skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes that is the misunderstanding, I do agree with him (you can see another response to him here where we continue agreeing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5214213 ). I was not correcting him by saying "Here's another way to think about it", I was offering another interpretation of why kenjackson is right by looking at the case of mobile in particular.

I chose to focus on mobile for iOS precisely because here you have the greatest example of how open source is helpless and irrelevant. Even if Apple were to satisfy all your requirements for WebKit being open source, you still would not be allowed to compile it and ship it in your app, let alone modify it and ship it. Even if I write the best browser ever for iOS, I am not allowed to ship it on iOS. This is why I keep coming back to it not mattering whether you can or can't fork WebKit for iOS, just like it doesn't matter whether you can or can't write a completely new engine from scratch for iOS, just like it doesn't matter whether you can or can't fork FireFox for iOS: due to the nature of the platform, the web is closed on iOS PERIOD. Apple is THE gatekeeper of all features that enter the iOS web. Continuing to agree with kenjackson, that is why he is right that a better runtime or plugin system are ultimately more important for the web to be open than source code being released: as long as I can have a direct relationship with the user where they can install a plugin and modify the behavior of their browser, then there is a shot for non-dominant market players to always influence the direction of the web (the same way Adobe created the video revolution of the web without needing to own a browser or a cell phone or any other way of forcing people to use their tech).

I was really confused why you kept arguing with me about how open source WebKit is when my point was "whether or not its open source and you can fork it, it doesn't matter because the web is closed on iOS for deeper reasons".
Those charts of "simulated" load balancing strategies don't look at all reasonable at first glance. You certainly don't see such spiky patterns with normal web loads. I think you'd have to have some crazy amount of std. dev in completion time cranked way, way up in your simulation before you saw a bunch of servers stacked at 30 with others at 1.

It's not that there is no benefit to better balancing, it's just that I've never seen it have anything close to that impact. It seems like it's only being perceived as a problem here because somebody drank too much of the (old) kool-aid.

Some of the other numbers are hard to take at face value as well. 6000ms avg on a specific page? If requests are getting distributed randomly shouldn't all your pages show a similar average time in queue? Sounds more like they're using a hash balancing alg and the static page was hashing on to a hot spot.
I'm interested in this too.

I'm currently using tastypie, but will consider Django REST Framework in the future, based purely on the fact that this is a new release and has a deprecation policy. tastypie is still only a pre-1.0 beta. A better evaluation is certainly needed though.
Most DSL in the US is /dramatically/ worse than advertised. Mine advertising 20Mbps down; I'm lucky to get 3. From what I've seen? this is pretty typical. I live in Santa Clara and have an office in Sunnyvale; DSL experience at both is similar, so it's not exactly out in the sticks. In fact, there is city-owned dark fiber running past my condo. (It's business-oriented, not consumer-oriented, so it would cost me some tens of thousands of dollars to setup, and significant monthlies, but it's there.)

I'm considering switching to cable, but we will see.
Ask HN: Free fantasy world (e.g. not LotR) 
Is there any free (both as in beer and as in speech) fantasy world available for any kind of development (game, novel, video, ...)?

I don't know the details, but I'd assume Lord of the Rings, World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons and similar popular ones are full with copyright, licensing, and fees.
> As a dark-skinned man who oftentimes sports a beard, I'm treated like a terrorist every single time I walk through security. To them, I'm a second-class citizen - no question about it.

As a dark-skinned, long-haired main who (usually) doesn't sport a beard when flying, I've learned to stick very close to my (fairer) wife and daughters whenever I can when going through security/immigration/customs.

