skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case you are not, at first brush, convinced that "specialists" with "vast amount of expertise" in organizations of national importance are routinely found to be incompetent schleps easily manipulated by your average conman, we can hop over to Great Britain:

U.K. businessman James McCormick convicted of selling golf ball finders as bomb detectors to Iraq

Source(s) :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2318182/British-mill...

Or we can look at our own homegrown example:

Drones Hacked with $26 Software

Source(s):

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5989599n

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html

These are even public because of their national security consequences.

Your average publicly traded corporation and even large non-profits and charities are filled with utterly moronic placeholders who are very good at self-preservation and climbing rungs.
How You Can Get Retweeted To 130k+ People – Even If You Have No Following
Temporal consistency is overrated for many applications and still more applications achieve consistency with a locking mechanism or serializing reads and writes elsewhere.

As for resources, I've heard it say that your architecture is working for you if you can throw more resources at the problem, and it scales linearly. If I have a key that gets accessed 2000/s on a single Couchbase node, I'm going to get long tails on every request that goes to that node.
Very cool. I've found many times that I'll start a project as a mezzanine project simply for the easy deployment, mixins, forms and other stuff that doesn't directly depend on the core Page infrastructure.

Very nice set of tools to kick start a project. This will eventually be another nice tool the plug into apps that require forum functionality.
Rapportive still works for me in the new Gmail
Left 4 Dead 2 (beta) available on Steam for Linux
Just saw it when I opened my Steam this morning :-D
> If Gwern wants a job at Google...

Sorry, I would prefer he continue to work on gwern.net.
And yet, I have to resort to Garmin software and maps to do real trip planning (cycling, hiking, and even driving).
In high school I got suspended for 2 days for creating a "broadcast storm" by plugging an ethernet wall outlet to itself. The school was without computer network for days. No felony charges.
The references to Ember are in the introduction only and provide some historical context for the project. I believe that it's important for standards to come out of real experience, and that the context of that real experience will help others understand the goals. That's why I provided the historical background.

JSON API's design is based around a smart client that wants the ability to avoid making unnecessary requests for documents it already has, and to provide a format that avoids unnecessary duplication in compound documents. It also aims to be relatively easy to implement, both on the client and server, using tools and frameworks that are already widely in use using familiar idioms.
Someone once said "If you don't toot your own horn, no one else will."

Hiding behind a pseudonym is a great way to avoid being recognized for your works in the short-term, unless you're some sort of prolific writer, but I think we know that's a lot different than developing software.

If gwern would associate these works you all revere him for with his real name, I'm sure he'd have plenty of job offers.
Another major issue with going "up-market" for JCP was their retail space situation. Many of their stores were in areas that didn't have a significant market share of higher-income families. If they did have higher income families, the market was already saturated with other higher-end retail stores.

Many of their stores also suffered from high rent even in failing malls, exacerbating their losses as suburban malls failed.

If JCP didn't have their retail lease obligations, they may have succeeded in pivoting to higher market consumers and transitioning to smaller stores and tighter, more informed staff. However, they have decade+ long leases on anchor stores in malls with massive financial penalties for early withdrawal, so they are stuck with massive amounts of retail floor. It's one thing to change your business strategy wit 4,000 square foot retail spaces; it's entirely different if you're locked into 40,000 square feet in hundreds of malls!
> I still work on cool stuff, but nobody notices anymore, partly because everybody takes the fact that Google Search just works for granted and because I work with enough other talented people that I can't claim sole credit for anything I do anymore.

Just curious: Are you equally satisfied with the not-so-public work you're doing now?
The reddit link to fitness/faq seems to be broken.
As soon as as a user types that into the browser, a few things will happen of course at that exact moment an http request is received by ________.

and then it will call iron.io ironmq or something like that, put in a request to the queue, fire off some ffmpeg scripts in the ironworker asynchronously, receive message that it's successful, send back to the browser animated gif that has been rendered.

During this time, the user will just have to wait, until the task completes. I'm not sure if I would want them to time out because what if (edge case), someone decides to convert one of those "Nyan cat loop for 10 hours" videos, the server is stuck in a long task.

Then comes the question of whether the same long process will continue if some other user wants to test out this exploit. That's where I think persistent storage of the processed file would come in handy. the request url should first be scanned if it's existing in one of our previous url requests.

Redis could be used replacing rabbitmq or ironmq. but I'm think for spike cases, not in a sense that the app will become hugely popular overnight (although making it on the first page of news ycombinator would awesome), but certain users either being passionate users making lot of requests and malicious individuals abusing it.

