skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So cool, a few questions:

1. The prices info, I assume is for US only, right?
2. Are you only analysing new products or also the used ones?

I created a similar (but very, very modest) proof of concept to track mercadolibre's prices (http://numok.com/products/view/samsung-t24a550/9), however it seems to be unusable without a human verifying each listing, as you state in your blog:

> This isn’t the highest price that we’ve recorded for a product though. Turns out this Samsung TV was priced at $1,000,000,000,000.00 ($1 trillion) in early November last year. A dozen sales of this would have gone a long way towards offsetting the American national debt!

3. Are you doing this validation in some way or unreal prices should be expected by using your API?

As stated before, great pricing! Although I'm not sure how does the limit of products work for the two initial account types (Up to 10,000).

Overall, I'm glad to have this API, thank you!
I have one, and this is accurate. The only benefit is being able to see notifications on the wrist without having to take the phone out of my pocket. That being said, it is a huge and amazing benefit. I hate watches, and feel they have no purpose, but now it does.

The thing is I think this article understated the horribleness of the notification bug that is supposedly Apple's fault. It's a huge pain in the ass. The only feature that matters on the Pebble is seeing notifications on the watch. Sometimes my phone buzzes and the Pebble does not. Unless the Pebble gets 100% of the notifications reliably, it becomes a frustration instead of a boon.

If that is fixed, then oh yes. If it's not fixed soon, I'll be trading pebble for the rumored Apple watch. Heck, I might do that anyway. But still.
Yup and history in general works well. Authentic history and embellished history tends to be a very exciting "fantasy" world.

Heck, look at the Total War games:

Shogun: Total War

Medieval: Total War

Rome: Total War

Medieval II: Total War

Empire: Total War

Napoleon: Total War
> Depressingly, this is the same logic that keeps Americans from improving anything...because they think it's already "the best"

So this is why there is no innovation in America? We are all culturally caught up in tradition and taught in such a rote manner that we can't innovate? You should see the caste system we have -- inflexible tradition all the way!
The question was somewhat rhetorical.

The point I was trying to convey was that even though verbs can be used in a noun context, that doesn't really make them nouns.

Similarly functions and objects. There's a certain verbiness to a multiply function that a Cat object doesn't have.

For further consideration: "It rained." What's doing the raining?
Computer Science - Part of English Baccalaureate
> computers do not have mechanisms for distortion

Yet.
SocialShare.com domain available for your startup
SocialShare.com auction ends Thursday at 12:52pm EST at Sedo.com

http://sedo.com/auction/auction_detail.php?auction_id=141953
While they may not intend to do it, it most certainly happens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deh_Bala_wedding_party_airstrik...

If it quacks like a duck?
Yup, from a cursory glance at it, it looks like it's been written using WxWidgets, so it should be (more or less) easy to port to other platforms.

Even though I'm not an active Lua programmer by any extent, I hope the community does a good job of porting it.
Just opened Quora to see if my user was still there:

User name: Alsfkj Alskfjaslkfj

E-mail Quora probably sends weekly e-mails: alsfkj@x.com

(sorry if any of you owns x.com)
ICT Move to Computer Science More Than A Makeover
How much money does Quora have left, and what is their burn rate? Are they making any revenue? It seems not.
Radiology screen share using HTML5
Objective-C is dynamically typed.
If it's one browser that have a shit ton of per domain/site options it is Opera.

edit: Also, what is up with the throwing around of the word "irrelevancy" on HN lately. Usually in snarky contexts as well.
This is so great! I'm planning a world programming trip, and this is so helpful for that. Do many people freelance on the go like this? Considering a programmer could at least earn $30/hr, at 20hrs/wk thats $2400 / month. Clearly enough to spend a month in each country, even with some fun.
Not even the TSA believes that. That's why they have "TSA Precheck" - pay $100 and submit to a "background check" and you will almost always skip the molestation.

