skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When do you need that? If 10sec makes a difference, over level is likely too high.
As usual, their summaries leave me with more questions than answers.

A maintenance process whose purpose in life is to delete data from ELB backend database (if it were not the case, you'd see "maint process didn't work right") in such a weird way that it would cause such chaos? Why on earth would such a maint process exist in the first place? I can imagine some possibilities here of course but it feels to me there is more to it than what they've chosen to disclose.

Next. So they lose config data but data path for now not impacted. Fine, makes sense. But then backend, with only partial data, attempts to reconfig running LBs, doesn't fail completely (as in it was able to connect and do at least something but not all actions it was supposed to do) thus forcing otherwise good but impaired LBs into a completely bad state. Sunds suspicious to me.

And then the biggest question - why did they choose to attempt to restore entire backend database when only 6.8% of LBs were impacted?

I also have no idea how a CM process can protect against making a mistake - mistakes happen when somebody is at the controls with or without prior coordination.

All in all, their backend systems are so sophisticated and precisely engineered that any unforeseen/unexpected abnormality caused by manual intervention (be it inadvertent run of a maint script or fat fingered traffic re-routing from primary to backup network) inevitably lead to overwhelming reaction of their automation that makes the problem even worse and extremely hard to recover from.

Very tough position to be in - during these outages, they are essentially fighting the skynet that they themselves created and at their scale there is no way around it.

So hats off to those who've been working on this and good luck taming the beast.
Bytebeat
It's this that I don't really agree with:

>The Goldman Sachs’s of the world will always know how to make use of “freely available to everyone” data before the average guy.

Because the Goldman Sachs's of the world have the data. They buy it from proprietary databases or hire underlings to look it up in dead tree format in the government records office behind three filing fees and six miles of red tape. If there is a buck to be made doing stuff like that, you will find the financiers making that buck.

Putting the data online may help them a little, because maybe now some things that weren't cost effective become cost effective, or the money they once paid to clerks and bureaucracies can now go to marble and champagne. But it helps other people more, because even though it doesn't make the playing field totally flat, it makes it more level than it was before.
I've read that malloc(3) will not always return errors when you expect them to [1]. Any comment on this?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4735589
Oh, no no no. Ill-advised idea. We've gone through this before already, and it was resolved in favor of baseline with optimization. How was it resolved? By website visitors, who hated-hated-hated progressive JPEGs.
Boy, those who ignore history... cue the "Doom Song" from Invader Zim, sung by Gir.

(edited)
President, CJI: Stop Rape Now
They both suck like Citysearch in their own ways, but the Yelp app is marginally worse than just going straight to the browser site.
This really seems like something the market could decide. If there's a large group of people that want an alternative would the opportunity not be great enough for a new company to fulfill it? Who are the restricted bootloaders actually harming? There's still plenty of choices for people that want to install linux on a box and I don't see that this choice will disappear any time soon.
And unlike the cook timer, the just-time timer beep doesn't stop when you press Stop. You must press the timer again.
Thanks for posting this. It's an important subject that deserves smart minds investigating solutions and cures.
Not the point, is it? 50 percent of a 1000W oven is basically 500W. W is energy / time, which is compatible with time division.
We actually pay for georeplication on Azure. Here's the official response from them:

"Why didn’t we just fail over?
We do have geo-replication for Windows Azure Blobs and Tables, where the data from US South is geo-replicated to keep another replica set of the data in US North. We have chosen at this time not to failover, since we believe we can bring back the primary storage stamp in US South in place. One of the advantages of recovering in place is it avoids losing the Windows Azure Queue data in that stamp, since Windows Azure Queues is not being geo-replicated at this time (we are working towards turning that on)."
On a slightly related note, a just-in-time compiler with a superb garbage collector can be more performant in some situations due to its ability to profile and optimize the code while the application is running.

Such runtime statistical analysis and real-time optimization is not possible in an application that is compiled to native code.

For $189, I can slap a 240GB SSD in the machine to make software more performant. The question you have to ask is: How much optimization can a senior-level programmer accomplish for $189?

JDeveloper (an IDE) takes about 30 seconds to start on my co-workers' computers. On my laptop, boasting a 240GB SSD, JDeveloper is ready in about 5 seconds.

See also: http://stackoverflow.com/a/145122/59087

And see also: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp09275/
What Is The Lizard Brain?
Have a look at prison rape stats for the US if you feel the need for some shocking data.
Any large technology company will have lots of employees from cultures that don't celebrate Christmas. One of the nice little upsides of globalization.
This may be the best LinkedIn profile Ive ever seen...
We are facing EC2 Load Balance issue again
http://status.aws.amazon.com/
In these small increments for projects of this scope, absolutely. For smaller things I have yet to cross that bridge, but honestly I'm going to try to steer clear from that type of work unless it comes from trusted connections.
A suggestion to MikeBloomberg: Preventing the next murder on the 7 train
It gives you an excuse to stay in the shower longer, thus increasing the percentage of your bathroom time spent in the shower (which if you ask me, is the best part of your bathroom time).
My point being is that your original opinion seems entirely predicated on the fact that Apps are worse experiences than mobile web. I think this is clearly wrong. For web-apps, I think native-apps can function much better. I guess we'll never ever see a Vidmaker app?

