skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure.

So, for any black-box service endpoint, the latency for any given request is obviously just the time it takes for that operation to complete. Ideally one measures both end-to-end latency from the client and server-side latency in order to understand the impact of the network and, for high-throughput applications, any kernel buffering that takes place.

All of that is obvious, I imagine. By "high-percentile latency", I'm referring to percentiles of a distribution of all latency measurements gathered from a given endpoint over some period of time. If you imagine that distribution as a frequency histogram, the horizontal axis ends up being buckets of latency ranges (e.g., 0-10ms, 10-20ms, 20-30ms, etc), and the bars themselves of course represent the number of samples in each such bucket. What we want to do is determine which bucket contains the 95th percentile (or 99th, or 99.9th) latency value.

You can see such a latency distribution on page 10 of this paper which I published while at Google:

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36356.html

Anyway, it is a mouthful to explain latency percentiles, but in practice it ends up being an extremely useful measurement. Average latency is just not that important in interactive applications (webapps or otherwise): what you should be measuring is outlier latency. Every service you've ever heard of at google has pagers set to track high-percentile latency over the trailing 1m or 5m or 10m (etc) for user-facing endpoints.

Coming back to Rails: latency is of course a concern through the entire stack. The reason Rails is so problematic (in my experience) is that people writing gems never seem to realize when they can and should be doing things in parallel, with the possible exception of carefully crafted SQL queries that get parallelized in the database. The Node.js community is a little better in that they don't block on all function calls by convention like folks do in Rails, but it's really all just a "cultural" thing. I don't know off the top of my head how things generally work in Django...

One final thing: GC is a nightmare for high-percentile latency, and any dynamic language has to contend with it. Especially if multiple requests are processed concurrently, which is of course necessary to get reasonable throughput.

Hope this helps.
Amazon is clearly capable of generating Walmart or Target range profit margins. In 2010 they earned $1.15b on $34b in sales. That's right on par with Walmart's sales to net income ratio, and I believe Amazon accomplished that without much focus on profitability.

The only concern I see about Amazon as a company, is the future stock market returns for the next decade are already baked into the stock. They're currently trading at three times the value of Target (with none of the profit, no dividend, and soon to be comparable sales).
While I interned at Google, my manager said to me once "See, at Google, we found a hose that money pours out of. It's name is 'Online Advertising'. We now do two things- improving the flow of the hose, and searching for another hose."
Average home tops $1 million in Silicon Valley
Thanks. I'm aware of the security implications. Please answer the question or don't reply.
I want ice cream! @Dave
Penny Pinching in the Cloud: When do Azure Websites make sense?
Google’s Android Seizes Smartphone Market
redalastor is correct. Joe's browser asks Joe's ISP for a token... Joe's ISP never knows what site it's for.

It's more like a client certificate issued by your email provider and installed ad-hoc on demand, rather than a typical Central Authentication System.
Download Concierge!
They would have been fine.
That is interesting...assuming you can address individual devices and get some concept of relative position you can likely create some pretty interesting psychoacoustical effects with that many point sources. Probably highly dependent on being able to control relative latency though.
Traditional economics holds that monopolies are bad for consumers. Essentially, this is because the monopolist can do whatever it wants, and the consumers have no alternative. The monopolist has no incentive to keep prices low, to innovate, or to improve its service level, because the consumer can't exactly go elsewhere.

These days, however, the threat of new entrants into any given market is much higher. Starting costs are drastically lower than they were when conventional microeconomic theory was being worked out. All things being equal, as a consumer, you still don't want a monopolist owning the market -- but the monopolist has to be somewhat cautious, for fear of disruption.

It seems highly unlikely that Amazon will ever operate a true monopoly over all categories of retail. Nor will the government (and competitive lobbying) allow it to get there. But an oligopoly is certainly possible.

(On a micro level, Walmart has basically functioned as a de facto monopolist in certain regions where it has virtually no competition. Those days are over, though.)
Agreed. The nails are in for the current system, but that is not The System, just one of many potential ones.

If you are non-US citizen and your customers request a product similar to US product please do exactly as AJ007 says. It will help you, the world, and the US long term. I say this as US citizen and SW dev. Please take our jobs and customers! We don't deserve those customers if we can't protect them and their data.

However, you should only build it if customers are requesting SAAS (or other offerings). Be very careful about blindly copying US business b/c many are successful simply b/c they are almost "Apparatchik" entities, supplying and protected by the US Gov. For example, if you copy Palantir or even Google/Facebook you may not succeed b/c you won't have customers in the same way the US does. But overall, this is a great opportunity for devs from Switzerland (and the like) to get some new customers.
Karl Popper is most famous for his work in the theory of science; primarily the importance of falsifiability. Apparently he had an issue with Marxism because he felt it wasn't falsifiable. The idea is that it should be possible in theory to prove any good theory wrong. For example, the theory of evolution is a good theory because there are things that we could discover that could prove it wrong (Precambrian rabbits).

