skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1600% faster app requests with Rails on Heroku
As a developer, I have great power to make things (web apps) that my internal business partners can barely dream of. I am working on using SignalR in .NET 4.5 to create some great working proof-of-concepts (MVPs as you call them). This is yet another great year to be a developer given SignalR, Meteor, Knockout/Angular/Ember/Backbone, Boostrap, etc.
> And they're not allowed to make certain calls into the OS to make a fast native JIT, even if they wanted to make their own browser from scratch. So due to artificial policy decisions, it's doomed to be slow

Yeah, and Firefox doesn't allow native code execution at all either, so, also slow. Mozilla doesn't have the moral high-ground here, in that they're also creating two tiers of developer: Mozilla, and everyone else.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_aging
Sitting is Killing You
I think "making things" is overrated. I think because the majority of people rely on computers to do things, from finding apartments to sorting data/information, that for beginners, it's better to "make your own life better". I guess it is non-trivial to realize how your day-to-day tasks in your professional life can be streamlined/improved by simple scripts, but no harder than it is to build a basic website that isn't amateurish.

And learning to code by reading a Rails book? Don't you have to know how to code before you build even a basic Rails app? Even average coders can't easily grasp all the concepts behind building a full-fledged web app, nevermind someone who barely knows what a for loop is.
How do you fail to kill yourself, multiple times?

I know that sounds unbelievably crude, but I'm really curious. My brother recently tried and I wonder (hope) that perhaps sometimes these attempts are more a call for help, rather than a genuine attempt.
I'm not really sure how many plugins you're running, or even what type of things you're trying to do with your themes, but I work at a web dev company where WordPress is used for 95% of our clients and I haven't run into any issues using the auto updater in years.
Don’t try to do everything
I'd argue we hit the tipping point more than ten years ago. Finance and a lot of tech (e.g. google) had already been transformed by machine learning at that point. At my last job we were working with some pretty complex neural network models that were first developed in the early to mid 90s.

AI research died off in the 1960s and 1970s because the results didn't even get close to matching the expectations. Machine learning's current commercial success ensures that won't happen in the foreseeable future. That said, it's worth tempering our enthusiasm. To put it perspective, deep networks are extremely far from recreating general, human-level intelligence. There's a long way to go, and I'm not convinced the path we're on is the 'correct' one to reaching the kind of general AI people see in the movies.
Link for the lazy: http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/publications/salarydisclosure/20...
Absolutely. Learning to "code" by taking codeacademy lessons, is okay but you don't get a product you can maintain, tweak, and break. In my experience if you set out to make a thing and do whatever it takes to make that thing, you will learn more and have something to come back to and refine constantly. Plus it teaches you to break a problem into steps and you learn where to find good info. It may mean that you miss some fundamentals, but you can come back to those if you decide to stick with it.
A new pope is elected
Yes, the sample is probably small, but Hungarians like some really, really weird shit. Here's an English [1] and a Hungarian [2] article about extreme porn in the country. Porn is culture here. One of the biggest porn directors [3] a is household name and is considered a celebrity.

As for Gay Grandpas, well searching for "Gay Grandpa Sex" [4] yields 29 700 results.

[1]: http://www.pestiside.hu/20100128/police-raid-the-only-effect...

[2]: http://www.nol.hu/archivum/archiv-506693

[3]: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1018310/

[4]: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=meleg%20nagy...

(edit: formatting)
The article cites a Google patent[1] for eye tracking within a wearable computing device. Hopefully it's still coming down the pipeline for Glass at some point.

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US8235529
Can anyone shed light on how persistence is achieved? The wiki page doesn't seem to come to any conclusions:

https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/display/ramcloud/Data+per...
The Art of Promoting Your App on the Web: Crafting Your Pitch
For me, the killer argument has always been cases like this:

a.btn {
&-primary,
&-info,
&-success,
&-warning,
&-danger {
&, &:link { color: #fff; }
}
}

Where the & is replaced with the previous mark, so it would create a.btn-primary, a.btn-info. You might still argue that you could get close to the amount of characters with vanilla CSS, but as soon as you have to change small bits of this, you end up refactoring a lot of code.