But that's all beside the point... you are so quick to argue against me, you don't even see that we agree. Re-read my original post. As I said, the execution sucks. You want to inform your audience that there's an app option, but most of the implementations suck and are too intrusive.
Muni is 100 years old. Too bad it won’t die
Allocating memory on initialisation is a bit questionable. It's better to alloc no memory and let the growth logic handle that case (either by checking for zero or by including an offset, such as vec->capacity += vec->capacity + 2).

The reason is code like this:

vector vec;
vector_init(&vec);
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
vector_append(vec, some_operation(n));
whole_vector_operation(&vec);
vector_free(&vec);

It's both natural and desirable for this code to do no allocation when n = 0.

Since this is C, you might also include a macro to allow for static initialisation: #define VECTOR_INIT { 0, NULL, NULL } or something.
It is HBR. The point isn't to learn something, it is to feel smart because one is exposing oneself to 'Harvard', fairy godmother of the East Coast wannabe elite.
People want the government to provide the services that they use. Everyone wants the roads to be paved and clean water to come out of the tap and the fire department to show up when you call them. To do that, you have to have a tax base capable of providing the revenue to do all of those things. To do that, you have to attract and retain affluent residents for your tax jurisdiction.

If you take from the middle class to give to the poor and the next city over doesn't, those middle class people vote with their feet, and then you no longer have that money to spend on anything, and your remaining constituents are upset with you when the drop in revenue necessitates a drop in spending.
21st Century Healthcare: drchrono (YC W11) & Eligible (YC S12)
I don't use Facebook and uninstalled it from my Android phone. But as soon as I connect to the internet it comes back as an 'update'!!

It's so frustrating. I don't want the goddamn app.

It's a Sony Ericsson Xperia. Does anyone know how to nuke it forever?
See: Derailing.
When instances of oppression occur, the most important thing to do is not point out the hypocrisies of the victim. It's not to whine about the oppression that YOU have to deal with yourself. It's not to compare your minor suffering to their systematic bullying. Everyone suffers, everyone has their own battles. Now is not the time to dredge it up as if it's more important, or just as important as what is happening here.

No, name calling is not racism. not on its own. It must indeed be backed by a system of oppression. A system of belief about the inherent qualities of a particular race. You apparently believe that all you need to do is call someone a name to be racist. It is your definition of racism that is skewed and uncommon, not mine.
This makes me just a bit nervous. You're scraping bank websites using a headless WebKit browser, which is presumably vulnerable to future exploits. You have my username and password (and probably verification questions) either stored on or accessible from that same server. Who's to say that one of the sites you crawl won't get compromised and used as a vector to compromise your crawler box and--potentially--your customers' banking credentials?
I'm currently a CS student, I'd argue that 2/3 of my class -- of not more! -- would need way more than two hours to accomplish the same 10 lines of code.

There exists a type of CS student that doesn't really seem to enjoy programming all that much -- if at all. They do the minimum required to nail that passing grade, and then never type another line until the next assignment. Thus, when they actually need to pull on some of those tools (like sending some mail), they aren't there.

Not that this guy is one of those, but I'm just saying, they exist, and in alarming numbers.
Good point, however I do understand how it happens. People have a perception of how safe/unsafe their own country is, so adding in the US numbers allows a mental comparison to occur.
The recent spate of gun violence related articles had this as well, with people comparing and contrasting Australia, the UK, Switzerland and a host of other countries. I wondered why these places mattered - I concluded that it provided context.
In this particular case, they can
https://twitter.com/anonaustria/status/285125967830208512
While I don't like generalizations about Europe (there was some topic recently here), this one is certainly true. It's something I admire about the American way of thinking, that failure doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. AFAIK in most European countries (if not all), failure is treated like a toxic disease, both socially and by law. I believe it discourages enterpreneurship on a bigger level we can even imagine.
That's basically any app that has data outside of the device.
I agree the wealthy will generally get to live where they want. I think there can be some variation in where they want to live, though, depending on policies. Some wealthy definitely want to live in urban areas, and others definitely want to live in suburban areas, but for others it may depend: for example, if you build shiny new condo towers with modern amenities, there are people who currently wouldn't consider moving into a dilapidated Mission complex who would consider buying one of those new condos and moving up to the city. So you might bring in some new rich people to SF depending on what gets built. The worry some anti-gentrification people seem to have is that the end result will be that the new demand gets soaked up by new rich people, and the only place demand is lowered is not so much a city-wide basis as a metropolitan-area-wide basis: prices go down in outlying suburbs, which is where the poor people then have to move. That's what seems to be happening in NYC: every time a new neighborhood is gentrified, poor people have to move another 15 minutes further away from work, into yet another further-out area with worse transit.

