "minimap" next to your scrollbar that shows a preview of the entire webpage

CMU got an honorable mention for a real time strategy (?) game called "The Hackers" that is based on managing a team for a hackathon.

UBC was there, but I've forgotten what their hack was. Sorry! Was really tired and nervous during demos!

Facebook showed me the time of my life. Eager to apply for a job there...
I'm sorry about that, had posted about jsSHA earlier, but the site was having problems (persistent Gitthub Unicorn Page), so I had to pull it down :)
Deadmansswitch was the first thing I thought about, though my idea was to keep the info somewhere off the net (thumb drive) and have the email contain instructions
Also (shameless plug), if you want to use murmurHash3 in JavaScript: https://github.com/karanlyons/murmurHash3.js
(in case anyone missed the reference, "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance" is attributed to Thomas Jefferson)
I'd feel a lot better if this article was from almost any other news site. RT is not known for being fair or balanced when it comes to anything involving the USA.
the Buffdale facility

It's Bluffdale, not Buffdale. And it creeps me out every time I look across the valley at it.

I really wish the investors in the company I was working on building to encrypted email for the "common man" would have been willing to invest what it would really take to make it work. We were on the right track. :(
If you need DPI to determine what traffic to drop, you are running your pipes way too hot. It's the users traffic, why do you think you're in the best position to decide to drop one website's traffic over another?
A Resource for Immigrant Entrepreneurs
My apologies to everyone who read this from this thread, I'm going to put this on HN tomorrow morning. Meant to do it this morning.
This could be used to give robots a sense of touch over their entire bodies.
Inline functions can be as good as templates
The purpose of the paper is to sketch out a field of investigation for social studies by observing cases which contradict the conventional wisdom in that field, as opposed to a rigorous or complete quantitative analysis. I'm sorry if I oversold it by stating why I considered it significant.

I don't think rigor necessitates the use of equations. Ronald Coase's nobel-winning contributions to the field of economics are almost wholly conceptual and devoid of math; at the opposite extreme, over-reliance on Li's Gaussian Copula proved unwise for Wall Street (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?curr...).
Startup Turns iPhone Into Personal Protection Device
I do my best to get this stuff right!

The top level of npmjs.org says "Node Packaged Modules."

What I was trying to say with regard to the event loop is that you don't have to write your own.

Let me know what you think of the SDK. The team loves feedback.
I'm curious as to the technical specifications of the supposed Naris device. I don't doubt that the US government can obtain the email logs of most citizens, but would it truly occur in this manner? Binney seems to describe a single unit connected directly into the backbone networks of major ISPs, logging all data on certain ports I assume (ie, the common POP3, IMAP, SMTP ports)? Depending on the level of distribution, this device would be tapping into potentially enormous amounts of data. The processing and storage infrastructure would have to be incredibly robust.

I'm not very knowledgable as to the feasibility of such a device, and quite frankly don't know where to begin, but I would love to hear from someone who might know more.

As a back of the napkin, rougher-than-order-of-magnitude calculation, it seems more feasible for the government to tap into existing email providers' databases than to try and administer their own. Would it not simply be easier to file requests (perhaps in a quasi-legitimate manner) for data from Google/Yahoo/MS/Apple than to try and catalog the entire email history of the Internet?
Why then does every nontrivial C or C++ code base I've ever worked on take 5 or 20 or 60 minutes to compile then? Do you honestly think it should take 5 minutes to compile 1M lines of code?

The linker AFAIK also has bottlenecks, but with today's computers, and thinking about what a C compiler actually does, there's no reason that you shouldn't be download (say) Python, Perl, or Ruby and compile them in 3 or 4 seconds. All of those codebases are 1M lines or less.
former student here, batch[1].

> I've produced a lot of interesting code across many domains and studied a decent variety of languages and technologies, the majority of my work has either been for pay or on personal projects that have (so far unsuccessfully) been aimed at least to some extent at turning a profit.

I would describe my pre-hackerschool self very similarly.

The important thing is that you want to spend 3 months honing your craft, that you love programming, that you can move to NYC, and that you have demonstrated that you have programmed enough to know that you can commit to doing it full time. Beyond that, it's about balancing the group, and, in all honesty, a bit of chance. There's more applicants than can be admitted, so even qualified applicants aren't necessarily admitted, not for any deliberate reason, but because resources are limited. Based on your description it sounds like it would make sense for you to apply if it's something you really want to spend 3 months of your life doing. I'm very happy to have done it.
General Introduction to DVDFab for Mac
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I work at Heroku and have never had pushback on taking vacation. Our CTO just took a month sabbatical. Sometimes I work on weekends and take some weekdays off. Whenever i'm in the (coding) flow I just do what feels right and Heroku let's me do that.
Does 3+2 mean "3 required, optionally take 2 additional"?
Someone should buy a Naris and let hackers start hammering on it. The delivery vector for any malware developed would be trivial. Just send it in an email to someone in the USA.

Hi NSA!
The story is that Bill Gates would personally phone the #1 graduating student of Waterloo every year to offer him a job, no questions asked. In some circles, Waterloo's very highly regarded.
This is a really interesting talk by the author of this article and program: http://archive.org/details/VarnishHttpCacheServer
You are more than welcome to not fix all of the security holes created by and allowed to exist by the old API.