On 9/11, I had a job where I racked up the frequent-flier miles. I still remember my friends and co-workers urging me to cut my hair to avoid hassles at the airport (among other things). While it has been an inconvenience from time to time, I'm still glad I didn't.
no, at x level of concurrency most set ups wont spend 16 seconds or more on 10% of their requests.
Shin recounts his experience in this incredibly touching and thought-provoking 60 minutes interview: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50136263n

Also, here are illustrations of a North Korean concentration camp by an escaped prison: http://imgur.com/a/648Mv. Incredibly alarming.
Please don't publicise this - Gawker already did enough damage. If some of the more interesting things become popular enough then governments will begin to attack them. In fact, there has already been at least one conviction regarding what you mentioned. Authorities have a terrible fear of things they do not control and are quite willing to become very violent to expand their influence. The less they know, the better.
It doesn't seem moral that the world doesn't invade North Korea and put an end to the insanity.
I'm glad you clarified that your first sentence is about their CSS choices. ;)
For a student who wants to explore Ruby for iOS apps instead of going through the whole Xcode-ObjC learning curve? I think not.
Don't use PayPal to get the registration fee. These kinds of events are very risky for PayPal and they will probably freeze your account. Two previous "horror" stories:

* How PayPal could have killed an independent conference (aralbalkan.com)
(109 points, 551 days ago, 65 comments) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877404

* PayPal Hates Conferences – Especially OpenCamp (openca.mp)
(115 points , 953 days ago, 49 comments ) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491485
This really sux. I like all their other offerings though - I'm considering running the Cloud Foundry "dyno" part alone and using the heroku services with it.
This kind of validates an idea I've been flirting with: a Heroku-like service which routes requests via AMQP or similar message broker and actually exposes the routing dynamics to the client apps.

From a naive, inexperienced view the idea of having web nodes "pull" requests from a central queue rather than the queue taking uneducated guesses seems to be a no-brainer. I can see this making long-running requests (keep-alive, streaming, etc) a bit more difficult, but not impossible.

What am I missing? This seems so glaringly obvious that it must have been done before...
Fucking IRS.

I must say I always paid taxes and never had problems with them. 2008 I made some nice stock trading profits. Paid taxes for them all to the last penny. Actually, I taxes more than I had to, since the bank statement reported higher profits that actually occurred (must be a real gypsy bank). What the bank statement did not report, was the buy and sale of an ETF. I held it for 3 months, made maximal 1% profit of it. The IRS became aware that I sold this ETF, but they could not figure out when and for how much I bought it. Hence, they assume, the sales price is 100% profit. Not they want:
* back taxes for a profit that never occurred
* Fine me since I did not pay taxes for this profit that never occurred.
* on top of that, want interest for this whole cluster-fuck.

I did not receive some letters from them since I was abroad because I was totally broke. I have no idea how I can pay this. It makes me also think that I might have to go offshore. I have to save urgently for retirement and just can not afford that the IRS pulls some random gypsy charges out of nothing.
What about hard drugs? You argue against prohibition - that alcohol should be legal, yet it is a hard drug.
I wasn't comparing Firebase to S3 (etc) so much as to what bandwidth actually costs service providers.

The only rational explanation I can come up with for the high cost is that it's a means of throttling use until you can acquire greater scale.

I've tracked Firebase with great interest since first hearing about it on HN. I'm disappointed by the cost, but I'm willing to give it a try and see how the value proposition ultimately stacks up.

In my use case, bandwidth is the primary cost concern with Firebase, but it's all text data (constantly dumped, so storage requirements are modest).
How about western/northern European mythology (Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, etc.)? The worlds you name take a huge amount of influence from these.
You might like my pixel art app, FatBits for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fatbits/id501273236?mt=8
More people would die if we did than if we don't. Seoul is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and it's extremely close to the border.
Show HN: Semantics3 – API for Products and Prices
Yeah Valve's company policies are kind of like Santa Claus I really want to believe in them but find it hard.

The whole hiring someone better than yourself idea is great and sounds great. However has been pointed out it may not be the best policy for people especially now that Valve has shown a chink in their armor.

Hiring everyone better than yourself is great for you if you have a nice chunk of equity in the company but when you're just an employee the benefits are much smaller.
>>There's a certain degree of irony in that statement; the Beirut bombing, the (first) World Trade Center bombing attack, and 9/11 were, at least in large part, a response to the destruction that the US has been wreaking on foreign soil for years.

