skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm fully with you on this. In the early days you're scrapping, ziging where others are zagging because you have to differentiate your're self to justify switching costs for your customers, if you're in a competitive environment.

But once you reach scale your goals shift and you're priorities change. I don't think one can fully ignore or embrace customization even at scale, there will be some sense of it present but not as much. There are other factors such as how large your customers are and what business you're in that can affect your decision. But generally we're more lenient towards increasing productivity and efficiency at scale.
>>I'm going to go out on a limb and say that performance is more subtle than can be reduced to a single "is better than" about throughput in HTTP requests or computing mandelbrot fractals in the shootout.

Sure, and I'd agree with that. But when it comes to empirical data, microbenchmarks are one of the best sources of data we have to look at. The best source will always be your specific application of course. Benchmarks will never be perfect, but they should not be so easily discarded.

>>All of the languages have a specific area where they shine.

Agreed. I do think it is worth pointing out that the Computer Lang. Bench. Game has a wide variety of programs just for the reason you point out, and it gathers both execution time and memory usage data.

>>Erlang in largely concurrent systems.

Very true; however, concurrency is also a strong point of Go.

>>Python also has a sizable mindshare in the HPC world.

While I'm sure this is true, that could be for reasons other than performance. I know some Astronomers that use Python because as non-CS people its easier for them to use than C or Fortan. However, if they have a really expensive program and they bring in someone with formal C-S training to port to C Fortran or Java the resulting improvement is almost always huge.
BTW It's not that Paul Buchheit.

It's this guy:
http://www.commondreams.org/paul-buchheit
That's a great point. All the existing SNS services are designed for chronological, "optional" consumption of posts.

This is very different from the way we interacted with posts in reader. They could give us a mode to let us look at posts in reader fashion though.
I submitted it. Sorry about that.
A Better Way to Manage the Rails Secret Token
My first year as an entrepreneur: a retrospective
The single page format would be even better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/world/asia/exposes-of-chin...
Devaluing your currency to fake economic results is short term and long term pain. There is no longer term gain to be had from it.

Currency devaluation doesn't make a nation wealthy. It doesn't make you more competitive. It doesn't create factories and jobs. It doesn't make your economy more productive. It doesn't spur innovation or business formation. It's a desperation move.

Japan has to import almost everything that their factories need. So while the claim that their exports will be more competitive is true short term, their costs will skyrocket alongside that and the net gain will be zero at best. Meanwhile you punish savers and consumers.

It's a bad Keynesian gimmick that won't save Japan. It's the last gasp of a dying experiment.

Japan turned to destroying the Yen because they have nothing left to eat before they start consuming muscle. 50% of their tax collections already go to debt maintenance. They're effectively bankrupt. Their savings rate has plunged compared to where it used to be. The Yen is all they have left to abuse before they have to start slashing the public sector directly; inflation is just another means of doing that.
That's pretty interesting. What age did that start and, if you don't mind telling, how much was given? Willing to try that with my future kids.
That's not the point. The point is that commercial advertising isn't full-blooded speech (and thus may be subject to regulation for the same reason that fraudulent speech is subject to regulation).
I always thought Google was smart about this and witch-hunts will not have an effect. But seems like that’s not the case.
In any case relying on a sing provider for the majority of the traffic with a plan B to survive a disaster is a great learning. One that we always forget when we are sailing the success boat.
Ah nostalgia... I recall wondering about this myself back in the early days of my career.

However, that was before the current wave of document-based DBs (Redis, Couch, Mongo etc.) so the meaning of a "database" was more targeted at RDBMSs. These days a lot of the reasons listed in the answers are equally applicable to, say, JSON files stored in Redis.
What if I only have an idea?
How to copy dvd (main movie) with dvdfab9
This is a step-by step tutorial on how to copy DVD main movie with DVDFab 9. DVDFab DVD Copy is the best and fastest DVD Copy software to copy DVD with more than 8 modes. Learn moare at: http://www.dvdfab.com/dvd-copy.htm
What harm is there in banning advertisement directed at children? Perhaps they may become less well equipped to deal with advertising as adults (but this seems an easy enough problem to solve). Conversely, the benefits of banning children-directed advertising are huge.
There are some indicators that Satoshi wasn't actually an applied crypto guy for a long period, since he overlooked a few basic things but got some more serious things correct. Might actually be more of a database/distributed systems guy who also knew crypto and finance from more recent interests.

I was talking with Adam Back about serious candidates this weekend; maybe 25 known people who could have been Satoshi and are known in the space, but absolutely plausible it could have been and individual or small team who were immersed in it for a few months or years too.
I can testify to this as well. The irony is that they're using Whatsapp to spam me :D
Having recently run into some non-obvious crappy performance characteristics with I/O in Erlang, I'm curious if you have any pointers to docs or code that shows how to use Erlang I/O correctly so it's fast?
A few months back we were exploring a abannonded building (scheduled to be demolished), and we found there was a working cell tower ontop of the building. There was a small server room that had all the eqipment to run everything (I think it was shared by the 2 big telco's here in NZ).

