skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Testing one piece of an overall picture and extrapolating from that is a great way to produce wildly inaccurate data.

Amazon may lose 1% of sales for every 100 ms, but I doubt Facebook will lose 1% of logins for an extra 100 ms on the landing page.

Since Facebook makes most of it's money from people scrolling down the feed, and SSL doesn't introduce scroll latency, this should have exactly zero impact on revenue.

Also, 4111 ms is insane, I have SSL enabled on Facebook and it certainly does not take 4 seconds to load. Maybe maybe perhaps it might take 4 seconds on a completely fresh install of a browser, but in that case you're also going to be downloading a huge amount of assets.

This post is typical link bait, wildly inaccurate numbers, bs extrapolations, and tangental references to real data followed by a mea culpa. Frankly, the post can't possibly save Facebook 100 million because there's no data to support the idea that Facebook would ever lose $100 million from this switch.
Who, What, Why: What happened to crime in New York City?
Progressive Insurance did :|

I nearly threw my remote at the television when I first saw that they were trying to get people to plug their insurance company into the computer of their car.
You're a fucking hero to some of us.
Introduction to ARM class
The folks at OpenSecurityTraining.info have released a new class covering ARM assembly and system architecture. If you haven't seen their other things on x86, exploits, RE, and malware, they're worth taking a look at.

http://opensecuritytraining.info/IntroARM.html
Man, what a weak article. I was expecting some cool tutorial on setting up tormail or something equivalent.

Hushmail? Seriously? They have no qualms with cooperating with authorities at the drop of a hat.
Let's take this sentence:
If you say you're willing to work for free, that tells me one thing: You think your work is of no value to me. And so if you think that, I will also think that your work is worthless to me. Instant turn-off.

As someone who has never even held a job, apparently, let alone hired another person, why would anyone believe that what you would think in this situation is in any way similar to what an actual employer would think? (Have you ever done or used any open source work? If so, how does that reconcile with your apparent theory that work done for free is valueless?)

Yes, my post is saying 'you do not have enough experience to make the statements you just made'. Ad Hominem is a logical fallacy because theoretically, 100 monkeys typing could have come up with the world's greatest business plan. However in practice, that does not make it worth people's time to read everything typed by monkeys.

I see from your other replies that you are using HN to practice sounding confident. Consider this as feedback that while it is sometimes valuable to sound confident even when you are ignorant, it is more often valuable to be able to understand when you actually don't know and what the limits of your understanding are, and on many occasions it is even more valuable to be able to communicate your own knowledge of these limits. Learning to use simple qualifiers like 'in my experience' will help you avoid sounding like an idiot and being easily tripped up by someone who hears your foolish generalization and says 'actually if you want to work in x, you pretty much always have to start by working for free'. Then you will say 'obviously I meant this advice only for y' and they will ask why you didn't say that?', and you will think 'because I made a bunch of stupid assumptions!' but feel too ashamed to say that and start blustering. You might as well say 'database x is always the best choice'.
Of course, that is only my experience (from both sides) of how those conversations often turn out, you might go through something different ;)

PS: I am a 'she'.
I like that it comes with a stylus (how 90's of me). I find these are one critical input mechanism that is lacking in every major tablet (save the Galaxy Note).

Pen/pencil-like devices have been popular for hundreds of years because they are an excellent mechanism for allowing free expression. Styluses allow creativity to be unhindered.
Are you trying to replicate Geogebra or Desmos ?
John McAfee's Last Stand (His new ebook from Wired)
Android Guide (Version 4.2)
I've looked into that a bit, and it wouldn't work precisely because the transactional nature and reprocessing of the tree we'd need to do in order to make it worthwhile. We do get an idea of the tree structure because each stream correlates directly to a task, but we have no idea what the fanout will be until everything is done executing, because a jython scriptlet could create 1 stream or 1000, and even that can be parameterized and changed on subsequent executions.

I think what would work best in our case is, in our stream table, an extra column for what I'd call "ancestor", or the top most stream and execution, then using that (with an additional column denoting an execution "isLatest") to quickly grab a subset of likely-nodes in an execution branch, and then process them to construct the tree of actual nodes. It's all kind of complicated because a third level stream could be the latest execution from a second level stream that's not the latest execution. A full closure table would be better and quicker, but that would require an extra table and a whole lotta entries which would just be bigger headache when it comes to locking a node for a transaction, because now you have lock one row in the main table, and a lot more rows in the closure table for an update.