Yep. It's actually funny because that's exactly what George Soros's General Theory of Reflexivity says: in any given situation, thinking participants have partial and biased views, and the actions they base upon those views, while inappropriate, end up influencing the situation to become more congruent with those views.

Basically, by treating the Middle East as a terrorist haven, the USA has turned it into one.
Heroku: The Rap Genius "Success" Story

http://success.heroku.com/rapgenius
NASA Live camera on international space station
They already did, although (unfortunately?) not at an airport.

http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/saudi-suicide-bomber-...
Show HN: Example of a tracking survey
Respectfully disagree, our goal is to establish a lifetime relationship with our customers, not churn-and-burn them out within first 3 months. If we sent clothes that fell apart people would stop using us.

We want users to come back to us for their wardrobe needs whenever they find they need them. That's why we built the product to be flexible, so you can schedule your next shipment when you want, or even pause indefinitely.
"We can better service them by being able to refund them, look up order status issues, and potentially contact them with issues they may have."
Order status issues for apps?

Giving developers the option of contacting users regarding issues is alright ... giving every developer of every app I installed my private phone number is NOT (in my personal opinion).
Designing a simple app interface with Bootstrap (video)
My point is that the taste or lack thereof proves absolutely nothing. So you can't err on the side of caution using the taste test.

Anyway, by the time you taste it, it's too late.
$3 million is enough to make me think crazy so after looking through the spec for a while I downloaded VistA to get an idea of how hard it would be to build something in M and integrate it.

To get a flavor of it, here is a random selection from one of the 913 files making up their current scheduling system (said file helpfully named SCAPMC8P.m, pretty much like all the others):

SCDATES2,SCN2,SCPTP,SCX,SCXA,SCXE,SCNA,SCNE,SCPRCLST,SCPRCPTR
N SCP1P11,SCP12,SCP13,SCP14P16,SCR
N SCLIST1,SCLIST2,SCN3,SCN4,SCPS,SCPSX,SCPSXA,SCPSXE,SCVALHIS
;
S @SCLIST@("PR","CH")=$$VALHIST^SCAPMCU5(404.53,SCTP,"SCVALHIS")
G:'$$ACTHIST^SCAPMCU5("SCVALHIS","SCDATES") PRECQ
G:'$D(SCVALHIS) PRECQ
I, too, love my Pebble, if only for the convenience of getting text and call notifications on my wrist.

I'm surprised at how poorly thought-out the UI is, and particularly surprised at how little control I have over it, at least out of the box.

For the moment, there's no way to invert the screen color, no way to view text or call history (even to the point of seeing a notification if you accidentally press the wrong button and dismiss it), not even a battery life indicator that I've been able to find.

Eventually, as developers start getting apps on the Pebble, and as Pebble themselves work on the UI, I have faith it will improve. As the author says, this is what it's like in early adopter land.

One thing the Pebble has convinced me of is that smart watches will be a popular product category in the near future. There's just too much potential, and even my very basic, very early-stage Pebble has already become one of my favorite gadgets.
The same thing happened to me. Fun fact, sunscreen residue trips the detectors. If you go to the beach the day before you fly, you will be tagged.
Winston Churchill was a painter as well [1]. I think you're reading too much into it.

[1] http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=667
Saleae LLC - www.saleae.com
We're a hardware startup in SF. We're hiring software developer interns for C++! (this summer, but any time really)

We make logic analyzers, debugging tools for electrical engineers and embedded programmers. It's also a pretty popular reverse engineering tool. If you like playing with Arduinos & electronics, you might have heard of us.

Check out the hiring video on our site, www.saleae.com/jobs. Shoot us an email to jobs@saleae.com!
I love talking about what we do so if you're curious at all, feel free to write in!

Oh, and if you don't have a hardware/EE background, don't sweat! Although that helps, there is no need to have any electronics background at all.
Most of the 'Power of two choices' I've read about assumes the presence of a global queue (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook20...) -- there's a parallel variety, but they go light on details in that text.

