skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last December I purchased an HTC Titan running 7.5 from a Microsoft Store. A couple months later, HTC released the Titan II, and not long after that, Microsoft announced my new phone was incapable of running WP8. I have never experienced such rapid technological obsolescence with any purchase.

Six months after purchasing my phone, AT&T still hadn't enabled visual voicemail, and numerous WP fixes (including several security patches) were never made available to my device. I'll blame AT&T for that, as well.

I was so disgusted by the experience that I went back to iOS, spending nearly $1300 on two mobile phones over a period of six months.

WP is a fantastic operating system, and for many reasons I do prefer it over iOS. What I did not like was the third and fourth tier app ecosystem, AT&T's interference with service upgrades and patches, and how MS sold me hardware when they knew it essentially would be EOLed with their WP8 announcement.
Because mostly everyone hates PHP. This site serves to show the Python way of doing things if anyone's interested, or is moving away from PHP.

Edit: I am wrong, not everyone hates PHP.
Scion: Motivate for art entrepreneurs
It can be. For instance: school funding.
Huge New Years Event Americans to Blast the Moon with Atom Bombs
This will make your jaws drop. The Americans are apparently planning to nuke the moon this new years eve!
MKV is a container format, not a codec. It's great, and can contain an arbitrary number of audio, video, subtitle, etc tracks. This is why the file sizes can generally end up inflated, people will put all dubs and subtitles into one file. The video stream rarely has anything to do with this (other than the tendency for very high def rips to use mkv).

Secondly, mp4 is a container format as well, but is less generic. MPEG-4 is actually a series of standards. MPEG-4 Part 14 describes the mp4 container format, and MPEG-4 Part 10 describes the H.264 codec.
Clickable:

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3437535

[2] http://goo.gl/UDZ3R [play store link]
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/LumpNet
A Growing-Up Year for Plug-Ins, including Tesla
>Shareholders will be very happy if Intel remains dominant at the high-margin, high-performance end. And competitive everywhere else.

Not with mobile trends and ARM uptake trends persisting. ARM speeds are getting more and more competitive. (I would argue, please forgive me, that signs are pointing towards Linux uptake. Intel's high-margins are on consumer processors as well, surely a large percentage of it. It will hurt as mobile continues to displace desktop and as desktop increasingly targets ARM.
Typically the first stage is destroyed during impact with the water(or ground). The Shuttle SRBs were generally recovered undamaged, but relied on large parachutes and were towed back using a specialized ship.

SpaceX Grasshopper avoids either destroying the first stage, or a labor intensive and expensive recovery process.
Intel would be wise to brand Clovertrail as something other than Atom (or Celeron). Clovertrail perf and efficiency are very good and the Atom name typically suggest otherwise.

If I could get a Surface Pro with a Haswell at the listed Surface Pro prices, it would be a no brainer. But with a 3rd-gen Core i5 -- not so enticing.
You don't seem to sure of yourself.
Gunicorn 0.17.0 released
New features:
allows gunicorn to bind to multiple address
add SSL support
add syslog support
add nworkers_changed hook
add response arg for post_request hook
parse command line with argparse (replace deprecated optparse)
No, although that is a common clause in employment contracts. The GP on the other hand is talking about the default ruling under California law. You're allowed side projects in the same field on your own time, so long as your contract doesn't say otherwise.

(As always, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, etc.)
How many people can lift 30kg 2 meters up?

Lifting 30 kg 2 meters requires about 600 Joules. If it takes 10 seconds to do it, using some kind of pulley arrangement, that's 60 Watts, which is not a strenuous level of effort for a human.

How about doing it continuously?

One 10-second lift every 30 minutes is not "continuously". Also, it would only have to be done when light was needed, i.e., during non-daylight hours when people were not asleep.

it require human energy to power it, which requires food

Humans require food whether they're lifting ballast to power lights or not. How much additional food would they require, if we assume that the entire energy required for the lights is added on (i.e., none of it gets shifted from other forms of exercise)? Let's see.

Suppose the light is in use for 4 hours a day; that means the weight gets lifted 8 times, for a total energy of 4800 Joules. One food calorie (which is actually a kilocalorie) is 4180 Joules. So we're talking less than 1.2 calories per day. What's that, an extra pellet or two of rice?
Show HN: Create, Edit & Play Cross-platform Multiplayer Games
Just made our multiplayer games editor beta public.

If you're interested in making multiplayer games, it would be great to hear your feedback.

WebGL Editor: http://multiplay.io/edit

WebGL Player: http://multiplay.io/play

Android Player: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.softpoetry.androids

Demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2nwNeKRXSo

Full newsletter release: http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=8c8235b00430c5fe69d6da100&id=459513cb80
A significant amount of rocket technology is covered by ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), which means that its restricted to largely US citizens. That means it cannot be legally shared with foreign college students, for example.
The first rockets were basically ICBMs without the warhead. Gemini capsules were launched from a Titan II rocket, for example.
I was not impressed with both the individual and the article.

