skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article. There are just a few things that I would add to it.

1. The metrics comment could not be more true. You cannot think hard enough about the actual problems you will encounter and what metrics you will have. Have a common way to pull information about each service, and to analyze it in some common place.

2. Standardize, standardize, standardize. When someone is answering a page at 2 AM and has to deal with a component of your system that they don't really know, the more it resembles other components, the better. Think hard about how you can get every service to be written in such a way that the same critical information is available. Where is it documented? Who do I page? Where is the monitoring? Yes, random third party components won't follow your standards, and will be hard to integrate. But standardization is a good thing.

3. You need to be able to send canary requests through that trace through your whole infrastructure. You should be able to flag a front end request, and have every single request that it generates through your entire system be logged somewhere so that you can see a breakdown of what happened. Hide this so that nobody can use it to take your site down, but build the capacity for yourself. (Standardization will make such a system much easier to build!)

4. Randomly canary a small fraction of your traffic. There is tremendous value in having a random sample of traced traffic. When you're trying to understand how things work, there is nothing like taking an actual request going through a complex system, and seeing what it did. Furthermore if you've got intermittent problems for a small fraction of users, being able to look at a random slow request really, really, really helps you track down issues that otherwise would be virtually impossible to replicate.
This question, along with the question why the EFF didn't fund Aarons' defense are close to the heart of all this. I've sent dr. Lessig an email asking for some enlightenment, I don't expect an answer (he's got other stuff on his plate right now) but I really would like to know what that was all about. It seems important.
What's the standard amount of time to delay before dropping charges?
Warner Bros. turning John McAfee's bizarre story into a movie
Randomly clicking around, busted out laughing when I came to http://branch.com/b/teen-wolf-or-vampire-diaries

I need to hop on the VD train.

(last answer on that page as of now)
It should cost $0 per page. The infrastructure and maintenance for a document database of our country's tax-funded court proceedings should be so vanishingly small in relation to what we already spend on the justice system that it should approach 0.
Some users get upvoted fairly quickly by username alone, too. Think pg, edw519, patio11, tptacek; I've noticed comments from them will have upvotes in seconds, regardless of content. It's just name recognition, for better or worse. pg could probably leave a comment saying only "This is a comment." and get a hundred points of karma off it. (I'd pay him to try.)

So, to an outside observer, you might suggest that these users game Hacker News but the real answer is that they have an audience. It's debatable whether that's their fault, on a case-by-case basis, though.

Then you could probably say it goes the other way: a large part of the community feels a certain way because Ed says so (in the top position), or Thomas says so. I've noticed the atmosphere of a thread change after a comment from a "well-known" person is left, rather rapidly on occasion. The momentum of a community like Hacker News is an interesting study, and although I didn't get an opportunity to watch the thread under the microscope, I bet a large part of it was shaped by Ed's comment.

Recently I've learned how Hacker News threads are living organisms, and I've noticed the impact of the commentary that I make. If you pay close attention, you'll be surprised at how the thread evolves and grows, particularly based upon what's in the top position.
Programming requires a certain kind of thinking about things and methods of approaching problems. As with anything there are people who are inherently inclined to think about things in this way, but i do believe that anyone has the ability to learn the skills to be at least a half decent programmer.

Learning to break down a problem into smaller pieces, recognizing different situations in which something can occur, and being able to determine steps to accomplish a goal are some of the main components of programming and are used be most people on a daily basis to varying levels of success.

Now this being said there are a lot of fairly abstract concepts that need to be understood in order to be able to produce clean, scalable code that would be needed at most mid to high end companies. These concepts can be very dense for people to understand as there often are no good real world comparisons for them, and so these can prevent someone from becoming a highly skilled programmer.

So can anyone learn to program? For sure. Can anyone learn to program to the level required for a lot of jobs now a days? Probably not.
Common law holds an individual responsible for their actions, not their families or associates. As such, there is no-one to punish in the event of death, so there is no point in continuing the trial (and no-one to pay for a defense, hence no fair trial is possible). It's why in some areas suicide is not a crime, but attempted suicide is.
It's pretty hard to read that thread. This is a good lesson in giving people the benefit of the doubt. Always.
I completely missed it at the time and I feel that I'm a complete fool because of that.
I never understood why this is easier than just manually doing the FOIL. 1312 = (10 + 3)(10 + 2) = 1010 + 102 + 310 + 32. Drawing all those lines and counting intersections seems tedious.
I just worked with a mathematician who understood grammars, and could write one, but could not use the theory in any practical way. Parsing is not just recognition. You need to pass info up the parse tree so that after parsing, you have a new data structure with everything nicely structured ready to ACT UPON. People write in specific languages to achieve something, not to simply create syntactically correct bodies of text. So understanding grammars is 50% of being able to use them as tools.

