skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've reposted/reformatted an excellent profile of Mr. Rogers from 1998. In the context of today's lack of civility (one need only look as far as HN's comment threads at times), it provided me with a fascinating look back at a time I sometimes desperately miss.

NOTE: The article is not mine, and I was unable to find the original. I've reached out to Tom Junod, and if I hear back from him, I'll be posting a link of his choice and any comments prominently at the top of the article.
What does "We perform continuous encrypted offsite backups for customer data." mean?
This article is stupid in stupid ways. Nintendo has the largest share of the portable handheld market with its handhelds, and is also the only profitable arm of the company right now.

Partnering with Samsung / Apple would be resigning their position, and then forcing their games to be sold at the $5 / game level to compete in Samsung / Apple's marketplace.

Nintendo continues to make a profit selling $40 games on their handheld system. Why should they give up the revenue advantage on their custom platform?
Why would you want to buy an ARM based Linux machine?
My experience over about 20 years of writing software professionally is that I need to tackle one algorithmic problem a year. Probably amounts to a day or two of work, and usually it is a refinement or adaptation of an existing algorithm, rather than totally new code. Call it less than 1% of my time.
Check out how to debug in Ruby with Metaprogramming. Mind blowing. Working on a Kernel now for educational purposes, and it's practically impossible to debug using GDB :-) not literally, but takes 5 minutes to fire up a GDB, which still won't work properly
I read a post a while back where someone theorized that Google owns enough fiber to make YouTube inexpensive to run, and it's deeply embedded in the minds of most web users.
You seem to be introducing a new point rather than agreeing or disagreeing with me or the article. Actually, I think you are agreeing with me. Contrary to the article, large amounts of money are at the complete disposal of individuals, corporations, and organizations, who simply don't choose to spend it in ways we agree with sometimes. For example, they earmark it for Africa instead of flying cars. We don't know what Apple will do with its $XX billion piggybank, but I'm pretty happy with what they've done so far. Buffett pledged most of his billions to philanthropy. I believe these decisions are theirs to make.

"Capital is power" is a metaphor. Capital certainly grants purchasing power. Some things (and people) can be bought and some can't. Laws shouldn't be as purchasable as they are, of course.
...run your own shit.

Except if you're running your own chat server you won't be able to connect to Gtalk users.
I think I more or less agree with the article. The Microsoft bit (that they are new at manufacturing) is a tad off as the author focuses on Surface even though they've been making peripherals since the 80s and Consoles for over a decade now.

I think another component is that the Wii was a bit cheaper at its launch and its closest competition (price wise) was the aging PS2 and the XBox 360 Core model at $299. The Core model lacked wireless controllers and initially lacked HD capability and I seem to be unable to remember any of my high school friends buying one (though I'm sure they sold well enough on their own), instead opting for the more expensive model.

Today the $299 WiiU has to compete with the still excellent $199 XBox 360 and $270-$350 PS3 Bundle Packs (Console + Games + extra Controller + additional Content). This is a lot harder sell especially since a lot of the multi platform titles are going to look just as good, if not better, on the 360 and PS3.
Programming is terrible — Lessons learned from a life wasted
404 without "Trailing Slash".

Here's the .htaccess fix (untested):

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$

RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [L,R=301]
The World's Fastest Computer Is Being Slowed Down By Too Much Gold
At $3 profit per book sold, $15 retail, I can see why he is mad at the value suck industry(publishers/distributors).
The windows search hitting the internet thing in XP is just a buggy software update mechanism, it doesn't send a search term. Here's a good explanation: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/04/11/winxp_search_assista...
Not the complete story either.

Fire Emblem: Awakening has paid DLC, that is very tempting to buy if you're a Fire Emblem fan. Lucina's full story is available in paid DLC, and the only way to experience it is to purchase those maps.

Anyone who has finished the game will know the importance of Lucina's character. (Spoiler alert btw: don't look her up if you haven't gotten to chapter 14 yet).
Do you always have to operate expecting sudden spikes and that prevents you from moving to a cheaper hardware? If traffic gets over what you could serve, display 'our servers are busy' message and perhaps that way you could have kept the service alive if costs halved..
Is there an study about statistical distribution of money among authors? I am most interested in median income.
He seems to be trying to say he made an an embarrassingly small amount of money, and that it is somehow unreasonable to have made only $12000 by selling 4000 books. At least that's how I read this piece.
Show HN: Use image hosts for general file hosting
It is true, though. Money is currency, not a store of value. Buy durable goods or invest in growth projects. Working to accumulate pure money is just piling IOUs on people. If you do that, you are going to face inflation in the future, which you deserve , because your non-spending took away other people's opportunity to create things of value. (Or, if they produced in excess of demand, then prices will drop in the future, and conpensatory inflation is no problem to you.)
No you aren't, roulette is not an RNG, it is a PRNG. If you take into account the initial marble velocity and rate of rotation of the wheel, you can seriously reduce the probability space of where the ball will land. Further, this can be modelled statistically pretty simply.

