skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear you. Heroku's value proposition is that we abstract away infrastructure tasks and let you focus on your app. Keeping you from needing to deal with load balancers is one part of that. If you're worried about how routing works then you're in some way dealing with load balancing.

However, if someone chose us purely because of a routing algorithm, we probably weren't a great fit for them to begin with. We're not selling algorithms, we're selling abstraction, convenience, elasticity, and productivity.

I do see that part of the reason this topic has been very emotional (for us inside Heroku as well as our customers and the community) is that the Heroku router has historically been seen as a sort of magic black box. This matter required peeking inside that black box, which I think has created a sense of some of that magic being dispelled.
I can't find anything like the original title in any of those links.
I'm getting a lot of "We're experiencing problems and this post was not saved. Please copy/paste this post somewhere and try posting later. Sorry!"
Great. This means we'll never seen a Day of the Tentacle remake/sequel :(
It's happening right now where the majority of the world's ISPs and companies are switching over to IPv6 (as a comparison).
Disagree. The quote reflects this observation:

Just because the thesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus) exceeds the requirements for the degree, does not make the degree insignificant.
I should add that using Unicorn Worker Killer to end a process on thresholds is not a solution as much as it is another stopgap.
Which doesn't even make sense, I would buy an iPad port of Full Throttle so fast.
Screw all y'all, I love this article. It's a sequence of true statements with a hard to swallow and idealistic conclusion, but it's absolutely right.

The only upside to an acquisition is money. Does that often make it the right, logical choice? Of course. Put that aside.

Once you're acquired by a larger more beaurocratic organization, your company dies (perhaps quickly, perhaps slowly), your projects flounder or become administratively managed, your ability to innovate quickly goes away. In short, your dream dies.

His personal accounts of this happening are on the money and are not uncommon effects.

Facebook is a grand counterexample. Zuckerberg didn't sell out when the company was young and he was offered ridiculous buyouts because facebook wouldn't exist today in the same way if he had. The dream would have been killed. Far-fetched example, but maybe true.

Of course it's important to think about reality, of course you have to look at the real world too; of course of course of course. No one can deny you that perspective.

But just maybe, let all that go for one second, and think from an idealistic perspective. Be a dreamer. Don't go after the most logical realistic thing right away. Or at least consider it.

Because we need those companies too. We need companies that can dream, and innovate, and remain independently fueled with a common goal and a vibrant workforce. We need companies that aren't acquired because we need dreamers to think big, so the world can go somewhere better—rather than just somewhere with bigger bank accounts.
> Isn't it more likely that lessons learned in Servo will simply be back-ported to C++ in Firefox?

Usually, with high-risk long-term research projects, its fairly likely that the main benefit will be providing knowledge that can be applied to more conservative projects or to later high-risk, long-term projects.

OTOH, those insights often come from getting out of conservative boxes and trying something radical and new, and C++ is as much as part of the "box" Servo is trying to get out of as is the existing code base of particular browser engines.
If it is not a bubble, then you just got left behind!
Why pop music is getting sadder
How dangerous is it to access an array out of bounds?
I could see protection happening on the digital landscape. With the physical merchandise it was tougher for a consumer to understand their lack of rights, but sadly I agree it will be tough.

It's odd though. I bet there are huge groups of "horder collectors" that exist and are holding back only because of the clear lack of ownership rights. I know my digital collection would be 500+ strong by now, instead of the mear 4 or 5 shows I've purchased for a quick fix.
Sure, the Unreal Engine 3 demo (Epic Citadel) had been already ported to Flash one year ago.
http://www.unrealengine.com/flash/
Since ActionScript VM is far slower than JavaScript, I'm afraid I have to say the Mozilla's demo does not prove the performance of asm.js at all.

And here's the latest Unreal Engine 4 demo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO2rM-l-vdQ

I know there are improvements on the web platform each year but I wish people would be very very cautious to say "we've achieved nearly native performance!".

To begin with, I think it's difficult to run 3D games (including Flash and Unity) on browsers because of the asset loading (and AOT compilation) time. If people must wait for seconds and even minutes to start a game, we can't do business with it. As many web developers says, immediate page loading is must. I'm personally running Flash and HTML5 games and I observe 80% people leave just in a few seconds loading.

To solve this issue, game stores (PS3, Xbox 360, App Store, Google Play, Steam and many others) are using the "reserve download and play it later" model. After all, traditional install apps are not that bad architecture...
>Analogy is the core of all thinking.