The other understanding you need to be able to put them to use is having a mental model of how a bottom up parser processes the tokens. You need to be able to insert actions for each grammar rule at appropriate places, which allows the information to flow bottom up too, and be processed appropriately at the same time. I have found this second bit to language processing is actually the harder bit, and its worth rewriting your grammar to make it simpler.
"unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge."

Considering the outcome... Does anyone know an example of what judges do when defendants appeal openly for financial help? Was this really good legal advice?
Not in my house: how Vegas casinos wage a war on cheating
It's not a war, as it's not even really an actionable thing. It's a calmly stated judgment that informs interpretation of events.

USG, having become entirely inconsistent with its founding philosophy, the purported highest law of the land, and the People's will, has ceased being a legitimate government by or for the People. It should instead be regarded as an uncontrolled, extremely powerful entity to be avoided at all costs, and hopefully worked around eventually.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017141
If you think it was easy for Ed to post what he did about Aaron's legal troubles, you don't understand the sentiment on HN at all. He posted that comment because that's what he believed at the time.
File a public records request in memory of Aaron
Ugh. I prefer the Carmack version.

This example turns the code into something that appears more airy but in fact is much harder to understand due to extensive use of ? :.

I find that one of my own major steps toward programming maturity happened when I stopped doing goofy things like this and started writing code that was as simple as possible to logically follow, and that was as un-special-cased as possible. (By this latter I mean, if you change the code a little bit, you don't have to rewrite it; it looks basically the same. Imagine you want to do more than just assign one variable inside the clauses of the 'if'. In the Carmack version you just add more code there. In the proposed substitute, you have to rewrite the whole thing.)
You seem to have conveniently missed the point. What you randomly decree is "filth" and what someone else randomly decrees is "filth" aren't the same. There is no reason to believe that porn is bad, hence no reason for you to be deciding who can access it and who can't. Your position is just as detestable as people who would want access to any non-christian religious material restricted.
Criminal convictions don't carry any binding authority of precedent. Only if some issue of the case were to be appealed, would the ruling on that issue become precedent on courts subject to that appellate jurisdiction.

Having said that, a successful conviction could encourage other ambitious AUSAs to bring charges in situations with similar facts.
CNET doesn't seem to have the greatest track record with editorial independence. Wasn't there a big blowup at gamespot a few years ago too?
Have you never knocked on a drywall wall? Have a sense of permanence and use plaster. Also, it's a bit odd when you find out their second largest market is food additives.
Carmen Ortiz under fire over suicide of Aaron Swartz
Like a commenter upthread mentioned, I think it's a combination of that and people upvoting names they recognize or that the community knows as/sees as "voices of" the community. They just take their word for it given past posts, rather than having it occur to them that maybe this topic isn't actually their forte. Additionally, someone taking the time to write out rebuttals just to be downvoted and "told off" with pointless and degrading one-sentence rebuttals is pretty pathetic.
Declaring at the top of a function conflicts with the C++ convention of powerful constructors. It's perfectly normal for a C++ class to allocate a lot of memory, open a network socket, or do any other number of heavy-weight things during construction. If you declare all variables at the top of the function, you're forced to have C-style init functions for all data structures that you call separately.
Exactly. And given how sensitive Ed is normally about issues involving people you can bet that he feels this more than most would.
Pinboard Co-Prosperity Winners
You can support more than 250,000 concurrent connections on a node server. That doesn't seem small to me. Anything you can do on other frameworks you can do as good or better on node.js or ruby on rails.
Space is important. Think that you are not writing code, but painting a picture. And you are using space to convey meaning.

You literally want to paint code, not write it. :)
Moscow Company to Use RC Helicopters to Deliver Parcels
Can we please actually push for change within our government over this tragic loss. There seems to be a problem, how many more times are we going to allow the justice department to do this to individuals?

I hate to compare the notion, but to put it into perspective. Every time I hear of a woman getting raped and the man not being prosecuted because the woman just feels like she shouldn't, I get truly upset. This shows the man, that it was acceptable and he can do it again. How many more times are we going to allow the justice department to push around people of much lesser worth in this world?
The composability of buildpacks
The timing of this one is scary.

I'm working on a mobile app that does a key exchange with a server before allowing a server-based registration or login. It's nowhere near as complex as your average distributed system.