TSA Precheck is a program explicitly designed to placate the people with enough influence to get the system changed. You can be sure that every member of congress and their staffs are in the Precheck program, along with anyone who flies on business or is otherwise wealthy. Pretty soon the only people getting molested on a regular basis any more are the lower classes.

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/pay-the-tsa-100-and-bypass...
Things just as bad were going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, but lots of people think they were unworthy causes.

I know they were failures, but part of that stems from the lack of dedication and support we had for them.
ThirdoceanTV – Hessie Jones on LinkedIn, Klout, Kred and #HMVTweets
Tragedy of the WebKit Commons
"Yet I'd rather improve my existing ops skills a bit than have to setup everything as async APIs (on EC2 anyway). That's the only way I can see that I can solve this."

You're going to discover that a lot of "ops skills" boils down to "do things asynchronously whenever possible". And while nearly any smart engineer can think of the "right" way of doing something, finding the time to do it all is a huge opportunity cost.

That's what the parent is trying to say. It's not that you can't do it; it's that it's a really bad idea to do it, at first.
Sounds like this would be a great match with my LTE iPad mini (I keep it in my pocket). But I'll probably still wait until Apple releases their version. Even then, not sure if I'll get it because I prefer to have one device... at least until they start to sync Notification (Interruption?) Center.
Yes, seems like they went back to giving paid apps a bit more weight again.
> If requests are getting distributed randomly shouldn't all your pages show a similar average time in queue?

A common misconception, called "the law of small numbers".

Probability theory tells us this is only true over a large amount of requests, i.e. in the long term (the law of large numebrs). In the short term, results can vary wildly and thus form these kind of queues.
anyone know how to get debugging working with a regular, command-line only, lua file?
I'd think that most of the requests being served by rapgenius.com would be highly cacheable (99% are likely just people viewing content that rarely changes).

Seems weird that the site would have such a massive load of non-cacheable traffic. Heroku used to offer free and automatic varnish caching, but the cedar stack removed it. Some architectures make it easy to use cloudfront to cache most of the data being served. My guess that refactoring the app to lean on cloudfront would be easier and more cost-effective (and faster) than manually managing custom scaling infrastructure on EC2.
> [nytimes paywall measures] These techniques are wide and varied. They appear to look at your IP, use cookies, use HTTP_Referer, use URL querystrings.

"Appear" what now how? Nope, it's just cookies. Very easy to defeat for anyone who cares on the desktop -- somewhat harder on apple walled garden mobile. But apparently good enough for their revenue, so.
HTML 4.01, then HTML5. Do both. It's good to know and helpful in the transition.
Definitely happy to talk further. Not sure how we can get in touch privately in this forum -- if that's not possible, drop me an email to anonimoheynonnyno@gmail.com
I guess the technology was a handout from the Soviet Union. I can't fathom that a country like North Korea would be capable of developing nuclear weapons on their own, when a highly advanced country like Iran can't do it in this day and age.
> The solution here is to figure out why your 99th is 3 seconds. Once you solve that, randomized routing won't hurt you anymore. You hit this exact same problem in a non-preemptive multi-tasking system (like gevent or golang).

The Golang runtime uses non-blocking I/O to get around this problem.
People have all sorts of notions about meditation. I'm writing for people who have become intrigued by the potential insights gained by psychedelics -- who may even be seeking relief from existential anxiety right now -- but may still have some doubts about using psychedelics. These folk are unlikely to to know what "vipassana" is, or that it is a meditation, or that there are lots of other things people call "meditation", and most importantly, a Google keyword to look through.

If you know enough to nitpick this, then you probably didn't need the information :-D
Designing For Immersive Reading
I'd love to see some better tutorials on how to use AWS Beanstalk to scale Rails apps.

There is this one, but it doesn't give me a sense of the scalability or management http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create...

Any recommendations?
That's the exact same version of Chrome I have running on my 2011 MBP with 10.8.2. Either there's something up with your video card, Chrome install, or maybe Snow Leopard is to blame (no idea why).
I'd love to see some better tutorials on how to use AWS Beanstalk to scale Rails apps.

