skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I can understand patenting things like file formats (e.g.: PSD) but general computer operation "controlling tones over a device connected to telephone lines to initiate a connection between a remote computer and a local one"

The former is a format. The latter sounds like a protocol. Formats should be patentable but protocols shouldn't?
This doesn't seem to be anywhere near a conclusive ruling on software patents. But imagining a world where such a ruling were handed down, the software giants would be writing down massive losses as their patent warchests evaporated. Mostly fake money but still, Wall Street wouldn't be happy. But ultimately it would be a good thing when you consider the massive distortion of the market caused by things like Google's purchase of money-losing Motorola for $12 billion.
Also, in this paradigm, only one thread calls refresh() at any give time (either the MonitorThread or before the thread is created, the initializer thread). This is contrary to some definitions of lock free, such as [1], "if any thread performing an operation on the data structure is suspended at any point during that operation then the other threads accessing the data structure must still be able to complete their tasks". If we kill MonitorThread, other threads accessing RSState won't be able to complete their operation.

[1] http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk/threading/non_blockin...
Python accepts this because bool is a subclass of int, and True and False have defined integer values (1 and 0 respectively).

Which means there's no coercion or conversion going on here. For what you think it "should" be, Python would have to break Liskov substitution for subclasses of int.
This is excellent. Thanks for sharing. I may look into forking to add DynamoDB support through dynamoid.

I'm saying this without having gone through the code base to see what is involved. ;)
Apple will unlock your iPhone for police
Indeed. Comparable sites (video games, video game companies, and TV shows) in English follow very similar design patterns.

That said, there are some major Japanese sites with absolutely mind-boggling design ("Rakuten" springs to mind...)
I am still a bit confused what the point of VP9 is.

Microsoft and Apple pay for the licenses on behalf of developers and users so licensing cost only affects a very tiny minority. And with the likes of Sony (PS), Microsoft (Windows/XBox) and Apple (iOS/OSX/Final Cut) firmly in the H.265 camp why would you produce content for VP9 if no one can play it.
Snapchats Don't Disappear: Forensics Firm Pulled Dozens of "Deleted" Photos
Elon Musk quits Zuckerberg's immigration advocacy group
I believe the title is a riff off of "Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!" Some other books or online tutorials have taken that form of title. I don't really know why, though I suppose the silliness offsets the otherwise heavy nature of the content. (Learning Erlang is probably easier than learning Haskell for most people, but it can still be a mind stretcher if you've never done a functional language before.)
One possibility is that Japan is a country with 2.1% of IE6 users (source: http://www.ie6countdown.com/) might be playing some part of this. (Although, my hunch is most of that 2.1% are in an office environment...)

Another thing I noticed in years of dealing with Japanese people (although, I'm from Japan, my time in the US is longer) is they certainly do have some obsession with grids -- to the extent they make graphing paper out of Excel to create a document. (Ugh, I hate these documents!) Many of those websites are table styled as well. (Another pet peeve! Use CSS!)
You don't need it. If you are a Junior developer (or aiming at being one) Haskell is a language you most definitely don't need.

Now, once you have your feet wet, it's worth learning. Here's why:

- Pure(mostly) functional language. This is in opposition to Java & Ruby, which while having functional aspects are OO (Object Oriented).
- It's okay not to know what a functional language is. It's making functions first-class citizens, such that a function becomes a value like any other.
- Separates IO from computation. IO is inherently impure and unreliable, so functions are generally pure and instead wrap IO in containers. Obviously, programs would be less useful (still use in the compiler running!) without IO.
- All of these concepts (and more) will change how you think about programming and make you a better programmer in all languages.

Haskell can be found in some backend stacks, the more notable examples I can think of are Mailrank (acquihired by Facebook) and Bump.

Personally, I've only done a limited number of projects with Haskell (a Postgres-backed beer API & IRC bot) but I've grown to respect it as a language and through limited exposure has made me love FP.
Written Japanese does to be a quite a bit more dense than written English, especially if it's heavy in kanji (Chinese symbols), where a single character represents a word or concept and can be several syllables in length when spoken. It's enough of a factor that, back in the 16 bit era when you only had a few MB of storage space to work with, there were several old JRPGs that either needed to have a lot of dialogue cut out in translation to still fit on the cartridge (e.g., Final Fantasy 6), or that were simply never translated at all because it would have been futile to try (e.g., Final Fantasy 5 and Seiken Densetsu 3, according to legend).