That said, I've run into a scary amount of the things mentioned in this article in my tiny little use case. Just trying to ensure a decent user experience (timing out a comms check after two seconds rather than waiting up to 60 seconds when the phone switches from networked to disconnected) in an async message exchange needs some crazy orchestration. Keeping the code clean means refactoring stuff I thought I had nailed two months ago.

I've been programming for a long time, but this stuff humbles me. And happily, I love it.
I would remove the testing code, for instance pressing C caused it to crash for me.

Also, it took me a second to figure out a few things, (I ended up looking at the source to figure out how to drop the key) and the boss battle was weird.

Overall I'd say the game mechanic works and is fun, and I'd like to see the game fleshed out.
Top iOS Conferences in 2013
I view HN as a community/forum of mostly "business hackers" (for obvious reasons: startups, duh). By analogy, I wonder: would a "business hippie" be more or less sympathetic to the original "hippie" goals? In either case, while I don't consider business and hippie/hacking to be a contradiction, I do think it's a tenuous combination that can easily re-frame one's original values unsympathetically.
If only most knew then, what they know now.

It's saddening that a positive response to that appeal might've actually helped him - both mentally and financially.
Sometimes it takes a shock for people to reconsider their position, especially if what they're really doing is defending their own lack of action. Let's not run to judge the people who posted in that thread many months ago.

Personally, I gave up on participating in any kind of activism about 10 years ago, partly because I didn't feel we were getting anywhere and the next generation didn't seem to care. I feel pretty uncomfortable about that now.
any early users here? Interface has definitely changed since the beta invites. How have this changed for all?

Can't place a single definition to the interface, but I like it. Others?
Every time I hear of a woman getting raped and the man not being prosecuted because the woman just feels like she shouldn't, I get truly upset.

So you think the government should continue to prosecute cases even when the victim of the crime claims that no crime occurred?
There is no developer account at the time, but in case you have a free publication to distribute you can get it on the App Store under the Standard package. We will develop your own branded app, we will give you an account for the backend of LazyPub to upload your issues and if at the end of 6 months you are not happy with it you can cancel and not get charged at all.
Expected. CBS makes all their money via ads so that's their golden egg, everything else can be used to defend that. CBS is also mature so there's no 50% growth y2y, defending their turf is paramount.

Just as some search engines favor their advertisers in rankings, at least indirectly.
Under the Hood: Automated backups
Have You Seen My Mug?
The App that Pays in so Many Ways - FREE registration
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This might the single most illuminating comment here about how this tragedy was allowed to reach its terrible conclusion. It perfectly illustrates the indifference towards unjust laws as long as they concern somebody else.

And to all those people that suggested seeing things from prosecution's vantage point -- now might be the time to also consider how Aaron might have felt reading those comments.
1. Generally speaking, district court criminal cases are non-precedential; i.e., they are not binding on other courts. Sometimes a district court will decide a legal issue that is adopted by a higher court and then becomes precedential. But the more I think about this case, the more it seems to be a political case, and in political cases, the rules are different. In this case, if the Internet reporting is correct, Swartz was only given the option to plead open to the indictment. That is extraordinary. Usually in a non-political case the prosecutor will agree to dismiss most of the counts in exchange for a guilty plea; would recommend a cap or prospective sentence, agree on the amount of the fine, agree not to allocute, etc. Someone wanted Swartz' head on a pike, perhaps for the PACER episode.
2. Yes. Upon the death of the defendant, the case is over. With all respect to Ms. Ortiz, Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Crim. Proc. shouldn't apply in this case. That rule relates to the dismissal of charges before trial. Upon the death of the defendant, the case cannot proceed to trial as there is no longer a case or controversy; there is only one name on the side of the v. and there needs to be a name on each side. This is a simplification, and it may well be a practice in the District of Massachusetts, but it is not the correct procedure (though I may be hypertechnical here). The point is that it wasn't government benevolence that caused them to file, the case was over upon the death of the sole criminal defendant. If there was another party involved, the case can and would proceed, absent a plea.
Writing A Transport Adapter for Requests
Simple Steps to Protect your WordPress Site from Hackers
Budweiser: is it better to be shown in negative way or in Adam Sandler movie?
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This shows the night and day personalities of Aaron Swartz and Julian Paul Assange.
Falkvinge: Aaron Swartz was a prodigy going up against powers
That rspec example looks like some sort of misguided language skeuomorphism. "If I name this method 'it' and this one 'should' and this one 'subject', I get something that sort of looks like English if you read it out loud while skipping the symbols! Isn't that neat?"

Well, no, it's a horrible idea, because in English those words would imply a certain syntax tree, while the actual syntax tree in your DSL is completely different, and those words have completely different roles from the ones they have in English. So you have something that superficially looks like English if you take care to arrange it just right, but in fact works in a completely different way from how you know English to work.