From what we would could see, there were a bunch of ancient racks running 2g gear that looked at least 10 years old (all beige), and then a whole 42U rack of 12v batteries for a UPS.

Then there was a quarter-rack which had a bunch of fibre cables going into a few Huawei branded 1u boxes. LTE only got deployed a month ago so it much of been HSPA+.

I think if they had a satellite connection there would be too much latency. And the throughput wouldn't be limiting as well. They could of had one as a backup source though, or just setup as a secondary connection.
When I was on a building with one, you could hear a quiet buzzing noise, but you couldn't physically feel anything from memory.
Ask HN: Why are many software engineers on a "later" schedule?
Most of the programmers I know would rather wake up late and stay up until 4 AM programming then get up early and go to bed at 10 PM (myself included). Is there any reason for this? Am I living in a bubble?
Uhhhh, Evan Miller here. Not sure why my name is in the submitted title, but whatever.

The current selection on that page is somewhat limited, but I hope to grow it over time. The stuff at the beginning is pretty basic (e.g. standard deviation), but things get pretty gnarly by the time you get to the Kiefer equation. At some point I'll add some more references on how to implement things, e.g. find successive zeros of Bessel equations. For now it should be a good jumping-off point. Enjoy!
The big point that you're missing is that this is only the first step. No one is suggesting that currency devaluation by itself will solve the problem. The idea is to gain the legitimacy and political will in the short term, so as to enact fundamental structural reforms.
Ask HN: What do you use to manage your knowledge base?
I am curious about what software you use but more importantly what's your strategy for managing your overall knowledge base, TODO lists, notes that needs to revisited asap, notes that need to be revisited after x amount of time, short format notes, long format notes, articles, snippets, etc.

For me, I use evernote mostly for web clipping but I rarely revisit them. For short format notes, I end up having dozens of sticky notes on my desktop. Some stay there for many months until I have what I need to take action on them. As far as knowledge base, I tried many software with no success. I always feel that I am spending more time inputting data than consuming it.
Sorry, but it's believed even visual (the right term is "graphic") design is indirectly related to "how a product looks" in the sense you use it ("art").

Function is fundamentally undetachable from form, so a poorly designed product can't truly be said to look good. It can just have varying degrees of fitness.

I highly recommend reading "Notes on the synthesis of form" by Christopher Alexander. It might blown your mind on what you consider design. I feel this word is tossed around a lot but few realize what it can entail.
Tesla short squeeze
Agreed. Space travel may be more interesting to read about, but, frankly, economics is more consequential. Before you can do anything, you have to think about what it will cost, and who will pay for it. Just ask NASA.
RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH Theatrical Release
`g(f)` returns a function, which is then immediately called with another value. You're passing `3` to the result of `g`, not to the function you passed to `g`.
So enlighten me.
Interestingly, I prefer vim to Emacs because of vim's tight shell integration. I feel like Emacs always try to reinvent the wheel, whereas vim plays much more nicely with the os shell. Just pipe arbitrary text through commands, outsource search to grep, building to make, etc. In fairness, I haven't learned Emacs yet, so maybe my impression of NIH is unfair.

And in most programs (especially vim) I'm only ever a C-z away from a shell I can use to test code, run curl, etc :)

It just makes more sense to me to host my text editor in my shell, not the other way around. But then, I guess Emacs isn't really a text editor so much as a development environment, complete with integrated shell.
This is certainly one of my favorite properties of functional programming: there is simply less to worry about. Everything is either local or explicit--distant parts of my code cannot implicitly affect each other.

However, for me, the real realization was this combined with the fact that these languages also manage to be more expressive than the imperative ones I was using before. This might seem a bit counter-intuitive--after all, it feels like they give you less power, not more--but it has been the main draw to FP for me.

So the code is simpler, there is less to worry about and it's more expressive. What not to like?
Now that my kids are a bit older I really want them to be obsessive about something. Minecraft is one of those things that they obsess over, and I'm torn between "It's too much," and "this is so awesome that they're passionate about something creative."

