skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is beautifully written and very moving Daniel. I hope the memory of the trauma is truly in the past and that the event really has changed you for the better.
Is it worse if Twitter lets flattr do this and then shuts them down later?
I'm not sure if you're curious or about to make an example of me.
As usual, there's a good write up on these changes from Scott Gu as well.[1] As someone who has been using Azure for 3+ years now, I'm pretty excited about the direction Microsoft is going with Azure.

But for crying out loud can Microsoft please officially release Azure Websites? It's been in 'preview' for so long. I would really like to use it in production and have SSL support. :)

[1] http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/04/16/windows-az...
<questions>

genuine/serious questions:

would you be okay with quotas in sports? music? movies?
something like "30% of olympic 100m finalists should be allocated to minorities" etc?

I've seen students with laughable grades (no, I am not making this up) get into medical schools, because they are from underprivileged group. Would you be okay with them performing surgery on you?

</questions>

Quota system is a very dangerous game to play - it usually goes downhill quickly, even if the intentions are good and even if people who run it are super competent. There are numerous other ways to help the under privileged.

They'll not even notice after decades of this.

History has lots of people from the privileged class who ended up working to improve society as a whole. Bill Gates is great living example.
Show HN: my side project, a Letterpress solver in Node.js
It probably feels to them like GitHub is so well known that the company needs to be called that. I think they're actually early enough on that they could just make it one of their products.

SocialCoding, Inc.
/ | \
GitHub ??? ???
Inequality And New York’s Subway
> the low-level ISA for accelerator chips is not documented at all (like with GPUs)

Let me show you the AMD Southern Islands ISA specs: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/AMD_Souther...
Fix Windows 8 by turning it back into Windows 7
> communicating via a small and easily-auditable interface

... isn't that called 'a network'? This seems to contradict your earlier statement about 'machine B should be considered internet-facing.'
Also, many 2d arrays of cells which represent data, and progressive calculations. And table lookups. This is, understandably, fun to debug.
They've also published a new RayTracer OO benchmark showing the Dart VM far out performing V8:
http://www.dartlang.org/performance/

Guessing being able to use native SIMD instructions inside the Dart VM should help with gaming and other graphics intensive apps:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKh7UOELpPo
>You sound like RMS, and that's not rational anymore.

I'm arguing for "free as in beer" not "free as in software", not that I am opposed to "free as in software" in fact I'm a big fan, but we are pretty clear of RMS territory at the moment.

>Google has to make money or kill the project. They are not afraid of killing projects.

Google does not care about the direct value of projects, the thinking that I've heard from Googler's is that if more people use the internet google makes more money. Thus anything that encourages or integrates the internet into peoples lives more is a money maker. Google kills projects when people don't use them, not when they don't generate direct income (think all the years that youtube was in the red).

>However, I would wait for Ubuntu glasses BECAUSE people can also sell good apps there.

I doubt we will see Ubuntu glasses, Ubuntu isn't in the hardware market. Don't get me wrong, people can sell and do sell good apps on Google Play and at some point I expect they will sell good apps for Google glass, but Google has to be very careful about managing expectations (Google is excellent at expectation management for example gmail being in beta this is just another example) and first experiences if they want the technology to take off. A bad expensive app that lots of people can buy will do serious harm to the project's reputation.
No part of the scene is different in the era of acquihires than it was before acquihires, except that startups with strong teams and losing product concepts (ie, most startups with strong teams) have a safety net. I am mystified at the idea that anyone could see group hire/retention packages as a bad thing; to my eyes, anyone arguing that must also be arguing that it would be better for startup teams to be incurring more personal risks.

The parties most harmed by acquihires would appear to be financiers. There seems to be a meme that financiers enable acquihires so they can jazz-hands portfolio company failures by pointing to acquisitions, but funds either make money or they don't, and a fund whose portfolio companies hit the eject button instead of doubling down and taking a shot at returning high multiples is a fund that isn't going to succeed.

I wonder (only wonder; not certain!) if demonizing acquihires is literally doing venture capitalists a memetic favor.
Because they don't sell computers.
As ernardom points out above (below? predict-o-karma where are you!), this involved much more intellectually serious errors than just the calculation bug. They both missed (or possibly cherry-picked) countries and misweighted them.
Huh? The comparison does not include iPhones/iPads
UC Davis Uncovers Security Holes in Mobile Apps
Sure... there are two different types, in my view, of software that uses location information.
Stuff that requires knowing exactly where you are in real time, like gps navigation software, which is location based. When you log into 4 square and check in at a location, that's a real time transaction.

But there is also software that uses occasional location lookups, or data from other applications that use such lookups, and it's not necessarily in real time, and it does so in ways aren't necessarily user initated. It's data which can be gps but also wifi or even cell phone tower based, or even from other apps like navigation software) to do things like figure out generally where you are, give you dining suggestions, tell you about local events etc. When your weather app updates with the local weather, it's probably on some schedule, but it does a gps lookup every few hours. Same thing.