There is this one, but it doesn't give me a sense of the scalability or management http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create...

Any recommendations for good tutorials?
My "favourite" thing about the One Class Per File thing is that (certainly when I last used it) javac would refuse to compile the class file unless it was in a directory tree identical to its namespace, and you fully specified that on the command-line.

# Worked
javac org/eclipse/something/SomeClass.java

# Failed
cd org/eclipse/something/ && javac SomeClass.java
It's a pretty simplistic viewpoint to think that nothing should have been done to amp of security and the problem would just take care of itself after the tragedy of 9/11. Yes, maybe the exact same plan wouldn't work again, but downing a plane would take far less compliance by the other passengers than running it into a building.
Objective-C has tons of language bindings out there. The only languages I'm absolutely sure have made it onto iOS are Lua, Ruby and Javascript.

If you're an OS X user you can check out PyObjC: http://pythonhosted.org/pyobjc/
Why is everyone leaving out Dota 2? Sure it's not technically 'released,' arguably to successfully scale to a point they can open the game up to China, but it's the most popular game on Steam, with a huge following growing every month.
I think that's only viable when the reason for the pay cuts can be blamed on forces outside the company (slowing economy, competition from other segments, etc.).

When it's internal, the people who aren't the problem are, rightly, pissed. With the kind of employees Valve has, I'd be surprised if they didn't lose 10% anyway, except they'd be losing their best, not the ones they actually want to go on without.
Here's a very simple gevent hello world app.

This is run from inside AWS on an m1.large:

https://gist.github.com/dcramer/4950101

For the 50 dyno test, this was the second run, making the assumption that the dynos had to warm up before they could effectively service requests.

You'll see that with 49 more dynos, we only managed to get around 400 more requests/second on an app that isnt even close to real world.

(By no means is this test scientific, but I think it's telling)
I'm curious to know what you mean by 'equivalent non-Monsanto herbicides'. Roundup is specifically designed kill everything except Monsanto's GM crops. Are you saying that farmers with contaminated fields should be able to use a non-Monsanto herbicide which is specifically designed to avoid killing Monsanto's GM crops?
> The point is that TSA and a bunch of other measures none of us like (Patriot act anyone?) were a reaction to an absolute failure to communicate, in no uncertain terms, that terrorism has severe and dire consequences. Almost unimaginable consequences that not one person on this planet would want to provoke.

So you think it is possible to have absolute security?

The TSA and Patriot Act are similar to irrational escalation or commitment bias ala "throw bad money after good money." We've already suffered a massive loss of life and money, but we'll throw all of this money at the problem that has passed and take away a number of liberties.

The downside of an open society is the ability to be harmed. Giving up that openness doesn't seem like much of a trade for the margin security it provides.
Well I did build a custom, fully watercooled computer with flow/temperature monitoring and custom fan control from scratch. Custom wired and designed and overclocked to 5GHZ. Although it's just a computer, it actually took quite a bit of extensive planning and research. Not sure that it really did anything for me, I don't tend to give myself credit for anything for some reason. I figure if I can do it, it must not be too hard.

But yea, maybe that is a good start. I need to shrug this feeling of worthlessness that I carry so heavily. Maybe these are the baby steps needed.
That's a great idea. Pricing trends analysis could be done through the historical data we provide across the different merchants.

We do provide the affiliate purchase links to the products, available under the 'offers' field. Currently you can only figure out when new merchants appear by polling the product ('pull' mechanism). One idea which we have been toying around has been a 'push' mechanism where you can subscribe to a particular product through our API and we would notify if there has been any change (price change or new merchant selling it or product has been discontinued). Drop me a mail at varun <at> semantics3.com if you want more details or wish to bounce off ideas.
> Narrowing your latency band --even if it makes the average case worse-- makes so many systems problems better (top of the list: load balancing) it's not even funny.

