skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I say go the other way: Sell a version of OS X without video drivers. (ok, maybe a text console so it can cry piteously when it is broken and you can create an account or something if you have to.)

Remote desktop to manage; if you have a supported GPU it is 100% free for compute; only support chipsets and processors that Apple supports anyway. The engineering cost is minimal. Compatible hardware is the customer's problem. People that need horsepower for their render farms or whatever can build or buy the systems that make sense the month they need to buy. People that need to stick code in a hosting service can do that. Stop making me do my engineering twice; once for the native Mac OS, and once for the servers. Stop losing customers when the Pro line gets too long in the tooth. Give it a "no brainer" price. You aren't doing much engineering and it isn't canibalizing your human interaction machines, it protects them from migration.
Have you looked at EA's financials?

They have been losing money for years.
"Quartz 2D Extreme ... still remains disabled by default" Somebody correct me if this is wrong.
Is it true that the master plan for Google Maps/Streetview is really just a way to get data for their driverless cars?
They have made public statements on their blog, and hopefully that will continue.
In this situation, I think it is the right move to avoid getting involved with this shameless law firm trying to incite drama for their own gain.
For us iOS & OSX developers, and apple themselves, an up to date mac pro is very very useful.
Ianal stands for I am not a lawyer, so "a lawyer" in "IANAL a lawyer" is redundant.
I think you don't really know what you're talking about. Sample size? What about sample quality?

People are generally - very generally - good at what they enjoy doing, because it sets up a virtuous circle: they do it because they enjoy it, and they enjoy the feeling of competence from it. And after having achieved this competence, they can start to tell whether other people might be better at it than them.

The mistake is to egotistically think that what ever "it" is, is the only metric that matters. There are lots of "its", and while there is usually some correlation, more than one dimension is needed to explain the hidden model.

The "smartest" person in the world might be a baker or mechanic or farmer. They may be smart enough to see that analytical prowess on its own isn't particularly impressive, especially when combined with social deficits; that the best one can hope for, in the end, is that the work of one's life is its own reward.

So much of "smarts" is just used for peacocking, jockeying for social status, in whatever pyramid we've embedded ourselves into. And we can hardly help it; we're genetically programmed to do it. Some are more aware of the trap we're in than others; but we all play along to some degree, because the penalties for refusing to play are severe. I suspect the smartest people are those who've found a way out of the trap, the hedonic treadmill, without being kicked out of the game.
Which policy do you have a problem with? I've been an active Wikipedia editor in the past and I think the problem has less to do with removing content, but rather maintaining existing content.
True, but bee venom wouldn't be harmful to anyone now would it? :P
Investors can invest in funds which utilize HFT.
I think the author mostly has a point with regards to backwards compatability; however, mobile app development is already centered around OpenGL ES graphics, so I don't see it as a major stumbling block for new code. Of the three points he made, the shift from XRandr to mode-setting sounds like the most potentially troublesome.

There was a presentation on the mode-setting architecture at FOSDEM in February, I'm going to look at it now:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI5N...
It's not really ambulance chasing if all he's after is a partial refund.

From the article:

As for Lehman, he wants some of the $20,000 his company pays Heroku each month returned. “We deserve some sort of refund here,” he says.

EDIT: I re-read the article, and it's not even clear that Rap Genius is part of this. Looks like a lawyer trying to drum up support.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/

HIEROKU!?

Ignoring the funny url. I doubt this will go anywhere besides in the domain expiry list.
Most people didn't buy them in the old days. Typically they were given away as promotional items. They are actually pretty useful beyond their obvious function of keeping your pockets from being destroyed by ink leaks and sharp points. For example, you could switch a set of writing instruments you use everyday from shirt to shirt without having to disassemble and reassemble it. But even the nerdiest these days realize that the only surer way to look like a total social misfit without involving body odors is to break your plastic-rimmed glasses at the bridge and repair them with tape.
Sadly, the US legal system does not reward heartfelt, honest statements, particularly in these situations.

Which is why fine print almost always makes even the nicest company sound like a jerk.
I think article is completely missing the point. For now MIR is going to use X server as backend. Priority for Canonical is to create single API portable between Android and Linux Desktop. Sure Android compositor will eventually replace X server, but it will be just side effect.
I suppose this will be a happy thing for some people but I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. In my opinion, Facebook is too shady.
Google captures greater profits and influence by flogging people its DRM-infested ChromeOS machines for cheap, claiming they are hyper secure.

On the face of it, that may be right, but privacy and independence are lost. Victim buyers discover they can't do anything without either paying more money or being online (ie. under surveillance from the GooglePlex).
plus it makes you come off a lot worse too, which is great.
It's really tiresome to post every new White House petition on Hacker News, especially those that have nothing to do with the issues most Hacker News users care about. The petitions are almost never the best framing even of issues that are inherently interesting to the broad and curious community here.

