skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure what it means for the Linux community that Canonical is doing this, but I do think they are doing the right thing for "Ubuntu" if they want to make it a more mainstream OS, and also an OS that works on mobile hardware, and it's fast and smooth.

If that means they have to break clean from a lot of legacy stuff, then so be it. Ultimately, I want a strong mainstream OS alternative to Windows - one that is popular enough and gets support from all major software vendors for apps. If Ubuntu got at least as popular as Mac OS, it would be amazing, and I don't really care what they have to do to get there.

I also hope this means they will make it dead-easy for developers, whether paid ones or open source volunteers, to make beautiful apps for Ubuntu/Linux. I hate how ugly and old Linux apps look. Absolutely hate them. And if that's happenig to me, then I can only imagine the reaction of "normal" PC users and how much of a turn off that must be for them, especially now when we're living in a time of iOS, Holo and Metro apps. Most of them would find the majority of Linux apps unacceptable.

If Canonical gives developers easy to use set of design resources and tools, then even open source apps for Linux or cross-platform won't have an excuse to not look beautiful anymore.

If Canonical manages to get chip makers to make unified drivers for Ubuntu/Linux/Android that would be an amazing feat as well, and something I wish Google tried from the beginning or was already working on. But I haven't seen any hints of that happening, unfortunately. So Canonical might be Android's last hope for that.
Doesn't work with iOS; hitting Next on the popup keyboard immediately jumps without giving the chance for the select's change event to fire.

(Bad first-hand experience looking for work-arounds.)
That's been the attitude at Canonical since they got into the game. Definitely not sustainable.
I've lived in Hong Kong for 3 years, normally in a room about 150sqft. And the biggest consequences of living this way are;

– no kitchen, I have to eat out every day, which makes me fat

- no sofa or decent desk – I have to lie on my bed all the time, bad for my back

– no space for guests – can only hang out in restaurants and bars, which makes relationships a bit more distant

All this has an effect on society and culture over here, and it's pretty bad.
His leadership is to not listen to the opinions of ten thousand different people and to direct his team to develop their product as they see fit. If it fails Ubuntu will go away due to lack of any outside contributions or popularity. If it works he will be proven right.
Said it before, I'll say it again. They jumped it at 10.04. That was their last best, and the version I still often use if I do use Ubuntu.
what a crock of shit.
See also the now demolished Kowloon Walled City

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
I think we should take his advice. He says he doesn't want "leet" Linux users and we should go use something else, and many of us have been taking that advice all along.

Personally, I'm a Gentoo guy and have been for a while. Here are some great hacker distros that I love to use and contribute to:

Gentoo

Arch

Slackware

Debian

And for those who want a "user friendly" distro for their mom to try out:

Linux Mint

Yeah, I said it, I know it's not exactly popular but if you want to convert someone to a Linux user I think Mint is your best bet.

In the end, we still have a choice. Thanks Canonical/Ubuntu for bringing more users and development to the community, we'll just steer them towards something better when they're ready.
Why is that? I don't see any evidence of mass users leaving Ubuntu anytime lately. Only minor whining on nerd forums about the default desktop and other quibbles.
You clearly have no idea how big a problem chargebacks are for companies. I have no sympathy for anyone who threatens with it.
Oki-doki, so I looked at some Russian sources and it looks weird. The RIA, the Russian Reuters, says [0] that

1. This is based on the analysis of a "technological" water that accidentally got into a drilling column (whatever it is) dating back to May 2012, and not on the specifically collected samples from a recent drilling that will be arriving to St. Petersburg in May of this year (apparently it takes 6+ months to ship them).

2. "You have to understand that only a bacteria DNA was found, not the bacteria itself." This is what the representative of the science agency said. Literally.

So.

I wouldn't be getting too excited. This reads like a PR or a vanity piece rather than a proper science report, meaning that is probably aimed at securing additional funding or something along these lines.

(edit) Also, doesn't the process of comparing DNA to the database samples smell a little like CSI bullshit to anyone? This is not my domain, but I would imagine that there's hardly a comprehensive database of a DNA of all existing life forms on Earth. I assume there's a way to see that a DNA is "alien", but why bring up some imaginary database if you are making a serious scientific announcement.

[0] http://ria.ru/science/20130307/926380740.html
"My gut instinct is that the HUD will work on a mobile device and as the platform matures it will become better."

I think you're right. Unity works great on a netbook, purely for consuming. Fine for a mobile device.

There used to be a Ubuntu 'netbook remix' which came with Unity (before it was the default), and it fitted there perfectly.

Canonical are hardly alone in betting the farm on mobile-like interfaces. MS are doing it with Windows 8, and some of OS X >= Lion's interface is only usable with a multitouch trackpad.

