skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, using TC hash datastore over millions (tenth of, not hundreds or billions) of entries, each being a compressed protobuffer. The cost of each write grows exponentially after some time. We've played with parameters, buckets size and numbers, cache, we tried over SSDs vs regular HD, no big improvement. We've considered writing a sharded version of TC (there are a couple implementations already IIRC). Typically, the problem seems to be related to the size of the file on disk and the number of buckets. Somewhere, the reads and writes become prohibitive (at least for our usage).

We like the speed of these datastores as some of our algorithms proceed with millions of calls every few seconds or so, and we like that it is not remote.
I'm perfectly happy with my Galaxy Nexus -- while it was subsidized, its not locked down in any way. I've had it for about a year and a half with no problems.
Ask HN: Online Payments
Which Online Payment platform/system do you use or would recommend for charging customers on your website?
I'm highly skeptical. I don't think "I am going to move my fingers around to press and hold the command button and press the tab button one or more times until I get to firefox". My brain already autopilots desires into physical output.

EEG is a joke, and it's never explained how exactly BCI is going to work. If I switch to Firefox when I think it, then I would have annoyingly switched over multiple times when writing this comment. If it's something more complicated then that, then what is the generic metaphor my mind learns to app-switch that's simpler than the current one my brain performs using my fingers?

I believe BCI absolutely can and will be the future of computing interfaces, but there's no way that simply "mapping" the brain is going to let us turn desires into actions more efficiently via digital telepathy than our existing high-res interfaces with our bodies - there's a lot of groundwork that still needs to be covered.

To put it another way, if you could build software to accurately describe "what information a user wants to observe", you'd likely win a combo Nobel prize in neuroscience, philosophy and AI.
Have a to create a new login to search. Forgot the old one. Don't have enough patience to go all over it again.
Hi, author here -- the article focuses on "code prep" because that's something you can brush up in a short-ish period of time. You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly, so on those parts of our criteria we take people as they are.

Implementing some well-known library functions is basically a quick way to see whether you know how they work.

If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you.
John C. Reynolds, Eminent Programming Language Researcher, has Died
> The free market offers no incentive to give health services to people who [...] don't know that these services will reduce hospitalization by 33% and costs by 22%.

Your argument proves too much. You might want to think through the logic in some other area of life. Maybe gas prices at the pump, or candy prices at the supermarket counter. Cheaper and better comparable products DO tend to win over time, do they not?

If X is 22% cheaper (while being better as well) than Y, the people who buy a LOT of this good, whatever it is, have a HUGE incentive to switch. In the case of health care, the big movers would be (a) health insurance companies, (b) other companies that offer health coverage to their employees.

Additionally, of those who buy health coverage or health care directly as individuals there are bound to be some customers who are unusually price sensitive or unusually anal about doing price comparisons. On the margin, THOSE people will switch, and their friends who look to them for guidance will also switch. Just that movement alone might put a company out of business and thereby protect everyone else too, but you also have to think about natural churn. Even if existing customers and existing big companies and existing insurers are all too lazy to switch, as NEW companies and individuals look for their FIRST contract, they'll do a comparison and see that 22% savings.

Last but not least, ignorance is somewhat curable. When X is 22% cheaper to provide (while also better) than Y, X can sell the service for less AND have a higher profit margin...and will use some of those profits (or expected profits) to ADVERTISE. They can TELL the people who "don't know" the stuff that they need to know.

I recommend putting up billboards near the competing hospitals. :-)
It would be nice if HN included, or just auto-linked, previous discussions.
Knowing how many people are on your pages at any one time isn't a meaningless number. You're right in the sense that it's not a great way to assess quantitative site load. I just used that number in the blog to give a qualitative assessment of how many people were currently on my site.

Also, you are misunderstanding this chartbeat number. These 282 visitors weren't spread out over 45 minutes. These are real time users. Granted, some users are idle but most are interacting with the pages.

If this blog post were about the specifics of server load from a #1 HN post, I wouldn't even use the chartbeat figure. The post was about middleman + s3 + cloudfront. The chartbeat figure was more than enough to give readers a qualitative glance of how many people were looking at my site.
Depends on your definition of "perfect", there are certainly a lot of highly effective ads that persuade people to buy borderline scammy products.
I like the mix of content, but I would like to filter out some of the topics. Reddit has sub-reddits, Lobste.rs has tags (and filters for members), and Facebook has ignore from a source. There are options, but I'm not sure anyone on HN will commit to any of them.
If I'm manipulated into buying something that I genuinely want, then I'd be happier for it.

It's not as if seeing an ad for a $100 256GB SSD would make me skip looking up the reviews for it and evaluating its performance before I buy it.