When Google Now figures out where you live and where you work using an occasional gps lookup/results from your google maps searches, etc, it's not a real time thing, but it is using location. I believe the iphone lets you set location based reminders. That's also location aware.

It's also rich interesting data. And since it isn't always on, it doesn't drain your battery.

Now either google, or someone with such data, is going to build an app that lets you opt in to sharing information about your general location, combined with data on your interests, to do some really cool things.

Also, It's not something I know too much about, but I understand that there are a lot of location based gay dating/hookup apps that are doing well. Better then some straight ones, especially if you take into account the smaller target audience.
I wrote a blog post about the algorithm over here:

http://neilk.net/blog/2013/04/16/letterpwn-a-nodejs-based-le...

Maybe the concurrency techniques for a computation-heavy service in Node.JS are of more general interest, but I'm still working on a writeup for that.
How does this compare the the new Intel MIC (Xeon Phi) co-processor boards? I think they claim 1TFLOP. Can we think of this as a low-powered alternative?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MIC
Umm, that's not true. In plenty of fields it's common not to publish the raw data, and instead publish only some graphs that summarize a huge data set down to a couple of data points. This includes biology, physics, and medicine. On the contrary, people actively "protect" and "guard" their data. And yes, that's a big problem.
If you want to build something cool, push MIT licensed code to Github, or write a kernel module for FreeBSD. The complaint that businesses are in it for the cash doesn't make sense.
Paul Graham Interview [2005][video]
Linode hacked, customer database taken
A function is never arbitrarily large, it's made of a bounded number of sub-expressions and those sub-expressions can be checked independently.

CPUs are extraordinarily wasteful. The reason I think a processor like this might work better is because it could do a lot more work in parallel.
Thanks a lot for the candid feedback!

It took us a while (and more than 60,000 free users!) to better understand our business metrics and see what our opportunities are until we've made these not always easy decisions. We also had a look at what our competing products are offering and many times it's nothing more than a free, very limited trial.

Let me try to shed some more light about the free version:
- We've tried to avoid disabling common sense functionality just for forcing users to upgrade. Unlimited saving, unlimited exporting, unlimited pages and so on. Keep in mind that all mockups are throwaway artifacts that one can simply export and then safely delete their projects. It's a little inconvenient but it's not a finite resource that users can't replenish like in a case of a time limited trial. The premium features are typically wanted by business users who like a little more granular privacy settings, run multiple projects through their many customers or prospects or have extremely big projects that can benefit from productivity features like master pages. The premium users even avoid using our service for free if they don't have some confidence that someone is running a sustainable and trustworthy business in behind.

- There is no data loss when you downgrade from a premium plan. The only thing we do is gracefully disable some premium functionality and restrict editing (not viewing) to projects created in the premium period.

- All the users who signed up before got to keep their projects and the editing capabilities. Some of them have more than 150 huge projects.

- On top of this, we are giving non profit and educational organizations as well as open source teams free premium plans.

- We rarely say no to users asking for discounts or extended trials if they can't afford the premium plans.

Our most important goal for us is to create a business we can grow so we can bring more value for our users - we really have a ton of great features in the pipeline that we're excited about.

Time will tell whether we've made the right steps or if we have to make certain adjustments to our business.

Thanks again!

Edit: line breaks
It's not instead, they can file the judgement on the pleadings and if they lose they can file motion to dismiss (most jurisdictions they can combine the two motions, motion for judgment of the pleadings and in the alternative motion to dismiss). It's not much of a legal cost and they stand to gain a lot .
I'm in the early stages of something "real", and I'm finding it very useful. I think if someone is already very familiar with and is mostly happy with JavaScript and its ecosystem, they might not see much of value (or maybe they would). For me, however, I can get small things done in JavaScript but tend to be overwhelmed by the ecosystem, and I'm far more comfortable in Dart. The core libraries are great, and having class-based object-orientation makes me much more comfortable than the prototype stuff in JavaScript.
Stepping back for a moment, this thorough debunking of Reinhart and Rogoff's flawed paper means that now there is NO evidence that government debt exceeding 90% of GDP somehow negatively impacts growth.

Let me repeat that: there is NO EVIDENCE that more government debt causes slower economic growth -- just theories.

I wonder what all the government deficit scaremongers will say to this!

--

PS. For reference, the often-cited paper by Reinhart and Rogoff can be downloaded at http://www.nber.org/papers/w15639.pdf and the new paper debunking it can be downloaded at http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/worki...

