skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That using multiple computers that you own together in a coherent manner without needing weird 3rd party software and services is still an issue for regular people is one of the things that tells me that we are not living in the best possible world of tech.

I don't really see any reason why some of the higher level concepts from Plan 9 that solved this problem should not have take off by now. Alas that is not the case.
It's too expensive and has dangerous vendor lockin. I myself was burnt 2 years ago and vowed never to return to that platform. Now we use combined Heroku and AWS services. However I do miss GAE though, its deployment is smooth, their auto scaling up is great. It's just that I don't want to be locked in any more.

That being said, we still use GAE as a platform for fast prototypes, as a cron service to keep our Heroku instances up + firing up an EC2 instance every night to run a script for 5 minutes. So we only use GAE when there's minimal risk of being locked in.
I really can't blame Heroku for spinning down non-paying instances that don't get a single hit in 6 hours.
It's the truth. You mean it's typical of me to tell the truth?
There's also a GPU programming course being taught at Udacity:

https://www.udacity.com/course/cs344
I have given up (most) fruits and grains. Never felt better.

Your nutritional recommendations gave me cravings and hypoglycemia in the past.
Pictures-from-a-developers-life
The page under the "Writings" tab also points to the same article. Furthermore, the link numbers go 1727, 1728, 1727, 1725, so I can't guess the number based on the ordering, either.
I'm with you.

Saying WP is a shitty CMS is easy, but where is a good alternative? There is none.

Anyone can say anything about WordPress, but the FACT is that it's most used CMS, with a BIG community and market arround it.
I have always wanted to learn how to build stacks on AWS and use them with my apps. Does anyone know of any good resources out there for this, definitely for a noob like myself? Perhaps a codeacademy-like site or user-friendly book?
A tour of the Jolla phone with company co-founder Marc Dillon (video)
I didn't say that it's not possible that Yahoo means everything they said. But I don't think they begin to understand what they're promising. That doesn't bode well for them keeping the promises.
And the article by headline was listed on this page:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/

But it also linked incorrectly to "Mobile Devices Per Day." Now it seems to have vanished completely.
I can very well empathize with you. I still don't have anything to "show", but am slowly making progress. Baby steps. I started with little bit of javascript and went onto node.js and then setup mongodb. The setup HTML5 + mongodb + node.js is a fertile playground to get few projects complete.
I think I found the proper link:

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1697
I was doing the exact same thing!
I completely agree, but sometimes third party tools are better than baking in-house, especially single purpose services. App crash analytics for example, or performance trending tools like NewRelic.

But cron? That's just ridiculous.
It's not reactionary: nvidia invested heavily in getting to market first and advertising to the HPC crowd and they have been reaping the rewards of a monopoly for a few years now. Their latest high-end cards are dramatically more expensive (vs AMD at the same raw computational power) while offering completely crippled GPGPU capabilities. I recall incredulity on IRC when people found that their new 6xx cards were a step backwards from the corresponding 5xx cards for their GPGPU apps. Pro media & HPC users fork over the cash for Tesla because they can't jump to AMD due to their legacy CUDA code. Gamers don't care since they don't use double precision arithmetic.

The bitcoin community was the only one nimble enough to switch to AMD. For those of us in academia, we'll be paying the piper for the foreseeable future :/
Well in both cases you have to look at the relative options. I would assume at this point the Tumblr founders have taken some money off the table (though perhaps not) or at least could in another big round of financing. Money has diminishing marginal utility. A few hundred million is a lot of money, but if you've already taken 10 or 20 or 50 off the table, is it life-changing anymore?

Tumblr is the sort of success that could probably not be replicated. How many people have founded more than one company that does that well?

So I think there's a valid argument that the extra money is not worth the risk of no longer getting to work on such a huge project. I'm sure the founders thought about that. I certainly couldn't criticize them for either decision.
Wordpress is a code architectural mess, but as a CMS it's one of the best I've ever seen. (CMS's are deceptively complicated to build)

People saying it's shitty don't know what they are talking about (even you point out others you've tried are worse).

