skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you only need one server that's going to be up to a lot faster than putting anything in front of it.

A single server setup might be simpler, but it won't be faster. Varnish serving a cached page from memory is going to be faster than 5 asynchronous calls that take 5ms of CPU time (and filesystem I/O in the case of the database and template given in the example). With varnish, even with a 1 second TTL (and 1 second grace), your first request will take the 5ms hit, but the next 199 for that second will be served from memory.

Now with Varnish serving 199 out of 200 requests from memory, if your backend is still toobusy, by all means serve a 503, and Varnish can cache that too.
Facebook, Please consider adding the following clause to all queries: AND WHERE deleted_at IS NULL OR deleted_at = '' OR private = ''

I like the idea of having a query language for facebook data. I just don't like the idea of having any of my things come up in any search. And yes, I quit FB a long time ago, but my spidey sense is tingling that FB didn't quit on my data.
Poet: A Node.js blogging platform
I teach classes on SVG, and CSS is one of the toughest parts. The distinction between styles and attributes seems very arbitrary in SVG. There are many layers of inconsistency. Compare text-align for HTML and text-anchor for SVG:

text-align: left | center | end | justify
text-anchor: start | middle | end
ok, now this is what is called, adding fire to the flame. Seriously, her husband is not someone involved directly with the case, as a witness nor as official. The guy might be defending his wife. But hey! why report this in international media?
if it turns out, after all, that MIT was in some way responsible -- that's still very unclear

In the Boston Globe, Aaron's lawyer says that a suggested plea deal with probation and no actual jail sentence was rejected by MIT, and that played a part in the prosecutor pushing for harsher judgement. If there is any truth in that, then there is evidence that MIT did indeed play enough of a role to have some of the responsibility here.

We won't have a full picture of what their role might have been until Abelson's report comes out. Which likely will take a good deal of time.
Oh please. Hardened systems and open access are not mutually exclusive. Pretending they are is the domain of untalented admins and those that wish to mislead you on reasoning for policy.

Also, this is MIT, the biggest threats to their network live on campus and are poking around on that network every day.
On San Francisco
Here's the thing about petitions: they aren't for convincing the people they're addressed to. They're for rallying the signers. Publicly writing your name down next to a cause triggers several psychological reactions resulting in your being more committed to the cause. Studies have shown that getting someone to sign a petition increases the probability that they will later take further action toward the cause in question.

So they are quite effective. They're just also a little sneaky.
The significant difference is that when the owner gets unhappy about it, it is trivial to figure out who to talk to to get the problem fixed.

The same is not true of DDoS attacks.
Well, being French and all, I beg to differ: "une lande désolée" can be translated as "a desolated moor". But it's a bit quaint, and yes, désolée usually means sorry (feminine form).
Right, because meetup.com has a higher market cap than Google. Oh wait. Online dating is not the big thing when compared to online search.
I've worked on a reasonably large Backbone app in production and I've written several toy apps with Angular.

I think that a lot of people dismiss Angular as yet-another-mvc-framework without ever discovering the key elements of Angular that are actually novel and worthy of study. Personally, I think that Angular is a local maximum in client-side JavaScript app development. But even if you don't agree, you should at least understand how it is different.

1) Angular prefers declarative

This doesn't mean you don't write procedural code. This means that if you want to do something proceedural, you should package it up as a Directive. Directives are where behavior and logic live. Your templates simply arrange and parameterize a tree of directives. This means that you have limited and well understood moving parts that can be tested in isolation, in combination, or in the application context. Contrast with the traditional big bag of event callbacks, which can only be tested in the application context and are more difficult to re-use in other application contexts.

2) Angular works like a game engine

Most traditional UI frameworks are a graph of intertwined callbacks. Games, however, traditionally have a pair of functions called Update and Render. The Update functions permutes the world and the Render function draws the new world. Angular works similarly, but it might not be immediately obvious. There is a "Dirty Checking" pass, where your view models, a simple hierarchy of poorly-named "scopes" are essentially diff-ed against the previous iteration. Then the Directives take over and permute the DOM to match the new view model.

Let's call the "Controller" part of the "ViewModel" and then just simplify that down to "Model". Inherently, Model and View systems are co-dependent. You have a graph like M <--> V. Angular's system graph is less like single bi-directional edge, and more like two directed edges in a cycle. That makes little difference when viewed abstractly with the two subsystems as nodes. However, once you break M and V down into subgraphs, the traditional Model & View systems look like a spaghetti mess of bi-directional relationships. An Angular application, on the other hand, would look like less like a lattice and more like a circle.
His father is justifiably enraged at the US Govt. Ms Ortiz and Steve Heymann are certainly the primary culprits here - However MIT is equally if not more responsible for this mess that ended in a horrible and needless tragedy.