I didn't design the system. It makes sense when it comes to science processing, especially when you have things where people want to reprocess data processed a few years ago with some new calibration or something. I know how I'd redesign it if I was starting from scratch though, but even then people often think of weird ways to use a system this flexible that can be a pain to work around.
I was talking about internal big company directives. The ones I've seen failed (Shell Oil), unless they were about infrastructure. (Amazon, Wells Fargo)

Android and iOS are a different case. The diversity they both want, they are getting. The diversity iOS doesn't want is controlled. In a big company, the ecosystems have mostly been internal, and standardizing interoperation has traditionally been about internal efficiencies. App ecosystems aren't necessarily like that -- they are for external consumption. (Though one could make the argument that Intents are about efficiency within the Android ecosystem.)
I would get a Nexus 4 but it has no 4g...
Welcome to enterprise
ODB means On Board Diagnostics. A majority of vehicles only report information - its not generally a control interface.
http://www.amazon.com/Wired-Story-Writers-Science-Sentence/d...

Wired for Story is a great book about the science of story. I think it applies to a lot more than writing.
RT-based tablets have not performed well, as expected by experts, who gave them less than average on reviews because of the weakness of “RT” that it runs on slower chips compared to those of conventional Windows. This weak performance of RT-based tablets led Microsoft to reduce the order of the Surface of RT by 50%. Microsoft will have to choose either to reduce its price or to replace them with a Surface Pro Tablet if the demand for RT-based tablets remains weak. With poor review on the Surface RT tablet and uncertain prospect of the Microsoft’s new Window 8 OS, Microsoft’s downfall is widely being expected among experts.
Yes, as Franklin. But earlier under the alias Poor Richard, it went:

"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

I've always found it oddly fascinating that that was originally published under an alias.
Neither, small sample of bigger dream
Show HN: New project we started – Simple uptime monitor
OBD-II, as I understand it, is a multimaster bus protocol, which means any master can send commands. That said, the commands that are exposed to the under-dash interface are restricted to interrogation. The emissions check people can tell how well your O2 sensors are performing but they can't modify the ignition or timing profile, for example.
I get it. I do plenty of async programming. But, at the end of the day, no matter how nice you think the async.waterfall mess is, sometimes you just want to block. Sometimes it turns out that that is the right pattern. I've written dozens of async apps, much to the chagrin of co-workers who hate anything resembling async. I think I'm qualified to know that sometimes I get to a bit of code that sure would be nice with a simple blocking call.
Ask HN: A front end developer tool kit
What would you say every front end developer should know?
A OOP Ruby java php?
jQuery
SQL
What's on your list and why?
One advantage of this grand diversity of the gene pool is that if a worst-case scenario apocalyptic epidemic does happen (weaponization of pathogens, anyone?) there's more odds a small subgroup of us could be naturally resistant.
Amicus (YC S12) is quoted. Must be a new record for YC --> Economist mention?
Ya we specifically picked something that was simple enough that we could complete, but that had the potential to build out a little more if we had the time.

As for sleep, that was definitely something I wasn't too sure about. Is it normal for people to pull an all nighter? I'm not sure I would be able to sleep before something was at least up and working (judging from my study/project tendencies in school).
Neat idea but it is way too animated, and the animation is too slow, making it feel inaccurate when mousing from one item to another. Somehow I also got it to bounce back and forth between two tooltips really fast by mousing from one bolded text to another.

This has potential but it needs a little less bling and a little more polish.
Facebook and Zynga tear up their contract
I'm the kind of person who believes that Apple's hardware is much nicer than their software, especially when it comes to their Macbooks.

OSX is awesome for most people, but for me I could never get a hang of it. The lack of having a package manager has always been confusing to me. A package manager is very similar to an "App-store" why not have one to keep things simple for developers?

I would have weird Kernel panics with the newest generation Macbook Air, this was very odd, but I don't fault OSX for it.

This is purely a personal preference, but the window management was a very frustrating experience for me. The OSX dock seems so unintuitive for me. If an application is open there's a tiny blue dot to signify that it's open. I can't really explain it, I just don't like it. There were a lot of odd inconsistencies when managing windows in OSX that I can't really remember but would frustrate me.

I'm not really saying OSX is bad, just giving you a perspective from somebody who thought the Mac hardware is much, much better than their software.
This. It's read-only, as far as I'm aware.
Ya, we discussed the idea ahead of time but haven't gone into too much detail yet as to who is going to do what. Maybe we will meet tomorrow to clarify things before the actual event. Thanks for the tip!
No, it's nothing like that at all.

It would be foolish to assume that all locations are equivalent when it comes to generating income. The differences in different areas far exceed a 1.3 increase in tax rate.
I guarantee they'll have "no printing things that fall under IP law" policies.