Wordpress is best in class for what it is: open source content manager. It's best use case is for a simple blog. It can be bashed into submission to be an ok general CMS or even a community managment solution. Past that though, it's architecture falls to pieces - but then, you wouldn't use a hammer to drill a hole would you?
Regardless of you how feel about FB, Banks, etc... In this case, the IPO underwriters DID serve the founders/company, which is their job.

Meaning, a "pop" means the IPO was priced too small, giving the early investors/founders/employees a low price, and giving the first-day IPO purchasers (who did no work, & are just gambling) the benefit of that new, higher price.

No "pop" means it's priced about right, and serves the interest of early investors, who took far more risk & often built the company.
Sounds like you're on the 'deferred life' plan. Drop the startup, get a job in Rome, and start enjoying the pizza. You can't have the fancy car, but you'd get bored of that in a month anyways.
Be careful about the multi-AZ promise. One of the reasons we don't use RDS is because there is no multi-region failover/replication capability.
Tesla's Trading Frenzy
Correct; if your writes are idempotent, retrying is safe. I cover this in the post as well. My above comment shows that it's possible to recover consistency even for writes which are not idempotent--though depending on the semantics of your retries, there may be some locking required.
Sorry if I wasn't specific enough.

In my opinion, you don't get enough control over the environment for what you're paying on a per hour basis. Automated backups? Great, they aren't that difficult to being with. Failover? Sure, within the same AZ, when you need to be doing it between datacenters. Scaling? I will grant that it scales up and down fast automagically.
The Outcast of Beauregard Parish: a documentary film
How to turn your SaaS application into a high-touch service
To be fair, if I had to guess, I think the measurement of interest is for American translation of said app already in development (or developed) by some Chinese devs. If anything I'm kinda impressed at the production quality; can't seem to find anything about the developers though.

As a person with some experience with mocap data analysis, the ad copy is mildly furiating (http://getmaoapp.cn/en/how-it-works/). But I suppose they do what they gotta do to impress the clientele.
How to choose your QoS Router with bandwidth manager for best results?
Dave Winer needs to let go of the past. He did good work for the developer community in the past but hey, move on. This is a gentleman who is still bitter because "I am no longer invited to join the boards of startups. To you young programmers, if you think Javascript is that different from C, think again [and, please, invite me to join your boards, sob, sob, sob]" :)
facebook=junk
The slicehost story
How Zenbox Uses Redis
Unnecessary ad hominems aside, you're confusing what we know now (BlogThis! didn't become big and important) with what was a realistic concern then (distributing easy-to-use one-click blogging that biased towards one platform would grow that platform substantially, and that this would actually matter).

Worth noting, of course, that some part of Tumblr's growth has come precisely from their equivalent of a BlogThis! button - it just took a few more years.
People can definitely change. They just don't, usually.
Yahoo buys Viaweb for $49 million (1998)
MIT's Makr Shakr open sourced after Google I/O debut!
MIT's Makr Shakr (www.makrshakr.com), as seen at Google I/O 2013, has open sourced all front-end code and is now inviting hackers from all over to hack and slash! New features, new ideas, new innovations, all welcome! We are in v0.0.0000001 of Makr Shakr, lets build v0.0.0000002 together!
Maybe, maybe not. A computer could pick up subtle shifts in body positions or vocal tone and pace that a human can't. Like the work to visualize a heartbeat and other bodily functions, by magnifying deltas that are too small for the human eye to detect. http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/ Something like that could certainly conceivably work for cat body language and voices.
Ask HN: Why doesn't news.ycombinator.com provide a Meta Description?
Just noticed recently that Hacker News doesn't provide a meta description. Realized it when the description for a Google search lists snippets of presumably some of the latest posts:

https://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+news

I took a quick search around the site and couldn't find an explanation. It's such a simple thing to provide, I'm wondering if there was a reason for it.
What's the difference between EC2 and a VPS for you? Do your VPSs already have things installed or a GUI? I've used EC2 before as a single server, never scaling. The main difference was installing things that are usually pre-installed (like on Ubuntu's official desktop image). Is that it or is it more about the scaling?

