skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm never one to trivialize another company's problems so would hesitate to say Netflix's case is easy, but you cannot counter this statement by saying their architecture is complex. I can build a complex architecture for "Hello World" if I wanted to. Complex architecture != complex problem.
A/C is less needed in Seattle than in other parts of the US because it cools off substantially at night. I was there two(?) summers ago when some weird inversion layer was both raising the temp (105+ F) and preventing the night time cooling. It was miserable.

Here in the southern US, even when it's only hitting 90 F during the day, the low might be in the upper 70s which isn't low enough to passively cool a house.
Critical files or not, data loss is a 100% unacceptable bug. I really doubt you will be able to convince anyone that data loss is okay. It's not.

With that said, I think Dropbox is a pretty amazing service and I credit them for getting Google and Microsoft to wake up and make some similar services which are solid and different in some respects (Google Drive and SkyDrive).
So work with eyeball networks and move your gear to the edge; dumping it all in AWS and hoping for the best is failing (at best). Do all the auth/billing/recommendations/transcoding in AWS, and push all the video content out to boxes at the ISPs.
To me there seems to be just as many issues with any belief system relying heavily on suggestion and then asking you to "see for yourself". Isn't this just another form of magical thinking? Most especially if you're accepting a lot of unprovable esoteric beliefs along with your simple meditation practice.
Abuse of prescription painkillers is massive. Acetaminophen does not prevent abuse, it only injures.
I hear this time and time again. "Flash is dead" and it is, except when it isn't. Beatport Sounds use it for playing samples, which means that I cannot use that site on my phone. Since WP8 is so locked down, the only browser option is IE 10 Mobile, so locking me out of flash means that one of the sites I want to go to is not fully functional for me. As a user, that pisses me off.
Will definitely consider, thanks!
Unlimited 3G data in 2012 is a lot more than unlimited 3G data in 2007 was.
You guessed correct!
I take that back. This is actualy very useful!
> The rationale is that sea landings make repair work much harder.

Ist the much more importend things the time and cost of getting the rocket back to where you want it much bigger?
Lean startup intro (with no buzzwords)
> When you build your own system, you decide how reliable you want it.

Ha! You mean that you discover how hard and expensive it is to build your own reliable infrastructure or how hard it is to hire people to do it for you.
There will always be room for ARM if Intel doesn't compete on price.
I'm curious why it matters that it's the current season. Several seasons worth of shows are available on Amazon as well as on Netflix. I would be much more interested in finding the first 20 or so seasons.
I work for a media streaming site (rank <30k on alexa) and I assure you the architecture doesn't change much when you scale it up to rank 99 (netflix).

"Trivial" may sound harsh but in terms of large scale systems it really doesn't get much simpler than serving static files. Obviously their auxiliary services (billing, content ingestion, social etc.) are nowhere near trivial. But there's no reason for the core services that are required to get the catalog and video to most[1] devices to not be damn near 100% available.

I'm not talking down netflix for having an outage anyway. Shit happens and afaik their overall track record is not bad at all. I only replied to jrockway's claim that multi-datacenter redundancy would require inconceivable engineering effort or amounts of money - neither is true.

[1] Excluding those that need realtime transcoding, absurd DRM schemes or similar.
How about writing code on your phone: https://www.touchdevelop.com/ ?
Thanks for doing this. We should identify the other companies that have an opt-out clause. I hate the fact that we have to sign our rights away just to use the best tools that are out there.

What happened to the open-web??
1. I heard that too, actually. It looks like they just dropped it from the DSM-5: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/dec/02/aspergers-synd...

I guess it makes sense in a way, but it'll probably just confuse popular conception of autism even further. Ah well.
The city I live in is building strip malls at an insane rate while the existing ones have a higher vacancy rate then I have ever seen. A few at the best locations will fill most of the slots, but the rest might have 50% capacity. Who is loaning money for this? Do they think that this capacity will be filled at some point in the distant future?
Agree. There's a really special mix on this board that makes it what it is. I've seen quite a few legit hackers posting here, for many definitions of 'hacker'.
Happy Birthday, Jesus
Merry Christmas to all of you.

A special 'thank you' to all NATO and allied troops stationed abroad and far away from their families. Come back home safely
can we get the "too stupid, didn't understand" version?
The site has been continuously updated since. Time to drop the Slashdot lingo.
And its not all sslenpoint sites either. We've been up through the whole thing. Which is critical seeing as we are a gifting company that provides an easy last minute gift!
Not meant to be a joke -- far from it. What it WAS was an ill-considered expression of outrage. And, btw, FU.
Agreed: here in Australia I get by on $5/ month on prepaid. The 500MB data credit rolls over & I can't use it fast enough - I now have 3.5GB accumulated.

