skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In theory you're right, but in practice, it breaks the mechanisms which ensure that investors actually want to participate in the market.

The function of the market is not job creation, however one of its functions is to incentivise investors to invest rather than store their money under the mattress. HFT hurts that incentive, that's why it's functionally bad.

The purpose of the market is to get all that capital out of the mattresses and into the economy, not to be liquid or efficient. Those are secondary objectives. To get investors' money, it needs first of all to be perceived as fair.
>Heroku declined our request for further comment. “Unfortunately, we can’t publicly comment on legal matters,” said spokeswoman Dana Oshiro in an email. “Heroku is committed to our customers’ success and focused on delivering the best possible product and experience. We’ll continue to update our customers via our blog.”

I don't run a company, and I'm not responsible for maximizing return on my shareholders' investment. So maybe I lack the mental schemas that make these sorts of statements seem reasonable, but they always strike me as short-sighted. Yes, admitting wrongdoing may open you up to legal liability. But it seems to me that, in the long run, it's far better to take your licks and own up to your mistakes than to hide behind the shield of pending litigation. My gut instinct is to offer a sincere mea culpa and provide a transparent roadmap to improvement, and if you lose a court case then so be it. I'd like to think that the good will and respect you build from accountability and honesty will ultimately outweigh any short-term losses from court settlements or judgements.

As I said, I don't live in that world. I would be saddened, though not necessarily surprised, to learn that I was wrong.
2591 1 star ratings of 2805 total
LOL!

http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-Pc/dp/B007FTE2...

I'm thinking this fail may be so epic it can kill always-on-DRM forever, force EA to back up on their customer-pissing force-feeding stuff like this

I'm not in the gaming industry, but launch is probably the most important event and, with this, they fucked the launch of one of the most adored, famous and known PC game franchises of the World

Firstly, the game reviews will suffer forever(that amazon rating is probably NEVER cease to be 1 star [unless EA starts paying chinese to do that too]), that must cost sales

Secondly and most important, word-of-mouth must account for A LOT of game sales, the hype of your friends, co-workers talking about a game must be the reason for most of non-hardcore-gamers sales... I, for example, only bought Diablo 3 because all my co-workers wouldn't shut about getting it, even tho I was a hardcore gamer in the past, played Diablo and Diablo 2, I wouldn't buy if it wasn't for the hype... people are PISSED and EA is probably losing a ton of money because of it

I'm almost certain this DRM will ultimately cost them considerably more than piracy would take, it's perfect!

As we say in Brazil: Time comes and the whip hits your own ass!
Now I just need something like this for Emacs :P
Although I like Vim too, so I'll try it.
https://www.google.com/experimental/gmailfieldtrial

What you're suggesting is probably phase 2.
the pool is transparent around acquisition and release:

conn = pool.connect()
conn.close()

the above "close()" is a release/checkin.
Air Force erases drone strike data amid criticisms
>This is to an extent lamentable, but you can't expect the "wild west" to continue to exist after the land stops being the frontier.

The internet has never been the wild west. Twenty years ago it was a bunch of middle class scientists and mathematicians discussing philosophy and writing code. It's about as far away from any kind of real danger as you can possibly imagine.

The result of the "wild west" metaphor is to imply that we need to have some cowboys come in with blankets and other "gifts" for all those wild Indians who once occupied it so that they can hurry up and die out and make room for Walmart and Cable TV and upstanding members of the Chamber of Commerce.

But the internet isn't a dangerous place. It isn't even a place. It's just a thing that lets computers and users all over the world communicate with one another. About the worst thing that the average person is even capable of doing with it is to lie to someone else or infringe copyright, or maybe (if we're the sort of people with an interest in keeping our comrades compliant members of The Party) they could distribute or gain access to some "subversive propaganda" from the likes of Jane Fonda or Adam Smith or whoever we don't like this year in this part of the world.

The internet isn't the dangerous thing, it's the rest of the world -- the dangerous thing is an internet without anonymity. Because if people know who you are then saying the wrong thing or reading the wrong thing can get you killed (or fired or harassed or wrongfully imprisoned). And all not knowing who said something really does is the same thing as the First Amendment: It requires you to respond to speech with speech instead of with punishment.
From Larry Page’s Car To The Depths Of The Grand Canyon
The procedure for filing a class action is to file suit with one or several named plaintiffs on behalf of a proposed class. The proposed class must consist of a group of individuals or business entities that have suffered a common injury or injuries. Typically these cases result from an action on the part of a business or a particular product defect or policy that applied to all proposed class members in a typical manner. After the complaint is filed, the plaintiff must file a motion to have the class certified. In some cases class certification may require discovery in order to determine its size and if the proposed class meets the standard for class certification.
Upon the motion to certify the class, the defendants may object to whether the issues are appropriately handled as a class action, to whether the named plaintiffs are sufficiently representative of the class, and to their relationship with the law firm or firms handling the case. The court will also examine the ability of the firm to prosecute the claim for the plaintiffs, and their resources for dealing with class actions.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action
Trying to reconcile this post with the ghosts of past Unix workstation vendors, who tried to push the boundaries of what you could do with microprocessor-based computers, where spending tens of thousands of dollars per box was common.