Besides that, what objects in a Staples store could you 3d print with paper? I can't imagine any of their products (that isn't trivially cheap) being simple enough.
I've read this several times and I'm still not able to understand what you mean. Part of your post seems like it's opposing mine, while another part is supporting mine...
It makes me wonder why the government works so hard to get new powers of investigation. It seems easier to catch someone now than it ever has, despite the preponderance of new privacy tools. Using good old fashion police work like warrants, subpoenas, plea bargains, surveillance, etc, police can put together a lot of pieces that add up to a whole (I make a comment elsewhere in the thread about the problem of plausible deniability in the face or corroborating evidence). Why the hell do they need more tools?

Perhaps someone in law enforcement could shed some light on this. After all, I am looking at this from the outside.
Backups. If you can backup someone's brain (which should be doable in silicon), then even if they contract cancer, you can simply back them up for a few hundred years (or however long it takes) until there's a cure.
Awesome, thanks for the support and let us know what you think!
I was referring to this part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BSa75Cw_s

At about 1:40 in.

YMMV of course, I'm certainly not the best FPS player but I found this significantly more frustrating than any other point in the game by a large margin mainly because I kept losing because of a dumb NPC.

When I was googling around I found a lot of people frustrated by this part. I did most of the game on hard but struggled with this part on easy.
Show HN: Color Alchemy, my game labor of love
In what democratic discourse are child porn traders engaged in? Protest over age-of-consent laws?

I don't think that is as clear cut as you make it out to be.

But yes, child porn, hate speech and a few other things might not be "essential for democratic discourse". I'm still not convinced censorship is the best tool to help fight the underlying problems. And I do believe the underlying problems (hate, violence, in some cases mental disease) should be dealt with -- I'm unconvinced the media files actually do much harm on their own -- due to the nature of their contents in general.

Now we need laws to limit speech that attacks and harms people (such as being able to prevent people from (legally) distributing pictures and film on the Internet against our will) -- and it is natural that government does that on behalf of those that are not adult and/or have guardians that can do it for them.

But there is a difference between that, and a blanket ban on media based on the imagery contained within.

Child porn would at least be relevant as evidence in a trial, and possibly (with victims not recognizable) in media cover of such a trial.
I don't mean to be hard on you, I was really just ranting against this pervasive behavior, not specifically just you. I can see how this could happen. I just think we should all try to proactively hold ourselves to higher standards of doing business and employing people.
From the perspective of the company's overall performance there is no question that just because some product was an acquisition is a minor detail, it's of course their prerogative to make use of resources on-hand as they choose. However from the perspective of measuring talent and ingenuity it's hard to ignore a company relying so heavily on Plan C to ensure success of their products, and when it comes in the form of a price war in an already cut throat sector I find the absence of finesse in their strategy remarkable, something like a rabid bull in a china shop after feasting on the brains of 20,000 Phds.

Least of all after witnessing the random price changes with App Engine, there's no reason to believe this low pricing is for the long term, so it's not like this is even good for consumers.
> .. Google's fleet undoubtedly has more machines than Amazon's in total ..

Given that this assertion is mandatory for your argument to hold water, actual numbers to support your claims are required here. And since Google and Amazon don't publicly share this data, where does that leave us?
Step 1: Stop misusing the word "hacking". It's lame.
...unless Amazon matches Google and retorts "let's battle this out on agility, support, security, service"
Facebook will lose way more logins from shoving more and more sponsored spam in the news feed then they will by a few milliseconds in latency from SSL.
Actually came here to the comments to say exactly this. Will be interesting to see if the Syrian government has people pretend to be free citizens go online and post to say "hey don't worry about what you read in the newspapers. Everything is great here."
All the responsive stuff just comes from twitter bootstrap.

Backbone is used when creating a page–mainly because we have certain attributes and form fields that only apply to certain pages.
Workless: dynamically scale your Heroku worker dynos
We're Changing The Fragrance Industry. We Want To Make You Smell Like Sexy-Time.
I suppose a more sinister (and perhaps) real profit is that it serves as commercials/advertisement for child sex rings/human trafficers. If by nothing else boosting demand.

But then that would have to be conclusively proved (another possibility is that paedophiles are less likely to prey on real children if they have access to child porn. Based on studies of porn in general, I'd doubt that, however).
I'm sure having some PHP code at a company like Facebook isn't deterring any serious candidates. Working for a company with almost a billion users who've created software like Cassandra, Thrift, HipHop and Haystack and working on writing loosely coupled systems which will run across thousands of machines; analyzing 10s of PB of data every day with Hadoop, there are definitely very specific and challenging tasks which would attract tons of talent. I think having a PHP codebase there isn't indicative that your new job would be sitting and writing crappy PHP code templates all day and wanting to kill yourself because it is so boring. Just my 2c.
I believe you are mischaracterizing the concerns people actually have. I am not particularly concerned about the absolute rights of pedophiles, but I am concerned by what I perceive to be the abridgement of the rights of innocents for the purpose of pursuing the distasteful elements of society. Law enforcement becomes much much easier when you are willing to inflict collateral damage. Uncompromising voices of opposition to that are a welcome foil to those who would see no end to the powers of authorities.
Modern vehicles report OBD-II signals over Controller Area Network, which is used to link most the controllers in your vehicle. All cars after 2008 in the states use CAN for OBD-II.