Marxism is not really what I would pick to talk about Karl Popper and falsifiability... his writings on politics are pretty much a side-act. I am guessing the author was recently reading some of Karl Popper's more political writings. I would have picked psychoanalysis.
Gadgets that make your life lot less miserable
Innovation has made technology development a never ending process which ultimately have made life easier for humans. Many new technology or existing technology is being used for activities that was thought to be impossible some time ago.
> The US administration sounds like a foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath to the rest of the world

No offense but if this is really what you hear then there is absolutely nothing the U.S. could do or proclaim that would change your mind, or that of the world.

So in that regard why worry about what the world thinks anyways? The world will hear what they want to hear, nothing more or less.

You need only look at the people comparing American human rights to Russian ones, or saying that the NSA is evil when they spy but the German BND "are not actually spying domestically and besides, they're incompetent".

The world has already decided, but let's not act like it's a completely evidence-based decision that was made.
Can HN suggest a good country to trust for hosting servers (if there is such a thing)?

EDIT: I just noticed RyanZAG put together a map for crowdsourcing unsafe hosting countries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182001
I'd say they've already found another hose: self-driving cars.

How they'll get them to market is the question.
Adderall is generally included under "nootropics", and is a stimulant. Its precursor was Benzedrine, which was used by some names you might recognize: W.H. Auden, James Agee, Graham Greene, Philip K. Dick, John-Paul Sartre, Paul Erdös, Jack Kerouac. The latter wrote "On The Road" in three weeks while under its influence.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
"ausmachen" ?

http://translate.google.com/#de/en/ausmachen
Good points. A counterpoint for #3 is that you could do kernel bypass RPC by installing a driver, but Rust developers probably don't want to write all those drivers, and Rust users wouldn't want to install them.

Work (task) stealing is very compelling, and a little paradigm shift is no bad thing. If Rust or any new systems language stands a chance, it should aim high and not too close to the past.
"I wonder if it would be possible to design a legal system that would work similarly to an open-source project, where anyone could contribute, just not all contributions accepted, etc."

Strictly speaking, that's sort of the case. Nothing stops you from drafting a bill and handing it to your legislator's staff. Of course, the bar for being "accepted" is high, and probably depends on some things it shouldn't.
Is amazon offering no hassle returns? How's it work?
I am happy to see this sort of story on HN mostly for the potential discussion amongst such a broad variety of (generally) very intelligent people.

Given that it's accurately described in the headline, it's easy to avoid for anyone not interested in the discussion.
Just two ways to make Firefox more secure
See below someone someone posted the video
The NSA Intends To Fire 90% Of Their System Administrators
Indeed, the behavior described here is just a consequence of allowing pattern-matching when assigning variables. Say you wanted to do the Python trick of swapping two values:

let a = 1;
let b = 9;
let (b, a) = (a, b);
printf!("a: %i, b: %i", a, b); // a: 9, b: 1

...or say you just wanted to grab a single item out of a tuple:

let x = (1, 2);
let (_, y) = x; // the underscore is the pattern for "ignore this"
printf!("y: %i", y); // y: 2
Oh wow! This is a great write up on Godel's work. Anybody who even vaguely cares about fundamentals of computer science should definitely give it a read, and if possible a thorough read.

Slightly related: Although a more technical/deeper discussion, but the book "Godel's Proof"[1] by Nagel and Newman is a very approachable text in this domain, and explains many aspects of the incompleteness theorems.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6dels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel/dp/0814...
hilarious!! since we on the subject, are there any veterans of NSA software industry who can share some insight?
oh, I see. There's a seriously flawed parallelism in his list; the first is a direct analogy (between GE and amazon itself) and the second is an analogy about analogies made on amazon.
https://bitmessage.org
2013 ICFP Contest Problem
I'm thinking now that if he had just been ordered to turn over some data, shutting down his service wouldn't let him off the hook. They must have asked for a back door or some other ongoing intrusion.
Maybe I'm wrong but my understanding is that they use passive RFID technology with a variety of frequencies that aren't compatible without specialized readers. Until recently there hasn't been a standardized frequency for these implants - but I think that's started to improve. With that said, this isn't based on first-hand knowledge - just things I've read online, so I may not be correct based on current technology in phones and what's being implanted in pets.
This isn't progress.

It's just change.

Blink never hurt anyone.
If you respond you're losing already. What you should be doing is innovating, running circles around other companies and make them respond to you by bleeding cash.

Having cash is nice, but if you can invest in raw growth makes zero sense not to.
Why Max Levchin's Glow is about much more than fertility
"Obama is going to take away your guns" (by spying on online gun transactions).

"Obama is going to make it illegal to speak out against abortion" (by spying on anti-abortionists).