It's a good idea to research cellphone plans, you can probably find something very affordable that suits your usage.
I swear if I see another gray on white web page, I will throw my own S#!7 at you like a 900 pound gorilla in a zoo!
"Flash is dead" means that few developers will allow it as a technology dependency for new long term projects. It doesn't mean that every web site you use will work fine without it.
Haven't we known for years that traditional malls are dying? So-called "lifestyle centers", typically anchored by a Whole Foods or otherwise hard-to-virtualize establishment, have been sprouting up for a decade.

And there's still room for specialty retailers. Somehow the two highest revenue/square foot stores didn't make it into these tables.

Yes, the traditional 50+ store indoor mall is a dinosaur, and there will be fewer and fewer of them each year. No, Americans are not going to stop shopping IRL.
I think Turing's key insight was that a special FA with a tape mechanism could be devised that could imitate any other FA. The power of this FA in imitating other FAs is limited only by the length of the tape.

However the improvement of this construction over any specific FA is that you have a device that can run any FA. As the length of the tape increases you have a device that can imitate the any and all possible FAs.

The CPU is precisely this FA which can imitate any other FA. The tape is memory.

However it is important to note that, at the end of it, any specific program that is being run on finite memory is still an FA.
Uh, yes. So?
Education: Keep it in the family
Get your new Django based web app live with AppFog in minutes
New startup idea: a B2B that customizes the CSS of a client's webpage to a Christmas theme.

It'll make tons of revenue! For 1/365th of the year, anyways.
Sounds great...now put this tech in a Windows Phone and get it to market within a year and you'll have something the other guys don't.
No, compilers that accept "void main" do not necessarily produce executables that produce an exit status of 0. I just tried it with gcc on Ubuntu, and the exit status was 1.

And the validity of "void main" doesn't depend on whether the system uses exit statuses. An implementation may accept forms of main other than the ones defined by the language, including "void main()" -- but if it doesn't, the behavior of such a program is undefined.

The rules are different for freestanding implementations, which are generally for embedded systems; for such systems, the program entry point is entirely implementation-defined, and might not even be called "main". But for hosted implementations, there's no advantage at all in using "void main" vs. the correct "int main(void)".
Write songs with animation programs in the SparrowOS format. God pays you, so I don't have to feel guilty. I would love to distribute a collection of hymns.

Hymns are the only actual use I make of my operating system.

Games are okay, but I've grown-up, personally.

As for contributing to the operating system... the only thing I can think of is AC97 sound support, fucken VMWare is fucken with me by changing shit around. At one point they had ATA on IDE primary; CDROM on secondary master... then they made shit move around for no God damn reason... and they took support for the PC speaker out. They had HD Audio which should have been easier, since I have native HD Audio working. They got rid of HD Audio and PC speaker and made AC97.

I don't give a fuck -- I'm done. Kill them, God.

God says...
high_mucky_muck sparrows wondered solemnities over-anxiously
forsake met Wisdom's conjugal you_better_not tempestuously
Whatsoever Tell chooses sellers sing indited dispenser
fain wither I'll_think_about_it incredibly Oratory Both
forsaking hosts six abound hope variously Lithuania hideous
brings Entrust own unbending still-standing lawyer estimated
Thank you for noticing jwilsco, I couldn't tell myself.
When I was there, all the American flags were just chasing Canada.
HN top bar is in red
the top navigation bar turned red from orange.

I think that is saying Merry Christmas!
Lester's Time Has Come Today (Thanks, HN, You got this started)
Both things like Oxycontin OP and drug clinics seem like good ideas to me. I don't know why you seem to be saying it's one or the other and we're making the wrong choice. I don't think that's a valid representation of the decision space.
Insect screens on openable windows are quite popular in the US.
As a Canadian I laughed at "steep taxes" when I go to the US alcohol is ridiculously cheap and sometimes given out free (e.g. casinos).

Especially hard liquor and wine, I rarely drink but it's interesting to see such a huge difference: 6 pack $15, 1 liter Captain Morgan rum $40, Sauvignon Blanc wine $15
No, local competitors win out over multinationals. This is better in my opinion. Human capital and knowledge are more mobile than ever, and should be even more mobile (why can we import goods freely but importation of labor is tightly restricted?).

This means that local companies in small and developing countries have enormous opportunities they did not have in the past. But multinationals that dump goods into these markets in the hope of securing market share for the future (when the markets actually become profitable for them) are a huge hurdle.

I see no problem with the scenario you described outside of a few select industries. For example, pharma is problematic, but that market is so screwed up it is hardly worth talking about (publicly funded research being turned into private profits, etc.).

Personally, I would rather see IP exceptions built into treaties. For example, if you refuse to sell product A in country B, then other companies can ignore your patents as long as they only sell in country B, etc.
Because poisoning people as a way to get them to stop using drugs is abhorrent?
I admit it's a complicated issue. See my response above... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965196
Shareholders will be very happy if Intel remains dominant at the high-margin, high-performance end. And competitive everywhere else.