--

PS#2. An Excel typo was partly to blame for Reinhart and Rogoff's errors! Reminds me of the Excel typo that allowed the "London Whale" silently to rack up billions of dollars in unexpected losses at JP Morgan: http://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-exc...
I'd prefer:

OctoCat Enterprises, Inc.
/ | \
GitHub ??? ???
They are stretching past the ability of a founding team to be intimate with everything - which in many many ways is fantastic - top 1% of startups only.

But I read an outsourced rebranding that came in nicely wrapped up, even with legalese in appendix A. And then octo-goodness sprinkled on top. This does not feel like a move and an announcement with GitHub DNA at is heart. It feels added on. Done well, but my antennae twitched.

The move from scrappy startup to 100m in funding is fantastic - real poster-boy stuff. But losing your identity in that move, what makes that team great, is so common it should have a name.

I want Preston-Warner et al to succeed. I want them to leap the chasm into a functioning corporate body that does whatever they have planned. But this one feels like the huge difficulties in running a fast growing high profile company might just be stretching them. I don't know - all I have are inferences and hunches. Maybe they have time each day to think and ruminate on what GitHub needs to become, have time for creativity. Or maybe they run from one to another meeting exhausted at days end. Who knows.

But like I said, if they even read this, they can wipe the tears away with bunches of Benjamin's. good for them, good luck. Think of it commenting on growing pains, not diagnosing terminal cancer

Anti-corp agita? I used to take over the college buildings in student protests, then sit up all night arguing market driven solutions beat socialism everytime.
So I type 'help', and a box pops down that says

Help!
Get help on using Storm Bar

and nothing else. I can't click anything. What am I supposed to be doing with this?
Northwestern Uni just published a post today describing their good experience of choosing Dart to teach their HCI class:

http://amartya.in/post/48107255194/introducing-dart-to-an-hc...
Sriracha hot sauce purveyor turns up the heat
Node.js: The Tolerance Of Maturity
I can only speak for the U.S. here.

* Austin, TX (seems to be the obvious pull-ahead winner in 2013)

* Portland, OR (great weather, beautiful, lots of potential)

* Madison, WI (near Chicago, great college town, not as cold as people think)

* Minneapolis, MN (underrated gem, beautiful, just very cold; I'm told they haven't had a 60+ yet in 2013)

* Pittsburgh, PA (CMU is right there; how is it not kicking ass?)

* Ann Arbor, MI (another Midwestern gem)

* Chicago, IL (if you consider that low-COL)

* Toronto, Ontario (ok, not a US city, but I spent a summer there and loved it)

Almost none of these would be considered low-COL (they're above 100) and relative to their regions they're quite high, but they're a hell of a lot cheaper than New York or Palo Alto.

Oh, one ass-kicking advantage of the low-COL places: people actually want to be lifelong software engineers. In New York, you can't raise a family on a (non-WS quant) engineer's salary.

Of course, most of young idiots have this insane dream of having a manager's title and pay (plus real stock options!) which you can get by 27 if you play the politics, but being full-time programmers and just using their magic manager powers to assign themselves the best work. It turns out not to work that way. Poor them...

I really think the fact that one can't raise a family out here on an engineer's salary is toxic to the culture. It creates the wrong kind of ambition.
Nice implementation.

I don't like Facebook only logins, always good to offer the email & password reg option.

It would be nice if more than one quote was saved from an article, that it would become a bulleted list - with the page title pulled in as well for the list.

Maybe publishers/bloggers may be interesting in curating three or four good quotes from their articles into a short summary, then promote thorough QuoteRed.

Regards
Melt
So it is! I see that it was tweaked quite heavily; rounded corners on all the glyphs, altered ‘G’, ‘i’, and ‘t’, different weight, etc.

Comparison: http://imgur.com/ggI204m

Were you involved in the design process? How was Apex selected? It’s not a particularly well-known font and it’s for sale at very few places.
Set up a Geofence Reminder on Your iPhone
That's the thing, it's never the right tool for the job. Hence the comment that it should never be used, ever, under any circumstance.
Intel does sell computers, but not very many. Example: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2020577/how-we-built-a-tiny-h...
This is pretty strange if it's true; shouldn't a switch (especially one that simple) compile into a jump table? Otherwise what's the point? Does Go just linearly search through case conditions in a switch?

EDIT: Missed the link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/IURR4Z2SY7...

Seems like a reasonable argument, but then again I don't see why they even bothered adding a switch given those constraints.
I'm not sure what is surprising about this. PC makers (Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, etc) produce fungible products in a market that's approaching perfectly competitive. Lenovo makes only about half a billion of profit on $30 billion in revenue. Acer made $11 million in profit on $3.8 billion in revenue in Q1 of last year. That's what happens in competitive industries--profits approach zero.

Apple makes profits by not playing the game of selling a fungible product. If you want a Mac, there is only one place to buy one. They can't charge whatever they want--other PC's are substitute goods--but they have more pricing power.