It's mystifying to me why people are bothered by targeted ads. If ads become relevant to me, that'd be a wonderful thing. I'm not saying I'm right -- I'm saying I wish someone would explain why targeted advertising is evil.
Yeah .... I had the same problem with a common first name + last name @gmail - even to the extent of getting someone else's buddy passes for JetBlue - before getting my own domain. I thought it wasn't bad for my purposes, but it's a terrible domain name for spelling out (my handle here plus .com).
The US is also mostly immigrants from different places. It is also more individualistic, but not in the sense you describe India. A lot of people know their families are mostly Irish/German/Whatever but for the most part no one cares. I'm not saying this because of "my country is better than yours" shit, but I'm legitimately interested in what causes the difference. Why do some groups assimilate into a common culture and others do not? Immigrants to the US did initially congregate and form their own communities like that.
Weekly Digest 11 - The most interesting links from .NET community
Goroutines are green threads[1], and thus are threads, just like Ruby 1.8s threads are threads.

Also, you can easily run 10s of thousands of kernel threads (provided you decrease the threads' stack size).

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_threads
Hi! Just pitching in here as an outsider who has interviewed twice with Facebook and talked to quite a few others (mostly fresh graduates) who have. I did not receive an offer on both occasions, but I'll try to remain unbiased. I did receive an offer from Google and Quora, if it helps.

Facebook's interview process seems to have a very high variance in terms of candidates' experiences about the process. In the telephone rounds, collabedit often has sync issues, which can be quite stressful for first timers. Occasionally, interviewers either do not speak clearly, keep moving away from the speakerphone or have a very difficult to understand accent (not sure how to solve this one). These two things compounded together have caused several people I know to have a terrible experience in the first round, and it appears that these issues are not taken into consideration when making a final decision, as was the case for me. I had two phone interviews because the first one had these issues. I was called to the campus for the final interviews, which I would certainly describe as "code problems", or more accurately as algorithm based problems. I actually found these interviews to be easier than the phone rounds, which was a common opinion among the other candidates I met. I was quite surprised to not get an offer and my guess is that the botched phone round had an effect, but I may be wrong.

This is intended as honest feedback rather than a sour grapes reaction to not being extended an offer. I have interviewed with several other companies and usually the experience is either consistently good or consistently bad, which at least gives the candidates a fair playing field. My guess would be that this feedback is getting ignored because it primarily comes from rejected candidates.

Finally, it would be great if software companies started sharing feedback about candidates' performance if they don't receive an offer instead of a cliched e-mail. Quora seems to be the only one doing this at the moment: https://www.quora.com/Quora-Recruiting/Can-I-get-the-feedbac...
Ask PG: What caused HN to go down on 4/28/13?
I got an Nginx server error and thought I'd ask.
The problem is that government clearance aren't up to speed with how the population housing need is growing. This leads to unauthorized colonies, unplanned, un-organised and unhygenic.

Few hundred years ago, the Harrapan Civilization had one of the best water & sewer management systems. But today, finding a public pool in Delhi, is like finding a Oasis in the desert.

In Delhi itself, the biggest issue, surrounding sewer and management of water bodies is the cleaning up of Yamuna River, many have fought for it, many have eaten corruption money out of it, subsequent governments have failed to address this issue.. about time it comes into the limelight.
Really it was just write code to verify whether it can be done or not (return boolean) based on the N input (integer). Without having to write code it would return true for N >= 4, but I didn't know that. I was just trying to get an initial solution down with recursion, not thinking about backtracking yet or worst case time (which was probably 2^N).
Ask HN: Ownership vs licensing my own code.
I am currently working with a company (say ACME) on developing a proof of concept idea. We started working with a premise that if things look promising, I would start my new company and this company would be our first customer and potentially a investor as well.

I spend considerable amount of time on this and now when things look promising, CEO of the said company wants to continue on terms that THEY WILL OWN the code and license it back to me if I want to use it to start my own company later. I will be compensated for the time I spend on working this in some hourly rate fashion.

I understand the value of legal counsel but wanted to get opinion of experienced folks here if I should even be heading in the direction of licensing my own code.

1. Will this sort of a deal prevent me from using the code to start a company of my own?

2. Is licensing the code as licensing the IP? I dont think anything would prevent them from filing patents without including me.

3. What's the alternate route?

Thank you very much for your advice...
Just installed it. I'd heard of it before but never given it a shot. It's definitely got a nice UI.
I just restarted the server. I do it every week or so.
Sony have also been very engaged with the open source community, with their own developers contributing on the XDA developers forums, participating in the AOSP[1], and they were the first outside Google to let anyone (not operator-locked) to unlock the bootloader with an official tool[2]. But everyone seems to ignore Sony phones for some reason. "Open friendly" does not seem to be a priority to customers, even ones who want to hack their phones.

