skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Find this interesting? OVH is already upgrading routers to 100gbps and 500gbps versions.

http://www.infinera.com/j7/servlet/NewsItem?newsItemID=336
anyone who has purchased: care to comment on code quality?
Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’: 10,000 times faster than light
>Consider any number which can be expressed as a patterned continued fraction, like pi or e. pi's digits are such that it is very hard to compress, but it is absolutely trivial to generate.

You're confusing theoretical compressibility with the actual compression ratios you get when you put a string through typical compression functions.

Here's a different example. Suppose you have ASCII text encrypted with AES with the AES decryption key appended to it. Run that through gzip and you'll probably get output which is larger than the input. But here's a different compression algorithm that will work much better: Decrypt the encrypted data with the key and then compress the plaintext with gzip.

It isn't that the original string is of the sort that can't be compressed, it's that you need a compression function which is suited to the input. Pi is like that.

Compare this to other strings, like the output of an environmental hardware random number generator, which will almost always be totally incompressible whatsoever.
This sort of cock-up is just one of the reasons why always-connected DRM is an immediate deal-breaker for me.

> What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days, which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues.

The issues are entirely artificial and should have been no surprise to EA. Every single time a game protected by always-connected DRM has been launched, this same sad story unfolds. Einstein's definition of insanity seems like a relevant item to mention here.

Always-connected DRM is a crutch for companies who are unable or unwilling to replace a business model built around the premise that duplicating a digital product is costly, which is simply not the case. Making it costly through DRM only punishes paying customers, and makes cheap/pirated versions that much more valuable.
DigitalOcean has been working well for me. They have SSD, but only single core.
It is very stable. I believe it is from having the custom kernel (it seems that whoever puts together image knows how to keep the arch guest and whatever host happy). What you will see with most vps providers with arch is that you purchase a plan, run pacman -Syu then something no longer works (usually the network interface). I don't know exactly what causes the problem, but my understanding is that it is due to incompatibilities with the guest kernel and the host or the technology the host is using. On linode you don't have to install the linux package they usually provide close to the latest (currently 3.7.x).
$20 a month is really nothing for supported hosting. I've been testing some of these PAaS offerings and I don't see how so many people can use them. The amount of downtime you see on things like heroku or pretty much anything that use AWS is awful. With my dedicated server I pretty much have no downtime. I see AWS issues all the time.
Do you use Skype for business or is Skype not allowed?
I believe this is the basis of the Prisoner's Dilemma
The NoSQL Partition Tolerance Myth
I'd like to know: without selling yourself cheap, what's the way to get that first client?
We run our company using Linode as one of our primary providers. We're very, very happy with their uptimes, control panel, and particularly their support. It's a testament to their professionalism that they've been going about these pretty major changes without experiencing any downtime. I'd highly recommend them.
The International Launch of Epilogger for iPhone
All I see here is the President granting himself and his administration powers to assassinate US citizens. This is NOT Constitutional in any shape or form. Never has been, no matter how many lists of exceptions there are. I can't find anything in the Constitution that allows him to do so, hence my question.
> Is RHEL ever really a snapshot of Fedora?

Basically yes, Fedora is Red Hat getting free testing of features and when it's time to create a new RHEL release, they grab a Fedora release, set it in stone and work from that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux

Red Hat Linux 6.2 → Red Hat Linux 6.2E

Red Hat Linux 7.2 → Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1

Red Hat Linux 10 beta 1 → Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

Fedora Core 3 → Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Fedora Core 6 → Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Fedora 12, 13 → Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Strut - a new iOS game of world exploration
Hey Hacker News,

We just released a new game of exploration called Strut. We'd love for you to try it out and let us know what you think.

http://strutapp.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/strut/id606686716?ls=1&mt=8

(And it was written up on engadget yesterday: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/06/strut-tasks-you-with-exploring-planet/)

------

Imagine the entire world is covered in billions of tiles. How many can you open up?

Strut is a game of exploration where you compete with other players around the world to uncover the map of the earth.

––––––

TRACK YOUR TRAVELS

Whether you walk, run, bike, drive, sail, ride a goat or take a hot air balloon, use Strut to keep track of exactly where you've been in the world. Share your map with friends, or keep your wanderings private... we won't tell.

EXPLORE YOUR SURROUNDINGS

Take a new route to work. Go down that street you never walked through. Visit every nook and cranny of your city. See more of your neighborhood – who knows what you might find?

