skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have experience in this area, but I dislike when people think this way in general, because it leads to comments like "oh, that's just standard language", and "no one else actually reads it all, I've never had that question before" in rather important contracts.

I often feel like I am signing my life away unnecessarily due to "standard contracts" that are highly asymmetrical, yet no one else cares or pushes back. So, I have to grant overreaching rights to the other party and just trust that they won't actually exercise it, for the sake of getting a deal done.

To me the paper approval seems like an odd request, but not logistically unreasonable. If they can communicate the content to the print operation, they can surely communicate a paper specification. Presumably they already do this for the paper size. More importantly, it doesn't matter. He did the deal because they agreed to his terms, whatever they were. That is them deciding that it's worth accommodating his parameters. If they thought they were logistically infeasible, they would have declined the deal, and both parties would be better off.

Edit: Ah, this is a book about design. That makes the paper approval request pretty reasonable, especially considering he had image bleed issues with the cheap paper.
Google Meets iOS
When running I/O bound workloads you really should be using a multithreading-capable app server. For example, if you're using Unicorn then that is extremely bad for I/O bound workloads (the Unicorn website's Philosophy page documents this under section "Just Worse in Some Cases": http://unicorn.bogomips.org/PHILOSOPHY.html). On the other hand, something like Phusion Passenger Enterprise 4 with multithreading turned on is excellent at handling I/O bound workloads and reduce your memory by a significant factor.
I'm basically talking about online communities. 4chan, reddit, somethingawful, various game forums, and on down to all the myriad niches, including this one.

True, their contributions to culture have varied wildly along the scales of importance, intellectual value, or whatever metric you choose.

Some examples, though, of what I would consider to be generally culturally impactful movements born of internet culture: Anonymous, WikiLeaks, Occupy, digital piracy, and the gradually changing way people are learning to interact and communicate ("kids these days, with their phones").

Edit: And politics - Ron Paul and libertarianism, twitter everything, youtube debates. And I'm not saying I support all of these things, just that they are pretty widely relevant.
Sigh. I don't know whether I'm alone in being saddened that many of the excellent thinkers of our time, who once might have spent their lives probing the the very limits of our comprehension in their field, now end up comfortably turning their minds to the services of (in the long term) rather short sighted commercial ends.

I can imagine that this sentiment is probably against the prevailing HN mood, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how certain kinds of thought and investigation are only enabled and supported by certain structures. The point of a university used to be being the highest pinnacle of thought. A place where people could have everything not related to intellectual pursuit taken care of so they could devote themselves to the pursuit of greater knowledge. Now that seems to be replaced by a corporate campus.

It's a cliche, of course, but how many breakthroughs of meaning are we missing out on because the brightest and best of our generation are now no longer seeking after truth, but instead seeking after a way to make more people click on an ad? Ah well, it's late, and as ever I'm post-sober. Best of luck to him and his team - I've enjoyed his lectures and papers. I hope they may continue, but I sadly suspect not.
BA Tech Talk: Effective Approaches to Web Application Security (Mar 13  6pm)
I agree, but I think the age of the language and community is another factor. Java, Python, C++, these are all old languages with decades of history and habits. Newer things like Node.js and Go have no history, no baggage to learn or avoid. I think starting in something with such a clean slate is somewhat easier because there is less ecosystem to learn.
what's so wrong about having the orange bar with "hacker news" in verdana??
Abstractions are not necessarily slow. The BSD socket API is an abstraction over sending raw TCP/IP packets to your Ethernet card, but you're not going to get a whole lot more performance out of accessing your Ethernet card directly.
They don't. SimCity runs on a new engine called Glassbox. They've been releasing videos and articles about it for months to get people pumped up.
> Or are bloggers not journalists, anymore?

Of course they're not. For better and for worse, bloggers are not and never have been journalists in any useful sense of those two words. Blogs do, however, fill some of the same niches that used to be the exclusive purview of journalistic channels, such as news curation and commentary.

If you're expecting blogs to match the rigor of journalism, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. I should note, however, that blogs are much more of a two-way street; they're more likely to get things wrong, but they're also more likely to be corrected when that happens.
What makes you think SimCity reuses code from Sims 1-3?
A related news is "Google acquires Canadian neural networks startup DNNresearch, aims to improve image and voice search"

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/12/google-acquires-cana...
> I think the religious war is already over, and Git won.

And this is how Fog Creek adapts to that reality without alienating their existing customers. They were headed directly at a tar pit. This this is the step sideways which will allow them to continue moving forward.
Is there a shirt design site that allows designs on the shoulders or sleeves? I have yet to find one.
"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

I'm going to point a finger and say that this is clearly untrue, and very easy to disprove just from basic network monitoring over 5 minutes of playing the game. I would immediately fire a systems architect that designed a single player game to compute significant calculations on our expensive [buzz word] cloud servers. Unless we use different definitions of the word significant...

