skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry I was severely jetlagged when I posted that and don't remember wth I was thinking.

At any rate, I don't see mobile-first making Rails irrelevant. Rails has never been cutting edge on front-end development except at the very very beginning when they bundled the brand-new Prototype library. But by the time they hit 1.0, seven years ago or whatever it was, they were already going down dead-end alleys like RJS in an attempt to avoid javascript. Since then Rails hasn't done anything amazing with front-end development, but they've stayed relevant in their own way with the asset pipeline, coffeescript, and generally staying out of your way to implement whatever front-end strategy you like.

Server-side development isn't going anywhere, so I don't see how the shift to mobile makes Rails irrelevant.
Copy on write!
I program with PHP and I don't care who knows it
Not the first time it's been tried: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_State...
But do bootstrap yourself to the death.

If you're bootstrapping, like we did, you absolutely have to take each step up as soon as you can, and push as hard as you can, as otherwise you'll find yourself in the time-trap described, where you bootstrap growth while neglecting organisational development.

We haven't cashed out for £800,000,000,000,000, but we've taken (small) investment after 6 years of growth and operation in order to open up opportunities (investor's customer base nom nom nom).

Ultimately, I think the main issue in startups is expectations. You probably won't make a billion dollars. You probably won't make a million. You probably won't even make $100k. But you might.
@ivan_ah I just placed an order for a print copy, am I also entitled to a PDF version?
It's also possible to build such a list by watching for static ips that do more than "x" requests and queuing rdns on them.

Google is easy to identify this way, even with a spoofed user agent (which they do a lot now).

But this technique is not possible with EC2 because Amazon refuses to make a public database of what customer is using what.
At a guess: eventually, yes. I don't think this actually writes over the heap at all - it writes to the .bss section instead. In theory, if left to execute (without the INT3s) it'd probably segfault as soon as it hit the end of the page containing .bss.

malloc could be used to expand the heap, which conveniently appears after .bss. The pointer returned would probably still need to be followed, since heap allocations might not be contiguous (and mprotect needs to be used to mark the pages executable).
If everyone else was using tcp/ip would it be sensible to continue using ipx/spx?
Great post, but you will also need to upgrade your ports collection. I personally use portsnap.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/po...
Server-side analytics inside an object
Ask HN: adverts in user notification emails
Just building something that uses email as a primary channel of communication with users and have been pondering whether showing ads in the body of the email (text link or simple HTML ad, no Flash offensiveness etc) is worth trying out [edit: for the free tier].

Has anyone had experience of this, either as a publisher, advertiser or end user? Any advertising platforms worth looking at? A quick look at AdSense ToS suggests that that isn't gonna fly.
Bonus: there are on average 20 centimeters between the thumb and the little finger of a fully stretched hand.
From the server's standpoint, running n players has optimistically the same cost whether those players are client-side bots or not (although, bots can be more abusive). In the MUD days (20+ years ago) this was called "multiplaying" and was usually forbidden, partly on grounds of this resource use, but some games did allow it. MMOs 10+ years ago saw an influx of people using GUI scripting tools to implement bots. It's fairly obvious when it's happening and people really don't like it for the same reasons that they often don't like server-side bots in multiplayer games.

So realistically I believe this is a niche idea which might be hard to make commercially viable. But it could be an interesting thing for private minecraft servers.
Thank You!
For locale yes as You said UTF-8 is standard and related to date and time it is better to use synchronization via NTP because so many troubles can make having different time on servers.

Regards,
for the record, people in the financial sector are the ones who point out it is scummy.

It takes someone with more than a passing knowledge in finance to explain the kind of scummy the financial sector has come up with.
Haha, this is really fun :)

I'm looking forward to exploring your blog.
Don't you have any shame?
Boat speed is measured in knots.

Knots are non-SI, since they're based on the non-SI nautical mile (1 knot = 1nm/hr). But they are a good example of why context is important; the nautical mile is absolutely superior to the kilometer for use in navigation (at sea or in the air). Forcing the SI unit there would actually make the relevant tasks more complex and more difficult.
All the more reason to change the title?
This is a great gateway drug for getting kids into coding.