OPEN UP YOUR WORLD

Strut around, level up and climb to the top of the leaderboards – there's a top 10 for every city, state, country, and the entire world. There are also a ton of medals to earn, so keep exploring and see what pops up in your adventures around the globe.
------

Thank you, and keep on Struttin'
Dave & Mike
Thickpolicy
You're remembering wrong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZS8HqOGTbA#t=16s
I'm not sure how true that is, given that every Apple product is billed as "The best foo yet."
Many people coming from dynamic languages rely too heavily on ORMs. It's not very hard to write some SQL that will do what you want it to do, and it'll almost always be faster than an ORM. There is a little more setup, but it's not really that hard unless you have a really huge data model. Also, many people are moving away from relational databases for web platforms anyway, and non-relational databases are a lot easier to write code against. Check out the mgo package for running against mongodb.
For less than the price of a 4GB linode get a 32GB SSD server from OVH http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sp_32g_ssd.xml or a multitude of others http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8302/99-e3-32-gb-list-o... .
They talk about interconnectivity bandwidth, but not the pipes going out to the backbone or peering. Anyone know?
Programming is not Math [video]
Managed cloud at rackspace starts at $100 plus usage charges. Seems a bit high.
"Magical" and "revolutionary" if you're Steve Jobs or Phil Schiller.
We did plenty of that as well :)
"... and they tend to scrape by just barely exceeding 99.90% [uptime]"

Wow. That sentence makes 99.9% uptime sound really shitty.
I don't know if this is still true, but when I started using Linode some years ago, Fremont was easily their worst datacenter. I've been in Newark without issue for some time now and I heard most of the other datacenters are pretty solid also.

Regarding their support, I've submitted tickets at sometimes very odd hours and gotten responses back within minutes.

What I really find amusing though is that you follow up your complaint of "completely absent during outage" with a reference to Amazon.
Another video, more focused on actually running through the specific changes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PW54Sm99ck
Where did you get that 6% and was that reliable source? And even if that number is somehow "correct" (each Tour is different and it is not possible to just numerically compare them) it does not mean the cycling is now clean, it does not even mean it's cleaner... there are too many factors that can influence this.

My opinion is this: cycling may be a bit cleaner in a sense that maybe doping is not as widespread as it used to be and maybe the effect of doping is more limited because they need to be more careful. But I don't believe cycling is clean now. There are new drugs that are undetectable and mentality has not changed. I believe this is more realistic: http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/italian-judge-says-doping-is...

And about SKY team - I have no proof and it's nothing more than just my guess but I don't believe they are clean either. Remember last TdF? They totally ruled, they controlled the whole race. My cycling intuition tells me this is not natural. They certainly compete against some (I would say many) riders who are not clean (some of them even got caught, like Frank Schleck) and they were not even competing on the same level - they were superior. I don't believe it is possible without doping. The fact that they claim otherwise on every occasion means nothing to me - I have seen this too many times.

My guess - and I realize it's nothing more than guess - is that if in 2030 they use their new methods to test today's samples they will find out that there is some substance that is undetectable today.

I would love to be proven wrong on this - I love cycling.
I guess economists are to blame because you weren't paying attention and you can't even be bothered to use Google to educate yourself.

http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/the-white-house-warn...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM

Economists were warning of the housing bubble from the beginning of the decade.
Republicans were warning of the problems with fannie/freddie from as early as 2002.
Eric Holder sends a follow-up letter to Rand Paul [pdf]
+1 for the +1 pun
Migrating a Google Code issue tracker to GitHub
Stupid question: What browser are they using in those screenshots? It doesn't look like Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
Go is pretty slow right now. I wrote a prime number finder in Go and Ruby 1.9 and Ruby smoked it. Granted that's probably mostly due to all the math in Ruby being C, but still, you can't just say that Go is faster because it's compiled before hand.
I didn't see anything in the article that mentioned performance at all. I think they just wanted to try out Go. Ruby being the industry standard for new websites these days, it seems logical they'd choose it if they didn't like their experience with Go.
I have a multitude of VPSs from various hosts (I've used vpslink, slicehost, linode, EC2, azure, prgmr, and about 4 or 5 others I can't remember off the top of my head right now). I usually do all of my web development over ssh, so I generally get a good feel for the latency of a box (as any delay will be immediately noticeable while hacking away in vim). While there are plenty of other solutions out there that offer better raw specs than linode, I've found linode to be the most consistent by far when it comes to performance. Is it a minor detail? Yea, one user with an additional 1 second on their page load out of a hundred isn't a huge deal usually, but when a consistent latency is important I've found linode to be my go-to provider.
At the end of the day each person can only speak to their experiences and the experiences of those they know who wouldn't exaggerate.

