skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I treat college like a 9-5 job, going to the library to study at 9 am and attending classes throughout the day. I don't need to do this, but there are very specific reasons why I do:

- If I study at home, I have no sense of urgency. Home is the place I associate with relaxation, so it's kind of cruel to expect myself to get work done there. The general public in the library holds me accountable to make it look like I have a purpose to be there.

- There are places I'd rather be than the library, like home. This motivates me to get my work done as quickly as possible and move on to other things that are important to me.

- We are social creatures, and interacting with others is important to our well-being. Given two days where I get the same amount of work done, I'll feel more accomplished on the day where I adequately socialize. This is true even if my interactions are largely superficial.
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It's been 7 years so far and I'm hanging in there!

I have been fortune enough to have always had my choice of teams to work with, so far that has meant great coworkers and very challenging work.

If I'm not pounding my head against a wall I'm not having fun. :)
International regulations are pretty insane. For example, France requires you to submit your software to them for review that's supposed to take up to 2 weeks. This isn't just for product releases, it includes everything, including patches.

Apple, MS and Google can get away with it because they have large legal teams that help them with all the various rules and regulations. For smaller companies, it's simply too massive to bother taking more than an off-the-shelf solution.
There is so much damn advice that comes down to "be awesome, don't suck." It's not interesting, we need more advice for those that aspire to be average.
not in particular. complex binary protocols while slightly more efficient are much harder to use, understand, and design properly.
Fact of a matter w/ anything outsourced is that you can outsource responsibility, but you can't outsource accountability.

Ultimately RG's devs are responsible for their choice to leave all the admin work up to heroku.
Their comfortable viewing distance is something like 12,000 feet, which is almost 3 miles up. You're not likely to have anybody shooting at them because they'll never see them.

That said, I agree that people will accept their new passengerless overlords, and it'll probably start in New York.
The usage refers to direct sexual context, even when directed towards traditionally unsexual behaviors.
Why is this the top voted article on HN? It's extremely short, makes a point that has already been stated elsewhere at least once, and it's entirely vapid. (See: Paul Graham essays.)
Submissions can't be downvoted (only comments) :)
"If you encrypt text within a note, we derive a 64-bit RC2 key from your passphrase and use this to encrypt the text. This is the longest symmetric key length permitted by US Export restrictions without going through a complex process to gain export approval."

Is this still true? Weren't US cryptography export restrictions relaxed in 2000? (See e.g. http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2327)
I think this could work for some things but definitely not others. You're riding a razor-thin line between security (essential) and convenience/peace-of-mind (not terribly essential), with potential ethical implications.

"Authenticate with your voice using our voice recognizer app," for example, could be pretty superfluous, since it's about convenience.

"Keep your password safe by not storing it in plaintext" should definitely be part of the core offering, no matter the price point.

"Use our app through a custom VPN" could be offered for pay, since offering that service costs the provider something.

"Use our app through SSL -- paying customers only!" should again be a core product, especially since it does not cost anything extra.

"Pay us 5¢ and we won't share your internal data with advertisors" etc etc -- you can certainly see where this is going
Opened up to write a response, saw you'd already covered it. Thanks.
"There's a big difference between giving safety advice and excusing rape."

There is zero difference in that you're stating that the woman had something direct to do with enabling her rape.
Not sure if they fixed it since this post went live on HN but I am not seeing that.

For me SO is first with six "breakout" links below it, and then wikipedia entry about it.

But I don't allow javascript or cookies on google search which may get me a less filtered result.
Promises are not an alternative to callbacks - they are a wrapper around them that make working with them much nicer (though still a little painful as you imply). They add composability which I think has wider implications than many realize at first.

Consider that with things like jQuery deferreds I can start a request in one function and pass it around adding handlers in others...something very hard to do with the old CB model. Maybe later on you have some optional action that you only want to occur if a previous action had completed. This sort of thing is easy with deferreds. It makes bundling together disparate actions easier as well as handling series of things as you mention.

Having an abstraction layer in there also has a lot of potential that is (somewhat) untapped. There is a lot of possibility for library authors to add excellent error handling or debugging capabilities in there - things that are currently a bit painful with POC (plain 'ol callbacks).

I agree generators have strong possibilities in this area- I would note thought that they are not an alternative to promises - the two are orthogonal, and in fact they work quite well together. Just take a look at what some other Mozilla folks are doing with http://taskjs.org/ for example.
The Learning Virtues
It's interesting you bring that up, as whether or not a drug-sniffing dog's alert is considered grounds for determining probable cause was recently tested by the Supreme Court.

