skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"a far bigger issue "

One way to evaluate claims like these is by looking at an extreme comparison:

Alternate World 1: red states are split into mini-versions of themselves the size of a single CD, a more than doubling of their electoral value. Ignoring effects on the Senate of course, this is just a test of POTUS electoral procedure.

Alternate World 2: 25 very red and 25 very blue states of combined identical population are subject to the whims of a single swing district that is right in the middle of the spectrum.

It should be obvious that the sorts of presidents you get in world 2 look a lot more like those in popular vote world than the ones you'd get in world 1. Actually we might expect that the liberal candidates in world 1 are nearly to the right of the conservative candidates in world 2.
This is awesome: actually taking the time to poll your intended customers to see whether it's even worth building the app, rather than building first and finding out later.
Is it possible to get a backup of the YC posterous.. or are they moving it?
Always Beaten
The FAQ included in my comment is slated to be a new page on my personal website. I certainly intentionally miss some opportunities to post the FAQ here on HN, as discussions of somebody's article or post about how to hire come up here more than once per week on average. Those threads often have very active discussion. Sometimes I post the FAQ, and other times I just lurk.
It is an excellent idea to always use click to play for all plugins.
* I noted in post that "SELECT 1" was done in 100ms round-trip, so I subtracted that from all points where it was reasonable. (No point to subtract it from 8 seconds).

* Not sure about the index support. Didn't try.

My idea was quite simple. I have some data at work (databases up to 30GB). Sometimes we hope to find something better. The main question was - will RedShift help, will it be radically faster? Will it be radically easier?

The answer for me - no, it won't help in my case, we need that 30GB data in real time, it looks like RedShift is more when you have 1TB+ data. Yes, it is radically easier.
To get products into more hands, Google will open its own stores
As a product I was always impressed by the just email, no setup approach.

With the current trend towards people posting one-off or irregular essays instead of full-featured blogs, it seems as if they veered away from the simple email posting route too soon.

What was once an interesting approach to blogging was pivoted into a samey metaservice with nothing notable for me.
Not much opensourced SEO tools around. Great Job!
Yeah, I figured this would happen... but I had hoped that it wouldn't ( I have a couple posterous sites).

Ah well. Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend.
The Western world was never that intellectual to begin with.

This statement doesn't make any sense.

Speaking of "intellectual decline", noticed how your example, e.g about how "mice are born from a peculiar mix of sawdust and wet hay" is NOT an example of a societal standard, whereas I only argued for those?

How have you determined that your examples are actually societal standards?

I say that "easy access to online porn increases the frequency and severity of sexual violence against women" _could_ be objectively quantified.

Nobody disagrees with that. But one has to actually quantify such frequency and severity in order to use it in an honest argument, not just claim it could be.
Web apps serve a purpose that didn't exist 30 years ago.
We want to make sure our users can move to other sites easily. If you have suggestions for our exporter, please let me know

The XML file in our export can be uploaded to Wordpress.
I would wonder if the author had been drinking, but I've been drinking (scotch, thanks for asking), and I'm just sat here going WTF at it.
From HN Guidelines:

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
Seconded.

My first regularly updated site in 96 was updated by hand; then I created a daily news site that was custom-roll; then I moved to Movable Type; then I custom-rolled again; somewhere in there I tried Drupal (for a year or so, not just a dalliance); then I used whatever RoR blogging engine was popular; then I got real and moved to Wordpress several years ago and haven't regretted it for more than a couple seconds, here and there. And those seconds of regret were more than made up for by the lack of crap I had to do myself. (And, naturally, nobody can shut MY wordpress blog down since I ran it on my own server and now WPEngine.)
anybody looking to offload Posterous blog into Tumblr - try http://www.import2.com/tumblr
This is a fairly accurate depiction of the current state of the industry. It's fair to say that it's difficult to think of a good reason to stay in vfx other than that the work itself is so darned enjoyable.
"... I’m often frustrated not to have a shiny web app that will automagically show the data in stunning tables and graphs (e.g. d3.js bliss). " : Are you looking for a web interface for manipulating OLAP data? (something like http://www.tableausoftware.com/olap)?
> Because backwards compatibility is really important. x86, the Windows API, TCP, IPv4, and Unix (compared to Plan 9) are all examples of things that are full of cruft, but they persist because they have the right survival characteristics.

All of those things were also incredibly successful at what they did.

JavaScript and the DOM have not been incredibly successful at turning the browser into a first-class application development platform.

This is for many reasons; network performance, CPU performance, the difficulty of composing rich APIs, the lack of cleanly defined re-usable widgets and libraries (eg, the non-suitability of the DOM), the difficulty of interacting with the host.