"Obama is going to make religion illegal" (by spying on your church e-mails).

"Obama is going to shut down the Tea Party" (by spying on their emails).

"Obama is going to criminalize anti-Obama criticism" (by spying on Facebook).

Raise money and run ads in red states associating Nancy Pelosi with the whole scheme.

These sound out there (and are), but: 1) there is a grain of truth embedded in each one; 2) they speak viscerally to things people care about; 3) they will get an emotional reaction.
Yahoo pays David Karp $110M
That sounds great. What if there were an email client that included an email server? If families left one desktop on 24/7 they could all use it as an email server. An open source email client could also include built in PGP or OTR encryption. Anyone know if it's feasible from a deliverability standpoint? Domain registration and DKIM signing may be tricky for the average user. As well as dealing with blacklisting, of course. But if it became prevalent maybe all of these difficulties could be overcome by instituting a new, truly decentralized infrastructure. Key exchange would still be an issue but could be achieved using a mobile app with QR code scanning.
If I was using Google, Microsoft or Yahoo I wouldn't have found out that my primary email account was shut down abruptly, my subscription canceled without refund and my email lost without any ability to download it. Not sure if that's really a worthwhile tradeoff for the average person.
I dislike that too.
Given that NSA, the Chinese, and presumably a bunch of other countries have a good amount of black hat hacking expertise, I think trusting your hosting provider, regardless of jurisdiction, is probably a bad idea.

If you had to, I'd imagine the best idea would be to do some multi-party computation/Byzantine system where you place nodes in mutually antagonistic jurisdictions. This doesn't help for email though, since they mail still has to go to one box first.
Is there a reason why future work on Go's runtime couldn't fix this problem?
Not at all, it just takes work.
If you're only worried about the NSA, and only worried about pervasive surveillance, the safest thing might actually be in the U.S., but only if you self-host the software and data.

I've heard KDE devs recommend Switzerland.

But in general it's kind of a quandary. You'd want hosting in a strong nation so that the U.S. doesn't simply use a black bag operation to force-collect the server hardware, but nations that are strong and opposed to the U.S. are undoubtedly being extensively monitored by NSA.

Really it all depends on the threat model you're trying to defend against. If you end up with "You can trust me, I'm not from the government" you're already screwed.
Switzerland has strong privacy laws.
Anyone care to comment on the chances services like LastPass are compromised in some way? I would expect they would have been approached. Even if the data is end-to-end encrypted there have to be ways - injecting something client side etc.
Someone collapsed the waveform! http://www.schrodingerscatis.com/
Drunk coders, awesome. Also I wonder who leaked, or found out, the tag first.
This does two things that I don't agree with though. One, assumes that people can accurately judge -anything- appropriately about what is safe in their surroundings. I'll trust someone so far as to not be too afraid to go outside lest someone decide to run me over with a crop thresher, but I've seen enough "No officer I'm not too drunk to drive" (with car wedged in a tree) to trust that judgement carte-blanche.

Secondly, it seems to ignore two things, first, you say that with limits, people game the system. I don't disagree. But without limits, I expect the exact same gaming, "I feel comfortable driving at 100mph on this road", but far more unbounded. Combined with some pretty reasonable evidence towards higher speeds increasing the risk of accidents (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/97.835.PDF), one can see the outcome this would lead to.
I was wondering, what if you are trying the key and it doesnt work... you forgot it for example. You just really cannot open it yourself! Would that be contempt of court?? How do you convince the judge...
> Bezos doesn't have an end game, he'll just keep driving growth until he gets sick of it.

What is the 'end game' of Wallmart? I mean, don't most established companies just want to continually drive growth till they saturate the market, then reap?
Nevermind this, I misread the parent. Yeah, it's a bit odd. Certainly, Popper's black/white swan analogy would've been sufficient.
Ah, very interesting. Thanks for posting that. Looks like I have one more reason to dig into Rust.
AA Battery Test
DPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_Patent_License) looked somewhat promising, but I'm still trying to figure out just how I feel about some of the details. Obviously, you'd have to change your bylaws to participate.
I don't think it is possible to be a "winning" company all the time. If that were so, then only a single winner would be dominating the entire industry.
So... was anyone surprised by the opinion expressed? Did you bother to see where this was posted?

More relevantly, what is this in reaction to?
Hes right and hes wrong.

Bill (and Melinda) Gates is having a phenomenal effect in Africa which I have the privlige of being involved in first hand.

Yet at the same time, Africa doesn't stop with health issues. The local information technology knowledge base in Africa is exploding and improving hard infrastructure to the continent will have a profoundly positive effect on African countries breaking free from the oft stereotypical mould of 'poor chaotic corrupt third world nations'.
Go is open source so anyone is free to inspect it for backdoors. I would be very surprised if Google, on behalf of the NSA, tried to sneak anything in like that. It would also be fairly obvious if it used the underlying OS's networking to send info back.
I think you underestimate the impact these particular reviews are having for some, even if it's a minority.