It also says something interesting about competitive markets in the economic sense. I think one of the reasons you see very little innovation out of the Acers of the world is that they have no money for R&D. They make a few percent on each item sold and can't afford to do anything other than figure out ways to cut costs. I think that kind of situation is bad for innovation even if it does result in cheaper goods.
Unfortunately you must now post an updated binary (and wait for review) to update your App Store screenshots.
Mac has different hardware. Screen is better quality, retina screens are amazing. Finish is much better. Battery is denser. Fan is less noisy. I can go on but you get the idea.

I agree that the processor is the same, but a computer is more than its CPU.
I'm assuming no such thing. I am also not assuming that Alice is responsible for protecting the entire internet.

Your response is exactly in line with my comment - security for the sake of security and unfortunately the analogy of crossword puzzles does not break down there.

Assuming that Alice is responsible to protect her user's data - and there is a comparison with Facebook, Google, and other companies which sell user data, here - Alice's responsibility is to take reasonable steps based upon the nature of the data she is protecting.

Until I started pointing this out on HN, my HN password was "hackernews" because there is nothing here that I really care about protecting, and in my opinion, nothing worth PG implementing complex password protection over.
You're under the impression that "something cool" is strongly typed to code. In reality, there's much more that can be done. Building an organization to make something happen is much more difficult than pushing to GitHub and usually requires outside investment.
There never was any evidence because they never published the data till now. Nobody could reproduce the results.
This is a comment that says there are only a few good startups in existence. There is no possible way the author fo the comment can back that argument up. It's a sentiment that stretches past commendable skepticism, past cynicism, and lands with a flatulent thud right in the soft belly of parody. It's like a mirror image of the "sharing economy will render property ownership obsolete".

That's too bad, because when it isn't making ludicrous generalizations about the CS/engineering demographics of the whole tech startup sector, it makes a good point about not accepting below-market wages from tech companies.
> It is my understanding that the lazy semantics of Haskell mostly mean that you shouldn't be making any assumptions about the order of evaluation which would seem to be useful from an optimization perspective.

A crudely example, to impart some intuition:

True || this_crashes();

Imagine the above reliance on lazy semantics, but then for Haskell memory management or constructs such as infinite lists.

The semantics of your program rely on the fact that some branches of your AST/program are not visited, due to lazy semantics. A FP with eager evaluation semantics can be free to evaluate every branch of the program, throwing away what isn't used. Lazy evaluation means a runtime cannot be as aggressive, introducing a number of logical sequence points.

NB. A Haskell colleague lets me know that it is considered good style in Haskell these days to program as if it was eagerly evaluated. There is talk of limiting or doing away with it in Haskell Prime. Can anyone confirm/deny this?
> I've been thinking recently about how hard it would be to teach a real programming language to Excel users. They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables.

A not-insignificant part of my previous job was training Excel users to use non-Excel reporting and analysis tools. I believe I can say honestly say that 100% of them had no idea of arrays or variables, and only about a third of them even used the built-in Excel functions.
A new journal http://f1000research.com/ has a really interesting new take on this: post-publication, transparent peer-review.
Behind the Scenes: How We Do Our Own Email Marketing at MailChimp
First of all, which is the NP-hard pathfinding problem you're talking about? When I hear "pathfinding" I think "shortest path", which is (deterministic) polynomial time (exact class dependant on exactly which variant of the problem, but even Floyd-Warshall is Θ(|V|³)).

---

Anyway, no. If you have an NP-hard problem, and you want an exact answer (i.e. you are denying yourself approximate solutions), and you want to solve it for large inputs, unless you have either proven that P=NP by construction (heh), or you have a non-deterministic computing machine (heh), you're basically screwed. Going parallel isn't going to help, any more than a hypothetical billion-GHz serial CPU is going to help. Asking this question suggests a fundamental lack of understanding about what is interesting (or rather, infuriating) about NP-hard problems.

Parallel processing models give you, at best, linear speedup. If your problem is O(too-big), and your input is large, linear speedup doesn't help, no matter how much linear speedup you have.
In case you are not aware, there is UIViewController's `prepareForSegue:sender:` method (http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit/...). In short you figure out which segue was being prepared (segue.identifier) and setup the destination view controller (segue.destinationViewController) as needed.
I know what the author of this post aimed for, I agree with his point of view, but still I believe that HN should only contain some tech or startup related topics. I read HN since nearly a year now, and I see more and more people misunderstanding its purpose. Or maybe it's me who don't get it.
Every vendor does this, especially on the enterprise side.

Apple's memory prices are somewhere between Dell's consumer prices and Dell's server prices.
At the end of the day, we all could have chosen med school and a life working for Partners in Health in Haiti, so this seems like a slippery slope argument.
I kind of feel bad, but I love this kind of reading. It gives you some solemn introspection- this could happen to me, kind of thoughts