First off the man deserved all the success he achieved but seriously, he had a solid education, high self-esteem, he was summarily effectual, he showed up to work and was industrious. (80% of success is just showing up- Woody Allen)

If higher taxes assisted him then why is the United States faltering and our educational system becoming such a joke? I mean to say are we not paying enough taxes? If so how high should they be?

I pay federal income tax, SSI taxes, state tax, sales taxes, property tax, garbage fees, gas taxes, utility taxes, I pay car registration fees, and probably a bunch of fees I am missing.

My fed tax rate is 21.7%, my California tax rate is 9.55%, sales sax 8.75% I believe, but with all of the above I easy pay 40% of my income.
Can someone explain why Netflix's service is designed this way? By "this way" I mean, why are some devices served by some set of servers/services exclusively, and apparently web browsers and other devices served in some other way?

I'm not questioning if there's a good reason that it's done this way, but that reason just not obvious to me. I would have designed such a system where there is one endpoint which all clients hit, regardless of platform. But I have never designed the world's largest video streaming infrastructure.
The Voice of Non-Conformity – A Conversation with Chris Guillebeau
All private space companies fall under the umbrella of ITAR.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms...
Guidance
Dear HN:
I am at a crossroads.. a journey lies before me, shrouded in uncertainty and mystery. Two paths: The C# one and the Javascript one.

Which do I take? What say you, great oracle?

I await a vision.
The webm container format is a subset of Matroska, so that should widen its base to some degree.
Nor is it equivalent to handing over the fruits of your work to armed thugs, another incredibly common conflation.
Amazon is showing "Performance issues" on their status page.

I think we've all misunderstood. They actually aren't reporting service disruptions, but rather their revenue having having "performance issues" with all the SLA crediting they'll have to do.
Dangerous for some humans, you mean. Clearly not dangerous for Mr. Wayne.
With any story like this, I have a hard time extrapolating it to the circumstances of anyone else. Most people have been fortunate to run into individuals that ultimately benefitted their careers. I certainly have. But let us not extrapolate one man's experience to everyone's experience. Most people never have the opportunity to even be easily lucky. Often, people have to work very hard to grasp just a little bit of luck. That reality should be recognized. And I cannot complain. I have done well for myself by working hard and grasping opportunities.

Scalzi is right to consider how he arrived at his current position. However, the tacit assumption that everyone in his position enjoyed the advantages he did is false and pernicious. Many people work much harder and sacrifice much more than the story portrays. I don't begrudge Scalzi in the slightest. My concern is that people will think his experience is typical.

Hard work is a big part of it, luck is a big part of it, and being in the right place at the right time is a big part of it. People that work smart, hard, and efficiently are not common but those that do, or at least occasionally approximate it, generally do well over the long term no matter how their "luck" plays out.
The intention is to make both stages of the Falcon 9 reusable and to have them land vertically back at the launch site. This does add weight, for thermal protection and landing gear, and it uses up some propellant but on the whole the savings in capital and operational costs should more than make up for it. Right now the entire rocket is thrown away for every launch, which is hugely expensive. But if they can manage to get dozens of launches out of each vehicle then they can reduce costs by a huge margin even if payload is cut in half or worse.
Probably worth noting that prices and regulations vary wildly on a state-by-state basis.

In Pennsylvania all liquor and wine can only be purchased from state stores, and beer can only be purchased from licensed beer distributors (never grocery stores or the like, with very rare 'technicality' exceptions). (Restaurants and bars also sell beer, so in practice most people who buy beer in Pennsylvania will buy a six-pack from the local bar or restaurant, often at rather steep prices).

In Utah, chances are you won't be able to buy that same $15 six-pack of beer; alcohol content is limited to 3.2 ABV (very low, for those not versed) unless the establishment is also licensed to sell liquor.

Then you get into the whole local government regulations/taxes situation. There are hundreds of "dry counties" in the US where you simply cannot buy alcohol at all. "Blue Laws" seem to be more common than not, even in cities.

It's a complex situation. In some places in the US alcohol will flow like water (Such as Vegas, as you eluded to), but in other places alcohol laws will make Canada appear liberal in that respect.
Had this happened to me a while back. They don't completely "delete" your stuff, just disable access to it. After contact support and the admin of the account, everything is sugar again.
If you're netflix, I'm sure you have staff/engineers at the office 24/7 during this time of year specifically. At least, I would hope they did.
You've crowdfunded an album on Kickstarter, a bus tour across the country on Indiegogo, and a billboard with friends on Crowdtilt. Nice :)

I don't know if many have used all three like you have - Which one was your favorite? Or least favorite?
This speaks to a few things and our opportunity to participate in them:

No one is self made. Everyone owes it to breaks from those around them. Get over yourself. Your life isn't the only hard or misunderstood one.