The JS language also allows a transition to html5/web stuff (cool web pages they and their friends can see with some simple-to-setup hosting) and perhaps ultimately server side (nodejs).

And a child walking that path would then be exposed to enough ideas/different environments that learning a different language would be a natural next step.

This is a pretty exciting idea. I wonder how easy it can be made. i.e. I wonder how much of the distracting tool-based detail can be swept to one side.
excellent writing. how long until similar "world w/o Internet-access" type essays?

even today, something to keep in mind as we design and implement Internet dependent/co-dependent systems and processes?
Good point. In Canada, we still use imperial measures for body height and body weight, and many older folks still talk in miles and fahrenheit.

But everyone adjusted to metric for less personal weights and measures, and other abstract measures.

Pretty good compromise, I think.
It was fun because you knew there would be an end to it and the power would go back on. If it lasted a month and there was no communication, survival mode would kick in.
Come up with a good idea for a start up
I like the premise because exploring the ramifications is interesting and useful. Unfortunately they then turn to magical plot devices. I was very let down by that; it got steadily less entertaining after the first few episodes (just like Fringe).
It's probably a better idea to use Hadoop 1.0.4 or even 2.0. Lot's of little annoyances are solved there.

Monitoring is also completely missing: We use Icinga/Nagios and Ganglia. Especially Ganglia is invaluable to adjust the configuration for optimal machine usage in my experience.

Another point worth considering is Security. Hadoop by default is secured like NFS. That means any user that is able to create an hdfs or hadoop user on a machine that has access to the NameNode can delete your HDFS. Hadoop can use Kerberos for security.

Also consider adding Snappy Compression to your setup, it speeds up the shuffle phase.

Last but not least - I've found these slides about Hadoop Tuning invaluable: http://www.slideshare.net/cloudera/mr-perf

@meinuelzen: We use Oracle JDK 7 with en_US.UTF-8 and ntpd on all machines. Ubuntu 10.04 / Ubuntu 12.04 but the OS should not matter. Lot's of RAM and lot's of disks are more important.
Absolutely!! We're looking for some developers! Send a mail at - aditgupta at functionspace.org or reach us through the contact form on our blog. :)
£20,013 reasons to celebrate 2013 with Ladbrokes
Facebook Starts Censoring Osama Bin Ladin and Che Guevara Images
In Northern Ontario everything except for lumber, iron ore and moose meat gets trucked in from afar.
It sure does. And I understand the issue that lies therein.

But, if the rest of the world is to ask of the US to switch to the metric system, there will be a time when the authorities have to enforce the system onto the citizen.

Sometimes, the greater good of the community does not align with that of the citizen. We Europeans have switched from our country's respective currency to the Euro not to please us personally but for the economic good of the whole European Union. (Whether it has succeeded or not is another debate altogether.) It sure wasn't easy for the ol' timers, but now it's all behind and even my parents don't think back in Francs when they have to pay their baguette and wine.
I think we're just having a semantic disagreement. I'd be fine with calling 30,000-40,000 'not rich'. I don't think I'm poor in the sense of poverty.

I think Paul Graham meant poor in the sense you're using 'not rich', and I commented to clarify that.
Summary: a Harvard student working on her master's thesis talked with some Maasai herders whose livestock was being devastated by Hoof and Mouth Disease. She did some internet searches and found that Big Pharma had attempted but failed to isolate the active ingredient in a traditional native treatment. They tried the traditional native treatment and it worked; now the Maasai herders have a profitable business selling the traditional treatment. The Harvard student is very sexy but will soon be too old to attract a man. One of the Maasai doesn't beat his wives much and she finds him very manly. They are expecting their first child.

I'm sorry, but while the first part is an interesting if unsurprising anecdote, I found the later part downright offensive.
Yep - I remember being told in 4th or 5th grade (which would be 1975ish) that we all had to learn the metric system because the country was converting.