For a while I'd introduce them to a new thing and they'd get bored with it in a day or hour. That was starting to worry me.
Why do you recommend easy_install (vs pip)? I have hardly any experience with easy_install so I'm always curious when projects use it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3220404/why-use-pip-over-...
You're assuming that streaming video can provide data at the same rate as speedtest. In reality those numbers are nowhere close, and don't reflect the reliability of AT&T's service.
That's all good but if your DB can't handle your insert rates you only have files as an option. And most DBs have very poor insert rates.
I think we might have something out of interest for Wellposed. Fire me an email at kai@airstonelabs.com and lets talk more.
Well, that comes down to a very specific question: Do you like iOS or Android better? If you are indifferent, what do you like/dislike about your current phone? Also, if you're thinking about mobile development, go for the one you'll be developing on. You will have a much better understanding of what users want from their smartphone if you are a user yourself.
The Anonymous Web (Apparently not finished)
I can eat carrots till I'm orange in the face, but I never feel full. I seem to need meat or fat for that.
It was sort of tit for tat.

Purchase of Motorola was one step. The day Google announces the buy, the next day Samsung announced a big strategic partnership with MS[1] and the CEO clearly said in the press conference they were not aware of the deal.

Samsung realized if they play by Google's rules they will be reduced to Google's puppets and the string could be pulled at any time. Like releasing the code later than others for e.g. their own Motorola.

Another thing was Once the phone was sold, Samsung provided support, updates without any additional income - whereas Google kept on earning money through content alone.

Samsung is too big to be just another OEM, though it will need need a HUUUGE culture (work culture, hierarchy, their senior-junior obedience mechanism) to be a software and content provider success. Because the oldies are not going to make new things.

[1] Can just be co-incidence as well.
I read Scientific American most of my childhood - articles about physics, biology, math and especially the Amateur Scientist column (I so wanted to make that laser but had no vacuum pump). I loved it!

Then in the 1990s something changed instead of being about new discoveries it began to cover news and to advocate for various causes, even political positions. Then they dropped the Amateur Scientist column.

Why couldn't they stick to science instead of snarky articles like this hectoring every American to eat better? Were they afraid of Omni, Popular Science or Time?

Perhaps this was a good business decision but I have no regrets about canceling my subscription.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Scientist
The yen is currently at 100 to a dollar, consistent with historical norms.
People who espouse bitcoin: see Japan for a textbook example of why deflation is a bad thing. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3563614/Wha....
What political reforms? Abe is all about "stimulus" and further spending and diving into an ocean of debt. He was already prime minister a couple of years ago so we know very well what kind of policies he is supporting. He's just destroying the country further: inflation is punishing savers who will start buying foreign currency instead to protect their savings, or take it away from banks to do something else with it. This, in return, will reduce the amount of money that can be lended to the private sector and therefore will drive the economy down further, too.

Consumption will be negatively impacted by raising prices, leading to further recession for everything produced and imported to Japan. I don't see how this is even a "short term gain" for anyone expect for the next 2 quarters of Toyota and such companies (because the costs of making stuff catch back to them).
May be that's why Google has been integrating most of the new features within the Play Store and the Google search app instead of a OS release. You can try to fork Android all you want but would the buyers be okay with losing the latest headlining features from Google?
Speaking of Google... Why do you think they still chose the S4 as the next Nexus model? Appeasement? Hope that people accidentally buy a Nexus S4 instead of a TouchWiz S4? Intuitively, it doesn't seem to make sense for either company.
Care to explain your thought a little more? Bitcoin as a decentralized currency and a centralized bank in Japan is not really comparable.
I wrote a gem called envious that could be used as an alternative to dotenv: https://github.com/RyanNielson/envious from what I can see it does a few things dotenv doesn't. Good guide though, I wrote Envious when I found out this problem existed.
I'm not sure I understand what dotenv does (or why you would need it to do it).
In FP, you can treat all functions as "curryable" because that's how you achieve composition. So that would be the equivalent of naming all your functions "callTwice". Now that doesn't make sense.
You haven't been following the news recently, have you? Here: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21578052-shinzo-abe-s...

Jump to the section "All change," if you're impatient.
The dollar has been lost value in the past few years because you had extra inflation compared to other currencies. Now Japan is just printing back all the money they needed to catch back, but that's hardly a good thing, oil was cheaper when the yen was stronger than the dollar and oil price drives everything else.
I suspect that the audience for these slides is Javascript programmers, which is why JS is heavily emphasized.

I think lambda functions is the only truly FP feature Javascript provides, but it's so darn useful that it really should be emphasized. Lately, I can't stand writing in languages that don't provide lambda functions (like PHP pre-5.3, or current Java), so at least Javascript has that going for it.
The image at the very top of the article mentions they have a microwave backhaul (see "E"), which I'm assuming goes to another ground location (i.e. a central office.)
Was this sarcasm... Seriously.
are there any publicly-available metrics on Diaspora adoption, engagement?
I asked a similar question on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and the only reply I got said "August?".
That distinction is irrelevant. Decentralized or not, Bitcoin is an inherently deflationary currency, and deflationary currencies are bad for the reasons you can see by observing Japan. Deflationary currencies create an extreme incentive to save, since your money will be worth more tomorrow than it is today, which suppresses what really makes an economy move: spending and investing. Whether it's centralized bank policy or an algorithm that causes the deflation is an irrelevant distinction.