Datapoint as example - a SGI Onyx could run you $250,000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx

Fast-forward to today, all the knowledge gained in building those high-end workstations have been distilled in the smartphones we have in our pockets now.

So for Apple, R&D for its own sake or for controlling the narrative?
From the Wired article, it appears the law firm is fishing for a lead plaintiff: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/
Iceland isn't (yet) a member of the EU though.
They probably haven't filed anything, if they get a couple bites then they will.
>> The story was manipulated to show first one side, then the other, then to leave the reader hanging in the balance.

This is true, but this is always true. The idea of pure journalism, imo, of a story presented without artifice or bias, is an illusion. A dry style with a linear presentation of facts shorn of judgement and opinion is itself an artifice. It just happens to be an artifice that has, by cultural convention, branded itself as "true" and "objective."

I don't think recasting this story in such a style would have provided much new information or left me with a clearer picture of what had actually happened. But I think quite a bit would be lost.
One of the founders is a friend - very interesting social enterprise idea
Wow, seriously? This is way over the top and unnecessarily snide ("Heroku...supposedly assists web application developers"). Stop Heroku? Pretty sure nobody's gonna get on board with that.

What is it even trying to accomplish? As far as I can tell it's essentially an ad for that law firm.
If the decisions made by Heroku to misrepresent the product were made prior to the Salesforce acquisition (December 2010) do the founders of Heroku have any liability? Would this sort of thing be a consideration with an acquisition?
The comment I was replying to said it depends on whether it's Apple or the developer who pulls it from the store. What you are reiterating here is what I said — that being pulled by Apple does not normally result in the app being deleted from devices, but Apple does have the power to do it.
> I'm not entirely sure whether you can submit a DMCA takedown request if you're not a citizen of the USA. For once, you need to provide US-based contact info.

So you can't just have an agent do the request on your behalf?
Dear Heroku, slice off a piece of your offering that shows some love to the Ruby community again. Lets call it the Maple stack. Have this stack use the old routing infrastructure.

Edit: To be clear, I do not support this legal action. I do want Heroku to hear the community, but I don't want it to go this far.
Although Intel's Westermere-EX was last updated in late 2011, the specs are still pretty good. Those CPUs have up to 10 physical cores (20 virtual thanks to hyperthreading) and 30MB of L3 cache. The clock speed isn't amazing, but that's to be expected when you have to deal with the heat from 2.5 billion transistors.

The Ivy Bridge version is supposed to ship in Q4. It should have even better performance.
Yup. They're like any other tool. If you're not sure how to use and/or, then don't use them. Or, better yet, study up. Programming can benefit from nuance.
If you are referring to the Kin-Slaying as the Noldor left the lands of the Valar, yes, that is precisely what he would have been trying to avoid.
I downvoted. The explanation above is a pretty good rendering of why (though I didn't think about it that long).
New Song & Speeches For International Women's Day
Pitchbox gives developers free UBER rides to their interview
It seems like we agree far, far more than we disagree.

All I meant by a high burn is that we are net negative more than a trillion dollars per year. I believe we probably need more taxes and less spending to solve it (or just a lot of growth).

Yes, we should just spend less on healthcare. We have a broken system right now.

I agree that social security has a real problem with the income cap. I also don't think I said anything about raising the eligibility ages.

I also agree that discretionary spending is eseentially irrelevant, and entitlement and defense spending is the issue. I believe I said this too.
As a Venice local, I wish you guys the best of luck. Here's my observations:

a) Those testimonials are obviously fake
b) There's an empty blue bar near the top
d) Would I get to preview or choose who the dry cleaner is? That's not obvious and I don't trust some dry cleaners.
e) Curious about how it works. Is it you coming to my house or the dry cleaner?
f) Are the ninjas hot chicks? That might persuade me to use the service.
I'm an OSX user, but I just created a repository (on Github) and anytime I add new plugins/configurations I try to commit those changes...as I spent a good deal of time customizing my setup at one point.

You could create one for Windows & one for Linux.
Point 1 is incorrect: You can use the full-desktop (non-ES) openGL with egl with no problems - just pass 'EGL_OPENGL_API' to eglBindAPI.

