skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Almost all of the time what you see in CloudWatch should be representative of what's being served. The internet stays consistent to at least four nines. Our CloudWatch metrics are actually made up of 16 independent metrics reporters (2 per 8 regions we run in) - each reporting a 1 or a 0.

So you can already use the CloudWatch "average" statistic to get some limited visibility. Here's the metric for my own personal micro instance (hosted in us-west-2) ; http://failfast.info/micrometric.png .

When the average drops to 0.875, what's actually happening is that one region couldn't reach us-west-2. (It turned out to be a transit networking issue somewhere between Singapore and Oregon). Just to give a sense of how rare partitions are; that's the first and only time I've seen one affect my instance, and I've been using the feature before we launched publicly.

But yes, we would like to add visibility into things like where it seemed to fail from and whether it actually impacted any DNS decisions (in this case it didn't, as even our nodes in Singapore were able to tell that my endpoint was healthy, via redundant data from other regions).

Edit to add: I should add that the most common reason why a health check fails is that the endpoint is just unhealthy, or totally unreachable. There is absolutely no ambiguity in those situations and the CloudWatch metrics tell you exactly when the failure and recovery happen. Only crazy internet partitions are hard.
You should write about this somewhere.
That's nothing more than the illusion of security. Nearly anyone using open source is using a distro. Do you imagine distro maintainers would willingly go to jail rather than putting in backdoors in the binaries they release?
I don't because the statement itself flips compared to for style, so it seems like the whole thing should flip. i.e.

for XXXXX:
for YYYYY:
ZZZZZ

it would kind-of make sense to me if this translated into a for comprehension as

[ZZZZZ for YYYYY for XXXXX]

but instead it translates to

[ZZZZZ for XXXXX for YYYYY]

which seems decidedly middle-endian.
Well that was a quick invocation of Godwin's Law.
> [A]ll the NSA has is what facebook, gmail etc, have.

Facebook has what Facebook has. Google has what Google has. Verizon has what Verizon has. The NSA has what all of them have, put together. The NSA can therefore draw conclusions that Facebook and Verizon and Google can't, and therefore I lose privacy when that data is handed over even if I happen to use some subset of the services in question.

That's not my only objection, but it's a substantial one...
No, you can implement methods outside the class declaration even with templates. It just has to be in the header file rather than the cpp.
The patent referred to:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...
Because most of the parts of the world that are designed, are designed for bipedal things that occupy about 1.5 feet^2, and are about 6ft tall.

Think about bigdog trying to walk through a house. It would have a lot of problems, because the house wasn't designed for something that looks like that.
Paws, Pee and Mice: Cats among Medieval Manuscripts
I would personally recommend the new one (but take this with a grain of salt: I work on it). I use it daily to build www.scalr.com.

It's got more tests, and it succeeds at building the Cactus examples like the old one. The only thing that's not stable in it is the "serve" mode.

I'm working with Koen (the original author) to get this into the main repo.

--- If you use it, and run into any issue, get in touch with me: thomas [at] orozco.fr
If you're concerned about someone who is possibly suicidal, and who is at significant risk of being killed by other inmates, what do you suggest?
Crontab a job to generate the aliases and write them to a file, source the file from .profile. Alternately, store the list in an alias-defining file instead of json. Source directly from the dropbox.

No installation required.
Deep-voiced chief executives are more successful, scientists say
No, that's not next.
... and, as I mention above, the Mac version has been pretty bad over the last few months, enough to drive users away (including me).
It really depends on what you mean by algorithms/data structures. If you mean knowing how to implement "these specific algorithms" in "this much time", probably not. Will you need to know the exact time complexity of methods for every data structure? I would hope not.

However, is it useful to know that such and such data structure is more efficient than that other structure over there for what I want to do with it? Yes. Is it important to be able to think in terms of other algorithms you've learned that might make what you're working on easier and more efficient? Absolutely.

I have never once implemented any of the algorithms or data structures that we learned about in my intro to algorithms/data structures class, other than for the class itself. But learning how those algorithms and data structures work, even if I can't remember the specifics of all of them at the top of my head, has has helped me to be a much more efficient programmer because they gave me the tools to think as such.

So, do you need to know specifics about exactly how every algorithm or data structure works, probably not unless that specifically is your job. But is it useful to have a basic understanding? Absolutely.
> On top of that, I plan for 40% of time spent doing billable stuff, and 60% of client search, marketing, networking, and general business handling.

Prospective freelancers are often warned that they won't be billing 40+ hrs a week because of ancillary non-billable tasks you have to handle, but this is vast overestimate.
> Many programmers on this site are in "at will" states like California and Texas. Meaning that you can be fired at any time for no particular reason

I just happened to be talking to our inhouse council and brought this up.

he believes you are incorrect. There is a legal distinction between a layoff and a firing, where layoff is defined as not for cause and firing is for cause.