And thanks for the reference to Digital Ocean. Never heard of them before. Seems great, might try using them :)
I guess "fast" is bit relative. I get reported 1-3 second render times, meanwhile imagemagick converts the image from png->gif in about 40 milliseconds.
that's pretty cool. i'll have to look into it.

on drawback is that in needs canvas. it may seem strange that i was hoping not to use canvas for the docs/demos since my entire lib is canvas-centric. but i would like at least the docs not to look visually broken in ie8 even if all of the live canvas demos dont work. the primary reason was to have upscaled demos via nearest-neighbor in chrome, though.

[EDIT] nvm, "...or emulating it using overlaid div elements for older browsers. "
guys check out page 23
unix line permission -> table-> "kurwa"
kurwa means whore/slut in polish
damn polish ppl trolling hard
Have you tried giffgaff? They offer 500mb for 5 quid, data only and no contract:

http://giffgaff.com/goodybags
With all the talk about Yahoo acquisitions I thought it might be a good time to remind everyone that back in 1998 Yahoo acquired a three-year old Viaweb.

With that exit money the Viaweb founders (Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell) went on to start a rather well known seed accelerator and a popular hacker news aggregation site.
I've often gone on Quora or Stack Exchange to answer questions about scaling or stack design, but the questions (and answers) are often very simplistic, or the questions are so specific that I'd need to spend hours answering.

If there was a place I could go to get some cash for my time answering these questions, I'd certainly be more inclined to spend the time to do so thoroughly.

Mentoring contractor start-up perhaps?
Viral PR and Media Traction for Start-Ups
If it was an acquhire they paid 5.8 million for each employee (187 employees). If it was to capture their revenue stream, they paid 85 dollars for every one dollar of revenue generated last year (13 million).
I was curious, too, but no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disemvoweling
Show HN: Skycraft, a creative voxel adventure game in WebGL
Take a look at these: http://www.o2.co.uk/tariffs/payandgo
£20 will get you 250 mins, 2500 texts, 500MB data.

The number won't disappear after a week but you're not locked in to a contract, it looks like a standard PAYG sim.
I have no idea, just things don't work on EC2.

> Do your VPSs already have things installed or a GUI?

Nope. I prefer straight-up Arch linux. ssh in and go from there.

To add some concrete-ness to the mix, I was installing ejabberd. When it came time to ping the server... no response. I did the exact same steps on my Digital Ocean VPS and everything went fine. I had done whatever commands EC2 expects to open the right ports...
No, just the usual suspects (O2, Vodafone).

I'll try this, thanks.

EDIT: oh, it looks like you have to order the SIM online and they send it to you. Not sure if it will make it, I'm leaving at Friday :(. Maybe just to have it ready for next visit.
10 Mbps is a good estimate considering modern video codecs, but it's not the upper bound. 1080p video at 32bpp and 60 fps could use as much as 3 Gbps, depending on the compression.
Why the World Got Stuck on Spreadsheets
Hello everyone, I'm the designer of Nimrod. I will be glad to answer any questions regarding the language.
You'd have to be mad to take an offer like that. On the other hand, you'd have to be mad not to take an offer for way more than the house is worth if you aren't actually very attached to it.
I found it interesting and not at all bitter.

The point was "Once they've bought it, promises don't matter", and there were two interesting stories that illustrate this point.

/shrugs

We all know yahoo are going to fuck up tumblr, and the promises that they've made won't matter.
Bread (and others) have provided the fuel to build civilization, true. However, they are man-made foods. When was the last time you saw a chimpanzee or caveman enjoying a loaf of bread, plate of pasta, etc?

As it has only existed since the dawn of agriculture, your tying of it to evolution is incorrect.
How We Grew Crazy Egg to 100,000 Users With A $10,000 Marketing Budget
I would love a simple way to measure my Heart rate, I did measure my heart rate for a few weeks 24/7, Now i need to go in an look for patterns in it
This begs the question, how did Tesla actually do it? Ultimately he was driven by the inventions themselves, not the business models. This was his genius and his failure.

