skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re point 2: As EliRivers has also stated, taking a counter offer when you have already stated your intent to leave can lead to a bad environment for both you and your employer. I don't see anything wrong with using that counter offer to try and negotiate a bit higher at the new job but personally I would suggest not taking counter offers.
KidsCash: Fun, educational online money-management for kids
I'm not a Ruby programmer, but a couple of these things just look completely wrong:

# good

def some_method(some_arr)

some_arr.size

end

Omitting the return statement is a good thing? How do you know if this method even returns anything? .size could be a method that doesn't return anything, right, since parens are optional?

#good

do_something if something_else

This, to me, is horrible.

If you're just scanning down the file, you can easily miss the if statement, and assume the do_something always goes off.

Also, it's incredibly hard to process when I'm mentally executing the code in my head. Generally if there's a method call on the left, you just do it... but now we hit this if statement, ok, so mentally undo the method call we just processed, now check the if statement... now skip back to the do_something and reapply the method call... and now skip the if statement and continue on in the code.

...or you could just do
if something_else then do_something
(if you really must have single line if statements, which I am also against, but not so much as the if statement after the method it's controlling access to)
Some good reading on the subject of a possible Helium shortage: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13757/is-there-a...
FBI Catches Criminals Blamed For The The Butterfly Botnet
As jtchang said, yes it comes down to planning.

Ask the founders (or if you are one you should know this) what your daily active uniques are. Also ask what language you are getting code in. Java needs more headroom than c++ for instance.

Then plan +40% capacity of whatever they tell you.

Always use an Aws autoscaling group to shave costs, but price as if you had always on on demand pricing.

Don't forget to think about supporting infrastructure. Do you need memcached? If you do how much? Will you run your own or use elasticache?

It all comes down to architecting your system on a whiteboard with needed resources (CPU, ram, etc) and then take that and apply it to the the instance type matrix and see where it fits

My experience is based on three startups each with 2n or greater redundancy each handling at least 500 req/s into the frontend
Not really. It's not a hard problem to solve if you start at the right end of it rather than retrospectively apply it.

Capturing the mouse position is perhaps legitimate for an "application" but not necessarily a "document". The web conveniently has turned from an information medium into a catch all for pretty much every hack that is imaginable. That's where it's all fallen over. "documents" are now "applications". This has lead to all of the crocks of shit out there. Office VBA and programmable documents are in a similar state.

I firmly believe we need to make the distinction between a document and an application and have appropriate sandboxes and/or virtualization for each.

Documents deliver information.

Applications deliver means of interaction.
> Self modifying code is a can of worms. Many things can go wrong, and good luck debugging the mess.

Linux uses self modifying code (usually at startup) to efficiently support booting the same kernel on single an multiple processor machines.
Homeland Security Pays San Francisco To Buy Surveillance Equipment
Yes. An unfuzzy line would imply an objective definition, and I think it's clear a such doesn't exist.

But what I meant by "explain" was more the other way around - if the intended observer can't independently identify it as art, it's not. Mostly, really, I just tend to get a little upset over the pompousness of declaring something fairly trivial you've done "art", because you can construct some platitudes about it being a commentary on some social issue.
Entando Meets Open Data
> 5) You miss pre-v.5 WebObjects

FTFY :)
So if I go to Mexico, I can't code for fun on my laptop? I hope that's not the case.
I am sorry she got deported but between the fonts, short sentences and colors I already have a headache...at maybe 20% of the article.

sorry for being off topic but it annoyed the hell out of me.
I tried a few times, even with colors only, and didn't win once... Now I have to stick to it as a matter of principle :)
I know there are specific exemptions for some stuff in the UK - tech support is one of these. If you have sold hardware or software to a UK company, you're allowed to come into the country and fix it with no special visa. Anything other than directly fixing the problem would be considered consultancy and a visa violation.

There are some other exceptions but most work or work-like activities you'd need a visa of some sort for.
Executable documents are powerful tools for teaching and learning.

These already exist, though, and the ecosystem already has a lot of support and momentum behind it: javascript within the browser.

Would you explain what some of the benefits are in comparison to this? I'm an outsider so I don't have a very firm understanding of what the implications are.
Indeed.

London 101 though: It's tricky to see Big Ben as it's one of the bells housed inside the tower. The tower is officially called "Elizabeth Tower" (recently changed from the "Clock Tower" in honour of the Jubilee).