Given that, why not start fresh for targeting applications? Leave JS in place, let your system target it as an output format for backwards compatibility, and -- finally -- clean up the massive cruft of the web as an app platform. Discarding decades of experience in producing effective consumer applications on the desktop (and now mobile) is foolish.
Imagine you are interviewing a salesperson. He doesn't have much experience, but he explains how he went door to door showing people his minivan. "You can drive it for free, I may make my money putting ads on the side, I may make my money charging referral fees to storage landlords, I'll figure it out later."

A bunch of families sign up for a free membership in his "Minivan Club" and choose not to buy or lease a family vehicle. He's proven that he can sell, he says, so he'll come work for you and exercise the same magic.

But what about those families? How are they going to go shopping or take their kids to school?

He shrugs. "Money back if not satisfied," he quips.
octopress on github pages
Manufacturing metals
Business has much to learn from the armed forces
<user name='joe' age='12' />
Another "Bang with" Clone.....
you shouldn't autorun any plugins. then just whitelist specific plugins on specific domains, click to play for the rest
What this test is essentially doing is comparing Postgres against a single node of Redshift. It is not surprising that Postgres is faster. But Redshift is not meant to be used on a single node.

What Postgres & Redshift represent are are two different products for two very different problems. Postgres is good for small sets of transactional data like orders in a shopping cart system (less than 1TB). Redshift is good for big sets of data involving user behavior and clickstream analysis (greater than 1TB). I would not want to manage clickstream data on a single instance of Postgres nor would I want to manage an order system in Redshift.

A better test of Redshift would be to see how it compares to Asterdata...particularly with both in AWS. That should be telling.
Yes, I hope that the pages that were on YC Posterous find another home online, with a redirect sent to search engines before Posterous shuts down.
Of the implementations of Fibonacci
Thanks! Always wondered about that.
> That uses quite a bit more memory.

Not really. What it gives you is easily configurable, absolute control over memory usage. I can ensure that my local dev environment doesn't use more than 2GB of RAM. From one setting. In one place. In about 20 seconds flat.
> I don't see how they would have prepared for anything other than the standard advice

The point is that their standard advice should err on the side of caution, not leave motorists stranded. Regardless of whether they work for the NYT.
We've Changed and Grown. Apple's iOS Hasn't
Wordpress is for bloggers, Github is for developers. Why not keep things simple?
I also use that approach, and while it sometimes gets annoying I am really glad for choosing it when I, once again, stumble upon some page that would like to load crap from 20 other domains.
This happened last month, so it was 0-day THEN, not NOW.

The hole in question was patched in the February 1st Java release.

This is news because it shows how Facebook was affected by the many unaddressed security holes that were present in Java (and how it could be run -- last month -- silently), but this is NOT news of new holes in Java.

So far the latest (quite significant) fixes seem to have been effective.
Well, yes. This is why you don't use free hosting services. This has been obvious since Geocities at least. Why is this still news in 2013? How is this lesson not getting passed along? Why do people still fall for this trick?
Both, from what I've seen.
Live Image Processing with getUserMedia() and Web Workers
Damn you auto correct
Obligatory link to "Posterous launches new tools to switch from dying platforms: A new importer per day for the next 15 days"

http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous
Yeah, I spent 7 years at R&H. Stayed because I loved the work. I left because the work demands require your entire being, day and night, leaving you no life at all.
> But asm.js is usable in all browsers immediately. asm.js is just JS.

A magic JS-based bytecode that's usable in all browsers immediately isn't useful if it isn't fast. Which it isn't, because it's a JS-based bytecode executing under existing JS engines.

So now we have apps that perform incredibly poorly when run on a browser without "asm.js" support, and a rather ridiculous bytecode format that will have to be parsed natively to run reasonably quickly, with a fair bit more complexity for every layer in the development and runtime stack because they insist on keeping it as valid JS syntax.
That's a more detailed video about the project. The shorter video from PopularMechanics is here: http://bcove.me/pbzl94cm
That a minister would like it to be law doesn't mean Iceland "may soon" adopt it, at least for any reasonable interpretation of the expression. Mr. Jonasson isn't even part of the legislative branch, and his party is only the third in the Parliament.
This is going to ravage blog links on search engines. Not sure why this wasn't announced a year back (although it was widely known this would happen eventually).
True. But once those plugins go away, something else will become the new low hanging fruit. Personally, I wonder how well WebGL will hold up, given that 3d graphics drivers are absolutely not written with security mind, and were never really intended to be hooked up to the web...
So a bunch of people go out for a social occasion and decide to use the payment of the bill as an opportunity to express group solidarity and mutual support, instead of selfishly nitpicking each other to death with a bunch of tedious arithmetic, and this is a bad thing?
This happened last month, so it was 0-day THEN, not NOW.