Licensing the patents worked but it's also worth looking at Tesla's relationship with George Westinghouse who became a patron more than an investor.

What's the avenue for a Nikola Tesla today?
They're not public so it's hard to say, but I would hazard a guess that Twilio has not turned a profit yet
Finally a book on Chef. I just purchased it and will be reading it over the next few weeks. Still waiting for one from Oreilly.

EDIT: Bah, maybe I'm not familiar with Learnpub, or maybe I didn't read the fine print, but this book is under active development and is currently only 42 pages long and is pretty skimpy. Oh well. Hopefully it iterates quickly.
Granted, she was extraordinarily foolish to have gambled her entire life savings on one stock's IPO. However, this is where things fall apart for me:

========================

She turned her attention to her computer screen only to realize that there was no sign of her having voided the order. She kept refreshing the page in hopes of seeing the notification. When no cancellation report appeared, she called her stockbroker at Vanguard. "What's going on?" she asked.

If the cancel order was placed, then it's probably cancelled, the broker told her. She got off the phone and went back to her computer screen. There was no sign of cancellation. She called Vanguard again. This time, she says, she waited on the line for a long time, but no one came to take her call.

Meanwhile, Facebook stock opened at 11:30 a.m. The mysterious delay was due to technical glitches. NASDAQ's electronic trading platform couldn't handle the high volume of trades. In the first 30 seconds, around 82 million shares were exchanged.

==================

Am I reading this correctly that she attempted to cancel the order and it just failed? Is that really tolerable?
10 Free Scientific Resources For Graduating Students
http://chyrp.net/ -- PHP + MySql/Sqlite
Why should Google add other blog services to the blog this button? They agreed not to give blogger preference in search. Google Toolbar was a separate product and they had no obligation to include competitors blog services in a feature of it.
Unnecessary ad hominems aside

The linked article isn't just saying "Yahoo may change the terms of their deal" (and pray they don't alter it further), which everyone knows they can and almost certainly will. It's saying "I, Dave Winer, will draw from my own personal experience, including my interaction with one of the participants of this deal, to speak with authority on this".

Like bringing up a character witness in a defense trial, such supporting arguments legitimately open up the speaker themselves to critique.
Where was that in the article?
Look up "qualified investor". Opening ownership shares up to literally thousands (if not millions) of not-qualified investors makes it impossible to get proper funding from VCs later. Imagine having to get signatures from 100,000 ten dollar investors, just to get a million dollars. Crazy.
Teen dies trying to hold onto iPad during theft
It's a bit of a cliche that the best ideas are obvious in retrospect, isn't it?
"He [Gordon Eubanks] left the room. What was I going to do? What could I do? Nothing, that's what. :-)"

I like Dave and I respect what he has done for blogging and the community, I also understand his angst here. However I think it is misplaced.

There are two things people do in commerce, one is to innovate/invent and the other is to capture (or extract if you are being cynical) value from that innovation.

Tumblr, like GeoCities before it, have done well on the innovate/invent part and failed at the capture value part. Once at a meeting of west coast venture capital types I heard someone call a business 'making mud pies'. In developing that concept further, they described a business where the founders were having a great time building their technical vision and yet had failed to convince anyone outside of their small circle of friends that it was worth paying money for. Like kids making mud pies or finger painting, the act of creation was the only reward they were getting.

In that sort of situation it's a matter of time before the entity ceases to be.

By all reports Tumblr (like GeoCities before it) was running out of money. If that is true, then Yahoo! has simply saved them from dissolution and retained the traffic (and more importantly the habits of visiting) that folks on the net have built up. They think they extract value out of it, and perhaps they can do so with only a smaller increase in their total expenses than Tumblr existing burn rate. That is a bet they make with themselves.