Whether they're right or not is open to discussion, but it's clearly happening.
"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

I'm running a 2.6 quad core with 16gb of ram and a ssd hd they're saying they have better than that (to overcome the internet latency) on their end for each user playing the game? I could understand needing to sync lots of actions with other players to need the server, but calculations? I call BS, that can't be right. Sounds more like a profit driving decision than a technical one.
I have no words for this. I could swear Obama is using his knowledge as a Constitutional lawyer to abuse such loopholes and skirt around it, instead of actually defending it and the spirit of it.
Zeus: Master of Olympus is my favorite city building game.

It just has a crazy charm to it, and it also has really nifty features, like how it shows the whole (albeit simplified) production line for food (fisherman catch fish, take them to a fishery, etc.).
And because of some of those verbs above is why Ubuntu exists in the first place. A distro that isn't paralyzed by too many cooks in the kitchen and that can be nimble.
Makes problems like my code not compiling seem rather small.
Yes but I think that is a bit besides the point.

You are still buying a "lease" to use the software from GoG. I'm not completely familiar with their license agreement, but I suspect it allows you to install the software on all computers you use/own. If you were to give it to a friend, that would be violating the terms of the agreement (even though GoG could not stop you).

The agreement may allow you to resell your license, provided you stop using your existing copies. (Again, GoG would have no way of knowing.)
Perhaps you'd find the change of company name in 2007 more convincing?

1977-2007 Apple computer

2007-2013 Apple inc

I very much doubt they did that just on a whim. As a user/developer of both platforms (iOS and Mac OS X) it's been clear for some time that the company has refocused on consumer gadgets - it's 'the next great thing', to quote Steve Jobs. That change might even accelerate under Tim Cook because that's where the money is.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/apple-drops-computer-from...

Re the Mac Pro, I'd love to see them sell a stackable tower of modular units like the mini in form factor, offering as much hot pluggable storage and CPU power as you want. Then they could widen the market and sell it to consumers who think of themselves as pros too, and actually make money from it. At present there just isn't enough money in mac pros for Apple inc to bother updating them, and like the server line they have languished.
The actions of Ubuntu affect people using other distributions. If Mir is completed and Nvidia, ATI and Intel decide that they will support it and no longer maintain their X11 drivers, that means that other distributions will suffer because of Ubuntu's actions.
Interestingly, 'AdobeUS' appears twice in the pledge list.
Could it be that the fonts group at Adobe recently started embracing open source (see also the Source Pro fonts)?
"Professor Frampton reportedly told investigators that he was set up after flying to Argentina to meet a "well known model" he met over the internet. Frampton was held in Villa Devoto Jail in Buenos Aires awaiting trial amid claims that his defense would involve an argument that he suffers from "a schizoid personality disorder that prevents him from making normal social connections and renders him unusually gullible."
http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/06/2118053/unc-prof-accu...

And a great read on his history on wikipedia.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Frampton
I'm basically referring to the fervent anti-DRM crowd (most gaming sites communities), and I would have expected at least a lower than average piracy rate for a game where the developer basically "gave in" to this group, in an attempt to placate them.

Apparently this group is group is not actually that big/influential and/or there is a significant group of people who pirate regardless of developer goodwill, etc.
What kind of mobility do these people have? Could they choose to move to somewhere in rural China and get something of decent size?
If you assume people can't learn something that is happening before their eyes for 20 years while they are at the peak of their career - you must have ver low and counterfactual opinion about these "old people".

Some things have to be experienced from birth to be truly understood. Knowing what the Internet is and how to interact with it are not the same thing as growing up with the Internet and having it be as much a part of oneself as one's religion or hometown.
RSI / Tendonitis advice for programmers
Their new policy is the five bullet point items outlined in the article.
http://us.fotolia.com/ is a good place, cheaper than istockphoto but less options also.
Does this color scheme look a lot like sublime text?

http://www.sublimetext.com/
This is great. I hope to see this feature built into their printer someday.
It's not sustainable because the type of people who are generally attracted to something like Linux are the very people Mark just insulted. The facts are clear: the average computer user doesn't care about an operating system that much. It's a means to an end. Most people are just using their OS as a portal to access media anyway so they really don't care.

Yes Canonical/Ubuntu has brought in a lot of new users but the simple fact is if you want the platform to keep advancing you need geeks. Suzy soccer mom and Bob the casual user are a great audience to attract but they aren't going to writing the next breakthrough software or fixing major bugs. They might bring money to fund the development and that's great, but once you shut us out we'll go to another distro and make that one better.