That being said, from what I have seen, it's not true for most people, and is even counterproductive for most people.
Well that is not very helpful. If the last math class you took was 20 years ago, ESL probably seems rather intimidating. The good thing is that most of the book requires only calculus and linear algebra. By brushing up on those topics first, you could be in a position to understand most of the basics of machine learning.
Is there a way to block the ads on Facebook using say Adblock etc.?
Is the motivation something like "we can't install some kind of PHP and a database for you"?
Just logged in to one of my servers in the London DC. 952 days of uptime, so in my case it has been pretty stable over the past couple years.
The bigger problem isn't really my team, it is my small circle of Hacker News reading friends. Turns out you can set off the voting ring without even realizing it, just because the same core group of people are listening to your status updated other places and hang out on the site. When I submit something here and don't tweet/FB post it until it already has some organic votes I don't seem to run into that problem.

There are two sides of this - getting readership and getting feedback when content really isn't good/interesting to this audience. Still learning, but I think I have a much better understand than I did a year ago.
I had a relatively simple payment form for a while, but I found I was being hit with a huge amount of fraud transactions and had to manually review each transaction at the end of each day to see if any looked suspicious and issue a refund.

I switched to using MinFraud automatic fraud detection. Unfortunately, their system requires that the customer provide their country, city, and postal code. They run over a dozen different checks from IP address, proxy detection, distance from IP to provided ZIP code, etc. I haven't had a single chargeback since I started using it.

For me, my product sells for $8 and a charge back is $15. For me it ended up worth while to implement the larger payment form in exchange for eliminating chargebacks.

I really wish that payments could be made simpler, but that would require that processors do much more vigorous fraud checks and they don't have a financial incentive to do so (they make their normal fees from fraudulent transactions that aren't caught).
Presumably you could use a mouseover/click/touch handler to swap out the dropdown options before the person sees the options. The handler could even consolidate the options if someone had already selected it.
I wonder if Layervault is going to file a DMCA against Facebook too.

http://i.imgur.com/h07jo3d.png
.. because the issue tracker API is vanishing:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html

"The Issue Tracker Data API allows client applications to view and update issues on Project Hosting on Google Code in the form of Google Data API feeds. We'll shut down the Issue Tracker API on June 14, 2013."
I totally agree with you.

I use dirt-cheap VPS servers to tunnel web traffic over SSH socks proxies. Why? For fun. Because I can. To thwart ISP packet inspection and Google profiling my IP. To screw up IP-based ad targeting. Whatever.

I often sign up for a new VPS service while relaying from another one. I will often make it through the entire sign-up process, going through the PayPal info and everything, only to be told something like, "Your new account has been suspended due to suspicion of fraud." This only happens when I'm using a proxy. So they must be doing geo-IP lookups and flagging IP space that is a certain variance from your billing address.

I don't know how many VPS providers have lost my business due to this practice.
Do you consider a 45-minute outage once a month to be acceptable? Maybe for the price, it is.
A loose rant on motivation and evaluation
Reddit actually had a few good points against it:

1) Flying Nazguls, first and most obvious - and Sauron would know they are coming, being unoccupied with war with Gondor.

2) By skipping Rohan and successively Gondor, Aragorn never becomes a king, kingdom of humans still most likely falls.

3) Nobody solves the Saruman threat, so in the meantime he becomes more and more powerful - probably crafts his own ring or in any case gets so much power he is unstoppable, even if The One Ring is destroyed. Films don't mention this, but in the book he escaped Orthank(and wasn't shot by Legolas like in the film) and took over Shire which he ruled for quite a while - he still had lots of magical power,even after destruction of the Ring. Remember that he was like demigod.

4) Boromir never dies, so he would probably succumb to the power of the ring eventually and took it from Frodo if this plan was not implemented very very quickly, which is unlikely.

In any case, it shows how brilliant Tolkien was.
One of the things that I thought about when I was working at Google was how screwed up some of the engineers were going to be post Google. The ones at risk were people who came from school right into Google and found "work" to be not unlike academia. A friend of mine who was a VP over at another big tech firm in the valley at the time said they tried not to interview people whose first and only job was Google.

That said, I've also seen companies where folks have done many similar things to what Google has done (food, vacation options, variable salary packages) and made them work in non cash-rich environments.

The interesting difference is 'revenue per employee' or RpE which is an interesting metric to track. In information businesses where the product doesn't have a "COGS" in the traditional sense, it really is a function of the value that the employees are creating on a day in and day out basis. So you can model your expenses by using taking RpE as your gross revenue, then subtracting off salary, monthly benefits, vacation, and overhead to get your 'gross margin per employee' (GMpE) and if you choose to allocate some fraction of that margin into what I think of as "lifestyle" benefits (onsite massage, or snacks, or what not).

If you take that approach its possible to really talk in real terms about "high tech" work environment vs the business. As a founder/CEO/manager you can get a sense of when something is "too much" and when you can afford to loosen things up a bit.