At will permits layoffs as you state.

However firings, even in at will states, can still get you into alot of trouble if you don't have paperwork to show that you layed out a performance improvement plan and documented all cases of the behaviour that go the employee fired.
replying to 23david, not the parent. 23david you appear to be shadow banned. It seems to be recent, might want to get it checked out.
> And we haven't even started using NEON yet.

That is almost concerning, because even though it seems like overkill to gpu accelerate audio decoding (that the copy and latency overhead isn't worth it) I imagine it will require quite a bit of refactoring to make a SIMD decoder (or encoder). But that will be absolutely necessary to see Opus adoption as the web audio standard where mobile devices need every watt of energy savings possible.
No. It is possible to bold and such. With some code to hook things up you have pretty much everything you need for a "real" rich text box.
His crusade from the beginning has been anti-surveillance
in the US.

Yup. What a lot of people in the US Government forget is that a lot of other countries look to us for guidance for what is and is not acceptable. Now every country in the world that was previously criticized for building a surveillance state can now point at the US and say "Why does it matter what I'm doing, they are already doing it and doing so on a much greater scale". Is that really the legacy this country wants to have?
The question in my mind is far more fundamental than anything related to the design of the battery packs or whether or not Elon Musk's involvement is of any real engineering value.

None of that matters. He/they would have to convince me that LiPo/LiIon packs are safe. This coming from someone who's waiting for Tesla's SUV's. I kind of draw a demarcation line between flight and road-based vehicles. Fires are a thousand times more dangerous at 30,000 feet.

The fundamental issue I keep coming back to is that Lithium Polymer batteries are dangerous. One or multiple cells. It does not matter.

I've been using and abusing them extensively for, I don't know, maybe a decade, in all of my RC gliders and helicopters. I keep them locked-up in a fireproof container and never --ever-- charge them unless I can be in the room during charging.

There are plenty of accounts in RC circles of battery packs spontaneously combusting, catching fire in flight, catching fire while charging or lighting-up if damaged. The problem, as it was explained to me, is that these cells can produce methane and have an avalanche failure mode. Methane is a product of a manufacturing defect whereby a small amount of moisture is sealed into the package. Lithium reacts unfavorably with moisture and the rest is history.

Lithium Polymer battery fires are extremely hot, fast and very powerful. I've seen it myself with three and six cell packs. I would not want to be anywhere near a fire in a larger pack.

And so the fundamental question for me is simple: Why? Why use Lithium-based chemistry for a flight battery pack. Yes, I know, lower weight, lower volume. However, I am not sure these packs can ever be considered to be safe. How can an aircraft manufacturer ensure that the quality of the packs it assembles is as required? Can you ever know?

I know millions of Lithium-based batteries are in use in everything from phones to laptops and more. Not sure how to think about that. A fire is a fire. A laptop stowed away in cargo can still cause a huge problem if it catches fire.

To be fair, I have never had a spontaneous fire in any of my thirty of forty packs (ranging from 2 cells to 12 cells). I have had cells spontaneously puff-up --inflating like a baloon-- and destroy the pack by expanding so much that the battery pack's casing cracks open. In those cases I've used them to experiment by overcharging to see how they light up. It does take a lot, but when they do it is massive fireball.

Perhaps someone with information closer to the source or quantifiable safety and reliability data can pitch in?

EDIT: Prior to LiPo's I was using NiCd (Nickel Cadmium) cells and have never had any issues, even with abuse and mechanical damage.
>Russia, as a country that stands against abuse of the powerless by the powerful?

It's perfectly possible to be a gross violator of human rights and then later (or even simultaneously) defend human rights.
Thanks for the links,

I don't quite get the complaint though. If the goal was to get the most readers good information than any article that makes it to the front page can be a vehicle for contributing your links too. Lots of things change whether or not something makes it to the front page, but if the topic is interesting enough at least one of the stories will and that serves the purpose.
Use "Amazon 1 Button" Chrome extension to sniff all HTTPS websites
Terminal is always open. Hitting it from spotlight just foregrounds it.
No, these guys:

https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/scr/cc/CorporationsCanada/fdrlCrpDt...
This is old, its been on HN already...
thats a common argument against IDEs but i think it doesnt reflect reality.
The most powerful IDEs like Visual Studio, Eclipse, XCode, IntelliJ IDEA have all been around for more than a decade and wont be going anywhere. Of course if you use some less popular product it might get abandoned, but the same can happen to less popular open source projects.