Script kiddies everywhere will "benefit".
* You should call Ruby files with the extension of .pl*

I suppose you could name the anything, but .pl says Perl to me. I would think .rb would be more intuitive.
Probably because almost any tool ever created can do amazing things in the right hands and commit horrible atrocities in the wrong hands? And usually the positive outweighs the negative?
ttf.js - A JavaScript TrueType Font Engine For Modern Browsers And Node.js
via Functionn - Open Source Resources For Web Developers & Designers: http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/12/ttfjs-javascript-truetype-font-engine.html

P.S. Functionn contains a whole lot more of awesome resources like ttf.js. There only a fraction of them I can post here at a time. Take a look if you're interested, and subscribe:

http://functionn.blogspot.com
I don't think you'll be convinced until you have worked on a Go project of your own. Even then it might take a little while to fully see the point.

Go's error handling model is simpler than exception handling. There are fewer surprises. That's pretty much it.
What is with all these Go articles? I wish Go would Go the way if the DoDo bird. Java rocks client and server, web and think client.
I wish all that this guy said is true. I desperately wish a perfect virtual memory can relieve me from all the pains of caching.

Take an example, in a word processor, can we just keep all possible cursor positions (for moving the cursor around) and all line-breaking, page breaking info, each character's location in virtual memory?
New Batch of Myspace Beta Invites Sent.
I finally got my beta invite tonight, looks amazing so far. Anyone else get their invite tonight?
The idea, as I understand it, is to use panic/recover in truly exceptional cases to unwind the stack and handle error conditions, but to never do so across package/api boundaries.

So essentially, use panic/recover as you would a much nicer version of longjmp.

(I believe) the only thing panic/recover lack compared to a more traditional try/catch is typed catching, but idiomatic usage is much different.

Honestly, I really like it. The typed-catching would be nice but the idiomatic usage of exceptions in languages like Java has always rubbed me the wrong way. Exceptions crossing package/api boundaries just seems wrong to me.
If you find similar coverage elsewhere please link it. In the meantime I'm glad RT is on this.

And please distinguish between the long-term goals and values of the USA and the craven personal interests of its present rulers. In pieces I've read and seen from RT, they've often honored the former while excoriating the latter. Which is something I wish an American news source could do. I'll know it's possible as soon as I see a single example.
100MB is the bonus you get whenever someone new connects to your device (seems like a referral bonus); 1GB is how much your account is pre-loaded with when you buy one of these things.
looks interesting, how does it compare to SHA hashes?
> "Is Netflix really unlimited?"
> Yes, you can watch as often as you want, any time you want.

https://signup.netflix.com/HowItWorks
Wired had some time ago an article about one NSA data center [1]. That article had some additional numbers on the scale of the surveillance efforts. Specifically it did note that the specific site will have a 65 MW power station, which one can compare to some supercomputers. For comparision RIKENs K Computer demands roughly 12 MW of power. [2] ( One can also try to estimate similar numbers from the size of the facility and from the building costs. In all cases one gets a similar factor of a few above modern supercomputers.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3711603

[2] http://top500.org/list/2012/11/
want - squeal - yeah!

I hope you can submit your own 3D models to share and make viral!
The post is right on, but I also have to repost what laquan jackson said in the comments:

"Programming is for weak and effeminate men. Try carrying bricks up flights of stairs, or collecting rent checks in the inner city. And on top of all this you complain about "being interrupted"? Oh, how awful it must be for you. You need to check to see if you have a vagina down there."

Sure it may be controversial, but it's funny.
Even if there are already about twenty AWS libraries on NPM, this is a welcome addition. One nasty part of the Node.js ecosystem is the elevated risk that the owner of a library you depend on goes AWOL. For some reason (maybe the low barrier to publishing with github + npm) this risk is incredibly high with Node.js libraries. So it's nice to see AWS put their weight behind this.

It's also nice to see a language-specific library that doesn't layer on a bunch of opinions/abstractions on top of the underlying HTTP API. Makes it a lot easier to grok, debug, and leverage existing documentation.

If there's anyone from AWS trolling these parts...will there ever be support for Node.js in Beanstalk?
Worked fine for me. X is very popular now. Don't know when you last used it, but "it still sucked" brings nothing to this conversation.
I was considering this as I posted. The difference, I believe, is that apps have users and music tracks do not.

The best song I've ever downloaded has exactly the same functional requirements as the worst song. The interface is consistent. There are not versioning issues. The purchase, delivery, and use experience is consistent. Variation is purely due to content.

Furthermore, I can accurately make predictions about the quality of music based on previous experience. If I like Rock-a-billy, my expectations when downloading a new artist within the genre are likely to be met. This isn't true if I like first person shooters.

To put it another way, a music store contains a much lower percentage of poor value propositions. A song may suck, but it won't be useless, not as advertised, or a scam.

[edit] Pandora illustrates the phenomenological difference between songs and apps. The idea of an app which streams apps to users is incoherent.
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