I really don't want to block the api behind the http auth dialog or a web based login.

I envision it to just work like you would use google, except you can convert youtube videos to animated gifs, just by entering in the url.

Of course in the backend, I'd need extensive monitoring and realtime analytics would be cool.
where does it go?
It amazes me how programming languages and APIs look more and more like Lisp. Modern languages copy essential features from Lisp, and JSON as one of the most popular JS libs almost look identical to Lisp s-expressions.

Someday also more people will realize how useful and effective the equivalence of control structures and data really is.

JSON:
{
"posts": {
"id": "1",
"title": "Rails is Omakase",
"rels": {
"author": 9,
"comments": [ 5, 12, 17, 20 ]
}
}
}

LISP:
(posts
(id 1)
(title "Rails is Omakase")
(rels
(author 9)
(comments (5 12 17 20))))
I'm willing to bet that Blizzard has at least one psychologist on board...
Übersiedlung
Übersiedlung wien, Übersiedlung
Sie wollen nichts dem Zufall überlassen? , Ihre Übersiedlung ist bei Favoriten Umzug in besten Händen… Ganz gleich ob Sie eine Übersiedlung innerhalb einer Stadt, eine Übersiedlung von einer Stadt in die andere, eine Übersiedlung innerhalb der Europäischen Gemeinde oder eine Übersiedlung nach Übersee planen, gestalten Sie Ihren Umzug mühelos per Mausklick, oder rufen Sie einfach bei Favoriten Umzug, den besten Partner in allen Bereichen einer Übersiedlung, an und lassen Sie sich bestens in allen Bereichen einer Übersiedlung beraten.
ooh I remember seeing this Lego rack. IIRC it's from a professor's computing project, with the rack built by his son?
Woow Feedback on competitors apps. What a great idea!
Yahoo has been moving away from FreeBSD for a long time. In 2011 they said that 75% of their servers run on Linux, the rest on FreeBSD.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/yahoo-the-linux-compan...
That sort of logic is what allows our flawed judicial system to continue with arbitrary and/or discriminatory sentencing. Yes, the Steubenville Rapists were under-penalized. And yes, this student was over-penalized.

To me, this seems like both data points illustrate the lack of true equality under the law (in the United States, at the very least).
Such personal questions about people whose work I respect come from a feeling that I might like to do similar, and an insight into their lifestyle and personality may enable that, or else persuade me that the sacrifices are too high for my circumstance. Learning about the lives of people with similar interests always widens my perspective on ways to spend time and the opportunity costs therein.

A good example for me is top level gamers. I love playing games and watching them being played competitively (videogames, Magic the Gathering, Chess, etc.). I've dabbled in competitive gaming but never committed very far, and when I do talk to high level players I always want to know what their day jobs are. To my surprise (or disgust, or satisfaction - I'm not quite sure which), many are unemployed or involved in low-level jobs which allow them to maximise practice time. Some are professional and sponsored but unless they do really well then their incomes from this are atrocious. Then there are others such as "Ultradavid" (a fighting game commentator, but someone whose work I highly respect) who is a lawyer! Only a couple of days ago I asked Ryan Hart (probably the best UK all-rounder at fighting games) about his job and he said he does remote consultancy and editing which means he can travel worldwide to play and still work. One of my relatives is world-class in a competitive sport and also has a very high-powered career - I asked him how he manages that and he told me the prestige of the sport in question allows him to be given time off for competitions and training, though his life essentially is just work, family, and the sport. I found that one particularly interesting because I suspect even if he were far and away the best Counter Strike player in the world rather than in a well-respected sport then that wouldn't fly in his profession. Anyway, these are datapoints which increase my knowledge and help inform my own decisions.

In the case of gwern, it could influence my own choices greatly to hear if he lives off an inheritance, or is a Physics professor, or a professional football player, or especially if he has applied his analytical skills to learning specific technologies in high demand and low supply which maximise his hourly earnings to enable him to work very little and do what he wants the rest of the time. Or, indeed, if he is unemployed and poor, and if so...why?
Why did you answer both "Yes" and "No" to your own question?
"The original Dynamo design was based on a core set of strong distributed systems principles resulting in an ultra-scalable and highly reliable database system. Amazon DynamoDB, which is a new service, continues to build on these principles, and also builds on our years of experience with running non-relational databases and cloud services, such as Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3, at scale."

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb....
was this supposed to be hard? I hope they don't plan their recruiting out of it
Nginx Requests/Second - Raspberry Pi vs. Amazon EC2
If this is the case I hope you are donating to him.
> What's the reason for the top level rel? It seems like it's just there to stop the urls from being repeated and to save space, but isn't that what gzip is for?