With LESS and SASS, you have a built-in capability to refactor things very quickly.
>> " I read a textbook on physiological chemistry"

>> "I'd been reading a lot of books on biology"

Well award this man a degree already. Am I the only one who doesn't trust these kinds of qualifications? A software engineer who is a hobbyist bio-chemist is telling me about a system that "costs 150 a month, cures skin diseases in 9 days, will get you in the best shape of your life, and tastes great." (per his blog)

Really? I mean... really, really? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And in this case, it's probably very dangerous as well.
Andy Rubin no longer leading Android, replaced by Chrome exec Sundar Pichai
From past experience with traffic routing in real life, the best bet is to encourage a heavily monitored subset of traffic to take alternative paths. If this traffic continues to route faster than, you gradually increase the share of traffic to the alternative path until you observe it run slower than the primary route, or until there is no more traffic to route.

I have no idea how they have let this go out without putting more work into this...however maybe the same people who wrote the AI are responsible for running the servers and this is why we're seeing problems there too?
The problem is that if you don't encrypt your over-the-air signal anyone can monitor your traffic.
Given that there's nobody who can force any particular action, it'd be interesting to think through the game theory and whether that's actually likely to happen.
Bitcoin on Bloomberg [video]
Because the iPhone was an obvious money printing machine, so the carriers were willing to accept the inability to put their garbage on it.
Currently, Salesforce and Google Contacts are the key differentiators.

At present, CardShark lets you push business cards directly to Salesforce and iPhone contacts, as well as Google Contacts (instantly via the FullContact web app). Additional integrations will follow - our goal is to allow users to transcribe business cards and push the contact info to wherever they want (from within one app, without cumbersome syncing).

We simply rolled Salesforce out first due to the fit and size of the market.
Notwithstanding all the bad press SimCity got since launch; I got the game 3 days after it's release.

I had seen one or two beta gameplay videos and was seriously impressed by the stunning graphics and seemingly awesome gameplay. Reasoning any of the initial server issues would be resolved sooner rather than later made the purchase.

During the installation and initial launch I was rather curious, as the plenitude of bad reviews would have you believe that the game could explode any instant now. Nothing happened. I connected to the by default selected server 'Europe West 6' and started playing.

Since the first launch I have not experienced any of the initial server related issues. Yeah, that's right, NONE at all. Once or twice I got a message that connection to the server was lost but the message never lasted longer than 5 seconds. What's more those messages had zero impact on the gameplay.

I have played the game for about 15 to 20 hours (I was sick over the weekend). All I can say : It's great!. Sure I have noticed the flaws in the AI when 10 of you 12 dump trucks keep going back and forth on a single street and leave the rest of the city piling with garbage. Yeah that are a few bugs with the snapping and routing of buildings and streets, but the game is still freaking great to play!

"This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.

The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper."

Comments like these are as bad, if not worse than EA/Maxis explaining or denying the initial server problems.

"...- but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken."

Seriously? A travesty? If that's your opinion I think you are either a fanatical SimCity gamer who's deeply disappointed at the unforgiving decline in quality. Or you are too closely related to the gaming industry and have very high expectations. Or most likely have a very biased perspective.
That's actually a really nice solution to that. Done correctly I bet it helps the page load faster too.
I'm 6'2, 175, with a lean somewhat muscular build, more in the core and legs than in the arms.

(Wow, this is starting to sound like a personal ad, heh)

Anyway, if you're not "nearly that heavy" then I imagine you are quite thin? So yeah you don't need to be dropping weight! Beef it up!
You just discovered Vipassana meditation on your own!
This is brilliant.

I often wonder of VCs actually have a secret website where they go on it, select from a half dozen drop boxes of platitudes they want to include, and then out spits a message along these lines. Over the years my inbox has gathered enough of them that I could probably extract most of the patterns.
Makes you wonder if the backend issues were geniune or if it was a way to buy more time for finishing the game (and to release something on a promised date).
There's also an API behind the scenes
IIRC SC4 with expansion packs actually allowed you to run a much better microsimulation of a small handful of individual Sims whose movements and "thoughts" could be tracked in parallel to a macrosimulation that produced a more realistic simulation of commute patterns between buildings.
Hi, I'm sorry you've had a bad WordPress experience but I don't think your experience is typical - we try very hard to maintain backwards compatibility we don't deprecate randomly or rename thing unnecessarily IMHO.

If you have specific examples of compatibility breaking changes we have made recently that caused you issues I would love to know about them so we can address them.

I agreed that $page and $paged can be confusing - being able to both be on a page within a single item of content or on page X of the stream of blog items means we need two different variables - yes they could have better names but changing them would be backwards incompatible ;)
I'm skeptical, too.