To win at betting with roulette you only need to bet on a set of numbers, where the probability of the marble landing on that set is pretty good, and the payout of winning over time covers the losses from being wrong.

So say you can accurately guess which 1/4 of the wheel will capture the marble. (and there are no greens... the real math is the same but uglier a bit). You put down equal bets on the 9 numbers represented by that. Each beting round will net you a 4:1 payout.

Now say you can only guess that 1/4 of the wheel, 50% of the time. You will still average a 2:1 payout.

Guessing the 1/4 of the board 50% of the time is not that hard, you just need to calculate the linear drift of the time the marble passes a fixed point, and know the frequency of "loops" that is too slow for the marble to stay on the track. Accounting for the rotation of the board is straight-forward, it is almost constant for a given play. The 50% covers the wierd bounces. Just calculate board position for the time that the marble will get below the threshold, and the marble position as well, and you've won. A person can't do it well, but an arduino is overkill for it.

Edit: further notes on this- casinos will be able to detect this easily. All they have to do is look for people on hot streaks that are "too hot", then compare betting placement with wheel positions. And they generally kick people out who are winning too much anyway, even if they can't prove 'chaeting'.
I really don't care about this issue at all, but if I have to read any more threads with you relentlessly defending Windows, you have to disclose your employer. Looking at your comment history, you are obsessed, and I don't think it's fair.

Same goes for recoiledsnake. To me, a vaguely interested reader, you all come off as zealots.
We perform backups of chat history, accounts and any other customer data, encrypt them and upload to multiple locations outside of our data center.
also please note: doing drugs in clubs is totally illegal. so we'll have none of that while you are over here, m'kay ? danke für ihr verständnis

in other words: laughably unenforceable.
Yes. I was all sympathetic with a poor famous author who made pathetic $12k on his bestseller until I hit the number of copies sold: 4000... Huh? Suddenly, $12k sounds like a pretty good deal.

I should note though that when I hear about authors of tech books (O'Reilly and the like), I do tend to imagine a Jaguar in their garage :) But also a lot more copies sold.

And also, 8 months delay on sales you made July last year, that's just not right. I thought if you're indie the turnaround is much faster with better pay. Apparently not.
| honorable president to leave office on his
| own accord

I'm not sure if this is a troll, or some form of satire... Calling Nixon on "honorable President" in a discussion of an article about hard evidence that he sabotaged peace talks for his own personal gain?

| undermining the US justice system

Now who's blowing things out of proportion? He lied about having an affair. He did so under oath, so it's perjury. Is this wrong? Yes. Is this "undermining the US justice system?" Not really. Committing a crime is not a undermining the justice system, no matter how much you might dislike the person.
The MS Surface is some pretty sweet hardware.
Steve Ballmer doesn't make Top 50 highest rated CEOs list
I've actually been wondering if there's a pattern to these closures related to some scaling issue on the Google infrastructure. Google tends to build services tightly integrated with a common fabric. Scaling issues might cause the design of smaller services to take more than their share of resources.

Consider that Reader and other small services needing event and data synchronization, were often started by independent "20%" teams, earlier on in google's infrastructure build out. So maybe services at a higher priority are needing those resources. Or maybe they're looking at upgrading the "google fabric" in an incompatible way and if you have to redesign fundamental assumptions through the code of smaller services, you might stop and take a hard look at seeing if a large rewrite is worth it.
I was curious so I looked up the numbers on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiopulmonary_resuscitation#E...

The survival rates are:

CPR by a bystander: 4%

Cardiocerebral Resuscitation (i.e., chest compressions only without artificial respiration): 6%

No bystander CPR: 2%

So attempting CPR results on average in doubling the survival rate as opposed to just waiting for an ambulance, and chest compressions only are 50% better than chest compressions plus mouth-to-mouth.
That's the thing, I'm self-employed and I'm the only one working on (highly experimental) open-source software development tools. It's not so much that there are unproductive people around me, it's that there are no people. My real-life friends are mostly doing their PhDs and none of them are coders/developers.
The producers of Warhammer 40k ought to take note.[1]

"Trademark Bullying" has totally gotten out of hand.[2] Brands have a duty to protect their rights, but a letter like this is really all that's necessary. Good on Jack Daniels. There is no reason to send indie publishers to the poorhouse over trifling infringement.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5176820

2. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/stupid-lawyer-tricks-a...
Because hardware can be bought with another OS installed and then reinstalled with Linux (having checked whether it's fully compatible beforehand, though that's quite okay nowadays). Most others will probably be doing that, but then you're supporting the Microsoft empire, which is what Hettes was trying to avoid.
Young Entrepreneurs Revolutionize the Energy Industry.
American Library Association awards Aaron Swartz the James Madison Award
Twitter's single timeline format is very much not designed for following all updates from someone (which is what I'm interested in for a blog). There are ways around it (keeping your subscriptions count very low, list tricks, etc), but it's complicated compared to just using rss.
I remember Sony trying to pull off Playstation Certified phones but it didn't catch on. They released this services called the PS Mobile and they half assed it and treated it like an extension of the PSN store. Basically, the PS Mobile is a mediocre app store with water downed games.

