skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I did most certainly not write, nor imply, that it was OK. I just didn't insist more on how bad it was, because there's only so much beating a dead horse can take, and because I didn't think I had anything constructive to add to this truism.

Sure, I apologise for implying this was your personal opinion, however the strength of my tone is based on the fact that some will use your observation as an excuse.

> I'm afraid you're getting confused between explanations and justifications; that's probably one of the causes for your depressed feelings.

Actually I feel fine, a figure of speech :-) the problem is that many will use these explanations as a justification, the gap between the two isn't very far.
So if they're using Rubymotion for their iOS hybrid app, I wonder if they'll use http://ruboto.org for their Android hybrid app?
> When you purchase something via bitcoins, it is public information. You have an address that is public that says abcdef bought this. abcdef cant be traced back to anyone unless you publicly announce you are abcdef.

Definitely not. Transactions are public, but definitely not the information that connects transactions to identities or merchants.

> When you buy a pizza, you are saying abcdef lives at this address. So anyone with a subpoena on Dominos records can tie your address to your previous purchases.

Also wrong. If you send the transaction from a web wallet, the merchant receiving the coins can hardly say anything about you.

It seems that there are lots of trolls here shouting something about bitcoin which they don't really know much about.
Maybe on fancy transmissions, but the Citroen I used to drive certainly didn't. Never tried at 100km/h, but I did sometimes accidentally switch to the wrong gear at lower speeds (like switching to 2 or 3 while driving 80) and it never stopped me.
Eh, I'm 24 years old ... in the crowd here on HN I would be considered part of that "kids" :P
Pete Johnson: why I left HP after 19 years for ProfitBricks
>The predicted loss of a bank robbery is high four figures.

Having worked as a bank teller, that figure is much, much lower. Often they'll only get away with a couple of hundred dollars.

Otherwise you're right. I think a lot of people still have the romantic picture of Bonnie & Clyde or Hollywood style movies like Heat. The reality is that bank robbers nowadays are idiots. They're high on crack or otherwise don't know what they're doing. They are dumb. All bank robberies are investigated by the FBI, and these guys get caught.

This isn't just fear for the customers or perception, it's a dangerous situation where the loss is really not that great. Meanwhile a teller that tries to act like a hero could get himself or others shot, over a couple of hundred dollars.
The premise of the app is that with a contrived double-blind method, you can turbo past the awkward stage of signalling interest in someone.

It's flawed because if I click all my friends just to see who clicked me, then find friends X, Y and Z clicked me, I still don't know if they actually want to have sex with me, or were just doing the same thing I did. We haven't skipped an awkward step at all.

In a way, it's worse than that, because if I sincerely click on friend X, and X clicks me, then I assume that means she wants to fuck me. If she was just seeing who would signal interest in her, we now have an excruciatingly awkward situation where I've said out loud "I want to have sex with you", and it's not mutual.
I fail to see how anyone can create a repeatable objective benchmark between different VPS providers.

I respect the fact that the author tried hard and didn't bias the results, but I fail to see where he even repeated the benchmark over a number of days to attempt to eliminate variations in what the other guests were doing while the benchmark was running.

As I see it, the only way I would trust a benchmark of this nature was if it was somehow ran over multiple hosts and was able to sample a large fraction of the physical boxes over a large period of time. As you can image, that's impossible to do on S3 and any of the other larger VPS providers

Even if somehow someone did manage to pull off a benchmark like the above, I still wouldn't trust it because it would only be valid until the provider added "Joe's Cheap Video Encoding Service" as a client that's sharing my box. Or someone else who's running a benchmark just like you are?

With all of the above said: I'm sure that there is differences between the VPS providers in how they allocate CPU and IO resources and Digital Ocean may indeed be much better on average. I'm just not sure how you can measure it objectively to make sure they are or that they will continue to be so even 5 minutes in the future.

Which is a shame, because an objective metric that was trustworthy that compared all the different providers would be absolutely awesome.
Well, I suppose the argument would go that a Taiwanese engineer would, by dint of shared language and culture, be more susceptible to coercion and bribes than someone from europe, south asia, etc...