The idea that money has intrinsic value or should have intrinsic value is poisonous. Money is just a proxy for goods and services, and the only point of money is to facilitate getting everyone to engage in productive activity. Encouraging people to park money in a digital wallet because it will be worth more tomorrow is the last thing you want.

Japan's famous savings rate was actually one of the causes of its problems in the last couple of decades: http://aparc.stanford.edu/research/causes_of_japans_economic... ("Surplus in Savings: Japan has traditionally enjoyed an unusually high savings rate and a comparatively low consumption rate. During the decades of recovery and high-speed growth, this 'savings surplus' supplied sorely needed capital to private industry in the form of bank loans. This money was used to build and expand Japan's industrial infrastructure and to achieve the rank of a world-class manufacturing power. However, during the 1990s, the 'savings surplus', once the indispensable fuel for high-speed growth, became a serious, structural impediment, leading to a severe slump in demand and causing a heavy drag on Japan's economic recovery.")
I wish Rails supported two secrets the way Rack::Cookie does by always signing with the first, but accepting either. That way you can rotate the secret without signing everyone out.
I signed up for an invite around the time it was announced. It took a while before even an alpha was released. Diaspora has unfortunately stagnated. The future rests with Status.net, Tent.io, or App.net in this field.
Google Reader was a busy user's tool for reading through several blogs quickly. Asking Google Plus users to visit the blog makes it as useful as, say Twitter without any of the productivity benefits. It is a typical social platform with all the distractions for people who would like to be distracted. A different set of users, in my opinion.
I really do not see how one can infer this, seeing there was no move, no migration!

So, Google is supposed to add everything to Plus without asking users or later ask users "hey guys, just add whatever was there in your Reader account to your G+ and we are sure you had backups or just work your memory - it will be fun".

Or they are going to subscribe users to all tom-dick-harry G+ profiles and tell users "Read on, this is your new Reader".

Well, in either case it's not going to be the Next GR.

The one who wrote this post has either absolutely no idea what GR was and what it meant or is just playing a Scoble.
I'm in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. I used to work for Engine Yard across the bay in SF, so I'm familiar with the city and have ties there.

I'm sure I could come up with a flimsy excuse to come down to Oakland when we're done :)

My wife's signed on to help with the book as well. She's never really played Minecraft, so she's the perfect person to help vet the material to make sure non-techies can understand it as well.
Well... good to hear. Don't take the pictures though while you are in the US:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290682/Walmart-Lisa...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290682/Walmart-Lisa...

http://richfield.patch.com/articles/parents-talk-when-are-na...
> if Rails.env.development? or Rails.env.test?

I hate code like this that is explicitly aware of the environment. The code says what it will do in an environment, rather than the environment saying what the code should do in it.
Hackers and canvas
Ben Bernanke on Economic Development & Innovation
Re: the first point, it actually is surprising, at least to some, because under Keynesian doctrine, Japan was supposedly in a "liquidity trap" slash "zero lower bound" where monetary policy is supposedly ineffective, but obviously it was thoroughly effective.

Re: the second point, it looks like RGDP rose 3.5% annualized in the 1st quarter, that means that real incomes in Japan rose in aggregate, even taking inflation into account. If true, it means that incomes rose faster than prices.

source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/16/japan-economy-gdp-...
This really shows how much autonomy Hong Kong retained after being handed back to China in 1997. At the Tsim Sha Tsui ferry terminal, there are people at stands distributing leaflets, magazines and DVDs which strongly criticize (that's an euphemism) the Communist Party of China. Of course, this would never be tolerated in mainland China.
Most dev people I know, including myself tend to get more done when everyone else is asleep.
The feds are making it hurt in every way for Weev, but for what?
So what? How is this going to change the outlook of the Economy in Japan, and why is there no word about the massive Debt problem in Japan ?

And let's not forget : "Energy has its own particular urgency following the nuclear accident in March 2011 at Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, leading to the closure, if only for now, of nearly all Japan’s nuclear power stations. The government wants to encourage competition in supply and investment in renewable energy as well as in a national infrastructure for imports of natural gas."

Import of natural gas + weak yen -> will not result in savings, oh no. This is going to cost more for everyone.
This is some good advice. I would also love to see start ups asking for my money.

When there's a free plan, my usual activity goes like:
- Register
- Test
- Forget

But when I'm paying, it's much different. Not to say that all services shouldn't offer anything free. But at least in my case, charging is doing both of us good. And it also ensures that company will have some sort of revenue to live on and not die as a freemium company!
Lock your script (against parallel run)