AFTER EDIT: I should have made more clear when I first posted that one reason it doesn't make sense for United States politics to absorb HN submissions is that the HN community is international. I have lived in more than one country myself, and many participants on Hacker News live outside the United States and aren't particularly influenced by local details of United States law. If you are a programmer programming for an international clientele, you have to learn a lot of different standard time rules to display correct local time to your online clients. I actually support the United States being on standard time year-round, but I think United States standard time rules are not a major issue for most of the working participants on Hacker News. Anyway, a technical work-around for internationalization of time would plainly be on-topic for Hacker News, but most (nearly all) political issues are not.
How To Fail At Freemium
Get rid of the multiple timezones in the USA while we're at it.
The progression of UO over time is not unlike that of most computer games over a longer period:

We used to have 3 lives, and pixel perfect jumps. Not a "100 life" buffer with health packs or -worse- life regeneration if you hide behind a tree. Or a completely safe MMO world like UO ended up as. Few went to the Dark Side of the UO world.

Most games have become movies, with little chance of anything bad happening to the viewer except getting popcorn hitting the back of your head.

UO was exciting when you thought you might get jumped and killed. It made you think hard about what you took out hunting.
If they made a swivel hinge and a touch screen on a macbook pro you'd get there, possibly easier.
You know, I'm pretty sure that Tumblr wouldn't have nearly the appeal it does if users had to post everything under their real name...
To offer an alternate perspective: I owe video games a great debt. I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't thrown myself to whole-heartedly into playing and making video games right out of highschool. My passion for them got me my first job as a developer despite having extremely limited experience.

Giving up video games, for me, likely would have meant I was working a menial job for low pay. Games are a huge part of life for a lot of people and it's totally possible to engage with them meaningfully, often and still have it be healthy.
Frankly, it would be infinitely better to be able to write:

$data = {
firstName: "John",
lastName: "Smith",
age: 25,
address: {
streetAddress: "21 2nd Street",
city: "New York",
state: "NY",
postalCode: 10021
},
phoneNumber: {
home: {
number: "212 555-1234"
},
fax: {
number: "646 555-4567"
}
}
};

Rather than the awkward and verbose:

$data = (object) [
"firstName" => "John",
"lastName" => "Smith",
"age" => 25,
"address" => (object) [
"streetAddress" => "21 2nd Street",
"city" => "New York",
"state" => "NY",
"postalCode" => 10021
],
"phoneNumber": (object) [
"home" => (object) [
"number" => "212 555-1234"
],
"fax" => (object) [
"number" => "646 555-4567"
]
]
];

JSON is everywhere these days, supporting object literals is a very, very big deal; I understand which features to implement are handpicked very carefully so as not to clutter more the core, but we are talking about making the life of devs who use and write JSON more difficult, and that happens to be lots of folks.

Telling people to use arrays and be done with it is the equivalent of implement a strpos function that may only accept a string that's 5 characters long — yes, theoretically you can work with that splitting your strings, but that's time consuming and a inconsistent behaviour (why would 10 character long strings be less of a citizen than 5 char long ones?)
I did consider that they might have bought a license from TNP, but if they had, that would not grant them exclusive rights to the icon.

Let's suppose they had bought such a license, and let's call the shared similarity between the LV icon and the FUI icon "X". Let's also suppose that X is copyrightable. The problem is that X is also shared by the TNP icon. So LV wouldn't have ownership of X, and wouldn't have any right to file a DMCA notice based on it.
Minecraft has pretty interesting terrain, whereas this kind of looks.... flat, like a table with a few objects added onto it, but you can still see the flatness.

I still backed it, hopefully they shake the terrain up a little and add some more shrubs.
I equate the taxes we pay, with a benefit in public goods

Ah, but there's the sad sad assumption that causes us to put the noose around our own necks. Often times, the emotions and ignorance of voters are manipulated so that the money paid isn't going to "the children" or "healthcare savings", or "defense"... it's going to empower and enrich those in the government. We're actually paying for our own suffering.

I'm indifferent as to who administers it

I'm not. I'm a firm believer that local tends to be more accountable. As with software development, you don't spread authority and concerns all over your object model.
While I agree this does seem to just be a law firm trying to make some money, Heroku did directly lie to developers about Cedar stack's routing being "intelligent" when it is indeed random.

New Relic's plugin was pretty quickly updated to include the missing time after the rapgenius article came out. But that doesn't excuse Heroku from lying about what they were selling and so far they've done nothing to make amends for those lies.
You know... I want a large format iOS device... but as a pro user the very last thing I want is a sandboxed jailhouse. Apple is abandoning pro users across the board. iOS apps are essentially toys because of the limitations of iOS and the app store itself. The promise and the potential is there for something truly incredible, and that's why it's so hard to watch.
From the article, Heroku says, "The problem affected an older version of Heroku’s service, he said, and those who use a new version of the service would not have these issues."