It's a little ridiculous to suggest that?... plus, for zero benefit (above DRM), it would have a non-negligible affect on their bottom line if they are computing time cycles for SimCity on their own servers...

Anonymous source or not, conjecturally, it's hard to not agree with what the insider has said.
I think he was talking about pointer from the "idea" point of view, not the language feature.

References in high level languages are mostly hidden pointers. A good knowledge of how pointers work is really important to get a good understanding of how high level languages work (a lot of Java programmers don't well understand the distinction between value and reference types, for instance).

Likely, be at ease with recursion is also very important as many complex problems are recursive by nature, and so way easier to solve using functional techniques.
Go is not great.
I was going to post this elsewhere, but I guess I'll just drop it here... That's not what HN looks like to me. Why? Because like (I assume) most users that reached whatever the magic number is for a custom-color top bar, I've changed the default orange (a random shade of purplish in my case).

I 'got' the design because of the description, but if I had seen it randomly on the street, I'm not sure I would have immediately associated it with HN.

Not sure that any of this matters, but the marketing/branding side of me finds the whole color scheme thing an interesting discussion.
What Happens When Engineers Own Dogs [Video 2min]
The app looks great imho. Well done on design and from what I can see the interface is simple and usable.

One question...why would I use this over a shared google doc or a hackpad?
The iOS convention is to put close / back buttons on the upper left, primarily since most apps have new screens enter from the right. I guess that trumped the precedent set on the web.
Just curious, what were the tradeoffs for profiling the Python code and rewriting slow parts in C vs total rewrite in Go? For high level languages, the usual argument has been to rewrite just the slow parts in C or some other low level language.
Challenges Scala Must Overcome to Cross the Chasm to the Mainstream
I don't think you can accuse Google of short sighted commercial ends here. The team he is working with has already done really groundbreaking stuff that falls right in line with his work. https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ResearchatGoogle/posts/EMyhnBet...
I'm very sympathetic to your tech-on-tech-on-tech-on-tech hogwashery promulgated by open sourcers & vendors prosteltyzing their wonderful solutions and the other acculturation factors that permits developers approaches other than trying & seeing & exploring-

That said, you are wrong.

I'm not a Go user and I don't care for it, but Go is fundamentally different and better than most runtimes. Go has it's own green threading, which allows it to start new tasks using extremely small amounts of memory, and it can switch between tasks without the normal cost of context switching full on threads.

That is a huge difference. Node has some elements in play here, with it's event loop and callbacks, but really the only thing in the field that compares to Go that's in use is Erlang, and there's no frameworking on top of Erlang that wouldn't cause most PHP or nine tenths the Python developers to curl into a weeping ball at the Eldritch horrors they'd been exposed to: even ASM code is not nearly so effective, being clearly a low level somewhat harmless thing.

Being able to kick off small processes, that can sit around for a really long time, awaiting data- that's a model of computation we haven't done in decades, never with the mass popularity- there's a TLA for this kind of processing- Communication Sequential Processes, and Go is it. It's entirely different from the procedural model, from the Python and Perl and PHP scripting, where concurrency is a carefully waded into thing- Go is a concurrent first runtime, about ongoing, enduring, concurrent processes, and that's huge, HUGE I say, huge.
I would argue that Google has had the largest impact on information dissemination , since the invention of pen and paper.

Advertising is just a means for providing comfortable livelihoods to these excellent people. There's no better place for these people to be working. We got some spectacular output when some bright folks ended up working together in a phone company, better than any university. Why not Google?
I think the biggest difference is that the knowledge gained in the context of a university is open and easily built upon by anyone else.

The saddest part of corporations replacing academia won't be realized for decades but it's that the death of knowledge is tied too closely with profitability.

The decision of what to do with one's life rests entirely in him or her. But we should ask as a society, what are we striving for? The same goes to how our society (I can only speak of the US) looks at teaching as a profession.

</zenmode>
I would look for drug dealers and film producers (seriously).
How Japan's 'flammable ice' breakthrough could revolutionize the energy industry
To be fair , google are doing a lot more than "making people click on ads". There must be a lot of genuinely cutting edge research into machine learning,classification,NLP etc going on in there.

Google also serves the purpose of amplifying the power of great (and not so great) minds by putting so much information at their fingertips.

The ads part is just what writes the cheques.
I think the anonymous source perfectly illustrates why other players have been able to handle playing offline for up to 20 minutes without any hiccups in the simulation. If indeed the server is simply processing the messages between cities, it makes sense that they have a time constraint on how long a city can operate without hearing from other cities in the region.
Automatic is designed to work with multiple drivers. So yes, you can share a car with your wife and both of you can use Automatic.