AMD has been competing with Intel on price for the past two decades.

I know which of these two stocks I'd have rather owned over the past ten years:

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

The data from this article is the first I've seen that indicates Intel could dominate the high-end mobile chip market in the near future.
>FU

You're not even new here. Why is it even relevant that you visited Auschwitz?
"I pay a lot of taxes. I don’t mind because I know how taxes helped me to get to the fortunate position I am in today."

Exactly! I pay a lot of taxes too and do not mind. How could I be stingy on welfare, public healthcare, education, etc, anything that can help others.
(no sarcasm, I mean it)
Yes, we are also experiencing difficulty in accessing https://api.heroku.com/login and git push to heroku. However, our web app is up and running.
I guess its due to EC2 North America issues - http://status.aws.amazon.com/.
"mostly from attempting to take too many painkillers which include both opiates and acetaminophen"

Brief Google returns 31%. Still a large percentage but nothing like the number of people who die from prescription opiate abuse (the better part of 15K). Powerful drugs sometimes result in the death of user, news at 11.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1874350/
Note that the numbers of the main page stories are also in alternating colors. That's a sure sign that the annual Christmas color styling for Hacker News is back. (My topcolor choice still shows as it does year round, but alternating colors for the numbered list of stories on the front page happens independently from the topcolor choice.)
For those interested, here is a similar video from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin last year.

http://www.blueorigin.com/updates/updates-2011-11-17-video-o...
Ok, that video is just freakin' amazing. Lets count the things they show in it:

1) Take off from the pad.

2) Loss of vehicle control (chute deploys), Loss of engine

3) Engine restart.

4) Attitude recovery after engine restart

5) Return to pad capability.

I had no ideas these guys were that far along.
Awesome is the only API-as-configuration-file that I know of which consistently breaks the API between point releases.
One major thing missing here: luck! Lucky to be born in the U.S.A., of course, but also lucky to be born with a high IQ (those test scores that got him into the University of Chicago), lucky to be born with a creative streak, and lucky to make certain connections in the right time in his life, etc.
I find the criticisms of Jaron Lanier here to be unfair, excessively dismissive and painfully elitist. Just because many of the technologies used in VR were already invented, it doesn't take away from his important contributions, namely the founding of VPL Research, whose patents were important enough to be acquired by Sun. Would you make the same argument about Steve Jobs who popularized products already invented by other individuals and companies such as Alan Kay and Xerox? There are tons of tech pundits who don't have a clue about how technology actually works, yet such criticisms are never leveled against them.

Even if Mr. Lanier didn't contribute anything to the field of VR, it doesn't take away from his message: web 2.0 and open source has been a spectacular failure and is destroying individuality and the middle-class. I've watched several of his lectures and read his book, he nibbles around the his main point with lots of history and digressions. He's very careful with his language and tries to avoid opening himself for being labeled or attacked. Consequently, he comes off sounding tepid, overly philosophical and even incoherent at times.

M. Lanier claims that online collectivism or the hive mind is benefiting the few (Google and Facebook) and not the masses, the content contributers. Content made freely accessible by trusting authors have been mined by network operators to make billions, while the authors, who put their hearts and minds into their work, receive neither money nor recognition. Facebook is now starting to charge their users to broadcast to their "friends." Web 2.0 has failed to create a larger middle-class through new opportunities that are financially rewarding. In fact, Mr. Lanier argues that it is shrinking it.

His most salient arguements are aimed at the Open Source movement. He argues that it hasn't produced any notable innovations, nor has it expanded the pie for the software industry. On any given day, a small group at Apple out innovates the entire open source movement. Open Source was supposed to liberate us from the tyrany of commercial software companies like Microsoft and Adobe. Instead, it has only increased their dominance by weeding out all of their smaller competitors. What are the chances of something like PC-Write succeeding today?

After all these years, the open source movement has yet to offer sensible alternatives to Windows, Mac OS X and large complex applications such as the Adobe Suite and Microsoft Office. Instead, Open Source has focused on software that doesn't require high-risk development such as development tools, frameworks and OS utilities. The few quality ones like Firefox, are developed by teams funded by large organizations. Being Open Source isn't what's made these applications successful.

Mr. Lanier makes some very sound and persuasive arguments. If you don't agree at least take the time to ponder it and give it the respect that it deserves. Writing him off as a charlatan or an opportunist isn't an argument, but a cheap character attack.
`rsync-for-android` is actually pretty good if rsync is what you actually want; android-only of course, and FolderSync has a slightly nicer UI-wrapper (using sftp directly, rather than actually rsync'ing) and "experimental" auto-push-on-change, so between the two of them my phone and tablet now "play well" with my existing linux-based photo workflow. (I agree dropbox has many advantages, and a simplicity that comes from not having features... but with rsync, I can keep "just the last 30 days" of my full photo archive on my tablet, nothing else gets me that particular kind of control.)
I'm not so sure. Granted, I have a .Net past (I currently am a full stack javascript engineer), but I really enjoy the developer experience for Windows Phone - much nicer (IMO) than with Apple and iOS, from a language, ecosystem, and tooling perspective.