Yeah, it's a lot more practical than implementing QoS, isn't it?
Nice idea, but in Chrome when you activate WebRTC, the favicon will blink with a "recording" icon, ruining the effect.
We are a nation of the people, by the people, for the people. Bin Laden wrote a letter to the American people and published it after 9/11 wherein he explains the motivation behind his attacks. Other than the obligatory fundie religious crap, his reasoning was thus: your government has been fucking with us for decades, and we're sick of it, yet we cannot attack your government because it is too powerful. Because your government represents you, that makes you culpable, hence the attack.

The easy conclusion is that all 'terrorist' are vile, murderous, evil people with not a drop of decency in their bodies. However, the reality is that 'terrorists' are usually just normal people who have frustratingly little recourse against that which they are opposed to.
There's a software switch in Pebble to disable notifications. Settings -> Display -> Notifications On/Off
I point out vipassana for these reasons:

(1) You don't have to do this with psychedelics.

(2) You can gain the insights without psychedelics, meaning that it is within the normal operating parameters of the human brain to gain these insights.

(3) You can trip and get high when you meditate. Don't be afraid when it happens.

(4) You can trip and get high when you meditate. It's another attachment.

(5) It's less of taking a "shortcut" with psychedelics and more about being initiated. Having tasted it and knowing that vipassana will also get you there invites you to have a regular practice. Peak experiences come and go.

(6) The universe is a bigger place than we thought.
As the guys from The Bugle (a satirical podcast) said while describing this product: "we've definitely come a long way when there's a need to develop a complete new piece of expensive hardware just to avoid having to take your phone from your pocket. Meanwhile, no solution to the global hunger problem."

As much as I nerdgasm at how cool this device is, I have to wonder if, as a species, we haven't 'jumped the shark'.
Print your own medicine [video]
It's hard to see the impact of not spending the money, but it is easy to see the benefit of spending the exact same money towards something that actually gives a return on investment.
I consider myself an atheist. However, my parents insist that I will never stop being Jewish because it is primarily a culture/creed.
Right now you can get ifttt alerts sent to pebble via SMS (iOS) or email/SMS (Android). It's 100% in our court to get the final part hooked up, absolutely nothing to do with ifttt!
You float the idea of a conspiracy to smuggle box cutters on a plane? Box cutters? So the terrorists supposedly had the co-conspirators in the airport and out of all the weapons to bring on board, they choose a tool with a one inch blade to take over the plane with, as opposed to something like say, a gun, or even a hunting knife.
The Secret Service opened an investigation as a direct result of the paintings (and other things, like emails) coming into the open. Pretty sure is real.
https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

Why does Firefox do so poorly? ;_;
Mozilla is such a good organization (but to be fair can only survive with Google).
That is exactly how an app I develop at $WORK works.

Requests come in on a front-end, it gets passed off to a router that has multiple different workers connected. The workers send a request to the router letting the router know that they are ready to start responding to requests. The router hands the worker a request, marks the request as being worked on, and moves on to the next request. It is a basic Least Recently Used queue at that point, and if all workers are busy but worker number 3 which received work last finished first, he gets handed new work instantly.

The worker then sends the request back to the router, which sends it back to the appropriate front-end that originally responded to the user.

We are using ZeroMQ for our communication.

For our use case we can handle around 200 requests a second from a TCP/IP connected client to our router, to a worker and back to a client. That is with 3 backend workers, which are hitting the disk/database.

It has worked very well for us.
Amazon RDS Price Reduction for Multi-AZ Deployments
Just like expert sex change, Quora has a way to see the answers without signing in (remember scrolling to the bottom?). Click the datestamp at the bottom of a blurred answer to see it.

As a long-time Quora user, it disappoints me that the content I donate is held ransom in an attempt at "growth hacking".
eBay owns x.com
the implementation is the same.if you use jQuery script the jQlite code is disabled in AngularJS. it is only possible if the subset code respect all the behavior or the main code. And Gecko doesnt use Webkit api at all. Chrome just cant swap its webkit code to to Gecko without significant rewrite.
Hi, I'm one of the creators of this web site. Claripacs screen share lets you show another radiologist or doctor a CT or MRI in real time on the web. Unlike other screen share software, you can temporarily disconnect from the screen share to explore the images on your own, before rejoining the screen share. Many people can join a single screen share, so it can be used in conferences as well as one-on-one consults.