Some people hope to make the city stay unattractive to rich people, so they prefer to live on the Peninsula or North Bay (or in NYC, maybe some nice condo towers on Jersey's "gold coast"). So you still have the golden ghetto, so to speak, but you try to put it elsewhere. Even leaving aside whether that's a good goal, I think it's certainly a good question whether current policy will actually do that; it's quite possible anti-growth policies won't have that effect anyway (e.g. Paris's anti-growth policy has certainly not resulted in a non-gentrified Paris). The interconnections are pretty interesting though, and seem hard to model, especially with the existing data points (e.g. NYC) having, as you point out, their own oddities.
Genetically modified salmons approved by the FDA
Of course there are scenarios where the app could be better. That's not the point. The point is that nag screens suck, people strongly dislike them, and if you actually do have a mobile app that's much better than the web app, there are better ways of promoting it.

Because here's the thing: when people see a pop up of any kind, they reflexively think "fuck you". And it doesn't take a marketing genius to realize that priming people in this fashion isn't the best opening move. It's like stroking a cat backwards; the simple rule is "Don't do this."

The correct approach is to start by provide people with what they want, the the form they request, without interruptions, redirects, etc. Make them happy before you try to sell them anything. Not until they're satisfied should you insert a plug for your mobile app. Knowing that you'll be taking up valuable screen space, make sure the app really is much better than the web app. Then tell people that it's much better, and that you think they'll really like it for this reason. And that's it.

Give people what they want, don't be a dick, and you're golden.
I got a few situations where I responded with the above line, and I noticed they ignored it and future emails also contained the oem's shameless plug.
You guys have a great product, good to see the brand coming to the table. Looks great.
http://reddit.com/r/askhistorians is very good, btw (although I don't think they would like people taking normative positions)
> Interesting, I didn't realize you could build this library without exposing that type. If you have a moment could you elaborate on how you might achieve this?

Very simple, move the struct to the .c file. Add a forward declaration of that struct to the header file instead.
Awesome, thanks. I think I signed up for the mailing list after that one.
Neil deGrasse Tyson Dancing Up a Storm (As if I Couldnt Love Him Enough Already)
Heh, even as an Apple afanaciado, though a rather poor one, I was thinking lots of iPhone owners liked t
No, nobody cares.
Arsenal vs Newcastle
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that MS is doing the right thing by insisting that hardware makers give users a choice. Microsoft _requires_ that Windows 8 certified devices have an option to disable Secure Boot. They still get blamed though.

Surface RT doesn't have that option, because it is exactly like the iPad except that it is going to be far less popular. To be fair, if there is anyone to be blamed for this alarming trend of locking things down, it is Apple.
Wohnungsräumung
wohnungsräumung wien , wohnungsräumung
Möchten Sie eine Wohnungsräumung starten?
Unsere Wohnungsräumungs-Firma zeichnet sich in erster Linie durch seine außerordentliche Flexibilität, Sicherheit und Ordentlichkeit was das Wohnungsräumung anbelangt aus.
Die Bereitschaft, jederzeit zur Kundenberatung sowie zur Besichtigungsvereinbarung für Wohnungsräumungen für unsere Kunden erreichbar zu sein.
Right.. he is personally disappointed that others do not share his interests. He isn't suggesting that you should be similarly disappointed.

Obviously if he thinks the general HN crowd isn't interested he doesn't expect the general HN crowd to be saddened by that fact.
We aren't disagreeing. I agree, current execution sucks. READ my original post.

I was just calling out dpe82's absurd absolute statement that they suck because all apps "do little to nothing to add to the content or user experience"... Implying that if they the app did offer substantially more, then it would all somehow be acceptable.
Thank you for an Indian perspective. The broader problems of inequality and poverty don't help, but raping someone to death with a steel bar seems a touch too much to blame on Indian society and a decreasing sex ratio. There are clearly some big problems around sexual abuse in India, but I think that some individuals could be receiving some more condemnation and a society a bit less.
Indeed, this has been done many times before and more carefully. I don't know why this was newsworthy, we used to implement dynamically-sized arrays for our programs in C 20 years ago ... :-/
These guys are great. Cisco Owned!
Spiderman skin stops a bullet
Ninjablocks.com are Australian and always up for a chat. .

Cheers

Marcus
Oh hey back to condescending dickhead mode, you seem great at interacting with other humans...