Give more breaks than you get. No one is a stranger or enemy. Treat everyone as your friend and they'll become one. Treat someone like an adversary and they'll become one too.

If you don't take the time to learn someone's story you have no right to an opinion other than wishing them well.

Keeping kindness, goodness, and sharing opportunity is the bedrock of a world I want to live in.

Keeping kindness, goodness, and sharing a growing thing is a world I want to work on. We're dealing with our own stuff, together. Not everyone will get, or do this. I have my choice.

Remember how connected we are. How I treat others is how I truly do end up treating myself or being treated. Things aren't black and white, but the greys can lighten or darken based on me. The drop is in the ocean, and the ocean is in the drop.

Our universal responsibility for and towards each other. When we can see that we are owed nothing and owe our respect and contribution to the world in exchange for becoming better every day, we begin to realize what life is really about.

It's your job to understand yourself first, enough to keep moving, inward, onward and upward. Through your understanding of yourself, you'll be able to connect to others deeply and in a meaningful way. As much as this may terrify some, it will involve learning to use your heart and gut as much as your mind.

Our responsibility for our society, and our society towards us. We get the responsibility we deserve and demand/contribute to in our actions.
I wonder what the most popular topcolor choices are. I'd go crazy without aaaaaa, which is highly effective in reminding me to be logged in, even on mobile browsers, etc.
I don't think he's arguing that it's equivalent to charity, but that's it's part of building an equal-opportunity society. He's arguing that he benefitted from that society, much of which was funded by other people's taxes, and is happy, now that he has money, to pay taxes that keep it in existence for others.

My parents have a vaguely similar view. My dad lived for a few years when he was a kid from social-security disability payments that his father received; and he went to college on a CalGrants scholarship, which at the time covered you almost fully if you had good high-school grades and were attending in-state. He would've been in quite difficult circumstances if those programs didn't exist, and would've had to hope for charity, which tends to be much less reliable and less uniformly available (e.g. churches tend to help their own members first) [1]. So now that he's an upper-middle-class engineer, he doesn't have a problem paying taxes that support those kinds of things.

[1] This is actually an argument F.A. Hayek makes for why there should be a minimal state safety net, even though most of Hayek's writing is anti-socialist and pro-free-market. He argues that, otherwise, people have to rely on more cliquish safety nets (extended-family clans, churches, etc.), which produces a tribalist rather than individualist society. So, perhaps counterintuitively, a little bit of collectivism at the top level (safety net for everyone) produces more individualism throughout society (people don't feel the need to cling to these tribalist groups for safety). He supported taxation to pay for education for similar reasons, though he argued for provision of the education to be market-based (via school vouchers).
Nice explanation. One more thing: this also leads to an algorithm for doing ordinary, non-incremental regular expression matching in O(lg n) time on a parallel machine. It uses a clever method which I think was first discovered on the old Connection Machines by Danny Hillis and Guy Steele:

http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/hillis-steele-d...
I had the same experience. When watching movies with my SO tonight, I explained that Netflix uses AWS and that AWS was experiencing problems. We started watching a movie on Amazon prime and she asked "So I guess Amazon Video isn't using AWS?"
I also just gave up my iPhone 5 for a week to test the HTC 8x I am using to dev with. I have been very pleasantly surprised with how much I like it. I'm sticking with the iPhone for now, but I really like wp8. I'd put it at a close second just ahead of android. Dev'ing for it has been nice as well. First app is in review as we speak.
> That said, information is developed in these programs

That would not be my null hypothesis. This kind of work strikes me as unlikely to be done in a way that has scientific utility. It's quite possible that I'm just not thinking of a similar circumstance with a useful outcome, however.

Also, the use of knowledge gained from unethical research conducted as part of Nazi war crimes is a highly divisive topic.
"doing jobs that become much harder because of location, etc etc all for 30% less money" --- our mechanics make $75 an hour flat rate. That's 3x what they make at their respective dealerships (on an hourly basis). The fact that master technicians (all 8 ase certs, 20+ years of experience) from mercedes, ford, nissan and toyota are offering mobile car repair services and have already finished over 1000 repairs on our platform is probably a good indicator that not every mechanic thinks the way you do.

I am not claiming that you are wrong or that YourMechanic will succeed (only time will tell).

p.s. Of the 1000+ cars we have fixed, not a single customer ever came back to us claiming that our techs made the dents, scratches, stole stuff etc. I am sure we will one day run into some of those interesting people. I may be cynical and/or naive, but I happen to believe that most people are basically good.
I'm really loving Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) http://amzn.com/0321721330
> "Nobody who is libertarian argues that there should be charity or we shouldn't care for our fellow person (well nearly nobody, I'm sure their are some mean spirited people out there). The point is how efficient we do it."