All the Textmate users now seem to be burned and always fear the software they use will die, so they stick to open source tools only. Those are okay for dynamic languages and smaller scope projects but i still find IDEs indispensable for large codebases and languages like C# or Java.
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Unless your definition of 'engineer' is someone who drives a train, I don't see how 'engineering' doesn't apply to coding. At least good coding.

I was an electrical engineer before being a software engineer. There is a difference in what level of the stack I focus on now, but there is very little difference in how I design solutions and think through problems (though hopefully I've continued to get better).

Most of my electrical engineering also involved coding day in and day out.
(Blog post author here)

I wondered where the random burst of traffic came from.

For those who haven't read the more recent posts, I received a ton of great feedback from HN and other entrepreneur friendly places. I've also been gobbling up great advice from places like Rob Walling's "Startups for the rest of us" podcast.

About a month ago I started a "challenge", inspired by Brennan Dunn, to rebuild my "failed" product, and it's been going pretty well so far.

Most importantly, a few days ago I announced that I'm "pivoting" from just inventory management to a full-blown ERP for printing companies. I chose printing companies because I'm a full-time developer at a printing company, and I know exactly what kinds of problems we face with our terrible ERP system. Though I need to be super careful not to build a system that is so focused only my own company can use it.

If there's one piece of advice I could give somebody else, it would be to narrow your niche like I did with printing companies. This has helped me so much it's downright ridiculous.

Edit: Also, when I originally posted the article some people were concerned that I was just trying to build a "meta" product with Iron Conversions. I admit I had planned to build a product with it, but I've put that on hold indefinitely in favor of rebuilding Rakasheets. I don't know if I'll ever return to it, so for now Iron Conversions is just the place I'm blogging about my progress.
I worked in optics in grad school. I think that near-term commercial viability is not good. The precision optics and the ultrafast laser would have to be heavily adapted to work outside the lab, and would be needed for both read and write.
Absolutely. One could make the argument, though, that many (including me) believe that expressive power and conceptual beauty is Lisp's core strength, not code maintainability or runtime performance.
Lyft Sells Legacy Zimride Assets To Enterprise Holdings
There has been significant work in the academic community about electronic voting schemes. For example, Civitas (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Projects/civitas/) is a voting system developed by researches at Cornell that provides universal verifiability, voter verifiability, anonymity, and coercion resistance. It is also implemented in a security-typed programming language, which provides additional guarantees about the correctness of its implementation.
I wrote about this a while ago: http://aaronblohowiak.com/blog_posts/rails-maintainability-m...
I also thought of this indie board game: http://store.looneylabs.com/Treehouse
Why not link directly to her site?

http://jessicahische.is/monkeyingaround

The blog you linked to (and you seem to link to it a lot) simply excerpted some of the text from her site, and then included some of the images (but not all) from her blog.

At least that post's author had the decency to re-host the images and put a source link at the bottom.
It won't work everywhere; e.g. SSN equivalent in Poland has sex encoded as one of the digits (determined by whether it's even or odd).
Boeing Dreamliner fire at Heathrow, another 787 diverted
A lot of false information was published about Chavez but he was one of the few people who stopped a US-based coup in his country [1].

[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/09/nytc-m09.html
How to Boost Desire Using the Psychology of Scarcity
It IS getting back at the MAN, as well as the man's partners(including all the big corporations). He lets them/the man lie, and then exposes them/him.(I'm not saying corporations LOVE to cooperate with the government. It is however unacceptable to give them direct backdoors(see microsoft case).)

I don't think the weasel simile is appropriate in this case. I don't think aligning himself with countries of questionable loyalty to his ideals is an inherently bad thing either - 1)It creates a sort of dichotomy, and increases the contrast between what the US portrays itself to be, and what it actually is(due to it using the same exact methods commie governments use) 2) Those are the only ones that will give him asylum, as the US is, after all, a G6 country. 3) It buys him more time(see 2.) to make decisions.

But you have to look at the other side of this issue - not for a second has the U.S. played this game without dirty tricks.

I didn't downvote you, however, I do think you watch US based media too much, judging from the rather overly simple argument. If not, then my apologies.
I basically am against discrimination on the basis of one's employer for the same principles behind any individual freedom. I might not like your work, but I respect that you are a taxpayer in the same state as me and as such contribute to our ability to meet in relative peace in the first place, and I won't condone organized discrimination against you on the basis of your legal work. If anything, I will petition the state to make your work illegal.
Yeah. This is my biggest gripe working with dynamically-typed languages, especially if the project is at all large. If I have SublimeText or Vim, I'll be equally productive in Python as I'd be in Java. But give me Eclipse/IntelliJ, and I can blow the pants off myself in terms of efficiency working in Java compared to working in Python with any Python IDE (that I'm aware of). There are just so few good tools for dynamic languages compared to static languages.