It also makes it possible to cache things locally indexed on their IDs, and to form URLs that make requests for just the precise documents that aren't available locally. In order to achieve this, it's necessary to have both (1) IDs, and (2) a way to convert a list of IDs into a single request for all of the documents at once.

> Also the name is a bit of an annoying land grab

HAL is "The Hypertext Application Language". In general, people tend to be using generic names for these things, so I chose an available, generic name.

> Lastly, it really seems based on a rails active record style data store, it's assuming ids are the most important thing and that links are all relations that point to other objects within the system

I reviewed a large number of server-side solutions (Firebase, Parse, CouchDB, Django, Rails) and they all had the concept of an ID for the document. As I said above, this ID is useful to keep track of which documents have already been cached locally, and how to formulate a URL that makes a request for just the missing URLs. I don't consider this solution to be particularly tied to ActiveRecord.

Less importantly, it is also more convenient to cache documents on the server using their IDs (or slugs, or whatever the storage wants to use), and allow a top-level configuration to define how to generate URLs. This allows server-side solutions to serialize and cache documents without having to be plugged into the router architecture, but enforces a URL-centric view once the HTTP response is built.
and there shouldn't be corruption in government. Why is that relevant? Problems either exist or they don't.
also residential customers usually do not have hourly rates, rather fixed per kWh monthly ones.
Agreed - the assumption is that the MTBF of a single network device is a relevant statistic is undoubtedly incorrect in anywhere but a hobbyist's network.
> Even the KMT (國民黨）has long given up that stance.

Are you sure? Just a few days ago, the President (and leader of the KMT party) said:

No matter where we are, here or abroad, we’ll by no means push for ‘Two Chinas’, ‘One Taiwan, one China’ or ‘Taiwan independence’.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/399347/taiwan-leader-pledges-to...
It seems like concept of threading is too complicated for average user these days. All the new & trendy software for communication have no threading capabilities -- Discourse, Google+, Github issues, Moot.
He is saying Taiwan is asserting China is a part of Taiwan, with the ROC government in control, not unifying with PRC.
99% of the people I email already know me, and can look up any of those details in an address book or social network. On the rare occasion I'm making first contact, I'm more likely to take care over communicating further contact info in the body of the email.
That's how it is, considering about 40% of emails being opened on mobile, and this share is growing - http://i.imgur.com/8hPUHY2.png
Gene Patents: What Will the Myriad Case Change?
Community is hygiene not heroics
What about battery replacement cost? AFAIK, Tesla buyers are looking at a $20k line item 5-10 years down the line here. Something gasoline cars don't need.

By talking about gasoline cost in their car price calculator, Tesla is going for a "total cost of ownership" thing, so why is battery replacement cost not included?

It looks to me as if Tesla is eager to talk loudly about the unique costs of their competitors, while keeping quiet about the unique costs of themselves.
I'm gonna call Hegel on this one.

This is a rather good presentation of a marginal point of view, and as such it has led to one of the most constructive discussions about team communication here on HN, revealing the entire spectrum (which is't grey either, but full of colors).

So BS is too strong a word.
One of the most solid news sources for EVE lately is http://themittani.com/ -- it's actually more than just EVE, but they have a large number of EVE related articles.

If you're not a player it can be hard to figure out what's going on, though, as many of the articles target people who are pretty familiar with the game.
>The important part is, Microsoft still runs email and nobody lost data.

Unless you fail to log in at least once every 270 days, at which point your entire account and everything in it is wiped.
At least all the Netflix web servers run on Linux.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2013/...

However their Open Connect network runs on FreeBSD.

https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect
I think it is fair for Tesla to put that in. Many people start off car shopping by comparing monthly lease amounts for a range of cars to figure out what is in their price range. However, at this high level overview, it can be easy to forget to factor in items such as gas into the monthly cost.

Tesla marketing is simply doing their job and making sure consumers don't forget to add the price of gas to gasoline cars, by making a point of subtracting it from their car.
Bane made an insightful post a few days ago about 'scene' computing vs workstation computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624912

That has had me rethinking your what-if. I don't think the unix is a big deal - the Be and Haiku terminals feel unixy, and BeOS offered a big subset of the unix system calls even into v3 (time of Apple purchase).

By v4.0 (two years after), BeOS had become a remarkable system for single-user, close-to-the-metal computing. The user experience was very fast and stable. The system gave a skilled developer easy access to video and audio.