If he was a true leader he would diplomatically find a way to attract the widest audience possible. By intentionally provoking the same people who built Linux he's just ensuring that someday they'll move to something else that will blow them out of the water.
The Edinburgh Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
> With a standard combination lock all I have to tell someone is the combination

I don't think that's fair. The standard combination lock interface is well-known, not intuitive. "6-38-16" is brief, but it assumes the listener already knows to translate that to "turn right 360 degrees, then right 6, left 38, right 16". This lock doesn't seem any worse in that regard.
Storylane is joining Facebook
I've done quite a few charge disputes, and had several kicked back at me by Wells Fargo visa. I don't know If this Is a 'visa' policy, or a 'wells Fargo' policy, but as long as the vendor provides evidence that this was an actual purchase by an authorized cardholder, and they delivered the product, then there is no grounds for charge dispute. You cannot (successfully) dispute a charge just because the product does not work as advertised with Wells Fargo visa.
So you're not able to understand 3D printing? Or bitcoin?
Like Rapleaf, we have spent an enormous amount of effort optimizing and searching for the causes of latency, and overpay for dynos to reduce but not eliminate the chance of latency issues. Heroku has always told us it's our fault.

You may well find that running your own ops means you run into exactly the same sort of issues - most companies see multiple major problems with their infrastructure as they scale. Heroku certainly haven't delivered for everyone, and it seems their promises of painless scaling are just not being met when it comes to larger customers, but this stuff is hard, and moving off heroku won't get rid of these problems for you, but it will make them your problems and perhaps give you more of a chance to fix them.

It would be really interesting (for heroku customers and for everyone else) to see a write up of your transition when you do move - it may not be as painful to do so as you anticipate.

Kudos on not recommending a lawsuit, which I can't see helping anyone but lawyers at this point.
The idea that corporations could be considered people with natural rights did not surface until a century later, and would have seemed absurd to the founders. If they had thought that such an absurd interpretation was a serious risk, I'm sure that they would have made their position clear, but the question never arose at the time.
I've grown up in a spacious house and am living now on about 800 sq ft with my wife and a baby. That's more than those people in Hong Kong but, given where I am coming from, it is constraint.
My wife is coming from a former communist country. There, 60 sq m were regarded enough for a family, and she feels perfectly comfortable in our space. She wouldn't want more.
And in fact it does have some merits: I can clean the apartment in an hour. I am forced to throw things out that I don't really need, which makes my life simpler. And since it allows us to live right in the city I don't really need a car. We can do all grocery shopping by foot, and we have all amenities nearby. That's something you'd miss out on a ranch.
Call me crazy, but I've always thought if I were a single guy with no family, I could live in something like this. I follow a couple of pages on Facebook about minimal living and think that it wouldn't be all that bad to have a one room place that has all the facilities needed.

It sucks that so many are left with no choice in the matter though.
Circus author here.

I am interested in any form of feedback on the issues you had. Falsely detecting a work crash sounds very weird and unprobable because Circus uses the system PID list to check on processes - so I wonder what happens in your case.
Idiocracy anyone?
Why would you not care if people are here to exploit you and the rest of this community?

Almost nobody unaffiliated submits their crap in spite of a year+ of spamming with about 8 different accounts so obviously their work is not even very relevant.

Systematic spam by these guys and a handful of other sites drowns out content real users find legitimately interesting.
As always really well written article and an interesting investigation. I learn a lot from your stuff. Thanks!!!
Mechanism simulator: http://toool.nl/images/e/e1/MhVisualizer_V2.0_p.swf
Interestingly, someone tried to spam a bunch of comment threads with this a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit
It could also be that people who are smart (or not) in one area simply fail to notice or recognize other smart people.
He is searching for the widest audience possible...and that is the soccer moms like you mention, not the nerds that care about the 1% of features 99% of their target audience had no need for. He is basically saying that it doesn't work to have 100k people's input from all backgrounds and opinions on a project like Ubuntu because nothing will ever get accomplished.

Which is a perfectly reasonable assumption in my view if you want to put out a polished product, which Linux has had a very hard time doing since inception. No one complains that Apple didnt have a committee of 10k Apple users vote on how the latest version of OSX should have been implemented. Shuttleworth is trying to do the same.

I'm not sure why everyone is so upset by this. I think people just believe if anything involves Linux they think they should have an opinion in the matter no matter what the project is, which for Ubuntu isn't the most efficient way of moving the project forward.
Beautiful example of great engineering. I like how they, at least from how the story is told, they first formed a hypothesis based on their knowledge, found a systematic way to test/particularise it and then built a fix for production in a separate step.
Mint Cinamon or Mate?
"We test and work out the capacity load of each server in load testing and through our beta events," she continued. "We have seen play behavior and load in areas that have stressed our game server [databases] in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test."

