skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That very much depends on the scale you're at and the database that you use. If your scale is such that you could comfortably run on 1 machine (as it is for 99% of sites), it's probably sufficient to rely on your database to handle the replication. For example for postgres: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/high-availabilit...

Then to utilize this you want a load balancer in front that's unlikely to fail and if it fails can be restarted rapidly. This load balancer should send requests to the other server as soon as one has failed. The other option is DNS failover, which can work but has different trade-offs.

One thing that this does not protect you against is repeatable failure due to a software bug. If a request comes in that happens to crash one of your servers, load will be quickly switched to the other. But the user that cause the original server to crash might refresh his page because he didn't get any response back, which also sends the problematic request to the other server, and might crash that one too. These kind of problems are very hard to deal with (if the requests don't come from humans but from programs that automatically retry their request to other servers when they don't get a response it's even worse: a single bad request can bring an entire cluster down in seconds).

Paradoxically sometimes measures to improve availability can cause availability to go down. If you make your architecture more complicated you introduce more opportunities for failure, especially due to bugs. If you have multiple servers in a pipeline, for example a load balancer and then the real servers which in turn talk to the database servers, that can also cause your likelihood to fail due to hardware to increase. If your pipeline depth is three, then the chance that you have a hardware failure is about three times as big compared to when you had a pipeline depth of one. You want to minimize the depth and maximize the width of the pipeline.

So you should ask yourself whether it's worth it, especially when you're small. Many of the successful sites had or still have a lot of downtime. Maybe it's better to minimize the duration of downtime with fast restarts rather than trying to lower the probability of downtime.
Show HN: Codetract, software micro-contracting via unit testing
Anil Potti tells Retraction Watch he wasn’t behind DMCA takedown notices
One minor clarification: by "posts like these..." I did not mean to include their first post on these issues with Heroku. That one had a big effect because of the attention it got. But the follow-up posts come across differently (to a non-customer Heroku).
Boston Gets Big Data
President: we will spend more money on science! HN: Meh?

The cynicism is that all "science" is not equal. Correct or not, cantastoria's criticism is that giving money to charlatans takes that money away from basic research. A good counterargument would outline why "mapping the brain" is possible and a good use of resources. Personally, I'm still waiting for that from someone.
Replace "Craigslist" with "Classified Ads" and the same thing can be said for over 100 years. ugly, spammy time waster calls for your ads, fake apartment listings (or worse scams), sex trafficking and more. I don't see how any of those things (other than perhaps "ugly") are immediately fixable on CL or any other site.

Personally I've done dozens of local CL transactions safely, securely and with a minimum of inconvenience.
8 year old girl CEO
Treeview - simple web-based treeview with draggable folders and items
Looks like you've got a stray </script> closing tag. It didn't work in Firefox on Mountain Lion, but it did in Chrome. I like it!
Weight-loss
I have been a contributor in two issues. Before an article you have written gets published there you are asked for your permission (and given a few months free of charge of subscription.) Also, the layout design, images and all this is work someone has done, and is an awesome work. After my free months expired, I subscribed. There are always things I miss in Hacker News, reading Hacker Monthly makes sure I read the best (or what the collective intelligence+editors in HM deem the best) in the best reading outline
Java is Dead (Again)
Burnout is accompanied by a drop in ambition. But not all drops in ambition indicate burnout.
Solar, wind & gas animation in pure HTML/CSS/JS
Thanks for the awesome explanation, Ruben!
US state mulls ban on 'peeping-tom' craft
One of these gets posted on HN every month. I'm sorry, but I don't get the big deal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4499435

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3526446

and more.
Agreed, this is incredibly annoying and has tipped the scales for me to "not worth the effort." It's as tho facebook attempted put a technical blog post in a status update and only used @tags or something; the content does not fit the format.

Basically it's breaking the web's "what happens when I click a link" contract; middle clicking should not open the same page in new tab, confusing me. Breaking that convention for a very specific purpose (annotating song lyrics) makes sense, but it's extremely misguided on a technical blog post.
I don't think that I can agree enough with this comment. Pointless are only comments point it out. How many people ask what they could do to learn programming? A lot, and I don't like all the "read books & watch videos", working on a little project like this is a great thing to learn many good things while doing something more fun than the common notepad or to-do-list
May I ask you about Unity3D experience? I played with it and I got an impression that it is a tool for designers - a lot of time is spent tinkering in complex UI...

Do you know if it is possible to have a more engineering oriented workflow? More, if not fully, code oriented projects? Even if it would require some boilerplate code equivalent to that tinkering in UI.
My Job At Barnes & Noble
I worked in the same department as Tom Lehman/Lemon @ D. E. Shaw in 2007...the guy is wicked sharp. So were most of the folks there.
But why do these first buyers feel a need to have a smartphone in the first place?