There are tours to see the bells (and Big Ben itself) but they seem to be only available to UK residents via their MPs. I've never bothered to try (I'd rather sort out a tour of Lord's cricket ground first).
Not that close...

$ date +"%y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S.%N"
12/12/12 12:12:12.367166822
I think only the Plan 9 people have got the idea so far.

The problem that has shot us as a race is that in the 1990s, technology became suddenly ubiquitous and whatever was lying around was glued together to fill a niche which took off before people had a chance to think about it and engineer something sound. An analogy perhaps:

http://megaswf.com/s/2529389/
> "Too often, people seem to give up on learning new stuff at an older age. Usually around 30."

Since when has 30 been "an older age"? It's still well within the 1st half of a persons life (assuming average life expectancy), never mind the latter part of the 2nd half.

As a 30-something myself, I'm constantly learning new technologies (only this week I started teaching myself Go).

I know the computer industry is a very youth-orientated sector. But calling 30 year olds "old timers" is a touch unfair.
Remember NEXT:Generation ?

I loved that magazine.
Available via marmalade as well.
As far as I can remember - yes, it will try to overwrite your Python dir, at least it did for me on my Windows machine (I backed up my original C:\Python27 before trying EPD, and then had to restore it, IIRC; there was also some mess with paths, but nothing incurable). I also tried installing EPD into its own directory, but Windows EPD package failed to run Notebook anyways (some issues with Tornado), and I was just too excited to try Notebook. Jumped to Ubuntu@EC2 and was running Notebook with EPD from it in 5 minutes.

Your mileage may vary, of course, so I'd say have a backup and give it a try - at least EPD didn't ruin anything for me. I'm pretty sure IPython Notebook on Windows machine is doable with some lib-hunting/building, since I managed to have fully functioning IPython Qt console installed and running perfectly on Win7 right now, and Notebook is just a couple additional requirements away from it.
Stop being naive.
> In short: Is Couchbase somewhat like the next CouchDB?

No, CouchBase shares very little with CouchDB, CouchDB retains the HTTP API and the original replication abilities.

CouchBase drops the HTTP for the Memcached API and adds speed + clustering.

If you want to look at what the 'next couchdb' looks like, look at BigCouch.
HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.
Apache CouchDB is the original opensouce project. The guy who started it left a year ago (?), but the project is alive. How much so? I don't know..

Membase does not exists, it was renamed to Couchbase Server. It used to be CoucbDB + Memcache, which seems like a strange combo to me, but I haven't tried it. Also, I guess it has evolved since then. According to wikipedia: "It has a separate and independent community, provides a very different set of capabilities, and supports very different use cases".

CouchDB still looks interesting, it "more different" than many of the other nosql databases. But you might have a hard time building Facebook with it: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-Novemb...

For me, that's not an issue :)
Also, the release notes says it has a "new replicator", so ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couchbase_Server
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchDB
However, the site will never keep the API's the same. The mini-program may stop functioning a few years after the person's death, and there will be nobody to change it
How about artists with a following ask for crowdfunding for their next project.
Introducing my open source Nginx monitoring tool
Eh, that sounds like good advice to me. I shower whenever I get smelly, which sometimes can be every two days if I haven't been very physically active. In the US/UK, people usually take a morning shower, while I prefer mine in the evening.

Just because a culture is different doesn't mean it makes no sense.
My dealings with government officials is never give them more information than they ask and always tell the truth. If you need to lie believe the lie until it is the truth ;).

If you are in transit, quite common for Heathrow, don't mention you have family in the UK unless they ask for family in the UK. If they do ask know where they live. If you have a tourist visa don't mention work you plan to or might be doing in the near future in the UK.

They are there to try and trip you up in a lie so they can question you further. You know how you can tell someone is lying by the way they go into too much detail on some aspects of their story but not others, don't be that person.
You might be interested in something similar I've been running for a few years:

http://mincepi.es
Returning the last expression is quite handy for a lot of functional patterns. One gets used to it very quickly, especially one has used lisp at all.

Parens being optional is indeed a flaw in Ruby's design.

Post-if can be handy, sometimes.
> Omitting the return statement is a good thing? How do you know if this method even returns anything?

In Ruby, all methods return the value of the last expression executed in the method.

> .size could be a method that doesn't return anything, right, since parens are optional?

This is in theory true but never happens in practice.

Edit: Ruby has no "non-method" properties on objects. Everything is a method call, regardless of use of parens.