I disagree. More often than not when libertarians come around on HN the "it isn't efficient" argument seems more like a proxy for "we shouldn't do this" without sounding heartless.

It's also based on a bit of blind faith that, failing any requirement to help their fellow person, people will do it on their own, at rates high enough that the people who need help will be helped. This bit of blind faith simply doesn't jive with observable reality around the world.

Most of the time I see the argument made "government is inefficient, we should leave social assistance to charities" is made knowing full well that such a scheme will never work, and that the unfortunate/needy will simply be left in the cold. It's intellectually dishonest and a cheap ploy to avoid saying "well, let them die".

The entire stance - or at least, the stance in the way it seems to be most commonly expressed - is fundamentally mean-spirited, made all the more galling by the disingenuous reframing.
Cloud with a single point of failure. Merry XMas!
I think this requirement says a lot about Scion's goal:

[ ] I am between the ages of 18 - 35

The (10,000+ word, with table of contents) T&C's also include mandatory arbitration, anti class-action, and a jury waiver. To their apparent credit, they say this is opt-out'able. At any rate, this appears to be a highly restricted and promotional latch onto incubator culture, similar to how they have previously attached themselves to graffiti and tuner subcultures.
You rarely hear of Google outages, or iTunes, or Youtube, or [insert six dozen other popular brands], do you? Yes it can happen to the best of them, but the EC2 outages are really piling up lately.

To me, this makes perfect sense. Google products are almost always designed to tolerate data center failures, and so you don't hear about data center failures affecting Google products. On the other hand, Joe's Random EC2 app is not designed for the same high availability, and so it's down whenever Amazon is. (This, incidentally, is a reasonable trade-off for most people. A few hours of downtime a year is often much cheaper than paying engineers to ensure that those few hours are five minutes or less.)

So the flaw here is not Amazon. The flaw is relying on one cluster of computers to handle all your computing needs. Amazon could make their product high-replication by default, but it would be so slow and expensive that nobody would use it. So the task is kicked to the application developers instead of the platform developers, and you should consider holding them responsible for the downtime.

(Incidentally, you can compare EC2 to AppEngine here. How often is your favorite AppEngine app down? Less than your favorite EC2 app, probably, because AppEngine pretty much forces the high-replication datastore, even though the semantics are strange for developers used to traditional single-homed or master/slave architectures. And if you read the AppEngine discussion groups, you'll see that users raise most of the concerns that I describe here: "Why is AppEngine more expensive than EC2?" "Why is AppEgnine slower than EC2?", and so on.)

Now, why does Netflix's video serving go down when an EC2 cell does? I have absolutely no idea. I do know that they do more than just stream bytes, though; they have to authenticate users, track what they're watching, and apply DRM to the streams. So there's that.

If you want fault-tolerant video distribution, look no further than the Pirate Bay. Although their servers are frequently seized, the video bits keep flowing. That's by design, not by accident.
Eww. This is what happens when hackers try to be designers.
We (breadpig) have done a few creative projects on kickstarter that have all gone rather well:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/999790007/trial-of-the-c...
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadpig/to-be-or-not-to...

And now Lester. The founders made a decision to support only creative projects and sticking to it has done wonders for our business, which helps creatives get tangible stuff made with their art, basically. All of our product costs are fully recouped before they even hit the market. It's awesomesauce.

Indiegogo seems to have the branding challenge as a 'we can do it all' platform; I still don't feel like I understand it. Letting campaign managers take the money they've raised even without hitting the goal is an interesting twist. It helped in our case with the bus, which didn't have a very clear, tangible 'goal' (however, our documentary is premiering at CES in January!!)

Crowdtilt (full disclosure I'm an investor) atm works really well for group funding, not crowd funding. That's not just semantic voodoo, it's the difference between getting a beach house among friends funded and a soul legend's album funded with different tiers of rewards.

I'm long on crowdtilt because they're not trying to be another version of kickstarter, rather, a general platform for crowdfunding. I see a lot of reddit in them, which for years heard people making dumb comparisons between us and digg. We opted to make a broader platform for online communities and it's turned out well so far.

e.g.,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/12/12/the-crowdfund...
Good holidays to you, then.
2010 :-|
Very nice writeup. For the GeoIP part, there are actually libraries that will load up the entire Maxmind database into memory. Though it bloats your node app's memory usage as you would expect, it's extremely fast and almost always worth it. We use this library:

https://github.com/kuno/GeoIP
That's not how most TOS are written and since you're not paying for the service (not that that would make a difference in reality) you're not going to get the protection you think you're entitled to. That's not how the law works in reality.