I've been trying out haiku again this morning. They've done good work. It now boots on my thinkpad, but, like OSX or Windows, feels sluggish in a way that Be never did. It needs some serious performance tuning. They need to get their out-of-the-box development experience sorted out too. OSX has done an excellent job of that.
Ask HN: What's the most productive way to dev a static site?
There's a bunch of excellent compilers, new languages, and frameworks to use to create static websites.

For the pros: In your opinion, what's is the best set of tech to use to build static websites quickly, productively, and making the code as beautiful as can be?
Most people have the misconception of how micro instances work. They are micro because they are given resources that aren't being used by the other allocated instances. Therefore, this really doesn't compare to the Raspberry pi at all. Try doing a small instance instead which has a fixed set of resources, and it's the smallest one of them all.
Hello, Kernel
Bitcoin Is Not as Secure, Unregulated, or Lucrative as You Might Think
Tough question. The work I'm doing is challenging and I'm paid well for it, so yes, on that end I'm satisfied with it. I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments where I wish more of it were public, though, or that I could do something impressive in its own right rather than part of a major software system (and hence constrained by the other design choices made for that system), or that it doesn't sting when the project you're working on, which is doing some very cool technical things, gets canceled because it doesn't fit into the direction that your group is going.

I'd say that on balance, yes, I'm equally satisfied. But that probably means that I'll end up switching between the two a few times during my career.
It's easy to avoid.
To hear my dad tell it, "back in the day" kids just had shoot-outs in the backyard with Red Ryder BB guns...
To quickly access the signature and (when applicable) the cumulative email thread text, press Ctrl/Cmd + a to bring them into the compose editor.

This is often faster than "click[ing] on three tiny dots."
I read a lot of RFCs and drafts for media types lately and what strikes me reading this spec is the very liberal use of MUST which seems to me like an unnecessary violation of the robustness principle, that Jon Postel introduced first in RFC761 (TCP). Mike Amundsen describes in his book 'Building Hypermedia APIs […]':

Media type designers should keep Postel in mind. Designers can make
supporting the Robustness Principle easier for implementor by keeping the
number of MUST elements in the compliance profile to a minimum. The fewer
MUST elements implementors need to support, the more likely it is that they
will be able to craft compliant representations using that media type.
Virtually everyone modern home has thermostats, but far fewer households have dumb water boilers.
I came across 2 teachers like that at school, but sadly not in any higher education. Obviously this is down to our own experience, and I suppose our own judgements of the lecturers, or teachers.

Thinking about it, I think inspirational teachers are more vital in schools. Idea being, once inspired, the kids will drive forwards themselves.
I like the sound of that method. I think it would have worked very well for me.
I hope you're being facetious. While (for instance) Facebook's ubiquity will insulate it for many years, come what may, raw connection numbers aren't nearly as important as local connection numbers, and "local" can mean many things, including distance on an interest graph. For instance, I joined Twitter (and Google+, for that matter) because there were interesting conversations happening there and I wanted to take part. Those networks continue to sustain interest for me, so I contribute, and that brings interest to other people, etc.

There might not be a steady state (either becoming abandoned over time, growing to monstrous proportions of popularity, or changing character enough to drive old timers away, or some combination of the three), but all the evidence for the entire history of social groupings suggest that other social groupings will pop up to take the place of any that fail and to fill in niches no longer served. It's certainly not zero sum.

Metcalfe's law was also only ever meant to be an observation (and really just boils down to a description of any network, with "value" being some nebulous term), and certainly was never meant to describe humans' social connections, if only because they cannot sustain an arbitrary number of them. Applying it to social networks for predictive purposes is just sloppy sociology, which is about as low as you can get.
I've been recently watching Structure and Interpretation of Computer programs, where it is demonstrated that first class functions and assignment operator with nested scope are enough to implement object oriented system.

The simplest example given is a Counter object. Translated from Lisp to Javascript it goes like this:

function make_counter() {
var val = 0;
function get() {
return val;
}
function inc() {
val += 1;
}
return [get, inc]
}

function get_count(counter) {
return counter[0]();
}

function inc_count(counter) {
counter[1]();
}

var counter = make_counter();
console.log(get_count(counter).toString());
inc_count(counter);
inc_count(counter);
console.log(get_count(counter).toString());

This gives polymorphism (you can define make_fast_counter() that increases by 2 and still use get_count() and inc_count() with it) and encapsulation (you can not decrease the count).
This sort of approach is a classic way of doing cheap usability testing.

If you've not done this sort of work before I'd recommend getting hold of the (short and entertaining) "Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems" by Steve Krug. It'll give you a bunch of useful tips on how to get the best out of our time.