I won't bore you with the full explanation of who won or why, but what I found interesting is that the dog's past performance comes in to play, the results of their testing, time in the field, etc. Also, the k-9 (human) officers are supposed to keep a record of their results to be provided should this come into question (which raises all sorts of things about false positives, false negatives, etc., due to ignored reporting of incidents that didn't otherwise generate paperwork).

I'm wondering now if there shouldn't be some similar standard of proof for police officers. I've never had the "smells like pot in there" pulled on me for any reason, but I almost hope that it happens at some point so that I can poll the officer's record to see how many times he's used that line as probable cause and what the feasibility of that is.
Also, a very great deal of sensitive government IT operations are outsourced to contractors and vendors and the like.
For the record, the one time I was forced to contact Netflix for support was when my brand new Roku was not connecting to my account. The Netflix rep I spoke with was very patient, and helped me solve the issue, which turned out to be with my Roku, not Netflix.

Other than that, I have never needed to call, email or otherwise contact Netflix at all, which I think is a great thing in and of itself!
I pretty much agree with you, but having seen the demo of the drone, there's a pretty big difference between a camera on every street corner, and a camera flying 3 miles up in the sky that you can't possibly see, but that is able to watch, draw boxes around and track every moving object in a small city.

Again, I don't exactly know where the line is or should be drawn, but the 1.8Gigapixel camera on those drones are just super creepy.
I think the data is interesting, but the point it infers is absolutely moot: I have personally derived a a HUGE amount of educational value from several MOOC's that I never completed. That's part of the beauty: you can learn what you need to learn, and you're not forced into a box that the course prescribes. You can pick-and-choose your own learning process.
Yacht Crew Direct Website Launch Opens Access to Super Yacht Jobs
Fancy working on a multi-million dollar super yacht or traveling the world without paying for flights? Yacht Crew Direct launches it's crew finder service allowing crew to discover world travel and dream careers.<p>Yacht Crew Direct, UK March 3, 2013— Yacht Crew Direct has launched it's online sailing crew finder service yachtcrewdirect.com, bringing budding crew together with global sailing adventurers, super yachts and everything in between.<p>The yachtcrewdirect.com site lists professional paid crew jobs, round the world travel opportunities and mile building trips for new crew, all posted by the yacht owners/operators themselves.<p>Yacht Crew Direct allows crew to search anywhere in the world for a working passage or professional job to apply for. Perfect for backpackers looking for creative ways to travel cheaply without stowing away on a ship or the seasoned Pro seeking the next step in their sailing career.<p>Crew members create their profile, upload CV's and search for yachting opportunities while yacht owners post their crewing needs and contact members that match.<p>The service is free to create crew profiles and job posts but members must pay a subscription fee to contact other members. Membership subscriptions range from 6 months to 2 years, so plenty of opportunity to contact multiple crewing opportunities and enjoy a decent amount of travel.
> this is the kind of performance we're getting out of a single Heroku dyno on a dynamic page with no caching

If you read the original article[0], you would know that this is a problem that only affects apps with large number of dynos.

I have not done queuing theory in a long time, but my initial sense is that the math on this one will be generalization of the birthday problem [1], which is Wiki-notable on the sole basis that the probability of sharing a birthday (or in our case, the probability of queueing a request) is far, far higher than ordinary people anticipate for N above 23. Assuming I've captured the essence of the problem correctly, you would see a sharp drop in performance when you start to saturate about 20-30 dynos.

Given that there's an entire Wikipedia article on the sole basis that the behavior of these mathematical functions are nonintuitive, I think it is pretty fair to give RapGenius a pass at being surprised by the math as well.

[0] http://rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-lyrics
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
> ever-increasing abundance.

I have never seen WB tell such a boldfaced lie. Maybe he's delusional, but either way, his letter is obvious pander for some other purpose.
I have had to deal with their customer service for one issue. After multiple 15-20 minute calls, spread over multiple weeks, my issue is unresolved, or not sure if resolved, at best.

They were not rude to me on the phone, but customer service isn't just about politeness. It's about resolving the problem. And that did not happen.
No. I consider properly setting up SSL to be a duty of care for the website owner. Your argument could apply to storing passwords in plaintext because "hashing is hard," or doctors refusing to wash their hands between patients because "it takes too much time" -- it's just not a corner that professionals should cut anymore.
Too bad there weren't any pictures in the article. Or did I miss something?

Edit: Oh, I guess there's supposed to be video. The Chromebook must be ignoring it.
True, a lot of the tooling for PostgreSQL is in its infancy when compared to something like MySQL. This problem definitely could be abstracted away by the tool. But because PostgreSQL doesnt support it natively, a side effect has been that many of the popular tools, comparable to ones in MySQL, dont have this feature either.