You could try to make that argument, but I've always figured it would go kind of the other direction. Every Taiwanese national I know is a fierce supporter of Taiwan's independence of China, and China certainly does all it can to foster that every time it tries to annex the country.
Can Backbone/Ember make Django a simple REST API?
For a while, I was pretty happy with another low-price host (ChicagoVPS)--but I had to switch away (to Linode, as it happens) due to something not mentioned or measured in this article at all: network throughput volatility. Someone or something was regularly burst-saturating the physical pipe going into the machine, such that it would seem to all the rest of the world that my website would be down for random 90-second periods every few hours. This is really bad when you're trying to run a realtime game with persistent connections :)

I'm not sure quite what it was--whether malicious user behavior, a lack of separation in bridge-interface setup making network traffic on the box un-QoS-able, or maybe someone on the box I was on bearing the brunt of temporary, persistent DoS attacks--but I didn't care to roll the dice on another box from the same host, when I knew that this kind of thing "just doesn't happen" with the major providers.

Still, if there was a low-end host that specifically mentioned stable network throughput in their SLA, I'd love to try another one. $7/mo sure does buy a lot of horizontal scaling and High Availability, once you can ensure each node can hold onto the little bit of traffic you send it. :)
Speaking as a non-technical person at Stripe, the google groups web interface good, but not great. Andreas on our team built a filter manager, which makes it much easier: https://github.com/antifuchs/gmail-britta

I was all set up with filters on my first day and then made tweaks over my first couple of weeks to improve efficiency.
The SQL Server Query Optimizer
We use DNS Made Easy but and are happy with them. However, for our level of DNS queries per month - e.g. over 50million Route 53 would give us some significant cost savings.

Do you guys know whether Route 53 offers templating mechanism? e.g. setup 1 template and apply to 50 different domains?
What software do you use to run the lists? Just some majordomo, or mailman software?
That said, a modern Greek can understand quite a bit of the New Testament, even though it's been around 2,000 years since it was written.
I spent the better part of high school with a copy of Lancaster's TTL Cookbook in hand (still have my dog-eared copy). Then as an undergrad in 78 I re-read this primer for success. While I was more inclined towards the 'enterprise' track, this book nonetheless helped shape my attitude about money, time, and purpose. I can't recall another book that combined (good) advice regarding cashflow, always giving customers something extra, working with your body's natural cycles of energy, retirement funding, and "modifying a television set for a better money machine" (by cutting the cord and throwing it away). Still a worthwhile read, IMO.
Disjointed channels and spectrum/bandwidth flexibility are features of LTE, hopefully the tune-able software defined radio is just around the corner.
Looks like it might be a great tool.

However, it seems like it might be a bit complex. This seeming complexity is accentuated because of the "lighter" expectation created by the name.

Why is it called "lightermail"?
Sex, Booze, Masturbation, and Cold Showers.
To me, that's the best argument against curiosity. (I know it's not a perfect argument.) Because some questions don't have answers, or the answers are deeply troubling.

That's why I regret how much I have pursued my curiousity about Human/artificial AI, evolutionary biology, the nature of religion, etc.

Sometimes, it's better to be a bit innocent and ignorant (also respectful and nice, otherwise the world can get into trouble with violent religious zealots) -- no one gets psychically hurt that way.
Hi btmspox,

Firstly, thanks for your reply and your works on chef. I really appreciate it.

I think there is a difference between people who want free support & people who document a bug of a opensource project clearly in the hope of to improve the quality of that project - I hope I am in the latter case.

My reported issue can be easily fixed with some hacky workarounds, so I didn't bother with it and move on (As you can see I have never comment on that ticket). However, I still decided to create that ticket because I think the issue is easy to reproduce and will affect a lot of new comers to chef.

The issue is confirmed by others as well, one awesome commenter Florin Mihaila even provided a very detail analyse and solution to the issue.

For me, I would prefer if you can close the ticket if you think it is invalid, or mark as don't fix if resource is not allowed, rather than leaving as open and unanswered.

Of course, this is your project so I can't disagree with your preference, thanks anyway :)
> You can still break up your algorithm into a class with multiple template methods

Template methods are an abomination. They are only widely used because many OO languages don't have first-class functions. A template method means that the method is being parameterized by one or more functions. Parameters should be expressed as parameters! You wouldn't design a Circle class so that you need to subclass it to specify the radius of the circle. The radius is a parameter. Likewise for the callback functions used by a template method. Template methods are intrinsically difficult to understand and spaghetti-like, unless well-documented, because it is not immediately clear what the parameters to it are. And when overriding a callback method, it's not immediately clear what template method the overridden method is paramaterizing. Or that it is even parameterizing anything. (Caveat: Sometimes template methods are warranted, but they are greatly overused.)

> Classes have another advantage: virtual method calls.

You don't need virtual method calls in order to parameterize functionality. See previous paragraph. Furthermore, it is not safe to override a method without knowing if it has been designed for overriding, and what the class expects of the overriding method. See Effective Java, "Item 17: Design and document for inheritance or else prohibit it". Also see "Item 16: Favor composition over inheritance", and a similar discussion in the Gang of Four book.