Without any variety in your food intake, it's an all-or-nothing approach which seems pretty risky. You'd need to keep a close watch on your vitals to ensure you're not missing out on specific nutrients. Something like this would need to be tailored to each person's needs depending on their lifestyle, which can also change depending on various factors like climate, age and so on.
If I had to hazard a guess at why the gut reaction is to call it a joke, it would be that (1) meal replacement shakes have been around for at least two decades and (2) it's not a weight loss suggestion (although he mentions it may be useful for that).
I disagree with the conclusions though. What MS needs to do is let devs to run apps in the desktop and enable AD integration - business would kill for this as a platform but it's been hobbled.
Caloric restriction used to be thought to increase lifespan, but more recent studies don't support this.[1][2]

[1] - http://earthsky.org/human-world/oops-caloric-restriction-may...

[2] - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7415/full/nature1...
I'm sure there are many Ruby programmers that are competent at low level code, but based on my anecdotal observations, I find the thought of the average Ruby developer writing Rust terrifying...
Pennies (microtransaction experiment)
I've always wanted to do this, and actually have talked to some GI's making this happen. They always said you can do it for a couple of months, but the stomach is designed to handle solid food. I definitely plan to become a beta tester for him though. For a college student, this is a dream.
Going from short-chain carbs to polysaccharides alone should help a lot.
It's not a matter of being lazy. Cooking and eating consumes hours in my day. At least four hours a day, and typically six hrs a day if I get fancy with cooking.
Live chat with Hermione Way at SXSW
Matt Ridley on How Fossil Fuels are Greening the Planet
Jorge Bergoglio, Argentine cardinal, elected pope
In terms of desktop environments, I've only used Ubuntu and Fedora recently, but I've found their font rendering to be sufficiently pleasant. Either way, the lower-level features of the OS are much more important to me, as is probably the case with most Linux users.
I would imagine that if you were entering a crowded market with an idea that simply cut costs, but provided no real unique consumer facing benefit, you could afford to ride on CPC.

Am I wrong?
Maybe not as dangerous as a stead diet of McD's. See it in persepective. He's at least trying, not just stuffing his mouthhole with salt-sugar-fat crap.
The universe presents overwhelmingly as a vast void. Of the total space in the universe, what fraction at most do you think is occupied by self-aware minds? What is the maximum percentage of all the matter in the universe that is organized into conscious beings? Regardless of whether life is common or rare on other planets, it is certainly vanishingly scarce overall.
So, what about using someone's frailties against them. Doing a time-constrained, cleverly marketed and salesman pushed, complex contract product agreed to by someone just this side of the line of legal competence due to low IQ?
Imagine if Steve Jobs would have thought like that, world was not going to experience iPhone.
> I can't be sure they got it right, I'll stick to GitHub

I guess you could just not use the feature and only use git clients. Who cares if the redundant hg clone they keep on their end gets out of sync.
Pope Francis
One thing experiments like this often seem to forget is that our bodies have evolved to eat. Even something as simple as your stomach physically expanding to hold large quantities of less nutrient-dense whole foods has been shown to have an effect on the body and brain.
Alternatively, it might weaken your teeth, in a similar way as being in space weakens your bones, while running helps build bone mass.
and on incandescent lamps...
Amazon Machine Image Copy to copy your AMIs across zones in EC2
Announcing AMI Copy for Amazon EC2
We are excited to announce the immediate availability of a new feature: Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Copy. AMI Copy enables you to easily copy your AMIs across AWS regions, enabling the following scenarios:
I normally agree with Schneier, but I think he's wrong on this one. Basically his argument is that, rather than try to secure your wifi, you should just leave it open and make sure your personal computers are secure enough to be used on an open network. He points out that, if you use your laptop on public networks, you have to secure it anyway, so there's no additional risk to having your home wifi basically be a public network.

All that may be true (though I would argue that, since you use your home connection a lot more than any other, your risk exposure is much greater and therefore it makes sense to have a layered defense there), but it completely misses the point that you are responsible to your ISP for how your internet connection gets used. Starbuck's may be able to say "look, we're a public place, we can't possibly control everything that everybody does on our wifi", and get away with just making people check an "I agree to your terms of use" box when they connect to their wifi. You, as a home user, are not likely to get away with that.