The situation is uniquely bad in JavaScript, since JavaScript doesn't formally have modules, functions can take any number of arguments, there's the funky scoping, and so forth. Not that good tools don't exist, but it makes it difficult for a JS IDE to enable working across files like a Java IDE can.
So glad you chose neutral, apolitical sources for your tangential point! /s
That's true, but you also don't need (or usually want) to unlock every single champion. Most players have at most 20 champs they're really good with and will typically play. There's also the new mode they recently added, ARAM, that will randomly assign you a champion from the pool of all champions. Playing ARAM gives you the opportunity to try out other champions for free, and if you decide you like one of them you can spend your IP to unlock it.
NEON isn't GPU, it's just the ARM equivalent to SSE/MMX. (Though a fair bit nicer to work with).

It doesn't require extensive refactoring. There are patches to use SIMD that aren't merged yet— though pure C improvements have tended to be more important since NEON isn't available on all ARM parts.
The trend extends to other words. Sometimes I hear Programmers calling themselves Computer Scientists or Computer Engineers [1] [2] [3] when in different cases they are a Developers or a Hacker. Which they get wrong too. You are what you are. of you're acting another role you should state that you're playing that role not that you are.

Ex. Computer Scientist, who can fill the role of a Programmer.

This discussion keeps popping up [4] [5] , but the definitions are clear. I believe there's a Wikipedia article somewhere that explains all the differences.

[1] In Puerto Rico
[2] http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/undergrad/academics/degrees/cs-vs...
[3] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5936652
[5] http://blog.hartleybrody.com/hacker-developer-engineer/
Your already have an audience. Your co-workers at your office, start an initiative like "know PHP" or "Email writing". Send out weekly e-mailers on it. Get feedback from your boss and co-workers. You communicate and you get feedback.
I never could make the switch to Chrome due to the limited interface. That and the Proxy setup being the IE control panel.
Also, if you're interested in doing this computationally, you should check out Probabilistic Graphical Models. There's a great Coursera course.
>The issue now is to build computers that actually take advantage of MRAM.

Well, also the fact that it's $7 for 256k
Not in Canada. It's illegal here to call yourself an 'engineer' unless you're a licensed engineer. It's a protected term, like 'doctor'. So unless you studied Software Engineering, which there are many schools that teach it, and hold a P.Eng, then you can't use the term.
> Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I
> can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no?
> http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code
>
> Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy
> friendly version?

People citing privacy as a reason to move away from Chrome are doing so on moral rather than technical grounds. Chromium itself doesn't have anything harmful in it, so there's no point in forking. Chrome is just Chromium plus some third-party proprietary plugins (Flash, the PDF renderer).
This sounds great. I do wonder though how the batch interviews would go - it is easier to dismiss people for subconscious (or conscious) racism and sexism when they are just a voice or a piece of paper, but I can see a lot of lawsuits coming out of the HR departments in companies with less than angelic hiring practices.
EBay Exact: on-demand 3D printed goods
Like many of us, I've been reading hacker news and related sites for years, but it was only after I attempted to actually apply all that knowledge I thought I had that I realized how unprepared I really was.

It's natural to read an article about a failure and feel like the points made are obvious - but that's because we aren't imagining all the pitfalls that we may have fallen into along the way that others would have avoided. Not only that, but the rules have so many exceptions that it could have just as easily gone the opposite way (I wish I hadn't listened to my customers) and we would still say it was an obvious conclusion.

I agree, the conclusions raised are all pieces of advice I have heard before, but I still enjoyed reading about his particular mental model of what he thought was the right course of action, and then seeing how it got shattered by the (lack of) results.
Who do you propose pay for a private jet with a military escort?
Could your (or someone) tell me whether you considered startpage.com at all? I tried both and I liked sp better.
Also, a working and redundant interface wins over a buggy, broken, and concise interface.

But I don't think the OP argued against either documentation or fixing bugs, so I fear that both of our comments are irrelevant.
Really? I've been using Nightly exclusively on my laptop and haven't noticed any problems. Maybe just lucky.

Edit: Oh, the mac version of Chrome. Gotcha.
From what I understand, locking up the Dreamliner batteries in a fireproof container is one of the steps they took to limit the severity of any potential future issues. The idea being that the batteries don't have to be perfectly safe if they can't take down the airplane.
> Men can get away with making sexist jokes (or even not-jokes) around other men.

That's an important observation and plays a huge role in perpetuating sexism and gender discrimination. It continues to exist because guys let other guys get away with it. If you speak up and indicate that you're not okay with it, behaviors and attitudes may change.

It's not easy and it requires courage. But it's necessary to really make a dent in the historical patterns.