They didn't use chaosmonkey? http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in...
Very little.

Most people actually would rather stay in HK to take advantage of the better education and healthcare system for their children than moving to China for a __slightly__ more affordable place. HK is also a much safer city to live in. The food is generally safe and the police is fair and professional.

Commuting between HK and China is also a big problem. Most jobs in HK are in the urban areas in HK, commuting from Shenzhen or elsewhere to those areas daily can take a huge chunk of money out of their wages, let alone the 3-4 hours they have to spend commuting.
I don't think the issues with New Relic was necessarily Heroku's problem. Sure, Heroku did have some outdated info on their website and their logs may not be fully accurate, but I personally don't think that they should provide refunds for that. Solving the problems that have been raised would be a better service to their customers. Providing refunds probably doesn't help Heroku create a better service which is what I think will matter long term.
I thought the exact same. Then I lived in NYC for a year and a half in something like 180sqft. Never, ever again.

Even things like having two other people in the place was uncomfortable. There was space for a full bed and a small desk and nothing more. There was no usable kitchen. It seems like something that can be dealt with, but doing it really, really sucks.
> I see it as Ubuntu finally having the balls to .. move ahead with their grand vision on bringing free software to the masses

Actually, I don't see that at all. Where's the marketing initiative? Where's the retail channel? Where's the Linux Genius Bar/Geek Squad? Who really desires/wants/needs Linux and why can't they obtain it?

This is all Open Source development politics where nerds project their prejudicial ideas of what "normal people" want in some sort of bizarre appeal to popularity. None of this is backed up by serious UI research. None of this is actually trying to solve a real market problem, even assuming they had the resources to do so.

Eventually, I hope that people will let Linux be Linux. It should be just an environment focused on the needs of Programmers and Free-Software lovers. It should stop trying to be a totally baseless appeal to the "the masses".
I'm certainly aware of what you are saying. But: if you can scale up the infrastructure by 130% in one week, then you have certainly baked the notion of scalability into your initial design. The fact that scaling to 130% helped makes me think that adding more capacity will help more.

As such, it is potentially also possible to scale up to 200 or 500%, giving even more users a chance to play. I don't expect it to scale linearly with the added hardware, but it will help a bit.

From a technical standpoint, I've learned somethings (from which I'm drawing my conclusions. Bear with me) about their problem:

0) the architecture is hosted on Amazons infrastructure

1) as part of their mitigation, they have turned off the ability to increase simulation speed. This points to a lack of CPU resources on the application servers or a lack of io resources on the backend database to keep up with the increased rate of changes to the data model. However, I've heard from various comments that they might not actually be storing all that state on-the-fly but syncing it at the end of the session at which point the db load would be independent of simulation speed.

I'm inclined to think that CPU starvation on the app servers was likely the reason why they disabled cheetah speed.

Adding more frontend CPU power is quite trivially done by adding more app servers and having each of them deal with fewer concurrent users. In the end, they could use one app server per region (= 10ish cities. Not all of them necessarily being played concurrently) without having to do a lot of additional work in synchronizing region state between machines.

2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347611 was talking about database io issues. This is of course a problem you can't just solve by adding more machines as many databases can't easily scale horizontally.

The way how sim city works though lends itself very well to sharding: run regions independently and balance them across multiple machines. Add more machines and rebalance shards (with downtime if you have to, but people weren't able to play anyways)

This is all the information I had to build my opinion on. I did however reflect upon these facts before posting my opinion by which I stand even now.

Being able to scale 130% in a week, having an easily shardable problem and having frontend server CPU starvation tells me personally, that adding more machines could be possible (but maybe not economically feasible).

Of course it's guesswork in the end. But writing these half-technical articles like the submission I linked above do invite guesswork. As long as one has at least some facts to start with, a discussion is still warranted. I have no problem in being proven wrong by additional facts, a different interpretation of the facts or just one article that goes beyond trying to convert PR speech into technical facts (above linked article)
Yeah and hot!
http://ca.askmen.com/denise-milani/picture-1.html
Very interesting... I had seen this lock before, but I wasn't sure how secure it'd be. Playing with the simulator (http://toool.nl/images/e/e1/MhVisualizer_V2.0_p.swf), found in a link on the website bewoody provided, I'm still not sure I'd want to trust this to anything I truly value.

For example, UDL is the equivalent of LDL, and UDLR is the equivalent of LLR... but by extension it is also equivalent of LDLR. There are 5 positions for each of 4 tumblers, but not every tumbler position is valid, so the total number of combinations must be far less than 5^4.

I know that the dial combination locks have a reverse combination as well, and that the total number of tick marks is actually greater than the number of valid positions for the dial, but this whole system reminds me a bit of a game of lights out.