Schneier also says this: "if someone did commit a crime using my network the police might visit, but what better defense is there than the fact that I have an open wireless network? If I enabled wireless security on my network and someone hacked it, I would have a far harder time proving my innocence." This seems backwards to me: if you have enabled wireless security, you know exactly who you have authorized access to--it's whoever you gave your passphrase to. So it's easy to distinguish authorized from unauthorized use. If you leave your wifi open and someone uses it for something nefarious, how can you defend yourself? You're still liable for the use of your internet connection, and you can't say the use was unauthorized because, well, you left your wifi open for anyone to use.
If this is real, I hope he keeps a very detailed log of his experiences. Since I doubt very much that we know everything about human nutrition, this could be a valuable data source for finding more gaps in our knowledge.

It would also be interesting to see the effect of this on gut microbes, which are seem to be increasing in importance in the formula of overall health [1,2]. I wish him the best of luck, but it's not something I'll be doing.

[1] http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ismej...

[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120815174902.ht...
So can we get a Rated R version?
This reminds me of a scene from the movie "This Film Is Not Yet Rated", where Stone and Parker describe inserting a super-graphic sex scene into the movie "Team America", which they knew the MPAA board would ask them to remove, attracting their attention and allowing them to keep their R rating.
I think the second point's moot, anyway, considering the fact that the the leader photo implies that as it is the only way you're going to whip some up is with non-ubiquitous-and-therefore-processed ingredients.
Also if you filled it out and accidentaly moved back or forward in browser navigation, then go back to it and your browser fills it, the Javascript often removes your text.
You could still chew gum to make sure your teeth and jaw get exercised. In fact you probably should?
> Before Android, you could write a Windows Mobile app and have it run pretty much on every Windows Mobile device and the same with Blackberry and iPhones.

Considering that Android pre-dates the iPhone (and thus iOS), the statement isn't accurate. This article cites 2004 and the iPhone didn't debut until the middle of 2007. It was indeed a nightmare, not only in the development process but in distribution. Good luck getting your app widely distributed across platforms/countries/carriers.

I remember being at CES around this time and the Google guys did a keynote where they made it a mission to get rid of all the different charging standards in use at the time (every phone was different, remember having to find a charger that worked for your phone?). It was a whole different game back then.
Dragdis - drag discoveries
> a 24-year-old software engineer
> ...
> Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a balanced diet

What utter bollocks. We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latter. It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods, but I doubt that anyone alive today knows how to do it. He may see "good" results on some metrics due to a lack of any desire to go hypercaloric -- i.e. there's probably no artificially boosted food reward[1] mechanisms in his glop. But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies.

So an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have whipped up a drink that eliminates all that. A task that specialists have so far failed at.

> "I read a textbook on physiological chemistry and took to the internet to see if I could find every known essential nutrient."

I've seen this enough to be sick of it; it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset gone badly wrong. The supplement and meal replacement powder/drink industry is a multi-billion dollar market. First sanity check: _no_ staff scientists for any of these companies thought to go look at a textbook and the intertubes and do the same thing? DOH! Egg's on them!

Another example of this failure: when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science (e.g. human subjects) without _any_ training in how to do experiment design, data collection, or analysis. "Just ask 'em some questions!" The general form of the problem seems to be a blindness to the depths of domain knowledge required to be effective in other disciplines.
Vimux-zeus: vimux and zeus in action.
vimux-zeus is a vim plugin to combine the use of vimux and zeus.
VCs, management consultants, business gurus... all the same rubbish.

After working in Big 4 management consulting jobs for almost six years, I'm constantly surprised that phrases like "value-add" and "validate a couple of the core assumptions" still have the power to bring me out in a cold sweat.

But what is it going to take to end this nonsense? We know we're talking rubbish. Most of us hate these stock business-speak phrases, yet still most of us choose to hide behind them. Clients are partly to blame, but an industry that tries to differentiate itself by the bizarreness of its terminology (thereby fabricating "exclusivity")is more to blame.

When are we going to wake up and realise that speaking in plain, simple, understandable English does not make us look stupid and simple. Quite the opposite.
Use em or lose em.
I think it's a lot less terrifying than writing Ruby extensions in C (which has been the main alternative up to now), because Rust is memory-safe. There's a lot less that can go wrong when you can't scribble on freed memory or jump to undefined addresses outside of designated "unsafe { ... }" blocks. Note that the Gaussian blur function is all safe code—the only unsafe code here is the code to marshal the data structures to and from Ruby.
Your information is outdated.

The Holo theme is required to be present on all devices that wish to carry the play store. If you write an app targeting 4.0 or higher that uses the default theme, it will look the same across all phones.
Here's the story in his own words: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298