> If you're just scanning down the file, you can easily miss the if statement, and assume the do_something always goes off.

An experienced Rubyist would catch it, if not at first glance, with the second. This is used relatively sparingly, and in scenarios conceptually similar to an early bailout return statement. It makes sense where it makes sense, if you will.

Neither of these is a problem in practice. It may be an issue of familiarity and comfort with the language, but in my experience it doesn't take long to be comfortable with either of those conventions.
21*2=42, this is the number game all over again,
all hail douglas adams!
Automatic Generator of Regular Expressions 1.1
We have slightly improved our automatic generator of regular expressions from examples, mentioned in a previous post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682545).

We describe how the system works---very informally and very briefly. Then, we will list some of the open questions.

The webapp generates regular expressions automatically, only by means of text extraction examples. An example is a string coupled with the substring to be extracted.

It is a research prototype developed by our lab and we believe it is the only existing tool where users provide only examples of the desired behavior. Being a prototype, though, it is far from being "perfect" and we will greatly appreciate any comments or criticism.
Colleagues of mine had a review paper on opinion mining published quite recently at this address if that is an interest of yours: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13278-012-0057-9 or without paywall: http://ge.tt/8qDJWPT/v/0?c
I doubt it, most mobile connections are behind NAT and/or firewalls, preventing one from connecting to devices.
I can't believe you posted this like 10 hours ago and nobody bit, this owns
UFC News: Mark Hominick Retires: Highlight Video: I'm Comin' Home
It's a shame that before releasing that to the public noone gathered few terabytes of such data and put it up on torrents.

We might learn a lot about how people use computers and UIs with such data.
Apparently there is a need to deliver documents with interaction. A browser is an application that delivers information, which delivers interaction... It's a mess, real world is never clean. And it's always changing...
Their showers frustrate me to no end. It's really hard to reach everywhere with them, I wonder why handheld ones haven't caught on.

Tipping is another major pain point for me. I never know when to tip (Do you tip cab drivers? If so, why? Their whole job is to take you to the place you asked for, that's why you pay them). This leads to me overspending a lot, since I didn't factor a 20% increase on the order prices (which usually are pre-tax anyway, so the increase comes to 30-40%).

Frustrating. In Greece, we only tip waiters and delivery people, and that's 1, 2, or maybe 3 euros if you're very generous. On orders of more than 100-150 euros, you might tip 5. It's not a percentage because the waiter didn't do proportionally more work in bringing me a 100 euro steak than in bringing me a 10 euro side.
We do make sure that it works without the rest of the Scipy stack, so it's useful for people outside the scientific world. But most of the core developers have a scientific background, and that's where we see the most interesting challenges.
> Omitting the return statement is a good thing? How do you know if this method even returns anything?

All methods return something.

> If you're just scanning down the file, you can easily miss the if statement, and assume the do_something always goes off.

This is actually one of the arguable points in that styleguide. Some people share your disapproval for inline if modifiers. Anyway it's not that bad after getting used to as long as lines aren't too long and predicates aren't too complex.
Gaming Google Scholar Citations, Made Simple and Easy
Meh. Just be British and don't worry about it! ;-)
Here's my take on it:

CouchDB: Still there, still doing their thing but now as an Apache project. A few companies have built businesses around it such as IrisCouch (SAAS platform) and Cloudant (who maintain the open-source BigCouch which is API-compatible with CouchDB but adds more scalable clustering).

CouchBase 2.0 (née Membase/CouchOne): Basically a version of MemBase (which was developed by the memcached developers) with some of the engine parts and concepts from CouchDB mixed in. My understanding is that a lot of things were also written from scratch. The idea is that it's the best of both worlds: good in memory dataset performance, disk persistence, data replication, cluster rebalancing and partitioning. Not sure how it works in practice.

The name is a bit unfortunate because it appears to be more like memcached from the developer API perspective than CouchDB. If successful, I don't think CouchBase will replace CouchDB but it will instead carve out its own place in the ecosystem.
> Parens being optional is indeed a flaw in Ruby's design.

This flaw allows us to have nice DSLs unencumbered with parens.
I agree that it's a crude measure, but I don't think the situation is quite as bad as you make out; your intuition about paper libraries is misleading you.