Most manufacturers have the OBD-II CAN bus connected to the engine controller for diagnostic purposes. If you can gain control of the CAN bus, you can do some real damage to the car. Furthermore, the hardware must write to the bus to get OBD-II data (it's a request/response system), so it's not a read only device.
How to Handle a "Butt Fumble" at Work
The source for this easter egg is from BSD, not Mac. Likely the import came from FreeBSD, but the LOTR calendar long predates FreeBSD:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=57623
>but I'm not sure how that distinguishes the Tor exit node from the ISP

I think it's closer to raiding someone who had their wifi unprotected and someone jumped on and did something illegal.

An ISP is a legal entity that has a certain relationship with its customers. This includes identity and at least some form of monitoring (logging and cooperation with authorities). Tor is opening your connection up to anyone in a totally anonymous and encrypted way. This is not to say that the guy is guilty or even that it's right to raid him, it's just saying that I don't think it's fair to argue he has similar legal protections. In the case of an ISP they don't have to raid them, they just show up with a subpoena and the ISP coughs up the info.

>The question is, do you want to ban anonymizing services or not?

I think that is precisely what they want to do.
Heroku down?
Looks like Heroku has crashed...
Using Clojurescript with AngularJS
OBD computers (especially anything before those even attempting to follow even a semblance of a standard) were a mess. They remain so even still. Lots of proprietary info and divergent technologies.
Very few will be this tenacious, so if you have a startup, don't get your hopes up unless the pool of workers is really desperate.
Fox steals phone, sends text message to owner
I find AI absolutely fascinating. I was having coffee earlier this week with someone working on this and he was telling me that although they have managed to accomplish this, there are still parts of what Spaun can accomplish that they can't quite explain.
Apple calls bullshit on the App Annie report
Apple disputes App Annie report: the app store did NOT grow just 13% this year — it grew by over 200%
Most of the neat things that this device can accomplish could also be done with an OBD-II to Bluetooth interface, which can be had for ~$20 off EBay.

You don't get remote access to the bus, but it's much cheaper. Not sure how they plan to implement some of the non-OBD-II features (remote unlock is a major one) for all vehicles, since there's no standard. But it'll be interesting to see where this goes.
My Amazon EC2 system just went down as well. It's in N.Virginia.

Can't load these pages either...wow:

http://www.amazon.com/

http://status.aws.amazon.com/

edit: 30 seconds after I posted this, everything came back.
The author does mention the "anti-advertising talk in the hacker world", but unfortunately he doesn't seem to be interested in addressing any of the arguments commonly made. The "values" in the title just means "money" in context.

This is an article about "extracting value" using advertising, and why advertising (as a business model) can be quite effective at this.

It takes for granted that "extracting" the maximum "value" from "consumers" is intrinsically good for everyone involved. (I know, I'm overdoing the scare quotes, but I dislike this entire vocabulary).

Obviously not all hackers have any problem with modern advertising; the top post on this discussion suggests that yes, this is where the money is, so you should consider directing your career path towards advertising if you're about to make the choice.

This is a kind of hacking; look for the shortest distance between two points (self <-> money), and bridge that gap, however unconventional the jump may be. No need to create anything; just master the ways to influence the purchase decision process. Control the tipping point where people decide, yeah, maybe I should be buying some mousetraps just in case, and the mousetrap makers (good and bad) will beat a path to your door.

I really hope anyone actually choosing between a career in advertising vs basically anything else reads a lot more than just this article, though.
Honey Stinger: Did the FBI informer launch an ecoterrorist plot?
Io language is another great example of a language with a minimal set of universal rules yet incredibly rich metaprogramming.

http://iolanguage.org/
Scoop: Key pricing and launch details of Redbox Instant revealed
Google-search "movies" easter egg
Having just started diving into front end web development, I'm personally finding java and jQuery super useful. I'm also getting excited by some of the new things HTML5 has to offer.
Why "Works with any car built after 1995", what's special about 1995?
> Break even is in the bracket between 10 and 49 TB but after that amazon again undercuts you with 7cent/GB/month

did, i mean did.. did you graph and solve that mentally while browsing the pricing page?
But that would show the IP of the ISP, and you won't know it's from Syria.