I'm unaware of how Heroku does things. I'd guess they dropped the global queue because it's unpractical (failure prone, not scalable as it's a single point of contention).

I'm mostly surprised to see people happy being able to handle 1 or 2 requests in parallel per instance in general. That sounds absolutely insane to me.
Clay Christensen: First the media gets disrupted, then education
See, for me it's not an "image dump", but a nice hobby project. Managing a community as well as the technical challenges this site presents is interesting. I can spare $200 but not $3000.

Also, I learned a great deal of JavaScript while building that page and I just now learned a bit about load balancing and setting up Varnish - something which may come handy for godknowswhat. I never imagined making my living by writing a JS game engine either.
Because when that one beefy server goes tits-up, you're out of business. Same with two.
Yeah, but you have created an object in doing so, which my parent poster claimed you cannot do without.
This sounds like the story Jessica Livingston mentioned at Startup School 2012 <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4699862 >, if I remember correctly -- business in Texas got a term sheet, moved to California, investors pulled out when their user acquisition metric changed. Anyone have more color on this?
The 10-day guides for achieving stream entry on that site are designed for people who already have 5+ years of experience. Similarly, the Buddha became an arahant within one 10-day sit, but not without many years of previous training.
Aside from all the rest (not to discount it), stories such as this lead me to believe that the government and the TSA are lying to the public.

I'm not content to live in a society where the government persistently lies to me and insists upon ruling with "secret" laws and policies.

Aside from the emotional impact, such an asymmetry of information does not foster a democratic process.
Disgraced 'New Yorker' Author Talks Plagiarism — For A $20,000 Fee
In Tech, Does I.T. or Marketing Rule?
Genius move, but surely CIAPC will settle with whatever fee if it comes to anything. That case going to court can be nothing but bad for CIAPC - anything they say in defence will be strewn against them in future, a ruling either way costs them PR or legal precedent. Wouldn't like to be their lawyer.
When the Bad Guys Name Malware After You, You Know You're Doing Something Right
> Before you make a predictable objection, remember that in real science, fields are united by theory, not divided.

You are ignorant on the history of science. Read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It will set you straight.

> Scientific fields craft and then test falsifiable scientific theories, explanations. Cognitive psychology can only describe, a failing freely acknowledged by its practitioners.

You cherry pick your quotes. Cognitive psychology is just like any other science. It constructs models, uses those models to make predictions, and then performs empirical experiments to test the accuracy of the models.

If you don't understand that science is about models, then you don't understand science.
No idea. It was clearly a bunch of Bic lighters, though.
Note that you proofread Nate Kontny's blog, not Mobileworks' dogfooded blog as suggested.
The "Computer Science" section at Barnes and Noble
Thanks for the overview of your experience. I'm eagerly waiting for mine to ship. How did the shipping process work? I.e. did it just show up on your doorstep one day or did the Pebble account site tell you when it shipped? I keep checking my account every few days but there's no sign other than I've done all I can do for now. Trying to figure out what the rest of my wait will be like. :-)
Yup, and have you tried asking those Arab Muslim Israelis how they feel about flying?

http://www.yalibnan.com/2010/11/27/israeli-profiling-airport...

FWIW, I had the rare pleasure of flying into Gaza airport shortly before its runways were bombed by the IDF. It took me 4 hours to get through security and back into Israel, and I'm a pointy hat short of a Viking (blond hair, blue eyes, the works). Can you imagine the treatment an ordinary Palestinian gets?
The Psychedelics and Religion (1970)
> As a dark-skinned man who oftentimes sports a beard, I'm treated like a terrorist every single time I walk through security. To them, I'm a second-class citizen - no question about it.

As another (very) dark-skinned man who has also donned something close to a beard, I've noticed that (a) I've been treated the same as everyone else at all of the major hubs and (b) Everyone else gets treated like cattle.