And here we are 35 years later...
I certainly wouldn't like ads in my emails and think you're only after the money. There are enough advertisements on the web, in my spam folder, in the letterbox, and lately one even arrived as a text on my phone. The more ads we print, the less they become worth. You might want to consider a real business model.
Everyone who works on my farm has a foot that is approximately 30cms, so it works great. If we all had 15cm feet, then we'd say you need to step off 60 feet in the aforementioned example. It is not strictly bound by the imperial system, it just so happens that the imperial system maps fairly well to what is practical in the field without any tools, so it is what we reference. I see no benefit to introducing the metric system here, despite using it in all other areas of life.
> the units don't matter. What matters is picking a system and sticking to it

That is exactly the problem with the imperial system. You have multiple units for the same thing, and when they are multiples of each other, it is in base 12.

You could settle on feet and have kilofeet and millifeet, and you'd have a sensible system (apart from being incompatible with the rest of the world).
For anyone looking to learn more about Switzerland's robust and imaginative defense system, John McPhee's La Place de la Concorde Suisse is an absolutely fascinating read:

http://amzn.com/0374519323
The science doesn't have to be technically correct but if you start waving around magic wands it's simply not sci-fi anymore, which is a shame if your interest was piqued by the 'sci.' Some amount of rules always has to be followed in narratives; e.g., 'the parrot did it' in a whodunnit is (most likely) not acceptable.
I grew up in Australia with metric, with parents and grandparents who grew up with imperial units. Though it seems things happened differently in Australia as my parents (and possibly grandparents too) converted to thinking in metric at least most of the time. That said, it's still reasonably common to hear people quoting their personal height in feet and inches. Even then, most people born post-metrification don't really have a grasp of imperial units (the exception tends to be people who have spent time in the US).
To some Osama Bin Ladin is a terrorist but he said that his terrorism is blessed to end American and Israeli unjust terrorism and occupation against Muslims and non Muslims. So to others he is a hero.

Despite what stand do not you agree that facebook should be a freespeech platform and do not interfere in what people say?

If facebook wants to enforce terrorism term in should be equal, The term terrorist is controversial, if it means is targeting civilians and killing women and children then Bush Obama, Netanyahu and Bashar Al Asad deserve the gold medal in terrorism for killing millions of Muslims. As such and like wise users should be banned from posting their images or promoting their stands on facebook.
Anonymous filer attacks Apple's patents on the page turn
A 4S is hardly "latest-greatest", and having to specifically buy a different (and inferior) device in order to jailbreak definitely qualifies as "hard" in my book.
Not necessarily, you can continually write until you hit the end of the uninitialized data segment, which is typically 128kb (or MMAP_THRESHOLD) after the last heap allocation (that itself was under 128kb, otherwise the memory will be, as you state, mmapped, which has no contiguity guarantees)
I agree the examples are irrelevant. A better example (from my experience) would be the oil/gas/chemical industry where you have millions of miles, oops kilometers, of pipes, uncountable valves, fittings, sensors, vessels, etc. What's the counterpart to a 6", sch 60 pipe? You definitely do not just convert to metric!

My favorite nonsensical (not-quite-non-dimensional unit)? Heat rate: MMBtu per MWh
+1 for Steven Pressfield.

I read Turning Pro first after this excerpt on 99u and loved it; The War of Art was cool too but kind of cringey & self-helpy in places.

http://99u.com/articles/7192/Are-You-Trapped-in-a-Shadow-Car...
In Franconia you still ask for a "Seidla" which traditionally is 535ml but you get 500ml. In Bavaria you still ask for a "Maß" and you get 1000ml instead of 1069ml.
It's easy to get dismissive about having multiple units, until you run into the contexts where they really are useful. Following up the example in one of my other comments: adopt the meter and the kilometer, or the foot and the kilofoot, and it won't matter to navigators, because they'll still use the nautical mile unless you literally put a gun to their heads, and if you do put a gun to their heads they'll show you why it's a much more practical unit for what they do.
I actually remember when the metric system was introduced in elementary schools.