MIT has a higher duty than the Govt. It is in their charter to foster open access - and not only did they NOT stand up for Aaron, they actually made the prosecution malicious by refusing to ask for anything less than JAIL TIME http://gothamist.com/2013/01/15/aaron_swartzs_lawyer_mit_ref...

So MIT as good as killed Aaron along with the Govt.. for shame!
The major trend of Facebook is that it is making the world smaller by making the people you interact with a smaller bubble. This may be a very good thing. Sometimes, though, it makes me feel like we're carrying out a new type of social hierarchy by only interacting with people we are like and are friends of friends with.
He may feel differently in time. My little brother committed suicide 5 years ago when he was like 22. His wife was cheating on him and despite having three sons, he still did it.

I know for years I hated her and blamed her fiercely. In time though, I looked at it differently. While I still don't have much love for her, I really can't place the blame for my brother's actions solely at her feet.

The thing is, it isn't natural or normal to kill yourself when your wife cheats on you, if it's ever normal, especially when you have three sons to watch out for. My brother had problems. He wasn't right in the head and I don't think he ever really was.

If it wasn't his wife, I think he just would have found another reason, because I think he wanted to go.

Aaron Swartz may have hated what the government was doing to him and he may have even stated that was the reason for his suicide, I really don't know. But that wasn't the reason, in my opinion.

If the threat of a prison sentence was reason enough to hang yourself, it would only make sense to at least see if you're convicted first.

My heart goes out to the family, I know firsthand how much it hurts when a family member commits suicide. And I really can't blame the father for reacting that way, I would've (and did) react the same way. Just thought it would be useful to offer some perspective.
xfce improved my experience of ubuntu considerably as well and the install was trivial too (sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop). alt-tab works there!
For stuff that is hard to characterize (like the aforementioned "vintage" computers) garage sales don't really cut it. At my previous garage sale I had a VAXStation 4000/VLC with a VT-220 terminal on it running VMS for sale ($25 or make offer). A lot of "Oh I remember those!" but no actual interest in acquiring it. Whereas EBay used to be a good venue for that, because there was a critical mass of people you could often find at least one person who would buy something.

That said, I bought my HeNe laser at a garage sale nearby for $15. It is of course much less convienient than a laser pointer and at 2mW not very bright, but scores for me on the coolness factor. I always wanted a laser as a kid and being able to acquire one scratched that itch.
Heads up -- your blog is very difficult to read in Chrome for Windows, due to the custom @font-face. Nothing says "Built on a Mac" like jagged fonts in Windows...

More info:

"Using Web fonts in your design requires thorough testing on as many different browsers and platforms as possible, with a close look at various options for rendering text. If the screen display is of poor quality and lacks subpixel rendering, then opt for graceful degradation by serving system fonts to older browsers and OS. Conditional comments are the easiest way to exclude older browsers and operating systems from style sheets with Web fonts. Of course, JavaScript is a more elegant way to detect whether a client’s subpixel rendering is turned on."

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/02/the-font-face-rul...

Also useful:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-...
I think we had a misunderstanding. The friend relationship is unbalenced when the guy wants a FWB/Girlfriend|boyfriend relationship, and the girl wants another girlfriend/platonic-friendship. In the situation the girl knows this to be the case, and continues to entertain the idea.

I'm not suggesting that you're obligated to date/reciprocate or entertain the guy's fantasies. Just let them know whats what and don't encourage that kind of unbalanced relationship. Props if you can pull that off and give feedback about why you wouldn't bang him without giving him an impression that he has a chance or attempting to destroy him.

My suspicion for the last part of that is becoming a wing-girl for him and helping him to see that there are other girls out there.
Something my Mother said whenever I asked/demanded something as a child that I am just now coming to appreciate:

"Do you need it, or do you want it?"
The problem is not the lag before resolving the request, it's the lag the user finding out that the request will not be solved. Underlying this is the fact that the server simply does not have enough power to resolve all requests, so some must fail.

The trick of using event loop lag is pretty neat, but the general strategy is IMHO a must have for any service. By aborting early and somewhat gracefully, the user knows ASAP, receives a controlled message that suggests she should not quickly retry, and the server can avoid trying to do part of the work for the request that is not going to be completed.
> Law enforcement, the prosecutor, and the individuals involved at MIT certainly should have learned about Swartz' character during the legal fight, and indeed they had the opportunity to do so if Swartz' attorneys are to be believed

Sure, but first impressions can never be erased. Remember, at first the investigators had no idea who was accessing the network. They had to place a camera to find out. Moreover, as a general rule, prosecutors don't go to lengths to really explore the character of defendants, because people are punished or not for their actions, not their character.