What's being counted as a single item here is not a single bound volume of a chemistry journal, nor the entire archive of Bioconjugate Chemistry, but rather the entire chemistry-journals wing of the library: 539 gibibytes, including 226 different journals. By comparison, the latest five items on http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... are 3.7MiB, 11.7MiB, 350MiB, 730MiB, and 260MiB; the chemistry-journals library is some 2000 times the size of the median of these and 120 000 times the size of the smallest, which happens to be a two-volume book called "Great Moments in Mathematics".

It turns out that when you have a power-law distribution crossing five orders of magnitude, like the one that characterizes file sizes, rather than the much narrower distribution that characterizes book sizes, you actually can get a useful approximation of the makeup of the total by looking at the makeup of only the largest items. It's surely not an unbiased estimator, but it's still a useful one.

Feel free to invest the work to do a better approximation.
What's The Most Important Part of The Sale?
> This discussion is all about the agent that sits on the clients premises, correct?

Correct.

> wait, you want the agent to receive requests for data? From what other clients?

I originally had this in mind, but while working through the problem it is both unnecessarily and a potential friction point (firewall issues with outside clients starting connections, etc). I'll just make the client poll the server at intervals for whatever functions need doing.

> First define your server side RESTy JSON API. Then write poll based client agent, extract data, transform, PUT to API. Don't bother with embedded http server or rpc etc. Add a --daemonize option (it's _really_ not too complicated) for customers who don't like crontab. And finally customers who don't want to run your agent can write their own against your published API. Maybe they don't want out bound http directly from their db. They could implement different transport and have a shim to your API service.

Excellent, this sounds simple and robust. I realized last night that if the client initiates all the connections, all it needs to do is create HTTP connections to URLs. Nothing fancy. Should even be pretty easy to BasicAuth over SSL too, which will be important for security.

I know Python has a few libraries for daemonizing scripts, I'll investigate those after the basic crontab functionality is complete.

Thanks again everyone. Glad to see that I was over-thinking things. Simple is good =)
Spotify's interface really sucks, have you checked out Rdio or Rhapsody?
In my tech environment, 3 cost-driven retailer clients with ~1000 branches have some 3rd party software which requires some AD to be present. Samba 4.x will be a nice option. They will start by migrating some branches from Windows Servers to Linux based AD services and move ahead as they see success.

Most people try to measure the cost benefit of free software, with TCOs, CALs, admin salaries etc. That is fine, but the true benefit of free and open source software in my experience:

1) The absence of license considerations in designing and developing systems; this frees the designer's mind in planning, and building. Now the system components can be planned without fear of a multitude of diverse, artificial license schemes.

2) The absence of a license-selling company; this frees the management's mind in estimating and revising the costs moving ahead. License-sellers like Oracle, Microsoft are well known for figuring out diverse sets of confusing licensing schemes. They spend their money in hiring the best sales people which are famous for hunting and then farming clients in the span of 5-10 years ahead by first locking them down.
Are you suggesting that there is something uniquely vulnerable about web technologies? Problems occur at every level of the stack from the OS on the client up to the server software. The big advantage of that programming model is how different elements can be loosely coupled. You can fix a problem by swapping individual parts of the stack without changing the experience.
Here's how the Zone File of Vatican City (.va) looks like (2007)
Summarizer in java for pdf files
YotaPhone Has LCD On One Side, Electronic Paper Display On The Othe
The brain is designed to process signal and if there is none it will sometimes make up its own. I guess you can compare it to dark current in photo-multipliers.

People who have tinnitus will hear the sound you describe or something similar all the time. When I was little I had the same experience as you, but now I have developed tinnitus and never get rid of that sound any more. Sometimes it also becomes rhythmical which very annoying. The only thing that helps is to ignore it.
Back in the old days they wrote software which wrote documents (in fact the company I work for actually does this) and wrote software which parsed documents. If you need to interact with a document, you write an application which processes it and creates another document!

That neatly assumes that documents are data and not code.
Thanks! Exactly what I meant :)

In other words: there was a WebObjects after v4? ;-)
The agent that sits on the database server is responsible for two things:

- Query the database to identify when various trigger conditions are met

- When a trigger condition is met, extract another piece of data from the database and send to the "Web App" server for processing

Theoretically, the entire agent is unescessary...I could use remote DB access credentials to perform the same task. I assumed most companies don't like giving out remote-access credentials though, and decided a local agent that reports home is a better option.

So a plugin to the database is unnecessary since a local DB connection would be sufficient, but I think the rest of what you said is exactly what I'll end up doing.
Hacktivists Ghost Shell dump 1.6m log-in details on web
Pyramids also come to mind.