However, this page isn't really the best example of that because nearly half the text is actually English loanwords written in katakana (the Japanese syllabary), which is only slightly more dense per character than English, since each character usually represents a consonant and vowel together. So in this case I'd say the Japanese page carries a little more information, but not drastically so. The copy itself is also quite different, though.
I can understand patenting things like file formats

The trouble with this is that file formats (and other communications protocols) have network effects, which greatly amplify the power granted to the patent holder.
Hackers also appreciate having a stable, even conservative, foundation on which to build, especially when it's time to put a service in production, scale it to multiple servers, and keep up-to-date with security patches.

There is nothing to stop Debian users from using Rails, Django, Node.js, or any of the other alternatives to LAMP. SOme of them are even packaged in Debian.
Richard Feynman: Life, the universe and everything
As much as people point out things that are missing, I gotta believe that this does fulfill the "Help me get a job" purpose of the posts.
I agree that sterile generic corporate speak is not good but it sounds like you're saying that the only way they could be true to themselves or to appear as real people is to use shit.

I disagree.
Because some people like the idea of being independent of such commercial players.
New research suggests complex animals evolved more than once
It's actually the other way around. Fred Hebert, author of LYSE, named it after Miran's LYAH.
What language were you using when coding the site ?
It would be interesting to see someone test this on a public, shared computer.
What's the difference between a file format and an API? I'm referencing the Oracle Java/Google Android API case.
Now that Wheezy is Stable, you shouldn't have to do the first step.
Amazon.com doesn't run on EC2.
As btn said, the Japanese page is "flatter", there's more information directly on the page, things are stated more explicitly, with fewer abbreviated forms and much less stuff hidden behind tabs or links.

In general, however, I think Japanese tends to be a fair bit more information-dense than English for a given amount of space/characters. It can vary greatly, depending, for instance, how polite you're trying to be, how many foreign words you use, etc, but the ideographic core is very, very, dense compared to English.

[A point driven home by trying to write text messages in Japanese versus English... my experience is that it's much harder to cram in what you want to say into the given limits (~160 bytes) in English, despite Japanese characters using multiple bytes each...]
FYI There were 7 different opinions (out of 10 judges) authored for CLS Bank vs. Alice.
It's a bit of a mess right now to figure out what's up.

The method and computer readable media claims were held ineligible by a majority of the court
The systems claims had an equally divided court, and the result there is to affirm the district court judgement.

See http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/...

This was an en banc (IE whole court) opinion, which to the degree it was a majority, is binding on not just lower courts, but all future 3 judge panels (the normal size) of the appeals court.
To the degree it was an equally divided court, it is not binding precedent.

Also, what usually happens in patent cases this is that the future 3 judge panels that disagree with the decision twist the hell out of it to avoid it.
It is a gamer|anime|comic book joke. There is a lot of cheaply written entertainment with poorly defined motivations ascribed to the heroes and villains. So what battle cry is used by an overly generic hero? Why an overly generic cry of "For great justice!" of course. Throw in a joke a about poor translations and you get their title.
DNA analysis of comb jellies indicate their nerve and muscle systems don't match any other known organisms-- they don't seem to have evolved from sponges like every other animal.
It's not so much the individual packages, it's the interaction between them, and dependencies. In this release, we got multiarch, which is quite an overhaul in how cross-compilation works (especially relevant for running 32-bit (often binary only, non-free) software under the amd64 architecture.

There are such issues as which version of libxml, libopenssl and even glibc certain packages work with (or especially, do not work with).

So, eg nginx upstream might test (mostly) against an upstream release of openssl and some libc, while the apache web server might be more conservative (this is a made up example, tomcat, especially legacy versions such as 6, might be a better example than apache httpd).
I managed a Google SRE team that helped run Borg for 5 years, so I'm pretty familiar with this. You can certainly run multiple application servers on one machine using virtualization. What isn't easy is automating where the applications are deployed, in an elastic, constantly shifting way that deals with massive numbers of machines and constantly changing hardware.

Cheap hardware crashes. It crashes all the time. Furthermore, the application's needs themselves change all the time, depending on traffic curves and processing needs. The dynamic needs of Google's (and presumably Twitter's) completely heterogeneous application stacks don't lend themselves to simple virtualization and over-the-counter software. This is an incredibly tricky bin packing problem that was never quite solved in my 5 years at Google.

I don't know a lot about the "distributed frameworks" you mentioned, so perhaps they do this too. I kind of doubt it. If it were as easy as you think, I'm sure my friends at Twitter would be using what you mentioned.
I saw some blog recently claiming that Office 365 downtime was 100x more abundant than Gmail downtime.

http://blog.cloudsherpas.com/hot-topics/google-apps-vs-offic...
Well, technically, there is already "contrib". I guess it is a little crazy to have as many packages in "main" as there is. Impressive, yes, but also a little crazy :-)
You seem to be describing essentially a static allocation of dedicated machines. That's fine if there are a couple of different apps you want to run. It'd be totally insane if a single data centre has 10k+ servers that are permanently running hundreds of different services and thousands of largely unpredictable and transient batch jobs.