Looking back, there was far too much emphasis on getting all prefixes and their relationships memorized: micro, milli, centi, deci, hecto, kilo, mega. And virtually no emphasis on developing an intuitive "metric" feel for the common quantities in everyday life.
I'm about the same age and went through the same education, although it was probably a bit earlier.

It did come in handy when taking science courses in high school. Everything we did was in metric, from chemistry to physics. I don't know if American high schools ever taught things like physics in English measurement in years prior, that must have been a nightmare.
That's interesting. Zipcar was acquired as it's growth just wasn't good enough (Q3 was 15% YoY I think I read) Stock was well below IPO levels. Too often I see startups do a) Initial crazy pricing deals to get traction b) Initial members who will light up the internet if they're not grandfathered forever and c) Initial members who curse when the service shuts down or is acquired.

Now if that lack of an annual fee really is what enticed you then maybe the economics of these services aren't compelling enough to built independent, sustainable businesses.
In answer to your two questions:

1: Yes, you will eventually need to mmap more memory. Since you want to minimize the number of mmap calls necessary for things like heap allocations, you generally allocate in larger chunks then necessary and then malloc etc. allocates from these chunks. It doesn't matter too much in terms of memory waste, since in the back end, linux allocates physical memory lazily, so the extra allocated block of virtual memory doesn't get a physical allocation until something tries to access it. For this reason, it can sometimes seem like a malloc call completes successfully, but you run into an out of memory condition once you try to actually use your "successfully" allocated memory.

2. It turns out most kernels don't actually enable the NX bit automatically, with the reason given being that early processors have buggy implementations, so by default the NX flag is not honored. As a result, all memory is executable by default, unless explicitly set not to be (i.e. using memprotect), and this is only if the kernel is compiled to support NX, which it may not be. This is changing, and some systems such implementing SELinux or similar are supposedly stricter but I haven't actually tested this out myself.
Plus no one is going to get a god complex on with all the people who cry how shit javascript is.
ATOS are a horrible bunch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atos#Controversy_over_disabilit...
VirtSanbox
http://valleyanon.com/p/2 oh dear...
Maria Popova's blog is awesome. Somehow, she always finds those little known (or unknown) books, quotes etc
At least a better reason than in the year MXMIX (or in the year MMXLII :)
100 Words Per Day
Systems that relied on pumping for pressure ended up under boil water advisories. Detroit, Cleveland, others. I think water pressure was mostly restored 3 or 4 days in though.
BBC-Backed Pirate Bay Documentary Ready for Premiere
That was really, really weird and ruined the entire article for me.
Decorators and Functional Python
4 actually

Facebook Photos, [Facebook Camera](https://en-gb.facebook.com/mobile/camera) (Instagram Clone), Instagram and Poke
Yeah, I get you - just pondering adding a 'free' tier to something that'd otherwise be paid-for only. ("Want the free version? You gotta put up with ads"). Odds are I won't go with them, but wondered if anyone does/has/had
"In douchey-business-guy fashion he tries to put an entire community of transdisciplinary people in their place"

I think his point is also that this type of thing is not just accepted, but encouraged within engineering circles when talking about business people.

But yes, it wasn't delivered very well and the confrontational nature of it will mean that a lot of people who would do well to heed its advice will immediately turn defensive and get nothing from it.
What is crazy is they have been sold out since early December (or maybe even before that).
Why branding is irrelevant.
Hopefully this doesn't mean a deluge of crappy domestic cars. The thing I like about Zipcar the most is the availability of some really nice cars, especially the German makes.
If you are in charge of widget production, you should absolutely understand the basics of widget production. Don't blame the widget-specialists you have hired to produce widgets if you are not putting forth any significant effort into understanding your own business.
I'll mention this in passing for those who are interested. Carl Rogers, in _The Carl Rogers Reader_ explains how he and some other psychologists and volunteer staff set up a small residential treatment center for psychotic patients.