[1] https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/device-sony-c6603

[2] http://unlockbootloader.sonymobile.com
The best physical reaction time is about 160ms [1]

A direct neural connection could be more like 5-15ms [2]

An order of magnitude difference in response time has huge ramifications for all sorts of applications.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron
Learning lessons from a peanut selling entrepreneur
There is one difference that everyone always seems to overlook: design is very opinion oriented, development is not.

Now, it really boils down to the type of feedback that you get as a designer is much different than the type of feedback that you get as a developer. Usually "it does not look right" vice "it does not work". One is aesthetic and the other is logical.

As a developer, I find that I usually only really trust decisions made by data (via A/B testing, or what have you). Otherwise, there is a quote paraphrased as "If we are going to use someone's opinion, it may as well be mine." (< not sure who said that originally).

I think that is the chasm between the two disciplines; really why someone can't be a great brain-surgeon and psychiatrist. As a self-characterized developer, I do not want to spend time arguing about the superiority of my artistic opinions. If this is a characteristic of the 'fixed' mindset that the article linked, well then.
Bright lights, big city for transformed Pyongyang
I've only ever owned 2 smart phones - both android, both on tmobile, and both unsubsidized. Those phones are 1) the Nexus One and 2) the Nexus 4. Cyanogenmod let the N1 remain relevant for nearly 3 years. The N4 has 4x the cores (each clocked at 1.5x the N1's single core) and 4x the memory. It's also much faster on the network. All of this and I paid $200 less for the N4 than I did for the N1. Google has proved to me that it's possible to make a kickass phone that is affordable without the need for subsidy. If course, there will always be a market for seeking people what they can't afford, but I like the fact that the choice is there and that the community can decide how long a phone is relevant/supported.

Also, tmobile is the least evil, large carrier IMO.
I assure you that there are people like this in every country.
shouldnt [1] instead be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(user_interface) ?
> "goroutines provide concurrency but not parallelization"

If they are multiplexed on several threads, then they also provide parallelization.
Jesus Jumping Blue Christ, why is it that every time Golang comes up in any type of discussion, there's always someone out there who complains that Go is horrible because it doesn't implement their favorite pet non-mainstream language features, which is obviously because the Go designers were inexperienced newbies with only 50 years of experience designing groundbreaking software, and therefore lacked your deep insights into how things should really be organized?
A tangent, but all the "list of" pages on wikipedia seem to be missed potential for some neat data-manipulation tool. I wonder how hard it would be to scrape that sort of information easily. Too many times have I tried to figure out the right wording for wolfram alpha to get some neat chart, secretly wishing for a more low-level tool
Does Facebook actually delete stuff yet? For a long time they wouldn't delete accounts, photos, etc.
Google App Engine also provides instantly (almost infinitely) scalable hosting, and super easy static content deployment.
Surely there's an opportunity here. It's mind boggling how people are having performance issues here, but they are. It's an opportunity for someone to make some money and improve the internet, by fixing whatever tools they're using.

To amplify your comment, processors today process billions of instructions per second. Even if all 3000 pageviews _did_ hit within one minute, thats hundreds of millions of instructions available per pageview. His pages just aren't complex enough to require that many instructions to serve.

tahoecoder's image to "prove" his load indicates he had 287 visits within a 45 minute window. Allowing hundreds of _billions_ of instructions per page served. Please do give me a break.

At Quantcast we handle 800,000 HTTP requests per second, and process 30 petabytes a day, so it really is possible to handle actual high loads.
Ask HN: Is there a startup private bus co-op in Silicon Valley?
There's the Google Bus, the Apple Bus, the Facebook Bus, etc. How about startups?
Google analytics real time showed 22-25k during its peak daily
Linux 3.9 released
While there's only a limited number of competitors in the high performance ASIC fabrication suitable for fast desktop CPUs space, the number of companies that operate plants that fabricate semiconductors is a lot larger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

It's also notable that a lot of companies who outsource new chip development still have substantial ties with the people building their foundries and maintain significant capabilities for manufacturing. IBM for instance, could probably run enough of its own fabs again to not rely on fabs from others if it really wanted to.

There's also a small handful of fabs owned by governments and universities.

And while the trend lately has been towards fabless companies, companies who do their own stunts and run fabs are pretty valuable because of it and eventually it seems likely an area some companies may want to play with again.

For instance, can anyone think of a company with billions in cash reserves, a huge bent towards owning as much of its own supply chain as possible and a need for a lot of chips?

I can.
Download and install software. Download and install necessary plugins. Play with window manager settings. Deal with the fact that the version that you are used to using has changed in the last 18 months and needs to be retweaked to behave like you want it to.