Explains why great pitches are stories.
I wouldn't. It's amazing only after you've read some of the books and familiarised yourself with it. Any teenage SF fan can come up with some kind of crazy and awesome-sounding universe, but turning it into a series of dozens of amazing novels is another thing altogether!
Corporate personhood is accumulating more and more of the rights previously reserved to real persons, but none of the same moral, ethical, or legal inhibitors are effective against them. You can't imprison a corporation when they break the law, and fines simply become a cost of doing business. If they get big enough they gain de facto immunity from prosecution even for serious felonies[1].

[1]: http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/med...
The UI is really pretty but I don't see why I would use this over iTunes. It seems about the same price (maybe slightly more expensive for rentals) and I'm locking my content up with a company I'm not sure will be around 15 years from now - I have more confidence iTunes will. I'll definitely try it though with the generous £20 credit.

If they can move this to a subscription model where I can pay £20 per month for full music, film, and TV streaming I will pay in a heartbeat. Netflix definitely has the jump on them though, especially now that they are getting into original content and based on House of Cards, they are doing a very good job of it.
Make mock websites for mock companies.
This is great news. LucasArts hasn't done anything with the brand that I've actually liked. I want to see more BioWare style licensing deals, and can only hope for a KOTR3
How interesting - I've been leaving GEB on the coffee table in hopes that I might pick it up and start it again (made it halfway about 10 years ago) but now I wonder whether I ought to pick this up. Thanks for letting us know.
The thing about bitcoin is that I feel it is fairly vulnerable to legislative intervention if/when it becomes extremely popular, or attracts too much attention for being the defacto currency for illegal items.
Possession of child porn is illegal in part because it gives the police a tool to compell possessors to help them find the creators--which is who they really want to catch.
IntelliJ IDEA 12.1 has been released
Thanks. Checking this out. Looks like a connection issue. Servers are up all the time.
This gets brought up every time anyone talks about any media streaming services, but has it ever been shown that consumers care?
The "poor bastards" in Cyprus are(sorry to say this) victims of their own rotten system. For years they were taking all benefits of being in the EU, while giving back very little. For the last decade they were asked repeatedly to impose fair taxes like the rest of the EU. They continuously declined, making Cyprus one of the tax-heavens of the world. Many companies moved to Cyprus purely to avoid taxes in their home countries - which was made possible thanks to EU trade agreements.

And when Cyprus economy could not survive this stupid approach any longer, they want help from the EU. So EU is like, you know Cyprus, you did not collect proper taxes in more than a decade, but now you want us to help you with our tax money? Sure,but this cannot happen again, so either you join everyone in the fair game, or get lost.
Catfished.
> After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games...

In other words: by closing the studio we can just collect checks from licensing our IPs which gets turned into bonuses for our executives while we don't have to pay any developers, artists, designers or other filthy wage slaves.
You cannot talk about a market without talking about trade; in the original context of the law, money was traded for child pornography, and that was the entire justification. Open source, Youtube, and HN comments are not a market.

It is important to remember that child pornography is evidence of a crime. People do not send that evidence to others without receiving compensation of some sort; the knowledge that others are looking at the images is knowledge that they have evidence of the crime. The people who commit crimes against children are very secretive, and those who produce child pornography often go to great lengths to remain undetected. It is clear from what is known about online child pornography exchanges that trade of some kind is occurring, often serving a dual-role of compensation and of filtering out law enforcement officers.

That is the real issue: these people know that once their photos and videos spread around, the police will become aware of them. Rather than knowing that people enjoy their work, what the producers of child pornography know is that their work can lead to their arrest. They are exchanging it because they are receiving enough in return to justify such risks.

The original legal justification for the censorship of child pornography was to remove that compensation, since the police were having so much trouble locating child pornography producers. My point is that that justification is now badly in need of review, because the majority of people guilty of child pornography possession did not compensate the producers in any way. I have no problem with raids on forums where child pornography is exchanged quid pro quo; my problem is with raids on people suspected of downloading child pornography from peer to peer networks or third/fourth/fifth/etc. hand websites that are many levels removed from the producers. At the very least, prosecutors should be required to show that the imagery was paid for in some way, whether by barter or with money.
yes making wildly stupid statements like this is no way to act for a supposedly professional organization - all this will do is get the EFF treated as "nut jobs" by law makers and politicians.
It's pretty much what they have been saying all along; Heroku switched to random routing to support other stacks than only Rails and they kept the routing infrastructure between Cedar and Bamboo the same, resulting in an undocumented performance degradation for large customers still on the old stack or running non-concurrent web frameworks on the new one. The last part was an oversight on Heroku's part, but the rest makes sense, especially considering Cedar supports other stacks than just Rails, including massively concurrent ones(Nodejs, Play, etc.).