We need to balance the gain of acquiring products with the inconveniences not only at a personal level but at a societal level one (work, environment, work condition of those producing etc.) This seems to be rarely the case.
...when I was naive enough to host all 19 free issues on my Linode server (lowest plan).
"Maybe I was just tired.

And when you’re responsible for so many people, you owe them more than that. Better to step aside and let others have their turn. So I did."

All too often we see managers hold onto jobs and effectively stifle others with poor management, but it's refreshing to see someone think about the good of the company.

EDIT: and the good of the people for which he was responsible (thanks nsmartt)
Why doesn't the tech support rep have access to the information he needs? The data is in the organisation.
The Internship Movie (a movie about Google)
Wireless Electricity Transmission Being Deployed to Power Korean Mass Transit
Roll out your own uptime monitor with NodeJS
Follow up Approaches That Guarantee Responses, If Not Sales
Is there a Linux equivalent to “The Design and Implementation of FreeBSD”?
When people ask me how to understand the deep internals of Unix I always recommend this book.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201702452/tomontime-20

Even if they use Linux instead of *BSD, this book is the best way to learn OS internals and... well... 90% of it applies to Linux.

Many years later, has anyone written a Linux equivalent?
How to advertise by asking a question?
It looks like this allows setting focus without using the mouse and without tabbing. That's a great feature just by itself.
I hope I am not doing something wrong here.

I was wondering why this person did not host it on some scalable cloud provider (like dropbox). Looks like the redirect service was broken .... I went through the first link and then just engineered the rest using the issue names. I guessed them from this link http://blog.hackermonthly.com/hn-down.html

These links below seem to be available directly without any authentication.

https://letscrate.com/d/hackermonthly/giveaway/hackermonthly...

https://letscrate.com/d/hackermonthly/giveaway/hackermonthly...

https://letscrate.com/d/hackermonthly/giveaway/hackermonthly...

https://letscrate.com/d/hackermonthly/giveaway/hackermonthly...

https://letscrate.com/d/hackermonthly/giveaway/hackermonthly...
I do not think the argument is that you can not tell between grapes. Only between expensive and not. Also, it should be noted that you probably can tell between garbage and not. Just once you reach a good state, there is not much improving it. Evidence shows none, actually.

Similarly, I don't think anyone claims you can not tell the difference between tap water and bottled. Since, clearly, the local quality of tap water is very influential to this idea. However, differences between bottled waters is going to be just as crazy.
Does it account for users who change their user agent string like those using Opera, though?
Free?!? I doubt it! Unless your game source code is released to the public.
The license of every component in the SDK is GPL. Based on this discussion:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5221461
it seems that the SDK will be dual-licensed with a developer friendly license. However in the github repo only GPL is cited.
I have a friend who is big into fantasy sports (blue collar job: construction). The first thing he does when he sits down in front of the computer is that he checks whatever roster he is managing at the time. Is he not "normal"?
Emacs 24.2.1 here, no matches for "ns-toggle fullscreen".

Edit: no luck with the latest pretest (24.2.93.1) either.
Author of linked project speaking. The latter is not dead, but closed-source (for the time being.) And moving very slowly, given that I am involved in several commercial projects which eat most of my time.
The "Beyond Games" Mirage
Oh British English, how much I love you..... Let me count the ways! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Me_Count_the_Ways] ;-)

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/luvvy

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Luvvies
Advertising income due to selling the default homepage and search boxes. In case of Opera and Mozilla Corporation, the majority of that income is from Google (who calls this "traffic acquisition costs" in their accounting).

Opera also licenses their browser to many phones and devices. That market may be starting to dry up.
Regarding the Pepsi / Coke test I'm a bit surprised... Apparently the letter 'M' and 'Q' were inducing people in error because people prefer M over Q.

But... From personal experience I can tell if coke is coming from a 20cl glass bottle (or a 33cl can) or a 25cl plastic bottle / 1 liter plastic bottle (tried with friends several times, they're always amazed). I can't differentiate 20cl glass from 33cl can and I can't differentiate small plastic from big plastic. But, simply, coke in plastic bottles doesn't have the "coke" taste. It just doesn't.

There's no way on earth you can make me drink Pepsi and I'll say it's coke. If often happen in restaurant: I ask if the coke they have is real coke. Typically people don't like but sometimes they do and serve me Pepsi. Than I get mean.

: )
Growing developers locally with Nashville Startup School
Ok, now I see what you meant. So basically we don't want to limit audience of that idea to just CoffeeScripters. Also: maybe we'll switch to JS some day - if community show the need.
Your call to action could be more prominent (I didn't notice it at all at first, then went looking for it).
Performance-Wise, C# Trumps Java
Show HN: Find design/development volunteer opportunities
There is nothing new or relevant about this post, and it is terribly explained (was the distinction between JS and Java really necessary?)