My Lumia 920 got here today, and the two gripes I had before - lack of 4g and a pitiful browser - have both been nicely addressed.
[Citation needed]. s/today/1973.
Opiate abuse is damaging enough. Increasing the danger does nothing to slow abuse among the addicted and is incredibly unethical. It's like building a car that disables it's own airbags when you start speeding.

Worse actually. Speeding is not a physically addicting activity, merely psychologically addicting.
How can you assure us of what the #99 system is like when you admit to only working on the ~30k system? That's not what "assure" means.
On the subject of paying taxes... there are places I could live where I would pay less taxes than I do in New York City. Texas comes to mind, but also India or for that matter Somalia. Yet people generally move in the opposite direction as they become more successful.

I find it deeply ironic that David Koch lives in Manhattan, with its high state and city taxes, as well as extensive welfare spending. It's almost as if paying taxes buys you access to civilization, which makes living in a place desirable.
It strikes me as an attempt at attention-getting, which in my experience often comes from insecurity. I'm not saying this is the case with this guy, but there's just no need for it.

So yes, I think he has some issues due to this particular expression of his sense of humor. It's not like I'm scared away by the language used - it was more cringe-inducing than anything.
Forcing oxycodone with acetaminophen has caused thousands of deaths. I recall reading a study that did the statistical analysis and got more precise numbers but can't find it with a five minute search.

In 2009, a federal advisor board recommended that Vicodin and Percocet be banned. Instead, they have to be reformulated to have about half as much acetaminophen. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/health/policy/14fda.html?_...

Suboxone prescribing physicians are more targeted towards the middle-class/middle-aged crowds.
Very nice and useful.
Genetically gifted, "a self made man". A dickotomy.
not even IE, all the modern browsers for mobile OS, all shut the door to Flash. but than does'n mean you can't watch online videos on, like youtube.

as users, we should welcome the new technology, rather than the good old days stuff. Flash used to be master and excellent, but time changed. They can't manage at every time, they need to be replaced by other new comers.
Given Microsoft's relationship with Nokia, doesn't that make the Lumia 920 the defacto flagship Winodws Phone? I agree with the author of the article that I would prefer it to come without all of the carrier garbage, but it's easily removed.
I always thought of the MVP as the most stripped down version of what you are trying to build that people are willing to pay for or use. I wouldn't confuse it with a landing page with a signup form.

Let's say I'm building an app that will make web design so easy all you have to do is scan a handwritten page and it generates a complete website. You can even sketch out crude design ideas and it will translate them into CSS. Fold the paper in half and scan it and it'll make a mobile site.

Well that's going to take some doing, so before I get too deep into it, I want to test the waters. I'll start with just the basics. Scan a stack of typewritten pages, and I'll generate a WordPress XML file with one post per scanned page. That's my MVP, because I think that's good enough for someone to pay $5 for. I don't feel bad about taking payments because people are getting something for their money. If I get a big response, I'll have the confidence to move forward, and a pool of users requesting features. If all I hear are crickets, well that's useful too.
They still do this in the United States!!!! With 10% methanol! http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDi...
What happened to the open-web??

Money and lawyers :P
Two things comes to mind; the author embodies "I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have."

And second I wish the author wouldn't try to ram his point about tax down. He's looking back at his life and saying taxes gave me a leg up and ignoring the places where low taxes and regulation did the same (the private school, AOL).

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.

He's looking down the one path that happened to him but what if instead of having a military when he was young there was just lower taxes and better support for mothers would society be better off? What if instead of Pell grants there was better primary schools? What if we gave Bill Gates more money to try and make the world a better place? What if lower taxes made food cheaper so that he wouldn't have to be fed through the schools lunch program?
So many people I know in their 20s only use Tylenol and especially after drinking binges nobody I know uses Aspirin, zero.

Tylenol the worst thing to take with alcohol after binge drinking it's terribly hard on your liver.

It's worse for women who can't process ethanol ("alcohol") as well as men due to women's bodies producing less dehydrogenase which breaks down the ethanol.

From what I understand alcohol and acetaminophen (Tylenol) are processed by the liver in the same way so ingesting both overloads the liver, more so in women.

I think liver failure is going to be common in a few years in the 30-something crowd.

I'm not a doctor and not involved in any way in the medical field just a concerned citizen.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2248624
http://www.health.harvard.edu/fhg/updates/overdoing-acetamin...
Yes, just as you said.