The hole in question was patched in the February 1st Java release, plus the way the Java plugin works now (and how most browsers handle Java now) even if there are still holes remaining in Java, the user will have to click through at least one, probably two warnings before they can run the dangerous applet.

So far the latest fixes (in browsers and in Java) seem to have been effective.
Let's say the average startup has a 10% chance of succeeding. An investor-mentor who could groom startups to raise that chance to 20% would be considered a genius and contribute a lot of expected value. But the investor's expected utility would be much higher by coaching and investing in multiple companies than by trying to start their own.
Meteor Strike Causes Panic, Injuries in Urals
Just b/c the account is new doesn't mean I haven't been reading HN for a much longer than that. I'd argue it's a semi noob illusion to assume otherwise :)
Sure, whatever. You win :-)
You're quoting out of context.

He's speaking of a single category advantage in which WPh has an arguably better design... integrated services instead of silo'd apps.

He says this was their advantage and that (with their sloth-like dev pace) MS is in the process of squandering it, because competitors are adding those improvements, leaving WPh with none.

That competitors have other huge advantages to lean on is not included in this piece, but as a fan of TWIT, he is well aware of them.
I wrote about different ways to set up a reliable blog about a year ago. The post is still relevant, except I'd add SquareSpace as a good option and obviously remove the part about Posterous.

See http://www.maxmasnick.com/articles/bulletproof_your_blog
This is spot-on.

Of course they're going to post something, and of course they'll make it sound as good as possible. But it's baffling how so many people applaud such meaningless damage control drivel time after time.
They may laugh now, but you'll laugh in the end.
From what I have seen of the Googleplex, that could make a really amazing shopping experience. Imagine a playground for gadgets and tech - I would love to see it.
Javelin: reactive programming library (like meteor) for clojurescript
Cloud Hosting Single Point Of Failure - Your Credit Card
Previous submission of canonical URL (1 comment):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5217463

Previous submission of same story with good reporting from different source (no comments):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5217066

The professor has changed his grading policy, as noted in the submission I saw earlier from the other source.
Is there any reason to believe the connection between this list and the questions Edison actually asked is any better than, say, the connection between what a Google interview actually looks like and how the newspapers like to portray it?
I don't feel this is really a "boycott" - it's not like they're objecting to him, the course, the university or the rules itself. They're just collectively exercising a loophole. I wanted to call it "conspiracy," but that implies secrecy, when the whole organization was very much in the open. Perhaps "openly collude."

Anyway, I like the reaction from the professor and the head of the CS department. It's nice to read about people reacting reasonably and seeing the forest.
"they veered away from the simple email posting"

IMHO, as a product, this is where they lost their way. This is when I stopped caring. Yet maybe this is where they had to go for a successful exit (read $$$). I don't know.
So a bit of internet sleuthing later...

The creator, Dr. Juan Asenjo, is speaking at the World Vaccine Congress and Expo [1]. He also refers to the drug as a vaccine [2].

[1] http://www.terrapinn.com/2013/world-vaccine-congress-washing...

[2] http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/430928/20130203/alcoholism... (unfortunately the original source of this quote seems to be behind a paywall [3])

[3] http://www.santiagotimes.cl/chile/science-technology/25637-w...
"The Western world was never that intellectual to begin with."

Can you elaborate on that please? What time period are you referring to? Which civilizations were more intellectual in your view and how do you quantify it?
Is there an easy to way to achieve exactly this (specific plugins per specific domain) in Firefox?

I know I can turn on `plugins.click_to_play` in general, but that's hardly convenient.
How long will we wait and shrug our shoulders until we start blaming Oracle and looking for assurances this doesn't happen again? 'Free' services continuously disappoint me, notwithstanding FLOSSware.

Perhaps there is a mole at Oracle leaking security holes elsewhere.
> We have plans!

Very cool. My position for years has been that "Javascript is the defacto bytecode of the web" is, on balance a very good thing. However, it has been a bit of a hack.

What you're proposing is: "Javascript is the bytecode of the web/ How about we make it a much better bytecode?"

For a bit of viewpoint from a couple of years back:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057443
Russia Meteor Not Linked to Asteroid Flyby
Devin (hailpixel) was my TA for one of my classes at Georgia Tech. He has some other really cool stuff on the labs portion of his website http://lab.hailpixel.com/
What Makes Manhattan Cost So Much
PNaCL is "incomplete" (as in, not working) because no one actually knows how to make it work, though they've been trying to figure it out for years. The fact that it's a hard problem has nothing to do with Brendan saying he doesn't like the idea.
Living in the country, there are lots of long boring drives where you mind wanders and you grow up very familiar with what a "shooting star" looks like streaking against the night sky.