> If one function in a module calls into another function in the module I can only do two things: a) copy/paste the library and change one of the functions or b) a monkeypatch which modifies a shared resource someone else might want to use with the old semantics.

If a method is not designed to be overridden, you shouldn't override it anyway. (See previous paragraph.) When using a functional approach (in a language with first-class functions), you can usually design for flexibility just as easily or more easily than when using an inheritance-based OO approach for flexibility.
It stands to reason, therefore, that humans do not want this diversity.
When I went to high school in Denmark in the late 90s, Latin was still a mandatory first-year course for students on the language track (the other being the science track).
BangWithFriends seems like a new implementation of something I've seen a couple times in the last few decades. This is the first time I've seen it on FB.

I ran into this years ago in it's email incarnation. I think it was something like you'd get an email that said someone had a crush on you and then you are supposed to put in emails of other people and if there was a match you'd be notified. The problem was you didn't know who sent the email so you'd probably put in the emails of all your female contacts (or vice versa, etc) and then all of them would get emails. Logically it was an email ponzi scheme where if you didn't see the inherent problem from the beginning you probably ended up really confusing a bunch of your friends.
I'm not sure I'm understanding. I develop web applications that run well on all major platforms and it's not nearly as hard to do as people make it out to be. And the difference between Javascript and Java, Ruby, Go, Rust, etc. is that it runs in an environment that literally everybody already has installed when they buy a computer - the web browser. No mucking around with installing the JVM, or downloading an application to install and keep up to date, etc... you just point your browser to say, Facebook.com or news.ycombinator.com and boom, you are served a nice, cross-platform application that never needs updating. Thus, the popularity of javascript and web technologies.
"The LTE standard can be used with many different frequency bands. In North America, 700/800 and 1700/1900 MHz are used; 2500 MHz in South America; 800, 900, 1800, 2600 MHz in Europe; 1800 and 2600 MHz in Asia; and 1800 MHz in Australia."

It doesn't seem like anyone's particularly standardized on frequencies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)#Frequen...
I have another interesting (and reproducible) manifestation on Supermicro motherboards with two 82574L controllers. In this case, it is again true that we only experience problems on the first (as ordered by ascending MAC address) of the two interfaces.

That was the case, though I did not clearly state so above, on the Intel motherboard with one 82574L and one 82579LM.
No they do not need to attempt to contact the merchant. Especially companies like American Express, they will usually chargeback first and ask questions later. In fact, if customers call in to ask what a particular charge is, they will ding the merchant.
Yeah, no disagreement.
The social network you can’t opt out of
Definitely. I wasn't at all interested until I came to the comments to figure out what it was. I'm still not entirely sure what it does or how it works (both important) but I'm no longer dismissing out of hand.
No no no ... that is still doing it wrong.

When you are in 5th, you downshift, while the clutch is still disengaged you blip the throttle to get it up to the required RPM's (in my car 3k in 5th is about 5k in fourth), then let the clutch up (no slipping, RPM (rev) match it), at this point you are no longer giving the engine gas. It will start to slow you down, from 5k back to 2k, disengage the clutch, blip the throttle to 4.5k, 3rd gear, let the clutch up, slow down further.

The same way that you have to rev-match when down shifting to go pass a truck on the highway quickly.

The way you are doing it is slipping the clutch and is absolutely terrible for the clutch. You are now using the clutch like your brake pads/rotors and it is definitely not designed for it.

---

No, I was thinking you were suggesting that you could put the manual transmission into first gear while driving 100, that is absolutely insane. The mismatch between speed from the axle and the engine is going to be too great and it will damage your transmission. Most transmissions even have protection against this so that you can't even push it in to first gear while going faster than 40 Mph unless you really force it.
And the ability to spell as well.
AllI have ever heard from a hallucinogenic mind traveler is "we are all connected" or an occasional dreamlike image that is explored by the conscious self later. It's not a replacement for actually experience and thinking about reality.
The problem with BangWithFriends is that there are no females on there that are down to bang. Every person I've ever seen login has a multitude of male friends "using this app" and little to no female friends using it.

This kind of app is completely fucked from the start bc of the gender disparity.
That's an interesting point. Reducing complexity is a top priority right now. I just wanted to ship and start getting some good ol' HN feedback!
The Future of Excel
i guess this is hoping too much, but does anyone know if there is an equivalent regulation here in chile that limits liability when money is taken from an account through fraud? banks aggressively sell "insurance" and i frequently argue with my account manager, saying the bank is legally responsible anyway, but i don't have any actual factual basis for that...
Of all the conclusions to be drawn from this observation, I believe yours is the most pessimistic.