I've seen people spend days getting themselves set up exactly the way that they want. And looking at http://xkcd.com/1205/ it isn't obvious that this is a waste of time either.
I did not know you went to such extent. At that scale that makes sense. Do you plan to open source it?
That's some very cool stuff. Thanks!
People aren't bothered by the targeted ads. They're bothered by what else can be done with that vast, accumulated store of information and the network that's designed for surveillance, tracking and predicting behavior. For a lot of people, facebook is their identity. It's the way others see them and communicate with them, and their account holds a great deal of personal information which could be used to impersonate, blackmail or profile them.
I'm confused by "American (Men|Women) Novelists". If both exist, then what's the point of American Novelists?
It is evil because:

1. I get no say in what information they store and use. If somebody else used my computer, that information is associated with me.

2. The more information companies have about me, the easier it is for the government to gather information without due process.

3. What is gathered about me can be stolen by somebody else.

I agree that, in theory, well targeted ads are far superior to the dating ads I get on Facebook, but with zero control, transparency or accountability, I'm very uncomfortable with the amount if info they are trying to gather from me.
There are lots of good reasons why you might not want random people plugging in their laptops on your computer, and likewise reasons that you wouldn't want them to walk away with your interview materials loaded on their personal computer.
Talk to a lawyer. IANAL.

If you don't have the initial agreement in writing, you effectively never had one in the first place. Check your invention assignment agreement in your hiring paperwork, if you have one. Also, check your states's rules regarding IP and your employer.

Now, for question 1, building a company off of licensed technology shouldn't be a problem. However, if you have dreams of an exclusive license, make sure it's in some sort of agreement.

For question 2, I've thought about this b/c of a situation I'm in right now. Consult a lawyer. Inventions are invented by people (in the US), and then can be assigned to a company. If you don't have an invention assignment agreement and won't sign one, can they arbitrarily name someone else as the inventor...sure. Then, you might be able to get into a really hairy legal game, like for example, when the published step forward. I'm not sure what the outcome will be, so consult a lawyer. Could you rush and file a provisional ahead of the company? These are the types of games that cost money to play, so beware.

3. Move on. It's probably seems like your whole world / future is collapsing around you. It's not.
drchrono (YC W11, iPad Health Records) hiring iOS/Android dev
The method I have found to stop tracking is to use /etc/hosts to block all traffic to sites that I don't want anything to do with including Facebook and their CDNs.
I based it around https://github.com/leto/Util/blob/master/config/etc/hosts.bl... and have added more tracker/advertisement domains as I have encountered them.
Having done this four times, in each case the people managing the 401k sent me the check made out to my IRA's bank, with the notation FBO me, aka "For The Benefit Of" and each case my bank cashes the check and transfers the proceeds into my IRA.
check out dbpedia's sparql endpoint, or freebase's apis
Because it seems like every mainstream news article about engineering at Facebook is written like this one: http://www.fastcompany.com/3005165/how-facebook-survived-34-...

Maybe it's Facebook PR's fault.
Working at fb sounds like cool experience. Though im wary of companies who still make one suffer through such interviews. Thats what keps me as a contractor. None of that interviews funny business.

Fb recruiter, if you read this, shoot me an email.
That was quick, simple and not nearly as exciting as I thought it would be. Thx :-P
A tool to help find unique names for new open-source projects.
Perhaps the following question should have its own Ask HN topic, but: Why isn't there a Linux demoscene?
> the reason that people don't care enough is because they have so much on their plate.

This is the 'false cause' fallacy[1]. It is akin to saying, because I have too much work stacked up, instead of making progress, I'd rather cool my heels and not do anything at all, ever.

[1] https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/false-cause
Hell ! Even a bloody e-mail-reset-password is more safe then THIS!
Good think I didn't decide to switch from MSN to Skype yet (and drop both) ... but now I decided.
How to synchronize localhost version changes with production version
You had ~2250 visits that day (1440 minutes), each of which spent (on average) ~45 minutes looking at your website. Assuming only one concurrent visitor, you'd have had 1440/45 = 32 total visits. You actually had 2250/32 = ~70 times that number, so you averaged ~70 concurrent visits that day.

Due to expected fluctuations (day/night, when you posted to HN) there will be considerable real-time variation; it is easy to believe that you spiked up to 282 concurrent visitors at some point when people were heavily commenting on HN: however, the real question here is what the concurrent number of requests looked like.

Finally, yes: one way to look at these visitors is that they were "spread out over 45 minutes" (although that isn't how I'd describe it myself). If you asked "during any given 45 minute period, how many visits (on average) started during that period", we would be looking at 2250/(1440/45), or ~70 visits starting in that window.
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https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q42
There is no delete in the cloud.
Lots of people are misunderstanding that chartbeat figure. It's not 287 visits in a 45 minute window. These are visitors who are currently interacting with your site. Some are idle but most aren't.