> sharing his politics is not necessary for a just outcome

No, but it totally shapes your perception of justice. Entertain the notion of someone who believes that copyrighted articles are really property, and that network boundaries are like real life fences. To such a person, what Swartz did seems like hopping a fence at a public art gallery to steal the paintings. But, most people on HN seem to subscribe to the politics that say a network boundary is like a "keep off the grass" sign at a public park, and that research articles aren't anyone's property at all. They are outraged that anyone would get in serious trouble for merely trampling on the grass and taking the fallen leaves on the ground.

> given this occurred at MIT, an institution whose primary notable achievement is the celebration of hacker culture

I think very few people would consider MIT's primary notable achievement to be the celebration of hacker culture. That's not what ordinary people think about MIT. They think it's like the show Fringe. Even within technologically-minded people, I think celebration of MIT's hacker culture is limited mostly to the CS set. I went to nerd high school, and what we knew about MIT was robotics, aerospace, etc, not hackers.

> and the target was not MIT, it was JSTOR. MIT was merely the vessel.

If you're familiar with Swartz's agenda, you know that. If you're the prosecutor presented with evidence of someone video taped accessing a restricted closet at MIT, you don't know that.
This "pacific interruption", as you delicately describe it, hurts innocent teachers and students who had nothing to do with the alleged bullying of Swartz, who was already suicidal prior to his prosecution.

Regardless of what one may think of computer laws, there is no proven link between his suicide and the criminal charges he faced, and any claims to the contrary have so far been entirely speculative and coming from people who never met the guy--one can't help but wonder if they had even heard of him before last week.

In addition, many of Swartz's accomplishments have been exaggerated specifically to fuel a frenzied mob. E.g., "co-creator of Reddit" which contradicts the public statements of other Reddit founders, and "creator of RSS" when he was one member of a group that took over Netscape's technology.

Of course, my saying this will be used as a reason to attack me for discounting contributions that he actually made, which isn't the case. I am simply pointing out that the knee-jerk righteous indignation and mad desire to blame is getting out of hand. It's becoming an angry mob, directing its violence at convenient targets to feed a primal hunger for revenge.
I have been wondering about option 1 (creator-type founder hires manager/CEO for managerial tasks, keeps focusing on creating) for quite some time.

Google is a great example where Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Eric Schmidt and hired him as their CEO. Worked great for 10 years, and their relationship seems to keep working today.

Are there more examples (also unsuccessful ones)? I'm actually not aware of any. It seems much more common that one of the co-founders becomes a full-time manager (or that they are kicked out of their own company).
His father's words may be a little too strong, but they're not entirely off-base either.

Yes, they are off base. He deserves leeway due to the untold grief he is enduring, but a statement like that is ridiculous. Thousands of people a day go to jail a day, many of them for breaking unjust laws, and very few of them kill themselves. He was killed by depression/mental illness not by the government. The charges likely exasperated his condition, but without that underlining fragile mental state, he would almost assuredly still be alive today.
"Love each other" is main rule of the Christianity and it's not a myth, definitely. Rites are absurd, love is not.
I'm not a member of any movement, Anonymous or otherwise. The point I was trying to raise: civil disobedience is disruptive by nature and will inconvenience and annoy - but it is far from immoral. Why should a DDoS be considered any differently? The methods of physical and virtual protest are different but their ends are the same.
There are many differences between that scenario and the equivalent on Facebook. Two critical ones:

- the interaction is of a short, definite length. I will probably never see you again if I don't want to.

- the number of real-life encounters I can have in a day are limited by my location in space and time. it's fun to have that happen once a day; I imagine the joy wears off when it's happening 30 times.
I don't know if it's the best solution either, but the fact that the petition calling for Carmen Ortiz's sacking reached 25k signatures in three days, alone, suggests that distaste for our "overly prosecutorial society" isn't exactly "rare".

Having multiple hops in the chain of command behind Aaron's prosecution publicly called out like that can't hurt, and makes it seem less of a "backlash" and more of a "this isn't right."
Social Engine launches its Cloud Version
After browsing the site today upon signing up, I listened to a bit of music and didn't have any problems.

My first impression was that is was quite similar to Grooveshark, only with a bit more polish on certain aspects. I'm going to give it a whirl over the next few weeks to see how it compares.
>People don't like being bothered by strangers on Facebook

This is true, however the fact that you can search friends of friends means you can look for people you might want to get to know better, and get introduced via your mutual friend. Or be bold and just send them a friend request with a little note, etc.

A friend of a friend is less of a random person than the current facebook search which is actually random.

Obviously it will be abused by some, however I think it is a pretty big deal as a feature
So, like sport, but without the exercise?