The rest of the whole thing was people who were unsatisfied by the change and wanted the old product offering to return and/or felt shortchanged by Heroku. Luckily, Heroku doesn't lock you into their platform like GAE does, for example; it's essentially a bunch of shell scripts to deploy binaries on EC2 workers, a hosted instance of Postgres on EC2, some routing and ops as a service. Anyone who wasn't happy about the change could've contacted Heroku to say "you said we would be sold non-random routing, but you've sold us random routing" or moved their app away to another provider or even their own servers.

Does this suck if you wanted the old service? Sure. Witness the flak that the canning of Google Reader got and it's obvious that discontinuing old services isn't exactly a popular decision. On the other hand, you can self-host (it's massively cheaper than Heroku) or switch to another provider. And if there are no other providers that specialize in Rails hosting, isn't that a business opportunity?
Show HN: time-based comments with Youtube Javascript API
How is consensus reached? Who has the 'final say' to merge in the patches necessary to make such a fundamental change?
I have a really basic question:

What does it mean to have a Github account, in the sense the article speaks of?

Is the idea that I should create an open source project and stick it on Github? Or perhaps find some open source project and start contributing to it?

Apologies for the super basic question -- I think I could piece together one myself, but I'd love to hear an answer from someone more experienced than myself.
Best Core Data book?
If I could ask a quick favor from you:

Can you create an account and try to post on our sandbox forum: http://moot.it/demos/forum.html

We have quite a bit more logging there. The production system is not showing any errors.

If you could do that THANKS! If not, sorry that you are having some issues!
I think Telltale Games is the current version of the old LucasArts we all feel nostalgic for.
Pretty it up and sell it. You should at least make some good money from the sale.
Scaling with CacheObservers
The question is, who is going to be picking up the rights to produce the next Star Wars Games?
Nice summary, never heard of tldr.io, looks useful.
I hate how many pages turn the "invite your friends" feature from a convenient way to set up your new account into an obnoxious risk to accidentally spam all your contacts. LinkedIn definitely aren't the only ones to blame, you could even say that they are nice about it, since at least theuy don't scrape your iPhone contact list without you even noticing.

But there is one thing about LinkedIn's implementation that is just inexcusable: They send the emails in such a way that they get through to all mailing lists the "sender" of the message is subscribed to! So every week or so somebody else will accidentally invite the entire local cycling community or a nationwide robotics mailing list to become their contacts on LinkedIn. It's embarrassing to the "sender" and wastes the recipients time. Way to generate hate, LinkedIn!

(I know that identifying mailing lists can't be 100% accurate, but both of the examples have addresses matching @lists. And if you weren't sending the emails in the senders name in the first place, you wouldn't have this problem.)
There is an interesting quote that goes something like this:

"when your hairdresser starts talking about the market, it is time to get out of the market".

Now I doubt your hairdress will be talking about bitcoins any time soon, they are too technical for the average non-tech person (but if he does, sell out and run for the hills, stat), but the lesson is, once a market becomes common knowledge, it is time to get out of that market.

Unless you can think of strong, fundamental reasons why bitcoins should be at the levels they are (and no, the bigger fool theory is not a strong, fundamental reason), then I would consider getting out at these levels.
Right, and that is the point: even if you accept Bitcoin payments, you still need to eventually get USD. Ultimately, this is why I believe that Bitcoin cannot survive with the Bitcoin exchanges.
You sound like a politician talking to someone of the opposite party, in that you say "I hear you", but then completely fail to address anyone's concerns. Selling a "magic black box" that guarantees certain properties, changes them, then lies about having changed them presents a liability for users who want to do serious work.

A major selling point of Heroku is that scaling dynos wouldn't be a risk. This guarantee is now gone and it's not coming back soon even if routing behavior is reverted, because users prefer good communication and trust with their providers. The responses of Heroku are blithe non-acknowledgement acknowledgements of this problem.
If the AWS GUI is difficult, then what about the Rackspace CloudFiles GUI?

But you are right, we pay them for their services, not for their web interfaces.
I'm looking up and down here for the differentiator that would get iTunes or Amazon Instant Video customers to switch to Vdio, and all I'm seeing is a lack of living-room device partnerships plus customer library lock-in on the Apple and Amazon platforms. How on earth will Vdio compete?
So if "fun" is the reason you do it, "fun" must also be the reason your employees do? Do you put this in your job ads as a required skill, doing it for fun, or is it perhaps something you don't say out loud?
I'm not aware of any similar arguments being tested in court, so this is all conjecture.

That said, barring an explicit definition of 'Internet service' in your service contract, it's commonly understood that requesting a page from example.com, all the data your ISP returns implicitly is sourced from example.com. Introducing your own content in between is therefore fraud, as you've mis-represented the origin of the content.