Anyone have any good suggestions for web frontend to PostgreSQL that supports reordering of columns as easily as MySQL? phpPgAdmin doesnt seem to compare to phpMyAdmin.

Admittedly I probably should be using a more robust OS native PostgreSQL admin tool, and not a web fronted. But alas, all of this is solved with MySQL quite nicely. I would like to see PostgreSQL catch up.
Exactly. It's a bit tricky to do the attribution. Looking at a current technology and giving it a single origin isn't realistic.

In the comments Chris cites HAM being a precursor for BBSes. Maybe; but so were actual physical bulletin boards.
The smartest people avoid Disneyland on the weekends...too crowded. Good to know that in 10 years, I can head back there again! Oh boy.
He's not even willing to mention the specific agency involved.

This is part of him pleading guilty to these charges, one of which is over "more than one classified memorandum from a government intelligence agency". It's not him personally being shifty about it--that's what the charge is.

But of course then the question is how he was able to access them given the impression I get is his office was rather low security, not a SCIF.

He refers to the "T-SCIF" many times in this statement, 'T' meaning 'Temporary'. There's even a photo in the chat logs published by Wired.
His thought experiments give a good illustration of the "hard problem" of consciousness.

A) It's not rationally possible to explain qualia in terms of quantitative phenomena. We can draw correlations using empiricism but they are ontologies fundamentally inconsistent with one another.

B) Intelligence does not imply experience. One of the biggest problems here is conflation of the two. An amoeba has intelligence with basic consciousness of its surroundings. That does not mean it has experiences.
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I'm pretty happy with org-mode, albeit minus the "OCR" bit. (Most of my org-mode docs tend to be written in org and stay there, there's less of this "pulling documents from outside into it" business than evernote)
Maybe Oracle did us all a favor by effectively forcing the dtrace folks to work on Linux. :)
> Nostalgia is distorting and dangerous.

That's one explanation. Another is that things didn't actually change the way people wanted them to. Where as Perestroika was supposed to be a transition from authoritarian communism to democratic communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in a transition from authoritarian communism to authoritarian capitalism.

State industries were basically given away to a small oligarchy through the "loans for shares" program, which resulted in a virtually identical experience for the average Russian, only without the nice state provided pension and benefits.

Russia also has an enormous rural population, which was celebrated and idolized through Soviet ideology. The transition to authoritarian capitalism was accompanied by a cultural shift that portrays rural Russia as being composed of stupid poor people.

The result is a lot of unhappy people.
Wild bees boost harvest more than honeybees
I was in a mentor talk over the summer and this veteran business-man who has turned a few failing companies into successful ones, and walked into his current company with hardly no pay and turned it around gave an interesting tid bit of advice.

He drew three overlapping circles and they were:

What am I passionate about? What can I be best in the world at? What drives the economic engine of it?

He said it takes all three to have something successful and sustaining. If it's just passion and being the best but there's no money making engine, it's just a hobby. If you have an economic engine and passion but you're not the best, it will never grow past a certain point. If you're good at it and you can make money, you'll hate it after awhile.

Now I personally like to believe that if you're the best in the world at something you're going to make money, but that's career wise, I'm talking about business wise. I feel a lot of companies are lucky that don't have a solid business plan but have become uber successful. The risk is certainly there, and it will probably tighten the gap of repeatability in the near future as well. All this to say, find your passion, be good at it, and figure out how to make money from it.
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I have a hard time understanding why, for all the money Rap Genius pays Heroku, they don't simply set up their own instances on EC2 and run the app there themselves.

Who says they won't do that now?

Obviously when they started, they had no idea they'd have these problems or that they'd spend so much time diagnosing them, because Heroku told them that they wouldn't have these problems to begin with.
I see your point, but the original article is a interesting take on "how to see the future", which is a powerful thing to do if you're trying to found a startup that succeeds big.

So it's worth the read to me. Just a little mind-stretcher, but one of the things I come to Hacker News for.
Think New York Is Costly? In New Delhi, Seedy Goes for 8 Figures
In case anyone's interested, here are the responses I received on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Buying-Domain-Names/Is-Global-Name-Brok...
"Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand."