I'm much more excited by the fact that information was able to quickly traverse national and language barriers, making it's way all around the globe to catch up with where it began in such a short time. That's pretty amazing if you ask me!
Selling VM's is a very competitive market. Success in such a market is a testament to quality.
Hmm. They email your initial root password in cleartext, rather than either letting me choose it or displaying it on the site, both of which would be over SSL.
Eliezer and others on LessWrong have authored a treasure trove of articles on using your brain more effectively. For a high level map of some "tracks" of articles elaborating common themes, check out http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
This is where a study by the Feds (I think?) comes in. They found that they were generally able to link accounts as belonging to the same person, based on transaction patterns and flow of money between the multiple accounts the holder owns.

You can make it more difficult to link your accounts together by never transferring funds between your different accounts, but then how do you fund your accounts? It just gets more and more complicated.

I don't really think Bitcoin will bring an end to "Follow the money".
You can always force it ... but in general there is some protection that at least makes a lot more difficult to move to 1st/2nd when doing 100 km/h. Third and fourth are no issues.
For some of the media encoding, presumably higher is better. x264 for sure: when talking about frames encoded per second, more would be better. the rest of the benchmarks are all "higher is better" so perhaps the same is true for seconds of (mp3|flac) encoded in a period. they are certainly ambiguous though.
Going the distance: driving the Tesla Model S in the real world
"Eventually we came to the conclusion that we should stick with what we’re good at: web apps. We know the technologies well, we have a great development environment and workflow, we can control the release cycle, and everyone at 37signals can do the work. It’s what we already do, just on a smaller screen. We all loved our smaller screens so we were eager to dive in. Plus, since WebKit-based browsers were making their way to the webOS and Blackberry platforms too, our single web-app would eventually run on just about every popular smartphone platform.", Jason Fried, http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2761-launch-basecamp-mobile

So, should we expect 37signals to ditch "bootstrapping" over VC-funded startups soon?

Let me be clear, I'm not out to troll 37signals. But here's the thing, if you claim a superior ideology, sell that ideology on paperback and then go against your own methodology, you're going to get some feedback. You can't claim that everyone is a troll, or a "cesspool" whenever people confront these ideas - especially when you're selling them for $.
Yet wolfram alpha isn't quite smart enough to tell that this wasn't really an earthquake but a nuclear test:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nuclear+tests+in+north+...
Nodejitsu Launches Business Plans and Expands to Europe
I wasn't previously aware of apptopia -- looks very cool and I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before. There's always an interesting outlier project that escapes our notice, right?

But I'm a little confused about this situation. Who was listing this app? (i.e., who originally coded the app?) Was he/she consulted about the situation?

Perhaps I'm not yet understanding how Apptopia works, but I'm surprised you took this action without consulting with the app's author. Or do you own all the apps listed outright? Or did you pay him/her for the app, regardless of the chargeback?

Anyway, glad this made to to HN, I'll take a closer look at Apptopia.

EDIT: And just to be clear, I meant an outlier on the distribution of the projects that are on my screen, not a global outlier for everyone. Clearly, given your funders and growth, many people are aware of your project.
Not a bad deal for Digital Ocean especially when there are $20 off promo codes available. Assuming you can use it for 4 months, it's essentially a 4 month trial. I found a few codes with a Google search. ;)
> How do you tell a non-technical person that they can’t understand?

This is unbelievably presumptuous, narcissistic and smacks of technological elitism. You don't know whether or not the client can understand -- all you know is you're unwilling to explain it to him.

If you don't want to get along with clients, if you're willing to take the risk of alienating them, take this article's advice and tell your customers, "You can't do that, and you also can't understand why -- trust me."

If you do want to get along with your clients as well as grow your business, try this instead: "Well, our system can't do that at the moment, but I appreciate your making this suggestion for future improvements."

Maybe it's a polite lie -- so what? You've empowered the client, made him feel as though you care about his needs. You've avoided opening an emotional exit door the client my well choose to walk through.
Lots of small things (on Javascript code management)
Interesting, I first saw this automatic trans behavior as early as about Y2K in a midrange Mercedes but only with the cruise control on, and it did actually downshift to set up the engine braking effect. I've never encountered it with cruise control off though.

Ford trucks with a Tow/Haul button enabled will do exactly what you describe though, especially if you tap the brake for an instant while going downhill.