I believe the owner of an involved web server would have standing as well, not just the users.
I'm waiting for the day when people take the time to do some independent research on crazy-sounding stuff before flying off the handle. Sometimes the crazy stuff is true, and it is worth flying off the handle. In this case, though (as the article admits), U.S. federal courts have so far ruled that violating ToS is not by itself a criminal act under the CFAA.
I can't go into a store and buy a suit with gold, so it's not a useful medium of exchange for me. If gold, or bitcoins, fell out of the sky and into my lap, I certainly wouldn't mind. But given the same value of gold, bitcoins, or dollars, dollars tend to be the most convenient for me.
Analysis of Stack Overflow's Survey of 10K developers
No, it just means that Disney will have to do it or license out the IP... unless it was something that was not commercially feasible, but that would have been true even with LucasArts
I'd imagine $90k would be considered.
You can have a bubble without it bursting right away. You just can't confirm that it is a bubble until that happens. So long as when the bubble does burst, prices drop well below the point at which you were calling a bubble, you would be proven right in the end. A bubble does not have to be at the very peak in order to be a bubble.
All of the stuff that Heroku are doing now to mitigate the routing issues for their Bamboo customers are things they should have done when it first became an issue. They are not going above and beyond in any way to make up for the lost time and money their customers.

Again, this is not about

-how advanced Heroku's technology is on an absolute level

-how challenging routing is for their scale

-what competitors offer in this space and for what prices

This is only about the delta between what Heroku sold their customers and what their customers received. They are collapsing the delta now, by being honest about what they are selling (and improving their offering, it seems), but they are doing nothing to address the long time for which the delta was significant for a subset of their customers.
That's what I suspected, thanks for making this observation. I wonder if others can chime in with anecdotes?

Certainly I've known several people who were held back by forced labor in the countryside, but later went to grad school in the US. They were a little younger than the professor in the OP, so it didn't affect them as much.
A similar thing has happened in Gecko. Probably modern Gecko browsers share similar amounts of old code as modern WebKit browsers share of old KTHML code (that is, very little in both cases).
What you say is "One can make a JIT that ignores a single-line declaraton that defines a lot of assumpions. Then that same JIT can do a lot of analysis around, inserting even run-time checks, eventually to get the chance to come to most of the conclusions implied by the very line it ignored." Technically it is possible, practically, it is just as nonsensical as it sounds.

If you have some reasons that aren't technical, I can understand that. Otherwise, your insistence on ignoring "asm.js" can't be rationalized.
HTML for Babies (baby book)
http://www.aclu.org/womens-rights/aclu-supports-ohio-mother-...

http://abcnews.go.com/US/family-pictures-flagged-walgreens-d...
> But if I had some sort of insurance that I'll get my bitcoins back

That's the problem. That insurance is not possible within Bitcoin. In equities markets, shorting is possible because the broker can force the borrower to cover and return the borrowed security. The broker can in turn resort to another layer of force in legal recourse if the borrower doesn't have sufficient cash deposited with the broker.

In Bitcoin, no entity can ever compel another to spend bitcoins (to the protocol, anything like asset seizure or any other method of surrendering a bitcoin is spending.) So the short-seller can walk away and never cover a short position that went badly, and the lender never receives back his bitcoins. For Bitcoin shorting to exist requires a broker with some way of enforcing non-Bitcoin power over the short-seller, perhaps a deposit in a fiat currency or some other kind of collateral. It is possible for this to exist but not at all simple.
Effect of Informations on decisions
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

"Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters."

http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financia...

In paperback, get yours today.
The Secret of Monkey Island is my favorite game of all time and their games in totality were a formative experience when I was growing up - I'm really sad to see them go. Booo.

On the other hand, hey, Disney owns Monkey Island. I'd love them to do something with it.
Terrible news. If you're not familiar with Iain's work you owe it to yourself to drop everything and start reading the Culture series[1] right now.

In fact go give all of his books a try (hey - we're allowed to read non-SF here too aren't we ;-)
OpenCoin Acquires SimpleHoney
This is basically what Vala is doing for glib/gtk (and it transpiles, too).

Languages with a more flexible syntax probably don't need it as much, of course (lisp, forth, SmallTalk, tcl etc.).
What is my browser?
This is interesting, but tying a language to a particular (version of) a specific framework strikes me as a bad idea.

If the aim is to bake in syntactic sugar for different constructs within Ember that are awkward in plain CoffeeScript (and there are a few), wouldn't creating a CoffeeScript version of sweet.js[1] not be a better idea (I have no idea if such a thing exists already)?

[1] http://sweetjs.org/