A tethering plan is not required. The Automatic Link communicates with your iPhone over Bluetooth and uses your phone's data connection.
I've long felt Google's true mission is AI, the rest is just chaff for the investors.
Being "kitchen sink" isn't a design goal of Rust. Rather, Rust is a lower-level, safer language. Go is higher-level.

Rust strives to be as minimalist as possible without sacrificing the goals of low-level control over memory and C++ performance (optional GC), memory safety, race-free concurrency, and type safety (no null pointers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization
Drug dealers? Never ever, unless you want to end up dead on the street when your biz fails
My thoughts exactly. I'd pay $7 for this app, but not $70.
While I don't know for certain, I can't possibly imagine that they've just added two physical machines. Small websites operate with more servers than that, let alone a AAA title from a major studio. I don't think they literally mean two servers - it sounds like they're trying to make the explanation simpler for consumers. What they're probably referring to is a self-contained cluster of machines that runs all of the necessary services that the game relies on - databases, notifications, social rankings, etc.

That being said, all of this wouldn't be needed if they'd just release an offline mode. The upcoming DLC content to unlock expected features (bigger cities, more transportation options, etc) is bad enough, but the always on requirement just makes this game impossible for me to buy.
I used to work for a small company where most employees enthusiastically spent time hanging out with the founder on various weekends, going to sporting events and dinners.

The critical point to be made is that the founder signed our paychecks. Until after the company dissolved, you couldn't tell who was doing it for office politics reasons or out of genuine friendship. Today, only 15% of those employees still speak to the founder.

In my opinion, it's best not to approach hiring in the same manner as dating. At the end of the day, it's a business arrangement and it's about getting high quality work done in exchange for money.
For research requiring ridiculous amounts of processing power, large corporations have the advantage over most universities.
Ian from Segment.io here—randomly happened across this and I was thinking the same thing while reading it. I'd love to hear about how you were thinking it'd work, or what the abstraction would look like: ian@segment.io
> it's in approximately the same place as C is w.r.t. databases.

I think the existence of a standardized interface like `database/sql` makes things strictly better.

An anecdote: I started making a new web application using MySQL. As soon as I realized the error of my ways (not because of the driver), I swapped out a single import from the MySQL driver to the PostgreSQL driver, and everything continued to work as it did before.

[EDIT] Anyone care to explain the down-votes?
Coca-Cola probed over mapping in China
Is that Basque-Icelandic pidgin?
it's a kanban[1] board. Very free form. Multiuser with private/public groups. Free.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
Considering my company bought into self hosted FogBugz & Kiln early last month I'm concerned that we need to start looking elsewhere now as we aren't going to see updates from here on...

It's quite sad as our company specifically can't hold source code and other information in an external environment (especially across borders) due to the nature of our client base.
> dereferences the pointers to get the integer values

Doesn't it find a method of x that implements addition?
Show HN: Voronoi painter
Vigilance Behaviour in Barnacle Geese (1997)
Well, they're always slower than not having them. Having a few layers on top of each other starts to add up. It's very easy to lose track of the bottlenecks of 2 or more layers below the one you're working in. There is a reason HTTP.sys runs in kernel space and BSD sockets don't. And there's a reason both of them are slower than XMLHttpRequests.

PS. The fact that you can point to one (or a few) efficient abstractions doesn't mean they all are.
Just stick them on reddit and they will learn markdown in a few weeks!
Novelists are less likely to be technically inclined than people writing books on programming languages. I was careful to make this distinction in order to avoid this pedantry when I specified the class of novelist that still writes out manuscripts on a mechanical typewriter. Technically competent novelists may well be in the same predicament as O'Reillys' authors. I didn't say all novelists were technically incompetent. Please curb your outrage.
This already exists in big Chinese cities. It's really cheap and convenient. Eccomerce is eating main street alive partly because of same day delivery. The seller/courier also usually offers free returns- you can= inspect the goods while the courier waits and return them for free if dissatisfied. Great for clothes, food etc.

I can't stress enough how great it is.
The Automatic Link supports both Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth Classic, so it will work with many Android phones that don't support BT 4.0 too.
Don't worry.

I'm sure Sim City "Megatropolis" DLC is soon coming that doubles the default city size. Only $19.95 or whatever they think people will pay.

And don't worry about the traffic jams from bigger cities. Sim City Subway edition will comes out soon after. Only $15.95.