I've dealt with these a number of times in the past. Generally they involve a frontend exploit as described, but also a backend backdoor, so that even if the exploit is removed, they can reinfect. Both sets of code are often obfuscated then eval'd to run.
Two stories: 1. I worked with a custom CMS infection once where someone infected every single PHP file with a combo frontend exploit + backdoor, just by checking to see if the function was already defined, then defining it if not.
2. With WordPress, someone included some relatively benign code that looked to be doing thumbnail manipulation, but it was actually reading malicious code out of a .ico file and evaling it. Took a while to find.
Thanks! Looking into this meow
The Linux Programming Interface, perhaps? It's an encylopediaesque book by Michael Kerrisk.
The Authentication forms should ideally submit to HTTPS, but it looks like you haven't setup SSL, but should.
In case anyone is curious...

Those prices converted to USD are $10.54 and $7.41, respectively.
An Experiment in Digital Self Publishing
Their entire site went down just now (hopefully not because of us) hence the 502 error. And just came back up a few moments ago.

I moved the download links to my own S3.
Correct or not, cantastoria's criticism is that giving money to
charlatans takes that money away from basic research.

I don't understand who the supposed charlatans are. The basic scientists lauded by cantastoria for doing existing research are almost certainly going to get the lion's share of this new money.

outline why "mapping the brain" is possible and a good use of
resources.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312...
I wonder how long it will be until a specific anti-drone gun is invented. Seems like there will be a strong market for one soon.
I always wonder about the 'good alcohol won't leave you hung over' theory.

I mean, if I'm drinking a Jack and Coke or a Jameson Rocks I'm probably at a concert or a dive bar, staying up late and having one too many drinks. Whereas if I'm drinking a high-end single-malt neat I'm probably at an upscale bar and I'm apt to maybe opt-out of that one last drink.

Additionally, a lot of people have bad memories of low end alcohols from college, when they're doing shots of cuervo, popov, or other low end alcohols in excess. Vodka, in particular, has very little differentiation between brands (it's pure grain alcohol). I'd really love to see a controlled study where a group of people drink a high-end and a low-end vodka and describe their hangovers the next day.
Thanks Jax. We were working on our own deck when I thought "what are the best pitch decks" - it was a bit difficult to find a single resource. The best I found was on Quora, so I had an intern whip up a POP & add a domain (took 1 hour on http://Populr.me). Might as well dogfood my own service :)

Hope it helps someone else. My favorite is the 'Go Yast!' pitch - you have to go about 8 min in before it starts, but WOW... its like Braveheart meets startup pitching
Ads are designed to manipulate perception and consequently distorts a person's world view.

Don't you think that only seeing ads for your local community college versus only seeing ads for Harvard will impact which school you try to go to?

Fortunately on the Internet there is an easy fix: Use Adblock. Unfortunately not nearly enough people use it.
For the some of the same reasons why somewhat crummy, but still more or less serviceable student apartments exist. It has sufficient utility. The landlords make enough money. And in the end, what choice is there, really? Then on top of that, add the network effect.
I get the feeling that you choose to misunderstand. If there is anything I can add to this line of discussion I will gladly do it, but I have to admit I'm a bit lost as to what your problem is here.
Ah ok! Thank you! :-)
A good explanation of 'this' in JavaScript
What's a boo boo?
Reminds me a lot to pivotaltracker.com
The problem is that the target audience, as a whole, doesn't necessarily care about prettiness. It's functional, it works, and the users are comfortable with the design, so there's no need to fix it.

I am reminded of Digg's redesign and descension.
GPS is what I was referring to.
found these three documentaries on the progress of the project so far. worth a watch! http://bluebrainfilm.com/bb/
The "red mafia"? Who or what is this?
Although many designers and developers enjoy volunteering for organizations they're passionate about, it's sometimes hard to find opportunities. Word-of-mouth is the norm.

There's a few other sites in this arena: taprootfoundation.org and catchafire.org. They're great, but are mediated and structured. Although that's certainly useful for some situations, The Pro Bono is attempting to cater to the opposite side of the spectrum: concise, "one-off" projects that can be done remotely/virtually.

More info: http://www.theprobono.org/about

Any thoughts or feedback would be appreciated! I think the biggest hurdle will be getting this in front of non-profits...
Apple supplier report: 88% are in Asia, 44% in China, 11% in America
No shit, I was referring to GPS (one of the more used features of a phone and it's commonly known as being satellite based).
Cute little thing :) - but: A pallet is a flat transport structure that supports goods in a stable fashion while being lifted by a forklift, pallet jack, front loader or other jacking device. A palette is a given, finite set of colors for the management of digital images.
Dear HN, I'm visiting Boston/Cambridge and would love to meet you
Hi,

I am visiting the US for the first time, I happen to be in Boston/Cambridge (I am actually staying at an MIT grad hostel) and I would really love to meet people doing startups and members of the HN community.