(Why would it be insane? Because with dedicated machines your utilization levels are going to be crap, reconfiguring and rebalancing the machine allocations will be painful, and you'd need massive over-provisioning to achieve a sufficient level of fault-tolerance.)
This post is so spot on. It never is as bad as it seems. But sometimes it's hard to rationalize and internalize that fact in the situation. Having a bad day as a founder? Ping me anytime. Beer/coffee/tea is on me :)
The language in that video is Erlang using the Nitrogen Web Framework (http://nitrogenproject.com)
Add in monitoring. Both generic monitoring, and monitoring of application specific information produced in application specific ways. (While you're at it, make it easy for applications that reuse standard libraries to get standard monitoring that goes with said libraries.)

Add in spinning jobs up and down quickly on demand rather than making them long-running. (This matters for a map-reduce, for instance.)

Add in making it easy to have dev/production running side by side with configurations that are as constant as possible, and not getting into each other's way.

Add in automatic failover from machine to machine, or from data center to data center as needed.

Add in making it easy to find/access applications set up and configured by someone else so that you can set rpcs their way.

After you keep adding things in, you understand why people think of this as a "data center operating system". And you realize that solving the basic problem - get jobs to run on a distributed set of machines - is only the visible first step in a long list of features that you want.
Now that backports is part of Debian, I think most of the issues with "out of date" packages are much less painful than they used to be. I suppose factoring main into "core" and "non-core", would make maintaining backports easier too - you could then test building a package against a smaller set of core packages and libs.

Packages needing newer versions of glibc, automake/autoconf, gcc/clang/ruby/python/perl etc are still tricky though.
Is launchrock down?
The site that I am using launchrock for is down and launchrock's homepage is up but nothing else. Anyone else having this problem?

http://use.launchrock.com/
Oracle only keeps history for specified time, it takes up space, on our systems it's usualy a few hours, so it won't work for long-period history.

Regarding game assets - why not keep them in git or some other cvs? For textual data it has huge additional advantage - you can blame, merge and easily see differences, but even for binary data it can be used.
Great product! Beautiful UI, simple & easy to use. One thing though, I'm kinda fill my job board randomly and I don't know how to sort them now (haha). Maybe you can implement auto sort based on date? Really love it by the way.

http://hoverboard.io/aqidd
Python and Java are equivalent in the sense that both a Turing Complete. Is there a similar equivalence between all musical instruments which makes choosing one over another a purely arbitrary decision? I don't know but I suspect not. A pair of bongos seems to have much less to offer as an instructional vehicle for learning about music than, say, a piano.

EDIT: Setting aside the above argument for a second, there are practical considerations too that make the choice of musical instrument a non-arbitrary decision. For example: the cost of the instrument, its portability (important if the band decides to tour) and of course the availability of instruction.
The 20 Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make In Your 20s
I started reading the online version, enjoyed it so much, I went ahead and boug ht the treeware version. And it's awesome.

I felt so loved as a customer of No Starch Press. They sent me the book, let me download the ebook in three free formats (no DRM), plus I got a bunch of freebie stickers.

The book itself is also quite remarkable to me in that I can read it and understand Haskell without needing a computer. I am used to reading mathematics books, and while I don't think Haskell is a programming language for all mathematicians as is so often advertised, the language does have a certain appeal to it in that you can treat its programs as abstract exercises that you can do independently of a machine. The statelessness of the whole thing doesn't need me typing stuff into a machine to see what a particular line of code. This makes it great for offline reading, away from the computer.

So yeah, get the treeware version. Support your favourite authors. :-)
Oh cool, visual realtime anything is awesome
Check real time tweets for keyword poop (lol)
<many confused clicks>
I see a map!
I wait for 8ish seconds and nothing happens.
I Close the tab.

The older I get the more I feel like I'm too damn impatient to learn to use another app. I really wish things like this didn't let me pick the colors, just show me something right away. I need a call to action or an example of an awesome configuration of the options to get hooked.

Otherwise nice looking tool
As mentioned in another comment, I managed a Google SRE team that help run Borg for 5 years. I'm good friends with several of the folks who are rebuilding it using Mesos at Twitter. They are all insanely awesome people.

Let's say you have a Rails stack (app server + DB) that you want to deploy for testing in 3 different datacenters. If that works out, you then immediately need to deploy 10,000 instances each to 10 different datacenters. Oh yeah, and the storage needs to be distributed and universally available, in case any of the servers crash. Performance testing reveals that you can't have more than 10 servers per rack, otherwise you saturate the rack switch. You also need to account for power distribution redundancy, shifting traffic loads, etc.