As far as I understand that is not really the case. The newer version is the Cedar stack which supports concurrent apps where Bamboo only supports non-concurrent apps. This would reduce the problem with random routing, but not eliminate it.
I think it is the barbecue industry.
I wonder about Tim Cook's personal history with computing; he's brilliant at what he does, but he doesn't strike me as a long-time computer enthusiast. Nor does Ive; his enthusiasm is wrapped up in crafting beautiful objects.

Obviously there are many other influential execs and engineers at Apple, but I don't know of any with the pure love of Woz or Akio Toyoda, who'd be able and willing to burn a billion dollars to push the limits of desktop computing for its own sake.

Simply put, I think they've already checked out of the computer industry. They're now a consumer electronics company that happens to make use of computer-grade hardware and software engineering.
In MIT's Mathematics for Computer Scientists course (6.042), I remember learning from Tom Leighton that in certain cases randomly distributing jobs actually IS the optimal solution to load balancing. This technique was somehow associated with Akamai, Professor Leighton's company.

Maybe I am misremembering...
For me, the thing I lusted before switching completely to Mac's was indeed the PowerMac G5. I saw it at an agency back in the day, and I couldn't get that massive tower out of my mind.

I eventually bought a MacBook Pro, but soon after a Mac Pro followed suit. I don't care if it's 8, 12 or 16 Xeon cores, but I do care about speed. The way I can use all the applications and virtualizations I need at the same time is amazing. I initially thought of it as overkill, but I'm never going back. Unless Apple forces me.

Plus, that tower is just gorgeous. I love looking at it. I even have an empty G5 case that I cannot bear to part with. That's what a "halo car" can do to you, I guess.
Because Flash plays streaming video well and Java doesn't?
This must be the Kim Kardashian of law firms.
Descent... well you needed as certain aptitude to play that game well. A degree in three-dimensional awareness would also have helped.
> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?

We didn't know how bad the performance was because Heroku's tools (logs and New Relic) reported incorrect performance data (i.e., they said requests weren't queuing when they were actually spending a ton of time queuing)

EDIT:

> Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?

To be clear, we have no official association with http://herokuclassaction.com/ or the lawyer behind it – I actually found out about the site from the article's author when he interviewed me for the story.

(But I do think Heroku owes its customers a refund)
Hah, fixed. Sometimes my fingers get ahead of my brain when typing quickly.
The misleading documentation that started all the controversy was about Heroku's legacy Bamboo stack, not the new Cedar stack.

The Cedar stack (which Heroku has been encouraging people to use for a long while now) has always claimed to do random routing.
I may have failed to clearly communicate my point. My intention was that they could do a lot more to manage expectations of their customers which would, most likely, greatly reduce the ill will they are currently experiencing.
This seems like precisely the type of situation class action lawsuits are intended to deal with: a company defrauded a lot of its customers in the same way. It makes more sense for all parties that the case be tried as one than to hear each claimant individually.
Just a question, how can growth be sustainable and good in a resource-limited world?

I mean, fore sure that everyone is better where we have a lot of lemons to give, but the lemon tree is limited to a number of lemons per year, if the demand increases, how we can producte more lemon if we only have this tree?
It's actually pretty hard to find details, maybe because I don't know any good security-related blogs, but I did find this about a recent exploit: http://www.security-faqs.com/another-day-another-java-0-day....

Java downloaded an executable with a misleading '.jpg' extension and then executed it (it was a trojan that downloads other malware: http://go.eset.com/us/threat-center/encyclopedia/threats/win... ).
There is no 'old' routing infrastructure. It has never changed on each stack (but that's not to say they are the same. I don't know about that)
Screen rotation is probably essential, but is screen resizing? I'm not sure it is. I think we're all just used to it.
> but calling in-app pooling "worse" than no pooling

You don't need to get all worked up. Nowhere I affirm it's worse than no polling.

I'm talking about not reinventing the wheel, specially since pooling inside the worker is inferior than just setting up pgpool.
Because for the first time in history, every action you take in fundamental aspects of your life--your communications with others (email), what you read (everything online), what you watch (Hulu, etc.), what you listen to (Pandora, etc.), and so on--can and will be traced and recorded, perhaps indefinitely. (See Room 641A, the NSA's Utah data center, etc.) People could go back and see exactly what you did online for years and possibly judge/punish you for it should laws or social mores change in a decade or two, which is not entirely out of the question--just look how things changed in a decade after 9/11. Things like Guantanamo Bay or open extra-judicial assassination of US citizens would have been unimaginable to us before that event, and yet here we are today.