So if you are interested in learning about the Nigerian startup scene or just interested in grabbing a beer (I hear Samuel Adams is the best) , do let me know. my details are in my profile.

I leave on Wed afternoon.

PS: Nope, i'm not a Prince :P
I saw a very clear illustration of this at a blind whiskey tasting I attended recently. We tried a selection ranging from the standard cheapo stuff all the way up to one that as $150/bottle.

It turned out that the cheapest two whiskeys did tend to get rated the lowest - though interestingly enough most people rated the less popular brand markedly higher than the more popular one. Beyond that though, everything was all mixed. I didn't grind any numbers, but at a glance I didn't recognize any correlation between price and how well people rated it. There weren't even really any clear favorites; everyone had their own taste. The only really interesting thing there was that absolutely nobody had picked the $150 whiskey as their favorite.
https://aboutmybrowser.com/ does the same without any signups
Offline reader for wikipedia
When I was a kid, I used to read paper books in bed, at the dinner table, relaxing on the couch, sitting on the toilet, riding the bus, in my room when I was supposed to be doing my homework etc. Apparently that wasn't a problem but now if I use a digital device in much the same way, it's an ominous sign of the collapse of society and the coming apocalypse. Damn those corrosive pixels!
Why is Silicon Valley so hot for tech startups?
Live Blog of Zeldman at An Event Apart.
It's child-speak for a small injury that children are prone to, such as a cut or scrape.
Defeating aging
90% of projects are certainly not Perl.
This is one of my favorite articles of pg's and falls pretty squarely under "Minimalism: Best Practices":

http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

In general, practical minimalism not a complicated notion; Just make a conscious effort to simplify and organize your productivity, and you will definitely benefit. Start with something systematic and disciplined, and let it work itself out to something that will mesh with your life.
I am an Indian and this is worrying situation. The university in which I study has censored a lot of things(game websites are blocked among many other) and many others are doing same.

The thing is that people are making it a habit to block Internet. And shady institutes like this are just going out and asking far away courts for blocks which they can easily get.
Anyone knows which software is used to publishing something like this? Looks very nice.
Are Users Stupid?
I guess this depends on whether there will be more to Opera than a Chrome skin. Sigh.
Correct, it's really not a solvable problem. It boils down to two problems: 1) SSL hostname has to match the hostname on the cert and 2) you can (realistically) only have one cert per IP address.

For 1), you would have to upload the ssl cert and key into the third party's service. They would then have to configure their web server to use the correct ssl cert for your CNAME. On top of that they would need to add support for whatever intermediate and CA certs that have to be included. Some CAs require multiple intermediate certs. If you simply upload the main cert and key then older browsers, android, and IE will all freak out. I have missed an intermediate cert before and it's not fun to track down the root cause. There are no errors in apache; you just get reports of your site being compromised or the cert expired.

Not to mention the problem of SSL accelerators/load balances and costs associated with adding new SSL certs and keys to them.

Even if they figured out a way to automate the cert/key/PEM/intermediate upload and server config steps then the one IP per ssl cert problem kicks in. Basically, the SSL handshake goes something like this: 1) browser looks up IP address for host. 2) browser connects to IP and establishes a ssl connection. 3) server reads the request and serves up content based on hostname. The problem is that the server does not get the hostname during step 2 so it can only serve up one cert for the IP.

Now, there is a process called SNI that attempts to solve it. Unfortunately it's not well supported enough to use. Mostly because it does not work on IE on XP at all (regardless of version).

And that's why third parties generally don't offer SSL CNAMEs.
Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching
Photoshop is Dead, Long Live the Web
I'd amend that he was thinking of the good of the people for which he was responsible.

edit: wording
I've been thinking about all the great things that have happened within tech companies in the last few decades, and it seems clear to me that a couple of centuries into the future, some of these events will be hallmarks of history. I don't think it's crazy to say that Tim Berners-Lee will eventually reach the same stature of Gutenberg.

Unfortunately there aren't many 'historians of technology' so people like Don Melton are doing an invaluable work to record the inner culture where technological revolution is taking place. Nobody is better suited to write history than those who made it happen. All the best to Don in his new adventure :)
Eliminating Sales Commissions
Open letter to bad email writers
I didn't choose your words.
How are you coming along so far on your own through tutorials and side projects? Work that approach first, if you haven't already, since it won't cost you anything. If you find you aren't making the progress you want to make, then look into getting help through more formal training resources.

Last year I took a 3-day, all-day class at MIT on relational database programming. I had learned database stuff on my own, picking up the bits and pieces that I felt I needed to get work done. I found being "forced" to go through all of the material in the class, whether if I thought it was relevant to me or not, was very enlightening, and well-worth the time. I could have learned all of that on my own... but I didn't.