Oh, and you want to do this with a single configuration that's manageable by a team of 3-4 people and have deployment be entirely automated and monitored.

The complexities behind this problem are simply enormous, almost too much to even comprehend. I am proud of the work we did at Google to attempt (yes, attempt) to solve this problem, and I know my friends at Twitter are doing great work as well. I'm mostly just happy that I can finally talk about it and that the badasses that do this work can get some credit.
Well Mark's post was interesting, but this is also old news now, is it not? Microsoft has had two OS updates since then and hot fixes and service packs.
The biggest difference I see is that the Linux Kernel can be tweaked to specific performance characteristics at build time, whereas Windows can only be altered by runtime configuration. depending on what you might want to change, you may not have that capability.
Going back to the article about network latency while playing media, the breakdown seems to show that this was a bug, and bugs happen. To Linux's credit, those bugs are probably patched more quickly and even if it hasn't been promoted to release, if someone has made a patch, you can incorporate your own fix. If not, the landscape doesn't look any different for Linux vs. Windows in that regard.
It is an intel (I don't know the exact specs because he is using it right now). It is mainly a browser/netflix/homework/science project machine, he does, however, game on it. And I mean WINE game. Simpsons Hit and Run, Starwars Battlefront 1 & 2, he is really into Spore now a days. He does play Simcity 4000 or whatever the old one is from time to time. I was considering an upgrade or giving him my 13 macbook pro when I get something new. We've had it for 3 years and I can't ask of more from something that I got for 200$ on craigslist. Its funny because while he has a very capable computer on his desk in his room, he would much rather do every task on the iPad.
You're forgetting the largest smartphone OS provider. And as Android is embedded into devices like televisions and cars, having a great libre codec available could be a significant advantage.
"meaningless" "purposeless" implies something that should be there, but isn't. What is your argument to yourself that this thing that you "lack" should be there? Some framework you don't even believe in?

there is no "lack of a meaning". We are all from Nature, we follow our nature and thus follow Nature. Nature is sometimes ugly, but it is more beautiful than ugly.
I see "locked up in Flash" and "locked up in EME" as equal, so I'd prefer the one with more adoption.
Thanks for the analysis. The Federal Circuit is really pushing the boundaries in trying to make their patent specialisation relevant to society.

If only someone would create patent troll shell companies whose sole purpose is the sue the Federal Circuit over ridiculous business method and algorithm patents. Maybe then they'd realise what they're doing to the world.
Ask HN: Google workers, sister is visiting S.J. Can she tour the Googleplex?
She is 21 years old and has an inoperable brain tumor. She is recovering from several surgeries. She has limited body movements, but wants to go back to school. She is unsure as to what she wants to study. I think it might inspire her to visit the campus and see people being innovative/productive in an office setting.
Mutability is change without chronology, which isn't the way the real world works. Immutability over time is a more accurate abstraction of physical processes, particularly when you get into smaller time increments and services distributed over larger distances.

Mutability is useful as an optimisation, but I don't think it has much worth as a model.
> Yes, this is probably good for the humans, but I don't see how it's better for the elephants.

Well, now they don't get shot, presumably.
Yahoo Acquires Mobile Gaming Studio Loki
You might find this interesting - http://functionspace.org/discussion/new There is lots of interesting stuff on Math, Physics and Computer Science

P.S -I founded it.
You are not a large corporation
Because "Microsoft and Apple pay for the licenses on behalf of developers and users so licensing cost only affects a very tiny minority" is not really true. See http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/mpeg...

If you encode a video into mpeg4 format, even using a commercial tool whose makers pays mpeg4 license, that license doesn't extend to the resulting video.

If you post such video on your website, you're violating mpeg4 patents and have to pay mpeg4 licensing fee (up to $5 million/year).

That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.

Not to mention that most people don't use commercial tools. We use ffmpeg/x264, which is not only free but has better quality than expensive commercial tools. Even using those tools without paying a license is not permitted (although, obviously, most people simply don't understand that or willfully ignore banking that mpeg4 la won't sue them).

Microsoft and Apple pays so that users of their software can CONSUME mpeg4 format.

All CREATORS are left out in cold and have to license the patents.

Given that video becomes more and more ubiquitous, it's not an acceptable situation for the web just as it wasn't acceptable to have to pay for using .gif format to post a picture on your website (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html)
My impression is that the secret sauce is in the allocation between machines - managing the allocation of high-CPU vs. high-IO vs. high-memory jobs, while still preserving things like rack locality and latency guarantees. A multidimensional knapsack problem, that changes over time.