Actually I agree with you about the mental side having some benefits, but I just don't see any specific benefit from the violence. Like you say, any other video game could provide the same.
Don't take this as trying to hit on you. But, I wish more girls on OKC had that attitude.
Backbone begot Spine, Underscore begot Lo-Dash... What about CoffeeScript? TeaMacro? Jeremy must be having a blast.
I can't find any information about `position:relative` impacting page render performance. Please share.

Given my experience of low impact on render performance of vanilla properties like this (transitions are a whole 'nother story), I'm much more concerned with whether this is of benefit to developer happiness.

You'll never be able to use `position:absolute` for anything outside of the context of an element's parent, and opting out of this back to default behavior is much more painful than opting in with a better-scoped `.feature * {position:relative}`.

Every new developer will need to wrap their head around nonstandard page flow, and customizations like this have a way of accumulating into a very intimidating environment. As a general rule, I don't want to inherit anything silent and clever without very compelling reasons (* {box-sizing:border-box} passes this test because it makes so many things so much easier).
This is true if by "get the attention of" you mean "shoot yourself in the foot".

People who are sympathetic to political action tend to become significantly less sympathetic when they are personally inconvenienced by said political action. And their ire tends to be directed at whoever they see as being most directly responsible for their inconvenience.

I am someone who broadly agrees with Aaron's goals. I agree with the principle of the protests. And it is for exactly THAT reason that I am squarely against this DDoS attack.
I'm glad you agree that the CFAA is problematic. I think we may to some extent be talking past each other.

What I am objecting to is legislation in the style of the CFAA. Notwithstanding the name, it is barely addressed to fraud at all. It concerns itself primarily with unauthorized access, arguably a component of certain types of fraud, but which is a completely ridiculous thing to legislate against. Because while it is probably safe to assume that unauthorized access is generally bad, the question of how bad is determined entirely by the specific facts of the case. If you access a computer (e.g. your family member's work laptop) "without authorization" in order to check your own email, that is on an entirely different planet from doing so in order to obtain military secrets in preparation for a terrorist attack. The entire world of possible criminal penalties lives between those extremes. So prohibiting what is quite plausibly the precursor to an entire legal code worth of different crimes is totally absurd because there is no sane way to assign proportional penalties to it -- if you assign penalties greater than those of the most trivial of offenses then you create a disproportional penalty for such offenses just because a computer was involved and even trivial offenses are, as a rule, unauthorized. In theory one might argue that unauthorized access should still be an offense with the lowest of maximum penalties, e.g. a $100 fine, but with penalties that low it just seems like a waste of effort to even bother with it. And it sounds like you may agree with some of that, though I'm not sure what possible value you think can be salvaged from it.

What you're talking about with electronic forms perhaps not matching up with 20th century fraud legislation is a completely different animal. I think as a general rule that is the sort of thing that judges are able to see through, but in specific cases where this has failed to occur it naturally makes sense for the legislature to update the statute.

I'm just still not clear why you believe it should be a separate statute rather than merely a collection of relatively minor updates to long-standing law. I don't see how setting up a fake physical storefront and then collecting layaway deposits before skipping town to the next state should require a distinct piece of legislation from doing the exact same thing with a website. Perhaps the language will have to be adjusted to make sure the new offenders fall into scope, but why should the penalties be different? Or (in broad strokes) the elements of the crime? Or the intent requirement? Why reinvent the wheel? If you reinvent the wheel you get untested catastrophes like "unauthorized access to a computer."
The only argument in favor of CSS not being the most horrible thing ever invented is that as far as I know, nobody has come up with a better alternative yet…
I feel like this guy could not miss the point by much more distance. How much of a shell do you have to live in to think "well sure, someone died after fighting for the rights of millions of people, but jesus, you people are going to inconvenience us for a few hours? this is just ridiculous!"
Sounds about right - i'm glad browser sniffing is going away. Not sure what's up with blogger's testing team - maybe everyone's busy helping out with the GAE outage?

Next question - why doesn't everyone get the blank page?

EDIT: By your profile, i'm guessing you're also in NZ - Looks like they might have just pushed the update out to only parts of their CDN.
The output of AES-NI is easy to verify. You can't verify random numbers generator.
Guys for the most part have a short term memory for those kinds of things. We don't have that much use for it.
Ah, that makes sense. PDFs render in the browser for me so it's no different than any other URL.
So MIT should have had reasonable cause to believe that there was a risk of suicide should they decide to prosecute a case? And that makes them responsible? Is that a road we want to go down?
The post you're replying to doesn't say anything about being pointless, but besides that, surely it's not a logical fallacy to point out that one action is more effective than another.
Well, that sounds like the definitive word on the subject.
And later in the comments he said the same happened to him with other books. i.e. purely intellectual math.
The more I read about Aaron he more I'm impressed and even though I didn't read enough about Chomsky I think he's right on far too many issues (the ones I encountered so far).
That is the issue that needs a petition.