That said, when Google employees were responsible for over $50,000 per quarter of free cash flow on a per capita basis, and Google decided to save a few cents by changing from OdWalla juice to an off brand, saving perhaps $250 per employee per quarter, I thought it was probably a pretty stupid move.
tumblr did it first, and did it better.
2012 Report on Web Malware Threats and Trends
It is shitty for infrastructure. 99.9% server uptime means your site might be down for about 44 minutes per month, through no fault of your own--i.e. that does not even take into account scheduled downtime, application problems, DDOS attacks, etc.
What is it that facebook employess work on daily? I see release of new features fairly often for something like G+ but rarely see anything from FB short of redoing what they've already done. Is this accurate or am I just unaware of a release blog?
Thank you grumble grumble blogs that don't link back to original content
0.1% downtime is about 45 minutes per month. Depending on how it's distributed, that can be extremely annoying.
CSC is only one of many options to improve checkout conversion. There are many other ones that don't result in increased fraud exposure like:

- Eliminate the concept of a shopping cart if you just sell one product

- Don't force buyers to create an account

- Don't ask for the same information twice like shipping and billing address (if you collect billing address, you shouldn't)

- Combine first and last name into one field: name

- Auto-complete address based on ZIP

- Trust messaging

Baymard has great recommendations based on their extensive studies: http://baymard.com/checkout-usability
The article had a link to a "related post" which had Neil Gaiman's 8 rules for writing: http://aerogrammestudio.com/2013/02/28/neil-gaimns-eight-rul...

I found those far more useful than the Pixar ones. (Although I admit that "when stuck, list everything that would NOT happen next" is a pretty good one.)
I had to move services running on my VPS because their "fraud detector" would portscan it and find an "open proxy". It's the stupidest thing ever implemented in a payment system.
I don't think the word "best" has the same flair as "beautiful" or "gorgeous." It's actually a very simple word that conveys a very specific meaning. It's strong and perhaps even cocky, but I wouldn't say it's hipsterish or over-the-top.
Web Threats are Real - Be Proactive
If you're trying to auth, and you get one subdomian vs. another - it's a pain in the ass for all users. That's why other big properties have unified to one domain and subroutes (e.g.: google.com - no more reader.google.com, but www.google.com/reader).
For reference this is S.481 113th. The full text isn't up on THOMAS yet, but when it is this link should work:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d113:481:./list/bss/...:
You advise basing the most critical part of your business on the cheapest offering possible?
The issue isn't so much Holder himself. His position is actually correct if you look at DOJ protocol. THAT, of course, is the problem. Inhuman, drone-like prosecutors use an unfair system in many cases for no purpose other than to pad their resumes in search of better paying positions at private firms. This is the standard operating procedure of the DOJ and is perfectly acceptable to the people that run it.

Over the years, lawmakers have been ratcheting up the maximum sentences on crimes and watering down the requirements for conviction. These factors have combined to create one of the most effective extortion schemes ever devised. I don't know what success rate the mob has when it extorts businesses, but I'll bet it's lower than the 90%+ plea rate that the DOJ has. They are modern-day thugs with pens instead of guns. You can't get 90% of any group to do anything - except apparently to admit to crimes that they may or may not have committed and literally send themselves to prison in order to avoid the risk of a conviction at trial and potentially draconian penalties.
no f-ing way.
> Doing favors for clients is, I promise you, cheaper than hiring salespeople. If you have a client that can't be trusted not to abuse favors, fire the client.

You're absolutely right, but I want to put it another way. I actively price in "one extra thing" for every project. This way, when a client asks for an extra tweak there or a small extra feature there, I don't feel bad because I already priced that in and the client feels good because they think they're getting a bonus freebie.

Virtually ever client asks for a little extra and since I already priced it in, I have no qualms with providing it. Everybody walks away happy.
Previously discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764169
Thanks Github, it's great to have your weight behind making tech more friendly to women, and spotlighting female role models so that more of the young might pursue a career in the field.
Who says there aren't already? Note that what's on the front page is just up-voted content. Tons of stuff (some quite good) slips through the cracks every day.
That works for the current ecosystem. As it is non-anonymous, bitcoin will eventually become infected with chargebacks. For this process to begin, it just takes one sizable stolen-from party getting the ear of an exchange.
I'll do some testing this weekend by mounting an SSHFS as my swap partition and removing all but a 256MB RAM module then opening several dozen instances of FireFox. My calculations show that this will have terrible performance but I want to ensure that my software engineering is robust.

Testing your assumptions is something that you're supposed to do when you hit a wall, not when you're driving through a field.
I really wish DigitalOcean provided more then one core on their plans with < 2gb of memory. Despite that, I am probably going to move to the 512mb plan in the next year or so (once I get around to it). The backup feature is enough incentive alone.
Cloud66 is awesome I should say, they take the pain of having to do all the groundwork yourself, which is so freakin awesome ! Are there any similar providers to cloud66, apart from Heroku? (and Engineyard ofcourse)