Same for when I've travelled with my family, and my Mom and Dad are dark.

I've definitely had my fair share of stupid racists (okay, maybe less than my fair share; I got lucky somehow); going through airport security hasn't been it.

Maybe it's a regional thing?
<i>What's the subject of the previous sentence?</i>

"eat". Words used as words are nouns in that context. Like the word "eat". Like the word "word". When something is eaten, someone or something is doing the eating,
eat" doesn't eat itself.

I think it's fair to be a bit harsh when the entire essay is based on grade-school level misunderstanding of what nouns and verbs are.
I have been using it on a few small projects. Haven't ran into an issue yet and the setup has been really easy.
I think he meant that the people who write the laws are lawyers - and thus there is an inherent conflict of interest.
You're still looking at Valve as a game maker. Are they? Or is their raison d'être to facilitate steam? I don't really see a lot of signals that they are slowing down on the steam-front any time soon, and their game production appears to be as slow as ever. I don't think we can correctly judge what's going on without understanding Valve's self perception, its internal identity.
Why does the FAQ say "Yes! You can deploy to one server for free forever"

Yet when I visit my account (signed up a while ago) it's forcing me to a credit card page regardless of which option I choose?
For non-student/non-academics that just want to try it out and see if it works for them, it is a very steep price to pay. I strongly support paying for the tools you use, but $200 for a feet-first dive is steep.
Does Iran-Contra ring a bell?
Not sure about in the US, but here (Australia) you are only allowed to carry 1 lighter per person.
Social engineering, name, address and email is enough to own anyone. For most things, maybe not on their own, but having these three keys its pretty easy to track down ph number, dob, and a number of other details.

The only reason this poses a security "threat" is because utility companies, banks, and other institutions use these "personal" bits of information like a password. And from what I hear, in the US your SSN's are used like this rather often as well.

I once had a long discussion with some call center manager about how using my DOB as a password to being able to cancel my account was hideously crappy and insecure, needless to say "its company policy" and there wasn't anything I could do to avoid it. (Yes I'm one of those people, but I really had nothing better to do and trolling some random call center staff is one of my favorite pastimes)

I probably should have put this nearer the top but oh well, to conclude, its not really a big deal, and hardly any different to any other commerce where you hand over this information along with your credit card. The only reason people are up and arms about it is because its too easy to get snagged by some identity thief uploading an seemingly legit application. In reality, there is easier ways to own someone in a targeted attack.

Simple solution: don't use your main google account for the play store, you can have multiple google accounts applied to android and pick and choose which to use for play store and which to use for gmail etc.
What a more productive State of the Union experience looks like
Hey HN: A lot of friends had been asking me about using Bootstrap in their apps, so I put together this video tutorial. It's fairly basic, but I think beginners will find it helpful.
He could also offer different levels of review.

Sometimes I want my writing picked apart for the slightest error, but at other times I want broader, more general feedback.

Nate said it perfectly with So if you have a short doc you'll get lots of edits, and a long doc will get a good look and some comments on how to improve but not a detailed proof read.

However, I don't think review depth should be strictly determined by length. Then again, this pricing structure would add more complexity, so go figure.
Amazingly this looks a lot like Borland's Turbo Pascal (later Borland Pascal, later Borland Delphi, then Embaradero something), which had lots of OO extensions over the years, designed by Andreas Hejlsberg (who went on to make C#).

In the golden age of Delphi, the language was pretty on par with today's Objective-C: Classes, late binding, properties, reference counting, modern strings, etc.

I wonder how much influence there was between the two.
Great article. Have you thought about the alternative of building your own auto-scaling architecture with 99.9% uptime? I'd be interested to hear if you plan to move off heroku and, if so, what your plans are.
Valve's Gabe Newell addresses layoffs: "We aren't canceling any projects"
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/02/13/newell-on-reported-layoffs...
I wonder if the reason is related to the dialect differences between North and South Korean. I recall that the North Korean dialect is "older".
Little Inferno Mocks the Players Who Love It Most