I don't know how good the support for this is from different drivers, however.
The truly disappointing thing to me, was that I was really excited and looking forward to playing Spore. That is another Maxis game produced by EA that I've completely lost interest in because of the DRM. From the sound of it, I need to stay away from this one too. It is as though EA doesn't want my money.
The "halo" strategy only works if you have a low-end product for people to buy after the halo sucks them in.
So true. A Mac IIfx setup could easily set you back tens of thousands of dollars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_IIfx
I love sqlalchemy!
In fact Qt was speed up noticeably for most use cases by their 'raster' graphics engine instead of the native X11 one.

Some of that is due to the X11 engine not being optimal, but then again if it's difficult to generate an optimal X11 rendering toolkit and it's easy to make a fast software renderer, then maybe that makes choices like these (moving to software-everything) seem more reasonable in retrospect.
I've never understood why people care about this. Lots of people submit their own stuff. All I care about is the quality of the articles and discussion, which is orthogonal to the identity of the submitter.
White House Petition to Eliminate Daylight Savings Time
Ask HN: Are there any modems smart enough to reset themselves?
I feel like this would save thousands in tech support.
Would Apple really be innovating by coming out with some smoking fast workstation? We know how to build these things: cram them full of top-of-the-line Xeon CPUs and tons of SSDs and GPUs.

The real problem is Apple's pro software is rotten, and throwing more hardware at it barely helps.
Sandy Bridge EP has been out for, what, nine months and Apple hasn't used it.
Class-proxy gem: AR compatible lazy loading
Abandonware isn't actually a legal concept so whether it's considered abandonware would be up to the person you ask, I guess.
So, pooling that has TCP/DB initialize connect overhead during a restart only is "worse than" having TCP/DB initialize connect overhead on restart as well as every subsequent request ?

There's pros/cons to in-app pooling vs. middleware pooling, but calling in-app pooling "worse" than no pooling at all is kind of misleading.

If I were using PGBouncer, I'd probably leave SQLA's pooling on anyway, so at least you have no TCP latency at all on connect. unless you're dealing with apps that go unevenly idle/active.
See also: Chromebook Pixel. The mere existence of that thing has to be driving sales of the $250 Chromebooks.
It's a good concept if your Internet connection is reliable.
doubt they can get away with it for much longer. Even amazon is reporting the issues directly on the product page: http://amzn.to/16cCByx
IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud.

The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?

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?
Amazed to see so many simple responses in this thread given that the single-system paradigm is sort-of heading out of date now (manual Unix systems administration is arguably a dying horse). For any serious (ie. highly available) systems, a major option that should be under discussion is Pacemaker/Corosync. http://clusterlabs.org/

It's a pain to learn, easy to screw up, non-trivial to test exhaustively, but provides highly flexible daemon migration and monitoring functionality you aren't likely to find anywhere else, for free, and for any imaginable service. (Actually you can monitor anything with it, including hardware. Check it out.)
OK, Thanks.

Paternalism:
Hostile/Dominative: Men should control women.
Benevolent/Protective: Men should protect and care for women.

Gender Differentiation:
Hostile/Competitive: Men are superior to women.
Benevolent/Complementary: places importance on traditional gender roles for
women (e.g., mother & wife).
Assumes that men depend on women to fulfill these roles.

Heterosexual hostility: views women as sexual objects for men’s pleasure.
Promotes the fear of women’s capacity to manipulate
men by engaging in or withholding sexual activity.
Intimate heterosexuality: romanticizes women as having sexually purity.
Views romantic intimacy as necessary to complete a man.
What makes this proposed class action suit possible is that Heroku did admit[0] that their service didn't match up with what their documentation and website claimed, that they messed up, and would be fixing it. And it wasn't something like "our documentation and site could have been misinterpreted", they actually admitted the website and documentation were inaccurate with metrics which were incorrect. It's like a class action lawyer's wet dream of culpability on the part of the defendant.

[0] https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/2/16/routing_performan...
Seeing that there is a website/lawfirm[1] threatening legal action, I can bet Heroku/Salesforce lawyers jumped on that ASAP and let all their employees that are allowed to talk publicly not to comment on the issue anymore.

The US legal system is setup that if a company admits fault in something like this, it makes defending yourself much more difficult. Meaning if a lawsuit is brought about, it's not about proving innocence anymore, it's about mitigating the damages you will have to pay. Your lawyer is going to want to have as many options available to him/her to deal with your case during it's lifespan, and admitting fault before the lawsuit even begins will limit the lawyers options when it comes to negotiations and what tactics they can use in the courtroom.