Apple has as much incentive here as they have with any customer complaints. If it's important enough to developers and genuinely impacts their product (aka products Apple benefits from in more ways than one) they know it will effect the relationship they have with Apple. Like with anything however, the problem needs to communicated. The more people who communicate the same issue, the more likely it will get attention. https://bugreport.apple.com/ is the place to start. Not blogs, not HN, not Twitter or anything else.

If you want a problem you're having solved, start with filing a report in as detailed, and polite, a way as possible. Using blogs to bitch and complain about how Apple is ignoring an "obvious" issue, or how stupid they were to do things in such-and-such a way, is essentially counterproductive and being part of the problem rather than the solution. Using them to explain the issue, get a discussion around it going, coming up with solutions that work for you and fellow developers, and get additional reports filed, enhances the ability for Apple to respond with a genuine solution sooner rather than later. Sometimes they see the blogs and articles, but I'm sure it's more often they don't, so the trend I've seen over the last several years of vitriolic blogs being the first and only mention of a problem has, IMHO, really been disservice to the whole community.

It's always taken much longer than I would personally like or understand, but with enough bug reports filed on a given issue I do see traction and changes come later on down the road. They may not always be the changes I explicitly requested or expect, but they do resolve the problems in one way or another.

edit: grammar
My impression is that they're also pretty popular among residents. I think many--probably most--DC residents support the cameras, at least in principle. See, for example, the comments in this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/1jagry/yes_som...
In the U.S. I believe at least one court circuit has ruled that you cannot be compelled to give up an encryption key if doing so would involve self-incrimination [1].

The 'catch' is that if the government already knows generically what incriminating data you have they can order you to produce it (as it's not any further incriminating). Or something like that? Recent decision though, so things can still change.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/24/1458203/federal-magis...
The would do far better to spend a billion on lawyers and lobbyists.
George Saunder's Advice to Graduates
That's what I've been trying to say since tomorrow.
FYI, last names are useful.
"Why is this privatised? Too easy to abuse."

Because the government never participates in abuse?
Boycotting the specific product (the new Nexus 7) and buying more open alternatives seems like a much better plan (even if that still probably won't achieve much).
to Subway?
Tax Startup bought by Intuit before its Techstars demo day
Microsoft's online business, for example, struggles, but cash helps to assuage the fears. Same with Yahoo, unimpressive performance and growth overall, sweet cash from Alibaba transaction kept investors excited and allowed them to grow via acquisitions.

Apple, for one, negotiates better manufacturing deals due to the wide knowledge of them having a fat checking account
http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/What-would-be-a-good-use-of... A lot of dealings in the offline world (datacenter leases, procuring manufacturing capacity, loans of credit, bond issuance, contracting suppliers) is easier if you have a fat account to show.
Actually, I suspect that pre-schizophrenic people might use marijuana not for self-medication, because they think something is wrong, but rather because early onset schizophrenia may intensify the pleasurable effects of marijuana.
Honestly GMail is perfect for the threat model of the mails I use it for.

It's very well-defended against random leakage across the Internet, against hacking attacks, etc.

The government has an easier time of getting access to it if I piss them off, but if I do piss them off enough they can essentially invent bad stuff regarding me anyways, and I'm screwed no matter what. Once I came into karmic balance with that I accepted it and went on with my life.

Of course, what's good for me is not necessarily what's good for you.
At Automattic Employees All Work From Home And Travel To Exotic Locations
We also live on the border of Atherton and when we drive the BMW no one bothers us. We also have an older commuter car, and when we pull out into Atherton a police cruiser will follow us along El Camino. The police wait at spots that are exit and entrance points to Fair oaks, such as Fifth and El Camino or Middlefield rd going into Fair Oaks, and by Selby Lane School. These aren't just peoples maids or gardeners, but simply people driving older beat up cars, which evidently is probable cause to stop by the Atherton PD
I suggest you read this :) http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat
Censorship and monitoring are a given in China. The US was supposedly a bastion of freedom with a long history of protecting individual rights.
As has Norway.
It all happens on the client side. Servers only store the encrypted emails and have no idea what the contents or the keys are.
Government is right in the middle of this. The city of Baltimore issued a speeding citation to a driver who was not moving after the camera evidence went past two city reviewers: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57559105-71/speed-camera-g...
Silent Circle shuts down email service
That may or may not be the best solution available to you, and one that I've started to consider very, very seriously as well, given that I have a EU passport.

However, if you're a US citizen, you do have other choices. I think the only real permanent solution is to organize and vote the totalitarian representatives out of US Congress. Vote out every single incumbent and vote for representatives that care about We The People rather than their own re-electability.

That'll take at least a decade, minimum, possibly much, much longer.