It's like having a picture of a sliding knob in your application, except instead of sliding it you're supposed to click it, and it's actually used as a tab switcher. And you put a denim texture on it.
Not to sound crass, or maybe I want to sound crass. But this is just looking like a chess game now.

As if we couldn't see this kind of thing coming with the way the movie industry portrayed hacking in the 80s and 90s. Public consciousness will, I venture to assert, take this kind of non-news as the new news norm. To the dismay of EFF, Creative Commons, Wikileaks, etc.
> It's inextricable from cultural bias, though the physics obviously plays some role.

Of course, as you say, our cultural biases/values play a role in how we create music and what music we appreciate with how much consonance/dissonance.

But the fact that certain musical intervals sound more harmonious or more dissonant seems to be a result of the human ear's response to the physical nature of the frequency of the sound waves, and thus a response that is shared across cultures.

> The ratios for a tritone, major 7th, etc. are more complex

Yeah, I guess that's true that the ratios between those 12 frequencies aren't the 12 simplest, but they can be derived by following the simplest non-octave ratio - 3:2 or a perfect fifth - starting from a root note and moving up one perfect fifth 12 times.

Thus if you start from C: C - G - D - A - E - B - F# - C# - G# - D# - A#/Bb - F and that's all 12 notes. I guess I thought that because of that pattern those were the twelve simplest ratios. Thanks for the heads up.

And yes this principle applies to the Just tempered Scale not the even-tempered scale.
The assignment sides[i] = ... with "? :" formatted as a table (in table notation) should be red as a single statement. It is a relatively common element, you will find in easy to read, once you see it a few hundred times.
Thank you, not sure I could have phrased it any better. I'm not sure many of us will ever fully understand what Aaron went through, something obviously dark enough that he felt the only way out was to take his own life. If some of the condolences and sympathy on offer right now had been given back then maybe a brilliant mind would still be alive. Hopefully all of us will think twice before dismissing calls of help with "man up" from now now.
I don't think prosecutor discretion should be used to second guess the legislature and the public. I do not think it is appropriate for a prosecutor to say "this fits both the latter and the spirit of the law, but I don't think this is as serious of a crime as Congress does, so I will give it less than its full effect."

I do not think 35 years in prison would have been an appropriate punishment for what Swartz did, but he wasn't sentenced to 35 years in prison. Being charged with counts that could carry up to 35 years is totally different than being sentenced to that amount of time. Ultimately, sentencing is the domain of the judge, and in this case the judge never got to make the call. And I don't mean that in a legalistic sense--simply describing the status quo. It's the engineer in my that admires the division of responsibilities inherent in our system.
I don't seem to have commented on those threads. But if I had, most of my thoughts now are similar to how they were then.

Fully in support of his goals. Mixed feelings about his methods. Thinking that civil disobedience gains some of its moral authority from being willing to pay a price. But that the price in this case was completely out of proportion to the violation. Thinking that the feds never should have been involved.

Pretty much where I am now, with the added anger/pain about a young man who had already contributed more to the world than most people ever will being hounded to death in a showcase prosecution.
Market cap today is is still $472,000,000,000. Cash reserves around $124,000,000,000. Earnings of $8,200,000,000 on $36,000,000,000 in revenue last quarter alone. I think they're doing fine! :)
I think this speaks a bit to the mentality of technical people.

Your job is to find things that suck and call them on it/make them better. Unfortunately this tends to carry over into all aspects of life, that we can be/are overly critical of everything. Look at almost any great tech/design mind - they can be overly cynical at times.

One of the skills I respect most in a technical person is when they can say, "I hate this, but I love this" at the same time. Or better yet, "You're good at what you do, but this isn't your best work. X is good, but Y really sucks, fix the Y."

Honestly we have a long way to go regarding dealing with people.
With solid developers it can be pulled off with a fair bit of success. However there is a LOT of work that needs to put in order to make a quality web-app have a good experience on all devices, it's not as simple as throwing the url to your web-app into a native container and hoping for the best.

But like I've said it is possible. I've seen web solutions put into a native situation with performance that is nearly indistinguishable from a native experience. But having a chance to sit down with the developers there was a lot of work that they needed to be put in to get the web component to that level on mobile devices.

There are reasons that people may want to choose using a web solution for their native product (ie over the air updates, extremely good web developer but lacking quality native developers, distribution of embedded apps without needed to go through the associated app store ect.) but if the reason is it's easier and takes less time, I'm sorry to say that that is not the case if your looking at providing a quality product.