But let's return to Dave's angst for a minute. Dave saw the deal with Symantec as Symantec getting this great thing they had produced with him to lead it strategically, from Symantec's perspective apparently they saw other things in the deal. Aligning thoughts and visions requires the the guy (or gal) being acquired do three things;

1) They need to understand the real reason they were acquired (was it for people, tech, traffic, brand?)

2) They need to figure out what they want to achieve out of the joined entity (recognizing it may not be possible based on #1)

3) They have to communicate a plan and build a following to insure that what they are trying to do is understood by the organization rather than just one or two people.

Its the strange thing that leaders are often as much controlled by their organizations as they are in control of them. There are few benevolent (or even malevolent) dictatorships, usually there is a group concensus about what is being done. And without that, not a whole lot gets done.

Marissa has stated she doesn't want to 'screw up' this deal. And I am pretty sure she is sincere in that, but it is less up to her than she might like.
It seems like a viable idea to let users of big sites vote for feature upgrades with their wallets, kickstarter style. Pay to get into a beta rollout.

Early adopters will do a lot to get a new feature, and they love to decide on features. So let them do that.

I don't know why Facebook doesn't do this, honestly.
I dont know if it is just me,but i do not feel like i have really understood a subject after taking an online class.Only hitting the books on my own gives me that kind of confidence.
I don't think we should idolize him for everyone to follow. The quote comes from him, not me -- which makes your downvote revealing.

But please, do not believe a word from me. Read the full story and perhaps reconsider your stance on Einstein.
Have you been through an acquisition like this before? I once worked for a small company that was acquired by a much bigger company, and I have to say Dave's thoughts about the acquirers making lots of empty promises to the acquirees to keep them happy sounded very familiar.
I wonder whether you could create a clause that allows you to publically register your dissatisfaction with being ignored without (legal) consequence?

I mean, if you're at the 'blogging your rage' stage you probably don't care if you still work there tomorrow, but nailing down that if they screw up, you're allowed to publically state that on the way out might at least make it possible for future founders to reconsider their deal options.
It's odd to me that we don't study creative thinking more. When it comes to technical details, we've got it covered; you can find hundreds of textbooks on any given field, from the arts to the sciences. But the mysterious step that actually lets you recombine that knowledge into new ideas is usually shrugged off as "hard work" or "inspiration".

On the other hand, I suppose it's a pretty difficult question to answer. If you were to ask a musician how they compose their music, they would probably talk about scales and chord progressions and improvisation. But the true answer involves a whole lifetime of experiences and memories, filtered in a specific way through the musician's brain to create certain musical effects, themselves based on years of training. To even talk about that would require a lot of introspection.

What if we could train ourselves to think like Einstein? What would this do for science? What about Mozart and music?
I'd been mulling over the same concept for quite a while, as a sort of an intelligent update to IE5 for Mac's Subscription manager[1]. It was a very useful tool in my toolbox, and I mourned losing it as that browser decayed.

The main issue with the Subscriptions was that they were global, and would not inform you what changed, just that there were changes. With the increased dynamicness of the web since good ol' Y2K (especially with ads), this model is much less feasible, whereas a DOM-based model is more robust, and allows further automatic data processing.

I never got past small prototypes, so I look forward to Sieve's release since it is basically someone doing my work for me! :)

[1] http://www.macoptions.com/tips/images/iesub2.gif
YouTube didn't grow primary colors when it got adsorbed by the GOOG.

I think there's precedent for letting a subsidiary group retain its own branding and culture, and for that to not cause morale to drop.
| grant him free access to the Internet

How? I thought that the Tweets weren't directly from him, but were posted to Twitter at his request by friends that had his credentials. So he's not allowed to pass messages to friends that are then distributed to the world via Twitter?
Sites down at the minute, hows it stack up to omggif https://github.com/deanm/omggif ?
Example of that with web workers here : http://gifpaint.com
wow- this is awful.
Who is Edward Whitten?
Pattern Tap relaunches with code patterns
It would be cool to check all the startups that use a certain tool.
Google Now cards
Moon Gets Slammed by Cosmic Bullet