Worse, it could be done on a massive automated scale. Before if an agency wanted to find a potential criminal, they'd have to expend time and manpower looking things up. In the coming years a computer could data-mine your online activity going back a decade, including email, to decide if you were a threat or not. Perhaps it's not possible today, but someday, it will be--and this stuff is being recorded now.

Laws and societies change. The hard information on your history kept in easily-processable racks in vast data centers doesn't. That's the big worry for me.
I think after reading the article, it is pretty clear they did not notice the routing issues until they noticed slowed down performance and till their consumers complained. That makes perfect sense, you don't really dig deep into routing until you hit a bottleneck, specially when you are unable to monitor it, and specially when your provider is lying to you about how they route.
The problem is not that they provide random routing, the problem is they said in their documentation that they provided intelligent routing, a design choice they backed off of when they switched stacks.

Customers still have a problem, but Heroku doesn't from a legal / class action-y perspective.
Only way to watch a video
Exactly. The real technological breakthrough is still 2048 × 1536 pixels in the iPad, together with the processing power needed to drive it small very mobile form and ten hours of work on battery. Compare that with the whole PC industry. The smallest monitor I can buy in my rich european country, which has nearly so much pixels on the shorter side is 27 inches in diagonal, having only 1440 pixels and just 110 dpi. Or with the Microsoft's Surface Pro of only 5 hours and "only" (a lot compared to the 1366x768 Surface RT, only compared to the iPad) 1920 x 1080.
After the full iCloud thing launched, I've had apps reappear that were much earlier pulled from the store, gone from my iTunes, and I've changed phones too. So it really does look like the purchase lives in the account forever.
I don't think personal wealth of an owner has anything to do with a business. I'm probably a greedy SOB, but that's his money, not the company's money.

If the company can't exist without him paying his own money into it, then the company probably shouldn't exist.

I find it laudable if an owner would help float a company through a short bad period using their own money, but I wouldn't expect them to beggar themselves (or not get paid back) just to keep a failing company running.
I have been using supervisor with my django apps for the past 2 years. I have no real complaints, and actually like how you can easily add new processes with a single conf file and then type

supervisorctl update to start the new deamon without having to restart the whole supervisor process over again ...
Top Best Publicly Known Hackers of All Time, A Personal List
Another: http://www.aldaily.com/
there's a lot of cases where just running an app and having it talk to the database in a halfway-efficient way is a lot more convenient than having to install and start a whole separate service.

As well as, in-app pooling is the easiest way to limit the max simultaneous connection checkouts per application. If PGBouncer were to handle this, I'd assume you'd need to either send distinct usernames or some other instance-specific token over so that it could identify sources of connections.
EWONTFIX: positioned internal table elements not abs pos containing block (2000)
Thoughtcrime and a rising police state
It would have been an issue for the acquirer before or during acquisition, if it were present at the time, of course. Some, perhaps many, investors into startups also insist on liability insurance.

But the founders of Heroku have no more liability than the company in control of its assets, which in almost all cases would be some sort of Limited Liability vehicle.
This is why you don't fuck around with PR issues. They can easily turn into lawsuits.
Windows 8 No Better Than Vista, Says Samsung Exec
I think computer systems are the ones that are the most impacted by daylight saving time changes. The amount of effort that is necessary to make sure a change goes smoothly might be higher than you're thinking.

I worked at a medium-sized billing business in 2007 during the switchover from the beginning of April to what it is now. Our team spent a great deal of time going through every single system, making sure that they had new DST tables. If I remember correctly, we still got bit because the MySQL service on a server hadn't been restarted since we upgraded the rules. We also had problems because of a java service since java ships its own copy of the time zone database.

For historical reasons, the dates and times on the mainframe weren't stored as UTC. We would do billing during the night in batch jobs. After suffering through problems a few years, we finally figured it was easiest to simply suspend the batch jobs during the whole "repeated hour" in the fall, so that we wouldn't get out-of-order timestamps in various places.
I understand the potential harm when working with teams, but I also recognize that it's a shame to limit your use of the language to avoid potential trouble. Surely there's some middle ground to be found over dogma such as Never use <feature>.

I'm not suggesting that everyone should understand every detail of every potentially misunderstood feature. I'm suggesting that these situations should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
The old bamboo stack has the same old intelligent routing, but the intelligence is only within each router. When the number of routers increased, the intelligence stopped mattering because concurrent requests were highly likely to not be handled by the same router, making the routing effectively random instead of intelligent.

So what you suggest would be great, but unfortunately not possible.
No, but the best are (even/esp fiction).

Retelling a tired, old, heard a million times plot requires superlative writing or at least something knew to be entertaining. (or I guess bad memory on reader's part).
Makerbot announces new desktop 3D scanner—you know, to go with your 3D printer