Incidentally, the screen share works by streaming URLs that encode the current series/image number, brightness/contrast, zoom, annotations, split screen layout, etc. When a study is first loaded, the images are preloaded to enable fast scrolling through a study. We use 16-bit grayscale images with lossless compression, to get the best image quality.
Agreed. Be careful who you mention it to. Its a beautiful place for responsible individuals but a death sentence for many. You do not want to go there with a habit.
For example, a small instance is $69/yr for 1.7GB of memory, with additional hourly costs that are quite low

This is very economical compared to Heroku, and most startups can survive on that initially if they cache properly.

But if there is any level of success, how hard is it to scale compared to the extra cost of Heroku?

I'm not convinced it's THAT hard, but would love to see more blog posts about Beanstalk. The AWS doco feels quite mechanical.
The Internship Movie
Their first game, NS1 a mod for half life, took away some years of my life! They are indeed very good and I'm very happy that NS2 went out as a success after so long. It's even cooler seeing that they can now give something else back to the community.
The five stages of hosting
Who would have thought we'd be nostalgic for Experts Exchange.
That isn't the only problem with random routing - the problems aren't as pronounced with uniform response speeds, but you still get a significant difference in net effective queue time, especially if you're operating close to your throughput limit.
I'm curious about this too, especially the last part (similar / identical stack) ?
I left it out because its release date hasn't been announced yet.
NPR hack apologizes for Wall Street (2012)
I forgot about Experts Exchange! I used to love them, but when they broke their shit all I had was a medley of frustration and rage every time I bumped into their site until they went away. Shame they screwed up so badly.

On a side note, what does Quora achieve by forcing people to view the data using a native app rather than through the browser? It seems a little ... pointless, or perhaps I'm being unduly myopic with regards to their strategy.
How to Get Rid of Bad Customers in 4 Steps
Why do you 'want to love' Heroku? Because their marketing speak is so great?
Popularity is no correlated with quality, more with "good enough for the price".
What ever happened to this?
I've dipped my toes in RubyMotion and it's a lot of fun.
And example of what is confusing...

$69 to reserve an instance for a year.

But that is for "light utilization"?!

What does it mean to reserve and instance, but to commit to light usage?

And if you are expecting heavy usage, the price goes up to $195.

But how can you buy an instance for a year but also commit to your usage level? If it's my instance, why is my utilization anyones business?
That gets pretty unlikely, especially if you have many dynos and a low frequency of slow requests. The main reason unicorn can drastically reduce queue times here is that it does not use random routing internally.
Yep sounds good
I'm sure they'd do it algorithmically both for elegance and legal liability reasons. It'd be done in an identical fashion to the Panda update. Use the big fish to identify techniques you can build rules around and then make sure your arbitrary penalty doesn't affect too many innocents too much before you push it live.
1. Right now, we're focusing on the US. But we've made room for expanding internationally (the "currency" and "geo" fields are in place with this in mind).

2. We're analyzing used and refurbished products as well. Each offer is tagged with a "condition" field that conveys this.

3. The question of whether a price of a product is right or wrong is, we realized with time, subjective. Yes, $1,000,000,000,000.00 is very unlikely, but where does one drawn the line? Hence, we don't mark something as bad data and remove it from the database at the data layer. But we do handle this problem at the search layer - we internally rank products based on factors such as their (estimated) genuineness, popularity and so on. For the user, what this means is that when you query the API, only the most relevant products will be returned. The ranking system is constantly learning, so the vision is that it'll get better with time and data.

Thanks for your words about the pricing. Each API query returns upto 10 products; the free plan provides 1000 API queries a day. So you could retrieve upto 10000 products each day. Hope that clarifies. Glad you find the API useful - I'd love to know more about how you plan to use it!