One day, driving home I happened to look out at something I thought was a plane and nearly drove off the road as I saw a meteroid falling silently through the sky. There was absolutely no sound and it moved much slower than I expected. After I regained control of my car and pulled it over to get out and watch, I saw small pieces silently broke away and the light show continued until it went over the horizon. It was totally unlike anything I'd ever seen before or since. It's dreamlike and beautiful.

I waited a few minutes after it went below the horizon since the angle it went on made me think it might have made it to the ground, but I never heard anything. It was never in the news, and nobody talked about it afterwards, for all I know I'm the only one who ever saw it. It was both terrifying and amazing. I had no idea what I was looking at since it didn't look like any picture of this phenomenon I'd ever seen.

One thing I'm sure of, is that I've never seen a video that ever does such a spectacle justice. There's so many subtle details that get completely obliterated on video.

Here's some video that do a pretty good job of showing what they look like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWhrW7lpqZM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyW0g1SIyxI

The videos of the one in Russia are on an entirely different scale. The sonic boom was tremendous, the amount of light being thrown off of that thing was unbelievable. Extrapolating from what I saw and how I now know video changes things, this must have been an unbelievable beautiful and terrifying sight.
> He has told me that asm.js is Mozilla's response to NaCl.

For a bit of viewpoint from a couple of years back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057443
"In a programming course, it’s exceedingly difficult to judge one’s knowledge of a subject by a written 50 minute exam. It ends up being a test on nit-picky details and doesn’t accurately determine the good programmers from the great, or the not so great." -- Student

Whereas of course boycotting an exam reveals so much more about one's programming knowledge!
Everything You Wanted to Know About Machine Learning, But Were Too Afraid To Ask
Not really a direct alternative as it's only for single posts, but I better plug Pen.io
Fair enough. I was super into XMonad when I used Linux, but never really found the need on Mac OS. I remember reading up on this topic back then, maybe that's why I didn't make the switch.
Presumably it could be sandboxed for security, being a feature of the browser itself, which Java can't be.
Some of these vulns are extremely old. I read the Oracle security bulletin which says some of them dates back to 1.4.2. (Oracle is still willing to support such old versions if you pay for it)
"Boycott" is the wrong word here. The students certainly organized themselves, but they were not boycotting -- they were taking advantage of a grading policy that creates an optimal strategy for the students if they work together and cooperate.

What these students learned by working together like this is almost certainly more important to their intellectual growth than the exam itself. The professor for the class seems to recognize that, which is also a good thing.
Do you take a lot of aspirin or something that's aspirin-like, like Pepto Bismol? That's what caused tinnitus for me. When I quit the Pepto, it slowly disappeared over a few months.
Depending on your usage, CF reserved pricing and price classes may be useful; linking to these just in case you haven't seen them:

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/#Can_I_choose_to_only_... expensive_Amazon_CloudFront_regions

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ (reserved pricing and price classes at the bottom)
Ask HN: Hardware leasing for startups, idea review.
Hello Everyone

Please review my idea about leasing hardware to startups?
I hear everyone has one or two laptops/mac mini which you are not using so much (mac or win).
How would you like to lease it for some amount (obviously the amount cannot to be too big, we are talking about startups here)?
If yes, then how much? (say for 1-2 years old macbook or an average configuration windows laptop)

Obviously, asking party will have to reveal their true identity (for merchandise safety), their name, startup's name and obviously you can choose whom to lease?

The price will be firm (predefined depending on the config).
This is a really bad comparison imo. The difficulty of sustainability and non-pollution is that it requires everyone to work together to not consume. If even a few parties decide to not cooperate they can consume everything that's left and the other people will lose out on their "share." In the case of an asteroid it's in everyone's interest to prepare as best as he/she can and cooperation actually helps. There's really no downside to preparing as much you as can.
Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?
Hi,

I have more than 200 bookmarks in my Chrome, I have tried different services to store them online,but every time I changed back to Chrome.

What do you use to store bookmarks?
The CTBTO has a small release on the infrasound detection: http://newsroom.ctbto.org/2013/02/15/ctbto-infrasound-statio...
Not to answer with a tautology, but it becomes a problem when it is a problem. For example, when you are missing work (or drunk/hungover at work leading to consequences), or it is causing problems in relationships, you spend an inordinate amount of time or money getting/using alcohol, etc. I would also add when you develop physical dependence as manifested by alcohol withdrawal symptoms, as alcohol withdrawal can be life threatening. People joke about "the DTs" (short for delirium tremens) but not many realize that you can die from them.

Check out the DSM for more detail about how addiction criteria are currently operationalized.
Ember.js: 1.0.0-rc.1
I have to nitpick there. I suspect Einstein is actually famous for his Special and General Theories of Relativity, and for his amazing hair.