Nobody besides Microsoft, is going to make a high end mobile device, that updates every year with high end games. Nintendo and Sony are not going to take the risk of going against Apple, Samsung, HTC, and Motorolla. They're losing some money now in order to not lose more money in the llong run. They're investing time to professionally tackling these established mobile companies.

Think about it: if Nintendo doesn't even release a dumb downed version of Pokemon games, Donkey, Kirby, Mario, etc. on "certified" mid-end Android devices that's because they don't want to take a 30% cut on their sales.

The larger demographic is not noticing but we're at that point where it's about online services in a Steam vs. PSN vs. Xbox LIVE world. Until the larger demographic notices this they will squeeze all life from consoles until people move to mobile devices with PC specs capable of running decent games.

You're discrediting the company who took design ideas from flip phones and created the GameBoy Advanced SP. They're obviously waiting for Linux to evolve and for Samsung to get their act together on providing enough high-end chips so their timing is not off. Again, all while losing money but they're not RIM, they've AT LEAST acknowledged making pokemon games in 3D with Pokemon X/Y, they'll make the money back in software.
Think about what my blood pressure feels like every day :-/
>But when I performed an Internet search, the Assistant sent my search terms to the Microsoft site, and also dropped a session cookie on my machine.

OMG, an internet search sends keywords over the internet to an internet server! Stop the presses!
Sure. I guess I forgot to also make the point that the best way to write tests is to do it as you write the code you are testing. Otherwise the tasks becomes somewhat tedious and intolerable.
Yes I've seen a few places. Rather than median income, the inequality indexes (like GINI) are interesting numbers. Book authors have income equality worse than 3rd world kleptomaniac dictatorships. Sometimes 5 authors will account for like 70% of all income.
It kind of reminds me of Matt Might's "The illustrated guide to a Ph.D." [1]

(Which I now see have been posted in an earlier comment)

[1]: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a...

http://imgur.com/jLP4KEa
Ok, I have to clarify. Things are pretty great for me. They've been improving and they're much better than in the past. I'm really happy doing what I'm doing. Procrastination has been a much lesser[1] problem lately.

So I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining. That said, there's still a lot of room for improvement, if I find like-minded people and get a chance to work with them.

I'm going to a workshop on the very topic that interests me[2], and I hope that'll be my chance to do some networking in this narrow area, and maybe get a chance to collaborate on something.

[1] https://github.com/shurcooL/

[2] http://liveprogramming.github.com/2013/
WordPress.com can import from Blogger, and then export an almost human-readable XML file with posts. It costs money to point your own domain at it, but it has a DNS editor (text-based, but it has some click-based tools). It's worth the small price if you're concerned with easy portability.

And it's not a peripheral service like Blogger. Automattic is WordPress.com, and all their peripheral products exist to serve it. The best part? You can take your WordPress.com and turn it into an identical WordPress.org with a billion different service providers.
Conversations like this make me wonder if there's some disruption waiting to happen. My understanding is that from a theoretical perspective software should be reducible to a combination of algorithms and business rules, but we seem to spend our time on something else. Is there some meta-solution to the rote stuff that we just haven't noticed? Doesn't it seem like the most tedious tasks - Extract-Transform-Load, for example - could get automated away? Is there something preventing that from happening? What is it?
The important question is how much time did he put into it. If it took 12 months to write, then he's got a terrible return on investment. If it only took 1 month, it looks much better.
The 3 slides initiative — make the audience interested by the first 3 slides
I think the plan is that if you have to manage costs as closely you describe (as you or I might), your revenue opportunities are too small to care about in comparison with the founders' expectations of a giant exit.

Many of us are not even playing the same game.
For those who would like to move away from Gmail+GTalk but don't want the hassle of running a VPS, Dreamhost offers XMPP as part of its web hosting service.
Ask HN: When people say "we use Scala for our API" what do they mean?
Scalatra? Play? Finagle? Lift?
Best illustration I've seen. It's not only useful for fresh batches of Ph.D. students, it's perfect to educate friends and family too!
I think Nintendo's failure is way more complex than this article makes it appear. It has nothing to do with hardware, but a lack of compelling reasons to buy into the hardware.