/curtains
Any benefit to fio vs. iozone?
Great sleuthing work my friend!
I want to see someone contrast this with costco, (I'm genuinely surprised that costco has a lesser reputation than amazon)
I don't understand why we are comparing the completion normal rates with MOOC's completion rate. I think that they can't be compared yet. While I am doing by degree full time, MOOC is an additional learning for me. If students could complete all courses online without attending a single class offline,the conversions would be much better. You cannot say MOOCs are good or bad just on the basis of completion rates.
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Or maybe your experience is an anomaly and it isn't that Amazon has just brainwashed everyone else via their clever marketing. I have bought a large number of items from Amazon, the price has always been competitive and even where slightly higher knowing I am not simply dealing with some remote company who managed to slap together a web page and who will have god knows what kind of service if I have a problem is worth some small(ish) price differential. As another anecdote, opposite to yours, a few years ago for Christmas I bought a flat panel monitor for my mom. It was kind of late and I did three day delivery. It was dropped on my porch (according to UPS) and was not there when I got home. I wrote Amazon expressing a bit of annoyance that they (actually, UPS) hadn't required a signature for a $400 monitor and just left it on my porch where it was apparently stolen. They were apologetic and said they would send another one overnight. It arrived early the next afternoon. No mixups, no blaming the shipper, no "sorry we will get you a replacement in a week", just good customer service, and on a tight deadline too. That said, I could be the anomaly, but I have heard similar good customer service stories from Amazon and Zappos (who Amazon bought and whose CEO is notorious for focusing on customer sat, which may have rubbed off in some small way on Amazon).
Actually, we DTrace folks left the company[1]; the people doing the DTrace port to Linux are solid engineers, but they're not from the Sun acquisition. For more details on them and on their perspective on the port, see Kris Van Hees's excellent presentation at dtrace.conf last year.[2]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=44m16s

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NElog3MvUC8
I had never heard of Rap Genius before this Heroku thing and their app is aimed at dissecting the types of textual messages that are being exchanged back and forth here. Seems like they decided to take the "pick a fight" approach to publicity quite literally...

Although I'm getting bored of this little scuffle, I am glad that they made some noise initially because it let me know that I wasn't crazy. I was trying to profile, understand, and optimize a Heroku app and ultimately gave up because it was relatively easy to migrate.
> "This is better, it definitely makes it clearer what exactly is going on"

function createItem(item, successCallback, errorCallback) {
var req = $.post("/api/item", item);
req.success(successCallback);
req.error(errorCallback);
}

How is this more clear than the default jQuery $.post?
Facebook to showcase new look for newsfeed on March 7
The desktop client has a "Export Notes" function that will export to HTML or their custom format. I use this to make a local backup occasionally.
I don't know why people are seeing low MOOC completion rates as a problem. It just makes completion more valuable as a credential. That plus the fact that MOOCs have wider accessibility should make traditional institutions very scared. It's the MOOCs' game to lose.
Are there more details about this? As a regular CTE use is both Postgres and MSSQL, but was unaware of this difference, I would like to know where I may be shooting performance to hell.
You must not have been listening hard enough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies

All major companies have their fair share of controversy. That being said, I've had nothing but good service with Amazon. And Apple/Google for that matter.
It's rarely up to a developer. For websites with large email campaigns there's usually a third party system, which has some link tracking feature. And guess what, your marketing department is using it, and they don't want to switch to your custom one (which will take a few months to code, debug, implement all kinds of reporting compatible with what they do now).
You can flag a post, if you feel like it's offtopic for YC. If it's on topic, and you're tired of it, alas, you just have to suffer through it. Besides, there's plenty of other submissions to make awesome with your thoughts.
Where is this an issue, where you dont just specify column order in a query? If from something like Excel, why not use a passthrough query.

Does any major RDBMS support this?
Thanks for fixing it, and sorry for the bug.

Your advice is good - and is the case for all observability tools. Bugs happen, even in older tools like vmstat(1), top(1), etc. I try to test every tool I use (including those I develop) with "known workloads", and make sure the numbers match, or understand why they don't.

An advantage of the DTrace-based tools is that they are usually short scripts that you can understand easily and also tweak. Don't like strace on Linux? That's non-trivial to understand and to then change yourself. Don't like dtruss on Mac OS X? It's a DTrace script you can make a copy of and edit (as people have done). dtruss originated from the DTraceToolkit...
The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013)
Loaves of bread were sold unsliced until 1928, when a guy named Otto Rohwedder figured out how to slice bread without crushing it. Rohwedder then wrapped the bread and inserted U-shaped pins on both sides of the loaf to make it look similar to an unsliced loaf. Sliced bread became a hit because you no longer had to worry about cutting pieces of similar thickness when you made a sandwich.

That's where the expression "the best thing since sliced bread" comes from. Obviously, people had been slicing loaves of bread for ages, but pre-sliced bread really is a relatively recent business innovation. The NYT magazine had a page about this in this week's issue.[1] Also, here is a Google ngram of the phrase "since sliced bread". You can see that the saying started in the 1950s. [2]

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/magazine/who-made-that-sli...

[2]http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=since+sliced+br...