(yes I am very cynical and angry about this and making bitter sarcastic comments. This is a game I've wanted for a long time but is so flawed because of bad decisions)
You're the one who did the hearing.
As someone who is trying to learn Haskell, my best guess would be: Clojure's "hump" is like 1/1000000 the size of Haskell's "hump".
The problem is queueing at the worker end and not the proxy side.

Using a fair queueing system (such as Nginx HttpUpstreamFairModule) can limit the number of concurrent requests sent to workers so they don't get overloaded. It will make requests queue up at the proxy and then get distributed evenly.

See: recent discussion on problems caused by Heroku's random order load balancing.
One could adopt some kind of event-based system in scala or clojure, but Erlang and Go are alike in being the lone runtimes where running millions and millions of very small messaging processes is AOK no problem for the runtime, and not something one has to work really hard for.

Fun and joy are terms applicable here because the alternative is Erlang. Zing!

Go is rather ideal for these guys use case: if it wasn't an easy win, given what a snug fit their use case is, there would've had to have been red flags abound, as this really is a nearly idealized work load for Go's use: a hell of a lot of processes which sit around doing nothing, where one occasionally gets a message and forwards it along. Perfect Go story, as Go's lightweight processes (goroutines) are ideal for this kind of Communicating Sequential Processes routing workload.
Are there people who "love unlimited risk" and give "unrestricted cash" ? Sounds like an oxymoron.

If you have produced a significant company that has gone public or has been acquired you may have some luck
> I don't even know if "beat" is the right word to use

I might be in some cases.

While it doesn't work for all people, I would say that I have "beat" my own depression-related illness (Panic Disorder) through a standard psychological regime called Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). Basically you learn about the mental instincts which are leading you into vicious circles and train yourself to avoid getting into trouble to begin with.

If you can gain control of these instincts (not all people can) you can literally stop depressive spectrum disorders this way (although I'll point out: Panic Disorder is one of the most responsive depressive disorders to CBT).

> not all depression is caused by a chemical imbalance

The essence of somatic conditions like depression is that your brain controls your hormonal and neurotransmitter homeostasis -- even if you're not always aware that it's doing so. If you change your brains habits, you change your chemical levels.
> Advertising is just a means for providing comfortable livelihoods to these excellent people.

I'd say it's a bit more than that; what Google has done in advertising has benefitted millions of consumers and businesses. I'm not sure why people tend to look down on some of the work they do in advertising as somehow being less worthy than working on GMail or Search!
You can disable the crash alert feature if you don't want it.
What is it with the "io" domain names? Seems overkill now.
I realise I'm ignoring about two levels of irony here, but "Wear something people want." would actually be a great front for an Official HN T.

Inside enough that you need to know about YC to recognize that slogan, but general enough that just about any HN regular should get it. (To anyone else, it would simply seem like an intentionally abstract or unintentionally opaque statement, almost like Engrish.)

Plus, that sequence of 4 words is very Google-able, for anyone curious enough to want to know more...
This isn't even an article it's just BI pumping out SEO links to their own BS.
Micron.io — Webcron manager with realtime jobs visualization
This story sounds mighty familiar. I realize the topic is about one language over another, and most of the comments here seem to be focusing on that, but there's another part which I find fascinating: the cascading failure mode when they'd lose a web head.

"This would in turn cause the load balancer to think it failed and take it out of the pool, thereby applying the load that the unresponsive server would have been handling to the remaining servers. And since the remaining servers are now handling the load of the lost server plus the spike, inevitably a second server would go down, the load balancer would take it out of the pool and so on."

It was 8 years ago, and the customer was running PHP, not Ruby, but otherwise it's the same basic story that lead to the creation of "Surge Protector", or its actual name, "Suicide Pact". http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/06/28/sp/
looks great;checkout my webapp directory which has apps that are mobile optimized.

http://webappvault.com
Ask PG: is it okay to sell these "make something people want" t-shirt?
Depression seems to be defined (or at least is talked about like) a set of symptoms. As far as I can see, it's like the observed state of data corruption: there are many, many things that can cause that, some being an order of magnitude easier to fix than others.

Sometimes people feel horrible for a real reason, but don't know why. It would be foolish to medicate that away.
Is there some Open Source solution in the similar spirit as document.ly? Would love this, but has to be running inside the company only.
When I signed out of the application it didn't forward me to a logged-out verification page or give me a model that tells me I've signed out. It kind of just hung there without letting me edit anymore. When I sign out I like a very robust verification that tells me I've signed out. It looks great regardless.
I think it really has more to do with a lack of spare capacity - each server is so maxed out that it can't handle a 1/n increase in load when one server goes away.
Yeah, man, you just know she's buying private jets with her blog ad money.
Indeed we do. And I agree. Honestly, with most of the people we end up interviewing it doesn't even get to the end. It's a hard challenge, but we prefer it that way.