Anyway, all those theories are fine, but I don't believe the development that could physically be done in the next 3-5 years would outpace tech employees and I believe that it would, as the article says, push lower income SF residents out. This is the entire point of this article, and seems to be going over your head. Not to mention that the article actually addresses the idea of building high rises all over and talks about how poorer high rises will be crime ridden while the upper class high rises would push all the locals and culture out. But hey, why use common sense or rational thought or even bother to read when you can just act like an insufferable condescending asshole? Really, I'm never usually this harsh on people, but your path to "winning" an argument, seems to be hearsay and insulting people versus logic and reason. Fuck that.
It's very possible the code change is a reactive fix to seek SEC compliance. Now that it's posted on HN and other places, the impact of the "Sell" query result is significant.
Aren't forums generally all running the same software? I'll bet having a mobile app is just a feature of that suite of software. Probably because the company making the software heard from some of their customers that they wanted that as a feature.
You can't really blame Apple for something Microsoft does. Microsoft is large enough to buck the trend.
Send from my bathroom.
No, Austrians are generally pretty unhappy with the present economic state of the world.
I think you can use Java 8 features in the latest build of the JDK. Not sure, though.
Oh man.. That is a cold, cold way to say no. Great story!
Sowell's "Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy" is also good.
VAK(T): Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, (Tactile). It's been argued that tactile and kinesthetic learners can be lumped into the same group, hence the parentheses. It's also hard to define exactly what the differences between the two are.
Great links thanks.

One thing I have been wondering is what text to speech synthesis would sound like with non 'human' voices. Most demo's are of course focussed on human voices e.g. http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html but it would be interesting to develop some 'creature' ones as per elmo, furby, alvin etc

Have you heard the Karotz rabbit's voice?
Would you send a note to admissions@hackerschool.com with the email you used on that application so we can sort that out? We certainly don't mean to ignore any applications, and if you didn't hear back by the date stated on the app when you applied, I'm sorry about that and I would like to figure out what happened.
I am not blaming Apple for something Microsoft did. I am blaming them for making it acceptable to lock things down.
I have read the book during my difficult times and even during good times. I was able to relate to the various phases of Siddhartha's life. Also liked the certain amount of randomness in the sequence of certain events.

However, I must admit that not everyone may like the book. Some folks I know religiously follow the book as a life guide while some didn't find it all that meaningful. Its entirely on how you want to interpret the book.
There's just an amazing lack of interest in the Surface altogether — except, apparently, from the freedom groups still upset about Microsoft while mostly ignoring the rest of the industry.
I'm not convinced this would be good for much as it is, considering the reality of input devices on Android, but it seems like something like this could have potential in aiding porting. Getting a good terminal emulator ported to Android using this sort of thing to help could be an interesting endeavor for example.
Probably. Microsoft's pushed hard to turn the ARM market into something closer to the PC one - Windows RT devices are required to have UEFI and ACPI, so device discovery is a solved problem. As far as the actual drivers go, the majority of the parts are almost certainly also present in at least one Android device on the market, and the touchscreen presumably uses the Microsoft multitouch protocol that's already supported by the Linux kernel.

The biggest hurdle you'd face is actually that Linux doesn't support ACPI or UEFI on ARM yet. I believe that Linaro are working on that, though.
92 year old widow embarks on adventure, blogs about it.
A good CS student spends some time up front reading all the source code of the libraries they're using, and some code that uses the libraries, to know what they're really doing, what they're capable of, and to learn from them. And by CS student, I include life-long students, and self-taught students.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to learn from a provider that isn't constantly screwing things up? Amazon's systems clearly aren't working reliably.

If Amazon can have an issue of this severity in ELB, one of their core core services, during peak traffic season for their #1 highest profile customer, every one of their services should be viewed with suspicion and you really need to have non-amazon backup systems in place in case they have an incident that affects you. Yes it is painful to leave the comfortable aws womb, but it's time to grow up and start either managing multiple infrastructure providers or build your own.
The problem is that mobile browsers are especially bad, not that dedicated apps are somehow better.

(Regarding most CRUD native apps)
I think the big reason for this is to unlock the engagement goldmine that is push notifications. I bet they've crunched the numbers and would prefer a few users having push notifications to more users not having them.
It’s End or new starting of society:Body of the girl cremated
The "information war" seems like a strange way to look at the world.

I use data, and I benefit from access to data. But my use of data doesn't make someone else worse off, and others' use of data doesn't generally make me worse off.

If they have faster computers than me, that's great.

Equating research and analysis to war sounds silly, and I think it's a really unhealthy worldview.
Well at least they didn't name it a cute cargo cult acronym like YAML and then only later realize it actually wasn't a markup language, then have to come up with a backronym to cover up their mistake.