It was structured very differently from conventional psychiatric treatment centers. Most of the staff were volunteers and uniforms were not used. There were only a few clients/patients living there at any one time. The staff fostered an environment of trust and openness. They did not medicate the clients and instead they tried as much as possible to be open to the psychotic material of the clients. In such a supportive environment, most of the clients showed improvement in their psychotic symptoms in as little time as a week. Staff were picked on the basis of their personality and experience with altered states of consciousness as it was felt that would make them better able to connect with the psychotic clients. The doctors on staff did have the ability to medicate and sedate clients if absolutely needed.

So, while I do think schizophrenia has a heritable component, the current medical model may not always be most appropriate or effective treatment.
I've started doing something similar, except I also use vagrant to ensure that my development OS is the same as production. I also find it easier keeping everything for dev within a VM.
That's an American web-site. His books are in metric.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gordon-Ramsays-Ultimate-Cookery-Cour...

Click "search inside." Everything is in grams.

edit: That web-site isn't even associated with the chief. It is just some fan site. Here is a legit web-site and it is all in grams: http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes/chefs/gordon-ramsay/go...
a(n) (un)fortunate side effect of anonymity online. :)
Excel Statistics for SEO and Data Analysis
My favorite part of data that almost every tool has one common feature and that is the "Export" button. This is the most powerful feature of all these tools because by exporting the data into Excel and we can sort it, filter it and model it in any way we want. Most of us use Excel on the regular basis, we are familiar with the basic functions but Excel can do way more than that. In the following article I will try to present the most common statistical techniques and the best part it is that we don't have to memorize complicated statistical equations, it's everything built into Excel!
The case for the iPad as a creation device.
My Troubled Relationship With Objective-C and iOS Development
DUNS is in the same category as the BBB and Angies' Liars.
It's rather easy to setup these types of operations and I'm amazed there are not more of them.
>they'll show you why it's a much more practical unit for what they do.

Why? Why is it more practical? How is it better other than being more familiar? It blows me away that people can make the argument as it being "better".
While I applaud the self-publishing, promising to teach "all of math and physics" in two weeks is preposterous at best.
You think there are no advantages to easy divisibility?

16 is divisible by 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16.

24 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24

10 just has 1, 2, 5, 10
This book looks very interesting, and one that I want to buy, but I'm going to hold off on buying it at the moment because (based on the comments in this thread and the preview) it sounds incomplete. Any chance of you selling a work in progress version so that we can help out (akin to the Manning Early Access Program)?
Another nonsensical conversion? MMCF to MMBtu or, worse, 10^3m^3 to MMBtu.
Why Should You Learn MongoDB?
Energy Drinks Promise Edge, but Experts Say Proof Is Scant
At my last job, we measured product thickness in mm; area in square feet; throughput in meters per minute; coating thickness in nm, angstroms, or fraction multiples of 550nm; weight in tons (imperial) but some input materials in grams and kilograms; and pressure in hPa, atmospheres, psi, and torr (occasionally in the same sentence and graphed logarithmically in some cases).

Basically, we use units like any tool. Use whatever tick marks line up to the problem conveniently. You can always covert later if you need to.
> It's confusing, but makes sense in the long run.

You're perceiving things like this because it's what you were brought up with. None of the examples in which you claim it's "natural" to use imperial units make any sense to me at all. I don't think in miles, don't know how much a "stone" is, and pints are just pure confusion - which pint? there's about 4 types isn't there?

It's what you grew up with, nothing more.
How Does a Startup Incubator Really Help You?
Person heights and baby weights are the only things I ever hear in imperial in Australia, end even then only half the time.
Check this link out:
http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/arm-chrubuntu-12...
quite a few errors in facts and concepts here.

modern programming programming languages are quite different from those of the 50's

personally, I think the industry missed a beat in the non standardization of CASE tools.