If you think way back to the GameCube, they were king of the hill, so to speak. They had the best hardware for gaming and even the most innovative at the time. No one else had wireless controllers for example.

The reason they lost was because they didn't take the threat of the PS2 and Xbox seriously. They ran a decade long empire in console gaming and were caught off guard.

Sony and Microsoft both knew they needed exclusive content and bought all the 3rd party gaming companies that were building AAA games for Nintendo at the time. With no AAA titles from 3rd parties Nintendo had to double-down and create their own. Zelda and Mario can only go so far.
But there is a cost -- the characters would often have trouble carrying so many pads (or that many pads + a cup of coffee, thanks Janeway).
I'm a CS PhD, and I agree. I always tell people I'm studying math because it gives them much more of a flavor for what I'm actually doing everyday. When I say computer science, people think I'm just programming something.

Also, when people ask me, "So What do you actually do studying math?" I reply, "Sit and stare at the wall for several hours a day. Occasionally I write something down."
The US justice system is pretty weak if it relies on the President to step down. Is this what you are suggesting?
Hence, modern day adherents of astrology. There is something in the human mind that wants to conform vague patterns to experienced instance, for whatever reason.
Why would they? From their perspective, you're a risk, a leak, and a time-sink.
The twitterverse is a very small subset of reality, although it is very easy to believe otherwise, as it is used by "us" and "our multipliers". As far as my (of course limited) observations go, twitter is filling the social communication need of a certain part of the population and is rejected because of practical considerations by the rest.

If you wonder what the practical problems are, consider a person that has the (possibly job-related) constraint that they cannot look at their twitter client whenever they want. If that person now wants to stay informed about something without missing an update, they are essentially screwed with twitter and other information-stream based services. At this point I am very certain that what I just described is not an outlier but rather the reality for a large section of the general population.
The Ability to Orient Yourself
Does anyone else think that his publishing contract is odd? He mentions it being a 50% revenue split after publishing expenses, I was under the impression that any contract that put any of the costs onto the author were considered bad to the point of exploitative[1][2].

It obviously couldn't have worked out terribly for him if he was making $3 a sale but I wonder if this is more common than I thought.

[1] Hydra's Contract: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/note-to-sff-writers-ra...

[2] Yog's Law: http://www.sff.net/people/yog/
Maybe so, but if I had another son, I could never name him Sue. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1BJfDvSITY
I work on a large commercial database mainly on optimizing joins and a lot of the work that has to be done is algorithmic.

Library functions normally are to generic and therefor we end up implementing lots of different variations of fast and memory efficient searching, sorting, graph optimizing, etc.
Ask HN: How many people small tutorial-like eBooks useful?
I've been using small eBooks for different topics (such as http://guidetodatamining.com/ for data mining) and I've been finding them amazing.

I was curious to see how many people are actually using them?

Would a Wiki-like or Git-like platform with many, many small books on different skills or topics be useful? Something that goes beyond a Wiki article, more hands-on, but shorter than purchasing an actual book and allows collaboration?
Yes, this is true, of the following two references I'm not sure which is more accurate, either way this happened:

"Insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite unit as the Navy SEALs who killed former Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden, U.S. officials said Saturday. It was the deadliest single loss for American forces in the decade-old war against the Taliban."

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/08/06/afghan-president-31-...

"U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that they believe that none of the Navy SEALs who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although they were from the same unit that carried out the bin Laden mission."

"The sources thought this was the largest single loss of life ever for SEAL Team Six, known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/06/afghanistan-helicop...
For the people who changed their career in the last two years;
here is the old HN-thread with some 42 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727
That query is interesting. I wonder if IBM's Watson would outperform google on those types of detailed questions, without human intervention. Just take the top-ranked google response against Watson.
I dislike the word "font" used this way. It reads the same as "mp3s used in oscar winning films". A font is the thing you buy or download, a typeface is the shape of the letters.
They do. I had a driver who took me on the most roundabout way possible to get to my office. I rated him one star. It popped up a text field entry, I said what happened and Uber credited me the difference.
Misguiding headline. 4000 sales of something netting 12k USD isnt all that bad.

As an example, 4000 sales of an iOS app probably put you in some of Apples Top Lists as well and could amount to the same amount of money, but its nothing super interesting or unexpected.
I did game development in a previous lifetime. Probably half my day was implementing algorithms and thinking about the correct data structure for a problem.

I spend less time these days implementing algorithms. However, you need a good understanding of algorithms to decide between using ActiveRecord or a service layer. You need a good understanding of algorithms to pick between a relational DB, a key-value store, or a document store.

Maybe you aren't picking difficult enough problems if you don't have to think about this kind of stuff.