[1] http://herokuclassaction.com/
On one hand the Rap Genius expose seemed like they got duped and mislead, but on the other hand something about this lawyer mentioned in the article comes off as ambulance-chase-y to me.
You're awesome. Thanks for the link and the enlightenment about that site!
Hilaroius (and sad) timelapse video someone made of them "playing" the game... mostly server error messages. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m62ppOUwFhk
When did "white" get added? Also, you could have easily searched for this:

http://www.raap.org/support-groups.html

As you obviously know nothing of rape, and probably not much of women either, I really have to question why you're still typing. You seem to be woefully unqualified to be participating in any conversation about what _should_ be, even supposing, as you have, that such a conversation doesn't need to be informed with facts.
I don't believe any decision was made to misrepresent the product. The product just evolved and the product documentation didn't. The end result is the same — the product was advertised with inaccurate claims — but this appears to be more a case of neglect than a deliberate misrepresentation.
It's no accident. Ruby is heavily influenced by Perl.
EA actually did this for a fb game:

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/20/dragon-age-legends-no-long...
Assuming somehow I got to that stage, that's the point I would realize there is very good chance I will be killed or kidnapped if I don't do what the people that are observing me expect. I would try to conceive a plan to leave with the empty suit case from the hotel but ditch it shortly before boarding a flight to US. Still at that point I would fear retribution later in US and because of that I might decide that the best course of action is to go along sadly.
Aside from inertia, what is keeping DST in place right now? I could imagine some bizarre lobbying incentive, like it provides some marginal and trivial benefit to the corn industry somehow, although I am not aware of one.
Good thing the I didn't do that, eh?

As I noted in the article, there are many more axes of innovation beyond just performance. But performance is definitely one of them!

Apple's pursuing top-end performance with gusto in its laptops and mobile devices. But its desktops have been left to languish, not even using the fastest available off-the-shelf CPUs and GPUs (let alone using custom high-performance silicon designed in-house, a la the latest iOS devices).
MN Dept of Revenue Warns Against Using Turbo Tax
A popularity contest to choose moderators? I wouldn't run my forums that way. We would end up with the wrong people in charge.
If they're both similar in this way, why did Flash win, or at least stay alive, while Java lost, to the point where most people can be told to turn it off and won't notice the difference?
You honestly don't believe that, if the allegations are true, Heroku has done something wrong?
the pool can be used in isolation of the rest of SQLAlchemy, which is what Kenneth's Django-Pool library is doing.
The analogy to Corvettes and Vipers is massively flawed. Automotive companies use sports cars to market their brand directly via racing and indirectly when the owners of production cars drive them down the street.

On the other hand, the days when speed was a major selling point of computers are long passed, and online, nobody cares whether I'm surfing HN with 8 Xeon cores of my desktop or one ARM core on my phone.

The only people who care about the MacPro are people who already want to buy Apple products. And an Apple logo which sits under your desk doesn't promote the brand in coffee shops and airports.
Oh my goodness--the keyboard. Yes. I'm a recent iPhone 4s -> Nexus 4 convert, and I can say that the built-in keyboard is vastly better than the iPhone keyboard. And the predictive accuracy (I have a friend in the business) of the built-in Google keyboard is quantifiably and substantially lower than its other Android competitors.

I'm told Apple's keyboard is abysmally bad because it asks the question on a per-word basis: "Given these jabs at the screen, what is the probably that the user meant 'foo'?"

Just about everyone else looks at the words preceding and includes that when coming up with a probability.

I can understand that a swiping keyboard might be too freaky for some people at Apple, but the predictive accuracy of the jabby keyboard is just embarrassing.

The ability to quickly and accurately type things out is the number one thing that will prevent me from moving back to an iPhone. Even given a choice between stabbing at my much bigger iPad screen and swipe typing on my Nexus 4, I've found myself putting down the ipad to respond to emails.
How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity
> They did. It's `&&` and `||`.

I assume you mean idiomatically chosen, since clearly the decision wasn't made at the language level.

> I have seen skilled rubyists make great (and correct) use of `and`.

I'm obviously not a ruby programmer, so it doesn't matter much to me, but it seems odd to argue that having a largely disused second set of logical operators in a language that skilled people periodically trot out for some cases is anything but a design wart. Maybe it's a cultural thing in the ruby world.

And, honestly, I don't mean that to sound snide or slighting. It's just odd to me.
Subscription still doesn't prevent them from stopping subscription renewal and switching off support.
Councilman Proposes Email Tax To Save U.S. Post Office
Oh yes! One of the anecdotes I remember from James Gleick’s _Genius_ was that one of Feynman’s ex-girlfriends kidnapped some memento of his nobel prize to get him to apologize (sorry, a bit hazy on the details, it’s been more than 15 years since I read that).
Google files patent for backside controls on Android devices